The Battle for Control of the Brass and Instruments Business in the French Industrial Revolution

Abstract

This book narrates and analyses the largest judicial battle in culture and industrial property in nineteenth-century Europe (and probably in the world), the echoes of which still ring today. Interestingly, the fight was motivated by some rather simple wind instruments made of brass and their related patents, not by opera—the musical genre that moved the most money and people at the time—or the always revered and contentious high art. The legal confrontation began when a group of French businessmen who built wind instruments saw their business threatened because the Army forced them to use a series of musical instruments that were protected by patents for invention that belonged to Adolphe Sax, the well-known inventor of the saxophone. The first phase (defence) lasted seven years, but it flared up again a few months later when the original defendant took the initiative and simultaneously pursued—this time criminally and for more than thirteen years—several of his competitors also inflicting numerous raids on them. Of course, there were other actors less in sight pulling the strings: the book gives evidence of how political power used economic power and vice versa and provides arguments on how culture articulated the social machinery and was a powerful tool for legitimizing political positions.