著者

中島 俊克

出版者

政治経済学・経済史学会

雑誌

土地制度史学 (ISSN:04933567)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.28, no.3, pp.38-55, 1986-04-20

---

French machine building industry, which started its modernisation in 1820s, came to maturity about 1860. Large-scale factories, engaged chiefly in the building of locomotives, grew up on the outskirts of the city of Paris. But these factories looked for skilled workers in the East End (around the Saint-Martin Canal) where small machine shops swarmed. The mechanisation of Parisian industries, especially that of the fabrication of articles de Paris, had activated these shops. Skilled workers, most of which were potential shop owners, dominated the work of machine building even in large factories, and the skill ef these workers ensured the high quality of French machines. The Great Depression deprived French machine builders of its foreign market, and the crisis of 1882 forced them definitively to reorganise their activities. (Technical progress, notably the diffusion of universal milling machines, transformed the character of the work of machine making. In this aspect, the United States and Germany went far ahead of France.) Some large factories, forsaken by railway companies, quit Paris to find a greater market in Northern region; others turned into a trade which had little or no connection with mechanical engineering. Small shops, damaged by the decline of articles de Paris industry, subsisted by the fabrication of new products, bicycles for example. The recovery of world economy from the mid-1890s encouraged the renascence of French machine making. The building of steam engines and of machines for verious industries revived. But this time the chief stimulus came from the automobile industry. Many machine makers entered for themselves into this new domain, or found a large market in automobile firms. Small shops, after the concentration of bicycle fabrication, reorganised themselves to realise the mass production of automobile parts. In the East End, very small-scale machine shops specialised in this field grew rapidly like so mony mushrooms. They enjoyed the benefits of technical inventions-coal gas engine, machine-tools for small works etc. Only the combination of these new technics and the traditional skill of machine making, which was fading away even in the East End, could meet the large demand of automobile parts in the early years of the 20th century.