This book makes a new foray into an old debate: France's apparent failure to keep pace economically with Britain in the nineteenth century. Since the 1970s, the so-called ‘revisionists’ have established that, on a per capita basis, French economic growth matched that of Britain in the years 1815–1914. This suprising result led Patrick O'Brien and Caglar Keyder to posit in Economic growth in Britain and France (1978) the existence of a ‘French path’ of economic development, not as spectacular but as solid as the British Industrial Revolution. Jeff Horn goes one step further and analyses the politico-cultural foundations of this French path. French political leaders did not fail to emulate Britain's model of unfettered competition, he argues, but devised their own model based on state management of technological innovation and administrative mediation between entrepreneurs and their workers. The roots of this strategy lay not in a deep-seated and irrational French taste for dirigisme, but in a justified fear of the ‘revolutionary politics’ of the labouring classes in France, or what Horn refers to throughout the book as ‘the threat from below’. The French elite therefore self-consciously eschewed British laissez-faire after 1793 and embraced a more pragmatic approach ‘that melded Physiocratic notions concerning resources and liberal attitudes about the rights of the individual with an activist vision of state action in technological matters’ (p. 13).
In order to establish that French distrust of economic liberalism dates from the decade 1789–99 rather than the ministry of Jean-Baptiste Colbert under Louis XIV, Horn offers a persuasive reappraisal of French economic policies before, during, and in the aftermath of the Revolution. As demonstrated by the repeated attempts to abolish the guild-system of production after 1750 and the French initiative that led to the 1786 Anglo-French treaty of commerce, French officials in the last decades of the ancien régime were enthusiastic about the potential benefits of market competition. The French elite became convinced of the necessity of state intervention in order to regulate labour relations and promote industrial technologies only after a fierce wave of machine-breaking by French workers in the early years of the Revolution and the relative success met by the Montagnard Convention in mobilizing industrial resources for the war effort in 1793–4. Drawing the lessons of the revolutionary experience, officials under the Consulate (1799–1804) elaborated a new industrial policy that combined market incentives with a high level of state intervention for the promotion of modern industries. Perhaps Horn's most insightful contribution to the history of French economic policies is his recasting of Jean-Antoine Chaptal, a Montpellier-educated chemist and Napoleon Bonaparte's minister of the interior in 1800–4, as ‘the father of the nineteenth-century French economy’ (p. 209). After a brief return to a more traditional form of mercantilism during the Continental Blockade (1806–14), France under the Bourbon Restoration and the regimes that followed resumed the course set by Chaptal, embarking on a more balanced and statist path of economic growth than Britain's.
Horn's intuition that different labour relations on each side of the Channel resulted in different development strategies has the ring of a self-evident and yet long overlooked truth. It is also supported by a considerable amount of original research on the short-term economic consequences of the Revolution, in particular the disarray of French industry under the Constituent Assembly and its reorganization by the state during and after the Terror. Horn is at his most convincing when he describes the inhibiting effects of workers' revolts on industrial entreprise in Normandy – the seat of France's most advanced textile industries – in 1789–91, or the travels of the Convention Montagnard delegate Noël Pointe to boost arms production in a dozen French departments in 1793–5.
Yet several imprecisions and weaknesses tend to undermine Horn's thesis. More than one assertion on the French economy is at best debatable, such as the contention that French foreign trade had ‘recouped’ by 1830 (p. 3): French exports stagnated in absolute terms from 1815 to 1830 and did not recover their pre-revolutionary level as a ratio of the gross domestic product before the 1860s. The repeated equation of Physiocracy with economic ‘liberalism’ or a desire to ‘improve the manufacturing sector’ (pp. 19, 52, 86) is also inaccurate. Horn ignores the agrarian bias of most Physiocrats and does not discuss the thought of the school's founder, François Quesnay – the latter's name does not appear in the index. Most puzzling is the decline in the occurences of machine-breaking in France after 1789–91, while it became far more frequent in Britain, culminating with the Luddite movement of 1811–12: Horn's explanation that the British peak in machine-breaking came too late to influence economic development fails to convince.
Moreover, Horn's exclusive focus on the relationship between the state and the industrial sector leaves out at least three factors that crucially contributed to the singularity of French economic development in the nineteenth century: the collapse of France's prosperous atlantic commerce after 1800, the slow productivity gains of its large agricultural sector, and its stagnant demographics as a result of a decline in fertility rates after 1780. All three factors may be attributed to developments closely related to the revolutionary upheaval, but Horn never attemps to draw such a connection. The path not taken therefore places a welcome emphasis on ‘the political component of political economy’ (p. 8). Yet this innovative piece of research still fails to take into account several important aspects of politics, while going too far in its disregard for the ‘economic’ component of economic development.
