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ANTONIO GONZÁLEZ BUENO Y RAÚL RODRÍGUEZ NOZAL AN. R. ACAD. NAC. FARM.

those of inorganic basis. It showed deficits however and was depend-
ent on their German ‘enemies’ for all the necessary raw materials with
which to elaborate their chemical drugs.

The imbalance in this speciality is translated into the existence of
a single factory of artificial dyestuffs, of French capital, capable of
working from basic raw materials. We refer to Société anonyme des
matières colorantes et produits chimiques de Saint Denis, founded in
1881, by merger of the Poirrier (1830) and Dalsace (1843). The rest
of the French establishments could only deal with the manufacture
of dyestuffs using intermediate products of Germanic origin; this is
the case of Fabrique de Couleurs d’aniline et Raffinerie de Beuzines
Victor Steiner, the Fabrique de Produits chimiques et Matières col-
orantes Mabboux et Cammel and the Manufacture de Matières col-
orantes Laroche et Juillard. To these four companies, we should also
add the Compagnie nationale de matières colorantes et de produits
chimiques, a national project, promoted by the Syndicat national des
matières colorantes, in the same line as the British Dyes and with sim-
ilarly ambitious aims.

Faced with a scarcity of purely French manufacturers, others were
able to find a place, either by means of acquisition, or through im-
plantation in French soil acting as subsidiary or branch of the large
German and Swiss firms. They were only finalisation factories in
which intermediate products were used coming from Germany, and
susceptible to conversion into dyes with a simple chemical operation
of transformation. In this way, the large German houses of dyestuffs
obtained a double profit: outwitting customs norms which prohibit-
ed the entrance of any supposedly medicinal product either unde-
clared or not included in the pharmacopoeia, thus enabling the pay-
ment of reduced tariffs, applicable to raw materials not existing in
French territory. Also, they continued to maintain their privileged sit-
uation by retaining, confined and protected, the procedures and tech-
niques of fabrication in Germany.

But German colonisation was even more evident in the case of
drugs ready made for consumption. In this case, the system used was
that of the prate-nom, i.e French pharmaceuticals established in the
country who prepared and/or sold drugs supplied by their German as-
sociates (25). The mechanism consisted in elaborating pharmaceuti-

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