Marchant de la Houlière, a French metallurgist and Royal Army officer, went to Britain in 1774, looking for new processes to refine cast iron using mineral coal. He brought back something else: a business plan, and a business partner.

The plan: to establish an English style gun-foundry, capable of remelting old canons to cast them anew; the partner was William Wilkinson, brother of Ironmaster John Wilkinson, whose works at Broseley had made a formidable impression on Marchant de la Houlière.

The making of cast-iron guns for the Navy was under close supervision by the State. The first challenge was thus to convince the authorities their interest in importing these British processes to France. This paper will examine the strategies that were employed to that end and what resistance they met – for technological, economic or nationalistic reasons.

Wilkinson did actually initiate the building of new works in France: the Indret foundry near Nantes, where cast iron was remelted and cast into guns and, a few years later, new works at Montcenis-Le Creusot, in Brugundy, which were devoted to a full reproduction of the British process, including coke smelting. This extension to the original project raises new questions: what set of technologies were actually being imported, and to what end?

We will then explore the ramifications of these first endeavors into the realm of late XVIIIth-century gunmaking: what part of the British process were indeed incorporated into the French gun-casting industry, and what impact those changes had on that industry.