The Background

Just after the Second World War, American economic historians launched a debate, which has remained inconclusive, on the causes of lags in the rate of growth of the French economy during the process of industrialization in the nineteenth century. Seeing a country impoverished by persistent depression in the 1930s and weakened by the German occupation, they sought other than specifically contemporary factors to explain the lag experienced by France in comparison with other European nations, particularly the two main belligerent powers of western Europe, Britain and Germany, who had led a titanic struggle for five years. If France had been retarded in her economic development, how was this to be explained?

Awareness of this supposed lag was certainly not new, for the industrial superiority of Britain and Germany – not to mention that of the United States – had long since been recognized. In the nineteenth century, scholars and economists had already noted this difference and tried to explain it. In 1819, the chemist and government minister Chaptal, who in addition to having an advanced scientific training was a strong and intelligent administrator, noted, ‘If we have not made as extensive use of machinery [as in England], it is because manual labour here costs less and because the low price of fuel in England allows them to use steam-engines with advantage everywhere.’ Richard Cobden could also remark:

“whilst the indigenous coal and iron in England have attracted to her shores the raw materials of her industry, and given her almost an European monopoly of the great primary elements of steam power, France on the contrary, relying on her ingenuity only to sustain a competition with England, is compelled to purchase a proportion of hers from their great rival.”