Age of Revolution 1789-1848 by Eric Hobsbawm

Author:Eric Hobsbawm [Hobsbawm, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: non.fiction, history
ISBN: 9780297865308
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2010-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

III

However, the economic development of this period contains one gigantic paradox: France. On paper no country should have advanced more rapidly. It possessed, as we have seen, institutions ideally suited to capitalist development. The ingenuity and inventiveness of its entrepreneurs was without parallel in Europe. Frenchmen invented or first developed the department store, advertising, and, guided by the supremacy of French science, all manner of technical innovations and achievements—photography (with Nicephore Nièpce and Daguerre), the Leblanc soda process, the Berthollet chlorine bleach, electroplating, galvanization. French financiers were the most inventive of the world. The country possessed large capital reserves which it exported, aided by its technical expertise, all over the continent—and even, after 1850, with such things as the London General Omnibus Company, to Britain. By 1847 about 2,250 million francs had gone abroad18—a quantity second only to the British and astronomically bigger than any one else’s. Paris was a centre of international finance lagging only a little behind London; indeed, in times of crisis such as 1847, stronger. French enterprise in the 1840s founded the gas companies of Europe—in Florence, Venice, Padua, Verona—and obtained charters to found them all over Spain, Algeria, Cairo and Alexandria. French enterprise was about to finance the railways of the European continent (except those of Germany and Scandinavia).

Yet in fact French economic development at the base was distinctly slower than that of other countries. Her population grew quietly, but it did not leap upwards. Her cities (with the exception of Paris) expanded only modestly; indeed in the early 1830s some contracted. Her industrial power in the late 1840s was no doubt larger than that of all other continental European countries—she possessed as much steam-power as the rest of the continent put together—but she had lost ground relatively to Britain and was about to lose it relatively to Germany. Indeed, in spite of her advantages and early start, France never became a major industrial power comparable to Britain, Germany and the USA.

The explanation of this paradox is, as we have seen (see above pp. 69–70), the French Revolution itself, which took away with the hand of Robespierre much of what it gave with the hand of the Constituent Assembly. The capitalist part of the French economy was a superstructure erected on the immovable base of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie. The landless free labourers merely trickled into the cities; the standardized cheap goods which made the fortunes of the progressive industrialist elsewhere lacked a sufficiently large and expanding market. Plenty of capital was saved, but why should it be invested in home industy?19 The wise French entrepreneur made luxury goods and not goods for mass consumption; the wise financier promoted foreign rather than home industries. Private enterprise and economic growth go together only when the latter provides higher profits for the former than other forms of business. In France it did not, though through France it fertilized the economic growth of other countries.

At the opposite extreme from France stood the USA. The country suffered from a

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