International Labor and Working Class History Number 24, Fall 1983, pp.

1-16

The Myth of the Artisan Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History Jacques Randere
University of Paris VIII The works devoted to the labor and socialist movements in France make use of a widely accepted interpretive principle: the relationship between professional qualification (skill) and militant consciousness (militancy). According to this interpretation, the movement developed as the expression of a working-class culture and was based on the actions and attitudes of the most highly skilled workers. Technical ability and pride in work thus created the basis for early labor militancy and it was the Taylorist revolution that spelled the end of this militancy by imposing massive and bureaucratic forms, which led to the creation of a new working population lacking professional skills, collective traditions, and interest in their work. I would like to show that such a view is very much debatable if one strictly analyzes militant practice and its basis in the trades. This supposed first axiom of labor militancy is most likely a belated interpretation, born of political necessity in some sections of the labor movement which, in order to fend off new and competing militant forces, was led to harken back to a largely imaginary tradition of "authentic" worker socialism. 1. The illusion of the elite trades: Tailors, shoemakers, and others. It is important that we go back to the period of "initial" worker socialism, the one which, through the strikes and associations of the 1830s. and through the republican organizations. Utopian groups, workers' literature and the press of the 1840s. led to the workers' eruption of 1848. Indeed, we are accustomed to seeing the worker of '48 as the typical representative of artisanal culture (whether it be. like Marx, to deprecate this culture, or to revalorize it in opposition to Marxism). Nevertheless, the facts relating to the trades most prominently represented in the republican associations, Utopian groups or simple street demonstrations seriously challenge this interpretation. The over-representation of certain trades and the predominance in particular of two of themthe tailors and the shoemakershas been duly noted.1 and the conclusion has generally been that these two groups were propelled to the front lines of combat by two factors: the consciousness of their own

ILIVCH, 24, Fall 1983

professional value and the threat of professional deskilling linked to the invasion of ready-made clothing. Looking at such an interpretation, we must, it seems to me, beware of a certain trompe I'oeil effect: for we have a tendency to project onto artisanal practice the image of bourgeois luxury, which is its end product. Thus we project the image of Parisian fashion onto the professionals of the clothing trade. By doing this, we misperceive not only the reality of their working conditions but also the subjective value they place on their work, according to their own scale of values. Certain trades which seem prestigious to us were in fact contemptible within the workers' tradition. Thus the occupations of tailor or typographer seem noble to us because they touch upon fashion or intellectuality. Yet. in the 1840s. the newspaper L'Atelier felt obliged to "prove to the workers of all trades who had met there that a tailor handling his needle, a typographer aligning his letters of lead are just as worthy as a baker, a cabinetmaker or a tanner of the respectable title of 'ouvrier.' " : These trades were contemptible in the workers'judgement, since they required little strength, skill or cleverness. From this point of view, one trade consistently symbolized the lowest of the low from the standpoint of the strong and skillful: that of the shoemaker. In order to get a feeling for the contempt associated with this trade, one must look to the songs of the compagnonnage. including that of "conciliatory" tanner Piron. which stigmatized the shoemakers as "vile and abject" in their ridiculous oversized smocks, using clumsy muffs or stinking pitch.3 Shoemaking is looked down upon not only from a professional point of view, but from an ideological one as well: Ashaverus, the Wandering Jew, was a shoemaker. And the tradition has it that shoemakers were fraudulently initiated to the secrets of the compagnonnage. Thus it was recommended that shoemakers bearing emblems of the compagnonnage be killed. This tradition, of course, tended to fall into disuse among the compagnonnages, yet some shoemakers were still being murdered by mid-century. And the malediction is further carried out by reality: shoemaking is the last of the trades. Or rather, it's not really a trade at all: it is the occupation of concierges who are trying to supplement their income. It is the apprenticeship for orphans and the homeless, the one most often given in charitable institutions, or the one chosen out of necessity or bad luck, as in the case of the young haberdasher's apprentice who lost first his parents, then his tutor: "he remained alone after this second loss, and his health had suffered too much for him to continue in his preferred occupation. What could be done? An occasion presented itself for him to become a shoemaker, a trade he didn't like. He had to become a shoemaker."4 Clearly then, it was not professional pride that fueled the militant ideas of the shoemakers. If the trade produced so many activists and dreamers, it is more likely because of the extent of forced leisure-time, and the fact that the material and symbolic rewards of the trade were so very insignificant. The tailor's trade did not suffer from the same contempt, yet it was also something of a refuge. The apprenticeship was a relatively short one. and in general it was not remunerated.5 One therefore tended to find there young men of modest

The Myth of the Artisan

backgrounds as well as youngest sons on whom little expense was lavished. Thus the tailor Constant Hilbey would have liked to ha\e been a cabinetmaker's apprentice, but "the cabinetmaker demanded more money than Hilbey's father was able to provide. The father then declared that he could only afford to have his son trained as a tailor."6 Likewise, the leader of the tailor's strike Andre Troncin. was condemned to a tailor's apprenticeship after the death of his mother and the remarriage of his father, a woodseller in Besanc,on. When his stepmother took a dislike to the children of the first marriage, only his older brother received a professional training, and Andre was shunted off to a poor man's apprenticeship." Nevertheless, Andre Troncin was to have considerable professional success. He became a cutter and shop foreman while at the same time pursuing, through study and the company of students, his education in militancy. Hilbey. on the other hand, seeking as much as possible to avoid "getting into a rut." chose to make children's clothes because that specialty "required less attention and intelligence."" Generally speaking, however, the work produced in shops where workers were squeezed one against the other, all bent over a too-narrow work bench with their legs crossed, the needlework accomplished "with a regularity approaching that of machines"9 had nothing in it which could have created a strong professional pride. And the supposed contrast between the quality work of the professional tailors and the poor work of the clothing-industry workers is a very dubious one: it is the same workers who, when the shops are in their off-season, work in the clothing industry.10 In addition, corporate tradition and the collective consciousness are very weak, given the great mobility of the workers. A correspondent from La Fashion stresses the weakness of collective professional links, in contrast to the tradition of mutual aid among the compagnonnages: "Nary a fraternal link uniting them. They see one another: Hello. They leave one another: Goodbye, and all is said. Another cause of their ruin is the brevity of their stay in each workshop. A term of three months is the longest."11 For the tailors and shoemakers alike, the mobilizing role was played not by professional links or by pride in their work, but rather by the particular "freedom" [disponibilite] of the workers: Material freedom stemming from the trade's role as a refuge or outlet, also from the abundance of manpower and from the off-seasons, which add the dimension of unemployment to their identities as workers. Intellectual freedom, linked to the small intellectual and moral commitment required in the practice of their trade. Indeed, this was a constant concern of bourgeois observers: that a certain number of working-class occupations were not interesting or challenging enough to occupy the mind as well as the body, thereby leaving the mind idle and leading it to seek fulfillment elsewhere.12 This is especially the case with the shoemakers and tailors; and what is true for the common workers applies all the more to the leaders. These "easy" trades are those where one is most likely to find men whose intellectual capacities and human aspirations are not used professionally or satisfied in the work place. The relationship between these two "freedoms" allows us to conceive of the mobilization of a trade, the capacity of its workers to rally around valuespolitical

ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983

(e.g. republican) or ideological (e.g. Utopian)that are external to. and even opposed to. those of the trade, and to follow leaders who are not so much representatives of the rank-and-file as they are the intellectuals of the corporation. A man like Troncin. for example, who earns 2400 francs a yearthree times more than the averageand who, as shop foreman, enjoys the confidence of his employers, has no financial motive to become a leader of corporate strikes. If he is chosen every time to lead the movement it is because of his intellectual and political prestige, because of the authority he has acquired as a propagandist, less concerned with salaries and working conditions than with the "education" of his peers and the ways to make of them partners equal in dignity to their masters. If one were to multiply the case studies, one might very well be led to a complete reversal of the prevailing opinion, and show that militant activity is perhaps inversely proportional to the organic cohesion of the trade, the strength of the organization and the ideology of the group. Workers in what was considered the king of trades, carpentry (for carpenters were the direct descendants of the legendary builders of the Temple of Solomon), were more than satisfied by their organization and by their awareness of professional superiority. When they became engaged in a collective struggle in the great strike of 1845, they were careful to select a royalist attorney in order to avoid any ideological or political overflow from their corporate struggle. Likewise, the curriers, very advanced in terms of their solidarity, are little heard from outside of their own circle.11 The highest level of militancy is to be found among the poor relations, those trades that are a crossroads or an outlet: for instance, among the tailors but not the hatters; among the shoemakers but not the curriers; among the woodworkers but not the carpenters; among the typographers who. in their relation to the intellectual world, are outcasts as well. Workers' militant identity would seem to go in the opposite direction from collective professional identity. The structure of the Saint-Simonian workers' groups is, in this light, significant: the most active of these groupsthe one in the twelfth arrondissement of Parisincludes not a single representative of the leading industry in that area, that of the curriers, tawers and tanners. Nor does it include any members of the next two most important trades in that neighborhood, metal casters and pottery workers. The militant worker population was situated within the poorest of the world of organic professional collectivities.14

2. The ambiguities of "love of work". This also suggests that militant worker ideology was characterized by the rejection, to some extent, of the concept of "love of work." Nothing shows this better than the contrast between the ideas of the Saint-Simonian "priests" and those of the workers they recruited. The former sought to engage "robust" workers in the great epic of an "industrial army" which was to work on the foundations of the future while preaching their gospel. The workers, however, were attracted for opposite reasons: as the worker and songster Vingard tells us in his Memoires, "There were many who, disgusted with their lives as salaried workers, embraced Saint-Simonian ideas

The Myth of the Artisan

only because they hoped to bid an eternal farewell to the past."15 The less sophisticated workers sought in Saint-Simonism a kind of mutual aid society which, for the poorest among them, would function as a welfare office, and for the others as a kind of social security system. The more enlightened workers were seeking intellectual growth, an escape from the worker's world. The lives of these workers whose trajectories came to intersect those of Utopian propaganda bring us now to a serious reconsideration of our ideas about the artisan and his attitude toward work. The term "artisan" evokes for us a certain stability, a certain identification of an individual with a function. Yet identities are often misleading. We find, for example, that there are two haberdashers among the Saint-Simonian workers. But we discover on closer examination that they are "haberdashers" only because an opportunity presented itself for them to purchase some material at a low price, thus enabling them to try their luck in that "skill," just as they might have done in a different field. One of the two men. Maire, was a sailor who had recently left the service. The other, Voinier. was an obviously educated proletarian. Being out of money, he was willing to accept a position as a servant with the Saint-Simonians, yet the following year, we find him working as a secretary for the Society for the Rights of Man. Later, upon being arrested by the police, he is identified as a wine-merchant and. upon a subsequent arrest, he is described as an accounting-clerk. There is nothing exceptional about his case: the professional identities under which militants are known to their colleagues, "bourgeois" militants, or the police are often but temporary stages in an otherwise rocky career. The same individual can be found self-employed in one trade, salaried in another, or hired as a clerk or peddler in a third. With the gaps in their time caused by unemployment or the off-seasons, with their businesses crumbling as soon as they are set up. their bills and loan payments going unpaid, with their feverish wait for provincial inheritances, their continual trips to the pawn-shops, their hopes and disillusionments, these artisans often led a life quite similar to the one we associate with the "marginal" workers of today. And often they were no more committed to their work than today's workers. Few Saint-Simonian artisans resisted the attractions of a job such as doorman, office boy or railway guard. On the other hand, only the greatest need would lead them to work on the railroad tracks or in the workshops. Reading their job applications, one gets a very "un-artisanal" sense of work as an abstraction. Thus, one reads in a letter from a bookseller to Michel Chevalier that he is not put off by any kind of work, and that he can just as easily "wear a smock, jacket and cap as. if need be. put on a suit of fine cloth."16 Work as abstraction: ambiguity of feelings this creates. One can get a sense of this ambiguity from two seemingly contrasting cases. The first is that of the archetypal militant artisan, Agricol Perdiguier. author of the IJvre du Compagnonnage and the Memoires dun Compagnon. In the context of our labor history, he would seem to represent a perfect example of a worker bringing into the political struggle his consciousness of himself as a proud and able worker. Yet his life story suggest an enigma: how could this carpenter, who claims to have created dazzling work during his Tour of France, have wound up with such an undistinguished career? For he

ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983

apparently lived in poverty in a slum of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And rather than make spiral staircases or other masterpieces of artistry, he made little dressingtables whose price was to diminish, in a few years' time, from twelve to seven francs apiece.17 This was work that could have been done by the children of the German workers who populated the Faubourg. To add to his income, he took in boarders, and his remarks during the crisis of 1846 which emptied the workshops, suggest that he was much more concerned about his boarders than his work, and thus that it was his boarders who constituted his principal source of income. Likewise, the title of "professor of architecture" that he bestowed upon himself hides the more modest economic reality: that he started to give lessons in order to boost his income. Nor does this proud artisan hesitate to badger George Sand into giving his wife some sewing-work. We must therefore ask ourselves the following question: If he takes up his pen to sing the glories of the work of the compagnons and to rebuke them for their quarrels, is it not also in order to escape this "glorious" work himself? One is tempted to say yes, especially in light of his Biographie de I'auteur du Livre du compagnonnage which is rather like the dark side of his two famous books. In it, the methodical accounting he presents of the splinters that have entered his body, the falling wood that has injured him, the lung diseases caught breathing sawdust and, finally, his suicidal thoughts, all of this allows us to see the hatred he felt for this work, whose hero and eulogist he has come to be in the eyes of posterity. Once again, we are tempted to propose a law of inverse proportionality, to say that the men who are loudest in singing the glory of Work are those who have most intensely experienced the degeneration of that ideal. This consciousness of degeneration is expressed with a naked force in some Saint-Simonian documents, and especially in the despairing letters filled with hallucinatory descriptions in which the carpenter Gauny describes the experience of a life "imprisoned" by the "trap" of the proletariat, torn to shreds by the "frenzy of tyrannical activity in our time."18 But we also see it crop up in those newspapers of the 1840s which aspire to be the voice of the working people: in the anecdotes of IM Fraternite or La Ruchepopulaire, in the editorializing of L'Atelier against any weakness in meeting one's obligations toward work. Such editorializing becomes even more significant when we see that one of the principal editors of L'Atelier, the locksmith Gilland, has written in ls Conteurs ouvriers of the hellish experience of apprenticeship and of the feeling of despair that accompanied his entry into working life; and when we see, twenty years later, the soul of that newspaper, the typographer and sculptor Corbon. apologize and recognize the virtues of indifference toward work, as seen in Parisian workers for whom that indifference helps preserve their hopes for a better society. One may object that these ambiguous attitudes are not those of the silent majority. But it is precisely those who are satisfied with their work who have no need to sing hymns to it. One must nonetheless be careful not to simply turn the standard interpretation upside down. For the hatred of work is, like its "love," ambiguous. This can be seen in the case of the Saint-Simonian tailor Delas, who appears to be the complete

The Myth of the Artisan

opposite of Perdiguier. Here is how Vincard, in his Memoires. presents this missionary worker: "a weak compagnon. working little and poorly, as a result earning almost nothing and barely subsisting, having no concern for his future; if one spoke to him about this, he would reply: Who cares! this won't last, do you think I'm the sort to spend my life sewing petit point?'20 From his vantage-point forty years later, Vincard has sketched an exemplary portrait. And he has conveniently forgotten what might complicate it: that Delas. having chosen the missionary route to escape the workshop, wound up taking a certain interest in his trade.. At the end of the '30s he invented a machine to take measurements which was to revolutionize the trade. And in 1847. he is again a pioneer in creating an association between managers and employees in the clothing trade where he plays a leadership role. His lack of interest in "petit point" is not hard to reconcile with his passion for social innovations and for inventions that give an "intellectual" dignity to the profession. During this entire period, the "geometric cut" is very much talked-about among the tailors. It is generally favored by men of progressthe republican Canneva or the Fourierist Barde and even men of "disorder" like Suireau. associated with Troncin in leading the strikers of 1840. The "geometric cut," scoffed at by political and sartorial conservatives.21 is one of those inventions which, like a commitment to politics or literature, compensate for the baseness of one's work and broaden the career options of those with inquisitive and independent minds. In the same way that the hyms to Work covered up a feeling of disillusionment, so too indifference and even hatred for the servitude of work can lead to an adjustment, a series of compensations that turn everything around. In his occasional work as a floor-layer, no longer under the gaze of his masters, or in the presence of his companions in servitude or subject to the workbell. the carpenter Gauny can create for himself a relationship to his work that is both playful and ascetic, and make of this relationship the basis for a philosophy of emancipation.22 This ambiguity is clearly seen in the workers' poetry, which combines a number of themes: the suffering of an existence that is lived far from its dream, the ascetic joy to be derived from the tour tie force of successfully living two lives at once, and an image of work as an ambiguous activity that mediates between several worlds. Thus, in the verses of the stonemason Poncy. the virtue of work is identified with that of traveling between conditions of life: I have built poor little cottages And rich palaces with lofty domes; My hammers have chipped away at gothic convents Whose walls of dust have flown off to the winds. A nomadic pariah, I have carried my trowel Into brilliant boudoirs perfumed with love. Into more than one tavern aspark with joy, Where cups flow with generous wine In smoke-filled garrets.23

8 3. The ruse of numbers and the ruse of words.

ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983

These contradictory images and practices should encourage us to be systematically cautious whenever we wish to establish links between professional situations. militant practices and ideological statements. Typically, the historian makes use of horizontal controls: accumulating, cross-checking, verifying certain kinds of data: economic statistics, descriptions of conditions, acts of repression, literature, etc. His vigilance is generally much more lax when it is a matter of placing heterogeneous kinds of data and archives into a vertical relationship, or relating a worker's discourse to a material situation, or deducing a given type of militant practice from a given type of industrial organization. Between the different kinds of knowledge, the different kinds of data which we use to piece together a picture of the militant worker, there are enormous gaps, lacunae that go unnoticed. And the historian who carefully verifies each level of data can all too easily underestimate these gaps, and fill them in with ideas that seem so obvious that they hardly require verification. This has indeed been the case for a whole series of representations of workers as a group, of their solidarity, their values regarding work, and the relationship between their conditions and their forms of expression. Between the fumes of the factories and the grime of the tanneries, between the assaults of poverty and the fury of the struggle, between the brilliance of luxury and the conditions of the artisans, between the artisan's end-product and the confidence of his hymn to Work, between the rumblings of the crowd and the voices of its representatives, an entire series of inferences impose themselves almost naturally and end up making us blind to the ruses of numbers and the ruses of words and the ruses of their relationships. I would like to consider only two examples of ruses that have helped form our image of the worker of 1848. The first example consists of the Statistique de 1'Industrie a Paris [Statistical Survey of Industry in Paris], published during the revolution of 1848 by the Paris Chamber of Commerce. It depicts the population of artisans as highly skilled, well-paid, working as regularly as their trades allow and possessing a solid education. This portrait is just the sort of thing to confirm our image of the worker of '48 as a skilled artisan, educated and relatively well-off, except during periods of economic and political crisis. The problem is that the survey was all too obviously conducted to produce just such an image. Without even discussing the salaries quoted in the report (which were disputed at the time), how could one seriously believe statistics that assure us that 90% of the workers were able to read and write, when the letters and petitions we have examined elsewhere show that even the workers selected to do the writing had difficulty expressing themselves? Looking at these flattering figures, one must bear in mind that this survey is above all a counter-survey. Planned in 1847, it was accelerated in 1848 so as to appear before another survey commissioned by the Assembly's Labor Committee. Conducted by managers who obtained their information from other managers, it meant to prove that "in normal and ordinary times, the working population of Paris leads a satisfactory existence in all respects."24 Yet even the coordinator of the survey allows

The Myth of the Artisan

that there may be some doubt as to the authenticity of some information provided by managers who wished to show a conciliatory attitude, so as to "bring about the much-desired recovery in business and employment." In order to put the blame on political agitators, who theoretically worked alone and from the outside to upset industrial harmony, the managers did not hesitate to paint a more flattering picture of the workers' education and mores than the one they had in front of their eyes. We find other distortions if we change our perspective from one of "bourgeois" statistics to one of "workers' discourse." While the former embellished the world of the artisan, the latter artificially welds the collectivity of workers to its "spokesmen." Whenever workers speak in the name of Work, affirm its rights or glorify its greatness, we run the risk of inferring a false picture of the collectivity they represent or of the realities which underly their speech, unless we determine very precisely who is speaking, who is being addressed and what the stakes are. The presentation of the anthology La Parole ouvri'ereon which I collaborated with Alain Faurethus seems to me to give excessive credit to the idea of a workers' discourse collectively addressed to the bourgeoisie, and oversimplifies the experience of collective struggle in the face of an opposing group.25 Such a conception, it seems to me, does not take into account two fundamental characteristics of these workers' publications: first, that they are polemical texts addressed to other factions of the worker intelligentsia; and second, that they reflect political and ideological positions from the "bourgeois" world. I have attempted, in my analysis of the principal workers' newspaper of the time, UAtelier, to show the complexity of these positions: the glorification of work that one finds in L'Atelier is neither the expession of a more or less diffuse "class consciousness," nor is it the view of an elite group of skilled workers.26 UAtelier did not oppose the bourgeois view of work as creative; but it did oppose the idea of work as condemnation, as imposed task, that was held by Saint-Simonians, Fourierists, communists, icarians, etc. On the one hand, this conception, which was that of the neo-catholic workers inspired by Buchez, provided a "realistic" way of dealing with the feelings of helplessness of those increasingly marginal beings, the intellectualized workers. On the other hand, it was the instrument of a political struggle which sought to unite the forces of the intellectual and militant worker elite around a specific political force, that of the moderate republicans. UAtelier's discourse on work or worker unity is precisely the means by which it sought, paradoxically, to integrate the forces of the worker elite into an external political force. In the case of L'Atelier, the specifically political elements are quite visible. Yet very often, political conflicts were hidden behind facade of collective discourse. From this point of view, one might profitably reconsider the question of the "worker press" in 1848. In the anthology mentioned earlier, I gave an important place to the Journal des Travailleurs, published in June 1848 by the "central committee" of the workers' corporations, an offshoot of the Commission du Luxembourg brought together by Louis Blanc. I presented this publication as a kind of systematization of the experience of the corporations, as the crystallization of a unitary class ideology.27 It now seems to me that one must take into greater account the ambiguity of this

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"avant-garde" of delegates to the Commission du Luxembourg who express themselves in the Journal. This self-proclaimed central committee is in fact largely dominated by representatives of specific political forces, and not by the collective of corporations. Although its most influential member, Pierre Vincard, had the title of "jewelry engraver," we have good reason to suspect that he spent very little of his life engraving jewelry. In 1848, he was already a journalist specialized in workers' issuesnot a corporate representative. And it was Louis Blanc, not the jewelry engravers, who placed him on the commission. His former colleague from In Fraternite, the metal-caster Malarmet. was more of an authentic woker. yet he too was not elected by his peers: once again, it was Louis Blanc who selected him for the commission. The sculptor Jules Salmson. author of an editorial in the Journal des Travailleurs, was most likely brought in by Louis Blanc as well, for he belonged to the same artistic circle as Louis' brother Charles Blanc. While the Journal des Travailleurs appeared to be the collective organ of the workers' corporations, it was in fact a weapon in the conflict between the "avant-garde" and large sections of the rank-and-file. Accused by this rank-and-file of having been overly preoccupied with the elections and having acted as satellites of the clubs, the editors counter-attacked on economic grounds by proposing a territorial organization of links between producers and consumers that would counterbalance the separatist and apolitical tendencies of the corporations. 4. The fabrication of images. Methodological and political issues. The preceding examples serve to focus our attention once again on an issue filled with complexities and contradictions: that of the relations between the labor movement "per se" and "outside" influences of a political and ideological nature. In many cases, we have a tendency to interpret as collective practice or class "ethos" political statements which are in fact highly individualized. We attach too much importance to the collectivity of workers and not enough to its divisions; we look too much at worker culture and not enough at its encounters with other cultures. This may well represent the other side of the coin of a certain number of good methodological principles. We have all followed the lead of the ethnologists who warned us of the dangers of ethnocentrism, who taught us not to project our reasons onto the practice of others. Most of us have learned elsewhere to beware of the political structures and ideologies proposed to the working class from above. Methodological requirements and political wariness thus work together to focus our attention on those aspects of the workers' struggle and discourse that can be explained exclusively in terms of their own practice and experiences. Thus we dutifully seek to place the origins of their words within the context of their trades, and we presume their representatives to be solidly anchored within the collectivity they represent. But in doing so, we are pe2'haps avoiding one form of "intellectual racism" only to fall into anotherone that consists of overstressing the difference of identity. By considering the carpenter Perdiguier, the tailor Troncin. the locksmith Gilland and the engraver Vin^ard to be representative of the population of skilled

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11

artisans, we are not perceiving them for what they really are: a marginal group at the frontier of encounters with the bourgeoisie, characterized by the same migrations and instabilities, the same ambiguities and contradictions that define the working class: but also a particular category of intellectuals, more intellectual, in a sense, than we are, for their intellectuality is a victory over their condition. With the good intention of limiting ourselves solely to the professional experience of the workers, we thus run the risk of reconfirming the old philosophical adage that recommends that workers not concern themselves with anything besides their work. We imagine a carpenter turning his sentences as he turns wood, seeing the world through his tools. Thinking we can define his militancy on the basis of his trade, we wind up defining it from the standpoint of our own functionalist preconceptions. And at the same time, we are ready to give credence to certain descriptions of workers' practices which transform political biases into ethnological traits. I am thinking especially here of some descriptions of Denis Poulot's in Le Sublime, and the validation they received in labor historiography through the work of Georges Duveau.3 Alain Cottereau has recently described the practices of worker resistance which Poulot denounced as a form of "cheating." But there is something else we must take into account: Denis Poulot was not primarily a manager who accused workers. He was first of all a Gambettist political militant who wanted to discredit the militants of the Internationale and the working-class orators of the public meetings. Certain of his descriptions do not refer to any practices of the workers; rather, they are pure political mythologizing. This is especially clear in his portrait of a group of worker leaders that he calls the "Sons of God": his discussion of them is filled with contradictions, to the point that one's entire image of them becomes inconsistent. They are but a political caricature, fleshed out by an imaginary anthropology. But the historian's gaze followed, and the polemical caricature was then validated as a form of anthropology that explained workers' behavior.29 We thus reach the heart of the paradox, which brings us back to our initial consideration: that the idea of "skilled workers' socialism" is a politically motivated concept. And those who have been the most intent upon showing the labor movement as an outgrowth of the workers' own culture and professional milieu have most often done so in order to subordinate this movement to a particular political point of view. This brings us back to the question of the historiography of French labor, which has in effect developed in a very distinctive manner: essentially as an indirect form of political discourse. It has been done, for the most part, by men who were not historians, but researchers, sociologists or jurists, and who were associated with weakening factions of the labor movement. The first major labor historians of the 19th century, Joseph Barberet and Isidore Finance, were political and trade-unionist militants, one linked to cooperatism, the other to the positivist school. Having both lost and been eliminated from the militant labor scene by the victory of the "collectivists" in the Workers' Party, they became civil servants specialized in labor matters. There, they delved into the history of trades, their traditions of struggle and their associations. The result was that they proposed, in contrast to the noisy scene

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of the socialist and revolutionary trade-unionist movement, the image of a more profound and authentic workers' movement, rooted in the traditions of the professions and in the solidarity of the corporate struggles, developing its own forms of unionist or cooperative organization, and ready, on the basis of its own culture, to collaborate with the republican State in instituting an "industrial democracy" based on professional competence, the education of the masses and social cooperation.30 Such an image might bring together, despite their differences, those sectors of the labor movement threatened by the rise of Marxist socialism and revolutionary unionism: the world of the cooperatives and the mutual-aid societies, unionist factions influenced by positivism, institutions of popular education, and the "experimental" tradition of Utopian socialism (claimed by Godin and his nephew Prudhommeaux). Outside of the labor movement, this concept found support in the ideology of "solidarity" of radical politicians such as Leon Bourgeois, and in those circles where new social science was being developed for the young Republic, especially that groundbreaking edge of social science that was sociology: it was the sociologist Celestin Bougie who. far more than his colleagues in history, shaped the careers of the young researchers in labor history. It was on this fringe of the labor movement and of the University that this form of social history was founded, seeking to counter socialist and Marxist "demagoguery" with a true tradition of socialist humanism of the worker elite. This line of thought, first linked to the rise of the radical Republic, was then taken up by the S.F.I.O. and the reformist C.G.T. during the crisis of revolutionary unionism and the split in the socialist movement. The S.F.I.O. and the C.G.T. then appropriated as their own this vision that had been proposed by the "reformist" militants of the previous generation. They then contrasted their labor movement, presented as that of the labor elites, to the communist movement, which they presented as the expression of the new workers, unskilled and cut off from the cultural and organizational traditions of the working class. This transformation occurred in two stages. It had its beginnings in the pre-war years, as a way of interpreting the crisis in revolutionary unionism. At a time when this crisis made clear the enormous gap that existed between the humanistic, pacifist Utopias of Pelloutier, Monatte, Albert Thierry, et al. and the far less glorious reality of corporatist practices and sectarianism, a militant like Merrheim closed the gap in his own way by proposing a sociological interpretation of the crisis. He saw it as a consequence of the new forms of the organization of labor: with the emergence of Taylorism, intelligence had been "driven out of the workshops":31 workers who had been masters of their work and of their own minds were now subjected to the laws of mindless, unskilled labor. The same interpretation naturally presented itself after the war to explain the failure of unionist-revolutionary "pacifism," the acquiescence of the working masses in contributing to wartime industry, and their sympathy for the Bolshevik revolution. Looking at the "revolution of the hungry," Merrheim adopted the theory of "industrial democracy" as his own, and succeeded in imposing his very questionable sociological explanation. In fact, there was something in it for everybody: the

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socialist family was happy to take on a great tradition of the socialism of the professional elites; the communist family, ordered by Moscow to "change its class base," found that it was very much to its advantage to have others help them appear to be something they had never succeeded in being: the voice of the assembly-line workers. From that point on, socialist historiography, supported by intellectuals linked to the corporative movement and to socialist cultural organizations (like the "Centre confederal d'etudes ouvrieres" of the C.G.T. and the "Institut superieur ouvrier" headed by Georges LeFranc), claimed for itself this "coutume ouvrfere" which provides the title of the masterwork of this tendency, La Coutume ouvrfere by the jurist Maxime Leroy. It pursued its quest for a "true" labor movement to hold up in contrast to the noisy revolutionary demagoguery around it, and in turn exaggerated the tradition of working-class humanism and "artisanal socialism." We know how one of the branches of this search led to the appropriation of the worker tradition for Petain's new order.3- The other branch had its swan song after the war, in a work like Michel Collinet's L'Ouvrier franQais. Esprit du syndicalisme which develops Merrheim's vision on the basis of dying hopes for revolutionary unionism. But there are political swan songs which continue to echo in the realm of theory. And Collinet's was revived and amplified by a double echo: that of the philosopher (Sartre) who imposed it on the politicans, and that of the sociologist (Alain Touraine) who reconfirmed it for the historian.33 We know that those who are defeated on the battleground often get their revenge by imposing their views on historians. The reason is simple: it is they who, by fascinating history, make it interesting. 5. The aims of the analysis. It will perhaps be of use to specify what is at stake in these observations. It is not my aim to deny the existence of that "worker humanism" which finds expression in the hopes of the nineteenth century and the nostalgia of the twentieth. Rather, it is a matter of questioning its internal coherence and the dominant role attributed to it in the area of work-related values. Nor do I wish to deny the existence or the importance of these values. I have not claimed that apprenticeship was an unimportant thing, or that profession and professional competence did not play their role. I did want to show the complexities involved in any definition of the workingman and the values that are attributed to him. Thus I attempted in La Nuit des proletaires to show the continuity that exists in the 1840s between the mentality of the worker that writes itself in poems and worker newpapers, and that which sees itself living in the everyday context of the workshop. Between these two mental states, there is a symbolic rupture which is constituted by the entry into writing, that is, into the domain of the literate. The locksmith Gilland or the typographer Corbon could be perfectly sincere about their workers' ideal. And they could, on occasion, experience equally sincere satisfactions in the exercise of their trades. Nonetheless, to put themselves in the position of

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writing "We, the workers . . .," they had to have first felt very deeply the rage of the mistreated apprentice or the disgust of the autodidact at the attitudes and values of the workshop braggart. The representation of the worker that they bring out in the press and in politics is the fallout from an impossible effort to escape the "culture" of their everyday working lives. Revolutionary unionism also attempted to unite, in its valorization of worker humanism and of the revolution of the producers, a number of heterogeneous elements. Internationalism, pacifism, and the autodidactic ideal of such men as Pelloutier, Monatte and Pericat are much closer to the moral and intellectual vision of militant schoolteachers than to the corporative traditions of control of apprenticeship and hiring, or the physical violence practiced by unionist gangs. But it was necessary, in the face of parliamentary socialism and Marxist dogmatism, to artificially weld one to the other in a concept of workers' self-emancipation which drew its values from the workplace. If this bid for power has generally been validated by social historians, it is most likely because culturalist models have tended to impose themselves. In attempting to reconstruct workers' attitudes against the simplifications of Marxist economism and political hagiography, historians naturally turned to the analysis of cultural anthropology. But in doing so. they endorsed a problematic axiom: that of the homogeneity of so-called cultural practices, of the single meaning that is expressed through eating habits or learned discourses, through the products of work and those of leisure. In a conflictual universe where the barrier of leisure, the barrier separating the necessity of work and the luxury of thought, consititutes an essential stake, this undifferentiated sense of culture is likely to miss the originality of the representations in at play in worker discourse and politics. It would thus be advisable to rethink the relationship that links the identifications and symbolizations of the workingman with the practices of his work and his material conditions as a worker, to rethink it outside of any axioms of cultural homogeneity. The remarks presented here have sought to go in that direction. "It is necessary," wrote Marcel Mauss, "that the sociologist (and the politician) not remain on a level of intellectual simplism, but that he truly, like the psychologist and the doctor, come to realize that men can desire, think and feel contradictory things, be they at the same time or in successive moments."34 The same goes for the historian.

NOTES 'This work was first presented at a conference on "Representations of Work in France." organized by the Western Societies Program at Cornel! University in April. 1983. The proceedings of the conference will be published by Cornell University Press in 1984 85. The translation is by David H. Lake of Vassar College.

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!. This fact is particularly stressed by Christopher H. Johnson in Utopian Communism in France: Cahel and the Icarians (Ithaca. 1974) as well as in his contribution to Price et al.. Revolution and Reaction: 1848 and the Second French Republic (London, 1975). 2. H. Leneveux, l Travail manuel en France (Paris, n.d.), 166. 3. Piron. "La Fete de braves." in Le Chansonnier du Tour de France (Paris. 1840). See. in the same collection. "Les braves" and "Reception d'un compagnon cordonnier." 4. Alphonse Viollet, Ijes Po'etes du peuple au XI Xe si'ecle (Paris. 1846). 87. The reference is to the poet and shoemaker from Reims, Gonzalle. 5. See the report of the tailor Deluc from Bordeaux that accompanies his project for an association (Archives Nationales. F12 4631). 6. A. Viollet. Poetes du peuple, 3. 7. .1. P. Gilland. "Biographie des hommes obscurs, Andre Troncin," IM Feuille du Village, November 28. 1X50. X. Constant Hilbey. Reponse a tou.s men critiques (Paris. 1846). 51. 9. Pierre Vingard, "Les ouvriers tailleurs," Le Travail qfflanchi, January 7. 1849. 10. See the analyses of the master tailor Canneva, in his newspaper. La Fashion. 11. IM Fashion, April 20. 1842. 12. Monneret. Hygiene des tailleurs, published as a supplement in August Canneva. Le Livre du tailleur (Paris. 1838). 13 On the forms of mutual aid among the curriers, see Office du Travail, Ijes Associations professionnelles ouvrferes (Paris. 1900), Vol. II, 193. 14. On the groups of Saint-Simonian workers, see the archives of the Arsenal (Fonds Enfantin, especially dossiers 7815 and 7816) and the second part of my book. La Suit des Profetaires (Paris. 1981). 15 Louis Vincard. M'emoires episodiques d'un vieux chansonnier saint-simonien (Paris. 1879). 16. Letter from Ruffin to Michel Chevalier. Fonds Enfantin, Ms. 7606. 17. On all that follows, see Agricol Perdiguier. Biographie de I'auteur du Livre du Compagnonnage (Paris. 1846). 18 The manuscripts of the carpenter Gauny. a unique account of a worker's life, are preserved in the Bibliotheque Municipal de Saint Denis. I have collected the most significant of these texts in the following volume: Gabriel Gauny. le Philosophe plebeien (Paris. 1983). 19. Anthime Corbon. l Secret du peuple de Paris (Paris, 1863). 20 VmQard. Memoires episodiques, 95. 21 For the scoffers, see Couannon. Journal des Marchands Tailleurs (1835-1847) and his Le Parfait Tailleur (Puns, 1852). 22. Cf. Gabriel Gauny, "Le travail a la tache." in l Philosophe plebeien. 44-49. 23 Charles Poncy, "A Beranger." U Chantier (Paris. 1844). See also my article "Ronds de fumee: les poetes ouvriers dans la France de Louis-Philippe," Revue des Sciences Humaines 190 (April June 1983). In his book. Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge. 1980), William H. Sewell also analyses Poncy's poetry, but from a rather different standpoint. 24. Stallstique de I'Industrie a Paris (Paris. 1851). 61. 25. l.a Parole ouvriere. 1830-1851. texts assembled and presented by Alain Faure and Jacques Ranciere (Paris. 1976). 26. Ranciere. //; Suit des Profetaires, chapter X. 27. Faure and Ranciere, IM parole ouvriere, 287. On this question, one must of course consult the fascinating analyses of Remi Gosse/ (IJS ouvriers de Paris [La Roche-sur-Yon. 1967]), while avoiding the temptation to see in the worker organization that he presents a foreshadowing of revolutionary unionism. 28 Denis Poulot. Le Sublime: ou le travailleur comme il est en 1870 et ce qu'il pent etre, reedited and with an introduction b\ Alain Cottereau (Paris. 1980) and Georges Duveau. La Vie ouvricrc en France \uu.\ le Second Empire (Paris. 1946). 29 On this pom! see Alain Cottereau's introduction and the debate caused by that introduction in /.t-v ficvultc, logitjuei 12 (Summer 1980).

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30. See Joseph Barberet, Le Travail en France, Monographies professionnelles (Paris. 18861890). and Office du Travail. Ije? associations profession/wiles ouvrferes (Paris. 1X99-1904). 31. IA Vie imvriere. March 5. 1913. 32. Cf. J. Ranciere. "De Pelloutier a Hitler. Syndicalisme et Collaboration." Irs Revoltes logiques 4 (Winter 1977). 33. Michel Collinet's influence is clear in the Sartrean analysis of anarcho-unionism (see l^\ Communities et la Paix and Critique de la Raison Dialectique) as well as in the writings of Andre Gorz. both of whom inspired others. Bernard H. Moss stresses his indebtedness to the analyses of
Michel Collinet and Alain Touraine ([.'Evolution du travail ouvrier aux I sines Renault [Pans. 1955]) in his work. 77K" Origins of the French labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers (Berkeley. 1976). 34. Marcel Mauss. "La Nation." Oeuvres (Paris. 1968), vol. III. 579.