Article ID: CBB001200334

“A Beautiful Madness”: Privilege, the Machine Question and Industrial Development in Normandy in 1789 (2012)

unapi

In the 1780s privileges --- widely held special exemptions from France's complex system of economic regulations --- obsessed the political elites of the province of Normandy. A number of influential pamphlets informed by economic considerations criticized the inequities and inefficiencies stemming from privilege in favour of sweeping changes in the productive role of privilege. The polemics concerning privilege in Normandy are familiar to historians, not least because they fuelled political discontent throughout France. But the looming presence of 1789 has obscured why the issue of privilege was so important in this province and clouds the pivotal impact that the evolution of Norman views on privilege had on the outbreak of the French Revolution. The missing piece of the puzzle concerns the royal government's use of privilege as a tool of economic development to nurture the birth of machine production in Normandy. Privilege was the basis of the society of orders in Bourbon France. The privileges of the nobility, clergy and king formed the apex of a structure that reached into most provinces and affected nearly all cities and towns, through the urban occupations that formed corporations (occupational groupings or trade guilds). Critics such as the abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, whose An Essay on Privileges helped to crystallize public sentiment, repeated the common assertion that privilege was `a dispensation or exemption in favour of him who possesses it and a discouragement to those who do not'

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Authors & Contributors
William Mazzaferro
Francesco Gaglianò
Žmolek, Michael Andrew
Westermann, Andrea
Weightman, Gavin
Varini, Valerio
Concepts
Technology and economics
Technology and politics
Industrialization
Technology and industry
Technology
Industry
Time Periods
18th century
20th century
19th century
20th century, early
Early modern
17th century
Places
France
United States
Italy
Great Britain
England
Birmingham (England)
Institutions
ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi)
RAND Corporation
International Business Machines Corporation
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