Les grandes Compagnies de chemin de fer en France, 1823-1937 (review)

This is a book that is hard to describe and hard to review. It is certainly not an ordinary study of railway history but a kind of broad survey, based on a series of financial reports concerning the great French private railway companies, as drawn up between 1882 and 1936 by financial analysts of the Credit Lyonnais Bank and preserved in the "Archives Historiques du Crédit Lyonnais." François Caron, dean of French economic and railway historians, has selected large parts of the original reports and has added his own comments and explanations. It is also not an easy book to read, with the parts of the original texts as selected by Caron set in bold and his own introductions and commentary in plain type. The contents of the original reports are 90 percent financial, as is only to be expected in view of the source they came from, but now and then, we are presented with a few statistical snippets of traffic figures and such. There is nothing on the actual working of the railways, nothing on technology, and nothing on relations with the staff or the public. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, of course, but a reader should be warned what to expect, as the title itself does not tell him much. The book is organized in four sections, rather unequal in length—the first covering the formative years until 1883, the second the years of the great economic recession between 1883 and 1899, the third the halcyon years between 1900 and 1914, and the last the period from there, with a lot of detail about the consequences of World War I, until the formation of the national railway system in 1937.

The history of the 'Grandes Réseaux,' the six great French railway companies, is a complicated story. The Nord, the Est, the Ouest, the Paris-Orléans, the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée, and the Midi all had fairly modest beginnings, but after many mergers and reorganizations, these six had emerged and finished their mainlines by the late 1850s. Some, such as the Nord, were incorporated to takeover lines already under construction by the state, and others were set up to construct new lines themselves, but with strong pressure from the government to create a real network of strategic lines radiating from Paris to all parts of the country. In 1859, the state signed conventions with all of them and guaranteed the interest on part of their consolidated debt and a certain amount of dividend on their shares. After the first network of mainlines was in place, the French government, to satisfy the demands of regions hitherto untouched by railways, instituted the construction of a second network of secondary mainlines and regional lines. The great companies were forced to work these lines, often much against their will, and a separate financial arrangement with the state was necessary for these generally lightly trafficked lines. The successive French governments, monarchal or republican, had generally positive views of the importance of railways for satisfying the demands of the population to secure votes, but these almost invariably served to saddle the railway companies with unremunerative lines and thus complicating the financial relations between state and private companies.

In 1883, a new series of conventions was signed between the state and the several railway companies, including the construction of new regional railways and a reworked financial relationship between state and companies. With some later minor rearrangements, this system was in force until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. There was at that time and later a lot of doubt whether this system really benefited the state or the companies or the country in general, and one of the most interesting chapters is the one that compares the railway systems of other countries with those of France. The conclusion of the Crédit...