Machines a papier: innovation et transformations de l'industrie papetiere en France,1798-1860 (review)

Louis André has written a valuable, comprehensive account of dramatic change in an old industry. Rather than offer a unified thesis, André weaves a fine tapestry of labor relations, capital formation, market pressures, and innovative, entrepreneurial dynasties in French papermaking. His story begins with hand papermaking, a mechanical art well established in France at the time of Gutenberg. Characterized by an extensive division of labor and a delicate product, premechanized papermaking was rich in artisanal lore and attendant limits on output. Bursts of demand, like the publication of the quarto edition of the Encyclopédie méthodique, pushed the craft to the edge of its capacity. Most papermakers, producers of gray wrapping paper or cheap writing papers, were in no position to mechanize.

In 1798, Nicolas-Louis Robert, a foreman in a paper mill, invented the papermaking machine. Moved by his frustration with ungovernable journeymen, Robert’s device was nevertheless a mechanical mimic of their actions. True to the eighteenth-century proverb that effective machines were invented by the French but rendered commercially useful by the English, the papermaking machine was perfected in the shops of the Fourdrinier brothers of London. It did not make its way back to native soil until the 1820s. The reams turned out by these pioneer devices were inferior and were reserved for newspapers and packing. But a second generation of modified machines soon overcame competition from the manual art: the thirty papermaking machines at work in France in 1830 grew to 180 in fifteen years.

A paper mill equipped with the modern machine and the mechanical devices necessary to prepare the pulp involved an average investment of two hundred thousand francs, quite similar to the start-up costs for a textile mill in the same era. As David Landes pointed out long ago, French entrepreneurial families preferred to finance technological innovation from their own coffers and current accounts, and the papermakers were no exception. In time, however, limited partnerships and joint stock companies were formed, opening the way for the penetration of the industry by bankers and mercantile capital. All this was made possible by a thriving market for newsprint and, beginning in the 1830s, cheap, mass-produced books. Still, the rapid diffusion of the machine, the steep fall in the price of paper, and the stubbornly high cost of raw materials provoked a crisis in the form of the price war of 1837. These difficulties were magnified by problems in the Parisian publishing industry, but after 1848 the industry’s principal concern was again keeping up with ballooning demand. Turbines and a generation of specialized builder-engineers helped, signaling the end of the period of technological shifts that began with Robert’s invention. André wisely concludes his tale in 1860, when the mechanical preparation of wood pulp would transform the industry again.

Of particular interest is André’s sensitive discussion of the dislocations in the workers’ lives brought about by mechanization. Paperworkers were highly skilled, well paid, and virtually tribal; one often heard them described as the clan papetier. Although the French state had long set apprenticeship standards, maturation in the craft was really a sort of family apprenticeship, as the custom and mystery of the trade were passed from father to son. Mechanization disrupted both the work and its culture: new jobs emerged, old ones (such as that of foreman) were modified, and the sexual division of labor took on fresh trappings. The most honored and lucrative tasks of papermaking, the actual formation of the sheets and their preparation for the press, disappeared.

Meanwhile, more women workers were required. They performed their traditional roles as rag sorters at the beginning of the process and finishers at the end, although the finishing and cutting now found them tending small machines. The recruitment of brigades of ouvrières put an end to a centuries-old...