This book challenges the foregoing consensus by showing that the French economy performed poorly relative to its rivals because of non-capitalist social relations. Specifically, peasants and artisans controlled the lands and workshops in autonomous communities and did not have to improve labor productivity to survive.

Xavier Lafrance, Professor of Political Science at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal), is the author of The Making of Capitalism in France (2019) and coeditor, with Charles Post, of Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism (2018).

Stephen Miller, Professor of History at UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham), is author of State and Society in Eighteenth Century France (Revised updated edition, 2023), Feudalism, Venality and Revolution (2020) and, co-authored with Christopher Isett, The Social History of Agriculture (2017).

Introduction. 1. French Agriculture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Growth without Development 2. Industrialization from the Old Regime to the Post-Revolutionary Era 3. The First Transition to Capitalism from the 1850s to the 1920s 4. The Agricultural Revolution of the Fifth Republic after the end of the 1950s 5. Slow Growth, Relapse and Rapid Capitalist Industrialization from the Interwar Period to the 1970s 6. Conclusion