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  • The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1830
  • John R. Pannabecker (bio)
The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1830. By Jeff Horn . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Pp. ix+383. $45.

The Path Not Taken is clearly the book to read for those interested in comparative studies of industrial change in France and Great Britain. Jeff Horn presents an alternate way of understanding the course of French industrial development from 1750 to 1830 that challenges dominant Anglocentrist portrayals of France as having followed an irrational or culturally determined path. For Horn, David Landes's The Unbound Prometheus (1969) is the classic representative of this approach, an approach that fails to answer broad questions about subsequent French economic development. How did France become competitive with Great Britain? Who in France led the way? What characterized the French approach? What role did the state play in France's "catch up"? In addressing these questions, Horn counters exaggerations of British liberal laissez-faire practices by revealing their mercantilist and repressive tendencies. In this regard, he expands on the comparative analysis of industrial change outlined in 1978 by Patrick O'Brien and Caglar Keyder in their Economic Growth in Britain and France 1780–1914.

Horn's subtitle makes it clear that he is focusing on the foundational period of modern French industrial development, not the subsequent period in which France attained a per-capita income roughly comparable to that of Great Britain by the outbreak of World War I. Readers will benefit [End Page 852] from his synthesis of the literature, his extensive use of archival sources, more than fifty pages of endnotes, and a twenty-five-page bibliography. Horn is also adept at distinguishing contemporary French perceptions of reality from "objective" measures (often made by historians in hindsight) as motivations for choices and behavior. It is less clear, however, to what extent French-reading scholars of this period will consider Horn's work "an impressive new interpretation" (as Suzanne Desan is quoted as saying on the jacket) in light of a generation of relevant research published in French. For example, Denis Woronoff's 1994 Histoire de l'industrie en France described France's distinctive evolutionary path of industrial development, and Horn's arguable characterization of Woronoff's assessment of the Treaty of Eden (1787) as "a curious oddity or grievous French miscalculation" (p. 64) does little to position his own work as distinctive. Nevertheless, Horn does acknowledge and synthesize the wide range of recent historical scholarship in French and English.

In nine chapters The Path Not Taken addresses topics such as divergence, convergence, and a distinctive French path to industrial development; French attempts to modernize, such as reforms of the corporations and lettres-patentes; foreign policy, labor relations, and industrial policy in the Year II (Reign of Terror of 1793–94); the challenges of British dominance; and worker and entrepreneur attempts to influence industrialization through coalitions. Horn makes a three-part argument: the French state sought to emulate what it considered to be the English model of industrialization; French revolutionary politics stymied those attempts; and the French state searched for a different route amid worker and business resistance to industrial change, revolutions and regime changes, continental wars and threats of invasion, and imperial dictatorship. Horn argues that the French state often played a mediating role between revolutionary demands ("threat from below") and cautious entrepreneurs who sought to make innovations influenced by British patterns of industrialization.

Horn also describes the roles of those who were involved in the search for a French institutional formula for industrialization in the wake of the Revolution. In particular, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, Napoléon's most influential interior minister (1800–04), formulated and implemented policies that shaped strategy long after the end of his official ministerial tenure. Chaptal's abilities and experience as a chemist, professor, industrialist, minister, writer, and administrator had a profound effect on the state's mediating role in French industrial development over the long term.

Historians of technology may be disappointed in the depth of coverage of technology in light of the volume's publication in the MIT series Transformations: Studies in...

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