Paris

Although Paris is not an ocean port, it has played a significant role in international trade because of its importance as a manufacturing, financial, and administrative center. Most major French companies are headquartered in Paris, and the city has long exercised enormous influence in the creation of luxury goods, from the tapestries and furniture created for princes and nobles in the seventeenth century to the fashion business today.

Paris has been a leader in the production of luxury goods since at least the late seventeenth century. It took the lead because of the enormous demand generated by the royal court and by the large number of wealthy nobles and royal officials who lived in or near the city. The court hired artists and skilled artisans, and the nobles and officials did the same; the Crown even created businesses, such as the Gobelins royal tapestry and furniture works, that gained an international reputation. The demand was particularly strong in the late seventeenth century when King Louis XIV (1638–1715) was building an enormous chateau in Versailles, and it helped to create the sort of network of middlemen and skilled and creative workers that we see today in places such as Silicon Valley. Princes throughout Europe built imitations of Versailles and generated more demand for French luxury goods, and in the eighteenth century elites throughout Europe bought furniture and other luxury objects created in Paris by the city's innovative merchant dealers and the army of skilled workmen whom they employed. The pattern persisted well into the nineteenth century. In 1867 the sort of luxury goods produced near Paris accounted for perhaps 26 percent of French exports of manufactured goods, and Paris remains a trendsetter in the fashion business.

Luxuries are of course not the only good that France has exported. The country has had a comparative advantage in agriculture for centuries, particularly in high quality agricultural goods such as wine, and in the eighteenth century it shipped slaves and supplies to the Caribbean islands it possessed and brought back the sugar the slaves produced. This eighteenth-century trade in slaves and sugar and the ongoing traffic in wine enriched ports on France's Atlantic coast, but it did little for Paris. It was all interrupted when the French Revolution erupted in 1789, however, and as France recovered in the nineteenth century, trade shifted from the Atlantic ports to manufactured goods produced in the northern and eastern portions of the country. Paris profited because it stood at the nexus of the road network and inland waterways; by the end of the nineteenth century it was at the center of railroad traffic too.

The nineteenth century made Paris a center of international finance. Parisian banks financed a great deal of international trade in Europe and helped to invest France's trade surplus abroad by helping to arrange long-term financing for mines, railroads, manufacturing plants, and new financial institutions in Europe, the Middle East, and even the Americas. These banks continue to be important today.

SEE ALSO Bordeaux; Cargoes, Freight; Chambers of Commerce; Empire, French; France;La Rochelle;Marseilles;Nantes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cameron, Rondo E. France and the Economic Development of Europe, 1800–1914: Conquests of Peace and Seeds of War. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966.

Sargentson, Carolyn. Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-Century Paris. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996.

Philip T. Hoffman