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RESEARCH PRODUCT

L'économie matérielle de la France (1830-2015). L'histoire d'un parasite ?

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This article explores the long-term dynamics of material use in France over a period of 185 years. It is based on material flow accounts that are perfectly consistent with the standards of Material Flows Analysis at the national economic scale. This work - which covers domestic extraction, imports and exports - is the first long-term study of material flows for France, with annual and national data for most of the period. Our database allows us to study the evolution of French metabolism during the industrialization of the country, together with the increasing dependence on abiotic materials. We highlight a singular metabolic trajectory: that of a state that benefits from successive world-systems to develop economically via massive imports of materials. First, we present the sources and the quality of the data collected. We then show the main long-term characteristics of the French material economy. Finally, we propose a socio-historical reading inspired by the notion of world-ecology introduced by Moore (2015).