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David Andress, From Artisan to Worker: Guilds, the French State, and the Organization of Labor, 1776–1821, French History, Volume 26, Issue 4, December 2012, Pages 567–569, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crs091
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Extract
The history of work and workers in France during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has several unique features that make it a particularly fascinating case-study in the intersection of economic, social and political histories. From a flourishing, albeit turbulent and ideologically-contested, guild-based structure, the urban economy passed through a succession of crises and political interventions that challenged every aspect of the relationship between craft skill, social position, training, quality regulation, economic competition and the needs of state security, public order and prosperity. For a time in the 1790s, manufacturing and service industries were almost literally a free-for-all, when rotten meat and half-baked bread could be sold openly to desperate consumers, and the police were powerless to intervene. Even the army was forced to complain vigorously about the abysmal quality of both textiles and tailoring in its hastily-produced uniforms. The sheer destabilisation of the experience of everyday life this produced has perhaps been undervalued in exploring the impact of the French Revolution. Yet at the same time, the state and entrepreneurs were learning new lessons about mass-production from the vast expansion of the armaments industry, and the necessary regimentation of workers that accompanied it. Under the authoritarian rule of Napoleon, despite widespread sentiments amongst administrators and local elites that bringing back the guilds would be both a good idea in itself, and consistent with the nature of the regime, authorities clung ultimately to the view that such organisation was irrevocably tied to Old-Regime privilege, and incompatible with a forward-looking economic policy. Even the Restoration, though it prompted a surge in attention to a past golden age of guilds and compagnonnages, did not try seriously to turn back the clock, and allowed French employers to push ahead into a new world of mechanisation and semi-skilled factory labour with little hindrance.
