Over the past decades, a revisionist consensus has emerged on two long-debated issues relating to French economic growth. First, scholars have rejected earlier characterizations of nineteenth-century France as “economically backward,” positing instead a divergent but nevertheless effective path to industrialization heading into the early twentieth century. Second, a largely separate body of scholarship, itself a critique of revisionist accounts of the 1789 Revolution, has argued for a causal link between the commercialization of late eighteenth-century France and the outbreak of revolution. While economic historians involved in this first body of literature rarely explicitly mention “capitalism” in describing France's industrial path, historians have frequently described prerevolutionary consumer culture as such, mobilizing a revised understanding of capitalism focusing on commodification rather than proletarianization to reemphasize the importance of economic change in precipitating political events.
Into these debates comes Xavier LaFrance and Stephen Miller's ambitious The Transition to Capitalism in Modern France,...
