Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France

More than five decades ago, David Landes suggested that the "relatively retarded status" of the French economy could be blamed on French "attitudes and values inimical to the development of enterprise" (Journal of Economic History 9 [1949]: 45). Those familiar with more recent work by Landes and Samuel Huntington know that this kind of thesis, one that links national "culture" directly to economic development (or stagnation), is once again very much in vogue. Leonard Rosenband's new book presents an entirely different picture, confronting us with an aggressively entrepreneurial family of French papermakers, the Montgolfiers. This papermaking family, Rosenband convincingly shows, was no bunch of conservative anticapitalists. Rather, the Montgolfiers adapted with great imagination to the challenges posed by high-quality, low-cost Dutch paper, working to transform their mill, Vidalon-le-Haut, into a "theater of experiment, a testing ground for both men and machines" (p. 6)

Archaeology · Economic history · Economics · Mill · Papermaking · Pulp and paper industry · Engineering · Historical and Literary Studies · History