The French economy has faced since the end of the Second World War a «great transformation». It was highly embedded in the republican political pattern and regulated by the model of the «national economy». Thus it seems in 1945 to be characterized by several paradoxes: between the State and the market, but also between free trade and protectionism. It results a new approach of globalisation as a dialectical process confronting in a long-term perspective the regulations of the national economy and the dynamics of the global market.
Keywords: France; economy; globalisation; free trade; Nation-State