page_title: Economy of Paris
section_title: 17th and 18th centuries
hierarchical_section_title: Economy of Paris / Economic History of Paris / 17th and 18th centuries
caption_attribution_description: English: Gallery inside the Hôtel des Gobelins, adorned with statues at left and tapestries at right; at centre, Edouard Colbert, surrounded by courtiers, is being shown the tapestries, designed by Charles Le Brun, representing the story of Alexander the Great; Colbert's coat of arms in lower margin.
context_page_description: The economy of Paris is based largely on services and commerce: of the 390,480 of its enterprises, 80.6 percent are engaged in commerce, transportation, and diverse services, 6.5 percent in construction, and just 3.8 percent in industry. Paris, including both the City of Paris and the Île-de-France region, is the most important center of economic activity in France, accounting for about thirty percent of the French GDP.
  The story is similar in the Paris Region, or Île-de-France, as a whole. 76.7 percent of enterprises are engaged in commerce and services, and 3.4 percent in industry. 59.5 percent of employees in the region are engaged in commerce, transport and diverse services, 26.9 percent in public administration, health and social services, 8.2 percent industry, and 5.2 percent in construction.
  The top ten French companies listed in the Fortune Global 500 for 2015 all have their headquarters in the Paris Region, nine within the City of Paris and one, Total S.A., in the Hauts-de-Seine Department, in the business district of La Defense. The fourth-largest company, Société Générale, has its registered headquarters in Paris and its operational offices in La Defense.
context_section_description: At the beginning of the 17th century, the most important industry of the city was textiles; weaving and dyeing cloth, and making bonnets, belts, ribbons, and an assortment of other items of clothing. The dyeing industry was located in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, along the River Bievre, which was quickly polluted by the workshops and dye vats along its banks.  The largest workshops there, which made the fortunes of the families Gobelin, Canaye and Le Peultre, were dyeing six hundred thousand pieces of cloth a year in the mid-16th century, but, because of growing foreign competition, their output dropped to one hundred thousand pieces at the start of the 17th century, and the whole textile industry was struggling.  Henry IV and Louis XIII observed that wealthy Parisians were spending huge sums to import silks, tapestries, glassware leather goods and carpets from Flanders, Spain, Italy and Turkey.  They encouraged French businessmen to make the same luxury products in Paris.   .
  With this royal encouragement, the financier Moisset launched an enterprise to make cloth woven with threads of gold, silver and silk.  It failed, but was replaced by other successful ventures.  The first tapestry workshop was opened, with royal assistance, in the Louvre, then at the Savonnerie and at Chaillot. The Gobelins enterprise of dyers brought in two Flemish tapestry makers in 1601 and began to make its own tapestries in the Flemish style. Master craftsmen from Spain and Italy opened small enterprises to make high-quality leather goods.  Workshops making fine furniture were opened by German craftsmen in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. A royal glass factory was opened 1601 in Saint-Germain-des-Prés to compete with Venetian glassmakers.  A large factory was opened at Reuilly to produce and polish mirrors made by Saint-Gobain. 
  Under Louis XIV and his minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the royal manufacturies were expanded. The most skilled artisans in Europe were recruited and brought to Paris. In 1665 the enterprise of Hindret, located in the old château de Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne, produced the first French silk stockings.  The Gobelins workshops began to produce furniture for the royal residences as well as tapestries, while the Savonnerie Manufactory produced magnificent carpets for the royal palaces.  The quality of the carpets, tapestries, furniture, glass and other products was unmatched; the problem was that it was nearly all destined for a single client, the King, and his new residence at Versailles.  The royal manufacturies were kept going by enormous subsidies from the royal treasury. 
  The most important market for luxury goods was located on the Île-de-la-Cité, in the spacious gallery of the old royal palace, where it had been since at least the fourteenth century.   The palace was no longer occupied by the King, and had become the administrative headquarters of the Kingdom, occupied by the courts, the treasury, and other government offices.  The small shops in the gallery sold a wide variety of expensive gowns, cloaks, perfumes, hats, bonnets, children's wear, gloves, and other items of clothing.  Books were another luxury items sold there; they were hand-printed, expensively bound, and rare.
  Clocks and watches were another important luxury good made in Paris shops.  Access to the profession was strictly controlled; at the beginning of the 17th century, the guild of horlogers had twenty-five members.  Each horloger was allowed to have no more than one apprentice, and apprenticeship lasted six years.  Nearly all the clock and watchmakers were Protestants; when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, most of the horlogers refused to renounce their faith and emigrated to Geneva, England and Holland, and France no longer dominated the industry. 
  During most of the 18th century, the Parisian economy was based on thousands of small workshops, where skilled artisans produced products. The workshops were clustered in particular neighborhoods; furniture makers in the faubourg Saint-Antoine; cutlery and small metal-work in 
caption: Colbert visits the Gobelins tapestry workshop (1665)
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