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Skeins, Scales, Discounts, Steam, and other Objects of Crowd Justice in Early French Textile Mills

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

William M. Reddy
William M. Reddy
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Extract

At 7:00 a.m. on 16 July 1833, M. Minder, owner of a cotton mill at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, a small textile center in Alsace, announced to his spinners that he would henceforth be charging them 1 franc 20 centimes per week for dévidage, that is for the reeling and unreeling of roving or finished thread—a task accomplished by women in a separate workroom. In response, his spinners walked out of the mill. A local arbitration board (the Conseil des Prudhommes) would later rule that M. Minder had broken the work contract (the contrat du travail) since he had not given proper advanced notice to his laborers of the new charge for dévidage. In other words, the board ruled that the laborers had in fact become legally free to leave work by virtue of Minder's improper announcement. Even though all ninety-five of them walked out en masse, they did not thereby constitute an illegal coalition since their unwritten contract with M. Minder as denned by law had been broken first by Minder's failure to give notice. The laborers' subsequent actions, however, did constitute a coalition; and ten of them were later prosecuted under the anti-coalition statutes. They marched directly to several neighboring mills and tried to induce their fellow spin- ners to join them in the streets. Everyone in town knew that M. Minder had not acted alone, that most local mill owners planned to institute a charge for dévidage.

Type
Continuity in Working-Class Concerns
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , April 1979 , pp. 204 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1979

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References

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the seminar of Jacques Revel and Roger Chartier of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, in January 1977 and at the meetings of the Society for French Historical Studies in April 1977.1 am indebted to William H. Sewell, Roger Chartier, Michelle Perrot, John Merriman, and Gary Kornblith for their comments and kind assistance.

1 The following account is taken from Archives Nationales (hereafter cited as AN), BB18 1217 (9281) and F7 6782; it has been previously discussed by Aguet, Jean-Pierre, Les greves sous la Monarchic de Juillet, 1830–1847 (Geneva, 1954), pp. 50–52;Google Scholar and Kahan-Rabecq, Marie-Madeleine, La classe ouvriere en Alsace pendant la Monarchie de Juillet (Paris, 1937), p. 335.Google Scholar

2 The relevant statutes are not the famous Le Chapelier law of 1791, which outlawed coalitions, but the laws of 22 Germinal, An 11, and 9 Frimaire, An 12, concerning the work contract and the work passport or livret. Copies of the relevant statutes were printed inside the covers of most livrets.

3 On these uses of the word, for Gisquet, Michelle Perrot, personal communication, and Aguet, , Les grèves, pp. 32, 34;Google ScholarGossez, Remi, Les ouvriers de Paris, vol. 1,Google ScholarL'organisation, 1848–1852 (Bibliothèque de la Révolution de 1848, xxiv, La-Roche-sur-Yon, 1967), pp. 273, 279, 337, 354;Google ScholarBlanqui, Adolphe, Des classes ouvrieres en France pendant I'annèe 1848 (Paris, 1849), pp. 15, 28, 47, 108–09;Google Scholar AN, F12 2370, pamphlet by Gobelin, , ‘La vérité sur la position actuelle des classes laborieuses et sur la principale cause de leur malaise’ (Darnetal, 1853); on the miners, see Archives departementales du Nord (hereafter cited as ADN), M626/1, M626/2, and M620/12.Google Scholar

4 See laws referred to, note 2, above, and also ADN, M581/137, M604/1,2, 3; AN, F12 501 B, F12 4648, On the English Master and Servant laws, see Simon, Daphne, ‘Master and Servant,’ in Saville, John, ed., Democracy and the Labor Movement (London, 1954), pp. 160–200;Google Scholar and Hobsbawm, E. J., ‘Custom, Wages, and Work-load in Nineteenth-Century Industry,’ in Briggs, Asa and Saville, John, eds., Essays in Labour History (London, 1960), pp. 123–24.Google Scholar

5 For a review of the history of this charge for steam-power, see AN, F12 2370, letter from Ernoult-Bayart et flls, 2 June 1859; also ADN, M606/6, letter from the mayor of Roubaix to the Prefect of the Nord, 9 October 1857. The discussion here follows Hobsbawm's suggestion that piece rates had a special role to play in ‘industries which had always been paid by results-for instance, in the domestic industries in which piecework was a degenerative form of the price which a formerly independent artisan had been paid for the sale of his product, or in occupations directly modelled on such industries,’ see ‘Custom, Wages, and Work-load.’ p. 126. Contrast, e.g., the experience of skilled glassworkers in France who were reduced from monthly or even yearly salaries to piece rates in the 1830s, according to Scott, Joan W., The Glassworkers of Carmeaux (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), p. 34.Google Scholar

6 See ADN, M605/3, demands of the Société républicaine des fileurs (Lille) to Prefect of the Nord, June 1848.

7 On weighing procedures, see ADN, M617/9, report of Prefect of the Nord to Minister of the Interior, 23 September 1839; also ADN, M606/6, report of commissaire de police of Roubaix to Prefect of the Nord, February 1858 (at a time when the same weighing procedure served as base for pay determination); also ADN, M 620/14, complaints of fileurs of Tourcoing to Prefect of the Nord, 8 January 1849.

8 For use of the word ouvrage, see, e.g., report of the Filateurs of Tourcoing to Prefect of the Nord, January 1849, on the unpredictable factors entering into work processes: ‘Car nous savons,’ the filateurs conclude, ‘et il est incontestable qu'avec n'importe quel tarif le fileur ne fera jamais une bonne semaine si l'ouvrage est mauvais.’ See also, on use of word semaine, report of commissaire de police of Lille to the Prefect of the Nord, 19 August 1839 in ADN, M617/9. On use of word ouvrage, see ADN, M589/164, letter of A. Vermesse to M. Mille, 27 March 1856.

9 For various reports on this dispute, see ADN, M617/9.

10 On the Rouen food rioters of 1789, see Archives departementales de la Seine-Maritime, 202 BP 12 (cote provisoire).

11 See the report of Mimeral to Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, 3 March 1836, in AN, F12 2337–38.

12 See Agulhon, Maurice, La république au village (Paris, 1971)Google Scholar and Ozouf, Mona, La fete revolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (Paris, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 For further comments on the cortège form, see Reddy, William M., ‘The Textile Trade and the Language of the Crowd at Rouen (1752–1871),’ Past and Present, No. 74 (February, 1977), 62–89.Google Scholar

14 The term ‘moral economy’ is here used in the narrow sense given to it by Thompson, E. P. in his influential article, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,’ Past and Present, No. 50 (February, 1971), 76–136.Google Scholar The suggestion is that for French textile laborers, the nature of the moral grievance changed at first little in form; that is, it did not immediately come to center on the issue of labor as a commodity, but rather remained focussed on prices paid for tangible products. Again, for further discussion, see Reddy, ‘The Language of the Crowd.’ The author intends to make this point in greater detail (and at greater length than is here possible) in the near future.