The Transition to Capitalism in Modern France: Primitive Accumulation and Markets from the Old Regime to the Post-WWII Era

Over the past decades, a revisionist consensus has emerged on two long-debated issues relating to French economic growth. First, scholars have rejected earlier characterizations of nineteenth-century France as “economically backward,” positing instead a divergent but nevertheless effective path to industrialization heading into the early twentieth century. Second, a largely separate body of scholarship, itself a critique of revisionist accounts of the 1789 Revolution, has argued for a causal link between the commercialization of late eighteenth-century France and the outbreak of revolution. While economic historians involved in this first body of literature rarely explicitly mention “capitalism” in describing France's industrial path, historians have frequently described prerevolutionary consumer culture as such, mobilizing a revised understanding of capitalism focusing on commodification rather than proletarianization to reemphasize the importance of economic change in precipitating political events.Into these debates comes Xavier LaFrance and Stephen Miller's ambitious The Transition to Capitalism in Modern France, which takes aim at both parts of this consensus. At the same time, they advocate for more than reinstating the prior status quo regarding France's economic growth and question such fundamental assumptions of this old order as the emphasis on conservative cultural values in preventing industrialization and the existence of a viable prerevolutionary capitalist bourgeoisie. Rather, as indicated by the subtitle's inclusion of “primitive accumulation,” this book deploys an explicitly Marxist definition of capitalism, grounded in the work of Robert Brenner, in which the term can only apply to a society in which the relations of social reproduction have been forcibly changed to such an extent that all levels of society (elites, small producers, peasants) must become market dependent. By this definition, France was not a fully capitalist society until after World War II, which explains the alleged mediocrity of French economic growth from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. The authors argue that during this period “peasants or entrepreneurs stuck to noncompetitive and economically suboptimal practices not out of conservative values but out of self-interest” (12).The Transition to Capitalism in Modern France relies on a synthesis and reinterpretation of a copious secondary literature rather than on the introduction of primary sources and is organized chronologically, with a particular focus on agrarian developments in keeping with the Brennerian underpinnings. Chapter 1 examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century agriculture, in which peasants gradually sought out more market opportunities, but only as a way of maintaining a traditional peasant lifestyle, while elites used old-fashioned techniques of extraction rather than productivity maximization. The ability of both groups to successfully perpetuate their lifestyles by applying these strategies, strategies in turn aided by the French Revolution, explains the relative stagnation of French agriculture to the mid-nineteenth century.Chapter 2 follows industrialization during the same period, arguing that France's political fragmentation enabled market fragmentation, which prevented the kind of coercion necessary to subject both business owners and workers to market dependency, as existed in contemporary Britain. The long prevalence of cottage industries built on the intensive use of labor rather than mechanization meant that workers generally could fall back on agriculture, preventing proletarianization. Capitalists still operated as old-style merchants rather than industrialists, and workers found protection from market discipline through the moral economy of “bon droit.” Chapter 3 shows how the Second Empire ushered in some capitalist modernization, particularly in the financial industry as well as through trade liberalization. Such transitions continued under the Third Republic as employment in the agricultural sector dwindled. Yet the authors stress that in the 1930s France still lagged behind leading industrial nations, testified to by the fall in French goods as a portion of total exports, because it remained a “dualist” economy with traditional and modern enterprises coexisting.Chapter 4 looks at the sweeping postwar agricultural reforms that, in the authors’ view, mark the decisive victory of capitalism over traditional social relations. Spearheaded by young farmers’ organizations and Gaullist administrators, reforms introduced capitalist finance-dependent export-driven agriculture. Chapter 5, spanning the 1950s to early 1970s, shows a similar capitalist triumph in industrial production. Following the thorough discrediting of old collaborationist industrial elites, organized labor and the Marshall Plan enabled market-oriented reformers to push through capitalist policies that explain France's robust growth going into the 1970s. The epilogue somewhat breathlessly brings us up to the present, with repeated attempts at further market liberalization since the 1980s met with correspondingly frequent protests across a vast spectrum of French society.Given the recent pervasiveness of “capitalism” in historiography, particularly the New History of Capitalism, where its exact parameters remain infamously undefined, it is unconventional and even refreshing to find a book so specific in its definition. Doubtless, however, this very precision, particularly as against the emphasis on commodification that has prevailed with other Marxist, marxisant, and Marx-ish scholars, combined with the apparently extremely short-lived nature of successful “true” capitalism in France per the authors’ definition (before collapsing into endless backlash against further liberalization), will prompt the question of their model's relative usefulness in explaining the particularities of political and economic development in modern France.