The Myth of the Artisan Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History - Ranciere

8/14/2019 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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(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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

The Myth of the Artisan Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History - Ranciere

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