Georgiana's guardian, Citizen Lioncourt, the "great philanthropist," was one of Lafayette's liberal nobles. In the Middle Ages, nobles were expected to fight for the king, and fighting required armor, swords, arrowheads, and so on. At the Battle of Agincourt, the longbowmen led by Henry V, made up of yeoman farmers, faced the heavy cavalry of the french nobility. Keeping horses, buying armor, and maintaining it all cost a considerable sum.
In the nineteenth century, all two hundred of France's iron and steel magnates were nobles, especially in the north and east. Yet nobles rarely worked at the factories themselves. They treated steelworks as investments. Only a few, such as François de Wendel, managed them personally. Eleven percent of France's steel output came from his family's factories.
But François dreamed of becoming a sailor. His eldest son had no interest in the family business either and chose to become a farmer. His youngest son was still in school. His only daughter had married a technician, one of those so-called "patent workers," so the company's technical secrecy was assured.
It was not easy for nobles to return to Parliament and enter politics again, and the french were not as skilled at finance as the British. Expanding production required buying equipment. Rolling mills existed, but buying them cost money. Raising funds through subscriptions was slow; generally speaking, loans were the most convenient option.
But french bankers lacked the adventurous spirit of British bankers. It was precisely because British bankers had lent money to textile enterprises so they could expand production that overcapacity had arisen, creating an urgent need to open new markets and causing many other problems, such as cutthroat competition.
Cotton cloth was cheap to begin with. To make greater profits, cheaper raw materials had to be used. Moreover, in many industrial