320 Chapter Nine
In the first furious weeks, cost scarcely mattered. Some 25,000
subcontractors began making munitions of one sort or another and
virtually every available machine was put to work somehow. Later,
high cost producers were squeezed out, mainly by failing to get
allocations of necessary raw materials and fuel. Large new plants con
structed from the ground up to produce armaments on an assembly
line basis became increasingly important as time passed, though some,
among them the largest and most ambitious, had not yet come on
stream when the war ended in 1918.^30
Big business looked after itself very successfully under these cir
cumstances. Businessmen controlled the local councils that allocated
scarce commodities—raw materials, fuel, and labor. Large-scale pro
ducers were able to reap fat profits from price levels designed to keep
marginal firms in business. Mass production methods paid off hand
somely for innovative firms with the right political, financial, and in
dustrial connections. Louis Renault, for instance, built up an industrial
empire in the war years. By 1918 he had 22,500 workers on his
payroll and was turning out shells, trucks, tractors, tanks, airplanes,
gun parts, and the like. His role as chairman of the industrial commit
tee of the Paris region gave him an inside track in bidding on new
contracts; his reliance on a corps of young engineers to design efficient
new production processes made such contracts highly profitable to
him and his firm.^31
Another factor in French success was the character of the labor
force. Large-scale industry, still new in France in 1914, was most at
home in the regions overrun by the Germans. Hence, customary ways
of work scarcely existed for the industrial plants created by the war
accounts of French war mobilization explain how things were done: Arthur Fontaine,
French Industry during the War (New Haven, 1926); John F. Godfrey, “Bureaucracy,
Industry and Politics in France during the First World War” (D.Phil. thesis, St. Antony’s
College, Oxford, 1974); and Etienne Clémentel, La France et la politique économique
interaliée (New Haven, 1931). Gerd Hardach’s brief essay, cited above, may also be
recommended.
- The most famous and controversial was a new state arsenal at Roanne, planned in
September 1916 and never completed. For details see Godfrey, “Bureaucracy,” pp.
314–33. For an upbeat account of a similar venture that barely got underway see Albert
G. Stern, Tanks. 1914–1918: The Logbook of a Pioneer (London, 1919), pp. 185–201.
Stern constructed a factory on French soil using Annamese labor, designed to turn out
300 tanks a month by importing motors from the United States and steel plate from
England.
- Two excellent books illumine the wartime growth of the Renault firm: Hatry,
Renault: Patrick Fridenson, Histoire des usines Renault, vol. 1, Naissance de la grande
entreprise. 1898–1939 (Paris, 1972). For Citroën’s and other firms’ similar successes see
Gerd Hardach, “Franzôsiche Rüstungspolitik 1914–1918” in H. A. Winkler, ed., Or
ganizierter Kapitalismus (Gottingen, 1974), pp. 102–4.
