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Industrialisation in Europe continued

The first attempt in continental Europe to industrialise on the British model occurred in France just before the Revolution.

In 1764 Gabriel Jars, a member of l’Académie des Sciences, visited Britain and saw the new techniques of iron making. He returned to France and wrote a detailed report. In 1777 the French navy minister decided to build a cannon foundry using the new methods. He even managed to recruit William Wilkinson, an English engineer who had worked with James Watt. Several possible sites were examined but Wilkinson’s final choice was Le Creusot, a small town in the Saône-et-Loire region of Burgundy. It was chosen because of the availability of coal and iron and also because of its geographical position midway between the River Loire and the River Saône (access to both the the Atlantic and the Mediterranean).

Wilkinson and his British technicians successfully set up the iron foundry and then went home, but it was not long before la Fonderie Royale was facing serious problems:

It was impossible to find sufficient qualified technicians to supervise the manufacturing process, particularly since France and Britain were now on opposing sides in the American Revolutionary War.
The local population was very reluctant to abandon its traditional peasant way of life and the labour force had to be recruited from as far away the Pas de Calais, Lorraine and even Germany. There were serious problems of cohabitation among the workers who refused to cooperate with those from other regions.
Because of these problems, the foundry found it increasingly difficult to attract investment, so there was a serious shortage of money.

Le Creusot

During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, work at Le Creusot almost stopped. So this first experiment in modern industrialisation was a failure.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) were a tremendous handicap to international trade, except for Britain. Her powerful navy permitted Britain to trade with the rest of the world and remain prosperous. This was why Napoleon, after having to abandon his plan to invade Britain, due to the destruction of the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, decided to defeat Britain by attacking its economy. In 1806 Napoeon created the " Continental System ". This forbade all continental European countries from trading with Britain in an attempt to strangle her commerce and force Britain to surrender.

Ironically, it was France and the rest of continental Europe which suffered most because they had come to depend upon British manufactured goods, while Britain continued to trade, very profitably, with the rest of the world.

It was in 1807 that a British engineer, William Cockerill, founded a textile factory near Liège (in what is now Belgium), and later introduced British iron making technology in order to meet the demand for manufactured goods in Europe.