YOU NEED MONEY TO MAKE MONEY^273ironmaster of Chalon-sur-Saône named Coste; but Adolphe was
determined to have it, and drawing on his connections (Louis
Boigues and François Seillière), he bought the firm for an additional
million. Not bad for M. Coste. Not bad for Adolphe Schneider.
Adolphe brought his brother in to help him: he would handle
trade and finances; Eugène would direct exploitation and
production. Shortiy thereafter Eugène married Constance Le Moine
des Mares, granddaughter of the baron de Neuflize and daughter of
a receveur des finances. (These were tax collectors who held and
invested the proceeds for considerable periods before they had to
turn them over to the state treasury. This made them in effect
important private bankers.) To improve his technical knowledge,
Eugène took courses at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in
Paris and in the time-honored French tradition visited England to
learn what his competitors were up to. So, Catholic enterprise and
money married Protestant enterprise and money, and all together
built on ties to political power to make Le Creusot a major supplier
of rails and forgings, a builder of steam engines, locomotives,
steamboats, boilers, and presses, and eventually France's greatest
armsmaker.
Bread upon the waters. In 1848, a year of omnivorous crisis,
Fourchambault got into deep financial trouble. The Wendel
(Hayange) and Schneider (Le Creusot) saved it by co-signing a huge
bank loan: we ironmasters have to stick together. And when, a
century later, Maurice de Wendel had four daughters to marry (and
no sons), one of them wedded a Seillière.
None of this was accidental, not even the romance.Making a Virtue of Lateness
It was almost half a century ago, in 1951, that Alexander
Gerschenkron wrote his seminal essay on "Economic Backwardness
in Historical Perspective." In it he posed the question, what does it
take for a follower country to undertake industrialization and
emulate its predecessors? Or, to put it differently, does it make any
difference to come along later?
What does it take? Gerschenkron answered metaphorically: an
ability to leap the gap of knowledge and practice separating the