ut Britain, "When such a powerful and enlightened nation not only puts such a great principle into practice but is also well known to have profited by it, how can its emulators fail to follow the same way?" Thus the governments in power were persuaded by the precedent of Britain to ignore demands for protection, in some cases detrimentally. Russia for instance saw a large deterioration of its balance of trade after the 1868 tariff was enacted. It behooves us to look at other nations at this point to see how international events and interest groups played a role in determining economic policy. France is a major exception to the concept that interest groups largely determine a nation's trade policy, although most other nations tend to follow this idea. France had remained highly protectionist up until 1860 for a variety of reasons, prominent among which was the textile industry as an interest group. Unable to compete with British producers of textiles, the French industry had managed to impose a prohibition on the importation of cloth to the French market. The fact that French industry opposed trade liberalization, in contrast to their British counterparts, and the continued support for protectionism in the agricultural sector guaranteed protectionist policies in France. It took Napoleon III, a supporter of free trade, to pass the Cobden-Chevalier treaty and move France from a highly protectionist to a medium protectionist state. Done without the consent of the French Parliament, and as Paul Bairoch points out, against the will of the majority of the people3, this precedent forced France to lower its trade barriers for at least 10 years. This is exceptional in that the interest groups were united in favor of protection and yet lost out. The inability of the interest groups to exert more substantial power lies in the structure of the government and the fact that Napoleon III adroitly used a political loophole to overcome them. Germany, loo...
