Now that I think of it: the British dominated the coal, textile and steel industries, they practically controlled the South American markets and they had unquestionable naval superiority, not to mention the obvious fact that they extracted resources and labor-power from a vast colonial empire. Eventually, as the twentieth century drew nearer and the juggernaut beast of fully-fledged capitalism reared its head elsewhere, British hegemony was threatened or outright surpassed by the US and the newly-unified German state. But the French economy, despite favorable initial conditions – seemingly more favorable than those in Germany, given the former's powerful financier class and highly centralized bureaucratic administration – always remained a distant second, or even third: in the mid-1830s, for example, Belgium extracted almost three times as much coal.
All this makes me wonder: how much of a factor was the structure of land ownership in the French countryside? A large percentage of French peasants paid land tax; the numbers vary significantly from region to region, from slightly over 30% in the Allier and the Bouches-du-Rhône to 76-77% in the Eure-et-Loir and Charente-Inférieure (data for 1842, taken from Statistique de la France: Deuxième série, Paris 1855, adapted by Peter McPhee to account for multiple ownership and the number of adults, i.e. those who could actually legally hold property). The majority of landowners were petty subsistence farmers, a tendency that continued well into the 1900s, long after “land” ceased to be the sole synonym for wealth and financial security.
This distribution was obviously a direct result of the parcellisation of the biens nationaux – and though it was primarily the upper strata of rural society that benefitted from the Constituante's (and the Republic's) policies, the age of latifundia had passed.
Of course, an economy of smallholders is less efficient; in absolute terms, British grain production was around 30% higher, and that figure only increases if we compare the countries geographically – although the surface area of arable land in France was only 9% (!) greater than in the United Kingdom.
Nevertheless, we know from contemporary accounts that life in rural France* was markedly better than in, say, Great Britain or Austro-Hungary. It comes as no surprise that extreme poverty wasn't as ubiquitous among the petit-bourgeois peasantry. This translated to fewer people leaving the countryside, and this in turn translated to a smaller reserve army of labor: in 1836, the United Kingdom (incl. Ireland) had twice as many “large” cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants (17 versus 9), despite its population being less than three-quarters of that of France (data for 1836, compiled by Eric Hobsbawm). I am aware that this is almost a truism, but the Revolution would not have succeeded if it had been entirely bourgeois in character, and because it was “ahead of itself”, it clipped the wings of the system that its ideological forefathers meant to create.
TL;DR: Did the French have it too good to reap profits from the Domestic Orphan Crusher 3000?
*These and all other figures apply to the metropole; the realities of e.g. British West Africa and French Algeria were of course drastically different.
