请将“Eighteenth-century France did see a growth in mining and manufacturing, the latter especially in the textile industry. A considerable part of this expan-sion resulted from the practice of ‘putting out', which was finally legalised in 1762. If the growth in manufacturing remained limited, this was above all because the great majority of workers in France obstinately defended their existence as peasants as best they could, and because the extent and forms of extracting ‘surplus' product socially restricted the market for manufactures. The effect of guild privileges should be analysed within these underlying conditions.
What we are focusing on here are those privileges that were guaranteed by the crown. The transformation of artisan associations into guilds regulated by the king arose out of fiscal requirements. As far back as 1581, Henri III had decreed the extension of the Paris guild regulations to the entire kingdom. Guild courts were to be established, with officials [jurandes] registering the local masters and devising appropriate arrangements for their certification. Examinations for barbers, apothecaries and surgeons were also established at this time, and it was laid down that every official deed had to be paid for. Most towns reacted with passive resistance, others reported that if the regulations were put into effect, disturbances could hardly be avoided. In Lyon it was confirmed that within the town's walls freedom of trade would continue. It was only in Provence that the prescriptions were to a certain extent obeyed. The edict was successful only with respect to the introduction of examinations for surgeons and barbers, the latter functioning at this time also as medical practitioners. Periods of apprenticeship were also prescribed. It was only in the second half of the seventeenth century, after the appointment of intendants in the provinces, that corporate arrangements for labour were successfully integrated into the structure of royal rule. Besides guaranteeing their privileges vis-à-vis potential competitors and establishing internal jurisdiction, the guilds also obtained the right to collect taxes and determine the allocation of the tax burden. The crown profited from the sale of office power, from the existence of additional local instances of order, and above all from the credits that the guilds granted it, more or less willingly.
Whilst researchers formerly saw the guilds as institutions that acted to delay technical innovation and change in the organisation of production, the extent of this effect is today seen as rather limited. This is first of all because the guild regulations, despite all prescription, were applied very differently at a local level. In many towns, for example, hardly any jurandes were appointed. In others there were few guild privileges to defend, since the situation in the prevailing branch of manufacture was such that even guild masters could scarcely escape poverty. In Bayeux, for example, where the most important manufacture was that of stockings, this failed to recover from the great crisis of 1740, and new methods of production could not be introduced for lack of capital, so that the price for a master's certificate fell in the second half of the century to 50 livres.146
Where guilds were active, they functioned towards the end of the ancien régime as organisations which could deal with conjunctural and long-term changes in market conditions in the context of traditional ordering structures sanctioned by generalised rule. The internal structure of the guilds was marked not by a general solidarity of the masters against the threat of com-petition from artisans not in the guild, but rather by conflicts (sometimes vio-lent) and processes of concentration in the course of which the less favoured masters became economically dependent on the better-off ones. There are reports of internal factions. Conflicts frequently arose from different ideas on how to relate to new technical procedures, or to the practice of concluding subcontracts (and in this way circumventing the limitation on the number of journeymen). The same period also saw defence strategies. Until the abolition of guilds, the officials [jurandes] had the right to levy fines on faux ouvriers [non-guild artisans], or apply for a lettre royale to throw them into prison. The penalty deemed most severe was permanent expulsion from the guild. In actual fact, most artisans under the ancien régime were not guilds- men, but since the majority of these lived and worked in villages, they did not fall under the authority of the guilds. The term faux ouvrier was not applied to them, but to journeymen who produced independently in the towns without belonging to their guild. Unless they were employed in monasteries, or the households of great lords, they worked as far as possible in secret, in attics or back rooms (hence the term chambrelans that was used for them in many places). Steven Kaplan has shown from the example of the faux ouvriers of Faubourg Saint-Antoine how the concrete relationship between guild and non-guild artisans cannot simply be ascertained from the guild regulations. The Paris faubourgs had traditionally remained outside the jurisdiction of the jurandes. When guilds sought in the course of the eighteenth century to extend their jurisdiction to the centre of independent production outside the city walls, the artisans there bitterly defended their freedoms. These conflicts fit into the traditional picture and do not need depiction here. What is new, as Kaplan establishes, is how from the middle of the century, a series of guild masters concluded subcontracts with the suburban workshops in which they acted partly as putters-out. They made use of the fact that the division of labour outside the guild regulations facilitated the employment of new methods of production.147 These economic connections thus overcame tendencies to rigidity that were present in the legalised work organisation of the guilds. This did not make the guilds weaker, but actually gave new strength to their economic position.
Under the ancien-régime system of rule, however, the guilds also had a firm place as creditors of the crown and pillar of a hierarchical order structured by privilege. This was apparent when Turgot sought to abolish the guilds in 1776. In the preamble that the minister formulated for the royal edict, he wrote:
All those familiar with economic life know that in every important enterprise of trade or manufacture two kinds of men collaborate: entrepreneurs who prepare the materials and equipment needed for the manufacture, and simple labourers who work for the former for an agreed wage. This is the real cause of the distinction between entrepreneurs or masters on the one hand, and workers or journeymen on the other. It is based on the nature of things, and does not depend on the arbitrary institution of the jurandes.148
The successful opposition to this proposed law evoked the importance of guilds for the order of the kingdom and their function as a bulwark against individual egoism and a decline in quality. The parlement de Paris, which took the lead in this opposition, defended in the guilds not only particular eco-nomic interests, but rather a whole order of regulation by power of working and social conditions.
When the guilds were finally abolished in 1791, this happened almost inci-dentally and without any notable objection. As Gail Bossenga has shown, however, in a quite remarkable essay on conditions in Lille, the local bearers of manufacturing and commercial enterprise were not all that enthusiastic about the new forms of organisation, but rather sought to maintain the existing arrangements, which were suited to their requirements. In one way or another, all recent research has confirmed that the strength of the guilds at the end of the ancien régime rested above all on the fact that there was no urban middle stratum that supposedly occupied the entrepreneurial starting posts and was obstructed by the guilds in the foundation of new enterprises or the expansion of existing ones.
A central structural change in the guilds is however to be noted: a certain individualisation of authority. Whilst the master's authority vis-à-vis his journeymen had previously resided rather in the corporation, or more exactly with the jurandes, government measures in the second half of the eighteenth century transferred this to a significant degree to the individual master. Until this time, political measures designed to maintain labour discipline and the appropriation privileges of masters had been limited to bans on associations of journeymen [compagnonnages]. In case of worker resistance, the actual or supposed leaders of these compagnonnages were prosecuted. In the 1770s, not only were associations of masters established beyond local limits (the guilds were not seen as such), to serve as a defence against worker resistance,149 but regulations were also made for an individualised control of workers. The background to this was repeated strikes of journeymen and manufacturing workers, which now sometimes broke out in several towns simultaneously.
Whilst it had already been the practice for masters to demand from jour-neymen a document of release from their previous employment, from 1770 specific testimonial forms [cartouches] were given out, initially in particular branches of manufacture, in which adherence to workplace discipline was noted. In the lettres patentes of 12 September 1781 on the ‘subordination of workers' (registered by the parlement de Paris on 8 January 1782), these regula-tions were generalised, since ‘nothing helps manufactures flourish better than good order [le bon ordre] between manufacturers and workers'.150 The general ban on associations was now supplemented by the systematic control of indi-viduals. At the same time, the introduction of the workbook [livret] meant that the individual worker was no longer subordinated simply to the rule of the master and manufacturer, but expressly also to that of the ‘state'.
Sonenscher reports a conflict that arose in connection with these new practices of rule.151 When it was announced in August 1783 that the maîtres constructeurs [shipbuilders] should in future provide testimonies for the car-penters and labourers they employed, the majority of workers laid down their tools. A foreman later recalled that when he returned to shore the following day, another foreman and the ship's carpenter called out to him: ‘Comment, vieux nègre, vous travaillez'. Insulting him as a black because he had con-tinued working despite knowledge (as they wrongly supposed) of the new regulation, meant that they did not want to be made into slaves. The protests were summed up by the jurandes as follows:
The workers want to be free. They say that no one will ever compel them to work or force them to provide testimonials, for they are not designed to be publicly exhibited [pour être affichés].152”翻译为中文