VII - ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE REVOLUTION

Summary

The abolition of privileged corporations in industry was one of the earliest effects of the revolution. Journeymen who imagined that the object was to let them set up in business on their own soon learnt that they were mistaken. Who in fact gained, and who lost, by this final abolition of obsolete and anachronistic institutions, which had only survived (or been revived) because they served the direct financial interests of the crown, and what effect did it have on French trade and industry? These are questions which would be worth investigation. Presumably they have not been investigated so far because it has been assumed that we know the answer: that the result was the liberation of French economy from feudal bonds and its simultaneous subjection to capitalism. This book will have been written to no purpose if it does not suggest that the repetition of such meaningless clichés is no substitute for historical research.

A second economic consequence of the revolution, also frequently commented on, was the freeing of trade in the interests, it is said, of bourgeois economic individualism. Again, it is desirable to ask just what was the free trade that the revolutionaries wanted, and here enough work has been done for us to attempt an answer. In the first place, it presumably meant the abolition of trading monopolies, chiefly in colonial trade.