The Boot and Shoe Trades in London and Paris in the Long Eighteenth Century

development of the French economy during the first half of the nineteenth
century. It is important to underline the word 'relative' because of the
comparative nature of such a debate. Britain provided the classic paradigm of
industrial development to which the so-called followers had to comply in order
to undertake an industrial revolution. European industrialisation was part of a
wider frame that started in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century and
continued all over Europe in the following hundred years. There was very little
scope for national characteristics as well as individual factors affecting the
rhythm of development and results achieved. This classic vision, popularised by
W.W. Ro in his Stages of economic growth during the 1960s created a frame
for the understanding of continental economies.2
The French economy appeared to be very difficult to fit within a 'British'
structure of development. France not only industrialised much later but seemed
to preserve during the nineteenth century what at the time was defined as a
traditional (and rather backward) productive structure. The French economy was
based on very small firms and workshops and keen to emphasise issues of
quality rather than show steady quantitative improvements over time. 3 In the
1970s the peculiarity of the nineteenth-century French economy was analysed
not as an exception to a pre-established pattern of growth, but as a new and
challenging dimension of economic development.4 The French path to
industrialisation was different from the English one. It was based on the
preservation of established structures and technologies and on the importance of
taste and fashion. 5 We can argue that this new view of the 'French industrial
2
W.W. Rostow, The stages of economic growth. A non-communist manifesto (Cambridge,
1960).
JR. Farr, 'New directions in French economic history: introduction', French Historical
Studies, XXIII - 3 (2000), pp. 417-22; P.T. Hoffman and J.-L. Rosenthal, 'New work in French
economic history', French Historical Studies, XXIII - 3 (2000), pp. 439-53; C. Heywood, The
development of the French economy, 1750-1914 (London, 1992).
' T. Kemp, Economic forces in French history (London, 1971); F. Crouzet, 'French Economic
Growth in the Nineteenth Century Reconsidered', History, LIX (1974), pp. 167-79;
W. Walton, "To triumph before feminine taste': bourgeois women's consumption and hand
made methods of production in mid-nineteenth-century Paris', Business History Review, LX —4
(1986), pp. 541-63; B.M. Ratcliffe, 'Manufacturing in the metropolis: the dynamism and
dynamics of Parisian industry at the mid-nineteenth century', Journal of European Economic
History, XXIII - 2 (1993), pp. 263-328; M. Berg, 'French fancy and cool Britannia: the
fashionable markets of early modern Europe' (Unpublished paper, XXXII Settimana di Studi,
Istituto internazionale di Storia Economica F. Datini, Prato, 8-12 May 2000).
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