This book is about industrial prosperity: how to get it and when it
emerges. Standard descriptions of the trajectory of comparative industrialization,
such as David Landes’ classic The Unbound Prometheus,
depict French industry as unable to compete with laissez-faire Great
Britain until after 1850 at the earliest.1 Budding French attempts at
industrial competition were unsuccessful, and later efforts were rapidly
overshadowed by two emerging industrial powerhouses: an arrogant
Imperial Germany and the upstart United States. In many historians’
accounts, the French were permanently relegated to a kind of industrial
purgatory. For Landes, the nature of French entrepreneurialism was to
blame. The French emphasis on family firms, an “outdated” form of
organization that championed austerity, frugality, and high profit per
unit sold at the expense of profit maximization and relentless expansion
of output, consigned the French to perpetual second-class status. Landes
attributed these business choices to cultural preferences; material
constraints, exogenous technical considerations, dissimilar labor relations,
and political pressures were at best secondary factors in his evaluation
of entrepreneurial decision making and the course of French
industrialization