French industrialization: A reconsideration

Explorations in Economic History 13,233-281 (1976)

French Industrialization: A Reconsideration RICHARD

ROEHL*

Bowdoin College

For the past generation, the dominant tendency in the Anglo-American literature’ on modern French economic growth has been to treat it in the context of such characterizations as “stagnation” and “retardation.” Indeed, in what may be regarded as the founding account of that development, Sir John Clapham went so far as to muse that “it might be said that *I have benefited from having had the opportunity to present versions of this paper to the members of the Columbia University Seminar on Economic History and the University of Pennsylvania Workshop in Economic History; I particularly thank Professors Rondo Cameron and Franklin Mendels for their detailed and much valued comments. In addition, my expression of thanks is extended to Professors Murray Brown, Robert Gallman, George Grantham, Tom Kemp, M. M. Knight, W. W. Rostow, William Shipman, and most especially to Professors Francois Crouzet and Charles Kindleberger. As I have not in every instance accepted proffered advice, I emphasize that responsibility for any errors is mine. I want also to acknowledge a special debt of gratitude to the members of my Spring 1973 graduate seminar in economic history at the University of California, Berkeley, who joined me in testing the premier edition of this paper’s argument. Financial assistance in support of this work from the Institute for Business and Economic Research and the Institute for International Studies, both of the University of California, Berkeley, is gratefully acknowledged; the views expressed here are of course solely my own. Finally, my thanks go to Virginia Linkovich for her careful and conscientious preparation of the manuscripts. ‘Economic historians in France have not been as troubled by the record of economic growth performance in the 19th century there, as have the Anglo-American writers. Landes has noted this, and suggested an explanation: “In general, the French have concerned themselves little with questions of national income and economic growth. Their lack of theoretical training does not predispose them to this kind of approach, and the absence of comparative background has tended to conceal the problem from them. To my knowledge, not one orthodox economic historian even posed the question of French industrial retardation until very recently, and then only to comment in passing on the efforts of American scholars to analyze the problem” (Landes, 1958, p. 80). Certainly the French traditions in this area of historiography seem rather bipolar. On the one hand, there is an abundance of high-quality and highly useful monographic work, as surveyed, for example, by Dunham (1949), who nonetheless bemoaned the inadequacies of our understanding of French economic history. On the other hand, there are the works of very broad scope, which offer extensive detail but much less by way of analysis; this genre is perhaps typified by the ongoing effort directed by Braudel and Labrousse (1970). At times in the past, however, the French have shown some concern for the implications from their economic basis for national viability and international standing; a survey is contained in Liebowitz (1970). Additional surveys of the literature on French economic history, and comments as to its areas of weakness, can be found in the work of Fohlen (1958,1962) and Leuilliot (1953).

233 Copyright 0 1976 by Richard Roehl All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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France never went through an industrial revolution.“2 This is perhaps an extreme formulation of the posture; yet the general orientation remains essentially unchanged in the most recent treatments, and has even been installed on the French side of the Channel: Both Milward and Saul (1973, pp. 255, 270, 286) and Fohlen3 find it difficult to discern chronological limits, especially a starting point, for a French Industrial Revolution.4 In the generation of this historiographic tradition the works of Cameron (1957, 1958), Clough (1946, 1972), and Kemp (1962) have attempted to elucidate the “sources of” and “factors in” the economic stagnation of France; Landes (1949, 1951, 1963b) has devoted much of his talents to the elaboration of one of these explanations in particular; and Kindleberger’s (1964) study is essentially a serial test of a number of these hypotheses. The tradition is a well-established one. There are, however, some troubling aspects about it. It must initially be conceded that the literature is not very generous in offering precision to the notion of retarded growth. Some relative failure is usually implicit, but it is frequently difficult to identify the terms of comparison. Is the French performance somehow slower than is to be reasonably expected, a priori, after the drawing up of a balance sheet of factors conducive to potential growth present in France? Or is it rather in contrast with the record elsewhere, in one or more other national economies, that the negative judgment of the French achievement is reached? In an early treatment, Clough begins with the following injunction (1946, p. 9 1). All scientific research requires at its initial stage as precise a formulation of the problem under investigation as is possible to the human mind. In a study of retardative factors in French economic development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the need for clarifying the implications of the subject and of removing possible ambiguities is particularly urgent.

On this there will be no disagreement. Several pages further on (p. 94), by way of rigorous content for the adjective “retardative,” Clough offers the failure of the French economy “to expand as much as England’s or Germany’s . . . .” This would suggest use of the second standard mentioned above, as seems also to be the case with Cameron (1957, p. 410), who does emphasize that French stagnation was relative. Yet in a more recent essay *Clapham, 1921, p. 53. Rondo Cameron and M. M. Knight have suggested in private communications to this author that the retardative perspective among the senior generation of economic historians, at least in this country, originates from personal impressions of the French economy in the immediate post-World War II period. This hypothesis is lent much plausibility by a reading of Landes (1957, esp. pp. 330-339). *Fohlen (1970). who notes that “if there is a certain ambiguity about the phrase ‘Industrial Revolution,’ this is particularly true of France” (p. 8). ‘Similarly, Lion: “Contrairement B une opinion gentralement rtpandue, le mouvement de croissance industrielle pourrait bien avoir atteint son apogee entre la fin du xvii? siecle et la fin du Second Empire, en valeur absolue aussi et en valeur relative” (L&m, 1960, p. 196).

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Clough (1972, p. 187) appears to be employing something closer to the first alternative, framing his inquiry in the form: “Why was French economic growth so slow in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution?’ The phenomenon of economic retardation in France becomes only slightly less elusive upon moving from the conceptual level to the chronological. Although there may be some problem in reconciling Clough’s reference to the “early phases” of industrialization with Cameron’s (1957, p. 410) identification of the critical period as 1883-1896, or 1871-1914, one would have to come to the conclusion that the essential object of condemnation is the 19th century, and, less crucially, the 20th. That is, retardation is a malady which has an onset; it has not been the permanent condition of the French economy. Indeed, Anglo-American as well as French writers seem virtually unanimous in viewing the French economy entering the modern era as basically strong and healthy, at least in relative terms. To be sure, there are some potential problem areas-the roots of those retardative factors-but France in the early modern period is universally regarded as a wealthy nation, again, as always, relatively.5 The 19th century is thus the period in which the phenomenon of retardation itself is to be located. Or, rather, we are back again to Clapham’s original statement, for almost all writers have accepted his periodization and have taken as the “19th century” in French economic history the 100 years from 1815 to 1914. The case for retardation rests upon the behavior of certain statistical series during this period. Table 1 presents a specimen of this type of indictment, for a somewhat different period, in the form of the growth performance of aggregate national product for France, in comparison with those of several other countries6 Even on this level, however, perhaps the data do not speak for themselves in an entirely unambiguous manner. In an early look at the quantitative data, Perroux (1955, p. 73) concluded that the French economy, between 1800 and 1950, was unprogressive. Yet Gerschenkron (1957, p. 453), reviewing this work, noted that according to the data presented by Perroux French material output increased more than four times between 1825 and 1909, which, he commented, “surely is a considerable rate of progress for a ‘nonprogressive’ economy.” On this absolute level, then, Gerschenkron, at least, hesitates to pass a wholly negative judgment. Moving from the absolute to the relative, moreover, some pause should be taken at identifying the appropriate terms of comparison. Following Kuznets a bit further, the construct which he emphasizes in his definition of modern 5For example, see the assessments view was shared, too, by contempories BSimilarly, see the data presented bles I, 2).

of Hoselitz (1955, p. 292), and Clough (1972, p. 188). This (see Goubert, 1966, p. 24). by Kuznets (1971, Table 2, p. 19), and by Pate1 (1961, Ta-

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Growth

of National

England and WalesUnited Kingdom 1700 to 1780 1780 to 1881 1855-59 to 1957-59 France 184-50 to 1960-62 Germany-West Germany 1851-55 to 1871-75 1871-75 to 1960-62 United States 1839 to 1960-62 ‘Source:

Kuznets,

1966, Table

Product (Product

ROEHL

TABLE 1 for Selected Countries in Constant Prices)’

over Long Periods Coefficient of multiplication in a century (Total product)

Duration of period tw=s)

Rate of growth per decade (%) (Total product)

80 101 101

5.3 28.2 21.1

1.7 12.0 6.8

105.5

20.8

6.6

20 88

17.6 31.1

15.0

122

42.5

34.5

2.5, p. 64.

economic growth is seen to be that of per capita performance.’ Cameron also struck a note of caution in observing that comparisons, when adjusted for the population bases, are “by no means so unfavorable to France.“” Table 2 illustrates the real significance of discounting the national aggregates with a population deflat0r.O The French performance, which when evaluated on the basis of the aggregate indices compared favorably only with England’s growth over the approximately lOO-year period from about the middle of the last century, when reckoned with a population base denominator is equaled only by Germany’s achievement from the 1870’s onward, and is decidedly superior to that not only of the United Kingdom but also of the United States, over roughly comparable periods. In the face of these data, how to account for the persistence of the general view of the French economy as stagnant from the 19th century onward? I believe it is due to the fact that what has impressed economic historians as they have looked at 19th~century France is the failure of some dramatic breakthrough to appear, the absence of a marked acceleration in the growth of the economy, something similar to that which is believed discernible in the case of England. When members of the profession gathered at Konstanz in 1960 to assess Professor Rostow’s takeoff hypothesis, Jean Marczewski, ‘Kuznets, 1966. He identifies his subject “as a sustained increase in per capita or per worker product, most often accompanied by an increase in population and usually by sweeping structural changes” (p. I). *Cameron, 1957, p. 41 (see also Cameron, 1970, p. 1419). Some evolution toward a less pessimistic view of the French performance is discernible in Cameron’s writings. “See also the figures in Bairoch 1962, Table IX, p. 328.

’ Source: See Table 1.

England and WalesUnited Kingdom 1700 to 1780 1780 to 1881 1855-59 to 1957-59 France 1841-50 to 1960-62 Germany-West Germany 1851-55 to 1871-75 1871-75 to 196Ck62 United States 1839 to 1960-62 5.3 28.2 21.1 20.8 17.6 31.1 42.5

105.5

20 88

122

(2)

Total product

80 101 101

Duration of period ters) (1)

21.6

7.7 11.2

2.5

3.2 13.1 6.1

Population (3)

17.2

9.2 17.9

17.9

2.0 13.4 14.1

Product Per capita (4)

Rate of growth per decade (W)

34.5

15.0

6.6

1.7 12.0 6.8

Total product (5)

7.1

2.9

1.3

1.4 3.4 1.8

(6)

Population

Coefficient of multiplication in a century

4.9

5.2

5.2

1.2 3.5 3.7

Product per capita (7)

TABLE 2 Growth of National Product, Population, and per Capita Product for Selected Countries over Long Periods (Product in Constant Prices)’

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there to report on France, had to offer as his findings an inability to identify or locate a well-defined takeoff for the French economy.1o Certainly, he felt, Rostow’s proposal of the period 1830-1860 was not supportable from the data; indeed, the whole of the 19th century failed to witness a genuine takeoff in France. If pressed to identify that type of discontinuous upturn, then Marczewski reported that he would have to assign it to the middle or to the very end of the 18th century, and his own preference would be for the former, i.e., the earlier point.” This is all rather troubling. Already over a decade ago so perceptive a historian as Tom Kemp was feeling some uneasiness. Noting “what has been assumed to be an established characteristic of French economic life,” Kemp commented that “enough work has been done for there to be little doubt about the symptoms of retardation. Indeed, they may be described and dilated upon to the point where the real growth accomplished in France between 1789 and 1940 is overlooked or underestimated.“12 It is the contention here that Kemp’s concern over this danger was well founded, and that in addition the symptoms are not those of retardation. The critical period seems to be that of the 18th century. The conventional picture is roughly as follows. The French economy in the early modern period, until, say, the late 17th century, is relatively strong and healthy; by the 19th it is troubled and stagnant. Though the chronology of the transition, from 17th-century wealth and power to 19th~century retarded industrialization, is rather imprecise,13 nevertheless the 18th century usually appears as the period during which those roots of subsequent problems are implanted.14 I wish instead to maintain here the proposition that something different is occurring in 18th-century France-specifically, that modern economic growth in France has its beginnings there. The 19th century then ceases to be paradoxical and becomes fully explicable: it represents the continuation of a long-term trend of economic growth. “‘Marczewski, 1963, pp. 131-132. Crouzet (1970) has subsequently reexamined the sectoral data. He finds slow growth for the aggregates (p. 85), perhaps slow enough to justify use of the designation “stagnation” (p. 86); but he finally chooses to conclude by emphasizing: “Si la croissance de I’industrie francaise n’a pas iti trbs rapide, elle apparais done relativement rguhere et continue . . .” (p. 91). “Marczewski, 1963, pp. 129, 131,137-138. See also theviewsof Levy-Leboyer (1968a. p. 801 et passim). ‘*Kemp , 1962 , pp. 325, 326, respectively. His unease seems also to be reflected in the title of the chapter that he devotes to the industrialization of France in his study of 19th-century European industrialization: “French Economic Development-A Paradox?” (Kemp, 1969, Chap. 3). IaNorth and Thomas, for example, see the 17th century closing with England and Holland emerging as “winners” in the economic sweepstakes; Germany, Spain, and Italy as “clear losers;” and France as an “also-ran” (North and Thomas, 1973, p. 103). See also theinteresting comments of Dowd (1974, pp. 201-203). r4Kemp, 1971, e.g., p. 41. For a harshly negative rendition of the same general position, cf. Luethy, 1957, p. 302.

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A focus upon the process and manifestations of economic growth implies at least to some extent the use of numbers, reliance upon quantitative data. Students of French economic history frequently have felt themselves to be at a disadvantage in this area. But I think that this no longer need be the case. Louise Tilly has recently written that “quantitative sources are there; French historians are using them. The exciting work being done lies in the area of bringing together sources and problems.“15 One of the largest of those problems must be the nature of French industrialization. For some considerable time the team of T. J. Markovitch and J. -C. Toutain has been working together with J. Marczewski, continuing work initiated by F. Perroux. Some of the results of this Study Group on Long-Term Series, at the Institute of Applied Economics in Paris, are now available. Reference has been made above to Perroux’s conclusions based on some of the early efforts (which he felt tended to confirm the traditional interpretation of French economic performance), and to Marczewski’s report on the early fruit of the labor (which, at variance with Rostow’s assignment of a French takeoff, could also be seen as possibly consistent with the tradition). Although there has been some debate over the methodological orientation itself,16 the data being generated are of unquestionable value to historians.” No one denies that France does arrive, albeit with certain peculiarities, in the 20th century as an industrial nation ranking with the other modern great powers of the West. As Berrill (1964, p. 243) so nicely expressed it, France “managed in an unobtrusive way continuously to industrialize, so that only a handful of countries are now richer than she.” France seems somehow to have had an industrial revolution almost without its being noticed! For heuristic purposes, I propose to examine here the proposition that France was in fact the first country, of those which we would generally agree to designate as industrialized, to commence upon the path toward that end. I submit that this hypothesis is neither idle nor trivial. It is capable of being 15Tilly 9 1972 1 p. 128. See also Gille, 1964, p. 99: “On a souvent place le xviiie siMe dans l’ere prestatistique. II semble que cette appreciation soit injustice. La France du xviiiesiZcle a fait un gros effort statistique. . . .” Vee Tilly, 1972, p. 133, for a brief overview. The reactions to the Group’s efforts are rather akin to, though perhaps befittingly somewhat more civilized than has sometimes been the case with, criticisms of the so-called new economic history in this country. In both cases, it seems to me, the dangers are not inherent in the respective methodologies themselves, but rather in unrealistic claims for the uniqueness of their strength and virtues. In France, at least, this pitfall seems to have been avoided. “This is certainly not to deny the problems of verifiability, accuracy, reliability, and consistency that exist with these data, perhaps most seriously with those relating to 18th-century French agriculture. (For an expecially negative judgment on the quality of the latter, see Landes, 1972, pp. 73-74.) However, it may be noted that if these estimates for the earlier period subsequently require downward revision the net effect will be to enhance and make all the more impressive the intervening, 19th~century performance of the French economy, to the levels it achieves by this century.

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examined, and that examination may enable economic historians to better understand the French industrial experience, to see it not as paradoxical or puzzling, but rather as in fact coherent and comprehendible. The greatest difficulty immediately faced in examining this proposition is the problem of deciding how to establish the sequence in which different countries entered upon modem industrialization, in particular, how to identify the “first” one. There are current a number of individual and separate indexes that could be employed for identifying this critical period: Hoffmann’s (1931, 1958) ratio of the net output of consumer-goods versus capital-goods industries, Rostow’s (1956, 1971) takeoff stage, Kuznets’ (1966) acceleration in the rate of growth of per capita output, and so on. But this situation is not entirely satisfactory: Debates are inevitable over the relative merits of selecting any one of these as opposed to some other, and none is completely above objection; and attempting to get around this by combining them introduces problems of intransitivity, as their respective rankings are not unambiguously and mutually consistent with one another. Furthermore, the process of modern economic growth is a historical phenomenon of broad, complex, and fundamental proportions; one which is unlikely to be captured or totally reflected in any single summary statistic. What is required is really an interrelated set of propositions regarding the process of industrialization, a set whose members possess some systematic and inherent relationships to one another. Given the state of theories of economic growth and development, one might be inclined to despair of finding such a set. There is, however, at least one to hand. I will employ here, in a modified form, the framework developed by Gerschenkron (1952). Gerschenkron’s idea of relative backwardness seeks to elucidate the processes of industrialization-at least for European countries during the 19th and early 20th centuries-as a function of the degree of departure from the paradigm afforded by earlier, more advanced industrializers. His framework thus requires by assumption the existence of some relatively more industrialized countries, or, in the limit, at least one relatively advanced economy, i.e., the first industrializer. Gerschenkron’s primary concern is with the processes of industrialization in various follower countries. In several places he has offered lists of propositions relating the nature of the industrialization process in a given follower to the degree of relative backwardness in that economy. I* A representative sample of these might be that a relatively backward industrializer will exhibit: (1) a rapid and intense growth of industrial output; (2) an emphasis, in the composition of output, on producers’ goods as against consumers’ goods; (3) a stress on largeness of scale in plant and enterprise; ‘*Gerschenkron 1962a, 1963,1965, 1970, pp. 353-354,152-153,499-500,99,

respectively.

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(4) a reliance upon technological borrowing, and probably financial assistance, from abroad; (5) importance in the role of banks and the state as promoters of industrial development; (6) the virulence of ideologies under the auspices of which the industrialization proceeds; (7) a passive role of agriculture, particularly as measured by growth of productivity and as a source of demand for the output of industry; (8) considerable pressure on the levels of consumption of the population. I propose here to counterpose these propositions, to convert them into a list of propositions about the process of industrialization in the relatively least backward industrializer, that of the first to begin to industrialize. Gerschenkron’s line of reasoning will simply be pursued in the direction opposite to that in which it has previously been applied: a feature of industrialization that is progressively more notable by its presence or operation as the degree of relative backwardness increases logically must be least prominent in the case of the first episode; and vice versa. This procedure is technically legitimate, for the negation of the contrary of a true statement must also be true.19 Thus, the contraposition of a series of propositions which accurately describe the nature of the process of industrialization in a relatively backward country produces a set of the observable characteristics of industrialization in the relatively least backward state, which I take by definition to be the first country to commence industrialization. If this maneuver is impeccable in terms of formal logic, in terms of historical analysis it possesses at least some plausibility. The framework for assessing the performance of the first industrializer is derived directly from the logic of the Gerschenkronian analysis. It has the virtue of providing the desired interrelated set of socioeconomic measures. In general, Gerschenkron argues, the greater the degree of relative backwardness on the eve of industrialization, the more marked the extent of the presence or influence of each of the factors listed above. By implication, then, the opposite must ap ply to industrialization in a less backward environment. Contraposing these propositions ought to result in producing a list of characteristics which fit the experience of the first industrializer. I propose the following listing. The pioneer industrializer will display: (1) a gradual, nonintense rate of growth of industrial output which nonetheless is adequate to the ultimate achievement of industrialization; (2) a relatively high proportion of light, consumer-goods industries in the mix of total industrial production; ‘*The technical term is “contraposition”

(see, e.g., Cooley, 1942, pp. 301 ff.).

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(3) the absence of a trend toward concentration in industrial organization, a tendency for scale to remain small; (4) an ability to obtain technology and capital largely from native sources; (5) minor roles played by credit banks and state budgets in the process of industrialization; (6) the absence of particularly virulent forms of industrialization ideologies; (7) a positive contribution to the process by the agricultural sector, with productivity improving sufficiently that the sector does not constitute an obstacle to industrialization; (8) a tendency for material standards of living to advance more or less in pace with the growth of the economy. How well (or poorly) does the historical experience of French industrialization measure up against and fit these inverted Gerschenkronian criteria? I will examine each of them in the order indicated above. (1) With respect to growth rates, Kuznets’ figures for gross national product have already been reviewed above. In Gerschenkron’s framework, however, the focus is specifically upon industrial output, rather than total product. In approaching these data, two considerations must be kept in mind. The first has already been established, that is, the crucial importance of adjusting the aggregate series to per capita terms. As will be seen, this applies to industrial product as well as to other national aggregates. In turning to French industrial product a second kind of adjustment is also necessary in order to do justice to historical accuracy. This concerns the analysis that has recently been elaborated by Mendels (1972b) with regard to what he terms “preindustrial industry,” industrial production which occurs in nonurban and nonfactory settings. The development of traditionally organized rural handicrafts he sees as “part and parcel of the process of ‘industrialization’ or, rather, as the first phase which preceded and prepared modern industrialization proper.“2o This dimension of “protoindustrialization” is of particular relevance for France, as Mendels notes (1972b, p. 260). It is a well-recognized fact that the nature of industrialization varied within Europe and that, in a country such as Switzerland, for example, this phase of protoindustrialization was of considerable significance, and from an early date.21 Equally important, we now know that early development along these lines is a specific and rational response to relative resource endowments and factor prices, and that it can permanently condition the process of industrialization, right into the present century.22 Mendels’ work has aOMendels, 1972b, p. 241; see also Mendels, 1973. I am indebted to the author for permitting me to see and cite his unpublished work. Wee Braun, 1960, 1967; B&gin, 1969, esp. p..223. a2Seethe discussion of Milward, in Milward and Saul, 1973, pp. 296-298,432-436,453-465.

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contributed much to clarifying the importance of this dimension in the case of the economic development of Be1gium,23 where it might easily be obscured by the popular impression of that country’s urban factories.24 What has not been so well incorporated into the literature is an appreciation of the significance of this type of development for the economic history of France.25 As Mendels suggested, “By looking at France through biased accounting concepts which emphasize the growth of the industries and techniques which flourished in England, one would tend to exaggerate backwardness and retardation in France.“26 To avoid this possible source of sizable error, Marczewski, following Markovitch, defines industrial production as “Industry and Crafts.“27 We still await Markovitch’s definitive study of 18th-century French industrial output. Marczewski (1961, table 3, p. 375) has estimated that the average annual rate of growth of the output of French industries and handicrafts in the 18th century was 1.91%. This would put the French growth at a higher rate than the British. Crouzet (1966, p. 266), noting this, has taken exception to the Marczewski estimate, which he feels will have to be modified downward, to rough equality with the English rate. Although even that result might still appear rather surprising, he feels that it is borne out by a “comparison of the evolution of the main industries in each country” (Crouzet, 1966, p. 266). Assessments vary as to the position by the turn of that century. Crouzet has offered as his own “wild guess . . . that the relative difference between French and English incomes per capita did not change much between the late seventeenth century (when Gregory King put it at 20 per cent) and the 1950’s” (with England ahead, though he is inclined to put France ahead at the beginning of the 19th century).2* This implies, minimally, approximately parallel performance in terms of aggregate growth per head. Returning again specifically to the question of industrial growth per se, Marczewski in2aMendels, 1972a. Again, I am indebted to the author for permitting me to see and cite his unpublished work. Also, see Milward in Milward and Saul, 1973, pp. 437-453. z’In the words of a recent writer, Belgium had emerged in the 1840’s “as the most industrialized country on the Continent,” though the terms of the comparison being drawn are not clear (Mokyr, 1974, p. 366). *5Although the prominence of rural industries in France is almost invariably noted, their significance is just as often missed. (See, e.g., Clapham, 1921, Chaps. 1, 3, 8, 10, Davis, 1973, pp. 215, 220-221, 229: Knowles, 1919, pp. 3, 20; Landes, 1963a, pp. 355-356; See, 1923b, pp. 47-53; Tarl6, 1910. But cf. Markovitch, 1966b.) %Mendels, 1972b. p. 260. *‘Marczewski, 1963, pp. 120-122. Marczewski has further refined Markovitch’s estimates by transferring peasant “auto-consommation” of industrial products from “industry” to “agriculture.” a8Crouzet, 1972, p. 99, Note 3, and p. 99, respectively. Professor Crouzet has reiterated the latter point in a personal communication to the author. Of course, the comments in Note 17 above, concerning the quality of the data, are again apposite.

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dicates that per capita output in France was on a level roughly equivalent to, or perhaps even surpassing, that of England at the start of the 19th century,2g a startling situation in view of the fact that, by conventional lights, England was by then a full 20 years into her industrial revolution, while France had several decades to wait before entering upon hers. There is a general consensus that the period of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars represents a hiatus in and a setback for French economic development, one which sees England forging decisively ahead.30 Possibly this is a correct judgment, though the most negative effect of the interlude appears to be the loss of Santo Domingo (as a consequence of the slave revolt there), representing about three-quarters of French colonial trade, and the general disruption of French trade with the Western colonies. In the judgment of Crouzet, the wars themselves were not widely destructive of physical capital in France, but rather had their most damaging impact on the conduct of international trade, largely to French disadvantage.31 The British imposed a maritime blockade and the French imposed a self-blockade, in the form of the Continental System, on imports, at least in theory. But trade with the Western colonies and with the East Indies was not completely closed to France, for “neutral” bottoms, mainly the United States, were still available, at least until 1807. After that date, in reaction to the Continental System and in response to pressures from (West Indian and shipping) interest groups, the British blockade was tightened, and the English took over France’s colonies (as well as those of her allies, the Dutch and the Spanish). All of this without doubt caused hardships for some French producers who found it difficult to secure their supplies of certain raw materials (tobacco, sugar, etc.), and the export-oriented linen industry and the French shipping industry in general also suffered. The French Atlantic ports were the hardest hit. After the conflicts had ended, there ensued, a difficult period of readjustment, but this was hardly confined to France alone. True, the French Atlantic trade never really revived to retain its former status; but just how deeply this affected the basic economy of France, and whether a large foreign sector is clearly desirable in the longer run, are separate matters (to which I shall return below). Attention might also be called to the evident strength of the French economy implied by the ability of France to engage in military hostilities with much of the rest of the economically relatively advanced world-not to mention Russia-without incurring crippling conse“Marczewski, 1965, Table 30, p. LXXIX. See also Markovitch, 1966a, p. 317. Once again, note the comments regarding the data in Note 17, supra. “See, inter alia, Henderson, 1956, pp. l9&191; Clough, 1972, p. 188. But cf. Bergeron, 1970. I an indebted to Professor Mendels for the latter reference. Vrouzet, 1964. The account in the text is drawn from Crouzet’s discussion.

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INDUSTRIALIZATION TABLE 3 Growth Rates0

National product Aggregate France 181524to1845554 Great Britain 1811-21 to 1841-51

Industrial product

Per capita

Aggregate

Per capita

1.9

1.4

2.5

2.0

2.1

1.3

3.1

2.3

’ Source: Marczewski, 1965, Tables 41 and 42, pp. cxxxvi and cxxxviii, respectively.

quences to her economy.32 A look at the data for the first half of the 19th century bears this out. As Table 3 indicates, during the period from the conclusion of the wars to the middle of the century, the French economy performed in an entirely respectable manner, as judged in comparison with the English. Measured in per capita terms, French growth was at a rate essentially indistinguishable from the English. Table 4 extends this argument to the whole of the 19th century, and confirms the conclusion that, in terms of the growth of industrial product per head, the economic development of France was as strong and steady as that across the Channel. In both economies there was a pattern of growth continuing the trends established in the 18th century. The growth of industrial output in 18th- and 19th~century France was in fact gradual, as compared with the subsequent experience of late-comers; TABLE 4 Compound Annual Average Rates of Growth of Industrial Product’ per Capita at Constant Prices* France 1803-12 to 1825-34 1825-34to1835-44 1835-44 to 1845-54 1845-54 to 1855-64 1855-64 to 1865-74 1865-74to 1875-84 1875-84 to 1885-94 1885-94 to 1895-1904

Great Britain 2.3 3.0 2.0 2.1 3.2 2.3 2.8 2.3

1801-11 1831 1841 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891

to to to to to to to to

1831 1841 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901

3.3 1.1 1.1 0.9 2.5 1.8 3.1 1.3

“‘Industrial Product”: for France, “Industry and Crafts”; for Great Britain, “Manufacturing, Mining and Building.” France base-year prices = 1905/13; Great Britain base-year prices = 1865185. *Sources: France: Computed from Marczewski, 1963, Table 10, p. 135; Toutain, 1963, Table 5, pp. 22-23. Great Britain: Computed from Deane and Cole, 1969, Tables 3.72, and 76, pp. 8, 282, and 29 1, respectively. a*A similar point for an earlier period is made by Goubert (1966, pp. 20,26).

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but it was nonetheless positive. The Gerschenkronian criterion for the first industrializer implies and predicts precisely this gradualness in the growth of industrial production. Merely to have experienced relatively slow growth, however, would not be sufficient by itself: the rate of growth must also not be too slow; there are, after all, any number of candidates for the title of “slowest grower.” To qualify for the designation of relatively most advanced industrializer, the nation’s rate of growth of industrial output must be simultaneously gradual and yet sufficiently strong to attain, ultimately, the status of being industrialized. Such was the rate of expansion of industrial product per capita in France, as in England. Thus the rates observed for the two countries are rather similar. England and France are both industrialized by the end of the 19th century. Each had achieved this condition by a process of gradual but, over the long run, continuous growth. Both industrialized successfully, over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. The data reflect this, and on this basis France meets the first, and the most central, of the contraposed Gerschenkronian criteria. (2) Shifting from the growth of industrial output in the aggregate to the question of its composition and structure, Gerschenkron’s argument leads to the prediction that this would display a pronounced predominance of consumer-goods production in the total, declining gradually over time as industrialization proceeds. Changes in the ratio of consumer- to capital-goods output are precisely at the center of the system of stages constructed by Hoffmann (1928, 1970). Examining his estimates for France immediately brings up a revealing point. As Kindleberger (1964, p. 289) put it, “The greatest anomaly in Hoffmann’s theory, however, is that while Britain and France go through the industrialization revolution at different timesBritain in 1780 to 1820 and France in 1820 to 1860-they arrive at various stages of industrialization simultaneously.” Reproduced in Table 5, Hoffmann’s data do indeed picture France and Great Britain moving TABLE 5 Hoffmann Index’ France 1851 1861-65 4.5 1871 1896 2.3 1901 1907 1921 1.5 1924 193s 1948 %ource: Hoffmann, 1958, Tables XL, XLI, and XLII.

Great Britain 4.7 3.9 1.7 1.8 1.5 1.1 0.7

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TABLE 6 Revised Hoffmann Index for France’ 1781-90 1803-12 1815-24 1825-34 1835-44 1845-54 1855-64 1865-74 1875-84 1885-94 1895-1904 1905-13 1920-24 1925-34 1935-38

10.0 6.3 9.0 8.9 8.3 8.4 6.4 5.7 4.5 5.3 3.8 3.5 2.4 2.5 1.9

“Source: Computed from Markovitch, 1965, Table 4a.

through his stages of industrialization more or less at identical paces. Perhaps, however, the anomaly lies in holding that England and France did not experience their industrial revolutions contemporaneously. Since it is by no means the intention here to dispute the established view that England itself was a very early, relatively very advanced industrializer, but only to argue that so too was France, the situation depicted by Hoffmann’s figures is not disquieting. Those figures, however, are in need of some adjustment, at least in the case of France. Because of the methodology he employed, Hoffmann systematically underestimated the ratio for France.33 He failed to take into account the relatively very large contribution to production from the protoindustrial sector. By its nature, much of this neglected output will fall into the category of consumer-goods production. The work of Markovitch permits a recalculation of the Hoffmann index, allowing for the inclusion of estimated production from this sector. Table 6 displays the results of this recomputation. As shown, the index declines in a gradual and fairly continuous, virtually linear, manner. The instances of discontinuity are not particularly disturbing: That of 1803-1812 represents a period of wartime, and one could well expect the shift in proportions which shows up; that of 1845-1854 is statistically insignificant; the other period, 1885-1894, remains an as yet unexplained aberration. The revised Hoffmann index numbers serve to strengthen the case: In a context of overall growth, the composition of French industrial output shows even greater emphasis upon consumer-goods industries, and the structure j3Hoffman, 1958, pp. 17-23. Also, cf. Markovitch, 1966b.

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evolves even more gradually than in the case of England. Certainly it must be conceded that England, too, had its protoindustrial sector of rural handicraft industries, and to the extent that Hoffmann’s figures fail to capture their contribution fully, the inclusion of estimates for this sector would modify the British index in the direction of restoring its similarity with that for France. However, until such revisions are made, the data imply French priority in relative advancement, and at the minimum are fully compatible with the second Gerschenkronian criterion. (3) The question of concentration of plant and enterprise is very poorly addressed by the quantitative data. Kindleberger, attempting to study this issue, expressed a general “lack of confidence in the data” on scale of plant and firm, and found that, in trying to approach the problem of firm size on the basis of numbers of employees, the historical data are essentially not available prior to this century.34 On the level of indirect evidence it is worth noting that one school of thought holds that the failure of the French economy in the 19th century alleged by tradition is to be interpreted precisely in terms of the persistence of the family firm (generally of small scale) in France (Landes, 1949, 1951, 1963b). The argument is that, by the middle of the century, this unit of production and organization had outlived its appropriateness and was outmoded; that it restricted the market by devotion to quality production, tailored to individual demand; 35 and that it restricted expansion and innovation by refusing to yield to the economic logic of the modern form of industrial organization, that of the limited liability corporation. Insofar as the characterization is granted as being correct, it provides a presupposition against any strong tendencies toward concentration and large-scale organization of plant and enterprise in France. Two points deserve mention here. The first is that almost exactly the same criticism is leveled by some economic historians against the English.36 Entrepreneurs in both countries are charged with having permitted the family firm to maintain for too long its dominance in industry and the economy, and with having moved too little and too late in the direction of the modern corporation-a factor which was, of course, present to some extent in both countries’ economies.37 The similarity of the two countries in this additional dimension is explicable by reference to a common cause. Habakkuk 34Kindleberger, 1964, pp. 163, 165-167, 173. =It is worthy of note that this same accusation is commonly made against British producers of the period. See, e.g., Ames and Rosenberg, 1968, pp. 835 f. Vee, e.g., Hobsbawm, 1968, pp. 182 f.; Kemp, 1969, pp. 185-187; Saul, 1969, pp. 4648. 37For France, see Freedman (1965, esp. Tables 1 and 2, pp. 200-201), who finds that “on the whole, when compared with other European countries, French company law cannot be said to have unduly impeded economic progress” (p. 204). Also see Hauser, 1902; Koulischer, 1931; Leon, 1954; and S&e (1923a), who finds this form of organization definitively triumphed in France by 1840 (p. 200).

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(1955, p. 159) has argued that the character of the enterprise was primarily the product of the economic environment, rather than the reverse. The element which conditioned enterprise in both France and England was the very early beginning of industrialization, the relative advancement of the two economies. Highly concentrated units of production and organization are a compensating feature in the industrialization of follower countries, in Gerschenkron’s analysis; it is a case of the substitution for missing prerequisites enjoyed by relatively advanced countries, and of the need to economize in certain scarce factors of production, i.e., entrepreneurship and capital. The family firm is a form of organization most appropriate to the earliest stages of industrialization, from which both England and France proceed from the 18th century into the 19th. It is a form of industrial organization inherited from the past, a past common to both nations, that of long traditions of economic growth; and it subsequently becomes a burden from that early start of industrialization, in both countries. It is a burden which latecomers avoid and skip over, but one which should be fully anticipated in the case of an early starter. The second point concerns the size of this burden. By the second half of the 19th century, presumably the smaller the share of larger corporations in the mix of industrial structures, the more that is foregone in the form of expanded output levels and greater efficiency of production and organization. What of the period prior to that? If one accepts the argument of Marglin (1974, p. 62), who contends that it is not correct that “the development of the centralized organization that characterizes the factory system . . . took place primarily for reasons of technical superiority,” then this would imply that, at least in the earlier stages of development, the opportunity cost of family firms rather than larger centralized organizations is small. As he concedes, once production does move inside the factory, technological change is conditioned and induced in a direction which brings returns to scale in the form of higher output with greater efficiency (Marglin, 1974, pp. 89-90, 95). The French economy would have grown more rapidly had the adoption of the modern form of industrial organization proceeded at a faster rate than it did there. Too, the share of the protoindustrial sector was higher there than in England, where movement into the factories generally progressed more rapidly. However, to the degree that the tendency toward concentration was weaker in France by comparison with developments elsewhere, to that same degree France conforms more closely to the third inverted Gerschenkronian criterion for the first industrializer. (4) The next criterion has to do with industrial technology rather than organization. Gerschenkron (following VeblerP and Trotsky3g) sees an advantage in the relative backwardness of late-comers to industrialization, in =In, e.g., Vebh, 1915, 1934, Chap. 6, esp. pp. 187 f., and passim, %SeeTrotsky, 1932, Chap. 1, Appendix 1.

respectively.

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the form of the opportunity to draw upon an existing large pool of already developed technology. By borrowing technology already perfected in the relatively advanced areas, all the costs of development, experimentation, trial and error, and false starts can be avoided: late-comers can skip over stages in the evolution of technology, and immediately install the bestpractice techniques available. Their mix of physical capital will therefore be “younger” and more efficient. Gerschenkron thus predicts that follower industrializers will be relatively more inclined to borrow technology internationally, and therefore by implication early starters will have a tendency to derive their technology from native sources. Unfortunately for present purposes the whole subject of technological change is conceptually one of the least satisfying facing social scientists. For the practicing historian the problems of invention versus innovation cum diffusion are little short of awesome. A manifestation of this situation is encountered in attempting to apply this specific Gerschenkronian contraposed criterion to the case of French industrialization. To begin, let me juxtapose the following positions. Crouzet (1966, p. 290), referring to the eighteenth century: . . the explanation for Britain’s superior inventiveness . . [is that] . . . in England the conditions for innovation seem to have been more favorable than in France.

And Davis (1973, p. 3 13): The safest thing to say, perhaps, is that although the need for innovation was strong in France as in England, French society offered a less congenial climate to innovation than did English, and that the accident of these [cotton textile] innovations nevertheless being made in France than in England did not occur.

As opposed to McCloy’s

(1952, p. 194) conclusion, on the same period:

Not only did the second half of the century see a larger number of inventions than the first half, but in the latter period there were many more inventions of real significance [made in France].

And Rostow’s recent assertion (1973, p. 570): The achievements of eighteenth-century French science match or outstrip thoseof Britain.

Perhaps the simplest (not to say most simple-minded) approach to the question of relative technological creativeness is to count patents. McCloy’s (1952, pp. 192-193) study indicates that, during the first half of the 18th century, there were numerically more patents recorded in France than in Britain. There are no grounds for believing that artisan resistance to the publication of their discoveries was any stronger in one country than in the other, so that this consideration does not seem likely to account for the observed difference. Certainly a number of the French patents were in fact for highly impractical schemes. Since, however, in Britain patents might be granted for ideas alone, whereas in France the Royal Academy of Sciences demanded drawings and scale models before registering a patent, any

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systematic bias introduced should be in the direction of understating French inventiveness while overestimating British. A closer inspection of the French patents discloses some areas of concentration, in particular chemical processes (dyes, bleaches, etc.), textiles (especially wool and silk), clocks and scientific instruments, and construction and transportation engineering. We may conclude that the French did indeed have their own traditions of technological progressiveness. International borrowing of course occurred in this period, but it displays no obvious national focus. French copying was catholic as to national origin. Much the same might be said of the English in the same period, or simply as a general statement. It is indicative that probably the most common mechanism for the international transfer of technology in the 18th century involved migratory movements, especially of refugees. Such individuals and groups frequently possessed technical skills and talents. It should be noted that a not insignificant proportion of these migrated from France, among whom the Huguenots are perhaps the most familiar instance.*O Borrowing of this type was generalized, and must be described as essentially passive on the part of the recipient. Possibly the safest thing to say of French technological borrowing in the 18th century is that it was internationally eclectic, and reveals no crucial dependence of French economic development upon the technology afforded by any single nation. This would confirm the impression one has from Clough, that the international borrowing of technology did not attain substantial importance until after the beginning of the 19th century.41 Does this situation alter significantly as we enter that century? It is generally acknowledged that, from the late 18th century on, the temporary or permanent movement of British nationals to the Continent played an important role in diffusing the new techniques, particularly in the cotton, iron smelting and, somewhat later, railroad industries, being developed in England. Henderson (1954) has devoted an entire volume to some of the details of this traffic. These transfers are frequently noted, and often emphasized in the case of France, where they occurred at times even despite formal or other hostile relations between the two countries. (Dunham [1953, p. 1571, for example, cites the figure of 15,000 to 20,000 English workers in France in 1824. Henderson [1954, p. 30, Note 631, however, corrects this by pointing out that the ‘OThe definitive study is that of Scoville (1960), who concludes that this dispora was not chiefly responsible for the stagnation of the French economy over the period 1684 to 1717 (pp. 436 f.) “Clough, 1957. The single most important exception to this generalization is clearly the diffusion of agricultural technology from the Low Countries, which is, however, not relevant to the present discussion, which concerns industrial technologies.

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figure refers to the total of all Englishmen then resident in France, of whom he indicates some 1300 to 1400 may accurately be designated as workers.) The specifics of that portion of Henderson’s book dealing with France involve precisely the textile, iron, and railroad industries.42 To concede that the French were indeed borrowing technology from Britain in some of the lines in which the British were making real technological advances in the late 18th and first half of the 19th century, however, is not equivalent to establishing total French dependence upon Britain, across the board of industrial technologies. I maintain that the case has not been established, and for the reason that it simply was not so. It may be true, as has been contended, that the reputation of French science as the most distinguished in the world was maintained into the 19th century only on the basis of momentum gained in the 18th.43 Yet it is also true that the French developed a system of technical education, based upon a structure of greater and smaller schools, that supported not only technical training to promote economic growth by overcoming routine methods and raising the quality of French goods, but also addressed the provisioning of good workmen and chiefs of workshops, as well as the training of skills in a number of practical lines (including commerce and the business end of industrial operations) (Kindleberger, 1973, pp. 7, 9, 10, 12). The achievement of French scientists, be it in the 18th, the 19th, or the 20th century, in areas with direct industrial application, as also in construction and transportation, is really quite impressive (Kindleberger, 1973, pp. 23-24). Whatever the relevance of the aphorism that “the French invent, the British do” may be with respect to entrepreneurial behavior in France, so far as it is accurate its implication in the present context can only be for something other than the necessity on the part of the French to rely totally upon others for sources of new technology. Relatively backward industrializers will also, according to Gerschenkron, look to nonnative sources for much of the investment capital required to initiate and sustain an industrial revolution. To my knowledge, no one has suggested that this was the case for France. Indirect evidence suggests a well-functioning capital market in France: Interest rates there were normal, as measured by comparison with levels obtaining elsewhere in Europe;44 and ‘*Henderson, 1954, Chaps. 2-4. If the British were responsible for many of the important developments in the technology of iron production during the 18th century, much the same judgment might be made of the French with respect to chemical technology in that century as well as in the next. And, in the context of the present argument,‘it is significant that the chemical industry in this period was one in which “almost incredible increases in productivity . . . occurred during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in some activities that relied very little on advanced mechanical devices” (Wolff, 1974, pp. 143- 144, see also Guerlac, 1969). “Ben-David, 1971, as cited in Kmdleberger, 1973, p. 10, I am grateful to the author for permission to see and to cite from his unpublished manuscript. “Homer, 1963, e.g., Table 14, p. 165, Table 15, p. 172; Chart 6, p. 182; Chart 13, p. 220, et passim.

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some of the direct evidence supports the same conclusion (Barker, 1973). Indeed, the most direct evidence we have on the question of the vigor of the French financial sector is in the enormous involvement of French capital beyond the borders of France. Cameron’s (1961) monumental study details this intense and variegated activity. It might be suggested that the large volume of capital migrating from France in this period is a reaction to and reflection of the deficiency of internal demand for investment funds, that capital sought opportunities abroad because those available domestically were too few or insufficiently lucrative. The corollary to this proposition is that French growth was held back by too little investment. The persuasiveness of this argument is best judged by reference to the data on per capita growth performance, rehearsed above. It is always true that, ceteris paribus, a higher level of productive investment will be translated into higher rates of growth, whether the capital flows from domestic or foreign sources. The point of importance here is that no one, to my knowledge, maintains that France was in fact dependent, for whatever growth did occur, upon capital imports from abroad. Investment came overwhelmingly from domestic sources, one of the tests to which my version of Gerschenkron’s framework subjects a candidate for the designation of relatively advanced industrializer. In addition, I argue these sources were adequate to meet the needs of industrialization. (5) In addition to the implication that late-comers to the process of industrialization will rely heavily upon external sources of investment capital, Gerschenkron’s analysis indicates that these relatively backward nations will also be forced to develop special channels and institutions for whatever investment does take place. They will display a tendency toward reliance upon government-initiated or -guaranteed investment, and toward highly concentrated institutional structures in the form of large credit banks in the private sector. This will be the case because they will have to substitute for missing prerequisites which had been present in the experiences of their relatively more advanced counterparts. In the case of the latter, less decentralized institutional channels had proved adequate to the needs of financial mobilization which were both less massive and more gradual in their rate of increase. The specific conclusion from this argument is that one should not expect to find the special institutional form of credit banks playing any significant role in the process of industrialization under conditions of relative advancement. In the case of France, agreement upon the involvement of credit banks on the “German” style is literally unanimous: Such involvement was insignificant. It is not enough to stop with generalized agreement on this fact, however, for there is an interpretation which comes attached to it. Specifically, the absence of credit banks in the process of French industrialization is at-

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tributed to the incapacity of the banking ‘structure to generate them; further, that incapacity is held responsible for having held back the modern economic development of France (Cameron, 1967, pp. 110-l 11). The argument of this essay is incompatible with that interpretation. Banking activities undeniably have a long tradition in France (see, e.g., See, 1939, pussim). By the 18th century, moreover, these activities were accommodated within a structure which was not only adequate to the needs of the developing French economy, but which was also most appropriate to those needs and to that development. In the earliest phases of industrialization, sources of investment capital tend to be overwhelmingly domestic and private, primarily retained earnings from profits that are plowed back and reinvested, and surplus funds from the merchant community. This is indeed what we find in 18th-century Britain. It is also precisely what is encountered in 18th-century France.45 To resolve this finding with the established interpretation of French economic history, note first, as has Bouvier, the ambiguity that exists in the banking/industrialization relationship: The sequence from cause to effect may be neither obvious nor unambiguously unidirectional.*s Late-comers to industrialization will find it necessary to resort to strongly centralized sources of capital accumulation such as credit banks and the state, because of the relatively large requirements involved in the importation and installation of advanced technology, which will have a marked tendency toward heavy capital intensity. These requirements will exceed the capacity of smaller, more decentralized sources of capital supply. Thus, Gerschenkron argues, for industrialization to proceed, specialized institutional forms will have to emerge or be adopted. In the contrary case of an early starter, capital needs are relatively much more minor and grow relatively much more gradually. In my view this is what explains the absence of credit banks in the process of French industrialization; that process began early on, was accompanied by the articulation of sources of finance able to sustain the process, and had no need to alleviate a handicap via such compensatory developments. What Cameron notes as the weakness of the French banking system and its insufficient specialization is, I believe, precisely the absence of large credit banks. This absence I do not dispute. It is, indeed, my point. The comparison with Belgian economic history is instructive. Possessing intimate geographical proximity and historical interaction, Belgium and France are brought by the conspiracy of political events into the early 19th Wee Choulguine, 1922, passim; Desazars de Montgailhard, 1961, passim; Dupont, 1952, passim; Gille, 1970, pp. 258-259. “‘Bouvier, 1972, esp. pp. 129 f. Cameron (1967), too, has noted this problem of the ambiguous direction of causality (p. 1 1 1), but he feels that he has satisfactorily resolved it (p. 127).

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century with dissimilar economic hi.storiesq7 France had an 18th-century background of relatively strong and more or less continuous economic progress, while Belgium was relatively less advanced (with reference to France, that is) in terms of the extent of economic growth achieved. Belgium subsequently, in the appropriate Gerschenkronian fashion, compensates by substituting credit banks and state initiative, particularly during the critical period of 1830-1850, for otherwise inadequate private and decentralized sources of investment capital. 4* Belgium does so to a greater degree than France, though decidedly to a lesser extent than subsequently observed in Germany, Italy, or late-Tsarist Russia. This is, indeed, a revealing measure of the degrees of relative backwardness in the five countries, during their respective drives to industrialization. Of all possible European comparisons, that with the characteristics of domestic sources of capital investment in British industrialization, in the 18th as in the 19th century, reveals the most similarity to what is observed in France. Once again, this is due to a common causation at work within the two countries: Both experienced early, 18thcentury, origins in their processes of industrialization. As a final point, the failure of the attempt by the brothers Ptreire to introduce such a financial institution into France hardly seems to me, in the context of the ongoing progress of French industrialization, to offer firm grounds for faith in the indispensability of large credit banks to that process. Surely, as the 19th century proceeds, a toll is taken. France does suffer from this inheritance from her early start and past long history of economic growth, in the form of capitalization potentialities which become progressively more archaic and less adequate for meeting the needs of the continuation of modern economic growth and by the failure to break with and abandon this tradition more rapidly and fully than was done.49 It is not my point here to deny this, as it was not in the earlier discussion of the problem of family firms. The same situation obtains here: The identical charges are leveled with equal force, in the case of 19th-century industrialization in Great Britain.5o Credit banks elsewhere in Europe in the 19th century are manifestations of relative backwardness. In France, as in England, their absence bespeaks the opposite condition. The fact that these ‘?See the discussion by Cameron (1961, p. 329). See also thediscussion of Craeybeckx (1968). who argues for locating the first phase of Belgium’s takeoff beginning with 1800, i.e., after the French annexation of Belgium (cf. Craeybeckx, 1970; Devleeshouwer, 1970). I am indebted to Professor Mendels for the latter two references. ‘*Cameron, 1961, pp. 346 f. Also see Lebrun, 1961, esp. pp. 559-563. It is also instructive that as Clapham observes, there is “much less emigration [of English experts and English capital] from England to France than from England to Belgium” (Clapham, 1921, p. 60). “‘Fohlen appears to be referring to the later 19th century when he suggests that the lack of investment banks held back French industrialization (Fohlen, 1970, p. 37). S0For example, Aldcroft in Aldcroft and Richardson, 1970, p. 165; Hobsbawm, 1968, pp. 188, 192; Kemp, 1969, p. 197: Saul, 1969, p. 41.

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institutional channels were not a significant feature in the industrialization of either France or England can be interpreted, in Gerschenkron’s framework, as evidence for the relatively low degree of their economic backwardness, when their modern economic growth was initiated. The same may be said of governmental investment activities. The state in France did little-indeed too little, it is sometimes charged-to initiate or channel investment into growth-promoting activities. In Gerschenkron’s argument, however, the function of state budgets is not only to substitute for the missing prerequisite of adequate private, domestic investment capital sources, but additionally to compensate relatively backward industrializers for their inadequate levels of aggregate demand: If the private sector cannot generate market demand of a volume to inspire and sustain an industrial revolution, the government may supplement it. For 18th-century France, it does some violence to the historical reality to speak in terms of governmental budgets; what one has is more in the nature of the royal finances of the king’s court. The standard criticism of these finances is that they had the effect of overly concentrating demand into lines of luxury-goods production, and that they were thus a poor stimulant to economic growth in the form of the expansion of mass, standardized production of common items of consumption.51 If in these circumstances economic growth nonetheless took place, we may legitimately and minimally conclude that it did so without dependence upon the stimulus of governmental spending. Similarly for much of the 19th century, granted such exceptions as Louis Napoleon’s various projects, the typical indictment is that governmental purchases of goods and services contributed little, certainly not enough, to stimulate economic growth. At all times, of course, had the government done more in this dimension then things would have been different, and the rate of economic growth presumably higher. This is, however, off the Gerschenkronian point: The dependence of the economic growth that did occur in France over the period upon state supplementation of deficient private demand is simply not alleged. (6) Turning to the question of the role of ideological impulses to industrialization, the contraposed Gerschenkronian criterion predicts that the extent to which any might be present in France would be relatively siight. For the 17th and 18th centuries, to speak of the ideological underpinnings of national economic policies is to speak of mercantilism, for western Europe in general and for France in particular. This is not to imply that mercantilism was an ideological monolith, for there were variations, and important ones, on this general theme. Clough, for example, has delineated the following &‘For example, Bamford, 1957, esp. p. 205. A recent study by Francois Crouzet suggests that in the subsequent century, too, French government expenditures made at most only marginal contributions to the promotion of economic growth (Crouzet, 1974b, 1974c).

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taxonomy. Mercantilism in the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain laid stress upon trade and bullionism, English mercantilism emphasized trade and production, while in France the version was one of bullionism tempered with production and trade.5a Perhaps more relevant for present purposes, Viner (1948) distinguished a dichotomy between (national) power versus plenty, as differentiating the several national policies. In the case of France, weight fell decisively upon the former. This contention will not be controversial. All the leading students of mercantilism in general and of French mercantilism in particular are in agreement on this issue. The orientation from Richelieu and Mazarin through Colbert to Turgot was consistent, and it was consistently a case of mercantilism as a system of state building in the political sense, especially with respect to the rise of a centralized government. For this reason the emphasis in French mercantilism was on the state of royal finances (see Cole, 1931, 1939, 1943; Lodge, 1931). This is hardly to deny that the policies pursued had definite implications for the course and nature of economic growth. The recurrent theme of attempts to unify the national administration of taxes, and more significantly, perhaps, to reduce or eliminate internal tolls and other barriers to commercial movements, could not but have ramifications in the larger economic climate; indeed, it is such policies that precisely help determine that larger climate. The relevant question is, To what extent was French mercantilism a policy of deliberate (economic) growth promotion? rather than, assuming that it was so oriented, To what extent did French mercantilism in fact promote economic growth? On the latter, most observers have tended to condemn these policies as invidiously producing just the opposite effect: The drive toward control and supervision (“surveillance” is, I think, the most applicable term here), and the growth of the royal bureaucracy in the institution of the intendants as its instrument, are held to have had a stifling effect upon trade and industry. In Usher’s (1934, p. 240) phrase, “[ilndustrialists were involved in a continual contest with the government,” under Colbert’s system. A few writers are inclined to temper this judgment somewhat.53 However, for the purposes at hand a fine line on this point is not crucial; it is the presence or absence of explicitly growth-promoting policies which is of consequence, not their success or failure. On this score the foremost authorities on the subject (Cole, Heckscher, Sargeant, Viner) all seem to believe that the French mercantilists, epitomized by Colbert, based their policies upon a static conception of trade 5*Clough, 1939, Chap. 1. See also the discussion of Gerschenkron (1970, pp. 62 f.), whose comments are quite compatible with the argument following in the text, infra. a8Rostow, 1974, p. 495, for example. One might add that, from the 18th century onward, mercantilist regulations became more and more nominal and less and less rigorously enforced.

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and production.54 If this is correct, then it is difficult to conceive of French mercantilism as a policy specifically resorted to in order to promote economic growth. This rather tentative conclusion is lent some additional support by the observation that, when some opposition to the policies of the mercantilists did develop, it originated precisely with those who were concerned with the prospect of encouraging economic growth, i.e., with members of the merchant class and their allies.55 Wolfe has identified the years from about 1680 to about 1710 as a period in which a group of antimercantilists, with a conscious growth orientation, came to the fore in France.56 That their program did not triumph is of real significance for the present argument. I believe that we are safe in concluding that whatever economic and industrial growth did occur in France prior to the 19th century did so in the absence of a decisive ideological impulse, certainly of the degree of “virulence” which Gerschenkron had in mind for his late-comers. Beyond the mercantilist period, the 19th century is virtually bereft of candidates in France for this ideological function. Gerschenkron himself (1952, pp. 22-24) does suggest that the doctrines of Saint-Simon served these purposes under the Second Empire. While conceding that Saint-Simonian ideas may have supplied a convenient rationale for certain policies, it might nonetheless be objected that this is not quite the same thing that Gerschenkron appears to have in mind as far as virulent ideologies are concerned. The latter should typically take the form of appeals for sacrifice and the postponement of gains in the levels of current consumption and material standards of living, appeals couched in strongly nationalistic terms. That is far from a fair characterization of Saint-Simonism, nor can it be maintained that this doctrine, with its inherent radicalism, was ever really firmly embraced by the regime or in any broader, popular sense. French industrialization proceeded without pronounced ideological stimulus, because there was no need for any. (7) Gerschenkron’s system finds the agricultural sector playing no active, contributing role in the industrialization of late-comers. Certainly, French agriculture has long been a favorite whipping dog of economic historians-French as well as others. The indictment centers on the dominance of the peasant in French rural life, and the dominance of the rural sector in the national economy. Specifically, French agriculture is characterized as displaying an absence of producers motivated by profit maximization, a deficiency of commercially minded and market-oriented farmers. This is %ee Cole, (1931, 1939, 1943; Heckscher, 1962; Lodge, 1931; Viner, 1965, Chaps. 1, and 2. Spengler (1960), while expounding upon the growth-theoretic content of classical mercantilism, seems clearly to identify this as implicit in it, requiring that it be “read into” the mercantilist policies (pp. 52 f.). sJSee Rothkrug, 1965; also, Fox, 1971, Chap. 3; Scoville, 1962, esp. p. 232. sBWolfe, 1966. Recall >too 1 that precisely these years were marked by severe economic dislocation (see Scoville, 1960).

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allegedly due on the one hand to the disinterest of the wealthier landlords in the direct administration and management of their estates, and on the other hand to the inefficiencies of peasant agriculture. It is well to begin with a summary of the “active, positive contributions” agriculture might theoretically make within the context of modem economic growth. Agriculture might: release a labor force to supply the rising (usually urban) industrial sector; supply foodstuffs to a growing and urbanizing population, and raw materials as inputs to industry; supply capital and entrepreneurship to industry; represent market demand for the output of industries; constitute a source of foreign exchange earnings by exporting agricultural produce, to pay, inter alia, for the importation of technology (Boserup, 1963, p. 202). How does the agricultural sector in France measure up against these? Its ability to feed a growing and urbanizing population is manifest. French population increased from about 20 million at the beginning of the 18th century, to approximately 28 million at its close, a respectable expansion. Then, during the 19th century, as is well known, French population growth was uncommonly slow; still, by 1900 another 10 million Frenchmen can be added to the figure for 1800. And these growing numbers of Frenchmen were proportionately more likely to be residing in cities: The urban percentage rises from about 15 in 1700, to more than 20 in 1800, reaches a third at the middle of the 19th century, and a half by its end (Toutain, 1963, Table 5, pp. 22-23, and Table 12, p. 50). Moreover, the figures for rural inhabitants do not of course exactly reflect the proportion of the population in agriculture: The percentage of the population defined as “living from agriculture” is fully 10 points less than the comparable percentage for “rural” in 1801, and the gap widens to almost 20 points by the beginning of the 20th century (Toutain, 1963, Table 15, pp. 54-55). Thus, the proportion of those engaged in agriculture declined more rapidly than that of rural inhabitants in the aggregate population. This suggests a prima facie case for the ability of French agriculture to feed a growing population, a decreasing proportion of which was engaged in agriculture. The only possibility arguing against such a conclusion is that the population was being sustained by the expansion of agricultural imports. For the entire 18th century, this was evidently not the case in France, which appears to have been essentially self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs. Even when, after about 18 15, this situation begins to change and France becomes a substantial net importer of some livestock and vegetable products, the amounts involved never reach significant proportions of total domestic production or consumption, during the 19th century (Toutain, 1961, Table 165; see also Knowles, 1919, p. 19). In terms of supplying agricultural raw material inputs to industry, French agriculture performed equally well. The major exception to this generaliza-

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tion concerns raw cotton (Toutain, 1961, Table 152, pp. 206-207), hardly surprising (or unique) in the case of France. Thus, agricultural output in France grew. It grew steadily, and rapidly enough to provide for an increasingly nonrural and nonagricultural population; and it can be presumed to have grown rapidly enough to meet the demands of growing industries for agricultural inputs. It was not a net foreign exchange earner consistently over the 18th and 19th centuries; but neither did it constitute a substantial source of drain on foreign exchange, for purposes of feeding the population (which may not be said of England, at least in the latter period). The conclusion from the fact of France’s ability to feed an expanding population with proportionately declining numbers in agriculture, and in the absence of massive additions to arable land, is that productivity was increasing. This is indeed what the most recent survey has documented. Toutain finds that productivity per capita of the agricultural labor force increased by 44% from the first decade of the 18th century to the last, while total population increased at a lesser rate. Productivity per unit of capital employed in agriculture increased steadily, if not dramatically, throughout the 19th century, to0.57 A recent study confirms and extends these conclusions for the 19th century. Working from regional data, as opposed to the national figures employed by Toutain, Newell concludes that “[wlhile growth in labor input accounts for some of this rapid growth in production, the important sources of growth are the productivity increases in both land and labor.” The result is that, in per capita terms, agricultural production grew “much more rapidly” in France than in England.5s Productivity is not the same as profitability. The labor and the capital employed on the land may be employed in a technically productive manner, but the profitability of the enterprise to the producer will depend upon, among other things, the size of the unit of production. In other words, profit involves the amount of land worked, as much as the physical productivity of the factors employed. For France, the consensus is that, for the majority of producers on the land, agriculture decidedly was not profitable. For the 18th century it is estimated that between 40 and 50% of the cultivable land was held by peasants (see Clough, 1972, p. 193; Goubert, 1956, p. 56). At the end of that century, IO-12 hectares can be taken as the absolute minimum “‘Toutam, 1961, Tables 110, 141, 144, 145. Recall, however, the words of caution regarding the data (Note 17, supra). 5sNewell, 1973, pp. 702, 699, respectively. This is consistent with the recent findings of O’Brien and Keyder (forthcoming) on levels of labor productivity in the two countries; these are, however, based upon Toutain’s data for French agriculture and thus the warning of Note 17 is once again invoked. (I am indebted to the authors for permission to see and cite their unpublished work.) Newell’s data, though from other sources, are also subject to some suspicion.

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necessary to sustain an average peasant family at bare subsistence levels. A conservative judgment would be that in 17th- and 18th-century France, fully 75 % of the peasantry held and worked units below this minimum.5g Thus, the mass of the peasantry would clearly lack the semblance of economic security from agriculture, leading to chronic undernourishment and resulting in the necessity for many to engage in an incessant search for forms of income from other sources.S” This leads to the issue of the volume of internal demand for industrial products, represented by the agricultural sector. The presentation above concerning the position of the peasantry suggests strongly that incomes generated from agricultural activities alone were inadequate to fuel strong market demand for nonagricultural products.61 However, the possibility exists that the difference may have been made up by nonagricultural sources of supplementary income. This is what is implied by the large volume of protoindustrial activities. The basic issue has to do with the extent to which French agriculture was commercialized and market-oriented. This will determine the impact of the agricultural sector upon the national economy from both the supply and the demand sides. The figures given above, regarding rural/nonrural and agricultural/nonagricultural trends, establish the overall orders of magnitude at which French agriculture was marketized: Those who did not produce their own food had to have their consumption needs provided for by means of some transfer from a producer to a nonproducer. Yet the conventional picture of French agriculture as it enters the modern period is one of selfsufficiency, subsistence agriculture, autoconsumption. The fact of the matter, however, is that it is most difficult to speak of “French agriculture,” that here generalizations are dangerous in the extreme. Rather, there were, and are, a great many varieties of agricultural practice in France. Certainly there are regions in which peasants exist and behave as the classic description alleges: barely eking out an impoverished existence from a small unit of poor quality land; supplementing incomes where possible by nonagricultural labor; hoarding what little surplus might exist; supplying little, other than labor, to a tightly circumscribed local market; purchasing almost nothing in “Soubert, 1956, p. 66; Jacquart, 1966; Knowles, 1919, p. 6, Note 18; Labrousse, 1966, p. 60. But cf. Forster, 1960, Table 1, p. 35; Loutchisky, 1912. Of course, the meaning and relevanceof averages for units of land holding and working always are rather obscure, and in addition small plot size need not necessarily imply inefficiency, e.g., in viticulture, garden farming, etc. @%oubert, 1956, pp. 67-69. But note that this trend toward increasing peasant by-employment is amenable of more than one interpretation: Knowles (1919) argues that growing prosperity “among large sections of the rural classes in France during the eighteenth century’* (p. 18) was due precisely to the spread of this practice (p. 20). This point will recur, infra. BLNonetheless, farm income is estimated to have risen annually by an average of 1% from 1789 to 1850, and at almost double that rate, 1.88, between 1850 and 1880 (Revenue national, 1952, p. 60).

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local or regional markets. For these, even a hypothetical national market is in practical terms irrelevant. But this is not the whole story. France is, agriculturally speaking, a generously endowed nation. Fully two-thirds of the total area of the country is good-quality land, readily cultivable (See Sourdillat, 1959, Part 1). Modern techniques were introduced as early in France as elsewhere,62 and Bloch has long since instructed us that parts of the French countryside did experience an enclosure movement of sorts, during the 18th century (Bloch, 1931, Chap. 6). Obviously, these developments proceeded earliest and went furthest in those areas in which the potential returns were highest: the hinterlands of the growing urban centers; around the great port cities; and, most especially, in the Paris basin. The Aquitaine, Loire, and Seine basins share the same geological good fortune as other of the most fertile regions of northwestern Europe-southeastern England, the Low Countries, and Denmark. Here the heavy clay plains with basic (nonacidic) soils, characteristic of the limestone bottoms of ancient seas from which they derive, benefit from the appropriate combination of rainfall and vegetation cover to produce a most propitious setting for agricultural production. Particularly the area west of Paris toward the Channel and north toward Flanders is structurally and climatically quite similar to the best agricultural regions of England. It is therefore not surprising to note that the “agricultural revolution,” which was as uneven in its incidence in France as in England, began in and was for long largely confined to these same types of agricultural regions in the two countries.83 There are really at least three French agricultures: that of the conventional picture, with a poor peasantry working small or otherwise unviable units of land, resulting in regions of inefficiency and relative overpopulation (e.g., Alsace, owing to fragmentation of land holdings, and Brittany, owing to the poor quality of the soil); the progressive and highly productive areas (probably the greater part of rural France, particularly the Paris basin, the north, and the east); and what might be termed a transitional area or areas, agronomically and economically (not necessarily geographically) between the other two, inefficient and stagnant, but not necessarily overpopulated (e.g., Lorraine, the center, and some of the south).g4 Newell’s findings, interestingly enough, are that the growth in yields, the productivity of the land, is uniform in 19th-century France, over all crops and over all regions; BZNew crops, especially from north America, were introduced into the rotations-potatoes, clover and other forage crops, Indian corn, sugar beets. They performed the function of simultaneously “cleaning” and resting the soil, and allowed for the suppression of the fallow; stall feeding of cattle, and the consequent expansion of arable, also resulted (see Bloch, 1931, Chap. 6, Sect. iii; contrast Morineau, 1968). 830n the regional variations in England, see Kerridge, 1967, esp. Chap. 2. YSee Sourdillat (1959, Part 2), whose description divides French agriculture into eight major regions. See also Klatzmann, 1933; Loutchisky, 1933.

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starting from higher levels in the north, the increases are greatest in the center of the country (Newell, 1973, p. 730). Though typically neglected, when this surprising vigor and prosperity in the French agricultural sector is recognized, it is on occasion invoked as the explanation for late and weak industrialization there (as, for example, Fohlen, 1970, pp. 30-31). But in general the variety of agricultural experiences in France, and in particular the existence of dynamic segments in French agriculture, have usually been neglected by economic historians. They have emphasized, rather, the first, those parts of the countryside typified by peasant proprietors or tenants clinging to unviable allotments, cultivating the land according to time-honored traditions, and representing an obstacle and impediment to, rather than a source of and stimulus to, dynamic economic growth and change. More specifically, the French agricultural sector as a whole has been characterized as totally fragmented and local in orientation, with production strictly limited to the needs of and demand arising from the local-or at best the minor regional-market. The only important exceptions acknowledged in this description concern the hinterlands of the great port and administrative centers, Paris above all. Nothing like a nationally unified market for agricultural production existed, it is asserted.s5 Certain indications from the available data, however, tend to dispute this interpretation. The clearest evidence of inclusion within a single market is the correlation of price changes in geographically separate localities. In this respect, the growing convergence among grain price levels and movements in Paris, Toulouse, and Beauvais evident over the 18th centuryB6 suggests that the standard account of the failure of the French national market to emerge until well into the 19th century-if, indeed, even then-may well be in serious error. A recent study by Louise Tilly of the pattern of food riots in France from the 17th through the 19th century suggests this conclusion. Contrary to the older views of Labrousse and others, her research discerns a progressive weakening of the impact of subsistence crises upon the mortality rate: Periods of high prices for food occurred, but their demographic consequences grew less severe (Tilly, 1971, pp. 24-25). This would have to owe to the fact that, for the early 18th century (probably from circa 1720) on, agricultural production generally grew at a higher rate than population.s7 Furthermore, from at least this period, a national market was emerging, in part if indirectly due to state actions. The fiscal, political and military policies of the Bourbons had this, certainly unintentional, effect, for the “Perhaps the strongest-certainly the most imaginative-rendition of this thesis is to be found in Fox, 197 1. YGee the data presented by Tilly (197 1, pp. 37-41). See also Braudel and Labrousee, 1970, Fig. 33,36-41, pp. 389,40-405. B7Toutain, 1961, Tables 142-143, p. 204, Toutain, 1963, Table 169, p. 245.

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dictates of royal ambitions demanded an almost unprecedented efficiency in tax collection (see Rostow, 1974). The history of taxation in France during the 18th century is well known, and all will acknowledge that it represented, in strictly administrative terms, an impressive achievement (see, e.g., Matthews, 1958). Yet the attempts on the part of Louis’ advisors to broaden the market by removing restrictions on internal trade-especially grain movements-are commonly judged a failure. My suspicion is that appreciation of the obstacles to internal communications and the fractionalization of markets in France has been overdone. In any case, that France was administratively and fiscally centralized seems beyond dispute. And the efficiency of the tax collectors was perhaps the strongest force driving peasants into the market: They had to sell much of their crop in order to pay their taxes. In Tilly’s words, it “transformed many of them into buyers of food, with money earned by specialized farming or participation in rural industry. The consequence of the heightened fiscal demands of the centralized state were both a growth in the number of buyers of food who were sensitive to price fluctuations and the increased movement of grain” (Tilly, 1971, pp. 25-26). Paternalistic economic controls eventually fell, and a national market, at least in grains, emerged. Thus, Paris prices for grain came to dominate those not only in nearby Beauvais but also in distant Toulouse. This was true by the end of the 18th century, but the process had been under way for at least a century.68 Perhaps a final bit of evidence of the marketization of agriculture is the observation that in France (unlike Great Britain), rents did not lag significantly behind upward movements of agricultural prices, but adjusted with alacrity.6g What all this suggests about the role of agriculture in French industrialization is that it did in fact fulfill many of the roles which can in principle be assigned to the sector (though the question of transfers of capital and entreprenurial resources admittedly has not been addressed here). The major qualification in this regard has to do with the supply of a labor force to growing industrial (and particularly urban) employment; but the validity of this potential objection depends upon what conception of industrialization is employed (see infra). In terms of Gerschenkron’s criterion, relating specifically to growth of productivity, we can note in conclusion that Toutain’s figures show the rate of growth of final output in agriculture generally exceeding the rate of growth of the French population per decade, from the middle of the 18th right through the 19th century, and this with a declining B8Tilly, 1971, pp. 36-45. And, indeed, for much longer at time, perhaps. BgGoubert, 1956, p. 72. One consequenceof this well-functioning market adjustment, it is suggested, may have been that in France the landlord captured a larger percentage of the surplus available from agriculture, which he then used “wastefully” for purposes of expenditures on luxuries and conspicuous consumption, rather than leaving it in the hands of the farmer, who would presumably use it for purposes of productive investment (see Forster, 1970).

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percentage of total active population in agriculture.‘O Perhaps understandably, the events occurring in British agriculture during the same period of time have attracted more attention, as they were more dramatic. But this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that, certainly in relative terms, French agriculture.performed quite respectably. It can readily be seen that the sector performed much more in the manner of an early industrializer than in that of a late-comer, in terms of the predictions generated by Gerscbenkron’s argument. (8) The performance of the agricultural sector has much to do with any answer that one might hazard to the vexed question of pressure upon levels of consumption, which in turn is the main component in the vexed matter of what happend to (material) standards of living during the process of in. dustrialization. In the British case, much ink has been spilled over the latter issue, yet it still stubbornly retains something of the character of inconclusiveness (see, for example, Hartwell, 1970). Although perhaps little better than the French, the relevant data for the English experience have certainly been subjected to more careful scrutiny, and in general much more intensive efforts at discovery and analysis have been applied there with as yet no clearly final resolution. This could well give one pause, when contemplating a similar excursion on the French side of the Channel. However, the pressure on consumption levels is a direct and unambiguous implication for Gerschenkron’s argument, and one must attempt, however reluctantly, to’come to grips with it. At the first level, the argument is rather straightforward. The expansion of the French population from the 18th century onward appears to have resulted primarily from declines in mortality (Spengler, 1938, p. 21). In the preindustrial setting, statements regarding changes in the material standard of living translate rather directly into statements about mortality rates. All other things being given and equal, improved consumption in this situation brings about mortality reductions, particularly in infant mortality rates. In neither. the English nor the French case are there many grounds other than improved consumption to account for a growing population caused by declining death rates.‘l Therefore, as has been argued for England, living standards in France must have been improving. At first, the argument appears impeccable. However, Hobsbawm has proposed in the English context that the decrease in mortality need not be due to per capita increases in consumption, but simply and rather to improved distribution of consumption over time: the absence of alternate ‘“See Note 67, supra. The cautionary comments on the data may again be recalled “Note, however, that Spengler (1938) suggests that the population growth century, in France and Britain alike, may have been the result of declining infant which resulted from the spread of midwifery practices (p. 44). On nutrition levels in the period, see Marczewski and Toutain, 1971, Tables 3,4,6, 10, 69,70, pp. 1919, 1926,2014,2016, respectively.

(Note 17). of the 18th mortality, France over 1920, 1922,

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periods of plenty and of want, more even consumption from one harvest to the next, a softening of deviations from the norm (Hobsbawm, 1957, p. 46). We may take a greater security in the regularity of supply as resulting normally from (1) improvements in transportation and (2) improvements in communications and information, both of which result in a greater degree of marketization. The previous section has just offered the argument that precisely these developments were characterizing the French economy from at least the 18th century. Thus, the plausibility of the inference, from growing population owing to mortality decline, to improvements in the level of consumption and thus in the standard of living, is susceptible of Hobsbawm’s objection, when applied to the case of France in this period. If the amelioration of mortality rates has ambiguous implications for the standard of living, a second approximation might be the relationship between the rate of growth of aggregate population, on the one hand, and the rate of growth of agricultural and industrial product on the other. The French economy appears to do well by this test: Since’at least the middle of the 18th century, agricultural and industrial (plus artisan) production growth rates have in general consistently exceeded that of population, right through the 19th century. 72 The evidence is that the terms of trade moved against industry and in favor of agriculture (Marczewski, 1961, Table 5, p. 378). But this is precisely to be expected; indeed, this may constitute a veritable definition of what is meant by the term “industrialization.“73 One might be tempted to conclude, then, that here perhaps the (per capita) facts do speak for themselves. Yet there are reservations on this conclusion, too. Industrial and agricultural product must be distributed in some specific manner within the total population, and the nature of the distribution-and, more importantly, possible changes in it-must be determined before any wholly conclusive judgments can legitimately be drawn from aggregate figures over a total population. In principle, it is entirely conceivable that all of the gain in total production was so unequally distributed that the benefit was concentrated within a very small proportion of the whole comWee Note 67, supra; Marczewski, 1965, Table 33, p. xci; Marczewski, 1961, p. 375. Wi the preindustrial setting, the terms of trade between agriculture and industry should move, if at all. in the opposite direction. This is what distinguishes “growth” in general from the special case of “modern economic growth.” In both, output levels rise, but in the latter the ratios of inputs to net outputs, particularly in the industrial sector, are also undergoing dynamic change, improvement, so that levels of per capita income are also affected in a fundamental way. Similarly, modern economic growth often though not invariably may be taken as an important component of, without being identical to, the process generally termed development, which also includes important changes in institutions, in relationships, and in individuals’ conceptions and perceptions of themselves, their society, and the process of ongoing change itself. Industrialization, then, may be taken as the mode of development in which modem economic growth is strongly pronounced. Thus, for example, while Australia can be seen as a country which has developed and attained a modern, i.e., industrial, level of the material standard of living, it is not designated as a country that has experienced an industrial revolution.

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munity, with levels of material consumption in the general population only very slightly improved, if at all. Problems of distribution (within the total population as well as over time) are central to general statements about welfare, standards of living, and consumption levels. At present, we can say very little on the issue of possibly significant changes in income distribution in France during the period under review, beyond noting Hart’s (1958) conclusion that the French economy in the 19th century, from at least as early as 1820, did provide increases in the real volume of consumption for each generation, over all social groups, and that Fourastie (1950, p. 477) concluded that the improvements in levels of standard of living for the working classes were due to the overall growth of production, rather than to any significant redistribution. Failing to resolve unambiguously the question of pressure on consumption standards both in the arena of mortality trends and in that of per capita rates of growth of product, the next step in seeking an answer logically would be an examination of the performance of real wage rates. This is, of course, exactly where the debate over the course of the standard of living in England during the “Industrial Revolution” so long centered. The data problems, certainly no easier of solution for France than for Britain, are not to be solved here. For the moment it must be concluded that we possess little more than impressions. None of this is very satisfying in terms of definitive judgments upon the consumption levels “enjoyed” by the population in general in France, over the 18th and 19th centuries. At best, there appears to be some not inconsiderable, though admittedly essentially indirect, evidence from the behavior of mortality rates, from an examination of per capita product rates of growth, and perhaps also from the easing of subsistence crisis (referred to above), for asserting that pressure upon consumption levels in France, over the better part of the 18th and 19th centuries, was nothing like what we are accustomed to observing in the cases of countries which were unambiguously late-comers in Gerschenkron’s schema (e.g., Russia). These are each, admittedly, slender reeds upon which to rest a judgment, but they do at least all seem to incline in essentially the same direction. In this dimension, France once again clearly seems to resemble much more closely the experience of that putatively premier performer, Great Britain. Gerschenkron’s proposition concerning the pressure upon consumption levels during the industrialization of relatively backward economies derives basically from the logic of his analysis. Indeed one could well suggest that all his subsequent propositions are in reality implications from the first: The achievement of a great spurt by a late-comer will be owing to and reflective of (a) the emphasis upon largeness of scale; (b) concentration upon heavy, capital-intensive industries; (c) the technology and capital for which flow through the government and from abroad; (d) in the context of special institutional arrangements-state budgets and investment banks-designed to

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marshal1 scarce resources and concentrate effective demand for the (e) ideologically inspired national effort, which, in the context of (f) a passive, unprogressive agricultural sector, will imply necessarily and unambiguously.(g) strong pressures upon the consumption levels of the generation which coincides with that effort. The absence of the great spurt and the reversal of conditions (a) through (f) will reverse implication (g). This is indeed the point: Pressures upon consumption in Britain during her industrialization are regarded as having been relatively lower (if no less real) than in cases of industrialization in countries starting from higher degrees of relative backwardness, precisely because in the former case the process was more leisurely, less intense, less rapid, spread out over a longer period of time than is true of the latter.74 It is my contention that one may legitimately substitute France for Britain in the preceding sentence. What I am attempting here is exactly to establish the nonexistence of a French great spurt and the reversal of propositions (a) through (f), above, when applied to the process of French industrialization. This results in the implication that pressures upon consumption levels were relatively weak in France during her industrialization. Perhaps it is best to rest the case for meeting this final criterion upon logical rather than evidential grounds. It is now appropriate to try to draw some implications and some conclusions. It is not my intention here to attempt to prove that France was literally the first nation to commence modern industrialization. My primary purpose is to argue that French industrialization is a process which begins very early,75 that the origins of her modern economic growth lie very deep in the past, and that this growth thus proceeded in a context of relative economic advancement. Through the reinterpretation and application of the Gerschenkronian framework, I believe a very strong case is established that the French experience is one which conforms very poorly with the tendencies, patterns, structures and rates of change predicted in a situation of relative economic backwardness. The situation is precisely the opposite: French industrialization exhibits very well the features likely to be associated with relative advancement and early industrialization. The purpose is not to replace England with France in terms of chronological primacy in the initiation of industrialization. The French industrialization process in a number of ways resembles (without being identical with) that of Britain because they both commence at a very early stage, and proceed more or less apace, of course with some important “Whether the sacrifices in aggregate of one or two generations consumption levels exceeds the total of smaller percentage costs interesting and important question, but one which is not relevant to 75Marczewski’s conclusion is that, “since the beginning of the nomic growth of France has been following a continuously rising periods of acceleration and deceleration,” in which the putative simply an instance of the former (Marczewski, 1961, p. 386).

under strong pressures on to several generations is an the issue at hand. eighteenth century, the ecocurve, with some alternative “take&” of 183&1860 is

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differences in detail. It is of little importance to decide which had the chronological edge on the other; equally, it is almost certainly futile to try to do so. We ought, however, to amend such questions as “Why did the industrial revolution begin first in Great Britain?’ (e.g., Hartwell, 1974, p. 8). Modern economic growth was and is a process, not a tightly circumscribed event, and it is a process of concrete historical complexity and of fundamental social dimensions. What can it mean to say that the initiation of such a transformation dates from some very narrow point in time, a certain year or even a specific decade? In the attempt to identify such a commencement, a period of a half-century, or even a whole, is historically more sound. Clapham would have been wrong had he finally concluded that France “never went through an industrial revolution.” But there is an important element of truth in the speculation. Substantively, what I think he was getting at was that France lacked, not an industrial revolution, but a takeoff. Marczewski’s inclination was the correct one: Neither the 19th nor really even the 18th century witnessed a French takeoff. But care must be taken in the interpretation of this fact. Rostow’s takeoff, as Gerschenkron noted, closely resembles the latter’s concept of a great spurt (Gerschenkron, 1962a, p. 353, Note 1). The intensity of this great spurt is a direct and increasing function of the degree of relative economic backwardness, on the eve of industrialization. In the case of France the intensity was so attenuated, the “great spurt” was stretched out over such a long period of time, that it becomes indiscernible to the searching eyes of economic historians. If my contentions as to the very early origins and the very long and gradual pace of French industrialization are accepted, what might be some of the implications? Most immediately, this would permit the abandonment of the stagnation/retardation syndrome into which discussions of the economic development of 19th-century France for a considerable time have fallen. Reinterpreting the 19th century in this light removes the paradoxes and makes sense of the French achievement of industrial status by the century’s end.7s A reunification of the 18th and 19th centuries in French economic history helps render them both much more intelligible.” “Recall Berriil’s (1964, p. 243) characterization of the French style of industrialization as “unobtrusive.” One detects here and there in the literature a certain ill-articulated but nonethe less perceptible uneasiness toward the conventional posture on modem French economic history. Kemp’s unease in this regard was remarked upon at the beginning of this study. A similar sense of disquiet can be found in some of the more recent and reflective evaluations (e.g., Cameron 1970; Crouzet, 1972, 1974a; Fohlen, 1970; Levy-Leboyer, 1968b, 1971). It ought not to come as a surprise, however, that perhaps the strongest and most explicit skepticism of the conventional orientation is expressed by McCloy (1952, e.g., p. 4), whose professional expertise is not, technically, modem economic history. 77For example, Tilly (1972) has found it impossible to fit French social history into the standard model which relates collective violence with the progress of industrialization, within a nation. Perhaps the reinterpretation of the process of French industrialization being advanced here will remove some of the impediments to that task.

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Accepting my view would also confirm and enhance the recently developed appreciation of the critical importance which can be present in the contribution of the protoindustrial sector to the attainment of modern economic growth. As Fohlen puts it, for France “the distinction between industrial and agricultural work is often artificial.“‘* Even more tellingly, Hartwell observes that economic historians almost exclusively use the rate of transfer of-the labor force from the primary to the secondary sector “as a measure of the slowness of France’s industrialisation rather than using it to analyze how growth occurred” (Hartwell, 1973, p. 390; emphasis added). This in turn suggests a larger and more general implication of the present study. Economic history has, I believe, so long misinterpreted French industrialization because it has for so long been customary to look at modern economic growth through the prism of the English experience. The definition of the industrial revolution, the concept of industrialization, derived from study of and familiarity with the British case. France appeared irrelevant and static in the 18th century, and retarded and stagnant in the next, because events, institutions, relationships and processes there evidently did not conform in a number of specific respects with their British counterparts. definition of industrialization was Ironically, this traditional, “British,” articulated originally, not by some ethnocentric Englishman, but by a most astute Gallic one. I refer, of course, to Mantoux’s early, classic, and stillinfluential work, the locus classicus of this “English” statement of the Industrial Revolution (Mantoux, 1906). The specifics of the Mantoux/English definition of the Industrial Revolution are fairly quickly summarized: iron, cotton textiles, factories. It is against the British “norms” with respect to these industrial sectors and the locus of industrial production that other industrial revolutions are measured. The tradition is continuous from Mantoux through its most able expression in the present generation of practicing economic historians, Landes’ (1970) authoritative The Unbound Prometheus (see also Landes, 1966, esp. pp. 14-15). In France, the cotton-textile and iron industries did not experience exactly the same dramatic events as they did across the Channel. But an industrial revolution is a much broader process of change than this; it is not confined to so small a selection of components from the great sectoral variety; and leading sectors, so far as they can be identified and agreed upon,7e need not be confined to this dichotomous choice, nor are they the whole story, for something-the entire remainder of the economy-has to be led. There is, in short, more to the story than just cotton textiles and iron. ‘*Fohlen 7 19707 p. 26. Fohlen (1961, p. 520) notes that the traditional expression of “Industrial Revolution” is ill-fitted to France. ‘%ee, e.g., the disagreement between Hobsbawm (1964, 1969, pp. 44-46,68 f., respectively), on the one hand, and Deane (1965, Chaps. 6-8; Deane and Cole, 1969, pp. 260 f.), on the other hand. See also Landes, 1963a, p. 336.

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Factories do play a highly visible and quite possibly almost unique role in the British case. The British managers were perhaps no more inclined than their French, or, more generally, Continental colleagues, to move their production into the factory setting. But they were able to indulge this inclination more fully because they found it easier to move the potential labor force from the countryside to the growing urban areas, from the cottage or small rural workplace to the factory. They found this easier owing to the particular nature of agrarian relationships obtaining in England as the result of the course that the events of legal and agrarian history had taken there, as opposed to their evolution on the Continent. In France, owing to the peasants’ status and attachment to the land, the organizer of industrial production more often found himself with no option but to set up operations in the countryside, where a potential work force existed. The result of these differences between the French (and Continental) situation and the English was that industrialization proceeded differently in the two places, and that what occurred in France looked different from the British perspective. That is not the same, however, as denying that industrialization took place at all in France. Nor is it proper to set up one of these industrialization processes as somehow more legitimate than another, to term one the “right” way to have an industrial revolution, and the other not. Yet this is, unconsciously, what has been done. There is such a thing as a paradigm of what I would term “European industrialization.” Its definition has to do with institutions and relationships, the legal environment, and the economic context: Market calculations, incentives, and allocation; private property and private capital markets; labor as a commodity; and spontaneity, the absence of centralized planning and direction-these are some of the dimensions along which the classic European (and the overseas offshoots) industrializations of the 18th and 19th centuries are differentiable from other varieties that have emerged since 1917. If any one country is taken to epitomize this paradigm, and I am unconvinced of the necessity of doing so, then a strong case could be made that it ought to be France. Experiences elsewhere on the Continent on average more closely resemble the experience of France than that of any other nation. If it must be said, then it is really British industrialization that is aberrant, and departs most markedly from this basic model, rather than the reverse. Indeed, one might propose an interesting and revealing application of Gerschenkron’s argument for the need of follower countries to substitute for the missing prerequisites which are present in relatively more advanced industrializers. Little mention has been made thus far of the role of an economy’s foreign sector, in the process of industrialization.80 This is a consequence of the adoption of the Gerschenkronian frame of analysis, a framework which leaves the foreign sector aside. Consider, however, the fact that 8oIt is appropriate to recall here the discussion above concerning the impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on the French economy and its international sector.

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a final component of the “Mantoux/English” definition of the industrial revolution has to do with the important, even crucial, role played by the foreign sector. I accept the thesis that the international sector was in fact of critical importance to England’s ability to industrialize. Its contribution to British GNP was in general always much greater than the corresponding share in France. I suggest that this was owing to a British deficiency in terms of the possibilities for industrialization. Specifically, in England, the domestic market was too small, the level of aggregate demand generated internally was inadequate to generate spontaneously and sustain an industrial revolution. France was a much larger nation. There, domestic demand was sufficient to the needs of an industrial revolution, and France did not have to rely substantially upon the world market to supplement aggregate demand. England was compelled to substitute international demand as a supplement to what was, had it to stand by itself, a domestic market too small to sustain an extended drive to industrialization. Rather than being a characteristic feature of European industrialization in the most classic paradigm, the role of the foreign sector in England represents a departure from it ,81a systematic departure, explicable in terms of Gerschenkron’s analysis. A final observation must now be made. The reinterpretation of French industrialization has depended upon the behavior of certain statistical trends, on a per capita basis. The achievement is measured, above all, in terms of rates of growth of output and income per head. These rates are the product of two separate but not unrelated trends, that of output (or income) growth, and that of the growth of the referent population base. As is well known, the demographic history of France is atypical of the rest of Europe, from the last years of the 18th century onward, in terms of the remarkably slow rate of expansion of the population. It therefore might be objected that the French achievement with respect to her economic growth in per capita terms is somehow “phony” because of this peculiarity of her demographic history. This objection could be met initially simply by reference to the fact that what is relevant is the growth of income or product per capita, howsoever and without regard to the specific nature of whatever growth may be attained. More fundamentally, however, I think that the unique French demo8’In view of the balance-of-payments problems and the vulnerability to economic dislocation, which seem to go hand in hand with a large share of GNP represented by the foreign sector in a mature industrial economy (e.g., England), I submit that it is far from obvious that this mode of industrialization is clearly to be preferred. The important role of the foreign sector is in fact a common characteristic of “small-nation” industrialization in western Europe. (See, e.g., Milward and Saul, 1973, on Belgium, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. On the latter, see, too, Jorberg, 1970. Also, on the Low countries, see Dhondt and Bruwier, 1970. On the share of exports in total product in France and England, see Marcxewski, 1965, Table 22, p. LXI.) This is not to deny the very real and vital contribution of the domestic market to British industrialixation. (On this point see the important study of Eversley, 1967.) The point here is simply that internal demand clone in England would have been unable to spark an industrial revolution.

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graphic sequence is once again a manifestation of relative advancement. Population grew slowly in France because the birth rate was restrainedS2 This must have been owing to decisions in which individuals prized other things more highly than they did larger families and greater numbers of offspring. The French valued the traditional ways of doing things: family and village ties, and social continuity and stability. Relatively speaking, they valued them over the greater social and geographical mobility characteristic of modern society, over the life-style and fractured families common to urban centers of industrial regions, over the social strain and dislocation which so often accompany more rapid rates of transition. It is essential to recognize that the French demographic sequence basically is not really different from that elsewhere in the industrializing West, but merely anticipates and enters earlier upon it. As Kemp has expressed it, the demographic “trend which established itself in France only heralded what was to become characteristic of all the advanced countries.“g3 In this day of-well-founded-concern over the pace of population expansion, the example of one nation’s success in achieving modern economic growth in the context of a relatively moderate and modest rate of population growth ought to be of particular relevance and interest, and perhaps is more deserving of admiration than of apologies. A similar suggestion might be offered with respect to the French style of industrialization in another dimension. The tendency among economic historians seems to be to bemoan the tendencies discernible in France for the rural population to want to retain its ties with the village and the soil, to be reluctant to move to cities, to resist installation in factories. Without wishing to deny the realities of rural poverty, one might ask if the social history of British industrial towns in the 19th century recommends the higher degree of reliance in England upon production in the urban factory, as compared with the stronger French bias toward rural locations? Again, the present day, with its problems of urban pollution, congestion and violence growing to almost insurmountable proportions, might want to give more consideration to this alternative. The world is irrevocably changed once an example of successful industrialization has come into existence. Followers have things to imitate, to emulate, and to avoid. In 19th century Europe, however, at least two examples were available for possible imitation. The intellectuals of the Risorgimento aspired to elevate the Italian economy as part of the drive for the goal of national unification. Looking about them, they perceived France and EnsZThe practice of birth control is perhaps the first symptom that an authentic revolution is in fact under way, as is suggested by Braudel and Labrousse (1970, pp. 80 f.). sSKemp, 1971, p. 276. Recall that Kuznets only requires that modem economic growth be, not invariably, but “most often accompanied by an increase in population” (of unspecified intensity, be it noted) (Note 7, supra).

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gland as the “two nations placed at the head of European civilization” (Greenfield, 1934, p. 269). For them, the choice between the different paths of the two was clear: France and England were both progressive, but the former “presented no such picture of misery as they saw in the state of the English working classes” (Greenfield, 1934, p. 269). In France, they found “a country that for some years has normally accommodated itself to the good, and which has all the characters of a good social spirit” (Greenfield, 1934, p. 269). This perception may be the ultimate contribution to our understanding of the nature of the French industrialization. White (1970, p. 3) has recently commented that “the history of the Industrial Revolution is today scarcely above the level of mythology.” If so, perhaps a step from myth toward history is to recognize that the concept of the “Industrial Revolution” is neither so monolithic nor so homogeneous as economic historians have become accustomed to regarding it.84 If the present retelling of the story of French industrialization hastens that recognition, then it will have serv its purpose. + REFERENCES Aldcroft, D. H., and Richardson, H. W. (1970), The British Economy, 1870-1939. New York. Ames, E., and Rosenberg, N. (1968), “The Enfield Arsenal in Theory and History.” Economic Journal 78, 827-842. Reprinted in S. B. Saul (Ed.), Technological Change: The United States and Britain in the Nineteenth Century. London, 1970. Bairoch, P. (1962), “Le mythe de la croissance lconomique rapide au xixe siecle.” Revuede /‘Institut de Sociologic 35,307-331. Bamford, P. W. (1957), “Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century France: Some General Conditions and a Case Study.” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 9,204-213. Barker, R. J. (1973), “The Pirier Bank during the Restoration (18151830)” Journal ofEuropean Economic History 2,641-656. Ben-David, J. (197 I), The Scientist’s Role in Society. A Comparative Study, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Bergeron, L. (1970), “Problkmes konomiques de la France napoknienne.” Revue d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine 17,469-505. Bert-ill, K. (1964), “Historical Experience: The Problem of Economic ‘Take-off.“’ In K. Berrill (Ed.), Economic Development with Special Reference to East Asia, New York. Chap. 7, pp. 233-245. Bloch, M. (193 l), Les Characteres originaux de l’histoire rurale francais. Oslo. Translated as French Rural History. An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966. Boserup, M. (1963), “Agrarian Structure and Take-off.” In Rostow (1963, pp. 201-224). Bouvier, J. (1972), “Rapports entre systimes bancaires et entreprises industrielles dans la croissance europeanne au xixc siecle.” In Pierre L&m (Ed.), L’lndustrialisation en Europe au xix’ siecle. Colloques Intemationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Paris. Pp. 115-134. *‘We might also profitably reflect on the following. “Surely the real problem is not to catalog the characteristics of economies that have already become differentiated, but rather to account for the emergence of differentiation in the first place” (Clower, 1973, p. 8).

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