Georgiana sat in the carriage, watching the people outside the window and listening to their cheers.
Compared with the small towns they had passed along the way, Yvetot was indeed a city, though it could not compare to Rouen.
It had no city walls, not because Richelieu had ordered them demolished, but because it had never had any to begin with. It had gradually expanded to its current scale thanks to the textile industry.
Wealth accumulated by squeezing workers' hours and wages would ultimately lead to what Périer had said: as factories increased, so too would conflicts between workers and employers. Paris was, in a sense, an example of this.
Madame du Barry's exaggerated tales of Marie Antoinette's Luxury stood in stark contrast to the suffering of the common people. When someone was starving to death while another person beside them was so full they could vomit, they could not tolerate such a disparity.
City dwellers longed for pastoral idylls, while country folk yearned for urban splendor. Natural scenery could certainly lift the spirits of those who had spent too long in cities and attract plenty of tourists, but Georgiana did not intend to let Brittany remain so "natural" forever.
It still needed industry, though not merely textiles. Fargeon happened to know distillation. There had been no brandy at first; then distillation technology appeared, and so did brandy. Making brandy also required oak barrels, which created industries for manufacturing distilling equipment and making barrels.
She would not be foolish enough to turn Brittany into a second Ireland. It was unrealistic to leap from a primitive state straight into modern civilization. At the very least, there had to be industries capable of absorbing the unemployed population created during the transition away from labor-intensive work, preventing anything like the machine-smashing during the