(^272) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
bringing home all kinds of sample products that the British, unlike
the French, were making of metal. So diligentiy did he buy that
Dufaud had to freight a ship to haul his loot across the Channel.^10
But back to Le Creusot. In 1821, aged only nineteen, Adolphe
Schneider entered the Seillière bank. The Seillière had started as
merchant-manufacturers of woolens, but like a number of such
putters-out, had branched into related commercial transactions.
From there they had gone into banking, moving from their ancestral
Lorraine to Paris.^11 They were among the few leading Catholic
families in a field dominated in France by Protestant firms with
strong connections to co-religionists in Switzerland. Among their
special business interests were ironmaking and metallurgy. The
Seillière were strong backers of their fellow Lorrain Ignace-François
de Wendel, artillery officer turned ironmaster in the Wendel family
tradition, probably the single most enterprising and influential
pioneer of iron-cum-coal technology in the France of the Old
Regime. When the Wendel lost their forge and foundry of Hayange
as a result of the revolution, Florentin Seillière helped them buy the
plant back in 1804, then again the nearby forge of Moyeuvre in
1811.^12
In 1830, the Seillière bank won the contract to provide equipment
for the French expeditionary force to Algiers (the start of French
imperialism in North Africa). Adolphe Schneider was sent to be their
agent on the scene and received a lucrative commission of 2 percent
on the total value of the merchandise. Much enriched, he then set up
on his own as a cloth merchant in Paris. It was in this capacity, we
are told, that he entered into business relations with the current
owners of Le Creusot, a pair of expatriate Englishmen, and became
their creditor. This put him in a good position to bid for the
enterprise when it failed shortly thereafter.
Meanwhile the younger brother, Eugène, was busily making his
own way. He started as a clerk in Reims, a center of wool
manufacture, and from there rejoined his brother in the Seillière
bank. In 1827, however, all of twenty-two years old, he was engaged
by the baron de Neuflize, descendant of an old Protestant wool
dynasty of Sedan, the Poupart, to run a nearby forge for them. (One
feels that all kinds of people, especially young people, were going
into iron.)
Eugène ran the forge for almost a decade. Meanwhile Adolphe was
pursuing the matter of Le Creusot, then languishing in bankruptcy.
In 1835, the works was sold at auction for 1.85 million francs to an