Abstract
Industry is like a chameleon. It constantly changes its appearance: nineteenth-century observers wrote about steam-engines, smoking chimneys, deafening noise and inhumane working conditions in Manchester’s cotton mills. Visitors of today’s car plants in Wolfsburg or Rüsselsheim see computerised machine tools which operate more or less silently on clean factory floors. The appearance of these concerns could hardly be more different and yet they are both industry. It is virtually impossible to understand contemporary comments about industry in any period without familiarising oneself as much as possible with the specific economic reality of the day. This is particularly true of the eighteenth century which saw the birth of many of our political, social and economic institutions but which was still a world strikingly different from ours in many ways. It already contained the seeds of modernity. ‘Much of what was modern in France’, Michael Sonenscher points out, ‘was already there, many generations before Marx wrote the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’.1 At the same time the economic world of the eighteenth century was still dominated by many traditional institutions, technologies and behaviours. It will, therefore, be useful to remind ourselves of the development of French industry at the time, before going on to examine the contemporary comments about industry.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Michael Sonenscher, Work and wages, natural law, politics and the eighteenthcentury French trades (Cambridge, 1989), p. 375.
Jan de Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 54 (1994), 249–70, pp. 254–8, 265. Adam Smith, An inquiry into the nature and the causes of the wealth of nations (1776), R.H. Campbell, ed. (2 vols, Indianapolis, 1981), I, p. 421.
See the chapter ‘Definitions and historiography of retardation’, in Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keyder, Economic growth in Britain and France 1780–1914 (London, 1978), pp. 15–25. Some of the key contributions to the re-evalution of French industrialisation were by
François Crouzet, ‘Angleterre et France au XVIIIe siècle: essai d’une analyse comparée de deux croissances économiques’, Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, 21 (1966), 254–91.
Nicholas Crafts, ‘Industrial revolution in England and France: some thoughts on the question “Why was England first?”’, Economic History Review, 30 (1977), 429–41.
O’Brien and Keyder, Economic growth, p. 192, 21, 198. The quality of their data is discussed in almost all reviews of O’Brian’s and Keyder’s work. See the reviews of Malcolm Falkus in Economic Journal, 89 (1979), 449–51, p. 451; Charles Freedman in American Historical Review, 84 (1979), 1359–60, p. 1360; Paul Hohenberg in Journal of Economic Literature, 18 (1980), 135–7, p. 135; Richard Roehl in Journal of Economic History, 39 (1979), 778–9, p. 778.
Charles Kindleberger, ‘Economic growth in Britain and France, 1780–1914 by Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keyder’, Economic History Review, 32 (1979), 295–6, p. 296.
David Landes, ‘Some further thoughts on accident in history: a reply to Professor Crafts’, Economic History Review, 48 (1995), 599–601, p. 601.
Denis Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France (Paris, 1998), pp. 177–81.
Nicholas Crafts, ‘Macroinventions, economic growth, and “industrial revolution” in Britain and France’, Economic History Review, 48 (1995), 591–8.
François Crouzet, ‘The historiography of French economic growth in the nineteenth century’, Economic History Review, 56 (2003), 215–42, p. 234.
Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France, p. 177. François Crouzet, De la supériorité de l’Angleterre sur la France (Paris, 1985), pp. 26–30. Foreign trade is defined here as the sum of imports, exports and re-exports.
Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France, pp. 627, 33, 69. Tihomir Markovitch, Les industries lainières de Colbert à la révolution (Paris, 1976), p. rpf.
Crouzet, De la supériorité, p. 31. Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France, p. 176. Line Teisseyre-Sallmann, L’industrie de la soie en Bas-Languedoc XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1995), p. 204.
Maurice Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1975), p. 276. Teisseyre-Sallmann, L’industrie de la soie, p. 223.
Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France, pp. 75–6. Patrick O’Brien et al., ‘Political components of the Industrial Revolution: Parliament and the English cotton textile industry, 1660–1774’, Economic History Review, 44 (1991), 395–423, p. 400. Sonenscher, Work and wages, p. 210–26.
Crouzet, De la supériorité, p. 42. David Landes, The unbound Prometheus (Cambridge, 1969), p. 41. Crouzet, De la supériorité, p. 35.
‘Je ne saurais souffrir qu’un homme qui porte un habit de drap Van-Robais…dise du mal de Jean-Baptiste Colbert’. Voltaire to Marie de Vichy de Chamrond, marquise du Deffant, 1 Nov. 1773, D 18607. Abel Poitrineau, ‘Van Robais’, in François Bluche, ed., Dictionnaire du grand siècle (Paris, 1990), p. 1564. ‘Sous nos yeux’, ‘tous les ouvriers rassemblés sous une même clé’. Josse Van Robais cited in Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France, p. 93.
Caglar Keyder, ‘State and industry in France, 1750–1914’, American Economic Review, 75 (1985), 308–14, p. 308. ‘Que l’on en accepte l’idée ou qu’on la combatte, l’industrie est une affaire d’État.’ Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France, p. 181. For the mulberry plantations and the dispute about the silk-caps see: Teisseyre-Sallmann, L’industrie de la soie, pp. 222, 268. For the export of silk-stockings from Nîmes see: Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France, p. 74.
Patrick O’Brien, ‘The political economy of British taxation, 1660–1815’, Economic History Review, 41 (1988), 1–32.
Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith. The emergence of political economy, 1662–1776 (Oxford, 1988), p. 295.
Charles Cole, Colbert and a century of French mercantilism (2 vols, New York, 1939), I, p. 335. ‘Alliance démagogique’. Crouzet, De la supériorité, p. 36. ‘Dirigisme d’État’.
Jean-Pierre Rioux, La révolution industrielle (Paris, 1971), p. 58. Landes, Prometheus, p. 134. ‘Orphelins de Colbert’. Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France, p. 630. Keyder, ‘State’, p. 308.
Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron von Holbach, La morale universelle ou les devoirs de l’homme fondés sur sa nature (5 vols, Paris, An IV de la Republiques Française [1796]), II, p. 9. Abbé Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (7 vols, Amsterdam, 1770), VI, p. 374. ‘Et celui qui éleva le premier l’industrie sur les ruines de l’agriculture.’ Denis Diderot, ‘Salon de 1767’, in Laurent Versini, ed., Diderot Œuvres (4 vols, Paris, 1996), II, p. 584. Winfried Schröder finds in his study ‘Zum Bedeutungs- und Funktionswandel des Wortes “Industrie”’, (Lendemains (1976), 45–62) that the sectoral meaning of industry has become widely used in the period. Earlier studies on the use of the term ‘industry’ in the French language include: Henri Sée, ‘A propos du mot “industrie”’, Revue Historique, 149 (1925), 58–61. ‘Bulletin historique, histoire économique et sociale’, Revue Historique, 158 (1928), 297–335, p. 326. Henri Hauser, ‘Le mot “industrie” chez Roland de la Platière’, Revue Historique, 150 (1925), 189–93, p. 193. Paul Harsin, ‘De quand date le mot “industrie”’, Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, 2 (1930), 235–42. Kurt Baldinger, ‘Einige terminologische Auswirkungen des Aufschwungs der Industrie im 18. Jahrhundert in Frankreich’, in Alexander Bergengruen, ed., Alteuropa und die moderne Gesellschaft — Festschrift für Otto Brunner (Göttingen, 1963), 318–36. Focko Eulen, Vom Gewerbe fleiß zur Industrie (Berlin, 1967), pp. 81–143.
Copyright information
© 2005 Florian Schui
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schui, F. (2005). Industry in Voltaire’s Time. In: Early Debates about Industry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230513334_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230513334_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52496-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-51333-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Economics & Finance CollectionEconomics and Finance (R0)