Labour, Science and Technology in France, 1500–1620

This 1995 book is a detailed study of technological and scientific ideas and innovation in early modern France.

Henry Heller (Author)

9780521550314, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 December 1995

272 pages, 6 b/w illus. 1 map
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.57 kg

"...one learns much from this important, interesting, and engaging book..." Cynthia M. Truant, Labor History

For a generation, the history of the ancien régime has been written from the perspective of the Annales school, with its emphasis on the role of long-term economic and cultural factors in shaping the development of early modern France. In this detailed 1995 study, Henry Heller challenges such a paradigm and assembles a huge range of information about technical innovation and ideas of improvement in sixteenth-century France. Emphasising the role of state intervention in the economy, the development of science and technology, and recent research into early modern proto-industrialisation, Heller counters notions of a France mired in an archaic, determinist mentalité. Despite the tides of religious fanaticism and seigneurial reaction, the period of the religious wars saw a surprising degree of economic, technological and scientific innovation, making possible the consolidation of capitalism in French society during the reign of Henri IV.

1. The expansion of Parisian merchant capital
2. Labour in Paris in the sixteenth century
3. Civil war and economic experiments
4. Inventions and science in the reign of Charles IX
5. Expropriation, technology and wage labour
6. The Bourbon economic restoration
7. Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie and the inertia of history.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD]