Surviving the End of the Guilds: Apprenticeship in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

Much of what historians know about apprenticeship in eighteenth-century France derives from guild records: statutes and notarized contracts drafted in accordance with those statutes. 1 Our understanding of the outcome of apprenticeship, similarly, derives from guild or police registers that record mastership receptions and the use of apprenticeship as a credential for entry. Reliance on these (abundant and accessible) sources gave rise to the view, still dominant among non-specialists, that guilds strictly controlled vocational training in urban areas and, as a corollary, entry to skilled labour markets. Reception records suggested in turn that guilds rigidly policed the training of would-be masters and thus that apprenticeship was merely the first step towards guild membership. Apprenticeship appeared to be inextricably bound to the corporate system and it has been studied almost exclusively within the horizon of guilds, specifically their regulations, their labour markets, and their reproduction. In addition to shaping studies of the Old Regime, these documentary biases produced a vision of the nineteenth century cast in the shadow of the corporate system. Most historians have long considered, like contemporaries, that apprenticeship did not survive the abolition of the guilds in 1791. Few written contracts exist after 1791 and without the guilds' strict requirements, it has been assumed that apprenticeship withered in the face of the economic and social transformations that occurred in the early nineteenth century. For this period, the only obvious sources referring to apprenticeship consist of discursive laments about its decline. Indeed, nostalgia for apprenticeship was expressed earlier and more widely than for any other element of the corporate system. The few memoirs of nineteenth-century French workers that mentioned apprenticeship thus modelled their accounts on Old Regime templates. 2 In contrast, our own researchas well as recent work on other European cities and states-demonstrates how complex the practice of 'apprenticeship' was in the eighteenth century and how nuanced its relationship to the guild system was. This complexity cuts in two directions. First, guild control over apprenticeship, and over the labour market and production in general, while loudly declaimed was in practice challenged in myriad ways across different trades, locales, and forms of employment. Many forms of training existed outside of and across corporate boundaries, particularly 1 Research for this chapter was funded by an American Council of Learned Societies Collabourative Research Fellowship and Sciences Po ('SAB Learning How'). Information from the sources was inputted by the

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