This panel explores the contested boundaries of capitalist development in 18th- and 19th-century France. Traversing the metropole and the colonies, the papers examine how thinkers, statesmen, elites, and market actors crafted normative frameworks and implemented policies aimed at economic transformation—only to encounter the limits of their interventions as social, political, financial, and ecological forms of resistance shaped, constrained, and redirected growth-oriented agendas. Taken together, the papers reveal that the evolution of capitalism in France was forged through a series of fraught attempts to overcome forms of resistance—from natural processes, from entrenched social hierarchies, from reluctant wealthy elites, and from capital markets that refused to be tamed. By tracing these points of resistance, the panel offers new insight into the contested emergence of capitalist rationality in the French context.