Labour, Science and Technology in France: 1500-1620.

This important study utilizes the approaches of several subdisciplines to investigate the relationships among labor, science, and technology in Valois and early Bourbon France. Heller challenges traditional accounts of the ancien regime developed by Annales school historians such as Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. He points to the conservatism of an approach that emphasizes long-term structures and downplays political and social change. In place of "l'histoire immobile," Heller suggests that sixteenth-century France underwent dynamic transformations in its economy and in particular areas of technology and science. Rather than la longue duree, he stresses class conflict, changes in the structure of labor, and the ongoing advancement of the bourgeois class.

Heller substantiates his thesis with detailed discussions of particular aspects of the French economy. In his treatment of the expansion of merchant capital in Paris, he stresses the city's vast capacity for consumption and notes that the city attracted large quantities of food and manufactured goods, both for its own population and for trade. The growth of Parisian manufactures also affected other areas of France. Heller's analysis accordingly moves to regional production, where he emphasizes growth, pointing to the 10,000 French mills used for manufactures of all kinds, and for mining. Parisian merchants influenced production in the countryside, for example, by encouraging the rural manufacture of cloth to be finished in the city. The prosperity of the first half of the sixteenth century encouraged the idea of progress, a new appreciation for the artisan, and an interest in technological improvements.

Stressing that workers fared less well than merchants, Heller delineates complex differences among various kinds of laborers. The Parisian economy was enhanced by the cheap labor of recent immigrants from rural areas undergoing unprecedented population growth. In Paris, apprentices and journeymen found it increasingly difficult to become masters. The rural population itself was divided between the more prosperous laborers who used their surplus wages to rent land and produce food to sell, and the majority whose fortunes declined. The rise of rural wage labor was accompanied by the expropriation of the land of small peasant producers. Heller suggests a growing number of poor as the century progressed and a partial "proletarianization."

Proceeding chronologically, he treats economic decline during the religious wars and renewal under the early Bourbons. Even during the wars, there was interest in the reform of both agriculture and manufacture. Evidence for such interest is abundant in technical treatises, including agricultural books, the writings of the artisan Bernard Palissy, and the machine books of Jacques Besson and Agostino Ramelli. Heller uses such books to point to a growing interest in invention and in empirically based science.

The author's effort to combine a serious study of technical writings with an analysis of economic issues is most welcome. However, two comments are in order. First, although he appropriately uses the content of the treatises to reinforce his argument concerning the vitality of French technical interests in the sixteenth century, a closer attention to the particular contexts of authorship, patronage, and readership would have enriched his discussion. Second, Heller does not sufficiently recognize the extent to which such writings were very much part of a European-wide proliferation of technical literature in this era.

This fine study combines an erudite discussion of certain aspects of French history with a bold new interpretive framework. It will likely provoke much discussion among historians of early modern France, and it is an important work for other students of early modern Europe as well.

PAMELA O. LONG Johns Hopkins University