It is interesting to recall that redistribution via inflation was much more significant in France than in Britain. As noted in Chapter 2, French inflation in the period 1913–1950 averaged more than 13 percent a year, which multiplied prices by a factor of 100. When Proust published Swann’s Way in 1913, government bonds seemed as indestructible as the Grand Hotel in Cabourg, where the novelist spent his summers. By 1950, the purchasing power of those bonds was a hundredth of what it had been, so that the rentiers of 1913
