The Bouchayers of Grenoble and French Industrial Enterprise, 1850-1970 (review)

French entrepreneurial performance has always been painted in somber tones. The classic industrial revolution took shape across the Channel. All that French manufacturers could do was emulate James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, and John Wilkinson, and dream of convergence. (Never mind that Wedgwood feared the competitive price and quality of French porcelain.) The "second industrial revolution"—the age of electricity, the automobile, and the chemical industry—was led by Germans and Americans, with their cartels and "throughput." Again, French producers, with their relatively modest factories and trust in quality wares and high profits per unit, were behind the times. The culprit in both industrial eras was the French family firm, an institution that intertwined dynastic and business fortunes, privileged caution and security, pinched centimes rather than pursued best practice, and throttled growth by restricting the search for capital to the family's cobwebbed purse. Smith's careful study of Bouchayer et Viallet, a family business dedicated primarily to the production of pressure pipelines, does not aim to overturn these conventional notions about French enterprise. Yet, his close reconstruction of the cultural identities of four generations of the Bouchayers, and especially the strategies and tensions embedded in succession to the role of patron, widen our understanding of the calculating and claustrophobic world that this family made and inhabited.

Inheriting a firm that specialized in the manufacture of capital equipment, Aimé Bouchayer, the second generation patriarch and fulcrum of Smith's story, tied the family's fate to "white coal," hydroelectric power. A patent for hooped steel pipes aided the company's ascension, as did Aimé's skillful construction of a dizzying array of partnerships, many of which served as captive markets for Bouchayer and Viallet's products. This intricate web of nominally autonomous firms paid handsomely for Aimé's wares, providing his firm with Chandlerian advantages of scale, but Aimé and his deliberate heir, Jean, were less alert to the dangers of narrowing the scope of their lines, which would prove fatal to the firm.

Smith's most original contribution is his detailed, even affectionate, depiction of the Bouchayers' perch in industrial Grenoble. Tireless and civic-minded, Aimé was a joiner and galvanizer, a leading citizen within his industrial orbit. He was a pioneer in seeking social insurance and other material benefits for workers, but at a price: He expected thorough deference from his skilled hands and was offended by their solidarities and desire to think for themselves. In fact, Smith's discussion of shopfloor and union relations is sketchy and reserved at once, as is his rendering of Aimé's attention to Action Française and his late embrace of devout Catholicism. Thus, Smith's conclusion that "unintended consequences of rapid wartime growth included the erosion of a traditional pattern of trusted relations between workers and patron" rings hollow, particularly in light of the regional metalworkers' strike in 1906 and Aimé's heavy-handed assessment of troubling hands—assessments that the workers themselves would have surely anticipated (69).

While Smith laments the cultural rigidities that settled the rank of patron on Jean, Aimé's ineffectual son, as well as Jean's generational revenge against his own son Robert, who desperately tried to reform the failing firm, his tale also accounts for the durability of the French firm. Without "modern" trappings—a phrase that Smith adopts easily and uncritically—and "professional managers," Bouchayer et Viallet prospered for a century. That the firm did so was no mean feat in the modern era of professionally managed firms with far shorter lifespans, such as Enron and WorldCom.