A Technocratic Ideal

Abstract This article tracks the rise and eventual fall of the jeune cadre social type in postwar France. The term evoked the young and university-educated middle manager, an upwardly mobile member of the salaried middle class. The jeune cadre was at the center of postwar modernization and was also an emblematic part of France's “golden age of growth,” the Trente Glorieuses . Building on scholarship that questions the periodization and its underlying notions of material and social progress, this article uses the jeune cadre as a case study to explore the limits of the modernizing project. It highlights the persistent gap that separated elite discourse from the lived experience of ordinary workers and university students who did—and did not—conform to the technocratic ideal.