Application of social scientific methods and approaches to the study of history has always been the subject of considerable and often acrimonious debate. In recent years, however, the terms of the debate have taken a somewhat different and, to some of us, surprising turn. Notes of pessimism and defensiveness have entered the arguments of practitioners; some feel the need to repeat the once useful polemics of twenty odd years ago; and there is talk of the intrinsic limitations of the general enterprise. At the same time, the traditionalist camp announces with a measure of glee that the tides of social scientific history are on the wane.

This article addresses recent revisionist literature concerning nineteenth-century French economic history, and in particular Cameron’s and Freedeman’s “French Economic Growth; a Radical Revision” (1983, see also Roehl, 1976 and O’Brien and Keyder, 1978 and the critical response of Locke, 1981 and Crafts, 1984). It questions the latter’s criteria for the perception of economic development or retardation and challenges revisionist affirmations concerning the role of entrepreneurial attitudes in the achievement of industrialization in France. The problems raised by the revisionist interpretation appear clearly with respect to the history of the French steel industry. The principal steel producers’ dynamism and technically progressive attitudes, which the authors cite to demonstrate the irrelevance of sociocultural hypotheses concerning French industrial retardation, represented only one component of the ferrous industrial scene. Sociocultural factors beyond the steel firms’ control, together with poor financial conditions and the economic geography of France outweighed entrepreneurial dynamism as determinants of the industry’s overall performance in the later nineteenth century, chiefly by their inhibiting effect on per capita steel consumption.