Social Mobility Accelerates

The war created unprecedented social mobility—both upward and downward. Death and disability removed millions from their social positions, creating vacancies filled from below. A sergeant might become lieutenant, a foreman become manager, a secretary become administrator. Merit mattered more than birth for the first time in French history.

Women experienced spectacular if temporary mobility. Working-class women became factory supervisors. Middle-class women managed businesses. Aristocratic women, their wealth evaporated by inflation, took paid employment. These role reversals, though often reversed postwar, demonstrated social hierarchy's artificiality.

Downward mobility affected previously secure groups. Small rentiers, living on fixed incomes, were impoverished by inflation. Professional officers, replaced by promoted NCOs, lost status. Aristocrats, their sons dead and estates ruined, sold ancestral properties. The bourgeoisie, though generally prospering, faced new competition from below.

Colonial subjects experienced limited but significant mobility. Some became officers commanding French troops—unthinkable prewar. Others acquired technical skills in factories, literacy in army schools, and political consciousness through urban exposure. Though most returned to colonial subjugation, seeds of change were planted.