(^266) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
everyone. The fact remains that history's strongest advocates of free
trade—Victorian Britain, post-World War II United States—were
strongly protectionist during their own growing stage. Don't do as I
did; do as I can afford to do now. The advice does not always sit well.
In France, the old monarchy assisted new industries and technolo
gies—by subsidy and stipend, fiscal exemption and privilege, or so-
called loans that remained unpaid. Because of these helps, ambitious
businessmen had reason to court people of influence, and the court,
like an overripe cheese, invited corruption. The only real constraint was
the increasing penury of the French treasury; by the 1780s, the money
had run out. Meanwhile, as in England, enterprise found a silent ally
in tariff protection, against the world without and other parts of the
kingdom within. (Commercial barriers reflected France's history of
piecemeal territorial accretion.) This long-standing policy stood invi
olate until 1786, when a bureaucrats' treaty traded easier access for
French wines and silks to Britain for admission of British cottons,
woolens, and iron into France.* Such an opening would have had dras
tic consequences for French industry, unprepared as yet for the new
machine technologies. But revolution in 1789 and war with Britain in
1792 put an end to the experiment.
The French Revolution reinforced the role of the state. Authority
was harder, more peremptory; control, more centralized. War needs
made production an urgent priority. Yet the regime lacked resources
(wars eat up money), and military orders only hardened old technolo
gies. Aid to industry consisted primarily of transfers of wealth—Church
properties, for example, confiscated by a militantiy anticlerical regime
and granted to industrial enterprises or sold on concessionary terms.
After the revolution (1798 on), the Bonapartist (later Napoleonic)
regime undertook a modest program of economic development. Once
again wealth (including fine art) changed hands, both within con
quered territories and from conquered lands to France. The greatest
contribution to industry, however—for better or worse—took the dis
guised form of an imperial market closed to British imports. Then, for
a brief moment after 1815, defeated France went over to laissez-faire
and free trade, if only by concession to the British victors and reaction
- European tariff history tells a story of popular, almost instinctive, protection punc
tuated by episodes of administrative, elitist moves in the direction of freer trade. So
with the Eden Treaty of 1786, the Cobden-Chevalier Anglo-French Treaty of 1860,
the post-World War II common market, and GATT. The contest lies between lowbrow
vested interests on the one hand, highbrow economic reasoning on the other.