Tempest played it briefly but he's not been around for a while. Ignore the French wiki page he wrote, you can re-write it later to fit your own canon. Just go by the stuff Vilage and Aaron have talked about in the last few pages and it should be fine.
@Pepperm1nts played it briefly, then he got bored or something and switched nations. I think this may have been after he tried to play an independent New England. Then Tempest played it before he switched to South Africa. France is one of those nations that's traded hands so much that we scrambled its background pretty hard-core. It's also traded hands most during that time where we weren't so organized with our lore and hadn't matured as writers.
Yeah, I am. But, I got more questions to ask.
1) Was the Great Depression as terrible as it was in real life or was it more terrible to the point that countries were ruined?
Even with the Great Depression being such a new thing tacked onto the RPs lore, I don't think we really explored it as much. So we don't have a snapshot on how massive it would have been. But if the Great Depression of the real-world threw a quarter of the US population into unemployment then a post-war effect tacked on over top would have had even heavier consequences, complicated by bruising population or demographic holes blown out of the structure of that nation.
2) Since a World War 2 didn't happened during the time, how did the countries recover for the depression?
Well the Second World War wasn't the only factor to end the previous depression. The US could have recovered from it over several years based on the New Deal programs and reforms of the FDR regime. War facilitated a jump-start to the economy by suddenly opening up a shit ton of jobs (soldiering) and creating a sudden jump in demand for industrial and other goods to feed the war-effort.
At the expense of mass inflation growth mobilization of a country's military can create a artificial period of demand with units in combat, or in peace-time simply being deployed or drilled. Arguably, a nation could sacrifice enormous portions of their national budget to maintain a fully mobilized army with no real combat-situation: as the US was and has been since the First World War. After the Great War, the French could simply not return to peace-time demobilization and maintain a long-term standing army, just without anyone to fight.
This might be wasteful and in a Republican context lacking any sensible enemy to fight while other government programs are sucked dry to maintain a large tumor on the national budget would galvanize austerity parties probably.
Otherwise, the other option is something akin to the New Deal: a series of state-sponsored and legislature-signed projects, subsidies, and programs designed to alleviate the stress of the nation's economic burden and to encourage money to move around the nation to keep the heart moving. It's like a pacemaker for the economy, it keeps the money - blood - moving so that it can stabilize a national economy. Tariff policies could be put into place to protect local industries so no one goes bankrupt from foreign competition that'd benefit from this sort of thing. But in all it's a complex procedure and I don't know enough about it to provide any arbitrary metric.
What's known for sure (because it's fathered in by now) is that Spain's inaction in the war and programs kept its economy stable and then the most healthy in Europe post-war. When it comes to economic investment and practice, it seems a stable economy is favored by businesses.
3) How does a country get out of a depression? Do they try to control the unemployment rate, increase tariffs, and enact domestic programs so the people could get back to work?
See above.
I suppose another strategy would be rather fierce and strict policies of economic isolation so the state and people can become reliant on itself long enough that it can rebuild itself before exerting itself outwardly. This can be seen as an argument the Chinese might make to defend its twenty-year history of absolute economic isolation and trading only with its allies in the Comintern.
The others being anti-European xenophobia and "fuck the bourgeois".
And thinking about the current economy of China in that context is pretty interesting, since a few of the older high-ranking officials are western-educated. But they came back to China cynical of the international economy which also explains their isolationism: they just don't want to risk drowning any pretense of revolutionary rewards by trading outwardly when being inward is much more stable.
4) Is it realistic to make France's economy collapse for this roleplay? Since, France had the most damage out of any other country after the Great War.
I don't see any reason why not. It can surely recover but maybe not to the degree that it was before. If the Spanish are going to assume the sort of economic strength comparable to the US but in Europe then a lot of the economic opportunities that may have been reserved to the old powers of Europe would have been denied because of Spain. And there'd be competition among the rest to assume the highly-competitive ranks of a rich economy like Spain.
And in PoW's pattern of Europe back-peddling a lot of the non-traditional powers in foreign economics can or have risen to assume some status as an economic competitor to the European markets. But this can be discussed.
