Extract from “Cultures Of The World France”, Written by Etbel Caro Gofen. Times Editions Pte Ltd, Singapore: 1999.

Amazon eBay: Therefore we can construct more comparable treatment and control groups within Germany. In addition, we collected data to develop several series of institutional reforms across German polities. This enables us both to verify that the French did indeed reform various aspects of institutions and to utilize a two-stage least squares strategy, with French invasion as an instrument for institutional reform. Crucially for our identi_cation strategy, European countries or parts of Germany did not choose the French institutions, but those institutions were imposed on them _rst by the Revolution and then by Napoleon.3 Moreover, territorial expansion by French armies did not target places with a greater future growth potential. Instead, it had two major objectives. The _rst was defensive, especially, in response to the threat of Austrian or Prussian (or later British) attempts to topple the Revolutionary regime. The second was expansionary. This was partly because of resource needs of the French Republic, and partly because of the ideology of the French Revolution. In addition, in the early 1790s, the French sought to establish France's `natural frontiers.'4 Finally, the purpose of the institutional reforms of the French Revolution 2These issues are also related to the classic historical debate about the extent to which the institutions of the ancien r_egime impeded capitalism and economic growth and whether or not the French Revolution played a constructive or destructive role in European political development. The historical debate about the consequences of the French Revolution is also about its impact on political institutions and democracy, which is beyond the scope of the current paper. 3In most cases, there were local Jacobin (local radical) forces in the countries invaded by the French armies, but the presence of such forces did not play a major role in determining which countres and cities were invaded by the French. See, for example, Doyle (1989, Chapter 9). 4For example, the Revolutionary leader George Danton stated: \Les limites de la France sont marqu_ees par la nature, nous les atteindrons des quatre coins de l'horizon, du c^ot_e du Rhin, du c^ot_e de l'Oc_ean, du 2 was not to foster industrialization per se, though they may have achieved this objective as a by-product of its major goal of destroying the grip of the aristocracy, oligarchy, and the clergy on political and economic power.5 Therefore, to a _rst approximation, we can think of the imposition of the institutions of the French Revolution as an `exogenous treatment' and investigate the economic implications of the radical French reforms. We distinguish three de_nitions of `French treatment:' (1) length of French occupation (in years), (2) a dummy for French control during the Revolutionary period prior to the take-over of Napoleon in 9 November 1799 (18 Brumaire in the revolutionary calendar), (3) a dummy for French control during the Napoleonic period up until 1815. Using all three de_nitions, we _nd reduced-form evidence, both across countries and within Germany, that our main proxy for economic prosperity, urbanization rates, increased signi_cantly faster in treated areas during the second half of the 19th century. We also supplement our cross-country analysis with Maddison's GDP data. Maddison reports data for `Germany' and `Italy' prior to their uni_cation, rather than the independent polities which subsequently uni_ed. Much of the variation in French treatment, however, is within what became Germany and Italy, so Maddison's data are much less appropriate than the urbanization data for our purposes. Nevertheless, the _ndings with GDP per-capita are similar, though on the whole weaker than those using urbanization rates. Within Germany, we provide supporting evidence using the expansion of railways and the sectoral composition of employment, again suggesting that treated parts of Germany grew more rapidly|in fact, industrialized more rapidly|after 1850. Using German data, we further show a strong association between our measures of institutional reforms and French invasion or control. Using this association as a _rst stage, we also estimate instrumental-variables models, which indicate large e_ects of institutional reforms on subsequent growth. Overall, our results show no evidence that the reforms imposed by the French had negative economic consequences. On the contrary, there is fairly consistent evidence from a variety of di_erent c^ot_e des Alpes. L_a, doivent _nir les bornes de notre r_epublique." (speech to National Convention, January 31, 1793; quoted in Blanning 1983, p. 2). Grab (2003, p. 1) summarizes these motives and arguments as: \The revolutionary governments justi_ed the occupation of foreign lands, using the theory of `natural frontiers' and declaring their intention or liberating oppressed people from tyrannical regimes." 5It is unlikely that the reforms were made speci_cally to encourage industrial growth. Most likely, no one at the turn of the 19th century could have anticipated the new technologies that were to arrive a few decades later. The exception to this statement is textiles. By 1800 the British and others had established some new technologies that increased productivity (e.g., in spinning) by an order of magnitude. Textiles are an important part of the story in the Rhineland, discussed below, but there is no evidence that the French changed institutions in the Rhineland speci_cally because they foresaw great potential in the manufacture of cloth.