Introduction

Industrial paternalism in France emerged in the context of the industrial development of the country from the 1830s onwards. Initially, providing workingman's housing was the main and most important element of welfare work, particularly in case of companies in rural regions with appropriate natural resources (water, timber, coal), where no or inappropriate workingman's housing facilities were available. Later, a number of companies also introduced profit sharing and other welfare work programmes. The apex of industrial housing provided by private companies was reached by 1889, when, at the ‘Exposition Universelle’ in Paris, on the occasion of the centenary of the French Revolution, extensive attention was paid to workingman's housing. At the same time, the 1889 Parisian world exhibition can be considered a turning point with regard to the development of building cheap housing for workers in France. Although the first private or cooperative building societies that constructed workingman's housing had been established earlier (from the 1860s), their role became more pronounced after 1890. At the outbreak of the First World War, building workingman's housing had mainly become a public affair, based on housing legislation. An important explanation for this development is the emerging social question in France in the nineteenth century and the way social reformers and the state tried to tackle it. Although there was a strong belief until 1889 in the problem solving qualities of industrial enterprises with respect to providing cheap and adequate workingman's housing, thereafter this belief gradually faded and the significance of building societies and the state predominated in the Third Republic (1870-1940).

To understand this development, first, I will pay attention to the characteristic development of the industrial revolution in France, which differed somewhat from the industrial revolution in the three other countries under examination. Then, in addition to the remarks made in chapter 2, I will return to the significance of labour utopias in the French context, in particular based on Fourier's ideas with respect to the phalanstère and, to a lesser extent, on Ebenezer Howard's ideas regarding the garden city.