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The article deals with the social and cultural history of the post-prosperity years, from the oil shock in 1973 to the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. It highlights the ambiguity of this hard-to-grasp period. On one hand, it was a negative period with major economic difficulties. Many signs pointed to the decline of the family, difficulties of work, urbanism, the integration of immigrants and ghettos, lower consumption, the crisis of the welfare state and health systems. The 1970s and 1980s thus seem like a period of disillusion. But they are also a period where a new plurality of choice developed for Europeans, that of their daily life, family and professional life, consumption, lifestyle or housing, their studies, values, or even more generally their vision of internationalism. They constituted a kind of unexpected and lasting recovery period for European construction over those recent years.