Ah, France. The country most visited by tourists. The home of wine, perfumes, and fashion. The only major European country the United States has never fought against. The country that played a critical role in our war of independence and whose sacrifices here helped bankrupt it and thus ushered in the French Revolution.
France is our friend, yet Americans sometimes ridicule or disdain the French—they are a safe target since relatively few French people chose to immigrate here. In 1995 an episode of “The Simpsons” called the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” and in 2009, only 62 percent of Americans had a favorable view of France, compared with 77 percent for Britain.
For historians, especially economic historians, France doesn’t fare too well, either. The Industrial Revolution, which occurred roughly between 1750 and 1850, started in England, not in France. Answering the question “why” sometimes means arguing that there was something “wrong” with France.
“England experienced a real outburst of inventiveness, which in France was almost completely lacking . . . ,” wrote Francois Crouzet in 1985 in a penetrating effort to understand the causes of the Industrial Revolution.[1] In spite of such statements, his book was designed to bring balance to the discussion of France vs. Britain. He pointed out that (unbeknownst to many) Britain grew no faster during the first 80 years of the eighteenth century than France did, and perhaps more slowly.[2]
In his 2006 book The Path Not Taken, Jeff Horn aggressively attacks what he calls the “Anglocentrism” of much historical writing about the French. “In many historians’ accounts, the French were permanently relegated to a kind of industrial purgatory,” (2) he says, “held back by regressive institutions like the corporations [guilds] of the ancient regime.” [3] Horn counters that view with an “alternative vision of industrial development.” France’s growth was shaped by state intervention (which was both good and bad), the resistance of French workers to exploitation (both good and bad), and the turmoil of the French revolution (bad).
Another historiographical trend in favor of the French has been to get away from the underlying assumption that Great Britain was a laissez-faire or free-market society during the gestation of the Industrial Revolution. After all, Adam Smith was proposing free markets, only rarely describing them. There is no better illustration of the impact of British tariffs (and sometimes outright bans) than the anti-French tariffs on French wine. John C. Nye and Charles Ludington have pointed out that tariffs and bans in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries shaped the drinking habits of the English. High tariffs on French wines discouraged common people from buying them, says Ludington, and spurred imports of port, thanks to lower tariffs on Portuguese wine. [4] Meanwhile, British subsidies to the brewing industry, Nye argues, made England a beer-drinking nation. [5] Not much free trade there.
I find the Industrial Revolution endlessly fascinating, and comparisons of France and England are on point. But I’m going to be cautious in how I treat a country whose people love wine, perfume, and peace.
[1] Francois Crouzet, Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990 [1985]), 27.
[2] France’s total output was much greater. France was the largest country in Europe in population—with about 21,000,000 people compared with Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales), with about 6,200,000 million.
[3] Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1830 (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2006).
[4] Charles Ludington, “’Claret Is the Liquor for Boys; Port for Men’:
How Port Became the ‘Englishman’s Wine,’ 1750s-1800.” Journal of British Studies 48 (April 2009): 364-390. Ludington says that duties in 1783 were £46 per tun (cask) on port compared to £96 per tun on French wines.
[5] John C. Nye, War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
I have a colleague who argues that the Industrial Revolution was possible in England because they had a well-developed state . bureaucracy that worked hand in hand with industrialists to exploit British workers. If course, my colleague is a quasi Marxist, but his arguments can be compelling.
One amazing difference between England and France was that England had a Parliament that held many of the purse strings (not quite all), and France did not. When English kings wanted to go to war, they had to get the funds from Parliament. But France never had that arrangement. Peasants paid most of the tax—noblemen were largely exempt. When Louis XVI finally called the Estates-General to approve more money, it was the first time it had been called since 1614. Its actions precipitated the French Revolution.
The question of why France has not done better economically is interesting, but I find more interesting still why France has consistently remained a great power (both economically and in other ways) despite her history of miserable governance. I think it has to do with the relatively large size and extraordinary natural productivity of the country.
As to the question of why England was more successful vis-a-vis the Industrial Revolution than France, no doubt there are a number of reasons. But a consistent motif among societies that have succeeded brilliantly in advancing human civilization has been decentralization, sometimes extreme centralization: Ancient Greece, Rome in the first centuries BCE and CE, Renaissance Italy and Germany, 19th century U.S.
England was not particularly decentralized in the 18th century, but it certainly was more decentralized than France. Moreover “England” was not an isolated polity: It was part of a decentralized union that included Scotland and Ireland and part of an very large, even more decentralized empire—effectively a loose federation rather than an empire.
Much of the force behind the British Industrial Revolution was actually Scottish and the markets were American, West Indian, etc., as well as English.