The development of the iron industry was largely influenced by techniques imported from Great Britain. In this sector, we again find the joint participation of the French state and British technicians.
In the eighteenth century, France lagged far behind England and Germany in iron production. The industry benefited from strong customs protection and relied solely on the mediocre-quality iron ore from Lorraine. Moreover, there was not even domestic competition due to the lack of transportation. Each producer held a monopoly within the geographical zone where their enterprise was established.
Réaumur had nonetheless been a pioneer in scientific research on metallurgy. In 1722 and 1762, he published treatises on wrought and cast iron. The government wished to expand armaments production, while John Holker sought to supply the equipment needed by the textile industry. The underdevelopment of French metallurgy thus represented a bottleneck that had to be eliminated. Holker assisted an English metallurgist, Michael Alcock, in building a foundry in Charité-sur-Loire in 1757. Alcock received 2,400 livres from the French government to hire skilled English workers. Between 1760 and 1786, Alcock established several metallurgical and mechanical enterprises, one of them at Roanne in 1767.
In 1764, the French government sent a young Lyon engineer, Gabriel Jars, to England to study iron and steel production methods. He carried out the first experiments in producing iron with coke at Saint-Étienne and tried to convince master founders to adopt the method. He died prematurely on August 20, 1769. The Wendel family, based in Hayange, Lorraine, benefited from Jars’s findings and continued experiments, drawing also on German techniques.
One of the most important British contributions to French metallurgy was that of William Wilkinson, who emigrated to France in 1777 and received an annual salary of 12,000 livres from the French government to set up a cannon foundry on the island of Indret in the Loire, near Nantes. Production there was limited, and the government dispatched Ignace de Wendel to Indret. He judged the remelting method ineffective and costly, and proposed instead the construction of blast furnaces to produce iron from coke. Together, Wendel and Wilkinson chose Le Creusot as the site. Thus was achieved the first coal–iron ore concentration. The blast furnaces of Le Creusot were built with private funds and financial support from the government of Louis XVI. Work began in 1782 and was completed in 1785, with the first pig iron produced on December 11, 1785. Until 1818, Le Creusot was the only French metallurgical enterprise to use coal for smelting. Substantial progress did not occur until after 1840. Yet, as indicated by statistical data, France remained far behind Britain. While in 1806 some 97% of English pig iron production relied on coke, less than 2% of French pig iron was obtained this way. Only by the mid-nineteenth century did this figure rise to 50%, surpassing 90% only between 1860 and 1870.
The steam engine of James Watt was also adopted in France at the time of Le Creusot’s founding. A few years earlier, in 1778, the Périer brothers had purchased two steam pumps from Boulton and Watt, which were installed at Chaillot in August 1781. Later, the Périers themselves manufactured this type of machine, but it was Ignace de Wendel who imported the first rotary steam engine for his enterprise at Le Creusot in 1784. French industrialists, however, did not follow this example with much enthusiasm: in 1810, French industry possessed only about 200 steam engines, compared to around 5,000 in Great Britain.
By 1815, France had practically not begun steel production. Only small amounts were obtained thanks to high-quality ore from the Pyrenees and the Dauphiné Alps. Since charcoal was used to treat the ore, it was very difficult to expand production. The process of cementation, which transformed iron into steel, had long been known in Germany before it was first applied in France under the Restoration. Nor was crucible steel—an English innovation by Huntsman around 1750—yet known. All fine or tempered steel was imported. Eventually, the crucible technique was adopted in France, though very slowly. Annual production of steel reached 5,000 tons in 1826, 7,000 in 1835, 12,000 in 1845, and 22,000 in 1855.
From 1862–1865, attempts were made to adopt the converter discovered by the Englishman Bessemer. However, Lorraine ore contained too much phosphorus, and the problem was not solved until the Thomas–Gilchrist process of 1878. Unfortunately, much of industrial Lorraine had been annexed by Germany in 1871. Steel production nevertheless expanded at the end of the nineteenth century: between 1895 and 1905, production doubled from 714,000 tons to 1,440,000 tons, and it doubled again in less than ten years, reaching 3,200,000 tons in 1914.
It is well known that the lack of coal supplies was a major obstacle. In 1913, British coal production reached 265 million tons. This shortage of mineral coal was one of the causes behind reliance on charcoal. Beyond this, shortcomings in transport, excessive customs protection, poorly trained labor, small production units, a routine-bound industrial mindset, and often insufficient capital were additional factors that slowed economic development during the first half of the nineteenth century.
France’s Industrial Backwardness
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 weighed more heavily than the former.