Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 1.1.
The growth of the main and secondary rail networks in France, 1870-1930
Years
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
1912
1928
1930
Main
lines (km)
17,707
25,759
34,878
38,261
40,214
40,696
n/a
42,400
Local
lines (km) 293
2,187
3,515
7,612
15,347
17,653
20,291
20,202
Sources:
Ministère des Travaux Public,
Statistique centrale des chemins de ferres français
au 31 décembre 1932
.
France, voies ferrées d' intérêt local, tramways, services subventionnés
d'automobiles
(Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1935), 5; Roget Price,
The Modernization of
Rural France
(London: Hutchinson, 1983), 25; Association of A merican Railroads and
Bureau of Railway Economics,
Comparative Railway Statistics of the United States, the
United Kingdom, France and Germany for 1900 and 1909
(Washing ton, D.C., 1911).
Note:
n/a means data not available.
Still, had he traveled through French villages during the same period,
he would have learned that the complaints of British farmers were small
potatoes indeed. In fact, a comparative study of British and French rail
networks suggests a more positive story of rural railway development in
England and Wales than Jefferies would have us believe (see figure 1.1a
and table 1.1).
In railway development France was a decade or more behind Britain.
A county four times larger than England and Wales, France had a good
deal more territory over which to lay down rails, to connect major cit-
ies and ports, and to reach country towns and the approximately thirty
thousand rural communes in which the bulk of its population still lived
and worked. Compared to Wales and the English Pennines, the uplands
and mountains of the French south, the Pyrenees, and the Alps presented
more formidable topographical and financial challenges. Moreover, the
French pace of industrialization was relatively slow, agricultural produc-
tivity in two-thirds of the country was low by British standards, and the
nation's defeat by Prussia in the war of 1870-71 had been a costly humili-
ation that siphoned off tax revenues to pay substantial reparations to the
new German Empire.
In 1878, in the aftermath of defeat and the French state's desire to
catch up with America and Britain, the government of the new Third
Republic, much as Jefferies reported and praised, launched a huge proj-
ect to expand the French rail system into the countryside. Named after
