Technology and Culture

352 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE L’Industrie sidérurgique en France pendant la Révolution et l’Empire. By Denis Woronoff. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1984. Pp. 592; maps, tables, notes, bibliography, indexes. F240.00 (paper). In many ways, Denis Woronoff’s L’Industrie sidérurgique en France pendant la Révolution et l’Empire is a typical French thèse d’état. The product of nearly twenty years of research, the book is massive (532 pages of text), painstakingly documented, loaded with graphs, tables, and maps, overburdened with detailed methodological discussion, and more than a bit rambling. Yet, despite these minor irritants, Woro­ noff’s book is an important one. He bas taken a discrete period of time (late 1770s to 1815) and has skillfully assessed the effect of the Revolu­ tionary and Napoleonic years on the development of the French iron industry. The period was characterized by almost incessant war, and military needs created a skyrocketing demand for iron and steel prod­ ucts. Following the arguments of classical economic theory, one would assume that this escalating demand would stimulate technological in­ novation, the rationalization of production methods and labor orga­ nization, the expansion in both the size and number of sidérurgique concerns, and an unprecedented prosperity among iron manufactur­ ers and suppliers. Woronoff, however, argues that it was not as clearcut as all this. The demands of the Revolutionary era on the French iron industry were mitigated by the persistence of structures that had been formed long before 1789—structures that played a powerful role in determin­ ing the response ofsidérurgie to these new war-induced stimuli. To use an example which will be of interest to readers of this journal, the heavy demand for iron by the Revolutionary armies did convince many government officials and industrial spokesmen that technological in­ novation (such as the use of coal to replace charcoal as fuel for forges) was the best way to increase productivity and meet the needs of mod­ ern armament. Yet these good intentions were rarely translated into actual practice. The French iron industry was still very regional in nature, each establishment producing primarily for a local market and, more importantly, drawing on raw materials that were close at hand (because of the prohibitive cost of transporting coal, wood, and iron ore over long distances in the days before the railroad). Many of these “forges” were located in areas far away from coal supplies (the Pyrénées, the Périgord, the Dauphiné, Normandy) and thus found it cheaper and more efficient to continue using charcoal, even given the escalating price and increasing scarcity of wood, rather than switch to coal. Even in those areas where coal was plentiful, such as AlsaceForraine , other structural factors blocked its implementation. The English had pioneered the use of coal in iron-smelting and had de­ veloped at least the primitive technology for employing it effectively. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 353 The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, however, cut oft contact with Great Britain and thus deprived French iron manufacturers of access to British coal technology. The wars interfered with the employment of new technology in another way as well: the French state, in its desper­ ate search for enough iron to meet the nearly insatiable demands ofthe military, made burdensome demands on the output ofsidérurgie, often issuing high production quotas to individual concerns. Given the some­ times strict penalties for failing to attain these goals, most French sidérurgistes preferred to stick to their old tried-and-true techniques and expand production through increasing the size of their establish­ ments, rather than risk disrupting their manufacturing schedules with the implementation of a new technology that was not yet entirely proved. Thus, even though many contemporaries saw such techno­ logical innovations as the use of coal as necessary, most French iron producers resisted adopting them—not from any obscurantist obses­ sion with the older techniques but because, given the structural en­ vironment of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the retention of traditional manufacturing methods made good business sense. The failure oftechnological development is but one example of how the Revolution failed to spur the transformation...