58950452 Ranciere Jacques the Myth of the Artisan Critical Reflections on a Category of Social...

7/29/2019 58950452 Ranciere Jacques the Myth of the Artisan Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History

1/16

International Labor and Working Class HistoryNumber 24, Fall 1983, pp. 1-16

The Myth of the ArtisanCritical Reflections on a Category ofSocial HistoryJacques Randere

University of Paris VIIIThe works devoted to the labor and socialist movements in France make useof a widely accepted interpretive principle: the relationship between professionalqualification (skill) and militant consciousness (militancy). According to this inter-pretation, the movement developed as the expression of a working-class culture andwas based on the actions and attitudes of the most highly skilled workers. Technicalability and pride in work thus created the basis for early labor militancy and it was

the Taylorist revolution that spelled the end of this militancy by imposing 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 strictlyanalyzes militant practice and its basis in the trades. This supposed first axiom oflabor militancy is most likely a belated interpretation, born of political necessity insome sections of the labor movem ent which, in order to fend off new and competingmilitant 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, theone which, through the strikes and associations of the 1830s. and through therepublican organizations. Utopian groups, workers' literature and the press of the1840s. led to the w orkers' erup tion of 1848. Indeed, we are accustom ed to seeing theworker of '48 as the typical representative of artisanal culture (whether it be. likeMarx, to deprecate this culture, or to revalorize it in opposition to Marxism).Nevertheless, the facts relating to the trades most prominently represented inthe republican associations, Utopian groups or simple street demonstrations seriouslychallenge this interpretation. The over-representation of certain trades and thepredominance in particular of two of themthe tailors and the shoemakershasbeen duly noted.1 and the conclusion has generally been that these two groups werepropelled to the front lines of combat by two factors: the consciousness of their own


2/16

2 ILIVCH, 24 , Fall 1983professional value and the threat of professional deskilling linked to the invasion ofready-made clothing.

Looking at such an interpretation, we must, it seems to me, beware of acertain trompe I'oeil effect: for we have a tendency to project onto artisanal practicethe image of bourgeois luxury, which is its end prod uct. T hus we project the imageof Parisian fashion onto the professionals of the clothing trade. By doing this, wemisperceive 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 becausethey touch upon fashion or intellectuality. Yet. in the 1840s. the newspaper L'Atelierfelt obliged to "prove to the workers of all trades who had met there that a tailorhandling his needle, a typographer aligning his letters of lead are just as worthy as abaker, a cabinetmaker or a tanner of the respectable title of 'ouvrier.' " : These tradeswere contemptible in the workers'judgement, since they required little strength, skillor cleverness.From this point of view, one trade consistently symbolized the lowest of thelow 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 thesongs of the compagnonnage. including that of "conciliatory" tanner Piron. whichstigmatized 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 shoemakerswere fraudulently initiated to the secrets of the compagnonnage. Thus it wasrecommended that shoemakers bearing emblems of the compagnonnage be killed.This tradition, of course, tended to fall into disuse among the compagnon-nages, yet some shoemakers were still being murdered by mid-century. And themalediction is further carried out by reality: shoemaking is the last of the trades. Orrather, it's not really a trade at all: it is the occupation of concierges who are 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 ofnecessity or bad luck, as in the case of the young haberdasher's apprentice who lostfirst his parents, then his tutor: "he remained alone after this second loss, and hishealth had suffered too much for him to continue in his preferred occupation. Whatcould 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 profes-sional 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 forcedleisure-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 alsosomething of a refuge. The apprenticeship was a relatively short one. and in generalit was not remunerated.5 One therefore tended to find there young men of modest


3/16

The Myth of the Artisan 3backgrounds as well as youngest sons on whom little expense was lavished. Thusthe tailor Constant Hilbey would have liked to ha\e been a cabinetmaker'sapprentice, but "the cabinetmaker demanded more money than Hilbey's father wasable to provide. The father then declared that he could only afford to have his sontrained as a tailor."6 Likewise, the leader of the tailor's strike Andre Troncin. wascondemned to a tailor's apprenticeship after the death of his mother and theremarriage of his father, a woodseller in Besanc,on. When his stepmother took adislike to the children of the first marriage, only his older brother received aprofessional training, and Andre was shunted off to a poor man's apprenticeship."

Nevertheless, Andre Troncin was to have considerable professional success.He became a cutter and shop foreman while at the same time pursuing, throughstudy and the company of students, his education in militancy. Hilbey. on the otherhand, seeking as much as possible to avoid "getting into a rut." chose to makechildren's clothes because that specialty "required less attention and intelligence.""Generally speaking, however, the work produced in shops where workers weresqueezed one against the other, all bent over a too-narrow work bench with theirlegs crossed, the needlework accomplished "with a regularity approaching that ofmachines"9 had nothing in it which could have created a strong professional pride.And the supposed contrast between the quality work of the professional tailors andthe poor work of the clothing-industry workers is a very dubious one: it is the sameworkers who, when the shops are in their off-season, work in the clothing industry.10In addition, corporate tradition and the collective consciousness are very weak,given the great mobility of the workers. A correspondent from La Fashion stressesthe weakness of collective professional links, in contrast to the tradition of mutualaid among the compagnonnages: "Nary a fraternal link uniting them. They see oneanother: Hello. They leave one another: Goodbye, and all is said. A nothe r cause oftheir ruin is the brevity of their stay in each workshop. A term of three m onths is thelongest."11For the tailors and shoemakers alike, the mobilizing role was played not byprofessional links or by pride in their work, but rather by the particular "freedom"[disponibilite] of the workers: Material freedom stemming from the trade's role as arefuge or outlet, also from the abundance of manpower and from the off-seasons,which add the dimension of unemployment to their identities as workers. Intellectualfreedom, linked to the small intellectual and moral commitment required in thepractice 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 mindidle and leading it to seek fulfillment elsewhere.12 This is especially the case with theshoemakers and tailors; and what is true for the common workers applies all themore to the leaders. These "easy" trades are those where one is most likely to findmen whose intellectual capacities and hum an aspirations are not used professionallyor satisfied in the work place.The relationship between these two "freedoms" allows us to conceive of themobilization of a trade, the capacity of its workers to rally around valuespolitical


4/16

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 likeTroncin. for example, who earns 2400 francs a yearthree times more than theaverageand who, as shop foreman, enjoys the confidence of his employers,has no financial motive to becom e 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 acomplete reversal of the prevailing opinion, and show that militant activity isperhaps inversely proportional to the organic cohesion of the trade, the strength ofthe organization and the ideology of the group. Workers in what was consideredthe king of trades, carpentry (for carpenters were the direct descendants of thelegendary builders of the Temple of Solomon), were more than satisfied by theirorganization and by their awareness of professional superiority. When they becameengaged 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 theircorporate struggle. Likewise, the curriers, very advanced in terms of their solidarity,are little heard from outside of their own circle.11 The highest level of militancy is tobe 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 notthe 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 collectiveprofessional identity. The structure of the Saint-Simonian workers' groups is, in thislight, significant: the most active of these groupsthe one in the twelfth arrondis-sement of Parisincludes not a single representative of the leading industry in thatarea, that of the curriers, tawers and tanners. Nor does it include any members ofthe next two most im portan t trades in that ne ighborhood, metal casters and potteryworkers. The militant worker population was situated within the poorest of theworld 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

con trast between the ideas of the S aint-Simon ian "priests" and those of the workersthey 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 whilepreaching their gospel. The workers, however, were attracted for opposite reasons:as the worker and songster Vingard tells us in his Memoires, "There were manywho, disgusted with their lives as salaried workers, embraced Saint-Simonian ideas


5/16

The Myth of the Artisan 5only because they hoped to bid an eternal farewell to the past." 15 The less sophist-icated 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 akind of social security system. The more enlightened workers were seeking intel-lectual growth, an escape from the worker's world.The lives of these workers whose trajectories came to intersect those ofUtopian propaganda bring us now to a serious reconsideration of our ideas aboutthe artisan and his attitude toward work. The term "artisan" evokes for us a certainstability, a certain identification of an individual with a function. Yet identities areoften misleading. We find, for example, that there are two haberdashers among theSaint-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 educatedproletarian. Being out of money, he was willing to accept a position as a servantwith the Saint-Simonians, yet the following year, we find him working as asecretary for the Society for the Rights of Man. Later, upon being arrested by thepolice, he is identified as a wine-merchant and. upon a subsequent arrest, he isdescribed as an accounting-clerk. There is nothing exceptional about his case: theprofessional identities under which militants are known to their colleagues,"bourgeois" militants, or the police are often but temporary stages in an otherwiserocky 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 soonas they are set up. their bills and loan payments going unpaid, with their feverishwait for provincial inheritances, their continual trips to the pawn-shops, theirhopes and disillusionments, these artisans often led a life quite similar to the one weassociate with the "marginal" workers of today. And often they were no morecommitted to their work than today's workers. Few Saint-Simonian artisans re-sisted 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 toMichel Chevalier that he is not put off by any kind of work, and that he can just aseasily "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 ofthis ambiguity from two seemingly contrasting cases. The first is that of the archety-pal militant artisan, Agricol Perdiguier. author of the IJvre du Compagnonnageand the Mem oires dun Comp agnon. In the context of our labor history, he wouldseem to represent a perfect example of a worker bringing into the political strugglehis consciousness of himself as a proud and able worker. Yet his life story suggest anenigma: 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


6/16

6 ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983apparently lived in poverty in a slum of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And ratherthan make spiral staircases or other masterpieces of artistry, he made little dressing-tables whose price was to d iminish, in a few years' time, from twelve to seven francsapiece.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 washis 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 order to boost his income. Nordoes this proud artisan hesitate to badger George Sand into giving his wife somesewing-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 istempted to say yes, especially in light of his Biographie de I'auteur du Livre ducompagnonnage which is rather like the dark side of his two famous books. In it, themethodical accounting he presents of the splinters that have entered his body, thefalling 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 thiswork, 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 saythat the men who are loudest in singing the glory of Work are those who have mostintensely experienced the degeneration of tha t ideal. This consciousness of degenera-tion is expressed with a naked force in some Saint-Simonian documents, andespecially in the despairing letters filled with hallucinatory descriptions in which thecarpenter Gauny describes the experience of a life "im prisoned" by the " trap" of theproletariat, torn to shreds by the "frenzy of tyrannical activity in our time." 18 But wealso see it crop up in those newspapers of the 1840s which aspire to be the voice ofthe working people: in the anecdotes of IM Fraternite or La R uchepopulaire, in theeditorializing of L'Atelier against any weakness in meeting one's obligations towardwork. Such editorializing becomes even more significant when we see that one of theprincipal editors of L'Atelier, the locksmith Gilland, has written in ls Conteursouvriers of the hellish experience of apprenticeship and of the feeling of despair thataccompanied his entry into working life; and when we see, twenty years later, thesoul of that newspaper, the typographer and sculptor Corbon. apologize andrecognize the virtues of indifference toward work, as seen in Parisian workers forwhom that indifference helps preserve their hopes for a better society. One mayobject that these ambiguous attitudes are not those of the silent majority. But it isprecisely those who are satisfied with their work who have no need to sing hymns toit.One must nonetheless be careful not to simply turn the standard interpretationupside down. For the hatred of work is, like its "love," ambiguous. This can be seenin the case of the Saint-Simonian tailor Delas, who appears to be the complete


7/16

The Myth of the Artisan 7opposite of Perdiguier. Here is how Vincard, in his Memoires. presents this mis-sionary worker: "a weak compagnon. working little and poorly, as a result earningalmost nothing and barely subsisting, having no concern for his future; if one spoketo him abou t this, he would reply: Who cares! this won't last, do you think I'm thesort to spend my life sewing petit po int? '20 From his vantage-point forty years later,Vincard 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 '30she 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 m anagers andemployees in the clothing trade where he plays a leadership role. His lack of interestin "petit point" is not hard to reconcile with his passion for social innovations andfor inventions that give an "intellectual" dignity to the profession. During this entireperiod, the "geometric cut" is very much talked-about among the tailors. It isgenerally favored by men of progressthe republican Canneva or the FourieristBarde and even men of "disorder" like Suireau. associated with Troncin in leadingthe strikers of 1840. The "geometric cut," scoffed at by political and sartorialconservatives.21 is one of those inventions which, like a commitment to politics orliterature, compensate for the baseness of one's work and broaden the careeroptions of those with inquisitive and independent minds.

In the same way that the hyms to Work covered up a feeling of disillusionment,so too indifference and even hatred for the servitude of work can lead to anadjustment, a series of compensations that turn everything around. In his occasionalwork as a floor-layer, no longer under the gaze of his mas ters, or in the presence ofhis companions in servitude or subject to the workbell. the carpenter Gauny cancreate for himself a relationship to his work that is both playful and ascetic, andmake of this relationship the basis for a philosophy of emancipation.22 This ambi-guity is clearly seen in the workers' poetry, which com bines a num ber of themes: thesuffering of an existence that is lived far from its dream, the ascetic joy to be derivedfrom the tour tie force of successfully living two lives at once, and an image of workas an ambiguous activity that mediates between several worlds. Thus, in the versesof the stonemason Poncy. 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 conventsWhose walls of dust have flown off to the winds.A nomadic pariah, I have carried my trowelInto brilliant boudoirs perfumed with love.Into more than one tavern aspark with joy,Where cups flow with generous wineIn smoke-filled garrets.23


8/16

8 ILWCH, 24, Fall 19833. 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 ofhorizontal controls: accumulating, cross-checking, verifying certain kinds of data:economic statistics, descriptions of conditions, acts of repression, literature, etc. Hisvigilance 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 dis-course to a material situation, or deducing a given type of militant practice from agiven type of industrial organization. Between the different kinds of knowledge, thedifferent kinds of data which we use to piece together a p icture of the militantworker, there are eno rmous gaps, lacunae that go unnoticed. And the historian whocarefully 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 agroup, of their solidarity, their values regarding work, and the relationship betweentheir 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 thestruggle, between the brilliance of luxury and the conditions of the artisans, betweenthe artisan's end-product and the confidence of his hymn to Work, between therumblings of the crowd and the voices of its representatives, an entire series ofinferences 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 wouldlike to consider only two examples of ruses that have helped form our image of theworker of 1848.

The first example consists of the Statistique de 1'Industrie a Paris [StatisticalSurvey of Industry in Paris], published during the revolution of 1848 by the ParisChamber of Commerce. It depicts the population of artisans as highly skilled,well-paid, working as regularly as their trades allow and possessing a solid educa-tion. This portrait is just the sort of thing to confirm our image of the worker of '48as a skilled artisan, educated and relatively well-off, except during periods ofeconomic and political crisis. The problem is that the survey was all too obviouslyconducted to produce just such an image. Without even discussing the salariesquoted 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 theworkers selected to do the writing had difficulty expressing themselves? Looking atthese flattering figures, one must bear in mind that this survey is above all acounter-survey. Planned in 1847, it was accelerated in 1848 so as to appear beforeanother survey commissioned by the Assembly's Labor Committee. Conducted bymanagers who obtained their information from other managers, it meant to provethat "in normal and ordinary times, the working population of Paris leads asatisfactory existence in all respects."24 Yet even the coordina tor of the survey allows


9/16

The Myth of the Artisan 9that there may be some doubt as to the authenticity of some information providedby managers who wished to show a conciliatory attitude, so as to "bring about themuch-desired recovery in business and employment." In order to put the blame onpolitical agitators, who theoretically worked alone and from the outside to upsetindustrial harm ony , 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 theworld 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 orglorify its greatness, we run the risk of inferring a false picture of the collectivity theyrepresent or of the realities which underly their speech, unless we determine veryprecisely who is speaking, who is being addressed and what the stakes are. Thepresentation of the anthology La Parole ouvri'ereon which I collaborated withAlain Faurethus 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 seemsto me, does not take into accou nt two fundamental characteristics of these workers'publications: first, that they are polemical texts addressed to other factions of theworker intelligentsia; and second, that they reflect political and ideological positionsfrom the "bourgeois" world. I have attempted, in my analysis of the principalworkers' newspaper of the time, U Atelier, to show the complexity of these positions:the glorification of work that one finds in L'Atelier is neither the expession of amore or less diffuse "class consciousness," nor is it the view of an elite group ofskilled workers.26 UAtelier did not oppose the bourgeois view of work as creative;but it did oppose the idea of work as condemnation, as imposed task, that was heldby Saint-Simonians, Fourierists, communists, icarians, etc. On the one hand, thisconception, which was that of the neo-catholic workers inspired by Buchez, 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 theinstrument of a political struggle which sought to unite the forces of the intellectualand militant worker elite around a specific political force, that of the moderaterepublicans. UAtelier's discourse on work or worker unity is precisely the means bywhich it sought, paradoxically, to integrate the forces of the worker elite into anexternal political force.

In the case of L'Atelier, the specifically political elements are quite visible. Yetvery often, political conflicts were hidden behind facade of collective discourse.From this point of view, one might profitably reconsider the question of the "workerpress" in 1848. In the anthology mentioned earlier, I gave an important place to theJournal des Travailleurs, published in June 1848 by the "central com mittee" of theworkers' corporations, an offshoot of the Commission du Luxembourg broughttogether by Louis Blanc. I presented this publication as a kind of systematization ofthe experience of the corporations, as the crystallization of a unitary class ideology.27It now seems to me that one must take into greater account the ambiguity of this


10/16

10 ILIVCH, 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 ofcorporations. Although its most influential member, Pierre Vincard, had the title of"jewelry engraver," we have good reason to suspect that he spent very little of his lifeengraving jewelry. In 1848, he was already a journalist specialized in workers'issuesnot a corporate representative. And it was Louis Blanc, not the jewelryengravers, who placed him on the commission. His former colleague from InFraternite, the metal-caster Malarmet. was more of an authentic woker. yet he toowas not elected by his peers: once again, it was Louis Blanc who selected him for thecommission. The sculptor Jules Salmson. author of an editorial in the Journal desTravailleurs, was most likely brought in by Louis Blanc as well, for he belonged tothe same artistic circle as Louis' brother Charles Blanc. While the Journal desTravailleurs appeared to be the collective organ of the workers' corporations, it wasin fact a weapon in the conflict between the "avant-garde" and large sections of therank-and-file. Accused by this rank-and-file of having been overly preoccupied withthe elections and having acted as satellites of the clubs, the editors counter-attackedon economic grounds by proposing a territorial organization of links betweenproducers and consumers that would counterbalance the separatist and apoliticaltendencies of the corporations.

4. The fabrication of images. Methodo logical and political issues.The preceding examples serve to focus our attention once again on an issuefilled with complexities and contradictions: that of the relations between the labormovement "per se" and "outside" influences of a political and ideological nature. Inmany cases, we have a tendency to interpret as collective practice or class "ethos"political statements which are in fact highly individualized. We attach too muchimportance to the collectivity of workers and not enough to its divisions; we looktoo 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 goodmethodological principles. We have all followed the lead of the ethnologists whowarned us of the dangers of ethnocentrism, who taught us not to project our reasonsonto the practice of others. Most of us have learned elsewhere to beware of thepolitical structures and ideologies proposed to the working class from above.Methodological requirements and political wariness thus work together to focus ourattention on those aspects of the workers' struggle and discourse that can beexplained exclusively in terms of their own practice and experiences. Thus wedutifully 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 pe2'haps avoiding one form of "intellectualracism" only to fall into anotherone that consists of overstressing the difference ofidentity. By considering the carpenter Perdiguier, the tailor Troncin. the locksmithGilland and the engraver Vin^ard to be representative of the population of skilled


11/16

The Myth of the Artisan 11artisans, we are not perceiving them for what they really are: a marginal group at thefrontier 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 recommendsthat workers not concern themselves with anything besides their work. We imaginea carpenter turning his sentences as he turns wood, seeing the world through histools. Thinking we can define his militancy on the basis of his trade, we wind updefining it from the standpoint of our own functionalist preconceptions. And at thesame time, we are ready to give credence to certain descriptions of w orkers' practiceswhich transform political biases into ethnological traits.

I am thinking especially here of some descriptions of Denis Poulot's in LeSublime, and the validation they received in labor historiography through the workof Georges Duveau.3 Alain Cottereau has recently described the practices of workerresistance which Poulot denounced as a form of "cheating." But there is somethingelse we must take into account: Denis Poulot was not primarily a manager whoaccused workers. He was first of all a Gambettist political militant who wanted todiscredit the militants of the Internationale and the working-class orators of thepublic meetings. Certain of his descriptions do not refer to any practices of theworkers; rather, they are pure political m ythologizing. This is especially clear in hisportrait of a group of worker leaders that he calls the "Sons of God": his discussionof them is filled with contradictions, to the point that one's entire image of thembecomes inconsistent. They are but a political caricature, fleshed out by animaginary anthropology. But the historian's gaze followed, and the polemical caricaturewas then validated as a form of anthropology that explained workers' behavior.29We thus reach the heart of the paradox, which brings us back to our initialconsideration: that the idea of "skilled workers' socialism" is a politically motivatedconcept. And those who have been the most intent upon showing the labormovement as an outgrowth of the workers' own culture and professional milieuhave most often done so in order to subordinate this movement to a particularpolitical 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 indirectform of political discourse. It has been done, for the most part, by men who werenot historians, but researchers, sociologists or jurists, and who were associated withweakening factions of the labor movement. The first major labor historians of the19th century, Joseph Barberet and Isidore F inance, were political and trade-unionistmilitants, 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 labormatters. There, they delved into the history of trades, their traditions of struggle andtheir associations. The result was that they proposed, in contrast to the noisy scene


12/16

12 1LWCH, 24, Fall 1983of the socialist and revolutionary trade-unionist movement, the image of a moreprofound and authentic workers' movement, rooted in the traditions of the profes-sions and in the solidarity of the corporate struggles, developing its own forms ofunionist or cooperative organization, and ready, on the basis of its own culture, tocollabo rate with the republican State in instituting an "industrial democracy" basedon professional competence, the education of the masses and social cooperation.30Such an image might bring together, despite their differences, those sectors of thelabor movement threatened by the rise of Marxist socialism and revolutionaryunionism: the world of the cooperatives and the mutual-aid societies, unionistfactions influenced by positivism, institutions of popular education, and the "experi-mental" tradition of Utopian socialism (claimed by Godin and his nephew Prud-hommeaux). Outside of the labor movement, this concept found support in theideology of "solidarity" of radical politicians such as Leon Bourgeois, and in thosecircles where new social science was being developed for the young Republic,especially that groundbreaking edge of social science that was sociology: it was thesociologist Celestin Bougie wh o. far m ore than his colleagues in history, shaped thecareers of the young researchers in labor history. It was on this fringe of the labormovement and of the University that this form of social history was founded,seeking to counter socialist and Marxist "demagoguery" with a true tradition ofsocialist humanism of the worker elite.

This line of thought, first linked to the rise of the radical Republic, was thentaken 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. thenappropriated 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 theypresented as the expression of the new workers, unskilled and cut off from thecultural and organizational traditions of the working class. This transformationoccurred in two stages. It had its beginnings in the pre-war years, as a way ofinterpreting the crisis in revolutionary unionism. At a time when this crisis madeclear the enormous gap that existed between the humanistic, pacifist Utopias ofPelloutier, Monatte, Albert Thierry, et al. and the far less glorious reality ofcorporatist 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 aconsequence of the new forms of the organization of labor: with the emergence ofTaylorism, intelligence had been "driven out of the workshops": 31 workers who hadbeen masters of their work and of their own minds were now subjected to the lawsof mindless, unskilled labor.The same interpretation naturally presented itself after the war to explain thefailure 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


13/16

The Myth of the Artisan 13socialist family was happy to take on a great tradition of the socialism of theprofessional elites; the communist family, ordered by Moscow to "change its classbase," found that it was very much to its advantage to have others help them appearto be something they had never succeeded in being: the voice of the assembly-lineworkers.

From that point on, socialist historiography, supported by intellectuals linkedto the corporative movement and to socialist cultural organizations (like the "Centreconfederal d'etudes ouvrieres" of the C.G.T. and the "Institut superieur ouvrier"headed by Georges LeFranc), claimed for itself this "coutume ouvrfere" whichprovides the title of the masterwork of this tendency, La Coutume ouvrfere by thejurist Maxime Leroy. It pursued its quest for a "true" labor movement to hold up incontrast to the noisy revolutionary dem agoguery a round 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 Petain's new order.3- The other branch had its swan song after the war, in a worklike Michel Collinet's L'Ouvrier franQais. 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. AndCollinet'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 (AlainTouraine) who reconfirmed it for the historian.33 We know that those who aredefeated on the battleground often get their revenge by imposing their views onhistorians. The reason is simple: it is they who, by fascinating history, make itinteresting.

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 hopes of the nineteenth century and 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 I wish to deny the existence or the importance of these values. I havenot claimed that apprenticeship was an unimportant thing, or that profession andprofessional 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 tohim. Thus I attempted in La Nuit des proletaires to show the continuity that existsin the 1840s between the mentality of the worker that writes itself in poems andworker newpapers, and that which sees itself living in the everyday context of theworkshop. 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 theirworkers' ideal. And they cou ld, on occasion, experience equally sincere satisfactionsin the exercise of their trades. Nonetheless, to put themselves in the position of


14/16

14 ILWCH, 24, Fall 1983writing "We, the workers . . .," they had to have first felt very deeply the rage of themistreated apprentice or the disgust of the autodidac t at the attitudes and values ofthe workshop braggart. The representation of the worker that they bring out in thepress 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 workerhumanism and of the revolution of the producers, a number of heterogeneouselements. Internationalism, pacifism, and the autodidactic ideal of such men asPelloutier, Monatte and Pericat are much closer to the moral and intellectual visionof militant schoolteachers than to the corporative traditions of control of appren-ticeship and hiring, or the physical violence practiced by unionist gangs. But it wasnecessary, in the face of parliamentary socialism and Marxist dogmatism, toartificially weld one to the other in a concept of workers' self-emancipation whichdrew its values from the workplace.

If this bid for power has generally been validated by social historians, it ismost likely because culturalist models have tended to impose themselves. In attem pt-ing to reconstruct workers' attitudes against the simplifications of Marxist econom-ism and political hagiography, historians naturally turned to the analysis of culturalanthropology. But in doing so. they endorsed a problematic axiom: that of thehomogeneity of so-called cultural practices, of the single meaning that is expressedthrough eating habits or learned d iscourses, through the products of work and thoseof 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, thisundifferentiated sense of culture is likely to miss the originality of the representationsin at play in worker discourse and politics. It would thu s be advisable to rethink therelationship that links the identifications and symbolizations of the workingmanwith the practices of his work and his material conditions as a worker, to rethink itoutside of any axioms of cultural homogeneity. The remarks presented here havesought to go in that direction. "It is necessary," wrote Marcel Mauss, "that thesociologist (and the politician) not remain on a level of intellectual simplism, butthat he truly, like the psychologist and the doctor, come to realize that men candesire, think and feel contradictory things, be they at the same time or in successivemoments."34 The same goes for the historian.

NOTES'This work was first presented at a conference on "Representations of Work in France."

organize d by the We stern Societies Pr ogr am at Co rnel! University in April. 1983. The proceedings ofthe conference will be published by Cornell University Press in 1984 85. The translation is by DavidH. Lake of Vassar College.


15/16

The Myth of the Artisan 15!. This fact is particularly stressed by Christopher H. Johnson in Utopian Communism in

France: Cahel and the Icarians (Ithaca. 1974) as well as in his con tribut ion to Price et al.. Revolutionand Reaction: 1848 and the Second French Republic (London, 1975).

2. H. Leneveux, l Travail manuel en France (Paris, n.d.), 166.3. Piron. "La Fete de braves." in Le Chansonnier du Tour de France (Par is. 1840). See. in thesame collection. "Les braves" and "Reception d'un compagnon cordonnier."

4. Alphonse Viollet, Ijes Po'etes du peuple au XI Xe si'ecle (Paris. 1846). 87. The reference is tothe poet and shoemaker from Reims, Gonzalle.

5. See the report of the tailor Deluc from Bordeaux that accompanies his project for anassociation (Archives Nationales. F12 4631).

6. A. Viollet. Poetes du peuple, 3.7. .1. P. Gilland. "Biographie des hommes obscurs, Andre Troncin, " IM Feuille du Village,

November 28. 1X50.X. Constant Hilbey. Reponse a tou.s men critiques (Paris . 1846). 51.9. Pierre Vingard, "Les ouvriers tailleurs ," Le Travail qfflanchi, January 7. 1849.10. See the analyses of the master tailor Canneva, in his newspaper. La Fashion.11. IM Fashion, April 20. 1842.12. Monneret. Hygiene des tailleurs, published as a supplement in August Canneva. Le Livre du

tailleur (Paris. 1838).13 On the forms of mutual aid am ong the curriers, see Office du Travai l, Ijes Associations

professionnelles ouvrferes (Paris . 1900), Vol. II, 193.14. On the groups of Saint-Simonian workers, see the archives of the Arsenal (Fonds Enfantin,

especially dossiers 7815 and 7816) and the second part of my book. La Suit des Profetaires (Paris.1981).

15 Louis Vincard. M'emoires episodiques d'un vieux chansonnier saint-simonien (Paris. 1879).16. Letter from Ruffin to Michel Chevalier. Fonds Enfantin, Ms. 7606.17. On all that follows, see Agricol Perdiguier. Biographie de I'auteur du Livre du Compagnon-

nage (Paris. 1846).18 The manuscrip ts of the carpenter Gauny. a unique account of a worker's life, are preserved

in the Bibliotheque Municipal de Saint Denis. I have collected the most significant of these texts in thefollowing volume: Gabriel Gauny. le Philosophe plebeien (Paris. 1983).

19. Anthime Corbon. l Secret du peuple de Paris (Paris, 1863).20 VmQard. Memoires episodiques, 95.21 For the scoffers, see Coua nnon . Journal des Marchands Tailleurs (1835-1847) and his Le

Parfait Tailleur (Puns, 1852).22. Cf. Gabriel Gauny, "Le travail a la tache." in l Philosophe plebeien. 44-49.23 Charles Poncy, "A Beranger." U Chantier (Paris. 1844). See also my article "Ronds de

fumee: les poetes ouvriers dans la France de Louis-Philippe," Revue des Sciences Humaines 190(April June 1983). In his book. Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge. 1980), William H.Sewell also analyses Poncy's poetry, but from a rather different standpo int .

24. Stallstique de I'Industrie a Paris (Par is. 1851). 61.25. l.a Parole ouvriere. 1830-1851. texts assembled and presented by Alain Faure and Jacques

Ranciere (Paris. 1976).26. Ranciere. //; Suit des Profetaires, chapter X.27. Faure and Ranciere, IM parole ouvriere, 287. On this question, one must of course consult

the fascinating analyses of Remi Gosse/ (IJS ouvriers de Paris [La Roche-sur-Yon. 1967]), whileavoiding the temptation to see in the worker organization that he presents a foreshadowing ofrevolutionary unionism.

28 Denis Poulot. Le Sublime: ou le travailleur comme il est en 1870 et ce qu'il pent etre,reedited and with an introduction b\ Alain Cottereau (Paris . 1980) and Georges Duveau. La Vieouvricrc en France \uu.\ le Second Empire (Paris. 1946).

29 On this pom! see Alain Cottereau's introduction and the debate caused by that int roduct ionin /.t-v ficvultc, logitjuei 12 (Summer 1980).


16/16

16 ILWCH, 24, Fall 198330. See Joseph Barberet, Le Travail en France, Monographies professionnelles (Paris. 1886-

1890). and Office du Travail. Ije ? associations profession/wiles ouvrferes (Paris. 1X99-1904).31. IA Vie imvriere. March 5. 1913.32. Cf. J. Ranciere. "De Pelloutier a Hitler. Syndicalisme et Collaboration." Irs Revolteslogiques 4 (Winter 1977).33. Michel Collinet's influence is clear in the Sartrean analysis of anarcho-unionism (see l^\

Comm unities et la Paix an d Critique de la Raison Dialectique) as well as in the writings of AndreGorz. both of whom inspired others. Bernard H. Moss stresses his indebtedness to the analyses ofMichel Col l ine t and Ala in Toura ine ([.'Evolution du travail ouvrier aux I sines Renault [Pans. 1955])in his work. 77K" Origins of the French labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers (Berke ley.1976).

34 . M a r c e l M a u ss . "L a N a t i on . " Oeuvres (Par is. 1968) , vol . I I I . 579.

58950452 Ranciere Jacques the Myth of the Artisan Critical Reflections on a Category of Social...

Documents

Transcript of 58950452 Ranciere Jacques the Myth of the Artisan Critical Reflections on a Category of Social...