The Industrial Revolution in France 1700-1914 [antikvár]

The Industrial Revolution in France THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM The expression 'Industrial Revolution', which made its appearance in the first third of the nineteenth century and has since then been widely used by economists and historians, covers without discrimination, in all countries, the phase of economic development in which the period of agricultural predominance gives way to industrial predominance. The habit has arisen of speaking of an industrial revolution in England, which was imitated, in the course of the nineteenth century, in the great countries of the European continent, France, Prussia, Piedmont, Austria-Hungary and Russia, before being exported to other continents, to the United States and Japan. The same expression is used nowadays to describe the transition from what is now called under-development, characteristic of former colonial territories, to the economic independence which should go together with political independence. Finally, Marxist terminology has ensured the success of the expression by making it, implicitly or otherwise, the criterion of transition from a society described as 'feudal' to a 'bourgeois' or even a 'proletarian' classless society. This is equivalent to saying that bourgeois society can only exist insofar as it is industrialised, a theory disproved by the history of medieval urban societies or even of certain societies based on landed property. The problem is further complicated by certain contemporary transformations. Historians, often working backwards from th&fait accompli, have allowed themselves to be dominated by the idea of a phenomenon which is finalised and limited in time. At the present time, we can better realise the incorrectness of such a preconceived idea, because the industrial revolution is in fact a continuing phenomenon which is going on in front of our eyes in