Next comes the class, still very numerous (28,626 establishments and 585,000 operatives), where we find only from eleven to fifty workmen per establishment. Nearly two-thirds of these small factories (17,342 establishments, 240,000 workmen) are so small that they give occupation to less than twenty persons each. They thus belong still to the small industry.
After that comes a sudden fall in the figures. There are only 3,865 factories having from fifty-one to 100 employees. This class and the preceding one contain among them 5½ per cent. of all the industrial establishments, and 27½ per cent. of their employees.
The class of factories employing from 101 to 500 workmen contains 3,145 establishments (616,000 workmen and other employees). But that of from 501 to 1,000 employees per factory has only 295 establishments, and a total of only 195,000 operatives. Taken together, these two classes contain less than 1 per cent. of all the establishments (six per 1,000), and 26 per cent. of all the workmen.
Finally, the number of factories and works having more than a thousand workmen and employees each is very small. It is only 149. Out of them, 108 have from 1,001 to 2,000 workmen, twenty-one have from 2,001 to 5,000, and ten only have more than 5,000 workmen. These 149 very big factories and works give occupation to 313,000 persons only, out of more than 3,000,000—that is, only 10 per cent. of all the industrial workers.
It thus appears that more than 99 per cent. of all the industrial establishments in France—that is, 571,940 out of 575,529—have less than 100 workmen each. They give occupation to 2,000,000 persons, and represent an army of 571,940 employers. More than that. The immense majority of that number (568,075 employers) belong to the category of those who employ less than fifty workmen each. And I do not yet count in their number 520,000 employers and artisans who work for themselves, or with the aid of a member of the family.
It is evident that in France, as everywhere, the petty trades represent a very important factor of the industrial life. Economists have been too hasty in celebrating their death. And this conclusion becomes still more apparent when one analyses the different industries separately, taking advantage of the tables given in Résultats Statistiques. A very important fact appears from this analysis—namely, that there are only three branches of industry in which one can speak of a strong “concentration”—the mines, metallurgy, and the State’s industries, to which one may add the textiles and ironmongery, but always remembering that in these two branches immense numbers of small factories continue to prosper by the side of the great ones.
In all other branches the small trades are dominant, to such an extent that more than 95 per cent. of the employers employ less than fifty workmen each. In the quarries, in all branches of the alimentation, in the book trade, clothing, leather, wood, metallic goods, and even the brick-works, china and glass works, we hardly find one or two factories out of each hundred employing more than fifty workmen.
The three industries that make an exception to this rule are, we have said, metallurgy, the great works of the State, and the mines. In metallurgy two-thirds of the works have more than fifty men each, and it is here that we find some twenty great works employing each of them more than one thousand men. The works of the State, which include the great shipbuilding yards, are evidently in the same case. They contain thirty-four establishments, having more than 500 men each, and fourteen employing more than 1,000. And finally, in the mines—one hardly would believe that—more than one-half of all establishments employ less than fifty workmen each; but 15 per cent. of them have more than 500 workmen; forty-one mines are worked by a staff of more than 1,000 persons each, and six out of them employ even more than 5,000 miners.
It is only in these three branches that one finds a rather strong “concentration”; and yet, the small industry continues to exist, as we saw it already in England, by the side of the great one, even in mining, and still more so in all branches of metallurgy.
As to the textile industries, they have exactly the same character as in England. We find here a certain number of very large establishments (forty establishments having each of them more than 1,000 workpeople), and especially we see a great development of the middle-sized factories (1,300 mills having from 100 to 500 workpeople). But on the other side, the small industry is also very numerous.[211]