The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789-1815 9780857455697

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The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789-1815

BERGHAHN MONOGRAPHS IN FRENCH STUDIES Volume 1 The Populist Challenge: Political Protest and Ethno-nationalist Mobilization in France Jens Rydgren Volume 2 French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s Michael Scott Christofferson Volume 3 Sartre against Stalinism Ian H. Birchall Volume 4 Sartre, Self-Formation and Masculinities Jean-Pierre Boulé Volume 5 The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815 Henry Heller

THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 1789–1815


Henry Heller

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

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Published in 2006 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2006, 2009 Henry Heller First paperback edition published in 2009 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heller, Henry. The Bourgeois revolution in France, 1789-1815 / Henry Heller p. cm.—(Berghahn monographs in French studies; 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-169-1 (hbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-84545-650-4 (pbk.) 1. France—History—Revolution, 1789-1799—Historiography. 2. France— History—Consulate and First Empire, 1799-1815—Historiography. 3. Social classes—France—Historiography. I. Title. II. Series. DC147.8.H45 2006 944.04072—dc22

2006042744

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-169-1 hardback ISBN 978-1-84545-650-4 paperback

To Joanne

CONTENTS


Acknowledgements

vii

Preface

viii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1

Questioning Revisionism

9

Chapter 2

Capitalism and the Eighteenth Century French Economy

27

Chapter 3

Capitalism, Wage Labor, and the Bourgeoisie

45

Chapter 4

The Revolutionary Crisis

65

Chapter 5

The Economy in Revolution (1789-1799)

83

Chapter 6

The Directory (1795-1799)

109

Chapter 7

The Era of Napoleon (1799-1815)

125

Conclusion

147

Bibliography

151

Index

167

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


In offering this work to the public, I would like to express my gratitude above all to my editor Irwin Wall. His perceptive reading of the manuscript, sage advice, and moral support have been essential to the publication of this book. I would like to also thank Sebastian Budgen, who in his reading of the text, taught me to leave no hostages to fortune. The companionship of Cy Gonick, Ken Kalturnyk, David Camfield, and the members of the Culture and Globalization group at the University of Manitoba, have provided the community that has sustained the creation of this work. Mark Gabbert, my colleague for many years in the history department of the University of Manitoba, in particular, encouraged me to develop my critique of revisionism into this book. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Sandra Ferguson, who provided indispensable editorial assistance.

PREFACE


Following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, the classic interpretation of the French Revolution held that it was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. This view of the Revolution asserted that the modern world, based on capitalism and the rule of the bourgeoisie, was created as a result of a monumental act of usurpation. The traditional incumbents of power under the ancien regime—royalty, nobles, and ecclesiastics—were swept away by a vast social and political convulsion led by the middle class. Since the 1960s this interpretation, which was dominant among French historians, was challenged by a revisionist school centered in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Scholars like Alfred Cobban, Betty Behrens, and George V. Taylor cast doubt on the claim that the Revolution was in fact capitalist and bourgeois. In the wake of this critique, François Furet reinterpreted the Revolution as cultural and ideological, rather than as a social and economic phenomenon. According to Furet, the French Revolution had nothing to do with the progress of capitalism and the aspirations of a middle class whose needs could have been otherwise satisfied. Rather, the Revolution was the work of alienated intellectuals and extremists whose activities were essentially nihilistic. It is fair to say that the study of the French Revolution since then, has been dominated by this so-called school. This is especially evident in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. In France the ascendancy of revisionism over scholarship has been less evident. Nonetheless, the influence of Furet in the media, think-tanks, and publishing has given revisionism a certain hold over public opinion even there. It seems evident that a connection exists between the predominance of revisionism, the decline of the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the conservative or neoliberal ideological offensive of the last decades. Whether or not the modern world came into being by revolution is more than an academic question. It bears on the present and future as well as on the interpretation of the past. At the same time it has to be admitted that the revisionist school did raise theoretical and empirical objections to the classic view of the Revolution that demand legitimate answers. But it seems clear that after more than thirty years of dominance, the revisionist view has grown exhausted.

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While impressive as a many-sided critique, it has conspicuously failed to produce an alternative to the classic interpretation of the Revolution. Moreover, a vast body of research has accumulated in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but especially in France, which cannot be accommodated to the revisionist viewpoint. Accordingly, against the dominant revisionist conception of the French Revolution, the following work reasserts the view that the Revolution—the capital event of the modern age—was a capitalist and bourgeois revolution. Based on an analysis of the recent historical scholarship as well as knowledge of Marxist theories of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, this work confutes the main arguments and contentions of the revisionist school, while offering an up-to-date narrative of the development of the Revolution.

INTRODUCTION


This work seeks to reclaim the idea that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. It asserts that in 1789, a massive popular uprising allowed the middle class to assume power by overthrowing the political and social order of the ancien régime. Profound changes in the economy, social structure, and culture of eighteenth-century France made such a revolution possible. That century saw a notable development of capitalist trade and manufacture, largely under the auspices of the middle class. The expansion of the capitalist economy during this period tended to upset the traditional life of millions of French peasants, setting the stage for an agrarian revolution. Similarly, the development of dispersed manufactures and new concentrated industries, made hundreds of thousands of wageworkers dependent on the vagaries of the capitalist economy. As a result they too became prone to social and political unrest. A deep economic crisis at the end of the eighteenth century proved to be the spark that set off a revolution in which millions of peasants and workers challenged the existing political and social order. The overall expansion of the role of profit in the economy and growth in the numbers, wealth, and confidence of the bourgeoisie, made it possible for this class to take political advantage of popular upheaval in order to wrest control of the state from the dominant classes of the ancien régime. The following quarter-century, including the period of Napoleon, was marked by bloody and earthshaking upheavals in France and in the rest of Europe. But they were also characterized by significant continuity based on the progressive ascendancy of a revolutionary middle class over the rest of society. These twenty-six years of revolutionary government witnessed a steady increase in the self-confidence of this class, and the strengthening of its hold on political and social power. The legal, cultural, and institutional changes set in place during this period set the stage for the further development of a capitalist economy and society in the nineteenth century. It is in this sense that the French Revolution is described as a bourgeois revolution. Notes for this section begin on page 8.

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The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

To the casual student of history such an assertion might not seem to be particularly controversial. Indeed, for a long period throughout the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century, such a view of the French Revolution was taken to be obvious, even self-evident, to historians of all political persuasions. Yet, our casual reader of history would be surprised to learn that for the last thirty years, this view has been contested and even rejected by the most influential elements of the academic world in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The notion of a bourgeois revolution has come to be challenged in France itself. Tainted by Marxism, the view of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution has been anathema to these so-called revisionist historians. Over the last generation it is not too much to say that these conservative and not-so-conservative scholars have dominated the historical study of the French Revolution in Britain, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in the Anglo-Saxon world. While unable to produce a convincing substitute for the notion of a bourgeois revolution, these historians have produced a wide-ranging and serious critique of the traditional view. Many believe that the notion of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution has been discredited. Even some Marxist scholars have accepted the revisionist perspective. We believe, however, that after a generation of scholarly dominance, revisionism has exhausted itself and is now at a dead end. Accordingly, our work represents a timely attempt to reassert the notion of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution. Avowedly Marxist in inspiration, this account is based on a synthesis of much of the important French and Anglo-Saxon scholarship of recent years. In the course of this survey we attempt to confute the most important arguments offered by the revisionists against the notion of a bourgeois revolution. We try to demonstrate that the view of the French Revolution, as the moment when the middle class took political power, is the only one that can make sense of the existing historical research. Much of the account that follows, like past Marxist narratives, dwells on the facts of economic and social history. In that sense it is biased in favor of seeking out what was innovative in the realm of economics and social relations, as one would expect in such a materialist narrative. The growing power of the middle class and the expansion of capitalist industry are major themes. Yet it is one of the major contentions of the revisionists that one of the main keys to the outbreak of the Revolution was the development of a radical political culture. They have argued that the importance of this new culture has been ignored by Marxist proponents of the traditional view of a bourgeois revolution. Recent scholarship has confirmed that a new political culture was born in this period that proved to be important in giving shape and direction to the Revolution. Therefore, in accord with the strictures of the revisionists, this work takes into account changes in the realm of culture that might have affected the political order. In particular, it stresses innovation in political thought, especially in the

Introduction

3

period prior to and during the Revolution. But in the thought of such pivotal figures as Pierre-Louis Roederer, Etienne Clavière, Alexis-Théophile Vandermode, and Jean-Baptiste Say, this work discovers not simply a revolutionary approach to politics, but a new political economy. As we shall see, the objective of such thinkers was not simply to invent a new political order appropriate to the rule of the bourgeoisie, but one compatible with an emergent capitalist economy. In French society prior to the Revolution, capitalism grew up within the interstices of feudalism. Accordingly, it was characterized by complicated and contradictory tendencies in which feudal and capitalist elements coexisted. Nobles created industries, capitalists became ennobled, so-called bourgeoisie lived off rents, and capitalists bought fiefs in order to exploit them in a capitalist manner. The revisionist critics of the French Revolution have had a field day dwelling on these contradictions in order to try to deny the existence of a capitalist bourgeoisie, the existence of capitalism, or the reality of a bourgeois revolution. It is important therefore to clarify the terms and theoretical premises of our argument. We begin by outlining what we mean by feudalism and capitalism, what we mean by bourgeoisie and a bourgeois revolution. France, prior to the Revolution, must still be considered a feudal society. The essence of feudalism is the antagonistic relationship between a ruling class of noble landlords who control access to land, and a dominated class of subservient peasant farmers. As such, the overall setting of feudalism is a largely agrarian society with limited productive potential. The producers in such a society are largely peasant families interested primarily in producing their own subsistence. Most of the limited surplus they do produce is directly or indirectly coerced from them in the form of rent. By the eighteenth century, feudalism in France had evolved from a hierarchical and parcelized system of landlordship, into one thoroughly ordered and regulated by the administrative apparatus of the absolutist state. The absolutist state reinforced the power of the landlord class while basing itself fiscally on a tax system which itself was a kind of centralized rent. By then the French economy was characterized by the production of commodities for exchange in the market, facilitated by the substantial growth of specialized manufacturing, long-distance trade, and commercial banking. Towns and cities accordingly had assumed considerable importance. But these elements, which were to fully flower under postrevolutionary French capitalism, had developed in the interstices of feudal society over several centuries and did not become fundamentally incompatible with it until the crisis of the French Revolution. Like feudalism, capitalism is a system that is founded on an antagonistic class relationship. In this case the opposition is between wageworkers and capitalists. The workers, who are the producers under capitalism, have limited, or no control, over the means or processes of production and therefore have restricted or no means of producing their own subsistence.

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The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

In other words, they have limited or no means of independently producing their own livelihood. As a result, they are compelled to sell their labor power to employers in return for a wage that enables them to buy food and other necessities. The wage then is essentially the value of the commodity-labor power. Capitalism, in contrast to feudalism, is a system in which tools, manufacture, technological innovation, and finally machinery and fixed industrial capital, progressively dominates the productive process. As a result, workers are provided with constantly expanding productive capacity, albeit under capitalist control. Using these increasingly efficient means of production, they are able, during their hours of work, to produce increasingly more value than the value of their own labor power. This surplus value-unpaid labor-is the fundamental source of surplus under capitalism in contrast to the primacy of rent under feudalism. Transformed by the productive process into commodities for sale in the marketplace, surplus value is realized by capitalists as profit. Marxist and non-Marxist accounts of the French Revolution agree that prior to the Revolution, rent was the primary form of surplus extraction in the French economy. A Marxist account then must demonstrate that within this system, profit played an increasingly larger role in the economy in the eighteenth century, and that accordingly, the power of capitalists who accumulated such profits increased. It will accordingly be shown that one of the ways in which the role of profit increased during the eighteenth century was through substantial progress in the use of profit-enhancing tools, and in the development of manufacture, technological innovation, and finally machinery and fixed industrial capital. Equally if not more important as a source of expanded profit was the transformation of the most fertile agricultural regions in the north of France into areas dominated by capitalist farming. In the wellknown concluding chapters of the first volume of Capital, Marx demonstrated the decisive importance of the capitalist transformation of agriculture to the emergence of English capitalism.1 Much less well known but important to our study, are Marx’s remarks on the capitalist development of French agriculture prior to the French Revolution. These are to be found in his analysis of the doctrines of the eighteenth-century French economists, the Physiocrats, in his Theories of Surplus-Value.2 On the basis of their writings, Marx assumed that French agriculture prior to the Revolution operated according to the dynamics of capitalism. Indeed, so much was this the case that, according to him, it enabled these writers to outline the essential contours of capital: “the analysis of capital, within the bourgeois horizon, is essentially the work of the Physiocrats. It is this service that makes them the true fathers of modern political economy.”3 It was the dramatic emergence of capitalism in the rural sector in this still largely agricultural country, according to Marx, which made it possible for these economists to discover the essential nature of value and surplus value in particular.4 As Marx described it, “the Physiocratic system is presented as the new capital-

Introduction

5

ist society prevailing within the framework of feudal society. This therefore corresponds to bourgeois society in the epoch when the latter breaks its way out of the feudal order. Consequently, the starting point (of modern political economy) is in France, in a predominantly agricultural country, and not in England, a predominantly industrial, commercial and seafaring country.”5 The essential nature of capital is more starkly revealed through its sudden surfacing in the relatively backward French agricultural sector than in the more diversified and sophisticated economy of England. According to Marx, then, the state of French agriculture in the eighteenth century corresponds to the period when the bourgeoisie is breaking its way out of the feudal order. Marx’s conclusion does not carry weight in itself. Its validity as insight is established by our subsequent review of the recent historiography of eighteenth-century French agriculture that fully confirms the impressive development of capitalist agriculture in eighteenth-century France. Part of this development included a great interest in, and the investment of substantial capital in, agricultural improvement. Marx notes that “the foundation of modern political economy is the conception of the value of labour power as something fixed.”6 According to him, it is to the credit of the Physiocrats that “…the minimum of wages therefore correctly forms the pivotal point of Physiocratic theory.”7 The Physiocrats and following them Marx, believed that securing maximum surplus value in capitalist agriculture in France was based on keeping wages as low as the maintenance of subsistence would allow. They assumed that working for wages was essential to the subsistence of eighteenth-century workers. Denial of this point is critical to the argument of the important revisionist George Comninel.8 Comninel rejects the idea that prior to the French Revolution capitalist farming existed on the large tenant farms of northern France which operated on the basis of wage labor and profit. He dismisses the idea that such operations were capitalist, because the labor force was kept dependent on its own subsistence production rather than being fully proletarianized.9 To the contrary, we shall demonstrate that what drove these rural workers to work for wages was that they could not produce their own subsistence, lacking sufficient or any means of production. Not only were they forced to sell their labor power in the market, but they were compelled to buy the greater part of their subsistence there as well. In order to perpetuate this situation, the Physiocrats emphasized the need to preserve the so-called minimum of wages, a form of economic coercion critical to maintaining a sufficient workforce available to employers in what was an emerging capitalist agriculture. The fact that some of the prerevolutionary workforce resorted to self-provisioning, does not signify that they were not dependent on wages. As Michael Perelman has pointed out, limited self-provisioning historically helped to raise the rate of surplus value by making it possible to keep wages at a minimum.10 In the final analysis, it was success in extracting surplus value from workers

6

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

rather than the unlimited character of market coercion upon workers, which determined the capitalist character of the most productive sectors of French agriculture.11 The French Revolution began as the result of an overall crisis of society, as we shall see. Among other factors inherent to the crisis of 1789, was the fact that the existing social and political order had become a barrier to the further accumulation of profit. It ought to be admitted that this crisis might have been solved otherwise than through a revolution. But, in fact, it was decided by virtue of a revolution led by the bourgeoisie. In order to avoid subsequent confusion, we therefore lay out clearly what we mean by the terms bourgeoisie and bourgeois revolution. Prior to the Revolution, the word bourgeois had different meanings. It could refer to a member of the third estate or to a member of the ruling elite or to a citizen of a town. It could mean a person who lived off rent, engaged in contemptible economic activities, or was a boss-someone who bought and employed the labor of others. Among these definitions the last would be closest to the Marxist conception. In this work, bourgeois refers to a capitalist or to someone who makes a large if not the largest part of his income, from profits-agricultural, manufacturing, or commercial. It might be conceded by revisionists that some bourgeois were living off profits in the Marxist sense. But it has been argued that other bourgeois and among them the most prominent, gained the largest part of their livelihood not from profits but from rents. The key term in this respect is prominent. As Maurice Dobb pointed out years ago with respect to the English Revolution, the most prominent elements of the bourgeoisie were deeply implicated in the feudal system of rents and privilege prior to the Revolution.12 It was perhaps even more the case in France, where prior to the onset of the revolutionary crisis, much of this upper element of the bourgeoisie accepted, with no doubt some reservations, the ideology of hierarchy and privilege of the ancien régime. That does not gainsay the fact that the great majority of the over two million bourgeoisie in France at that time lived primarily off profits. Indeed, many bourgeoisie whose income was more or less dependent on rent, were collecting capitalist and not feudal rents, as we shall see. As we have noted, profits did play an expanding role in the French economy throughout the eighteenth century. But the dominance of rents, feudal relations, and the regulations of the ancien régime constituted an ongoing brake on profit-making activity. Increasing rents and the ongoing state control of the grain trade restricted profits and limited if it did not entirely block, investment in the agricultural sector. The feudal system and the administrative apparatus of the ancien régime checked the emergence of a unified national market. Limited gains in productivity and output and consequently higher prices for food restricted disposable income and the market for manufactures, inhibiting investment in fixed industrial capital. These rent-based constraints on profits and capital accumulation were tol-

Introduction

7

erable so long as the economy was expanding, as it did for most of the eighteenth century. The crisis of 1789 was in part the point when such restrictions based on the continued domination of rent induced a crisis of profits which became an element of the overall crisis. The crisis of 1789 was in part, a crisis of profits in the commercial and industrial sector. But it was also a crisis of the whole society, including the looming threat of hunger, mass layoffs of workers and artisans, and state bankruptcy. It became a revolutionary political crisis because the financial and political capacity of the absolutist government of the ancien régime came into question. Millions of peasants and hundreds of thousands of workers and craftsmen rebelled against the existing order, alongside the bourgeoisie. Why then do we label the revolution a bourgeois revolution? In the first place it’s because the bourgeoisie assumed leadership over this revolution. Almost to the eve of the Revolution the bourgeoisie had more or less coexisted with the privileged orders of nobility and clergy within the society of orders of the ancien régime with only relatively minor complaints and objections. But with the onset of the crisis in 1788, the bourgeoisie rapidly became conscious of its antagonistic interests to the nobility and to the whole order of privilege, and began to mobilize politically and ideologically as a class. Mass urban insurrection and peasant revolt were indispensable features of the revolutionary process that followed. But revolution is supremely a political event entailing the seizure of control of the state. Without taking control of the state everything accomplished by revolutionary violence is potentially reversible. It was only the bourgeoisie, increasingly self-conscious as a class and endowed with sufficient economic, political, and cultural resources, which in the first instance could challenge and overthrow the absolute monarchy and the feudal order and establish a new state. It is this political capacity of the bourgeoisie that makes it possible to refer to the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution. But appreciating the Revolution as a bourgeois revolution also entails understanding the relationship between control of the state and the development of class power. The initial success of the bourgeoisie did not mean that France was a fully developed capitalist economy led by a fully conscious and self-confident bourgeois class. It only meant that the bourgeoisie had developed enough economic as well as political strength to get rid of the ancien régime. It would take an extended process over the next twenty five years for it to mature as a class while further developing its economic underpinnings. Its control of the state played a large part in enabling it to do so. Indeed, the next quarter-century would see a continuous struggle to consolidate its control of the state against internal and external enemies. This political and military struggle itself helped to develop the confidence and identity of this new ruling class. In the meantime, the new educational, technical, scientific, and cultural institutions created by the revolutionary state, directly helped to articulate its ideals, aspirations, and needs. Equally if not

8

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

more important, the bourgeoisie would use the state to strengthen itself economically. The new state that the bourgeoisie created and dominated would sweep away feudal constraints, protect capitalist property rights, and unify the country legally and administratively into a national market. It would foster the profitability of agriculture and the creation of industrial capital on a more extended scale than prior to the Revolution. It is in this larger sense that the French Revolution is properly referred to as a bourgeois revolution.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Karl Marx, Capital (New York, 1977), chap. 26-29, pp. 873-907. Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value (Moscow, 1963), pt.1, 44-68. Marx, Theories, pt. 1, 45. Marx, Theories, pt.1, 46.Value(crystallized labour) is a foundational concept of Marxism. Here we are treating it not as a concept subject to the proofs of economic “science.” Rather, we are dealing with the notion of value as a premise or hypothesis, that is, as an insight central to an understanding of Marx’s own conception of capitalism as a social formation. Marx, Theories, pt.1, 50. Marx, Theories, pt.1, 45. Marx, Theories, pt.1, 45. George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London, 1987). Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 190-91. Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, North Carolina and London, 2000), 92-123. Neil Davidson, “ How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions: Four Critiques and a Reconstruction,” Historical Materialism 13:3 (2005), 20-21. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York, 1963), 120-23.

Chapter 1

QUESTIONING REVISIONISM


The notion of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution was fundamental to Karl Marx’s understanding of historical development. Marx did not invent this conception of the Revolution out of thin air. He derived it from the writings of liberal historians like François Guizot, Augustin Thierry, and François-Auguste Mignet who published their works in the first half of the nineteenth century. The concept of the gradual development of the power of the middle class which is found in the work of these historians was the basic theme of the liberal account of French history. According to these early nineteenth-century scholars, the story of the whole period from the Renaissance to their own time was one of the stepby-step ascension of the middle class. Prior to the Revolution this expansion of the power of the middle class occurred under the protection of the monarchy and came at the expense of the aristocracy. This process reached its culmination with the Revolution of 1789 that saw the overthrow of the nobility, the monarchy, and the whole of the ancien régime. Writing with the memory of the Revolution still fresh in their minds, it was taken as axiomatic by these historians that the Revolution saw the overthrow of feudalism by an ascendant middle class.1 The idea that the period of the French Revolution was one of major economic and social progress was current even prior to the publication of the writings of these historians. One finds such a view in the work of ClaudeAnthelme Costaz, for example, who wrote soon after the fall of the Napoleonic regime. Costaz himself had had a distinguished career as a Napoleonic bureaucrat. Toward the end of the Napoleonic period he was appointed director of manufactures. Costaz was concerned that the positive changes during the Revolution not be undermined by the Restoration. Notes for this section begin on page 24.

10

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

He argued that the period of the Revolution saw major economic advances. While nuanced in his account of the positive and negative aspects of the politics of the Revolution, Costaz was convinced of the gains that had been made in industry and agriculture during the period from 1793 to 1815. Among the social advances singled out by him was the disappearance of the prejudices against manufacturing. Indeed, the decline in such attitudes had determined that many from the upper classes of French society had entered industry during that period.2 Avoiding a discussion of changes in the social composition of the upper class, he nonetheless insisted that the upper class had been transformed. At the very least its mentality had changed in terms of its much more favorable view of manufacturing as a profession. A more explicit and developed version of this positive view of the Revolution is found in the work of Pierre-Louis Roederer. Roederer wrote more or less coincidentally with Costaz but in a much more direct fashion. He was in no doubt of the triumph of the middle class during the Revolution. Rather than obscuring this victory like Costaz, Roederer celebrated it. This perspective is to be found in his retrospective account of the history of the Revolution written in 1815 but only published in 1831 following the final ouster of the Bourbons. Roederer had played a major political role in the period of the national legislative assembly (1789–1791). As a political democrat he was among the leaders of the most radical elements of the Girondin Party. Under the Jacobin dictatorship he was discredited politically and abandoned his democratic ideas. Instead, he became preoccupied with liberal economic theory and with developing a sociology of order that could help to stabilize a new postrevolutionary regime Indeed, he played a significant role in the coup d’état of eighteenth Brumaire(1799) and became an influential figure in the subsequent Napoleonic regime that consolidated the bourgeois revolution. Living through the entire revolutionary period and playing a major role through most of it, no one had a better appreciation of its meaning than Roederer. Roederer summed up his view of the Revolution in a work entitled The Spirit of the Revolution.3 In the second chapter he characterized the Revolution in a quite balanced way as the product of the growth of both intellectual enlightenment and economic wealth. But it his view of the economic and social factors behind the Revolution that is of special interest. According to him, to understand the coming of the Revolution one must comprehend that movable capital gradually arose alongside land as a form of wealth. Over time, the value of such capital overtook that of the land as it expanded throughout industry and labour. In the same way it soon flowed back from the towns into the countryside where it gave an immense impetus to agricultural production. Capital became the unit in which the value of all kinds of goods including land was measured. At that point, the bourgeoisie, the leading possessors of capital, held in their power the greatest portion of the national wealth. The Revolution, among other things, was

Questioning Revisionism

11

the political expression of this new economic reality.4 Roederer clearly saw the importance of the bourgeoisie in both the urban and rural sectors. More importantly for him, the Revolution was self-evidently a capitalist revolution both in town and country. Marx’s view was, then, not original, but was based on an interpretation current in the aftermath of the Revolution especially among liberals. According to Marx’s conception, capitalism operating under the auspices of the middle class had developed over centuries within the interstices of the ancien régime. It was the increasing influence of capitalism that was the basis of the growing strength of the bourgeoisie. The Revolution was the decisive moment when the bourgeoisie was able to destroy feudalism and take power over the state. In this respect its course paralleled the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. The destruction of the feudal regime between 1789 and 1794 and the consolidation of bourgeois control over the state made it possible to remove the obstructions to the future development of capitalism embodied in the ancien régime. The new legal, educational, and administrative system put in place by successive revolutionary governments culminating in the rule of Napoleon, enabled capitalism little by little, to dominate the future development of French society. In Marx’s eyes the Revolution in France alongside the English Revolution was the classic form of a bourgeois revolution. The Revolution perfectly embodied the way in which the growing social and economic power of a class translated itself into political power. As such, it was a model against which the ascent of the bourgeoisie to power elsewhere could be judged.5 At the same time the slow historical development of the bourgeoisie and the subsequent sudden and violent seizure of political power in the French Revolution of 1789 was also, in the eyes of Marx, a prototype for a future proletarian revolution. Over three centuries the bourgeoisie and capitalism had gradually grown in strength within the tissues of the old order and had then rapidly and dramatically destroyed it. Likewise, the working class would step-by-step gather its forces within the interstices of the capitalist order and eventually overthrow it. Just as the bourgeoisie had reached the point where its strength was sufficient to challenge successfully the power of the feudal order, the proletariat would one day do likewise. In other words, the French Revolution played a crucial role not only in Marx’s interpretation of the past, but in his prognosis of the future. There was no reason why history in the form of revolution could not repeat itself. The success of the revolution of 1789 demonstrated the fundamentally unstable and impermanent character of subsequent bourgeois rule. Just as the bourgeoisie had been able to overthrow the ancien régime, a historically mature and properly prepared working class could overthrow bourgeois rule. Marx’s view of the French Revolution is, thus, important to the predictive element of his theory of history.

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The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

Marx’s notion that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, as we have noted, was not created by him. It dates from the years of the Revolution itself and became a commonplace of the liberal historical writing that emerged in its aftermath. It was then taken up and became an intrinsic feature of the socialist and Marxist interpretation of the Revolution that was initiated by Jean Jaurès and continued by Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul and Michel Vovelle. This classic Marxist interpretation did not exist merely as a historical idea. It was embedded institutionally through the ongoing control by Mathiez, Lefebvre, Soboul, and Vovelle of the prestigious and influential chair of the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne. Their interpretation of the Revolution—the most important event of French history—was reflected throughout the highly centralized academic curriculum of the French university and secondary school system. Beyond that it was an essential aspect of the historical outlook of the powerful Socialist and Communist parties and trade union movement that shaped the French Left throughout the twentieth century. The universalistic implications of the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution were closely tied to the more generous and outwardlooking varieties of French nationalism. The Revolution was viewed as the supreme contribution among the many French gifts to the progress of humanity as a whole. In recent years this interpretation has come under increasing attack by a group of powerfully entrenched academic revisionists who questioned the Marxist interpretation. Originating in the Anglo-Saxon countries, revisionism was taken up in the 1970s in France by François Furet, the offspring of a Parisian banking family and a former member of the French Communist Party. Furet was able to find support for his views among certain conservative and liberal historians in France including members of the celebrated Annales historical school. In this respect, Furet may be seen as being the heir to a line of counterrevolutionary French historians of the Revolution dating back to the nineteenth century including Hippolyte Adolphe Taine and Augustin Cochin. Equally if not more important to the dissemination of Furet’s ideas was his connections with influential conservative elements in French book publishing and the media.6 This French counteroffensive against the Marxist view was prepared in the 1960s in the Anglo-Saxon world as we have mentioned. In the United Kingdom the groundwork for revisionism had been laid by Alfred Cobban and Betty Behrens.7 On the other side of the Atlantic it was George V.Taylor who pioneered the revisionist position.8 These scholars attempted to puncture holes in the premises of the Marxist view arguing that the French Revolution was noncapitalist in its leadership and in its basic causes. The politically influential Cobban meanwhile was able to place many of his students in key academic posts in Great Britain and throughout the British Commonwealth.

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The appeal of revisionism, in part, lay in the challenge it laid down to a Marxist orthodoxy that had begun to appear somewhat stale. Questions were raised for which this orthodoxy apparently had no immediate answers. At least as significant to the growing influence of revisionist intellectual arguments were the conservative political forces that served to reinforce it. Its success more or less coincided with important ideological and political changes that set in in France and elsewhere in the world after 1968. The failure of the revolutionary challenge to capitalism of the 1960s gave new heart to conservatives and reactionaries. Indeed, the massive economic rationalization and globalization processes that have unfolded in the capitalist world since then, have thrown cold water on radical thought and action. The subsequent collapse of Soviet and Chinese communism have further discredited Marxist ideology in the eyes of many. As a result of such changes, communist parties and unions in France and elsewhere have suffered a dramatic decline in power and influence. At the same time, a conservative political and ideological counteroffensive developed not only in politics and the media but throughout academia. In the arts and social sciences in France and in the Anglo-Saxon countries, an interest in culture, gender, race, postmodernism, and postcolonialism has tended to replace a concern with class and Marxist analysis. This shift of intellectual interest has been not without its intellectual merits, but nonetheless it is fair to say that it entailed a questioning of the materialist interpretation of history in tune with the spirit of the age. The historical profession as a result has been no exception to these currents that ran counter to the Marxist point of view. It is our view then that the revisionist view of the Revolution should be viewed as part of the ideological and academic reaction against Marxism that has marked the last thirty years. As such, the revisionist view of the Revolution is multifaceted and at important points even self-contradictory. Its intellectual pluralism—some would say incoherence—is seen by its proponents as one of its strong points. But what unifies this perspective is its underlying opposition to the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution, which it views as a Procrustean bed stifling historiographical creativity. It seeks to deny that it was the bourgeoisie who took power by revolutionary means in 1789 or that the Revolution fostered the development of capitalism. Among its more important arguments against the Marxist view is that prior to the Revolution there is little or no evidence of a growing class consciousness among the middle class. Insofar as they had social aspirations, members of this class aspired to buy land and to join the nobility. As such they were no different from the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The revisionists furthermore insist that the political elite that initiated the Revolution in 1789 were not industrialists and merchants, but rather lawyers and venal officeholders. Far from embodying a dynamic rising class, the early revolutionary leaders reflected a weak and timid bourgeoisie that

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The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

sought secure investments in land and noble status. Broadening this critique, revisionists argue that it is wrong to see the bourgeoisie and the nobility in opposition to one another. Both belonged to a common elite of landholders, rentiers, and capitalists. These are some of the key elements of what has been called Anglo-Saxon revisionism, as developed by Cobban, Behrens, and Taylor. These positions have been recently reasserted almost intact by William Doyle.9 In response we can unhesitatingly acknowledge that prior to the Revolution the upper levels of the bourgeoisie were, indeed, enmeshed in feudal relations. As we have noted already this was a point made by Dobb the economic historian of the English Revolution long since. But aside from the profound cultural and social differences between French bourgeoisie and nobles that have been ignored by the revisionists, what is unexplained by them is the deeply opposed reactions of most nobles, on the one hand, and most bourgeoisie, on the other hand, to the crisis of the Revolution itself. Beyond these arguments by the revisionists that are at best half-truths, certain of them minimize the development of capitalism in eighteenth-century France. Dismissing quantitative indicators of industrial growth, they concentrate instead on the archaic nature of relations of production in the manufacturing sector. In doing so they seek to minimize the capitalist character of French industry and the dynamic of profit-seeking prior to the Revolution.10 Other revisionists argue that it was the nobility rather than the bourgeoisie that was the really dynamic element in French economic life. The nobility led the way in both agricultural and industrial innovation.11 The notion that nobles were the key element in a dynamic French economy reflects a serious contradiction in the revisionist argument. As we shall see, recent research on the economic history of the eighteenth century has revealed that the French economy was in fact not stagnant, as contended by certain revisionists. Quantitatively orientated historians even regard the eighteenth century as the period of modern economic takeoff.12 Indeed, the century was characterized by significant growth in manufacturing and even in agriculture, making France the strongest economy in continental Europe.13 Capitalist relations of production, as Marxists had argued, became stronger both in the agricultural and even in the still largely archaic manufacturing sector. Even if one allows that elements of the nobility represented the avant-garde in this economic expansion, one can hardly argue that this major capitalist expansion was solely the work of the nobility as a class. Capitalist activity on such a scale was beyond the limited numbers, capacity and, indeed, outlook of the nobility. Such an argument simply belies the facts. It was the bourgeoisie who numbered over two million who in fact played the greatest part in this economic expansion. The bourgeoisie, therefore, cannot be characterized as completely timorous and inert, as some revisionists have argued. Indeed, such indubitable realities have led revisionists to deploy a more sophisticated line of defense based on the idea that eighteenth-century French capitalism after all was strong. Given the vigor of the French econ-

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omy and the growing integration of the nobility and bourgeoisie, there really was no need for the Revolution at all, it is argued by these revisionists. The Revolution was economically regressive.14 True, there was an economic crisis at the end of the eighteenth century. But if certain limited reforms had been made, the economic downturn of the 1780s might have been overcome. Capitalist growth might have continued uninterruptedly from the eighteenth century into the increasingly industrial nineteenth century without violent disruption. This perspective, stressing the continuity between pre– and post–revolutionary France represents a revival in a new economic form of the argument of the liberal aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville. In the first part of the nineteenth century, De Tocqueville had argued that politically the Revolution represented a continuation of the centralizing tendencies of the ancien régime. Centralization had been going on for centuries and entailed an ongoing movement toward equality that would have continued with or without a revolution. The Revolution represented a precipitous acceleration of the process of political centralization that would have occurred anyhow in due course. It could be inferred that such a centralization might have been achieved without the Revolution. In any event, this view implied that there was more continuity than change in the Revolution. Its necessity and wisdom was, thus, open to question. The neo-Tocquevillian position puts the emphasis on the possibility of unbroken economic rather than uninterrupted political development, as De Tocqueville would have it. How true this view is we shall never know as it is difficult to prove a counterfactual argument. One of the followers of this train of thought, Florin Aftalion, nonetheless, tries to buttress it through a somewhat dubious analysis based on public choice theory, seeking to prove that the Revolution actually set things back economically.15 Indeed, it is the economism of this perspective that is its greatest flaw. It suggests that democratic political and social progress follows automatically from economic transformation, or simply ignores the historical and human costs of social and political inertia. Some other revisionists accept the fact that the structures of the Ancien Regime were indeed antiquated in the light of the developing capitalist economy, and that the Revolution of 1789 was, indeed, an unfortunate necessity. They argue that this initial or liberal Revolution that was led by a noble and bourgeois elite, represented a positive development. It established a constitutional monarchy on the British model allowing for responsible government and individual liberty that harmonized with an emerging capitalism. According to this view, the real tragedy was that the Revolution did not come to an end at this point. On the contrary, the democratic revolution of 1792, which swept away the monarchy, was violent and totalitarian. It rejected the idea of individual freedom and constitutional restraints on government. Furet himself initially championed this view in a book he published with Denis Richet in 1965.16

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The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

The policies of the Jacobin government and its successors proved to be an economic disaster, according to the revisionists. Not only did they lead to catastrophic economic losses, but they did irreparable long-term harm, consigning France to backwardness with respect to its great rival, Great Britain.17 In particular, the redistribution of property in the countryside in favor of small and middle peasants and even the landless, which was supported by the Jacobins, blocked the development of agrarian capitalism on the English model, inhibiting the development of the Industrial Revolution.18 This position is perhaps the most serious argument of all those advanced by the revisionists. It at least allows that some sort of revolution was necessary in 1789. Moreover, it has to be admitted that the moderate reforms of the Revolution of 1789 were likely sufficient to permit the further development of a capitalism from above, on the British model. What is overlooked is that the subsequent democratic Revolution was itself the product of a disastrous war, which was declared in the first instance not by the revolutionary extremists, but by the moderate revolutionary regime which felt itself threatened by internal unrest and external enemies. Moreover, it is by no means clear that the Jacobin phase of the Revolution was inherently harmful to capitalism, as we shall see. In any case, the apparent rationality of this version of revisionism has not prevented some of the revisionist school from advancing arguments based on a reversion to fullfledged idealism. This extreme brand of revisionist thought rejects the notion of social and economic causation altogether. According to this more radical kind of revisionism pioneered by Furet, the fundamental cause of the French Revolution was the ascendancy of a perverse new ideology promoted by rootless intellectuals.19 Toward the end of the eighteenth century a new more radical political culture came into being. Feeding on itself, it gradually came to justify the use of indiscriminate violence to achieve its democratic and republican objectives. It was the radical discourse of the revolutionary leaders, not social and economic crisis, they insist, which caused the Revolution, and especially was responsible for its excesses under the Jacobins. Radicalizing the ideas of the Enlightenment, the rhetoric of these demagogues not only overturned the ancien régime, but created the Terror. One would think that the exaggerated emphasis on ideology put forward in this view is scarcely credible and discredits itself. Yet for all that, Furet and others who take this viewpoint have attracted a considerable following who reject not only Marxist notions of a bourgeois revolution, but social history itself. Some opponents of the Revolution in previous generations had argued that the Revolution—arguably the most important event in modern history —really had no fundamental causes cultural or otherwise, but came about through a serious of unfortunate political mistakes and economic accidents. The natural state of affairs is for the elite to govern. Its loss of control is a highly unusual and regrettable circumstance. Accordingly, the elite’s inability to maintain control is what must be explained. An expla-

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nation was sought at the level of political miscalculation and the inauspicious course of events which allowed power to fall into the hands of demagogues. The idea of a connection between short term antecedents and more long term trends was rejected. It is this view which is currently advanced by Doyle among others.20 This notion that a major event has no long-term or deep-seated causes is difficult to accept if one has a commitment to rational analysis of historical events. In the past one found this view confined to certain conservative historical circles who rejected or refused to consider any connection between the facts of political history and social and economic developments. Yet it has been given new credence through the influence of postmodernism, especially on some American historians. Rejecting in principle the idea of any global model of explanation as totalizing and essentializing (i.e., Marxist), the search for the causes of the Revolution is abandoned. No matter that any coherent historical narrative necessarily must aspire to a comprehensive view of its subject. Nor that commonplace and inescapable historical terms like bourgeois, feudalism, capitalism, or even surplus value have an indubitable epistemic status despite their being at one or two removes from the level of the empirical or concrete. Turning their back on attempts to explain by attempting to tie together a multiplicity of factors, such revisionists, following Furet, lay emphasis on the development of a radical political culture, which had its own internal logic and momentum. Historical understanding comes through the hermeneutical analysis of the new revolutionary discourses, political cultures, and identities which are seen as causal agents in themselves. Perhaps the foremost advocate of this view in France is Mona Ozouf, who with Furet, is the editor of a revisionist historical encyclopedia entitled Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française.21 Ozouf has been described as a sentinel guarding the gates against the intrusion of any kind of social explanation that could contaminate the closed realm of discourse analysis. For Ozouf, all attempts to link discourse to social and economic forces is arbitrarily dismissed as discredited, inherently constraining, and reductionist.22 As the Marxist school perhaps did not pay sufficient attention to the creation of the new revolutionary and republican culture, this current of revisionism in reaction has gained a certain credibility among some historians who take the importance of culture seriously as a factor. It takes advantage of the fact that the Revolution, all parties agree, represented a civilizational change of epochal dimensions. The depth of cultural transformation inherent in this profound event, it is then argued, cannot be reduced to economic and social factors. Not only can this momentous event not be reduced to the socioeconomic, argue the revisionists, but the socioeconomic is irrelevant to it. Without the existence of a revolutionary political culture, revolution cannot occur regardless of the socioeconomic context. Hence a spate of historical work on the political culture of the Revolution which deliberately dismisses its socioeconomic context. Never

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mind that Marxists have always insisted that analyzing political consciousness or the so-called subjective factor in politics is indispensable to understanding moments of revolutionary change. But from a Marxist perspective political consciousness is not a sufficient condition for a revolution. In a quite balanced way, Marxists have generally stressed that the strength of political consciousness—revolutionary or otherwise—must be related to the existing social and economic context. Ideology and culture alone could never have induced a revolution. Accordingly, the social and economic context on the eve of the French Revolution is far from irrelevant Marxists quite rightly insist. Preoccupation with discourse in some cases has led to a virtual flight from historical reality toward a pure idealism. Thus, in the view that we have espoused the revolutionary process of 1789–1815 was the result of the developing strength of the bourgeoisie as a class in itself and for itself. Put simply, the bourgeoisie developed as a class both economically and socially and in terms of its consciousness of itself. In contrast, in a recent book, Sarah Maza makes her central thesis the memorable notion “that the French bourgeoisie did not exist.”23 Justifying this position Maza asserts her belief “that language is not passive but performative: identities are constructed by the cultural elements they absorb and then articulate as individual and collectives stories.”24 Designating this approach, cultural constructionism, Maza insists “that the thesis of bourgeois nonexistence derives from my belief that classes only exist if they are aware of their own existence.”25 According to her account, there is no sign of a sense of the bourgeoisie as a class in French discourse until after 1820, and then mainly in a negative sense. As such, the existence of a bourgeois class was largely mythical. It follows that there was no bourgeois revolution in France. The existence of poor Roederer’s discourse is not even acknowledged by Maza. Nor is the very similar view of Antoine Barnave, who, stumbling for words to describe the new reality in the immediate wake of the Revolution, spoke of a new aristocracy, albeit a bourgeois and commercial aristocracy, arising from the triumph of industrial property.26 In 1791 Philippe Antoine Grouvelle rejected the notion of the nobility as a corps between the king and the nation. According to Grouvelle, the “only intermediate class is the middle class.”27 Evidence of the sense of the bourgeoisie as a class emerging in opposition to the nobility, is ignored by Maza. Thus, two years later in Jean-Louis Laya’s play, L’ami des lois one of the characters remarks, “that your friend my dear husband who made me brag about his barony became third estate-member of the bourgeoisie.”28 Among other things, it is the sense of opposition to the nobility—whose existence as a class is beyond doubt—that step-by-step engenders the bourgeoisie.29 Nor should we ignore the way in which the distinction between active and passive citizens, income requirements for membership in the National Guard, and the new political sociability induced by moderate political

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clubs helped to induce a sense of self-identity in the emergent middle class as separate from the rest of the population. By 1795 the Gazette de France, a moderate royalist paper, could assert starkly that society is composed of only two groups—property owners and proletarians. The government of a well-ordered society rightfully is in the hands of property owners.30 For the Gazette of 1795 class is not a hypostasized thing-concept or a play with words (Maza’s bourgeoisie). It is a relation between those with property and those without. Supporters of the Directory subsequently called for all property holders and especially those who owned “movable capital” to rally to the government. “31 In their turn the sansculottes, at their height, denounced rich merchants, shipowners, and plantation proprietors, alongside aristocrats.32 The followers of Gracchus Babeuf then execrated not the fully emergent bourgeoisie, but the “class” of proprietors and the “big capitalists.”33 Acknowledging that the term bourgeoisie had multiple significations prior to the Revolution, it needs to be stressed that Maza hardly mention its use by workers to refer to those who hired their labour.34 Such a conception of the bourgeoisie as a matter of fact was to enter general usage in the course of the Revolution.35 In any case, in our view what is signified matters at least as much or more than the word that signifies it. Through such expressions, rooted in social existence we see developing a growing sense of the bourgeoisie as a class. Indeed, throughout Maza’s work the realm of actual social and economic relations impinges if at all, as an insignificant afterthought. Insofar as it exists for Maza, the bourgeois class in itself is the product of its existence for itself. In other words, it is consciousness over all and especially language that constructs the social and material reality of class. Class is merely a product of language.36 Another recent and important strand of revisionism has been pointed out by Vovelle.37 Particularly favored by American historians like Donald Sutherland, it is populist in orientation and, therefore, far removed from the idealism of Furet and his school.38 Its plausibility is based on its deep commitment to popular history based on rigorous archival scholarship. Focusing its attention on the peasantry, it stresses the explosion of popular violence during the Revolution based on the enduring importance of traditional patterns of thought and behavior. The continuing significance of religion to the rural folk is emphasized. As such, this brand of revisionism underscores how far the nonurban population was, from accepting the goals and ideals of the revolutionary bourgeoisie or the ideas of the Enlightenment. With its emphasis on historical continuity and resistance to change, the affinity of this approach to the Annales notion of enduring structure seems evident. Indeed, in a sense it represents an attempt to assimilate the Revolution to the longue durée of the ancien régime, and accordingly to downgrade its importance as a historical break.

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That the revisionist school with all of its self-contradictions and lapses is one element in a larger conservative political and intellectual movement, is obvious. Its success in recent years is directly related to the collapse of Soviet and Chinese communism and overall triumph of a global neoliberal agenda. As everyone understands, the tide of socialism has, for the time being, globally receded. In France the influence of Furet and his followers is clearly linked to the weakening of the Communist Party and trade union movement and the rejection of Marxist ideology by a majority of intellectuals. Among historians of the French Revolution in the United States, a Marxist approach never had much purchase. Reviewing the historiography of American historians of the Revolution, Keith Michael Baker and Joseph Zizek note that few American scholars writing in the 1950s and 1960s, found that writing history from below and from a Marxist perspective to be acceptable at face value. Baker and Zizek conspicuously fail to explore what political, institutional, and social features of American academic life made this the case. Still, they point out that Lefevbre’s study of the French peasantry was treated with respect. But they add that the same could not be said for the communist historian Soboul’s pioneering analysis of the Parisian sansculottes. American critics of Soboul “focused unfavorably on the Marxian or Communist perspective of such studies.”39 The distinguished American historian Robert Palmer, commenting in 1960 on Soboul and on other Marxist historians, dryly observed that “these books are part of the cold war.” Baker and Zizek note that Palmer “with characteristic candor added, “‘so is their present reviewer.’”40 Palmer, self-critical as any good historian must be, acknowledged in passing his own anti-Marxist bias. Regrettably, few historians during the cold war were prepared to acknowledge that they were politically prejudiced. Indeed, it is astonishing how many academic historians in the United States and Canada at that time were blind to their own class and social biases. For most professional historians, liberal consensus passed itself off as historical objectivity. Very little has changed today in the United States or Canada. If anything, this unanimity has been somewhat inflected to the right. Radical perspectives insofar as they exist, have been deflected into an interest in race, gender, or postmodern discourse. Explicitly Marxist historians are few and far between in North American academe. It is particularly rare to find such people in major university departments. Meanwhile, referees from such prestigious departments tend to control academic publication. Likewise, they are the most important suppliers of newly minted Ph.D.’s to the academic marketplace. As such, they play a determining role in the historical profession as a whole. As a consequence, revisionism with respect to the French Revolution has become the new orthodoxy. Lately there are signs that this orthodoxy is beginning to be questioned, albeit timidly. Some academic historians in the Anglo-Saxon world like Peter McPhee, Gwynne Lewis, John Markoff, Morris Slavin, Colin Jones, Steven Kaplan, and James Livesey have been prepared to question some

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elements of this new dogma.41 The stifling effects of revisionism on historical analysis have recently led the American historian Jeremy D. Popkin to even champion a neoliberal or even neodemocratic point of view that readmits the social factor while somehow being able to avoid a dreaded Marxism.42 Yet so powerful and comprehensive has been the revisionist attack that even Marxist scholars have fallen under its influence. The most notable example is George Comninel in his Rethinking the French Revolution, which we took note of in the introduction. Comninel, a political sociologist rather than an historian, believes that Marx and those who followed him, uncritically accepted the categories of liberal nineteenthcentury historiography, which supposed a basic conflict between the nobility and the bourgeoisie. In consequence they misconstrued the nature of the Revolution of 1789 as a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. From the Marxist perspective the Revolution of 1789 resolved itself into a conflict between those who lived primarily by rents, and those who based themselves on profits. According to Comminel, a class that based itself on profit did not exist in France prior to 1789. Appropriation of surplus value by a bourgeoisie did not really take place. The nobility and the bourgeoisie both based themselves on rent and income from state offices. As a result, Comninel believes that the two groups must be regarded as members of a single class. Hence, the conflict that did break out between the bourgeoisie and the nobility in 1789 was essentially an interelite struggle rather than a class conflict.43 On this point Comninel is in complete accord with Cobban, Behrens, Taylor and Doyle. Comninel also rejects the idea that capitalist farming existed on the large tenant farms that operated on the basis of wage labor and profit. He disallows the idea that such operations were capitalist because the labor force was kept dependent on its own subsistence production rather than being fully proletarianized. Furthermore, the process of production was blocked from expansion and improvement of the means of production by the whole body of traditional practices, rights, and obligations.44 Comninel’s views have been subject to attack. Indeed, we have already criticized this last point in our introduction and will criticize it further. But his arguments have obviously proven to be persuasive to some. Thus, in her recent study of the beginnings of capitalism the influential Marxist theorist Ellen Meiskins Wood, Comninel’s thesis supervisor, notes that the French Revolution may have been a bourgeois revolution but was not a capitalist revolution. Capitalist conditions did not exist prior to the French Revolution, she insists.45 Comninel’s arguments, which deny the growing importance of profit based on the generation of surplus value in eighteenth-century France is belied by historical research, as we shall see. Indeed, many revisionist arguments like those of Comninel, are at best partial truths. In recent years a revised and enlarged Marxist view has emerged. The work of Vovelle,

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the heir to the Marxist tradition of revolutionary historiography in France, has opened Marxist historiography to the importance of culture. Indeed, Vovelle has made a point of embracing the research if not the conclusions of revisionist and other non-Marxist scholars.46 Meanwhile, the most solid restatement of the Marxist view of the Revolution as a capitalist and middle-class revolution can be found in the works of Guy Lemarchand.47 The most original work on the relation between the Revolution and the transition from feudalism to capitalism was published by the Soviet historian Anatoli Ado in the 1970s. But to those who were ignorant of Russian his work has only lately become available through a recent French translation.48 Peter McPhee has attempted to make known the results of Ado’s research in the Anglo-Saxon world while developing it further.49 McPhee’s attempt to present an alternative perspective at the time of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, has been largely disregarded.50 The work of recent Marxist scholars has been largely ignored in the Anglo-Saxon academic community, dominated as it is, by the viewpoint of the revisionists. The present work is an attempt to make this perspective better known by reviewing the more recent historiography of the French Revolution from a Marxist perspective. It will argue that the Revolution was, indeed, a change of deep historical and cultural significance. As such, an appreciation of its cultural dimensions is essential. At the same time it will insist that class conflict was the central feature of the Revolution. The pivotal factor of the Revolution from this perspective was that it was led by the bourgeoisie, which was prepared to use popular violence to attack and dismantle the feudal system. The Revolution was caused by, among other things, the development of eighteenth century French capitalism. Capitalism destabilized the ancien régime and provided the middle class with the economic strength and cultural confidence to overthrow the traditional nobility. It was the bourgeoisie that subsequently assumed the seats of power as a result of a revolutionary political crisis. It employed its new political influence to reshape the institutions of the state so as to strengthen itself and favor the further development of capitalism in France. Left-wing historians of the Revolution like Mathiez, Lefevbre and Soboul and their followers, pioneered the study of the popular movements during the Revolution. Much of the focus of their work has been on the democratic element within the Revolution. Such an approach was justified because of the previous neglect or misunderstanding of this aspect of the history of the Revolution. It was all the more warranted because without mass involvement, the Revolution could not have succeeded. This study will accordingly not dwell inordinately on the urban sansculottes and the peasantry who were the rank and file of the popular revolution. Rather, the focus will be on the step-by-step development of the bourgeoisie as a new ruling class. Even so, it will be argued that far from being an impediment to capitalism, the popular and democratic phase of the Revolution was an

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essential element to the further development of French capitalism. While it caused a great deal of upheaval, the short term effects of the Revolution on the French economy were by no means completely negative as claimed by the revisionists. More importantly, the shake-up of society as well as the administrative, legal, and educational reorganization instituted by the Revolution, laid the essential foundations for the further development of a distinctive French path toward capitalism. This study will make a point of investigating not merely the eighteenthcentury background and the most tumultuous years of the Revolution, but also the period of its consolidation under the Directory and Napoleon Bonaparte. It will examine this process, which was drawn out over more than two decades, by assuming that the political and cultural elements of the Revolution were closely tied to the social and economic factors. Much emphasis will be placed on economic history, which tends to be ignored by many revisionists. Yet the view advanced here will be one that insists that the economic, political and cultural factors cannot be seen as separated from each other. The notion that priority should be given to one factor— economics, politics, or culture as the case might be—is rejected. On the contrary, such factors will be treated dialectically as coexistent features of a great civilizational transformation. Epochal changes are always simultaneously cultural and economic and must be perceived and comprehended as such. At the same time, this analysis will reassert the need to always take the economic aspect of history into account as part of an integrated conception of historical reality. The weight of the evidence will demonstrate that a Marxist interpretation, as reflected through recent research, retains its validity. The work that follows will not engage systematically with the multiplicity of revisionist arguments, the most important of which we have already noted. To do so would be to plunge unnecessarily into an academic thicket that would bar the way to our goal of a coherent Marxist narrative of the Revolution. Rather, it will deal with revisionist arguments in the course of presenting the evidence for a Marxist interpretation. Needless to add, we do not regard our version of a Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution as definitive and as the last word. Like any other interpretation, it is liable to be superseded by further advances in scholarship or by the opening of new historical or social perspectives.

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Notes 1. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990), 14–17. 2. Claude-Anthelme Costaz, Essai sur l’administration de l’agriculture, du commerce, des manufactures et des subsistances; suivi de l’Historique des moyens qui ont amené le grand essor pris par les arts depuis 1793 jusqu’en 1815 (Paris, 1818), 404. Costaz’s view is confirmed by Maurice Agulhon’s analysis of the emerging entrepreneurial attitude among the traditional bourgeoisie in Provence at the beginning of the Restoration. Agulhon, La vie sociale en Provence intérieure au lendemain de la Révolution (Paris, 1970), 477–78. 3. Pierre-Louis Roederer, L’esprit de la révolution de 1789 (Paris, 1831). 4. I have used a recent translation of this work, The Spirit of the Revolution of 1789 and Other Writings on the Revolutionary Epoch, ed. Murray Forsyth (Aldershot, England, 1989), 8. 5. François Furet, Marx and the French Revolution (Chicago, 1988), 37, 48, 189–90. 6. Furet’s trajectory as an academic was highly unusual. A mediocre career as a scholar was transformed by his connection with a politicized French media. Cf. Michael Scott Christofferson, “François Furet: Between History and Journalism, 1958–65,” French History 15:4(2001), 420–47. 7. Betty Behrens, “Nobles, Privileges and Taxes in France at the End of the Ancien Regime,” Economic History Review 15:3(1963), 451–75, Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1964). 8. George V. Taylor, “Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 72:2(1967), 469–96. 9. William Doyle, “Reflections on the Classic Interpretation of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 16:4(1990), 743–48. 10. Taylor, “Types of Capitalism in Eighteenth Century France,” English Historical Review 79(1964), 478–97. 11. Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1985). 12. Jean Marczewski, “The Take-Off Hypothesis and French Experience” in The Economics of Take-Off into Sustained Growth, ed.W. W.Rostow ( London, 1963),138, François Crouzet, “England and France in the Eighteenth Century: A Comparative Analysis of Two Economic Growth’s,” in The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England, ed. R. M. Hartwell (London, 1967),154. 13. Paul Bairoch, “L’économie française dans le contexte européen à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue Economique 40:6(1989), 939–64, Jean-Pierre Poussou, “Le dynamisme de l’économie française sous Louis XVIe,” ibid., 965–84. 14. Poussou, “Le dynamisme de l’économie française,” 981. 15. Florin Aftalion, The French Revolution: An Economic Interpretation (New York and Paris, 1990). 16. Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution Française (Paris, 1965). 17. Crouzet, “Les conséquences économiques de la Révolution française, ” Revue économique 40:6(1989), 1193–94. 18. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Révoltes et contestations rurales en France de 1675 à 1788,” Annales:ESC 29:1(1974), 16. 19. Furet, Penser la Révolution francaise (Paris, 1978). 20. Doyle, “Reflections on the Classic Interpretation,” 745–76. 21. Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, eds. Mona Ozouf and Furet (Paris, 1988). 22. Stephen Lawrence Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: The Historian’s Feud, France, 1789/1989 (Ithaca and London, 1995), 54, 61–62. 23. Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary: 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Mass.and London, 2003), 5. 24. Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, 6–7. 25. Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, 6.

Questioning Revisionism

25

26. Antoine Barnave, Introduction à la Révolution française. ed. Fernand Rude (Paris, 1971), 9–10. Following the Thermidorean reaction, L’ami du people (6 brumaire an. III) complained: “Have we worked only to see the aristocratic bourgeoisie the most insupportable and humiliating of all re-established?.” Cited in Pierre Serna, La République des girouettes (Paris, 2005), 385. 27. Philippe Antoine Grouvelle, De l’autorité de Montesquieu dans la Révolution présente (Paris, 1789) cited in Serna, “Existe-t-il un ‘extreme centre’? …le point aveugle de la République directoriale: L’exemple de La Décade” in Des notions-concepts en révolution autour de la liberté politique à la fin du 18e siècle, eds. Jacques Guilhaumou and Raymonde Monnier (Paris, 2003), 159. Under the Directory the Décade referred to the middle class as made up of educated and propertied citizens as well as government functionaries opposed to the Ancien Regime as well as the Terror. Cf. ibid. 28. Jean-Louis Laya, L’ami des lois (Paris, 1793), 16. 29. Indeed, the third estate’s sense of difference from both the nobility and the common people below them is present from 1789 onward. Cf. Haim Burstin, Une Révolution à l’oeuvre: le Faubourg Saint-Marcel(1789–1794) (Paris, 2005), 39–40, 294–95. 30. Paris pendant la réaction thermidorienn:Recueil des documents pour l’histoire de le ésprit publique à Paris, ed. Alphonse Aulard, 5 vols.(Paris, 1898–1902), vol 2, 267. 31. Jean Marc Schiappa, Les Babouvistes (Paris, 2003), 505. 32. Burstin, Révolution à l’oeuvre, 441. 33. Schiappa, Babouvistes, 142. Cf. Burstin, Révolution à l’oeuvre, 294. Babeuf himself had a dynamic sense of class based on the opposition between the rich, powerful, governors, masters, and property owners, on the one hand, and the poor, powerless, governed and wage earners on the other. Cf. Philippe Buonarroti, Conspiration pour l’egalite dite de Babeuf; suivie du proces auquel elle donna lieu, et des pièces justificatives, ed. Lefebvre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1957), vol 2, 96, 104. 34. Burstin, Révolution à l’oeuvre, 5. 35. Guy Antonetti, “Bourgeoisie, ” in Dictionnaire Napoléon, ed. Jean Tulard, 2 vols. (Paris, 1999), 1: 295. 36. Contrast Maza’s view with Michel Vovelle’s [Les Mots de la Revolution (Montpellier, 2004), 16] balanced assessment of the development of the bourgeoisie through the Revolution: “It is a bourgeoisie of a mixed sort. It associates the ‘self-defined’ rentier bourgeoisie with the representatives of the commercial bourgeoisie which is beginning to become industrial and with the world of services. The latter are full of ambition and bearers of new values, but are still not triumphant.” This view of the evolving nature of the bourgeoisie allows Vovelle to conclude: “With due caution and with a consciousness of the evolution of language it does not misrepresent things to maintain the classic designation of the revolutionary historiography of the French Revolution of a bourgeois revolution based on popular support.” 37. Vovelle, “Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 16(1990), 753. 38. Donald M. G. Sutherland, France 1789–1815: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (New York, 1986). 39. Keith Michael Baker and Joseph Zizek, “The American Historiography of the French Revolution, “ in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, eds. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, 1998), 363. 40. Baker and Zizek, “The American Historiography,” 363. 41. Peter McPhee, “The French Revolution, Peasants and Capitalism,” American Historical Review 94:5(1989), 1265–80; McPhee, The French Revolution 1789–1799 (Oxford, 2002); Gwynne Lewis, France 1715–1804: Power and the People (Harlow, London, 2004); John Markoff, “Violence, Emancipation and Democracy: The Countryside and the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 100:2(1995), 360–86; Morris Slavin, The Left and the French Revolution (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.,1995); Colin Jones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivified:1789 and Social Change,” in Rewriting the French Revolution, ed.Colin Lucas,

26

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

(Oxford, 1991), 69–118, James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). Livesey rejects the revisionist interpretation from a liberal, not from a Marxist perspective. Steven Lawrence Kaplan meanwhile assumes a middle position between the revisionists and Marxists in his Farewell, Revolution: The Historian’s Feud, 195–9. Jeremy D. Popkin, “Not Over After All: The French Revolution’s Third Century,” Journal of Modern History 74:4(2002), 801–23. Rebecca L. Spang likewise ponders the conundrum of how to return to the social aspect of the Revolution without lapsing back into Marxism. Cf. Spang, “Paradigms and Paranoia: How Modern Is the French Revolution?,” American Historical Review 108:1(2003),119–47. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 200. Rethinking the French Revolution, 190–91. Ellen Meiskins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (New York,1999), 56, 111. The most recent restatement of Vovelle’s views can be found in his Revolution française (Paris, 2000). Vovelle’s contribution is celebrated by important Anglo-Saxon scholars like Malcolm Crook, Timothy Tackett and Donald Sutherland in a special appreciation in French History 19:2 (2005), 143–88. Cf. Guy Lemarchand, “Aux origines de la Révolution Française: Une crise de la politique ou une société en crise?,” Cahiers d’histoire de l’Institut de Recherches Marxistes 40(1990), 15–32, Lemarchand, Féodalisme, société et Révolution française: études d’histoire moderne, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles (Caen, 2000). Anatoli Ado, Paysans en révolution: terre, pouvoir et jacquerie, 1789–1794 (Paris, 1996). McPhee, “French Revolution, Peasants and Capitalism.” McPhee, “French Revolution, Peasants and Capitalism.”

Chapter 2

CAPITALISM AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FRENCH ECONOMY




Rural France Eighteenth century France was still a feudal society. As such, agriculture was the major economic activity of most of the population. The ruling class, which controlled most of the land, consisted of the nobles and upper clergy. Owing to their hold on the land, this class of landlords dominated the rural population and even exercised sway over many of the smaller towns. The feudal seigneurie, which dated back to the Middle Ages, was still the predominant legal and political institution in the countryside. Accordingly, the network of feudal legal relationships that determined rural property links remained for the most part, intact. True, most landed rents were no longer primarily seigneurial. Yet these rents tended to be assimilated with, or to approximate those of, the seigneurie. More to the point, seigneurial rents remained a critical factor in defining the social relationship between lord and peasant in the countryside. Rents in kind of this traditional type continued to be a significant economic burden on the peasantry. At the same time, a substantial part of aristocratic income continued to be based on seigneurial revenues. Indeed, the overwhelmingly largest portion of noble income came from the land.1 Throughout the eighteenth century the nobility, still dominant on the land, maintained their traditional monopoly over political power. The highest local offices were reserved for members of this class. Their preNotes for this section begin on page 41.

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dominance reflected itself likewise on the national level. The principal bodies of the French state consisted of the royal court, the established church, the army and navy, and the system of high courts or parlements. These important national institutions were all more or less exclusively dominated by members of the nobility. Virtually all the ministers who served the king and controlled the reins of political power during the eighteenth century were noble.2 It is true that many nobles became interested in the new culture of the Enlightenment. As such, this reflects a certain ability by the nobility to adapt to new ideas and circumstances. Accordingly, hundreds of provincial academies were created during the century to discuss the new ideas. More often than not, such bodies were created under noble patronage and were socially dominated by them. Indeed, nobles constituted a large minority of the membership of these bodies. Yet the more or less cosmopolitan individuals who participated in these learned societies did not represent the majority of the noble class. The education and culture of the greater part of the nobility remained based on traditional aristocratic values and on the established Catholic religion. Indeed, toward the latter half of the eighteenth century the nobility appear to have become, more rather than less, religious. In contrast some merchants and even common people, seem to have fallen away from religion.3 Looked at as a whole the nobility can hardly be said to have placed themselves in the vanguard of the culture of the Enlightenment. Agricultural productivity for the most part remained low and unpredictable. Consequently, self-sufficiency remained an ideal for many peasants. Indeed, barter activity outside the market was not unusual. On the other hand, such an autarchic ideal was only realizable if at all in the relatively backward south and west of France and notably in the frérèches or “extended family units” of the Midi. But even in the most favorable of circumstances, such peasant autarchy remained illusive in an era in which tax payments had to be made in cash, and harvest failures required peasants to resort to borrowing money.4 More damaging to the autarchical ideal was the fact that the majority of rural families did not have enough land to sustain themselves. It is extremely significant that the majority of the peasantry did not produce their own food but bought it in the local markets. According to Daniel Roche, “everywhere most peasants and peasant craftsmen, workers and day-labourers lived in a state of uncertainty and economic dependence. They were all the less sure of eating regularly in that they had to buy a considerable part of their food.”5 An increasing dependence on the market is observable with respect to clothing and household articles as well.6 Landlessness, or an insufficiency of land, thus required a growing resort to wage labor or to the sale of labor in the market to buy the necessities of life. The development of rural protoindustry on a massive scale, as well as the introduction of urban patterns of consumption into the countryside further encouraged a growing dependence on the market as the Revolution approached.7 At one level or anoth-

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er, engagement with the money economy was less and less possible to avoid for producers in eighteenth century rural France. The growing sale of the labor power of agricultural producers in the marketplace in turn reflected itself in the growing role of profit in the rural economy. Notable was the fact that the bourgeoisie’s share of the land was increasing toward the end of the ancien régime. In addition to the land that the rural bourgeoisie normally rented, increased ownership of property on the part of the middle class must be taken into account. Overall, the bourgeoisie, both rural and urban, owned between 20 and 30 percent of the land—an amount equal to that held by the nobility. The nobility, clergy, and urban bourgeoisie together owned at least half of the land.8 Most of the rest was in the hands of a relatively well-off minority of peasant producers. The great majority of peasants had small amounts of land or no land at all. While this was the overall structure of landholding in the Kingdom as reflected in national averages, a clear distinction should be drawn between the rural economy and society of the north of the Kingdom as compared to the rest of France. Capitalist tendencies were far more visible in the north in the vast region between the Loire Valley and the Belgian frontier. Elsewhere in France there were trends that favored the development of capitalism, but it would take the Revolution to fully release them. There were, in fact, three types of peasant societies in France prior to the Revolution. Over much of northern France a kind of capitalist farming had emerged. Such farming was based on the social differentiation that had developed between an elite of laborers or ploughsmen and a mass of day laborers and smallholding peasants. In the center and west of France there existed a generally poor peasantry made up of sharecroppers and rural workers who were able to find a significant amount of complementary resources in the surrounding meadows, forests, and marshlands. In the mountains of Auvergne and Provence further south, there were a large number of middle peasant proprietors with significant communal lands and rights. Alongside them were a considerable number of landless and vagabond poor.9 In the west and south of the Kingdom, then, petty production and subsistence agriculture remained the rule. Common land and rights were very important as complementary resources for the whole rural population of France in both the north and south. They were especially crucial for the subsistence of the poor peasants and the landless. Yet in the course of the eighteenth century the rich rather than the less well-off, tended to benefit disproportionally from these commons. Indeed, one of the underlying trends of rural society in the eighteenth century was the growing enclosure of the communal lands to the benefit of the better-off, including the nobility.10 While such trends were general throughout most of rural France, it is mainly in the north that they were part and parcel of the development of a manifestly capitalist agriculture. As part of this development, some nobles, urban bourgeoisie, and even clerical landowners turned to the direct exploitation of the land they owned using wage labor. But the most impor-

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tant form of capitalist enterprise that emerged was the grand ferme or large farm. Exploitations of this type were evident in the Ile-de-France since the sixteenth century.11 By the eighteenth century they had become ubiquitous in the Paris region, Brie, Picardy, Maritime Flanders, Hainaut, Cambraisis, Beauvaisis, Beauce, Orleanais, and in the north-east of Normandy. More often than not, these larger holdings were formed by the expulsion of small tenants and their replacement by enterprising farmers who paid a capitalist rent to a landlord. In certain places social polarization reached an advanced level. At Gonesse near Paris, for example, an area of large farms, the administrators noted that in their district there were only two classes, farmers and proprietors, on the one hand, and workers, day laborers, and teamsters on the other hand.12 At the time of the Revolution bitter social conflicts developed between such substantial farmers and the rest of the rural population. Farms of 500 acres were not uncommon, and a few were more than 850 acres. Many of these holdings were still divided up into smaller parcels based on the open field system, but some were enclosed properties. The eighteenth century saw the expansion of the population from around twenty million to twenty-eight million. Especially marked, was the disproportionate growth of the urban population that was dependent on the market for food. Increasing demand for food led to higher prices for land and grain. The nobility and urban bourgeoisie, who benefited from higher rents, developed an interest in expanding the level of profit from agricultural activity. The role of profit and from midcentury, of capital investment, grew in the rural economy as a result.13 The traditional view has been that French agriculture lagged behind England’s. At least some historians are now prepared to question this longestablished consensus. Jean-Pierre Poussou, for example, argues that there were numerous regional examples of French agricultural improvement that were comparable to developments in England. Some of these changes entailed technical innovations and alterations in the existing system of agricultural production. In other cases, such transformations reflect commercial rather than technical improvements. Yet Poussou argues that the latter innovations also deserve to be taken into account.14 Gérard Béaur singles out the intensive agriculture of the Alsace region, the tree nurseries of the Ile-de-France, and the commercial cattle raising operations on the metairies or sharecrop holdings of the West as examples of significant innovation.15 The Limousin, once thought of as remote, poor, and economically autarchical, has recently been shown to have rivalled Normandy as the prime source of beef cattle for the Parisian market and as such, was completely integrated into the emerging national market.16 In his recent survey of the eighteenth-century French economy, Paul Butel assumes a somewhat selfcontradictory viewpoint on the state of the French rural economy. He notes the growing commercialization of crops like wine and tobacco. Moreover, he takes note of the increasingly efficient use of labor. Likewise, he remarks on the introduction or spread of new crops like corn, potato, alfalfa, protein

Capitalism and the Eighteenth Century French Economy

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rich grass and clover. Yet he insists that there was little improvement in the productivity of agriculture.17 On the contrary, Jean-Marc Moriceau argues that in the Ile-de-France and over much of the rest of the north of France genuine agricultural progress did occur. Especially in regions close to cities that were affected by new agronomic ideas and by the growing availability of manure, productivity significantly increased in the second half of the eighteenth century.18 He notes the almost universal extension of arable, at the expense of waste and pasturage, and the resulting disruption of the traditional agricultural equilibrium in the same period. He furthermore remarks on the suppression of fallow and the improved processing and storage of crops. The idea of introducing such agronomic improvements spread to the better-off peasants through the increasing influence of rural postmasters who often were themselves successful farmers.19 The rich peasants who rented large farms, favored a free market in grain. They organized production using their own tools and equipment. At the same time they employed a workforce paid in wages. The Physiocrat Anne Robert Jacques Turgot described them as “agricultural capitalist entrepreneurs.” Based on their operations, they derived a profit and as a result paid the landlords what amounted to a capitalist rent.20 Indeed, the farmers of such enterprises had to pay not only these rents, but usually also seigneurial dues, taxes, and tithes. But since their farms were on fertile lands that were close to good roads and towns, they were able to take advantage of high prices and to enjoy profitable returns. Yet they often enhanced their revenues by farming ecclesiastical tithes and seigneurial obligations. As such, the income of such farmers were made up of both capitalist profits and feudal rents. They also earned money from taking interest on loans to poorer peasants. Through their business and social connections and their lifestyle, such farmers constituted part of the bourgeoisie alongside those of the middle class who lived in the surrounding bourgs and towns. Moriceau describes these wealthy farmers in the Ile-deFrance as attaining the level of a kind of gentry in the eighteenth century. The sons of this group could aspire to the college, entry to the law and even to the ideas of the Enlightenment.21 In northern France this elite of wealthy farmers constituted a minority among the more numerous and broader group of prosperous peasant ploughsmen or labourers. On a lesser scale than the wealthy farmers, they, too, hired wage labor and loaned grain, plows, wagons, and money to their less well-off neighbors. As such, they too were part of a emergent class of rural capitalists. More generally we can say that the French countryside even in the south and west, saw a halting and tentative progress toward capitalist relations in agriculture. The eighteenth century even in these regions was marked by the timid emergence of a certain rural bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and of a category of wage-earning cottagers who clung to small peasant properties on the other hand. By the end of the century well-off peasants throughout the Kingdom who had enough land, wagons, tools, and live-

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stock and who were able to hire labor constituted an emergent rural bourgeoisie. Within the framework of general countrywide development of the capitalist system, small-scale peasant ownership and production thus constituted a wide base for the development of an agrarian bourgeoisie.22 During the second half of the eighteenth century the rural bourgeoisie reinforced by much of the nobility, upper clergy, urban grain merchants, and intellectuals, increasingly championed the idea of a free market in grain. Starting in the 1760s, the government attempted to move in the direction of removing the barriers on the sale and purchase of grain. Such steps reached their peak in the ministry of Turgot (1774–76). But popular resistance and the continued high cost of transportation still inhibited the development of a fully national market. At best, there developed several large regional grain markets.23 That being said, we can still conclude that an emergent capitalism is evident in rural France toward the end of the eighteenth century. The bourgeoisie that practiced such a profit-orientated mode of exploitation was strongest in northern France but was evident elsewhere as well. In the Revolution itself, the rural bourgeoisie were to emerge as the leading element in the countryside in the struggle against the nobility and the old order. Moreover, in the course of the upheavals between 1789 and 1815 they would take form as numerically the largest part of a new political and social rural elite. The emergence of a layer of capitalist farmers prior to the Revolution ensured the coming revolution of ultimate leadership in the countryside. At the same time, the capitalist tendencies that were developing in French agriculture that we have described put a tremendous strain on traditional peasant society and prepared the basis for rural social revolution. Growing social divisions, attacks on the common lands, and falling living standards engendered largely by market forces, threatened what remained of the unity of village communities. Nonetheless, it was the vestiges of these communal ties and the consciousness that they fostered that provided the basis for peasant resistance that became more and more visible as the Revolution approached. The assertion of the rights of community over the common lands, resistance to rent increases, assertions of the right to subsistence over the freedom of the market, sparked rural protest in the decades leading up to and during the Revolution itself.24 The number of agrarian protests rose as the Revolution approached. During the period 1720–88 there were a total of four thousand recorded collective protests. Three-quarters of these occurred after 1765.25

Commerce and Manufacture A true national market emerged in France only after the French Revolution. Indeed, that was to be among its most important legacies. Nonetheless, it can be said that Paris and Lyon dominated the rough beginnings of an emerging national market already in the eighteenth century.26 From the death of Louis

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XIV until the 1760s, France experienced a sustained economic expansion. Commercial growth in the grain trade as well as in manufactures marked the first two-thirds of the century. This was followed by a stagnation of the internal market that lasted almost to the eve of the Revolution. Despite the growing sluggishness of the internal economy in the decades immediately preceding the Revolution, the trade in exports continued to grow vigorously. In the ten years prior to the Revolution foreign trade expanded by 80 percent from 600 to 1,060 million livres.27 A comparison between France and Great Britain in the volume of exports, illustrates the strength of the eighteenth-century French economy. Between the years 1716–1720 and 1784–88 French external commerce multiplied by a factor of 3 compared to a British expansion of 2.4. At the beginning of the reign of Louis XV, the value of France’s external trade had been less than half of Great Britain’s. By 1788 French foreign trade was superior to that of its rival. France dominated the sale of manufactures to Spain, Italy, and the Levant. The French led in the reexport of colonial products to the northern countries. Their colonial trade grew at an annual average rate of 2.8 percent.28 Especially striking was the expansion of trade through the port of Bordeaux as well as through the other Atlantic and Mediterranean maritime ports.29 Internal trade also expanded markedly, although not nearly so dramatically as did exports. Constituting four-fifths of the overall economy, the expansion of commerce within France reflected the inherent social inequalities of prerevolutionary France. It was above all the trade in nonessential or luxury products that prospered. But the whole of society was affected by the intensification of market relations.30 Commercial expansion in turn, stimulated manufacturing output although not as spectacularly as in Great Britain.31 The capitalist tendencies in French agriculture were reinforced by the further development of rural manufacturing. Proto-industrialization, or dispersed manufacturing, burgeoned in both town and country. Prior to the eighteenth century there had developed important wool cloth, linen and canvas, and silk and iron manufactures. In the eighteenth century cotton manufacture, as well as clock-making, assumed real importance.32 Such industries extended over whole regions occupying tens, indeed, hundreds of thousands of workers and their families. These producers enjoyed a greater or lesser degree of independence from merchants who provided raw materials, markets, credit, and even on occasion, means of production. Over much of the countryside families and villages engaged in a complementary fashion in both agriculture and manufacturing. The increasing strength of French manufacturing at the local level can be seen in Dauphiné-an example that has been thoroughly documented by Pierre Léon.33 The eighteenth century saw significant expansion in the manufacture of cotton, canvas, silk cloth, and stocking manufacture in the province.34 Starting in 1750, a conscious effort toward mechanization and toward the introduction of new products, was undertaken. Without exaggerating its extent, a certain increase in productivity was also evident.35 Likewise visible was a ten-

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Figure 2:1 Capitalism infiltrated the interstices of the Ancien Regime. Factories sometimes were built to resemble the chateaux of the nobility. Source: Gérard Gayot, “Dispersion et concentration de la draperie Sedanaise, Revue du Nord, 61(1979):135

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dency toward the concentration of production into veritable factories, especially in the textile sector.36 Parisian, Lyonnais, and Swiss as well as local capital, helped to finance the expansion of this emergent secondary sector.37 But an ongoing shortfall of more extensive credit placed a significant constraint on the further expansion of this manufacturing activity.38 Despite the trend toward the concentration of production in factories in Dauphiné and elsewhere, dispersed manufacturing was still the rule.39 At Saint-Etienne in nearby Forez, for example, ironware and silk manufacturing were the main industries employing over one-third of the population. But work was dispersed in small-scale establishments and was still seasonal. The land provided an important supplement to wage labor. Industrial production could still be suspended for the sake of planting or harvesting. The burden of social reproduction was thus partially thrown back on the producers, and industrial wages could be maintained proportionally at a much lower scale. Such seasonality is often associated with crude methods of production and with a primitive division of labor. But at Saint Etienne this was not so. Seasonal work proved to be compatible with sophisticated production techniques and with extensive industrial development.40 Despite its appearance in Dauphiné and elsewhere, concentrated factory production was still relatively rare. Concentration of production and the increasing use of machinery was evident especially in coal mining, metallurgy, cotton and wallpaper manufacture, glass making, and paper-making.41 In the Faubourg Saint Antoine in Paris prior to the Revolution, enterprises using new technology were set up to produce fine steel tools, spinning machines, and devices for the knitting of stockings and the manufacture of ribbons.42 The huge scale and capacity of large-scale operations like Le Creusot, Anzin, and Oberkampf, especially portended the future. The most advanced industrial enterprise of the prerevolutionary period was the Le Creusot iron and steel manufacture built in the 1780s under the direction of William Wilkinson and Ignace de Wendel, based on shares to the value of ten million livres. This substantial manufacturing establishment had a workforce of over 1,300, used the advanced coke reduction process in the manufacture of steel, and operated with the help of at least five steam engines and between twelve and fifteen miles of railway tracking.43 On the eve of the Revolution, the coal mines of Anzin in the north of France employed 1,600 workers and produced 300,000 tons of coal annually.44 In 1786, two decades after its foundation, Oberkampf’s manufacture of printed cotton fabrics located at Jouy-en-Josas with additional branch plants situated elsewhere in the Ile-de-France, had a capitalization of 7.2 million livres and employed 900 workers.45 Beginning with the installation of a machine to print indian-style cotton goods by means of a copper plate and a mechanical press in the early 1770s, Oberkampf’s manufacture was characterized by ongoing and conscious technical innovation designed to improve the processes of production and the quality of the final product.46 Oberkampf was only the most successful of well over a hundred concen-

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trated manufacturing establishments fabricating cotton textiles which were set up between 1759 and 1789.47 This massive expansion of cotton manufacturing prompted the emergence of a parallel chemical industry whose products were largely used in the processing of textiles. Between 1769 and 1789 fourteen sulfuric acid factories were established.48 Likewise, production of sodium carbonate began in 1777.49 The revolutionary period was to see a further advance of the cotton and chemical industries. Steam engines were only beginning to come into use at the time of the Revolution. They appear to have found their first significant application in the mining industry. As we have noted, by 1750 Anzin had five such engines in operation, twelve at the time of the Revolution.50 Based on designs obtained from James Watt and Matthew Bolton, the brothers Jacques-Constantin and Auguste Charles Perier built at least forty steam engines in their workshop on Chaillot in the 1780s.51 In addition to the Perier brothers, France had other home grown innovators. Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon interested himself in the improvement of smelters. René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur upgraded the methods of steel production. Jean Hellot studied the development of coal mining and improved techniques for dyeing wool cloth. Antoine-Gabriel Jars, who pioneered advances in mine engineering, and Pierre-Clément Grignon, who improved the bellows used in iron manufacture, were also celebrated figures.52 The most notable French inventor was the ingenious technician, Jacques Vaucanson. In 1746 he entered the Académie des Sciences at the instance of the king, over the protests of its membership. On the one hand, the Académie was constituted out of an intellectually and socially conservative scientific elite devoted to pure theory that resented the intrusion of a mere mechanic into its midst. On the other hand, the entrance of Vaucanson into the Académie at the insistence of the French government reflected the monarchy’s growing commitment to the encouragement of technological innovation in industry. Indeed, Vaucanson’s elevation to the Académie stemmed from a great series of inventions that he was responsible for: a mechanical silk loom, a draw loom for brocade and figured silk, a silk throwing mill, and a mangle to achieve the effect of moiré or “clouded silk.” Vaucanson’s career reflects the resistance to technological innovation, not only on the part of the intellectual elite, but by the relatively privileged sectors of the artisan class in France under the ancien régime. Vaucanson’s peremptory attempt to reorganize the Lyon silk industry, based on his mechanical silk loom provoked a riot by the artisans of that city in 1746. The silk industry in France, like many others, was organized into a corporate body whose statutes were of long-standing and resistant to technological innovation. Vaucanson’s initiative came immediately in the wake of a reorganization of the Fabrique of Lyons in 1744, which saw a transfer of power from the artisan manufacturers to the merchant capitalists. Major disturbances in 1744–45 already marked this shift. The subsequent attempt to introduce Vaucanson’s mechanical loom exacerbated the decline in the economic

38

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

power of the artisans. It was this state of affairs which provoked a second wave of rioting by the artisans that forced Vaucanson to flee for his life.53 Despite resistance at Lyon and elsewhere, some of his inventions were gradually disseminated through the silk manufacture in Aubenas, Lyon, Montpellier, and elsewhere in the Midi.54 Following the Revolution the mechanical models and machines that Vaucason had built in his Paris workshop became the foundation of the collection of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers.55 Vaucanson’s difficulties at Lyon reflect popular resistance to technological change based on a sense of a steady decline in the power of producers and fears of future unemployment. But opposition to Vaucanson also existed at the level of the intellectual elite, as we have already noted, and was even more serious. Despite his considerable accomplishments, Vaucanson was only able to gain entry to the Académie at the command of the King. His case illustrates the regressive and elitist attitudes of the members of the Académie toward technological knowledge. Such prejudices prevailed right to the outbreak of the Revolution. The perceived gap between practical knowledge, conceived of as vulgar and inferior, and more prestigious and superior theoretical learning, which had long characterized the educational and scientific establishment of the ancien régime remained in place until the Revolution.56 Despite Vaucanson’s presence among them, the members of the Académie remained committed to a fundamentally conservative attitude toward technological innovation. In approving new inventions, they demanded a scientific rigor that was inspired by, among other things, a hierarchical and aristocratic mentality inimical to practical knowledge and mechanical innovation.57 The resistance of artisans and the Académie to innovation were not the only obstacles to technological progress. In fact, a complex cultural network made up of various officials, legal bodies and social groups governed and more often than not impeded the reception of innovation. These included not only the guilds and the Académie, but also royal officials, municipal authorities, the inspectors of manufactures, the nobility and clergy as well as various specialists.58 The traditional intellectual culture of these groups which were constituent elements of the ancien régime did not favour technological change. Without a doubt France lagged behind the scientific and technological culture that had already developed in Great Britain. France did have technical expertise in such fields as shipbuilding, armaments, and public works. But overall, such competence was not extended to manufacturing.59 Indeed, the major source of innovations in French industry came about as a result of technological transfers, especially from Great Britain. There, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs had created a veritable technological-scientific culture based on a popularized Newtonianism. In the course of the eighteenth century and especially from midcentury onwards, this culture infiltrated France with the conscious encouragement of the

Capitalism and the Eighteenth Century French Economy

39

French state.60 All told, there were some one thousand British technological migrants to France in the eighteenth century. Many of these were encouraged to migrate by agents of the French government. During their years in France they played an important role in the transfer of advanced British techniques.61 In 1764, Thomas Lecler brought British techniques of textile manufacture to the Brive region. William Hall did likewise at Sens in 1779. The same year Jacob Milne, son of a Lancashire mechanic, set up his cloth manufacture in Lyon, later moving on to Paris. New techniques for manufacturing metals were brought to France from England by William, Count Stuart, who set up at Sarre in Soulzbach, (1775) and by William Wilkinson, brother of the more well-known, John Wilkinson.62 The most important of the immigrants, John Holker, introduced British cotton manufacturing techniques and technicians to his factory at Saint Sever in Normandy in the 1750s. His factory was a model of what was, at the time, a new kind of enterprise distinguished for the importance of its initial capitalization, its concentrated workforce under the authority of an entrepreneur, and its sophisticated division of labour.63 In addition to his involvement in cotton manufacturing, Holker maintained a factory that built spinning and weaving machines for other cotton factories. As inspector general of manufactures, he helped to spread this new cloth-manufacturing technology as well as other technical innovations throughout French industry64 Among Holker’s successes in this respect was the transfer of Birmingham metallurgical techniques to France through privileges conceded to the button and hardware manufacturer, Michael Alcock.65 Such technological transfer, based on initiatives coming from abroad, were mainly successful. Yet such interventions were necessary in the first place, primarily due to the persistent resistance on the part of local elites. The education provided in the provincial colleges, which were controlled for the most part by the Jesuits, conspicuously lacked a grounding in modern science, to say nothing of technology. True, the burgeoning provincial academies did interest themselves in science. Yet dominated socially as they were by the nobility, they failed to orient themselves to the practical applications of such knowledge, especially with respect to industry.66 Compared to Great Britain, there was a lack of local scientific expertise and an absence of interest in machines, chemical processes, and inventions among influential notables.67 Insofar as there was such an interest, it tended to be found among military engineers. Their mechanical and engineering knowledge was used to serve the state and the army, rather than the needs of the market economy.68 One of the singular achievements of the revolutionary period was that it put an end to the split between scientific research and technological innovation. Technological innovation and the concentration of manufacture on the British model, thus, had only limited effects on the organization of production in France prior to the Revolution. The limited degree of such technological innovation reflected the complexities and obstructions underlying the

40

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

business and commercial culture of the ancien régime.69 On the other hand, proto-industrial production, under the control of capitalist merchants, developed on a vast scale affecting virtually every region of the country. The widespread revolutionary social and political effects of a serious economic downturn in the manufacturing sector would consequently make themselves felt prior to, and more importantly, during the crisis of 1789. Meanwhile, supported by high prices reflecting sustained demand, industrial production staged an impressive advance from the death of Louis XIV. Between 1726–41 and 1771–89 wool cloth production rose by 22 percent, iron production by 30 percent, and canvas by 36 percent. Steel production remained based on hundreds of dispersed small-scale foundries. Nonetheless, the number and scale of these enterprises tended to increase over the century. Average annual output rose by 2 percent per annum between 1730 and 1780. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, coal output was around 50,000 to 75,000 tons. By the time of the Revolution, France was producing 600,000 tons annually. Responding to the needs of industry above all, the level of capital investment and the mechanization of operations notably expanded.70 The mines of Anzin alone, produced over 300, 000 tons a year in 1790. Wool and silk cloth production appears to have maintained their growth throughout most of the century slackening only toward the onset of the Revolution. Meanwhile, the production of canvas appears to have sustained itself across the decades until 1789. As we have noted, the rapid expansion in the manufacture of cotton and calicoes especially from the 1760s, was perhaps the most striking expression of modern industrial development. It is possible that in 1780, France was the leading power in the world in aggregate industrial output.71 A thriving home market and especially an expanding market overseas had sparked the expansion of the consumer goods industries. Recent research points to a level of economic performance on the part of France that over all compared favorably with that of England. According to Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, over the period 1715–85, the British economy grew by nearly 50 percent. Surprisingly, in the same period the economy of France expanded by nearly 100 percent. The two British economic historians estimate that the annual average growth of the French economy between 1701–10 and 1781–90 at 1 percent as compared to only .7 percent for Great Britain.72 Compared to Great Britain, France produced more wool cloth, canvas, silk cloth, and iron. One ought not, however, to confine one’s view to these gross aggregates to artificially bolster the claims of the French economy. The underlying advantages of the British economy as compared to France in 1780 ought to be acknowledged. In France, expansion of the capital goods industry based on new technology and interest in a larger scale of investment lagged behind Great Britain. France trailed Great Britain in such leading edge industries as coal, nonferrous metals, and ship building, to say nothing of cotton manufacture. France made great progress in its export trade, but it failed to close the gap with Great Britain in its export of manufactured goods.73

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41

The fundamental difference between the French and British economy was in technology and in the organization of industry. French economic expansion in general, occurred on the basis of a traditional technology and mode of organization. British growth in manufacturing was more capitalintensive based on transformative inventions that entailed the factory and the machine as the basis of industry: the flying shuttle, the power-loom, the printing drum, the coke furnace, the puddling of iron, and the steam engine. These innovations were adopted in France but only latterly and not on the same scale.74 Only 19 percent of the French population, as compared to 43 percent of the British, were employed in industry. The relatively weak productivity of agriculture in France as compared to Great Britain, and the resultant conjunctural difficulties, depressed the living standards of the majority and curbed demand for manufactured goods.75 These weaknesses, particularly when compared to Great Britain, reflect the fact that Great Britain in the eighteenth century was a fully capitalist political and social order which France was not. It had developed a new technological and industrial culture that had struck real social roots in the middle class. Even so, the overall strength of the French economy relative to Great Britain, particularly in manufacturing, points to the growing strength of French capitalism in the eighteenth century.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Guy Lemarchand, “Aux origines de la Revolution Française,” 22–23, 25–26. Lemarchand, Féodalisme, société et Révolution française, 96–97. Lemarchand, Féodalisme, société et Révolution française, 99–100. Lemarchand, Féodalisme, société et Révolution française, 32. Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800 (Cambridge and New York, 2000), 227. Cf. Cynthia A. Bouton, The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Régime French Society (University Park, Pa., 1993), 103. Roche, History of Everyday Things, 213–19. Dominique Margiriz, Foires et marchés dans la France préindustrielle (Paris, 1988), 233. Gérard Béaur, Histoire agraire de la France au XVIIIe siècle: inerties et changements dans les campagnes françaises entre 1715 et 1815 (Paris, 2000), 23, 39–41. Lemarchand, Féodalisme, société et Révolution française, 33. Lemarchand, Féodalisme, société et Révolution française, 33–36. Jean-Marc Moriceau, Les fermiers de l’Ile-de-France: l’ascension d’un patronat agricole, XVeXVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1994). Moriceau, “Les gros fermiers en 1789; vice-rois de la plaine de France, “ in Les paysans et la révolution en pays de France: Actes du Colloque de Tremblay-lès-Gonesse 15–16 octobre 1988 (Paris, 1989), 35. Social polarization in rural Artois and Flanders was comparable if not

42

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

quite so extreme. Cf. Jean-Pierre Jessenne, “ Rapporti de dipendenza, comunità di villaggio e ‘citoyenneté’ nella Francia del Nord, “ in Rivoluzione Francese: La Forza delle Idee e La Forza delle Cose, ed. Haim Burstin (Milan, 1990), 145. David R. Weir, “Les crises économiques et les origines de la révolution française,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 46:4(1991), 917. Jean-Pierre Poussou, La terre et les paysans en France et en Grande-Bretagne au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Condé-sur-Noireau, France, 1999). Béaur, “L’histoire économique de la Révolution n’est pas termineé,” in La Révolution française au carrefour des recherches, eds. Martine Lapied and Christine Peyrard (Aix-enProvence, France, 2003), 25–26. Jean-Pierre Delhoume, “L’élevage bovin en Limousin au XVIIIe siècle: Des bouefs gras pour Paris,” Histoire & Sociétés rurales 22:1(2002), 65–101. Paul Butel, L’Economie française au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1993), 186–89. Moriceau, “Au rendez-vous de la ‘revolution agricole’ dans la France du XVIIIe siècle: à propos des régions de grande culture,” Annales:Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 49:1(1994), 32; Moriceau, Terres mouvantes: les campagnes françaises du féodalisme à la mondialisation XIIe-XIXe siècle (Paris, 2002), 236–80. Moriceau,”Au rendez-vous de la ‘revolution agricole,” 35–36, 38, 43–44, 45–46. Maurice Garden argues for a trend toward agricultural improvement and productivity gains extending from the eighteenth century through the Revolution to the Restoration. Cf. Garden, “Un procès: la ‘révolution agricole’ en France,” in Histoire économique et sociale du monde, ed. Pierre Léon, 4 vols.(Paris, 1978), vol 3., 311–37. Anatoli Ado, Paysans en révolution, 51. Moriceau, Les fermiers de l’Ile-de-France, 703–69; Moriceau, “Les gros fermiers en 1789,” 46–47. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 53. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 35. On the physiocratic reforms and their results in Picardy see Guy-Robert Ikni, Crise agraire et révolution paysanne: le mouvement populaire dans les campagnes de l’Oise, de la décennie physiocratique à l’an II 6 vols.( Paris, Université de ParisI, 1993), vol 2, 1–99. La Guerre du blé au XVIIIe siècle: la critique populaire contre le libéralisme économique au XVIIIe siècle, eds. Florence Gauthier and Ikni (Montreuil, France,1988). Peter Mcphee, The French Revolution, 33. Louis Bergeron, “Paris dans l’organisation des échanges intérieurs français à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” in Aires et structures du commerce francais au XVIIIe siecle, ed. Pierre Léon (Paris, 1973), 237–64; Garden, “Aires du commerce lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle”, in Aires et structures du commerce francais, 265–300, Thomas Le Roux, Le commerce intérieur de la France à la fin du XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1996), 187, 289–90. Butel, L’Economie française, 54. Butel, L’Economie française, 68. Poussou, Bordeaux et le Sud-ouest au XVIIIe siècle: croissance économique et attraction urbaine (Paris, 1983), 241–42; Jean Meyer and Poussou, Etudes sur les villes françaises: milieu de XVIIe siècle à la veille de la Revolution Française (Paris, 1995), 227–28. Atlas historique de la Révolution Française, vol. 10, L’économie, eds. Béaur and Philippe Minard (Paris, 1997), 31. Denis Woronoff, “ Expansion coloniale et retombées économiques en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 44:1(1997), 129–39. Lemarchand, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme: à propos des consequences de la Revolution sur l’évolution de l’économie française,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 272 (1988), 176. Pierre Léon, La naissance de la grande industrie en Dauphiné, fin du XVIIe siècle—1869, 2 vols. (Paris, 1954). Léon, Naissance de la grande industrie, vol 1, 205–16. Léon, Naissance de la grande industrie, 251–2, 253–54.

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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Léon, Naissance de la grande industrie, 254–59. Léon, Naissance de la grande industrie, 269–75. Léon, Naissance de la grande industrie, 310. On the complexities of industrial organization see Gwynne Lewis, France 1715–1804, 97. Michael P. Hanagan, Nascent Proletarians: Class Formation in Post–Revolutionary France (Oxford and New York, 1989), 31–36. Charles Ballot, L’introduction du machinisme dans l’industrie française (Lille, France, 1923), 6–7. Raymonde Monnier, Le faubourg Saint-Antoine, 1789–1815 (Paris, 1981), 59–63. Denis Woronoff, L’industrie sidérurgique en France pendant la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris, 1984), 17; Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, 1980), 437. Philippe Guignet, Mines,manufactures et ouvriers du valenciennois au XVIIIe siècle: contribution à l’histoire du travail dans l’ancienne France (New York, 1977). Serge Chassagne, Oberkampf, un entrepreneur capitaliste au Siècle des lumières (Paris, 1980). Alain Dewerpe and Yves Gaulupeau, La fabrique des prolétaires: les ouvriers de la manufacture d’Oberkampf à Jouy-en-Josas, 1760–1815 (Paris, 1990), 16. Chassagne, Le coton et ses patrons: France, 1760–1840 (Paris, 1991), 93. John Graham Smith, The Origins and Early Development of the Heavy Chemical Industry in France (Oxford, 1979), 52. Smith, Origins and Early Development, 196 Maurice Daumas, Bertrand Gille, Roger Gourmelon, and Olivier de Prat, “ La machine à vapeur en France au XVIIIe siècle,” Techniques et Civilisations 2 (1952), 153–63; Pierre Léon, “Tradition et machinisme dans la France du XVIIIe siècle,” L’information historique 17(1955), 13; J.R. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot, England, 1998), 287–323. Jacques Payen, Capital et machine à vapeur au XVIIIe siècle: les frères Périer et l’introduction en France de la machine à vapeur de Watt (Paris, 1969), 151. Pierre Léon, Naissance de la grande industrie, vol.1, 234. David L. Longfellow, “Silk Weavers and the Social Struggle in Lyon during the French Revolution, 1789–94,” French Historical Studies 12:1(1981),1–40; Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1970), 573–82, 586–87. Cf. André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre, Jacques Vaucanson, mécanicien de génie (Paris, 1967). Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime, 413–17. Cf. Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 1997). Margaret Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (New York and Oxford, 1997), 169–70. Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, “Invention, politique et société en France dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 37:1(1990), 38. Crouzet, Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (Cambridge and New York, 1990), 156. Jacob, Scientific Culture, 167–68. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer, 552–53, Pierre Léon, “Tradition et machinisme dans la France,” 10. Chassagne, Coton et ses patrons, 53. André Remond, John Holker manufacturier et grand fonctionnaire en France au XVIIIe siècle 1719–1786 (Paris, 1946), 58–60, 82, 85, 87, 94, 96, 100; Harris, Industrial Espionage, 43–143. Harris, “Michael Alcock and the Transfer of Birmingham Technology to France before the Revolution,” Journal of European Economic History 15(1986), 7–57. Jacob, Scientific Culture, 136. Scientific Culture, 169. Scientific Culture, 139.

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69. Hilaire-Perez, “Culture, techniques et pratiques de l’échange, entre Lyon et le Levant: invention et réseaux au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 49:1(2002), 92–3. 70. Marcel Rouff, Les mines de charbon en France au XVIIIe siècle 1744–1791 (Paris, 1922), 11–15, 173–74, 243, 332–34. 71. Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie française du XVIe siécle a nos jours (Paris, 1994), 177–81. Cf. Pierre Léon, “L’industrialization de France en tant que facteur de croissance économique, du début du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours,” in Première conférence internationale d’histoire économique, Stockholm, Aout 1960 (Paris-Hague, 1960), 172–79. 72. Butel, L’Economie française, 63 73. Pierre Léon, “ Structure du commerce extérieur et évolution industrielle de la France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” in Conjoncture économique, structures sociales. Hommage à Ernest Labrousse, ed. Fernand Braudel (Paris, 1974), 407–32. 74. Crouzet, Britain Ascendant, 26. 75. Butel, L’Economie française, 63.

Chapter 3

CAPITALISM, WAGE LABOR, AND THE BOURGEOISIE




Arguing against the existence of capitalism in eighteenth-century France, George Comninel has asserted that the absence of a real proletariat precluded the possibility of such an economy. According to him, no true proletariat existed because the wage-earning class, which Comninel acknowledges existed, was required to live off its own subsistence. An authentic proletariat must be dependent on the market for its means of subsistence as well as be wage based. As a-matter-of fact, Comninel’s concept of a wage-earning class living off its own subsistence appears to be a bit of a contradiction in terms. If wageworkers in eighteenth-century France could sustain themselves through their own subsistence, why did they turn to wagework in increasing numbers? As we have already seen, the rural wage-earning class in eighteenth century France in fact, did not, and could not, live off its own subsistence. That is why it turned more and more to wage work. It is true that many rural workers had gardens and were able to glean and forage for a certain portion of their subsistence. It is this possibility that Comninel emphasizes. Nonetheless, a substantial part of the food and eventually even clothing and household articles of rural workers had to be obtained by spending money in the market. Money-indispensable to subsistence- was only available to the laboring classes through the sale of their labor power in the market, in return for wages. Consequently, the sale of labor in return for wages was an intrinsic feature of the eighteenth-century economy. Moreover, dependence on wages seems to have increased among the rural population throughout the century. Following from this growing importance of wage labor, the Notes for this section begin on page 61.

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The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

role of surplus value or capitalist profit produced by wageworkers-composed an expanding element in the eighteenth-century French economy. Comninel’s view is perhaps based on the purist idea that a true proletarian is one who not only must sell all his labor power in the market, but also one who must buy all his means of subsistence in the market as well. Comninel apparently would have us believe that the rural laboring population prior to the Revolution, was not proletarianized because it did not obtain all means of subsistence from the market. Yet one cannot understand eighteenth-century France nor much of today’s globalized capitalist economy using such a strict criterion. It precludes seeing the process of proletarianization or, indeed, the development of capitalism as proceeding through stages. It blocks an understanding of capitalist labor regimes in which wage labour is forced on populations precisely because other means of subsistence are kept insufficient. At the same time, it obscures the role of alternative means of subsistence in keeping wages in the capitalist economy low. As Shahid Amin and Marcel van der Linden have put it: “ Not only have the debates on proto-industrialization and worker-peasants shown that intermediary forms of wage labor have been of continuous importance in European history over the past three or four centuries, but “pure free wage laborers” in advanced countries are at times clearly forced back into alternative activities through which they can sustain their subsistence margins in times of unemployment.”1 While the degree of wage dependency varies depending on time and place, it is also true historically, that growing dependency on wages entails a progressive loss of control over the means of production on the part of producers as capitalism develops. From Comninel’s quite unhistorical and mechanistic perspective, proletarians, and hence capitalism, either do or do not exist. From this standpoint it is impossible to distinguish, over time, degrees of wage dependence as the capitalist economy evolves. In Comninel’s view the working class comes into being fully developed ex nihilo or it does not exist at all. There is no historical making of the working class in the sense of E. P. Thompson. Indeed, Comninel contrasts eighteenth-century French peasant producers with what he represents as a truly proletarianized English rural workforce who are consequently utterly dependent on the market. Eighteenth century England is pictured in contrast with France as a place where a fully rational agrarian capitalism existed.2 That this was far from having been the case, has recently been shown, for example, by J. M. Nesson. Not only did commons rights largely survive in England into the nineteenth century, but even a peasantry continued to exist, according to Nesson.3 Like Comninel, the Marxist Annaliste, Ernest Labrousse, refused to speak of the rural laboring population as proletarians. On the other hand, unlike Comninel, Labrousse unhesitatingly acknowledged the importance of profit and capital to the economy of the ancien régime. He was justifiably reluctant to speak of the rural wage-earning population as a proletarian

Capitalism, Wage Labor, and the Bourgeoisie

47

class in a Marxist sense because most of this population was not fully dependent on wages and lacked class-consciousness. On the other hand, it is important to underline that unlike Comninel, Labrousse insisted on the growing importance of wage earners to the character of the economy in the eighteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century he concluded that an important wage-earning element had emerged in the population that was in part full-time and permanent and in part partial or temporary. Labrousse notes that Jean Joseph d’ Expilly’s Tableaux de la population de la France put the number of cottagers and day laborers at 60 percent of the population. Labrousse concluded that the composite group of those forced to work for wages were in the majority in the eighteenth-century countryside.4 Labrousse thus had doubts about the existence of a proletariat in the strict sense of the term in prerevolutionary France. But unlike Comninel he did not use such doubts to question the existence of an eighteenth-century capitalist economy. Indeed, he was one of the foremost proponents of the idea that the development of a capitalist economy played a decisive role in the background to the French Revolution. In a more recent study of French agriculture, Gérard Béaur suggests an even greater degree of dependence on wage labor. He concludes that up to 90 percent of the rural population did not have enough land to support themselves. True, only 20 percent of the rural population were completely landless. The great majority were microfundists whose access to a cottage or plot of land, however small, determined much of their consciousness.5 Nonetheless, in order to support themselves, they necessarily had to turn to wage labor in domestic service, agriculture, or proto-industry. What is important to the argument we are making, is that in the eighteenth century, an increasing fraction of the surplus taken from the rural population took the form of profit derived from the extraction of surplus value from wage-workers rather than the form of rent paid by peasants. Rent, indeed, seigneurial rent, remained the dominant form of surplus extraction. But the role of profit in the rural economy was growing. Indeed, an increasing fraction of the rents being paid were capitalist rents paid by capitalist farmers who employed wage labor. The neglect of the significance of rural capitalism in prerevolutionary France has led to serious misconceptions with respect to the development of eighteenth-century French economic thought. For example, the school of French economic thinkers known as Physiocrats, play a large role in David McNally’s important study of the relationship between the emergence of capitalism and the rise of political economy.6 Like many other critics including Karl Marx, McNally acknowledges that the Physiocrats anticipated much of the doctrines of laissez-faire capitalism of Adam Smith. Yet based on the received scholarship, McNally insists that what these French thinkers said about agrarian capitalism was based on their understanding of English social conditions. According to him, they could not have based their analysis on the situation in France because rural cap-

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italism did not exist in that country.7 As we saw in the introduction and in chapter 2, the views of the Physiocrats in fact, reflected French more than English conditions. Despite the need to placate the economic interests of the landlords, it is the emerging capitalist agriculture in France that is the preoccupation of the Physiocrats. For the Physiocrats it is the farmers and agricultural workers who are the productive elements of society. Laissezfaire with respect to them is the economic policy that will most effectively expand national wealth.8 Nothing engaged the Physiocrats and other eighteenth-century French economists more than the theory of wages. Yet with one notable exception, this preoccupation with wages in eighteenth-century French economic thought is seldom noted in the usual accounts of French economic writing.9 The emphasis on wages in this literature reflected the French economists’ preoccupation with the extraction of surplus value not in England, but in that sector of French agriculture already marked by capitalist relations of production.10 Marx, whose historical knowledge these days is underrated even by Marxists, refers, as we have noted, to the Physiocrats as the “first systematic spokesmen of capital” who happened to “ consider rent-yielding, or agricultural, capital to be the only capital producing surplus-value, and the agricultural labour set in motion by it, the only labour producing surplus-value, which from a capitalist viewpoint is quite properly considered the only productive labour.”11 Wages in agriculture, according to the Physiocrats, normally hover at the level of subsistence. Competition for unskilled work ensures that wages remain at this low level. Increases in the price of grain do not adversely affect such workers, as such increases must necessarily be followed by an increase in this subsistence-based wage. If grain prices rose employment would increase and wages would rise because of the growing demand for labor. Manufacturing and export industries would not be depressed by higher wages sparked by rising grain prices because betterpaid workers would be more productive, lowering the unit-cost of production. Anticipating the opinion of Thomas Malthus, the Physiocrats believed that a continual downward pressure on wages existed because increases in subsistence raised the birth rate.12

Wage Labor Under the Ancien Régime The importance of wage labor to industry is better understood than in the agricultural sector. As we have seen, there already were enterprises whose concentrated operations employed large numbers of workers. Le Creusot with 1,300, Oberkampf with 900 and Anzin with 4000 workers were among the largest. But there was in addition such firms as the coal mines at Littry with 3,000 employees and the calico manufacture of the brothers Wetter at Orange with 600 employees.13 Still, most of the hundreds of thou-

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sands of workers in the manufacturing sector worked in dispersed manufacture. Philippe Guignet’s study of rural lace and linen producers in the Valenciennes is one of the most systematic studies of dispersed or protoindustry in the eighteenth century. It reflects varying degrees of economic dependence from full proletarianization to relatively independent producers who employed family labor as well as the labor of other workers. Yet ultimately all such producers were to a greater or lesser extent dependent on merchant capitalists.14 A recent study of the silk manufacturing and silk stocking industry of Nîmes and its region reflects an analogous situation. In the eighteenth century the producers in this industry progressively lost their independence to the merchants. There ensued a gradual proletarianization of the workforce.15 As we have seen the silk manufacture at Lyon was going through a similar kind of reorganization. Wool cloth manufacturing at Sedan was somewhat more centralized. At the heart of the system of manufacture were the finishing workshops located in immense industrial palaces in the town itself. Around these central manufacturing establishments was a constellation of domestic workers in the faubourgs or dispersed in the surrounding villages over a twenty mile area.16 The operation of the cotton manufacturer Dupont at Valence studied by Pierre Léon was similar to that at Sedan. Yet it serves also to illustrate the complexity of eighteenth-century labor organization. In 1787 most of Dupont’s workforce was made up of spinners scattered in workshops in the villages surrounding Valence: 121 at Saillans, 320 at Upie, 44 at Beaumont and Montléger, 56 at Alex, and 115 at Livron and Loriol. In each of these villages there was a supervisor. Most spinners worked at home. Only carders, dividers, and those who operated mechanical spinners worked in the large workshops in Valence under the director. Thus, a hierarchy characterized the organization of production within the firm: at the base were the spinners working in their homes, then the village workshops with their mechanical spinners and other workers. Finally at Valence itself there was the factory with additional spinners, weavers and printers of the cotton cloth. All together, Dupont’s workforce totaled 970 persons.17 Marx and his followers treat these forms of industrial organization as characteristic of the manufacturing stage of capitalism that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution. During the long period that stretched from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Marx emphasized that for the most part, merchant capitalists dominated producers not by exercising direct control over the means of production. Rather, these merchants held sway over producers by gaining control over raw materials, markets, and credit. Producers were left largely in control over their means of production although even these might in part be provided by the merchant capitalists. Through such means they achieved what Marx described as a formal subsumption of labor. It was by the formal subsumption of labor that they extracted surplus value. At Valenciennes, Nîmes, and Lyon, the subsumption of labor was still more or less formal. In the latter two manufactures, however, real merchant

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control of the manufacture was clearly growing. In the case of the wool manufacture at Sedan, and the cotton manufacture at Valence, formal subsumption of labor was clearly giving way to real control, reflected in the centralization of production and even a certain mechanization. As we have noted, Marx treated these kinds of differences as reflecting different stages in the development of capitalist industry. For him there was no doubt that the stage of manufacture was no less capitalist than the industrial stage, the latter marked by the concentration of production and the real subsumption of labor in factories. Both stages entailed the extraction of surplus value through the payment of wages for labor time. Certain revisionist historians instead harp on the absence of a real subsumption of the labor of producers and their continued control over the means of production during the ancien régime.18 According to this view, without the real subsumption of labor there is no capitalism.19 Such arguments parallel those of Comninel, that access to some means of subsistence outside of the wage relation precludes regarding agricultural producers as proletarians. Never mind that they are producing surplus value. In the case of industry, those who take this view minimize the incipient class divisions and the extraction of surplus value within the structures of the largely rural putting-out industry and urban gild industry.20 They ignore the deepening infiltration of capitalist relations of production within the tissues of the corporate regime in the period leading up to the Revolution.21 By identifying capitalism necessarily with concentrated industry and perfectly rational markets they seek to deny the capitalist nature of French industry prior to or, indeed, following the Revolution. Capitalism from this viewpoint exists full-blown or not at all. Such a standpoint based as it is on a lack of understanding or on political presuppositions, makes it difficult to appreciate the early stages of capitalism that appeared within the interstices of the society of the ancien régime. Perhaps the most sophisticated attempt to deny the existence of capitalism prior to the French Revolution is to be found in Jean-Yves Grenier’s recent theorization of the economy of the ancien régime.22 Grenier’s effort to explore the historical distinctiveness of the ancien régime is entirely laudable. His characterization of this period as neither quite feudal or capitalist appears quite to the point. Grenier is likewise correct in underlining the importance of exchange or commercial capital to the period. On the other hand, Grenier makes much of the fact that under the ancien régime there was no basis for the production of value in Marx’s sense and consequently no abstract labor and no possibility for the equalization of capitals. Capitalism based on the exploitation of workers deprived of the means of production, cannot therefore be said to have existed, this despite Grenier’s acknowledgment of the importance of wage labor. Paternalism and the irrationalities of the marketplace blocked the emergence of a real labor market.23

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The a priori nature of such an argument should be emphasized. The emergence of a fully rational labor market in France was the work of the entire nineteenth century and even beyond. The full emergence of abstract labor and value are not capitalist preconditions but the end product of a prolonged historical process in which struggle over the means of production and their further development are primary factors. The labor market in France in the eighteenth century in the meantime was no more irrational in liberal economic terms than the market for grain or for other commodities. Like all other commodities, the sale of labor was regulated by the state. At the same time labor was increasingly bought and sold in eighteenth-century France in common with all other commodities. At a certain stage in the evolution of the economy of the ancien régime, the creation of value began to occur within the structures of the guilds and corporations, institutions that likely facilitated the process. Grenier quite arbitrarily ignores the existence of these historic dynamics under the ancien régime, erroneously attempting to undercut the connection between the development of capitalism in the eighteenth century and the French Revolution that followed. Wageworkers constituted an increasing fraction of the growing urban population. In Paris there were perhaps 100,000 men and women dependent on wages out of a total population of 500,000. Some were skilled workers subordinated to the corporations. The great majority were unskilled workers, most of whom were employed in services and construction.24 Skilled journeymen in such industries as printing, papermaking, and the production of luxury commodities underwent long apprenticeships, found means to collectively defend their interests, and enjoyed wages that were substantially above subsistence. Unskilled laborers such as porters, could expect a bare minimum. The Faubourg Saint Antoine was the most industrialized area of the city. Some two thousand workers were employed in concentrated manufactures. About 30 percent of these were employed in wallpaper factories, 23 percent in glass manufacturing, 20 percent in porcelain and faience factories and 16 percent in textile manufacturing. Yet, three thousand other wageworkers or sixty percent of the workforce in the Faubourg, worked in smaller enterprises.25 The relative absence of economic regulation, abundance of cheap labor, vacant real estate, and proximity to the huge Paris market, attracted manufacturers to the Faubourg.26 Michael Sonenscher insists that relations between masters and workers prior to the Revolution were not as harmonious as Albert Soboul pictured them in his classic study of the Parisian sansculottes. Many skilled workers worked in large workshops of twelve or more employees in which relations with the master were distant and often ridden with conflict. Soboul’s picture of workplace solidarity and relative equality was overdrawn.27

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All wage workers had in common the fact that they were looked upon with suspicion and contempt by their masters and by their social betters. From the perspective of those with property or power, the condition of those who had to sell their labor was regarded as servile and degrading. Not infrequently they were still seen as domestics to be treated at best paternalistically or to be punished or dismissed with contempt. The control of workers was a constant preoccupation best managed by ensuring them their bread while enforcing strict discipline in the workplace. Indeed, maintenance of the corporate structure of the guilds was understood as an important mechanism for governing them.28 The growing social presence of workers was reflected in the suggestion of Nicolas Toussaint Des Essarts who proposed to establish bureaucratic control over them by the establishment of a systematic registry of workers. Des Essart’s scheme combined the old corporatist notion of control with the penchant for classification of the new social science of the Enlightenment.29 In the skilled trades the interests of journeymen vis-à-vis their masters were defended by confraternities and journey men’s associations. On the other hand, the masters used guild regulations and royal privileges to try to keep these workers in line.30 In 1776, Turgot attempted to move toward a free market in labor by dissolving the guilds. This measure delighted journeymen and other workers, but dismayed the masters. Taking advantage of the situation, many workers attempted to change their place of employment, or even set up in business for themselves.31 Following the restoration of the guilds in the wake of Turgot’s dismissal, a growing mood of insubordination was evident among workers. The period between 1776 and 1789 saw the government trying to maintain control in the hands of the masters, while moving reluctantly toward a freer labor market.32 Greater control of the guilds by the state bureaucracy entailed an effort to strengthen the masters’s ability to control workers. As a result of the government’s intervention, a certain nationalization of the corporate organization of the economy occurred.33 According to Steven Kaplan, despite these efforts, the growing unruliness of workers in this period leading up to the Revolution, suggests an evolution away from a society of orders toward a society of classes.34 The world of work increasingly was escaping corporate control.35 Kaplan’s views are reinforced by Sonenscher who detects the gradual undermining of skills by the force of the market over the century. This suggests to him the beginnings of a movement toward the uniformization of the labor force.36 Scholars thus agree that workers became increasingly dissatisfied as the Revolution approached. As such, they were to take their place as part of the so-called plebeian crowd of the French Revolution in the unruly period between 1789 and 1795. Part of the reason for the unhappiness of workers lay in a reduction in their salaries. David Weir tends to minimize this. He notes only a slight decline in wages in the period 1726–87. Instead, he stresses a sense of grievance arising from wageworkers’ awareness of the

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substantial increase in the level of profits and rents in this period as against a slight decline in their wages.37 On the contrary, Kaplan claims that the decline in wages was substantial, between 20 and 30 percent in the period between 1725–1741 and 1785–1789.38 Technological innovation was also a cause for dissatisfaction among workers. We have already noted that Vaucanson’s attempt to introduce machinery into the silk industry of Lyon had provoked rioting in the 1740s. By the time of the Revolution the growing introduction of machinery was provoking widespread protest. Between 1788 and 1791 in Normandy, Champagne, Lille, Paris, Troyes, Roanne, and Saint-Etienne there were riots by workers that involved the breaking of machines.39 At Rouen, Darnetal and Sotteville attacks on machinery constituted one element in the popular revolutionary uprising of the summer of 1789. It was those employed in the traditional sectors of the cloth industry rather than those who worked in the new mechanized factories who took the lead in such Luddite attacks.40 The government’s Bureau du Commerce with its inspectors of manufacturers, was the major regulatory body overseeing the eighteenth-century French economy. Elaborate state control and inspection appears to have worked well in the first part of the eighteenth century, supporting steady economic expansion throughout this period. It can thus be said that state intervention seems to have fostered rather than inhibited capital accumulation.41 However, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Bureau moved from relatively strict control over the economy to a growing liberalism. Partly this was a response to the increasing influence on overall public opinion of laissez-faire economic doctrine. But it was also a response by government to growing pressure for free trade from specific commercial interests.42 Neither merchants nor bureaucrats had a united point of view on the question of laissez-faire. Certain merchants and manufacturers argued for free trade out of perceived personal advantage. Still others argued the contrary, likewise seeking their own profit.43 The state attempted to find a compromise position to fit particular circumstances. At Elbeuf, for example, the wool manufacturers were able to find a new balance between a traditional regulated production and a new unregulated sector that was more responsive to changes in fashion and the pressure of English competition.44 Of interest in all this is the interaction of immediate material interest and the elaboration of economic theory. In the case of the proponents of economic liberalism, the development of the theory of laissez-faire reinforced the material interests of certain merchants and manufacturers. The growing economic power of such entrepreneurs in turn stimulated the further elaboration and spread of free trade doctrines. One area of industry that continued to benefit from strong state intervention was cotton manufacturing which clearly became the lead industry in the Kingdom. The development of cotton manufacturing from the 1760s onwards, was the result of a veritable industrial strategy deployed by the

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Bureau du Commerce. That body’s strongly protectionist policies supported the expansion of manufacturing in the textile sector as well as in other export-oriented industries.45 Its policies included the deliberate substitution of French for imported intermediate products, the implantation of factories in economically depressed areas, and the development of simple machines.46 In this regard the Bureau actively promoted the introduction of new technology including the machines of the great inventor, Vaucanson.47 Especially notable, as we have seen, was its role in the transfer of advanced technology from England to France. Also, the state attempted to foster technological innovation through the creation of the École des ponts et chaussées, the École des mines and the École du génie de Mezières.48 As we have seen, there are scholars who would deny or minimize the growing importance of capitalist relations of production and the increasing role of profit in the eighteenth-century French economy. No doubt the ongoing dominance of the nobility over society fundamentally shaped the distribution of income, the nature of consumer taste, and the extent of the market. It is certainly also true that the influence of the guilds, corporations, and state control over manufactures and the market inhibited the free play of labor, capital and commodities. The partial liberalization of the second half of the century failed to alter the essential nature of the marketplace under the ancien régime. The market of the eighteenth century from first to last, as Kaplan explains, was an institutional rather than a free market. Constituted and framed by the state, such a market entailed the visible rather than the invisible hand.49 Such a guiding-rather than invisible-hand surveyed and controlled the economy, ensuring the continuation of the existing structure of guilds and corporations while regulating such matters as grain prices and foreign trade. Despite the corporate structures of this closely controlled market, the social relations of production in craft manufacture and putting-out industry, to say nothing of mines, factories, and the most productive agricultural regions, increasingly were those which opposed capital and labor.

The Bourgeoisie Rises Elements of the nobility certainly participated in the development of manufacturing and agricultural innovation during the eighteenth-century expansion. Nobles or their agents were especially prominent in iron and steel manufacture, and in coal mining and in glass making.50 In some cases they were in the forefront in the introduction of new technology. But nobles constituted only a fraction of those involved in the expansion of manufactures. Moreover, only a minority of nobles participated in such enterprises.51 It was the bourgeoisie who were the overwhelmingly dominant element in the economic expansion of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, they were its prime beneficiaries.

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In comparison to the past, the numbers of the bourgeoisie expanded both in absolute and in proportional terms. One indicator of this growth is the fact that between 1700 and 1790 the urban population grew by 50 percent, while the population of France as a whole increased by only 30 percent. It is estimated that the size of the bourgeoisie grew from 700,000 to 800,000 at the beginning of the eighteenth century to perhaps 2.3 million in 1789, vastly outnumbering the 120,000 or so nobles.52 In the years just prior to the Revolution, The Abbé Expilly’s Tableau de la population de France calculated the number of nobles at just .3 percent of the population. He estimated the urban bourgeoisie alone at 16.9 percent.53 A city like Lille, for example, explored in depth by Jean-Pierre Hirsch, saw an unprecedented expansion in the ranks of the dominant middle class that was made up largely of merchants.54 Not only did the number of bourgeoisie grow far larger throughout urban and rural France over the century, but their wealth as a class also expanded in absolute terms. The urban bourgeoisie included not only merchants, but also manufacturers and wealthy artisans as well as notaries, lawyers, and physicians.55 Many of the so-called professionals were close to those who were directly involved in business and were more or less dependent on them. Notaries arranged contracts for merchants. Lawyers represented manufacturers in court proceedings and were silent partners in businesses. Physicians looked after the families of affluent urban citizens. As for those many bourgeois who lived in part or wholly off rent, much of this rent was capitalist rather than feudal.56 This means that such rents were collected from agricultural producers who, far from being subsistence farmers, were themselves producing grain for sale in the market while using wage labor to do so. At the highest level prior to the Revolution a grand bourgeoisie made up of bankers, merchants, and manufacturers came into existence which was overwhelmingly composed of entrepreneurs of bourgeois origin. Prior to the Revolution these wealthiest of the bourgeoisie were still poorer than the great aristocrats, but the gap between them was closing.57 According to Bertrand Gille, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, once the dust of the Revolution had begun to settle, it was this group that effectively controlled the French economy and exercised enormous if not exclusive influence in the Napoleonic state.58 More numerous and wealthier than ever, the bourgeoisie grew more demanding and impatient as the century progressed. While requests for ennoblement increased from this class, these solicitations were not met by the regime. This was owing to the seigneurial reaction that saw a closing of ranks of the upper class against bourgeois intrusion. After 1720 the number of ennoblements fell to levels below those of the seventeenth century. Ennoblement through office was suspended after 1728.59 Such social exclusion caused resentment, as did the tax exemptions of the nobility. Some of the bourgeoisie were prepared to accept the idea of a nobility based on merit. Such a nobility would of course be open to their

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The Structure of Society at the End of the Ancien Régime According to the Abbé Expilly’s Tableau de la Population de France (1780) 1 2

3 4

5

6

7

8 9 10

11 12

13

Social group Clergy Nobility heads of family women, children TOTAL Soldiers women, children TOTAL Judicial & financial officials women, children TOTAL University professors, lawyers, surgeons, apothecaries women, children TOTAL Bourgeois, financiers, businessmen, merchants, women, children TOTAL Sailors, seafarers women, children TOTAL River-folk women, children TOTAL Big farmers, peasants with livestock women, children TOTAL Wine-growers & workers women, children TOTAL Wage-earners, day-labourers women, children TOTAL Servants men, boys women, girls TOTAL Children 15 years old and under GRAND TOTAL

Number 200,000 18,200 59,890 78,090 300,000 50,000 350,000 60,000 240,000 300,000 25,000 70,000 95,000 1,020,000 3,060,000 4,080,000 70,000 210,000 280,000 10,000 30,000 40,000 426,000 1,704,000 2,130,000 1,000,000 3,500,000 4,500,000 2,500,000 7,500,000 10,000,000 1,026,000 928,000 1,954,000 122,110 24,129,200

(%) 0.8

0.3

1.5 1.2

0.4

16.9

1.2 0.2

8.8 18.7 41.4

8.1 0.5

Expilly’s totals are in error but they clearly indicate the enormous size of the prerevolutionary bourgeoisie relative to the nobility. The Longman Companion to the French Revolution, Colin Jones, ed., 278-79.

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aspirations. On the other hand, institutionalized distinctions were not acceptable, especially not undeserved privileges and tax exemptions.60 It is true that during the eighteenth century the regime’s imposition of the capitation levy and the tenth/twentieth tax forced the nobility to accept some of the financial burden. But it did little to assuage the resentment of the bourgeoisie against the ongoing fiscal privileges of the nobility. The contemporaneous debate that developed among the public on taxing the privileged, helped to create a political sphere based on notions of rights, natural law, and citizenship. Such public discussion of the tax system only served to increase rancor. The bourgeoisie and plebeians continued to pay proportionally more than did the nobles. It was perceived rightly that the nobility were escaping payment in proportion to their income. Moreover, as the tax burden grew and as economic difficulties multiplied, this was more keenly felt as the state depended increasingly on indirect taxes that disproportionately burdened the least well-off commoners.61 Still it must be admitted that the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie was limited prior to the Revolution, as the revisionists point out. But class consciousness, it is important to recall, is a political as much as it is a social term. No doubt it reflects the degree to which a class is aware of itself as a class, but the development of such consciousness depends in part on the possibilities for activity and self-development by a class in the realm of politics. In order for bourgeois self-consciousness to fully emerge, members of this class had to have the possibility to define themselves through political practice. Prior to the development of the revolutionary crisis the possibilities for such political engagement were fundamentally constrained. Before the onset of the Revolution, the sphere of autonomous political activity was quite circumscribed by the authorities of the ancien régime as a matter of policy. It would take the successive shocks of the early period of revolutionary crisis to allow the bourgeoisie to fully awaken to its own interests. As we have noted, the term bourgeois itself carried a variety of meanings to those who lived in prerevolutionary France. It distinguished those who lived in the towns from peasants, it set apart commoners from nobles, and significantly it delineated bosses from workers. As used by the nobility and by those who reflected their attitudes, bourgeois was often used as a term of derision. Despite such ongoing contempt on the part of nobles, bourgeois cultural confidence grew during the course of the eighteenth century. A distinctively bourgeois way of life imposed itself, involving a preferred way of dressing, eating, behaving, and housing oneself and one’s family.62 Such was the pace of change that despite the seigneurial reaction, the nobility could not prevent the bourgeoisie from penetrating into the administrative apparatus of the state. The corps of engineers, the ranks of the mining engineers, and likewise the principal secretariats of the central bureaucracy, for example, were opened to the bourgeoisie.

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Book and newspaper publishing continued to be closely controlled by the authorities of the ancien régime. Moreover the newspapers, such as they were, reflected the outlook above all of the court and the upper classes. Yet in the course of the eighteenth century, the substantial development of the fields of journalism, authorship, and publishing increasingly escaped the control of the nobility and came under the sway of the middle class. More and more educated young writers were attracted to these fields that moreover, could not begin to provide them with gainful employment. More generally, those professions and occupations that were open to aspiring young bourgeoisie through the universities, the royal court or bureaucracy were monopolized by the generation born between 1720 and 1730. Indeed, by the time of the Revolution large numbers of graduates of the law schools of the Kingdom also found themselves underemployed or without employment. As a result, late eighteenth-century France produced a large stratum of alienated intelligentsia who played an important role in the Revolution.63 It is true, as we have noted, that a significant number of nobles became members of the many new provincial academies and sociétés savantes. But it is significant that the majority of the six thousand members of such bodies in the eighteenth century were bourgeoisie. These institutions were largely devoid of a immediately subversive political or social agenda. Yet they encouraged the mingling of nobles and bourgeoisie on equal terms, the secularization of thought, the practice of rational criticism, and the penchant for social utility. In addition to the academies there were the Masonic lodges of which there some six hundred by the 1780s. A freethinking and rationalist ideology, freemasonry attracted a mainly middleclass membership and was characterized by a distinctively middle-class outlook.64 The meetings of the lodges became the sites not only for philosophical discussions, but for the creation and financing of new business partnerships.65 Masonic lodges, academies, salons, coffeehouses, newspapers, and journals, created a public space increasingly beyond the reach of the ancien régime. In addition to this bourgeois public space a more popular public opinion prompted by rising literacy rates likewise emerged in the decades prior to the Revolution.66 The clergy, who in earlier centuries had culturally dominated French society, was less and less able to control the population ideologically and socially. Education and charity, two traditionally important sources of its power over the laity, increasingly slipped from its grasp. Its power over education waned with the further development of municipal colleges and private instruction. At the same time, the control of charity by ecclesiastical institutions diminished as a result of the creation of homeless shelters by royal intendants and by the establishment of charitable workshops by local authorities.67 Even the upper clergy’s ability to dominate the lesser clergy diminished. A growing chasm between upper and lower clergy over economic and social differences especially divided them. Attempts at censorship by the Church or the state were increasingly ineffective.

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In the course of the eighteenth century, criticism of the traditional functions and prerogatives of the nobility mounted. The notion of a group’s identity being based on lineage and prowess in war came under attack. The manners and ethics of the royal court and the legal privileges of the nobility were assailed. The philosophes denigrated the uselessness and vanity of the nobility. Historians and legal scholars documented the origins of what they called feudalism in medieval land grants and argued that the system fostered ongoing violence and tyranny. Lawyers portrayed nobles as bullies, cheats, and sexual predators in trial briefs that were read by thousands of people.68 Of course some of these criticisms were made by members of the nobility themselves. Revisionists take this to mean that such attacks were a case of healthy self-criticism by an elite attempting to reform itself. On the other hand, such criticism coming from members of the ruling class might well be taken as a symptom of crisis. Advanced views are not uncommon among members of a ruling class prior to a revolution. Such figures may even assume leadership positions in an emerging oppositional movement. In any case, according to Patrice L.R. Higonnet, it can hardly be denied that during the 1770s and 1780s the French bourgeoisie developed a new ethic that emphasized the values of work, discipline, professionalism, and happy mediocrity. For the first time, the bourgeoisie in France became selfconfident about being non-noble.69 It would be wrong to suggest that as a consequence of these tendencies the majority of the bourgeoisie had already rejected the idea of nobility altogether prior to the Revolution. The idea of nobility based on merit was still compelling. A good example of the ambiguous attitude of the prerevolutionary bourgeoisie is the case of Claude Perier of Grenoble. Perier had become one of the great merchants and manufacturers of France prior to the Revolution. Solidly planted in the bourgeoisie of Dauphiné, and with connections to bankers and merchants throughout France and beyond, Perier nonetheless sought and obtained the aristocratic title of Marquis de Vizille. Yet the force of circumstances led the newly ennobled Perier to give influential support to the Constitutional Party in 1788–89. By the year 1793 he was known as Citizen Perrier dealing in assignats and the confiscated property of the clergy.70 That same year he became a director of a foundry at Grenoble, which called itself the Société des Sans-Culottes Républicans. It produced weapons for the revolutionary government.71 Another illustration of the effect of the force of events on a member of the bourgeoisie is the case of Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf. Oberkampf was without doubt the leading figure in the spectacularly successful new industry of cotton manufacturing which saw unprecedented growth prior to the Revolution. On the very eve of the Revolution this millionaire capitalist manufacturer still sought and received letters of ennoblement. Yet in 1793–94 we find Oberkampf supporting the Jacobin regime and even posing as a sansculotte. During this period of revolu-

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tionary crisis, Oberkampf patriotically mobilized the resources and personnel of his manufacturing business to support the revolutionary Jacobin regime.72 We should also make mention of the example of Jean Barthélemy Le Couteulx de Canteleu, first president of the Cour des Comptes of Normandy, alderman, banker, and merchant from Rouen. One of the most powerful bourgeois families of the city, the Le Couteulx were recognized as nobles in 1756. As such, Jean Barthélemy took his seat in the Assembly of Nobles of Rouen at the beginning of 1789. The majority of nobles in the Rouen Assembly of Nobles passed a motion rejecting the idea of surrendering any of the rights and privileges of the nobility. The subsequent polarization of opinion between the nobility and the bourgeoisie forced Jean Barthélemy Le Couteulx to choose sides. Faced with the stubborn refusal of the majority of nobles to compromise, he withdrew from the Assembly of Nobles and had himself elected as a representative of the third estate in the Estates General. In that body he became one of the principal architects of the constitutional monarchy.73 Clearly, prior to the Revolution there were some among the bourgeoisie who already had rejected the continued existence of the nobility out of hand. But as late as the outbreak of the political crisis of 1788–89 some of the most influential members of the bourgeoisie cannot be said to have had a unequivocally negative view of the future of the nobility. Some of the bourgeoisie were prepared to accept ennoblement for themselves as well as for others based on achievement. One could even suggest that prior to the Revolution, there was a limited integration of the more culturally and economically progressive elements of the nobility with the upper reaches of the bourgeoisie. Yet there were clear limits to such a process–limits that the ultimate crisis of the ancien régime abruptly fixed.74 As Higonnet puts it, “no simple solution could emerge in 1789, when the bourgeoisie’s ideological and practical goals were still confused. Only the course of revolutionary politics made possible the emergence of a definitive solution to the noble problem on the basis in practice of the defense of property and in theory of bourgeois individualism.”75 What is critical is that the revolutionary crisis led to the rapid polarization of opinion in which the bourgeoisie became fully conscious of its political interests. As for the attitude of the nobility, there is no doubt that some nobles were quite culturally and economically progressive, as we have emphasized. A minority on the eve of the Revolution were open to the notion of serious political reform. But few would have been prepared to accept the idea that the bourgeoisie should have equal social status with themselves.76 The deliberate exclusion of the ennobled from the drafting of the cahiers of the nobility in 1789 was particularly indicative, as was the rejection of voting by head by the majority of the nobility as reflected especially in the cahiers des doléances.77

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Notes 1. Shahid Amin and Marcel van der Linden, Introduction to “‘Peripheral Labour?’ Studies in the History of Partial Proletarianization,” eds. Shahid Amin and Marcel van der Linden, International Review of Social History 41(1996), Suppl. 4, 4. 2. George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, 190. 3. J.M. Nesson, Commoners, Common Right, Enclosures and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993), 297–330. 4. Histoire économique et sociale de la France, eds. Braudel and Ernest Labrousse, 4 vols. Des derniers temps de l’âge seigneurial aux préludes de l’âge industriel (1660–1789) (Paris, 1970), vol. 2, 495–96. 5. Gérard Béaur, Histoire agraire de la France au XVIIIe siècle: inerties et changements dans les campagnes françaises entre 1715 et 1815 (Paris, 2000), 27–28. 6. David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation (Berkeley, 1988). 7. McNally, Political Economy, 88–89. 8. The outlines of an emergent laissez-faire political economy prior to the Revolution is sketched in Judith A. Miller, “Economic Ideologies, 1750–1800: The Creation of the Modern Political Economy?” French Historical Studies 23:3(2000) 497–511 9. The important exception is the rather neglected work of Joseph J. Spengler, French Predecessors of Malthus: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Wage and Population Theory (New York, 1965).Cf. Jean-Yves Grenier, L’économie d’Ancien Régime: un monde de l’échange et de l’incertitude (Paris, 1996), 117–20. 10. On the awareness of the development of agricultural capitalism in France see Georges Weulersse, La physiocratie à l’aube de la Révolution, 1781–1792 (Paris, 1985), 77. 11. Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, Pre-Capitalist Socio-Economic Formations (Moscow, 1979), 194. 12. Spengler, French Predecessors of Malthus, 205–8. 13. Alain Dewerpe and Yves Gaulupeau, La fabrique des prolétaires, 32. 14. Phillipe Guignet, Mines, manfactures et ouvriers du Valenciennois, 209, 211, 212–14. The organization of the textile industry in and around Rouen is described in Fernand Evrard, “ Les ouvriers du textile dans la région rouennaise (1789–1802),” Annales historique de la Révolution française 19(1947), 333–42. 15. Line Teisseyre-Sallman, L’industrie de la soie en Bas-Languedoc, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles, (Paris, 1995), 265–76. 16. Gérard Gayot, “Dispersion et concentration de la draperie sedanaise au XVIIIe: l’enterprise des Poupart de Neuflize,” Revue du Nord 61(1979), 136. 17. Pierre Léon, La naissance de la grande industrie, vol. 1, 260. 18. For a balanced assessment of the extent and limits of economic independence among rural cloth producers cf. Thomas Brennan, “Town and country in France, 1500–1750,” in Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800, ed. S. R. Epstein (Cambridge, 2001), 264–65; Pierre Deyon, “Proto-Industrialization in France,” in European Proto-Industrialization, eds. Sheilagh C. Ogilvie and Markus Cerman (Cambridge, 1996), 42. 19. William M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900 (Paris, 1984), 19–47. 20. For a contrary view see Gail Bossenga, “ Protecting Merchants: Guilds and Commercial Capitalism in Eighteenth Century France,” French Historical Studies 15:4(1988), 694, 703; Bossenga, “Capitalism and Corporation in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Naissance des libertés économiques: liberté du travail et liberté d’entreprendre: le décret d’Allarde et la loi Le Chapelier, leurs conséquences, 1791-fin XIXe siècle, ed. Alain Plessis (Paris, 1993), 13–27; Serge Chassagne, “Industrialisation et désindustrialisation dans les campagnes françaises,” Revue du Nord 63:1(1981), 36–41; Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves du commerce: entreprise et institution dans la région lilloise(1780–1860) (Paris, 1991), 143. 21. Stephen Lawrence Kaplan, La fin des corporations (Paris, 2000), 360–61. 22. Grenier, L’économie d’Ancien Régime.

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23. Grenier, L’économie d’Ancien Régime, 21, 85–86, 111, 245–47. 24. Haim Burstin, “Unskilled Labor in Paris at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” in The Workplace Before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians, 1500–1800, eds. Thomas Max Safley and Leonard N. Rosenband (Ithaca, 1993), 63–72. 25. Raymonde Monnier, Le faubourg Saint-Antoine, 80. 26. Christine Velut, “L’industrie dans la ville: les fabriques de papiers peints du faubourg Saint-Antoine(1750–1820),” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 49:1(2002), 115–37. 27. Michael Sonenscher, “The Sans-Culottes of the Year II: Rethinking the Language of Labour in Revolutionary France,” in Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale XVIeXIXe siècles: actes du colloque de Paris 24–26 mai 1984, ed. Jean Nicolas (Paris, 1985), 557–72. 28. Kaplan,”Réflections sur la police du monde du travail, 1700–1815,” Revue historique 261((1979), 24, 26. 29. Kaplan,”Réflections sur la police,” 57. 30. Kaplan, “La lutte pour le contrôle du marché du travail à Paris au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 36:3(1989), 367. 31. Kaplan, “Social Classification and Representation in the Corporate World of Eighteenth Century France:Turgot’s ‘Carnival,’ in Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization and Practice, eds. Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp (Ithaca, 1986), 199–201. 32. Kaplan, Fin du corporations, 108–10, 117, 129, 133; Allan Potofsky, “The Construction of Paris and the Crises of the Ancien Régime: The Police and the People of the Parisian Building Sites, 1750–1789, “French Historical Studies 27:1(2004), 9–48. 33. Kaplan, Fin du corporations, 321. See the important review of this work on the website HFrance, December 2001 by Christopher H. Johnson. 34. Kaplan, “Réflexions sur la police,” 69–72. 35. Kaplan, Fin du corporations, 326–52. 36. Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge, New York, 1989), 131, 187–88. 37. David R.Weir,”Les crises économiques,” 920–21. 38. Kaplan, “Réflexions sur la police,” 72. 39. Charles Ballot, L’introduction du machinisme, 19–22; Serge Chassagne, Le coton et ses patrons, 220; Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, Les banques européennes et l’industrialisation internationale dans la première motié du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1964), 28; Jeff Horn, “ The Legacy of 14 July 1789 in the Cultural History of French Industrialization, “Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 28(2000), 251–60. 40. Claude Mazauric, “A propos d’un mouvement populaire préprolétarien survenu à Rouen au cours de l’été 1789 et de sa valorisation dans le champ des affrontements politiques de la Révolution,” in Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, ed. Nicolas, 511–16. 41. Christopher H. Johnson, “Capitalism and the State: Capital Accumulation and Proletarianization in the Languedocian Woolens Industry 1700–1789,” in The Workplace before the Factory, eds. Safley and Rosenband, 37–62. 42. Pierre Léon, Naissance de la grande industrie, vol.1, 150–52. 43. Menard, “Un libéralisme en débat: notes sur l’inspection des manufactures et le système intermédiare de Necker(1778–1779),” Histoire, économie et société 12:1(1993), 7–27, Gayot, Les draps de Sedan (1646–1870) (Paris, 1993), 78–83. 44. Alain Becchia, Francis Concato, and Pierre Largesse, “L’industrie drapière elbeuvienne sous la Révolution: hommes, techniques et produits,” Annales de Bretagne 97:3(1990), 209. 45. Deyon and Philippe Guignet, “The Royal Manufactures and Economic and Technological Progress in France before the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of European Economic History 9:3(1980), 619. 46. Chassagne, Coton et ses patrons, 73. 47. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime, 413–17. 48. Antoine Léon, La Révolution française et l’éducation technique (Paris, 1968), 64–66.

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49. Kaplan, “Lutte pour le contrôle du marché du travail,” 361, Gay L. Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, New York, 1986), 89–90. 50. Denis Woronoff, L’industrie sidérurgique en France, 71–75. 51. Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1985), 84–116; Lemarchand, “Aux origines de la Révolution Française,” 23. 52. Jones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivified,” 84, Lewis, France 1715–1804, 91. 53. Abbé Expilly also takes note of so-called big farmers estimating their number at 8.8 percent of the French population. 54. Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves du commerce, 46. 55. On the different types of pre–revolutionary bourgeoisie cf. Lewis, France 1715–1804, 89–115. 56. Guy Lemarchand, Féodalisme, société et Révolution française, 114. 57. Lemarchand, Féodalisme, société et Révolution française, 116. 58. Gille, “La société française, “ in Napoléon et l’Empire, ed. Jean Mistler, 2 vols.(Paris, 1968), vol.1, 208–11. 59. Lemarchand, “Aux origines de la Revolution Française,” 21–22. 60. Patrice L. R. Higonnet, Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution (Oxford and New York, 1981), 53. 61. Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Egalité, Fiscalité (New York, 2000), 92–93, 95, 113–15, 209–12, 251–52. 62. McPhee, The French Revolution, 26–27. 63. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins, 190–91. 64. Mcphee, French Revolution, 31; Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London, 2002), 180. 65. J.-M. Schmitt, Aux origines de la révolution industrielle en Alsace (Strasbourg, France, 1980), 166–67. 66. Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France (University Park, Pa., 1994); Jones, Great Nation, 185. 67. Lemarchand, Féodalisme, société et Révolution française, 24. 68. Maza, “Luxury, Morality and Social Change: Why there Was No Middle-Class Consciousness in Prerevolutionary France,” Journal of Modern History 69:2(1997), 203. 69. Higonnet, Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles, 52. 70. Francoise Ours, “Aux origines de l’industrie textile vizilloise: la manufacture des Perier de 1776 à 1825,” in Bourgeois de Province et Révolution, ed.Vovelle (Grenoble, 1987), 56; Bernard Bonnin, “Un bourgeois en quête de titres et de domaines seigneuriaux: Claude Perier dans les dernières années de l’Ancien Régime,” in Bourgeois de Province et Révolution, ed.Vovelle, 61–79. 71. Romuald Szramkiewicz, Les régents et censeurs de la Banque de France nommés sous le Consulat et l’Empire (Geneva, 1974), 301. 72. Chassagne, Oberkampf, un entrepreneur capitaliste, 171, 173–74, Dewerpe and Gaulupeau, La fabrique des prolétaires, 175–76. 73. Geneviève Daridan, MM. Le Couteulx et Cie, banquiers à Paris: un clan familial dans la crise du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1994), 99–100; Michel Zylberberg, Capitalisme et Catholicisme dans la France moderne: La dynastie Le Couteulx (Paris, 2001), 294–95; Szramkiewicz, Les régents et censeurs, 213–24. 74. Jones, Great Nation, 324–26. 75. Higonnnet, Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles, 55. 76. Higonnet, Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles, 48, 51–52. 77. Higonnet, Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles, 81, 105–6; Lemarchand, Féodalisme, société et Révolution française, 119.

Chapter 4

THE REVOLUTIONARY CRISIS


Despite signs of rising tension between the nobility—more and more on the defensive—and an increasingly confident middle class, there was little open conflict between them prior to the Revolution. The seigneurial reaction—to be sure a form of class conflict from above—was certainly an ongoing affront to the middle class. But economic prosperity and an unprecedented degree of bureaucratic control over society helped to contain the middle class and to maintain a reasonable degree of social peace for the most part, through the eighteenth century. The bourgeoisie became the primary beneficiaries of this internal stability. They put themselves at the head of the expansion of the capitalist economy throughout the period. It was they who were most involved in the commercial, industrial, and agricultural expansion in which profit played a greater and greater role. As a result, the bourgeoisie became more numerous, more prosperous, and more confident than ever before as the century advanced. In the ensuing revolutionary conflict this class proved to have sufficient cohesion, selfawareness, and strength to overthrow the aristocratic order and to organize a new political and social regime over which it ruled. At the same time it must be admitted that the inevitability of a revolutionary confrontation in France between the middle and noble classes cannot be taken for granted. We must acknowledge that transitions to capitalism occurred in Japan and Germany without such a rupture albeit, at an ultimately tragic historical cost in the form of fascism. In terms of transitions to capitalism, the most usual comparison made is between revolutionary France and tranquil Great Britain, where supposedly capitalism implanted itself without resort to a revolution. Such a view depends on a certain historical amnesia that obliterates the memory of the English RevNotes for this section begin on page 80.

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olution of the seventeenth century. But in any case, it is at least conceivable that the French bourgeoisie could have been integrated without political violence within a constitutional structure like Great Britain’s in which the nobility remained the politically and socially predominant element. That a clash developed that led to the legal extinction of the old nobility was not the result of an inevitable historical process. Rather than speaking in terms of inevitability, we should say that the Revolution developed out of certain specific, deep-seated historical circumstances. We can say, for example, that the French nobility were politically and socially less wellentrenched than that of Great Britain. The absolute state had deprived the French nobility of much of its ability to control the rural population or to withstand revolt. This was not the case in Great Britain where the aristocracy maintained important and many-sided rural connections and retained a significant voice in county affairs. On the other hand, many members of the upper nobility in France were in fact nonresident in the countryside. They spent part or most of the time at the royal court or resided in the towns. The ability of the nobility to politically and socially control the peasantry was correspondingly diminished. Moreover, while the French nobility was becoming more entrepreneurial, its role in the capitalist sector of the economy does not brook comparison to the enterprising activity of the English gentry and aristocracy. They did not command the economic initiative over the agrarian economy in the same way as did the rural English elite. In sum, the control of this traditional class over the people and the economy of rural France was relatively weak. The comparative ease with which the power of the nobility was overthrown in the countryside as result of popular disturbances in 1789, testifies to its social and political fragility. At the same time, the relatively low level of overt social violence in the early part of the eighteenth century also contributed to the overthrow of the ancien régime.1 Lulled into a false sense of security, the government maintained only a rudimentary police and military apparatus in Paris and other municipalities.2 Yet from 1775 onward there were growing signs of overt and collective resistance on the part of the peasantry, especially with respect to the collection of the tithe and the enforcement of seigneurial rights. Rumors began to circulate among the rural population about the imminent abolition of these burdens.3 More or less in phase with the situation in the countryside, the period from the middle of the century to 1789 was marked by a rising level of urban violence around the issue of the availability and price of bread.4 The failure of the state to adequately reform itself and to transform society was another factor of great consequence in bringing on the Revolution. Certainly the ministers of the Crown were aware of the need to overhaul government policies and to increase state revenues. Accordingly, they attempted to meet the government’s own needs and to respond to economic expansion, demographic growth, and the increasing weight of the bourgeoisie with reforms of a modest sort. Some twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand miles of roads were surfaced and raised to high standards. Great bridges of

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first-class engineering and architectural quality were built. The state timidly reformed taxes and even created a merchant bank, the so-called Discount Bank in 1776. More significantly, it attempted to move in the direction of economic liberalization through Turgot’s more or less simultaneous attempt to abolish guilds and to allow agricultural enclosures. But the monarchy’s tradition of absolutist control and ongoing dependence on the nobility prevented it from going too far in the direction of laissez-faire, to say nothing of fiscal and legal equality.5 The attempt at reform from above was too indecisive to stave off ultimate economic crisis and financial bankruptcy. Indeed, the crucial and decisive factor in the overthrow of the ancien régime was an economic and financial crisis. It was this dual emergency that triggered a political crisis and brought on a popular revolution. Marxist historians of the previous generation like Georges Lefevbre, Albert Soboul and George Rudé dwelt upon this mass popular mobilization. The revisionists contend with these quite central matters by ignoring them, by belittling them, or by treating them in a fragmented fashion. State bankruptcy forced the calling of the Estates General, allowing the development of a political crisis in which the bourgeoisie seized the initiative. But for all the bourgeoisie’s growing economic strength and emergent political consciousness, it could never have seized power by itself. It was swept to power as a result of a popular revolution that engulfed both the cities and the countryside and afforded the opportunity to the bourgeoisie to seize political power. Economic crisis galvanized the mass of the population to throw its weight behind the political struggle of the bourgeoisie, allowing it to take power. The roots of this economic crisis were deeply embedded. Signs of economic difficulty began to appear in several economic sectors from as early as the 1760s. Both industry and commerce were affected. Further movement toward productive investment in manufacturing was arrested. According to some historians who are not necessarily Marxist, the economic slowdown marked the exhaustion of further possibilities for accumulation within the existing system. Historians of a more explicitly Marxist orientation take things a step further. They stress the inability of the existing order to transcend dispersed manufacturing and commercial capitalism and to move toward the Industrial Revolution. A system of credit and an internal market that could support large-scale factory and machine production on an extended scale, was beyond the capacity of the existing economic and political system.6 Guy Lemarchand, one of the leading Marxist authorities, highlights a series of contradictions. In the first place, industry was blocked from further modernization owing to a shortage of capital. The flow of capital toward manufacturing was inhibited because too much of the economic surplus was drained off in the form of agricultural rents. Not enough of this surplus taken in the form of rents was made available to finance the further capitalization of industry. Indeed, not enough of this capital was invested in the improvement of agriculture itself. Admittedly a large num-

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ber of Genevan and other Swiss bankers with European-wide connections had established private banks in Paris in the years leading up to the Revolution. Many of these financiers engaged in highly sophisticated financial transactions and experienced spectacular success. But interested as they were in commercial and state loans, few of these private banking enterprises took an interest in advancing money to the manufacturing sector.7 At the same time their public and private loans helped to create a gigantic financial bubble that burst on the eve of the Revolution. One of the more recent historians of these bankers and speculators, the revisionist George Taylor admits that the advanced methods of these operators anticipated those of the banking houses of the nineteenth century. He concedes that these financial operators were already operating according to the norms of modern capitalism. At the same time, as a leading revisionist, he takes as proof of the noncapitalist character of the Revolution, the fact that these financial capitalists were not much involved in advancing industrial capitalism. According to him, then, if there was little connection between finance capital and industrialization prior to 1789, this proves that the Revolution was not capitalist.8 For Taylor, the French Revolution is a capitalist revolution only if financiers and industrialists can be shown to mount the barricades together. Why this union of financiers and industrialists is a necessary precondition of a capitalist revolution, Taylor does not explain. In insisting on this partnership as a precondition for capitalist revolution, furthermore, Taylor literally puts the cart before the horse. Instead of empirically discovering what a capitalist revolution in the French case might have consisted of, he arbitrarily lays down the conditions of such a revolution and then registers their nonexistence. He is unwilling to explore the institutional constraints that blocked the linkage of finance and industry prior to the Revolution and that helped to produce the consequent economic crisis. It is of no interest to Taylor that the confinement of banking activity to the commercial and state sector might have played an important role in creating a financial bubble and setting off the Revolution. In contrast, this is a point stressed by Lemarchand in his account of the causes of the Revolution. The fact that both industrial capitalists and financial capitalists largely supported the Revolution does not sway Taylor either. That the latter group emerged as the economic elite of the new postrevolutionary ruling class, Taylor does not deign to notice. That the Directory and the Napoleonic state made it a priority to establish a linkage between financial and industrial capital, cuts no ice with him either. In short, that the Revolution, however imperfectly, actually produced the juncture between financial and industrial capital insisted on by Taylor, is ignored by the same Taylor. Apparently a revolution is only capitalist for Taylor if it has already achieved its goals prior to its onset. In the final analysis, the paralysis of the leading sectors of an emergent capitalism reflected the ongoing stranglehold of the seigneurial class over the economy. At the same time, economic pressure on the mass of the pop-

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ulation grew heavier. The burden of taxes on the common people was raised owing to an increasingly serious budgetary shortfall. In part these mounting state deficits were the result of France’s involvement in a series of colonial wars, especially the war of 1778–83. But tax increases on the commons were also made mandatory by the ongoing refusal by the privileged to pay a fair share of taxation. True, the nobility had been forced to pay some taxes since the reign of Louis XIV. But the taxes they did pay were not in proportion to their incomes, as we have already noted. Moreover, the taille, which was a direct tax on the actual income of commoners, diminished over time as a proportion of tax receipts. Instead, the most regressive form of taxation, namely, excise taxes, provided the bulk of state revenues.9 While taxes on the common people grew, rents on the peasantry increased owing to the ability of the nobles to take advantage of increasing population pressure. The nobility also expanded their incomes by pursuing a policy of squeezing the rural population by usurping communal rights and by increasing other feudal charges on their tenants.10 Population rose during the eighteenth century from twenty million to twenty-eight million. The growth in population rendered the holdings of many of the peasants progressively smaller and increasingly fragile. In the economically most advanced areas of the countryside north of the Loire River, there occurred a two fold movement. On the one hand, at the pole of expanding prosperity there took place an enlargement of agricultural exploitations and an expansion of peasant property. At the same time, as elsewhere in France, there occurred a further division of peasant holdings enlarging the pole of deep rural poverty at the other extreme.11 In the course of the eighteenth century there were undoubtedly improvements in agricultural productivity. But, in fact, demographic growth tended to outrun gains in agricultural output. On the eve of the Revolution agricultural production was no greater per capita than in the time of Cardinal Jules Mazarin and Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The century overall, represented more a catch-up than an absolute advance in agricultural production.12 Hence, the economic crisis which brought down the ancien régime was a classic Malthusian as well as a capitalist crisis. The final crisis of the ancien régime was, thus, industrial as well as agrarian. The Treaty of Eden of 1786 reduced tariffs between France and its major competitor, Great Britain, in the name of peaceful competition. Its objective was, among other things, to strengthen the long-term competitiveness of French industry in accord with laissez-faire economic theory.13 As is well known, its short-term effects were disastrous. It did not by itself engender a manufacturing depression, as contemporary critics claimed. But it did intensify an industrial stagnation already apparent in many branches of industry.14 The manufacturing slowdown was the result of insufficient demand in the home market, as well as growing protectionism abroad. France had to contend not merely with old rivals like England and Holland.

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It had to deal as well with rising trade barriers in countries like Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Spain intent on developing their own industries.15 Lemarchand sees the economic crisis as a general one affecting virtually all sectors of the economy including agriculture and the colonial trade as well as canvas, linen, wool and other manufactures.16 Paul Butel, following Ernest Labrousse, highlights the fall in wine and grain prices, the contraction of the market for manufactures, and the grain shortages of 1788–89 as key economic elements of the final crisis of the ancien régime. On the other hand, Butel rejects the idea of a crisis in foreign commerce including the crucially important colonial trade.17 Lemarchand, like Butel, also emphasizes the failure not of the external, but of the home market. The depression in manufacturing, agriculture and commerce was due above all to the insufficiency of internal demand. Even the shortage of capital, the availability of which would have made possible the enlarged reproduction of manufacturing, was the result of the unattractiveness of the domestic market. The domestic market was clearly inhibited in the first instance by growing rural poverty. But the market was also blocked by the persistence of tolls and tariffs, local systems of weights and measures, a lack of adequate means of transport, and the burden of indirect taxes. Such a situation encouraged the persistence of too large a degree of domestic or local subsistence inhibiting urbanization and the commercialization of agriculture. At the same time economic growth and the rise in population in the eighteenth century destabilized a social and political system whose basic framework had remained largely unmodified since the reign of Louis XIV. According to Lemarchand, the final crisis of the regime, then, was provoked by the invasion of British manufactures, the bad harvest of 1788, and the severe winter of 1788–89. It was in this context that the financial insolvency of the state led to an ultimate political crisis.18 The final political crisis of the regime began as a revolt of the nation as a whole against the monarchy. With some exceptions, the nobility and the commoners formed a united front against the absolute monarchy until the autumn of 1788. This stage of the crisis lends some support to the revisionist notion of a unified elite of nobles and commoners. But the onset of autumn in 1788 brought signs of an aristocratic reaction and of a bitter and growing division between nobles and commoners. The Parlement of Paris’s decision of September 1788 against the doubling of the third estate, immediately divided the third from the second estate. Indeed, the subsequent months of preparation of the Estates General between the fall and spring proved crucial to the polarization of opinion and to the politicization of the bourgeoisie. From the fall of 1788 it is difficult to retrieve the notion of a common elite of nobles and bourgeoisie, as claimed by the revisionists. The most determined conservative resistance came in those regions where nobles were already organized and experienced in collective action. Using existing estates and parlements, the nobles in these provinces organized themselves to pro-

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tect their interests. As early as October 1788, 880 Breton nobles signed a petition insisting on a refusal of any modification of the rules that had governed the organization of the Estates General since its last meeting in 1614. This petition immediately gained the support of the Parlement of Rennes which was controlled by the nobility. Similar aristocratic movements emerged in Provence and Franche-Comté and elsewhere in the Kingdom. It was precisely in those regions in which the aristocratic reaction was most powerful, that the bourgeoisie in turn proved to be most militant.19 The strongest mobilization of bourgeois opposition mirrored the areas of the strongest noble reaction. The intransigent stand of the nobles in defense of their privileges at the second assembly of notables in December 1788, provoked a particularly strong outburst of bourgeois hostility throughout the Kingdom. The cahiers des doléances or lists of grievances drawn up for the Estates General in the following months reflected similar divisions. The cahiers of the nobility generally rejected doubling the representation of the third estate or voting by head. Overall, they insisted on the need to retain aristocratic privilege. The cahiers of the commoners, on the contrary, were filled with antiseigneurial and antinoble sentiments.20 Likewise, the speeches and pamphlets of the commoners who were elected to the third estate of the Estates General, showed themselves to be bitterly antinoble.21 Indeed, the political culture of the bourgeois delegates to the Estates General proved to be totally out of sympathy with that of the nobility The delegates from the second estate came primarily from the highest and most distinguished old nobility. Insofar as they had a profession, it was the traditional aristocratic one of military service. These nobles tended to be more religious than bourgeois delegates. They were less interested in scholarship or legal studies than the bourgeois representatives. To the degree that they had cultural interests, these tended toward literature.22 As for the third estate, a sixth of the third estate were involved in commercial or industrial activities.23 By profession most were lawyers with almost a majority holding either a venal or nonvenal office.24 Revisionists make much of the fact that so few of the delegates were in fact business people. Accordingly, it is argued that most drew their income not from profit, but from landed property. From the perspective of the revisionists this made them indistinguishable from members of the second estate. Yet if this is true it is also true that there was a vast gap in wealth between the members of the two orders.25 Moreover, it is unlikely that the delegates of the third estate were as dependent on strictly feudal rent as were those of the second estate. There is a distinction to be made between feudal and capitalist rent that is not without its importance. It is not at all surprising that most members of the Estates General were not business people. A similar underrepresentation of merchants is evident in the the English House of Commons during the revolutionary seventeenth century. The Long Parliament had only 31merchants, 20 members of London City companies and 27 sons of tradesmen. During the Interregnum, the

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representation of business people barely increased.26 Business people furthermore were rarely the majority of any bourgeois representative assembly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were otherwise occupied in the marketplace, stock exchange, and banks. On the contrary, it was lawyers who best understood the state and legal system and who generally were over-represented in such assemblies. It is not surprising then, that the grassroots electoral assemblies that chose members of the third estate in 1789, mainly elected men of the law to represent them. Under the circumstances, it is actually surprising that 16 percent of the delegates to the Estates General were directly connected to the world of commerce. To be sure, the courts may have been the principal arena of lawyerly activity, but since when have lawyers not dabbled in business when the opportunity presented itself? Furthermore, it is important to recall that an important aspect of the work of lawyers involved the administration of property. Moreover, it must be recalled that the Assembly had been elected under the auspices of the ancien régime in which at every level lawyers were a constituent part, and without which the system could not function. It was only normal that electors who wanted reform, would choose delegates to the Estates General who knew the existing laws of the ancien régime. Lynn Avery Hunt makes the further point that in the postrevolutionary legislative bodies, the economic bourgeoisie were even less visible. But she does not conclude that this proves that the Revolution was noncapitalist. It was rather that the legislature in 1789 was professionalized to begin with and became even more so.27 Colin Jones argues that the professionals and officeholders in the Estates General were more genuinely bourgeois than ever before, exuding a new civic professionalism rooted in market consciousness. Their mentality was in fact close to the commercial bourgeoisie.28 In the final analysis, the revisionist dwelling on the lack of business people in the Estates General is the flimsiest of arguments. Long ago Antonio Gramsci pointed out the significance of so-called organic intellectuals to the development of a new social class. As a new class develops within the world of economic production, it tends to create from out of itself a stratum of intellectuals that help to give it a sense of homogeneity and a sense of its economic as well as its social and political functions. With respect to the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, such organic intellectuals included physicians, journalists, writers, and above all lawyers.29 In this light, to demand why business people and not lawyers were to be found sitting in the Estates General for the third estate in 1789 is to invoke an argument based on a crude reductionism—a position of which Marxists are often accused. Moreover, the revisionists have ignored the actual efforts of merchants and manufactures to gain representation to the Estates General. Between October and December 1788 some fifty-six chambers of merchants from the major towns of France requested direct representation in the Estates General. These solicitations undoubtedly reflected a concerted effort by these bodies looking

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forward, with enthusiasm, toward the upcoming opening of the Estates General. Although rejected by the Assembly of Notables in December, an immediate objective of these demands was to constitute a Committee of Extraordinary Deputies of Manufactures and Commerce. The representations made by these chambers reflect the point of view of the leading merchants, financiers, and manufacturers of each of the principal cities of the Kingdom. They embody a call for recognition of the status and expertise of this group and its right to deliberate over the affairs of the Kingdom. Although these requests are couched in respectful terms, they demonstrate an undeniable emergence of class awareness.30 At the same time, the denial of the request of the urban economic bourgeoisie for direct representation in the Estates General must be kept in mind when analyzing the social composition of that body. As we have already noted, the manufacturing bourgeoisie appears to have been enthusiastic supporters of the opening phases of the Revolution. It is noteworthy, for example, that in May 1789 Oberkamp opened his home to the deputies of the third estate of Caen, Carcasssone, Villefranche-sur-Saone and Dauphiné successively.31 In November, following the violent upheavals of the summer and fall of 1789, he enthusiastically paid a special tax of 50,000 livres regarding this levy as a patriotic obligation.32 It was the wealthy director of the cotton factory of Wesserling, Joseph-Jean Johannot, who led the popular insurrection of 1789 in the valley of Saint-Amarin in Alsace against the seigneurial regime.33 Likewise, the merchants of Lille enthusiastically supported the doubling of the third estate, as proposed by the celebrated assembly of Vizille in 1788. The abolition of privilege in the summer of 1789 by the National Assembly drew the approbation of these same merchants as part of a new order of things.34 The industrialists of Dauphiné including Perier were similarly keen about the advent of Revolution envisioning it as a new dawn for their business prospects.35 Likewise, the hundreds of maîtres des forges throughout France, initially were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the Revolution. The subsequent liberalization of the internal market, the exclusion of foreign competition, and sale of national properties were warmly supported by them.36 The Parisian bankers were likewise optimistic about the work of the National Assembly in the summer of 1789. They were above all enthusiastic about the new government’s ability to address the economic and financial crisis. The Assembly in their view would attend to the public debt and that would lead to a restoration of confidence in the depressed private credit market and the economy.37 The fact that most of the delegates for the third estate were lawyers and/or officeholders raises the more general question of the relationship between economic and cultural forms of capital. It is one of the complaints of revisionism that the Marxist view of the French Revolution fails to take culture seriously. Accordingly, at this point we should reiterate the decisive importance of intellectuals, lawyers, administrators, publicists, professionals, and the military to the political course of the Revolution that began in 1789. Such people were more central as political actors than were merchants

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and industrialists, both revisionist and nonrevisionist historians acknowledge.38 This being so, revisionists will audaciously argue that the Revolution had nothing to do with capitalism. They will claim instead that changes at the level of culture and politics are sufficient to explain it. The economic and social changes that we have documented, had nothing to do with it. Such an argument represents little more than a regression to idealism. The alternative to such a position is not vulgar economic materialism. Instead, it is to insist that culture has always to be viewed in conjunction with the economic and political realm. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais wrote plays, played politics, and speculated on the stock market. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was both a social philosopher and a novelist. In social reality the world of meaning and signification and the realm of political and economic life were coexistent and mutually dependent. Cultural practices in prerevolutionary France like the fine arts and theatre had a political and economic dimension. Political and economic practice in turn had a cultural valence. These interrelationships must be perceived epistemically as such. As Steven Lawrence Kaplan has recently expressed it: “ I believe that cultural and socio-political factors, on the one hand, and economic ones, on the other, were deeply imbricated in one another in a dialogical relationship. Cultural and social capital and political utterances were inseparable from capital and economic action.”39 From a Marxist point of view it is not the primacy of the economic that is the distinguishing feature. Rather it is an insistence on a knowledge of the historical process in its entirety or as a whole. From this perspective the cultural and ideological and the economic are not mutually exclusive and must be perceived in relationship with one another. What then is the relationship between capitalism and the French Revolution? In the first place, we take our point of departure from the insight of Pierre Bourdieu, that power over those subordinated in the workplace or through money power does not begin to explain how hegemony is achieved in a capitalist society, emergent or otherwise. Other forms of capital-cultural, ideological and educational-are required in order to secure control over those who are dominated in the workplace or marketplace. At no time is this more true than during a period of revolutionary change when authority over people in the workplace as well as in the rest of society comes into question. Under such circumstances the importance of ideas and politics is critical. It is no wonder then that the central actors of the Revolution were those who above all had possession of forms of cultural capital that could be put to political use. Hence, we would argue that the French Revolution was necessarily as much a political and ideological revolution as it was a social revolution. Bourdieu, of course, makes the further point that it is wrong to privilege the possession of economic forms over noneconomic forms of capital. But it is also important to acknowledge the economic form when it is present and to acknowledge the necessary relationship between the two. It is, thus, to be taken into account that the Swiss banker and ardent Genevan revolutionary Jacques

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Bidermann, head of the merchant banking firm of Senn, Bidermann and Company, moved the headquarters of the firm from Brussels to Paris in July 1789. Moreover, it was precisely at this tumultuous political moment that this future supporter of the Jacobin government succeeded in completing the capitalization of this Parisian bank at nearly six million livres based on subscriptions from both French and foreign capitalists.40 Until 1794 Senn, Bidermann and Company was highly successful and constituted the largest export and import house in Europe even though it was centered on revolutionary Paris.41 Nor is it unimportant that even in the midst of the growing economic chaos that followed the overthrow of the monarchy that Henri Bouchon-Dubourniat, a former engineer of the École des Ponts et Chaussés, created a cotton spinning and weaving manufacture employing some fifteen hundred workers in the Parisian faubourg du Roule.42 It is precisely in this same tumultuous period, furthermore, that the mechanization of the textile industry in Rouen really got under way.43 At the same time can we say that, for example, the lawyer and officeholder Antoine Barnave who played a key role in the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man through the National Assembly, played a less important part in the Revolution than did these men of business?44 One would think not. What such a juxtaposition of business and political figures who were prominent during the Revolution should teach us, is that possessors of political as well as economic capital were necessary to so momentous an event. Indeed, the Declaration of the Rights of Man is inconceivable without the century of capitalist economic expansion that preceded its proclamation. For all that Barnave was a lawyer and officeholder, it is also important to recall that he issued from a family of Huguenot silk merchants and manufacturers from the Diois. Moreover, it was Barnave, the man of politics, who was the author of the first economic interpretation of the French Revolution.45 The example of Pierre Louis Roederer, as we have seen, author of perhaps the most sophisticated early analysis of the Revolution, is even more to the point. Indeed, his case represents a caution against the perils of accepting at their face value the categories of social status of the ancien régime in dealing with the political alignments of the French Revolution. In a recently published dictionary of members of the Estates General and National-Legislative Assembly by Edna Lemay, for example, Roederer is noted as a lawyer and councillor of the high court of Metz from an ennobled family. Brief mention is made of his shares in the glassworks of Saint-Quirin.46 From the perspective of this analysis based on ascribed social status, this would preclude lumping him with the business element elected to the third estate in the Estates General of 1789. Moreover, as a powerful legal figure and noble, one would expect him to have been rather conservative politically. But these biographical details do little to reveal his actual political orientation and ideological position or even his economic interests.

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Roederer’s family roots lay in the Protestant commercial bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century his family were lawyers and had been granted noble status. He first came to notice politically by taking the lead in carrying through the municipal revolution of 1789 at Metz, and through his subsequent election to the National Assembly.47 Through marriage he was in fact connected to the owners of the SaintQuirin glassworks outside of Metz. In the late eighteenth century this glass factory already had the characteristics of a nineteenth-century factory: large buildings, power-driven machinery, and substantial sales and profits. Its workforce numbered between 600 and 700 employees lodged in company housing.48 It was the only factory in France that used the advanced waterpowered glass-polishing machines ‘de Wirtemberg’ which cost one million livres to install. Between 1781 and 1785 average annual sales were 572,000 livres and annual profits were almost 167,000 livres. In 1786, three years before the Revolution, Roederer was able to a buy a one-quarter share of the enterprise for 500,000 livres. This opportunity had been made available to Roederer in part because of his leading role in successfully carrying through a long-term legal fight against the monopoly of the Royal Saint Gobain glassworks over the casting of plate glass for use in the manufacture of mirrors.49 Even before taking up his position in the National Assembly, Roederer had assumed the position of a political democrat. This placed him on the extreme left of public opinion at the beginning of the Revolution. Roederer’s view was based on his previous experience in the struggle against the privileges of the Royal Saint Gobain factory as well as on a current conflict with the organized association of the merchants of Eastern France.50 The latter group had, up to then, successfully resisted the establishment of free trade within the borders of France in order to protect their legally privileged access to the German market. It was clear to Roederer as a result, that if nothing was left unchanged at the upcoming meeting of the Estates General, the privileged orders, including favored elements of the bourgeoisie, would do everything they could to protect their privileges. Merely doubling the votes of the third estate would not break their power. The surest guarantee of ending the regime of privilege and establishing laissez-faire was by abolishing representation by order and by instituting a democratic suffrage.51 In an assembly constituted in this way, the manufacturers would be one interest among others. But this would be preferable to being totally excluded through the perpetuation of the regime of privilege and inequality. Roederer’s struggle in behalf of the industrial interest moved him in the direction of political democracy. Indeed, it led him to a principled defense of the right of the less well-off to political representation of their interests.52 At the same time his political position helps to illuminate the relationship between democratic political ideology and the progress of industrial capitalism. The case of Roederer, we conclude, ought to serve as a caution against separating the category of legal bourgeoisie from economic bourgeoisie too readily through over hasty sociological categorization.

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The example of Roederer reflects an instance of a figure whose ennobled status and whose position as a lawyer sitting in the Estates General masks his identification with the interests of a nascent industrial bourgeoisie. A mere categorization of Roederer by profession and social status conceals rather than reveals his historical role. But we should not forget that there were important revolutionary figures with business ties who did not even sit in the National Assembly in 1789. Jean-Henri Bancal des Issarts, for example, was a lawyer and notary who was not elected to the Estates General but who nonetheless played a major role in revolutionary politics in Paris from the early days of the Revolution. Later on he sat with the Girondin faction in the Convention. Moreover, his legal training ought not be allowed to obscure his roots in an important silk manufacturing family from Clermont-Ferrand.53 But the primary example of a revolutionary personality who rationalized the political ideals of the Revolution with the business interests of the middle class was Etienne Clavière. His importance to the Revolution is even now not sufficiently acknowledged. Clavière was born into a Genevan banking family that had fled France as a result of the persecutions of Louis XIV. Involved in the struggle against the Genevan aristocracy, he was banned from the city in 1782. After exile in England, Ireland, Neuchâtel, Besançon, and Brussels, he settled in Paris in 1784. There he became associated with the powerful banker Isaac Panchaud. In the next few years he emerged as one of the most influential of the many financial speculators, and bankers operating in Paris on the eve of the Revolution. Clavière and his brother Jean-Jacques were the most important silent partners of Senn, Bidermann and Company.54 In addition to his banking associates, during the 1780s Clavière formed close ties and became the financial backer of both Honoré-Gabriel Mirabeau, the future leader of the so-called Feuillants, and Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the legislative chief of the Girondin party during the Revolution. Launching a political and literary campaign against the financial and economic underpinnings of the Perrier brothers’ Paris Water Company, he made a killing by selling short the fast depreciating company shares. A succession of further speculative ventures by Clavière marked the years leading up to the Revolution.55 Clavière combined fervent idealism and shrewd business calculation in pursuit of financial advantage. With the help of the writing skills of Mirabeau and Brissot, he carried on pamphlet campaigns as part of his business activities. In these writings, he demonstrated an uncanny ability to combine his own pecuniary interest with a Rousseauist and moralizing rhetoric.56 As the Revolution neared, Clavière’s interest in social and political affairs matured and deepened. In 1788 he founded along with Mirabeau, Brissot, Antoine Caritat Condorcet, Marie-Joseph La Fayette, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Constantin Volney, and others, the Société des amis des Noirs. With the Revolution underway in 1789 Clavière, as a foreigner, was unable to gain election as a delegate to the Estates General. He, nonetheless, played a key role behind the scenes in seconding Mirabeau politically and

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financially while helping to draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man.57 The launching of the assignats as a new currency backed by the value of nationalized property, was largely his doing.58 Indeed, his influence grew stronger with the ascension of his political and financial protégé Brissot, as head of the Girondins. In 1792–93 Clavière achieved his ultimate political ambition when, for a few months, he became minister of finance.59 Clavière reflected the viewpoint of the liberal bourgeoisie of the time. Educated in the ideas of the Enlightenment, such people comprehended that a new constitutional order could not base itself on property and money alone. Nor did they wish it to be so. To be sure, Clavière believed that the power of modern states depended on the growth of commerce and manufacture. The operation of such an economic system in turn required a sound currency and system of public credit. But Clavière, the financial speculator, realized that the new regime in France could not simply be based on private economic interest. He himself wrote a draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In it the following clause occurs, which is made much of by Robert Darnton: “The preservation of morality being absolutely essential to the maintenance of the social contract, all financial operations in the public interest should be considered in their relation to morality.”60 Darnton’s observation is the discerning one that “perhaps Clavière really did understand the Bourse according to ideas derived from Rousseau’s Social Contract.”61 The relationship between Clavière’s political ideals and his prerevolutionary financial speculation has recently been explained in a convincing way by Richard Whatmore and James Livesey.62 According to them, Clavière rationalized his success at selling short by invoking the ideals of Rousseau and Adam Smith. According to Clavière and his apologists Brissot and Mirabeau, the shares of the companies whose valuation they had sought to undermine, were all integrated into the corrupt financial system of the monarchical state. The value of these companies were all being manipulated by the government for political purposes. Instead, they demanded a new commercial and financial order that was freed from political manipulation. Commercial relations based on virtue were necessary to economic development and social stability. Political interference by overly powerful government ministers, nobles, and financiers were the greatest obstacle to the establishment of this new financial and economic order. They identified this new regime with the free market.63 It is with an appreciation of this aspiration to reconcile the public good with private interest that we must attempt to understand the mentality of the liberal bourgeoisie in 1789. Few people then or now are prepared to make sacrifices and to die for the sake of property rights and for a free market by themselves. Even those who enjoy power under such circumstances prefer to believe that their actions are determined by more than greed. At no time was this more true than in the opening optimistic phase of the French Revolution. At the same time, people like Clavière believed that the social violence accompanying the Revolution had to be channeled within certain ideological

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and institutional limits. What was required was a new political morality based on the ideals of republican democracy. It was the new revolutionary regime in the United States that best embodied these ideals for Claviere.64 Marx of course took a quite cold-blooded view of the shibboleths of the Revolution, like liberty and equality it is worth recalling. For him, the precondition for the idea of equality or liberty as a political ideal was the concrete existence of these concepts in the give-and-take of the market. Marx believed that notions like liberty and equality arose as demands of the market before they were transformed into political values. According to Marx, liberty and equality, as abstract political ideals were merely market values raised as he put it, to a higher power.65 It is useful to be reminded of Marx’s view at this juncture if only to recall that there was indeed a connection between the political culture of the Revolution and the market, something revisionists are at pains to deny. Marx suggests that under circumstances where the market is triumphant, abstract notions of liberty and equality infiltrate the consciousness of historical actors and take on the character of a new common sense or become foundational political principles. This is undoubtedly a deeply perceptive observation. Still Marx’s view must be regarded as incomplete, however insightful. Merely connecting such ideas to the market does not explain the process by which the ideologists of the new regime were able to intellectually and emotionally convince and organize millions of French people under the ideology of a new revolutionary order. Summing up our view of the background to the Revolution we would like to reiterate the importance of capitalism to the upheaval. That part of the surplus produced by eighteenth-century capitalism was appropriated as rent and interest is evident. But what is significant is the incontestable expansion of agricultural, industrial, and commercial profits in the eighteenth century. The growth of industrial, commercial, financial, and agricultural capitalism in the eighteenth century within the archaic political and social confines of the ancien régime is undeniable. In manufacturing it was the consumer sector that experienced the largest expansion, while producer industries lagged behind. The enhanced role of profit was in turn made possible by the expanded economic role of surplus value in an economy more and more dependent on wage labor. The capitalism that had developed prior to the Revolution was directed predominantly by a capitalist bourgeoisie. Revisionists stress that nobles were also capitalists. But we have pointed out that such capitalist nobles represented only a minority of capitalists and only a minority of nobles. It is also one of the arguments of the revisionists that a significant number of bourgeoisie invested their capital in landed rents, urban properties, and state annuities as did the nobles. But that does not take away from the fact that a large, economically important and dynamic fraction of the bourgeoisie based themselves on commercial, industrial, financial, and agricultural profits. While these sectors were perhaps still not the largest part

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of the French economy, as revisionists insist, they were far and away the most dynamic in terms of economic growth and in radically destabilizing social relations and political affairs. It was precisely in the manufacturing towns as well as in centers of naval construction that municipal revolutions most frequently occurred in 1789. It was in places like these where revolutionary committees had to respond to the demands of large concentrations of hungry and unemployed workers that direct challenges to the municipal government of the ancien régime most frequently occurred. The revolutionary militias and governments of 1789 and 1790 were led by merchants and lawyers—the merchant element being most evident in the textile manufacturing centers.66 The depression in manufacturing thus particularly reflected itself in revolutionary politics. If lawyers tended to dominate politics at the national level, merchants appeared to control the new municipal governments that emerged from the Revolution.67 It was in this context of ultimate crisis that the politically revolutionary potential of the new industrial capitalism made itself felt. Moreover, the capitalist bourgeoisie that had emerged at the end of the ancien régime by no means disappeared during the Revolution, as some revisionists claim. Most of the big bourgeoisie survived the tumult of the revolutionary period and their numbers were reinforced by those who appeared in its course. It was this bourgeoisie that would emerge as the predominant class in the Revolution’s aftermath.68

Notes 1. Jean Meyer and Jean-Pierre Poussou, Études sur les villes françaises, milieu du XVIIe siècle à la veille de la Révolution française (Paris, 1995), 169–70. 2. Meyer and Poussou, Études sur les villes françaises, 179–80. 3. Guy Lemarchand, “Sur la reaction seigneuriale, “ in Présence de Babeuf: Lumières, révolution, communisme: actes du Colloque international Babeuf, Amiens, les 7, 8 et 9 décembre 1989, eds. Alain Maillard, Claude Mazauric, and Eric Walter (Paris, 1994), especially 134, 129–36. 4. Stephen Lawrence Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, 2 vols. (The Hague,1976), vol.1, 260–61, 345, 353–57. The rising tide of both urban and rural violence is charted by Jean Nicolas, La rébellion française: mouvements populaires et conscience sociale 1661–1789 (Paris, 2002), 34, 538. 5. Lemarchand,”Aux origines de la Revolution Française,” 25–26. 6. Lemarchand, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme: à propos des consequences de la Révolution sur l’évolution de l’économie française,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 272 (1988), 178. 7. Herbert Lüthy, La banque protestante en France, de la Révocation de l’Edit de Nantes à la Révolution, 2 vols.(Paris, 1959–1961), vol. 2, 41–42, 716–22; Bertrand Gille, La Banque et le credit en France de 1815 à 1848 (Paris, 1959), 37–38; Guy Antonetti, Une maison de banque à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Greffulhe Montz & Cie (1789–1793) (Paris, 1959), 66. 8. George V. Taylor, “The Paris Bourse on the Eve of the Revolution, 1781–1789,” American Historical Review 67:4 (1962), 951–77.

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9. Lemarchand, “Aux origines de la Revolution Française,” 26–27. But see Maurice LévyLeboyer, Les banques européennes et l’industrialisation internationale, 419–20. 10. Lemarchand,”Du féodalisme au capitalisme,” 181–82. 11. Lemarchand, “Aux origines de la Révolution Française,” 20–21. 12. Lemarchand, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme,” 171. 13. Léon Cahen, “Une nouvelle interprétation du Traité Franco-Anglois de 1786–1789,” Revue historique 185(1939), 257–85; Marie Donaghay “Calonne and the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1786,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 50, no. 3, On Demand Suppl. (September 1978), D1157–D1184; Orville T. Murphy, The Diplomatic Retreat of France and Public Opinion on the Eve of the French Revolution, 1783–1789 (Washington, D.C., 1998), 63–89. 14. Gay L.Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay, 86–88. Clearly some industrial areas were spared. The great woolen manufacturing centre of Sedan, for example, was able to sustain its growth right down to the Revolution. Cf. Gérard Gayot, Les draps de Sedan, 319. 15. Lemarchand, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme,” 179; Denis Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France, 190. 16. Lemarchand, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme,”179. 17. Paul Butel, L’Economie française, 54–55, 73–74. 18. Lemarchand, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme,” 183. 19. Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, 1996), 90–94. 20. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 99. 21. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 107. 22. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 75. 23. Edna Hindie Lemay, “La composition de l’Assemblé Nationale Constituante: les hommes de la continuité,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 24:2 (1977), 347. 24. Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 35, 38 25. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 39. 26. Richard Grassby, The Business Community of Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge, 1995), 224. 27. Lynn Avery Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984), 151. 28. Colin Jones, “The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 101:1(1996), 39. 29. Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution; A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley, 1980), 143. 30. Jean-Pierre Hirsch, “Les milieux du commerce, l’esprit de système et le pouvoir à la veille de la Révolution,” Annales:ESC 30:6(1975), 1337–70. 31. Serge Chassagne, Oberkampf,un entrepreneur capitaliste, 154. 32. Chassagne, Oberkampf,un entrepreneur capitaliste, 155. 33. J.M. Schmitt, Aux origines de la révolution industrielle, 282–33. 34. Hirsch, Les deux rêves du commerce, 191–95. 35. Léon, La naissance de la grande industrie, vol. 1, 312–14. 36. Woronoff, L’industrie sidérurgique, 128, 132. 37. Antonetti, Une maison de banque, 185. 38. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, 150–51. 39. Kaplan, La fin des corporations, 123. 40. Lévy-Leboyer, Banques européenes, 390. 41. Schmidt, Aux origines de la révolution industrielle, 255–62. 42. Louis Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers parisiens du Directoire à l’Empire (Paris, 1978), 206. 43. Evrard, “Les ouvriers du textile,” 344–45. 44. Cf. Dictionnaire des Constituants 1789–1791, ed. Lemay, 2 vols. (Paris, 1991), vol.1, 58–62; Keith Michael Baker, “The Idea of a Declaration of Rights,” in The French Idea of Freedom; The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed.Dale Van Kley (Stanford,

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45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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Calif.,1994), 180; J.K. Wright, “National Sovereignty and the General Will: The Political Program of the Declaration of Rights” in The French Idea of Freedom, 228. Barnave, Introduction a la Révolution française, especially 13–14, 51–52. Barnave, ibid., 9–10 insists that just as control of the land had been the basis of the power of the nobility, so now manufactures were the basis of the power and liberty of the people. Dictionnaire des Constituants, vol. 2, 820–24. Dictionnaire des Constituants, vol. 2, 821. Kenneth Margerison, P.-L. Roederer: Political Thought and Practice during the French Revolution (Philadelphia, 1983), 16–17. Margerison, P.-L. Roederer, 17, 19. The industrialists of the new cotton industry in Alsace were engaged in a comparable struggle for free access to the French market. Cf. Schmitt, Aux origines de la révolution industrielle, 255, 259. Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy (Oxford, 2000), 76, Thierry Lentz, Roederer 1754–1835 (Metz, France, 1989), 36, 45–46. Margerison, P.-L. Roederer, 27. Quite disingenuously Margerison, in ibid., 32 concludes by discounting a Marxist understanding of Roederer’s politics. He quite incredibly asserts that Roederer believed that the primary struggle in the Revolution was between the privileged and unprivileged merchants rather than between the bourgeoisie and nobility. Every schoolboy understands that there was a layer of privileged bourgeois among which were some merchants who formed part of the ancien régime. That does not exclude the fact that the ancien régime privileged the nobility above all. Roederer’s outline history of the French Revolution, written at the end of the Napoleonic period indicates that he clearly understood that the primary struggle in the Revolution was against the nobility. Philippe Bourdin, “Bancal des Issarts, militant, député et notable: de l’utopie politique à l’ordre moral,” Revue historique 302:4(2000), 895–937. Schmitt, Aux origines de la révolution industrielle, 274. J. Bénétruy, L’atelier de Mirabeau: quatre proscrits genevois dans la tourmente révolutionnaire (Paris, 1962), 92–117; Robert Darnton, “Ideology on the Bourse, “ in Congrès mondial pour le bicentenaire de la Révolution (1989): L’Image de la Révolution française: communications présentées lors du Congrès mondial pour le bicentenaire la Révolution, Sorbonne, Paris, 6–12 juillet 1989, ed. Vovelle, 4 vols. (Paris and New York, 1989–90), vol.1, 124–39. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins, 181. Baker, “Idea of a Declaration of Rights,”183–85. Bénétruy, Atelier de Mirabeau, 279–81. Pierre-François Pinaud, “Clavière: Ministre des contributions et revenus publics et réformateur,” Revue historique 289(1993), 361–81. Darnton, “Ideology on the Bourse,” 135. Darnton, “Ideology on the Bourse,” 135. Richard Whatmore and James Livesey, “Etienne Clavière, Jacques-Pierre Brissot et les fondations intellectuelles de la politique des Girondins,” Annales historiques de la Revolution Française 321(2000), 1–26. Whatmore and Livesey, “Etienne Claviére,” 10–14. Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution, 78–81. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical Geography (London, 2001), 273. Hunt, “Commitees and Communes:Local Politics and National Revolution in 1789”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 18:3(1976), 321–46. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, 160–61. Lemarchand, “L’histoire sociale de la Révolution depuis 1989,” in La Révolution française au carrefour des recherches, eds. Martine Lapied and Christine Peyrard (Aix-en-Provence, 2003), 72–73.

Chapter 5

THE ECONOMY IN REVOLUTION (1789-1799)


The Revolutionary Decade: 1789–1799 Reviewing the overall economic performance of the new revolutionary regime from 1789 to 1799 one must at once acknowledge that it was marked by much disruption, turmoil, and hardship. It could hardly have been otherwise during a period of almost constant foreign and civil wars that were accompanied by enormous social and political changes. Property and social relations, the administration of government, educational institutions, and the systems of jurisprudence and banking were all dramatically transformed. It would appear that the Revolution of 1789, like most revolutions, was not conducive to short term economic growth. On the other hand, to judge such an inherently catastrophic event merely in terms of their immediate economic results, as some do, would appear to be foolishly economistic. Political and social restructuring is what revolutions are all about. Indeed, the period 1789–99 even from an economic perspective was also mainly about restructuring. But even so, the first decade that followed the upheaval of 1789 was by no means entirely negative from the point of view of economic growth.1 Recovering from the crisis of 1788–89, the three following years saw significant recuperation in trade and manufacture. The Atlantic and Mediterranean trade reported the best results of the eighteenth century in 1790–91. Internal commerce likewise saw a revival. Steel production as well as the production of cloth expanded. In 1791 the cotton mills of Christophe-Philippe Oberkamp achieved their highest level of sales and profits since the foundation of the firm. His confidence was such that between 1791 and 1793 he built a new factory occupying an unprecedented 5000 square feet of space at a cost of 280,000 livres.2 Notes for this section begin on page 104.

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The crisis period 1788–89 had seen catastrophic bankruptcies in the industrial and commercial sector. There were ongoing difficulties in wool and cotton manufacture related to British competition under the Treaty of Eden. Part of the answer lay in the imposition of the tariff of 1792, limiting British imports. Indeed, the war against England, which began with the conquest of Belgium and the opening of the Scheldt, was among other things, a war to make France economically dominant on the Continent at the expense of England.3 Unable to compete with Britain in purely economic terms, France tried to enhance its prospects through a resort to war, conquest and protectionism. At the same time, it is significant that the leading cotton manufacturers like Oberkampf decided that the way out of the crisis that had begun in the 1780s was through a further economizing on labor through mechanization.4 Indeed, 1792 marks the beginning of the real mechanization of the French cotton industry, the results of which became visible at the end of the decade.5 In 1793 the Haitian slave revolt and war with England broke out. Both of these events had dire implications for the colonial and overseas trade inherited from the ancien régime.6 Mediocre harvests in 1794 and 1795, an increase in inflation, intense state regulation of the economy, and a suspension of private investment further reduced economic activity until 1796. While the overall picture by the mid–1790s is a somber one, manufacturing in Alsace and in the Massif Central, appears to have held up. Moreover, the textile and metallurgical sectors supported or created by the state, seem to have flourished during the period of Jacobin dictatorship.7 The period of the Directory(1795–99) began with a drastic monetary deflation that made its early years economically difficult. Nonetheless, the outlines of an overall revival can be discerned from 1795, as a result of foreign conquests and a steady flow of orders from the state to supply the needs of the military. Monetary stabilization was achieved by 1796. Economic recovery was strengthened by good harvests in 1796 and 1797. In any event, the economic recovery under the Directory, such as it was, was cut short in 1799 by renewed agricultural difficulties, military defeats, and a weakening of the government. Toward 1800, manufacturing was profoundly depressed and foreign commerce half of what it had been in 1789. By then, two of the jewels of the economy of the ancien régime, the colonial and Atlantic trade and the redistribution of exotic products to Northern and Eastern Europe, had been severely damaged or lost altogether. Manufacturing, especially in the west of France, was badly crippled. Over the first revolutionary decade, war mobilization, the Law of the Maximum, and deflation curtailed investment in agriculture. Widespread deforestation did long-term damage to the economy. Financial speculation and the war economy curtailed both public and private investment.8 But already under the Directory the conquest of territory, the creation of vassal republics, and the exclusion of England from the Continent opened

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new opportunities to French manufacturing and commerce.9 Meanwhile, the centralization of banking and commerce, which would reanimate the economy of Paris, was already evident.10 Despite the disruptions in the economy, certain important manufacturing sectors made impressive gains. Steel production almost doubled between 1789 and 1801. The production of cottons—the leading sector of the manufacturing economy—soared. Whereas there were 110 cotton manufactures in 1789, there were 166 by 1800. Notable was the concentration of production in veritable factories and signs of real technological advance. Cotton spinning grew impressively. In 1789 there were 6 firms using spinning jennies. Ten years later there were 37.11 Cotton manufacture also benefited from the reabsorption of cheap labor from the declining industries of the west of France.12 The economic geography of France was greatly affected by the revolutionary decade. The west of France, but also Lyon and its regions, were severely damaged. Ports like Nantes and Bordeaux would never recover. On the contrary, based on coal, metallurgy, wool, and cotton, Paris and the north and northeast of France, became from this point on, the focal points of the national economy. The economy was reorientated toward the Continent rather than toward the Atlantic in just ten years. The restructuring of the national economy away from the overseas and colonial trade and toward the rest of Continental Europe based on an increasingly mechanized and concentrated form of production in the north and east of France was dramatic. Indeed, the speed of this industrial restructuring in the midst of war and ongoing revolutionary political convulsions was remarkable. We must reiterate that overall there is little doubt that manufacture and trade declined. The period 1792–99 marks the final end of an expansion that had begun in 1718. Still, as we have noted, there were economic bright spots during this decade. Moreover, the legislative triumph of economic liberalism and the progress of technological innovation augured well for the future. It should be noted that two motors of the eighteenth-century economy, internal trade and demographic expansion, seem to have faltered even prior to the Revolution and issued in the depression of 1788–89. Moreover, overdependence on colonial trade, lack of credit, low productivity, and the diversion of profit to nonproductive activity in the prerevolutionary economy cannot be attributed to the Revolution.13

Laying a New Foundation: The National Legislative Assembly (1789–92) The Revolution, as a political event, entailed the overthrow of royal government in town and country and the installation of a new revolutionary administration. Magistrates and officeholders including nobles who were loyal to the king, were removed from their posts throughout France. They were replaced by more or less reliable members of the revolutionary bour-

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geoisie. In the countryside, the Revolution saw the installation of a new rural bourgeoisie as the social and political elite. Many of the wealthier peasants who were employed as agents of the seigneurial reaction prior to 1789 reappeared as ardent leaders of this rural revolution. Not surprisingly, the new regime proved to be more favorable to the process of rural capitalist accumulation than the ancien régime. Royal government likewise was swept away in the towns. Urban administration fell into the hands of lawyers, physicians, notaries and local bureaucrats, as well as merchants and manufacturers. It is at the local level of government that we find a large admixture of merchants and manufacturers who became involved in politics for the first time. The revisionist demand to witness the economic bourgeoisie in the seats of power is fulfilled at the level of local rather than national government. The seizure of power, thus, cannot be understood simply as the transformation of the Estates General into the National Assembly or as the popular revolution in Paris. Rather, the revolutionary process has to be appreciated as one involving a transformation of local government throughout the cities and countryside of France. In other words, the weight of the economic bourgeoisie made itself felt directly at the level of local rather than national government. Within Paris itself recent research has demonstrated the presence of a newly assertive commercial and manufacturing bourgeoisie in the closing decades of the ancien régime. It is this element that assumed power in 1789.14 Looking ahead to the period of the Convention (1792–95)—the most radical and democratic phase of the Revolution—it is true that the urban plebs, or sansculottes, played an unprecedented role in Parisian municipal politics. To some this has suggested the absence of the bourgeoisie proper from the Revolution or at least from the radical revolution. It has to be conceded that the majority of these democratic revolutionaries were undoubtedly from the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. Moreover, the radically democratic agenda of Jacobins and sansculottes undoubtedly alienated most of the more affluent bourgeoisie. Yet even in this most radical phase of the Revolution, many of the leading cadres of the Jacobins and sansculottes were of solid bourgeois standing–small manufacturers, rich artisans, substantial merchants and professionals who deflated their social status for reasons of political expediency.15 The goals of the seizure of power by the substantial bourgeoisie at the municipal level in the immediate wake of the Revolution is illustrated quite well by the case of Lille. Prior to 1789 the wealthy bourgeoisie of that city were involved in activities ranging from overseas and foreign commerce to crafts and rural and urban manufacture. This element included 200 to 300 persons including wholesale merchants, merchant manufacturers, and the most prosperous grocer-merchants, epiciers, druggists, salt

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refiners, sugar refiners and brewers. The manufacturing depression and credit crunch of the late 1780s hit the big merchants hard. The widely circulated program of the provincial estates of Dauphiné calling for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, helped to create a common political front of the third estate of Lille as early as December 1788. Having taken control of the consular government in the wake of the seizure of the Bastille, this group carefully saw to the continuity of its control over municipal politics as the Revolution developed. In June 1791 the tribunal of commerce replaced the consular jurisdiction of the ancien régime. The mayor of the revolutionary municipality was first a wholesale merchant and then a lace merchant. The principal objective of the new government of Lille in the short term was to seek the restoration of credit and business while supporting the constitutional monarchy. The social and political limits of this middle class urban regime were also soon made clear. Faced with peasant or popular radicalism, it was resolutely conservative especially in defense of property.16 Certain new entrepreneurs made their appearance in Lille in the course of the revolutionary years between 1789 and 1815. But for the most part the new ruling class, which emerged from the Revolution at Lille, stemmed from the already ascendant bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century.17 The National Assembly, later the Legislative Assembly, which governed France between 1789 and 1792 clearly reflected the point of view of this now dominant bourgeoisie. Responding to the social movements of the summer of 1789, the Assembly abolished personal and legal privilege on the night of 4 August 1789. The first principle of the momentous Declaration of the Rights of Man, which soon followed, proclaimed the fundamental idea of the legal equality of all men. Such an assertion amounted to the repudiation of the underlying premise of the ancien régime, which was the natural inequality of human beings. The privileges of individuals and provinces disappeared. Administrative unity was imposed by establishing a system of uniform departéments by the law of 15 February 1790. Specific acts of the Assembly subsequently annuled juridical, professional, economic, and honorific privilege. The mentality of the delegates to the National Assembly, with respect to the economy, had been shaped by the thought of the preceding Enlightenment. The philosophes and economists of that period were virtually unanimous in their rejection of the dirigisme of the absolute monarchy. In its place they championed the notion of economic liberalism. The cahiers de doléances of the third estate drawn up in 1789, faithfully mirrored these attitudes that reflected the interests of an emergent capitalist bourgeoisie. The cahiers overwhelmingly expressed support for the idea of putting an end to all the obstacles that stood in the way of the economic freedom of the individual. In particular, they called for free trade within

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the borders of France and for an end to tolls and customs. On the other hand, they were less unanimous on the matter of liquidating corporations and on the enclosing of rural land. But the most glaring exception to this program of economic liberalism was in the area of foreign trade. In part the Revolution had been initiated by the apparently disastrous consequences of the free trade agreement with Great Britain of 1786. The tariff of March 1791 imposed a regime of strengthened protectionism that would subsequently be toughened under the National Convention and the Directory.18 The inconsistent position of the Girondin Party, which dominated the political life of the Legislative Assembly (1791–92), clearly illustrates this contradictory attitude with respect to free trade. The leading economic thinkers of this party were passionately devoted to the free market at home and abroad which they equated with the sanctity of private property. Yet in the face of the threat of British manufactures to French industry, they strongly favored protectionism.19 The Law of Allaire of 2 March 1791 represented an essential further step toward the much vaunted economic individualism. Corporations, guilds, and royal manufactures were abolished. Subsequent legislation gave people complete freedom to open a shop, workshop, or manufacture. In the years that followed, thousands of artisans and petty bourgeoisie took advantage of this new liberty to open new small enterprises. Many of these new enterprises soon found themselves bankrupt. Nonetheless, their brief life testified to the economic aspirations and convictions of many of the skilled workers and petty bourgeoisie which the Revolution helped to unleash. In contrast to the Law of Allaire, the Le Chapelier Law which soon followed, attempted to bridle the economic and social aspirations of those who worked for wages. The Revolution had, in fact, revived or given birth to new forms of popular and working class militancy and sociability. They appeared to challenge the newly emergent liberal order and the National Assembly accordingly tried to put them down.20 The Le Chapelier Law of 14–17 June outlawed socalled combinations and strikes. It was passed as an attempt to suppress a tide of democratic agitation that included a wave of strikes that affected both town and country. The region of large capitalist farms to the north and east of Paris was particularly hard hit by these so-called bacchanales or strikes in 1790–91. Bachannal, i.e., ‘drunken riot’ was a term long-used by employers and public authorities to refer to strikes. Rural strikes, in fact, had a long history under the ancien régime dating back to the sixteenth century. But such strikes in the countryside around Paris had increased in frequency and intensity in the years leading up to the Revolution. Despite the haphazard nature of their recruitment and the seasonal nature of employment, rural agricultural workers proved capable of a surprising militancy and level of organization in the face of their capitalist employers. The deterioration of real wages in the face of higher profits in the years leading to the Revolution appears to have sharpened the intensity of such economic conflict. The arrival of the

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Revolution further aroused militancy in 1790–91.21 Stephen Lawrence Kaplan has recently argued that widespread working-class unrest, both urban and rural, at this juncture, in fact, represented the birth of modern working-class politics in the midst of the Revolution. The coercive provisions of the Le Chapelier Law turned out to be insufficient in suppressing working-class agitation. The subsequent emergence of the patriotic and populist ideology of sansculotterie helped to stifle the growing sense of class solidarity among workers.22 Class conflict if anything grew worse in the early days of the National Convention that followed the fall of the monarchy. In the tightening labour market of the Year II of the Republic, the Comité d’agriculture et des arts was flooded with petitions from employers asking for government intervention to prevent workers from leaving their employment for better jobs. At Montauban, employers—loyally republican and staunchly Protestant— cracked down on their employees who were regarded as suspect owing to their economic demands as well as their unpatriotic Catholicism and royalism.23 In this context the invention of the ideology of the sansculottes represented a more positive means than outright repression of containing conflict between workers and masters and manufacturers. Its stress on workplace solidarity and egalitarianism amounted to a new public discourse that could mediate and assuage emergent conflict between labor and capital.24 Internal free trade was established by the law of 29 August 1789. It was reinforced by the subsequent suppression of tolls, chambers of commerce, inspectors of manufactures, and trading companies. The imposition of a uniform system of weights and measures, the judicial and administrative unification of the state, the establishment of a law of patents, and a more flexible law of inheritance completed this edifice of liberal capitalism.25 The bias of the delegates to the National and Legislative Assemblies in favor of liberal capitalism is especially clear with respect to agriculture. The provisions for the sale of ecclesiastical property of 14 May 1790, the decree of 5 June 1791 on agrarian property rights, and the decree on the division of communal lands of 14 August 1792, clearly favored the larger property holders who were regarded as the most productive. In this respect, the decree of 5 June 1791 was especially important. It established complete individual freedom in agriculture, including the right of individuals to enclose their land. Under the terms of this law, the cultivator could withdraw from the system of common lands including communitybased rotation of crops and systems of fallow. Likewise important in this respect were legislative measures in favor of a free market in grain, the abolition of tolls, and the elimination of regulations on fairs and markets.26 The consistency of early revolutionary legislation stressing individual property rights is notable. In the legal language of these acts, for the first time, the land was defined as privately owned capital and as a factor of production. Swept aside was the notion held dear by the ancien régime, that those who worked, owned, or protected the soil should be linked by obligations which set limits on what could or could not be done.27 Land was now seen as a com-

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modity to be freely bought or sold in the marketplace. Relieved of seigneurial and ecclesiastical exactions and constraints, such land was to be worked by free labor.28 Meanwhile, expropriated ecclesiastical and aristocratic property fell into the hands of largely middle-class elements both urban and rural, who already disproportionally possessed property.29 These legislative initiatives in favor of rural capitalism still reflected a compromise between the moderate bourgeoisie and their liberal noble allies who together, controlled the revolutionary government in the first phase of the Revolution. Such a compromise entailed the destruction of the juridical basis of feudal property. On the other hand, this compromise attempted to maintain feudal fiscal charges on the land by converting them to a form of redeemable rent. In this way, the nobility as well as bourgeoisie and peasants who had an interest in seigneurial rights under the ancien régime, would be protected from loss. Likewise, the domain lands of the nobles, including those recently usurped from the communal lands during the so-called seigneurial reaction, were sheltered. Nationalized land totaling 10 percent of the land area of France and thousands of buildings were put at the disposition of the already propertied notably, the bourgeoisie.30 Freedom of enclosure and agrarian individualism, as we have seen, were affirmed.31

The National Convention(1792–95) The Revolution, as we have noted, initially represented the triumph of economic liberalism enshrined in the legislation of the period 1789–91. But the coming of war in 1792 initiated a temporary if powerful reaction in favor of a more interventionist state. The requirements of national defense and popular demands for control over grain prices led the state to take control over more and more aspects of economic life. From September of that year, the state began to requisition grain to ensure provision of its armies and to insure food supplies to the restless populations of the towns. In April 1793 it attempted to fix the value of the assignats in the face of mounting monetary inflation. At the beginning of the next month, the price of grain was fixed by the Law of the Maximum. On 29 September the Law of the Maximum was extended to all commodities. In addition to its control over prices, the regime’s supervision of access to raw materials gave it more or less complete control over the French economy. Supervision of all trade was part and parcel of the concentration of undivided political power in the hands of the Convention and its Committee of Public Safety. Control over national commercial activity was vested in the hands of the Commission des subsistances created on 22 October 1793. Foreign commerce likewise came under strict control. The blockade imposed by the English provoked the decree of 1 March 1793 prohibiting all English imports. Nothing now remained of the Treaty of Eden. Protection-

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ism was an intrinsic part of the economic philosophy of the Jacobin leadership. In contrast to the Girondins, the Jacobins, who dominated the Convention from the fall of 1792, were strongly protectionist in principle. From the Jacobin perspective, such policies not only reflected the exigencies of warfare or economic crisis, but were necessary in order to defend French industries against foreign manufactures. The Navigation Act of 21 November 1793 gave the government control of all shipping. A decree of 30 May 1794 vested all control of foreign commerce with the Committee of Public Safety. But perhaps the most spectacular aspect of the dirigisme of the Convention was its intrusion into manufacturing. With the decree of the levée en masse or national mobilization of 23 August 1793, the Convention undertook to ensure the arming of the revolutionary armies by supervising all arms and munitions manufacture. The ascension of the Jacobins over the Girondins undoubtedly represented a repudiation of the latter’s policy of laissez-faire capitalism. The imposition of the Law of the Maximum, the closing of the Deposit Bank and the Bourse, the prohibition of corporations, and the prosecution of financiers and speculators, signified the Jacobin’s rejection of the unfettered market. The dictatorship of the Jacobins was especially hard on the tax farmers and banker-financiers of the ancien régime. On a single day, 8 May 1794, thirty-one farmers and farmers-general of the former regime, were guillotined. The forced loan of 20 May 1793, which hit the rich in particular, reflected the commitment of the Jacobins to progressive taxation. Fiscal equity corresponded with the belief of many Jacobins in a notion of equality based on an equal right to possess property.32 It is fair to say that the egalitarianism of the more extreme Jacobins amounted to a repudiation of the very idea of capitalist development. Other more moderate Jacobins believed that a fair wage was not incompatible with an honest profit.33 Indeed, it is important to realize that the dirigisme of 1793–94 was likely seen by a majority of Jacobins as a temporary expedient. Most were convinced believers in private property and in the free market within the borders of France.34 The necessity of a war against both internal and external counterrevolution and the consequent need to make concessions to keep the support of the peasants and sansculottes, explains the willingness of the majority of Jacobins to accept an emergency state dictatorship over the economy. The ascendancy of the Jacobins reflected the temporary, but necessary, triumph of politics over economics.35 Exemplary in this regard, is the attitude of Joseph Cambon, who directed the finances of the state under the Committee of Public Safety. Heir to a cotton manufacture in Montpellier which employed thousands of workers, Cambon only sold his holdings in 1796.36 At the same time, he retained control of his vast agricultural lands acquired as nationalized properties from the estates of the bishop of Montpellier.37 Cambon’s goal was the consolidation of a strong national economy based on a powerful state. A staunch advocate of a graduated income tax, his great work was the estab-

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lishment of a consolidated national debt.38 Loyal to the Committee of Public Safety and its dirigiste policies until its collapse, Cambon almost immediately afterward called for the reestablishment of freedom of commerce and an end to the Law of the Maximum.39 Cambon was not alone among capitalists in supporting the revolutionary dictatorship. Alongside him there was his friend and fellow Montpellerian, the banker Victor Francis Aigoin who was named Commissioner at the Treasury.40 Meanwhile, his brother-in-law, the merchant Jean-Jacques Brunet, an associate of the Montpellier bank Lajard-Brunet, became one of the Commisioners of the Commission des subsistances.41 In similar fashion, Nicolas Ponsardin, who employed a thousand workers in the largest wool cloth manufacturing establishment in Reim, was twice elected president of the Society of Jacobins in that city during the Terror.42 Likewise, Eugene Balthazar Crescent Bénard, who bought the Reveillon wall paper factory in the Faubourg Saint Antoine in 1791, loyally served the Jacobin regime through the same period and ended up ennobled under Napoleon.43 Managers and directors of the great cotton factories of Thaan and Wesserling in Alsace, controlled the local Jacobin society in these places.44 In the iron-producing region of Breteuil in Normandy, it was the mayor of the town J.-L. Levacher, a maître de forges, with holdings comparable to Ignace de Wendel or Jean de Dietrich, who presided over the local Jacobin society along with the other maîtres de forges of the countryside of Ouche and le Perche.45 While it was generally the case that most of these clubs, which were created all over France, were controlled by radicals from the petty bourgeoisie during the Terror, their membership always retained a small minority of grand bourgeoisie including bankers, wholesale merchants, manufacturers, and rentiers.46 Another servant of the Commission des subsistances was the banker and Girondin, temporarily turned Jacobin Jacob Bidermann. The extraordinarily wealthy and successful Bidermann transformed his merchant bank into an agency of the revolutionary government.47 Also noteworthy is the Swiss Marseille banker Emmanuel Haller who organized the logistics of the Republic’s suppression of the Girondin revolt in the Midi and then the French invasion of Italy.48 More important still, was the influential Swiss Parisian banker Jean-Frédéric Perregaux who, at the behest of the Jacobin regime, organized a committee of French bankers to mobilize the foreign exchange that was necessary in order to import essential products for France’e economy from neutral countries.49 Some forty Parisian merchant banks offered a credit of forty million francs to the radical Republic based on their holdings outside of France.50 It seems clear from this evidence that certain bankers, industrialists, and merchant capitalists were prepared to support the radical Jacobin regime. Their motives appear to have been based on a varying mixture of idealism and expediency. Ought we to conclude, as some have that the democratic and egalitarian spirit of the period of Jacobin rule was illusory? Under-

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neath the demagogic rhetoric some discern an essential continuity with the period of the Legislative Assembly if not with the ancien régime.51 Given the attack on merchant speculators and bankers, the suspension of laissez-faire and the institution of the Law of the Maximum by the Jacobins, the denial of the democratic and egalitarian bent of Jacobin policy is untenable. Moreover, only a small minority of bankers and great merchants were prepared to hazard their persons and capital by actively supporting the Jacobin regime or by committing themselves to new business ventures. Many suspended their operations during the period of Jacobin rule and sent their money abroad or cautiously invested their capital in nationalized properties.52 On the other hand, despite this chill on financial and commercial activity by bankers and merchants, it would be quite wrong to view the period of Jacobin dominance as inimical in principle to capitalism. On the contrary, the Jacobin ascendancy saw a bold attempt to use the state to construct a capitalism from below based on the support of the rural and urban producers. Further on in this discussion, we will take note of the struggle of the landless and less well-off peasants for greater access to the land during this period. The Jacobins, in part, satisfied these demands by dividing the communal lands and making more of the nationalized land available to those of modest means. As we will see, Anatoli Ado interprets these attempts to redistribute property as an effort to establish the economic dominance of rural small producers. The attempt to establish a new agricultural regime based on small producers was ultimately defeated. Such a regime, he has argued nonetheless, would have represented the starting point to the emergence of an agrarian capitalism far more dynamic than the one that actually materialized in the wake of the Revolution. The Jacobins in the towns likewise sought to base themselves on the mass of plebeians. The so-called sansculottes, the politicized mass of the urban population in Paris and elsewhere, were in fact an economically and socially heterogeneous group, as analyzed in the great work of the historian of the movement, Albert Soboul. In their ranks were to be found small business people including some manufacturers, shopkeepers and master craftsmen with varying amounts of capital as well as journeymen and wageworkers. What held them together was the cooperative and intimate nature of the artisan workshop and their belief in an ideology of egalitarianism and direct democracy. Critical to their support of Jacobin rule was the latter’s maintenance of the Law of the Maximum. Soboul’s viewpoint has been challenged by Richard Mowery Andrews. Andrews believed that Soboul took the egalitarian ideology of the sansculottes too much at face value. According to him, Soboul lost sight of the fact that those who dominated the movement were solid bourgeois, notably, the master artisans who commanded sometimes substantial amounts of labor and capital.53 Like much of the peasantry, they resented the domination of the marketplace by merchants and bankers. It was the Jacobins who best reflected the interests of such smaller-scale producers in both town and

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country.54 The Jacobins in turn pursued an economic program based on the idea of developing a strong national economy in part by excluding foreign competitors, especially the English. In this respect they donned, however reluctantly, the mantle of their Girondin rivals. The outbreak of war with England in 1793 was decisive in this regard. That war has been described by one historian as “a war against English capitalism on which depended the fate of French manufacturing.”55 The creation of a nation in arms went with the establishment of a strongly protectionist regime aimed at reinforcing the national economy. The construction of the Jacobin state was not simply based on countering the threat of counterrevolution, but on the determination to oppose the threat from economic competition from its English rival by using political means. The struggle against English capitalism, the encouragement of French manufactures, and control over the export of grain and raw materials sealed the close alliance between manufacturing—the core of the emergent national economy—and the popular classes.56 Such a strong national economy required agricultural and manufacturing production based on the notion of a playing field that was as level as possible between the inhabitants of France. Among its other functions, the role of the state was to institute this equalizing process in part by assisting those citizens who, because of a deficiency or lack of property, could not participate on fair terms in economic life. As Ado points out, such a policy, if successfully implemented, would have led to an explosion of petty commodity production as a prelude to primitive accumulation, social polarization, and the emergence of a vibrant agrarian and industrial capitalism following a path much like that of the new United States. The short-lived Jacobin state may thus be seen as a bold if unsuccessful attempt to install such a capitalism from below. While these policies constituted the social and economic objectives of Jacobin rule, its most pressing concern was organizing a national defense. Here its strategy was based on the levée en masse or total national mobilization that was meant to overwhelm its enemies at home and abroad. But in order to carry out such an unprecedented mass mobilization, the regime was forced to create an entire bureaucracy of expert savants, technicians, and engineers. Control over the economy was instituted not only to feed and mollify the common people, but also to mobilize as fully as possible, the nation’s human and economic capacity to fight the war. The period was therefore marked by a kind of fierce and autarchical industrial Jacobinism designed to marshal among other things, the material resources of the nation. As Jean Claude Perrot points out, proper study of this period requires careful regional analysis of the parts of the economy which came under state control. Such an analysis would seek to comprehend the way in which representatives on mission or local authorities went about sustaining enterprises, controlling markets, regulating capital investment, and confiscating the financial and other property of ecclesiastics and nobles.57

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During the period 1792–94, the Committees of Commerce under Jacobin control, considered requests for financial aid from some 120 enterprises, handed monasteries and chateaux over to entrepreneurs for conversion into factories, and intervened in order to ensure production in various workshops. A serious effort was made to increase agricultural and industrial output. All told, some 280 proposals for the improvement of production or for new machines were brought before experts from the Bureau de consultation des arts et métiers in the period 1791–95. New machine tools, textile machines, and precision instruments constitute an important percentage of these proposals.58 All told more than one million livres in financial aid was distributed to inventors. No doubt these funds were distributed to inventors somewhat indiscriminately and with a lack of attention to ensuring the application of machines to the improvement of industry and agriculture. But some of the inventions supported by the Bureau were subsequently successfully disseminated into French industry.59 Among other projects meant to make possible such an effort at economic mobilization, were the first attempts at serious statistical surveys of the French economy.60 During the period of Jacobin dominance a scientific brain trust, which included Claude-Louis Berthollet, Antoine François de Fourcroy, and Gaspard Monge, made important contributions to the war effort through experiments on copper and steel refining and the production and use of saltpeter and other explosives.61 Alexis-Théophile Vandermode, together with Monge and Berthollet, published a short pamphlet on the best methods for producing steel, thousands of copies of which were distributed to the personnel of foundries, arsenals and armories.62 The chemist Jean-Antoine Allouard Carny perfected new methods for refining saltpeter and for fabricating gunpowder.63 The Jacobin period saw the development of early forms of telegraphy and balloon reconnaissance.64 The scientific theory and technological practice related to the manufacture of saltpeter, muskets, and artillery were taught by Monge, Berthollet, JeanHenri Hassenfratz and Jacques-Constantin Périer to politically conscious artisans from all over France in so-called revolutionary or crash courses.65 At their height, these courses had an enrollment of eight hundred students who disseminated the knowledge they acquired in Paris throughout the country to aid the war effort.66 While these Parisian savants made a major contribution to the war effort, major scientists like Antoine Lavoisier, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and Charles de Coulomb were ignored by the Committee of Public Safety because they were held to be politically suspect.67 Indeed, the Académie des sciences and the provincial academies were dissolved by the revolutionary government because they were considered to be institutions fundamentally tainted by aristocratic values.68 During the heyday of Jacobin rule, only a science that was technologically useful and of benefit to the national defense, indeed,

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comprehensible to a democratic audience, was countenanced.69 Theoretical knowledge was identified with the social pretentiousness and lack of pragmatism of the ancien régime. The attitude of the mining expert and chemist Hassenfratz perhaps best embodies the utilitarian attitude characteristic of the Jacobin ascendancy. In a pamphlet published in July 1793, he insisted that the development of national industry ought to be the fundamental aim of public instruction. The reorganization of arts and crafts through public education should be aimed at stimulating the development of national industry, the building of factories, and the growth of commerce so as destroy tyranny, intrigues, and division in the nation.70 A petition from the revolutionary Lycée des Arts presented by Hassenfratz to the Convention, called for the creation of 2,500 primary schools throughout the nation in which vocational training would be an integral part. Supplementary courses in technology would be offered on Sundays and on holidays to the public.71 In conformity with this view, Fourcroy, professor of chemistry and sansculotte, called for the mobilization of scientists, technicians and engineers to develop the national economy and to defend the Revolution.72 At the heart of the state’s effort was the production of sufficient armaments to supply the mass armies it was raising.73 Under the ancien régime there had existed seven armories scattered throughout France. The Committee of Public Safety took control of these while creating a great new armaments manufacture in Paris and many new ones elsewhere. At its height, the Parisian arsenal employed more than 5,000 workers in 30 government workshops. It aimed to produce 1,000 muskets daily—six times more than the output of the armories of the ancien régime. In an effort to assure industrial peace and to secure patriotic enthusiasm, workers were allowed a limited involvement in the governance of the armories. Worker representatives were appointed to the board governing the manufacture. Likewise, the directors of the various workshops had to be approved by the workers.74 In theory wages were agreed upon through a process of negotiations between management and workers elected from the workshops.75 Despite these gestures toward co-management, the Parisian arsenal saw a steady deterioration in labor relations over the months of its existence which coincided with the period of Jacobin government. The Committee of Public Safety considered the workers in the armories as engaged in a form of patriotic service equivalent to service in the revolutionary army. Accordingly, efforts were made to impose a military discipline on them. Salaries, holidays, absenteeism, efficiency on the job, and efforts to change jobs came under close scrutiny.76 In reaction, the workers contested wages and working conditions as they organized collective protests against the Committee of Public Safety. Under the conditions of the Terror, such resistance was seen as

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treasonous.77 The workers in turn attempted to employ the sansculotte rhetoric of patriotic egalitarianism to advance their demands.78 Something similar occurred in the Parisian spinning workshops that were opened to provide employment to female workers. These workshops were created in 1790 to deal with the large number of indigent workers thrown out of work due to the crisis of 1788–89 and on account of the subsequent decline in the Parisian luxury trades that had catered to the nobility and grand bourgeoisie. In Paris the two principal public spinning workshops employed some 2,000 women who had been made redundant by the crisis in the privately run clothing industry. Conceived as both a welfare scheme and a commercial operation, the outbreak of war saw production in the workshops increasingly geared to supplying the military with uniforms. As with the arms manufacture, conflicts over wages and working conditions between the women and bourgeois administrators reflected differences in class outlook. Nonetheless, during the rule of the Jacobins these female workers, like their coworkers in the arms manufacture, were able to invoke the egalitarian language of the sansculottes to their own advantage to a certain extent.79 As we have noted, relations between the Committee of Public Safety and the workers in the armories deteriorated under the pressure of relentless inflation.80 Worker dissatisfaction and a shortage of skilled labor created a bottleneck in the production of gunlocks. To remedy this situation, at the beginning of May 1794, the Committee of Public Safety established the so-called atelier de perfection or finishing workshop. The establishment of this workshop was meant to increase and improve quality of output using machines to take the place of skilled labor. Hassenfratz and Vandermode, who were put in charge, immediately established interchangeability of parts—a central element of modern mass production—as the key to raising levels of productivity.81 As a result of these efforts by the Jacobin government, by September 1794 a spectacular increase in national armaments production had occurred. There were by then 30 foundries that could produce no less than 12,000 to 13,000 cannons annually. Some 20 musket manufacturers, an identical number of sword manufacturers, and 50 workshops producing bayonets made possible the production of hundreds of thousands of handheld weapons. Two hundred repair shops, 40 munitions works, and 12 naval arsenals completed this impressive complement of military manufacturing.82 While the market economy overall may have suffered from the wars of the Convention, military production based on state orders undoubtedly helped to sustain overall production and employment.83 At Elbeuf, for example, the provision of military uniforms to the army represented a godsend to the otherwise depressed manufacturers of wool clothing.84

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With the coming of Thermidor the workshops of the national arms manufacture were progressively disbanded. A vigorous reaction in favor of private enterprise, even in the armaments industry, made itself felt. Nonetheless, the technocrats on the new post–Thermidorean Committee of Public Safety attempted to defend the atelier de perfection. Unpopular new technologies, they argued, could not establish themselves through private initiatives in the marketplace. The state should undertake to provide ongoing support toward the introduction of such mechanical innovations. Where private capital was unavailable, it should provide the financial means to develop such inventions. To preserve the atelier Fourcroy and Louis-Bernard Guyton transferred it to their newly created Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. The purpose of the state-supported Conservatoire was to instruct citizens in the possibilities of machine production. Henceforth, the atelier, in addition to its work on gunlocks, developed effective tools for a wide variety of the mechanical arts. This was seen as a logical extension of its earlier mission. As Vandermode pointed out, there was a connection between the techniques of production in the armaments industry and the methods of manufacture in almost every other branch of the economy.85 Vandermode’s interest in improving the efficiency of weapons production by means of the introduction of interchangeable parts was included in a larger and more comprehensive vision. It was a perspective shared by other scientists like Berthollet, Hassenfratz and Monge, who served the Jacobins and the Committee of Public Safety. These views were most clearly set out in Vandermode’s lectures as professor of political economy at the École Normale in the Year III.86 Vandermode owed his appointment to his close and long association with Monge and to his network of former students and colleagues. Monge’s influence in government circles was already notable during the last decade of the ancien régime. His power only increased during the Revolution as he and his circle threw in their lot with the Jacobin republic. In contrast to the physiocratic stress on agriculture, Monge and his group of so-called scientific Jacobins, promoted the idea of economic improvement based on industrial development and mechanization. Insofar as economic theory went, Vandermode expressed his passing admiration for Adam Smith. But it was the ideas of another Scottish economist, James Steuart, which really inspired him. Vandermode called for economic development founded on protectionism and a regime of easy credit based on a national paper currency. It was the emergency of war which unfortunately had discredited the assignats, which in principle was a good idea. In conformity with his moderate Jacobin views, Vandermode believed that such an economy should be based on high wages and on the increasing availability of consumer goods that would benefit the common people. High wages would be offset by the productivity gains of industrial innovation based on rational technology.87

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Peasant Revolution and Capitalism In an economic sense the truly revolutionary change in the first decade of the Revolution came in the agrarian economy. Despite appearances to the contrary, a powerful impulse toward the development of rural capitalism marked the period of the National Convention (1792–95). It was an economic impulse that was closely tied to the democratic movements in the countryside that marked these years. The agrarian program of the National and the Legislative Assembly was clearly aimed at strengthening a liberal capitalist regime based on supporting the interests of rich peasants, bourgeoisie and enterprising nobles in the countryside. But these policies did not go unchallenged. As everyone knows, the establishment of the constitutional monarchy in the first place had only been possible through a massive revolt of the urban and rural population. The extinction of feudal privileges by the National Assembly on the night of 4 August 1789, had itself been in response to the vast peasant upheavals of the weeks that had preceded it. But the jacquerie of the summer of 1789 was only the beginning of a cycle of peasant mobilizations that in turn challenged the agrarian policies of the National and Legislative Assemblies. From the end of 1789 to the fall of 1791, three further rural jacqueries affected large parts of rural France. As in the summer of 1789, these uprisings took the form of scattered and uncoordinated regional movements. The new rural communes and national guards served as the organizational basis of many of these localized uprisings. Peasant battalions of 4,000 to 5,000 men were put into the field. The abolition of feudal fiscal charges and the recovery of communal lands, as well as protests over the distribution of nationalized property, united all levels of the peasantry against both the nobles and the bourgeoisie.88 The upheavals of 1789–91 culminated in a major rural uprising in the spring of 1792, which played an important part in the overthrow of the constitutional monarchy on 10 August 1792.89 The mass movement of 1792 was animated by protests on the part of the poorer peasants, rural artisans, and workers upset by low wages and the high price of bread and raw materials.90 Within two weeks of the establishment of the Republic, feudal fiscal obligations, which had previously been transmuted to rent, disappeared altogether. As a result, the peasantry was able to retain 10 to 15 percent more of the surplus. This represented a substantial economic gain for the peasantry as a result of the Revolution.91 The demands of the poorer peasants for access to land were partially met by a decree of June 1793, liquidating the communal lands.92 Against much opposition from the better-off peasants, the Jacobins supported the aspirations on the part of the less well-to-do for a share of the commons and for a more equal division of confiscated property.93 The partition of communal lands and a more equal sharing of nationalized lands gave the less well-off access to a significant

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if indeterminate amount of land.94 For the departément du Nord, Georges Lefevbre estimated that the peasantry increased its share of the land between 1789 and 1802 from 30 to 31 percent to 42 percent. Elsewhere, the gains seem to have been more modest. The better-off peasants were the major beneficiaries, but the middle and poor peasants also benefited.95 Producers of modest means also benefited from the massive liquidation of debt that occurred in these years of hyperinflation.96 Thus, the political weight of smallholding peasants, part-peasants, and agricultural laborers

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guaranteed the survival and extension of smallholdings into the nineteenth century. Lefevbre noted that one hundred years after the Revolution peasants owned 50 percent of the land. They had possessed only one-third prior to the Revolution.97 Lefevbre himself was a firm believer in the Marxist view of the French Revolution. According to him, the development of capitalism in the eighteenth century was directly linked to the outbreak of the Revolution. Furthermore, the Revolution was a bourgeois revolution in the sense that political power was taken over by this class. On the other hand, he believed that the outcome of the Revolution in the countryside had retarded the subsequent development of capitalism. The entrenchment of smallholding peasants had held back agricultural innovation, slowed the development of the market for manufactures, delayed the process of proletarianization, and consequently slowed the development of modern industry. Both Marxist and non-Marxist historians have concurred in this view.98 It has certainly proven grist to the mill of those revisionist historians who insist that the Revolution was an unfortunate error that slowed the process of modernization of the French economy that had begun during the ancien régime. In this sense these historians argue that the Revolution, far from being capitalist, was in fact hostile to capitalism. Ado does not deny that the outcome of the Revolution inhibited the development of capitalism. But his analysis of the reasons for this economic time lag are completely the opposite of those who follow the line of argument of Lefebvre. In the first place, he argues that recent studies have demonstrated that small scale nineteenth-century French agriculture was far more productive than had hitherto been believed. According to Ado, it is not only large farmers who can be productive. The innovativeness of small-scale agriculture demonstrates the productivity of petty commodity producers as well.99 The aspirations of the small and middling peasants during the Revolution was toward access to more land. If the ambitions of these lesser producers had been fully met and if the land was further divided up, Ado admits that this would have retarded the development of agrarian capitalism at first. But under free market conditions it would have speeded primitive accumulation over the medium term, by unleashing the path of small-scale commodity production in both town and country. In other words, the extension of smallholding property and petty commodity production would at first have slowed, but then under dynamic conditions of market competition would have speeded up primitive accumulation. Under conditions of the free market, the full development of simple commodity production would have greatly accelerated the process of class differentiation between emerging rural capitalists, on the one hand, and proletarians on the other hand. At the same time, small-scale commodity production in manufacturing and agriculture would have been stimulated by a greatly expanded internal market.

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Ado’s view of the economic potential of small-scale producers is no mere figment of Marxist theory. It was subscribed to by the adherents of the Revolution who were explicitly committed to the development of French capitalism. Recent research by James Livesey has demonstrated that under the Directory (1795–99) there existed among some of its supporters, a conscious awareness of the connection between the consolidation of the Republic and the promotion of a progressive capitalist agriculture based on small farmers. These proponents of what Livesey calls commercial republicanism, like François de Neufchâteau, were fully conscious of English agricultural achievement based on enclosure, tenant farming and agricultural innovation. In contrast, they elaborated a French republican project of agricultural improvement rooted in support for the small-scale citizen farmer.100 These so-called commercial republicans were convinced that this approach to capitalist development was every bit as viable as was the English alternative based on progressive tenant farming. The moral superiority of farmers, especially small farmers, was underlined by the commercial republicans who supported the Directory. It was a political trope designed to lend legitimacy to the regime. The notion of a republic based on small farmers was reinforced by the idea that freedom was necessarily based on prosperity. The government’s function was to supply credit and education to small agricultural proprietors while ensuring respect for property rights. In theory at least, it became the policy of the Directory to provide the landless with land in order to make them productive citizens.101 A prosperous national economy based on the production and exchange of the products of such an agriculture became the central image of the commercial republican thinkers. Exchange of course should be based on a free market. Such an economy of petty commodity production and a free market would prove to be a solid foundation for the Republic. Comparing Great Britain to France, the commercial republicans argued that Britain could not fulfill the promise of economic liberty, because unlike the republican French, the British under their monarchy, did not enjoy full political liberty.102 But the middle and small peasants achieved their goal of acquiring more land during the Revolution only to a limited extent. Ado, in particular, highlights the demands of poor peasants for a new redistribution of large properties and exploitations. Such claims were especially strong during the period of Jacobin dominance. Yet these demands and the more moderate claims of the middling peasants for a more egalitarian distribution of nationalized properties fell on deaf ears following Thermidor.103 Large property controlled by nobles, bourgeoisie and rich peasants remained one of the foundations of the postrevolutionary agrarian order in France. Moreover, given the persistence of peasants without land or without sufficient land, rent remained an important component of the social product. Ado concludes that it is the persistence of large property

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and the burden of rent, not small peasant property, which inhibited a more rapid development of French capitalism.104 Ado’s emphasis on the importance of the development of a dynamic market based on petty commodity production to the process of primitive accumulation is, in the first place, a reiteration of Marx’s analysis found in parts of Capital.105 But Ado’s application of these insights to the context of the French Revolution represents a major intellectual contribution to scholarly debate. The popular revolution was interpreted by Lefebvre and by others including Marxists and non-Marxists as undercutting the capitalist thrust of the Revolution. But, according to Ado, the popular revolution based on the petty producers ought to be seen as an essential element of the capitalist dynamic characteristic of this upheaval. As such, it powerfully reinforces the notion of the capitalist nature of the French Revolution. Ado’s conception is of great importance in helping us understand the most democratic phase of the Revolution under the Jacobins. It also assists in comprehending those forces—big property, rent, and landlordism—which effectively put limits on French capitalist development. The struggle over land was a key feature of the period of the Convention. But it was not only control of land that was transformed in the countryside. Beginning under Jacobin rule, the revolutionary period saw the transfer of the iron and steel industry, one of the largest and most important industries in the country, out of the hands of the seigneurial class and into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Two-thirds of this largely rural, largely dispersed, and still technologically backward industry was in the hands of ecclesiastics and nobles prior to the Revolution. Most of these enterprises were rented out and operated by so-called maîtres de forges who were of bourgeois origin. Confiscation of the iron and steel works controlled by the clergy was initiated under the Legislative Assembly. About 100 more of these enterprises were seized by the state from émigré nobles during the Convention. All told, two-thirds of the total number of the approximately 1,500 furnaces and forges in France were taken over. During the Convention the industry was considered key to national defense and was closely controlled and supervised. Indeed, during the period of war emergency these operations remained largely state property while being rented out on leases. But under the Directory and under Napoleon they were sold off largely to bourgeois entrepreneurs many of whom had been maîtres de forges under the ancien régime.106 Until the end of the Napoleonic period these new capitalist owners made little effort to modernize this industry that they now controlled. On the other hand, what one does notice is a rapid concentration of ownership and control of mines and forges over the period 1789–1815.107 The stage was set for a future transformation of this industry—key to the development of nineteenth century industrial capitalism—under the auspices of these maîtres de forges who now operated these means of production as their private property.

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Notes 1. Guy Lemarchand, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme,” 184–85; François Hincker, “Economie,” in Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution Française, ed. Albert Soboul (Paris, 1989), 397; Jean-Claude Perrot, “Voies nouvelles pour l’histoire économique de la Révolution,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 47(1975), 33. 2. Serge Chasssagne, Oberkampf,un entrepreneur capitaliste, 167–68. 3. Georges Dejoint, La politique économique du Directoire (Paris, 1951), 17–19. 4. Chassagne, Le Coton et ses patrons, 181–82, 220. 5. Ballot, L’introduction du machinisme, 23. 6. Paul Butel, “Revolution and the Urban Economy: Maritime Cities and Continental Cities, “ in Reshaping France: Town, Country and Region during the French Revolution, eds. Alan Forrest and Peter Jones (Manchester and New York, 1991), 40–41. 7. François Hincker, “Economie,” 397. 8. Lemarchand, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme,”187–88. 9. Lemarchand, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme,”188–9. 10. Ballot, L’introduction du machinisme, 23. 11. Denis Woronoff, L’industrie sidérurgique en France, 193. 12. Hincker, “Economie,” 397. 13. Hincker, “Economie,” 397. 14. David Garrioch, The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie 1690–1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 128–29, 131, 136–38, 145, 148, 153, 158–59; Haim Burstin, Le Faubourg Saint-Marcel à l’époque révolutionnaire: structure économique et composition sociale (Paris, 1983), 212–13. 15. Jean-Marc Moriceau, Les fermiers de l’Ile-de-France, 545; Jean Nicolas, “Villageois et ‘gens d’affaires’,”in Bourgeoisies de province et Révolution: actes du colloque organisé en octobre 1984 par l’Université des sciences sociales de Grenoble et le Musée de la Révolution française à Vizille, ed. Vovelle (Grenoble, France,1987), 167–77. 16. Hirsch, “Sur la bourgeoisie d’affaires lilloise de 1780 à 1815,” in Bourgeoisies de Province, 103–8. 17. Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves du commerce, 27. 18. Cf.Lemarchand and Claude Mazauric,”Le Concept de la liberté d’enterprise dans une région de haut développement économique: la Haute-Normandie: 1787–1800,” in La Révolution française et le développement du capitalisme: actes du colloque de Lille 19–21 novembre 1987, eds. Gayot and Hirsch, Revue du Nord, numero 5 special hors-serie (1989), 137–38, 148, 135–53; Jeremy J. Whiteman, “ Trade and the Regeneration of France, 1789–91: Liberalism, Protectionism and the Commercial Policy of the National Constituent Assembly,” European History Quarterly 31:2(2001), 171–204. 19. Marcel Dorigny, “Recherches sur les idées economiques des Girondins,” in Actes du colloque: Girondins et Montagnards: Sorbonne décembre 1975, ed.Albert Soboul (Paris, 1980), 79–93. 20. Burstin, “La loi Le Chapelier et la conjucture revolutionaire,” in Naissance des libertés économiques: liberté du travail et liberté d’entreprendre: le décret d’Allarde et la loi Le Chapelier, leurs conséquences, 1791-fin XIXe siècle: actes du colloque, Paris, Institut d’études politiques, 28–29 novembre 1991, ed. Alain Plessis (Paris, 1993), 79–93; Burstin, “Un itinerario legistlativo: le leggi Le Chapelier del 1791,” in Rivoluzione Francese; La Forza delle Idee e La Forze delle Cose, ed. Burstin (Milan, 1990). 21. Jacques Bernet, “Les grèves de moissoneurs ou ‘bacchanals’ dans les campagnes d’Ilede-France et de Picardie au XVIIIe siècle,” Histoire et sociétés rurales 11(1999), 153–86; Moriceau, “Les “Baccanals” ou grèves de moissoneurs en pays de France(second moitié du XVIIIe siècle,” in Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, ed. Nicolas, 421–33. 22. Stephen Lawrence Kaplan, La fin des corporations, 494–99, 572–73. Cf. Burstin, “Conflitti sul lavoro e protesta annonaria a Parirgi alla fine dell’Ancien Régime,” Studi Storici

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23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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19(1978), 735–85; Kaplan, La Révolution à l’oeuvre: le faubourg Saint-Marcel (1789–1794) (Paris, 2005), 306–9. Jean-Claude Perrot, “Voies nouvelles pour l’histoire économique de la Révolution française,” 58; Burstin, “Problèmes du travail à Paris sous la Révolution,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 44:4(1997), 670–71. Michael Sonenscher, “The Sans-Culottes of the Year II: Rethinking the Language of Labour in Revolutionary France,” in Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale XVIeXIXe siècles ed. Jean Nicolas, 571. Lemarchand, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme,”196–97; Ado, Paysans en révolution, 241–43. Jean-Pierre Poussou, La terre et les paysans, 307. Peter Mcphee, “The French Revolution, Peasants and Capitalism,”1266; Gérard Béaur, Histoire agraire, 18–19. Béaur, Histoire agraire, 38. Béaur, Histoire agraire, 56. Bernard Bodinier and Éric Teyssier, L’évenément le plus important de la Révolution: La vente des biens nationaux (Paris, 2000), 228, 439. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 430–31. Jean-Pierre Gross, Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice (New York, 1997), 147. Gross, Fair Shares, 161–62. François Hinker, “Y’eut-il une penséee économique de la Montagne? “ in Colloque International de Vizille (1989), La pensée économique pendant la Révolution française: actes du colloque international de Vizille: (6–8 septembre 1989), eds. Gilbert Faccarello and Philippe Steiner (Grenoble, France, 1990), 215. Hinker, “Y’eut-il une penséee économique de la Montagne?” 213. See Alain Chante, “Les manufactures d’indiennes à Montpellier au XVIIIe siècle, “ in De la fibre à la fripe: le textile dans la France méridionale et l’Europe méditerranéene (XVIIe-XXe siècle): actes du colloque du 21 et du 22 mars 1997 Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier, eds. Geneviève Gavignaud-Fontaine, Henri Michel and Elie Pélaquier (Montpellier, France,1998), 143–66. Michel Bruguière, Gestionnaires et profiteurs de la Révolution: l’administration des finances françaises de Louis XVI à Bonaparte (Paris, 1986), 77. Clovis Sené, Joseph Cambon (1756–1820): le financier de la Révolution: biographie (Paris, 1987),153–56, 160–61. Hincker, “Joseph Cambon,”in Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution Française, ed. Soboul, 183–85. François Balteau, “ François-Victor Aigoin,” Dictionnaire de biographie francaise, ed. J. Balteau et al. (Paris, 1933–), vol.1, 875–76. Bruguière, Gestionnaires et profiteurs, 237. Georges Clause, “L’industrie lainière rémoise à l’époque napoléonienne,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 17:3(1970), 580. Raymonde Monnier, Le faubourg Saint-Antoine, 130. J.M.Schmitt, Aux origines de la révolution industrielle, 367. Christine Peyrard, Les Jacobins de l’Ouest (Paris, 1996), 96–104. The case of the wealthy merchant and speculator in nationalized properties, Benoît Lacombe, who placed himself in the forefront of the popular society of Gaillac, is detailed by Joël Cornette, Un révolutionnaire ordinaire: Benoît Lacombe, Négociant 1759–1819 (Paris, 1986), 211–12. On a smaller scale also see the Jacobin François Mauvage, a fan manufacturer, who employed sixty workers and became revolutionary commissioner of the Paris section du Nord. Cf. Monnier, “De l’An II à l’An IX, les derniers sans-culottes. Résistance et répression à Paris sous le Directoire et au début du Consulat,” in Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, ed.Nicolas, 597.

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46. Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution (New York and Oxford, 2000),103 Cf. Joël Cornette, “ La personne, l’histoire et le récit: le destin de Benoit Lacombe propriétaire, négociant et revolutionnaire (1783–1 819),” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 32:4(1985)561–90; Monnier, “Antoine-Joseph Santerre,brasseur et speculateur,” in La Révolution française et le dévelopement du capitalisme, eds.Gayot et Hirsch, 333–46; Danièle Pingué, Les mouvements jacobins en Normandie orientale (Paris, 2001), 465–66, 474. 47. Roman d’Amat, “Jacob Bidermann,” in Dictionnaire de biographie française, ed. J. Balteau, et al., (Paris, 1933), vol.6, 407–08; Herbert Lüthy, La banque protestante, vol. 2, 730; Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton, 1985), 205. Bidermann’s economic and political ideas were similar to those of his mainly Girondin friends. He explained his adherence to the Jacobins as the action of one among those who knew how to impose privations on themselves for the sake of preserving liberty. Cf. Charles Poisson, Les Fournisseurs aux armes sous la révolution française (Paris, 1932), 47–50. 48. Lüthy, Banque protestante, vol. 2, 643. 49. Emile Ducoudray, “Jean-Frédéric Perregaux,” in Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution Française, 836–38; Bruguiere, “La Place du Nord sur les routes de l’argent 1792–98,” in La Révolution française et le dévelopement du capitalisme, eds.Gayot et Hirsch, 91–98. 50. François Pascal, L’économie dans la Terreur: Robert Lindet: 1746–1825 (Paris, 1999), 221. 51. Bruguière, Gestionnaires et profiteurs, 73–108. 52. Lüthy, Banque protestante, vol. 2, 728, 731–32; Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, Les banques européennes, 423. 53. Richard Mowery Andrews, “Social Structures, Political Elites and Ideology in Revolutionary Paris, 1792–94: A Critical Evaluation of Albert Soboul’s Les Sans-Culottes Parisiens en l’An II,” Journal of Social History 19:1(1985), 71–112. 54. Andrews’s characterization of this element is undoubtedly correct. Yet he appears to have exaggerated the degree to which they were able politically to control the mass of the sansculottes. Cf. Monnier, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 128–35. 55. François Démier, “ Les ‘economistes de la nation’ contre l’ ’economie-monde’ du XVIIIe siecle,”in Pensée économique pendant la Révolution française, 286. The emergent industrial bourgeoisie of Rouen, for example, strongly supported the policy of protection against British manufactures. Cf. Eric Wauters, “La Normandie en Révolution et le monde atlantique: un dialectique de l’oeuverture et du repli,” in Révolution Française: idéaux, singularités, influences; actes des journées d’études en hommage à Albert Soboul, Jacques Godechot et Jean-René Surratteau, ed. Jean-Clement Martin (Grenoble, France, 2002), 51–62. 56. François Démier, “Les ‘economistes de la nation,’” 286. 57. Perrot, “Voies nouvelles pour l’histoire économique,”33; Michel Biard, Missionaires de la République (Paris, 2002), 306–21. 58. Perrot, “Voies nouvelles pour l’histoire économique,” 38–39. Over the revolutionary period, 750 patents were issued in conformity to the law of patents of 1791. Cf. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years (Princeton, 2004), 198–99. 59. Dominique De Place, “Le Bureau de Consultation pour les Arts, Paris, 1791–96,” History and Technology 5:1(1988), 139–78. 60. Perrot, “The Golden Age of Regional Statistics(Year IV–1804),” in State and Statistics in France, 1789–1815, eds. Perrot and Stuart J. Woolf (Chur, Switzerland and New York, 1984), 12–14; Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 2000), 42–43. 61. Monge appears to have been the central figure in organizing scientists for war. Cf, Gillispie, Science and Polity in France:The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years, 339–45; Rodger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley, 1971), 256–62.

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62. C. Richard, Le comité du salut public et les fabrications de guerre (Paris, 1922), 209–11. On the pamphlet by Monge and Berthollet and other technical manuals written by French scientists to assist the war effort, cf. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years, 389. 63. Richard, Comité du salut public, 669. 64. Richard, Comité du salut public, 612–32. 65. Richard, Comité du salut public, 469. 66. Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, 1997), 303. 67. Joseph Fayet, La Révolution française et la science, 1789–1795 (Paris, 1960), 251–53. 68. Margaret Jacob, Scientific Culture, 38; Nicole et Jean Dhombres, Naissance d’un nouveau pouvoir: sciences et savants en France 1793–1824 (Paris,1989), 18–21. 69. Dhombres, Naissance d’un nouveau pouvoir, 32–33. More radical elements like Henri Descremps, author of La science sans-culotissée (Paris, chez l’auteur, An II) demanded a yet greater democritization of science. Cf. Jean-Luc Chappey, “Enjeux sociaux et politiques de la ‘vularization scientifique’ en Révolution (1780–1810),” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 338(2004), 30–31. 70. Emmanuel Grison, Du Faubourg Montmartre au Corps des Mines: l’étonnant parcours de républicain J.-H. Hassenfratz (Paris, 1996), 185; Pierre Gourdin, “L’apport du republicain J. H. Hassenfratz à l’histoire des chaux et ciments,” Scientifiques et societies pendant la révolution et l’Empire in Actes du 114e Congrès Nationale des Societes Savantes (Paris 3–9 Avril, 1989) (Paris, 1990), 514. 71. Grison, Du Faubourg Montmartre, 186. 72. Dhombres, Naissance d’un nouveau pouvoir, 47–48. 73. Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 253–91; Roger Dupuy, La Répubique Jacobine: terreur, guerre et gouvernement révolutionnaire 1792–1794 (Paris, 2005), 78–79. 74. Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 265–66. 75. Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 270. 76. Richard, Comité du salut public, 25–43, 699–705. 77. Richard, Comité du salut public, 710–11. 78. Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 261. 79. Lisa Dicaprio, “Women Workers, State-Sponsored Work, and the Right to Subsistence During the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 71:3(1999), 519–51. 80. Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 272. 81. Richard, Comité du salut public, 80–81, Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 277. 82. Denis Woronoff, Industrie sidérurgique en France, 384–85. 83. Woronoff, Industrie sidérurgique en France, 409–10, 516. 84. Alain Becchia, Francis Concato and Pierre Largesse, “L’industrie drapière elbeuvienne,” 215–18. 85. Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 282. 86. On this institution see Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years, 494–520. 87. Charles R.Sullivan, “ The First Chair of Political Economy in France: Alexandre Vandermode and the Principles of Sir James Steuart at the Ecole Normale of the Year III,” French Historical Studies 20:4 (1997), 635–64. 88. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 253–54. 89. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 257. 90. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 292. 91. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 307–8, 431. 92. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 357. 93. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 379. 94. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 431. The complexity of these rural conflicts in Picardy is analyzed in Ikni, Crise agraire et révolution paysanne, vol. 3, 284–89. 95. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 432–23.

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96. Atlas historique de la Révolution, vol. 10, L’Economie, eds. Gérard Béaur and Philippe Minard, 58. 97. Mcphee, “French Revolution, Peasants and Capitalism,”1267. 98. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 433–34, Mcphee, “The French Revolution, Peasants and Capitalism,” 1268–69. 99. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 437, Mcphee, “ French Revolution, Peasants and Capitalism,” 1269–71. 100. James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution, 101–2. 101. Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution, 158–62. 102. Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution, 104–8. 103. Ado, Paysans en révolution, 395–405, 450, Moriceau, Terres mouvantes, 76, 78–79, 382, 384 et passim. 104. Mcphee, “The French Revolution, Peasants and Capitalism,” 1273–74. 105. Mcphee, “The French Revolution, Peasants and Capitalism,” 1276 provides the key references in Capital, vol. 1, chap. 32, app. 1, vol. 3, chaps. 20, 47 pt. 5. Ado’s work in the context of Marxist thought is explored in Hernâni Resende, Socialisme utopique et question agraire dans la transition du féodalisme au capitalisme (Paris, 1976). 106. Woronoff, Industrie sidérurgique en France, 80–88. 107. Peyrard, Jacobins de l’Ouest, 105–6.

Chapter 6

THE DIRECTORY (1795-1799)


A little more than a year after the fall of Robespierre, the National Convention was replaced by a new government which called itself the Directory. At first it was tightly controlled by Thermidorean members of the Convention, many of whom were able to retain their seats in the new government. The new regime survived for four years until the coup d’état of Napoleon Bonaparte on 9 November (18th Brumaire) 1799. The government of the National Convention had been a democratic republic which based its economic policies on centralized management of prices, wages and commerce. The Directory attempted to maintain the Republic, but on the basis of a reassertion of liberal ideas in politics and the economy. Political life was made more exclusive and restrictive, while more freedom was given to the market. While it did not abolish democracy outright, its system of indirect elections limited ultimate control over the composition of the government to about thirty thousand substantial property holders. Limiting participation in government in this way, the Directory sought to restrict not only popular political participation, but to also exclude from power members of the old nobility and the monarchist bourgeoisie. Rejecting the state controlled economy of the Jacobins, the Directory confined itself to a lower level of political control in accord with the principles of laissez-faire.1 At the same time, the continuation of trade protectionism and the pursuit of war against England opened up fresh possibilities toward the establishment of the economic dominance of France on the European Continent.2 The republican bourgeoisie, which governed under the Directory, sought to consolidate what it regarded as the essential gains of the Revolution: legal equality, administrative reform, the abolition of feudalism, Notes for this section begin on page 121.

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and the ongoing sell-off of the nationalized properties of the church and the émigré nobles. Its social base was the rather large and solid one of the urban bourgeoisie and propertied peasantry. These elements had played a major part in the early phase of the Revolution. They wished now to avoid a return of either the Terror or the monarchy. Both were seen to threaten what the bourgeoisie had gained from the Revolution. An important insight into the nature of the new order is reflected in a speech of September 1794 by Paul-Augustin Lozeau, an obscure Thermidorian from the Charente-Inférieure. According to him, it was impossible to transform everyone into owners of property. This, of course, had been the conception of equality advanced by the Jacobin leader Maximilien de Robespierre. According to Lozeau, it was chimerical, furthermore, to try to do away with poverty. Even if it were possible how then, asked Lozeau, could the big farmers, the merchants, and the industrialists find the labor power that was indispensable to their enterprises?3 It was essential to the emergent capitalist economy, Lozeau rightly discerned, that there be a class available that needed to sell its labor in order to survive. Rejecting at first any notion of an alliance with the discredited Jacobins, the Directory sought above all, a reconciliation with repentant and chastened monarchists willing to accept the new order of the Republic. At the same time, in order to win the more moderate royalists over to the idea of a conservative and constitutional republic, the Directory needed to destroy all hope of a monarchical restoration based on counterrevolution.4 The radical phase of the Revolution had fundamentally altered the social structure. In Paris the high ecclesiastics of the church, the court nobility, and the former regime’s legal and financial officials including the farmers-general, had all been swept away. Lawyers were still important, but had diminished in number and prestige. Inflation had ruined many rentiers and severely squeezed owners of property. On the other hand, it is worth underlining that virtually all of the prerevolutionary banking houses survived the period of Jacobin ascendancy and resumed operations.5 It was financiers and bankers like the Jean-Frédéric Perregaux and Claude Perier who made out best under the Directory. Their ranks were enlarged by a stratum of nouveaux riches who made their fortunes through military contracts and speculation in the wake of the Revolution. Already under the Convention, substantial amounts of money were made in the sale and resale of nationalized properties, and in the disposal of property seized in conquered lands and through government contracts.6 The scale of such activity on the part of speculators grew dramatically under the Directory.7 Many of those who had been part of the bureaucracy of army provisioners under the Convention, reappeared as the heads of private companies contracting with the Directory.8 The ongoing budgetary difficulties of the new government encouraged the privatization of army provisioning through contracting out to these commercial enterprises. At the same time, at least twenty-five members of the government of the Directory had a financial

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interest in these private companies.9 While one should not exaggerate the riches accumulated by such upstarts in these unsettled years, it would be foolish to ignore them. If the history of capitalism demonstrates anything, it is that the possibilities for profit by private entrepreneurs are never greater than when the state is at war. More to the point, such wealthy parvenus constituted an important new element of the bourgeoisie that was issuing from the Revolution.10 In addition, the ongoing activities of the real captains of industry, especially in cotton manufacturing, also helped to strengthen the emergent bourgeoisie. On a lower social level, the ranks of those employed by the state as bureaucrats grew compared to what they had been prior to the Revolution. At the top of this enlarged bureaucracy of largely middle class origin stood additional members of the new bourgeois elite.11 Writers and actors took a central role in the Revolution and raised their prestige in the eyes of public opinion. Despite all the ups and downs in business in these revolutionary times, many merchants and artisans saw their affairs prosper and became members of the emergent middle class. There was as well, the rural bourgeoisie whose ranks had been strengthened by the sale of the nationalized properties of the church and émigré nobles. With all this, in the words of one historian, the whole new social order dominated by the bourgeoisie remained an incongruent hodgepodge and had still to sort itself out.12 The Directory was plagued by problems. Not the least of these difficulties was the incompetence, unpopularity, and corruption of the government and the elites. Disillusioned by economic hardship and effective political exclusion, most citizens of the republic responded to the Directory with an attitude of studied indifference. In contrast to the period of the Convention, the four years of the Directory saw the depoliticization of the majority of the population. Ordinary citizens refused to participate in elections, evaded taxes, and avoided service in the armies. Despite such political apathy on the part of most citizens, the early Directory was marked by threats from a still active opposition from both the politically conscious Left and Right. Having effectively quashed the Jacobin Left in 1795–96 through an alliance with the Right, the government had to face the serious prospect of a royalist coup on 22 September 1797 (18th Fructidor).13 In order to save itself, the Directory temporarily encouraged the reemergence of the republican Left.14 Thereafter, until its fall on 18th Brumaire(1799), the threat to the Directory appeared to come from an increasingly strong democratic and Jacobin revival.15 The military reverses of 1798–99 intensified fears of a second Jacobin government.16 The government’s method of rule correspondingly became more and more repressive as it approached its own extinction.17 Over the four years of the Directory, the opposition on the Left and Right attempted to create effective parties through local organizations and newspapers. The leaders of the Directory resisted these

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efforts, while proving to be incapable of creating a strong political coalition of the center that was able to secure substantial grassroots support. The failure and corruption of the Directory amid ongoing economic and political difficulties, have cast its memory in a negative light. The traditional historiography of the regime has therefore been generally unfavorable. Recently, however, a new more positive trend of interpretation has emerged that puts the spotlight on the ideological creativeness of the Directory. As we have noted in our discussion of the commercial republicans in chapter 5, the Directory promoted an ideology that sought to reconcile its commitment to private property and free markets with the promotion of the idea of an agrarian-based republic.18 It was at this time, too, that Jean-Baptiste Say began to enunciate his ideas on the development of industrial capitalism. The evidence suggests that in contrast to his later apparently apolitical position, that Say was, by political conviction, a convinced republican in the first decade of the Revolution. It is noteworthy that La Décade, the journal he was closely associated with, was founded in the midst of the Terror. At that time, the journal took the line current among certain members of the upper middle class that the strong government of the Committee of Public Safety was necessary to the defense of the Revolution. Such a view, as we have seen, was common among more affluent Jacobin supporters. The Jacobin government’s attempts to use the fine and mechanical arts to politically and morally educate the public and to develop agriculture and industry were also applauded by La Décade.19 Following the fall of Robespierre, Say and his friends supported the conservative republicanism of the Directory. Adopting a perspective that he would later renounce in favor of an economism divorced from politics, Say championed a republic as the form of government that would best promote the industriousness and frugality that were necessary for the successful development of a capitalist industrial economy. Based on artists and inventors, and entrepreneurs and workers, such an economy would be the product not simply of a proper economic policy, but of a suitably republican politics and austere civic morality.20 Meanwhile, economic theory itself evolved under the Directory in the direction of a more mature conception of a capitalist economy. It was in this period that physiocratic doctrines, which insisted on the primacy of agriculture to the economy, came under concerted attack. Led by Say and Roederer, the leading economists championed laissez-faire capitalism based on the notion of the equality of all forms of capital—agricultural, industrial, merchant, and financial. At the same time, the necessity of an economic division of labor was now invoked as the justification for an unequal social order.21 The move away from physiocratic ideas towards a more sophisticated conception of a capitalist economy reflects both the political and economic changes that the decade of Revolution had made possible. These achievements in the realm of theory and ideology have led to a major effort to challenge the received view of the Directory by James

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Livesey in his Making Democracy in the French Revolution. We have already referred to Livesey’s research with reference to the efforts of the commercial republican ideologues of the Directory to promote the small-scale farmer as the political and economic foundation of the Republic. Livesey’s purpose is, however, far greater. He conceives the great achievement of nineteenth-century French history to have been the creation of a postrevolutionary subject or individual who was at the same time a rational citizen and the autonomous economic and social agent of capitalist republicanism. It was the thinkers and political actors of the Directory, he argues, who created the foundations of this new public culture. Livesey claims that the admitted failures of the Directory have obscured the profound transformations in social and cultural values that it promoted. The Directory created the forms and discourse of popular modernity, according to him. Until the Directory, every effort during the Revolution to formalize the market as a central institution in French political life had failed. It was the Directory that created the language and culture that made the acceptance of the market possible. As a result of the ideological innovations of the commercial republicans, social struggles over the nature of the economy henceforth became protests over monopolies, not over the principle of the market itself. The Directory’s success, if we are to believe Livesey, was to create the nineteenth century language of democratic capitalism.22 Livesey’s view of the Directory clearly marks a sharp break with the traditionally pessimistic view of this period.23 But his analysis has still more radical implications. In terms of the current debate between revisionists and Marxists, Livesey breaks sharply with the revisionist view of the French Revolution. According to Livesey, revisionist attempts to measure the economic consequences of the Revolution in terms of short-term costs and benefits is historiographically misconceived. The Revolution entailed the creation of the fundamental political and economic institutions that governed France through the next century and beyond. In economic terms, what was in question was the model of the market, the forms of wage labor, the archetype of property, and the ideal of the small unit of production and of the industrial community. Measured in terms of subsequent economic growth, the consequences of the institutional changes of the Revolution make France compare favorably with Great Britain.24 Clearly, Livesey’s analysis marks a definite break with revisionism that we of course welcome. Rather than decrying the Revolution, Livesey celebrates it. Moreover, in contrast to the revisionist attempt to prove that it was noncapitalist or anticapitalist, Livesey sees the Revolution as essential to the future capitalist development in France. Furthermore, he acknowledges albeit somewhat indirectly, the great importance of Ado’s view of the key significance of petty commodity producers to the development of a vital capitalist economy. At first glance, it would seem that Livesey has been won over to the Marxist view of the Revolution. It turns out that nothing

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could be further from the truth. As he makes clear in his introduction, Livesey seeks “to rescue the Revolution from the dead hand of nineteeth century philosophies of history.”25 It is as much from Marx as from the revisionists that Livesey seeks to distance his work. Perhaps more so. Marxists have always stressed the early phase of the Revolution based on mass politics as its creative period. Instead, Livesey lays the stress on the Directory not only as the period of consolidation, but as the key phase of innovation. It was an outstanding period because it created the language and institutions that were, in the long term, to culminate in the democratic capitalism of the Third Republic. Such a democratic capitalism was to be based on small-scale rural producers. There can be no doubt that there is much food for thought in this viewpoint. On reflection there would seem to be a real connection, as Livesey suggests, between the aspirations and actions of the politicians of the Directory and those of the Third Republic. Livesey’s insights into the relationship between the Revolution and subsequent nineteenth-century French history are as important as is his attack on revisionism that he correctly perceives as a dead end. On the other hand, the democracy that Livesey sees in the making under the Directory is of a most peculiar kind. As he himself makes clear, it has nothing to do with the economic egalitarianism, mass politics, and experiments in direct democracy or even with the universal suffrage and democratic elections of the Jacobin period that became the legacy of the left. Livesey is apparently embarrassed to discuss in any detail the highly limited nature of the actual so-called democratic political suffrage that did exist under the Directory.26 He makes much of the verbal commitment of the Directory toward some kind of democratic partition of the common lands. Yet he has to confess that this was belated and in the end did not at all succeed.27 Such as they were, the laws sanctioning egalitarian partition of the commons were in fact an initiative of the Jacobins which proved critical to saving the Republic in its moment of danger. The failure to enforce these laws by the Directory and by subsequent regimes ensured the persistence of the economically and politically regressive system of large property and rent. Insofar as peasants subsequently acquired more access to land, they had to politically and economically struggle for it. Livesey appears to be more impressed with the invention of the language than with the substance of equality. Livesey’s case for the Directory helping to constitute French democracy, ultimately is untenable. Indeed, Livesey, in the final analysis, is not talking about making democracy at all but rather about making capitalism. It was the Directory that first offered the French the illusion of democratic institutions and democratic language and the reality of the capitalist market. In doing so, it posed the problem of modern politics that the conservative politicians of the Third Republic more or less resolved. A politics that reconciles the masses to social and economic inequality is what Livesey considers making democracy. Living in the greviously unequal world we live in at present, it is regrettable but not a surprise that Livesey chooses to cel-

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ebrate this as an achievement. In conclusion we should note that Livesey’s contention that the Directory reconciled the Revolution to the market is only a partial truth. If Livesey is talking about an unregulated market, clearly this is not the case. The Napoleonic regime that followed the Directory rejected laissez-faire. Indeed, the rationalizations of supporters of the Directory proved to be politically unconvincing to the majority of the French people in the 1790s. Contrary to Livesey, the Directory failed to advance a convincing ideological rationale for its continued existence. Moreover, it was unable to deploy the mythology of the Revolution in a way that was politically effective. In the meantime, such political support for the regime as it did have was undermined by chronic economic difficulties.28 The restriction of democracy by the Directory was not accepted by the Left. It gave rise to a neo-Jacobin movement, which despite setbacks, grew stronger, especially from 1797 onward. To the left of these radical republicans there appeared the first Communists, the most important of whom was Gracchus Babeuf. Babeuf and his not inconsiderable following were far from accepting the market. To be sure his revolutionary conspiracy of 1796 never had a real chance of success as the working class was only beginning to emerge as a class. The conspiracy arose out of the defeat of the mass popular movement in the wake of Thermidor. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and ClaudeAdrien Helvétius may be seen as the intellectual progenitors of Babeuf’s ideas. But also important to the development of Babeuf’s radicalism was his experience of rural pauperization and concomitant development of agricultural and manufacturing capitalism in Picardy and elsewhere in France.29 Babeuf’s adherents were, in the main, recruited from among the veterans of the sansculotte movement, especially from its most popular ranks.30 It is frequently asserted that, as a result, most of those involved in the conspiracy were nostalgic for the direct democracy of the Year II rather than yearning after communism. Babeuf’s collectivist economic ideas it is claimed, were only vaguely understood. In the end it is believed that his conspiracy of equals was made up of a set of conspirators with no unified political program.31 According to this view, here and there in the workshops there were faint stirrings of support for Babeuf. However, it is believed that he notably failed to arouse significant support from workers. The recent work by Jean Marc Schiappa reflects a very different perspective. Schiappa demonstrates that working-class agitation was widespread all over France leading up to the Conspiracy of Equals. Moreover, the ideas and organizational activity of the followers of Babeuf played a surprisingly significant part in structuring this agitation.32 The threat embodied in the Conspiracy in fact was reflected in the merciless punishment of its leaders by Lazare Carnot and by the other members of the Directory in the wake of its failure.33 The articulation of a communist ide-

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ology by Babeuf and the substantial number of working-class followers that were attracted to it, is an important indicator of the attempt by a politicized minority on the Left to begin to come to terms with the reality of an emergent French working class which began to make itself felt as early as the strike wave of 1791. Indeed, for all its initial dependence on the sansculotte movement, it should be stressed that the collapse of that movement opened the way for the emergence for the first time of a movement with a genuinely working-class perspective. The experience of the Revolution and especially of the Jacobin dictatorship, had been decisive to the development of Babeuf’s revolutionary and communist ideas. The Jacobin experiment in the political control of consumption and regulation of production led Babeuf to the notion that such a system could become the basis for a new economic order based on equality of consumption.34 Private property was rejected and all property was in principle, to be nationalized. On the other hand, reflecting the still smallscale nature of the existing means of production, such production would remain in the hands of families working individual farms and workshops. The state would merely reserve the right of eminent domain over such property. Where the state would intervene decisively would be at the level of distribution where it would ensure equality in consumption.35 The successful implementation of the Law of the Maximum by the Jacobin government must have encouraged Babeuf’s belief in the feasibility of implementing such equality at the level of distribution. The difficulty of the times furthermore made Babeuf an advocate of a rather unattractive equality of scarcity rather than of abundance.36 Babeuf’s politics appear likewise to have developed in part based on Jacobin experience. In order to implement such a communist design, Babeuf believed in the necessity of a communist party led by a secret directory of public safety. Such a party would use conspiracy and violence to achieve political power while subsequently establishing a temporary revolutionary dictatorship.37 During the short life of the Directory the government was plagued by economic instability. It was destabilized by serious inflation, deflation, corruption, and the repercussions from the plundering of conquered territories. In the immediate aftermath of its assumption of power, a monetary and financial crisis hindered production and trade and exacerbated social inequalities. The crisis was intensified by cold and famine during the severe winter of 1795–96. These problems were made worse by the widespread sense that some-speculators, parvenus, merchants, and rich farmers—were in fact prospering, while the politically excluded working population and the poor bore the brunt of the suffering.38 Indeed, these difficult economic and social circumstances were partly the result of a deliberate government policy of deflation designed to bring inflation under control. Such unequally shared hardship fueled intense opposition from the Left. The govern-

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ment sought to counter such opposition by repression and through alliances with moderate and even extreme royalists. The Directory did not set out to make itself unpopular. Its objective was to stabilize the economy to allow the market to engender profits and a renewal of economic growth. From a fiscal point of view, the goal was the negative one of eliminating the fiscal excesses of the previous government. The end of price controls by the Thermidoreans in December 1794 had in fact unleashed a dramatic inflation. The subsequent deflationary measures adopted by the government, at first partial and hesitant, and then more coherent and purposeful, inflicted much pain but in the longer term laid the foundation for a new economic expansion.39 At first, the problems attendant on serious inflation and devaluation of the currency appeared to worsen. The initial period of the Directory saw a precipitous decline in the value of assignats and a runaway increase in prices. Those who had borrowed money, including those who had acquired nationalized properties, rejoiced while creditors were in a state of despair.40 The treasury meanwhile was empty. Indirect taxes had lapsed with the onset of the Revolution. The tax on land was grossly in arrears. Between 1791 and 1795, 16 billion francs of tax had been assessed, but the state had only been able to collect 3 billion.41 In the wake of the Revolution, the peasants in particular withheld payment on their tax assessments. In order to assure itself of revenue, the government imposed a forced loan on the wealthy. They proved as recalcitrant as the peasantry. The assignats, by now virtually worthless, were no longer printed after 19 February 1796.42 An unsuccessful attempt was then made to issue new paper money backed by nationalized property in the form of so-called mandats territoriaux or jurisdictional warrants.43 The government recalled them on 4 February 1797, creating a second severe recession. Agricultural prices collapsed and the market for manufactures withered in the face of a shortage of means of exchange.44 This monetary deflation cleared the way for the issue of a metallic currency and ultimate economic recovery. In 1797–98 steps were taken to curb government deficits and to reduce the national debt while restructuring the tax system so as to improve revenue.45 Government expenditure was sharply cut, reducing if not eliminating, the budgetary deficit.46 Lowering the burden of debt was achieved by a stepby-step repudiation of outstanding obligations. The reform of the finances was made possible by creating a more effective bureaucracy and by the imposition of four main taxes, that is, a land tax, tax on movable property, a business license fee, the so-called patente, and a tax on doors and windows.47 Taxes were imposed in order to encourage savings and improvements in productivity.48 Despite ongoing problems with collection these impositions proved to be a permanent legacy of the Directory as these taxes became the basis of the French system of taxation for the next century. In the short run these measures signified the consolidation of a socalled responsible republican government.49

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Financial policy was powerfully shaped by those who controlled the great contracting companies on whom the regime depended to supply its armies, the more so as ultimately the big bankers and financiers became involved in underwriting these enterprises.50 During the years of the Directory there was little profit to be had from investing in productive economic enterprises. Rather, it was by contracting with the state that private companies headed by speculators accumulated extraordinary profits. These profits were compounded by the acquisition and resale of nationalized properties on a grand scale by these same contractors and their financial backers. In a sense, the state underwrote such returns to those with financial capital while insisting that the rest of the population conform to the principles of the free market. Meanwhile, up to a quarter of the state budget was met from taxes extorted from the conquered territories. 51 The perilous condition of France’s internal finances ensured that war beyond the borders of France necessarily had to be fiscally predatory on the conquered populations.52 Indeed, Napoleon under the Directory, was in the process of discovering that war and conquest could pay for itself. Napoleon’s notions reinforced those of the Directors who came to the additional conclusion that the exclusion of the English from the Continent was not only the way to collect tribute, but the means to assure France of markets and raw materials. War became the means for advancing the industrial interests of French manufactures at the expense of the English but also at the expense of the Dutch, Swiss and Italians.53 Already under the Directory, then, the future of French industry was linked to a politics of imperialism on the Continent.54 Moreover, a whole network of financiers, speculators, and bankers on whom the Directory depended, developed an interest in sustaining such a politics of war. Meanwhile, ostensibly faithful to the principles of laissez-faire, the government attempted to stimulate the economy by publishing economic statistics, promoting agricultural societies, and publishing technical information to improve farming. It encouraged manufacturers by helping them to collect debts and by trying to control workers.55 It organized the first national industrial exhibition in Paris in September 1798.56 The short life of the Directory saw the sale of most of the rest of national property to the benefit of the rural and urban well-off, the amassing of overnight wealth by army contractors, and often successful attempts by nobles to recover confiscated property by negotiated agreement with neighbors or, if necessary, by intimidation.57 Efforts to improve agricultural practices, begun under the ancien régime, were resumed largely among the elite rural producers. The further spread of the cultivation of the potato represented insurance against the recurrence of famine.58 Deforestation, the deterioration of roads, and an upsurge of banditry reflected a lack of effective governance.59

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Ecclesiastical holdings in iron and steel manufacture had been sold off by 1792. The period of the Directory saw the transfer of many other forges and mines that had been owned by nobles into the hands of the middle class.60 A significant number of other aristocratic and ecclesiastical edifices that had been confiscated and sold to entrepreneurs were converted to industrial sites. At Lille, for example, the purchase of national property became a means of preserving capital, providing future credit, and financing conversion from commercial activities to manufacturing.61 Numerous attempts to create new manufactures were initiated in the Paris region, in Normandy, in Alsace, in the northern departéments, and in the southwest. But overall, in such traditional industrial sectors as silk, canvas, and wool manufacture as well as in mining output declined.62 Nonetheless, it has been noted that steel production almost doubled between 1789 and 1801.63 Yet manufacturers complained about labor shortages and wage pressure due to competition from agriculture and as a result of the high price of food. The prerevolutionary journeymen associations which survived illegally, provided the basis for advancing the demands of skilled workers.64 The skilled iron workers of Ariège, Aude, and the Pyrénées-Oriental engaged in prolonged struggles against their employers between 1797 and 1799.65 Similar turmoil occurred in the coal mines of Normandy, in the glass factory of Saint-Gobain, and in the textile factories of Montjoie and Eupen in occupied Belgium.66 The regime did all it could to bring such unrest under control based on a vigorous enforcement of the provisions of the Le Chapelier Law.67 But recurrent strikes and lesser forms of worker resistance helped alienate industrialists from the regime as the coup of 18th Brumaire approached.68 Innovation in manufacturing was largely confined to the buoyant cotton industry. Despite ongoing hardship, the taste for fashion and modest luxuries grew among the lower orders in the towns and even among some peasants.69 In the factories of Paris, Alsace, Amiens, and Louviers the spinning mule became standard by 1797. It had been adopted in Orléans and Toulouse earlier. Ghent became a major textile center through the initiative of the Belgian capitalist Liéven Bauwens. But the use of coal as a fuel and the introduction of steam engines in manufacturing made little progress. Despite the expansion in production, innovation in the manufacture of iron and steel was conspicuously absent. At its height under the Directory industrial output was only two-thirds of its prerevolutionary peak. Woolen and canvas manufacture in the west of France directed toward the colonial market, declined beyond recall.70 On the other hand, the army and the territories east of the Rhine provided important markets for manufactured cloth. Notable was the relationship between the French conquest of Belgium and the rapid development of capitalism there. The integration of Belgium into revolutionary France led to the dismantlement of the many traditional barriers to manufacturing and trade including local tolls, tarrifs, and monopolies. A much wider

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and protected market for Belgian manufactures opened in France and in the conquered territories beyond. An influx of French capital led to an impressive expansion of mining in Hainaut. The textile industry, whose most influential figure was Bauwens of Ghent, rapidly mechanized. A rapid expansion of cotton manufacturing in Ghent and of woolen cloth manufacture at Verviers ensued. The iron industry of the Saar and Luxembourg benefited similarly from absorption into France.71 Perhaps the most serious obstacle to innovation was the lack of capital. The lack of credit hobbled both manufacturing and trade. The merchant bankers who resumed business in Paris following Thermidor charged very high rates of interest. A conference sponsored by the government to help to restore commerce in the difficult winter of 1795–96 recommended the establishment of a commercial bank with an enlarged financial base from which to offer expanded credit. On 29 June 1796, a group of bankers and merchants founded the Bank of Current Accounts which discounted paper at three months’ date. In the fall of 1797, a second bank, the Commercial Discount Bank opened its doors, at first serving only its associates. It eventually began to offer mortgage debentures backed by the property holdings of its shareholders. A similar scheme provided an expanded base of credit to a third bank, the Bank of Commerce, which began functioning at the same time. Unfortunately, the services of all three institutions were restricted to only the most creditworthy clientele in Paris and offered little or nothing to merchants in the rest of France.72 We have already noted the decline of the colonial trade and manufacturing in western France. France’s external commerce reorientated itself to northern and central Europe, notably toward the markets of Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, and Berlin. Political and economic centralization, furthermore, helped Paris to control an increasing proportion of French trade. Parisian establishments dominated the wool cloth trade formerly in the hands of Orléans and Rouen. Cotton cloth manufactured in the North and Alsace was likewise distributed by Parisian businesses.73 The years 1795–96, we have seen, were years of crisis marked by inflation, monetary crisis, and then deflation. Budget cuts and the withdrawal of paper currency proved to be profoundly deflationary. High interest rates curbed borrowing.74 Certain regions and sectors of the economy weathered these difficulties better than others and emerged stronger as a result. The base of the economy—agriculture—suffered from persistently low prices that were the consequence of good harvests. The next two years, 1797–98, showed some overall economic improvement with some parts of the economy faring better than others. The year 1799 saw an ultimate crisis marked by war, food shortages, industrial downturn, and a credit crunch.75 The threat of a radical revolution or a counter-revolutionary invasion led to a coup by Napoleon that put an end to the conservative republic of the Directory.76

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The governments of the national assembly, the legislative assembly and of the Directory, each in their own fashion, had attempted to establish a new constitutional order based on limited government, rule by the propertied classes, and a laissez-faire economic order. The fact that these ideas of the period of the constitutional monarchy were resurrected by the Directory shows that they were the preferred principles of the bourgeoisie who now socially and economically dominated France. But the threat of external invasion, fears of internal subversion from the Left or the Right and the inability to sustain an economic expansion based on uncontrolled markets, brought this second experiment in constitutional government and laissez-faire economics to an abrupt conclusion.

Notes 1. Georges Dejoint, La politique économique du Directoire, 84. The transition from a government-controlled economy to a laissez-faire one has been studied by Hincker, “Comment sortir del la terreur économique,” in Le tournant de l’an III: réaction et terreur blanche dans la France révolutionnaire, ed. Vovelle, (Paris, 1997), 135–48. 2. Dejoint, Politique économique du Directoire, 24–25. 3. Georges Lefevbre, France sous le Directoire (1795–1799), ed. Jean-René Suratteau (Paris, 1977), 798–99. 4. Suratteau, “Bonaparte dans l’optique de la révolution bourgeoise: Du Directoire au Consulat,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 55(1983), 132–33. 5. Herbert Lüthy, La Banque protestante, vol. 2, 732. 6. Bernard Bodinier and Eric Teyssier, L’évenément le plus important, 426–27. 7. Howard G. Brown, “A Discredited Regime: The Directory and Army Contracting,” French History 4(1990), 48–76. 8. Brown, “A Discredited Regime,” 53. 9. Brown, War, Revolution and the Bureaucratic State: Politics and Army Administration in France, 1791–1799 (Oxford, 1995), 210, 217. 10. Jean Tulard, Les Thermidoriens (Paris, 2005), 297–317. 11. Clive H. Church, “The Social Basis of the French Central Bureaucracy under the Directory,” Past and Present 36 (1967), 59–72. 12. Lefebvre, The Directory, (New York, 1964), 164–65. 13. Suratteau and Alain Bischoff, Jean-François Reubell: l’Alsacien de la Révolution française, (Steinbrunn-le-Haut, France, 1995), 215–22. 14. Christine Peyrard, Les Jacobins de l’Ouest, 331. 15. Bernard Gainot, 1799, un nouveau jacobinisme? (Paris, 2001), 22–23, 155–57, 354–55, 393–94. 16. Lefevbre, France sous le Directoire, 671–79; Suratteau, “Le Directoire: points de vue et interprètations d’après des travaux recents,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 48(1976), 191. 17. Isser Woloch, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement Under the Directory (Princeton, 1970), 370; Suratteau and Bischoff, Jean-François Reubell, 300–309; Raymonde Monnier, “De l’An III à l’An IX, 591–601.

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18. James Livesey, “ Agrarian Ideology and Commercial Republicanism in the French Revolution,” Past & Present 157(1997), 94–121. 19. Joanne Kitchin, Un journal “philosophique”: La Décade (1794–1807) (Paris, 1965), 9–10, 34. 20. Richard Whatmore, “The Political Economy of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Republicanism,” Journal of Political Thought 19:3(1998), 439–56. 21. Martin S. Staum, “The Institute Economists: From Physiocracy to Entrepreneurial Capitalism,” History of Political Economy 19:4 (1987), 525–50. Cf. Ruth Scurr, “Social Equality in Pierre-Louis Roederer’s Interpretation of the Modern Republic, 1793,” History of European Ideas 26:2(2000), 105–26. Adam Smith’s ideas proved to be important in the movement away from physiocracy. Cf. Whatmore, “Adam Smith’s Role in the French Revolution,” Past and Present 175(2002), 65–89. 22. Livesey, Making Democracy, 165. 23. One sees a similar attempt at rehabilitating the Directory in Jean Tulard’s Les Thermidoriens which credits it with anticipating Napoleon’s economic and military imperialism, bureaucratic centralization of power, restoration of currency and finance, and patronage of elite educational and scientific institutions. 24. Livesey, Making Democracy, 130. 25. Making Democracy, 3. 26. Cf. Lefebvre, France sous le Directoire, 800–801. 27. Livesey, Making Democracy, 163–64. 28. Lefebvre, The Directory, 191–202; Woloch, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement Under the Directory; Lynn Avery Hunt, David Lansky, and Paul Hanson, “The Failure of the Liberal Republic in France, 1795–1799: The Road to Brumaire,” Journal of Modern History 51:4 (1979), 734–59; Pierre Serna, “Le Directoire”: un non lieu de mémoire à revister,” in La Republique Directoriale: actes du colloque de Clermont-Ferrand (22, 23 et 24 mai 1997), eds. Philippe Bourdin and Bernard Gainot, 2 vols. (Paris, 1998), vol.1, 39–40. 29. Babeuf’s primary concern was the miserable condition of the rural workforce. See the remarks of Claude Mazauric in Ted Margadant, “Cinq silences de Babeuf,” in Présence de Babeuf: lumières, révolution, communisme; actes du colloque international Babeuf, Amiens, les 7, 8 et 9 décembre 1989, eds.Alain Maillard, Claude Mazauric and Eric Walter (Paris, 1994), 141. Mazauric’s claim that Babeuf had only a belated sense of the importance of industry is more dubious. Cf. Victor M. Daline, Gracchus Babeuf à la veille et pendant la Revolution francaise, 1785–1794 (Moscow, 1976), 290, 291–92; Jean-Marc Schiappa, Les Babouvistes (Paris, 2003), 42–44. 30. Richard Mowery Andrews, “Reflections sur la conjuration des egaux,” Annales: ESC 29:1 (1974), 78, 90; Raymonde Monnier, Le faubourg Saint-Antoine, 149; Michel-André Iafelice, “La Babouvisme en province. Les abonnés méridionaux au Tribun du Peuple,” Cahiers d’histoire de l’Institut de Recherches Marxistes 17(1984), 94–114; François Wartelle, “Babeuf, babouvisme et mouvement populaire dans la France du nord en l’an III et en l’an IV,” ibid., 147–72. 31. Michel Vovelle, “Une troisième voie pour la lecture de la Conspiration des Égaux,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 312(1998), 222. 32. Schiappa, Les Babouvistes, 60, 72, 73, 127–28, 139, 143. 33. Suratteau, “Les Babouvistes, le péril rouge et le Directoire,” in Colloque international de Stockholm (21 août 1960): Babeuf et les problèmes de Babouvisme, eds. Maurice Dommanget and Daline (Paris, 1963), 147–48. 34. G. Caire, “D’une revolution à l’autre:Gracchus Babeuf et la question sociale,” in Colloque International de Vizille (1989), La pensée économique pendant la Révolution française, 265–67. 35. Caire, “D’une revolution,” 268. 36. Lefebvre, France sous le Directoire, 831–32. 37. Caire, “ D’une revolution à l’autre,” 273–74. 38. Etienne Delcambre, La vie dans la Haute-Loire sous le Directoire (Rodez, France,1943), 63.

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39. Jean-Claude Perrot, “Voies nouvelles pour le histoire économique,”34. 40. Judith A. Miller, “The Aftermath of the Assignat: Plaintiffs in the Age of Property,” in Taking Liberties: Problems of a New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon, eds. Brown and Miller (New York and Manchester, 2002),70–91. 41. Lefebvre, France sous Le Directoire, 134. 42. Denis Woronoff, The Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 1794–1799 (Cambridge, 1984), 92–93. 43. Lefebvre, France sous Le Directoire, 115–41. 44. Robert Schnerb, “La depression économique sous le Directoire après la disparition du papier-monnaie (AN V-AN VIII),” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 11(1934), 27–49. 45. Claudine Wolikow, “Fiscalité et citoyenneté sous le Directoire ou la déroute de l’état sans fisc,” in Du Directoire au Consulat, vol.2, L’intégration des citoyens dans la grand nation, ed. Hervé Leuwers (Paris, 1999), 217–37. 46. Alexandre Chabert, Essai sur le mouvement des revenus et de l’activité économique en France de 1798 à 1820 (Paris, 1949), 354. 47. Suratteau, “Le Directoire,” 207. 48. Perrot, “Voies nouvelles pour l’histoire economique,”46; Colin Jones, The Great Nation, 509. 49. Hincker, “Les débats financiers sous le premier Directoire,” in La République directoriale, eds. Philippe Bourdin and Berard Gainot, vol. 2 (Paris, 1998), 702. 50. Brown, “Discredited Regime,”63, 71; Louis Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 160–61; Jacques Léon Godechot, La vie quotidienne en France sous le Directoire (Paris, 1978), 89–97, 110–15. 51. Denis Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 94–7. 52. Lefebvre, France sous Le Directoire, 143; Jones, Great Nation, 513, 519. 53. Dejoint, Politique économique du Directoire, 97–105, 122, 170; Suratteau, “Directoire,” 195. 54. Surateau,”Le Directoire: points de vue et interprétations,” 195, 201; Dejoint, Politique économique du Directoire, 107–08, 120, 170. 55. Dejoint, Politique économique du Directoire, 95–906. 56. Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 98–99. 57. Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 99–101. 58. Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 102. 59. Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 104, 109–110. 60. Woronoff, L’industrie sidérurgique en France, 95–99. 61. Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves du commerce, 233. 62. Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 104–5; Godechot, La vie quotidienne en France sous le Directoire, 62–70. 63. Guy Lemarchand, “Du féodalisme au capitalisme,”190. 64. Lejoint, Politique économique du Directoire, 112. 65. Woronoff, Industrie sidérurgique en France, 195–97. 66. Lefebvre, “Les mines de Littry, “ in Etudes sur la revolution française (Paris, 1954), 132–39; Maurice Hamon and Dominique Perrin, Au coeur du XVIIIe siècle: Condition ouvrière et tradition villageoise à Saint-Gobain (Paris, 1993), 673–74; Gérard Gayot, “Les retombées imprévues de la modernisation économique à Eupen et à Verviers, premiers centres drapiers de la France du Directoire,”in Du Directoire au Consulat, Vol. 2, 239–52. 67. Lejoint, Politique économique du Directoire, 112. 68. Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 106, Godechot, Vie quotidienne en France sous le Directoire, 56–59, Edmond Soreau, “Les ouvriers en l’An VII,” Annales historiques de la révolution française 8(1931), 117–24. 69. Jones, Great Nation, 543. 70. Paul Butel, “Succès et déclin du commerce colonial français, de la Révolution à la Restauration,” Revue économique 40:6 (1989), 1079–96.

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71. Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 108; Fernand Leleux, A l’aube du capitalisme et de la révolution industrielle: Liévin Bauwens, industriel gantois (Paris,1969), 98–101, Herman Van der Wee, “ The Industrial Revolution in Belgium,”in The Industrial Revolution in National Context: Europe and the U.S.A., eds. Mikulá, Teich and Roy Porter (Cambridge and New York, 1996), 67–68. 72. Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 109. 73. Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 109–110, Perrot, “Voies nouvelles pour l’histoire économique,” 34. 74. Chabert, Essai sur le mouvement des revenus, 354. 75. Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 113–15. 76. Jeff Horn, “Building the New Regime: Founding the Bonapartist State in the Department of the Aube,” French Historical Studies 25:2(2002), 244–45.

Chapter 7

THE ERA OF NAPOLEON (1799–1815)


The coup d’etat of 18th Brumaire helped to renew confidence, particularly in the hearts of a bourgeoisie frightened by the Jacobin threat and concerned by the possibility of a Bourbon restoration. If the price was a more or less unconcealed military dictatorship, so be it. Ended were the prevarications of the Directory with respect to popular participation in government. The populace was once and for all excluded from politics. Raising Napoleon to the imperial purple subsequently shut the door to the restoration of the ancien régime. The regime of privilege based on the first and second estate was gone for good. From the perspective of the bourgeoisie, the new order safeguarded the essential gains of the Revolution: civic equality, administrative reform, and the unqualified right to private property. The new government subsequently issued a civil code that created a solid legal framework for future capitalist growth: civil equality, personal liberty and unqualified property rights. It pursued the administrative unification of the nation that had begun in 1789. The Consulate and the Empire further strengthened the optimism of the wealthy by restoring the public finances while putting an end to forced loans on the rich and ensuring payment on state annuities. It concluded a religious concordat with the head of the Roman Catholic Church that guaranteed the property rights of the new owners of ecclesiastical property, while further undermining a Bourbon counterrevolution. Continuing the fundamental gains of the Revolution and spreading them beyond France, the Napoleonic era marked the consolidation of the Revolution as well as the power of the bourgeoisie.1 For a while the rule of Napoleon held out the hope of peace with the rest of Europe.

Notes for this section begin on page 141.

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In capitalist states the conditions of production are not all furnished by market forces. The provision of a more or less trained and disciplined labor force, a reliable currency, law and order, and an infrastructure of roads and bridges are not provided directly through the market but require state intervention. Markets themselves in so far as they are not already in place, have to be fostered by the state. Through tariffs, treaties or military interventions, the state expands the national market and increases foreign exports. Indeed, the weaker the market, the more necessary is state intervention. State intervention into the French economy during the Revolution was in part simply a return to the bureaucratic practices of the ancien régime. But it was also made necessary by the ongoing weakness of the capitalist economy in France as compared to, and in competition with, England. The members of the National Assembly in 1789 clearly declared themselves in favor of a laissez-faire economy. But, as we have seen war, social upheaval, and the weakness of the economy made it impossible to sustain such a free market approach. The subsequent Convention opted for a controlled economy in which the state took a decisive part in directing distribution, and even in directly engaging in war production or maintaining large-scale public workshops for the unemployed. The Directory, in principle, marked a reversion to laissez-faire. But the weakness of the economy and the exigencies of war meant that the heights of the economy could only be sustained by producing and supplying commodities under government contract. Moreover, the hopes of French industry and commerce became increasingly linked to the political and military ambitions of French generals and statesmen. The Napoleonic regime which followed entailed a return to the directed economy of the ancien régime under new circumstances. Indeed, the sweeping away of corporate regulation of the economy at the beginning of the Revolution, led the Napoleonic centralized state eventually to fill the vacuum by intruding deeply into economic life.2 Under Napoleon, the system of military procurement through government contracts to entrepreneurs, continued to support the private economy. But it was but one aspect of an overall rejection of the idea of laissez-faire. Private property as well as the pursuit of a reasonable profit were of course sacrosanct. But Napoleon in principle rejected laissez-faire with respect to both internal and external commerce. In his view, the economy must be politically controlled for both moral and economic reasons. The market left to itself cannot reconcile conflicting private interests. It is for the state to ensure such a reconciliation. At the same time, administrative control over the economy is an essential source of national economic dynamism. A strong state, therefore, was an economic as well as a political necessity. Such a state was to be maintained by indirect taxation, rather than by taxing those with wealth. Although tempted to do so, Napoleon refrained from directly interfering into the actual operations of agriculture and industry. He contented himself with ensuring that internal commerce be carefully regulated while strongly protecting it from foreign competi-

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tion.3 Priority was to be given to the reconstitution of the national economy. Science and technological innovation fostered by the state would serve as the keys to such an economic revitalization.4 The Napoleonic regime had a clear economic strategy. But this plan for the development of the economic strength of the nation was seen as inseparable from the political goals of the Napoleonic Consulate and Empire. The economy was regarded as a means of struggle against the great industrial and economic power of the implacable enemy, England. In this respect, the Napoleonic regime carried over the policies of the Revolution that were strongly protectionist, especially with regard to competition from English manufactures. Napoleon’s Continental System was clearly an extension of policies already elaborated under the Directory. The Continental System thus had both offensive and defensive characteristics. The Continent was to be closed to English products, depriving France’s main opponent of vital markets. At the same time, the French economy was to be built up to make its economy number one on the Continent and able to supply the European market with the manufactured products it required. State intervention was necessary to oversee the development of the necessary forces of production.5 Under Napoleon a new social structure dominated by the bourgeoisie consolidated itself. It was this group that was in control of the state bureaucracy and the heights of the economy. Outside of Paris the provincial bourgeoisie dominated local politics, while slowly beginning to fuse with the old nobility into a new class of so-called notables. As part of this class, provincial merchants and lawyers coexisted with upstart landowners as well as members of the old nobility.6 The legal order of nobility of the ancien régime had been extinguished by the Revolution. But most of the old nobility had in fact not been destroyed or gone into exile. The great majority remained in France. They had been deprived of personal privileges and seigneurial rights to the land. Yet they retained their domainal lands as unentailed personal property as legally defined by the new regime. Even some nobles who had emigrated were able to return and recover their domainal lands. On the other hand, the old nobility had lost control of the government and the administration and had experienced a considerable decline in economic power. The social and political scales had been tipped in the other direction as the old nobles were forced to coexist more or less passively with a new and assertive elite of rural middle class landowners and rich peasants. It was the latter element alongside merchants, bankers, state functionaries, and members of the liberal professions who were the political and social foundation of the Napoleonic regime.7 The land, rather than commerce or manufacturing, remained the basis of the social and political power of this new broader elite. This new ruling class, like the prerevolutionary elite, drew their most reliable income, their social influence, and their qualifications for public office from their ownership of land. Insofar as they involved themselves in commercial or manufacturing ventures, land served as the primary means of credit.8 But this land was now

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legally defined as capital like any other form of capital. Of the 1056 largest landed proprietors in France under Napoleon, 130 were merchants and industrialists.9 Whether their economic power was based on land, industry or finance, the notables of Napoleonic France were already recognizable as the French bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century.10 Some of the nobles of the ancien régime saw fit to actually rally to the new political order. To be sure, these old nobles committed themselves to Napoleon with a greater or lesser degree of sincerity. In 1806 Napoleon created a new hereditary nobility. Some of the old nobles were allowed to enter this new caste, but only on the basis of new titles. Of this new nobility, 22.5 percent were old noble, while significantly, almost 60 percent were bourgeois with roots in commerce, the liberal professions and law. The two groups of new Napoleonic nobles remained deeply divided socially. Indeed, the legal status and activities of this nobility in no way represented an attempt to restore the social position of the nobility in the ancien régime. Before the law and the fisc, the Napoleonic nobles were equal to other citizens. Titles were no longer directly tied to land. Moreover, genealogy and privilege were no longer impassable barriers to those with money, ambition, and talent.11 The creation of this new nobility, on the contrary, amounted to an effort to lend further political stability to the Napoleonic order as well as to feed the amour propre of the newly ascendant upper bourgeoisie. Being bourgeois continued to have negative connotations in certain quarters despite the Revolution. As a result, some of the bourgeoisie were still plagued by a sense of insecurity and aimed to imitate the life style of the old nobility. Yet despite these echoes of social prejudice from the past, in the course of the Revolution and the Empire, the bourgeoisie more and more came to claim its rights as masters of the state and society. In fact, the status of bourgeois increasingly took on a positive image. Indeed, so much so, that some more confident elements of the middle class expressed misgivings and resentment at Napoleon’s attempt to create a new nobility. Under Napoleon being a bourgeois entailed a certain economic independence and an assured level of personal consumption. As a bourgeois generally one worked for oneself and enjoyed a certain life style based on a more or less conspicuous level of consumption. Such a social position required an income from rent and investments or from commercial, industrial or professional activity. Approximately 10 percent of the population made up the bourgeoisie.12 At the top of this class were the grand bourgeoisie made up of merchants, industrialists, and bankers. Most of these figures had emerged already on the eve of the Revolution and survived and even prospered during the next ten years of upheaval that followed. Certain of the most influential among them helped finance the coup d’etat of 18th Brumaire and were able to profit from it. At the same time, their ranks were strengthened by new personalities and new ideas that were a product of the Revolution. In the revolutionary period we have noted that certain newcomers made their way up through war profiteering and speculation on nationalized properties. Among the most promi-

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nent were Jacques-Rose Recamier, Jean-Joseph Barillon, Jean-Charles Davillier, and Jean-Pierre Germain.13 But it was those who were already powerful prior to the Revolution who especially stood out. Among these were outstanding figures like Claude Perier, Jean-Conrad Hottinguer, Jules-Paul-Benjamin Delessert, and Jean-Frédéric Perregaux. They combined banking activity with an interest in commerce and manufacture. The creation of the Bank of France was in part a reward for their support of Napoleon.14 In the provinces, likewise, the bourgeoisie who dominated the main ports and industrial centers under Napoleon had already emerged prior to the Revolution. The important banking houses like the house of Evesque at Lyon, of Gouin at Tours, of Gomez-Vaez at Bordeaux, and of Courtois at Toulouse all predated the Revolution. Likewise, the great merchant firms of ports like Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Marseille, although badly hurt by the Revolution, were still able to maintain their local dominance.15 As a result of the Revolution, new dynasties of industrial bourgeoisie emerged from the maîtres de forges of the ancien régime. Prior to 1789, the control of the hundreds of iron smelters and forges on French soil was closely connected to noble and ecclesiastical property by virtue of the latter’s control of mineral rights, forests and water mills. Not only did these maîtres de forges have to lease these smelters and forges from nobles or high ecclesiastics, but they often served as farmers general collecting all sorts of seigneurial revenues for their seigneurs. The most successful themselves became noble, like the Wendel family in Lorraine and the De Viesse de Marmont family in the Châtillonais. The Revolution enabled many of these maîtres de forges to acquire these important means of production from ecclesiastics and émigré nobles as their own private property. A certain consolidation of the industry also occurred in the course of these years of upheaval. A survey of French manufacturers dating from 1810, lists some fifty-nine important maître de forges. No more than ten were really upstarts who were pure products of the Revolution.16 Under Napoleon the maîtres de forges formed 10 percent of the grands notables in the department of the Haut-Marne and Ariège. In the latter departément, there were eleven maîtres de forges, of which four were noble and seven were bourgeois. One of the latter was François Avignon, a supporter of the Revolution. From an old family of maître de forges, Avignon bought smelters and forges as nationalized property in 1813. These properties constituted one-third of his fortune. Avignon was the eleventh among the thirty most heavily imposed taxpayers in the Ariège. Prior to the Revolution, Jean Croux was the steward of the forges that belonged to the Duke of Lévis-Mirepoix in the Ariège. He acquired them as nationalized property and under Napoleon, became like Avignon, a rich notable.17 Most of the hundreds of maîtres des forges were men of relatively modest means. But more than a dozen already had assets of between one and three million francs in 1811.18

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On the national stage an elite of manufacturers gained political recognition at the highest level. In 1810 the ministry of the interior created a Council of Factories and Manufactures. Composed of sixty members the Council included the most important French manufacturers. Among these were François Richard-Lenoir (cotton manufacture), Jean-Ulrich Schlumberger (cotton manufacture), Louis-Guillaume Ternaux (wool cloth manufacture), Jean-Baptiste Decrétot (wool cloth manufacture), Jean-Paul-Benjamin Delessert (sugar refining), Jean Abraham Poupart de Neuflize (wool cloth manufacture-Sedan), Jean-Baptiste Pinel and Auguste Sevène (cotton manufacture, Seine-Inférieure), Nicolas Rambourg (maître de forges), Charles Albert (machines), Pierre Joseph Fleury Jubié (silk manufacture, Grenoble), and François Alexandre-Frédérique Rochefoucault-Liancourt (cotton manufacture). Although merchants were the most numerous among these new industrialists, this industrial elite derived from a variety of social backgrounds. Some were the sons of manufacturers who had created their enterprises in the ancien régime. A certain minority had risen from the ranks of the artisanate and petty bourgeoisie.19 Others like the Eure cutlery manufacturer Buzot de Bourg, had been venal officeholders, or like the cotton manufacturer and economist Jean-Baptiste Say, were lawyers. Some like Rochefoucault-Liancourt were even former nobles who assumed the role of bourgeoisie. It was, in fact, under the Empire that the first veritable captains of French industry appeared. The names of some of these industrial pioneers survive even to the present day.20 It was this new bourgeoisie, orientated toward manufacture, which was the most free of aristocratic prejudices. Recruited from the most varied social backgrounds, and proud of its practical and moral capacities, it constituted a fraction of the middle class that was most disdainful of, and impatient with, aristocratic pretensions.21 Some industrialists operated on an enormous scale. Ternaux was the heir of a cloth merchant and manufacturer. Favourable to the Revolution at first, he was forced into exile in England by the Jacobins. He returned to France under the Directory bearing with him an understanding of the new techniques of manufacture that had become current across the Channel. By 1807, his enterprise which exported wool cloth all over the Empire, was centered at Reims and employed 11,000 workers in some ten factories located in different French towns.22 Richard-Lenoir emerged from obscurity under the Directory. Son of a Norman farmer, he was apprenticed to a merchant. His financial fortunes varied until speculation in the assignats, trade in contraband goods, and the acquisition of nationalized property provided him with a substantial pool of capital that he invested in cotton manufacturing. Factories in Paris, Normandy, and elsewhere soon made him one of the most powerful cotton manufacturers in France. Eventually he began to manufacture textile machines to supply his own factories as well as those of his competitors. By the end of the Empire his workforce totaled 15,000 employees.23 The fortunes constituted by capitalists orientated toward manufacture remained smaller than those of great merchants. Commerce generally con-

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tinued to overshadow industry. The fortunes of substantial merchants often amounted to more than one million francs. This was seldom the case with respect to manufacturers. In the Seine-Inferieure, a departément in which considerable progress toward industrialization occurred, there was scarcely a manufacturer who was a millionaire. On the contrary, the leading merchants of the region had fortunes which were well within that range.24 Faced with the dominance of the English navy in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, the French economy gradually began to refocus itself toward Paris and toward the north and east of France. This process had started in the period of the Convention and was more or less completed under Napoleon. In fact, there occurred a concentration of financial and commercial capitalism centered on Paris.25 Over the course of the first revolutionary decade there took place an ongoing migration of commercial and manufacturing capital from the French port cities toward Paris.26 Under the Directory, new Parisian banks like the Bank of Commerce and the Commercial Discount Bank attempted to make credit and banking services available to merchants and industrialists using land as collateral. In the provinces banks in Tours, Troyes, Saint-Quentin, and Nantes attempted to do likewise. But the pressure to create a reliable paper money and to expand the possibilities of credit in Paris and the provinces was intense.27 It was in part in response to these demands that Napoleon created the Bank of France. Indeed, the Emperor and some of the most influential figures in government were among the select group of initial rich investors in the Bank. The political and financial elite of the Empire were in fact closely connected to the regents and censors of the Bank.28 State funds were deposited and the financing and credit operations of the government including the payment of state annuities and pensions were in large part effected through the Bank.29 Napoleon’s objectives in creating the Bank were far-reaching. In accord with his plans to make France the commercial and manufacturing center of Continental Europe, he aimed at making the Bank the key instrument for the provision of long-term commercial and industrial credit.30 Branches of the Bank were opened at Rouen, Lille and Lyon.31 The actual result fell short of the Emperor’s ambitions.32 Nonetheless, the creation of an institution with such goals is a clear reflection of the ambitious dirigiste economic program of the Napoleonic regime. The regents and censors of the Bank were themselves overwhelmingly bankers, but ones who had extensive commercial and industrial interests.33 The wealth and business interests of this elite mirrored the world of grand liberal capitalism that had emerged already at the end of the ancien régime. The wealth of its members had multiplied during the revolutionary period as a result of their speculations. By the time of the Empire the members of this elite were at the head of powerful and diversified business enterprises.34 Parisian banking capital, which these financiers as well as others controlled, played a great role in the capitalization of the textile, steel, and above all the

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mining industry.35 Among the most important developments in this period, Claude Perier and his financial associates initiated a certain concentration of ownership in coal mining.36 Indeed, Louis Bergeron, the foremost authority on the economy of the Napoleonic period, somewhat over-optimistically concludes: “In the Napoleonic period French industry found the capital necessary to its first take-off in the multiple forms of bank credit.”37 In reality the tying together of financial and industrial capital at this stage was still only a partial reality. The ongoing lack of sufficient public or private credit was compounded by a very restrictive monetary policy. In reaction to the runaway inflation of the 1790s induced by the printing of assignats, the Napoleonic regime refused to issue a new paper currency. Legal tender was restricted to a metallic currency. Reliance on a metallic money proved to be cumbersome, inconvenient and sometimes even dangerous. The regime was able to increase the money supply from 15 million francs to 111 million francs by 1812. But this was far from meeting the demand. The shortage of currency had the effect of worsening the shortage of credit, driving interest rates up even further. That the Napoleonic economy experienced a significant expansion in the face of these credit restrictions is a measure of the vigor of both internal and external demand.38 Unlike England, in France industrial capitalism did not develop more or less spontaneously from the grass roots. The large amounts of capital that were required, meant that most new factories were financed by merchant and banking capital. Often support from the state was likewise indispensable.39 Much capital, to be sure, was still unfortunately diverted by capitalists from manufacture into the purchase of real estate throughout the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. But contrary to received opinion, Bergeron argues that the ties between investments in rural and urban real estate and in commercial and manufacturing in fact had a positive aspect. Real estate proved to be an important source of credit for commercial and industrial ventures at a time when medium—and long-term financing was difficult to get.40 We can cautiously conclude then that the Empire in part overcame the barriers to commercial and manufacturing credit that had been a feature of the ancien régime. Indeed, that such a goal existed as a key objective of government reflects a fundamental break between the elites of postrevolutionary and prerevolutionary France. Under the Empire for the first time, Paris became the focal point of the national market for wool and played a crucial role in the initial mechanization of the wool cloth industry.41 The machine shops of James Douglas, William Cockerill, and Ternaux, turning out a prodigious number of spinning and weaving machines, made Paris the center from which the rapid mechanization of the French wool cloth industry proceeded.42 These years saw a substantial development of the Parisian chemical industry, its development closely connected to the development of textile manufacture.43 But it was the growth of the Parisian cotton manufacture that was especially remarkable. In the département of the Seine by 1813 there were 52 cotton

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factories equipped with 744 spinning jennies employing some 5,000 men, women and children. Mechanization was well underway in these manufacturing plants although horse or human power was still essential to their operations. As yet, only one cotton factory operated by means of water power and two others by means of steam engines. On the other hand, the presence in Paris of some of the largest and most advanced factories, the availability of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, and of a substantial number of machine shops and machine manufacturers, made the capital a center of innovation.44 Technological improvement in the cotton industry in particular, necessitated an appreciable increase in capital investment in the industrial sector of the Paris region.45 While maritime commerce floundered under Napoleon, the Continental System helped to stimulate the external and internal market, especially in the provinces on the eastern and northern frontiers. Alsace saw commercial expansion, major public works programs and industrial and technological progress especially in cotton manufacturing. Swiss, and to a certain extent German, rather than Parisian bankers, were the major sources of financing in that province.46 The departément of the Nord which included such important industrial centers as Lille, Tourcoing, Roubaix, and Douai, experienced a prodigious economic development. The rich Anzin coalfields as well as the operation of fisheries, sheep and other livestock production, and the output of grain, linen, hops, tobacco, potatoes, sugar beets, chicories and colza, provided a diversified economic base. Linen, wool cloth, cotton, lace, ribbon, and stocking manufacture occupied both the rural and urban population. Significant steps toward mechanization and factory production were taken in many of these sectors.47 Belgium entered into the first phases of the Industrial Revolution under the Empire.48 Mechanization and the concentration of production in the hands of seven great textile manufacturing firms including the Ternaux marked the response of local entrepreneurs to the opportunities of the Continental market.49 Wool manufacturing at Reims expanded prodigiously during these years. The whole of the industrial north was involved in this expansion which was closely connected to the concentration and mechanization of the industry. It was from the years 1804 to 1805 that one can date the birth of a modern or mechanized wool industry in France. It was especially Douglas’s spinning and weaving machines that found favor with northern manufacturers. Douglas established his machine shop with the help of a government grant in 1802–3. By 1805 he was turning out 15 or 16 spinning and weaving machines a month and they were being used in factories in nine départements. Two years later a government report notes that 400 such machines were in use in twenty départements.50 Cockerill’s machines had particular success in Alsace and Lorraine, but were installed even in the Midi. Despite the growing economic difficulties of the last years of Napoleon’s tenure, wool manufacturing was able to maintain its progress.51

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While the north and east of France did well under the Empire, the Midi tended to languish. Marseilles, the great port on the Mediterranean, was typical in that sense. It did see the development of new chemical and soap industries. But overall its trade languished. Montpellier and Nîmes also suffered. On the other hand, the highly positive economic experience of Lyon, the second city of France, was the exception to the rule. The city had been devastated as a result of its role in the Federalist revolt on the side of the Girondins. But based on a substantial revival of the silk industry and its expanding commercial relations with Italy, the city saw an impressive revival of its fortunes under Napoleon.52 Just as the machines of Douglas and Cockerill transformed wool manufacturing, the Gensoul system of silk spinning and the new Jacquard loom did likewise in the silk manufacture of Lyon.53 The mass production of paper had to await the post–Napoleonic nineteenth century. But the first machine making this possible was invented by Louis Nicole Robert in 1798. Even more significant than changes in the means of production, were the profound changes in the relations of production in this sphere. The old regime of closely restricted bookstores and limited publishing privileges came to an end with the Revolution. The new period of the Revolution and the Empire was one of intense free market competition among a multitude of new, mainly Parisian entrepreneurs, from whose midst there emerged the first modern publishing houses of the nineteenth century.54 The Haitian Revolution and the English blockade had already destroyed the manufacturing and overseas colonial commerce of France’s Atlantic seaboard prior to the ascent of Napoleon. On the other hand, the Continental System undoubtedly allowed French manufacture a fresh start based on the European market. In a remarkably short period, a new group of manufacturers with a progressive outlook and a taste for technical innovation came into being. In the wool industry manufacturing experienced an unprecedented concentration of production. The cotton industry as well as certain other sectors got their first experience of largescale, capitalist, integrated, and mechanized industry.55 At the focal point of economic innovation under Napoleon was JeanAntoine Chaptal (1756–1832), chemist, large-scale entrepreneur, and bureaucrat.56 Girondin in sympathy, he had nonetheless played an important role in the development of war production under the Jacobins. As Napoleon’s minister of the interior (1800–1804), Chaptal enormously boosted the confidence of industrial capital.57 He played a major role in the creation of a host of new institutions that laid the foundation for a uniquely French approach to industrial development. Chaptal became the most visible exponent of a new and revolutionary approach to the application of science to industry.58 Many of his ideas had been adumbrated by others during the period 1789–99. But as Napoleon’s minister responsible for the economy, he was in a position to realize them. Government guidance over economic affairs constituted a basic assumption of his ministry. With respect to competing with

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the English, Chaptal advocated the development of more productive industries as the basic means. Among the measures he promoted to achieve this end was the provision of a better educated and more disciplined workforce, free trade within the Empire, and an emphasis on producing lower-priced goods. He sought to bring together theoretical knowledge and the skills of the workshop.59 He encouraged the formation of informal committees made up of the leaders of industry.60 Accordingly, as minister of the interior, Chaptal helped to create the Councils of Agriculture, Arts and Commerce (1801), the Society for the Promotion of National Industry (1802), twenty-three municipal chambers of commerce (1802), and the Advisory Council for Manufacture, Fabrication, Arts and Crafts (1803). All of these bodies brought together diverse groups, including bureaucrats, scientists, industrialists, merchants, and artisans, and encouraged them to discuss, debate, and resolve the numerous problems entailed in the application of science to industry.61 It was through these organizations that the business and manufacturing elite lobbied the regime. The Society for the Promotion of National Industry in particular was composed of a key group of scholars, business people and state officials including Monge, Berthollet, Chaptal, and Joseph Montgolfier. Through prizes and publications it sought to encourage and make known improvements in manufacturing, commerce, and agriculture.62 New journals like the Journal of Mines, Bulletin of the Society for the Promotion of National Industry, and the Annals of Chemistry helped to spread news of the latest innovations.63 It was under Chaptal that statistical compilation became an integral and ongoing feature of French administration.64 During his ministry the state pursued a policy of consolidation of the cotton manufacture that had grown more or less spontaneously in the previous fifteen years. Capitalist manufacture took wing under the aegis of the state. Under the Empire, the state facilitated the purchase of ecclesiastical properties for conversion to factories, promoted mechanization through financial subventions, and provided assistance to industries experiencing financial problems. Where absolutely necessary, loans and grants were provided to sustain industries in difficulty and to maintain employment. Efforts were made to marshal and organize local sources of credit.65 It is important to emphasize the continuity between the earlier phases of the Revolution and the Napoleonic period. The Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, institutionalized under the Directory, carried on its work under Napoleon as the first significant industrial museum in Europe. It offered courses in drawing, applied geometry, statistics and weaving. Among its alumni were inventors and manufacturers including Joseph Marie Jacquard, the inventor of the mechanical loom and Eugène Schneider, the director of Le Creusot. Other students became professors in the Ecole polytechnique, Ecole des mines and Ecole des ponts et chaussés. Likewise ongoing was the provision of a large corps of engineers by the Ecole polytechnique, which itself had come into being during the closing phases of the Convention.66

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According to Margaret Jacob, the Ecole polytechnique embodied a visionary perspective which asserted that science could transform the world. In contrast to the defunct Académie des sciences of the ancien régime, the founders of the Ecole polytechnique were all men devoted to the ideals of the Revolution. Their school was to be a school for the science of the Revolution. They embraced an essentially industrial vision of the power of science to transform society and nature.67 The Ecole provided the institutional context for the teaching of a radically innovative mathematics theorizing the movements of machines.68 It was the greatest achievement of the Revolution in technical instruction. In some ways it was the most significant advance in the whole history of technical education in Europe to that date. Through the publication of manuals and the creation of the Ecole polytechnique and other technical institutes, the leading mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, and mechanics were from this point onward able to influence the education of ordinary technicians on an ongoing basis. It was in these years that technology as a discipline situated between theoretical scientific knowledge and empirical technique, became institutionalized. Particularly notable were advances in the theorization of chemical and mechanical processes.69 In the period 1794–1815, the Ecole polytechnique provided France an average of 120 new engineers annually.70 During the period of the Revolution and the Empire it is estimated that the complement of engineers and scientists roughly doubled.71 The opening of the Ecole polytechnique, the Institut de France, the Bureau des Longitudes , L’Ecole des ponts et chaussés, L’Ecole des mines, L’Ecole de santé, the Museum of Natural History, and the Conservatoire provided unprecedented new opportunities for talented young members of the middle class.72 By the time of Napoleon many enjoyed incomes and a social prestige unthinkable under the ancien régime.73 Such new state institutions perfectly illustrate the way the revolutionary state helped to constitute the bourgeois class. Jacob, indeed, argues that the program of science-based industrialization became a part of the dominant ideology of the Napoleonic phase of the Revolution.74 The Paris Industrial Exposition of 1806 reflected the new context of state inspired economic growth.75 This government—sponsored event was the largest and most impressive of the early industrial fairs. It featured 1,422 exhibitors from 104 departéments, dwarfing the offerings of the earlier expositions of 1798, 1800, and 1802. The representation from the iron manufacturers, notably, was truly national in scope. Sixty-two factories from thirty-five departéments sent samples, reflecting the state’s ambition to revolutionize the techniques of this key industry.76 Indeed, the holding of expositions were an important aspect of the state’s policy of fostering the development of manufacture right across-the-board. The exposition’s location on the esplanade of the Invalides was designed to stress the link between economic innovation and Napoleonic power. At the same time, judges accorded prizes according to the commercial viability of the machines.

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As we have seen, during the period 1789–1815, and especially under Napoleon, French manufacturing underwent a certain concentration and mechanization. It is generally conceded that such tendencies went much further in Great Britain during the same period. Yet historical research in recent years has tended to diminish the gap presumed to exist between Great Britain and France. In the first place, current historiography has tended to reduce estimates of the degree of mechanization in British manufacturing. By 1815, it had been assumed that there was a qualitative difference between British and French industry. Yet it has been pointed out that the use of power-driven machinery was still not predominant in the first half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain. Hand-powered tools and machines and skilled labor remained quite important both in Great Britain and France although more so in the latter case.77 Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keyder make the opposite point. They accept the fact that British industry became much more mechanized and concentrated than in France. But they insist that mass production was not the only way to industrialize. With its higher-quality production, France inserted itself differently into the international division of labor in the nineteenth century. According to them, France grew at a rate comparable to that of its neighbor but based its secondary sector on small craft and manufacturing enterprises.78 In any case, from the perspective of the argument we have been making, it can hardly be doubted that France after the Revolution was as much a capitalist state as was Great Britain. Overall there was only modest progress in agriculture under Napoleon. Herds of livestock, sheep, cows, and horses saw moderate expansion. At the same time, sugar beet and potato farming expanded. It was in the Napoleonic period that the potato became ubiquitous in the French provinces. Cultivated on marginal land and more nutritious than grain, its increased consumption had a major positive effect on the nutrition of the population.79 Here and there départemental prefects made special efforts to promote agricultural improvement. Nobles newly returned from emigration, devoted themselves to the improvement of their land.80 For the first time there was a widespread adoption of the techniques of the agricultural revolution by significant numbers of peasants who had economically benefited from the Revolution.81 Donald Sutherland argues that the period saw significant improvements in productivity by rural producers.82 JeanMarc Moriceau notes that the capitalist farmers of the Ile-de-France were major buyers of nationalized land and the beneficiaries of the security of tenure that went with it. In the Napoleonic period they emerged as part of the avant-garde of agricultural improvement.83 According to James Livesey, a new agricultural culture orientated toward technological innovation consolidated itself in the wake of the Revolution.84 It can be concluded that during the course of the Revolution, there undoubtedly was some increase in agricultural production and improvement in both the quality and quantity of food consumption.85

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During the imperial period wheat prices rose by 20 percent, while taxes on the peasants were kept low. Tax increases, such as they were, took the form of a tax on consumption rather than on land or capital.86 Many peasants of course had already benefited from the removal of seigneurial impositions by the Revolution.87 In the Nivernais, for example, rich farmers prospered under Napoleon. This class, which had emerged prior to the Revolution, based itself on the exploitation of wage labor. They adhered to the Revolution, bought nationalized land, and profited from the inflation of the period 1789–99. Under Napoleon they invested in forges, mines, and livestock. They not only survived the crisis that marked the end of the Napoleonic regime, but knew how to innovate in the face of it.88 At the same time, there were many both rich and poor peasants who were placed at a disadvantage because they were forced to rent land. The ongoing inertial effect of the weight of rent on the subsistence of the poor and more significantly on the profits of the prosperous agriculturalists, is evident. Thus, for example, rents on farmers rose by nearly 40 percent during the Napoleonic period. Meanwhile, the profits of those who employed rural labor were also squeezed by being forced to pay higher wages to agricultural workers owing to a shortage of labor.89 Rural demand for manufactures undoubtedly increased during the Empire. But the growth of the market for industrial products and manufacturing profits was constrained by the burden of rent in the countryside and by higher wages in manufacturing. The period of the Consulate and Empire saw a notable growth in key technological sectors, marking a major turning point in French industrial development. It is in the Napoleonic period that the upheavals of the Revolution began to reflect themselves in the growing strength of the capitalist economy. As compared to the decade 1781–90, industrial production rose 25 percent between 1803 and 1812. The average annual rate of industrial production increased by 3 percent between 1796 and 1812.90 As was suggested in the case of the Paris region, progress was most notable in the cotton and chemical industries.91 In 1799 there were 37 mechanical spinning factories. The number leapt to 234 in 1806, and rose to 272 by 1814.92 Between 1800 and 1804 alone, some 215,000 mechanical spinners were installed in cotton factories.93 Chemicals, which played an important part in the manufacture of textiles, also made significant advances. There were 14 sulfuric acid works in operation in 1789. A further 45 were created between 1789 and 1815. Of these 33 were still in operation in 1815.94 The production of soda in substantial quantities began following the Revolution, especially, with the introduction of the Leblanc process.95 In the meantime, Delessert pioneered the refining of sugar from beets in his factory at Passy using advanced technology including the steam engine. By 1814 he had created 10 such factories in the Paris region as well as others elsewhere.96 No fundamental breakthrough occurred in the critical iron and steel industry. Lack of contact with English innovation and the conservatism of most maîtres des forges inhibited such progress. Nonetheless, there were

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focal points of inventiveness. In Nivernais there existed a network of bureaucrats and manufacturers which pushed for technological innovation. Certain manufacturers were themselves veritable inventors. In 1808 Georges Dafaud received a patent for a new method of refining coal. Two years later he obtained a patent for a cementing furnace.97 There were many experiments in the refining of iron by means of the coke reduction process, but they did not bear fruit immediately. On the other hand, the use of coal expanded in the production of iron implements. Moreover, continuity of production in iron and steel manufacture overall improved.98 Production of iron at the end of the Empire was fifty percent greater than in 1789.99 Industrial expansion under Napoleon was favored by higher profits made possible by rising prices, enlarged demand, and technological innovation. The cost of labor, capital and especially industrial raw materials all rose. Profit margins were sustained by higher prices for manufactures as well as by increases in productivity through technological innovation and by increasingly resorting to the factory mode of concentrated production. Rising demand for manufactures both in the home market and in the Empire, was vital to maintaining the momentum of profits. In this respect, the Continental System not only blocked the entry of British goods, but it discriminated against the manufactures of territories under French occupation. Strongly supported by French manufacturers, such policies damaged other Continental states. Italy for a time was virtually a colony of France under these circumstances.100 On the other hand, Belgium, the Rhineland, Bavaria, Saxony, and Switzerland benefited from the enlarged Continental market, positive legal changes, and the protectionism of the Napoleonic occupation and the Continental System despite French discrimination. In all of these places the foundations for nineteenth-century industrialization appeared under Napoleon.101 In the meantime, political centralization, dirigisme, and a war economy favored the development of a national market in France. Market integration, which had progressed only slowly in the eighteenth century, moved ahead rapidly between 1789 and 1815.102 The Napoleonic period, in contrast to the revolutionary decade that preceded it, was one in which the economy experienced substantial growth. Explosive growth in manufacturing fueled the political ambitions of the Napoleonic regime not only in Europe, but even for a while in the Americas, the Middle East, and India.103 Nonetheless, the period of Napoleonic power was punctuated by three periods of economic crisis. The first in 1802–1803 was a throwback to the crises of the ancien régime. Provoked by a succession of poor harvests, it led in classic fashion, to higher food prices, a reduction in the market for manufactures, and consequent unemployment among workers. As in the past, high food prices and unemployment provoked unrest, including the pillaging of bakeries and granaries and the burning of grain fields and barns by unemployed workers. Napoleon was deeply alarmed by the threat of unrest in Paris, which might threaten the government, as had occurred in the days of revolutionary upheaval. The price and distribution of

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bread was brought under close regulation. The provision of soup kitchens, public works for the unemployed, and the massive purchase of grain from English and Dutch merchants, dispelled the menace of disorder.104 The second crisis of 1806–1807 was at the same time more serious and more interesting. It was a crisis of the financial and manufacturing sector, and as such the first distinctively capitalist economic crisis of the new century. Forced to raise money to fight yet another war, Napoleon borrowed the necessary funds from a financial syndicate known as the Négociants Réunis. The failure of this group in 1806 induced a run on the Bank of France and a general financial panic. According to one analysis, the crisis was induced by the sudden withdrawal of massive amounts of metallic currency from the economy by government borrowing. This only worsened a contraction in the supply of money caused by a public rush toward saving induced by a loss of political confidence.105 Another perspective views the source of the crisis not as one based on a contraction of the money supply, but as one based on the problem of overproduction. The period 1803–1806 had seen an impressive expansion in manufacturing. By 1806 the existing market at home and abroad for French manufactures was saturated. The financial crisis of that year brought the underlying crisis of overproduction to the surface. The dissolution of corporations, the institution of large-scale public works and manufactures, dirigisme, and military conscription facilitated the development of a more effective labor market and the disciplining of the workforce.106 The billets de congé, which had been used to control labor under the ancien régime, were abolished by the Revolution. But Napoleon attempted to restore control over the movement of labor under the rubric of an internal passport known as the livret ouvrier (1803).107 City governments made efforts to strictly control their local labor force. The municipal government of Lille, for example, instituted a rigorous labor code to try to support the owners of the new cotton factories that were establishing themselves in the city. As well as enforcing a thirteen- or fourteen-hour day, the code imposed fines for the wasting of time or materials or for negligence on-the-job.108 But in fact, attempts to control the movement of labor or to direct the development of a labour market, met with only limited success.109 At the same time, journeymen associations and mutual aid societies looked after workers interests despite official disapproval.110 Higher wages were promoted by military conscription and by an increased demand for labor due to economic expansion.111 It was in agriculture that such wage pressure was most keenly felt. Wages rose faster in agriculture than in industry.112 The expansion in the employment of women and children and the redeployment of workers from devastated industries eased wage pressure in industry. Nonetheless, in the iron and steel industry, which employed some 50,000 workers, wage increases were considerable. Taking the period 1789–1811 as a whole, wage increases ranged from a low of 10 percent in the Ardennes, to two-thirds in Périgord and Nivernais, and to as much as 150 percent in the Orne.113 High wages in the Napoleon-

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ic period helped to moderate industrial conflicts.114 The authorities complained about the independent attitudes of the lower orders. Too many had acquired small amounts of property, making it difficult to recruit labour on the large farms, workshops and factories. Turnover in the emergent factory sector was an ongoing problem for the employers.115 The high demand for labor made workers arrogant toward their employers.116 Improvement in the wages of workers and in the livelihood of many peasants over the course of the period represent important positive results that need to be taken into account in evaluating the Revolution. Most historians agree that the Napoleonic period ought to be seen as a continuation of the Revolution. The Napoleonic regime’s social composition, financial, legal, and administrative innovations and foreign policy reflect the ambitions and objectives of the middle-class revolutionaries of the previous decade. Our discussion of the economy of the Consulate and Empire likewise demonstrates continuity between the aspirations of the Revolution and the Napoleonic elite. The remodeling of the scientific, technological, and educational superstructure to spur capitalist economic development is a notable aspect of this continuity. The previous decade had seen the elaboration of countless schemes aimed at spurring educational improvement, technical and scientific progress, and economic growth. The initiatives of Chaptal ought to be understood as a direct outgrowth of these ambitions. Finally, it is incontestable that these changes played a role in spurring a significant advance in the growth of capitalist industry and in the emergence of a national market.

Notes 1. Malcolm Crook, Napoleon Comes to Power: Democracy and Dictatorship in Revolutionary France (Cardiff, Wales, 1989), 10–11. 2. Pierre Léon, “L’industrialisation de France,” 273; Philippe Minard, “Etat et économie en France après la Révolution,” Historiens et Géographes 93(2002), 197–203. 3. Jean-Louis Billoret, “L’affirmation et les polémiques du modele consulaire,” in Colloque International de Vizille (1989), La pensée économique pendant la Révolution française, 307–10. 4. Billoret, “L’affirmation et les polémiques,” 306. 5. Pierre Léon, La naissance de la grande industrie, vol.1, 374. 6. Tulard, “Problèmes sociaux de la France impériale,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 17:4(1970), 650; Rafe Blaufarb, “The Ancien Regime Origins of the Napoleonic Social Reconstruction,” French History 14:4(2000), 411–12 7. Louis Bergeron, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret and Robert Foster, “ Les notables du “Grand Empire” en 1810,” Annales: ECS 26:5(1971), 1052–75; Bergeron and Chaussinand-Nogaret, Les ‘Masses de granit’: Cent mille notables du Premier Empire (Paris, 1979). 8. Bergeron, France Under Napoleon (Princeton, 1981), 151–52, 154. 9. Tulard, “Problèmes sociaux de la France impériale,” 648.

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10. Bergeron and Chaussinand-Nogaret, ‘Masses de granit,’ 64. 11. Tulard, “Problèmes sociaux de la France impériale,” 655; Natalie Petiteau, “De l’histoire de Napoléon Ier à l’histoire du Premier Empire,” in Voies nouvelles pour l’histoire du Premier Empire: Territoires, Pouvoirs, Identités: Colloque d’Avignon 9–10 mai 2000, ed. Petiteau (Paris, 2003), 20. 12. Antonetti, “Bourgeoisie,” in Dictionnaire Napoléon, ed. Tulard (Paris, 1999), vol. 1, 296. 13. These self-made men have been studied as a group in “L’aristocratique descendance des affairistes de la Révolution,” in Michel Bruguière, Pour une renaissance de l’histoire financière XVIIIe-XXe siècles (Paris, 1991), 311–25. 14. Antonetti, “Bourgeoisie, vol. 1, 296; Bertrand Gille, “La société française,” in Napoléon et l’Empire, ed. Jean Mistler (Paris, 1968), I, 208. 15. Gille, “Société française,” vol.1, 209. 16. Claude Menard, “Le grand patronat dans la sidérurgie française,’ Revue d’histoire de la sidérurgie 6(1965), 103–22. 17. Antonetti, “Bourgeoisie,” vol. 1, 302. 18. Denis Woronoff, L’industrie sidérurgique en France, 116. 19. Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France, 270. 20. Alexandre Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements des revenus et de l’activité économique en France de 1798 à 1820 (Paris, 1949), 333–34, 344. 21. Bergeron, “Négociants et manufacturiers français dans les premières décennies du dixneuvième siècle: d’une approche typologique à une analyse sociologique,” Revue historique 281:1(1979), 139. 22. Tulard, “Louis-Guillaume Ternaux,” in Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 846. 23. Françoise Martin, “François, dit Richard Lenoir,” in Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 649. 24. Tulard, “Problemes sociaux de la france imperiale,” 647. On the adaption of the merchants of Rouen to the collapse of overseas trade, cf. Gavin Daly, “Merchants and Maritime Commerce in Napoleonic Normandy,” French History 15:1 (2001), 26–50. 25. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 45–46. 26. Romuald Szramkiewicz, Les régents et censeurs de la Banque de France nommés sous le Consulat et l’Empire (Geneva, 1974), xl. 27. Gabriel G.Ramon, Histoire de la Banque de France d’après les sources originales (Paris, 1929),15. 28. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 124–5, Szramkiewicz, Regents et censeurs de la Banque de France. xxii. 29. Ramon, Histoire de la Banque de France, 34. 30. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 132 31. Gille, Banque en France au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1970), 35, 44–45. 32. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 303. Cf. Guy Thuillier, “Crédit et économie sous l’Empire: les ‘Notes sur la Banque’ de Joseph Fiévée,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 41:1 (1963), 56–68. 33. Szramkiewicz, Les régents et censeurs de la Banque de France, xlvi-xlvii. 34. Szramkiewicz, Les régents et censeurs de la Banque de France, lv. 35. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 300–304. 36. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 304. Especially noteworthy was Perier’s seizure of control of the great Anzin coal mines in Valenciennes Cf. Guignet, Mines, manufactures et ouvriers du valenciennois, 247–48. 37. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 304. The credit situation was hardly brilliant in the Napoleonic period. In Nivernais, for example, the failure of the Bank of France to provide liquidity and recurrent political and economic instability led to the insolvency of local banks and steel manufacturers. Cf. Guy Thuillier, Aspects de l’économie Nivernais au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1966), 114. 38. Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements des revenus, 286–88. 39. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 206, 213.

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40. Antonetti, “Bourgeoisie,” in Dictionnaire Napoléan, vol. 1, 298; Jean-Marc Moriceau, Terres Mouvantes, 398. 41. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 195. 42. Bergeron, “Douglas, Ternaux, Cockerill: aux Origines de la mécanisation de l’industrie lainière en France,” Revue historique 247:1(1972), 67–80. 43. Gille, Documents sur l’état de l’industrie et du commerce de Paris et du Département de la Seine (1778-1810) (Paris, 1963), 21–22. 44. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 205, 216. For the expansion and mechanization of the cotton industry in the Rouen region see Gavin Daly, Inside Napoleonic France: State and Society in Rouen, 1800-1815 (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt, 2001), 173–75. 45. Pierre Caspard, “L’accumulation du capital dans l’indiennage au XVIIIe siècle, Revue du Nord 61:1 (1979), 115–25. 46. Geoffrey James Ellis, Napoleon’s Continental Blockade: The Case of Alsace (Oxford, 1981), 264–73; François d’Huillier, “Alsace,” in Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 1, 82–83; Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, Les banques européenes, 451. 47. Louis Trenard, “Nord,” in Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2., 407–8. 48. Bergeron, “Problèmes économique de la France Napoléonienne,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 17:3(1970), 498; Robert Devleeshouwer, “Le Consulat et l’Empire: période de “takeoff” pour l’économie Belge,” Annales historques de la Révolution française 42(1970), 437–49. 49. Clause, “L’industrie lainière rémoise à l’époque napoléonienne,” 574–95. 50. Bergeron, “Douglas, Ternaux, Cockerill, “ 68–69. 51. Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 75, 77, 79. 52. Trenard, “ Lyon,”in Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 234–6, Pierre Guiral, “ Marseille,” ibid., vol. 2, 280–81; Bergeron, France under Napoleon (Princeton, 1981), 187. 53. Pierre Cayez, “Enterprises et entrepreneurs Lyonnais sous la Révolution et l’Empire,” Histoire, économie et société 12:1(1993),17–27. 54. Fréderic Barbier, “La révolution libératrice: l’exemple des activités du livre en France, entre révolution politique et révolution industrielle,” Histoire, économie et société 12:1(1993), 41–50. 55. François Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade, and Economic Change in Europe, 1792–1815,” Journal of Economic History 24:4 (1964), 580. 56. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years, 612–40 provides a brilliant synthesis of Chaptal’s achievements. 57. Gayot, “Quand les chefs de manufacture et les gens de travail retrouvèrent leur place naturelle dans la société après Brumaire An VIII,” in Du Directoire au Consulat, Vol.3: Brumaire dans l’histoire du lien politique et de l’état-nation, ed.Jean-Pierre Jessenne (Paris, 1999), 217–40. 58. Jeff Horn and Margaret C. Jacob, “Jean-Antoine Chaptal and the Cultural Roots of French Industrialization,” Technology and Culture 39:4(1998), 676. 59. Horn and Jacob, “Jean-Antoine Chaptal,” 685. 60. Serge Chassagne, Le coton et ses patrons, 230. 61. Horn and Jacob, “Jean-Antoine Chaptal,” 694; Raymond Cheradame, “ Le ministre de l’Interieur: la Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale, in Chaptal, ed. Michel Peronnet (Toulouse, France, 1988), 191–95; Philippe Dermigny, “Le ministre de l’ Interieur: les chambres de commerce” in ibid., 196–203. 62. Frederick Binkerd Artz, The Development of Technical Education in France, 1500-1850 (Cleveland, 1966), 146–47, 149; Serge Chassagne, “ La société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale,” Histoire, économie et société 8:2(1989), 147–65; Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years, 628–38. 63. Denis Woronoff, Industrie sidérurgique en France, 318–19. 64. Jean-Claude Perrot, “The Golden Age of Regional Statistics (Year IV–1804),” 26–27. 65. Charles Ballot, “Les prêts aux manufactures sous le Premier Empire, Revue des études Napoléoniennes 2:1 (1912), 42–77.

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66. Dhombes, Naissance d’un pouvoir, 80–84; Bruno Belhoste, La formation d’un technocratie: l’Ecole polytechnique et ses élèves de la Révolution au Second Empire (Paris, 2003), 75–80. 67. Maragaret Jacob, Scientific Culture, 138. 68. Eduard Glas, “Socially Conditioned Mathematical Change: The Case of the French Revolution,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33(2002), 709–28. 69. Fernand Beaucour, “Techniques,” in Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 840–44. 70. Artz, The Development of Technical Education, 159. 71. Dhombes, Naissance d’un pouvoir, 171. 72. Dhombes, Naissance d’un pouvoir, 163–72. 73. Dhombes, Naissance d’un pouvoir, 181–85. 74. Jacob, Scientific Culture, 178. 75 Daryl M. Hafter, “The Business of Invention in the Paris Industrial Exposition of 1806,” Business History Review 58:3(1984), 317–35. 76 Woronoff, Industrie sidérurgique en France, 322. 77. Steven King and Geoffrey Timmins, Making Sense of the Industrial Revolution: English Economy and Society 1700-1850 (Manchester and New York, 2001), 70–79. 78. Patrick O’Brien and Keyder Caglar, Economic Growth in Britain and France. 1780-1914. Two Paths to the Twentieth Century (London, 1978). 79. Atlas historique de la Révolution Française, vol. 10. Economie, eds. Gérard Béaur and Philippe Minard, 68. 80. Jean-Paul Bertaud, La France de Napoléon: 1799-1815 (Paris, 1987), 105. 81. Rosemonde Haurez-Puech,”Agriculture,” in Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 1, 45; Octave Festy, “Le progrès de l’agriculture française durant le premier empire,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 35:3(1957), 266–92. 82. Donald M.G. Sutherland, “Peasants, Lords and Leviathan; Winners and Losers from the Abolition of Feudalism,” Journal of Economic History 62:1(2002), 1–24. 83. Moriceau, Terres mouvantes, 406. 84. James Livesey, “Material Culture, Economic Institutions and Peasant Revolution in Lower Languedoc 1770–1840,” Past &Present 182(2004), 143–73. 85. Ernest Labrousse, “Elements d’un bilan économique: la croissance dans la guerre,” Comité international des sciences historiques, XIIe Congrès International des Sciences Historiques, Vienne, 29 Aout- 5 Septembre, Rapports I Grands Thèmes, 482. 86. Robert Schnerb, “Les vicissitudes de l’impôt indirect de la Constituante à Napoléon,” in Deux siècles de fiscalité française: XIXe-XXe siècle histoire, économie, politique, eds. Jean Bouvier and Jacques Bouvier (Paris, 1975), 57–78. 87. To the contrary, Sutherland, “Peasants, Lords and Leviathan,” 16–17 argues that the tax burden as well as rents on rural producers increased but were compensated for by productivity gains. 88. Thuillier, Aspect de l’économie nivernaise au XIXe siècle, 15–16. 89. Béaur, Histoire agraire, 89, 293. 90. Bergeron, “Problemes economiques de la France Napoléonienne,” 496. 91. Horn and Jacob, “Jean-Antoine Chaptal,” 695. 92. Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie française, 193 93. Chassagne, “La diffusion rurale de l’industrie cotonnière en France (1750–1850),” Revue du Nord 61:1 (1979), 104. 94. Smith, The Origins and Early Development of the Heavy Chemical Industry, 51–53. 95. Smith, The Origins and Early Development of the Heavy Chemical Industry, 206–25, 244–58, 272–73. 96. Séverine de Coninck, Banquiers et philanthropes: la famille Delessert (1735-1868): aux origines des caisses d’épargne (Paris, 2000), 120–23. 97. Woronoff, Industrie sidérurgique en France, 329. 98. Woronoff, Industrie sidérugique en France, 332–49, 505. 99. Woronoff, Industrie sidérugique en France, 526. 100. Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements des revenus, 302–3, 347.

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101. Bergeron, “Remarques sur les conditions de l’industrialisation en Europe,” Francia 1 (1973), 536–57. 102. David R.Weir, “Les crises économiques,” 923. 103. Jean-Paul Bertaud, La France de Napoléon: 1799-1815 (Paris, 1987), 59–60. 104. Antonetti, “Crises économiques,” in Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol.1, 591–92; Alexandre Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements des revenus, 358–60. 105. Jean Gabillard, “Les financements des guerres napoléoniennes et la conjuncture du Premier Empire,” Revue economique 4:4(1953), 568–69, 571. 106. Haim Burstin, “Problèmes du travail à Paris sous la Révolution,” Gayot, “Quand les chefs de manufacture,” 234–37. 107. Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie, 199 108. Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves du commerce, 255. 109. Sonenscher, Work and Wages, 366, 368. 110. Michael Sibalis, “Workers’ Organizations in Napoleonic Paris,” Proceedings of the Western Society of French History 5(1977), 218–25. 111. Raymonde Monnier, “Ouvriers,” in Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 456. 112. Pierre Leon, La naissance de la grand industrie, vol.1, 390–92, 395. 113. Woronoff, Industrie sidérurgique en France, 143–44, 180–81. 114. Woronoff, Industrie sidérurgique en France, 198. 115. Gayot, “ La classe ouvrière saisie par la révolution industrielle à Verviers, 1800–1810,” Revue du Nord 84(2002), 660. 116. Marie–Noëlle Bourget, Désordre public, ordre populaire à l’époque napoléonienne “ in Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, ed. Nicolas, 703–4.

CONCLUSION


To conclude this discussion, let us return to Karl Marx’s conception of the French Revolution. According to him, the growing strength of the bourgeoisie was the result of the increasing influence of capitalism in eighteenth-century France. Recent historical research confirms that capitalism expanded dramatically during the eighteenth century. Capitalism made itself felt in virtually all sectors of economic life and came to control the productive process in both the most advanced sector of agriculture and in industry. Agriculture in the rich agricultural region of northern France was more and more marked by capitalist relations of production. Elsewhere in France, small producers struggled to survive in the face of an increasingly commercialized marketplace. Industry, likewise, came under increasing capitalist influence as older forms of industry were reorganized on a capitalist basis by merchant capitalists. New and more concentrated and productive industries based on the concentration of means of production and the use of machines, appeared in the production of cotton, chemicals, and coal. Some nobles participated in these developments. On the other hand, it was the bourgeoisie who assumed the largest role in this movement. Indeed, the numbers and the confidence of this class notably increased over the course of the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, by the eve of the Revolution, several million rural and urban workers had become subject to the vagaries of capitalist market forces. The crisis of the Revolution was not studied in detail by Marx. Modern scholarship has revealed that the final convulsion of the ancien régime was a complex affair that was provoked by a Malthusian crisis as well as by a crisis of eighteenth century capitalism. These difficulties precipitated the political and financial crisis of the regime itself. Obviously Marx had little sense of these complexities. Likewise, while aware of the deep popular uprising that marked the Revolution, his knowledge of its details was sketchy. What Marx did have, was a keen understanding of the politics of the Revolution. It was his view, that what was essential to these events, was

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that amid the mass violence and confusion that marked the Revolution, the bourgeoisie were strong enough to seize political power for the first time. Moreover, he assumed that this was possible not because the bourgeoisie were fully prepared economically and politically to assume such a role. The emergent bourgeoisie of 1789 were not the same as the fully mature and conscious bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. Rather, it was his view merely that the growth of capitalism in the course of the eighteenth century had given them sufficient means to take political power amid the upheaval of the Revolution. Accordingly, it was Marx’s view that the Revolution was the decisive moment when the bourgeoisie was able to destroy feudalism and to assume control over the state. To be sure, the Revolution began as a more or less united struggle of the nobility and bourgeoisie against political absolutism. But this political alliance and the established social and political ties between the two classes quickly sundered as the political crisis deepened. Examination of the legislative work of the National Legislative Assembly confirms, indeed, that the dismantling of the social and political framework of feudalism was a distinctive feature of its legislation. Yet the National Legislative Assembly and the constitutional monarchy, which it supported, proved to be a transitory regime. It was replaced by a succession of more or less radical revolutionary governments including the National Convention, the Directory, and the Consulate and Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte. All of these regimes defined themselves and were defined by others at home and abroad as perpetuating the Revolution. Moreover, all of these governments, it is fair to say, were to a greater or lesser degree controlled by the bourgeoisie. Certainly, it is true, as Marx suggested, that the new legal, educational, and administrative framework put in place by these successive revolutionary governments, enabled capitalism, step-by-step, to dominate the future development of French society. We have argued that even the Jacobin dictatorship should be understood in this light. Between 1789 and 1815 there occurred a vast restructuring of property rights and class relations that strengthened the development of capitalism under the auspices of this bourgeoisie. As part of this transformation, a sweeping reconstruction of the banking, legal, administrative, and educational system was set into place. An institutionalized scientific and technological culture closely tied to the state took root, especially in Paris. Revolutionizing the means of production became a basic goal of these new institutions. The already strong sense of individual property rights was legally and culturally reinforced by the Revolution. The strengthening of the state and ongoing war mobilization as well as economic growth, fortified the tendencies toward a national market. The construction of this new apparatus of political domination and new economic infrastructure set the stage for the further development of extended capitalist reproduction. In this context the period of the Revolution and Napoleon already saw a definite progress of concentrated factory produc-

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tion based on new machine-driven technology. At the same time, the political and social changes of the period resulted in a steady strengthening of the bourgeoisie as a class. Capitalism emerged from the period of the Revolution freed from many of the fetters that had restricted it under the ancien régime. The middle class, it is true, was unable to exercise its influence directly over the state under the Restoration. But even under this regime its influence was immeasurably greater than it had been under the ancien régime Moreover, its further economic progress between 1815 and 1830 guaranteed its rapid return to the exercise of direct political power at the end of this politically reactionary period. True, the capitalism that did issue from the Revolution had its difficulties. We have taken note of the continued excessive influence of rent and landlord power that inhibited the unimpeded further development of a capitalist market and a fully capitalist agriculture and industry. The internal and foreign markets for manufactures likewise, appear somewhat constricted. Although the Revolution did create a new financial system, it failed to fully resolve the problem of weak and unreliable credit markets that further retarded capital investment in industry. The nineteenth century would see the further success of France’s consumer industries. Its producer goods industry made progress as well but perhaps less spectacularly. Many of these deficiencies appear somewhat more glaring in the light of the spectacular successes of Great Britain. French capitalism in comparison, appears less successful or perhaps only different from the British example. Indeed, perhaps because of the democratic political gains of the Revolution, it was somewhat less savage. If the nineteenth-century capitalism in France that emerged from the Revolution was a lesser or different version from that of its British cousin, it was capitalism nonetheless. Capitalist relations of production had existed in the ancien régime prior to the Revolution. But if one follows its history from the ancien régime to the Restoration its seems clear that the Revolution was the decisive moment in the emergence of a new economic, political, and social order. The Revolution was the period in which the old political, legal, administrative, and social impediments to the development of this new order were swept away. If we can use the term, a new superstructure more conducive to the future development of capitalism was put in its place. With all of its deficiencies, such a view of the French Revolution essentially confirms the Marxist interpretation. To be sure, as we have suggested, Marx knew little of the details of eighteenth-century economic history or of the development of the popular movements within the Revolution. His view of the French Revolution as archetypical of bourgeois revolution may also be questioned. Nonetheless, his understanding of the political significance of the Revolution stands intact. This confirmation of the Marxist view has emerged from a review of the existing scholarly literature, especially one that based itself on the unfolding of the revolutionary process from start to finish, that is, from 1789 until

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1815. It need hardly be added that research on the Revolution remains incomplete and must be ongoing. It is true that this notion of the French Revolution as a capitalist revolution, cuts against the grain of received opinion in academic circles that is today dominated by revisionism. To be sure, there have been some gains from the dominance of revisionism, for example, an interest in gender and the study of political culture. But in the final analysis, the maintenance of a perspective that rejects the idea of the French Revolution as a capitalist revolution, is only possible by refusing to comprehend these events as part of a unified process or by rejecting the idea that such comprehension is possible. Such a position is a form of historical irrationality that is rooted in political and social conservatism. As such, revisionism is the latest in a long line of conservative interpretations of the French Revolution that date back through Hippolyte Taine and Augustin Cochin to Joseph De Maistre and Edmund Burke.

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Velut, Christine, “L’industrie dans la ville: les fabriques de papiers peints du faubourg Saint-Antoine(1750-1820),” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 49:1(2002): 115–37. Vovelle, Michel, Les Mots de la Revolution. Montpellier, France, 2004. ——, “Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 16:4(1990): 749–55. ——, La Revolution française. Paris, 2000. ——, “Une troisième voie pour la lecture de la Conspiration des Egaux,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 312(1998): 217–27. Wartelle, François, “Babeuf, babouvisme et mouvement populaire dans la France du nord en l’an III et en l’an IV,” Cahiers d’histoire de l’Institut de Recherches Marxistes 18 (1984):147–72. Wauters, Eric, “La Normandie en Révolution et le monde atlantique: un dialectique de l’ouverture et du repli,” in Revolution Française: idéaux, singularités, influences: actes des journées d’études en hommage à Albert Souboul, Jacques Godechot et Jean-René Surrateau, ed. Jean-Clement Martin. Grenoble, France, 2002: 51–62. Weir, David R., “Les crises économiques et les origines de la révolution française,” Annales: ECS 46:4(1991): 917–47. Weulersse, Georges, La physiocratie à l’aube de la Révolution, 1781-1792. Paris, 1985. Whatmore, Richard, “Adam Smith’s Role in the French Revolution,” Past and Present 175(2002): 65–89. ——, “The Political Economy of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Republicanism,” Journal of Political Thought 19:3 (1998): 439–56. ——, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy. Oxford, 2000. Whatmore, Richard and James Livesey, “Etienne Clavière, Jacques-Pierre Brissot et les fondations intellectuelles de la politique des Girondins,” Annales historiques de la Révolution Française 321(2000): 1–26. Whiteman, Jeremy J., “Trade and the Regeneration of France, 1789-91: Liberalism, Protectionism and the Commercial Policy of the National Constituent Assembly,” European History Quarterly 31:2(2001): 171–204. Wolikow, Claudine, “Fiscalité et citoyenneté sous le Directoire ou la déroute de l’état sans fisc,” in Du Directoire au Consulat, Vol.II, L’intégration des citoyens dans la grand nation, Hervé Leuwers, ed. Paris, 1999: 217–37. Woloch, Isser, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement under the Directory. Princeton, 1970. Wood, Ellen Meiskins, The Origin of Capitalism. New York, 1999. The Workplace Before the Factory : Artisans and Proletarians, 1500-1800, Thomas Max Safley and Leonard Rosenband, eds. Ithaca, 1993. Woronoff, Denis, “Expansion coloniale et retombées économiques en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 44:1(1997): 129–39. ——, Histoire de l’industrie française du XVIe siécle a nos jours. Paris, 1994. ——, L’industrie sidérurgique en France pendant la Révolution et l’Empire. Paris, 1984. ——, The Thermidorean Regime and the Directory, 1794-1799. Cambridge, 1984. Wright, J. K., “National Sovereignty and the General Will: The Political Program of the Declaration of Rights,” in The French Idea of Freedom; The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, Dale Van Kley, ed. Stanford, Calif., 1994: 199–233. Zylberberg, Michel, Capitalisme et Catholicisme dans la France moderne: la dynastie Le Couteulx. Paris, 2001.

INDEX


A academies, Académie des Sciences, 37, 38, 95 provincial, 28, 39, 58, 95 Ado, Anatoli, 22, 93, 94, 100-103, 113 Aftalion, Florin, 15 Aigoin, Victor Francis, 92 ancien regime, 1, 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 16, 19, 22, 28, 50-5, 72, 75, 86, 87, 88, 96, 98, 101, 110, 118, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 140, 149 class basis of, 28 debt and bankruptcy of, 69 growing violence under, 66 resistance to technical and economic innovation under, 37-38, 39 reform and, 66-67 and state directed development, 3738, 39, 53-54, 87 agriculture, 4-6, 87 capitalism and, 29-30, 99, 101-103 common lands, 29, 32, 93, 99, 114 enclosures, 29, 88, 90 improvements in, 30-31, 118, 137-38 and liberal reform, 89-90, low productivity of, 28, 41, 69 redistribution of the land, 93 rural strikes, 88 Albert, Charles, 130 Alsace, 84, 92, 119, 120, 133 Amiens, 119 Amin, Shahid, 46 Amsterdam, 120 Andrews, Richard Mowery, 93 Annales school, 12, 19, 47 Anzin coal mines, 36, 37, 48, 133 Ardennes, 140 Ariège, 119, 129 assignats, 78, 90, 98, 117, 130, 132 atelier de perfection, 97, 98 Aude, 119 Austria, 70

Avignon, François, 129 B Babeuf, Gracchus, 19, 115-116 Baker, Keith Michael, 20 Bancal des Issarts, Jean-Henri, 77 Bank of France, 129, 131,140 banks, 67-68, 77, 91, 92, 110, 120, 129, 131, 133 Barillon, Jean-Joseph, 129 Barnave, Antoine, 18, 75 Bauwens, Liévens, 119, 120 Bavaria, 139 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 74 Béaur, Gérard, 30, 47 Behrens, Betty, ix, 12, 14, 21 Belgium, 84, 119, 133, 139 Benard, Eugene Balthazar Crescent, 92 Bergeron, Louis, 132 Berlin, 120 Berthollet, Claude-Louis, 95, 98, 135 Bidermann, Jacques, 73-74, 77, 92 Bolton, Mathew, 37 Bordeaux, 85, 129 Bouchon-Dubourniat, Henri, 75 Bourdieu, Pierre, 74 bourgeois revolution, ix-x, 1-2, 7-8, 10-11, 101, 109-110, 147-49 and the French left, 12 Napoleon and, 125 the people and, 7, 67, 86-87, 109 state and 7-8, 110-111, 148, 149 bourgeoisie, attitude toward nobility, 13, 55, 57-60, 70-71 consciousness of, 7, 13, 18, 57, 58, 5960, 73 definition of, 6, 57 development of, 9, 10-11, 18, 19, 55, 57-58, 65, 86, 110-11 economic growth and, 14, 65

168

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

landholdings, 28, 90, 127-28 lawyers and, 71-72, 73, 75-77, 80 liberalism and, 78-79 numbers, 6, 14, 55 non-economic bourgeoisie, 73-74 political participation of, 71-73, 80, 86, 109 revisionist view of, 13-14, 18, 21 rule of, 85-86, 87, 127-31 rural, 31-32, 127 support for Jacobins, 91-93 welcome revolution, 73-74 Breteuil, 92 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre, 77, 78 Brunet, Jean-Jacques, 92 Brussels, 120 Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, 37 Bureau de consulation des arts et métiers, 95 Bureau des longitudes, 136 Bureau du Commerce, 53-54 Butel, Paul, 30, 70 Buzot de Bourg, 130 C Cambon, Joseph, 91-92 capitalism and agriculture, 4-5, 29-30, 93, 101103, 115, 138 under ancien regime, 54 In Belgium, 119-20 definition of, 3-4 in England, 4-5 and industry, 98, 112, 130, 131 Jacobins and, 91 Napoleon and, 141 productive process and, 4 and Revolution, 10-11, 15, 16, 22-23, 47, 65, 79, 86, 148-49 and rural unrest, 32 and state, 126 and value, 50 and war, 110-111 Carnot, Lazare, 115 Carny, Jean-Antoine Allouard, 95 Chaptal, Jean-Antoine, 134-35, 141 Châtillonais, 129 Clavière, Etienne, 3, 77-79 clergy, 58, 125 upper, 27, 28, 110 Cobban, Alfred, ix, 12, 14, 21 Cochin, Augustin, 12 Cockerill, William, 132, 134 commerce, 3, 90-91 Atlantic trade, 33, 34, 84, 85, 119 compared to Great Britain, 34

Continental market, 85, 109,118, 119, 120, 127 Continental System, 127, 133, 139 and dirigisme, 90-91 dominates industry, 129-30 effects of Revolution, 83, 84 export expansion, 32 and grain trade, 30, 32, 84, 90 growth of, 32, 34 and livestock trade, 30 and laissez-faire, 32, 89 market ideology, 112-115 national market and, 32, 139 role of Paris and, 85, 132-33 and state, 126 weakness of market, 70 Commission des subsistances, 90, 92 Committee of Public Safety, 90, 91, 95, 96, 97, 98, 112 Comninel, George, 5, 21, 45-46, 50 Condorcet, Antoine Caritat, 77 Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, 37, 98, 133, 135, 136 Copenhagen, 120 Costaz, Claude-Anthelme, 9-10 Coulomb, Charles de, 95 Courtois bank, 129 crisis inevitablity of, 65-66 and Revolution, 6-7, 14, 40, 67-70, 80, 147 under Napoleon, 139-40 Croux, Jean, 129 D Dafaud, Georges, 139 Darnton, Robert, 78 Dauphiné, 34, 36 Davilier, Jean-Charles, 129 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 75, 78, 87 Decrétot, Jean-Baptiste, 130 Delessert, Jules-Paul-Benjamin, 129, 130, 138 democratic suffrage, 76, 114 Des Essarts, Nicolas, 52 De Viesse de Marmont family, 129 Dietrich, Jean de, 92 Directory, 109-20 agricultural policy of, 102 Conspiracy of Equals and, 115 economic policies of, 116, 117, 118 economy under, 84, 109, 116-120 imperialism and, 118 ideology of, 102, 112-115 politics of, 109, 110, 111-112 social basis of, 110, 111 unfavorable view of, 111, 113

Index

speculators and, 111, 116, 118 Dobb, Maurice, 6, 14 Douai, 133 Douglas, James, 132, 133, 134 Doyle, William, 14, 17, 21

169

overthrow of, 9, 11, 87, 90, 99 Feuillants, 77 Fourcroy, Antoine François de, 95, 96, 98 Furet, François, ix, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20 G

E École de santé, 137 École des mines, 54, 135 École des ponts et chaussés, 54, 75, 135, 136, 137 École du genie de Mezières, 54 École Normale, 98 École polytechnique, 135, 136, 137 economic determinism, 74, 77-79 economic dirigisme, 84, 91, 115, 126-27, 131, 139 economic growth, 14, 40, 85, 119, 133, 138, 139 restructuring and, 85, 131 revisionist view of, 14, 16 and Revolution, 9, 83, 84, 85 revolutionary change and, 83, 85 war and politics of, 109 economic liberalism, 32, 47, 52, 53, 69, 76, 85, 87-88, 89, 90, 91, 109, 117, 118, 121, 126, 134 economic protectionism, 54, 69-70, 84, 88, 9091, 94, 126-27 economism, 15, 83 Elbeuf wool manufacture, 53 England, 47 agriculture, 30, 102 and capitalism, 4-5 commercial rivalry with, 69, 70, 84, 88, 90-91, 94, 118, 127, 135, 139 economy compared to France, 16, 38, 39, 40-41, 126, 132, 137, 149 Parliament, 71-72, 109, 127 peasantry in, 46 revisionism and, ix, 12 Revolution, 6, 11, 14, 65-66 role of nobility, 66 technolological transfers from, 38-39, 54 trade of, 34 war against, 84, 109, 118, 130 Enlightenment, 16, 19, 28, 31, 52, 78, 87 equality, political, 87 Estates-General, 70-71, 72, 76, 77 Expilly, Jean Joseph d’, 47, 55, 56 F feudalism, 5, 27 bourgeoisie under, 6 definition of, 3 limits capitalist development, 6-7

Germain, Jean-Pierre, 129 Germany, 65 Ghent, 120 Gille, Bertrand, 55 Girondins, 77, 78, 88, 92, 94, 134 Gomez-Vaez bank, 129 Gouin Bank, 129 Gramsci, Antonio, 72 Grenier, Jean-Yves, 50 Grignon, Pierre-Clément, 37 Grouvelle, Philippe Antoine, 18 Guignet, Philippe, 49 Guizot, François, 9 Guyton, Louis-Bernard, 98 H Hainaut, 120 Haitian revolt, 84, 134 Hall, William, 39 Haller, Emmanuel, 92 Hamburg, 120 Hassenfratz, Jean-Henri, 95, 96, 97 Haut-Marne, 129 Hellot, Jean, 37 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 115 Higonnet, Patrice L.R., 59, 60 Hirsch, Jean-Pierre, 55 Holker, John, 39 Holland, 69 Hottinguer, Jean-Conrad, 129 Hunt, Lynn Avery I Industrial Revolution, 16, 132, 133 industrialization complex organizational forms of, 49, 137 concentration of manufacture and, 34-37, 103, 133, 137 English influence on, 38-39 expansion of output and, 40, 132-33 expositions, 118, 136 financial constraints on, 36, 67-68, 131-32 Jacobin approach toward, 93-94, 95, 96, 97, 98 Marx’s notion of manufacture and, 49-50 mechanization and, 34, 84, 132-33

170

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

resistance to, 37-38, 53 rural forms of, 28, 34-35 steam engines, 37, 119, 133 technological improvements, 37-38, 95, 97, 98, 119, 132-33, 134 see also manufacturing idealism, 16, 19 Institut, 137 Italy, 92, 139 J Jacob, Margaret, 136 Jacobins, 16, 59, 60, 86, 92, 98, 103, 112, 114, 116, 134 attitude toward capitalism, 91, 93-94 economic regulation and, 84, 91 under the Directory, 110, 111, 115 land reform and, 93, 99-100 and levée en masse, 90, 91, 94-98 and workers, 96-97 see also industrialization Jacquard, Joseph Marie, 134, 135 Japan, 65 Jars. Antoine-Gabriel, 37 Jaurès, Jean, 12 Johannot, Joseph-Jean, 73 Jones, Colin, 20, 72 Jubié, Pierre Joseph Fleury, 130 K Kaplan, Steven Lawrence, 20, 52, 53, 54, 74, 89 Keyder, Caglar, 137 L Labrousse, Ernest, 46-47, 70 La Fayette, Marie-Joseph, 77 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 95 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, 77, 95 Law of Allaire, 88 Law of the Maximum, 84, 90, 92, 93, 116 Laya, Jean-Lous, 18 Le Chapelier Law, 88-89, 119 Lecler, Thomas, 39 Le Couteulx de Canteleu, Barthélemy, 60 Le Creusot iron and steel works, 36, 48, 135 Lefebvre, Georges, 12, 20, 22, 67, 100, 101, 103 Le Havre, 129 Lemarchand, Guy, 22, 67, 70 Lemay, Edna, 75 Le Perche, 92 Léon, Pierre, 34, 49 Levacher, J.-L., 92 Lewis, Gwynne, 20 Lille, 55, 73, 86-87, 119, 131, 133, 140 Littry coal mines, 48 Livesey, James, 20, 78, 102, 112-116, 137

Lorraine, 129, 133 Louviers, 119 Lozeau, Paul-Augustin, 110 Luxembourg, 120 Lycée des arts, 96 Lyon, 32, 85, 129, 131 silk manfacture, 37-38, 49, 134 M Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 115 maîtres des forges, 73, 92, 129, 138-39 Malthus, Thomas, 48, 147 manufacturing, 39, 40, 84, 94, 130, 134, 138, 147 chemical, 37, 132, 138 glass, 76 iron and steel, 40, 83, 85, 103, 119, 120, 129, 138-39 paper, 134 textile, 34, 35, 36, 37-38, 49, 53-54, 83, 85, 119, 132-33, 138 revolutionary unrest and, 80 Markoff, John, 20 Marseille, 129, 134 Marx, Karl, 4-5, 21, 47, 48, 49-50, 79, 103 and classic interpretation, ix, 9, 11, 147-48 Marxism, 17, 18, 21, 23, 101-2, 111-114 waning of, 13, 20 Marxist school, 12, 16, 21-22, 103 influence of revisionism on, 2, 5, 21, 45-46 Massif Central, 84 Mathiez, Albert, 12, 22 Maza, Sarah, 18-19 McNally, David, 47-48 McPhee, Peter, 20, 22 Metz, 75, 76 Midi, 133, 134 Mignet, François-Auguste, 9 Milne, Jacob, 39 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel, 77, 78 Monge, Gaspard, 95, 98, 135 Montauban, 89 Montgolfier, Joseph, 135 Montpellier, 91, 92, 134 Moriceau, Jean-Marc, 30, 100, 137 Museum of Natural History, 136 N Nantes, 85, 131 Napoleon, 125-41 agriculture under, 137-38 bourgeoisie under, 127-31 Continental System, 133, 134 dirigisme, 126, 134-35

Index

imperialism and, 118 industry under, 130, 132-35, 138, 139 links with the Revolution and, 141, 148 nobility under, 128 politics of, 124 technology and science, 127, 132-33, 135, 136 National Convention, 86, 90-103 National-Legislative Assembly, 73, 75, 76, 8790 liberal reforms of, 87, 89, 99, 147 Négociants Réunis, 140 neo-liberalism, 13, 20 Nesson, J.M., 46 Neufchateau, François de, 102 Nimes, 49, 134 Nivernais, 138, 139, 140 nobility, 3, 9, 27-28, 54, 58-59, 60, 66, 70-71, 79, 87, 90, 102, 103, 109, 110, 118, 127, 128, 137 revisionist view of, 14, 21 seigneurial reaction and, 55, 65, 90 taxation and, 55, 57, 69 Normandy, 30, 39, 53, 60, 92, 130 O Oberkampf, Christophe-Philippe, 59-60, 73, 83, 84 Oberkampf cotton manufacture, 36, 48, 83 O’Brien, Patrick, 137 Orléans, 119, 120 Ouche, 92 Ozouf, Mona, 17 P Palmer, Robert R., 20 Paris, 30, 31, 32, 36, 51, 74, 85, 86, 96-97, 110, 118, 119, 120, 130, 131, 132-33 peasantry, 3, 16, 27, 46, 47 capitalist farmers among, 31-32, 138 Directory and, 102, 113, 117 limited self-sufficiency of, 28 and land reform, 93, 99-100, 102 Napoleon and, 138 protests and, 32, 66, 99-100 regional economies of, 29-30 social polarization of, 69, 101 Perelman, Michael, 5 Perier, Auguste-Charles, 37, 77 Perier, Claude, 59, 73, 110, 132 Perier, Jacques-Constantin, 37, 77, 95 Périgord, 140 Perregaux, Jean-Frédéric, 92, 110, 129 Perrot, Jean-Claude, 94 Physiocracy, 4-5, 47-48, 112 Picardy, 115

171

Pinel, Jean-Baptiste, 130 political culture, 2, 16, 58, 71, 112-15 Ponsardin, Nicolas, 92 Popkin, Jeremy D., 20 population, 30, 69 postmodernism, 13, 17, 20 Poupart de Neuflize, Jean Abraham, 130 Poussou, Jean-Pierre, 30 privileges, 87, 99, 125 profits, 4, 6, 21, 30, 46, 47, 79, 117, 138, 139 proletarian revolution, future of, 11 Prussia, 70 public choice theory, 15 Pyrenées-Oriental, 119 R Rambourg, Nicolas, 130 Réaumur, René Antoine Ferchault de, 37 Recamier, Jacques Rose, 129 Reims, 92, 130, 133 rent, 3, 4, 6, 7, 21, 27, 30, 31, 47, 79, 102-103, 138 Restoration, 149 revisionism, ix-x, 2, 5, 12-20, 67, 70, 79 American historians and, 20 Annales school and, 19 and bourgeoisie, 13-14, 18, 21, 80, 86 discourse theory and, 17-18 English historians and, ix, 12 and Estates-General, 71-72 and French economy, 14, 16, 68, 101 French historians and, 12 idealism and 16, 19, 73-74 and Jacobins, 15-16 nobility and 14, 21, 59 political appeal of, 13 reaction against, 20-21, 113-114 value and, 50 See also Marxist school Rhineland, 139 Richard-Lenoir, François, 130 Richet, Denis, 15 Robert, Louis Nicole, 134 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 110, 112 Roche, Daniel, 28 Rochefoucault-Liancourt, François Alexandre-Frédérique, 130 Roederer, Pierre-Louis, 3, 10-11, 18, 75-77, 112 Roubaix, 133 Rouen, 60, 120, 131 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 74, 77, 78, 116 Rudé, George, 67 Russia, 70

172

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815

S

V

Saar, 120 Saint-Etienne, 36 Saint-Gobain glass manufacture, 76, 119 Saint-Quentin, 130 Saint-Quirin glass manufacture, 76 sansculottes, 19, 51, 59, 86, 89, 93, 96, 97, 115 Saxony, 139 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 3, 112, 130 Schiappa, Jean-Marc, 115 Schlumberger, Jean-Ulrich, 130 Schneider, Eugène, 135 Sedan wool manufacture, 35, 49, 50 Sevène, Auguste, 130 Slavin, Morris, 20 Smith, Adam, 47, 78, 98 Soboul, Albert, 12, 20, 22, 51, 67, 93 Société des amis des Noirs, 77 Sonenscher, Michael, 51, 52 Spain, 70 Steuart, James, 98 Stuart, William, Count, 39 surplus value, 4, 5, 8n4, 21, 46, 48, 50-51 Sutherland, Donald M.G., 19, 137 Switzerland, 139

Valence cotton manufacture, 49, 50 Valenciennes lace and linen industy, 49 Vandermode, Alexis-Théophile, 3, 95, 97, 98 Van der Linden, Marcel, 46 Vaucanson, Jacques, 37-38, 53, 54 Volney, Constantin, 77 Vovelle, Michel, 12, 19, 21-22

T Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe, 12 taxation and absolutist state, 3, 57, 69 Directory and, 117 Napoleon and, 126, 137 Taylor, George V., ix, 12, 14, 21, 68 technology and science, 85, 135, 138 revolutionary government and, 39, 95-96, 136 see also ancien regime Ternaux, Louis-Guillaume, 130, 132, 133 Terror, 16, 92, 96-97, 110, 112 Thann, 92 Thermidor, 98, 102, 116 Thierry, Augustin, 9 Third Republic, 114 Thompson, E.P, 46 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 15 Toulouse, 119, 129 Tourcoing, 133 Tours, 129, 131 Treaty of Eden, 69, 84, 88, 90 Troyes, 131 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 31, 32, 52 U United States, 79, 94

W wages and wage labour, 4, 5, 6, 28-29, 30-31, 36, 46-47, 48 Watt, James, 37 Weir, David, 52 Wendel family, 129 Wendel, Ignace de, 36, 92 Wesserling, 92 Whatmore, Richard, 78 Wilkinson, John, 39 Wilkinson, William, 36, 39 Woods, Ellen Meiskins, 21 women, 97 workers, 3-4, 5-6, 21, 30, 36, 51-53, 80, 88-89, 96-97, 110, 115-116, 119, 130, 138, 140-41 proletarianization of, 37-38, 45-46, 49 strikes, 88-89, 116, 119 Z Zizek, Joseph, 20