Raymond Williams wrote about the history of the term “the industrial revolution”. He argues that, before Arnold Toynbee popularised the term in the 1860’s, it was first used “technically”, as a purely descriptive phrase, for a change in industrial processes, and their impact on broader society. To support his thesis, he cites a 1922 paper by Anna Bezanson called “the early use of the term “industrial revolution.” Bezanson writes:
“My interest in the origin of the term arose from reading the debates of the French Chamber of Deputies. Le Moniteur Universel of August 17, 1827 reprinted an article from the Journal des Artistes. In the center of the page in italics were the words “Grande Revolution Industrielle.” The article is an important one. The article is an important one. It is significant that the term is there used technically to describe the change in arts, manufactures and social institutions. The author sets out to examine”jusqu’a quel point les arts ont pu exercer leur influence dans cette “grande revolution industrielle.”
There are two problems with Williams’ argument:
Firstly: The author of the 1827 article in the “Journal des artistes” is not using the image of a “great industrial revolution” to make a purely descriptive, “technical” point.
The article condemns the political changes that allowed industrialists to shape the aesthetic value of commonly used products, from mantlepieces to carriages. He compares this state of affairs to the “celebrated age” of Louis XVI, when artists had (so the author says) more influence over the way these products (like mantlepieces or carriages) looked. That golden age, when the arts rose “abruptly to a higher degree of perfection”, were “that governing principle which gives industry its rule and direction” and “received their inspirations in silence and repose, far from the agitation of material interests.”
The reference to the “greatness” of this industrial revolution is likely a sarcastic reference to the “great” promises of the political revolutions of the previous century.
Apart from the the content of the article, I think this interpretation is supported by other articles in the same publication, which reflect
- .. A generally sarcastic tone: Reviewing a set of plaster statues of Christ and the four Evangelists placed in a church, the reviewer writes: “These statues… but it is better not to speak of them. Why not have left these niches empty, which would at least have left us the pleasure of hope!”
- .. Enthusiasm for the Restoration: In July 1827 , for example, the journal reviewed the Musée Royal de France and framed the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods as a time of losses that the Restoration government had been working to repair: “after the losses of [the Revolution] and 1815, zealous and well-considered care has succeeded, if not in repairing all the damage, at least in repairing part of it and skilfully masking the rest.” On the publications political stance, see also: Roth, 1989.
- …Skepticism of the intrinsic importance of industrial achievements: The journal’s coverage of the industrial fair of 1827 is, on balance, very critical.1 Arguing that it “ought to be a competition serving to establish the progress of each branch of industry, and not a fair where every manufacturer displays whatever he has that is most beautiful and best.” A reader’s letter published in the same issue pushes back against the journal’s stance, asking whether the looms that produce “twenty times more cotton” than a hundred workers could have made thirty years ago really seem like “a blameworthy invention, prejudicial to industry” – I think this, at least to some degree, confirms that the journal’s anti-industrial position was recognisable enough to provoke direct objections.
I suspect few readers will find it difficult to understand why an artists-journal might not be overly impressed with industrial progress or industrialists. Some contemporary readers might find it implausible though, that such a Parisian artist would also be skeptical of the French revolution and its achievements. This makes sense, considering how much of our collective memory of the French revolution revolves around les-misérables-esque heroism: While most people know that terrible, unnecessary things happened in the name of this revolution, we mostly talk about them in symbolic (Guillotines) or abstract ways (“The revolution eats its children”). Because of this, here are some more concrete things that the author of this article might understandably associate with the term.
The first French industry fair was planned in 1798. The Minister of the Interior came up with the idea as a way to celebrate the 5 year anniversary of the Republic that had “proclaimed freedom of work and opened new pathways to the genius of man.” Other people had suggested a horse race. The revolutionary republic this fair was launched to celebrate sentenced around fifty people to death a day on average, for ten months, that its employees could simply drown thousands of people in the Loire before filing a report about “miracles” happening on the river. Similarly, the revolutionary “freedom of work and pathways to the genius of man” looked fairly bleak for the 300,000 casualties of the revolutionary wars against the first coalition, or the 200,000 casualties of the Vendée insurgency.
There might have also been more specific, art-related associations with revolutionary promises. Maybe they remembered Jacques-Louis David, a painter, and a meaningful authority on the arts under the previously mentioned “miracle” government under Robespierre. David was imprisoned after Robespierre’s fall, and got out of prison again after offering to put his brush at Napoleon’s disposal. After Waterloo, he was exiled to Brussels. When a student asked him to sign an amnesty petition to return, he said: “Never speak to me again of things I ought to do to get back.” He died in Brussels in 1825, two years before the publication of this article. His paintings were auctioned in Paris for basically nothing. His family asked for his body to be returned to France. The request was denied, because David participated in the execution of Louis XVI.
Another thing the author might have remembered was the parades of the art that Napoleon had systematically looted from every country he defeated, in 1798: Along with the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, Raphael’s “Transfiguration”, the Horses of Saint Mark from Venice, were paraded through Paris, behind a banner that said:
After Waterloo, their fate changed more. Prussian diplomats threatened to have soldiers storm the Louvre and arrest its director if he didn’t hand over their paintings. Wellington sent armed escorts to remove the Flemish works. When the bronze horses were taken down from the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, the streets were lined by Austrian (decidedly non-bronze) cavalry. Shannon Selin notes:
Touring the Louvre to see what remained, Louis XVIII reportedly remarked, “We are still rich”. That view was not generally shared by his subjects.
The second problem with pointing to this article as an example of a description of technological industrial change is that the article is not, actually, the “origin” of the phrase. (Neither is the 1799 letter from Louis-Guilleaume Otto that Francois Crouzet cites as the “first known use of the phrase” in “the industrial revolution in national context: Europe and the USA” – notably without supplying a source.): In 1797, Joseph Morgue published a book called “On France in comparison to the United Kingdom and Austria” and sets out a strategic case for what he explicitly calls a “révolution industrielle“. For context: By 1797, France had been at war with Britain for four years. On the continent, French armies could celebrate successes in Italy against Austria, Spain had switched sides to join France and the Dutch Republic had become a French client state. Britain, frustratingly, remained protected by the Channel and the Royal Navy. See, for example, the Bantry Bay expedition:
Meanwhile, British subsidies were sustaining continental coalitions, and British taxes – as Morgue argues- were being paid, in effect, by foreign consumers through the price of English manufactures. The Bank of England had suspended cash payments that February – He proposes, as a result, that France should deliberately operate an industrial revolution “at” their adversary: compete with the English in every market, collapse the volume of their sales, and force them to bear the fiscal burden their export economy had been externalizing onto the rest of the world. Morgue proposes an industrial success for a revolutionary government as an act in a revolutionary war: What else was he supposed to call it?
- Twelve days before the article was published, the 7th French industry fair started. The author would have seen 600’000 visitors looking at new kinds of heavy machinery, a carpet made entirely of 4,000 Ostrich feathers, and apparently, a giraffe. (Arthur Chandler: A gift of the Pasha of Egypt, the Giraffe had been marched from Marseilles to Paris and arrived in Paris two months before the exposition opened.) ↩︎
larathurnherr.blog 
Leave a comment