Proto-industrialization in France

Abstract

ation with the same enthusiasm as that exhibited by their British and German counterparts.' The explanation may, at least in part, be ideological. Following the Second World War, marxist approaches to the study of history were, if not hegemonic, then certainly dominant in many university circles. In the i960s the entire historical world seemed to be peopled by revolutionary artisans.2 The reaction to the influence exercised by French marxists and neo-marxists following the evenements of May i968 favoured the rise of the Annales school of historians who created their own church in which mentality was worshipped over the tongue duree: the short-term emphasis on revolutions and 'transitions' was replaced by a long-term, Braudelian concern for civilizationss', Mediterranean and Atlantic.3 The debate over proto-industrialization occurred just as a new generation of French historians-dependent upon a new professorial elite for advancement-were moving away from short-term socio-economic issues to longer-term cultural, ethnographic, and socio-linguistic concerns. Nonetheless, eminent French scholars, non-marxist and marxist, such as Meuvret, Labrousse, Marczewski, Henry, and Dupaquier had already provided the statistical, structural, and methodological materials necessary for the application of 'protoindustrialization theory' to French economic history. During the i960S, economic and social historians such as Crouzet, Richet, and Deyon provided the language from which Mendels, in his famous I972 article, was to popularize the word 'proto-industrialization'.4 In Britain, critics of proto-industrialization-at least when the term is interpreted as signifying the first phase of the process of modern