Two categories of factors influenced the development of the French economy between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries: some favorable, others unfavorable. The latter appear to have outweighed the former.
Favorable factors for development
These favorable factors were institutional and legal on the one hand, and scientific and technical on the other. They formed part of the revolutionary and Napoleonic legacy. They represent what Rostow called the “preconditions” for development. The Revolution of 1789 eliminated feudalism and abolished serfdom. A law of March 1791 ended the guild system, which had paralyzed individual initiative. That same year peasants were granted the right to cultivate whatever they wished. The old provinces were replaced by new administrative divisions, which Napoleon completed within a framework of strict centralization. Internal customs barriers were abolished, and men, goods, and capital could circulate freely. Thus the French geographical space became a single market protected by a high external tariff.
In May 1790, the Assembly adopted the metric system, infinitely simpler than the old system of weights and measures, thereby facilitating trade.
In 1794, the Convention founded the École Polytechnique for the training of civil and military engineers, and also the École des Mines. It should be recalled that France had been the first country to establish a school of engineering with the creation of the École des Ponts-et-Chaussées in 1747. In 1793, the Convention transformed the Jardin du Roi into the Museum of Natural History to promote research and teaching in chemistry, botany, biology, anatomy, geology, mineralogy, and agriculture. At that time France was rich in scientists such as Georges Cuvier, Louis Daubenton, Antoine Fourcroy, Laurent de Jussieu, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, François de Lacépède, Lamarck, and mathematicians such as Monge, Lagrange, and Laplace.
In 1798, the Directory founded the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and the École Normale Supérieure. The Conservatoire “placed applied science and theory on the same level” and attracted both French and foreign students. Throughout the reform of education and research carried out by the Revolution and the Empire, emphasis was placed on the importance of mathematics. In a report prepared by the Commission de l’Instruction publique in 1792, Condorcet wrote: “…The mathematical and physical sciences provide a remedy against prejudice and narrow-mindedness… Those who follow their evolution foresee a time when their practical usefulness and application will reach dimensions beyond our expectations… literature has its limits, but the sciences of observation and calculation have none.” In 1794, Lakanal stressed the importance for the nation of “ensuring that the mathematical sciences are cultivated and deepened, since they instill the habit of precision: without them astronomy and navigation lack guidance; civil and naval construction follows no rules; the sciences of fortification have no foundation.” Napoleon gave the École Polytechnique its military style, but this did not affect the quality of its teaching, except at the end of the Empire and the beginning of the Restoration.
In 1828–1829, a group of engineers and industrialists founded the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, which was also destined to have a brilliant future for the benefit of French industry.
It is striking to note the influence these French schools had abroad between the end of the First Empire and the war of 1870. Students came from across continental Europe and the United States to study the technical training provided by French engineers. The École Polytechnique often served as a model for the foundation of engineering schools in Prague in 1806, Vienna in 1815, Stockholm in 1825, Germany between 1820 and 1830, Liège in 1825, and Zurich in 1848. The military academy of West Point in the United States was founded with the help of a polytechnicien exiled by Napoleon for his republican sympathies. Foreign imitators, while inspired by the scientific quality of French school programs, did not always adopt the military spirit of the Polytechnique. According to E. Cameron, the founders of the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1861 were inspired by the École Centrale.
Among the most notable was Frédéric Le Play, a mining engineer who organized the coal mines and metallurgical complexes of the Donets. Many European countries and some South American nations sought the collaboration of French engineers. At this point it is necessary to recall the influence of Saint-Simon and his followers, apostles of industrialization and its benefits. The Suez Canal, the development of the banking system, and the growth of the railways were, directly or indirectly, of Saint-Simonian inspiration. The Péreire brothers, who founded the Crédit Mobilier in 1852, were Saint-Simonians. But Saint-Simon was not the promoter of any form of capitalism, as François Perroux notes in his Industrie et création collective: “The fecundity of the industrialists, a rising class, was intimately linked to collective techniques, which Saint-Simon and his followers understood directly and rigorously, worthy of great ‘engineer-economists’… I believe insufficient importance has been given to the Saint-Simonian phrase, apparently so simple: ‘humanity is not condemned to imitation’.”
François Perroux highlighted the scope and significance of Saint-Simonian projects and achievements: “Still young, Saint-Simon proposed to the viceroy of Mexico in 1783 the construction of a canal between the two seas, and in 1787 another through Spain… ‘Suez and Panama are the work of industry,’ said Enfantin in 1834. The vicissitudes of the society studying the Suez Canal, followed by the dispossession of the Saint-Simonians by Lesseps, are well known. Perhaps the project of a dam on the Nile has been forgotten, but everyone knows the doctrinal and practical role of the Saint-Simonians in railway construction, creating markets and renewing social structures both in France and throughout Europe, as Michel Chevalier announced with exceptional clarity. Major public works enabled communication, in the sociological sense of the term, on a large scale, generating new networks of power and information exchange. They are therefore the relatives and partners of these collective techniques which, ultimately, are the organizations of multinational units.”
Daniel Villey wrote in August 1943 in his Petite histoire des grandes doctrines économiques: “…After divisions, it will be necessary to bring together and coordinate; after conflicts between political ideologies, to unite in a common effort for the economic exploitation of the globe; and more particularly in our case: after a return to the land and to craftsmanship, to build a new apparatus of large-scale industrial production… We need no more lessons than those of Rue Taranne. May God grant that tomorrow all of France be shaken by a great Saint-Simonian tremor.”
However, French influence in the scientific and technical field diminished toward the end of the nineteenth century. What had been revolutionary in centralized organization a century earlier had turned into sclerosis. On the eve of the First World War, the number of baccalaureate holders remained limited. First, secondary and higher education was reserved for a small number of the wealthy; second, the supply of engineers and scientists did not keep pace with demand. Finally, despite this flourishing of scientific spirit and entrepreneurial drive, French industrialization advanced more slowly than in Great Britain and Germany. For alongside the driving forces of growth, there were also numerous negative factors.