ABSTRACT
Economic historians of France should be to some extent familiar with the criticisms levelled at the late Victorian economy: they are in substance similar in content to those directed at its French counterpart in the nineteenth century, and a generation of historians struggled for decades to explain French industrial ‘retardation’ in the period up to the Second World War. Recently, however, a ‘revisionist’ approach has set out to rehabilitate the French record during the period of industrialization: no, France’s nineteenth-century economic growth was not dismal compared to other industrializes; no, French firms were not unprofitable because too small; no, French entrepreneurs were not timid and conservative rent-seekers. Given the renaissance of France’s economy and its promotion to fifth rank among industrial nations after 1945, there must have been, so it is argued, solid foundations in her recent past to explain this belated vitality.
