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In 1946, after the success of L’Économie française dans le monde, Jean Fourastié (1907-1990) joined the so-called ‘optimist’s club' founded by Jean Monnet from the Commissariat au Plan (State Planning Commission). Fourastié was a non-conformist economist and a professor at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers. As an archetypal modernizer, he was convinced that an increase in the standard of living brings about mass consumption and causes the ‘average man’, of whom he had a somewhat elitist vision, to transform his lifestyle. He popularized, for both the elites and the general public, a subtle argument based on existing relations between growing production, increased consumption and professional productivity and migrations, among both the elites and ordinary people. However, at the end of the 1950s, this ‘optimistic humanism’ gave way to certain reservations. Fourastié discovered what Keynes already knew: that man is not a rational economic actor since mass consumption was giving birth to a ‘consumer civilization’ of which man is the ‘illusory king’. The disappointed prophet then announced the end of the ‘good times’ even if he did not refute his previous well-known economic theories. More importantly his criticisms cannot be said to reflect any kind of anti-Americanism.