L'industrie francaise au milieu du 19e siecle: Les enquetes de la Statistique generale de la France (review)

Historians of technology as well as social and economic historians of nineteenth-century France would be well advised to consult L'industrie française au milieu du 19e siècle. Authored by a team of eight, this useful volume is a well-integrated study of two national statistical surveys of French industry, "massive sources that have been insufficiently utilized" (p. 6). The results of the first, conducted from 1839 to 1847 by the government of the July Monarchy, were originally published in four volumes under the title Statistique de la France: Industrie (1847-52). The government of Napoleon III conducted the second about twenty years later, the results of which were published during the Third Republic in a single volume called Statistique de la France: Industrie—Résultats généraux de l'enquête effectuée dans les années 1861-1865 (1873).

The book comes with a significant bonus: a compact disc that includes an electronic version of the book and features many active internal links, selected text material, illustrations, and a vast quantity of statistical data from the two surveys, organized by department and by arrondissement. This compact disc should facilitate the work of historians on a variety of industry-related topics, not only in the French context but also in comparisons with other countries. For example, the data in the second survey on the cotton textile industry in France reflect the decrease in American imports during the American Civil War.

The criteria for selecting survey data for the compact disc suggest the complexity of the research issues; the authors write that, "whenever possible, we entered for the second survey all the variables identical to those entered for the first survey, with the exception of the number of prime movers" (p. 158). Acknowledging that the second survey also contains data on the number of prime movers, the authors chose to enter only the horsepower of these prime movers (not available in the first survey) "because it is a more pertinent variable than their number" (p. 158). This example confirms the authors' explicit orientation toward economic history. Historians of technology will want to consult the original surveys as well as L'Industrie Française.

The original publications did not use identical nomenclatures, categories, or methods of collection and analysis. Moreover, the first survey was possibly flawed—to a greater degree than the second, anyway—by problems of consistency and accuracy due to industrialists' suspicions about the use of data for tax purposes. Historians who have sought to compare data from both surveys have been plagued by problems of interpretation. Nevertheless, the two decades between the surveys allowed bureaucrats and statisticians to improve their methods of collecting and analyzing data. L'Industrie Française goes a long way toward explaining internal inconsistencies and differences between the two surveys and proposing solutions for managing problems stemming from those differences.

In brief, chapter 1 introduces the two surveys and places them in their historical and subsequent historiographical contexts. Chapter 2 addresses differences in nomenclature used in the two surveys, outlines some of the obstacles for researchers, and suggests appropriate limits to the use and interpretation of the data. Chapters 3 and 4 then take up statistical issues. For example, the authors test for internal consistency of the data and for reliability by comparing the survey data to independently collected data from census records and from the surveys of the Administration of Mines during the same periods. Chapters 5 through 8 address specific topics, including daily and annual wages, the means of production and value of capital, localization of industrial activities and the size of firms, and elements related to production and productivity such as capital investment, salaries...