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This book examines how professionalization became intertwined with xenophobia and economic self-defense in the French Third Republic. Focusing on the fields of law and medicine within the complex setting of interwar and Vichy France, it considers the rise of a social movement that lobbied for state intervention to exclude undesirable competitors from these professions. More specifically, it explores how lawyers and physicians, complaining that their professions were overcrowded with foreigners and naturalized citizens, persuaded legislators to create a second-class level of citizenship in France. These lobbying efforts led to exclusionary legislation imposing a two percent quota on Jews in both legal and medical professions. The book discusses three motivations behind this exclusionary movement: prejudice, economic protectionism, and professional identity-formation.

The Nine failed to establish an industrial free-trade area with Spain and thus to gain access to the Spanish market, the largest west European industrial market outside their direct influence. The decision of the Council of Ministers of the European Communities, in October 1975, to suspend FTA negotiations with Spain, without denouncing the 1970 Agreement, meant the ultimate success of the Spanish government’s politico-economic strategy, the last episode of the European rescue of the Franco regime. The EC Council decision might have been inevitable in terms of public opinion and democratic morality, but it meant to permit Madrid to retain full control over the country’s import policy while fully exploiting the export prospects offered by the 1970 Agreement. In the end, the decision was detrimental for the overall interests of all the parties involved, whether the Spanish population or Western Europe. The final section of this book invites economic historians to estimate the costs of the Spanish EEC policy concerning the inefficient allocation of resources, weak technological transfer, lesser accompanying investment, and limitations to total-factor-productivity increases. Political historians, in turn, should explore what specific interests explain, in each case, why, if official Spanish trade practices in export promotion and import restriction gave the Six every incentive to denounce the 1970 Agreement, apart from obvious political reasons, they did not do so. Finally, scholars dealing with Spanish EEC-membership negotiations should determine the extent at which the Community experience over the 1970 Agreement explains Community attitudes towards some Spanish demands after 1979.

The Berlin Conference of September 1931 secured a formal agreement to create a Franco-German customs union, envisaged wider cooperation, and established mechanisms to achieve this. This bilateral agreement would initiate a wider process of European union and even secure German participation in the French Empire. A successful visit to Berlin by the Mayor of Paris in the cause of detente followed. However, momentum was soon lost as the destabilizing impact of the Great Depression undermined the synergies between the financial strength of the French economy and industrial strength of the German economy. These synergies had informed the thinking at the Berlin Conference, but soon enough Paris imposed trade quotas in an effort to stave off domestic economic crisis. Briand, mortally ill, was sorely missed as French protectionism fostered an acute sense of betrayal in German diplomatic circles. Impending French parliamentary elections overshadowed residual efforts to revive rapprochement with Germany.