942 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste and Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century. By Whitney Walton. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Pp. xii + 240; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00. The question of why France failed to industrialize as rapidly as Great Britain did during the first half of the 19th century is one of the most discussed topics in French economic and technological history. Explanations for this relative lack of industrial development have included such factors as the widespread persistence of small-scale peasant agriculture in France, the presence of an archaic business mentality among French businessmen, the difficulty in obtaining sufficient amounts of industrial raw materials, the prejudice against applied science among French intellectuals and educators, govern ment instability, a primitive banking system that made capital forma tion difficult, and efforts by the French ruling elite to maintain political and social peace by artificially protecting artisan manufactur ing. The assumption that underlies these explanations is this: if the various weaknesses within French society, polity, and manufacturing that “held France back” could have somehow been corrected, France would have industrialized just as quickly and thoroughly as Great Britain did during this period. Whitney Walton implicitly rejects this assumption. Instead, she approaches the problem of relative French industrial retardation from a unique and interesting angle. Although she does not com pletely deny the role played by the various structural factors empha sized by other historians, she argues that French concentration on handmade, artistic, and expensive products (as opposed to cheaper but aesthetically inferior machine-made items) represented a rational and entrepreneurial response by French manufacturers to domestic consumer demand and tastes. Walton’s examination of the influence of domestic market forces on French manufacturing employs the Crystal Palace exhibition, held in London in 1851, as its central point of reference. Traditionally viewed as a celebration of British industrial superiority, the exhibition was also interpreted by French observers as a vindication of small-scale handicraft production. French entries at the exhibition (which prima rily included furniture, home furnishings, art reproductions, and various luxury items) won numerous prizes for their craftsmanship, artistic merit, and elegance and convinced many political economists and other knowledgeable observers that the economic future of France lay in the continued exploitation of the market for high-quality hand made products rather than competing head-to-head with the British in the manufacture of mass-produced and inexpensive goods. This emphasis by French manufacturers on the production of high-quality consumer goods was, according to Walton, primarily the result of consumer demand within France. She argues that the main TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 943 consumers of manufactured products in France during the halfcentury that led up to the Crystal Palace exhibition were middle-class, and it was their tastes, preferences, and life-style that encouraged and perpetuated the dominance of artisan manufacturing in the country. Heavily influenced by earlier aristocratic preferences for the ornate, substantial, and expensive, they also modified this desire in response to their more limited incomes and a practical concern for comfort. The result was a solid market for items that advertised the taste and status of their owners but that simultaneously appealed to affluent, if not wealthy, practical-minded consumers. This consumer orientation did not preclude the introduction of technological innovation, as long as the new techniques met the associated demands of craftsmanship, price, and comfort. In the area of art reproductions, for example, such technological innovations as improvements in lithographic techniques, electroplating, and the Collas method (which accurately transferred the outline of a full-size statue onto a smaller plaster block) actually strengthened consumer demand for these products because they lowered prices without sacrificing quality. On the other hand, continued bourgeois demand for intricately decorated furniture made from hard, exotic woods limited technological innovation since machines, at this time, simply could not produce the type of furniture that middle-class consumers desired. French manufacturing, in short, was not necessarily techno logically archaic just because it concentrated on the production of high-quality consumer items. As long as new technology did not violate the basic requirements of beauty and elegance demanded by bourgeois...
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Nov 1, 1993
Mark H Lazerson + 1
