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The Rise of Capitalist Manufacture in the Ancien Régime a Review of Economic Development in Early Modern France: the Privilege of Liberty, 1650–1820 by Jeff Horn

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The Rise of Capitalist Manufacture in the Ancien Régime a Review of Economic Development in Early Modern France: the Privilege of Liberty, 1650–1820 by Jeff Horn Historical Materialism 25.3 (2017) 210–222 brill.com/hima The Rise of Capitalist Manufacture in the Ancien Régime A Review of Economic Development in Early Modern France: The Privilege of Liberty, 1650–1820 by Jeff Horn Henry Heller University of Manitoba, Winnipeg [email protected] Abstract Viewing the development of French trade and manufacturing between 1650 and 1820, Jeff Horn underscores their great success based largely on overseas markets. His evidence supports the view of Friedrich Engels and Perry Anderson that capitalism developed within the pores of the Old Regime. Yet Horn attempts to deny the leading role of the bourgeoisie in this advance. He claims that it was through the Old Regime system of economic privileges rather than the agency of bourgeois capital accumulation that such progress was made. This article rejects Horn’s exclusive preoccupation with the positive economic role of the privileges granted by the state. It reasserts the importance of the agency of the bourgeoisie in furthering economic development. Moreover, it contends that for all the economic gains made by the system of state privileges, such privileges were more than offset by the weight of rents on the peasantry and to the benefit of the nobility and Church imposed by this same regime of privileges. The distorted development that privileges imposed on economic and social life became an important factor behind the outbreak of the Revolution. Keywords privileges – bourgeoisie – society of orders – institutional economics Jeff Horn, Economic Development in Early Modern France: The Privilege of Liberty, 1650–1820, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/�569�06X-��Downloaded34�53� from Brill.com09/27/2021 09:53:51AM via free access Rise of Capitalist Manufacture in the Ancien Régime 211 There are those such as George Comninel and David Parker on the left and Alfred Cobban and George Taylor on the right who have taken the view that the French Revolution was not capitalist because capitalism barely existed prior to 1789.1 Comninel rejects the idea that the workforce was fully proletarianised prior to the Revolution, which he believes is a sine qua non for accumulation. Parker finds no capitalist bourgeoisie at the time of the seizure of the Bastille. Meanwhile Cobban sees the Revolution based on the lower classes as more anti-capitalist than capitalist. Taylor rejects the view that the Revolution could have been capitalist because the crucial junction between financial and productive capital had not yet been made. I have tried to argue for the contrary view that the Revolution was both bourgeois and capitalist based on the evidence of current research showing that there had developed a certain commercial, industrial and even agrarian capitalism prior to the Revolution which was sufficiently strong to allow the bourgeoisie to take political power in the crisis of 1789.2 Moreover, I have also emphasised that the revolutionary seizure of the state allowed the bourgeoisie subsequently to strengthen its political and economic grip on power and especially fostered the tie between financial and productive capital.3 This position reinforces the view articulated by Friedrich Engels and Perry Anderson that a capitalist bourgeoisie developed within the interstices of the Old Regime. Engels took the position that the Old Regime balanced itself by holding the ring between the nobility and the rising bourgeoisie.4 On the contrary, Anderson more convincingly viewed early modern absolutism as an institution which essentially served the interests of the nobility.5 Both agree that the forces of production of capitalism directed by the bourgeoisie were able to advance under the protection of the absolute state in France. Jeff Horn’s important new work Economic Development in Early Modern France: The Privilege of Liberty, 1650–1820 lends further support to this perspective. Horn previously published The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1830, which I reviewed in the pages of Historical Materialism.6 That work was distinguished by its acknowledgement not of bourgeois ascendancy but of the importance of nascent class conflict rooted 1 Comninel 1987, Parker 1996, Cobban 1968, Taylor 1962. 2 Heller 2006. 3 Heller 2014. 4 Anderson 1974, pp. 15–16. 5 Anderson 1974, p. 18. 6 Heller 2012. Historical Materialism 25.3 (2017) 210–222 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 09:53:51AM via free access 212 Heller in working-class resistance to industrialisation. Horn’s recognition of the reality of an emerging working class and the progress of industrialisation represented a real advance in the light of the existing and highly-influential revisionist historiography which has largely denied the progress of capitalist industrialisation before and during the Revolution. On the other hand, I criticised it because it exaggerated the importance of working-class resistance in limiting the pace of nineteenth-century French industrial development as against other factors such as competition in the international market, institutional and infrastructural problems, and the organisational structure of French industry. Manufacture and Commerce in the Old Regime In this new book Horn acknowledges some of the limitations of his earlier work, too narrowly focused on the militancy of workers as a barrier to capital- intensive industrialisation. But this recognition partly stems from the much more comprehensive view of French economic history that he develops in this ambitious and challenging new work which deals with the development of the French economy from the reign of Louis XIV until 1820. Based on primary research in the French archives dating as far back as 1990, Horn offers nothing less than an in-depth account of French commercial and manufacturing development over the course of nearly two centuries, from the reign of the Sun King through the Revolution. As such Horn gives us an unparalleled overview of the development of capitalism within the structures of the Old Regime. In so doing he helps to substantiate the view of Engels and Anderson that capitalism developed within the pores of the feudal and absolutist regime. Following Hegel, Marx understood the Old Regime as one in which civil society and the state are fused together. Indeed, Hegel’s left-wing followers, including the young Marx, were dealing with the fact that they were still living under the thrall of a German old regime which was marked by the continued dominance of feudalism and absolutism. Their enthusiasm for the French Revolution stemmed largely from the fact that the Revolution had broken the tie between civil society and the state, allowing the autonomous development of capitalist society and its bourgeois freedoms. As Marx came to recognise, it was the revolutionary intervention of the bourgeois class which brought about this separation. It was his initial hope that revolutionary change along the same lines would occur in Germany. Indeed, he made this insight on the meaning of the French Revolution the cornerstone of his historical theory based on class struggle. Historical MaterialismDownloaded 25.3 from Brill.com09/27/2021(2017) 210–222 09:53:51AM via free access Rise of Capitalist Manufacture in the Ancien Régime 213 As in his earlier work, one of the goals of Horn’s work is to downplay as much as possible the role of the revolutionary bourgeoisie in this transformation. On the contrary, Horn’s work is aimed at demonstrating the reality of economic development in the Old Regime in which the state and not capitalist entrepreneurs directed the economy as well as most other aspects of society including the economic activities of the bourgeoisie. The latter were simply the dependents of an all-powerful state. The entrepreneurs with their petty concerns of exploiting labour, finding markets and maintaining profits were essentially instruments of state policy. Horn’s narrative seeks to applaud the success of this paternalistic and all-encompassing state control over economic life from the late-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The eventual demise of this system and the breakthrough of bourgeois civil society is only obliquely and reluctantly conceded. The growing revolutionary potential of the bourgeois class is denied as much as possible. The System of Privileges According to Horn, the key means through which the capitalism of the Old Regime developed were economic privileges accorded by the Bourbon monarchy. Privileges, economic and otherwise, were the constitutional basis of the early-modern state’s legalising the provisions of rights to some while denying them to others. Between 1683 and 1753 about 1,000 industrial guidelines, mainly in the form of privileges, were issued by the Bourbon state. Officials deployed what Horn refers to as the ‘liberty of privileges’ to towns, corporations, guilds, territories, religious minorities and entrepreneurs to foster commercial and industrial development. The bulk of Horn’s work is dedicated to showing how until the 1750s this system served to accelerate France’s growth. The remainder of the text outlines the decay and eventual overthrow of this system by the Revolution. Following an introductory chapter Horn explains how the monarchy allowed the development of free economic zones in Paris and Bordeaux while providing duty-free exemptions on the specialised products of other French towns. The privileges accorded by the crown allowed the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to emerge as a burgeoning centre of trade and manufacture independent of the powerful guilds which controlled economic life in the rest of Paris. Likewise in Bordeaux the ecclesiastical enclaves of Saint-Seurin and Saint-André achieved a similar economic independence from the rest of the town. Colbert, it is true, greatly extended the control of guilds over French economic life. Stressing the positive, Horn claims that the sway of the guilds Historical Materialism 25.3 (2017) 210–222 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 09:53:51AM via free access 214 Heller fostered economic competitiveness, established uniformity and order, and helped to rationalise the productive and commercial environment.
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