A Light Bulb Goes On: Religiosity and the Adoption of electrical Technologies in 19th century France

Georgios Tsiachtsiras (), Sergio Petralia (), Ernest Miguelez () and Rosina Moreno ()
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Georgios Tsiachtsiras: White Research SRL, Belgium.
Sergio Petralia: Department of Economic Geography, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
Ernest Miguelez: AQR-IREA, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.
Rosina Moreno: AQR-IREA, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.

No 202606, IREA Working Papers from University of Barcelona, Research Institute of Applied Economics

Abstract: This article studies how anti-scientific sentiment can shape the direction of technological change, focusing on the tensions between the Catholic Church and the French Republic in late nineteenth-century France. We construct a novel geo-referenced database of French patents filed at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (1838-1960) and combine it with historical measures of religiosity at the departmental level. We find that areas with higher shares of refractory clergy, those who refused to swear allegiance to the revolutionary state, produced significantly fewer electrical patents between 1890 and 1914. Crucially, this negative relationship does not extend to other technological fields or to overall patenting activity. Neither education nor migration explains this pattern. We also show that early electrical patenting predicts later activity in computer and communication technologies, consistent with path-dependent technological development. These findings suggest that conservative institutional environments did not suppress innovation broadly, but selectively discouraged disruptive technologies that challenged established norms, with consequences that persisted for decades.

Keywords: Innovation; Patent Data; Religion; Path-dependence; Technological Change. JEL classification: L92; N73; O31; O33; P25. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2026-01
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ira:wpaper:202606

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