The great hardships of wartime, and of the immediate post-war period, were succeeded by a period of steady economic development, in France, now often fondly recalled there as The Thirty Glorious Years (Les Trente Glorieuses). Alternating policies of "interventionist" and "free market" ideas enabled the French to build a society in which both industrial and technological advances could be made but also worker security and privileges established and protected. In the year 1946 France signed a treaty with US that waved off a large part of its debt. It was known as The Blum-Byrnes agreement (in French accord Blum-Byrnes) which was a French-American agreement, signed May 28, 1946 by the Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and representatives of the French government Léon Blum and Jean Monnet. This agreement erased part of the French debt to the United States after the Second World War (2 billion dollars).
