UNIVERSITY OF THESSALY
2nd International Conference on Economic and Social History
"Markets" and Politics
Private interests and public authority (18th-20th centuries)
Volos, 10-12 February 2012
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Abstracts
- Anna Mahaira The law “du cadenas” of 1897 in France and its role in the adoption of a “national” political economy
This paper examines the implementation and the impact of the law du cadenas in the context of the representation of local interests within the system of the 3rd Republic, as well as against the background of the conflict between protectionism and free trade in the field of economic policy. In the economic conjuncture of the ‘fin de siècle’, after the Great Depression that started in 1873, most European states began to reconsider the liberal tariff policy. Protected tariffs were erected in order to safeguard the agricultural income against imports from the New Lands, but also in order to prevent an agrarian exodus that would have been directed towards industrial production; and this at a time when the relationship between industrial production itself and the trade sector was in the process of being transformed and overturned.
In 1892 a double tariff was imposed on France’s import trade: the maximum and the minimum one. The 1892 tariff policy was no longer dependent upon France’s long-standing trade agreements with other countries, which had been inaugurated in 1860; now it was to be dependent upon short-term bilateral conventions whose duration was one or two years. These conventions saddled trade with conditions of intensifying institutional ambiguity and economic insecurity, since they demanded constant negotiation so as to guarantee the minimum tariff. The situation was further aggravated with regard to France’s external trade when it was proposed by the Association pour la défense du Travail national, named by the liberals Ligue pour la suppression du commerce extérieur de la France, to “lock” the new tariffs on cereals, meet and wine and to implement them immediately by governmental decree, without prior discussion and approval by parliament.
The law du cadenas was eventually implemented in 1897, after acrimony and conflict, and it crystalized two opposing camps with regard to domestic economic policy. The one was that of the French style free traders, calling themselves ‘economists’ in order to stress their better grasp of the market economy; the other was, according to the ‘economists’, much broader and included the protectionists, the socialists, the agrarians, the hygienists, the statists, and all those who, in case of a poor national harvest, would proclaim, following the example of the Convention, “a general fast and a civic Lent”.
