In summarizing the results of this enquiry into French science, technology and economic life from the beginning of the sixteenth century until the time of Richelieu, emphasis has to be laid on the importance of two interrelated rural phenomena: proto-industrialization and primitive accumulation. During the first part of the sixteenth century, there was a great expansion of rural manufacture based on more extensive employment of wind and water power, and the use of the forests as a source of both energy supplies and raw materials. Mining, quarrying, iron, glass and ceramic manufacture all developed. At the same time, the countryside saw a great expansion of textile manufacturing extending beyond the manufacture of wool cloth to linen and canvas as well as silk. The introduction of new techniques certainly played a part – silk-spinning machines, improvements in the printing press, new tools in mining – but the essential gains came from the development of a relatively new labour process, namely the systematic exploitation of rural labour by merchant capitalists.

The economic expansion of the first part of the century came to an end with the outbreak of the wars of religion in the 1560s. The crisis which came to a head in that decade was the product of deep-seated problems in French economic life. The benefits of economic expansion had gone to fewer and fewer people as the century progressed.

In 1595 the wars of religion came to an end. France embarked on the road to recovery under Henri IV and his minister Maximilien de Sully. The limits and extent of this economic revival at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century are suggested by a study of the textile industry in the north of the kingdom by Pierre Devon. According to Deyon, a recovery began at the end of the 1590s which quickly brought the level of production back to the highest points of the sixteenth century. Expansion, although more irregular after 1600, continued until 1628. Agrarian crises in 1617–18 and 1625 interrupted production, as did a brutal commercial collapse in 1614 which was linked to a Europe-wide crisis. But growth, however interrupted, continued until the late 1620s, when a definitive tendency towards decline set in.

Deyon's view is reinforced by Pierre Jeannin's study of the mining industry in the southern Vosges. A vigorous economic revival is visible there during the closing years of the sixteenth century.

To what extent can we speak of the French economy of the sixteenth century as capitalist? If we confine ourselves to looking at the heights of the economy, namely, banking and international commerce, the answer is an unqualified affirmative. Quite clearly, the circulation of credit and commodities at the highest level was more and more under the control of bankers and merchants from Paris and Lyons. The issuing of rentes on the Hôtel de Ville of Paris and the creation of that vast financial syndicate known as the Grand Parti of Lyons bespeak an ability to organize credit operations on a grand scale. Paris and Lyons were centres of international commerce on the level of Antwerp, Florence and Venice in the first half of the sixteenth century. Moreover, French banking and commercial activities were increasingly linked with those of the rest of Europe. On the other hand, it is not enough to confine our perspective simply to that of the circulation of large amounts of money, credit and commodities when speaking of capitalism. However much a necessary condition, the development of the European market into a world market in the first part of the sixteenth century is not a sufficient condition for us to speak of France as a capitalist economy.

France in the sixteenth century was hardly a unified state, let alone a national market. Although the monarchy was more powerful than it had ever been, the balance of political power still lay with local elites. Likewise, the overwhelmingly largest part of trade and manufacture was locally consumed. Indeed, this ongoing political and economic localism helps to explain the striking vitality of small and medium-sized towns in France in the first part of the sixteenth century. In this period of the Renaissance, the monarchy was nevertheless more powerful than it had ever been. The expanding capacity of the state was facilitated by a surge of economic expansion which promoted a growing economic interdependence between different parts of the kingdom at the higher levels of trade and exchange. One of the two focal points of this economic expansion – second only to Lyons in importance – was Paris. Taking advantage of its strategic location between Mediterranean and Atlantic and its growing importance as the political capital of the kingdom, the growth of the capital was a reflection of the economic dynamism and political integration of sixteenth-century France as a whole.

Paris was by far the largest city in France in the sixteenth century.

In the 1560s, as we have seen, many initiatives were taken to try to reverse the onset of economic crisis. Indeed, the initial crisis of the early 1560s was followed by a partial recovery. It is only from 1575 to 1580 that one sees the full onslaught of economic depression. By then there is no question that the combination of the ravages of war, the burden of heavy taxation, the decline in population, and the lowering of profit margins was responsible for a serious economic regression. Le Roy Ladurie characterizes the period of the religious wars as a crisis of the second degree. By crisis of the second degree, he means one that was more serious than an ordinary cyclical downturn, but less severe than the total collapse of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. No doubt the difficulties of these concluding years of the sixteenth century were somewhat less serious than the catastrophic decline of the late middle ages, a crisis of the first magnitude. Still, there is little question that we are dealing with a severe economic setback.

WAR AND ECONOMIC DECLINE

One of the most serious aspects of this economic regression was the migration of skilled craftsmen, merchants and small-scale manufacturers out of the kingdom. The value of fixed capital in early modern industry was generally negligible.

Bernard Palissy is the hero of the final chapter of The Conquest of Poverty: The Calvinist Revolt in Sixteenth Century France which I published in 1986. In that book I represented Palissy as an isolated figure who, while appalled by the tragedy of the onset of civil war, was nevertheless unique in his understanding of the economic and social problems which had helped to provoke the crisis. While retreating into a religious vision in the face of an increasingly uncertain future, Palissy nevertheless singled out the agrarian problem as a key to France's troubles. Under-investment in agriculture, responsible for the grain shortages and the high cost of food, was at the heart of the difficulties which were exacerbating the political and religious crisis into which France had fallen.

I portrayed Palissy as more or less a lone voice and saw his proposed remedy of an agrarian capitalism as Utopian in the French context. As I depicted it, the ongoing strength of seigneurialism and the absorption of the middle class into the ranks of the notables of the expanding state, foreclosed the possibility of a capitalist breakthrough in agriculture and a resolution of France's economic problems.

At a certain level there continues to be a certain truth to this view of France in the ancien régime.

The economic and political crisis into which the French kingdom was plunged in the 1560s spurred technological innovation and economic rationalization. Schemes and proposals to produce more food or to conserve or develop sources of energy were put forward. All kinds of machines and inventions were designed with the intention of producing manufactures which were cheaper and therefore potentially more profitable. A fascination with machinery became pervasive. An inventor came forward to offer the city of Rouen an underground diving bell of his own devising to repair a recently collapsed bridge. The Hermeticist bishop François Foix de Candale spent his leisure contriving all sorts of mechanical devices including wheels, levers and pulleys, clocks and measuring instruments. A mock castle with ninety-nine mechanical artifices toured the kingdom, its mechanically operated cannon, jousting knights, water fountains and windmill astounding the population. The mathematician Henri de Monantheuil, viewing this spectacle, took it as a portent of more important things to come. The monarchy, although hamstrung by its own insolvency and distracted by the civil wars, tried as best it could to encourage such initiatives.

The emergence of science policy

In spite of their rugged individualism and celebrated independence of mind, scientists have always sought, and often gained, government patronage. Indeed, in many countries of Continental Europe the academic scientists were mostly, in a technical sense, civil servants, although their ‘freedom to teach and to learn’ was usually well protected by long-established traditions of operational autonomy for state universities and scientific academies. Paradoxically, in France and Germany, where these traditions are still very much alive, academic science has resisted ‘collectivization’ more successfully than in countries such as Britain, where academics are not (at least in principle) government employees, and have always been very chary of putting themselves directly in the power of the state.

In the Anglo-Saxon countries, however, it was customary for state support for basic research to be very limited, except in fields such as medicine and agriculture with direct connections to major sectors of governmental responsibility. This custom changed radically in and after the Second World War [§4.2]. Public funds soon became so vital to the advancement of science – especially the academic research carried out in universities and other higher education institutions – that they largely determined its direction and shape.

One might say, however, that until the early 1970s the scientific community largely dictated the terms on which this support was provided.

Science is reaching its ‘limits to growth’. It is expected to contribute increasingly to national prosperity, yet national budgets can no longer support further expansion to explore tempting new research opportunities, by larger research teams, equipped with increasingly sophisticated apparatus. As a result, science is going through a radical structural transition to a much more tightly organized, rationalized and managed social institution. Knowledge-creation, the acme of individual enterprise, is being collectivized.

This transition is pervasive, interlocking, ubiquitous and permanent. It affects the whole research system, from the everyday details of laboratory life to the politics of national budgets. Changes in one part of the system, such as the abolition of academic tenure, have repercussions elsewhere, for example in the commercial exploitation of scientific discoveries. A new policy language of ‘accountability’, ‘evaluation’, ‘input and output indicators’, ‘priority-setting’, ‘selectivity’, ‘critical mass’, etc. has become commonplace throughout the world, from Finland to Brazil, from Poland to New Zealand, from the United States to Papua New Guinea. Indeed, science is becoming a truly international enterprise, organized systematically on a global scale.

Many scientists and scholars look back regretfully to a more relaxed and spacious environment for academic research. But nostalgia is a fruitless sentiment. What all scientists know is that science cannot thrive without social space for personal initiative and creativity, time for ideas to grow to maturity, openness to debate and criticism, hospitality towards innovation, and respect for specialized expertise.

The multinational tradition of science

On ceremonial occasions, scientific notables congratulate each other, and themselves, on being members of a world-wide community that has always ‘known no frontiers’. This is an admirable sentiment, but what does it mean in practice? Paradoxically, on other occasions, the same scientists say that science nowadays is ‘going international’. This apparent inconsistency is yet another manifestation of the transition to a new regime in science.

It is quite true that science has always been a multinational activity. It has never been realistic to consider science in the UK independently of science in other countries, particularly its European neighbours. One of the features of the Renaissance was the rapid diffusion of new scientific discoveries and theories across the Continent, carried by scholars, churchmen, artists, craftsmen, mountebanks, diplomats and other travellers, as well as by printed books.

Since the seventeenth century, scientists have sought international recognition for their discoveries. The European market for scientific ideas set both the goals and the standards for research. Scientific journals, such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London and the Comptes Rendues of the Acade-mie des Sciences in Paris, were published nationally, but they circulated freely and were cited indiscriminately throughout the scientific world.

A history of rapid, unimpeded growth

Ever since modern science ‘took off’ in the seventeeth century, it has been a growth industry. Knowledge and technical capabilities have not only accumulated steadily: the rate of accumulation has also accelerated over time. The scale of all scientific and technological activities has continually expanded. Every measure of these activities – numbers of people engaged, resources employed, output of published papers and patents, commercial and industrial impact, etc. – seems to have been increasing exponentially for the best part of three centuries.

Of course, that same period has seen immense growth in many other parameters of national life: population, industrial production, ‘gross national product’, education, and so on. Nevertheless, the overall growth rate of science throughout this whole period has been exceptional. In the 1680s, for example, England had a total population of about 5 million: nowadays, the United Kingdom has a population of about 50 million – ten times greater. Even if we multiply this by another factor often, to allow for the fact that people are now much richer individually than they were before the Industrial Revolution, we still fail by a whole order of magnitude to match the thousandfold growth of scientific and technological activity in Britain since that time.

Much the same elementary historical calculation could be made for other European countries such as France and Germany.