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CHAPTER X - Economic and social policy in France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
T. Kemp
Edited by
Peter Mathias  and
Sidney Pollard
T. Kemp
Affiliation:
University of Hull
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Summary

Introduction

Two traditions, apparently conflicting but having more in common than appears on the surface, have operated to make up the social and economic policy of the French state since the eighteenth century. The older one expresses the need for greater centralization and control of economic and social life inherent in the creation and consolidation of the modern state manifested first of all by the monarchy of the old regime. The other emphasizes the objective character of economic laws and demands maximum freedom for the individual, conceived as a property owner, to do what he likes with his own. Ostensibly it is the revolution of 1789 which swings the balance from the one to the other and establishes the necessary juridical bases for the full development of the free market economy. But the earlier tradition was by no means dead. The revolutionary, and more especially the Napoleonic, regimes continued the centralizing mission of the monarchy and carried it out more successfully. The theoretical basis for the exercise of state power changed from divine right to the general will; the privileges of the nobility gave way to the rights of property; but in the new system of law the state had rights superior to those of the ordinary citizen. The centralization of power in the state, the establishment of bureaucratic agencies of control having interests of their own, were characteristic of the new order. During the nineteenth century and after the attitude of the bourgeoisie to the state remained ambivalent.

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The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire , pp. 691 - 751
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1989

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