URING the reign of Louis XIV, Colbert sent spies abroad to bring back new industrial techniques, sponsored the experiments of inventors in special laboratories, enticed foreign entrepreneurs with concessions, and attracted skilled foreign workers with special privileges.' In the eighteenth century, although the government manifested much less enthusiam in the pursuit of this policy, it was not completely abandoned. As England was undergoing its industrial revolution, a few models of the new machines found their way across the Channel in spite of prohibitions and embargoes. And in the last years of the ancien rEgime an ambitious group of manufacturers in Rouen, the Abbe Baudeau's Free Society for the Encouragement of Inventions Which Tend to Perfect Arts and Trades, in Imitation of the London Society (1776), and government agencies working under Calonne made a concerted effort to further the introduction of machines.2 Since this mechanization was limited, machine-breaking was not a serious problem in eighteenth-century France.3 The workers received each new loom with a complaint that it deprived them of work, disrupted the organization of the existing industrial system, and caused a marked deterioration in the quality of the finished product. Except for chance outbursts, such as