La population de Roubaix; Industrialisation, démographie et société 1750–1880 (review)

Successful labor force development and failed class formation are the principal themes of Chantal Petillon’s ambitious study of Roubaix between 1750 and 1880. Relying on demographic analysis, Petillon seeks to explain urban growth and working-class passivity. According to Petillon, Roubaix’s sustained industrial growth depended upon Roubaix’s entrepreneurial culture of flexibility and adaptation. In turn, this business culture rested on a working-class culture of passivity, impoverishment, and despair.

Methodologically pioneering, an enormous work of family reconstitution, involving over 11,000 sampled families between 1740 and 1889, provides the study’s foundation. Family reconstitution involves piecing together records of births, deaths, and marriages to study family composition and its change over time. The method is commonly used in village studies but, due to the enormous effort involved in linking different types of data, it is seldom applied to cities or towns. Petillon supplements her family reconstitution with analyses of manuscript censuses. The use of specialized documents such as fiscal records, records of illegitimacy and reports on epidemics and sanitary conditions round out her sources.

For those interested in historical labor force formation, Roubaix is a good starting place. In the 1760s and 1770s, the abolition of royal textile monopolies undermined the domination of regional textile production by Lille, Roubaix’s close neighbor and regional rival. The city did not sit on top of a valuable ore field nor was it situated on an accessible harbor but Roubaix made the best use of its opportunities. Although landlocked, its geographic location—on the roads between early industrializing Great Britain and Belgium—put its industrialists in contact with the latest technologies and Roubaisien entrepreneurs would later profit from close proximity to France’s richest mining fields in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais.

Over the long haul, Roubaix’s growth depended upon wool but throughout the century Roubaix’s producers avoided exclusive specialization in any one product or even in any single fabric; producers nimbly turn towards mixed fabrics and even toward cotton and linen when the usually strong demand for combed wool failed. The city grew from 7,415 in 1764 to a height of 124,661 in 1896, a rate of sustained long-term growth over more than a century without equal in France and with only a few peers in all of Europe. Roubaix expanded in the age of artisanal workshops in the late eighteenth century and during the first wave of mechanization in the early nineteenth century, but the years between 1851 and 1913, the years of large-scale mechanization and great factories, were its real golden period.

Roubaix owed almost everything to proletarianization. Without underestimating the abilities of the city’s entrepreneurs, the greatest single factor in the city’s success was its continued access to cheap labor. Most migrants came from surrounding areas within thirty kilometers and drew on populations that had long sent sons and daughters and often entire families to the city; only in the later nineteenth century did a significant number of migrants come from areas of more than fifty kilometers. Even here the expansion of the recruitment area may have been due less to the entry of distant strangers than to a transportation revolution in local roads and railways. In later periods as in earlier, the great part of the migrants who came were from small towns and villages with longstanding ties to Roubaix.

Migration to Roubaix of local rural artisans from a densely-inhabited surrounding countryside and from nearby regions of northern France and western Belgium and the unusually high fertility of the urban population proved crucial to the continued labor force expansion. Over the course of the century, many Belgian migrants to Roubaix were from Flanders where Catholicism was strong and many women illiterate. Flemish women were also the migrants with increasingly higher illegitimacy rates and generally higher infant mortality.

The city’s own fertility also contributed to its growth. In a France where fertility was declining...