A history of commerce

by Clive Day

First of all, as a matter of course, there was the customs tariff on the frontier. This went through the normal course of development in the period under consideration. The government attempted to reduce to some sort of system the scattered duties of the earlier period; and under the influence of mercantilist doctrines it ceased to use the duties chiefly for raising revenue. The idea of using the tariff to protect home industries, which was at first held vaguely and applied only occasionally, gained strength with time and was made by Colbert, a minister of Louis XIV, the chief point in the tariff system. In 1664, and again three years later, the duties were raised to protect home manufactures; duties were raised twofold and more, and when wares were found still entering the kingdom they were in some cases absolutely prohibited. The high tariff led to reprisals on the part of other countries, and strained political relations with them; it was one of the causes of open war with the Dutch. It remained throughout the period a serious obstacle to commerce with advanced industrial countries like England and Netherland; the breaches made in it by commercial treaties were comparatively unimportant; and smuggling formed in France as in England the real safety-valve of the commercial system.

281. Persistence of customs frontiers inside France.—Far more serious than the frontier tariff were the customs duties inside of France. The French kings had made their country by the political union of feudal fragments, and had never used their great power to abolish the evidences of former separation and to unify their territory for the purposes of commerce. We must distinguish three different sections of the country. The North, roughly speaking, was an area in which internal trade was free, i.e., in which the provinces were not separated by customs barriers. The South, on the other hand, was composed of provinces “reputed foreign” which had kept their tariffs, so that trade here was not free, and wares passing between this and other parts of France had to pay duty. Still a third section was the East, “provinces foreign in fact”; these provinces did not form part of France at all, commercially speaking, for they were outside the national customs frontier, enjoying free trade with other countries and paying duties when they sent wares to other parts of France. If the reader will recall the economic evils that resulted in the Middle Ages from the separation of districts he will readily appreciate how much France lost by carrying over a medieval system to modern times. It was impossible for a district to make the most of its resources by specializing in production. A producer did not have France for a market; a consumer did not have France for his source of supply; each was bound by provincial restrictions.

282. Persistence of local toll barriers.—Still the picture is not complete. There were not only provincial tariffs inside of France but also local customs inside the provinces. Let us consider the case of a merchant of Paris who desired to export a package of cloth to England in the sixteenth century. He had to pay not only the national export duty, but also at fifteen places on the way down the Seine he had to pay local customs; at Rouen he must pay provincial customs; and we must add to his list of expenses freight, pilotage, etc. Wine carried from Bercy (near the Swiss frontier) to Paris, in the next century, had to pay sixteen different dues on the way to market. In the sixteenth century there were over a hundred tolls or customs on the Loire; in the next century there were still twenty-eight on the stretch from Orleans to Nantes; and some persisted till the French Revolution. Conditions improved in the course of time, as the above figures suggest, but improvement was obstructed by the opposition of local interests and retarded by the delay of the law; and the Revolution was needed to wipe away these remnants of the Middle Ages with many others.

283. Manufactures; the gild system maintained in spite of its bad effects.—Before we leave the commercial history of France in this period we must consider still another subject, the organization of manufacturing, to understand why the country did not make better use of its resources, and why it entered the nineteenth century handicapped in competition with a country like England. Three general topics will be considered: (1) the gild system; (2) the national regulation of manufactures; (3) the royal or privileged manufactures.

(1) The gilds which in England during this period gave place to a more modern and more efficient system persisted in France and even extended their influence. When the government was in want of money it found the gilds more convenient subjects of taxation than scattered artisans; for fiscal reasons, therefore, and not for any economic advantages, it encouraged and even compelled artisans to unite in gilds on the old model. The result was a rigid separation of allied trades and a complication of processes which would seem incredibly stupid to a modern merchant or to the head of a modern factory.

284. Separation of trades.—At Amiens there were nine distinct corporations, each with its specific regulations, engaged in the manufacture of woolens alone. Every gild watched jealously to see that another gild did not infringe on its petty field, and there was an interminable bickering among them over the question of monopoly. The quarrel of the goose-roasters and the poulterers lasted half a century, and went against the poulterers, who were restricted to the sale of uncooked game; but the roasters emerged from the conflict only to meet another foe, the cooks, who were flushed with a recent triumph over the gild of “vinegarers-mustarders” (who made sauces); and after another half-century the cooks succeeded in limiting the right of the roasters to sell cooked meat. This is an example of the conflicts which all the time absorbed the energy and the resources of people who were engaged in kindred lines of retail trade and manufactures; cobblers and shoemakers; old-clothes men and tailors; watchmakers and clock-makers; bakers and restaurant-keepers; and so on through a list that seems interminable. Some tradesmen had a specially long list of enemies. The mercers, for instance, who dealt in certain lines of dry-goods, in the course of a century had sixteen decisions of the supreme court (Parlement) in their conflict with the glovers; and fought also the “bonneters-cappers,” and nearly all the other tradesmen whose wares they sold. The question, who had the right to make and sell buttons, rose nearly to the dignity of a question of state; search was made in private houses for illegal buttons, and private individuals were arrested in the street for wearing them.

285. Influence of the gilds in preventing technical progress.—Space is lacking for a description of all the evils that the gild system entailed on French industry in this period, and the reader is referred to the general discussion of the gilds in a previous chapter, with the assurance that all the evils there enumerated were well represented in France. We cannot leave the topic, however, without notice of the obstacles which the gilds put in the way of inventions and technical improvements. A coppersmith who devised a new helmet was set upon by the armorers; a hatter, who improved his wares by mixing silk with the wool, was attacked by all the other hatters; the inventor of sheet lead was opposed by the plumbers; a man who had made a success in print-cloths was forced to return to antiquated methods by the dyers. The gildsmen opposed not only new wares and methods, but also the use of machinery and production on a large scale. A Lyons silk-weaver could keep only four looms; a Lille serge-maker secured the right to have twenty looms, that he might carry on experiments looking to improvement of the manufacture, only by special privilege and against the vigorous protest of the city government. In spite of all opposition there was improvement, but the difficulties were so great that nine reformers must have failed where one succeeded. The history of the French gilds of this period is a history of wasted opportunities.

286. Narrow restrictions imposed on manufactures by the government.—(2) Industries were tied down not only by the narrow regulations of the gilds but also by laws of the central government. Every government believed in this period that it was unwise to let manufacturers follow their own ideas in all respects, to stand or fall according to their success in pleasing the public. Even England had an extensive system, prescribing the standards for the products of certain manufactures. The English system, however, did comparatively little harm, if it accomplished little good, while there can be no question that a similar system in France was carried so far that it was a serious check to industrial development. This excessive growth of government regulation was most marked under Colbert, the minister of Louis XIV, to whom reference has already been made as a leader in the extension of the protective tariffs; and the system continued throughout the period. Taking the cloth manufacture for an illustration, Colbert fixed by law, for each kind of cloth, the length and breadth, the dimensions of the selvage, the number of threads in the warp, the quality of the raw materials, and the method of manufacture. His instructions for dyeing contained 317 articles, to which dyers must conform. To fix responsibility and force compliance all cloth had to bear the special marks of the weaver, dyer, and finisher, the seal of the gild, and sometimes another mark. These regulations grew constantly more complicated; an official said in 1787 that the regulations on manufactures filled eight volumes in quarto.

287. Burden of these restrictions on manufactures.—There can be no question, either of the honesty of Colbert’s intentions or of the energy he showed in carrying them out. He sent out agents everywhere to study industries and to talk with the manufacturers, that he might legislate to the best advantage. One man, however, cannot know a hundred businesses better than the men who are carrying them on. Colbert and his successors were ignorant of many points, were deceived in many others. The result was a mass of regulations of which many were utterly bad, injuring both producer and consumer. The regulation prescribing a minimum breadth for cloth would have killed an industry in one part of France that wove strips for flags, an industry in another part that could sell cloth cheaper by weaving so narrow a breadth that one man could tend the loom. These industries, after a tedious and expensive delay, secured exemption from the law; others, less fortunate, were destroyed. A manufacturer ran always the risk of having his wares confiscated, not because they were bad and people did not want them, but because they failed to conform in some point to hide-bound regulations. An official inspector, shortly before the French Revolution, said that in every week of years past he had seen 80 or 100 pieces of cloth, good except from the government standpoint, cut in pieces or burned because they were irregular. Even the French revolted at some of the regulations, and half of the laws were evaded with the connivance of officials.

288. Special privileges granted to certain manufactures; resulting abuses.—(3) While the government restricted in this fashion the natural development of manufactures, it granted not only exemption from its own rules but liberal grants of money taken from taxpayers to stimulate favored industries. This practice, begun in the sixteenth century, grew under and after Colbert. It enabled certain industries to expand as they would otherwise have been unable to do, and to reach the higher grade of organization which was coming as a natural growth in England. Unfortunately, however, the privileges went not to the most deserving but to the loudest and most adroit claimants. To gain the privileges, which included everything from exemption from taxes and handsome subsidies down to titles of nobility, the manufacturer did not need to show that he had some technical improvement to introduce; it was sufficient if he promised to bring in a foreign industry or even to extend one already in existence at home. The royal factories abused their power to raise prices to the consumers and to lower the wages of the laborer. Some of them came to be regarded as public calamities. They showed in general the characteristics of the hothouse plant, which cannot thrive unaided, and most of them failed after a longer or shorter career. We can say of them as of many other manifestations of the French policy of the period; some good may have resulted in ways unknown to us, but the evils are apparent, and justify us in calling the policy bad.