From Artisan to Worker: Guilds, the French State, and the Organization of Labor, 1776-1821.
Lynn, Michael R.
From Artisan to Worker: Guilds, the French State, and the
Organization of Labor, 1776-1821, by Michael P. Fitzsimmons. New York,
Cambridge University Press, 2010. xi, 287 pp. $95.00 US (cloth).
The status of workers during the French Revolution, especially
their activities and politicization, has produced a considerable amount
of scholarship over the years. These workers, which may have formed as
much as a third of total population of Paris, operated in a wide range
of crafts and typically worked within the guild system. These guilds, or
corporations, were abolished in 1791, a move that sparked a debate which
lasted for the next decades and which would not see a resolution until
the period of the Restoration. Historians, Michael P. Fitzsimmons notes
in the introduction to his book From Artisan to Worker: Guilds, the
French State and the Organization of Labor, 1776-1821, have spent
considerable time discussing the end of the corporations in 1791 as well
as the status of workers in the nineteenth century. The bridge between
these two events, however, has gone largely unanalyzed. This transition
did not go smoothly and Fitzsimmons homes in on the series of
debates--encompassing state ministers, intellectuals, and workers
themselves--which took place concerning the re-establishment of the
guilds during the French Revolution and Napoleonic period. In the end,
France did decide to maintain the proscription on guilds, but the
decision was neither easy nor certain.
Fitzsimmons takes a chronological approach to this study and
begins, in the first chapter, with a discussion on the state of guilds
at the end of the Old Regime and their demise during the first years of
the Revolution. Corporations had been around for centuries with some,
such as the guild of bakers, dating back to the thirteenth century. For
much of this time, their status and significance remained unquestioned.
However, guild emphasis on the mysteries of their crafts contrasted with
the Enlightenment's desire to spread knowledge, and Turgot, in
1776, issued a decree titled the Six Edicts, which called for their
abolition. This would, Turgot argued, eliminate the privileges asserted
by some artisans and free up industries which felt hampered by the guild
system. Turgot's ouster led to the eventual restoration of the
guilds although they appeared in reduced numbers. They appeared again on
the chopping block, however, on the infamous night of 4 August 1789 when
the revolutionaries attacked and dispensed with many forms of privilege.
Miracul--y, however, guilds survived this episode although there was a
universal sense by this time that their dissolution was only a matter of
time. The Committee on Agriculture and Commerce, however, kept delaying
a decision and it was only when the Committee on Taxation stepped
forward with a plan that the National Assembly took action. In this way,
guilds were abolished in 1791. This was followed by the Le Chapelier law which, among other things, forbade workers from the same profession from
coming together in assemblies. At this stage, the debates concerning
guilds were primarily attacks on corporate privileges.
In the second chapter, however, Fitzsimmons takes the story forward
to 1799. In the wake of the abolition of the guilds, the National
Assembly had failed to provide an alternative method of organizing
labor. This, coupled with a labor shortage after the onset- of
conscriptions to support the war effort, led to government efforts to
increase production through licenses and, ultimately, through the
mechanization of industry. However, this effort coincided with a decline
in quality and a general disarray of industries. Fitzsimmons, in chapter
three, takes this story into the Napoleonic period during which guilds
had the strongest possibility of being restored by the state. The
Council of State during the Consulate debated the issue of guilds and
even went so far as to recommend their restoration. Many groups tried to
act on this recommendation over the next decade but to no avail. Their
goal was not to restore a segment of the old regime, but to create a
more efficient system. Ministerial restructuring in 1812 led to a new
phase of the debates with the emergence of the Ministry of Manufacturing
and Commerce, a group committed to supporting the mechanization of
production and to keeping corporations a thing of the past. Thus, in
chapter four, Fitzsimmons follows the debates from 1812 until 1821. Even
after the downfall of Napoleon and the crowning of Louis XVIII, the
debate continued with new proponents of the guild system emerging after
1815. An economic slowdown in 1820, combined with worker unrest, also
helped spark a renewed discussion of guilds. However, by 1821 the issues
of guilds was permanently squashed and the state never again seriously
considered their re-establishment.
Fitzsimmons, in these four lengthy chapters, provides a thorough
and richly detailed discussion of the debate over guilds. He has tapped
into a wide array of resources. Significantly, he brings in the voices
of the people on all sides of the debate, including the workers. Even
more significantly, Fitzsimmons provides a broad range of examples and
illustrations from across France and avoids the pitfalls of relying too
heavily on evidence from Paris. In this thoughtful study Fitzsimmons has
provided an excellent analysis of the transition away from guilds and
the resulting shift from eighteenth-century artisans to
nineteenth-century workers.
Michael R. Lynn
Purdue University North Central
