176 Chapter Five
naval gunfoundry at Indret, an island at the mouth of the Loire. In this
way, French planners hoped that the French navy could secure large
numbers of cheap guns for its ships and for harbor defense. An En
glish technician and entrepreneur, William Wilkinson, joined forces
with a French captain of industry, Baron François Ignace de Wendel,
and Parisian financiers to promote this scheme. Interest-free loans
from the French government helped with initial expenses and Louis
XVI personally subscribed to 333 of the 4,000 shares. With this au
gust backing, Le Creusot began production in 1785, but met with
severe and persistent technical difficulties of the same sort that were
plaguing British ironmasters in these years. The grandiose enterprise
in fact went bankrupt in 1787–88, and after years of unsatisfactory
production the scheme was abandoned in 1807 because the poor qual
ity of iron from Le Creusot produced too many defective cannon.^39
Despite its ultimate failure, this grand plan clearly adumbrated
nationwide mobilization for large-scale arms production of a kind that
became important only in the twentieth century. Such plans were not
entirely without precedent. In the seventeenth century, Colbert im
ported considerable numbers of Liégeois arms makers to staff royal
arsenals in France.^40 Even earlier than this, import of technology from
abroad, and its application on a grand scale to armaments production,
had helped the Russian state outstrip its rivals and neighbors. Thus,
the establishment of a Dutch-managed arms plant at Tula in 1632 was
followed by Peter the Great’s successful efforts to build up ferrous
metallurgy in the Urals.^41 Moreover, the transfer of Flemish metallur
gical technique to Sweden in the early part of the seventeenth century
had a very similar character,^42 and Prussian efforts to establish an arms
- Bertrand Gille, Les origines de la grande industrie métallurgique en France (Paris,
1947), pp. 131–35 and passim; Conturie, Histoire de la fonderie nationale de Ruelle, pp.
248–80; Theodore Wertime, The Coming of Age of Steel (Leiden, 1961), pp. 131–32;
Joseph Antoine Roy, Histoire de la famille Schneider et du Creusot (Paris, 1962), pp.
11–15.
- Gaier, Four Centuries of Liège Gunmaking, p. 60.
- Most of the labor needed was provided by ascribing serfs to the new enterprises.
Much of the work was done in winter when there was nothing to do in the fields; hence
the extra burden on the serfs cut into their agricultural productivity only slightly. By
generous resort to compulsion, in other words, the Russian government instituted a far
more efficient distribution of labor through the year—and acquired an iron industry,
basic for armaments, for little more than the cost of supporting supervisory personnel
and a few imported master workmen. Cf. James Mavor, An Economic History of Russia,
2d ed. (New York, 1925), 1:437–38. By 1715 Peter’s factories had produced no fewer
than 13,000 cannons; in 1720 the annual production of muskets reached 20,000—fully
equivalent to French production. Cf. Arcadius Kahan, “Continuity in Economic Activity
and Policy during the Post-Petrine Period in Russia.” in William L. Blackwell, ed.,
Russian Economic Development from Peter the Great to Stalin (New York, 1974), p. 57.
- See above, p. 122.
