Planning the French canals

The Becquey Program is one of the landmarks of French transport history. Francois Becquey, the politician/bureaucrat who was the director of the Bureau des ponts et chaussees, believed that the canal acts of 1821 and 1822 would finally provide a national network of mainline canals. He expected these canals to stimulate economic development, thereby allowing France to "catch up" with Britain, whose dense canal network was seemingly a necessary condition for its recent triumphs in the marketplace as well as on the battlefield. The Becquey Program has never been studied in detail, yet it is clearly one of the major landmarks in French transportation history. Its history is an opportunity to reexamine two of the oldest and most debated issues in modern French history: the alleged weakness of French economic liberalism and the putative backwardness of the French economy. The story of the Becquey Program also provides insight into the mentality and behavior of the haute banque of Paris, Becquey's own state corps of engineers, and the deputies of the French legislature - three overlapping elements among the emerging elite of notables who dominated political, social, and economic life during the Restoration. Finally, in a comparative framework, the debate over the canals led to an examination of the inadequacy of a British model and to a rehearsal of the arguments about state economic policy that the next generation would revive.