ABSTRACT
The process of industrialization in France was long and relatively complex, compared with that of other developed countries. Economic historians have some difficulty in singling out any one period of ‘takeoff’, such as is held to have occurred in, say, Britain or Germany, i.e. a relatively short time during which, from being agriculture-based, the economy moved decisively towards domination by industry. In France it seems that from the early nineteenth century onwards the pattern was one of slow but steady industrial advances (especially in the Second Empire, early Third Republic and 1920s) without there ever having been a dramatic industrializing surge. Such industrial growth varied greatly between sectors and regions, and the reasons for the slowness are too complex to be discussed here.1 A good index of this slowness is to look at the high percentage of the workforce employed on the land, in comparison with other countries. Clearly this high density of peasantry is important not just in explaining France’s industrial lag, but also some aspects of her politics; we shall have to refer to this phenomenon later (see Figure 2.1).
