508. Statistics of French commerce in the recent period.—The table on page 429, presenting the course of French commerce in the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the World War, illustrates what has been said regarding the checks imposed on commercial expansion; and provides the means of comparison with the commercial development of other countries.
509. Position of France in recent commerce.—In matters of taste and of artistic finish, in which personal aptitude and training are the important factors, the French remained unrivaled; in production on a large scale, in which elaborate organization and the extensive use of machinery determine success, the French did not compare with English, Germans, or Americans. Thus the French, though always assured a respectable position in the commerce of the world, could not hope to share the progress which other nations attained by the export of cheap manufactures in great quantities. An Englishman said of the trade between his country and France in 1878, “Broadly it may be said France supplies us with our luxuries, and we minister to the necessities”; even at the close of the century this held true, in general, of the relations between France and the other great countries. France supplied objects of art, luxury, and fashion, delicacies and wines, and took from others in exchange the articles of solid utility, the product of mines and of power machinery.
| Special Commerce of France, Selected Years in Milliardsof Francs and of Dollars. | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Imports | Exports | |||
| Francs | Dollars | Francs | Dollars | |
| 1870 | 2.9 | .6 | 2.8 | .5 |
| 1880 | 5.0 | 1.0 | 3.5 | .7 |
| 1890 | 4.4 | .9 | 3.8 | .7 |
| 1900 | 4.7 | .9 | 4.1 | .8 |
| 1910 | 7.2 | 1.4 | 6.3 | 1.2 |
| 1913 | 8.4 | 1.6 | 6.9 | 1.3 |
510. Failure of the government in its attempts to stimulate commerce.—Attempts of the French government to stimulate commercial expansion have not met the expectations of their promoters. The government has built up a colonial empire about sixteen times as large as France, but most of the dependencies are in a backward condition, and their total commerce (including that of Algiers) was before 1914 only about one-quarter of that of France. So far France has lost money on her colonial enterprises, and there seems no likelihood, in view of the extremely small emigration from the home country, that she will recover it. Nor can the results of attempts to build up the merchant marine be regarded as satisfactory. Measures to protect French shipping, which disappeared to a large extent during the period of the movement to free trade, have been resorted to again since 1880, and have led to the payment of two to four million dollars a year to aid the building and renewing of French ships. They have done no more than keep the French fleet stationary while other merchant marines were rapidly advancing, and seem to have hurt rather than helped the interests of French commerce. It is noteworthy that of the total output of merchant ships in France in 1901, 70 per cent of the tonnage was in the form of sailing vessels, a means of transportation now out of date for most purposes of foreign commerce; and that two-fifths of the total tonnage under the French flag in 1912 were in the form of sailing ships.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS
1. Burdens from which French commerce and industry were freed by the Revolution. [Review chap. 25, above; Rand, Ec. hist., chap. 3; Adams, Growth, chap. 15.]
2. Hayti as a French colony and as an independent state. [A. K. Fiske chap. 20 ff.; Spenser St. John, Hayti, Lond., 1884, chaps. 2, 3, 10.]
3. Backward political condition of France after 1815. [Adams, Growth, chap. 18; Seignobos, chap. 5.]
4. Write a report on one of the following topics in French commerce, about 1850: import and export trade, manufactures, customs tariff, colonial system. [Homans, Cyclopedia, p. 710 ff.].
5. France under Napoleon III. [Seignobos, chap. 6.]