ABSTRACT
A very large part of French foreign investment went to Russia in the two decades before the First World War (WWI). These investments were endorsed by both governments and reflected in part a strong political entente between the two countries. From 1870, between France’s eastern border and Russia’s western, was the newly unified state of Germany, economically and politically imperialist in its desire for markets and space and unequivocally therefore more of a potential enemy to France and Russia than any other country, including Britain. This was not all they shared. For nation states to be successful militarily, it was clear by the mid nineteenth century that armaments, naval power and communication lines had to reflect changing technology. Modern arsenals, steamships, railways, cables, later tanks, destroyers and aircraft, became as important as the crude size of army manpower. Industrialisation was necessary and in the nineteenth century that meant coal, iron, metallurgy, machines and later electricity. Apart from the need to keep abreast of technology innovations, industrial expansion required a much bigger manufacturing labour force and that would have to come from falling mortality in urban areas, immigration or, most likely in this period, a shift out of agriculture. In both France and Russia this was a major economic problem: the slow decline in agriculture’s share of the economy and slow rural– urban migration was common to both, albeit in very different contexts.
