请将“Whilst in capitalist societies - as we shall return to below -, the conclusion of a labour contract means that power of command over the owner of labour-power devolves on its purchaser (within historically won limits) for an agreed duration, under the ancien régime workers maintained certain rights over the production process and over the organisation of their services. (These rights varied in different cases, according to whether they involved domestic servants, workers on the land, journeymen hired for a shorter or longer term, apprentices or other employees.)
Customary rights of this kind - which had a counterpart in collective village rights vis-à-vis the possessors of land - had a particular structural importance in France, inasmuch as the generalisation of royal rule in the form of legal power, and the fiscal interest of the crown in the regulation of guilds, led to a situation in which both individual aspects of the organisation of labour processes, and individual aspects of disposal over land, were regulated by the courts. Legal recognition of local custom made this in a certain sense into a component of the structures of generalised rule. There were indeed certain areas - for example the regulation of leases to be paid in money or a share of the product - in which those materially dependent had scarcely managed to win any customary rights that were legally protected as a specific form of property, but it was generally the case that 'economic' relations were between the owners of different rights.
Judicial instances such as seigneurie, (church) parishes, guilds and munici-pal authorities could all be drawn into the regulation of the specific course of production, as could the intendants, the courts of baillage or a parlement. If, for example, weather conditions led the possessors of meadows to fear they would be deprived of income if they could not mow a second time, they could - among other things - apply to the intendant for permission to refuse the cus-tomary right to common grazing after the first hay-making. A particular cus-tomary right for such emergency situations thus arose on a regional basis, restricting the refusal of common grazing to a third of the meadow area.138
A reference to certain conflicts of the revolutionary years will make clear the relevance of the structures of privilege under consideration here. In the view of the possessors of land, it was not only seigneurial rights that were abolished by the Revolution, but all customary rights as well; the (poorer) peasants, on the other hand, struggled for their collective rights to be maintained. In actual fact, customary rights lost their sanctioning by power with the demise of the generalised rule of the ancien régime. If they were to be preserved, they had in a certain sense to be newly acquired: as state-sanctioned restrictions on a right of disposal over private property (or possession) that was in principle unlimited after the Revolution.
Under the established ancien régime, the penetration of capitalist labour rela-tions presupposed not simply the expropriation of means of production, but also the expropriation of rights. If these rights were protected by the king's courts - and, in the second half of the eighteenth century in particular, this happened even against the crown's deliberate strategy - then the power of these courts limited the unhindered use of private property for private economic purposes, even if this could not always be completely prevented. To avoid one misunderstanding, the fact that, under the ancien régime, a large part (though not all) of those social relations that we describe today as class relations involved a confrontation between owners of rights (or privileges), did not necessarily mean that these relations were for this reason less exploitative and more humane. The point to establish in the present context is the specific structure of material reproduction, and the demands, conflicts and developmental conditions that arise from this structure.
Because the conditions of reproduction and appropriation were necessarily perceived in the first place as social relations determined by different rights, and because legal decisions actually were a regular feature of these relations, mentalities oriented towards the courts were comparatively widespread. The fact that, in the eighteenth century, resistance to the infringement of traditional rights - such as the privilege of being invited to eat on high feast days, which journeymen insisted on vis-à-vis their masters - was often voiced in such terms as 'we are not slaves', is seen by Michael Sonenscher as the result of a spreading conception of natural rights. This did not mean a new legiti- misation of unimpeded acquisitiveness, but, on the contrary, the generalisation of the view that all French men and women (but not slaves, who outside of France were the property of Frenchmen) enjoyed certain natural rights. If these were not obstructed by legitimate power, they could be invoked before the courts. In the eighteenth century, Sonenscher concludes, the legal principle was successfully established, not only in respect to work en jurande, but also in respect to seigneurial rule, according to which possession of a particular right, i.e. a privilege, had to be demonstrated either by documentation or by long-established custom. If this could not be done, then the contending parties could invoke their natural rights.139 The maxim nul privilège sans titre summed up not just philosophic conceptions, but also social developments. The appeal courts continued to sanction privileges, but by accepting natural-rights arguments for the claims of those who enjoyed only few privileges, they established themselves as institutions of a generalised instance of public order. These conclusions of Sonenscher do not necessarily contradict the established view that in the eighteenth century it was especially the parlements, whose members were almost all themselves owners of seigneurial rights, that bitterly defended the persistence of seigneurie (whereas the king's courts had formerly served to limit this power). For the defence of existing rights is perfectly compatible with stricter demands for the proof of titles to property in these rights.
Under the ancien régime, privileges were not just for the rich and eminent. They were, as Olwen H. Hufton140 stresses, the contemporary form of an order-ing of society. This ordering embraced the majority of the king's subjects. Even local beggars had the invaluable privilege of being allowed to beg in public places without having to fear being branded or sent to the galleys. The sphere of absolute non-privilege began only with the conditions of those wretches who roamed around as vagabonds or had already been legally condemned as criminals.
Privileges were always the property of persons or precisely defined groups. Sometimes, though not always, these privileged groups were legally fixed corporations (members of a university, a court, a guild, etc.). Many of the most profitable privileges, such as seigneurial rights and above all the privilege to levy taxes on the basis of exercising an office in the service of the crown, could be bought for money. This did not, however, mean that access to this market in privileges was open to all and sundry. After the legal recognition of privilege as property, the social limitation of the market in privilege is the second feature of the unity of the organisation of power and appropriation under the ancien régime. In practice, formal selection frameworks - such as particular qualification requirements for guild masters or judges - were of secondary importance. The really decisive restriction lay in access to the key structures of patronage. No one could make a career under the ancien régime as an isolated individual: neither in the sphere of royal office, nor in the guilds, and not even trading in cloth or corn. A key example given by Michael Sonenscher makes clear how the decisive obstacle to access to the privileges of a guild master in a large town lay not in the level of entry fee that was demanded, but rather in the requirement of marrying into one of the local masters' families (not necessarily in the same guild). It was only in this way that a candidate could prove himself a man with connections, credit, and an already vouched- for reputation. This favoured the sons of local guild masters far more than did the formal facilitation of access that sometimes existed.
Although many privileges were at least formally the property of individual persons, they were also the structural feature of a society in which the organi-sation of material reproduction was not the mere sum of connections between individuals. It was families rather than individuals who were the most impor-tant bearers of strategies of provisioning, enrichment and advance, with mar-riage continuing to serve as the most important form of appropriation. In the context of familial strategies of appropriation and advance, unmarried women often functioned as objects of trade. If married women were widowed, they reverted to this status, but not completely. For widows had a considerable power of disposal over the business pursued with their assets, with the status of their family and their personal appeal. There were also certain privileges that they inherited. We have already noted how Daniel Dessert came across 
many financières of the king in his research, speculating in the state debt; these were generally widows. It is well known how in many guilds, widows could be managers with legal competence [jurandes], and James B. Collins indicates that regularly between 10 and 20 per cent of the household heads appearing in village tax rolls were women. Unmarried women are generally found at the end of these documents, i.e. among the poor who had only small incomes to declare, but widows appear also in the upper reaches.141 Even if many of these were mothers who only ran their household until the eldest son was in a position to take over, they still differed in the use that the family made of its collective privileges. There were many forms of property from which women were excluded - a judge could never leave his office to a daughter - but there were other forms of property and particular privileges that were open to women, in so far as their family situation made this possible. In a certain sense, the individualisation of material connections was a structural precondition for the strict legal disadvantaging of women, and for the concept of order that ascribed women to the non-public space of the 'private' as their appropriate sphere.
In the following section, we shall not deal with particular privileges, rather with those complexes of privilege that were especially important for the development of material reproduction. The first of these complexes involved seigneurial rulership rights. Under the developed ancien régime, a considerable part of the appropriation by possessors of land resulted from simple economic power: from the possibility of raising rents according to rising demand (rents practically doubled almost everywhere in the course of the eighteenth century),142 and not increasing wages in accordance with the rising demand for labour-power, even though bread prices also rose. At the same time, however, almost all rural inhabitants, even those who had only a small plot or a vegetable garden to call their own, were subject to an exploitation in one form or another resulting from seigneurial privilege, no matter that this varied very greatly between regions. They had to pay a fee if they wanted to record a contract, they were excluded from hunting yet had to accept the damage that seigneurial hunters did to their land, they had to take their corn to the sei-gneurial mill and their ale to the seigneurial brewery, and much more besides.”翻译为中文