TO SPEAK OF FRANCE in the first half of the nineteenth century as an industrial society may seem an exaggeration. After all, the majority of the population still lived in the countryside in 1850, and even in the cities only a minority of the labor force was employed in factories. Although factory industry and the steam engine made significant advances, the developments of these years were only the first stirrings of industrialization. But from the standpoint of the late eighteenth century, the epithet “industrial society” is much more appropriate. What now appears as the hesitant beginnings of a long and slow development seemed to be a major departure to contemporaries: Even a very few steam engines or blast furnaces or spinning mills could make a powerful impression on people who had never seen them before. From their point of view, modern industry was a distinctive feature of their age; theirs was an industrial society as no previous society had ever seen.

Moreover, when the late eighteenth century is taken as the reference point, the term “industrial society” turns out to be appropriate in quite another sense, for the term had a very different meaning at the end of the eighteenth century than it has today. “Industry” in the eighteenth century meant diligence or assiduousness; it referred to a quality of human effort. This meaning still exists, of course, but industry now refers primarily to a set of institutions and operations whose function is the production of goods and, above all, to manufacturing.