France's finance minister says the economy is out of recession, part of a campaign by the French government to convince the public that a turnaround is underway.

France's gross domestic product shrank by 0.2 percent for the past two quarters — the technical definition for a recession — and data for the second quarter of the year won't be published until Aug. 14. But Pierre Moscovici told Corse Matin newspaper in an interview published Saturday that the recession is over, without revealing the second-quarter figures.

Still, he tamped down expectations for growth for the full year, saying that he expected GDP for 2013 to be somewhere between -0.1 percent a 0.1 percent. Previously, the government had predicted the economy would grow 0.1 percent.