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Transcript of The Myth of the Artisan Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History - Ranciere
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International Labor and Working Class HistoryNumber 24, Fall 1983, pp. 1-16
The Myth of the ArtisanCritical Reflections on a Category of
Social History
Jacques Ranc?ereUniversity 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
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 itwasthe Taylorist revolution that spelled the end of this militancy by imposing massiveand bureaucratic forms, which led to the creation of a new working populationlacking 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 oflabor militancy ismost likely a belated interpretation, born of political necessity insome 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, theone 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
therepublican associations, Utopian groups
orsimple
street demonstrationsseriously
challenge this interpretation. The over-representation of certain trades and the
predominance in particular of two of them?the tailors 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
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2 ILWCH, 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 l'oeil effect: for we have a tendency to project onto artisanal practicethe image of bourgeois luxury, which is its end product. Thus we project the imageof 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 subjectivevalue they place on their work, according to their own scale of values. Certaintrades 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 LAtelierfelt 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 in the workers'judgement, since they required little strength, skillor 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 orderto 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 onlyfrom 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'snot
reallya
tradeat
all: it is the occupation of concierges whoare
tryingto 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 tradehe 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 producedso 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 sovery 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 generalitwas not remunerated.5 One therefore tended to find there young men of modest
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The Myth of the Artisan 3
backgrounds as well as youngest sons on whom little expense was lavished. Thus
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
condemned to a tailor's apprenticeship after the death of his mother and the
remarriage of his father, a woodseller in Besan?on. When his stepmother took a
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.7Nevertheless, Andr? 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 inmilitancy. 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."8
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 itwhich could have created a strong professional pride.And the supposed contrast between the quality work of the professional tailors and
thepoor
work of theclothing-industry
workers is avery
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 linksor
by pride in their work, but rather by the particular "freedom"[disponibilit?] 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 chal
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 findmen whose intellectual capacities and human aspirations are not used professionallyor 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
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4 ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983
(e.g. republican) or ideological (e.g. Utopian)?that are external to, and even opposedto, those of the trade, and to follow leaders who are not so much representatives ofthe 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
average?and 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 everytime 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 withsalaries and working conditions than with the "education" of his peers and the waysto 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 consideredthe 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 selecta 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
graphers 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 groups?the one in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris?includes not a single representative of the leading industry in that
area, that of the curriers, tawers and tanners. Nor does it include any members ofthe 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 Vin?ard tells us in his M?moires, "There were many
who, disgusted with their lives as salaried workers, embraced Saint-Simonian ideas
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The Myth of the Artisan 5
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, forthe 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 purchasesome material at a low price, thus enabling them to try their luck in that "skill," justas they might have done in a different field. One of the two men, Maire, was a sailorwho 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 anaccounting-clerk.
There isnothing 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, salariedin another, or hired as a clerk or peddler in a third. With the gaps in their timecaused 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 feverishwait 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 theother hand, only the greatest need would lead them to work on the railroad tracksor 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 Livre du Compagnonnage
and the M?moires d'un Compagnon. In the context of our labor history, he wouldseem 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 duringhis Tour of France, have wound up with such an undistinguished career? For he
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6 ILWC H, 24, Fall 1983
apparently lived in poverty in a slum of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And ratherthan 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 Germanworkers 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 thathe 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 modesteconomic
reality:that he started to
give lessons in orderto
boost his income. Nordoes 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 uphis pen to sing the glories of the work of the compagnons and to rebuke them fortheir 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.Once again, we are tempted to propose a law of inverse proportionality, to say
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 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 La Fraternit? or La Ruche populaire, in the
editorializing of L'Atelier against any weakness in meeting one's obligations towardwork. 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 Conteursouvriers 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
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The Myth of the Artisan 7
opposite of Perdiguier. Here is how Vin?ard, in his M?moires, presents this mis
sionary 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 spoketo 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 forgottenwhat might complicate it: that Delas, having chosen the missionary route to escapethe 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 isagain
apioneer
increating
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 leadingthe 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 ofthose
with inquisitiveand
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
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 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 workas an ambiguous activity that mediates between several worlds. Thus, in the verses
of the stonemason Poney, the virtue of work is identified with that of travelingbetween conditions of life:
I have built poor little cottagesAnd 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
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8 ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983
3. The ruse of numbers and the ruse of words.
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 heterogeneouskinds 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, andfill 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 factoriesand the grime of the tanneries, between the assaults of poverty and the fury of the
struggle,between the brilliance of
luxuryand 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 theruses 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,
well-paid, working as regularly as their trades allow and possessing a solid education. This portrait is just the sort ofthing to confirm our image of the worker of'48as 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 obviouslyconducted to produce just such an image. Without even discussing the salaries
quoted in the report (which were disputed at the time), how could one seriouslybelieve 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 beforeanother 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
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The Myth of the Artisan 9
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 upsetindustrial harmony, the managers did not hesitate to paint a more flattering pictureof 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
presentation of the anthology La Parole ouvri?re?on which I collaborated with
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 experienceof 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
workerintelligentsia;
andsecond,
thatthey
reflectpolitical
andideological positionsfrom 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, provided 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 theinstrument 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 bywhich 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 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 theworkers' 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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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 largelydominated 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 jewelry. In 1848, he was already a journalist specialized in workers'
issues?not a corporate representative. And it was Louis Blanc, not the jewelry
engravers, who placed him on the commission. His former colleague from La
Fraternit?, the metal-caster Malarmet, was more of an authentic woker, yet he too
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-attackedon economic grounds by proposing a territorial organization of links between
producers and consumers that would counterbalance the separatist and apoliticaltendencies 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 collectivitythey 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
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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The Myth of the Artisan 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 migrationsand instabilities, the same ambiguities and contradictions that define the workingclass; 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 goodintention 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 imaginea 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.28 Alain Cottereau has recently described the practices of worker
resistance which Poulot denounced as a form of "cheating." But there is somethingelse 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 theworking-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 caricaturewas 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 labormovement 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 bothlost 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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12 ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983
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" basedon 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 revolutionaryunionism: 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 Prud
hommeaux). 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: itwas the
sociologist C?lestin Bougie who, far more than his colleagues in history, shaped thecareers 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 revolutionaryunionism 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 transformationoccurred in two stages. It had its beginnings in the pre-war years, as a way of
interpretingthe
crisisin
revolutionary unionism. Ata
time when this crisismade
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 hisown 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 massesin 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 questionablesociological explanation. In fact, there was something in it for everybody: the
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The Myth of the Artisan 13
socialist family was happy to take on a great tradition of the socialism of theprofessional elites; the communist family, ordered by Moscow to "change its class
base," found that itwas very much to its advantage to have others help them appearto be something they had never succeeded in being: the voice of the assembly-line
workers.
From that point on, socialist historiography, supported by intellectuals linkedto the corporative movement and to socialist cultural organizations (like the "Centreconf?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 incontrast to the noisy revolutionary demagoguery around it, and in turn exaggeratedthe tradition of working-class humanism and "artisanal socialism." We know howone of the branches of this search led to the appropriation of the worker traditionfor 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 developsMerrheim's vision on the basis of dying hopes for revolutionary unionism. But thereare 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 isnot my aim to deny the existence of that "worker humanism" which finds expressionin the
hopesof the nineteenth
centuryand the
nostalgia of the twentieth. Rather, it isa matter of questioning its internal coherence and the dominant role attributed to itin the area of work-related values.
Nor do Iwish to deny the existence or the importance of these values. I havenot claimed that apprenticeship was an unimportant thing, or that profession and
professional competence did not play their role. I did want to show the complexitiesinvolved 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 existsin 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 isconstituted by the entry into writing, that is, into the domain of the literate. Thelocksmith Gilland or the typographer Corbon could be perfectly sincere about their
workers' ideal. And they could, on occasion, experience equally sincere satisfactionsin the exercise of their trades. Nonetheless, to put themselves in the position of
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14 ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983
writing "We, the workers...," they had to have first felt very deeply the rage of themistreated 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" oftheir 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 heterogeneouselements. Internationalism, pacifism, and the autodidactic ideal of such men as
Pelloutier, Monatte and P?ricat are much closer to the moral and intellectual vision
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
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 attempt
ing to reconstruct workers' attitudes against the simplifications of Marxist econom
ism 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 separatingthe 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 workingmanwith 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 (andthe
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.
NOTESThis work was first presented at a conference on "Representations of Work in France,"
organized by the Western Societies Program at Cornell 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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The Myth of the Artisan 15
1. This fact is particularly stressed by Christopher H. Johnson in Utopian Communism inFrance: Cabet and the Iearians (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, Le 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 "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 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. J. P. Gilland, "Biographie des hommes obscurs, Andr? Troncin," La Feuille du Village,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, April 20, 1842.
12. Monneret, Hygiene des tailleurs, published as a supplement in August Canneva, Le Livre du
tailleur (Paus, 1838).13. On the forms of mutual aid among the curriers, see Office du Travail, Les Associations
professionnelles ouvri?res (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 Nuit des Prol?taires (Paris,
1981).15. Louis Vin?ard, M?moires 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 l'auteur du Livre du Compagnon
nage (Paris, 1846).18. The manuscripts of the carpenter Gauny, a unique account of a worker's life, are preserved
in the Biblioth?que Municipal de Saint Denis. I have collected the most significant of these texts in the
following volume: Gabriel Gauny, Le Philosophe pl?b?ien (Paris, 1983).19. Anthime Corbon, Le Secret du peuple de Paris (Paris, 1863).
20. Vin?ard, M?moires episodiques, 95.
21. For the scoffers, see Couannon, Journal des Marchands Tailleurs (1835-1847) and his Le
Parfait Tailleur (Vans, 1852).
22. Cf. Gabriel Gauny, "Letravail
? la tache,"in
Le Philosophe pl?b?ien, 44-49.23. Charles Poney, "A B?ranger," Le Chantier (Paris, 1844). See also my article "Ronds de
fum?e: les po?tes 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 analyzes Poncy's poetry, but from a rather different standpoint.24. Statistique de l'Industrie a Paris (Paris, 1851), 61.
25. La Parole ouvri?re, 1830-1851, texts assembled and presented by Alain Faure and JacquesRanci?re (Paris, 1976).
26. Ranci?re, La Nuit des Prol?taires, chapter X.
27. Faure and Ranci?re, La parole ouvri?re, 287. On this question, one must of course consult
the fascinating analyses of R?mi Gossez (Les 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 peut ?tre,
reedited and with an introduction by Alain Cottereau (Paris, 1980) and Georges Duveau, La Vie
ouvri?re en France sous le Second Empire (Paris, 1946).29. On this point, see Alain Cottereau's introduction and the debate caused by that introduction
in Les R?voltes logiques 12 (Summer 1980).
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16 ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983
30. See Joseph Barberet, Le Travail en France, Monographies professionnelles (Pans, 1886
1890), and Office du Travail, Les associations professionnelles ouvri?res (Paris, 1899-1904).31. La Vie ouvri?re, March 5, 1913.
32. Cf. J. Ranci?re, "De Pelloutier ? Hitler. Syndicalisme et Collaboration," Les R?voltes
logiques 4 (Winter 1977).33. Michel Collinet's influence is clear in the Sartrean analysis of anarcho-unionism (see Les
Communistes et la Paix and Critique de la Raison Dialectique) as well as in the writings of Andr?
Gorz, both of whom inspired others. Bernard H. Moss stresses his indebtedness to the analyses of
Michel Collinet and Alain Touraine {L'Evolution du travail ouvrier aux Usines Renault [Paris, 1955])in his work, The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers (Berkeley,
1976).34. Marcel
Mauss,"La
Nation,"Oeuvres
(Paris, 1968),vol.
Ill, 579.