Abstract
Reviewed by: Christopher Guyver, University of Bradford, UK
David Todd has returned to the subject of his first book, L’Identité économique de la France: libre-échange et protectionnisme, 1814–1851 (2008). Using a wide range of archival and printed primary sources in English, French and German, Todd provides the reader with an exhaustive analysis of the economic debates within France and stresses their connection with the globalizing economy of the nineteenth century.
At the turn of the nineteenth century the crisp distinction between British free trade and French protectionism had not yet been fixed. Adam Smith, for instance, had for several decades been seen as essentially a ‘French’ author. By 1850 it had become almost a truism that France was a protectionist country, a view that has continued to the present day. Yet, both Britain and France lowered their tariffs during the first half of the century at more or less the same rate, and yet these countries adopted opposing economic policies. Todd considers it more helpful to see this debate, which grew more polarized as the decades went on, in terms of ideology than economics.
Another historiographical layer is added through his desire to include a global perspective: after all, the very notions of protectionism and free trade are implicitly engaging with the desirability or otherwise of trade with the outside world. The lens chosen here, as in his earlier L’Identité économique, is Bordeaux and Henri Fonfrède, a wine-grower and verbally inventive pamphleteer.
The Restoration was reactionary, Todd tells us, because it tried to bring old economic systems back to life and it was aimed at repressing heterodox political opinion, mainly through the strict surveillance of imported books, imposed in April 1816 by the ultra-royalist Chamber of Deputies, but was just as much in continuity with Napoleon’s Continental Blockade. This repressive system, directed by Pierre de Saint-Cricq, reinforced the political opposition’s identification of commercial with political liberty, even if Todd notes that commercial liberty existed more as a slogan than a thought-through principle of opposition at the end of the 1820s. The government’s insistence on keeping the exclusif, whereby trade with the plantations in the Caribbean was privileged, does not lead Todd to consider the paradoxes of free traders’ support for slavery (witness here the liberal industrialiste Charles Dunoyer, who argued in his 1845 work De la liberté du travail that the slaves themselves were disqualified from emancipation by their racial inferiority).
The July Revolution of 1830, that toppled Charles X and replaced him with Louis-Philippe and a marginally wider franchise, could have been the turning point for French economic policy. Instead the reactionary Saint-Cricq still had influence over economic policy (was he so reactionary then if he served the Orleanist usurper?). Todd argues that the Englishman John Bowring, a name that ought to be anathema for his later role in causing the First Opium War, queered the pitch for the economic liberals by touring France preaching the necessity for lowering tariffs. The foundations of economic Anglophobia in France were being laid.
The backlash against free trade began in earnest, Todd believes, under the Minister of Commerce, Adolphe Thiers in February 1834, just as the Zollverein was finalized in the German Confederation. Even so, Thiers’s enthusiastic and aggressive adherence to protectionism did not prevent his resignation that April. Thiers may have been in opposition to the Restoration regime but he, like many others, was inclined to be seduced by the Napoleonic overtones of the protectionist system.
By the early 1840s, as Cobden’s Anti-Corn Law League was gaining greater influence among the middle classes in Britain, in France it was the protectionist Association pour la Défense du Travail National run by Mimerel and Odier with their newspaper the Moniteur du Nord that had the greatest success. (One may wonder, however, why none of the sources cited in this book noticed the Irish Famine, which gave the strongest argument in the mid-nineteenth century against free trade doctrines.) Frédéric Bastiat, perhaps the most sympathetic spokesman for free trade in France at this time, had no luck with his copycat Anti-Corn Law League, the Association pour la Liberté des Échanges. The Catholic democrat Bastiat was soon eclipsed in 1848 by the cannier élitist ex-Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier. Although socialists such as Louis Blanc and Prosper Considerant had tentatively supported free trade before the early 1840s, by the end of the decade tentative approval had turned into resolute hostility.
Todd’s theme of the divorce of economic and political liberalism does make me pause: what exactly was political liberalism? Although he concedes that liberalism was very vague in the 1820s, when political liberals were in favour of economic liberty, he appears certain that political liberalism did exist as a discrete ideology twenty years later, when it had split from economic liberalism. I am not so sure: while it is clearly the case that the Charter of 1830 was more liberal than its predecessor of 1814, above all in its widening of the franchise, which was doubled (but it still remained very constricted), constitutional liberalism of the nineteenth century was ultimately an elitist ideology. If the men who rallied to Louis-Philippe in 1830 preferred protection to free trade in order to protect their wealth, this cannot be any surprise, any more than that economic protection felt more secure against the threat they believed came from socialism after the Monarchy’s fall in 1848. If, as Todd says in the Introduction, numerous petitions show that the debate affected Frenchmen and women further down the social scale, we are still left with the impression that this was ultimately an elite argument.
Nevertheless, this book is a considerable achievement that manages to cross international and disciplinary boundaries. Todd explores convincingly how protectionism became an economic comfort blanket (my expression, not his). The economic and ideological questions that faced the French about imperialism, globalization and engagement with other countries are almost a parable for more modern times, for countries other than France.