In France, the lack of upperwork and mixtures came much earlier, namely with the young Cavaillé-Coll: many of his small-to-medium sized instruments hardly had any mixtures at all. It was mainly 16'-8'-4' flues plus 16'-8'-4' reeds. Of course, this is also partly because of French tradition, where reeds had always predominated over mixtures, even in the 18th century, but the young and eager C-C, yearning for an "orchestral" organ, went to
Guilmant and Widor eventually learned the lesson, and influenced C-C into revising his position, which can be seen in his later instruments such as St-Sernin or St-Ouen (the mutation series of the 1868 Notre-Dame organ being more of an isolated experiment).
Mutin (C-C's successor) continued moving in the same direction, as can be seen e.g. from the way he changed the specification of the 1898 C-C organ before setting it up in the Sacré-Coeur in 1919.
Around that time, Norbert Dufourcq, Victor Gonzalez and André Marchal started the neoclassical mouvement (roughly the French equivalent of the Orgelbewegung), which insisted even more on
restoring the rôle of mixtures and upperwork.
Gonzalez had an obvious talent as a voicer and his instruments can actually be quite beautiful. The bad reputation of his name has much more to do with his successor Danion, who built his instruments under the name "Danion-Gonzalez". Two of Voctor Gonzalez' organs have been recorded:
- Bailleul (close to Lille in Northern France), by Loïc Mallié (Hortus CD) and by Jérôme Faucheur (MP3s may be found here);
- Soissons, by Vincent Genvrin (he did his own transcription of Mussorgski's Pictures, a Studio SM CD, long out of print I'm afraid).
Another organ builder of that time was Joseph Beuchet, whose orientation was similar to that of Gonzalez.
As far as I know, unification was hardly used in France, except sometimes in the pedal. I believe it was more common in the UK, but I'm not familiar with the organ history of that country.