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

1-16

The Myth of theArtisan

Critical Reflections on a Category Social History Jacques Ranc?ere
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 inter
pretation, the movement developed as the expression of a working-class culture and

of

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 itwas 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 ismost 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 "authen
tic" 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, one which, through the strikes and associations of the 1830s, and through
republican organizations, Utopian groups, workers' literature and the press of

the the
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). the facts relating to the trades most prominently represented in Nevertheless,
the republican associations, Utopian groups or simple street demonstrations seriously

challenge
predominance

this interpretation.
in particular of

The
two

over-representation
of them?the tailors

of certain
and the

trades and the

shoemakers?has

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

2 professional
ready-made Looking

ILWCH, value and the threat of professional

clothing. at such an interpretation, we must, it seems to me,

24, Fall

1983

deskilling

linked to the invasion of

beware of a

certain trompe l'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 LAtelier 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.' "2 These trades

were contemptible
or cleverness.

in the workers'judgement,

since they required little strength, skill

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 as the shoemakers and abject" in their ridiculous oversized smocks, "vile stigmatized or muffs using clumsy 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 that shoemakers bearing emblems of the compagnonnage be killed. tradition, of course, tended to fall into disuse among the compagnon nages, 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 This 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 profes sional pride that fueled the militant ideas of the shoemakers. If the trade produced so many activists and dreamers, it ismore 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 itwas not remunerated.5 One therefore tended to find there young men of modest recommended

The Myth
backgrounds

of the Artisan
as well as youngest sons on whom little was lavished. Thus

expense

the tailor Constant Hilbey would have liked to have 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 Andr? Troncin, was to a tailor's apprenticeship after the death of his mother and the in Besan?on. When his stepmother took a remarriage of his father, a woodseller dislike to the children of the first marriage, only his older brother received a professional training, and Andr? was shunted off to a poor man's apprenticeship.7 condemned
Nevertheless, He became a cutter Andr? and Troncin shop was to have while at considerable the same professional time pursuing, success. through foreman

study and the company of students, his education

hand, seeking as much as possible to avoid

inmilitancy. Hilbey, on the other

into a rut," chose to make

"getting

children's clothes because

Generally squeezed speaking, one against

that specialty "required less attention and intelligence."8

the work all bent in shops where workers produced over a too-narrow work bench with were their

however, the other,

legs crossed, the needlework accomplished "with a regularity approaching that of machines"9 had nothing in itwhich 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 corporate the shops are in their and off-season, collective work in the clothing are industry.10 very weak, In addition, tradition the consciousness

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 or in their but rather the links work, by pride by particular "freedom" professional the workers: freedom from the trade's role as a of Material stemming [disponibilit?]
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
of their trade. practice number that a certain Indeed, this was a constant occupations concern were of bourgeois not interesting observers: or chal of working-class

lenging 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 ismost 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 itsworkers to rally around values?political

ILWCH, 24, Fall

1983

are external to, and even opposed (e.g. republican) or ideological (e.g. Utopian)?that 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 year?three times more than the

who, as shop foreman, enjoys the confidence of his employers, average?and no has financial motive to become a leader of corporate strikes. If he is chosen every to time 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.13 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 typo to in their the relation intellectual world, are outcasts as well. graphers who, 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 one in the twelfth arrondis light, significant: the most active of these groups?the not a single representative of the leading industry in that sement of Paris?includes 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 to The former "robust" workers in the great epic of an recruited. engage they sought "industrial army" which was to work on the foundations of the future while
preaching their gospel. The workers, however, were attracted for opposite reasons:

and songster Vin?ard tells us in his M?moires, "There were many ideas who, disgusted with their lives as salaried workers, embraced Saint-Simonian

as the worker

The Myth

of the Artisan

only because they hoped to bid an eternal farewell to the past."15 The less sophist a kind of mutual aid society which, for icated workers sought in Saint-Simonism
the poorest among them, would function as a welfare office, and for the others as a

kind of social security system. The more

lectual growth, an escape from the worker's

enlightened workers were

world.

seeking intel those of

about

The
Utopian the artisan

lives of these workers

bring attitude us now toward and his

whose
work.

trajectories
The term

came

to intersect
of evokes our

propaganda

to a serious

reconsideration "artisan"

ideas

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
he is identified as a wine-merchant and, upon a subsequent arrest, he is

police,

described as an accounting-clerk. There is nothing exceptional about his case: the are known to their colleagues, identities under which militants professional
"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 a one we and these to often led life artisans the similar disillusionments, hopes quite
associate committed with to the their "marginal" work than workers today's of today. And Few often they were no artisans more re workers. Saint-Simonian

sisted 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 sense in the workshops. as of work Reading an abstraction. their job Thus, applications, one reads one in a gets letter a very from "un-artisanal" a bookseller to

Michel Chevalier
easily Work "wear as

that he is not put off by any kind of work, and that he can just as
jacket and cap of as, if need be, this put on a suit One of fine can get cloth."16 a sense of ambiguity feelings creates.

a smock, abstraction:

this ambiguity from two seemingly contrasting cases. The first is that of the archety pal militant artisan, Agricol Perdiguier, author of the Livre du Compagnonnage and theM?moires d'un 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

6 apparently than make

tables whose

ILWC H, 24, Fall

1983

lived in poverty in a slum of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And rather spiral staircases or other masterpieces of artistry, he made little dressing
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 itwas 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 l'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. to say Once again, we are tempted to propose a law of inverse proportionality, that the men who are loudest in singing the glory ofWork are those who have most intensely experienced the degeneration of that ideal. This consciousness of degenera and tion is expressed with a naked force in some Saint-Simonian documents, in the the letters in filled with which despairing especially hallucinatory descriptions a the the describes of of life the carpenter Gauny experience "trap" "imprisoned" by we torn to our the shreds But of in time."18 by proletariat, tyrannical activity "frenzy also see it crop up in those newspapers of the 1840s which aspire to be the voice of in the the working people: in the anecdotes of La Fraternit? or La Ruche populaire, L'Atelier of weakness in one's toward editorializing against any meeting obligations 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 Les 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 opposite

sionary

of the Artisan of Perdiguier. Here is how Vin?ard,

working

7 in his M?moires,
little and poorly,

presents
as a result

this mis
earning

worker:

"a weak

compagnon,

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, Vin?ard 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 progress?the 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 toWork 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

in servitude or subject to the workbell, the carpenter Gauny can his companions 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 ambi guity 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 deforce 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 between conditions Poney, the virtue of work of life: is identified with that of traveling

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

systema

tically 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 dis course 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 l'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, as well-paid, working regularly as their trades allow and possessing a solid educa tion. This portrait is just the sort ofthing 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 even discussing the salaries conducted to produce just such an image. Without were at the in the report (which quoted time), how could one seriously disputed 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, itwas 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

satisfactory existence

and ordinary
in all

times, the working

Yet even

population
of

of Paris
the survey

leads a
allows

respects."24

the coordinator

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 "bour geois" 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 which I collaborated with presentation of the anthology La Parole ouvri?re?on
Alain Faure?thus 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, LAtelier, to show the complexity of these positions: the glorification of work that one finds in LAtelier 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 L'Atelier 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 B?chez, pro vided a "realistic" way of dealing with the feelings of helplessness of those increas ingly 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. LAtelier's discourse on work or worker unity is precisely the means by to integrate the forces of the worker elite into an which it sought, paradoxically, external political force. In the case of L'Atelier, the specifically political elements are quite visible. Yet very often, political conflicts were hidden behind fa?ade 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

10

ILWCH,

24, Fall

1983

"avant-garde" of delegates to the Commission du Luxembourg who express them selves 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 itsmost influential member, Pierre Vin?ard, had the title of "jewelry engraver," we have good reason to suspect that he spent very little of his life engraving
issues?not

jewelry.

In 1848, he was
representative.

already
And

a journalist
it was Louis

specialized
Blanc, not

in workers'
the jewelry

a corporate

engravers, who
Fraternit?,

placed him on the commission.

Malarmet, was more

His

former colleague
woker,

from La
yet he too

the metal-caster

of an authentic

was not elected by his peers: once again, itwas 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, itwas 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 the separatist and apolitical producers and consumers that would counterbalance
tendencies of the corporations.

4. The fabrication
The preceding

of images. Methodological
examples serve to focus

and political
our attention

issues.
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 to the working class from above. political structures and ideologies proposed and thus work together to focus our wariness Methodological requirements political 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 perhaps avoiding one form of "intellectual racism" only to fall into another?one that consists of overstressing the difference of the carpenter Perdiguier, the tailor Troncin, the locksmith identity. By considering Gilland and the engraver Vin?ard to be representative of the population of skilled

The Myth
artisans, we

of the Artisan
are not them for what are: a marginal

11
at the

perceiving

they

really

group

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.
same time, we are ready to give credence to certain descriptions of workers'

And at the
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.28 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 orators of the of the Internationale and the working-class not to do of his refer Certain any practices of the descriptions public meetings. are This is workers; rather, they pure political mythologizing. especially clear in his a of of leaders that he calls the of worker "Sons God": his discussion group portrait to the point that one's entire image of them of them is filled with contradictions, becomes inconsistent. They are but a political caricature, fleshed out by an discredit the militants 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 labor scene by the victory of the lost and been eliminated from the militant "collectivists" in theWorkers' 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

12

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of the socialist and revolutionary trade-unionist movement, the image of a more and authentic workers' rooted in the of the profes traditions movement, profound sions 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 "experi mental" tradition of Utopian socialism (claimed by Godin and his nephew Prud this concept found support in the hommeaux). Outside of the labor movement, 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: itwas the sociologist C?lestin 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, to counter and socialist Marxist "demagoguery" with a true tradition of seeking 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, which they presented as that of the labor elites, to the communist movement, as new the of the cut off from the and unskilled workers, presented expression 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 Albert Thierry, et al. and the far less glorious reality of Pelloutier, Monatte, and sectarianism, a militant likeMerrheim closed the gap in his corporatist practices 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 revolu tion. Looking at the "revolution of the hungry," Merrheim adopted the theory of "industrial democracy" as his own, and succeeded in imposing his very questionable In fact, there was something in it for everybody: the sociological explanation.

The Myth socialist

of the Artisan

13

family was happy to take on a great tradition of the socialism of the to "change its class professional elites; the communist family, ordered by Moscow was to found that its to it much have others base," very advantage 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 conf?d?ral d'?tudes ouvri?res" of the C.G.T. and the "Institut sup?rieur ouvrier" headed by Georges Le Franc), claimed for itself this "coutume ouvri?re" which provides the title of the masterwork of this tendency, La Coutume ouvri?re 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 P?tain's new order.32 The other branch had its swan song after the war, in a work

like Michel Collinet's L'Ouvrier fran?ais. 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. Itwill 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 Iwish 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 prol?taires 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, in the exercise of their trades. Nonetheless, experience equally sincere satisfactions to put themselves in the position of

14

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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. unionism also attempted to unite, in its valorization of worker Revolutionary humanism and of the revolution of the producers, a number of heterogeneous ideal of such men as elements. Internationalism, pacifism, and the autodidactic are to the moral and Monatte and much closer intellectual vision P?ricat Pelloutier, of militant schoolteachers than to the corporative traditions of control of appren ticeship and hiring, or the physical violence practiced by unionist gangs. But it was to in the face of parliamentary socialism and Marxist necessary, dogmatism, a one to which the other in of workers' weld concept self-emancipation artificially 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 attempt ing to reconstruct workers' attitudes against the simplifications of Marxist econom ism and political hagiography, historians naturally turned to the analysis of cultural But in doing so, they endorsed a problematic axiom: that of the anthropology. 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 tomiss the originality of the representations in/at play inworker discourse and politics. Itwould 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
moments."34 The same goes for

things, be they at the same time or in successive

the historian.

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

The Myth
1. This France: Cabet and Reaction:

of the Artisan
fact

15

and

is particularly stressed by Christopher H. Johnson in in Utopian Communism to Price et al.. Revolution the Iearians (Ithaca, 1974) as well as in his contribution 1848 and the Second French Republic (London, 1975).

(Paris, 1840). See, in the same collection, "Les braves" and "R?ception d'un compagnon cordonnier." 4. Alphonse Viollet, Les Poetes du peuple au XIXe si?cle (Paris, 1846), 87. The reference is to the poet and shoemaker from Reims, Gonzalle. 5. See association the report (Archives of the tailor Deluc from Bordeaux that accompanies his project for an F12 4631). Nationales, Poetes du peuple, 3. "Biographie des hommes obscurs, Andr? Troncin," La Feuille du Village,

en France (Paris, n.d.), 166. 2. H. Leneveux, Le Travail manuel 3. Piron, "La Fete de braves," in Le Chansonnier du Tour de France

6. A. Viollet, 7. J. P. Gilland, November 28, 1850. 8. Constant

Hilbey, R?ponse a tous mes critiques (Paris, 1846), 51. 9. Pierre Vin?ard, "Les ouvriers tailleurs," Le Travail afftanchi, January 7, 1849. 10. See the analyses of the master tailor Canneva, in his newspaper, La Fashion. 11. La Fashion, 12. Monneret, April Hygiene 20, 1842. des tailleurs, published as a supplement in August Canneva, Le Livre du

tailleur (Paus, 1838). 13. On the forms professionnelles 14. On especially 1981). 16. Letter ouvri?res

of mutual

dossiers

the groups 7815 and 7816) and

aid among the curriers, see Office du Travail, (Paris, 1900), Vol. II, 193. see the archives of the Arsenal of Saint-Simonian workers, the second part of my book, La Nuit

Les Associations

(Fonds Enfantin, des Prol?taires (Paris, (Paris, 1879).

15. Louis Vin?ard, M?moires episodiques d'un vieux chansonnier from Ruffin to Michel Chevalier, Fonds Enfantin, Ms. 17. On all that follows, see Agricol Perdiguier, Biographie

saint-simonien 7606.

de l'auteur du Livre du Compagnon

nage

(Paris, 1846). 18. The manuscripts

in the Biblioth?que following volume:

of the carpenter Gauny, a unique account of a worker's life, are preserved de Saint Denis. I have collected the most significant of these texts in the Municipal Gabriel Gauny, Le Philosophe pl?b?ien (Paris, 1983). 19. Anthime Corbon, Le Secret du peuple de Paris (Paris, 1863). 95. Journal des Marchands Tailleurs (1835-1847) and his Le

20. Vin?ard, M?moires episodiques, 21. For the scoffers, see Couannon, Parfait Tailleur (Vans, 1852). 22. Cf. Gabriel 23. Charles fum?e: les po?tes

Gauny, "Le travail ? la tache," in Le Philosophe pl?b?ien, 44-49. "A B?ranger," Le Chantier Poney, (Paris, 1844). See also my article "Ronds ouvriers dans la France de Louis-Philippe," Revue des Sciences Humaines In his book, Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge, 1980), William Poncy's poetry, but from a rather different de l'Industrie a Paris (Paris, 1851), 61. ouvri?re, 1830-1851, texts assembled standpoint. by Alain Faure

de 190 H.

1983). (April/June Sewell also analyzes 24. Statistique 25. La Parole Ranci?re (Paris,

and presented

and Jacques

des Prol?taires, chapter X. and Ranci?re, La parole ouvri?re, 287. On this question, one must of course consult the fascinating (Les ouvriers de Paris [La Roche-sur-Yon, analyses of R?mi Gossez 1967]), while to see in the worker of the temptation that he presents a foreshadowing avoiding organization unionism. revolutionary 27. Faure 28. Denis reedited ouvri?re ou le travailleur comme Le Sublime: Poulot, and with an introduction (Paris, by Alain Cottereau en France sous le Second Empire (Paris, 1946). this point, logiques see Alain Cottereau's 12 (Summer 1980). introduction il est en 1980) and Georges 1870 et ce qu'il peut ?tre, La Vie Duveau,

1976). 26. Ranci?re, La Nuit

29. On in Les R?voltes

and the debate

caused by that introduction

16 ILWCH,

24, Fall

1983
1886

30. See Joseph Barberet, Le Travail en France, Monographies (Pans, professionnelles ouvri?res (Paris, 1899-1904). 1890), and Office du Travail, Les associations professionnelles 31. La Vie ouvri?re, March 5, 1913. 32. Cf. J. Ranci?re, logiques 4 (Winter 1977). 33. Michel Collinet's Communistes Gorz, Michel both Collinet et la Paix of whom The Origins Mauss, "De Pelloutier influence ? Hitler. Syndicalisme et Collaboration,"

Les R?voltes

is clear de Bernard

in the Sartrean

and Critique inspired others. Touraine

la Raison

Dialectique) stresses H. Moss

and Alain

in his work, 1976).

{L'Evolution of the French Labor Movement: "La Nation," Oeuvres

(see Les analysis of anarcho-unionism as well as in the writings of Andr? to the analyses of his indebtedness du travail ouvrier aux Usines Renault [Paris, 1955]) The Socialism 1968), vol. of Skilled Workers (Berkeley,

34. Marcel

(Paris,

Ill, 579.