Both the kinds of visions that inspired attempts to integrate and develop national life and the barriers they encountered are well illustrated by a project to which the state devoted great resources, cheered on by writers and reformers outside the government, namely the efforts to improve transport and communication set in motion by the government department responsible for bridges and roads, the ponts et chaussées.
One reason why the projects conceived there deserve special notice is that, as François Caron has shown, they created the terms in which French railroad construction would be debated, planned, and carried out after 1830. French observers in the early nineteenth century still echoed the plaints of their mid eighteenth-century predecessors, that the country’s development was impeded by its lack of commercial integration, and railroad construction would be seen as realizing, finally, “the national unity that road-building had only begun.”6 Their forerunners had been similarly inspired by a “coherent and centralizing vision of the organization of the national territory,” to be realized in the earlier case by means of a “national network of roads and canals.” To this end they set up construction sites in various parts of the country, building more than 20,000 kilometers (over 12,000 miles) of land and water routes (far more in roads than in canals). Behind their efforts were economic notions like those voiced for instance by the Marquis de Condorcet when he wrote that good roads capable of rapidly moving a surplus not needed in the region where it was produced to another where it could be sold were implements for making “something of nothing,” letting an otherwise stunted potential for wealth blossom, as well as providing new capital for agricultural improvement and encouraging other forms of production. In a similar vein Charles-Joseph Panckoucke wrote in his well-known Encyclopédie méthodique published in the 1780s that improved roads had the ability to “double riches.”
At the same time, however, the officials of the ponts et chaussées had other, less specifically economic goals in mind, namely furthering the cultural unity of a country where the languages and customs of some regions remained strange and foreign to people from others (a concern that would still inspire the proponents of railroads in the following century), and above all serving the political and military aims of the state. To these ends, connections between Paris and other cites were favored over direct links between provincial places, and roads between major locales were laid out on lines intended to be as straight as possible, often bypassing lesser towns, which had to be served by secondary branches. (Needless to say, such measures were not intended to spare urban centers from excess traffic in the manner of more modern ring roads.) Trade and commerce were sometimes served by these projects, but the planners had little interest in giving merchants or producers better connections to their suppliers or consumers; the stimulus to national life the administrators hoped to provide was to come from the center, letting information and activity flow outward to the distant reaches of the kingdom. Impressive as the results were, they still left France with what later observers and planners would recognize to be a limited and fragmentary system of communication. Bernard Lepetit emphasizes the difference between the relatively well-developed road network that came to characterize the northern part of the country and the much inferior one in the south. Caron prefers to speak of “a structure split up into regional networks, between which relations remained difficult.” Both agree that the cities favored by the administrators were those that occupied prominent places in an already established urban hierarchy, based on their importance in administration, and whose non-state revenues came chiefly from agriculture and land rent.7
The limits to what the French state achieved in improving internal communication stand out especially when compared to English developments. The much greater improvement in British road travel was brought about by turnpike trusts, private companies licensed by Parliament but set up through local initiative, that collected tolls from users and invested part of the revenues in maintaining and bettering the roads, a system made possible by the greater development and importance of distant markets there. By 1750 there was hardly an English town without a good connection to this system. The dominance of state action in France was premised on an understanding that too few private individuals had either the desire or the resources to effect a similar improvement in social infrastructure. The state’s assets were limited too, given the growing budgetary difficulties with which warfare and the inefficient tax system saddled the monarchy, and the recourse to forced peasant labor, the royal corvée, to maintain the roads, was both inefficient and a source of resentment. In the 1770s Turgot set out to speed up road travel by instituting a service with faster coaches called diligences that reduced the travel time between Paris and other cities (at least for customers able and willing to pay their higher fares), and his efforts were widely praised. But here too government policy was intended largely to serve ends that grew out of its own operations, rather than ones that emerged independently outside it; connections involving Paris were of primary importance, and overall the service remained spotty and irregular. English travelers remarked on the lack of traffic on French roads, and Arthur Young (whose reports on his travels in France provided much information about the country as a whole that few French observers possessed themselves) observed that the “universal circulation of intelligence, which in England transmits the least vibration of feeling or alarm, with electric sensibility, from one end of the kingdom to another, and which unites in bands of connection men of similar interests and situations, has no existence in France.”8 His comment testifies to the developed awareness people had of how important travel and communication networks were to national life, and how differently they functioned in the two places.
None of this should be taken to indicate that the French economy was in general backward in the eighteenth century; in many ways it was just as dynamic as the British one. Much of the energy driving it forward came from an impressive expansion of foreign trade (some numbers suggest it quadrupled during the eighteenth century), partly with France’s own colonies, especially in the Caribbean, and partly with Italy, Spain, northern Europe, and the Levant. One result of this expansion was a boost to the commerce of port cities, notably Bordeaux, Marseilles, and Nantes, and a consequent building boom that made the construction industry one of the success stories of the pre-Revolutionary economy, producing new streets and squares in a manner much like the “urban Renaissance” that began after 1660 in England. The rebuilding of Bordeaux was particularly impressive, and Arthur Young opined that no city of similar size in his own country could stand comparison with it. All the same, the conditions of communication in France set limits to the impact these developments could have in many parts of the country, and one historian has recently remarked that anyone who journeyed from Bordeaux to the Massif Central at this time “would have found himself moving from a maritime to a mule-pack economy in the space of a few days.” At the same time, however, the advance of international trade drew some distant places into new networks in beneficial ways; for instance, the grain exported through Bordeaux to America from Montauban, some 200 kilometers to the southeast, tripled during the first half of the eighteenth century.9
Mushrooming trade opportunities also stimulated manufacturing, especially of textiles and of iron, giving a strong boost to French industry, whose output may have been expanding at a faster rate than Britain’s, probably producing a larger per capita product, at least during most of the century.10 Although much manufacturing (especially of the more skilled variety) was located in urban places, the work was increasingly done in the countryside, usually organized by merchants from nearby towns who put the materials out to part-time workers unable to support themselves fully through agriculture. Some of these merchants took the next step toward something more recognizable as modern industry, gathering workers together in factories, at first on the basis of traditional techniques, but sometimes adopting new tools from England, such as the spinning jenny, soon after they were introduced acros
s the channel.11 Even where older methods still prevailed, the effect of distant connections on local life could be profound. A study of peasants who doubled as textile workers in the northern village of Montigny, near Cambrai, describes the way some rural people engaged in linen-weaving used the income they derived to set themselves up as little entrepreneurs, organizing the work of their neighbors. The lives of such people were marked by their connection to distant markets no less than in England: “Montigny’s peasants saw further than the farm gates and the village boundaries. Their connections to the world beyond were dynamic, born out of a mixture of necessity and response to opportunity,” and some of them “actively sought such contacts and inserted themselves within far-flung networks.” With their partners in urban markets they often formed connections based on “mutual recognition and potential trust and respect” (like those between urban traders in different cities). Their activities weakened certain traditional communal solidarities, and some around them resented their greater affluence (although we need to remember that differences of wealth and status were a common feature of rural and village life), but such people were not bourgeois; they remained villagers engaged in an essentially peasant form of existence. Similar situations probably obtained in other, less-closely studied villages.12
Despite all these achievements, however, France’s economy never developed the self-generated dynamism that England’s did. One testimony to this was the large role played by state action in introducing new techniques. The mid century minister Daniel Trudaine, a friend of the economist Vincent de Gournay from whom the physiocrats and Turgot derived some of their chief ideas, and a force behind the push to build roads and canals mentioned above, set up industrial projects in order both to bring prosperity to declining agricultural regions and to assure a demand in France for cotton grown in the colonies. His enterprises were freed from guild and other restrictions, producing a situation where, as Paul Butel puts it, “monarchical interventionism and liberal policy were closely allied,” a connection whose necessity physiocratic theory took for granted, and that would long remain important in France (as in Germany). His son and successor carried on his work, setting up a cotton-spinning factory under the direction of an English businessman, John Holker, who introduced the recently invented spinning jenny. The government also initiated efforts to modernize cast iron production, recognizing its possible military importance, and bringing in another prominent Englishman, John Wilkinson, to oversee a coke-fired foundry at Le Creusot in 1785. The town would later be an important site of the French metal industry, but in this period activity languished there, “too dependent on the subventions of an impecunious state, and suffering from the lack of skilled workers and above all from the narrowness of the market.”13
That the state was drawn into such activities was partly a continuation of its longstanding attempt to develop the economy and bring the country’s regions more closely together, but these initiatives also reflected an explicit or tacit recognition that the fragmentation which the officials of the ponts et chaussées sought manfully to overcome left many areas without sufficient incentive to pursue innovation and expansion on their own. By the 1780s, when France faced a series of poor harvests that put a sharp dent in the prosperity brought by the earlier part of the century, certain structural weaknesses in the economy, especially in comparison to Britain, came to the fore, contributing to the Revolutionary crisis. As a recent French writer puts it, the “essential difference” between the two economies “were those having to do with the structures of production and of the market, more than the rhythms of growth.”
The proportion of the active population employed in industrial production in Great Britain was more than double the French, 43 percent against only 19 percent, and the relatively weak productivity of French agriculture, joined to the conjunctural difficulties of the period, depressed the level of life of the majority of the peasant population, and thus the demand for manufactured articles. In the English cities, by contrast, growing and with a unified national market, general demand was rising and demand for manufactured articles stayed at a higher level.14
Those contrasts rested on the differing degrees of integration in the two cases, and they would persist well past the end of the eighteenth century.
To round out this picture of the continuing hold Old Regime conditions retained over French life and the ways they limited reform efforts, we look for a moment at attempts to improve the royal financial administration. As in England, the government department in charge of tax collection in France, the Contrôle générale des finances, was long organized as a complex structure of patron–client relations. The people appointed to head its various bureaux gained their places through royal favor or purchase, appointing their own favorites in turn to the lower positions under their sway, and paying them out of the income they received from their offices. John Bosher, in a classic study, described the system as “a combination of aristocracy and private business,” well aware that the “business” in question had nothing to do with industrial production. Each head ran his section in the way he chose, and social hierarchy always took precedence over efficient operation. If the minister at the top happened to be a commoner, as was the reforming banker Jacques Necker, some fictional veil had to be fabricated to make it seem that no aristocratic official received his salary from him, lest he suffer an insult to his dignity. The whole configuration perfectly exemplified the way that “the aristocratic society of the ancien régime inevitably undermined all general laws and regulations because privileges, grâces, favors and marks of distinction consisted in personal exemptions and exceptions.” Similar arrangements had prevailed in England until after 1688, when they were replaced by the modernized bureaucracy we encountered in the previous chapter.
In France, efforts to effect a change along the same lines appeared almost a century later than in Britain, under Necker’s first ministry (1776–81). Necker sought to introduce a uniform system in which the principle of efficient service to the government replaced the maintenance of patronage and hierarchy, abolishing venal offices and special gifts, and establishing a chain of authority based on administrative rather than social criteria. But Necker’s opponents accused him of putting France under the rule of a bureaucratie, by which they meant not government by royal councils (as in earlier usage) but rule by unworthy officials whose abstract methods subverted the “natural” hierarchy on which social order rested, much in the way Turgot’s critics of 1776 viewed his attack on guilds. His successor Calonne restored the old system. The failure to reform it came partly from resistance on the part of influential aristocratic groups and individuals who profited from it, and partly from the size and weight of the administration itself. By the end of the ancien régime the ferme générale (the agency charged with harvesting the excise taxes on salt, wine, soap and oil, in the provinces where it could be levied, as well as the customs duties on goods entering from regions outside this so-called grande ferme) had become what one recent historian calls “a state within a state” with 58 offices in Paris employing 685 people, and 228 bureaux in the provinces employing over 28,000. Not surprisingly, its officials did not welcome reforms that would have reduced or eliminated their functions.
Only under the Revolution would administrative reform measures in the spirit of Necker’s be permanently put in place. The changes focused at first on organization rather than personnel: salaries were paid directly to employees, who were made responsible to the managers of their departments instead of to aristocratic patrons, offices were reorganized so as to bring related tasks into a single section. Under the Directory (after 1795) large-scale replacements of staff were undertaken as well, so that by the end of the century the old system of favoritism and clientage had been superseded by what Bosher calls a national civil service. Personal influence did not disappear, to be sure, but it was no longer accepted as a basis for organization: a network long subjected to teleocratic purposes defined outside it had been reshaped in accord w
ith principles formulated in accord with its own operations.15
The monarchy and the bourgeoisie
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 11
