Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice 9781501711237

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Work, Fellowship, And Some Economic Realities Of Eighteenth-Century France
Journeymen's Migrations And Workshop Organization In Eighteenth-Century France
Social And Geographic M Ability Of The Eighteenth-Century Guild Artisan: An Analysis Of Guild Receptions In Dijon, I 700-90
Independent And Insolent: Journeymen And Their "Rites" In The Old Regime Workplace
Social Classification And Representation Zn The Corporate World Of Eighteenth-Century France: Turgot's "Carnival"
The Alphabetical Order: Work In Diderot's Encyclopédie
Visions Of Labor: Illustrations Of The Mechanical Arts Before, In, And After Diderot's Encyclopédie
The Urban Trades: Social Analysis And Representation
A Nineteenth-Century Work Experience As Related In A Worker's Autobiography: Norbert Truquin
The Myth Of The Artisan: Critical Reflections On A Category Of Social History
Statistical Representations Of Work: The Politics Of The Chamber Of Commerce's Statistique De L'industrie À Paris, 1847-48
The Moral Sense Of Farce: The Patois Literature Of Lille Factory Laborers, 1848-70
Reinterpreting Capitalist Industrialization: A Study Of Nineteenth-Century France
Proletarian Families And Social Protest: Production And Reproduction As Issues Of Social Conflict In Nineteenth-Century France
Apprenticeship In Nineteenth-Century France: A Continuing Tradition Or A Break With The Past?
The European Science Of Work: The Economy Of The Body At The End Of The Nineteenth Century
Automobile Workers In France And Their Work, 1914-83
Afterword
Notes On Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Work in France

Work in France REPRESENTATIONS, MEANING, ORGANIZATION, AND PRACTICE

EDITED BY

Steven Laurence Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright© 1986 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1986 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number o-8014-1697-3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 85-22352 Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. The paper in this book is acid-free and meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

To the workers of Vins de Postilion, Ivry-sur-Seine, 1962

CONTENTS

fu~ 1.

Introduction Cynthia]. Koepp and Steven Laurence Kaplan

2.

Work, Fellowship, and Some Economic Realities of Eighteenth-Century France Daniel R!)('he

3· Journeymen's Migrations and Workshop Organization in Eighteenth-Century France Michael Sonenscher 4· Social and Geographic Mobility of the Eighteenth-Century Guild Artisan: An Analysis of Guild Receptions in Dijon, qoo-qgo Edward]. Shephard, Jr.

9 13

54

74

97

5· Independent and Insolent: Journeymen and Their "Rites" in the Old Regime Workplace Cynthia M. Truant

131

6. Social Classification and Representation in the Corporate World of Eighteenth-Century France: Turgot's "Carnival" Steven Laurence Kaplan

176

7· The Alphabetical Order: Work in Diderot's Encyclopedic Cynthia]. Koepp 8. Visions of Labor: Illustrations of the Mechanical Arts before, in, and after Diderot's Encyclopedie William H. Sewell, Jr.

229

258

Contents

g. The Urban Trades: Social Analysis and Representation

287

Maurice Garden

10. A Nineteenth-Century Work Experience as Related in a Worker's Autobiography: Norbert Truquin Michelle Perrot

297

11. The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History 1 acques Ranciere

317

12. Statistical Representations of Work: The Politics of the Chamber of Commerce's Statistique de l'Industrie a Paris, 1847-48 1oan W. Scott

335

13. The Moral Sense of Farce: The Patois Literature of Lille Factory Laborers, 1848-70 William M. Reddy

364

14. Reinterpreting Capitalist Industrialization: A Study of Nineteenth-Century France Ronald Aminzade

393

15. Proletarian Families and Social Protest: Production and Reproduction as Issues of Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century France Michael P. Hanagan

418

16. Apprenticeship in Nineteenth-Century France: A Continuing Tradition or a Break with the Past? Yves Lequin

457

17. The European Science of Work: The Economy of the Body at the End of the Nineteenth Century Anson Rabinbach

475

18. Automobile Workers in France and Their Work, 1914-83 Patrick Fridenson

5 14

19. Afterword Christopher H. 1 ohnson

548

Notes on Contributors

s65

Index

569

-8-

PREFACE

Most of the essays collected in this book were first presented at Corn ell University on 28-30 April 1983 as part of a conference entitled Representations of Work in France. By "representations" we intended not only language, iconography, and ideas about work, but also those activities that are called work (that represent work to members of a given society) as well as represenLations of those who practice (or avoid practicing) such activities. The conference demonstrated that "representations" could not be abstracted or separated from the whole tissue of the work experience: thus the four-part subtitle of this book. Only in recent years has work received significant scholarly attention. Perhaps this is not surprising. Work seems to be such a common and pervasive fact of life that we often do not recognize that "what work is" is not self-evident. In the past twenty years or so, however, historians have begun to entertain a whole series of questions about the activity of work-some of which have rarely been addressed before. They are investigating work practices: the relation of the worker to his tools or machines, to other workers in the shop or factory, to supervisors, to customers, to the products he or she makes, to innovations in the production process. They are also considering the ways work has been organized and shaped from the outside: by police, by legislation, by definitions of work time, and by other external constraints. More general questions are finally being raised as well: What are the meanings of work? What is the (normative or legal) place of work in a society? What about hierarchies or dichotomies of work such as manual/intellectual, urban/rural, men's/women's? How does the organization of work relate to the larger organization of economic, social, and political institutions? And some historians have decided that "work on work" can benefit from

-g-

Preface new approaches like those of cultural anthropology; new theoretical undertakings, more often than not still oriented by positive or negative reference to Marxism, but in some cases leading to wholly new forms of social analysis; and new combinations of methodologies proper to intellectual, political, economic, and social history. The purpose of our conference, then, was twofold: ftrst, to serve as a forum for some of this recent scholarship on work, and second, to provide a moment for discussion that might stimulate further reflection and investigation. Like the conference itself, this book shares those two goals. The chief sponsor of the conference was the Western Societies Program at Cornell University, which has acquired an international reputation for its promotion of research on European subjects. Precious support was also provided by the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, and the Council for European Studies, and by the following institutions at Cornell: Society for the Humanities, Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences, University Lectures Committee, Department of Romance Studies, and School of Lahor and Industrial Relations. ln myriad ways John Weiss, director of the Western Societies Program, has helped us move from conference to publication. For enriching the debate at the conference we are indebted to Stuart Blumin and .John Weiss of CornelJ's Department of History, to John Meniman of Yale's Department of History, to Maurice Garden of the University of Lyons II, and to .Jeffry Kaplow of the University of Paris VIII. vVe are grateful to Lawrence Malley and John Ackerman for their "book" wisdom and to Shirley Rice and Kathy Whigham for typing parts of the manuscript. S. L. K. C. .J. K. Ithaca, New York

Iowa City, Town

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Work in France

oRouen Poissy 0 0 Nanterre Billancourt o o Paris

0

Le Mans 0

..

0rleans Sochaux 0 Audincourt o 0 Dijon

oNantes oTours o Montreuii-Bellav o Poitiers

0 Macon Pant-de- Veylc 0

0 Lyons Le Chamhon o Rive-de-Gier 0 o Saint-Eticnne

Lodeve 0 oToulouse

France: Some cities and towns mentioned in this book -12-

0

Avignon

-1-

Introduction

CYNTHIA

J.

KoEPP

and

STEVEN LAURENCE KAPLAN

Near the end of Candide the Turk, while describing his family's life on their twenty acres, remarks that "work protects us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty." Pangloss, not one to miss the similarities between this exotic and idyllic plot of land and Eden, agrees that "man was not born to repose." Martin adds that "to work without thinking is the only way to make life endurable." And Candide himself, after reflecting upon his own misadventures and perhaps with the Turk's bountiful success in mind, concludes that all their talk is well and good but "il faut cultiver notre jardin." Thus Candide and his companions end their journeys and settle down to work their land. How they arrived at cultivating their garden has less to do with work than with stuffing their pockets with the diamonds of El Dorado. No, in Candide there are few clues that labor has anything to do with acquiring property or wealth. Indeed the dominant structure of the text occludes this insight. Yet work is nevertheless offered as a solution to problems in other areas. As philosopher and social theorist, Voltaire posits work as an agency of social control, the antidote to vice, ennui, and want; as storyteller, he uses work as a device to solve the problem of narrative closure. At precisely the moment Candide and his friends begin to labor in their garden, the narrative stops. Eating pistachios and candied fruit from the Turk's harvest is one thing, but actually plowing the fields, planting the seeds, weeding the plants, and pruning the trees in the blistering sun do not make for a good story. Narration and work are antithetical activities. Although the Turk may say that work helps us avoid boredom, by not

Introduction showing us any work Voltaire seems to imply that work itself is uninteresting, or at least that reading and writing about it are. Whether or not he is right, no scholar can ignore the challenge. Certainly we should not be surprised that Candide ends when work begins, for the things that labor ostensibly guards against-idleness, crime, and poverty-are the very elements that often generate our plots. A few scholars have perceived that Candide is somehow a book about work, indeed the work ethic, and have taken the final passage at face value: that tending one's garden is Candide's answer to evil in the world. Yet the movement of the novel as a whole, and the bitter irony throughout, seems to belie that very understanding. Even the Turk's simple pronouncement on the virtue of work-in a story whose subtitle is "or Optimism"-has a negative or "pessimistic" quality that should not be overlooked. There is virtually no sense of work as philosophically positive, as aesthetically creative, or as enhancing one's moral worth. The virtue of work is extolled only at the end of the story, and even then primarily in terms of prophylactic or privative utility. It is true that after the violence, cruelty, and vertiginous irony of the earlier passages the garden scene comes as no little relief. But Adam's curse-to toil in the fields-has finally caught up with Candide and his friends, and the tedious business of survival in their Eden has, ironically, just begun. Although it would be a mistake to read Candide as the universal metaphor for the meaning of work in eighteenth-century France, it does provide a seminal example of the complex baggage bound up with the concept. What is especially interesting for historians of work is the way echoes of pejorative attitudes toward work inherited from classical and religious sources undermine newer, more positive notions of work current in eighteenth-century economic theory. Take, for example, the way the narrator mystifies the connection between labor and wealth. What allows the characters to travel from place to place? What enables them to ransom their companions from bondage? Or, if you prefer, what force drives the narrative forward? Consorting with the rich and powerful or finding diamonds in the streets! Only for one fleeting moment, when Candide and Cacambo meet a black slave who describes his life in a sugar mill, do we find an unsettling scene of recognition of what work really means to both eighteenthcentury Europeans and Africans.' The black man tells of the punishments meted out by his Dutch owner: a hand cut off for tasting the 'This chapter, unlike others in its lucidity about the wnnections between labor and wealth, did not appear in the earlier drafts of Candide but apparently was added shortly after Voltaire read a passage on slavery in De /'esprit by Helvetius in the fall of 1758. To compare the remarkably similar language, see the introduction to the critical edition of Candide, edited by Renc Pomeau, Candide, ou l'Optimisme (Paris, 1979), pp. 38-39.

Cynthia]. Koepp and Steven Laurence Kaplan sugar, a leg cut off for attempting to escape. No mild platitudes about the virtue of work here. Work is cruel, debased, inhuman, an activity performed by slaves. Only here is a flickering, tacit admission that labor power produces wealth, but it is wealth produced by slaves, only to be confiscated by the master. And at what cost? As the black man laconically comments, referring to his severed limbs, "This is the price of the sugar you eat in Europe." In Candide, then, work is signified as an absence: the black man's missing hand and leg. Thus work represents the precise conjuncture where the adventures must stop. Now, insofar as Voltaire's narrator emphasizes the negative aspects of work and obscures the relation between labor and wealth, he is further from his near contemporaries across the channel" and closer to the writers of classical antiquity, who rarely recognized labor as a positive source of wealth. Indeed, the ancients associated labor with poverty, observing self-prophetically that only the needy had to work. They perceived wealth not as a product of labor, but rather as something derived from inheritance or conquest, or perhaps, as in Candide's case, dumb luck. Similarly, the Turk's comment that work helps us avoid evil reformulates the Christian tenet that "idleness is the mother of all vice"an axiom endlessly intoned by moralists and administrators throughout the eighteenth century. Insofar as it opposes oisivete, work helps keep one out of trouble. In Old Regime France, work functioned as a means of social classification and social control. One's place in the hierarchy of work defined one's behavior in the complex nexus of social, political, and economic relations and thus gave at least the illusion of a stable and predictable social order. And work contributed to public order too, since it kept people occupied, their actions accountable to their immediate superiors and to the police. The nervousness of the police on holidays when workers were "free" to roam, drink, and disrupt neighborhoods stands as further evidence of the utility of work. In this sense Candide refers to the mischief, evil, and disasters that follow when people are not tied to a workplace. But Christian theology rationalized work in moral terms: as duty to one's fellowman, as a means of charity for the needy, as activity increasing individual self-discipline, self-reliance, and moral fortitude. Working in Candide's garden, on the other hand, diminishes moral responsibility, for at the end Candide and his companions purchase their own peace of mind at the cost of any concern either with others or with the recognized evils of a world so demonstrably in need of remedy. 'Adam Smith's iVealth ofNations (1776), a treatise asserting that \abor was the soun;e of all wealth, was still two decades away. However John Locke, in the Second Treatise of Government ( 16go), had argued persuasively that labor was the true source of property. and Voltaire was a great student of Locke.

Introduction It is in the light of this profound ethical problematic that one genuinely new notion of work (one first expounded in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, especially by the philosophes) appears in Candide in its full irony. It is the belief that work helps one avoid boredom. Obviously the relevance of this observation is confined to a limited spectrum of society. The great majority of workers in eighteenth-century France had no luxury of choosing "interesting" work. And in contrast to the philosophes' speculations, most people expressed (in story, song, or myth) the desire to be released from their labors, not their ennui. Yet that some theorists perceived boredom as a problem in the first place and, further, offered work as its cure indicates that the evaluation of work and leisure was at some level undergoing a conceptual and social shift. From Greek myths through peasant folktales, paradise had often been conceived of as a place where no one had to work. Even in most conceptions of Eden, Adam somehow tended the garden without effort and certainly without pain. Yet myths and fairy tales are also populated with deformed workers silently bearing witness to the sheer physical cost of manual labor. Weavers are made nearly blind from their toils at the loom, and spinners' hands and feet are misshapen after years of working the thread. The ultimate prize won in these folktales is, if anything, some vague happiness guaranteed by material comforts, ensuring that tedious and painful labor will no longer be required for survival. And there is the El Dorado of Candide, where people do not pray to God, but merely thank him for providing for their every need. El Dorado is a society with no prisons, no pain, no poverty. But compare Candide's response. He gets tired of El Dorado after one month and leaves, preferring to trade this utopia for what he knows to be an evil and unhappy world. Like Samueljohnson's Prince Rasselas of Abyssinia, one simply becomes bored with "Happy Valley" because work is not necessary there, and one needs something to do. In the social structure of Candide, then, as in Samuel Johnson's short essay, work is a source of unhappiness both for those who do work and for those who don't. These stories, as well as the myths, religious allegories, and folktales circulating in France during the eighteenth century, reveal a deep confusion in the understanding of the meaning of work, one riddled with contradictory variants. Work is demeaning, yet work is a source of dignity. Paradise is the place where no one has to work, yet paradise without work is tiresome. Work encourages good morals, yet work diminishes moral responsibility. Work keeps one out of trouble, yet workers are inherently troublesome and disruptive. Work is Adam's curse, yet work is the very source of wealth, felicity, and culture. Voltaire's Candide represents these multiple and seemingly incompat-

-16-

Cynthia]. Koepp and Steven Laurence Kaplan ible notions of work in a single text. Written in 1759, Candide was symptomatic both in its revealing and its repressing of our topic. In mideighteenth-century France, many of the most hotly contested social debates implicitly (or explicitly) advanced ostensibly new positive (or negative) valorizations of work while at the same time retaining remnants of attitudes more or less consciously inherited from the classical and Christian traditions. Abstract discussions about slavery or noble status or guild organizations were (whether their participants knew it or not) in fact about contemporary and concrete social structures and hierarchies and the role that work and the economy played in maintaining and challenging those distinctions. Just as Candide ends when work in the garden begins, and just as subsequent historians and scholars avoided addressing the role of work and workers until the late nineteenth century, many of the eighteenth-century debates obscured and denigrated the value of manual (especially artisanal) work even as they stressed its utility in keeping order and guarding morals and the body politic. 3 One such contested topic was the relatively new political economy. And discussion of it was initially dominated by the physiocrats. Guided by Franc,:ois Quesnay, the physiocrats constructed an abstract theoretical model of a market economy that sharply differentiated urban work from rural, artisan from farmer. For Quesnay the only authentically productive work was agricultural. Only nature-admittedly with the help of human labor--, same plact> of origin. and oftt>n tht> same adclrt>ss in Rouen who left the city to work elsewhere and then returned a few months later. Accuracy in the fullest sense would onlY strengthen the proportions aiHI figures presented here. ''Jean- Pierre Bardt>t, Rouen !lUX XVI/ le sihles: Les mutations d'un espace social (Paris, 1983), 2: 110. f(>r the geographic origins of immigrants to Rouen.

journeymen's Migrations and WorkshojJ Organization

trial Capitalism (Alhany, 1981), pp. 16-28. 6oAMT, recensements de 1830, 1872. "'Edmond de Planet, Statistique industrielle du departemenl de la Haute-Garonne (Toulouse, 186 5 ). 6 'AMT, Secretariat general137. 63 Archives departementales de la Haute-Garonne (hereafter ADHG), 12M 34·

Ronald Aminzade Most of Toulouse's factories existed within industries that remained predominantly handicraft in character. For example, although most of the city's hatters continued to labor in small handicraft workshops, by 1865 local hat factories employed 308 workers, or approximately 45 percent of the city's hatters. Most cabinetmakers also remained employed in small handicraft workshops, but by 1865 there were five cabinetmaking factories employing 146 workers. 64 Although joiners, masons, and carpenters-the three largest construction trades in the city-also remained employed mainly in small handicraft shops, by 1865 there was a building-joining factory employing 135 workers and four marble-cutting factories employing 92 workers, and in 1868 there was a mechanized sawmill employing 32 workers. 65 The joiners, printers, carriage makers, metalsmiths, hatters, cabinetmakers, marble masons, and bakers who found work in these manufactories faced foremen and factory discipline, which their counterparts in handicraft industry did not have to contend with. Although the growth of these factories entailed an increased scale and greater division of labor, they typically did not involve the use of steam power or the mechanization of production. Although they were wage laborers, artisans in these early factories, like their counterparts in handicraft production, typically owned the small tools they used in the factory. A second aspect of capitalist industrialization at Toulouse was the penetration of merchant capital into the city's two largest consumergoods industries-tailoring and shoemaking-and into the industry that employed the largest number of the city's artisans-construction. During the 183os and 184os, ready-made standardized shoes and clothing increasingly challenged the custom-made products of small handicraft workshops. At Toulouse shoe warehouses emerged as centers of organization for cutting leather and distributing leather pieces that were then assembled in the homes of local shoe stitchers. By 1858 this merchantcapitalist organization of shoe production yielded an annual estimated output of one million francs, and the Toulouse chamber of commerce reported that "incessant activity reigns in the factories engaged in readymade production of shoes and among the homeworkers (ouvriers en chambre) who supply them." 66 The de Planet industrial survey of 1865 lists three such "factories" (which were really warehouses that distributed cut leather to household workers), employing three hundred workers, or approximately 15 percent of the entire trade. In the 1830 manuscript census, all workers in the local shoe industry listed their occupations simply as shoemakers, cobblers, or bootmakers. By 1872 21 percent of lbid. lbid. 66 ADHG, 64

60

12M

32.

Reinterpreting Capitalist Industrialization all shoe workers listed occupational titles that implied participation in urban household production (e.g., shoe stitcher, boot stitcher, bootedger), while 79 percent listed their occupations as shoemakers, cobblers, and bootmakers. 67 Urban household production made even earlier and greater inroads in Toulouse's garment industry. In the 1830 manuscript census 6g percent of all garment workers listed occupational titles that reveal an advanced division of labor characteristic of urban household production (e.g., garment cutter, seamstress, stitcher), while only 31 percent listed the title of tailor. 68 City directories provide evidence of the growing role of merchant capital in the garment industry during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. 69 The city directories of 1840 and 1872 list three types of tailoring establishments: (1) small-scale master artisans (tailleurs aJar;on), shop owners with little capital who produced custommade clothing from cloth provided by their customers; (2) artisanal tailors (marchand tailleurs) who had larger capital investments, including stocks of cloth that they usually bought in volume from suppliers on credit; and (3) large-scale merchant-capitalist producers of ready-made clothing (maisons de confection). The 1840 listing of Toulouse's tailoring enterprises includes forty-four small-scale master artisans, thirty-three larger-scale artisanal tailors, and eighteen ready-made producers. In the 1872 directory there were listings for forty-nine small tailors, ninety larger artisanal tailors, and twenty-seven ready-made producers. In other words, small-scale custom-made tailoring dropped from 46 percent to 30 percent of local enterprises while larger-scale artisanal tailoring and ready-made production organized by merchant capitalists grew to include a larger percentage of local firms. In both tailoring and shoemaking, the incursion of merchant capital meant a transformation of the labor force as women and children household producers increasingly replaced male handicraft artisans. This movement from handicraft workshops to household production did not, however, increase the control employers exercised over the work process. As in Saint-Etienne's silk ribbon industry, the household organization of clothing production at Toulouse presented merchant capitalists with problems of labor control. On 12 April 1837 the police commissioner reported to the mayor of Toulouse that six local garment industry employers, dissatisfied with the quality of the work they were receiving under the household system, had established a plan to eliminate household production. The plan, according to police, was "to force the workers to labor in shops" rather than in their homes. These employers drew 67 AMT,

recensements de 1830, 1872. AMT, recensement de 1830. 69 AMT, annuaires 1840, 1872. 68

Ronald Aminzade up an agreement not to engage in household production with the provision that violators would be forced to pay a fine of two thousand francs. 7" The growth of urban household shoe and clothing production did mean a more intensified division of labor than was the case in the handicraft industry. It also involved an expansion of the scope of the market, since urban household industries, like local manufactories, produced for an international world market, exporting their products throughout Europe and overseas to the colonies. Merchant capital also made important inroads, by other means, into the city's construction industry. During the 184os entrepreneurs increasingly hired subcontractors to organize different stages of the production process and provided credit, raw materials, or both to the subcontractors they hired. The subcontractor (rnarchandeur or tacheron) hired workers who, with materials and larger tools provided by the merchant-capitalist entrepreneur, executed the work given to them. This system of subcontracting (rnarchandage) made the maintenance of uniform wage and working conditions extremely difficult and generated intense hostility on the part of masters and workers in the building trades. In February 1848 the new republican national government, in a concession to its workingclass supporters, outlawed subcontracting as an exploitative form of work organization, but the practice continued. 7 ' In May 1848 small masters expressed their opposition to this disruption of standard hours of work within the industry. They sent a letter to the new city council seeking approval for a request to enforce standard hours for starting, meals, and finishing throughout the construction industry. The masters affirmed their solidarity with their journeymen against local construction entrepreneurs, stating that "as workers ourselves, we will never abandon the cause of our brother workers; like them we have spent most of our lives with the hammer, trowel, and saw in our hands." 7 ' The third aspect of capitalist industrialization at Toulouse, the most important in terms of the number of workers affected, was the response of small-scale handicraft producers to the growth of newer forms of industrial production. Some artisanal masters, along with their workers, were deprived of their jobs because the custom-made products of smallscale units of production could not compete with the cheaper readymade products of capitalist factory and household industry. Many other small handicraft masters responded to growing competition by enlarging 70 AMT, 11 6o. ''For a discussion of subcontracting in nineteenth-century France see Bernard Mottez, Systemes de salaires et politiques patronales (Paris, tg66); Arthur Fraysse, "Le marchandage dans l'industrie du batiment" (Paris, 1911); Robert Bezucha, "The French Revolution of 1848 and the Social History of Work," Theory and Society 12, no. 4 (1983); 469-83. 7 'AMT, 2F 5·

Reinterpreting Capitalist Industrialization the scale of their workshops, intensifying the pace of work, and ignoring traditional practices governing the use of apprentices and the division of labor. Faced with competition from factories or urban household production, they became capitalist masters; that is, they continued working alongside their journeymen and apprentices but enlarged the scale of their operations and altered the character of the work setting. The term "master" may not be entirely appropriate to designate these artisanal employers, given their altered position within the production process. Although in structural terms they occupied a "contradictory," or transitional, class location, 73 they are referred to as masters in existing documents, by government officials, and by their journeymen workers. This perception of these employers as masters reflected in part their past connections to the trade community. They had typically gone through the established apprenticeship training process before becoming journeymen and masters. Workers apparently continued to think of them as members of this corporate community, despite their violation of trade community norms and their altered position within the process of production. Small-scale handicraft production continued to exist in most artisanal trades, but these small handicraft workshops increasingly coexisted alongside handicraft shops owned by master artisans who had enlarged the scale of their operations as well as alongside larger-scale manufactories. This development is evident in the city directory statistics cited above on different types of enterprises in the garment industry. Other sources document this same trend in a variety of different trades. A city council commission report of Toulouse's baking industry in March 1848 noted that although most of the city's 250 masters owned only one or two ovens and hired only one or two workers, there were 20 masters who owned three ovens and 11 masters who owned more than three. 74 A similar situation of the coexistence of large- and small-scale enterprises existed in the city's cabinetmaking industry. In 186g only 38 of the city's 100 masters regularly employed workers, but 6 employers hired 118 of the city's 343 workers. 75 Although shoemaking workshops also remained predominantly small in scale, by 1855 a number of masters, including Jean Guille, who employed 20 workers, and jean Barbet, who employed 20 to 25, had greatly expanded the scale of their operations. 76 During the wheelwrights' strike of 1861, a local police report stated that the small masters in the industry were very jealous of the real carriage makers ("veTitable carTossiers"), like Monsieur Mercier, a master carriage maker Erik Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (London, 1978), pp. 68-110. ADHG, 4M 6o. 75 ADHG, M1g6. 76 ADHG. 223U 10. 73

71

Ronald Aminzade who had centralized the diverse operations of carriage construction under one roof in his own larger workshop. 77 Those master artisans who managed to stay in business were able to remain competitive by enlarging the scale of production, hiring apprentices to do work formerly done by qualified journeymen, increasing the number of workers they employed, and intensifying the division of labor; in other words, by more efficiently exploiting the artisanal labor they employed rather than by introducing new machinery. Although their disregard of traditional regulations that had previously governed their trades generated intense conflict between masters and journeymen, 78 it enabled them to maintain their relatively small workshops and to expand their production. This pattern was by no means unique to Toulouse. Markovitch's quantitative study of nineteenth-century French economic development found that, during the middle decades of the century, productivity increases were more a product of the increasing division of labor then of the growing use of machinery, and that small-scale artisanal production provided the major source of capital accumulation. 79 Industrial capitalist development at Toulouse and throughout France did not eliminate artisans; it transformed their work settings and altered class relations within handicraft industry.

Conclusion: Capitalist Development and Theories of Industrialization During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, industrialization at Saint-Etienne and Toulouse altered class relations within both household and handicraft production. These changes involved the growing subordination of master artisans in handicraft production to merchant capitalists and of journeymen artisans to nascent capitalist masters, and the increased subordination of master weavers in household production to merchant capitalists. This subordination was not primarily a matter of dispossession of the means of production. Master weavers retained ownership of their looms, and journeymen in handicraft industry, even when employed in enlarged workshops characterized by an increased division of labor, typically still owned the small tools they needed to practice their trades. Although they were wage laborers, artisans employed in subcontractADHG, WU 72. Aminzade, "French Strike Development and Class Struggle: The Development of the Strike in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Toulouse," Social Science History 4, no. 1 (1g8o): 57So. 7' 1T. J. Markovitch. "Revenu industriel et artisanal," pp. 86, 88. 77

78 Ronald

Reinterpreting Capitalist Industrialization ing arrangements typically owned part of their means of production. In the construction industry, for example, they typically owned the saws, trowels, and planes they used but not the scaffolding or the raw materials they worked on. Journeymen in handicraft industries generally owned their own small tools, but they could make use of these tools only by selling their labor power to a master who owned the workshop and the raw materials they worked on. Master artisans in handicraft industry typically owned their workshops, although in trades in which merchantcapitalist entrepreneurs were making inroads they often did not own the raw materials. In the case of urban household weavers, journeymen and apprentices were wage laborers who owned neither looms, workshops, nor raw materials. The masters typically owned the looms but were dependent upon merchant capitalists who owned the raw materials and, in the case of Jacquard looms, the cardboard patterns that controlled them. Master weavers could not use their looms outside of relations with merchant capitalists. The subordination of master weavers at Saint-Etienne involved various strategies of accumulation by merchant capital, extending from the merchants' early control of raw materials and finished products, to growing indebtedness that made many masters only nominal owners of their looms, to merchant ownership of the cardboard patterns necessary for use of the Jacquard looms. These findings suggest that it was not changes in legal ownership of the means of production, but rather changes in effective power over persons and productive forces that were the central feature of capitalist industrialization in mid-nineteenth-century Toulouse and Saint-Etienne.R" Only such a broad view of the process of capitalist development can account for the diverse strategies of accumulation and mechanisms of subordination of labor to capital that occurred in nineteenth-century France. The separation of workers from the means of production was indeed important in the overall process of capitalist development, but it is only part of a more general process of the subordination of labor to capital by various means. "Sociology," writes Philip Abrams, "proceeds in its most typical forms by way of the typing of structural systems-for example, industrialism, feudalism, legal-rational authority .... Logically ordered contrasts between structural types have been treated, quite naively for the most part, as though they effectively indicated chronologically ordered transitions . . . . On this basis, a sociological past has been worked up, a past which is linked to the present not by carefully observed and temporally located social interaction but by inferentially necessary connections between concepts .... The function of the sociologists' past ... has not been to provide 8

"Gerald A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton, 1978), p. 62.

Ronald Aminzade a frame of reference for empirical studies of the mechanics of transition but instead to furnish a rationale for side-stepping such tedious historical chores."H' Such an ahistorical treatment of the past is quite evident in the literature on the sociology of economic development. Conceptual polarities like particularism/universalism or ascription/achievement have been used to characterize the past and present and to derive tendencies of development from logical procedures rather than historical research.8" Theories of economic development that rely upon ahistorical conceptual dichotomies to counterpose the past and present typically emphasize the rapid displacement of older "traditional" or "precapitalist" forms of production by newer "modern" or "capitalist" forms of industry. My research suggests that such theories fail to appreciate the importance of the reconstitution of older forms of industry in the process of socioeconomic change. This process of reconstitution has often been overlooked by historians as well, perhaps because it typically left intact the outward form of production-the household and workshop--while transforming class relations internally. The central implication of this research is that in order to theorize and decipher the dynamics and tendencies of capitalist development, we need more historical case studies of the diverse local patterns of capital accumulation that marked different phases of the process of industrialization. Such studies should provide us with a better understanding of the various means, including but not limited to proletarianization, by which labor has been subordinated to capital. 8 'Philip Abrams, "The Sense of the Past and the Origins of Sociology," Past and Present 55 (1972): 18-32· 8 'See, for example, Bert F. Hoselitz, "Main Concepts in the Analysis of the Social Implications of Technical Change," in Industrialization and Society, ed. Bert Hoselitz and Wilbert E. Moore (New York, 1966).

-15Proletarian Families and Social Protest: Production and Reproduction as Issues of Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century France

MICHAEL

P.

HANAGAN

At the founding meeting in 1844 of the Saint-Jean-Fran~ois-Regis Society for the Marriage of the Poor and the Legitimation of Their Natural Children in the provincial industrial city of Saint-Etienne, welldressed men maintain an attitude of sleepy, patient stoicism while a secretary reads a document bemoaning the plight of modern industrial society: More and more we see multiply in large cities, and chiefly in large industrial cities and among the working classes, those unions created by passion alone or by libertinage and maintained by culpable habit outside the law and the church. Religion sighs deeply over these corrupted morals, hut it is not alone in grieving and deploring these unions. The social order is no less concerned with them. Society insofar as it has been created by Christianity rests almost entirely on the family, and the family on marriage, ... It is difficult for those who have strayed from the path of good to stop on the bad road that they have taken ... Ideas of order, love of property, the desire of acquiring and transmitting which motivates the efforts of the laborious worker, have no hold on their spirit.' I thank, for their insightful comments, Ronald Aminzade, Steven Kaplan, David Kennett, Ben Kohl, Yves Lequin, Robert Moeller, Michcllc Perrot, Joan Scott, Louise Tilly, and participants in the Columbia Doctoral Seminar on Social History. '"Societe charitable de Saint-Jcan-Fran