Tribune. Heir to a kingdom whose history is marked by invasions and European wars, the France of the XIXe and XXe centuries were crossed by territorial ambitions – with Napoleonic Europe – then colonial. But she was especially worried about the thalassocratic ambitions of the United Kingdom (until the Entente Cordiale of 1904), then of the territorial construction of Germany in the heart of the continent, of the appetites of an Italy eyeing towards the Maghreb. French, or the imperial proselytism of the USSR.
These geopolitical issues explain the desire to equip themselves with stocky armed forces, able to resist these potential enemies. The outbreak of the Great War, then the rise of Nazism, justified two waves of massive investment in armaments. The Republics, the monarchies and the two Empires had recovered from the Ancien Régime the maritime arsenals and modernized them to constantly renew the fleet of sailboats and then steamers.
The arsenal of Brest was restructured and enlarged, with its forges, its shipyards and its quays, until 2010. The increasing weight of artillery in the conflicts explains the birth of the first military-industrial complex which s ‘is consolidated throughout the XIXe century. The symbol is the Châtellerault factory, which opened in 1819 to manufacture small arms and artillery pieces until 1968 – it had 8,000 employees in 1914-18.
A long industrial tradition in armaments
In 1838, the State took over the Saint-Etienne factory, a private company since it opened in 1764: 10,000 employees worked there from the end of the century until 1940, before it closed in 2001.
The Revolution and the Empire obtained their supplies from State factories (Versailles, Tulle, Saint-Etienne, Liège and Turin for the rifles, Kligenthal for the bayonets, Douai, Indret, Ruelle, Le Creusot, Saint-Gervais for the cannons) but also private (forges of Wendel in Hayange for cannonballs and axles of carriages and fronts, fodder and couplings of the Seillière company).
The rise of the private sector was stimulated by the law of 1885 which liberalized arms exports. The French “gun merchants” take part in the competition to equip the emerging armies, in Russia or China during the Belle Epoque, in Asia and in central Europe in the interwar period. Schneider became, especially during the First World War, a major exporter and the “pivotal firm” of the military industry, at the heart of a production system encompassing its own factories, those of subcontractors and those of suppliers of semi-finished products. metallurgical.
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