The Myth of French Worker Support for the North in the American Civil War

Abstract

France faced one of the worst economic depressions in her history during the early 1860s. The major cause of this crisis was the American Civil War, which deprived French textile mills of Southern cotton and drastically reduced the lucrative American market for many French exports. Hardest hit were the cotton textile centers of Normandy, Alsace, and the north, which had depended on the Southern States for 90 per cent of their raw material before the war. Within a few months of the war's outbreak, the combined effects of the Northern blockade and the Southern embargo had choked off this source, and the price of raw cotton had tripled on European markets. To make matters worse, English manufacturers took advantage of the recent Commercial Treaty by dumping great quantities of surplus textile goods in France during the last quarter of 1861; this invasion made it almost impossible for domestic manufacturers to dispose of their own stocks. These developments hit the French industrialists at the worst possible moment, since many of them had just invested heavily in modernized equipment in order to meet the English challenge. Faced with the scarcity and high price of raw cotton on one hand and the difficulty of selling their finished products on the other, many firms were forced to curtail their activity or close down altogether. For thousands of French cotton workers this meant reduced wages and short-time or total unemployment.1