Labour, Science and Technology in France, 1500–1620 Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History Series

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.