The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900

Geoffrey Crossick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781859282328
• eBook ISBN: 9781351894463
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Artisans played a central role in the European town as it developed from the Middles Ages onwards. Their workshops were at the heart of productive activity, their guilds were often central to the political and legal order of towns, and their culture helped shape civic ritual and the urban order. These essays, which have all been specially written for this collection, explore the relationships between artisans and their towns across Europe between the beginning of the early-modern period and the end of the 19th century. They pay special attention to the processes of economic, juridicial and political change that have made the 18th and early 19th centuries a period of such significance. Written by leading historians of European artisans, the essays question the myths about artisans that have long pervaded research in the field. The leading myth was that shared by the artisans themselves - the myth of decline and the belief in each generation that artisans in the past had inhabited a better age. These essays open up for debate the nature of artisanship, the way economic change affected craft production, the political role of artisans, the cultural identification of the artisans with work and masculinity, and the way changing urban society and changing urban structure posed threats to which the artisans had to respond.

CHAPTER ONE

Past masters: in search of the artisan in European history

Geoffrey Crossick

Visions of the past

Artisans were rather like villages. In the modern European imagination they came to represent a world in which harmony and community ruled, in contrast with the inadequacies of urban industrial society. It is taken for granted that in an unspecified past things were better. At the end of the nineteenth century, when urban consumers used images of a harmonious and natural countryside to reassure themselves in the face of the anxieties induced by urban society, the postcards which they bought in such profusion were often of traditional village craftsmen and craftswomen. The artisan and the village came to occupy similar spaces in the urban imagination as inversions of the menace of modernity. These idealizations of the past pose problems for the historian of the artisan, for the implications of the term go beyond the merely occupational. The implicit meanings of artisanship include expectations about the nature of work and workplace relations, place within the urban social order, the role of family, and much else. Artisans, like villages, evoked interest at the end of the nineteenth century because they were in decline, and because their past seemed to represent an alternative to the harsher face of modernity. The meanings of artisanship were thus embedded in a particular reading of the past,¹ and historical study of artisans must take account of the myths which successive generations have woven around them and which they indeed wove around themselves – myths that were about the past.

One dimension of this renewed later nineteenth-century interest in the artisanal past was the publishing of craft histories. Social conservatives who saw craft masters as a bulwark with which to defend property, and masters themselves whose pride in their craft’s past grew as its present became less comfortable, combined to reconstruct artisanal traditions. The scholarly Albert Babeau and a host of lesser mythologizers wrote widely cited artisanal histories which evoked the artisanal workshop and household of former times as the basis for social, economic, and indeed aesthetic order. The individualism unleashed by the modern world was contrasted with these ordered pasts.

If this [corporate] system was contrary to civil and economic freedom, it favoured security for the worker. In the corporation he found a craft family which raised him as an apprentice and then supported him as a master; he also found his civic importance there, something which since he became isolated he has never been able to enjoy.²

Babeau wove together the themes of patriarchal household, continuity of place, personal relations with customers, the simplicity of the honest trader, care for apprentices, workplace discipline, and the wife’s lack of vanity and involvement in the business, to present what he acknowledged was a distinctive vision. ‘For those who are in favour of the present’, he wrote, ‘the past is barbarism; for others it is the ideal’, and his writings were cited by those for whom the artisanal ideal represented a social alternative.³ Histories of individual crafts proliferated. François Husson wrote histories of various trades, and the period since 1789 was significantly given a mere 22 pages out of the 225 in his book on joiners.⁴

Artisanal movements were themselves active in constructing identities through history. The master bakers of Vienna reorganized their archive to make it worthy of the corporation, and published their history, as did the city’s carpenters’ guild. Festival processions were revived with traditional costumes and old guild banners.⁵ In France the dual impulse of the regionalist movement seeking to establish the traditional pays and the revival of historic ideas of craft production produced a flurry of local craft museums, while by the 1890s Swedish craft organizations were opening museums and commissioning their craft histories.⁶ In the later nineteenth century almost every issue of the Swedish masters’ journal, Handtverks- och Industri- Tidning, carried excerpts from old guild archives.⁷ The motives behind these activities varied, but all drew upon a belief that artisanship offered a social as well as an economic vision to set against contemporary society, a vision which museums and histories might affirm and protect. There was also an aesthetic dimension to this artisanal alternative. In Austria, Camillo Sitte used his headship of the State Trade Schools in Salzburg, and then Vienna, to articulate a quasi-medieval version of artisanal culture, advocating the integrating power of artisanal values to overcome the fragmentation of modern life.⁸

Social catholic and Le Playist conservative discourse between the 1890s and 1914 provides a striking example of the way the meaning of artisanship came to be rooted in a particular reading of the past.⁹ For the Comte de Boissieu,

the normal, prosperous, family workshop … teaches its members the value of the family home, maintains an intimacy between husband and wife and within the family which is always endangered by factory life, and ensures the recruitment of an elite of workers, endowed with the happy qualities of initiative and independence.¹⁰

Another writer cast the vision explicitly in the past:

In former times, the patron was a craftsman who loved his occupation just as an artist loved his art. He was less driven by the demands of frantic competition, and had the time to attend to his apprentices. And the child, sharing his master’s life, sleeping beneath his roof and sharing his table, made his way gently but surely towards becoming a master himself. From morning until night he benefited from the lessons of his master who, immersed above all in love of his craft and of his guild, saw in his apprentice a pupil and the continuation of his work [œuvre].¹¹

These writers were attached to a distinctive social catholic perspective, but their vision reflected broader assumptions about the character of artisanal life in the past. The historical ideal of the artisan has proved less capable of inspiring social alternatives since the First World War – the enlargement of the classes moyennes to embrace white-collar employees shows the search for an alternative conception of the middle¹² – but artisanal organizations and the need for artisanal votes kept the vision in public view, to be renewed by various right-wing regimes, none more so than in Vichy France. Pétain proclaimed his desire to return the artisans, and all they stood for, to their traditional place in French society. ‘Class struggle is impossible in the artisanal workshop’, he proclaimed in 1942 during his May Day speech on the artisanate, endorsing the historic vision of workshop production, even if this Pétainist rhetoric was rarely matched by policy.¹³

There had always been a better artisanal past, it seems, whether in the minds of craftsmen themselves or of those seeking to sketch a better future from an idealized artisanate. The success of Reformation theology in early sixteenth-century Augsburg rested, according to Roper, on its appeal to urban craftsmen, as it ‘imagined a civic haven in which the household would be restored to its mythical, ordered past’.¹⁴ In his Tableau de Paris, published in the early 1780s, Mercier bemoaned the way the old family-like ties in artisanal production had been replaced by money and market alone. The links in the chain had gone, journeymen could move at will, and the old world of harmony and order was no more.¹⁵ The eighteenth-century Parisian glazier, Jacques-Louis Ménétra, was convinced that in the old days social relations in the trade were more harmonious, and Roche sees this belief as one of the governing notions transmitted through the journeymen’s tour de France.¹⁶ Swedish master artisans felt the same at the end of the nineteenth century, complaining that the freedom of trade established in mid-century had destroyed harmonious relations in workshop production. ‘Instead of being, as in the past, members of the same family, employers and workers now face each other as distrustful and often bitter enemies.’¹⁷ We return to the late nineteenth century, as if the myth of artisanal decline might be found at almost any time in the European past. It is easy for historians to mythologize the period before their own study begins, and this tendency is exacerbated for the historian of artisans by generations of writing about the fate of the crafts.¹⁸ Guild abolition and industrialization may have made decline the obvious template upon which to sketch artisanal history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it applies to earlier periods as well. Those in search of the artisans in European history must be wary of visions of the past.

The meanings of artisanship

‘I was born on 13 July 1738 a native of this great city. My father belonged to the class usually called artisans. His profession was that of glazier.’¹⁹ Thus Jacques-Louis Ménétra opened the journal of his life. If artisanship was inseparable from its memories and its vision of the past – as it was even for a craftsman like Ménétra, frustrated by the restrictions imposed by his guild – then we must ask what it meant to be an artisan. At the heart, according to Zarca’s socioeconomic definition, lay a technical division of labour in production that left distinguishable crafts to carry out the making of distinct products or their parts. A craft was a body of producers tied together by a set of techniques and knowledge which could be acquired only through the practice of the occupation itself over time. The artisan or craftsman need not make the whole product, but the division of labour needed to rest on distinguishable crafts. The artisan could produce directly for the market as a small entrepreneur, to order from individual consumers, or on order from merchants, or exclusively for a single merchant, or sell not the product but his or her labour to a master artisan or putting-out merchant. In the last of these the artisan was a wage-earner, in the other cases some kind of master.²⁰ Such a definition can only set general parameters, for artisans’ situations varied greatly during the four centuries with which this collection of essays is concerned: in terms of the organization of the craft and labour process, labour force composition, household structure, the nature of the contracts and process of remuneration, the gender composition of crafts, their juridical basis, their significance to the economy, and much more.

Artisanship came to refer to distinct but overlapping phenomena. The actual work which artisans did was not necessarily, and certainly not always, the point around which they were constituted, but artisans would exist in neither our sources nor our imagination had they not been performing an economic activity within production or the provision of services. Artisanship came to mean much more than work, as Farr argues in his essay (Chapter Three), and it carried meanings that were often detached from work, but without its economic functions it would not appear upon our agenda. What were these overlapping phenomena? First, there was artisanship as occupation: the job carried out by an individual to earn his or her living, and its characteristics. Second, there was artisanship as social position: the place within a social order that accompanied the designation ‘artisan’. Third, there was artisanship as identity: the sense of personal and family identity associated with being an artisan and the meaning for the sense of self. All three dimensions are relevant to our concern for the urban artisan, but it might be argued that the trilogy is in part the product of the kind of sources through which artisans have been studied. Occupational title came to be used to denote position in the urban administrative, legal or social order, and historians have inevitably focused on artisanal occupations and attached to them a degree of social significance that can be matched in no other sector of society. If one was an artisan – certainly if one was a male artisan – it has come to be assumed that artisanship was at the heart of one’s social being and personal identity.

The different sources which have been used by those studying artisans have all served to encourage historians in that direction. Memoirs written by artisans such as Ménétra and Perdiguier give a privileged place to the primacy of their trade,²¹ as does the discourse of protest movements, whether the struggles of journeymen to defend their craft position in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, or the masters’ defence movements which developed towards the end of the century. Indeed, the French philosopher and historian Jacques Rancière has argued that the discourse of French artisan radicals in the early nineteenth century should not be read as an expression of their artisanal identity. They were generally from the most debased crafts, such as tailors and shoemakers, and their conception of work derived not from their own experience, for they had little work commitment of their own, but from their search for identity through constructing the myth of the proud artisan under challenge. For Rancière, ‘a strong militant identity among workers in a craft seems to imply a weak collective professional identity and vice versa’.²²

Whether or not we accept Rancière’s conclusion, his insight alerts us to the way our sources encourage the view that occupational identity was the core of artisans’ existence. The introspection and cohesion of artisanal life have similarly been too readily extrapolated from the image which urban guilds presented of themselves. Instead of seeing craft guilds as an expression of occupational structures and artisanal identities, studies of late medieval York and seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Turin both inv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Past masters: in search of the artisan in European history
• 2 Artisans and urban politics in seventeenth-century Germany
• 3 Cultural analysis and early modern artisans
• 4 ‘Broken all in pieces’: artisans and the regulation of workmanship in early modern London
• 5 The aristocratic hôtel and its artisans in eighteenth-century Paris: the market ruled by court society
• 6 Craftsmen and revolution in Bordeaux
• 7 Craftsmen in the political and symbolic order: the case of eighteenth-century Malmö
• 8 Women and the craft guilds in eighteenth-century Nantes
• 9 Worlds of mobility: migration patterns of Viennese artisans in the eighteenth century
• 10 Artisans in Hungarian towns on the eve of industrialization
• 11 Urban renovation and changes in artisans’ activities: the Parisian fabrique in the Arts et Métiers quarter during the Second Empire
• 12 Artisans and the labour market in Dutch provincial capitals around 1900
• Index