EXTERNAL CAUSES OF DECAY
A body of institutions, like a living body, begins by passing through
a period of formation, growth, and consolidation, after which decay
inevitably follows; it becomes feeble, disintegrates, decomposes,
and finally dissolves. Death is thus presented as the natural term
of life with its constant wear and tear, as the necessary end of
the spontaneous development peculiar to living beings. But it is
also determined by the pressure of outside forces, by the action of
environment. Thus the guild system held within itself elements of
dissolution, and at the same time met with destructive forces from
without; it declined and decayed under the combined influences of
internal and external causes.
It seems fitting to begin with the external causes, since these were
the most important. In an unchanging environment living beings could
exist for long unchanged, but the changes ever at work without hasten
changes within, from the very fact that the organism is itself at work.
Thus it was that the guilds were first of all affected by the profound
changes going on around them. The sphere in which they had to work was
both extended and modified. We must follow out the consequences of both
these changes.
1. _The Extension of the Market and its Results._--The fifteenth
century saw the formation of the great States in Europe. France, which
felt herself to be a nation when she was trampled under foot by the
English, was the first to become a unity, and for several centuries
drew her power and her greatness from the start which she thus gained.
Spain was concentrated under the authority of Ferdinand and Isabella.
England, worn out after a terrible civil war, found rest under the
Tudor dynasty. In Germany, which was still very divided, the Hanseatic
League included twenty-four cities. Even in Italy the restless
republics, ever jealous of their independence, were absorbed into
larger territories and placed under a common supremacy. Everywhere the
endless subdivision of the Middle Ages gave place to larger groupings,
possessing fuller life and wider interests. Hence a new situation
arose for the cities; among those which in every state had up till
now been on an equal footing one rose to be the capital, the others,
with diminished prestige and importance, were only secondary centres.
They also ceased to be islets where the people lived lives apart; from
henceforward they formed an integral part of a whole which surrounded
them and no longer allowed of a proud isolation; they could no longer
treat their neighbours as foreigners or enemies; they found themselves
bound together by the necessity of obeying the same laws and the same
sovereign.
It followed that _city economy_, becoming narrow and exclusive, grew
difficult and by degrees impossible.[95] It was replaced by _national
economy_. This meant that the commercial market, instead of being
confined to the inhabitants of a town and its suburbs, included
henceforth the province, the duchy, and by degrees the whole kingdom.
Above all, it meant that the central power no longer legislated
for people enclosed within a small area, but that it attempted to
unify over the whole surface of a considerably enlarged territory
the official language, moneys, weights and measures, as well as the
regulations of industry and the judicial forms; that it suppressed as
far as possible the tolls which obstructed the roads and rivers; that
it carried back to the frontier the barriers which had been set up on
the boundaries of every little domain; that for a localizing spirit
it substituted the desire to reconcile the interests of the different
regions between which it played the part of arbitrator and peacemaker.
Doubtless the economic policy adopted by the great States did not
sensibly differ from that practised in the towns. A system does not
disappear without bequeathing traditions and customs to its successor.
National economy copied the methods of city economy. When Colbert, for
instance, tried to realize for France the ideal of self-sufficiency,
when for this reason he wanted to sell as much as possible and buy as
little as possible abroad, to create industries which were lacking,
to prevent those which existed from leaving the country, to encourage
the export of manufactured goods while watching over their proper
manufacture, and to hinder the import of similar goods by barricading
the country with customs tariffs, he was only taking up once more and
making general an old system formerly tried by Florence or Venice
and adopted later by kings and ministers in France and England, by
Henry IV. and notably by Richelieu. This mercantile system has been
christened Colbertism, and the name will serve provided that it is
known that Colbert was not its father but its godfather.
Nevertheless, in spite of the continuity of the principles which
guide great governors, the mere fact that the enlarged area in which
the guilds operated contained several towns whose jealousy might be
measured by their rights, was a terrible blow for the guilds; each town
with its narrow boundaries, finding itself completely out of harmony
with the world in which it was condemned to live, had to adapt itself
to the new conditions or die.
Not only, however, had the internal markets grown larger, the external
market had also extended enormously, and it was no longer for the
spices and gems of the Levant alone that ships and caravans set out.
In the South, Vasco da Gama had discovered the route to the Indies; in
the West, Christopher Columbus, while seeking those same Indies, had
come upon America; in the North, Russia and Scandinavia had proved to
be magnificent fields for traders to exploit. Africa, which as yet no
one had dared to penetrate, was approached and the existence of Oceania
suspected. Europe, in revenge for old invasions, overflowed in her turn
into other continents; she expanded into distant colonies; the sun no
longer set on her possessions.
The first result was a rearrangement of commercial routes, a formidable
rush to the West. The Mediterranean basin, cut off from the East by
the Turks, ceased to be the meeting-place of nations and the universal
centre of commerce. Genoa and Florence, the mothers and glorious
victims of Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, began to decay, and the
very source of their wealth was assailed by the discoveries of their
children. Beneath the trappings of gold and silk that yet covered them
there was left only the melancholy glory of their dying prosperity.
Venice the rich, Venice the beautiful, slumbering in the fever-laden
air of her canals from which the life was ebbing, slowly died in her
gorgeous setting of palaces and churches and degenerated into a city of
dreams, luxury, and pleasure, where the leisured and the gay came to
seek the shadow of a great past and the splendours of a half-oriental
civilization. Many cities, like Pisa or Siena, deserved with Bruges to
be called "the dead," cut off from the ocean by the encroaching sands
and from liberty by the Spanish lords of Flanders.
How could the guilds hope to escape from the consequences of
misfortunes which struck at their very roots? An even graver menace
threatened them. To take advantage of the new outlets, to satisfy a
clientèle henceforth scattered over the most diverse countries, it
was necessary to produce more, and to produce more it was necessary
to produce in a different way. Production was transformed to meet the
needs of trade. Capitalism, which had hitherto been confined to a few
towns, received an impetus and developed with unexpected vigour.
"Great" commerce, which spread over an immense area, created exchanges
and banks, and great financial institutions for the circulation of
capital; it formed great companies which undertook to exploit the
resources of new countries; it accelerated transport and built up in
the press a valuable instrument for the spread of information and
for advertisement. In its use of credit it no longer encountered the
displeasure of the Church, which, together with civil law, became
reconciled to loans on interest and recognized the practice as long as
the rate was moderate. Its coffers, filled with the gold and silver
of the galleons which came from Mexico and Peru, gave Europe a hint
of a hitherto unsuspected danger--the glut of money. Capital, too,
which had accumulated in the landlords' and merchants' chests, took a
leading part in business activities by reason of its power to command;
it became a moving force.
Henceforward, as we have already seen in the case of the woollen
merchants, three functions, hitherto united in the person of the small
craftsman of the towns, became separated: those of the _merchant_, who
bought raw material and sold finished goods; of the _manufacturer_, who
possessed the appliances of labour; and of the _workman_, who wrought
with his own hands. Three classes of men answer to this specialization
at the present day: the _traders_, who are not producers, but act
as middlemen between producer and consumer, deciding what shall be
produced and concerning themselves solely with buying and selling; the
_industrial capitalists_, who, at the tradesmen's orders, direct the
transformation of the raw materials entrusted to them, in workshops and
with machinery which are their property; finally the _workmen_, who,
mere wage-earners, carry out manual or mechanical work as they are told.
These three classes of men have different interests. The big merchants,
with their bold speculations, are impatient of anything which hinders
circulation: town dues, customs, tolls, differences of coinage, weights
and measures, all regulations, everything, in fact, which tends to
isolate towns and countries. When Louis XI. convoked the States
General in 1484, the town deputies expressed themselves in favour of
the freedom of trade, which now felt strong enough to stand alone.
When Henry IV., on the advice of Montchrestian and Laffemas, wanted
to secure French markets to the French by increasing customs tariffs,
all the guilds consulted declared themselves in favour of the project,
with the exception of the mercers--"sellers of everything, makers of
nothing," as they were called--thus plainly expressing the hostility
of wholesale trade to the exclusive policy which had been pursued by
the towns. The great traders represented a revolutionary tendency with
regard to the guild system; they were its constant enemies; they ended
by being its destroyers.
The manufacturers, for their part, were not averse to being protected
against foreign competition; they were indeed inclined to ask for this
protection. Like the guilds, they had a predilection for privilege
and monopoly, but were not in agreement with them on some essential
points. In order to produce much and profitably they were in need of
cheap and abundant labour. Ignoring the rules of apprenticeship, they
hired foreigners, peasants, women, and children; in the sixteenth
century, in the town of Norwich, which from being agricultural had
become industrial, children of six were employed in the factories.[96]
When they did not crowd the workers together in enormous workshops,
they resorted to what sometimes goes by the equivocal name of "the
domestic system," which I prefer to call "scattered manufacture."
In the towns they employed men and women, who, working in their own
homes, were sheltered from inquisitive eyes. Such workers were found
in the suburban and country districts, in any places which were beyond
the ordinary jurisdiction of wardenship and mastership. Or again,
they employed labour in the hospitals, orphanages, or work-rooms of
religious orders, which had escaped from the jealous supervision of
the guilds. In Picardy, at certain periods, the weaver workmen thus
scattered among the villages numbered 10,000.[97] The same thing was
to be found in Brittany,[98] Normandy, and Dauphiny, in the manufacture
of linen and hemp; in Velay in that of lace; in Auvergne in that
of trimmings; in the Rhone valley in that of silk. In England the
peasants, driven from home, impoverished, eaten out by sheep, deprived
of their means of livelihood by the enclosure of huge pasture lands
to which they might no longer take their cattle, provided a wonderful
reserve army for industrial magnates in search of labour.[99] The
town artisans fought with desperation against the blows struck at
town monopolies by these new departures.[100] Opposition--significant
but utterly useless--was offered on every hand to the new demands of
large-scale production. Risings against foreign workers, like those
at Norwich; the many attempts to limit the number of apprentices;
the English law of 1555 known as the Weavers' Act, which forbade a
master to own or hire out more than a certain number of looms; and
the innumerable lawsuits in France brought by guilds to check the
disastrous competition of peasant labour were all illustrations of this
opposition.
Another necessity of large-scale production, involving still greater
consequences, was mechanical labour.
"Great" industry demanded the division--even the disintegration--of
labour. The product, before it is finished, passes through the hands of
various craft groups. It undergoes a series of processes which follow
one another and are interdependent, and of which each is carried out
by specially trained workers. This was the case in the manufacture of
wool from the thirteenth century. The wool had to be washed, beaten,
carded, combed, oiled, spun, woven, fulled; then the cloth had to be
stretched, dyed, dressed, and folded. It is a well-known fact that
if each class of work is entrusted to a special class of workers,
manufacture costs less both in money and in time. But it must be added
that this disintegration of the whole process into a succession of
operations leads straight to the mechanical system.[101] The simple
and monotonous tasks performed under this system of subdivision by the
different classes of workers owe their automatic and half-mechanical
character to the uniformity of the movements they demand. It needed
very little to complete the technical revolution already begun and to
make hands of wood or metal accomplish what had been done by human
hands.
A machine may be described as a more or less complicate engine, which,
by means of an animate or inanimate motive force, executes movements
which hitherto have been performed by the human hand. The weaving loom
and the spinning wheel were already rudimentary machines. The Middle
Ages knew, under the name of "mills," more complicate appliances, of
which many date from the Alexandrine period, which was to Graeco-Roman
antiquity what the nineteenth century is to modern times--the era of
science and machinery.
Water- or wind-mills, mills for grinding flour, for crushing nuts
or olives, for raising water; iron mills; mills for fulling cloth,
for making paper, sugar, silk stuffs--all these expensive appliances
were in use, and gradually spread over Europe during the period which
brought to a close and immediately followed the Middle Ages. Thus old
industries changed their method, and new industries were from the start
modelled on the new system.
Printing may be quoted as an example; the printing press, with its
movable letters, took the place of writing--the work of human fingers.
It may be said of it that it was born mechanical, and if we ask why it
killed the slow industry of the old copyists who protested in vain, we
need only look at the unexpected results it achieved. The identity of
the copies produced; the speed, which allowed demands hitherto forced
to wait months and years to be met in a few days, and which gave, so to
speak, wings to thought; and the unheard-of cheapness, which reduced
the price of a Bible from 600 to 60 crowns and even less (things
which evidently could not be obtained without the co-operation of the
Prince of Darkness, as was proved by the red characters which flamed
at the head of the chapters), such were the diabolical but invaluable
advantages which in less than half a century assured the triumph and
the rapid spread of the new invention.
If we remember the thousand-and-one prohibitions with which the guild
statutes bristled--the prohibition to mould seals with engraved
letters, the regulations which in every craft prevented all change and
consequently all improvement in manufacture, it is easy to understand
how "great" industry, without deliberate effort, but by its very
development, overthrew the economic order which had reigned in the
Middle Ages. The guilds, moreover, with the best intentions in the
world, fought against innovations which seemed to them abominations.
In England in the year 1555 the _gig-mill_, a mechanical appliance,
was forbidden by law.[102] The first English coaches, called "flying
coaches," were attacked and censured[103] because they threatened to
injure the art of riding and the manufacture of saddles and spurs, and
because, being too cold in winter and too hot in summer, they were bad
for the health of travellers; but, above all, because, on account of
their extreme speed, they would be dangerous. The public authorities
were begged to limit them to thirty miles a day (rather less than the
distance a fast train covers to-day in an hour); and later, in France,
when the _turgotines_ were instituted, which shortened by half the
length of a journey, an abbot added the strange complaint that, by
going so fast, they deprived the passenger of the means of hearing
mass.[104]
"Great" commerce and "great" industry, however, continued to develop
in the direction they had originally taken, and finally overcame the
old-fashioned timidity of the guilds, which were gradually reduced
to defending the interests of the small crafts. The great merchant
guilds were predominant at first; the Lord Mayor of London was chosen
from the city guilds, and the guild of the river merchants gave to
Paris its coat-of-arms and motto and was an embryonic form of the
municipal councils which followed later. As time went on, however,
they disappeared or separated themselves from the organized crafts.
At Paris, the Hanse of the river merchants does not figure among the
_six guilds_ which head the list, although they did not actually lose
their privileges till the year 1672. In London,[105] the city guilds
slowly ceased to have any connection with the crafts whose names they
bore. The great capitalists, whether bankers, merchants, or great
manufacturers, voluntarily formed themselves into a separate group and,
as far as possible, cut themselves clear of the trammels of the guild
system.
Meantime, under the system of large-scale production, the workers
were either subjected to the guilds as we have seen them at Florence
in the _Arte della Lana_,[106] or else, if they were not enrolled,
were treated by their individual masters in such a way as to keep them
permanently in a precarious and subordinate position. Whether they
worked crowded together in great workshops--where, owing to their
numbers, they were under severe discipline--or at home, in which case
their isolation only brought them, under the appearance of liberty,
harder conditions, they soon saw that, with the rarest possible
exceptions, they were destined to be wage-earners for life. They no
longer had the hope, the ambition, even the idea of one day owning the
factory in which they laboured, or the business which every week paid
its thousands of workers. The divorce was complete between the manual
worker and the instruments of production, and, in consequence, between
the men who were the servants of these expensive appliances and the
master-manufacturers who owned them. Masters and workmen, henceforth
separated by their present and their future, by their education, their
manner of life, and their aspirations, formed two classes, united
as yet, in that both were interested in the intensity of industrial
activity, but opposed, in that the one wished to keep the other in
subjection and to sweat out of him as much work as possible, as cheaply
as possible.
It is from this time, and still only in "great" industry, that a
working class can be spoken of. For a long time it was fairly small;
but the self-consciousness it was acquiring was shown by the strikes,
the combinations, and the attempts at union which were common in
England from the sixteenth century; by combinations which were already
national, like that of the papermakers in France at the end of the
seventeenth century; by the popular songs in which the discontent of
the workmen was expressed in bitter complaints or biting irony.[107]
The energy and diplomacy displayed in the sixteenth century by the
master printers of Lyons and Paris in preventing their workmen from
striking (_fair le tric_, which was the name given in those days to
concerted abstention from work[108]) is well known; so is the song sung
in England by the wool workers[109] towards the end of the seventeenth
century, the title of which is curious. The master is supposed to speak.
THE CLOTHIER'S DELIGHT;
OR, THE RICH MEN'S JOY, AND THE POOR MEN'S SORROW
Wherein is expressed the craftiness and subtility of Many Clothiers
in England, by beating down their Workmen's Wages.
Combers, weavers, and spinners, for little gains,
Doth earn their money, by taking of hard pains.
_To the tune of_ "Jenny, come tae me," etc., "Paddington's Pound,"
or "Monk hath confounded," etc.
Of all sorts of callings that in England be,
There is none that liveth so gallant as we;
Our trading maintains us as brave as a knight,
We live at our pleasure, and take our delight;
We heapeth up riches and treasure great store,
Which we get by griping and grinding the poor.
And this is a way for to fill up our purse,
Although we do get it with many a curse.
Throughout the whole kingdom, in country and town,
There is no danger of our trade going down,
So long as the Comber can work with his comb,
And also the Weaver weave with his lomb;
The Tucker and Spinner that spins all the year,
We will make them to earn their wages full dear.
And this is the way, etc.
In former ages we us'd to give,
So that our work-folks like farmers did live;
But the times are altered, we will make them know
All we can for to bring them under our bow;
We will make to work hard for sixpence a day,
Though a shilling they deserve if they had their just pay.
And this is the way, etc.
and so on, for twelve stanzas.
From now onwards can be found all those motives for disagreement with
which the "social question," as it has developed and grown more bitter,
has made us familiar;--increase of hours of work, lowering of wages
by the employment of apprentices, women, and children; reductions of
the sums agreed upon by means of fines, payment in kind,[110] and
other tricks; draconian regulations; harsh foremen; the binding of
the workers to the workshop, as the serfs were to the soil, by money
advances which they could never repay. Events follow their usual
course: the story is one of struggles, prosecutions, appeals to the
law, and finally, when no more can be said, battles with folded arms
and closed factories--strikes by workmen or employers. There follow
riots in which machinery is wrecked and attacks are sometimes made upon
the masters themselves. Repression ensues; the carrying of arms is
forbidden, the rights of combination and public meeting denied at pain
of death. And, in reply to these measures, the workers retaliate by
emigration, by secret societies, by recourse to force which may damp
down the fire but cannot prevent it from smouldering till in time it
bursts out afresh.
The guilds and their statutes were of but feeble assistance in
calming these conflicts. The greater part of the workers in the great
industries did not belong to them. Worse still, the guild system
itself suffered from the startling inequality which separated its
great manufacturers from their employees. Between rich masters and
small masters, between the sons of masters and the poor journeymen,
the gulf ever widened, and an institution was soon to reveal the
growing friction. I have already spoken of the separate societies,
now of long standing, governed by journeymen (_compagnons_); but
_compagnonnage_, united to these ancient associations by more than one
tie, had a more extensive influence. Its origins are obscure.[111] It
is hardly found before the beginning of the fifteenth century, and
developed particularly in Central Europe, France, the Low Countries,
and in Germany. It seems to be allied to freemasonry in its origins,
but was distinguished by an activity peculiar to itself. Freemasonry,
as far as it is possible to pierce the mists which envelop its early
history, was essentially a federation of building trades. It took its
birth from the bands of workmen who had their _raison d'être_ in the
construction of those vast cathedrals whose harmonious proportions are
certainly the most perfect legacy left to us by the Middle Ages. The
aim of the association was to keep in order the crowds of half-nomadic
labourers, who for half a century or more would establish themselves
in a town; to transmit from one generation to the next the secrets of
the craft; to act as arbitrator in the quarrels which might arise among
this restless population. Born in the shadow of the sanctuary, it was
naturally mystic and religious in character; it claimed to go back to
the Templars, or even to the builders of Solomon's Temple; it was the
child of an age which delighted in mystery and occult knowledge, and
it imposed on its members a complicated initiation, formidable tests,
signs of recognition, and pass-words. Created for men who sometimes
transferred their labour and their plans from one end of Europe to
the other, it scattered its lodges over different lands; it was
international, and in this differed profoundly from the guilds. But
with this exception, it took its place within the existing order of
things, accepted the hierarchy of the guild system, and had its three
degrees--_i.e._ included apprentices, journeymen, and masters. It was a
mixed institution as much and even more bourgeois than working-class.
_Compagnonnage_, too, covered many craft-guilds, of which the
most important were closely connected with building (carpenters,
stone-cutters, joiners) or with the clothing trades. It had its mystic
legends, its symbolic rites in which baptism and communion figured,
its claims to a long genealogy, its tests, pass-words, and strange
ceremonies, in fact the whole armoury of a society which believes
secrecy to be of vital importance. It was a league for mutual and
fraternal assistance, which spread over many countries and undertook
to procure for its travelling members moral support, lodging,
travel-money, and, above all, work. But it differed from the guilds and
from freemasonry in that no masters were admitted. It concerned itself
exclusively with obtaining work for _compagnons_, and with looking
after their professional interests. It thus emphasized the separation
which had taken place between masters and workers. It was feared as
an instrument of war, suspected on account of its secret methods by
the public authorities which persecuted it, and by the Church which
accused it of disseminating heretical ideas and condemned it in 1655
by the voice of the Faculty of Theology at Paris; it was also exposed
to the attacks of the guilds. Nevertheless it survived all this, and
was strong enough to organize strikes, and to black-list the firms
which did not accept its conditions, and even the towns in which it was
persecuted.[112]
Of course its strength and power of emancipation must not be
exaggerated. _Compagnonnage_ remained bound by the customs and liable
to the vices of the guild system. If it escaped from the restraining
spirit it did not escape from the corporate spirit; it jealously
closed its ranks, and would only admit certain crafts; it was divided
into hostile rites or _devoirs_ which took for patrons Solomon,
Maître Jacques, or Père Soubise. Violence was frequent (_topage_ for
instance), and bloody battles for the monopoly of work in a particular
town often took place. Besides, it only included a privileged minority
who ill-treated and despised not only those who were outside their
ranks but even those who aspired to enter them. It was on the whole
a fighting league, and imposed conditions on certain masters; but it
was far from being a combination of the whole of the working classes
against the masters.
Centuries were yet to pass before the development of "great" industry,
by constantly increasing the number employed, by turning the suburbs
of great cities and the black country into seething human anthills,
forced all these multitudes of workers, in spite of wide differences
of occupation, to unite into a great army.
As has been said, the division of society into guilds is vertical; it
only becomes horizontal when the conditions common to the great army of
wage-earners blot out all differences of craft and origin.
2. _The change in intellectual conditions. The Renaissance and the
Reformation._--We have summed up the effects produced on the guilds
by the enlargement of the environment in which they developed. This
environment, however, changed not only in extent but also in character.
Without going into the details of the changes they passed through, we
can see that three great events stand out in the history of Europe
from the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, and it is
impossible that they should have failed to react on the system we are
studying; these are the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the increase
in the powers of the State.
The great intellectual revolution which has been named the Renaissance
was at first a return to Greek and Roman antiquity. Literary men and
scholars, filled with adoration for a glorious past, abandoned their
mother tongue for that of the great dead, imitated Virgil, Cicero,
Demosthenes, swore by Jupiter and Mercury, insisted, like Montaigne,
on being given the title of Roman citizens, or like Erasmus, Ramus, or
Melanchthon, took neo-classical names. They restored ancient methods
of thought and action; they wove conspiracies in imitation of Brutus;
they dated their letters by the Calends and the Ides; they became
pagans once more in appearance and sometimes in reality; in opposition
to Christianity--the religion of sadness, resignation, poverty, and of
the struggle against the flesh and passion--they re-established love,
pleasure, beauty, and the joy of life. They wakened from their long
slumber the old systems of philosophy, and as disciples not only of
Aristotle, but of Plato, Epicurus, and Diogenes, they became accustomed
to coquetting with every kind of doctrine and often acquired an elegant
dilettantism.
These new conceptions, which demanded a knowledge of languages
requiring long study at college, could only be held by an _élite_. To
have the right of initiation into the ancient authors it was necessary
to belong to the leisured classes; it took time to read and re-read
them in order to extract the "marrow within."
In a word, the Renaissance was fundamentally aristocratic. Most of its
classical scholars and poets profess disdain and hatred of the ignorant
masses.
Rien ne me plaist que ce qui peut desplaire
Au jugement du rude populaire
cries one of the brilliant satellites of our Pléiade.[113]
It follows logically that the education it instituted and which
was founded on the study of Greek and Latin drew a clear line of
demarcation between the children thus brought up, who were destined to
hold the highest social positions, and the others doomed to inferior
tasks and studies. It will therefore be understood that the Renaissance
influenced the condition of the workers. It swelled the tide which was
carrying society towards class division; it helped to separate still
further the tradesman and the manual worker; and above all it separated
the artist and the craftsman, those twin brothers, who till then had
shared the same life and the same ideals. The artist was no longer the
interpreter of the thought of a whole people, but, working for the
rich and powerful bankers or princes, who required him to reproduce
archaic forms and consequently demanded of him a certain amount of
education, he left the ranks of the people, rose to wealth, to the
ranks of the upper middle classes, and figured at court; he and his
fellows grouped themselves into special brotherhoods such as that of
St. Luke at Rome, and before long formed academies inaccessible to the
vulgar. Compare the life of Raphael with that of Giotto. In these days,
the craftsman remained a working man, lost in the crowd, watching from
afar and from his lowly station his successful comrade, who no longer
recognized the poor relation he had left behind.
Separations of this kind abound in almost every direction. In the
Middle Ages grocers and apothecaries, barbers and surgeons, were
classed together. But in the sixteenth century the apothecary, on his
admission to mastership, had to reply in Latin, and henceforth he no
longer considered the spice merchant his equal. So in France, from the
year 1514, the bond between the two professions was broken.
The historian can easily prove that this separation of art and craft
was often harmful to both; that art, isolated from the warm heart of
the people, became conventional, cold, stiff, and artificial; that
craft, relegated to a lower position, no longer sought for beauty, and
was condemned to express itself in inferior, routine work; but, taking
the guilds alone, this separation certainly weakened the mediaeval
system. Deprived of members whose gifts were their glory, they lost in
power as in prestige.
In spite of all this, and although the Renaissance is from some points
of view a retrogression towards social conditions which had long
disappeared, it was more than this; it was the awakening of the spirit
of initiative; it was a forward impulse, a bold step in advance. It was
not limited to a mere renewal of relations with classical antiquity;
it stimulated inventive effort, and taught men to think for themselves
once more, to open their eyes and to observe. It thus gave a strong
impetus to science. The age is rich in many-sided geniuses and seekers
after truth, who widened the field of human knowledge and power in
every direction. It saw the birth of those universalists, Leonardo
da Vinci and Michael Angelo, who may be likened to trees, which, by
the mysterious process of grafting, bear twenty different kinds of
fruit. In short, the Renaissance was a setting free of intelligence, a
breaking forth of truths, which, thanks to printing, spread all over
the world and became a lasting possession.
It is true, indeed, that mankind, like the Wandering Jew, is always
moving forward, and never comes completely to a standstill. Man
moves ceaselessly because he is alive. But after the great creative
movement which is the glory of modern times, his progress is more
apparent, surer, and more rapid. From this time must be dated a
permanent alliance between science and industry, exemplified in that
heroic potter, Bernard Palissy, who spent his life and fortune in
rediscovering the secret of certain enamelled pottery. The pity is that
this alliance, so fruitful in new methods, in the exploitation of new
materials and new products, was formed at the expense of the guilds;
for the innovations which it rendered necessary were the death of their
rules governing manufacture. Everything contributed, as we can see, to
the break-up of the organization of labour which they embodied.
The same may be said of the Reformation, the religious renaissance,
which was both a development of and a reaction from its fellow.
It could hardly be expected that a revolution which rent Western
Christianity asunder should spare the unity of the craft guilds. True,
it did not act in the same way: by making the reading of the Bible
obligatory it encouraged the education of the people, and in this
way it raised the craftsman. It found, and not without reason, its
first adherents among workmen,--Saxon miners, carders from the town
of Meaux; it turned towards democracy, towards theories of equality.
Those who carried it to extremes, like the Anabaptists of Münster,
pictured a government in which all the guilds, great and small, should
be made equal; their ideal was to turn all organized crafts, superior
and inferior, into a sort of public service; to establish a kind of
Biblical communism. Their leader and prophet was John of Leyden, an
aged working tailor.[114] If this was only a passing birth-throe of
Protestantism at least the guilds took a large share in the great
movements which shook Holland and England. It really seems that the
Reformation brought a renewal of vigour and activity to those states
in which it triumphed. But in many countries the fight between the
two faiths was so fierce that many cities were devastated and ruined
by it. In Germany, after the Thirty Years' War, Magdeburg, Wurtzburg,
Heidelberg, Spire, and Mannheim were simply heaps of ruins, almost
deserted. The Teutonic Hanse which had been so powerful was a wreck;
the Protestant and Catholic towns had broken the union in which their
strength lay. In a hundred places, since it was admitted that the
religion of the prince was law for his subjects (_cujus regio, hujus
religio_) whole bodies of people and industries moved away; workmen
and masters went in search of refuge among their co-religionists. The
guild system was profoundly disturbed by this; the new-comers, when
they were too numerous, were not always very warmly welcomed by their
brothers in God, and even when they were received, they practically
forced their way into a closed system which they strained to breaking.
In places where the population remained divided between the two creeds,
or where, more from indifference to, than respect for, the beliefs
of others, they made a lame attempt at tolerance, it was extremely
difficult to get men of the two sects to live together in the same
body. Just as the Jews had been excluded from the guilds in the Middle
Ages, so now the Protestants were kept out. In France, from the time
of Richelieu, fifty years before the repeal of the Edict of Nantes,
the professions of a doctor, apothecary, grocer, and many others were
forbidden to them.[115] Then came the great exodus of 1685, which
scattered the French Huguenots over every place in Europe where they
had friends, and planted colonies of refugees in Switzerland, England,
Holland, Prussia, Denmark, and Sweden. "They carried commerce away
with them," says Jurieu, one of their pastors; and _commerce_ in the
language of those days included what we call industry. The fact is
that they naturalized abroad many manufactures which had hitherto
been unknown. England alone learnt from them the arts of silk-making,
Gobelins tapestry-making, and sail-making. What then became of the
guilds which remained in France, of the monopoly at which they aimed,
and of the secrecy which was one of their methods of securing it? It
was a terrible blow for them when, as at Abbeville, 80 families out of
160 left the country, or 1600 out of 2200, as happened at the election
of Amiens.[116] How, thus mutilated, could they stand against the
foreign competition of which their own members had become the most
formidable allies?
3. _The change in political conditions._--Changes in political
conditions affected the guilds even more than intellectual and
religious changes. Europe, in spite of waves of revolt, passed through
a period in which great powers prevailed. The State, which was becoming
centralized, increased its prerogatives and complacently interfered in
economic matters. The motives which determined its intervention were
sometimes a purely _political_ interest, sometimes a _fiscal_ interest,
sometimes a _public_ or _national_ interest.
(_a_) The political interest of Sovereigns is to subdue rival powers
within their territories. For this reason they first attacked the
liberties of any cities where the spirit was bad, that is to say, as a
King of Prussia said later, _frondeur_, intractable, or restless. In
Spain their _fueros_ were taken from them; in France, town liberties
decreased, till they were almost entirely destroyed by Richelieu and
Louis XIV. In Germany, the number of free Hanseatic cities dropped
from eighty to three. The Italian republics fell one by one under
the domination of a monarch, and, though Venice survived, she had
concentrated her government in the hands of three State judges,
magistrates as autocratic and irresponsible as kings. In the Low
Countries, Bruges lost all jurisdiction over her suburbs in 1435,
and Ghent lost the power in 1451, and also the right to nominate the
aldermen. Liége, like her neighbour Dinant, was destroyed, crushed,
reduced to nothing. In the following century Antwerp, suspected of
sympathy with the Reformation, lived under the Spanish yoke, pillaged
and down-trodden.
Municipal and guild life were so closely united that it was impossible
to strike at one without injuring the other. In the city of Liége,
the thirty-two crafts and the _perron_ which was the emblem of its
independence were taken away at a single stroke.
At Florence, no sooner had the Medicis become Dukes of Tuscany than
the Constitution of the _Arte_ was altered in such a way as to make
it impossible for them to exercise any influence in the direction
of public affairs. In England,[117] the king and Parliament agreed
in forbidding the guilds to make ordinances without the consent of
the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Crown Treasurer, or to fix
the price of goods, and aimed at supplanting them in supervising
the quality of products. The Statute of Labourers in 1563, in the
reign of Elizabeth, gave to justices of the peace, that is to say,
to magistrates who were not craftsmen, the right of fixing workmen's
wages. In France, Philip the Beautiful ill-treated the confraternities
and found no difficulty in modifying the rules of the Parisian
industries.[118] The Crown, however, differentiated between the guilds:
at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the doctor of theology, John
Gerson, lays down in the clearest terms the alliance between the Crown
and the rich burgesses: "All the harm," he says, "arises from the fact
that the king and the good burgesses have been put under servitude
by the outrageous enterprise of men of small standing.... God has
permitted it in order that we may know the difference between royal
domination and that of any people whatever: for that which is royal
is general and should be gentle: that of the low-born is a tyrannical
domination which destroys itself."[119] In accordance with this
principle, royalty was tactful in its dealings with the great guilds,
and willingly bestowed on them honorary privileges. Francis I. not only
confirmed to the Six Guilds, which formed the merchant aristocracy of
the capital, the precedence which they enjoyed at solemn functions, but
of the thirty-six wardens of these Greater Guilds as they would have
been called at Florence, he formed a High Council of Parisian industry.
Even with the others, the Crown proceeded gently at first. It desired
to absorb, and not to suppress. It realized what an advantage it would
be if these independent institutions, still under the influence of
their feudal origin, could be transformed into State institutions,
protected and obedient! It was with this end in view that Henry III.
decided that their organization, hitherto local, should be extended
throughout the whole kingdom, to the scattered villages as well as
to the towns. The city (urban) guild was therefore converted into a
national organism, and the guild was made compulsory at the same time
that it was put under tutelage. This unification, which placed it under
the direct supervision of royal agents, was, however, only to operate
on paper. It encountered the displeasure of the craft guilds; worse
still, it was in opposition to the first principle of the whole system.
The ordinance allowed the inhabitants of the suburbs to follow their
craft within the cities, and the inhabitants of one town to settle
in any other, with the exception of Paris[120]--a last concession to
an ancient tradition. It was something quite new for craftsmen to
possess equal rights and for crafts to be organized like those of Paris
throughout the whole of France; but it was only in accordance with the
general trend of French civilization. This sudden enlargement of the
guild system, however, was practically its death, and there were many
who from this time did not hesitate to say so openly.[121] The edict,
renewed by Henry IV. in 1597, was next extended to include merchants,
and was completed by the abolition of the _king of the mercers_, who
still exercised a certain amount of authority in the fairs; for even so
trumpery a king made the king at the Louvre uneasy!
The Crown was the less willing to give up its ideas of realizing unity
in the industrial domain in that it mistrusted the small crafts; it
bore in mind the fact that, formerly, when the Holy League tried to
create a sort of intermunicipal federal Republic, the masters' and
journeymen's confraternities eagerly joined in the attempt. It did not
forget that, in the time of the Fronde, the guilds were credited with
having had the repeal of the privileges granted to the great merchants
and the prohibition to import silks into the kingdom inserted in the
peace treaty forced on the Regent by his rebel subjects. Little by
little it reduced the authority remaining to them. It was tenacious in
carrying into every sphere the form of organization at which it aimed.
It made further attempts in 1673 and 1691; between the first date and
the second the guilds officially constituted and classified rose from
60 to 127, and what clearly shows the meaning of this administrative
classification is the fact that it nominated, or threatened the
nomination of, the headmen by officers of the Crown.
A very inadequate idea, however, of the encroachments of royal
authority will be gained if the solemn publication of edicts alone is
remembered, and the daily, incessant attempt of its agents to restrict
the jurisdiction both of local and of guild authorities is ignored.
No doubt a good deal of the economic jurisdiction formerly exercised
by the town magistrates still existed. Contraventions of regulations,
and struggles between producers and consumers, between employers and
employees, and between allied and rival crafts, were under municipal
jurisdiction.[122] The right of pronouncing judgment on such points as
falsifications, the observance of religious festivals, the price of
merchandise and the rate of wages, was still left to the municipality
by Colbert. Naturally its powers were greater or less according as the
town was royal, seigneurial, or communal. But it was not unusual for it
to retain the right of collecting taxes, and of nominating supervisors
who controlled crafts; for it to create masterships and organize
charity workshops which changed into regular factories; or to withhold
the monopoly granted to the guilds.
It is none the less true that communal jurisdiction grew less year
by year. Attention must be drawn to the fact that the craft guilds
sometimes passed it by and of their own accord applied to the central
authority for intervention. Thus, questions of provisions, public
health, monopoly, speculation, regulations for the prevention of
fraud, and the protection of apprentices, one by one came under the
jurisdiction of _parlements_, ministers, governors, and of their
delegates. Colbert, in his general rules for manufacture which
date from 1666 to 1669, codifies, in the name of the State, the
minute directions contained in the guild statutes on questions of
apportionment, bad work, etc.
At the end of the seventeenth century, then, the guilds still existed,
but had been subjugated and deprived of their principal rights. Behind
the solid front which they still presented were ruin, desolation, and
decay.
(_b_) It is probable that the Crown in France allowed them to
live and decline in peace because they supplied an easy method of
directing commerce and industry; but it was also because they were
fruitful sources of production. The Crown often disguised with fine
phrases the _fiscal interest_ which inspired it; it is, however,
easily discoverable in three different forms. Sometimes it confirmed,
strengthened, and extended the monopoly of the guilds and made them
pay for the favour; sometimes it sold to outsiders privileges which
encroached on and compromised this monopoly; and finally, it sometimes
threatened them, and only withdrew threats in return for ready money.
The great ordinance of 1581 and the special edict of taxes of 1673 may
be taken as examples of the first method. In 1581 the strengthening of
the organization of the guilds by purging them of certain abuses and
irregularities was the pretext cited; the king spoke and appeared to
act as the great national justice of the peace; but the real object of
the measure, which extended to the kingdom a system hitherto localized,
may well have been the filling of the royal treasury into which fell
a part of the matriculation fees paid by each new master. In 1673
trouble was no longer taken to find a pretext; the work was done by a
financial edict, that is, by the establishment of a method of taxation.
The guilds themselves encouraged these calls on their funds; indeed, in
1636, when France was in danger of invasion, they offered their wealth
and their services for the defence of the kingdom.
The second means, which consisted in creating privileges for which the
guilds paid and by which the king's coffers were filled, was invented
by Louis XI., who in 1461 instituted _letters of mastership_, which
exempted those who bought them from the examination of capability and
the expenses which the ordinary reception entailed. Soon the kings
introduced irregularities into the masters' guilds on every possible
occasion.[123] The blow could not miss its aim. If none were found to
take these licences, the guilds hastened to buy them up to prevent the
intrusion of new competitors. In vain they attempted to protest; the
procedure became habitual and legal. The great ordinance of 1581 stated
that the king would dispose of three letters of mastership in every
town and every craft.
This led to a third procedure. The guild was vulnerable at many points,
in its revenues and in its autonomy, as well as in its monopolies. If
a pretence was made of attacking its weak spots, it would pay in order
to be spared. It clung to the right of electing its own officers.
Now Francis I. had already introduced among them royal officers who
had naturally bought their office. At the end of the seventeenth
century the Crown, being short of money, renewed this expedient on a
large scale. In 1691 it declared its intention of replacing all the
officers and syndics by agents of its own nomination, and the guilds
had immediately to raise three hundred thousand pounds to avert the
calamity which threatened them. It was thus that the Jews and Lombards
had formerly liberated themselves. In 1694 the king took it into his
head to institute auditors and examiners to control their accounts;
another sacrifice of four hundred thousand pounds was demanded before
these were removed. In this way from year to year posts were created
and bought up. In 1711 the pressure brought to bear was even stronger
and more direct; the admission of new masters was forbidden, and they
were created by royal authority without the assent of the guilds. The
guilds gave everything that was demanded of them, everything at least
that was in their power; they borrowed, got into debt, became involved
and were on the verge of bankruptcy; just as the communes had formerly
succumbed under the weight of the too heavy burdens imposed on them by
the Crown.
(_c_) The Crown was not always actuated by such personally interested
motives; it sometimes happened that it was moved by nobler inspirations
in its relations with the craft guilds, and studied the general
interest when it restricted their exorbitant privileges.
In order to develop public assistance with little expense, those who
participated in works of charity were recompensed by being exonerated
from corporate obligations. In 1553 an edict conferred mastership
on all craftsmen who consented to teach their craft to the children
of the Hospital of the Trinity, and the hospital itself thus became
a factory working against the guilds. Several hospitals were in a
similar position. In the seventeenth century, however, it was with a
different aim,--the development of national industry,--that the Crown
deliberately created factories not under guild rule. Henry IV., in
order to naturalize in France the silk industry, which diverted from
the kingdom seven to eight thousand gold crowns annually, planted
mulberry trees, and brought in Italian workmen on whom he lavished
money and monopolies, and who were exempted from taxation, in order
that they might teach the art of weaving these valuable stuffs. In 1607
he installed, in the great gallery at the Louvre, a colony of foreign
craftsmen--a sort of industrial school of art where apprentices were
trained--who might establish themselves anywhere in the kingdom without
waiting to become masters. He thus launched the industry of luxury and
attempted to organize, over the heads of the guilds, that which was
most distasteful to them,--innovation, while their domain was still
further restricted by the special conditions granted to merchants who
followed the Court and became tradesmen by appointment to princes and
to the most brilliant of the nobility.
Colbert built up into a system what Henry IV. had practised, and great
factories rose at his command. These were of two kinds: first, _royal
factories_ properly so called--State establishments, in which all
expenses were borne by the Treasury; the director was nominated by the
king, and the privilege which they enjoyed was in perpetuity (the soap
works of Beauvais, Aubusson, the naval workshops in the ports, etc.).
Others, also called "royal factories," were, in spite of this ambiguous
name, private enterprises; they enjoyed important privileges, such as
exemption from taxes, subsidies, or titles of nobility for those who
directed them; but they were only temporary, and the company, with a
private individual at its head, was worked at its own risk and peril.
I will only quote one example, the cloth factory of the Van Robais at
Abbeville. No matter what their methods of administration, for the
guilds they were so many formidable competitors, and it is easy to
imagine the futile complaints and remonstrances of which they were the
object.
(_d_) We have described in detail the policy of the French Crown
with regard to the craft guilds, partly because this book is written
in France and for the French, but also because it developed with
remarkable logic and continuity. In neighbouring countries, however,
what happened was, if not exactly the same, at least similar.
In England, when we study the encroachments of the central authority,
we find that, in spite of the Commons, who represented the commercial
class, the kings authorized foreign merchants to reside in the ports
where originally they had to sell their cargoes wholesale within forty
days, and that in 1335 they were allowed to trade freely throughout
the kingdom.[124] We find three Parliaments in turn making laws to
impose certain industrial methods on the whole country, and many acts
of legislation are to be found regulating "the size and weight of
pieces of stuff, the methods of stretching and dyeing, the preparation
of wool by means of certain ingredients the use of which was allowed
or forbidden, the finishing of cloth, folding and packing, etc."[125]
A whole army of officials was needed to see that these complicated
laws,--which from being guild laws became national laws,--were not
broken. In 1563 the Statute of Labourers codified in this way, in the
name of the State, rules for apprenticeship and for other matters which
had hitherto been in force among the craft guilds.
At Florence, from the year 1580, under the rule of the Medicis, who
had become sovereign princes, the statutes of the Guild of Silk or Por
Santa Maria,--hitherto the most important Guild,--were reconstituted,
and governors, whose jurisdiction extended over the whole of Tuscany,
were set up beside the consuls. These were still elected by the
masters, but if one of the chosen magistrates were not approved (_la
grazia_) by His Serene Highness, that was enough to disqualify him.
From this time no subject could be brought up for debate in the
assemblies of the _Arte_ unless it had first been submitted to the said
Serene Highness, who could either allow it to be introduced or could
stop its passage.[126] In 1583 His Highness took upon himself to unite
two ancient guilds (Fabbricanti and Por San Piero); he had the seal of
the new guild remade, and the statutes, which even fixed the salaries
of the officers, reconstituted.
By degrees the consuls ceased to be chosen from _Arti_ over which they
nominally presided; they became personages who assumed honorary titles,
and the actual power was in the hands of "deputies" (to-day we should
call them delegates) nominated by the prince;[127] the organization
of crafts became purely bureaucratic and the ancient _Calimala_ a
mere charitable body. Wherever tribunals and chambers of commerce or
technical schools were formed, wherever foreign craftsmen were called
in and welcomed, there it may be said that the doom of the guilds was
sealed.