Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution Allan Potofsky

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

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Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution Allan Potofsky Professor, Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7

© Allan Potofsky 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–57471–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

FOR ISABELLE

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Contents

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables

x

Preface

xiii

Acknowledgments

xvi

Introduction The Three Dreams of Commerce: Corporatism, Statism, Liberalism The builders’ great chain of being A symbiotic French capitalism? Post-1763 consumer politics The building trades and labor migration: Meandering masons, peripatetic plumbers, and others The French industrial “exception?” 1 Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime: The Construction Trades, the Pre-Industrial Market, and the Guild Debate, 1750–1789 Perceptions of urban decline and ancien régime construction practices Architectural critics and the guild debate on the construction sites of Paris The birth of the strike and the reform of Paris construction On the capital’s “unbounded magnificience” 2 The Revolution and Construction Guilds, 1789–1793 The construction of the Revolution’s public sphere Private construction and the credit crunch of the early Revolution Dismantling the corporate order and demarcating the new regime of Parisian building Guild abolition and labor conflict in the construction trades, 1791 vii

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4 8 13 18

22 29 47 56 60 63 67 75 81 82

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Artisanal contention in the interstices of old and new regimes Guilds and the post-corporate economy 3 Projecting the Revolution on the Parisian Work Site, 1789–1793 Public service and construction in the Revolution From municipal to national public works, 1789–1793 The nation’s work site: The Panthéon français Contestation and public works Site-specific and neighborhood-based labor strife in the Revolution “What is the citizen-builder?” From genius to commerce: Construction projects in 1792 The 1793 revival of the ancien régime police idea On the limits of the revolutionary state 4 The Building Trades of Paris During the Terror and Thermidor, 1793–1795 The making of a Jacobin labor and industrial “policy”? “What is a sans-culotte?” Work in the Year II Terror and reaction on the building sites of Paris: Public and private construction in the Years II and III On the radicalization of the Year II 5 Reconciling Commerce and Revolution, 1795–1805 “Republican” commerce under the Directory, 1795–1799 The state and the construction entrepreneur: A rapprochement? Toward a new “bureaucratie” of building The state, capital, and labor in the debate over wages during the Consulate, 1799–1804 6 Constraining Capital, Containing Labor: State Urban Planning of Paris, 1802–1815 The Napoleonic state and the Revolution Assessing, measuring, and policing the Parisian labor force On the advantages and disadvantages of restoring the guilds, 1807–1810 The corporate revival under the Empire

87 93

96 96 98 105 112 119 129 131 137 141

146 146 150 157 165 181 183 183 184 188 200

216 216 222 227 237

Contents ix

Conclusion and Epilogue “Unfree” yet prosperous: Labor and capital in construction, 1763–1871 Epilogue: The nineteenth-century career of corporatism

243

Appendix

260

Notes

264

Bibliography

309

Index

333

243 249

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables Figures 1.1 Anonymous, Construction of the Hôtel de Salm, ca. 1788, detail 1.2 Anonymous, Construction of the Hôtel de Salm, ca. 1788, detail 1.3 Rue de Richelieu, building, 1765 1.4 Rue Volta and rue du Vert Bois: collapsing building 1.5 Rue de Charonne 1.6 Faubourg Saint-Antoine 1.7 Rue Montmartre 1.8 Rue Saint-Martin 1.9 Rue aux Ours 1.10 Courtyard, faubourg Saint-Antoine 1.11 “Architecture: Masonry”: Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert 1.12 Professional Breakdown of the Building Trades of Paris, 1790–1791 1.13 Professional Breakdown of the Building Trades of Paris, 1790–1791 2.1 Tax collectors’ office for the toll house (1787) of the Farmers-General Wall, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux 2.2 Detail of the tax collectors’ office at the place of the Throne (now Nation) 2.3 “Demolition of houses on . . . the pont au change,” Hubert Robert, 1788, detail 2.4 “The Church of the Feuillants in Demolition,” Hubert Robert, 1805, detail 2.5 Souvenir Bastille, marketed by the entrepreneur, Palloy 2.6 “Masons at the hiring fare of the place de Grève,” Jules Pelcoq, 1869 2.7 Rue de la Mortellerie, late-19th century 2.8 Revolutionary-era private construction 3.1 Pierre Antoine Demachy, the New Church of Sainte-Geneviève, 1764 3.2 The Pantheon x

26 27 32 33 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 72 73 74 74 75 88 89 90 108 109

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables xi

3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 C.1

The Pantheon from a “medieval” street perspective Rue de Lanneau Rue Laplace Place de l’Estrapade. Faubourg Saint-Marcel Rue Mandar, 1792–1795 Rue Montmartre: revolutionary-era bourgeois construction Villa Riberolle: revolutionary-era construction Rue des Colonnes, 1793–1795 Rue des Colonnes Rue de Rivoli, begun in 1802 The northern Chaussée d’Antin quarter Revolution-era structure designed by Nicolas-Antoine Vestier, 1792–1793 Directory-era hôtel particulier The rue de Charonne The Abby of Saint-Antoine des Champs as the hospital of Saint-Antoine The canal of St Martin, 1802–1825 The neoclassical Palais Brogniart, called the Bourse Images of Builders, 1. Nicolas de Larmessin, “The Mason’s Costume,” 18th century Images, 2. “They abridge and make labor easier by giving mutual aid,” 1802 Embellissements de Paris (1850s). Artist unknown

109 110 110 111 143 144 145 190 191 192 192 193 193 197 198 220 220 241 242 257

Maps P.1 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3

The Turgot Map, 1739, detail: Île de la Cité Plan de la ville et faubourg de Paris . . . 1790 Turgot Map, 1739, detail: the Marais quarter Plan de la ville et des fauxbourgs de Paris, 1789 Turgot Map, 1739, detail: the place de Grève Jaillot Map, 1773, detail: the place de Grève Turgot Map, 1739, detail: the faubourg Saint-Marcel Map of the Commission des artistes Map of the Commission des artistes, detail: Bastille Map of the Commission des artistes, detail: faubourg Saint-Antoine

xv 25 31 70 71 71 107 162 163 163

xii List of Figures, Maps, and Tables

6.1 Turgot Map, 1739, detail: Enclos du Temple 6.2 Plan Routier de la Ville et Frauxbourgs de Paris . . . (1810): detail, Temple

221 221

Tables 1.1 Professional Breakdown of the Building Trades of Paris, 1790–1791 4.1 Socio-Professional Identities: Police Dossiers of Builders, 1793–1795 A.1 Professional Analysis of Arrested Builders, 1773–1789 A.2 Chambre Criminelle: Arrested Builders and Others, 1773–1789 A.3 Parisian versus Provincial Origins of Arrested Builders, 1773–1789 A.4 Nature of Builders’ Crimes, 1773–1789

41 170 261 262 262 263

Preface Constructing Paris in the age of revolution The fantasies of the decline of Paris are a symptom of the fact that technology was not accepted. These visions bespeak the gloomy awareness that along with the great cities have evolved the means to raze them to the ground. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project One of the oldest discourses about Paris is that it is not what it used to be. In the popular historical view, Paris’s past seems all-too-much centered on the violence of Haussmann’s renewal operations in the mid-nineteenth century. Such a wistful reaction to Paris as a gleaming functional city – but paying too steep a price in brutal razing and reconstruction, in an implacable logic of gentrification – originated a long time ago. The “modern” and beautifully symmetrical Paris came at heavy cost to a less harmonious, more idiosyncratic past. This book aspires to put the eighteenth-century city in a more favorable light than most histories and public memory. It seeks to recover an earlier, less aggressively well-designed Paris. It is a supreme irony, of course, that the eighteenth century also featured many nostalgic voices for a disappearing Paris, and they play a prominent role in this study. I have had the pleasure of inhabiting the great city of Paris and the metropolitan area of Île-de-France – living in the Northeast quarter of Belleville, teaching at the Université Paris-VIII in Saint Denis – for the past 15 years. Experience dictates that avoiding the well over half of the city rebuilt after the mid-nineteenth century is not always possible or desirable. Still, many parts of the capital, like Belleville, remain labyrinthine, richly heterogenous, and hopelessly anchored in the pre-Haussmannian. These compelling qualities, as I occasionally still discover, are far from the exclusive domain of the centrally located and wealthy quarters, where the mammoth trail of Haussmannisation is often the most deeply ingrained in the city fabric. Think, then: construction and the French Revolution and one envisions not cranes, stones, mortar, and scaffolding, but their precise opposite – vandalism, mutilation, and obliteration of the past with the project to annihilate the ancien régime. They evoke, in sum, xiii

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de-construction and violence; the ground-clearing to prepare the way for a greater city. This is a “gloomy awareness,” indeed, as Walter Benjamin remarks. Alternatively, in a more aesthetic vein, construction and the French Revolution bring to mind the monumental architecture of Étienne-Louis Boullé and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: colossal and wholly impractical projects suggesting the dreams of radical and ruthless statesmen who seek to bring the ideal City from heaven to earth. Here, the terms evoke grandeur and utopianism. In both extremes, the association between construction and the French Revolution is at worst antonymous and at best far-fetched or symbolic. Their co-existence, at first glance, did not lead to lasting accomplishments before the Napoleonic Empire. Yet, in taking a longer view, the two were intimately linked. The French building trades during the last half of the eighteenth century constituted the second largest economic sector of preindustrial France – construction was only surpassed by agriculture and kept its runner-up status in France until the end of the nineteenth century. The vast literature on the peasantry and the provinces is eloquent testimony to the grip of rusticity on the historical imagination. By contrast, the building trades have largely been overlooked by historians – which this work seeks to rectify – even if most Parisian construction workers in this period were often also migrant peasant workers. The French Revolution succeeded in opening up rich possibilities for remaking the capital city. Yet, due perhaps to the persistence of the black legend of uninterrupted revolutionary vandalism, very few historians have researched the construction of revolutionary Paris – particularly not in material progression from the quarry and the stone-cutting workshop to the final inspection, nor in its more eminent quality as a core sector of revolutionary labor and industrial policy. As I write the very word, construction, it summons forth darker forebodings of difficulties ahead. This year opened amidst a worldwide economic crisis of staggering proportions with the distinct possibility of a ruinous global breakdown of employment, credit, and finances. The crisis was first brought on with the virtual disintegration of a radically liberalized financial system supporting housing and real estate. Here, as in the past, the building sector was the primary vector for a speculative bubble leading to a bust, followed by a deep crisis in confidence, and a worldwide reluctance to extend and to assume credit and debt. It is indeed a good moment for the historians’ restoration of President Franklin Roosevelt’s image and, with him, to rehabilitate statist solutions to stimulate a depressed economy. This book seeks to remind

Preface

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Map Preface.1 Turgot Map, 1739, detail. Nearly all the buildings featured in the medieval quarter of Nôtre Dame on the Île de la Cité were razed to enlarge the “parvis” during the Baron Haussmann’s makeover of central Paris.

readers that the idea to put people back to work through public service and public works was not born with Roosevelt or in America or in the twentieth century. Perhaps the lessons of the French Revolution and Empire with their sometimes imperfect but nonetheless decisive political engagements toward similar solutions – in particular the massive infusions of public funds to Walter Benjamin’s “great cities” – will be an inspiration during, and after, the current crisis (Map Preface.1).

Acknowledgments As befitting the subject of building, I have accumulated intellectual debts over the years that are simply staggering. Many friends and colleagues have patiently and wisely commented on parts of this book in embryonic form or as polished chapters. I hope they will forgive being mentioned in an impersonal list. Many thanks to: Barry Bergdoll, Paul Cheney, Paul Cohen, Youri Carbonnier, Nathalie Dessens, Lisa Jane Graham, Evan Haefeli, Carla Hesse, Dirk Hoerder, Colin Jones, Bertie Mandelblatt, Robert Mankin, Vera Manzi-Schacht, Silvia Marzagalli, Robert Paxton, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, and several anonymous readers. My editors with Palgrave Macmillan, Ruth Ireland and Michael Strang, have been patient, encouraging, and exacting in their collaboration. Eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century documentation used as the foundation of this study would not have been possible without the generous assistance of the conservators and librarians of the Archives de Paris; the Archives Nationales; the Archives de la préfecture de la police; the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale; the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, site Tolbiac; the Bibliothèque nationale, site Richelieu; the Musée Carnavelet and its Cabinet des arts graphiques. My gratitude toward the extraordinary staffs of Parisian research collections is deep. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Frenchgovernment Bourse Châteaubriand, Columbia University, and the Reid Hall Institute in France, helped to underwrite the research. I have also received support from the Groupe de recherches sur l’histoire intellectuelle, UPRES/EA 1569. The Université Paris-VIII generously granted me a precious sabbatical in 2007–2008. I appreciate these institutions’ support and their confidence in my project. A glance at the endnotes will show that this book on buildings is constructed on credit. I am obliged to several outstanding historians of the eighteenth-century world of work. Steven Kaplan has inspired me for his sensitivity to the mysteries of preindustrial labor; his precise commentary of earlier research constituted a virtual roadmap for future directions. Michael Sonenscher has also made tremendous insights on the elusive artisanate and his oeuvre has egged me on with the anxiety that my own work is too little, too late. Haim Burstin’s masterwork on xvi

Acknowledgments

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the neighbourhood of Saint-Marcel during the Revolution is another stone of this edifice. Our (too brief) friendly encounters were an encouragement when I despaired of finishing a less vast study. Finally, Daniel Roche’s insightful commentaries on a section and on conference presentations have deepened the project’s soundness and solidity. His commitment to the history of the people of Paris reminded me that to comprehend fully the capital’s construction, it is most vital to appreciate its often-refractory inhabitants as well. I was particularly well directed by my university advisers and I wish to thank Charles Rearick who taught me to “see” the very city I work on and live in with greater insight. For years now, our wanderings in “down and out” Paris have followed his inspired and image-filled teaching of French history. Isser Woloch, my graduate adviser and now my friend, taught me rigor and precision are never opposed to elegance and sophistication. Most importantly, he has borne witness that criticism and enthusiasm for this rich historical subject – the French Revolution – are far from contradictory perspectives. In France, I have ironically found my own life to be an (Atlantic) prolongation of the peripatetic wanderings of the maçons de la Creuse toward the capital city. I was welcomed at my previous institutional home, the Université Paris VIII with great warmth. My colleagues and friends, most notably Lazare Bitoun and Michel Cordillot, have eased my departure from the United States, and may have even partially succeeded in their boisterous efforts to make me a tiny bit “more French,” just as the provincial Creusois before me. Although we are now separated by an ocean, my American family has always been “there” for me. My sisters Judy Finch and Donna Ritter gave precious help with thorny technical issues arising from my hopelessness with new technologies. My mother has inspired with confidence in all my choices. My late father was the amateur historian and Francophile who (without knowing or intending) prepared me from my earliest youth for a new life in France. By accompanying him as a boy on long, meandering walks in New York, I first acquired taste to flâner through the obscure nooks and crannies of large urban spaces. My wife, Isabelle Olivero, author and historian of the book, now at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, site Arsenal, has been deeply empathetic and generous with her time, both at home and at work. I could not have had a finer and more critical reader as the one who had to wait this project out. This book is dedicated to her.

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Introduction The Three Dreams of Commerce: Corporatism, Statism, Liberalism

‘(I)t is impossible to erect any building or establish any method without understanding its principles. It is not enough to have a fondness for architecture. One must also know stonecutting.’ There is a whole history to be written about such ‘stone-cutting’ – a history of the utilitarian rationalization of detail in moral accountability and political control. Michel Foucault, 19791 These (building) workers do not have the elegance, the gentleness, the graciousness (l’aménité) which we see among the workers who are involved in the luxury trades . . . Even in their Sunday best, you can tell who is a construction worker. They have more of a rough exterior . . . they also are much more outspoken. Paul Vinçard, 18502 As the comments by Michel Foucault and Paul Vinçard suggest, urban construction was long a ripe subject for interpretive readings. In Foucault’s sense, stone cutting, as opposed to the more noble science of architecture, is an analogy for the gritty material details needed to comprehend the mechanisms of political control. For the much more prosaic reformer Paul Vinçard, the building trades worker is the archetypical gruff plebeian: the laborer as member of la classe dangereuse. Whether in Foucault’s or Vinçard’s optic, the building workers of France’s capital city are indeed protean symbols of many historical developments that convulsed the nation from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first century. The entrepreneurs, masters, laborers, journeymen, and apprentices in this sector were, of 1

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Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

course, the principal actors in the great debates over city planning, urban reform, the division of labor and forms of preindustrial construction. They formed the heart of artisanal movements in revolutions; they were the first participants in the massive labor migration from the countryside to the cities; they were victims and beneficiaries of the industrial re-organization of labor; and they experienced the great transformation of guild masters and journeymen into entrepreneurs and contractual labor. Finally, during the nineteenth century, they constituted a core sector for the rise of republican and socialist ideologies among the artisanal and working classes. This book examines the decisive period of Paris construction that extended from the conclusion of the Seven Year’s War in 1763 through the end of the Napoleonic era in 1815. For over half a century, Paris experienced a real estate and housing boom, punctuated by several dramatic downturns, but sustained by an ineluctable movement toward investment in property and stones. In this epoch, Parisian and national authorities faced deeply contradictory pressures to decrease and to increase oversight. They forged one of the oldest and continuous tropes concerning Paris: the unregulated as well as the arbitrarily regulated market destroys the social fabric of the city. Reformers repeatedly decried the human cost of rapid urban growth in the capital. The popular, squalid, shoddy, and insalubrious Parisian apartment, whose building codes were flouted by proprietors, speculators, and entrepreneurs alike, were repeatedly denounced in a city lacking inexpensive housing. The smallest apartment rooms to let were out of the financial reach of the poorest members of Parisian society, even to those hired to put up new construction. These social problems are by no means resolved today, as witness the tragedy of 2005 when 50 immigrant laborers and family members died in preventable fires in three overcrowded and unsound Parisian buildings in different neighborhoods. All were Sub-Saharan African immigrants, unskilled laborers for the most part who themselves worked on building sites.3 After 1763, city planners struggled to overcome inadequate public funding for affordable, sturdy, and well-designed housing. Then, as now, a rising population density, where increasing numbers of people were squeezed into decreasing amounts of space, challenged reformers, social critics, and political leaders alike. Then as now, tensions between financial constraints and political ideals were rarely conciliated. Then as now, the ascent of market imperatives had real human costs. For example, Parisians regularly disappeared under the collapsed rubble of poorly built buildings to the point of inspiring the adage, “Paris is Swiss

Introduction 3

Cheese” (un gruyère), as a reference to the pock-marked substructure weakened by connecting cellars, tunnels, and quarries. Conserving a homogenous capital, with well-aligned streets and buildings of approximately the same height, repeatedly clashed with the goal of rendering Paris well organized, serviceable, and appropriately majestic in its successive roles as the capital of the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters, the Revolution’s Republic of Virtue, and the Napoleonic Empire. During the French Revolution, this book focuses on the complex, contradictory, and critical views toward of unleashing a new entrepreneurial culture in the public sphere of construction. Despite the historians’ emphasis on liberalization during the earliest phase of the Revolution, it was precisely in 1791, the year of the suppression of corporations and dismantling of the Crown’s administrative apparatus, that the most compelling and durable arguments for statist policies emerged. A tumultuous series of strikes on private construction sites and at the site of the Pantheon, the very symbol of a national labor policy, helped to discredit the liberal solution of granting promoters, speculators, and entrepreneurs greater leeway in Parisian construction. Not limited to misgivings toward capital, revolutionaries were also wary of Paris’ role as an urban magnet attracting seasonal migrant workers, many of them maçons de la Creuse, who arrived in the Spring from the impoverished central region of France (just as Paris and her suburbs now attract North African and Sub-Saharan immigrants for the same reasons). Adding to the Revolution’s challenges, the chronic instability of the new currency, the assignat, and dried-up credit networks provoked periods of crisis in the building sector. In Paris, a combustible mix of international war, terror, and the weakness of municipal organs – as well as greater calls for strict oversight concerning the world of work – compelled a centralized state to resist the pull of market forces. Jacobin statist urban policies also provoked a clear and public rupture with the widely perceived failures of the ancien régime’s corporate-based urban policies. The Revolutionary era’s legacy in Parisian building was thus an abiding critique of deregulated private interest as well as the economic domination of the guilds. The book concludes with the building trades transformed under Napoleon, when new technocratic elites emerged to replace the networks of building oligarchies of the ancien régime. Napoleonic administrators generally favored the technical expertise of engineers, civil and military, over that of architects. The profession of architecture was tainted by former attachment to royalty and privilege, whereas engineering was depicted as a relatively new democratic and merit-based

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specialization. Thus, the priority given to shoring up and expanding Parisian infrastructure was framed as a technocratic choice. Napoleon’s favored Parisian projects were not well-known extravagant structures celebrating imperial grandeur but rather four feats of applied practical science: the canal de l’Ourcq, an expanded market center in les Halles, several vast butcheries, and eastern wine storage centers along the Seine. Pragmatic questions of relieving the Seine of excess boat traffic, rendering fluid choked-up streets in the center of Paris, the distribution of foodstuffs, and easing access to wine were greater priorities than the Arc de Triomphe, constructed over a 20-year period to celebrate the Imperial Army after the victory at Austerlitz.4 The centralization of urban planning, however, only partially resolved the problem of constituting a post-revolutionary state administration of civil construction. A project to revive the guilds of the ancien régime, under the vigilant domination of the state and city police, was launched by Napoleonic administrators at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Empire’s rehabilitation of state-structured corporatism was intended above all not only to maintain security and public order, but also to revive a system of quality control that had been discarded, according to certain high functionaries, with reckless abandon during the French Revolution. The Chambres syndicales, as these statist entrepreneurial organs were called, demonstrated the strength of French corporatism within a market-oriented political economy. Archaism and innovation were symbiotically used in corporate, state, and entrepreneurial institutions to bolster the commercial revolution in France.

The builders’ great chain of being Architectural and urban history often treats the history of construction through the exclusive optic of careers, intellects, and tastes of architects and urban planners, or through the structure and aesthetics of buildings, streets, and cities – as if the humans who erected the buildings were a mere afterthought to connoisseurship or to the material history of their own urban environment.5 At the other end of the great chain of being on the building sites, micro-histories of the building trades, examined strictly in the context of regions, migrations, techniques, or jurisprudence, overlook the full significance of the sector within the broader urban, labor, and political history of France.6 Rather than enclose the history of the building trades within the disciplinary constraints of one historical school, method, or discipline, this book uses diverse approaches to focus on three evolving contexts.

Introduction 5

First, this book examines the rise of construction in Paris as a specific form of public investment and private commerce during the building boom of the later eighteenth century. After 1763, an unprecedented wave of private construction in the capital city created opportunities for urban visionaries and reformers to remake Paris. Successive revolutionary governments and the Napoleonic regime appropriated this élan for the public sector, and, despite several periods of depression provoked by a collapsing economy, capital flight, and war, they confirmed that urban renewal was a state monopoly. Second, this book examines the policy debates on the urban transformation of Paris in a period of reform, revolution, and Napoleonic centralization. It emphasizes the primacy of policy and protest – where state and civil society meet – in the restructuring and “policing” of the building trades in preparation for the remaking of the capital city’s urban environment. A technocratic discourse of urban reform whereby the state was seen to transcend the particular interests of capital and labor further secured architecture as an official science. Third and finally, this book probes how the construction industry earned pride of place in the growth of the modern bureaucratic state during and after the age of mercantile and corporate monopolies over trade, production and the labor market. In sum, the policies of liberalization during the Revolution were relatively short-lived reforms and were quickly supplanted by state “policing” – that is centralized administration and control of the urban labor force. The core argument here is that a porous combination of three dreams of commerce – corporatism, statism, and liberalism – assured the construction industry’s transition from the ancien régime to the Revolution. The French Revolution crystallized the terms and ultimate stakes of the struggle between the three dreams of commerce. This book also suggests why France remains conflicted to this very day.7 For they were, in fact, never mutually exclusive, despite contending claims to the hegemony of each idea. In the context of workers’ discourse and organization, for example, continuities between corporatism and state interventionism were prominent. The French labor movement often cited a collectivist idyll in the past to further demands of the state’s intervention. Outside the realm of labor ideologies and insurgencies, moreover, corporatism remained a strategy for the state’s centralizing policies as well. Far from completing the dissolution of corporate structures of the ancien régime, the revolutionary and Napoleonic state reinvested entrepreneurial guild structures, such as the Chambres syndicales, with vigorous authority to police labor, to guarantee the competence of entrepreneurs within certain sectors, and to implement a collaborative urban administration of

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Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

capital and labor. Finally, the absence of laissez-faire was not due to a “redistributive” impulse that at least one polemical historian sees as providing a disastrous continuity between the ancien régime and the contemporary French state.8 Rather, market mechanisms were finessed in relationship to administrative and regulatory institutions that resembled modern housing authorities in their scope and ambition. Despite a long historiography that tends to emphasize the exclusivity and singularity of corporatism, statism, and liberalism in French history, in fact, were largely political discourses masking symbiotic socio-economic practices. In this manner, the industry corroborates recent historical research in core sectors of the economy: the grain trade, metallurgy, arms production, the spinning trades, coal mining, silk weaving, and industrial chemicals, among others. Notwithstanding the rich history of labor and of capital in the Parisian construction sector, a full historical account of its actors has never been written. The utter historiographical domination of the Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s nineteenth-century state-organized transformation of the capital city has all but obliterated the “pre-history” of the Parisian building trades. It has also created a teleological gold standard of modern urban reform by which previous aspirations were bound to fail. Indeed, “Haussmannisation,” the monumental razing and reconstruction in the Second Empire (1852–1870) helped make Paris into “the capital of the nineteenth century,” in Walter Benjamin’s famous phrase. Quite recently, however, historians have begun to rehabilitate the career of “Haussmannisation before Haussmann.” This involved putting into place a centralized administration that could execute visionary urban planning as a long-term process, one that also involved evolving technical changes, new forms of labor organization, innovative fiscal structures for state capitalization, and above all, the political urgency and ruthless will to destroy and remake vast swaths of the capital’s historic center. Other historians have questioned the exceptional nature of Haussmann’s urban reforms, noting that his efforts belong in a tradition of adaptation undertaken in all great Western capitals to the realities of population explosions, the science of sanitation, and, above all, the challenge of mass forms of vehicular transport. In sum, recent historical revisions on the question of the essential “modernity” of the nineteenth-century urban revolution have conspired to underscore the long-term fits and starts in the evolution of Parisian development – and the argument at the core of this book is a further contribution to this thesis of essential and durable continuity.9

Introduction 7

Another challenge to the history of the Parisian building trades is not as much chronological as methodological. In particular, they have been marginalized by what François Dosse called the “crumbling” (émiettement) of history into varieties of specialized sub-disciplines.10 Historical accounts of the people who work in the core industries of the preindustrial urban economy have, at times, shorn social classes from larger contexts, including the state and municipal policies that structured the work environment; or they disregard the capitalist markets, be they luxury or commodities, that rendered certain industries more economically vital than others. In fact, the very concept of social classes within the large-scale and fluid economic sector of the building trades is often indefinable and always elusive. For laborers at times subcontracted work to subordinates in the system called marchandage or piece-mastering – rendering a fixed notion of a master and journeyman slippery at best. To show how class was a lived experience, rather than a sociological abstraction, is to demonstrate how craft, skill, and labor hierarchies were porous realities that were often made and remade.11 For these reasons, this study does not broach the hoary question of fixing a particular definition upon class, while it is a class analysis of the relationship between many of the principal groups in French urban society.12 This book therefore is a departure with methodological trends of the past few decades that focus increasingly on political culture. Representations and ideological debates on the Revolution have separated political culture from social causality. In reaction to inflexible forms of Marxist determinism, much recent scholarship on French history – indeed, it would seem as if nearly all of it! – followed the research, disciplinary, and interpretive model of political history. This study is an explicit call to return to the social, economic, and urban history of the Revolution and reconceptualizes the full scope of social referents in their relationship to political events. Its solution to historical “crumbling,” then, is a synthetic perspective that cuts across artificial disciplinary barriers and thematic distinctions to comprehend Parisian history in a broadly inclusive perspective.13 Despite the importance of the construction industry to Parisian history, there are very few works on this sector, and it is hoped this book will begin to fill the lacuna. The preindustrial building trades have been largely examined as case studies in larger histories of ancien régime guilds, particularly for scholars in the Anglophone world.14 For the nineteenth century, there are many important monographs on Haussmann and the rebuilding of Paris during the Second Empire.15 Also, more recently,

8

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

several general histories of Paris provide a rich contextual basis for this book’s focus on urban policies and the laboring class.16 But as yet no single book synthesizes the broader history of the end of the ancien régime and revolutionary period the urban history of Paris, and the building sector. The approach of this book brings together Parisian history, urban policy, the history of construction, and the entrepreneurial and labor history of the building trades. Manifestos seemingly abound on the need for historical research in this domain, and this book is inspired by ambitious research projects of social and urban history, previously adumbrated by Gérard Noiriel, Jean-François Crola, André Guillerme, Gabriel Désert, among others, on the building trades.17

A symbiotic French capitalism? Post-1763 consumer politics The argument for a history of corporate, statist, and liberal modes of construction demands a good account, particularly, with attention to interpretations of France’s social and economic development in the eighteenth century. Indeed, in the age of Enlightenment, urban planning was claimed, in France more than elsewhere, as the government’s prerogative, and architecture became the state science. Central planning of Parisian construction, that indeed reached its apotheosis with Haussmann, also created a master narrative which disregards other vital threads in the development of French capitalism. As in Renaissance Florence and seventeenth-century London, particularly after the 1666 fire destroyed vast swaths of the English capital, eighteenth-century Paris created the challenge of a western city compelled to rebuild to accommodate new tastes and techniques, as well as to house people of different social strata, while functioning as vital administrative centers and inviting intensified forms of commerce.18 At the same time, however, the context of Paris construction in the ancien régime was distinct from previous ambitions to construct great, beautiful, and functional cities. Exceptional factors specific to Parisian history preclude a fruitful comparative framework to other European capitals or even to provincial French cities.19 True, of course, the centralized monarchy was able to impose, more successfully in Paris than elsewhere, the rules and regulations of safe and standardized building. Most famous was Henry IV’s campaign to eradicate new wooden structures with the abolition of combustible timber frame that accompanied a partial imposition of uniform façades in 1604. Height limitations would follow in 1667 when buildings were restricted to a maximum

Introduction 9

of 16 meters. In a state-centered narrative, the modernization of Paris continued with the elaboration of building codes as the 1783 and 1784 height limitation (five to seven floors, calculated as a coefficient of street width), along with regulations concerning the proper alignment of construction on Parisian streets.20 This book explores at length the statist concern with remaking the modern capital by controlling private construction practices. But, first, it attempts to broaden the historians’ perspective of Paris construction beyond that of official building codes and urban planning, and, second, it examines the expanding role of commerce in other contexts besides building. For example, the expansionist policies of the French crown stimulated the production of national monumental architecture. In turn, mercantile adventures also provided the fiscal and political means for rebuilding Paris. Far from a self-regulating commercial space, developing doux commerce invisible hand economic institutions and mechanisms, the success of international commerce in the eighteenth century – in the first globalization of trade – stimulated nationalist rivalries. Moreover, challenges between the powerful states of Europe extending to the colonies of the Americas were not purely international in nature, but also turned on domestic economic and political concerns. International geopolitics had a deep impact upon the Parisian construction market when mercantile rivalries forced attention upon the glorification of the state and its capacities to control, invest, and aesthetically embody new-found wealth and power.21 Aggressive nationalist debates over mercantile balance of trade policies and the place of commerce in ancien régime society, in fact, had the corollary consequence of energizing public opinion for state intervention in remaking the capital city worthy of the nation’s imperial grandeur. For while the early modern state sought to intervene aggressively in the international realms of trade monopoly, colonization, and war, the domestic economy featured fewer visible levers to pull. The agricultural sector, as the Physiocrats repeatedly complained, was resistant to political intervention, for when applied in the form of protectionism, it was often counter-productive.22 The one fully visible lever of a national political economy, particularly to Parisians in the eighteenth century, was construction. Compelling veritable armies of men (for few women worked in the Parisian building trades outside of widows of entrepreneurs) to conform to modern regulations concerning work rhythms, wages, and safety requirements, while razing and erecting large structures in the capital, were widely accepted as prerogatives of the centralizing state.

10

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

The chronological framework of this book thus begins in the building boom after 1763 which also represented, in purely material terms, a temporary and cyclical pause from a wartime fiscal system, first elaborated by Louis XIV’s finance minister, Colbert. The tentative peace that reigned in the period, that temporarily ended with the French entry into the American colonies’ War of Independence in 1778, liberated financial capital needed for private investment in stones. Indeed, wars had been borne with great difficulty by the average subject of the fiscalmilitary state – in such periods, as 1760 and 1763 and, again, from 1783 to 1786, the vingtième, or the 5 percent tax, was tripled to become a 15 percent tax on all income. Respite from war, then, mechanically freed up investment capital.23 None other than Voltaire himself, writing at mid-century, had sardonically argued that war and urban renewal projects were antonyms: For the greatness of his soul and his love for the people, the king would like to participate in making his capital city as dignified as himself. But . . . the king, after a long war, is hardly in a state at present to spend a lot of money for our pleasure, and, before tearing down the houses that hide the façade of the Church of Saint-Gervais, he must pay for the blood that he spilled for the fatherland.24 Thus, while ancien régime and revolutionary wars ultimately sapped the fiscal and material means by which Paris might be reconstructed, they also paradoxically created political opportunities for urban plans to raise the capital of the kingdom to the level of ancient Rome. Patriotic movements to invest in the embellishment of Paris arose just after the most bellicose moments of the eighteenth century. Such ambitious projects as the Church of Sainte-Geneviève (in 1791, the Panthéon français), la Halle au blé (the Grain Market), and the place de Louis XV (after 1792, la place de la Concorde) were conceived by the Crown at the end of the humiliating Seven Years War and, not coincidentally, undertaken between 1763 and 1764 after a year’s peace allowed for royal coffers to begin to be refilled. The heightened significance of Parisian building was also determinative in resolving Paris’ ambivalent status as the capital of the French nation, with the monarchy and much of the government in Versailles. The flow of political power and the state’s administration toward Paris, as the undisputed state capital, began in 1789. During the Revolution and Napoleonic eras, the building site in a regenerated nation was the focus of numerous efforts to illustrate clearly the steadiness and strength of the visible hand in the domestic economy.

Introduction 11

It provided, above all, a rare showcase for the revolutionary state to demonstrate its authority to give coherence and splendor to the urban center of a regenerated nation.25 The state-centered narrative of Parisian construction, to the exclusion of other factors, is as coherent as it is incomplete. It above all marginalizes the private and corporate sectors of the French economy, and relegates social causes which inflected the ability and will to construct in Paris. For example, Parisian building was also at the heart of the eighteenth-century consumer revolution, a European-wide phenomenon, spurred largely by colonial commerce. The consumer revolution occurred with the growing market for product innovation. Cheap copies of luxury goods cohabitated with a growing demand for imported consumer items. Frequent disruptions in Atlantic trade made substitute items for “high-end” hats and umbrellas more desirable and more accessible: an explosion in the production of inexpensive hats, fans, snuffboxes, imitation silver and gold watches for the masses resulted. The dynamic and expanding consumer market was stimulated by changing fashions, innovative production methods, and new tastes.26 Among other commodities, the classic four-story Parisian rental apartment building (the ground floor and attic were, and are, of course, not counted) increasingly became an object of consumption, accessible to a greater number of newly successful proprietors. The construction of buildings built for profit by landlords who rented entire floors to single families took off in the middle of the eighteenth century. Even as Louis Sébastien Mercier, in 1788, lamented that a typical Parisian family “home” was no more than a single apartment room with a fireplace, more buildings allowed for families to spread out in three or four small rooms on a single floor.27 Balancing a greater investment in space was the use of cheaper materials. A “populuxe” method of construction for the masses – decried for its built-in and dangerous evanescence – was to increase the use of plaster of Paris, often mixed with mud, while limiting the use of more expensive dimension stone.28 Thus, the liberal dream of commerce was partially realized in the form of increasing return on investment in landed rent. This opened up greater possibilities for new social classes to become proprietors. About three-quarters of the owners of Parisian houses and apartments in the eighteenth century were members of the professional bourgeoisie, including master artisans, or those rentiers living off investments or land.29 Money flowing to stones increased dramatically after the August 1766 ordinance enjoining that investors in a project could claim all property on a construction site if the contractors went bankrupt.

12

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

This ordinance paradoxically strengthened both the corporate and the liberal lobbies, as witness the contestation that resulted between guilds and proprietors. For it virtually eliminated risk for speculation, while compounding the financial burden of credit-worthy guilds. Guild masters, who would lose their total outlay in cases of the bankruptcy of a collaborating building contractor, came to rely increasingly upon their guilds as credit unions. This early financial and building bubble for investors had spectacular consequences. Between 1770 and 1789 Parisians accumulated debts averaging 28 million livres per year; almost half, 12 million livres, of these debts were invested annually in apartments, houses, and land, with the vast majority of this real estate located in Paris. The presumed “seepage” of money from capital to land, from urban to apparently more secure rural investments – long taken to be one of the fundamental causes for the tenacity of feudal conditions in the ancien régime – was staunched well before the Revolution.30 Greater access to private property in the form of buildings, of course, only provoked debates for why such access was restricted in the first place. The rise of consumer culture created a sharp tension between the liberty lobby and the corporate dream of commerce, increasingly portrayed in the Enlightenment as masking monopolistic practices for the privileged few. As evident to many observers, building entrepreneurs, like furriers or hatters, were drawn by cycles of offer and demand into a system demanding more sub-contracting, less regulation, and greater commercial liberty.31 In sum, market-driven production methods competed with quality control, the masters’ command of technical expertise, and urban planning. The guild system, in turn, came increasingly under ideological attack by an elite French public opinion that demanded a reformed political economy, progressive fiscal policies, and a transparent administration or police, as it was called in the epoch. A rapidly bankrupt state during the waning years of the ancien régime began to face insurmountable challenges to serve convincingly as the honest broker in assuming responsibilities assigned by corporate and liberal apologists. This final, corrosive challenge to the statist dream of commerce – and to the state itself – was not adequately met before 1789. Nor was it fully met afterward. By situating the history of the building sector in a larger context of public, private, and corporate production, the consumer revolution will be shown to reach deep into the popular classes. In the far-off southern region of Languedoc, for example, a deeply creative peasantry increased productivity by cultivating new crops derived from African and American colonies, while exploiting the new markets of

Introduction 13

France’s first empire via the canal du Midi which linked the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. But it was by road that almost half of the new wealth accumulated in Languedoc in the eighteenth century flowed to Parisian creditors, financiers, and royal coffers. Fiscal hemorrhaging from the provinces to the capital of the national economy meant that Paris was the beneficiary as well as the financial source of prodigious eighteenth-century growth.32 By the time of the French Revolution, crowds accustomed to the fruits of colonial commerce responded to market disruptions with vehemence. There were, for example, days of action (journées) provoked by the mere rumor of sugar and coffee shortages in the aftermath of slave riots in faraway Saint-Domingue.33 Ultimately, the irreconcilable difference between lofty promise and gritty reality led to the collapse of urban renewal projects at the end of the ancien régime. The fiscal shortfalls that fanned the fear of national decline largely undermined the Crown’s financial capacity to reconstruct Paris. By contrast, the opportunities represented by the Revolution’s 1791 abolition of the guilds and the massive appropriation and selling of properties – mostly tied to ecclesiastical institutions – created a long-term stimulus to the private building sector. In the case of Paris construction, then, the arrival of the Revolution and anticorporate policies provided a spur to private construction; while the Revolutionary municipality’s investment in public structures such as hospitals, theatres, and “ephemeral architecture” during national ceremonies provided precious capitalization of the building trades in a moment of deep crisis. In the construction sector, in particular, the Revolution was a boon to capitalism, but in complex and unintended ways, combining archaic and innovative ideologies and practices.34

The building trades and labor migration: Meandering masons, peripatetic plumbers, and others The three dreams of commerce engages as much the history of labor as that of capital. The context here emphasized is how the advocates of the guilds, the state, and liberal markets applied symbiotic solutions to labor policies and, in particular, to the hoary issue of labor mobility in the construction trades. This book, then, sees an alternative to the classic ways the circulation of labor is recounted via the prism of the “push” of rural poverty or the “pull” of the urban labor market.35 The founding of a national labor market in France, side by side with consumer markets and increased state and municipal investment, was another vital component of French capitalism. And, here

14

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

too, the building sector was at the center of the French version of the great transformation from a feudal to a commercial capitalist economy. The attraction for the French peasantry of urban centers undergoing renewal and expansion in the eighteenth century made labor flow toward the cities, first, a seasonal and, increasingly during the Revolution and the nineteenth century, a permanent migration. As is still the case in the contemporary developed world, the building trades provided choice opportunities for an unskilled migratory labor force. The building trades of Paris underwent another variant of the classic assimilation of “peasants into Frenchmen” – Eugen Weber’s male-exclusive formulation is indeed applicable as the wives and families of peasant builders were almost always left behind. Eventually, the transformation of displaced peasants into urban labor contributed to elaborate a plebeian culture with later implications for the French Revolution.36 This book will argue that the material changes during the eighteenth century created momentum for the industrial transformation of a labor market – unlike Weber’s thesis, which put a chronological emphasis on modernization squarely during the Third Republic and the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Revolution, as will be shown, was far from an “irrelevance” to the masses of ordinary people. Massive investment in infrastructure and – simultaneously – a centralizing and liberalizing state, competing with the corporate organization of the building trades, laid the groundwork for the arrival of future laborers in the cities.37 The departure from a destitute countryside was the central act in the forging of a tragic national myth. In this optic, the French peasantry’s slow and often reluctant abandonment of le terroir – for the most urbane Parisian’s authentic identity still lies in the deep provinces – contributed to the “desertification” of the countryside. In fact, migration toward the cities unfolded at a steady cadence through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and greatly accelerated in the post-war twentieth century. But a material precondition privileging the circulation of labor in France was the state’s successful creation of 40,000 kilometers of roads between 1737 and 1787. In particular, the 1749 founding of the prestigious Ecole des ponts et chaussées, the engineering school of bridges and roads, was a decisive moment in the century-long state project to connect Paris to every major provincial city. Also, by the application of the corvée, a widely hated tax constraining peasants to participate in road construction, the French crown made greater mobility of goods and people a priority. The expanded means given to the state’s civil engineers under the Revolution, coupled with the elimination of tolls, made roads

Introduction 15

accessible to all; in turn new infrastucture gave migrant workers fresh opportunities to travel from the hinterland to urban centers.38 In the specific case of the masons of Paris, a vast majority originated from Limousin, among the poorest, least accessible, and, for the future physiocratic Finance Minister Anne-Robert Turgot, the royal intendant to the province from 1761 to 1769, one of the most backward regions in France. Turgot, as we will see, was an early advocate of the liberal dream of unfettered labor flow within the French nation, an idea imperfectly realized and imperfectly rescinded in 1776, with his abolition and restoration of the guilds. He thus had direct experience of the mountainous region, the Limousin, near the dead center of France, notorious for its human misery built on miniscule landholdings scraped out of rocky and recalcitrant soil. And he concluded that the geographical conditions of the region could scarcely provide subsistence for its destitute peasantry, a situation he attempted to remedy through a series of far-reaching reforms, such as introducing the potato for cultivation. Turgot’s energetic efforts were to little avail: the solution to misery for most Limousins was departure. Migration toward Paris reached such proportions that the region and the term Limousin became Parisian argot in the building trades, designating the unskilled laborers who mixed mortar and sometimes applied it on the finished stonework. The liberal dream of commerce was, to Turgot, also a humane legitimation of a migratory flow deeply rooted in the region’s chronic poverty.39 The dim recesses of collective memory place the beginning of the Limousins’ labor migration during the construction of Cardinal Richelieu’s military fortifications during the siege against the French Protestants of La Rochelle in the 1620s. More likely, however, was the insatiable demand of the Versailles château for manpower that began a national exploitation of the Limousin’s knowledge of masonry. Massive movements toward Versailles were noted in the 1680s when up to 36,000 laborers were hired on the chateau’s site.40 By the Revolution, labor migration toward the Paris area began in early March of each year, when veritable armies of the maçons de la Creuse – the region is the western part of the Limousin that became a Department in 1790 – undertook the journey by foot or on horses to migrate to the capital, or alternatively, to Saint-Etienne or Lyons. As the construction industry developed in France, the numbers of laborers leaving the Limousin grew from about 12,000 in the 1750s, or just under 20 percent of the Limousin adult population, to 15,000 under Napoleon, to almost 25,000 in 1830, climaxing at 42,000 migrants in 1876, or 15 percent of Limousin adults

16

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

at the very height of Haussmann’s monumental reconstruction of parts of Paris.41 Despite a widely repeated myth, however, about an eternal return in November or December of each year, the Limousins headed home only occasionally and for short periods of time. According to a detailed inquiry during the Napoleonic regime, about one in four builders born in the Department of the Creuse returned to the provinces each year. The prospects of returning to cultivate the regions’ small and poor landholdings were not at all enticing. Martin Nadaud, the archetypical maçon de la Creuse, recounts his first trip home after three years of work in Paris; his departures from Paris to the Creuse became even less common afterward, when he was elected deputy from the region in the Second Republic.42 The experience of rejection, adaptation, and integration shared by the Limousins, as among many migrant workers in Paris, is another subject of a vast historical literature. For the period after the Revolution, the notion of a French “melting pot,” the France’s integrationist model that successfully reforged, first, provincials and, then, foreigners into French citizens, inspired research on communities of migrants and immigrants. In the early nineteenth century, the principal attraction of Paris for provincial workers was, of course, the presence in the capital city of compatriots of certain regions who shared certain specialized skills and dominated whole sectors of production. The emergence of “colonies” of Auvergnats, Creusois, Berrychons, Normands, and still others was tied to craft-specific specialization: thus, the Auvergnats became tied to small commerce; and well before they were known as owners of cafés, they were often heavily represented in the trades of metallurgy and cobbling as well as casual labor. In parallel fashion, the maçons de la Creuse, the largest of any migrant community in Paris, took full advantage of the reputation of their region as the repository of a form of collective memory in their talent for construction. Up to three-quarters of the migrating Creusois worked in Paris as stonemasons.43 Other trades were similarly colonized by immigrants from one region, prized for specialized talents. The stonecutters from the Lower Normandy area also were renowned for their precise work, and represented three out of ten members of the Parisian trades, the other provincials dominated the profession in the capital. Among stonecutting artisans working in Paris, native Parisians represented a meager 15 percent of craftsmen in construction.44 Hence, one seemingly accurate source of criticism against the corporate statist and liberal dreams of commerce was the “armies” of provincial

Introduction 17

workers marching into the capital city to fill increasing demand for labor. Visibly, the guilds were scarcely able to maintain a monopoly over production and the workforce in periods of economic expansion.45 Nor was the state adequate in policing the Parisian economy of scale, which flourished after the middle of the eighteenth century, attracting increasing numbers of migrant workers from the provinces and in almost all socio-professional categories. In turn, the liberal dream seemed synonymous with social chaos. Up to 10 percent of the Parisian population was “floating” in the summer months; that is, they were largely “masterless” seasonal labor released from all community control. The rise of large manufactures in the unincorporated faubourgs of the capital, particularly to the Northeast and South increasingly attracted these provincials. The sheer poverty of these quarters, epitomized by the faubourg Saint-Antoine where liberty of commerce was first guaranteed in 1657 and which erupted in revolt in July 1789, further repudiated the liberty lobby. Labor migration was so intense that the appellation of “native” Parisian (i.e., born in Paris) was applicable to perhaps half of the population in the first half of the eighteenth century. The number of born and bred Parisians declined to less than 40 percent in the 1780s, and would be reduced to less than a third of the Parisian population in the years of the Terror during the Revolution. Daniel Roche concludes that 7,000– 14,000 migrants from the provinces arrived in Paris each year in the period, 1750–1790, with the number of freshly arrived migrants numbering around 3–5 percent of most samples of the Parisian population. Paris, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had become a magnet for migration. Fewer than half the capital’s population was born in the city during the entire second half of the eighteenth century. The specter of Paris inundated by migrant laborers was a trope used by political adversaries and allies of the corporate dream. Either, as for Turgot, unfettered labor circulation signified the breakdown of guild controls as a fait accompli; or, for advocates of corporatism, the arrival of provincial flotsam was a mere harbinger of real anarchy once the guilds would be swept away. Either way, labor could not be fully “policed” in a market economy. Even Napoleonic reformers, anxious to rehabilitate the guild regime, would reprise this debate in the early nineteenth century.46 The memoirs of itinerant workers in France re-tell the same story as Martin Nadaud, the celebrated former mason and socialist politician who wrote his colorful memoir after his involvement in the 1848 Revolution and the 1871 Commune. Nadaud’s narrative is the classic tale

18

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

of how regional or provincial ties were transformed, first, into craftspecific solidarities and, then, into a broader class consciousness. His colorful memoir of workers’ migration into Paris retraces the shock of rejection and discrimination that accompanied the arrival of a provincial worker in the Capital. In particular, the seasonal arrival of thousands of building workers stoked the social prejudices of Parisians of the ancien régime and the nineteenth century. While the maçons de la Creuse were seen as a necessary part of the Parisian landscape, they were often as despised as they were vital to the Parisian economy.47 Nevertheless, the demand for masons so consistently outstripped supply that these “foreigners” rarely faced outright rejection from the labor market once in Paris.48 Some restrictive Parisian corporations overtly practiced exclusion of provincials from their trade: the roofers’ guild in 1768 won a lawsuit heard by the Paris Parlement to forbid provincials from entering the place de Grève to look for work. A petition signed by 300 journeymen and apprentice roofers was cited in this decision, with the Paris Parlement also agreeing to the request that “foreign journeymen” roofers be compelled to perform a second apprenticeship in Paris before qualifying for journeymen status. This former of protectionism sometimes was profitable as the “closed” Parisian roofers’ guild guaranteed wages that were consistently superior by one-fourth than were the daily salaries assured by the “open” guild of masons.49 Despite the rigid categories of the corporatist, statist, and liberal dreams of commerce, the Parisian labor market in Paris combined fluidity and protectionism, originality and tradition. This seemingly paradoxical situation – an elaborate, tried and true infrastructure for migrant workers and corporate restrictions in some trades – created a fragile but largely functional balance between the “pull” and “push” of migrant labor from the provinces to the capital city.

The French industrial “exception?” As early migrant laborers, as consumers and producers of “populuxe goods,” as recipients of private or public capital investment in stones, or as an unjustly perceived migratory “dangerous class, laboring class” – the Parisian building trades entrepreneurs and laborers were core actors in the origins of French capitalism. (While definitions of capitalism vary, this book will use the term in the broad sense given to it by Fernand Braudel of the productive, consumption, and circulatory systems which, simultaneously, create and flow from the surplus creation of capital.50 )

Introduction 19

Their history also raises questions about the nature of French economic development in the early industrial era. For before industrial machinery such as mobile steam cranes and new materials such as reinforced concrete transformed techniques for erecting the capital’s buildings, an industrial division of labor became a fixture on the building sites of Paris. By the Napoleonic era, as we will see, each craft specialization had specific and circumscribed tasks, recompensed with regularly defined hourly wages, and with work rhythms dictated by the state’s labor code in accordance with a rigorous time-discipline: the very preconditions of an industrial workforce. The restructuring of the construction trades in accordance with the three dreams of commerce – corporatism, statism, and liberalization – helped to mold the French model of industrialization. What, precisely, constituted the French model has been widely debated since well before the 1978 publication of the economic historians Patrick O’Brien’s and Caglar Keydor’s comparative study of English and French industrialization. But O’Brien and Keydor convincingly concluded that the anglocentric notion of a French “lag” in nineteenth-century economic development was a misleading depiction, to be jettisoned in favor of a greater appreciation of an alternative “path to modernization.” In terms of per capita output and labor productivity, the French economy, from the 1780s to 1914, developed at a steady pace, roughly equal to that of Britain.51 France’s passage to “modernity” was different, not inferior, to the British model of development. In absence of certain social traumas originating in deep inequalities, without the massive diminution of its agricultural sector and rapid urbanization on a ruinous scale, France managed to match British economic growth in the long term. The broader challenge, then, for historians is to understand the singular nature of French economic development as a viable option to British industrialization. Even more than in Britain, certain industries depended heavily on artisanal production, leading to a peaceful coexistence between workshops and factories until the twentieth century. But the French model continues to provoke the larger question of what constituted its distinctiveness, one which resisted the British formula based on the diffusion and adaptability of technologies, product innovation, expansion abroad, and a liberalizing state. From the ancien régime through the end of the Napoleonic epoch, the Parisian building trades exemplified this distinctiveness, in particular, as a crucible for the three dreams of commerce, while never fully embodying a single socio-economic model inherent in these dreams.

20

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

Most persuasively, Jeff Horn has established that “the other great fear,” that of revolutionary violence by plebeian radicals, who periodically engaged in waves of Luddite-type machine-breaking in textile mills, consistently inflected the political economy of French administrators up to the middle of the nineteenth century. This book will amplify this argument and show that a deep tradition of labor contestation in the building trades helped boost wages over the period studied. Also, the findings of Camille Richard and Ken Adler in arms fabrication and of André Guillerme in biochemicals and metallurgy, focusing on the stunning rise in wartime revolutionary industrial production during the Years II and III (1793–1795), verify that the revolutionary state created sound alternatives to British-style capitalism. The Jacobin planned economy was a powerful, efficient model of technological competition in delivering goods while channeling, with often tragic results, the resurgence of popular violence. The state was the ultimate guarantor of equity in labor relations, and this, in turn, as a long-term consequence helped to inspire a multifaceted transition to industrial capitalism.52 This book is thus inscribed in the historiographical tradition of French exceptionalism. It demonstrates the Revolution’s legacy on the building sites as one of modernity, particularly, in the validation of expertise in the form of a corps of rigorously formed state-trained and state-employed civil engineers, urban planners, and architects. The post-revolutionary building trades also were to become a prime vector for a technocratically defined and highly specialized labor force.53 These innovations, moreover, were partially accomplished in remobilizing what Turgot had condemned as “archaic” forms of ancien régime corporate society. For example, as the state’s hand was made increasingly visible to all on outdoor construction sites, corporate self-policing was also revived in the guise of entrepreneurial cooperation with state authorities. The Terror had made patronage networks vital to the mobilization of labor and resources in the wartime economy, and these brought to power in the local sections many of the urban notable elite of the ancien régime. After 1806, Napoleonic administrators restored the trade corporations in a deeply altered form. The ancien régime’s and Revolution’s paradoxical efforts to contain as well as to expand a burgeoning entrepreneurial culture thus had a tenacious life. The technocratic and corporate regime in the construction sector by the early nineteenth century was also deeply sensitive to market forces. The collapse of Atlantic commerce after the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and Haitian Revolution (1804), along with the 23-year period of nearly unremitting warfare and a generally unfavorable demographic growth

Introduction 21

at the turn of the century, compelled the Parisian construction industry to adapt to a more restricted market, with fewer wealthy and middling proprietors able to invest in stones and with a state heavily committed elsewhere. The entrepreneurial elite emerging in the Napoleonic period, as will be shown, was more restrictive in number, while more diverse in background. Few were issued from the extended families of master builders and contractors and their kinship networks whose family names dominated the ancien régime trade almanacs.54 The French Revolution had thus created the foundations of an industrial capitalist order by concentrating wealth and talent in the hands of a technologically proficient and enterprising bourgeoisie. At the same time, the Revolution fostered the formation of a class of closely watched laborers, subjugated to time-discipline and well-versed in the imperative of obedience to new forms of state and entrepreneurial authorities. Even in the absence of new technologies and techniques, the Parisian world of work of 1815 would have been hardly recognizable to the laborers who had produced the architecture of the Enlightenment after the mideighteenth century. In its account of the transformation of the Parisian building site, this book will demonstrate how, precisely, the French exception of industrialization was traced before the industrial revolution, and in a contentious symbiosis of the three dreams of commerce, embodied by the Parisian building guilds, the centralizing state, and capital and labor markets.

1 Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime: The Construction Trades, the Pre-Industrial Market, and the Guild Debate, 1750–1789

Paris is too large, seen politically; it’s an outsized head for the body of the state. But today it would be too dangerous to remove the tumor rather than to let it subsist. There are diseases that, once they take root, are indestructible. The great cities are very much favored by absolutist government: you need it all to herd people together; they lure the great proprietaires enticed by luxury and pleasure. They squeeze crowds in to the city, as if fencing in sheep on a prairie . . . . Paris is thus like an abyss where the human species is melted down . . . . Everyone has the right to live; subsistence is the first law. I see a flourishing city, but only at the expense of the nation as a whole. These six-story houses, packed with people, devouring the harvest and the grapes for fifty miles around; these lackeys, these priests, these do-nothings, they serve neither state nor society. But they all have the right to live. There are political evils that must be tolerated since we cannot find absolute solutions, and such is the scope of the city: we cannot sweep off the earth those who live in lodging houses and attics. They have nothing, not even their own arms, which have withered. Stop, all those who would enter? We must preserve even the diseased parts, as we cannot extirpate them without putting into danger the political corps . . . . But let us not foretell what we sense about this city which will always be cherished by a 22

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 23

government whose head is as disproportionate as the capital is to the kingdom. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, 1782 Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s commentary with its mix of sarcasm, anxiety, and resignation vividly conveys a complex set of views held by many eighteenth-century observers of Paris. On the one hand, the dramatic spread of urban ills such as squalid boarding houses and dilapidated garrets were seen as a malignancy on France’s “body politic.” On the other hand, Paris’ “tumor” could not be simply excised without inflicting greater harm. In the face of this paradox, Mercier counseled a resigned tolerance for the relentless growth of the lump constituted by Paris. Mercier expressed an elitist perspective on the urgency of urban renewal and social reform within the capital; but he also conveyed fatalism that neither consensus nor political will nor economic means might transform the capital in accord with a single vision of the city. His sardonic call – “Stop, all those who would enter?” – reflects the widely shared perception that the fragile equilibrium in the social composition of Paris, with its range of characters, rich and poor alike, only coexisted on borrowed time by the second half of the eighteenth century. His starkly alarmist conclusion that more harm than good would come from extirpating the undesirable parts of Paris was a call for a resigned tolerance that the Crown and the Parisian administration might have heeded at the end of the ancien régime. Contrary to Mercier’s remark about the affinity between large cities and absolutist governments, late eighteenth-century Paris posed a number of insurmountable challenges for the monarchy at the end of the ancien régime. There was no consensus over specific reforms to enact and no practical way to carry out urban revitalization on a grand scale. The Crown was, in fits and starts, boldly reformist in aspiration yet often indecisive in action, for it was on the verge of bankruptcy. In the absence of a coherent and feasible public plan, Paris’ chaotic growth was driven principally by a flourishing private sector, the “great proprietors enticed by luxury,” as Mercier had it. Out of their anarchic and frenzied development came, not a reformed capital of a kingdom, but the capital of the Revolution. This chapter examines Paris as the unique theatre of a great transformation that took place in multiple realms – in the physical construction of the city, in the policies of its administration or what was broadly called the “policing” of its people, as well as in the thinking about

24

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

an architecture and labor market worthy of the capital of the republic of letters.1 In particular, the city’s construction industry became the focus of efforts by the Crown, various courts, and trade corporations to reform what Mercier meant by the ”capital’s “unbounded magnificience” (grandeur démesurée de la Capitale). The building site was a crucible of competing authorities, cooperating in the construction of buildings while seeking greater control over the tasks of construction. The sheer diversity of tasks, from digging the foundations at the beginning to carting away the debris at the end, and the cast of characters, from proprietors to master builders to building inspectors, rendered the construction sector a vast social laboratory for the often contradictory efforts by Enlightenment reformers, la police, and the Crown to alter the physical landscape of the capital and to streamline the administration of the city. While the precise numbers of construction sites opened at the end of the ancien régime are not known, Mercier echoed the widely shared notion of Parisians that fully one-third of the Capital had been rebuilt from the 1760s to the 1780s, boldly putting forth the estimate that 10,000 new private homes had been erected in 25 years. As urban historians put the number of buildings in Paris on the eve of the Revolution at between 25,000 and 30,000, Mercier’s estimate is probably well founded. Furthermore, the rhythms of construction followed that of the economy – for “as the building trades go, so goes everything else,” as the nineteenth-century expression had it – and particularly following the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the construction sector enjoyed a rare burst of robust activity.2 Another Parisian commentator, the bookseller Siméon-Prosper Hardy, from his shop on the rue SaintJacques, noted with amazement the rapid pace of progress on the public grands projets of his day in the 1780s, citing Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s toll houses, the barrières d’octroi, the church of Sainte-Geneviève (later converted into the Pantheon), and the (yet unfinished) Palais de Justice (Map 1.1, Figures 1.1, 1.2).3 The building trades comprised the most significant sector of the city’s economy: slightly more than one in 20 or between 5.4 percent and 6.3 percent of the total population (around 37,800 people out of the most widely accepted estimates of 600,000 to 700,000 inhabitants) were employed or worked as masters in 1790–1791. With an average of 15 workers to one employer, the building sector became the locus of judicial and royal reforms that, as we will see, eventually undermined the ancien régime’s corporate order of construction, paving the way for labor strife and the breakdown of the system supplying the Parisian housing market in the years leading up to the Revolution. As the

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 25

Map 1.1 Plan de la ville et faubourg de Paris . . . 1790. Map displaying the recently constructed Farmers-General Wall. Note the lively urbanization beyond the freshly completed wall rendering it outdated.

majority of builders worked in open air rather than in the closed ateliers of Parisian courtyards, the sense of crisis in this industry was further inflated by the sheer spectacular visibility of the occasional industrial accident – a falling crane, collapsing building, or fissured structure had repercussions in the imaginaire far beyond the numbers of injured workers or ruined proprietors. In its statistical and symbolic importance, the Parisian construction sector heralded the industrial world of the nineteenth century.4 The turmoil within this sector affected, first and foremost, the principal building corporation of master builders, the Chambre royale des Bâtiments. By the end of the ancien régime, this royal and municipal institution had evolved into a powerful quasi-public housing authority with jurisdiction over proprietors, entrepreneurs, private architects, and artisans alike. As a trade corporation overseeing private construction sites, the Chambre enforced a precise system of controls, inspections, salary structures, and commercial transactions. In a feverish explosion of speculative activity after 1763, the Chambre’s members helped to

26

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

Figure 1.1 Anonymous, Construction of the Hôtel de Salm, ca. 1788, detail. The stonecutters are in the foreground while the architect, with map in hand, apparently consults with the proprietor off in the distance. Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

assure the expansion of Paris by carving out entire quarters in what had once been the outer faubourgs to the west and northeast of Paris. For the artisans and unskilled laborers of the building trades, this vigorous growth meant a long period of plentiful work rewarded by good pay. The ample wage scale (tarif ) defined by the Chambre reflected the flourishing demand for Parisian construction that outstripped supply. The wage scale was practiced by many urban guilds, but the construction industry distinguished itself from other sectors of the Parisian economy with salaries for laborers that rose by 15 percent more than average workers’ salaries in Paris between mid-century and the Revolution. Beneficiaries of a 50 percent average pay increase over 50 years, building workers were among the few Parisians who did not see a steady erosion of real wages in an inflationary period. In the popular imagination as well as in reality, the masons, stonecutters, carpenters, plasterers, roofers, locksmiths, and others represented the artisan elite of Parisian laborers. Indeed, due in part to the relative “affluence” of

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 27

Figure 1.2 Anonymous, Construction of the Hôtel de Salm, ca. 1788, detail. In the background, the Hôtel de Salm was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson during his term as minister plenipotentiary to France and served as inspiration for his rebuilding of Monticello. 1787 March 2: “While in Paris, I was violently smitten with the Hotel de Salm, and used to go to the Thuileries almost daily, to look at it” (Jefferson to To Madame de Tessé). Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

its workforce, the building process became a target for the criticism of disgruntled proprietors, architects, city and monarchical administrators, as well as “the liberal lobby” of Enlightenment reformers who wished to put an end to the corporate system writ large. The construction industry was widely vilified as a sector where producers enjoyed exceptional economic advantages vis-à-vis consumers.5 The history of the Parisian building sector calls into question the master narratives of statism and liberalism in the period leading up to the French Revolution. Neither the effects of a Tocquevillian centralizing state nor the unintended consequences of Physiocratic market forces were responsible for the disruptions of the corporate order in the Parisian construction market. Nor does the discourse of a decline and fall of Colbertism, according to which French state and society were once inextricably linked through the tripartite relationship of corporations, privileges and state regulation, adequately frame the larger issues

28

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

posed by the building sector’s development in the eighteenth century. A fuller description of that sector challenges the linear historical conceptualization of the end of the ancien régime as essentially and exclusively centralizing, liberal, or Colbertist. What is needed – what this chapter attempts – is a more complex account of the role of corporations in the expansion of a market economy and the practices of preindustrial capitalism.6 This discussion also seeks to complement and extend the direction of recent historical research of the French corporate universe. A (rare) consensus among historians has emerged that sees the guilds as one response, in the words of David Bien, not to the question of why the ancien régime collapsed, but rather, why the ancien régime lasted as long as it did. In recent studies of various trades and guilds of Paris, a more favorable view of the corporate idea accentuates the role of negotiation and complicity between the municipal administrators, police commissioners, and corporations. As a part of this process, the historian of Colbertism Philippe Minard demonstrates that the corps of statenominated manufacture inspectors founded in 1669 became over the next century a protean and supple, rather than imposed and dictatorial, form of state interventionism. By ensuring quality control, the inspectors helped stimulate French manufacturing interests, particularly in luxury goods. The French corporations were, in sum, a part of a complex strategy for providing public service, avant la lettre, by effectively regulating labor, professionalizing certain trades, and creatively protecting manufactures.7 Colin Jones suggestively sketches out two strategies that helped create a transition from the “corporative framework” to a capitalist economy. The first, based on “expertise, internal discipline, and segregation,” was intended to distinguish a specific group of professionals from all others: the builders were experts in their domain and needed no intervention in their affairs. The second, based on “transcorporative, egalitarian, and horizontal” qualities, stressed broader relations between a specific trade and society in general. The building guildsmen, entrepreneurs, and corporate members of the Chambre were servants of public interest in assuring safe and quality construction practices. The first internal strategy of builders as experts of their own exclusive domain was elaborated to keep a grip over the construction market against proprietors and state meddling. The second transcorporative strategy was based on the claim to safeguarding privileges in the name of fulfilling the functions of a public housing authority. In this, the builders mirrored the novelty of French corporations in general, for whom “the prestige of experts” and the close

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 29

relationship between administrators and guildsmen broadly favored innovation.8 In light of newer perspectives on the Parisian world of work, the ancien régime Parisian building trades invite a larger reconsideration of the tenacious Enlightenment-era liberal attack on reactionary corporations, portrayed as mired in customary techniques and archaic forms of fabrication. The liberal critique of arduous guild procedure and layers of bureaucracy, the favored targets of the “liberty lobby,” mistook a corporate discourse of privileges and tradition, typically reserved for lawsuits or guild statutes, for the real practices of corporations, more dynamic and more innovative than assumed. Rather than coming to grips with the socio-economic and demographic challenges of a city rapidly becoming a large and densely populated metropolis, the voices of criticism and reform of the eighteenth century were preoccupied with the larger ideological project to sweep away the corporate system of urban society. Such a reform would strengthen state oversight, liberalize commerce and production, or further both objectives simultaneously. An influential critique emerged that represented quality control, professional standards, and certain labor practices as cumbersome obstacles both to state regulation and to the “natural” cycles of offer and demand in the housing market. As this book will demonstrate, the call for progress through sweeping deregulation and reform was itself a highly partisan discourse that failed to comprehend the world it sought to analyze and ultimately annihilate.9

Perceptions of urban decline and ancien régime construction practices Mercier’s perception of the social breakdown in Paris was based on multiple rapid developments at the end of the ancien régime – in its changing population and in the housing market, the economy, and the administration, or “police” of Paris during the second half of the eighteenth century. Specifically, he highlighted the accelerating social segregation between rich and poor; the rise of overcrowded apartment houses tous peuplés, the proliferation of boarding houses or chambres garnies; and the rising population density where increasing numbers of people were squeezed into decreasing amounts of space. These reflections on the declining condition of the city, and the fruitless efforts to reform it, expressed a prophetic insight into the erosion of Paris’s physical and social coherence.

30

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

At first glance, the housing market seemed steadily to fall behind the socio-economic and demographic changes of the capital. Yet a closer examination of the evidence of an overall decline in the quality and quantity of housing construction suggests that short-lived attempts at liberalization of the housing market were interspersed with long periods of legal contention and state reforms that aggravated the very problems they were intending to solve. Indeed, it was largely the incoherence of state-driven and court-ordered policies, rather than the excesses of monopolistic guild practices, that led to the perception of decline, and for the widely repeated argument that the eroding buildings of Paris (sarcastically denounced as immeubles immuables) were unworthy of the capital city. Erected with techniques and an organization of labor that dated from the Middle Ages, the classic early eighteenth-century apartments, buildings, largely concentrated in the old city center and averaging three or four stories in height (five to seven floor structures began to appear only in the 1760s), were, by the late eighteenth century, considered fragile, unsanitary, and dilapidated, with cracks in walls and crumbling foundations forming the basis of common complaints. After a mere 60 years, the typical Parisian apartment building of the eighteenth century needed a complete restoration, with just under half of the new work invested in masonry, indicating serious structural problems.10 Of course, not every proprietor could afford such an investment. About 75 percent of the owners of Parisian houses and apartments were merchants, artisanal masters, “bourgeois,” (signifying an individual who lived off of rents or investments) or members of the legal and medical professions, meaning that a relatively small number of Parisian proprietors, just over 10 percent, were members of the French grand social elite.11 As increasing numbers of neighborhoods decayed, mostly in the city’s center as well as on the periphery (most notably the Right Bank faubourg SaintAntoine and Left Bank faubourg Saint-Marcel), the commercial, rentier and manufacturing elites that made up the majority of Parisian proprietors who could invest in restoration had little incentive to do so, choosing to move instead toward the more solidly built houses of the western quarters of Paris (Map 1.2, Figures 1.3, 1.4, 1.5).12 Some of the documentation on building materials bears out the harshest critiques of the practices of the builders of Paris. To begin with, France, compared to Britain or Italy in the early modern period, lacked abundant and accessible marble quarries. On average, less than 10 percent of construction materials of the private houses were properly ashlar or dimension stone (pierre de taille) – blocks and slabs cut to order – while

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 31

Map 1.2 Turgot Map, 1739, detail of the Right Bank Marais quarter with its 3–4 story buildings (before the 5–7 story structures that began to appear in the 1760s).

the remainder of the materials were made up of rougher, crushed stone (57 percent), plaster (22 percent), with the rest made up of wood, terracotta, and metals. In the poorer quarters, a typical Parisian building could be constituted by almost 90 percent limestone and plaster of Paris. Moreover, the quality of construction was not only a question of class or status. Even the luxurious houses of the four bridges that cross the Seine, the pont de Change, the pont Marie, the pont Saint-Michel, and the pont Notre-Dame, structures torn down between 1786 and 1788 to allow for the free flow of traffic – except on the pont Saint-Michel where buildings survived until 1808 – featured a surprising absence of solid materials to distinguish them from those built on terra firma.13 But was the practice of using shoddy material the fault of corrupt or greedy building guildsmen? Was it indeed the monopolistic or corrupt practices of master artisans that dictated that the least expensive materials be used in construction? Considerable evidence suggests deregulation and not the archaic guild monopolies were the source of at least some inferior construction. The deliberations of the Community of Master Masons disclose the response of the guild to many lawsuits

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Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

Figure 1.3 Rue de Richelieu, 1765. A classic five-story building of the Post-Seven War building boom anticipates the style Louis XVI. Made of cut stone (pierre de taille), this “bourgeois” construction set a very high standard – rarely met – of private construction.

engaged by proprietors who sued guildsmen over flimsy or defective construction (malfaçon). The lawsuit was a common weapon brandished by wealthy proprietors who sought to strip corporate monopolies of their power over production.14 For example, in a series of deliberations between 1759 and 1761, the guild met repeatedly to address the effects of a “new jurisprudence,” upheld by several tribunals including the Paris Parlement, to free up the construction market by stripping the right of guildsmen to fix an industry-wide price for labor and materials (in particular, stones, plaster, mortar, and wood). This “precedent creates an absolute liberty of enterprise which could lead to the ruin of master builders,” complained the syndics of the master masons’ guild.15 In March 1761, they obtained partial satisfaction for the sanctity of contractual accords over this “freedom of enterprise.” A compromise rendered more “transparent” the procuring of building materials by stipulating that the negotiations and prices of building materials be published in multiple copies. These documents would then be submitted for

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 33

Figure 1.4 Rue Volta and rue du Vert Bois. “Paris is a Swiss Cheese,” as the saying goes. Similar late seventeenth-century buildings, the one perfectly restored, the other with serious structural problems. To this day, older Parisian buildings collapse for many reasons, with no relationship to the quality of construction.

approval to the syndics of the guilds of “master carpenters, locksmiths, joiners, roofers, glaziers, pavers, and painters” to solicit their approval of the bidding and of the final price. In this case, and many others, it was a court-driven liberalization and not guild monopoly that obliged builders to cut corners in order to save costs. And, as the outcome suggests, it was a private lawsuit rather than a corporate collectivism that added a cumbersome layer of bureaucratic procedure to the building process. When they were not defending themselves against lawsuits, moreover, the guildsmen also faced a barrage of decrees, ordinances, and court verdicts that vividly reveal the weaknesses of their supposed unassailable monopolies.16 Of course, the problem of sloppy or dangerous building practices cropped up in ways other than lawsuits. The bookseller Siméon-Prosper Hardy noted in his journal 14 fatal accidents for the period 1785–1787 alone, most with several victims among the laborers. The collapse of houses whose foundations were built upon abandoned stone quarries led to half-measures in the 1780s such as their propping up on wooded

34

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

Figure 1.5 Rue de Charonne. A late sixteenth-century “house,” suitable to a rural setting, precisely the context in which this was built when the quarter was beyond the city walls. This style of inefficient “primitive” construction in the capital was the source of much derision by those seeking to remake the capital.

pilasters in the neighborhoods of the faubourg Saint-Jacques, the rue de la Harpe and the rue de Tournon. The practice of building entire neighborhoods upon hollowed out wood foundations led Mercier to muse: “All these towers, these steeples, these vaulted temples – so many signs that show to the eye: what you see in the air is missing under your feet.”17 But here again, the pilasters were a symbol of the weakness and not the strength of guild monopoly, for it was a strictly forbidden practice in corporate regulations as first published 1763 after approval by the Paris Parlement. In fact, some of the condemned construction sauvage of proprietors, by-passing guilds to cut cost, were concentrated in areas of Paris that were not incorporated. The absence of corporate controls and not their abuse created these evident hazards to public safety.18 Regardless of their cause, the uncertainties and disruptions in the Parisian ancien régime housing market helped to aggravate social segregation in the eighteenth century. Earlier, the mixité of rich and poor, according to the classic iconography of the Parisian building, was

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 35

assured by a graduated rent scale, which imposed a vertical rather than horizontal social organization across the city. The occupancy of a given structure had the shops on the ground floor and the finest apartments on the lower floors, where rents were the highest, with the least expensive and smallest rooms let out on the top floors; these were topped off with the miniscule rooms of the attic. But that image seems to have dimmed and blurred over the course of the eighteenth century, with an increasing amount of social segregation replacing the mixité of the typical Parisian building. The outskirts of Paris, particularly in the eastern neighborhoods, where fewer guild controls, cheaper housing, and exemption from many taxes led to what would later be called zones franches, excise-free quarters, were magnets for poorer laborers and artisans. Many settled in the faubourgs Saint-Marcel and SaintAntoine where up to 70 percent of the population was migrants from the provinces by the early 1790s. And, toward the end of the ancien régime, the new housing market was increasingly focused on these areas, with private construction in the rest of Paris taking the form, mostly, of repair work on older structures (Figures 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 1.10, 1.11).19 The fundamental cause for this social stratification was the shortage of inexpensive rental apartments: the average rents of Parisian apartments soared over the eighteenth century, by around 130–140 percent, with a considerable acceleration in the second half of the century. Wildly fluctuating grain prices added to the reality that spending was increasingly reduced to basic necessities. The average Parisian laborer saw an increase of merely 17 percent of his or her wage over the period, 1726–1789, while the price of food increased by 62 percent. The working people of Paris thus experienced a serious decline in their standard of living in the eighteenth century.20 Hence, the sheer lack of inexpensive rental apartments in Paris meant, for laborers and their patrons, the fading away of the classic arrangement whereby lodging and often food – according to a popular myth, the origin of compagnon is cum panis, or the sharing of bread – were furnished by the master artisan. David Garrioch, in a study of journeymen’s lodgings, concludes that 67 percent of Parisian journeymen were put up in their master’s building in 1752, while only 34 percent were similarly housed in 1788. The “modern” divorce of home and work was well underway in Paris of the eighteenth century.21 The building sector fully participated in the transformation of the Parisian economy from one based in artisanal fabrication to a mode of production based on large-scale industries such as textiles, food distribution, and transport. For while most workshops in Paris still featured one master artisan and one or two journeymen under the same roof, the

36

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

Figure 1.6 Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Since 1657, the quarter was a tax-free and guild-free zone without many of the regulatory organs that “policed” Paris elsewhere. The resulting juxtaposition of haphazard construction was jarring to contemporaries. The early eighteenth-century building in the center appears crushed between earlier and later construction.

city’s economy was simultaneously evolving into one that favored production of scale. The shift from small-scale manufactures toward large projects, in turn, further exacerbated the city’s social segregation. The rise of massive construction works, for example the Church of the patron saint of Paris Sainte-Geneviève in the 1770s where 550 builders on average toiled during the summer, foreshadowed things to come. The public sites launched by Louis XV in the aftermath of French defeat in the Seven Year’s War – in the 1760s and 1770s – attracted great amounts numbers of laborers: the largest sites included the Place Louis XV (now the Place de Concorde), the école Militaire, l’Hôtel de la Monnaie, the theatre of the Odéon, and the Collège de France.22 These, though, were easily matched by the large-scale private industries that thrived toward the end of the ancien régime: Charles-Joseph Panckoucke’s printing shop, where La gazette de France and Le mercure de France were published, resembled a factory comprising 27 presses,

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 37

Figure 1.7 Rue Montmartre. Heterogeneous seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury buildings provoked a critique of “unbalanced” streets. Note the difference in width as well as height; the late-eighteenth century movement toward standardized ordonnance, a repetitive ensemble within a structure and street, grew as a reaction.

with 800 employees working regularly in 1788. The royal glassworks factory in the faubourg Saint-Antoine engaged 500 workers; 350 laborers worked in the wallpaper factory of Réveillon, on the rue de Montreuil, site of the riot in April 1789 in which 25 Parisians were killed. It was, “unsurprisingly, in the poorest, most agitated and most undisciplined neighborhoods,” as Mercier had it, where such large numbers of workers were amassed. These worksites, workshops, and industries, and the bustle of crowds of workers moving back and forth from the manufactures to the faubourgs, marked the end of the era of a traditional economy based exclusively on the small shop, with an atelier in the courtyard, where a lone master was assisted by one or two journeymen of long standing who shared the same lodgings. As Mercier complained, the beginning of massive concentrations of labor deepened the growing rift between work and life, as bustling neighborhoods in the day were deserted by night as workers returned to the faubourgs.23

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Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

Figure 1.8 Rue Saint-Martin. The problem of wasted space with unevenly aligned buildings in height, as well as their relationship to the street, compounded the critique of “archaic” structures. Restrictions of 1783 and 1784 were intended to create more homogeneity by limiting overall size in relationship to the street.

The perception of geographic separation of rich and poor was matched by other ominous signs of the declining quality of life of ordinary Parisians. For example, the explosion of chambres garnies in the capital, or boarding houses for itinerant laborers, created an increasing sense of dangerous over-crowding in the Left Bank and around the place de Grève. In the quarter of the Bonne Nouvelle on the Right Bank, the building workers who migrated from the Creuse were clustered in sordid lodgings: 30–50 masons could be found in the same buildings. The chambres garnies were estimated to lodge 20,000 people in 1780 and up to 50,000 in the 1820s, and for the majority of cases, rarely for periods exceeding six months. When Mercier wrote above that “we cannot drive back into the soil those who live in the boarding houses and attics,” he was underscoring both the peasant stock and the ineluctable existence of migrant workers in Paris.24 Commentators on life in Paris were, of course, quick to condemn the lack of adequate controls upon the migrant workers of the rooming

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 39

Figure 1.9 Rue aux Ours. Over two centuries of construction are represented here, with the earliest from the beginning of the seventeenth century, with a modest one window per floor (right); the latest is a pre-Haussmann nineteenthcentury structure (left).

houses, singling out the maçons de la Creuse, the most peripatetic of laborers on the construction site. In the early Spring each year, they made an annual rite of passage from the Center of France (specifically, the historical region of the Haute Marche) to Paris, in particular, to the place de Grève (the present place de l’Hôtel de ville). There, from 5:00 to 7:00 every morning but Sunday and Feast Days, and also depending on the season, the Creusois rubbed shoulders with crowds of skilled and unskilled laborers ranging from masons and carpenters to roofers and day-laborers waiting to be hired “à la journée,” by the workday, on building sites across the city.25 Annie Moulin found in her study of eighteenth-century migrant masons that the Limousins and Creusois represented over half – 56 percent – of the laborers in the masonry trade. A full 31 percent came from a range of other places in the provinces, including Normandy and Picardy, leaving only 13 percent as native Parisians: thus roughly nine out of ten laborers on the building sites of Paris were migrants.26 Perhaps their lack of Parisian roots and their

40

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

Figure 1.10 Courtyard, faubourg Saint-Antoine. “Primitive” rural structures subsist in a few Parisian courtyards to this day. Often, newer buildings were simply erected in front of older streets, creating these courtyards.

heavy drinking led them to be less than diligent in their daily work in the Capital, as Hardy contemptuously remarked, noting that migrant workers were commonly involved in sites experiencing accidents. The perception of sloppy Parisian construction was inspired by a distrust of the key role played by these itinerant peasant-laborers in the building sector. As patois-speaking masons were foreigners to the city, hired as unskilled seasonal labor, they did not fit into the secure niches of the urban corporate universe (Table 1.1, Figures 1.12, 1.13, Professional Breakdown, 1790–1791).27 In the ebb and flow of the hectic construction yards of the eighteenth century, an industrial labor market was elaborated at the core of a preindustrial economy. The hybrid composition of the construction trades, with their massive and migratory labor force and impressively large machines and devices, such as gigantic cranes and complex scaffolding, seemed to clash starkly with their medieval techniques, poor building materials, and “archaic” forms of guild organization. By the 1770s, the contradiction between the quotidian life of the building trades

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 41

Figure 1.11

Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopedia: Architecture: Masonry.

Table 1.1 Professional Breakdown of the Building Trades of Paris, 1790–1791 Workers Declared by Profession

%

Employers by Profession

Proportion of Workers to Each Employer

Masons Carpenters Painters Sculptors Roofers Marble-cutters Plumbers

11,746 1,684 1,973 872 806 290 173

67.0 9.6 11.2 5.0 4.6 1.6 1.0

458 87 203 87 53 23 18

1:25.6 1:19.4 1:9.7 1:10.0 1:15.2 1:12.6 1:9.6

Totals

17,544

929

Average 1:14.6

Source: NUMBERS OF BUILDERS IN PARIS, 1790–1791. From the archival series, La Statistique, A.N. F30 109–124; 131–160

and the official statutes, offices, and judicial life of the corporations sharpened the criticisms of Parisian construction and galvanized a reformist Crown to undertake an overhaul of the Parisian construction industry. The resulting “judicial chaos” helped undermine the

42

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution 12 000 10 000 8 000 6 000 4 000 2 000 0

Workers Declared by Profession

Masonry

11 746

Carpenters

1 684

Painters

1 973

Sculptors

872

Roofers

806

Marble-cutters

290

Workers declared by profession 1% 2% 5% 5%

11%

Masonry Carpenters Painters Sculptors Roofers

10%

Marble-cutters

67%

Figure 1.12

Plumbers

Professional Breakdown of the Building Trades of Paris, 1790–1791.

Source: NUMBERS OF BUILDERS IN PARIS, 1790–1791. From the archival series, La Statistique, A.N. F30 109–124; 131–160

French state’s primary role of assuring the public safety of the people of Paris.28 Proprietors, commentators, and Enlightenment critics who assailed the building corporations through lawsuits and polemical treatises blamed the multiplication of privileged corps for making the building

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 43

500 400 300 200 100 0 Employers by profession Masonry

Figure 1.13

458

Carpenters

87

Painters

203

Sculptors

87

Roofers

53

Marble-cutters

23

Professional Breakdown of the Building Trades of Paris, 1790–1791.

Source: NUMBERS OF BUILDERS IN PARIS, 1790–1791. From the archival series, La Statistique, A.N. F30 109–124; 131–160

procedures pcumbersome in Paris, and this, when there was a crying need for more construction. A potential proprietor of a future Parisian building had first to receive authorization from the Bureau de la ville de Paris, consisting of the merchants’ provost, four échevins (a precursor of deputy mayors), and a host of lawyers and clerks. Once the City de Paris approved a particular project, moreover, a proprietor also had to submit the project and its site to the inspection of the 60 architectes-expertsbourgeois and architectes-experts-entrepreneurs. These were members of the Chambre royale des Bâtiments, whose authority and structure derived from a royal reform in 1690 that stripped most inspection rights from the elites of the masons’ guild, the jurés, in matters concerning private construction.29 The incorporation of an exclusive body of architects and master builders gave the Chambre monopoly control over decisions on the feasibility of architectural plans, the prices and quality of materials (devis et marchés), the precision of construction (down to the soundness of foundations and walls), and final inspection reports of the building (procès verbaux de receptions d’ouvrages). It also had the last word on any contention arising from the building site. As a guarantee of the disinterested nature of their inspections and decisions, the

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Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

architectes-experts-bourgeois of the Parisian Chambre des Bâtiments – the term “royale” was dropped in most eighteenth-century references to this body – were forbidden to engage in commerce. The venal status of half of the Chambre’s members meant the fees collected on each certified act, for example, 5–7 livres for a routine inspection of the worksite, became a lucrative substitute for engaging in actual building itself.30 As a corporation, the Chambre des Bâtiments was closely affiliated with – and was charged with the oversight of – the Community of Master Masons, whose senior members (les anciens) enjoyed privileges over younger members (les modernes): for example, only les anciens were eligible to hold elected offices. Unlike the precisely demarcated number of 60 experts who belonged to the Chambre, the numbers of master masons continued to grow in the eighteenth century, from 275 masters in 1761 to 357 in 1776, before the first abolition of the guilds under Turgot, and 409 in 1790, on the eve of the definitive abolition during the Revolution. Accessibility to mastership was favored by its relatively low cost: a Lettre-Patente of 1762 reduced the price to 300 livres (from 400 livres) for a master’s son and to 540 livres (from 800 livres) for an apprentice. The prodigious cost of remaining a master mason meant fewer institutional barriers to becoming one. According to the most widely used Parisian business almanac, the Guide to the Merchant Corps and the Corporations of Arts and Crafts, the average initial investment of a master mason was 1,400 livres to build a particular apartment. In terms of an average Parisian journeyman’s salary, this represented 700 working days.31 The master mason fulfilled the role of a contemporary building contractor, hiring artisans for specific tasks and paying laborers for services rendered. The costs of construction incurred by the master mason were later reimbursed by the proprietor upon receiving the key from two of the Chambre’s experts, in a rigorously defined corporate ritual that followed the final inspection of the premises. This procedure was hardly an outdated, quaint, or timeworn custom suggesting a preindustrial attachment to elaborate ritual void of content. For the reception of the keys from the hands of the master mason directly into those of the proprietor via the experts symbolized a precise and market-conscious rite of quality control. The supervisory powers of the experts and the supremacy of the master mason over all other trades on the building site were represented as a guarantee of the final product’s solidity. Hence, as the eighteenth-century legal scholar, Claude-Joseph de Ferrière, concluded, “The privileges of a mason, who builds one house and who makes repairs in another house, outstrips (l’emporte sur) all other

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 45

privileges.” In particular, de Ferrière underscored the authority of the master artisan over that of the proprietor, suspected of being too financially compromised to assure safe construction practices in his or her own structure.32 Once having worked his or her way through the intricacies of the Chambre des Bâtiments, the proprietor had then to consult the annual Almanach des Bâtiments to contract the various guild masters, from the sculptors and carpenters to the locksmiths and roofers for the last stages of construction. The Almanach was a listing of the names and addresses of each Parisian builder with the technical expertise and the mastership that permitted an artisan to work on the building site. In Mercier’s terms, “When a house is built, nothing is finished quite yet; for one has only spent a quarter of the overall cost.”33 To what extent do the layers of authority in the guild universe governing the construction trades explain the housing shortage that drove up rents and accelerated the decline of socially diverse apartment buildings? Did the complex bureaucracy of building aggravate or attenuate the urban ills we have examined? While the corporate idea may have been lucrative for financing many functions of the French state, for assuring quality control, and for guaranteeing the commercial reputations of artisanal trades, its pertinence to sound construction may not have been so evident to the average Parisian proprietor. For after negotiation through the welter of contending authorities, the final result was that a declining number of building projects were seen to completion. Once again, the numbers are eloquent. While at the beginning of the eighteenth century (1718–1722) 44 building projects out of the 47 projects (94 percent) that received authorization from the Parisian housing authorities were actually constructed; by the end of the ancien régime (1788–1792) that number was 104 out of 122 (85 percent). Even fewer projects for the restoration of older structures were completed in later years. Despite a strong demand for housing, the very ability of builders to construct in Paris seemed increasingly obstructed by corps of construction interests run amuck, demonstrating to Parisians that the well-policed state was not always a well-ordered one.34 Yet, this classic neo-liberal narrative of archaic guild masters undermining an increasingly capitalist and “modern” construction market invites, in turn, a historical critique. The discourse of tradition-bound corporations caught in a perpetual defense of custom against a reform monarchy, in fact, was employed in specific contexts. Over time, the Châtelet, the courts, and the Parlement constantly redefined the

46

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privileges of the Chambre des Bâtiments and the master masons’ guild. They became flexible and adaptable corporate institutions that resembled embryonic forms of a municipal housing authority. While defending themselves against lawsuits and adjusting their practice to the barrage of decrees and ordinances of the Crown, the Chambre’s officers, in particular, articulated their essential mission as that of executing coherent guidelines in a mix of public and private considerations. The rites of elaborate housing inspections, interventions to settle wage and pricing disputes, the approval of licenses to engage in construction – these and other functions heralded a world in which construction entered the domain of state oversight and regulation.35 In the name of the public good, the process of construction was hence partially divorced from private entrepreneurship and the interests of proprietors; it was also to be stripped from market-driven interests and made a function of venal offices reserved for the architectesexperts-bourgeois – not to be confused with the non-venal architectesexperts-entrepreneurs in the baroque nomenclature of corporatism. The architectes-experts-bourgeois functioned as municipal officers with the task of inspecting the sites before, during, and after construction. These experts, accountable to colleagues and to the Crown, often found themselves in a confrontational relationship with proprietors, who in turn had recourse to the business-oriented architectes-experts-entrepreneurs. In response to the multiplication of conflicts between corporations and proprietors, the experts were increasingly responsible for rendering the construction site a matter of public record.36 The experts’ charge was greatly heightened by eighteenth-century population growth and a fixation on facilitating increased air flow in a crowded city. This energized a movement to harmonize street and building alignment in the 1760s. Lack of circulation, of course, was a leitmotif that covered a multitude of sins. Business and finance could only flourish where human and street traffic could flow unimpeded. Also, by restricting the size of buildings and seeking greater uniformity in construction more light would illuminate the city and air would flow more freely. The cohabitation of structures of different heights and a lack of sufficient control over the entire city plagued efforts to allow city dwellers to breathe, move, and even to see. The Parisian building corporations and their numerous officers became oriented toward the regulation and inspection of regulation amidst the frenzied atmosphere of post-1763 construction, culminating with the application of height limitations imposed by the Crown in 1783 and 1784.37 A wealth of documentation also suggests that the experts had an increasingly difficult time doing their work in the face of a growing

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 47

number of obstacles: lawsuits by proprietors seeking “liberty of enterprise” as in the case cited above of 1759–1761; by a complex of royal reforms in the 1770s (as we will see); and, perhaps most decisively of all, by the stagnant numbers of architectural experts. For the entire eighteenth century, the building inspectors attached to the Chambre des Bâtiments remained frozen at 60 hereditary offices, whereas the numbers of master masons increased by 60 percent between 1761 and 1790 alone. As at least two or three experts were assigned to supervise the last stages of each construction site, and as legal conflict was on the rise in all sectors of Parisian artisanal trades, the building trades suffered from a decline of available officers qualified to oversee construction.38 In the building sector, the limits of the reach of Parisian corporatism and not the excesses of monopoly control were responsible for obstructing the pace and rhythm of construction. Just as the Crown imposed coherent architectural styles, materials, and decorative sculptures on the bridges, places, and a few of the quays of Paris, so did market and legal forces exert growing pressure for equitable procedures and standard techniques to assure better quality construction. But in the face of lawsuits, reforms, and polemics, the Chambre des Bâtiments never fully carved out its potential role as a regulatory authority. And as the production of houses appeared to be in disarray, private construction inspired ever-greater demands for public oversight in the lives of Parisians.39

Architectural critics and the guild debate on the construction sites of Paris We will discuss the art of building; of the confused heaps of annoying debris; of the immense piles of crude materials; of the startling noise of hammers; of the perilous scaffolds; of a terrifying assemblage of machines; of an army of dirty and wretched workers. It is all that is vulgar that presents itself to the imagination, (yet) this is merely the disagreeable surface of an Art whose mysterious ingenuity is grasped by few and which excites the admiration of those who penetrate it.40 Marc-Antoine Laugier, 1752 The corrosive critiques of the construction practices in Paris shed light on the famous debate that preceded the first suppression of the guilds in France by Turgot in 1776 – and partially explain why so few revolutionaries deplored the coup de grâce of the corporations as stipulated by

48

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

the 1791 Loi d’Allarde and Loi Le Chapelier. For the execrable image of the building trades, although undeserved, vividly illustrates the reasons why the larger corporate universe of Paris began to inspire deep dissatisfaction at the end of the ancien régime. In this particular sector of the economy, the guild question – the source of a vigorous theoretical debate from the 1750s to the 1770s – was transformed into a polemic that unfolded in the illustrious halls of the Académie d’architecture as well as in the law courts. Corporate monopolies were increasingly denounced for obstructing the implementation of an “enlightened” urban policy in the overcrowded and insalubrious city.41 In the case of the building sector, a blurring of two controversies involving the corporate universe took place in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. One involved the public’s demand for more stringent oversight of construction; the other called into question the guilds’ role in policing and regulating the labor market. Here we see that the Enlightenment’s critique of corporations and the larger guild debate did not flow exclusively from a purely ideological liberalism. They were also grounded in the specific challenges of emergent sectors. Professions struggling to adapt to commercial and labor markets of preindustrial capitalism were theaters of the great debate on political economy. Nor were criticisms of the status quo in the construction industry limited to those of “interested” entrepreneurs, proprietors, or the actors who directly benefited from mounting litigation, the guild lawyers. Rather, architectural theorists, as we will see, turned out to be most effective critics of the construction site. They faulted the construction process itself, dominated by what Laugier deemed an “army of dirty and wretched workers,” as a barrier to the creation of a capital worthy of the Republic of Letters. The inexpensive Parisian building was poorly constructed because of a system of corporate monopolies, inadequate administration of craftsmen (police des métiers), and an overall decline of effective regulation. The proponents of a new Parisian architecture bitterly denounced both the houses and the men who put them up.42 The sense of a breakdown of quality control due to guild monopoly gave rise to many proposals to found the well-ordered building site. And as the concern for public safety evolved into a fear of the disarray in anarchic private construction, a wave of architectural treatises found inspiration in Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–1772). To the circle of encyclopedists, to explicate construction as a “mechanical art” was an integral part of the larger project to bring a precise and orderly method to every craft. As Diderot put it, “each laborer, each science, each art, each article, has its language and its style.” The

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 49

disorderly building process represented an opportunity and a challenge to eliminate turmoil borne of prejudice, and to bring a harmony of interests to a deeply divided social milieu. Hence, both encyclopedists and architectural theorists sought to impose clear and distinct principles of architecture on the building process, making Paris as well organized and as well constructed as befitting the capital of the kingdom.43 One of the earliest and most devastating salvos against the corporate bodies was published well before the Encyclopédie: Michel de Fremin’s widely cited Critical Memoirs on Architecture Concerning the Idea of a True and False Architecture (1702). This text was a furious condemnation of the deceitful practices of the ouvriers de Paris, meaning for the most part master artisans, who are excoriated page after page for ruining architects and propriétaires by their systematic cost-cutting ruses. Enlightenment treatises on architecture published toward mid-century by architectural critics Antoine-Babuty Desgodetz, and Nicolas Le Camus de Mèzières, among others, denounced the domination of guildsmen in Parisian construction. But this grim assessment of the poor quality of building in the capital was most famously articulated by the energetic promoter of Neoclassicism, Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713–1769), who castigated Parisian building practices in a broader discussion promoting a return to ancient sources of construction.44 Laugier’s Essai Sur l’Architecture was published anonymously in 1753, but was widely debated only after its second edition of 1755, when he affixed his name to the Essai’s frontispiece. Laugier became, together with Jacques-François Blondel, an illustrious voice for an enlightened architecture in France. His most notable and ambitious project sought to unite all the Parisian ports of entry, places, and bridges with a dense network of interconnecting streets. Seeking as well to rid construction practices of “vain prejudices,” founded equally on “the laziness of workers” and the “timid spirit of masters,” Laugier launched a polemic for the classical ideal of architecture in the guise of an impassioned plea to transform Paris for the benefit of the public that inhabited the city. In distinctive Enlightenment fashion, Laugier sought to bring and condemn before the court of public opinion the building conventions of Paris. He was not content to complain of the use of massive foundation stones on aesthetic grounds alone: it is “the Public which groans from this annoying excess.” It is “the Public that disdains all practices dictated to save money.” The excessive use of wood to support masonry for instance is the cause of too many fires: but this too is a practice that will stop “as soon as the Public will declare itself” against such a convention. Laugier took part in the wider crusade of philosophers and critics who

50

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

spoke for public opinion in advocating reform. His avowal to articulate “the enlightened result of the common and public reflection” made him a favored critic of the building trades.45 If following custom was routinely attacked – as being “superstitiously enslaved to bad practice” – it was forms of cheating that exasperated Laugier the most. The systematic use of shoddy construction materials, the inflation of prices, the needless expansion of projects to the ruin of proprietors were regarded as rooted in the excessive trust granted to master artisans and guild syndics to police their own kind. The search for profit, to Laugier, even corrupted the experts of the Chambre des Bâtiments who inspected the building site. Laugier saw many of the experts as favoring fellow members of the corporation against proprietors in exchange for payoffs by those who employed cheap labor or shoddy materials: “We must not trust the experts’ building reports: many of them only have a poor grasp of construction, and some of them work in bad faith in order to give false assurances against the perils (of the construction site) which they only pretend to want to repress.”46 Laugier’s harsh attack on the construction trades linked the opacity of internal policing with the failure to reconstruct a capital city based on clear and distinct enlightened and classical models. This critique gained wide currency in the last four decades of the ancien régime. Was the solution, then, to create a competitive construction market or to strengthen the visible hand of the state? Laugier, as with Fremin, Le Camus, and many other distinct voices, articulated a forceful critique of contemporary building practices; but they did not offer a single response to the cheating, shoddy practices, uncontrolled labor flow, and other forms of deceit. Despite the common complaints put forth by Enlightenment-era critics, there was no consensus on reform. The only general points of agreement between reformers and legal authorities was, first, that the construction corporations had ceased to fulfill their charge, and, second, that the creation of a free market of the building industry, duly watched over by royal authorities, would be the only alternative. In practice, these paradoxical criticisms – calling simultaneously for liberalism and state intervention – converged in a radical first step: an attack on the layers of privilege and protections enjoyed by those who laid claim to a monopoly on the Parisian construction sites and who were seen as compromising precisely the public safety they were charged to protect. In the end, an audacious experiment to open the construction market to the laws of offer and demand was one response to the cacophony of voices clamoring for an elusive “reform.”

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 51

In 1775, the controversy over building procedures reached the summit of the state. Less than a year into his tenure as controller general of Louis XVI (August 1774–May 1776), Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot stripped away the venal privileges of the Parisian architecte-expertbourgeois who was forbidden from engaging in entrepreneurship. Insisting that the office of “architect” signifies a “master artisan who knows the craft of building,” Turgot imposed the principle that only those who do business in construction should take charge of the tasks of building site inspections, verification, and controls. He attempted to stamp out the “prejudice” that had bifurcated “architectural science” and “entrepreneurship” by arguing that commercial investment in building was the only grounds for real expertise in construction. Turgot attacked students of “simple theory” in favor of the individual who “joins speculation to daily practice to become a qualified architect – a man of capacity and of recognized experience.” Concluding with a flourish, that “there is no other veritable Architect than he who is at the same time an Entrepreneur,” Turgot’s impassioned defense of the capitalist builder heralded a new age which he sought to inaugurate with the liberalization of the grain trade later that year and the suppression of the guilds in February 1776.47 As with his later, more ambitious failures, Turgot attempted to tip the balance of power on the building site completely in favor of the “new man,” the architect cum capitalist. His impassioned plea on behalf of this mythic figure sought, with one fell swoop, to overturn the fragile legal and economic equilibrium established through centuries of legal precedent and ordinances that directed relations between architects, entrepreneurs, and proprietors. Henceforth, those subject to market principles would alone direct the process of construction. The open market and unfettered entrepreneurship, rather than the Academy d’Architecture, the Chambre, or the guilds, was the proper training grounds for qualified experts. Turgot’s 1775 reform to open the building site to entrepreneurial control was withdrawn with his “disgrace” the following year. But its importance remains as a key preparatory to his ambitious project to abolish all corporations. For after the decree of March 1775, the political economy of the Physiocrats was projected beyond the building sites and into all shops and ateliers of France. The analysis put forth by Turgot in his February 1776 edict suppressing the guilds closely followed the argument of his earlier attack on the privileges of venal experts. Generalizing about all corporations, Turgot portrayed the guilds as responsible for all of France’s economic inadequacies. Due to the guilds’ pernicious

52

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

influence, the French economy remained wedded to traditional method, to a closed labor market, and to an ethos of protectionism and statist interventionism. The decrepit guild idea undermined the productive capacities of capital and labor by costing more than it could possibly be worth to the nation.48 Hence, the debate on how to create an efficient construction market in Paris flowed a few months later into the liberal critique of what Turgot himself called Colbertism. Turgot’s fierce polemic that constituted the introduction of the 1776 reform was rife with denunciations of “restraint on trade,” of “monopoly,” the “slowness of work,” and the accumulation of “irrational statutes.” He dismissed with particular fervor the core routine of guilds, the antiquated practice of acquiring masterships “only after having paid multiple fees or exactions, whereby a part of the business assets are consumed in pure wastefulness, rather than applied to commerce or to the atelier.” By suppressing masterships, Turgot portrayed his project as the liberation of the economy from the yoke of all corporate practices.49 Turgot’s edict was at first resisted by the Paris Parlement, which relented and approved it only after registering a protest. Its remonstrance, published a month after the edict was promulgated, focused on the central assumption of Turgot’s 1776 reform: as the laws of the marketplace were universal, so the guilds could be utterly abolished throughout France without regard to the particularities of town or trade. In their rebuke to the author of the reform, the Parisian magistrates dwelled at length on the corrosive effects of liberalization upon Paris itself. By insisting on “the impossibility of applying it (Turgot’s reforms) to the Capital,” the parlementarians insisted that, in Paris above all, no police mechanisms divorced from corporations could be a proper check to the “license of the cities.” Such “license,” moreover, would be inevitably ushered in by the liberty of an unfettered labor market; it was the natural corollary to the administrative chaos provoked by the abolition of the guilds. For without tight controls on journeymen and artisans: the spirit of subordination will be lost, the love of independence will sprout in all the hearts; all workers will want to work for their own account; the present masters will see their shops and stores abandoned; the lack of work and the shortages that will follow will lead this crowd of journeymen to escape their ateliers where they had found subsistence, and the multitude which will (henceforth) never be contained, will cause the greatest disorders.50

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 53

In this world turned upside down, the magistrates warned, liberty would degenerate into “license” and, worst of all, “independence” into insubordination. No policing authority was sufficiently vigilant to avoid being “drowned in the details of a city as vast as Paris.” By necessity, then, the police of Paris needed the corporations to maintain “interior discipline.” To the magistrates of the Paris Parlement, police authority was by its very nature “grounded in the intermediary authority of a multitude of domestic corps” – the corporations – “with power more widespread than its (Parlement’s) own.”51 At the core of the Parlement’s remonstrance lay an indictment of liberal economic policies as a threat to ancien régime urban society. The free-play of the laws of the market might be salutary, but the particular issues of Paris – the flow of migrant labor to the city, the complications of establishing policing mechanisms over different trades, the question of quality control of production in a major metropolis – made the capital of the kingdom an exception to such “universal” laws. While liberty might be more desirable than containment, Paris was absolutely not the place to experiment with liberalism. Paris was too vast and too unruly for central authority to govern the workforce without help from corporations. Again, the magistrates were preoccupied with the amount of administrative detail that the police of the Châtelet would have to master to assume the guilds’ authority: (W)hat city is comparable to the Capital where details are lost in its immensity; where the citizen lives unknown in his own house, whereas, in the majority of the towns in the provinces, common relations between inhabitants establish between them a natural surveillance? The ebb and flow of a liberated labor market was the greatest enemy of “natural surveillance.” Thus, it was precisely in their ability “to slow down the prodigious immigration toward the towns,” as in the yearly migration of seasonal workers, that corporations made their most vital contribution to the policing of the Capital. The guilds substituted an institutional means of surveillance where “common relations between inhabitants” no longer held sway. Institutional and corporate controls over labor, otherwise unchecked in the “immensity” of the capital, were the most compelling arguments for the preservation of the guilds.52 The alarm sounded by the Parlement that Paris was becoming a “disunited multitude of interests” cut off from true communal ties by the

54

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dismantling of its organic coherence, was hardly new to the eighteenth century. Fears of excessive and reckless expansion had since the reign of Henri II inspired efforts to seal Paris off from what the parlementarians called this “prodigious immigration.” Yet before 1776 the question of protecting the social integrity of Paris focused on precisely demarcating the physical limits of the city. Between 1548 and 1766, the Crown, the Parlement, and the municipality of Paris published 31 edicts attempting to fix the size of the city. Most of these proclamations were efforts to institute a more efficient policy of taxation by the collectors of the Farmers-General Wall. But the lack of precision regarding where Paris ended and where surrounding villages began, in particular to the Northeast and Southeast, fed the sense that the borders of the city could never be policed without the corporations. In sum, the porousness of the illdefined “town limits” of Paris was apparent to one and all. Official edicts were rarely successful in stemming the tide of those perceived as rootless flotsam.53 By denouncing these “disunited multitudes of interests,” the Paris Parlement helped to shift the focus of controversy on the overpopulation and physical integrity of the city to that of a fear of anarchy provoked by liberalism. The 1776 remonstrance conceptualized labor migration as requiring social and economic containment, that of the police of Paris as embodied by the guilds. The usefulness of the guilds was also found in the daily protection they offered over various “plagues” of industry, such as “fraud, bad faith, greed, imperfection of work” that could only be detected on an intimate scale, by those with inside knowledge of the industry. As Antoine Louis Séguier, the reporter of the remonstrance, put it, the particularism of corporations could only be conceptualized as “small republics uniquely occupied with the general interest of all the members that compose them,” and which can only be contrasted to the general level of police surveillance. How could the office charged with assuring the policing of craftsmen, the lieutenant general of police, “suffice for the innumerable disputes that will arise?” How could he who is expected to survey “the totality of a city so immense” also be expected to “pause over details of an administration so complicated?”54 The parlementarians deftly opposed the heavy-handed nature of official police power to the “interior discipline of the corporations.” “The police has only two means in its hands. Force, which it can only use when it is necessary. Terror, which demonstrates its vigilance, and by which it rules . . . .” By contrast, “what police could be more gentle (douce) than that of the guilds?” By remaining sensitive to the idiosyncratic nature of each craft, the “internal discipline of corporations”

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 55

would have means at its disposal a gentler power – and thus a more persuasive one – than either force or terror. Corporate particularism was not only more desirable but was also more effective than intangible, centralized, and statist police power.55 Clearly, the magistrates of the Parlement of Paris had the building trades in mind in their denunciations of “prodigious immigration,” improper work habits, and the specter of an inundated Paris police force. Peripatetic laborers, who traversed half the land mass of France to find work on Parisian building sites in the spring and summer, should not to be allowed to enter at will an under-policed capital. While the level of the guild debate was mainly abstract, rarely descending to the specifics of any one trade, the parliamentarians marshaled a standard trope, focusing on the locksmiths and the fears they engendered. Without the guilds, journeymen locksmiths were free to use “false keys” to commit burglaries. Absent the master locksmith, thefts will “multiply, and what clue could lead us to discover those who have abused the keys?” In fact, the parliamentarians argued, the power overseeing the locksmiths’ corporation ought to be enhanced not abolished. Those craftsmen demand an authority even more peremptory than that of mere guild masters to overawe potential criminals, “and should attract the closest attention of government.” Mistrust of masterless building tradesmen compelled the advocates of the guild economy to forget momentarily the superiority of gentle policing.56 The wider resonance of the Parlement of Paris’s critique may be detected in the very edict reinstating the guilds published after the fall of Turgot in August 1776. In the eight-month interim, the Crown had been convinced that France lacked a policing mechanism sufficiently magesterial to oversee a free labor market. In fact, the perceived fear of market forces operating without police controls had already led to a de facto resurrection of guild practices. The bookseller Hardy wrote that as of June 1776, destitute journeymen returned to masters after their brief, failed experiment in economic liberty. The principal objective of the edict re-founding the guilds was to create a more “rational” and condensed corporate order. The Parisian corporations were reduced from 120 before 1776 to 50 afterward, and some of the guilds were synthesized into single all-purpose corporations such as the Community of Roofers, Plumbers, Tile Layers and Pavers. These new bastard guilds were conceived to be more easily brought under the expanded authority of the lieutenant general of police. The latter’s jurisdiction was extended with the power to review all elections and decisions of guild officers, and with enhanced power to void statutes

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and regulations leading to “excessive monopoly.” Such an arrangement was a compromise in an era when both Physiocratic liberalism and traditional corporatism had been largely discredited. The guilds may have been officially allowed to practice as before, but in the period between August 1776 and the Revolution, individual guild masters and journeymen increasingly used lawsuits to challenge ill-defined statutes or to appeal the arbitrarily strengthened mandate of some reconfigured corporations. As we will see, the turmoil of this stepped-up contestation induced other forms of strife as well.57

The birth of the strike and the reform of Paris construction Following the attempted abolition of the guilds in February 1776 and their August 1776 resurrection, the decade of the 1780s featured repeated experimentation to transform the Parisian world of work. For the guilds that had been briefly obliterated were only imperfectly refounded by Turgot. Predictably, the merger of often disparate corps to render the guild economy more “rational” provoked more litigation than it settled. Having swept away the jurisprudence concerning the world of work in 1776, the Crown, the courts, and the police of the trades now had to put it back together piecemeal. Once again, the building site became a fertile ground for the standardizing and analytic impulses of the various arms of the police: the lieutenant general of the police situated in the Châtelet, lawyers attached to the Chambre des Bâtiments, and the architectural experts charged with responsibility over the building site. Their efforts to reconfigure the corporate boundaries of the building trades were to inspire a violent resistance by those most affected by designs for a “rational” taxonomy of the organization of labor – the laborers themselves. Dangerous innovation had only aggravated a general “insubordination and insolence,” in Hardy’s words.58 A series of ordinances and royal edicts sought to fill a conceptual vacuum in the guild statutes. These featured, in particular, the forceful interventionism of the new Controller-General Jacques Necker (1777–1781), whose avowed motivation was to be the anti-Turgot. Necker reinforced the privileges of masters against journeymen, and sought to increase the collaboration between guild officers and police commissioners of the Châtelet. In particular, he sought to revive the policy of a workers’ passport system (livrets), to stem the tide of migrant labor flowing from the provinces into urban areas, especially Paris.

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 57

The livrets were imposed in an uneven fashion but proved a formidably dissuasive tool in controlling preindustrial labor.59 The revival of the guilds also created an occasion for the assertion of wider powers by the 48 police commissioners attached to the Châtelet. The litigious 1780s represented, to them, an opportune moment to crack down on possible abuses on the work site. Starting in 1785, the Commissioner Allix, whose jurisdiction comprised the bureau of the Community of Master Carpenters, raided building sites often in search of unauthorized workmen in the carpentry trades performing skilled tasks (ouvriers sans qualités or faux-ouvriers), or the use of cheap construction materials (bâtir par économie), as well as shoddy workmanship (malfaçon). A further effort to end the putatively lax supervision of building trades was a police ordinance of 1787, warning against the steadily mounting “disorder and excesses” provoked by laborers waiting to be hired on the place de Grève. It was in this volatile context, in 1785, that building journeymen and unskilled laborers organized a series of strikes for higher wages. For the most part, these labor actions took place over one or two days, and were quickly resolved by the immediate intervention of one of the 48 police commissioners attached to the Châtelet.60 A guild reaction at the end of the ancien régime accompanied the re-founding of the corporate universe on the construction sites of Paris.61 The summer of 1785 witnessed the first appearance of the term, faire grève, which appeared in police reports to refer to a strike. A commissioner noted that faire grève meant to “not work in order to have the daily wage increased.” This is “what they call (it) among themselves,” he explained, translating for his superiors this argot or patois term for strike that would soon enter the modern terminology of labor conflict. The source of the expression was the place de Grève. A refusal to work at this central locale, otherwise used for public executions, was no doubt an impressive act of defiance. By strictly enforced ordinance, the place de Grève was the site where most building masters and entrepreneurs gathered early in the morning to hire day laborers.62 In the aftermath of a series of strikes in the construction sector during the summer of 1785, the Chambre des Bâtiments, in an accord with the Community of Master Masons, convened and passed a resolution seeking to eliminate “the infinitude of contestation” and to crack down on the “slowness of construction.” In order to obtain closer collaboration between entrepreneurs, masters, and experts, the Chambre implemented a floating seasonally adjusted tarif or wage scale for laborers. Unlike its previous incarnations, this tarif was established to fluctuate in

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relationship to the health of the building industry and the price of subsistence items in Paris. Every December, the salaries for the following year were affixed to the door of the masons’ guild and distributed on the place de Grève. The Chambre thus claimed for itself the power to restrain the salaries of workers by a draconian measure: the imposition of an industry-wide wage scale that categorized, labeled, and priced each “species of worker.”63 But as with Turgot’s experiments in liberalization, the Chambre failed to account for the tenacity of quotidian practices of masters and journeymen. The very same day that the Chambre posted the new wage scale, the masons, stonecutters, limousins, and day laborers from the major projects of Paris went on strike, left their workplaces, and assembled in two sites associated with centers of power. The first was the place Louis-le-Grand (re-named the place Vendôme in 1799), home of the Châtelet’s Lieutenant General of Police, Jean-Charles-Pierre Lenoir (1774–1785). The second was the Château de Brunoy, 15 miles outside of Paris, where it was rumored that Louis XVI had been present. The size of the crowd grew as it moved closer to its destinations, and, in the eyewitness account of the bookseller Hardy, “forced certain of their comrades who worked on individual houses to join them for the uprising.” Hardy estimated the crowd at some 700–800 builders who showed up at the home of the lieutenant general of police. Simultaneously, 300 builders appeared at the King’s temporary residence, doing so menacingly, “with their tools in hand.” Lenoir granted an audience to a few builders and “listened with benevolence to its statement.” Then, predictably, he urged the laborers to return to work, promising due justice. Not so easily discouraged, the builders chose one worker “to interpret for his colleagues” suggesting the majority of builders were provincials who spoke the patois of the Creuse. Hardy recounts that the Creusois complained that entrepreneurs: fattened themselves on the blood and the proper substance of their workers . . . to which the Lt. General of Police, politically and without doubt to appear to be more attentive to this affair, and so to manage more easily to calm the spirits, then wrote the names and addresses of the Entrepreneurs in question.64 This calmed the crowd until the following day, 26 July 1785, when the Paris Parlement in an emergency meeting rescinded the Chambre des Bâtiment’s wage scale on the technical grounds of irregular procedure. In a final act of compliance with the journeymen’s wishes,

Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime 59

14 entrepreneurs received orders from the lieutenant general of police to reimburse workers whose salaries were reduced by the voided sentence. Hardy noted with satisfaction, after the peaceful dénouement of the strike: “everything has returned to order.”65 The Parisian strike of July 1785 highlights several features of labor strife on the building sites of Paris at the end of the ancien régime. Despite many legal injunctions, most notably during the 1780s, there was no active police repression of this movement to increase wages. What the commissioners called faire grève (strike) among builders was an appeal for the mediation of conflict by the authorities; this was underscored by the appearance of the crowd at the home of the lieutenant general of police. After a decade of abolition, reform, and restoration of the building trades, the settlement of the strike represented a tacit recognition of the dignity of customary practices of laborers by the Parisian police. The police and the people were here both moved by what Hardy called a general “revulsion” at the Chambre’s action: its brutal attempt to fill the void of corporate regulation by imposing an industry-wide labor policy in one fell swoop. It did so by jettisoning employment practices that, in the police reports of the crowd’s actions, were embedded in tradition. Fluctuating salaries, permeable job categories, favoritism, the use of a core of loyal journeymen, the occasional days off here and there for Feast Days – these were not to be weeded out to make way for standardized practices on the building site in the name of greater transparency. Simply put, traditional practices of labor excluded precisely circumscribed tasks assigned to fixed salaries. The Chambre’s precise classification was worthy of the Encyclopédie: to each “species” of worker, to each season of the year, “the just price.”66 Thus the guild debate transformed the very terms by which labor was comprehended at the end of the ancien régime. A defense of the “customary” practices of journeymen was a strategy every bit as effective as the Paris Parlement’s remonstrance against Turgot in 1776. As Michael Sonenscher has demonstrated, the recourse to a language of lost tradition was in itself a legal tactic to protect guild privileges. In fact, there was nothing “customary” in the demand for a flexible wage scale as it was specifically guaranteed by previous guild statute. But the “invention of tradition” in the strike of 1785 resulted in the radicalization of a discourse about the privileges of labor, one that mobilized journeymen masons, stonecutters, limousins, and day laborers in a general strike that shut down the construction sites of Paris. Furthermore, the resolution of this movement confirmed the enhanced power and prestige of the Parisian police. The protest before Lenoir’s house demonstrated that

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the influence of the lieutenant general of police had grown in inverse proportion to that of the reconfigured corporations. The decline of the building guilds and the growing appeal of centralized authority were plainly manifest in the 1785 strike and its outcome.67

On the capital’s “unbounded magnificience” The great conflict between the corporate idea (sustained by the key concepts of privilege, custom, and hierarchy) and the reform idea (conceived around liberty, progress, and meritocracy) became a drama played out at the heart of the capital and before an audience of all who wished to comment. It suggested to Mercier the impossibility of any meaningful change in the capital city of France. The resignation evident in his observation, the verbal equivalent of a Gallic shrug cited at the beginning, might have served as words of caution to the reforming Crown at the end of the ancien régime: “There are political evils that must be tolerated since we cannot find absolute solutions, and such is the scope of the city: we cannot sweep off the earth those who live in lodging houses and attics.” The breakdown of confidence in the ancien régime construction industry represents a larger failure on the part of the state to breach the gap between the lofty promise of the corporate order and its very untidy realities. The unintended consequences of attempts to reign in and to project order onto what Mercier called “the Capital’s unbounded magnificence” was that this vital sector of the Parisian economy came to incarnate the breakdown of the institutions of the ancien régime in public opinion. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the strategies of self-policing guilds, of liberal free agency, of statist centralization, of a despotism of “experts,” and, finally, of a return to direct police interventionism were successively favored by the reforming Crown, only to be abandoned in efforts to find other, more perfect solutions to an increasingly unruly process – and all this, to “reform,” in Laugier’s terms, “all that is vulgar that presents itself to the imagination.” Whether it was ever possible to control labor migration, to put an end to fraud and poor construction, to mediate all work disputes, and, in general, to assure the public of the well-policed building site, was perhaps a project too immense for a state rapidly going bankrupt to have assumed. The construction sector made the reforming Crown’s failure visible to all who witnessed or experienced the precariousness of an eighteenth-century building.

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In fact, the “problem” with the construction trades may not have been an excess of corporatism but rather its limitations – or more specifically, the lack of its reach over the entirety of Mercier’s “expansive reach of the capital.” The reform efforts of all ideological stripes to reign in the venal building inspectors and to dismantle the entire apparatus of the guilds accomplished a political objective beyond what the reformers had in mind. They marginalized the alternative solution: that of extending the authority of the corporations to the unincorporated areas of Paris, such as the faubourg Saint-Antoine, where many of the accidents, cases of shoddy workmanship, and accusations of corruption had surfaced, and where the harsh public judgment of the building corporations resonated with urgency.68 Beyond the immediate capacity of the building trades to construct the capital city, what does the history of Paris construction corporations reveal about the collapse of the ancien régime? Historians of seventeenthcentury French absolutism, including Perry Anderson, William Beik and David Parker, have amply demonstrated the vital role of collaboration between social elites and the monarchy in strengthening and maintaining the absolutist state. Their scholarship emphasizes the common political and social concerns fusing the Crown’s interests with the class of privilege, wealth and power. Projecting this interpretation forward to the second half of the eighteenth century, common interests also compelled corporate elites to collaborate with the Crown by accommodating its growing fiscal and administrative needs. Within the world of work, guild masters at the pinnacle of the urban social hierarchy played a collaborative role parallel to that of rural seventeenth-century elites. As with the discredited nobility and landed magnates, Parisian elites of the world of work aided and abetted the Crown with significant corporate financial “contributions” and a veritable bureaucracy to support the established social and economic order. Corporations serving as shadow administrative agencies practiced this particular form of “bureaucratic delegation,” as David Stasavage argues.69 Guild elites, particularly in the capital city, used corporations as the nobility had wielded institutions such as the courts and tax farms: to appropriate new wealth. This was partially accomplished with a “patriotic” language of “service” as captured by the denomination metiers jurés – sworn trades – to convey undying loyalty to the King. Even in its sweeping, self-interested, and doomed endeavour to standardize seasonal wage scales in 1785, the Chambre des Bâtiments and Community of Master Masons seized upon a dubious claim to rationality to act on behalf of the nation and the Crown, thus provoking the first

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recorded industry-wide grève (strike). Here, corporate officers in the building trades acted like their colleagues in the administrative, military, and judicial spheres by vastly expanding the authority of venal offices as indirect sources for greater revenue. Not discursive merit, honor, or patriotism, but a utilitarian relationship to power bolstered the collaboration between the corporate regime and the monarchy.70 Mutual dependency and bureaucratic delegation, however, also meant that corporatism and absolutism declined together. As we have seen, the cycles of sweeping abolition, partial restoration, and wholesale re-invention of the corporations spearheaded by Turgot and Necker in the last decades of the ancien régime eventually destabilized a vital and constituent pillar of monarchy. The result not only discredited the corporations but also helped to undermine the ancien régime’s corporate organization of society. (As we will see, however, a refounded corporatism survived the Revolution once stripped of alleged anachronisms and abuses.) For the Crown, the enfeeblement of the guilds, as well as the “disgrace” of those who tried to reform them in the 1770s, had ominous repercussions for the following decade. The erosion of corporate finances that followed the guilds’ gerrymandered restoration meant the Crown’s fiscal crisis of the 1780s was viewed by the public as a deeper threat to the state’s viability than was actually the case. There was little confidence in a nearly bankrupt French state cut off from its corporate moorings; few entrusted the monarchy to overcome its final fiscal crisis without reviving credit flows backed by guilds. The monarchy’s debt thus only exposed and aggravated its own lack of political resiliency. It was condemned by public opinion even if, by some measures, the French state by the end of the 1780s was in less dire straits than soaring Great Britain. The emergency triggered by the Finance Minister Calonne’s 1787 announcement that the state’s finances were ˆ of the discredited guild economy insolvent accelerated the coup de grace and of absolutism.71 In this respect, the end of the ancien régime heralded the character of the new regime. For after 1789 the stark visibility of the revolutionary “police” embodied by section-based officials, City, Communal, Departmental administrators, and other functionaries, clearly demonstrated that the era of privileged corps commanding the work site was finished. As with the role of the lieutenant general of police in 1785, the high drama of the massive intervention of officials who represented the nation, and later, the Republic, could not have been more reassuring to Parisians after 1789. For they provided a sharp contrast to the internal, “gentle,” and ultimately failed police of the artisans of the annihilated ancien régime.

2 The Revolution and Construction Guilds, 1789–1793

The perceived breakdown in the ancien régime construction industry represented, to many observers, a larger failure of the state to reconcile the idea of the corporate order with its untidy practices. The unintended consequence of reforms in the second half of the eighteenth century engraved the image of this sector as duplicating the Crown’s disintegrating institutions – foundering structures in declining neighborhoods symbolized the collapsing foundations of the monarchy. The staggering tasks of controlling labor migration, cracking down on fraudulent practices, mediating in work disputes, and assuring the public of the well-policed building site were too immense for a state rapidly going bankrupt to have assumed.1 The Revolution’s transformation of the construction sector was sure to be far-reaching in light of the prominence of the Parisian building trades in the political critique and the economic collapse of the ancien régime. In place of corporate monopolies and the strict divorce of “expertise” and entrepreneurship, the building trades would be regulated by supply and demand, by the free agency of labor, and by the protection of the “sacred and inviolable right” of property enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of August 1789. Above all, the dismantling of the ancien régime system of building followed the implacable logic of anti-corporatism: the abolition of the guilds in 1791 was followed by the suppression of all corporate administrative and academic bodies, including the Parisian housing authority, the Chambre des Bâtiments, in 1792 and the Academy of Architecture in 1793. The consolidation of the revolutionary state took place in many domains, but the Parisian construction site demonstrated that civil functionaries paid with state salaries could fully assume supervisory, 63

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administrative, and architectural responsibilities. These were previously the exclusive domain of venal office holders and accountable to the Crown. Thereafter, a new technocratic, entrepreneurial, and engineering elite emerged to replace the networks of building oligarchies of the ancien régime. Simply put, by invoking the virtues of talent, experience, and merit, the new officials of Parisian public construction assured their central place in the new order, while ideologically lying to rest the corporate model of the ancien régime construction industry. This was not merely an abstract political discourse formulated opportunistically in the meritocratic categories of the Revolution. For by investing in the construction of the capital during the Revolution and Empire construction magnates and state functionaries eventually carved out a niche for new elites at the pinnacle of the post-revolutionary urban economy.2 Amidst the étatisation of construction oversight, however, the paradoxical endurance of the guilds flowed from the stabilizing effects of a corporate economy in the first two years of the Revolution. This chapter examines the assets of the guilds – in a figurative and literal sense – as among the reasons why the corporations were only suppressed at the end of Revolution’s second year, in the élan that had swept away most other controls on production and exchange. The historiographical consensus on abolition focuses on parliamentary debates and decisions rather than on socio-economic practice. But, as we have seen, the corporations were central to the stabilization of workplace and political authority and the creation of networks of credit, materials, and personnel. As we will see, they remained crucial to the organization of labor and to bureaucratic hierarchies, as well as to the application of quality controls over production during the Revolution.3 The master masons’ guild, for example, was partially assimilated to the Paris municipality by a decree to collaborate with the Parisian Department of Public Works in December 1790. Writing on behalf of the Department, Mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly called for officials of the community of master masons to do the impoverished municipality’s bidding in construction and reparations by assuming inspection responsibilities over public works. The master masons’ guild was henceforth conceived of as a “fraternal administration,” with that of the municipality in assuring public safety. This experiment in the “municipalization” of the master masons’ guild no doubt in part explains the brief, peaceful cohabitation of corporations and urban authorities in the decidedly anticorporatist political culture of the National Assembly. Furthermore, guild officials, particularly, the syndics and the adjuncts,

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figured prominently in the municipality’s struggle to assure Parisians’ safety around construction sites.4 Perhaps an even more vital function was the corporations’ central role in helping to overcome the principal challenge of construction in the transition from the ancien régime to the early Revolution: the crisis in credit and attitudes toward indebtedness and risk-taking. Entrepreneurs and proprietors in the private construction sector were awash in debt by the end of the 1780s. Parisians had increased their net arrears by 533 million livres between 1770 and 1789. And among the reservoirs soaking up Parisians’ wealth, along with education and land acquisition, was a massive investment in stones.5 Indeed, Paris is no exception to the lowly historical status of the unglamorous subject of real-estate speculation: it is, and remains, an entirely overlooked motor of urban development. (Or perhaps it is overlooked simply because there is no money in poetry, just as there is no poetry in money, as the classicist Robert Graves put it.)6 Also, adding to the frenzied atmosphere of construction, the monarchy encouraged real-estate investment and construction by stimulating speculative activities. The ordinance of 18 August 1766 eased the way for investors to take greater risks in building, for it mandated that speculators in a project could claim all property on a construction site should a contractor go bankrupt during construction. One result was that razing and erecting entirely new structures were greatly favored – for being more profitable – over rehabilitation. This fueled speculation in the construction market in the period leading up to the Revolution. The 1766 ordinance eliminated ponderous risk for wealthy investors in construction projects. Projects passed before the Chambre des Bâtiments for extensive repairs of older structures actually declined in Paris: 493 plans for maintenance were approved between 1718 and 1722, while only 298 were submitted between 1788 and 1792. Taking advantage of these favorable conditions, Parisian elites found not only the construction sector but the housing market writ large increasingly accessible to growing numbers of newly wealthy individuals.7 As a result of unfettered Parisian construction after the Seven Year’s War, intensified financial risk fell heavily upon the construction trades. These relied increasingly upon the corporations to stake labor costs and other investments potentially lost with the bankruptcy of a single contractor. Two archival sources suggest that the finances of building tradesmen were particularly well protected by the sector’s corporations. For an earlier period, the credit-worthiness of the

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community of master masons is itemized in a scrupulous balance sheet of guild arrears and assets. They show a net surplus of 68,133 livres in the period, 1752–1763, after which this rare paper trail tails off. While this balance sheet speaks little to the immediate pre-revolutionary period, the book-keeping in itself is an exercise of economic precision most telling for the financial health of this branch of the corporate universe.8 In a separate document, this time directly concerning our period, the bankruptcy registry of the Châtelet partially records the numbers of business failures in Paris. This shows a total of 1,617 bankruptcies declared between 1757 and 1791. A mere 36 of recorded economic failures concerned the building trades, and proportionately fewer of these were identified in the early years of the Revolution. The post-Seven Year’s War construction boom did not end in a significant bust, despite the shaky economic climate between 1789 and 1791, and, as we will see, despite the general perception of impending crisis. The corporations’ utility to the Revolution included the continuity in guaranteeing, securing, and backing credit. Guilds, indeed, were a credit union avant la lettre.9 Conditions during the Revolution were surprisingly favorable to construction. Aided by an opportune economic conjuncture in the sector, from the spring of 1791 to the summer of 1792, the national authorities viewed the Parisian housing market as an exemplar of how a sector could be restored to health once liberated from the archaic, corrupt, and monopolistic corporations – a caricature, surely. But by these means, Revolutionaries created an “invented memory” of a catastrophic system of ancien régime Parisian construction. Their new order, furthermore, was to be supervised by national authorities with larger aspirations than to carve out the municipal housing authority for the city of Paris. For revolutionary construction practices only proved enduring after being perfected by the ambitious men who would re-make Paris in their image – from Napoleon to Haussmann. The tradition of wholesale razing and constructing the grands travaux were made possible after both the corporate model of society and the liberalism of Turgot had been politically “disgraced” once and for all. The new regime was, indeed, physically and ideologically, built on the ruins of the ancien régime.10 This chapter explores how the Revolution arrived on the private building sites of Paris and, in particular, how the trades employed in the construction trades were politicized in revolutionary categories. The arrival of the post-1789 civic order in urban construction was to bring transparency, flexibility, and creativity to Paris’ most highly visible – and exemplary – economic sector, that of the capital’s construction industry.

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Over the revolutionary decade, reform proposals poured into the public sphere, many in the form of petitions and pamphlets, calling for greater investment, “transparency” between proprietors, entrepreneurs, and laborers, as well for enlarging the regulatory scope of the state. As during the end of the ancien régime, the reform idea in this literature included the paradoxical goals of easing and tightening regulations. Liberty could only be won by stripping intermediary corporate bodies of monopoly control over construction and the labor market. At the same time, the vacuum created by the suppression of the Crown’s regulatory institutions had to be dealt with. Of course, with the fall of the monarchy and the Prussian invasion of August 1792, the revolutionary state would begin to face deeper challenges in war and counter-revolution. The quotidian inspection of cracks in Parisian buildings and the settling of arcane legal differences between contractors and proprietors were not, at first glance, priority activities of the French Revolution, roiled in the start of nearly 23 consecutive years of continual warfare. And, yet, improving the lives of Parisians, particularly in the domain of everyday life where the ancien régime had been failing, was, indeed, a revolutionary ambition. The transformation of the urban environment of Paris, now unquestionably the capital of France, was more than ever an elusive challenge during the revolutionary decade.

The construction of the Revolution’s public sphere In the early years of the Revolution, the creation of new types of public spaces, the transformation of former religious structures into hospitals, schools, prisons, and barracks and the boom in theatre building, stimulated a demand for the builders of Paris. Revolutionary construction featured a marked preference for limited and pragmatic projects, most typically, functional infrastructure, less cluttered public streets, and badly needed sewage drainage. The few entrepreneurs to receive sparse public commissions in the revolutionary decade were mostly engaged in the creation of “ephemeral” architecture, namely, the staging of festivals, such as the Fête de la Federation, or the completion of bridges and roads launched under the ancien régime, such as the pont de la Concorde opened in 1791. The principal reasons were the economic facts on the ground which put an abrupt end to the preference for razing and replacing older structures – or destroying them for purposes of aiding traffic; such was the fate of the luxurious buildings of most of the bridges crossing the Seine, structures torn down between 1786

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and 1788. Revolutionaries, then, as now, applied the simple truism: it is often less expensive to build than to restore.11 There were also perhaps more jobs to be had, and more money to be made, in destruction than in construction. Wholesale demolition occupied the construction industry in the Revolution and, at first, brightened employment opportunities in the sector. The self-described “architect, entrepreneur, former master mason, former journeyman,” Pierre-François Palloy (1754–1835), the building contractor engaged to dismantle the Bastille, employed 400 construction workers before the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789. Starting on the evening of July 14, Palloy mobilized a massive labor force to dismantle the fortress while rendering its debris into souvenirs. Iron shackles were melted into medals and stones were carved into souvenir likenesses of the fortress, then sold to commemorate the cult of the Vainquers de la Bastille, and, particularly, the 98 fatalities among the heroic assailants. Palloy thus contributed a “patriotic cult of relics” to festive celebrations of the taking of the Bastille.12 Palloy was a shrewdly ambitious and enterprising representative of new men in the building trades – in a less media-savvy age, he was also well ahead of his time. His sense of self-promotion inspired no fewer than 200 distinct publications of political brochures, maps, songs, and assorted construction proposals, many under assorted pseudonyms, and nearly all self-financed. Having started as a bricklayer, his autobiography, repeated incessantly, was a classic one of social ascension, helped, he stressed, by the Revolution’s meritocratic inspiration. In fact, his fortune had begun in banal fashion in the eighteenth century, with his marriage to a building contractor’s daughter. His wealth flourished in the construction business during the Revolution but was squandered in massive printing bills for publications. An increasingly distressed tone suggests this master builder, who bragged in July 1789 to possessing half a million pounds and seven houses, was close to ruin by the end of his life.13 Palloy’s most exalted project was a contribution to the debate on replacing the dismantled Bastille fortress. His plan for a 72-foot column was typical of many others; however, the construction process was shrewdly conceptualized for the Revolution. Palloy demanded that the National Assembly create a national draft to compel each of France’s 83 Departments to send four building workers to Paris, including two stonecutters, a stonemason, and an assistant, so that “each department contribute by their co-citizens to erect a monument to the glory of the French nation.” Eventually abandoning this and other ambitious

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ventures, Palloy focused on executing public contracts for revolutionary festivals. Before exhausting his resources, he contributed, early and often, to the articulation of a revolutionary patriotism based on national unity through participation in constructing symbols of the nation.14 Thus, the Revolution did not abolish architecture, despite the bias of certain art and architectural historians to limit the Revolution’s architectural contributions to vandalism alone.15 Palloy demonstrates that even in the hothouse environment of Revolutionary Paris, opportunities for commissioned private and public building enterprises arose in fully sustained cadence. Certain forms of architecture were promoted, with particular attention to principles of democratization of use, standardization, and, above all, surveillance. Also, the physical materials used in construction were chosen with greater attention to the bottom line. Scarcities during the Revolution imposed a greater use of plaster of Paris and even cheaper substitute materials to replace expensive cut stone. With the shift in priorities of form and content, public discourse about Paris construction also developed in a new direction. In order to carve out a place for the construction sector – and to seek favored treatment for public funds to be funneled to large-scale projects – prominent entrepreneurs such as Palloy, as well as artisans, contractors, and architects, wielded a patriotic discourse of civic regeneration that attributed transformative powers to the Parisian building sector. The revolutionary principles of “liberty, equality, fraternity” would be physically incarnated, with greater political impact than via the written word, through revolutionary construction that would represent a new order to the rest of the world. The civic discourse that began with a benign and routine “lobbying” for new construction projects became a language that claimed for the builders of revolutionary Paris an exalted role in the sensual transmission of the Revolution’s meaning through the physical reconstruction of the Capital. Paris would be the Rome and not the Babylon of the end of the eighteenth century. In practice, however, the Revolution’s reticence to launch large-scale urban projects was a result of the dramatic state of financial arrears. But there was also the popular reaction against the ancien régime’s lavish and far-reaching schemes to remake Paris. The extravagant plan to expand the wall around the capital by the Farmers-General Wall completed in 1787 ringed with Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s tollhouses, the barrières d’octroi, the first target of the revolutionary crowd, created a backlash of sorts against futile monumentalism. Nevertheless, the National

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Assembly received and published many projects for reconstructing Paris from prominent architects, critics, and connoisseurs, suggesting that opportunities existed to erect expansive and monumental structures in the capital city. Notable plans were submitted for commissions to the National Assembly by De Wailly, Brogniart, Poyet, Ledoux, Boullée, Lequeu, Gisors, Rousseau, Legrand et Molinos, Percier et Fontaine, with little success for their authors. While no contemporary source credibly suggests these projects were practicable, they indicate an ambition among elite architectural circles to put their art to use in the new order. In theory, the regeneration of the French nation would follow a symbolic appropriation of the public space of the capital city by architects and urban specialists. In practice, however, there was little appetite for monumental efforts to create a unified landscape around massive projects entailing whole-scale urban renovation. Parisians, after nearly 25 consecutive years of steady construction, were clearly sick of the dust, mud, and noise kicked up by builders, many of whom were “foreigners” from the provinces.16

Map 2.1 “Map of the city and suburbs of Paris with its expansion and the new wall of tollhouses around the capital, 1789.” This illustrates the relationship of the Farmers-General Wall built in the 1780s to its predecessors.

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Map 2.2 Turgot Map, 1739, detail of the place de Grève (now, the place de l’Hôtel de ville). As the daily site of the hiring fare of masons and other building workers, it was first mentioned in edicts dating from the fourteenth century.

Map 2.3 Jaillot Map, 1773, detail of the place de Grève. A real proximity of work and life: the hiring fare (Grève) was next to the street where many masons lived in lodging homes, the rue de la Mortellerie on the southeast corner.

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Early revolutionary programs were indistinguishable from those of the closing years of the ancien régime: inculcating patriotism and promoting the grandeur of a regenerated nation inspired projects before and after 1789. Characteristic of the many schemes presented before the National Assembly was Charles-Philippe Le Sueur’s Project of Utility and Embellishment for the City of Paris published in May 1790. Le Sueur sought to memorialize the creation of the 48 sections of Paris by commissioning one sculpture to represent each section to be erected throughout Paris. The ultimate value of such a project was to “educate the public in the principles, practices, and morality of the public Virtues.” To Le Sueur, as to most early Revolutionary architects, utility referred strictly the edification of those who behold the statues, not those who labored to construct them.17 Similarly, Florentin Gilbert, an obscure civil architect, was silent about the mundane issue of employment in his submission

Figure 2.1 One of two identical tax collectors’ offices attached to the toll house of the Farmers-General Wall at the place of the Throne (renamed in 1794, place of the Dethroning; near the present-day place de Nation). Sixteen of 55 planned toll houses were completed between 1785 and 1789 and were the first royal symbols attacked in July 1789, 2 days before the Bastille.

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to the Academy of Architecture’s August 1790 competition for the construction of a National Assembly. Gilbert extolled his contribution as a pure advancement of “the culture of the Arts.” The public utility of his project, as signaled by Gilbert, was to encourage creative endeavors and to facilitate “the enlightenment of Artists to unite patriotism with the competition of talents.” Gilbert sought to extend the Academy of Architecture’s mission into the Revolution by means of artistic competitions (concours) – “the competition of talents” – a notion of citizenship based on merit and creative labor, but narrowly conceived as appropriate to artists alone. In their relatively modest proposals, Le Sueur and Gilbert restricted programmatic ambitions to generic patriotic formulations, suitable to a meritocratic revolutionary setting. The repudiation of ancien régime forms of monumental grandeur and aestheticism in favor of early revolutionary pragmatism was underway, albeit haltingly (Maps 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5).18

Figure 2.2 Detail of the tax collectors’ offices at the place of the Throne, symbolizing the seeing-eye surveillance regime of the Crown. All crimes, to its architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, including excise tax evasion, were “offenses of non-surveillance.”

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Figure 2.3 “Demolition of the houses on the bridge the pont au Change,” Hubert Robert, 1788, detail. Here, explosives clearly did most of the damage but elsewhere much material was recovered and reused. Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

Figure 2.4 “The Church of the Feuillants in Demolition,” Hubert Robert, 1805, detail. Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

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Figure 2.5 A souvenir Bastille, carved and sold out of a stone from the demolished fortress, and commercialized by the entrepreneur, Palloy. Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

Private construction and the credit crunch of the early Revolution As Balzac observed in 1840, it is as difficult for towns and cities as it is for commercial houses to recover from ruin.19 The perception of a fragile state of affairs in the Revolution first became widespread on private, rather than public, building sites. Then, as now, a confluence of political incertitude and financial crises weakened the housing and labor markets. As the National Assembly haggled in 1790 over the legal structure of a liberal economy – debating such issues as the price of business licenses (patentes) for entrepreneurs and the eventual abolition of certain commercial courts (such as the jurisdiction consulaire) or the future powers of the chambers of commerce – work sites were temporarily immobilized. With increasing impatience, building entrepreneurs and future proprietors awaited clarification on the true value of their investments in a new economy. Surely, also, relatively fresh memories of disastrous experiments in economic liberalism, in 1763–1764, 1775–1776, and 1787, caused apprehension among Parisian

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entrepreneurs and propriétaires. Paradoxically, then, as the Constituent National Assembly proclaimed the freedom of commerce in five separate decrees between October 1789 and September 1790, many construction sites of Paris slowed down or were partially paralyzed. In the absence of a fully achieved commercial code, the exact risks of a liberal economy remained to be determined. Liberty was as perilous to its supposed beneficiaries as it was exhilarating to the National Assembly which repeatedly decreed its arrival.20 Thus, the immediate cause and repercussion of the 1789–1790 slowdown in the housing market was the fear of a breakdown of the corporate economy and the drying up of elaborate networks of credit. Corporations and credit in this period were intimately linked, and disarray in the former brought about a crunch in the latter. The complex web of “active” and “passive” debts carried by guild members throughout the eighteenth century meant that Parisian builders relied heavily on trust, firmly backed up by corporate ties, to keep their operations afloat. Membership in the guild implied a network of associates who could be sources of extended loans, services, or raw materials. Thus immunized from the normal pressures of entrepreneurship, guild members allowed themselves to fall heavily into debt to workers, proprietors, and contractors alike. Declarations and papers concerning bankruptcies, stocked in the underused departmental Archives de Paris, give a detailed profile of ordinary business in construction. The largest bankruptcy with a fully constituted dossier was filed by the Brunet brothers who had worked on the Palais de Justice. They were ruined in 1790 owing 122,604 livres in liabilities.21 The smallest debt owed by a master who filed for bankruptcy was the dossier that the master mason Duhamel submitted to the Parisian Merchants’ Court in 1786, with a debt of 3,633 livres. In general, however, the standard amount of liabilities to provoke economic failure for master masons was between 10,000 and 15,000 livres: the core of these debts was made up of salary payments, buying and shipping material, such as plaster, stone, gravel, and payments to the experts for inspections.22 This amounted to a massive layout. As a skilled employed laborer might earn around 2 livres for a day worked, the typical venture required the wage equivalent of 5,000 to 7,500 workdays for a journeyman. This prodigious cost would only by reimbursed by the proprietor upon receiving the key to his building from the expert following a final inspection of the premises. Of course, Parisian guildsmen were generally prepared to risk such an outlay only because the corporation was the legal guarantor of the credit of

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each of its members. Rare economic failure occurred when the guild, for any variety of reasons, did not or could not back the master in difficulty.23 The apparent fragility of previously secure credit networks is reflected in a cascade of pamphlet literature urging the immediate launching of new public works projects. These were joined and seconded by the Parisian lists of grievances, the cahiers de doléances, concerning the construction trades in 1789.24 As a whole, these contrasted sharply with the discourse of ancien régime enlightened critics of the capital in the ambition to transform Paris’ urban landscape. Many reformers sought to repudiate the fervor for urban embellishments of a previous generation of utopian urban thinkers as symptomatic of monarchical megalomania. With the Revolution, the occasion to reign in the zeal of self-proclaimed urbanists had arrived.25 Further aggravating the sense of impeding disaster in the last years of the ancien régime was the Crown’s manipulation of the financial institution founded by Turgot in 1776, the Caisse d’escompte, whose original mission was to issue paper money and to control the kingdom’s stock of gold and silver. The Controller-General Necker destabilized this establishment during his failed bid to transform it into the French national bank, based on the British model of state financing. (The Caisse d’escompte was abolished in August 1793.) These steps helped caused a fiscal crisis that prompted vociferous debate on overhauling French commerce. The discussion on restoring sound enterprise led to the abolition of the ancien régime commercial courts on 16 August 1790. Without even this often ineffectual recourse guild members felt themselves further exposed to the vicissitudes of a shaky market, with no protection from creditors. One appraisal of the grim situation was offered in a pamphlet written by a group of 27 construction entrepreneurs representing the Assembly General of the Deputies of the Arts and Professions Constituting the Building Trades in December 1790. Composed of some of the largest master builders and guild masters of Paris, this emergency assembly denounced a coming crisis in which a terrifying scarcity of projects, a commercial stagnation, the abandonment of the trades, canals intended for greater circulation commandeered from their regular course, the artists and the artisans condemned to an idleness that torments them; and whereas so many people suffer, simultaneously, several contractors and entrepreneurs in each trade enjoy exclusive profits from the [Paris] Commune’s

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expenses, while others are deprived and reduced to a profound distress; everyone, contributing to public charges are owed at least this – they should share in the advantages offered in the contracting and in the public works of the [Paris] Commune.26 The new construction lobby portrayed itself as collectively victimized by the fiscal reforms of the new order whose ambiguities aggravated precarious economic conditions in Paris. For months, contractors had been denied payment for services rendered while financial innovations were discussed ad infinitum. In the meantime they were forced to submit to a deluge of complicated procedures initiated by unscrupulous creditors, perhaps spurred on by the hazy approach taken by the National Assembly. Listing the series of costly brevets, financial charges, bail and security arrangements imposed by creditors, the building contractors forcibly made their case that commercial uncertainty was undermining Parisian construction. Scant efforts of the National Assembly to formulate a coherent commercial code provoked new forms of bureaucratic entrapment. The proposed solution was a utopian scheme to reorganize Parisian construction. The builders urged the division of the capital into six distinct construction arrondissements and the assigning of four suppliers and contractors from each building trade to handle future contracts. The 24 contractors thus hired from each building trade would assure a highly competitive and efficient market, thus avoiding the monopoly control of large-scale building entrepreneurs who could outbid or undersell the competition.27 Contradicting the perception of imminent economic collapse, fanned by catastrophic portrayals of paralyzed Parisian construction, the sheer durability of credit-worthy building corporations tell a different story. In fact, the industry as a whole was not threatened in its daily business but rather by the collapse of the ancien régime’s market founded upon monopoly patronage. An end to the masters’ economic cartel provoked strife in nearly all sectors of the Parisian economy. Privileges to control such varied enterprises as the stone quarries of the faubourg Saint-Marcel, the royal manufacture of Gobelins, or such public buildings as the Church of Sainte-Geneviève were subcontracted by the Crown to individual entrepreneurs based upon opaque criteria of favoritism, clientelism, family connections, and “friends of friends.” The public administration of the king’s domains, the Bâtiments du Roi, reserved the right to inspect and to pay or not the interested party at the reception, the final inspection and acceptance

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of the finished product. But the Crown wielded ineffectual control against the corruption and manipulation of many public entrepreneurs, whose state-backed monopolies guaranteed unlimited access to credit, contracts, and supplies. Ancien régime privilege also granted selected entrepreneurs unparalleled power to negotiate very low salaries, leading to controversy in the early years of the Revolution as demands for restitution came pouring in to the National Assembly. Many grievances about ancien régime wages assumed the Revolutionary state would pay damages for abuses committed under the Crown. The miners of the stone quarry in faubourg Saint-Marcel, as Haim Burstin reveals, demanded compensation for salary reductions dating back to 1777. The legitimacy of monopoly control itself came under attack by way of petitions and movements against entrepreneurs who had benefited immensely by the ambiguity of their statute – although private merchants, they were protected against the vicissitudes of the market by guaranteed state contracts. Neither suffering the indignities of risk in the private sphere, nor the accountability demanded of state administrators in the public realm, these entrepreneurs enjoyed immense financial and legal privileges. They were secured against bankruptcy, against the right to be judged by anyone but professional peers in case of contestation, and enjoyed easy access to the policing institutions of the state. The collapse of the political edifice of the ancien régime exposed the contradictions of entrepreneurs’ prerogatives and fed, in turn, the scathing critique of monopoly privilege that led to the abolition of the corporations in the spring of 1791.28 The Revolution, then, was never hostile to construction, only to the monopoly privilege widely practiced in the industry. Uncertain political conditions added to the unfavorable economic conjuncture and the spiral of anticorporate sentiment focused on the undue advantages granted to privileged insiders. Moreover, the credit crunch that started with the Controller-General of Finances Charles Alexandre de Calonne’s publication of a report demonstrating imminent national bankruptcy in February 1787 was, of course, based on a realistic assessment of the future of financial speculation in this perilous moment. As economists have amply demonstrated, discount rates and interest rates that dictate the availability of credit are often determined by collective expectations rather than by measurable economic data.29 Real economic opportunities in construction had not much changed since the frenzy of the previous decades, as witness the successful completion of several large-scale projects during the Revolution. The rapid opening of several

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aristocratic urban mansions, the hôtels particuliers designed by Ledoux, such as the Hosten houses on the rue Saint-Georges completed in 1792 and the Godet houses finished in 1795 on the rue Saint Lazare, clearly demonstrate that the housing market, especially for previously commissioned projects, was far from dead.30 But another and more decisive impact on revolutionary building – with deeper implications than the mere availability of inexpensive credit – was the disposition to go into debt at the end of the eighteenth century. The debt consciousness that soared in popular opinion during the debate on the catastrophic state of finances was the principal obstacle to doing business as usual. Calonne’s announcement exposed the structural weaknesses of a fiscal system based on a complex network of privileges and corporate bodies that supplied low-cost credit to the state. A second panic about imminent royal default in the summer of 1787, spurred by draconian reform proposals, also aggravated widespread suspicion of the stock market. The fiscal crisis of the ancien régime projected a harsh light on the foreign speculators who had been taking ever greater risks in the 1780s. As vehement denunciations of the stock market demonstrated, the challenge of the national debt reached into the very economic foundations of ancien régime society and its labyrinth systems of public finance.31 The question of who pays to reimburse the debt was increasingly posed to those privileged echelons of French society that had profited from the fruits of the building boom after the Seven Year’s War. The vulnerability of certain privileged elites to foot the bill for the national catastrophe became clearer with every proposal received by national authorities. In August 1787, Calonne’s replacement as the controllergeneral, Loménie de Brienne attempted to pass an edict that would have taxed heavily expensive stamped paper for all bills of exchange, loan contracts, and receipts – this represented, in fact, a tax on credit itself. On top of this new tax, a direct threat to the privileges of manufacturing and entrepreneurial elites, as well as the proprietors of France, was embodied by a tax proposal on all landholdings. The aristocratic revolt of the early Revolution may have thus been partially provoked by the inclusion of more and more of the elite – previously exempted – in the taxpaying pool. Only the Parlement’s refusal to register the edicts raising taxes eased the panic, but this series of reform proposals inflamed credit inflation. Lacking solvency, business bankruptcies in Paris, as registered before several jurisdictions, increased from 262 in 1787 to 386 in 1788 and 379 in 1789. Insolvency in Paris remained unusually high – 344 – in 1790, and dropped to 144 with a return to relative prosperity in

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1791. The building trades were a rare sector to defy economic collapse, but could they resist for long?32 An additional factor aggravating the uncertainty of credit and debt was the promise to eliminate most forms of ancien régime taxes. As early as 17 June 1789, taxes were abolished by the Estates-General and only by January 1791 would a national system for taxation be fully in place. This lack of a sure source of public funds had a predictably dissuasive impact on new public construction. In sum, the economics of debt, the mentality of debt consciousness, and deeply uncertain fiscality created a complex and paradoxical situation. Work on such major public sites as the Church of the Madeleine (until late 1790) and the Church of Sainte-Geneviève proceeded as if nothing had happened; at the same time, however, fewer new sites in 1789 and 1790 would see the light of day. In the construction sector, as with the entire French economy, the anticipation of an impending economic crisis loomed as an impending self-fulfilling prophecy.33

Dismantling the corporate order and demarcating the new regime of Parisian building In sharp contrast with the brittle economic conjuncture of the end of the ancien régime and early Revolution, a confluence of circumstances in the spring of 1791 created a more favorable climate for the construction industry. This, in turn, facilitated a renaissance of private and public construction after the April 1791 transformation of the assignats into the national paper currency. The assignat had the unintended consequence of promoting construction. For the financial basis of these assignats was nationalized property, the biens nationaux, seized from their ecclesiastical and noble proprietors and sold by the state at auction.34 A virtuous cycle in Parisian construction became a minor boom in 1791 and 1792, driven by the appropriation, sale, and rapid exploitation of 12 percent of all Parisian property as nationalized property. Georges Lefebvre concluded that over a thousand buildings were ultimately sold as biens nationaux in Paris: 505 structures were seized from the Church and 587 from the aristocracy. The reconversion, restoration, or destruction of these structures nursed the building sector back to vigorous health. A sign of renewed financial confidence in the new order was the 115 contractors and entrepreneurs (13 percent of all acquirers) who purchased new properties as biens nationaux, mostly in the northern parts of the capital, and concentrated in the areas in what are now the second, third, ninth, tenth, and eleventh arrondissements (i.e., in a

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sweeping arc from the northwest Chaussée d’Antin to slightly beyond the northeast place de la République). Each new lot represented an opportunity to develop the peripheral neighborhoods of the capital. Adding to this burst of activity on the building sites was the liberalization of the architectural profession as more and more unscrupulous building entrepreneurs appropriated the confidence-building mantle of architects or, better still, architectes-entrepreneurs, a real oxymoron in the baroque nomenclature of the ancien régime. Unqualified businessmen were blithely passing themselves off as technical specialists.35 Brighter economic prospects in the private sphere had three corollary affects on construction in Paris. First, new employment opportunities made makeshift public solutions to unemployment, such as public workshops, ever less appealing. Second, the revival of private construction fed into at take-off at public sites: employment opportunities were expanded on the Palais de Justice, the Louvre, and the pont de Louis XVI, among other projects. Third and finally, the sheer visibility of these massive sites, along with the primitive cranes put up in the northeast outskirts of the capital city, created a movement for salary increases among the building trades workers. In this heated conjuncture of the prosperous spring and summer of 1791, the crowning act of confidence in a new socio-economic order was passed as two separate laws: the Loi d’Allarde (2 March), which specifically abolished the guilds, and the much more sweeping Loi le Chapelier (14 June), which prohibited all corporate bodies. In two fell swoops, the National Assembly reconceived labor relations on a new contractual basis, in which traditional privileges were dismantled in the name of the application of market principles to the world of labor and capital.

Guild abolition and labor conflict in the construction trades, 1791 In virtue of the ordinance of the Department of Paris, we were brought to a house on the cul de sac St. Martin whose first floor is occupied by the bureau of the carpenters’ and masons’ guild in order to address a summary of all its possessions.36 These solemn words were followed by an elaborate inventory and confiscation of the papers and belongings of the carpenters’ and masons’ guilds. Thus did revolutionaries begin to dismantle the ancien régime corporate universe in Parisian construction. The police commissioner Cavilliez of the Section du Pont Neuf, accompanied by a secretary and a bailiff, grimly followed the ritual of the notary’s inventories of

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a deceased person’s property (inventaires après décès), by denominating and sealing each and every document, piece of furniture, and tool kept in the office. As a revolutionary police commissioner, Cavilliez was well aware of this procedure for had been a member of the corps of the police commissioners under the ancien regime, and the center of his jurisdiction had been the same neighborhood. The officials who accompanied him in disassembling the guild offices had formerly worked in close collaboration with the commissioner as syndics of the defunct masons’ and carpenters’ guilds. The Revolution hence used ancien régime corporate officials to suppress the corporations themselves – indeed, who better to do so? This bastard carpenters’ and masons’ guild, located in a demolished street on the outskirts of what is now the Marais, was a direct result of the guild universe’s restructuring at the end of the ancien régime. The enfeeblement of the urban guild structure had continued unabated since Turgot’s 1776 reforms and through Necker’s centralizing efforts of the 1780s. This created a situation ripe for conflict reformulated in the revolutionary political categories of the 1790s. The absorption of many guild functions by the state, as in Necker’s 1781 project to impose workers’ passports, or livrets, left the guilds as greatly weakened intermediaries between state and civil society. As the general building strike of 1785 had amply demonstrated, the entrepreneurs’ Chambre des Bâtiments did not have the historical legitimacy to replace the masters’ guilds in policing the labor force. And, after 1789, when masters were forbidden to impose industry-wide fixed salary structures and pricing lists, among other “monopolistic” practices condemned by the Revolution’s liberal voices, the free agency of workers and master builders became both easier to proclaim and to contest.37 In the weeks that followed the 1791 closing of the guild bureau, a veritable deluge of pamphlet literature on behalf of “former” (çi-devant) master and journeymen carpenters brought to light the depth of labor conflict in Parisian construction – and the extent to which the guild practices had remained a constant presence in the world of work. Strikes, usually one or two days in duration, were widespread in the threemonth period between the two laws, as was an upsurge in other forms of strife between masters and laborers. The new order of labor and capital was hardly structured around “invisible hand” mechanisms of contractual negotiation and supply and demand. Among the first detailed accounts of the social movement in this sector was a petition signed by former master carpenters, and sent to the Parisian authorities six weeks after guild abolition. The former masters seemed little aware of the irony in reconstituting themselves

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as a corporate order in order to denounce an assembly of journeymen carpenters, meeting in the expropriated archdiocese of Notre Dame. While their immediate concern was a movement to strike for increased wages, the ex-master artisans appealed to anticorporate sentiment to signal alarm at the associative organization of the journeymens’ organization.38 From across Paris arrived similar reports of movements of journeymen carpenters. The wealthy master carpenter Sylvain Moreau on 21 April 1791 – the maître d’ouvrage who had sponsored the construction of the sumptuous Maison Moreau near the Pantheon on the place de l’Estrapade in 1775 (figure 3.6) – denounced the threats of violence directed at his own recalcitrant journeymen. His laborers had resisted calls to to strike for salary increases as issued by “illicit” assemblies of laborers.39 Further provoked by the disbanding of public works projects on 7 May 1791, carpenters agitated to impose a new city-wide wage of 2.5 livres for a day of work. Declarations to the police commissioners of the sections conveyed the entrepreneurs’ dismay that the movement of journeymen carpenters spread from workshops in the outer city to the center of Paris. One denunciation by an entrepreneur on the northeast rue Ménilmontant maintained that 12 journeymen carpenters came to his atelier to force his workers to leave work. Another master carpenter complained of an illegal assembly of journeymen carpenters who conspired to force a wage of 2.5 livres per day throughout the summer and the winter, representing an increase of around 20 percent of customary salaries.40 In a more sober analysis, Spicket or Spiket, the police commissioner of the section de l’Observatoire in the south of Paris, conceded it would be impossible that the masters submit to “a unform tax” (sic) for that would destroy the entire trade by “alienating” the good workers while rewarding the mediocre ones. Still, Spicket, himself a former worker in the quarries, concluded that entrepreneurs themselves had been in part responsible for inflaming the movement by tolerating a great disparity in Paris wages, ranging between a mere 12 sous (a bit more than one half of a livre) and 4 livres for the very same tasks.41 The journeymen’s strife had political as well as economic motivations. A pamphlet by a group of former master blacksmiths confirmed the carpentry entrepreneurs’ account of widespread social conflict in ateliers where “uprisings and humiliations” threatened the social peace. The blacksmiths provided a precious outsiders’ glimpse into the unfolding of the journeymens’ meetings: “assemblies as illegal as dangerous and where provocative and anti-constitutional decrees are passed.” Corporate rituals – every bit as much as the sociability and “club mechanisms” that Augustin Cochin suggested formed the link between ancien régime

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associations and Jacobinism – were also an education in the forms of democratic practice.42 In alarmist terms, the blacksmiths warned that the movement of carpenters risked becoming a coalition générale, gaining adherents among locksmiths, shoesmiths and joiners. This might lead to another outcome, without doubt even more a more frightening one: a gang of these workers will report to the different Departments whence they came, and they will spread the principles that infused them, principles capable of causing the greatest disorders among other classes of citizens.43 The specter of a blossoming workers’ movement spreading into the provinces led the blacksmiths to declare that the carpenters had successfully mobilized 80,000 workers in the capital – a claim that was no doubt apocryphal, for that would represent much more than a tenth of the Paris population by the most generous estimates.44 In response, the journeymen drafted a riposte to the entrepreneurs’ accusations. In a published petition bearing 110 signatures, the journeymen carpenters focused on the “privileges of masterships” that entrepreneurs of the new regime persisted in exercising. The foremost “abuse” to betray the principles of the new regime was monopoly control on the labor force, enforced by “coalition.”45 The journeymen carpenters thus sought to mobilize the anticorporatist bias of the Revolution to their own cause. Their petition denounced “selfish” entrepreneurs in vivid terms, accusing them of being enemies of the Constitution, since they failed “to recognize the Rights of Man and are the most zealous partisans of the worst forms of aristocracy.” The journeymen thus echoed the masters’ claim to represent “public interest.” But whereas the journeymen put their arguments in political terms, as adherence to new constitutional principles, the masters had placed theirs squarely in the economic sphere. To the masters “public interest” meant upholding their commitments toward the proprietors who had hired them to perform work on the building site. The contractual terms of the masters’ petitions were, of course, bound to have a favorable reception with the Parisian municipality and National Assembly.46 As one former master carpenter described the strikes: Carpentry workers in the different workshops and building sites of Paris employed violence to peel away the workers who were working peacefully. The Entrepreneur Carpenters denounced them in their sections and sought assistance from the municipality to contain them

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and to obtain justice . . . . The workers should not be slaves; but, when they announce a resolve to harm society and attempt to perpetrate injustice, the law and public force should be used to oblige them to return to their duties. A labor coalition that imposes the General Will today might present even more exaggerated claims tomorrow; the Administration must establish a firm opposition to this as soon as possible.47 The former master thus called for the repressive force of the law to oppose the former journeymen’s efforts to “impose the General Will” through strikes. Factionalism and self-interest had replaced rebellion and sedition as the crime of striking laborers. The Revolution had, indeed, transformed the terms of labor strife in the Parisian construction trades.48 The final response by the municipality of Paris was to establish in absolute terms the inviolability of the private contract. The Paris Mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly signed his name to a “warning to the workers” that denounced the journeymen carpenters’ coalitions as illegal. He then shut down their meeting hall, in the former archdiocese of Nôtre Dame, while dispersing the journeymen still present by force.49 The unabashed interest politics implicit in the carpenters’ petitions made sophisticated use of the Revolution’s political vocabulary. Journeymen and entrepreneur carpenters wielded the same arguments to make opposing claims: the other camp engages in corporate behavior and seeks to betray the nation by putting its private interest ahead of the public good. Both thereby committed what the other saw as the cardinal sin of grouping in a “coalitions of factions” to further a selfish agenda.50 While the discourse of protest had evolved in the Revolution, it is also clear that corporations continued to structure the political, social, and economic life of Parisian artisans. Revolutionary authorities were pressed to intervene against ritualistic guild assemblies, the nomination of representatives of journeymen and masters, and legalistic petitions adopting the language of lawsuits to claim newly found constitutional rights. Certain ancien régime socio-economic practices continued to thrive within dense corporate credit networks, the quality inspection of finished goods, the organization of the workforce, labor protections, and even the choreographed fashion that limited one- or two-day strikes compelled “police” interventions. The “persistence of the old regime,” in Arno J. Mayer’s memorable phrase about another and later context, infused revolutionary

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practices and institutions with ancien régime innovation and tradition. Indeed, as Steven Kaplan concludes, the Revolution needed the corporations.51

Artisanal contention in the interstices of old and new regimes The vociferous builders compelled early twentieth-century historians of workers’ movements in the Revolution to portray some of the most contentious Parisian trades as almost single-handedly provoking the suppression of the corporate universe. More recent research throws into doubt this causality, and sees the suppression of the guilds as a single ideological blow to all corporations in an environment hostile to the very existence of factional elements.52 But this debate between circumstance and ideology, between the effect of labor strife and the larger commitment to end ancien régime privilege, may be confronted with other questions: what was the precise nature of the relationship between ancien régime and revolutionary-era contention in the world of work? Were they essentially continuous forms of class struggle before struggle, or did the Revolution transform preindustrial relations between capital and labor?53 These “classic” questions about revolutionary politicization point to the structure of work in the transition from the end of the ancien régime to the Revolution. Carpenters, for example, were widely assumed at the workplace to possess the characteristics that best lent themselves to political activism. First, they represented a peripatetic workforce that was not easily policed. Second, their work, most often in large teams, did not lend itself to the sort of intimacy that united masters and journeymen in the shop or workshop. Third, they perceived themselves as deeply underpaid for their talent and, as native Parisians, were not easily intimidated into silence. Journeymen and apprentice Creusois masons, by contrast, were less active in craft-based contestation during the Revolution. Finally, many carpenters were skilled artisans involved in one of the most impermanent tasks on the worksite: that of putting up and taking down scaffolding on building sites. The rhythms of carpentry work were intensive, dangerous, and ephemeral. Unsurprisingly then, the carpenters were seemingly the only building tradesmen to have petitioned the municipality of Paris and the National Assembly in a city-wide movement specifically as former masters and journeymen in the years before abolition. Other contentious laborers focused on grievances through site-specific

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demands. On the public work site of the Manufacture Royale des Gobelins, the skilled workforce of tapestry weavers struck for fewer hours and higher wages.54 The specialized stonecutters and sculptors (the tailleurs de pierre and sculpteurs en ornements) of the Pantheon’s façade and columns grouped themselves together on similar grounds to denounce work conditions.55 On the other hand, within the building trades, masons, painters, roofers, pavers, and others among the myriad trades that collaborated in putting up private buildings only sporadically organized themselves as trade-specific corporate groups in the early Revolution – and these were typically around specific and circumstantial issues.56 Why were contentious carpenters the most visibly contentious artisans of the French Revolution?57 The uniqueness of the carpenters’ political engagement cannot be readily explained with reference only to the worksite. Other trades shared the characteristics and the work structure of the carpenters. By police ordinance, they shared the same physical space as other laborers to search for daily job opportunities. The place de Grève, from 5:00 to 7:00 every morning but Sunday during

Figure 2.6 “Masons at the hiring fare of the place de Grève,” Jules Pelcoq, 1869. Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

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the spring and summer, was teeming with skilled and unskilled laborers ranging from masons and carpenters to roofers and day-laborers waiting to be hired à la journée, by the workday, on building sites across the city.58 Also, the nature of the carpenters’ engagement cannot be deciphered as expressing economic deprivation. Carpentry was generally among the highest paid work on the labor market in the eighteenth century after such luxury trades as silkweaving, engraving, and jewelry. The pay scales for a journeyman carpenter matched that of an average journeyman mason. While both varied at times, depending on the nature of the site, by the 1780s both would earn about 2 livres per day – around half the salary of luxury trades.59 In sum, carpenters, masons, as with other building tradesmen had much in common with a bourgeoisie of the world of work. Ernst Labrousse found the national average in 1790 of all wages was half of the average earnings of builders: 20 sous, and 6 deniers. By no means were the vast majority of the building trades a part of the masses of very poor in Paris (Figures 2.6, 2.7, 2.8).60

Figure 2.7 A late-nineteenth-century photo (provenance unknown) of the former rue de la Mortellerie, renamed la rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, known as “the street of the masons.” The turret is that of the hotel de Sens. Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

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Figure 2.8 Revolutionary-era construction (foreground) on the rue du faubourg Saint-Antoine.

That said, the carpenters and masons, as with all rural and urban trades, had witnessed a slow decay in real earnings at the end of the ancien régime. Yves Durand found that the most well-paid and leastpaid workers on the building site, the journeymen mason and the day laborer, increased earnings between 42 and 44 percent from 1727 to 1786. In that same period, however, Ernest Labrousse calculated that the price of wheat rose by 66 percent and firewood by 91 percent. The sense of a steady economic privation and the general degradation of living standards was common to most members of the French world of work at the end of the ancien régime. As we will see, however, this tendency would be reversed, at least in the building trades, during the Revolution. Labor contention in the 1790s and early nineteenth century contributed – with particular exceptions during the crises of 1793–1794 and 1796 – to advantages acquired during the two decades of a generally favorable economic conjuncture in which many urban laborers made up for lost earnings of the recent past.61 The origins of the confrontation between former masters and journeymen in the carpentry trade were embedded in the ancien régime, born in

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the history of the carpenters’ corporation. The master carpenters constituted a traditional and relatively closed guild that conducted its affairs autonomously of other building trades. Further, the guilds’ method of settling disputes provoked much dissension from both within and without, between masters and journeymen, as well as between itself and other guilds. Its procedures for policing its members and workers, of granting masterships and of practicing business, contrasted sharply with the evolution of the master masons’ corporation and the Chambre des Bâtiments as a professionalized housing authority.62 The contentious carpenters are most vividly captured in records of police interventions at the workplace. These portray a carpenters’ guild fiercely protective of its privileges with officers that guarded membership in jealous fashion against the encroachment of clandestine artisans (contrevenants) who used their own tools and hired their own laborers in defiance of the guild. In Paris the procedure for police raids became grim routine for the carpenters by the end of the eighteenth century. Guild representatives, typically the sindics or adjoints, would denounce to one of the 48 police commissioners a master or journeymen in violation of corporate statutes. The commissioner would follow the guildsmen to the workplace of the accused where he would interrogate those present, seal with a wax stamp any evidence to prevent tampering, and examine all tools for markings indicating that they are indeed the guild’s property. Unmarked tools were prima facia evidence of “outsiders” usurping guild privileges and were to be smashed, seized, or as the guild statutes of 1785 put it, “confiscated . . . to the profit of the master” who made the original denunciation.63 Suspects and witnesses were interrogated during a hearing on the building site, where a fine was determined, the sealed “defective” woodwork was destroyed, and a settlement was usually reached between the guild officials and offenders involving financial compensation. The corporate policing of master carpenters became so extensive, in fact, that in 1785, the guild passed a statute to grant the masters exclusive monopoly over the ownership of tools. Alone among the builders, journeymen carpenters were forbidden to own the tools of their trade, making the journeyman absolutely dependent on the master for his livelihood. The statute also permitted the swift verification of a journeyman’s status as the employee of a certified guild member, whose seal would mark all tools.64 Finally, the carpenters’ corporation exercised firmly and routinely the privilege to raid construction sites to inspect material and labor. The guilds’ officers concentrated on finding unmarked tools and cheap wood – often fished out of the

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Seine – used in scaffolding, the most dangerous form of deceit for masters, workers, and passersby alike. The increasingly high price of wood, which augmented dramatically in the winter of 1788–1789, made the use of moldering or humid wood a very real danger for the carpentry trades. In collaboration with the Police Commissioner Allix the syndics of the guild engaged in 81 raids in the years between 1784 and 1790. Predictably, the raids provoked much rancor between journeymen and masters in the waning years of the ancien régime.65 The force of the carpenters’ corporation is also substantiated by the restricted number of masters and journeymen granted access to the trade. The most reliable source to quantify the Parisian world of work in 1790–1791, particularly for large-scale trades, indicates there were 1,684 journeymen carpenters declared by 87 master carpenters, who registered to receive the revolutionary currency, the assignats, to pay their labor force in 1790 and 1791. These numbers are no doubt excessively low, even if they seem to be partially corroborated by declarations for the distribution of the cartes de sûreté in 1792 and 1793. Just as today, any account of construction employers and employees will leave out many of those working “in the black,” or off the books, who do not declare their laborers to avoid taxes and, especially in today’s context, immigration restrictions.66 The dependable trade manual, the Almanach des Bâtiments, in the year before abolition, indicates that 141 master carpenters were licensed to engage in carpentry enterprises in 1790, suggesting that a third of all Parisian master carpenters did not declare their workforce to municipal authorities. (Table 1.1 and Figures 1.12, 1.13.)67 Regardless of the raw numbers, the petitioning journeymen carpenters continued to make an issue of the limited availability of masterships. In one petition after the abolition of 1791, the journeymen interpreted their want of social ascension or of any progress toward entrepreneurship as a vestige of the masters’ “repugnant right” to make their fortunes at the “detriment of talent while adding to the misery” of laborers. Resentment over the colonization of such offices by family oligarchies – the sons of masters paid less for a mastership in all trades – aggravated this conflict.68 Out of the 141 masters in 1790, 43 were sons or son-inlaws and 15 others share the same family names without an indication of their precise relationship. Thus, 41 percent of the master carpenters had apparent family connections with other masters.69 Also, the guild’s pattern of granting masterships appeared erratic and arbitrary. It sporadically granted large numbers of masterships but alternated such largesse by restricting access to membership during the last half of the eighteenth century. Between 1751 and 1776, the number of masters

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increased from 78 to 121: a growth rate of 59 percent. But between 1776 and 1790 the increase in masterships slowed down from 121 to 141: a growth rate of almost 17 percent. Certainly, the rising price of wood was one factor in this retardation. But carpentry masterships were generally awarded in fits and starts, with great fluctuations in accessibility. These figures may be contrasted with the more fluid guild of masons, which expanded slowly but more surely during the same period. The receptions of master masons enjoyed moderate and steady growth throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. The stark contrast of a “closed” carpentry trade to a more “open” masonry could only have aggravated tensions between journeymen and masters. Clearly, guild abolition, to some former journeymen carpenters who met in assemblies in the spring of 1791, was perceived as shutting the door for one and for all to social ascension in any form, despite the meritocratic promise of revolutionary politics.70

Guilds and the post-corporate economy The closed, conservative, and rather classically “contentious” carpenters’ guild engendered deep tensions between masters and journeymen that spilled into the public sphere with the Revolution and the abolition of 1791. The structure of the guild and its impact on revolutionary politicization underscores the diversity of corporate experiences in eighteenth-century France. They suggest that the historical image of a single corporate “regime” dominated universally by oligarchies of firmly entrenched families tends toward caricature. The idea of the guilds as a “block” was a description that originated with reform-minded collaborators of the Physiocrats, only to become policy within the Roussseauist context of revolutionary anticorporatism, and was finally elaborated upon in the republican historiography of the Third Republic. Finally, the political recuperation of the corporations by France’s Vichy government – to the point of reviving the journeymen’s corporate organizations, the compagnonnages – further disgraced their historical memory.71 In fact, as we have seen, the guilds followed shifting strategies and crafted distinct responses to the challenges of an emerging market society and the centralizing state. Reinforcing privileges or restricting masterships (or extending both) were often particular reactions to singular contexts. Such practices did not express the essential “logic” of the corporate regime, described famously in such legal tracts as the seventeenth-century jurist Loyseau’s Traité des ordres, which gave the guild idea a theoretical basis as a hierarchical and organic order. Nor did

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they only embody the “language of labor” in creating solidarities and antagonisms which would become the basis of class struggle in a future industrial order.72 Beyond the issue of political circumstances, and the conjuncture of a favorable but fragile economic revival in 1791, lie the social consequences of the Revolution within the Parisian world of work. What difference, in fact, did the Revolution make? Counter-factually, would the nature or expression of labor conflict have been any different had final guild abolition taken place under the ancien régime? Did the 1791 eruption of strikes and labor petitions represent specifically revolutionary conflicts or forms of preindustrial artisanal strife (or both)? In sum, as put by Richard Cobb, was the Revolution indeed “irrelevant?”73 In the historiography of nearly the past half century, the great debate on the origins and effects of the French Revolution has largely been frozen in Cold War categories. The argument of a purely political revolution is opposed to the thesis of socio-economic causes and implications. The construction guilds in the Revolution, however, illustrate that this is a false dichotomy. The “municipalization” of guild officers within the Paris commune, the mobilization of corporate solidarities, the language of legal rights in citations of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, clearly expose the sources of the Revolution’s politics in the guild order. But the corporations were also deeply implicated in a fluid ancien régime and revolutionary economy, particularly, in the credit networks and debt guarantees, on the one hand, and in the professionalization of entrepreneurial capitalism, on the other. The guilds contributed heavily to structure urban political and economic organization, the assets, and the early Revolution’s financial foundations. The eighteenth-century history of the construction guilds demonstrates that an exclusive emphasis on purely political or socio-economic factors creates a tendentious portrayal of the origins of the French Revolution. The classic narrative of moribund guilds swept away as a mere anachronism in 1791, moreover, overlooks the extent to which the Revolution absorbed the corporate universe into its own institutions and practices – many of its officers became future functionaries (such as inspectors, administrators, or teachers); its economic networks became business contacts; its policing mechanisms became the model for a revolutionary inspection and surveillance regime in the Terror and afterward; finally, its political bodies were revived as lobbies and commercial syndicates under the Napoleonic Empire. The actual practice of the guilds – not merely their discursive and rhetorical

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representations – was crucial to the politicization of the urban world from the Revolution to the present day. Ultimately, the corporations were not exclusively a category of social classification, nor the stabilizers of the hierarchy and status of artisans, but were a material reality that penetrated deep into French society throughout the revolutionary decade and beyond.74

3 Projecting the Revolution on the Parisian Work Site, 1789–1793

Public service and construction in the Revolution Parisian builders experienced the early Revolution as both a political moment and an economic opportunity in the rapidly changing capital. By the summer of 1791, the Revolution had simultaneously suppressed and absorbed the infrastructure of the corporations. The guilds’ extensive credit networks were converted into the private wealth of some entrepreneurs, former journeymen and apprentices became contractual labor, and many former guild-masters followed new career trajectories as municipal officers or functionaries. Beyond dismantling the corporate universe, the state expropriated and auctioned off ecclesiastical properties – a stimulus to private construction – all the while abolishing the onerous and arbitrary ancien régime tax system. This frenzied activity created fresh incentives for investment in Parisian property and thus set in motion a temporary bonanza in construction. The boom of new structures in the northeast and southern quarters of the city no doubt created deeper adherence to the Revolution. From the perspective of the building site, the liberal dream of commerce indeed seemed ascendant. However, one exception to historical narratives of a triumphant economic liberalism in the early Revolution is the great expansion of public works projects and, as a corollary, the reconceptualization of public service. Street maintenance, brush clearing, textile spinning, and other tasks deemed menial were assigned to the municipal government. They were subsequently reorganized as showcases to display the changes demanded by a progressive elite and to embody a decisive rupture with the opaque, lax, and corrupt ancien régime. Many of these projects were taken over as forms of bienfaisance or public assistance for the 96

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indigent population of Paris by the National Assembly in 1790. The early Revolution also imposed stringent procedures upon public outlays in welfare projects to render them fiscally and socially accountable to the nation. By these methods, a broad political consensus on the vital place of public works in the new order was achieved. Vital public investment in construction stimulated the building trades by providing valuable credit for material and the workforce: in the early Revolution, the public and private economic spheres developed in close symbiosis.1 In a vast social experiment, the National Assembly and its committees sought, simultaneously, to legislate into existence equal access to services and guarantee the continuity of their utilization. Starting with the simplest drudge work and ending with the intricate details of ornamental sculpture in monuments the revolutionaries created criteria for the standardization, exactitude, and economy of publicly funded projects. In the name of a newly found patriotic responsibility to the nation, revolutionaries reigned in expenditures, changed methods of supervision, and overhauled work rhythms and the daily wage. Finally, a transparent administration, situated in Paris rather than in Versailles and composed of functionaries rather than servants to the Crown, promoted specific reformist goals for public works: to impose an ideal salary for an ideally productive day of labor.2 The bureaucracy also became a vector for new forms of public expertise. Paid employees replaced the venal inspectors, the experts, of the moribund Chambre des Bâtiments. Engineers, inspectors, and urban planners were solicited as building officials with responsibility for the efficacy of investments in public sites. As a footnote, a new rivalry between the “artistic” architect and the “scientific” engineer, between building and construction, began to be sketched out among military specialists concerned with fortifications, although the opposition would only become generalized under Napoleon.3 Ultimately, functionaries and the Revolution’s legislators concluded that the true theatre for patriotic public works were large-scale projects of national monuments. Only public edifices demonstrate social utility and properly symbolize a collective effort to remake the Revolution’s capital in the image of ancient grandeur. The key moment in the shift toward a utilitarian usage of labor for the nation was in the spring of 1791. A transfer of credits – one million livres – intended for workshops for the poor was prepared in order to finance the construction of the Pantheon. This signified a clear political choice of architecture over make-work, of technical expertise over policing, and of funding skilled craft labor over the unskilled labor of the working poor.4

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The resulting policies clarified a trajectory of investment from humble municipal public works to bold manifestations of patriotic architecture. This, in turn, inspired new forms of politicization. From the perspective of the construction site, the history of public works in the Revolution confirmed the central place of productive labor in the new order. The pamphlets and petitions by entrepreneurs, architects, and contractors, in lobbying for ever greater public investment in Parisian construction, created a potent political identity as the industrious backbone of the Nation. This identity accentuated the builders’ potential to organize collaborative undertakings between various professions, artisanal craftsmen, and unskilled labor. The emergence of this abiding image of the building site as an education in cooperative citizenship was also a political claim on the advantages – for the indigent urban population as for entrepreneurs – of expanded public investment in construction projects. The making and remaking of this political lobby of the building trades represented their transformation from the epitome of a deeply corrupted and violent corporate milieu, as we have seen in the ancien régime, into iconic revolutionary professionals. Builders were deeply industrious, fully qualified citizen-workers who embodied the ideals of the productive Third Estate. Further, it was not merely in the realm of representations that the heroic image of the revolutionary producer took hold. The policies of public works and the transformation of the urban world of work in the Revolution were realms of practice, not of simple images. As the building tradesmen demonstrate, the early Revolution’s producer-citizen was rendered fully distinctive in the figure of the sans-culotte, who dominated the Revolution’s center stage during the Terror of 1793 and 1794. As we will see in Chapter 4, the sans-culotte was the perfect militant revolutionary incarnating the sanctity of work and radical political orthodoxy. But he most certainly did not come forth fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. The sans-culotte was partially the successor to the producercitizen of 1791, selflessly laboring on behalf of public service on the streets and monuments of the capital city. The Revolution’s “problem of work,” treated in most historical accounts as chronologically constituent to the Terror, was in fact posed from the earliest years of the Revolution’s pretended liberal phase.

From municipal to national public works, 1789–1793 Public works were perhaps among the oldest solutions to misery in the capital, with publicly financed work projects to relieve poverty and

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teach industrious work rhythms dating back to state-sponsored cathedral building in the thirteenth century.5 Following the catastrophic winter of 1788–1789, and through the end of the Terror, the Parisian indigent population ebbed and flowed between 85,000 and 110,000 people out of a population of about 600,000. The vast majority of the impoverished was able to work; for only 15 percent of the arrested poor in eighteenth-century Paris were considered to be infirm or sick. Alleviating poverty, in the merit-driven political orientation of the Revolutionary decade, meant reinforcing and reforming public works projects rather than distributing gratuitous assistance.6 The very nature of urban renewal projects amalgamated the twin demands of improving Parisians’ daily life and providing work for the poor, as the district of the Saint-Etienne du Mont argued in rapidly petitioning for two new streets leading from the Montagne SainteGeneviève to the place Maubert.7 But among the first poor-relief projects actually to be transformed was the ancien régime system of assisting indigent women, the spinning bureau (Bureau de la filature), providing work and material for several thousand destitute seamstresses and their children to engage in textile production. This decentralized system for home relief was given new life in the form of massive spinning establishments in December 1790. The National Assembly removed them from municipal and parish responsibility, changing them from centers of distribution and situating many of the indigents in a nationalized convent turned warehouse on the rue Saint-Jacques in the faubourg Saint-Marcel. There, up to 1,800 impoverished women, children, and a few elderly men spun cotton, hemp, and linen threads under close state supervision.8 The revolutionary project to recast other forms of public work projects followed a more convoluted itinerary. For the National Assembly also inherited nine Parisian charity workshops (ateliers de charité), based for the most part in low-skilled terracing for roads and brush clearing, which had been opened in December 1788, in the midst of its financial crisis and one of the harshest winters of the eighteenth century. Their malfunction made them ripe targets of blame for disruptions in the Parisian economy. By the summer of 1789, the public workshops were widely denounced as having forced up wages in competition with the private sector, especially the wages of unskilled building workers. The Journal de France joined an outpouring of brochures to warn, in apocalyptic terms, that 200,000 unemployed laborers – an impossibility as this was a third of the Parisian population – were educated in the dubious lesson they could now make a living without learning how

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to face up to daily work.9 Despite an ordinance that children, widows, and workers were to work on a sliding scale for a derisory 10 to 18 sous a day, widespread rumors held that “generous” recompense for public works invited brigands to be paid to stay idle. In sum, there was little stomach for continuing public workshops in or near Paris, viewed as teaching bad habits by drudge work achieved in desultory fashion. Worse, they undermined the labor market by driving up the wages of unskilled hands in the building trades. The traditional answer to unemployment and commercial stagnation was discredited, and providing an alternative would compel the administrator’ attention in the opening year of the Revolution. Predictably, then, one of the Revolution’s earliest acts was to dissolve the Crown’s workshops in August 1789. Parisian municipal authorities even paid provincial migrants paltry incentives to return home.10 The Revolution’s brusque closing of the workshops, though, in the midst of a widespread food shortage, was quickly seized upon as an early mis-step. On August 20, an authoritative voice on the subject of poverty, the liberal economist Pierre-Francois Boncerf, made a widely remarked intervention to the assembly of St Etienne du Mont on the dangerous consequences of the abrupt dispersal of indigent laborers. His speech was considered so alarming (and prescient) as to be reprinted eight times by the National Assembly between 1789 and 1791. For Boncerf was a Physiocratic specialist on the question of poverty. Previously a secretary in the Ministry of Finance during Turgot’s tenure as controller-general, Boncerf authored anti-feudal agrarian treatises; he was also an associate of the French Royal Society of Agriculture. As we will see, he later served as an illustrious member of the National Assembly’s Committee on Mendicity.11 The masses of unskilled laborers discharged from the municipality’s ateliers, Boncerf predicted, would join forces with unemployed building tradesmen to create social chaos. Warning of a potential cataclysm, they were swelling the ranks of a dangerous underclass: their numbers increase every day, because every day construction sites proceed slowly or are suspended, and the multitude of day laborers, the masons the stonecutters, the locksmiths, the carpenters, the transporters, the out-of-work foremen, keeps growing and adds to the army of dangerous men which political compassion had tried to aid and assist. We must therefore find work for these men quickly and, above all, prevent them from associating; because once they unite they will incite fear. This heap of humanity, whose majority

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is deeply corrupt, will proceed to subvert the masses and persuade many people to commit crimes. Evoking the possibility that 60,000 unemployed laborers would turn to brigandage committing “atrocities” in the capital and its environs, Boncerf sought to evacuate all of Paris’ unemployed human flotsam into the provinces. For the only possible solution was to empty the capital of these potential criminals, “by transforming building tradesmen into farm laborers who will work to save terrain abandoned to marshland.”12 Boncerf’s suspicion of peripatetic unskilled workers as ready to spread mayhem expressed the darker fears of upper-class Parisians: the capital in Revolution risked becoming an insalubrious megalopolis mobbed by a floating population of provincial undesirables. The immediate context of these qualms was the Great Fear of 1789, the rural uprising of July and August against imaginary brigands which resulted in the ransacking of many a château – and led to the suppression of most feudal duties. As we have seen in the ancien régime, this trope of Paris indundated was also explicitly articulated in the Paris Parlement’s rebuke to Turgot’s suppression of the corporations in 1776. Guild abolition was to lead to a loss of control of the labor market, and, as the Paris Parlement put it, the “license of the cities” would hopelessly corrupt masterless provincial laborers flowing into Paris. In 1789, Boncerf’s polemic and the pervasive nature of the Great Fear directly affected the status of construction workers in public works projects. Within days of disbanding the charity workshops, the municipality of Paris organized a Department of Public Works to impose order in public service employment. This department was, at first, given the mundane task of the ancien régime jurisdiction, the voirie, with responsibilities over roads, quays, bridges, fountains, and other public edifices. Administrators were charged with making sure that ancien régime ordinances were correctly applied, and that unscrupulous contractors would not compromise public safety through violations of building codes. Such a narrow compass was broadened by Bailly, the mayor of Paris, who further defined the Department’s mission as “coming to the aid of the Indigent and most Laborious Workers that unfortunate Circumstances have deprived of an occupation.” It was the public employer of destitute Parisians in projects to clear away the debris, deposits, illegal and legal, and to drain cesspools after years of neglect – a public works administration without openly declaring its ambition to provide jobs for indigent Parisians. The ancien régime’s charity workshops were thus replaced by municipal public service.13

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The municipality of Paris, contracted from 60 diffuse districts to 48 administrative sections on 21 May 1790 (as precursors to today’s 20 arrondissements), concurrently expanded the Department of Public Works’ authority over public construction in the Capital.14 In a directive, the mayor outlined changes in the qualifications for employment on municipal worksites. It would no longer be sufficient cause to call oneself destitute to find work on the Department’s sites. Rather, candidates had to hold a certificate of indigence, delivered by the local priest, and have proof of fixed residence within a Paris section. Even menial positions in the Department were awarded in a competitive manner but now only to impoverished Parisians. Furthermore, the municipality announced job offers based on specialization and experience. The Department of Public Works thus enlarged its mission beyond that of surveying cracks in minor structures. It was to become a key administration in the institutional transition from the old to the new regime on the building sites of Paris.15 In clarifying the place of municipal public works in a liberal regime, Paris officials directing the Department ran headlong into a confrontation with the authority of the central state, embodied by the Committee on Mendicity of the National Assembly. Under the commanding hand of the reformist philanthropic noble, François Alexandre Frédéric La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and seconded by Pierre-Francois Boncerf himself, the Committee at the end of August 1790 took decisive steps to eradicate begging by reopening the ancien régime’s public workshops along new principles. Committed to the notion of eliminating poverty through a systematic work regimen, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt promoted the English distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, between indigents who could work and those who would not.16 Projects aimed at eliminating poverty institutionalized this differentiation by offering a choice of tasks to the able-bodied poor while disciplining the idle poor, obliged to carry out lesser responsibilities. Moreover, the project for the relief workshops (ateliers de secours) was conceived specifically to avoid the mistakes that had led to the undoing of the old charity workshops (ateliers de charité). (Eliminating the term “charity” represented their divorce from religious connotations in moving from charity to welfare.) Places were strictly reserved for Paris residents who would be paid at a rate “inferior” to the current salary for the same genre of work as determined by on-site inspectors. No one in his or her right mind would choose performing menial tasks in grueling workshops over proper opportunities to find employment in the private sphere. Low wages averaging 20 sous a day, coupled with

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mind-numbing tasks consisting mostly of clearing fields of debris, were to offer a punishing lesson in work rhythms. They were truly the last resort of the destitute.17 The numbers of indigent Parisians employed on the new sites fluctuated between 18,000 in October of 1790 to 31,000 (an astounding 5 percent of the Parisian population) just before their permanent closure in June 1791. Despite the precautions of the Committee of Mendicity, the sight of these massive numbers of unemployed men and women performing meaningless tasks with little enthusiasm deeply offended bourgeois and literate Parisians. Even within the Department of Public Works emanated strident criticism of the national workshops.18 A group of ornamental sculptors employed by the Department of Public Works wrote to the municipality to complain that “in these workshops the hungry and idle poor are corrupted by the example and the violence of thousands of wretched people who simply have the misfortune of being there . . . .”19 Outrage that the Revolution had launched such projects, with their grueling work conditions aggravated by the corruption and negligence of those in charge, was widely echoed. Besides the moral indignation these workshops aroused, their poor organization led to practical criticism as well: the workshops ruined the labor market by lax discipline. A petition by two master carpenters asked that any journeyman in the workshops be immediately sent back to his master. The ateliers were denounced as draining the private sites of their best workers, and inspiring further agitation for wage increases.20 Besides supposedly corrupting the workforce, there were the supervisors themselves to worry about. Inspectors and a few departmental administrators faced charges of fraud, bribery, and even theft. By May 1791 the beleaguered police commissioner of the Section de Mont Blanc passed on a litany of complaints about the local workshop: the workers at a nearby site had not been paid during a period between six weeks and two months, and inspectors were no longer even making cursory appearances.21 In this atmosphere of crisis, many pamphlets and newspapers, including Jean-Paul Marat’s, L’Ami du peuple, called for disbanding the public workshops for reasons of finance and public safety.22 Another such appeal was written by the architect and former inspector of municipal construction in Paris, Bernard Poyet. His anonymous brochure called for a massive investment of public funds in construction projects as a substitute for the public workshops. The needs of the nation would only be satisfied by a large-scale public revival of craft industry in Paris, which would in turn “give movement and life to the most numerous

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class, those who are the most industrious, the most useful, & who nevertheless are the most distressed, the class of workers and artisans of the Capital.” Poyet’s pamphlet collapsed a wide range of social prejudices and charitable impulses into a single argument for prominent grands projets. While advocating the “embellishment” of Paris through a network of boulevards and monuments, his objective was to marshal forth arguments for the rejuvenation of the nation around the building process. Poyet appealed for money to go to public building projects by distinguishing industrious tradesmen from the masses of indigent poor who had flocked to the public workshops. To fulfill the promise of the Revolution is to reconceive the building process itself as a thorough education of the nation in citizenship: To give greater life to the liberal and mechanical arts, we must undertake large-scale public projects whose execution will demand the cooperation of a great number of workers of all types, and directed by considerations of general utility. Architecture, of all the arts, enjoys the deepest influence in the future of a great empire; all the other arts are mere tributaries of architecture, so artists and artisans of all the classes are called to come together around the erecting of public monuments. It is thus these arts, so pleasant in their effects and so powerful in their political results that they deserve, at this moment, the broadest possible support.23 At first glance, Poyet presents a variation on the ageless theme that makework public assistance corrupts while productive labor edifies. And, for their social usefulness, the building trades alone embody the supreme qualities of the Third Estate. The competitive yet cooperative nature of work on large public work sites; the unification of professionals and artisans as productive laborers; the political results of virtuous labor – these distinguished the building process as an education in active citizenship within the French nation. Further, the specific qualities of building make the putting up of public monuments the most eloquent symbols of architecture’s “general utility.” Poyet thereby laid the groundwork for the great reversal in the Revolution’s labor policy. As becoming of a social experiment of this order, the policy’s first trial would take place away from the city center but rather in the teeming, popular quarter in the southern outskirts of the city, the faubourg Saint-Marcel.

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The nation’s work site: The Panthéon français The Parisian neighborhood of the faubourg Saint-Marcel was a microcosm of an urban preindustrial manufacturing quarter. Its finest historian, Haim Burstin, has described its social character in the Revolution with scalpel-like precision. Located on the Left Bank, populated by about 10 percent of the Parisian population, its reputation as a poor, marginal, and insalubrious zone belied the reality of a mixed socio-economic makeup. For the faubourg Saint-Marcel comprised a large semirural and very poor southern sector. It featured a dense arc of religious institutions and hospitals such as the Salpêtrière to the east; university annexes and bookshops associated with the Sorbonne to the north; and a series of slaughterhouses and some 33 tanners adjacent to the famously polluted stream la Bièvre that flowed, or rather trickled, into the Seine to the west. Here, the many paradoxes of late eighteenth-century Paris were apparent to visitors and local inhabitants alike. Ancient symbols of immense clerical wealth centered upon the adjacent Latin Quarter around the Saint-Etienne du Mont (the site of the Church of Sainte-Geneviève, soon to be transformed into the Pantheon) which contrasted brutally with immense stretches of new forms of misery. The Salpêtrière hospitals and its dépendances – Paris had 48 hospitals and hospices by 1789 – attracted a movement of sick and impoverished families, mostly from outside of Paris, toward the eastern part of the neighborhood. To the west, the odors emanating from the industrial waste material dumped into la Bièvre and various cesspools were so powerful as to overwhelm even the hardiest inspectors come to examine sanitary conditions in the quarter. And in the heart of this dense neighborhood, a multitude of stores and indoor and open air workshops added to the social and economic predominance of manufacturing and industry. Bonnet makers and blanket weavers were clustered around the Gobelins sector; a host of shoesmiths thrived near the site of Sainte-Geneviève; and several breweries were installed on the rue Mouffetard.24 Old and new collided also in the techniques and structure of labor. The intense activity of textile and leather production, with its timeless, artisanal organization of work, competed for labor with novel technologies in such fast-developing sectors as chemicals and the extraction of saltpeter for explosives, badly needed for demolition and military purposes. Economic opportunity in both old and new sectors attracted networks of migrant unskilled laborers who congregated in areas such as what is now the place Maubert in search of places to sleep – rooms to

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let, chambres garnies, those run-down and inexpensive rooming houses run by the often-condemned “sleep merchants,” (marchands de sommeil) who packed many laborers to a single small room. A police report published in 1795 counted around between 8,000 and 11,000 migrant workers crowded into these rooming houses each month. During the Revolution, 66 percent of the faubourg Saint-Marcel’s population was made up of provincials; these constituted also the majority of the indigent poor housed in the hospitals.25 At the very heart of this diverse neighborhood, a gigantic building site was erected after 1764 following the demolition of much of the Romanesque cloister and the old Church of Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. Following the sudden death of the National Assembly’s president, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti Mirabeau, the newly completed Church of Sainte-Geneviève was reconsacrated, on 4 April 1791, the Panthéon français, a civil monument “to the great men, a grateful nation,” as inscribed over the portico. Mirabeau’s body was to be the first occupant of the space’s crypt. Over the next quarter century, many small enterprises, grocers, and larger workshops owed their survival by furnishing the building materials, the food, water and wine, and even specialized labor – especially, the skilled workmen such as sculptors, carpenters, and metalworkers. The tumultuous, anarchic character of the faubourg Saint-Marcel would be politicized in the revolutionary years by the combustible mixture of labor strife, guild culture, and neighborhood conflict projected onto the national stage via the Pantheon’s worksite (Map 3.1, Figures 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6). Numerous public enterprises in the faubourg Saint-Marcel reinforced the importance of state-managed enterprises (régies) to the Revolution’s economy. The quarter comprised the thriving Gobelins tapestry factory as well as several nearly exhausted stone quarries providing public employment opportunities.26 The relatively high rate of employment at these state-run sites, however, was coupled with spasmodic rhythms of labor. At the site of Sainte-Geneviève, lapses in funding, budgetary cutbacks, and frequent changes in the architectural plans contributed to a heightened sense that revolutionary public works were as precarious as private sites. Colliding headlong with the expectation that state projects would provide full employment, especially in the most difficult of times, these disruptions gave rise to a tradition of labor contentiousness borne of low salaries, the arbitrary dismissal of workers, and the near-dictatorial power of a few favored entrepreneurs.27 Aggravating the social problems of the faubourg, the National Assembly began to dismantle the administrative authority of many state-managed enterprises.

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Map 3.1 Turgot Map, 1739, detail. The outlying faubourg Saint-Marcel before the construction of the eighteenth-century Church of Sainte-Geneviève. The emplacement of the new church would correspond with the center of this image, within the abbey’s garden.

The resulting administrative void would be more difficult to fill than anticipated. In the revolutionary years, the pent-up grievances of the artisans of the faubourg Saint-Marcel were given a new and powerful articulation in the language of republicanism. Many building trades workers on the site of the Pantheon were politicized by radicals gathered at the heart of the Sainte-Geneviève quarter. Some had no doubt attended meetings at the radical Cordeliers club (or the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen), located a brief stroll down the hill from the Pantheon, on the rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine. Starting as early as the spring of 1790, the Cordeliers drew up and circulated petitions denouncing employment conditions, reformulating labor protest in the new political language of citizenship and radical populism.28 Cordeliers radicals, including the journalists Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, and the future Montagnard political leader Georges Danton, were only the most well-known republicans who met on the edges of the quarter. Nationally, about one million individuals, out of a

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Figure 3.1 Pierre Antoine Demachy (1723–1807), Ceremony for the posing of the cornerstone of the New Church of Sainte-Geneviève, 1764 (1765), detail. The church here is depicted by wood scaffolding covered with a full-size painting of the church based on the original design. The architect Jacques Germain Soufflot presents the project to the king in the center. Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

population of perhaps 27 million French people, attended as many as 20,000 surveillance committees and many more political clubs during the revolutionary period.29 In particular, as we will see, the sophistication of the political vocabulary of laborers of the Pantheon site suggests strongly a connection between republicans and artisans. At the same time, evidence for the seductive thesis of worker radicalization by vanguard revolutionaries is sketchy, for the former “Grub street” pamphleteers that made up the Cordeliers were concerned in the summer of 1791 with more abstract notions of the people against the aristocracy.30 These political and moral categories omitted discussions of exploitation by entrepreneurs, stressing instead the counter-revolutionary tendencies of the idle classes, those parasites borne of luxury, and corrupted by easy or inherited wealth. The Cordeliers at this time accused the nobility at every turn of plotting to starve the people, of

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Figure 3.2 The Pantheon. Among the Revolution’s accomplishments was the secularization of the sculptural programs and the blocking of windows which transformed the church into the masoleum for the nation’s “great men.”

Figure 3.3 The Pantheon viewed from the perspective of the rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève.

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Figure 3.4 Rue de Lanneau. The medieval texture of the neighborhood near the Pantheon is apparent in many smaller streets, mostly bypassed by Haussmannisation due to their outlying location.

Figure 3.5 Rue Laplace, near the Pantheon.

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Figure 3.6 Place de l’Estrapade. The Maison Moreau, 1775–1776, an example of the “gentrification” of the faubourg Saint-Marcel during the Sainte-Geneviève’s construction. This was built for a wealthy master carpenter Sylvain Moreau by François Soufflot, cousin of the Pantheon’s chief architect Jacques Germain Soufflot.

fomenting counter-revolution, and of committing treason. The crime of entrepreneurial oppression or corruption did not fit this Manichean mentality in easy fashion, for mere profiteering on public works projects paled as seditious activity in the wake of the Revolution’s political crises which threatened the new order beginning in the spring of 1791.31 Yet, the publication of certain petitions on behalf of the Pantheon’s labor force in Marat’s newspaper, L’Ami du people, strongly suggests that the Cordeliers’ republicanism was circulated, received, and translated in the categories of artisanal radicalism. For example, on 12 June 1791, Marat published the “The Protests of the Artisan-Masons of SainteGeneviève,” which denounced a “cabal” by entrepreneurs who sought to keep their positions on the site by scheming to dominate local political instances. The archival record is silent on the question of whether Marat’s journal reprinted the masons’ petition verbatim or, more probably, interpreted the demand in the political vocabulary of the Cordeliers Club.32

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Contestation and public works Later revolutionary days of action such as the Prairial journée confirmed that the 550 laborers who came together on the site of the Pantheon indeed created a ripe opportunity for republican proselytizing. But Jean-Paul Marat and the Cordeliers’ particular interest in the site of the Panthéon was fueled, at first at least, not as much by republican hope as by political suspicion: in particular, they were wary of the penetration of royalist politics within the site’s management. It was a charge inspired by the nomination of Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy as director of the project to transform the church into a secular national monument on 19 June 1791.33 Quatremère de Quincy, like the former president of the Committee on Mendicity, La RochefoucauldLiancourt, represented the deeper paradoxes of applying Enlightenment principles in the Revolution. Both men had brought to revolutionary policy a peculiarly hybrid mix of innovation and archaism in the domains of public labor policy; both applied ideas intended to further the efficiency, rationality, and precision in the world of work; both also betrayed deep social prejudice in questions arising from disciplining, controlling, and policing the workforce and the indigent population of Paris. The brief arrest of Quatremère de Quincy in 1794 and the coerced flight of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt to the United States between 1793 and 1798 were widely perceived as payback for their repressive dispositions toward personnel on public sites: at the Pantheon for the former and in the relief workshops for the latter. Quatremère de Quincy was deeply steeped in the culture of the Enlightenment’s architectural program, having made his reputation as an architect-theoretician, winning a national contest on ancient architecture and writing the Dictionnaire d’Architecture as a part of Charles-Joseph Panckoucke’s Encyclopédie méthodique in 1785. (Quatremère’s closest collaborator on the Pantheon site, Jean-Baptiste Rondelet, contributed 125 articles to the same Encylopédie méthodique.) In his first project of note, he served as architect and supervisor (commissaire) of the structure’s reconception. He deeply modified the Church of Saint Geneviève, suppressing the church towers and the lantern, while blocking the windows to give the building a solemn aspect befitting a mausoleum. The Revolution was to be commemorated with stark and austere neo-classical architectural principles, as befitting a Roman revival which would be particularly exalted under Napoleon.34 In the political sphere, Quatremère was elected deputy to the Legislative Assembly by the departmental electors of Paris in recognition of his

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service to the nation’s Beaux-Arts and for his commitment to the “regeneration” of the nation. His politics, as divulged on site in conflicts with laborers, were soundly conservative. After his brief imprisonment, he became a member of the royalist Clichy club, and participated in the days of action of 12–14 Vendémiaire (4–6 October 1795), in favor of the overthrow of the Republic and restoration of the king.35 Notwithstanding royalist politics, he was a forceful advocate for architectural policy in building the new nation. As an extension of the Republic of Letters, his pamphlets on a “Republic of the Arts” drew parallels between the relationship of citizens to the state and artists to the public. The “Republic of the Arts” brought together an “enlightened” human community on the basis of manifest and intelligible artistic principles. Aesthetically and politically, a united nation would be borne of agreed-upon rules, clearly and distinctly inscribed upon the urban environment and the constitution. The harmony brought to a nation by classical architecture would reinforce the harmony created by the social contract.36 Despite Quatremère’s lofty ambitions for French architecture, a royalist as chief architect hardly inspired confidence among the Pantheon’s employees. For, as mandated by municipal officials, the Pantheon was supposed to be organized as a deliberate departure from the ancien régime system of public construction. The arrangements of the ancien régime site had turned, above all, on privilege. A relatively small stable of architects, entrepreneurs, and furnishers within the Bâtiments du Roi had been the exclusive supervisors of the monarchy’s projects.37 With the suppression of most functions of this royal administration in April 1791, the municipality of Paris announced its intentions to throw wide open public construction by jettisoning the Crown’s closed system of procuring material, recruiting supervisors and labor, and appointing inspectors and architects. The confusion and disorder engendered by the reform of public sites compounded a deepening sense that the entire enterprise of putting up public buildings in the new order was assigned low priority in a struggling transition.38 Shortly afterward, a spokesman for the entrepreneurs and architects formerly attached to an evanescent Parisian body (Bâtiments des domaines de Paris) wrote to the director of the national Treasury Department seeking payment for work done a year earlier on the Palais de justice, le Châtelet, and several prisons. Claiming that workers had gone unpaid for their services, the petition painted a stark portrait of the ripple effect within the stagnant public sector of the economy. The delay in promised funds had obstructed the principal contractors engaged for Parisian public buildings from finishing

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assorted projects in civil edifices; private construction was begin to be effected as a result.39 Emergency meetings held at the City Hall from May to July 1791 took on the delicate question of absorbing the Crown’s Parisian domains within the Paris municipality.40 Among the first decisions made was to accept the finances of the new site by the National Assembly, which suppressed the Committee on Mendicity’s public workshops in June 1791 and channeled remaining credits to the construction of the Pantheon. Beyond the financial issue was a host of questions concerning the organization and administration of the site. In a sharp departure from the ancien régime, the city of Paris set about recruiting the “unrecognized” talents of individuals slighted by the ancien régime authority. The elite of the construction site was to represent new officers of the new order, types whose artistic sense, training, and craft specialization resembled a new form of “patriotic” civil engineer more than that of classical architect. Above them stood the 14 member direction of the Pantheon, including two inspectors, verifiers, supervisors, accountants, and other public officers. In theory, at least, as Quatremère argued in a pamphlet justifying the changes in personnel, the administrators of the building site were to come from outside the Crown’s preferred building elites, a principled refusal of ancien régime privilege in the new civic order.41 In practice, however, technocracy did not come quickly to the site, as the municipality turned repeatedly to the Crown’s stable, to architects who earned reputations in glorifying the King’s domain. The architects Jean-Baptiste Rondelet and Jacques-Germain Soufflot-le-Romain, who served the site in the new regime as inspectors, also had deep connections to the project as an ancien régime church. Rondelet had begun his tenure on the site in 1774, working as a designer; he had become an inspector in 1784. Soufflot-le-Romain was the nephew of the original architect, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, and had joined the site as a draftsman after his uncle’s death in 1780. In fact, the political royalist Quatremère was the only member of the Pantheon’s revolutionary directory not to have connections to the site during the ancien régime.42 Yet, while most faces were familiar, they applied new techniques in the organization of labor. The Pantheon’s administrators, galvanized by the fresh purpose given to the site by the National Assembly and the Parisian municipality, transformed the building site’s hiring policies and work rhythms. No longer would employing and dismissing laborers be a matter of patronage – of obligations owed to a specific master or entrepreneur – but now, they were dictated by rigorous charts

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and timetables set by supervisors who answered only to the municipality’s directory. Quatremère de Quincy’s principles of labor theory and practice on the Pantheon’s site reveal an abiding impulse to render the work process “rational.” The uniformity of work hours and salaries were enforced by an inspector who pored over every salary roll, making the occasional report to denounce irregularities. The Pantheon also served as an employment bureau in which, ideally, all who qualified would find work, while all who worked would receive the same pay for the same labor. Laborers on the work site of the Pantheon were conceptualized as freely contracted working citizens of the nation. Eventually, however, the contentiousness of the labor force would only be a measure of its disillusionment with the site’s lofty principles.43 Besides competitive employment practices, the innovations on the nation’s work site extended to the organization of labor. The very establishment of pay scales and hours were fixed by the city of Paris, through the Public Works Department, rather than determined by the ebb and flow of the loosely organized economy of the ancien régime. Labor on the Pantheon was to be rigorous and systematic, with every laborer receiving equitable daily rates that were to be applied to all in each task. The new organization of labor was documented by salary rolls for the Pantheon during the Revolution after April 1791. These show a consistent group of workers retained for uniform (if low) salaries – hovering just above 2 livres – and for near-12-hour days and six-day-work weeks. There was little evident favoritism and no indulgence shown toward those who were sick or injured, who would be rapidly replaced. Rhythms of work and pay were rendered routine and disinterested, tough but fair, on the nation’s work site.44 The Revolution, briefly at least, brought a modicum of stability in the organization of labor in the capital city. Consistency is particularly noteworthy in the work rhythms, the steady wages, and the loyal core of laborers who remain on the site for years at a time. The stonecutters’ salary roll for the two-week period, 18–30 July 1791, lists 339 laborers who were paid at 2 livres 8 sous per day for 12 days of labor. (Wages were paid every two weeks.) The average stonecutter at the Pantheon, then, worked 11.6 days every 14 days – an intensive pace of work for a relatively low wage.45 This rhythm continued throughout the summer and fall, varying little with events such as the transfer of Voltaire’s remains in July 1791. Proper context, however, is difficult to establish: the ancien régime salary rolls of the construction of the Church of SainteGeneviève have not survived for a comparison with revolutionary-era wages on the Pantheon’s site. The unique source of salary rolls by master

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artisans of the ancien régime exists in the Parisian archives as legal documentation for bankruptcies. These archives, by definition, chronicle the practice of soon to be insolvent private builders – hardly representative of the profession as a whole. However, they demonstrate general patterns of hiring, payment, and even firing in the Parisian building trades. The routinization of labor at the Pantheon’s site stands in stark contrast to standard ancien régime practices on public worksites. Ebb and flow characterized the constant movement of personnel. As Michael Sonenscher demonstrates, there was typically a core of a few regular journeymen and a large periphery of occasional laborers.46 As is the case of building enterprises today, the guild masters entrusted a few longstanding journeymen to do the most intricate forms of work, while temporary labor was allowed to do the more-routine and less-skilled tasks. The master mason Grelet’s workforce of 12 stonecutters – two core and ten peripheral – was contracted for modifications of the Opera between 22 April and 4 May 1782, earning salaries that fluctuated from 2 livres to 2 livres 10 sous per day. His workers were hired to work six days a week, yet in fact put in an average of only four and a half days per week.47 Such inconstancy and improvisation were not limited to journeymen and guildsmen, moreover. Similar fluctuations in personnel, work rhythms, and salaries on the public site of the public hôpital des Incurables (renamed hôspice des Incurables during the Revolution) between 1727 and 1786 were caused by the irregular ebb and flow of the worforce on the site. In turn, availability of labor was disrupted by the constantly changing salary structure and the comings and goings of migrant workers. As with the Church of Sainte-Geneviève, this hospice had considerable symbolic importance in raising the profile of the ancien régime link between Church and State, and its salary structure was carefully documented and closely controlled by inspectors. Above all, they demonstrate that wages stagnated through the 1780s when the hospital site, in the outer-lying faubourg Saint-Martin, was incorporated into Paris leading to higher taxes (the octroi) on building materials.48 In the urban world of work even the elementary question of what constituted the workday – the prix de la journée, the traditional salary for each “day” worked – was in contention. Not only would the length and value of a given task be under dispute, but the work week itself was constantly challenged by both journeymen and masters. In the public sphere, salary rolls show many deviations from the standard two-week pay period when financially strapped entrepreneurs continued directing their assigned projects without paying their workers. Delays in the

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payment of laborers lasted up to a month. But in private construction, even worse abuses occurred regularly as master masons had recourse to declare bankruptcy before the end of a construction project, eventually “writing off” journeymen along with merchants and furnishers under “passive debts.” Journeymen were itemized by bankrupt masters as losing up to 200 livres for about six full two-week periods under the ancien régime.49 In general, building workers would be engaged on a given work site as infrequently as not, and often for tasks that would only take up to as little as one-eighth of a day. With the exception of a steady cadre of well-paid assistants, continuity of the workforce was a sometime thing, with individuals changing often from month to month. Payscales were also tipped in favor of seniority and of what might be called loyal insiders. Notwithstanding the efforts of the police of Paris and the guilds previous to the Revolution, there was no fixed sense of a regular workday, work week, or payscale. Thus, in the spring of 1791, the superintendents of the Pantheon had sought to create a model work site, an elusive utopia sought after by the Crown, the police, administrative reformers, and even certain guild masters throughout the age of Enlightenment. The projection of the Revolution onto the Pantheon was accomplished in three overarching ways. First, the organization of labor – of the rhythm, pay, and definition of the tasks themselves – was made transparent and coherent. Two-week pay periods replaced the more supple journée. Narrowly defined hierarchies of tasks replaced the customary and loosely organized distinctions between a “loyal” nucleus and a “fringe” of occasional laborers engaged for a few days or a few hours for specific tasks. Labor at the Pantheon represented unmediated contractual work which had consented to sell its property, as embodied by its labor, for inflexible and precisely stipulated conditions. Second, the recasting of conventional work practices to create a body of trustworthy, regular, and, on paper at least, civic-minded laborers would be guaranteed by a tough system of petitioning for work contracts. Quatremère de Quincy and Soufflot-le-Romain fully intended that a competitive meritocracy would replace patronage. Revolutionary “merit,” of course, meant at the same time social utility and political virtue. Petitions for work on the Pantheon were drafted to advertise a worker as among the most militant of the politically engaged and as among the most deserving of the industrious poor. The process of hiring workers was thereby deeply politicized. The competitive system of petitioning for jobs meant that former masters and journeymen appealed on the basis of their civic virtue as well as on the basis of

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talent. Petitions for employment typically presented the writer as a citizen without resources, the father of a family, a patriot, as well as a builder in good standing among colleagues.50 With competitive petitioning for jobs, the act of seeking work constituted a political appeal. Civic virtue was thereby introduced as a category of public employment. The petitions were drawn up by public writers or by club members who cited the patriotism of the candidate – as a volunteer in the local battalion, a participant in the taking of the Bastille, or an activist in the local district and later section – along with his potential hardship as a “father of a numerous family.” Often, a laborers’ sectional colleagues would attach a letter to petitions addressed to the Assembly to (C)ertify and attest that Lamotte, sculptor, living on the rue de Lappe n. 12 for six years, is an active citizen of the Popincourt section and a volunteer for the National Guard of the same section; that he has three children, and that his comportment is irreproachable, having never acted contrary to good mores and public tranquility.51 The flood of petitions to the Pantheon’s superintendents solicited work on behalf of those who claimed to fulfill four prerequisites. The petitioner was simultaneously impoverished, politically active, a “family father” ready to defend la patrie en danger, and technically proficient.52 Third, and finally, as the labor force at the Pantheon had been identified by meritorious criteria, it was also consistently classified by name and specialization in the Pantheon’s salary rolls. The nicknames that fill the pages of ancien régime masters’ salary rolls – “le Rat,” “Victoire,” “Petit Jean,” even the generic “Limousin” – contrast dramatically with the meticulous proper use of last names and tasks on the Panthéon. A process of sorting, surveillance, and individualization was the Revolution’s response to the fear of an anonymous labor force, such as created by the ancien régime and inherited by revolutionaries in the form of the public workshops. While labor was recast in revolutionary categories of meritorious competition, Quatremère de Quincy removed the nomination of elites on the site from any and all competitive selection. The inspectors, engineers, and artists were chosen by Quatremère de Quincy himself. This division of labor between common laborers, hired on the basis of labor specialization and civisme, and a technical and artistic elite handpicked by the site’s director, was an absolute one.53

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Over the course of the summer of 1791, a massive labor force of masons, carpenters, stonecutters, sculptors, and hundreds of unskilled assistants was engaged to complete the Pantheon’s transformation into a secular shrine to the glory of the nation. This politically active, highly skilled, and overworked body of workers would prove a lethal combination for political leaders, threatening often the social peace of Paris. Paradoxically, the choice of hiring politically reliable builders would also create a workforce capable of articulating work-related grievances through the appropriate political channels.54

Site-specific and neighborhood-based labor strife in the Revolution The Pantheon was hardly the only site to have experienced labor strife in the faubourg Saint-Marcel during the early Revolution. The Royal Manufacture of the Gobelins, specializing in the manufacture of artistic tapestries, had been under the authority of the same royal administration as that of Sainte-Geneviève. Supervised by the Director of the Bâtiments du Roi, the Marquis d’Angivillers, formerly a close associate of Turgot, an inclination toward productive methods often inspired his labor politics. Under the Revolution, contention at the Gobelins’ site centered on an ancien régime reform, put in place by d’Angivillers in 1785, imposing salaries based on a piece-rate wage (salaire à la tâche). A weaver received compensation for finished cloths rather than for the amount of time at work. The official preference for this policy was, of course, to favor the quality control which it imposed in the particularly closely policed luxury industries. Inspections of finished goods were conducted before the salaries were doled out. The new salary structure also placed the burden of damaged goods on the laborer or artisan, who received no compensation for rejected merchandise. In December 1790, following several months of collective petitioning, the piece-rate wage was suppressed in exchange for a weekly salary. But, at the same time, in a cost-cutting move, many apprentices and unskilled workers were dismissed. The Marquis d’Angivillers boasted that he had successfully “put an end to the demands of laborers in adopting a middle ground between extreme rigor and an excessive condescension.”55 There were more differences than similarities between the nearby sites of the Pantheon and the Gobelins Manufactory. Above all, the funds available for salaries in the lucrative and internationally acclaimed Gobelins were rarely in doubt, whereas the Pantheon suffered from a series of financial problems and a lack of consistent deliveries of building

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supplies. Aggravating the disruptions, the May 1791 abolition of the merchandise tax, the octroi, was accidentally announced in advance, leading to a line of carriages transporting heavy construction material which waited up to several weeks outside the city limits to avoid paying the fees. Adding to material disruptions, the erratic distribution of the revolutionary currency, the assignats, created a shortage of small coin to pay wages. Finally, the funds advanced by the National Assembly for the Pantheon were insufficient. The 1 million livres voted as funding for the monument in June 1791 was more an exemplary sum, determined not by the specific needs of the site – the material and labor – but was the amount of credits left over for the public workshops at the moment of their closure. Symbolism clearly trumped pragmatism, as Quatremère de Quincy bitterly estimated this was less than half the required amount of funding the Pantheon.56 Underlying labor conflict throughout the summer of 1791 were the two distinct yet contradictory objectives of the Pantheon. On the one hand, as a public works site, it held forth the promise of hiring the unemployed skilled citizens of Paris; but, on the other hand, as a particular monument with limited tasks, it followed rhythms of labor that dictated periodically laying off workers. The noted activism of carpenters, for example, was provoked because their primary task – putting up and taking down of scaffolding – did not demand the continual engagement of regular workers.57 In late May 1791, amidst the bustle of reorganizing the worksite of the Pantheon, the exasperated Chief Inspector Rondelet wrote, “We might say that in dedicating this Temple to Glory, we were building a charity workshop.”58 Rondelet reacted to what he viewed as a denigrating mix of artistic and social concerns in the most immaculate province of French architecture. The dictates of the building as a “work of art” were, to Rondelet, beyond the ephemeral exigencies of the marketplace of labor. As work on the site was completed, only very specialized artisans were needed for the highly precise finishing of sculptures, capitols, and columns; yet, as the need for a large workforce faded, the municipality was simultaneously besieged with job petitions to treat the site as a “charity workshop.” The hybrid charge of its mission and the shaky finances of the Pantheon were further aggravated by the hothouse political context of the spring and summer of 1791. On 25 June, a crowd estimated to be several hundred thousand Parisians greeted the king and his family upon their forced return to Paris, under arrest, after their failed “flight to Varennes.” On 17 July, 50 petitioners supporting the destitution of the king were killed after martial law was declared by Bailly and Lafayette in the “Champ de Mars massacre.” Financial volatility and political

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instability resulted as capital seeped to Switzerland for safe-keeping and the assignat was devalued by 30 percent. Shortly thereafter work stoppages throughout Paris spread to the Pantheon, accompanied by angry petitions, demanding increases in pay of up to 20 percent and a relaxation of work rhythms set by the municipality. At the end of July, one petition signed by 300 laborers denounced the site’s entrepreneurs as “voracious beings fattened off the blood of the artisans.”59 As if the site’s conflicts were never ending, the authority of private entrepreneurs on a public works site also came under attack by the highly skilled ornamental sculptors who had been agitating for reforms since their engagement by the Public Works Department earlier that summer. In a furious exchange of petitions between sculptors and contractors, who furnished raw material and doled out salaries after being paid by the National Assembly, a running pamphlet battle was waged on the very principle of private entrepreneurship as the organizing principle of furnishing material on a public site. The contractors exalted their crucial role on the site by invoking the triumphant emergence of construction for the regeneration of the nation, for they alone had helped the “public economy” grow by their wise organization of time, work, and material.60 In response, the sculptors became stalwart critics of profiteering, finding it “incredible that in this century, in this moment of regeneration, the enlightened contractors would have us believe in the absolute necessity of their existence” for the construction sector. As self-described artists, having trained with painters in the elite Corporation of Saint Luc and perfected their art through periodic visits to Rome, the sculptors of the capitals, bas-reliefs, and tympanum of the Pantheon had traditionally worked independently of the master-journeyman relationship. They now sought to restore a measure of their lost liberty under the Revolution’s system of tightly controlled patronage, in denouncing the excessive subjugation of journeymen toward the contractors; here we could reveal too many horrors; but generally we only say that the dependence of the journeymen upon the individual who compels work without being fully committed to the quality of contractor requires an additional inspector paid for by the Municipality of Paris.61 In the midst of the liberal phase of the Revolution emerged a scathing critique of private entrepreneurship on public sites. To the sculptors, the utility of private directors exacted “the payment of large amounts

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of interest to intermediaries.” The latter only looked after their own gain on the building site, “too often forming coalitions between themselves” to keep down wages. The contractors are incapable of imposing an efficient discipline upon the workforce because it was widely understood that “their selfish surveillance could be supplied by another,” more public-spirited administrator. In sum, the contractors represented a corruption of public investment for they were expendable middlemen adding needless expense while also skimming off sums of money from the salaries of employees. These “passive beings” even brazenly displayed their own lack of commercial probity by filching publicly owned wood used in scaffolding to sell elsewhere. The sculptors pronounced their own patriotic whistle blowing as evidence of their own unselfish and patriotic commitment to the new order, condemning the ancien régime, where “we ran up against a police excessively interested in enterprise” and who would sooner “condemn the citizen . . . who uncovers such abuses.” The obligations of citizenship now summoned the sculptors publicly to air their grievances against the contractors. At bottom, the unaccustomed authority of private entrepreneurs in ornaments, in a craft driven by artisanal independence, provoked a vibrant defense of the rights and duties of citizenship in the new order.62 The petition literature of workers at the Pantheon repeatedly called into question entrepreneurial domination of the work process. The sculptors’ attack on the speculation and corruption of contractors was reprised by stonecutters on 29 July 1791 in an appeal to La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, then the president of the Paris Department. Three hundred and eighty stonecutters signed a petition claiming that corruption was rampant on the site. They maintained they were carried on salary rolls at 3 livres per day, while being paid between 2 livres, 5 sous and 1 livre, 16 sous. Unscrupulous entrepreneurs were accused of pocketing the difference: “You may consult the payrolls,” this petition concluded. In fact, the Pantheon’s payrolls for the second half of July show stonecutters paid at the rate of 2 livres, 8 sous. Regardless of the petition’s exactitude (or the payroll’s veracity), it had put forward another basis for refusing the authority of entrepreneurs on large public sites. Now, they were not only superfluous middlemen; they were corrupt profiteers, whose immediate interests at the Pantheon also compromised the demands of public safety. The circumstance that provoked the stonecutters’ wrath was the collapse of the scaffolding and of masonry stone inside the buildings’ unfinished dome “that could have cost the lives of 50–60 men.” The

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accident took place on a Sunday when no laborers were present. The incident was mentioned only once elsewhere in the welter of contemporary literature on the Pantheon’s construction site, and that in a later report by the Chief Inspector Rondelet, who only mentions an accident costing 12–15,000 livres. No loss of life is noted nor is the galvanizing affect on the workforce remarked upon.63 In the course of their bitter analysis of its causes, the stonecutters denounced a series of entrepreneurial decisions that had undermined the integrity of the structure itself. The Pantheon was endangered by the “employment of bad materials, by vices of construction”; the entrepreneurs skimmed off funds meant for paying workers; and they prevented careful crafting of elements by micro-managing work practices.64 As Rondelet later made clear, however, the perceived heavy-handed obstruction of entrepreneurs was due to the demand for very precise cutting and preparation of the Pantheon’s material. Nevertheless, the presence of private entrepreneurs on the building site was now cast as figuratively and literally eroding the structure from within. While the newly competitive entrepreneurial regime on the Pantheon site was the chief culprit in grievances of sculptors, stonecutters, and carpenters, administrative paralysis was also contested in other petition literature. Throughout the summer of 1791, journeymen began to dispute the right of municipal officials to hire and fire workers uniquely according to the demands of the Pantheon itself. Redundant carpenters, it was reported, had terrorized timid officials into staying on the payroll. Scaffolding could not be dismantled even after it was no longer needed.65 As a result, Quatremère de Quincy became deeply disenchanted with the revolutionary order on the Pantheon’s site. He not only attacked the supposed self-indulgence of workers, but he criticized the abusive and negligent system of verification, finding that “bills are not at entirely paid, the accounts are settled on blind trust, the tasks are only surveyed in form alone, and one senses well that inspection is left only to be exercised by men who put money and services first.” Closely paralleling the breakdown of the public assistance workshops, the Pantheon was slipping into total disarray a mere three months into its new life.66 A consequence of the unrest would be the crafting of a form of political self-representation of the building trades, one that was articulated by journeymen sculptors and stonecutters. This was based on civic virtue (civisme) alone. Transcending entrepreneurial despotism and bureaucratic ineptitude would be the exemplary citizenship of Parisian building workers. Those who denounced corrupt practices sought to

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demonstrate that they were more than self-interested employees: in the anticorporatist political culture of 1791, they advertised themselves as the real guardians of the Revolution’s national temple, who cared for the public safety of the citizens of Paris, and were thus constantly vigilant of quality control in construction. The commitment of certain builders to civic virtue was the point of distinction from the profiteering motives of entrepreneurs and certain corrupt supervisors. A display of the will to protect the safety of Parisians was conceived therefore, symbolically and literally, as public labor transformed into a public service.67 Further, this view of the active citizenship of civic-minded artisans clashed with their treatment on the Pantheon’s site as purely contract labor to be engaged and dismissed following the staccato rhythms of the worksite. Petition literature formulated the debate in terms of resistance to the imposition of “tyrannical” techniques of organizing work by individuals whose precise interests were in conflict with national solidarity embodied by the Pantheon. Workers who had met tough standards of civic virtue had little tolerance for receiving orders from profiteering contractors whose patriotic zeal for the nation was never a standard for engagement on the building site. The political origins of the discourse to promote the patriotism of the Pantheon’s workforce is elusive. As mentioned above, the physical proximity of the Cordeliers club invited intervention by the most combative Parisian newspaper, Marat’s L’Ami du peuple in June 1791, which printed a petition signed by the Pantheon’s laborers that supported corruption charges against 12 entrepreneurs with public works contracts. Marat himself added that “the bloodsuckers have enriched themselves at the expense of the former administration and the workers.”68 The subversive implications of citizen-builders who derived their sense of identity from civic virtue were fully drawn by the architecttheoretician, Quatremère de Quincy, as the chief inspector of the Pantheon. He condemned the contentious workforce as forming “factions” and as fostering “disorder and anarchy.” In a ringing denunciation of the workers, Quatremère, in July 1791, focused on the influence of Republicanism on their behavior: This state of things is the inevitable consequence of the absurd system established between the worker who, by an absurd parody of government, look upon their work as their property, and the building as a republic where they are co-citizens and believe as a consequence that it is their right to name their chiefs, their inspectors and to distribute the tasks arbitrarily. In such a hierarchy, we conclude that

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all verification would be dangerous, all inspection would only be a vain formality, and a coalition would be formed . . . between the destructive agents of all kinds of insubordination.69 Apparently, to Quatremère de Quincy, the building tradesmen had learned the wrong lessons in their education as citizens of the nation on the work site of the Pantheon. In his denunciation of republicanism, Quatremère de Quincy addressed himself to a movement by carpenters, stonecutters, and sculptors to appoint a particularly popular inspector as chief inspector of the site. A motif surfaced in workers’ petitions in August 1791 of the need to establish a labor commissioner (commissaire des gens de l’art) on the nation’s work site. Rumors of imminent changes in the Pantheon’s Directory had circulated widely, and journeymen in a vociferous series of petitions demanded that Soufflot-le-Romain, the nephew of the original architect of Sainte-Geneviève, take charge of organizing the workforce. Known as sympathetic to workers through his meticulous execution of duties as inspector of salary rolls, he was praised in a petition signed by 130 sculptors as “a man as just and as virtuous, by his talents as by his impartiality.” Elsewhere, the carpenters admired his “talent, zeal, and patriotism.” In fact, Soufflot-le-Romain was particularly appreciated as the military commander of one of the faubourg Saint-Marcel’s battalion – his fame as a fair-minded leader of men was also based on his patriotic engagement in the Revolution.70 The good press enjoyed by Soufflot-le-Romain was matched by the opprobrium heaped on the main contractor of the Pantheon’s masonry materials, Pierre Poncet. In an updated version of a medieval morality play, the two figures were juxtaposed as darkness and light. The stonecutters denounced Poncet as a “tyrant”; a petition that claimed to speak “in the name of all the journeymen working at the edifice” enumerated a litany of complaints against Poncet. He skimmed 6 sous per day off the wages of each carpenter and even “prolonged their day in order to increase his profit”; he surpassed the authorized funding by 14,000 livres; he collected 60–80,000 livres in rents off national buildings for which he did not own a lease. In short, Poncet was blamed for “doing everything against the principles of economy.” The chief grievance, however, was leveled against Poncet’s harsh treatment of the labor force. In petitions, workers protested his unauthorized dismissal of workers, once up to 60 to 80 at a time, who had been promptly “reestablished in their functions” by the administration. Apparently, Poncet sanctioned the dispatch of laborers unnecessary to construction or too risky

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as political actors. The role of the entrepreneur on the nation’s worksite, to Poncet, did not include compromising its rapid achievement by stooping to satisfy its hybrid mission as full employment site and symbolic monument. But Poncet’s “tyranny” in improperly discharging workers was added to further charges of corruption. He was accused of furnishing substandard materials and taking hidden profits off the margins of his masonry supplies. These many charges were addressed in a mid-September report by Quatremère de Quincy which concluded that “the complaints of the workers are dictated for the most part by hatred and discontent,” more personal than professional in nature. Poncet would remain in place at the pinnacle of elites at the Pantheon, with the capacity to impose a fierce regimen upon the workforce. This, however, would abruptly end with the contractor’s arrest in September 1793. By the time he was released from prison a few months later, the work on the site was declared nearly “finished” by a relieved Quatremère de Quincy, who had also been briefly detained as a suspect during the Terror.71 The campaign against Pierre Poncet was prompted by apprehension over uncontained entrepreneurial practices on public works projects. Moreover, Poncet himself, 60 years of age in 1791, was a figure deeply rooted in the ancien régime, having first started to supply masonry to the site from the start of the destruction of the Church of SainteGeneviève in 1755. His advanced age, he wrote later, prevented his attendance in revolutionary club meetings, and this absence no doubt further damaged his reputation. Like other masters, contractors, and suppliers throughout the ancien régime, he took for granted a relatively free hand on public building sites. Poncet carelessly even claimed that the Pantheon “was no different from any other building enterprise.” Out of touch with the Revolution’s movement to delimit the authority of entrepreneurs over supplies, materials, and employment decisions at public worksites, he attempted to elude the Revolution’s procedures on wages. He assumed the responsibility of directly paying the wages to the laborers without accountability to the Pantheon’s direction.72 (This contravened the elaborate controls established by the Assembly. Salary rolls were to be prepared and verified by the inspector, then submitted to the treasurer of the Public Works Department, who would disburse the funds to entrepreneurs as salaries for the workers.) Poncet’s execrable reputation was captured in an incendiary portrayal by Marat, once again. In June 1791, the journalist condemned the masonry entrepreneur (ex-maître maçon, now a term of abuse) as being in fact a simple carter (charretier) by profession, “having no knowledge of the art of construction,” who was able to steal exactly 90,000 livres “at the expense of the

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workers” which were now invested in lucrative rentes.73 Poncet was not only corrupt but an utter fraud. At the end of August 1791 the collaborative regime of municipal experts and entrepreneurs was temporarily replaced at the top of the Pantheon’s construction hierarchy by the loathed and detested Poncet himself. Until the convening of the Legislative Assembly a month afterward, Poncet had nearly unlimited means to suppress all conflict and even broader powers to dismiss workers without due administrative process. A troubled peace was temporarily restored by a harsh implementation of a pitiless work regimen and employment schedules. The entrepreneur began by making deep cuts in the workforce. A poster put up on the site announcing Poncet’s new function as superintendent also proclaimed that an unspecified reduction of stonecutters would take place because of “the confusion caused by such a great number of artisans is prejudicial to regular work procedures.” Starting in September 1791, Poncet’s made it policy to reduce employees on the site to a bare minimum.74 Poncet also targeted the few traditional privileges of artisans that remained after guild abolition. A few former ex-masters tenaciously clung to long-established monopoly employment practices in defiance of the dismantling of corporate privilege. The ex-masters obstructed the hiring of meritorious public laborers by insisting on choosing their former apprentices as assistants on the site. According to municipal inspectors’ complaints, even by means of “physical assaults, these artisans employed by the municipality permitted themselves to choose or even to reject” certain laborers who arrived in search of work.75 After the suppression of the corporations, former masters took it upon themselves to restore apprenticeship relations on certainly public sites. Customary relations among the workers were not to be disposed of easily by revolutionary policies. Poncet mercilessly clamped down on these recalcitrant masters by closing the stonecutters’ workshops nearby the building where material was measured, shaped, and sculpted. It was within the confines of these ateliers, it appears, that the revival of the masters’ ancien régime privileges took place. The Pantheon’s directors announced that those who wished to work under the “new order” ushered in by Poncet had to conform to new restrictions: to be re-employed at the works, all workers now had first to register directly with Poncet at his bureau. Presumably, this stipulation facilitated the weeding out of contentious elements, while making readily available the names of provocateurs in case of trouble. Later the same year, the stonecutters’ workshop was

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reopened with a diminished and tightly regulated workforce; the total number of laborers at the site was reduced from 550 to 422 workers. The exigencies of political containment overrode even the practical demands of the construction site.76 What were the origins, meaning, and legacy of the conflicts engendered on the site of the Pantheon? At first glance, contention at the Pantheon in the spring and summer of 1791 was sparked by what appears to be the reinforcement of vestiges of ancien régime practice: the re-introduction of a cast of characters on the construction site, foremost among them Poncet, with seemingly despotic powers to impose draconian labor relations. More broadly, the protracted exchanges between the building workers, entrepreneurs, and administrators of the Pantheon demonstrate how corporate politics were ended and how new state-entrepreneurial relations were reconceived in the Revolution. In this transitional moment, only a few months after guild abolition, labor strife had become intensely politicized. Resistance to restructured salaries, new forms of authority that engendered deep distrust, and a wider rejection of entrepreneurial culture on a public work site were articulated in the language of patriotism, civic virtue, and as Quatremère de Quincy viewed it, republicanism. In these conflicts, the distinction between those who worked with their hands and those who did not was present in outlined form – a clear harbinger of the radical discourse and politics of 1793–1794. The builders of the nation’s symbols designated their natural ally as the patriotic local battalion commander Soufflotle-Romain, a humble draughtsman (despite carrying the name of his prestigious uncle) nominated to the post of inspector. Here, the local notable, actively engaged in defending the Revolution and who participated as an artisan in the national monument’s construction, was raised to the status of local hero. The main objective of the Pantheon’s supervisors, moreover, had been to reconceive the social hierarchy of work by replacing artisanal production with technocratic supervision. In theory, the Enlightenment project of technocracy embodied by the Encyclopedia – indeed, Quatremère de Quincy’s first significant publishing venue was his contribution to the Encyclopédie méthodique – reinforced the greater transparency of method and the streamlined systemization of work procedures as embodied by the well ordered work site. In fact, this upended erstwhile practices. After imposing political hiring criteria, and by placing engineers such as Rondelet and Soufflot-le-Romain in new inspection and verification roles, the Pantheon’s direction proceeded also to undermine traditional craft identities. While trade boundaries were respected – the difference between a mason and carpenter was not in question, of

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course – but within each trade, specialized craft categories, differentiation between limousins, manoeuvres, apprentis, garcons, commis, and many other micro-occupations simply disappear from the salary rolls of the Pantheon. The anarchic moment of social decomposition on the site of a closely watched, highly symbolic monument created the opportunities for the new forms of political contestation. Craft solidarities replaced a corporate culture tied to the great chain of being on work sites. Many of the same laborers and artisans whose civic virtue was manifested in signed petitions denouncing corruption embraced the cause of defending the Republic from enemies within and without. The trajectory to workplace radicalism was partially sketched out in discourse if not yet in action. Nevertheless, the Terror was, of course, hardly “scripted” in 1791, any more than in 1789, for the issues that created a fragile unity to builders at the work site of the nation were not tenable for long.77 At the suggestion of Pierre Poncet, the Pantheon’s directors decided to favor the hiring of Parisians over migrant laborers from the provinces, in particular, those from the impoverished and backward region of the Limousin. At the end of September 1791, the municipality also announced that fathers and “citizens of the city of Paris will be preferred to foreign (sic) workers.” Petition literature emanating from the building site no longer claimed to speak for coalitions of the Pantheon’s building tradesmen; rather the appeals were formulated along Paris-based demands relayed from the neighborhood section of the Panthéon-français. The building trades as a political constituency – earlier speaking as the industrious exemplars of the Third Estate – were transformed from site-specific or professional and occupational spokesmen into a politicized group addressing questions affecting the larger faubourg Saint-Marcel, Paris, and the nation as a whole. By the end of 1791, lingering animosities based on craft, status, or regional distinctions made long-term solidarities between Parisian public construction laborers a seemingly utopian aspiration.78

“What is the citizen-builder?” Parisian building entrepreneurs and architects sought to maintain public confidence in construction for the fear of the construction site as a crucible of social unrest was plainly bad for the industry as a whole. As an ancien régime trope the fear had created a deeply ingrained stereotype of the building site as a dangerous agglomeration of criminality and of corrupt, vested interests. This concern is reflected in a pamphlet, published toward the end of 1791, that Girard de Bury the legal counselor

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(Procureur du Roi) of the moribund mason’s corporation, the Chambre des Bâtiments, wrote in collaboration with two architects, Convers and Roussel. These elite members of the ancien régime construction industry hierarchy conceived a detailed proposal on reforming the building site along reformed principles. The resulting Réflexions were an attempt to posit an ideal construction site that incorporated the revolutionary ideals of equal access to jobs by all professionals and workers and of a sense of esprit de corps unified under a regime of talent. These construction notables became self-appointed spokesmen for the building trades in proposing a corporate basis for restructuring the trades: a respect for conventional differences of craft, specialty, seniority, and rank was the only grounds for encouraging the vigorous professionalization of architects, masons, carpenters, and others. The creation of an ideal work site, they argued, hinged on judging the utilitarian need of placing the arts before the court of public utility. The construction of public buildings was ennobling precisely because as a process it served the practical needs of all citizens. In the words of these architects, (B)y suppressing the Masterships and Guilds, by giving to all citizens the liberty to exercise the profession of their choice, the National Assembly dissolved all the special traits that connect the Worker’s industry with the scope of a particular Profession . . . But we must not confuse those professions borne of luxury, and which have mere comfort as an objective, with those whose labors are of interest to public safety and the life of the Citizen. We can abandon the first to the taste of the amateurs of the Beaux-Arts; but it is not the same thing for the others, such as the practical Architect, the Mason, and the Carpenter.79 Here, the building trades were not fused with the general class of undifferentiated Third Estate citizens nor were they distinguished from the indigent poor that depended on public workshops to survive. This discourse also exhibits little evidence of the patriotic identity of “builders of the nation,” as displayed in the civic virtue of workers at the Pantheon. Rather, by late 1791, the spokesmen of the building trades carved out a niche for themselves, between poverty on the one hand, and the useless luxury trades on the other that were corrupt for encouraging mere opulence. The building trades here emerged as uniquely occupied with labor in the “interest to public safety, the life, and the fortunes of the Citizen.” In this political incarnation, the image of the building trades as a practical science that served only the public good was the antidote to the fresh

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memories of unrest at the Pantheon. The builders are thereby depicted as an inclusive, cooperative, and harmonious milieu. The nation by its public works policies, now “multiplied to infinity,” embraced the unity of interdependent builders by assuring “all the laborers, all the entrepreneurs, all the artisans who have an equal right to share public works in common; it is thus only fair that they be all called to participate in these works, and that they be employed concurrently and proportional to their talent.”80 The meritocracy inherent in “building the nation” is here portrayed as collective citizenship based on talent alone. In these petitions, we witness the builders of Paris move from characterizations as destitute laborers, to industrious citizens, to civic-minded republicans, and finally to interdependent and cooperative artisans, in response to shifting contexts of the Revolution. This political debate was framed in terms that ultimately favored the industrious citizen-builder over the unskilled poor. The adaptable categories of the political debate between public works versus the workshops for the indigent and the supremacy of productive over unproductive labor may also be detected in Girard de Bury’s polemic against useless luxury trades. This reaffirmed the privileged place of builders in constructing symbols of the Nation. Whether the contrast was with the unskilled poor or with useless trades, the building process emerged favored as exemplary of middling, socially useful productivity. The career of these flexible and opportunistic political presentations of the building trades demonstrate the lack of the hegemony of a single revolutionary notion of citizenship as derived from the organization of labor. But they suggest the central place of a new standard of civic engagement, that of serving the public interest and the “life of the Citizen” in the new order. A more radical critique of both the bottom and the top of the urban social hierarchy, the unproductive poor and the luxury-gorged elite, would be developed in the next phases of the Revolution.

From genius to commerce: Construction projects in 1792 The evanescent Legislative Assembly, which convened on 1 October 1791 and was dissolved with the foundation of the Republic a year later, was not a period of great ambition in Parisian construction. The lack of financial stability stymied even moderately ambitious projects. For the most part, statues of the Great Men were solicited, but also the sculpture program of the Pantheon’s columns, a sculpture on the Champ de Mars,

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the amphitheaters (the arènes couvertes) at the Porte Saint-Martin, the sculpture for the place de la Victoire, and a never-to-be built Temple à l’Egalité at the former place de la Bastille. The Assembly encouraged public competitions for designs; however, these were often financial expedients as explicitly acknowledged by the programs themselves. Prize winners were rarely remunerated while their drawings, maps, and plans provided valuable inspiration (often scarcely concealed plagiarism) for civil structures in the Capital. As distinct from the Academy of Architecture’s competitions, the Assembly authorized open academic exercises. The Assembly’s architectural competitions were also focused on specific buildings or locations in Paris. Rarely executed, the resulting plans often embodied a mélange of utopianism and hard-headed financial calculation but also a conflation of antique and monarchical aspirations – the overthrow of the Crown and the founding of the Republic rendered null and void the near totality of these royalist urban plans submitted before 20 September 1792.81 There were, nevertheless, notable exceptions to the humble projects submitted to the Assembly. Several were presented by Charles Mangin, closely affiliated with the ancien régime elite in the corporation of the building trades. His reputation stemmed from his former status as an officeholder, an expert-bourgeois (a paid inspector) for the Chambre des Bâtiments, since 1780. His major architectural accomplishment had been a close collaboration with Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières on the much-admired grain market constructed with an experimental dome, the Halle au Blé.82 During the Revolution, Mangin advocated the thorough reorganization of the public works projects of the old Louvre to be converted into a “Palais National.” In a separate proposal, he submitted a sketch to transform nearly the entire Right Bank, arguing that this would create “work for an immense crowd of artists and artisans for a century.” Another project, in collaboration with a certain architect Corbet, improbably sought to link the Left Bank palais Bourbon with the Right Bank Tuileries. Needless to say these utopian ambitions were hardly feasible given the budget restrictions of the new order.83 The social justifications of Mangin’s projects, however, were seamlessly interwoven into his revolutionary-era urban vision. Simultaneously arguing for full employment and for his bold vision of the transformed urban fabric of Revolutionary Paris, Mangin published no fewer than five separate pamphlets in 1792 in a vigorous campaign for the capital’s renewal. These guide us to the ways in which Third Estate ancien régime magnates were won over by the Revolution’s vibrant affirmations of meritocracy. For Mangin did not belong to the caste of elite

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academic architects but rather to a “lesser” species of successful technician constructors who had one foot firmly in the world of promoters, developers, and speculators. Here as elsewhere, it is regrettable that studies of the late eighteenth-century world of French architecture rarely take into account the social distinctions between the academic world of the Crown’s architects and technicians, specialized entrepreneurs, and engineers who would emerge with superior positions under the Revolution. With the spread of five- to six-story structures in the 1780s, experiments with larger and larger domes, and the greater use of iron beams and other new forms of technical reinforcement, the newer specialists were indeed increasingly vital to urban construction.84 The revolutionary appeal to technocracy – eventually leading to a greater use of civil engineers over architects – was therefore grounded in a favored treatment of those whose career trajectories most resembled civil servants. Mangin inserted himself squarely into this revolutionary mold of an advocate for the “rational” bureaucratization of architecture. One of his projects sought to create a public office of 12 salaried architects who would collaborate with clerks, designers, surveyors, writers, and calculators in order to take responsibility for speculation and development of confiscated real estate, the biens nationaux. Previously handled in haphazard manner, creating scattered urban development, the new office would distribute the land which will be “prepared and combined by artisans whose talents will then be employed to expand public fortune”. This, to Mangin, was an example of affirming a national commitment to competitive labor: “It is no longer sufficient to offer vast and immense projects for the utility and the embellishment of the major part of the Capital.” A regard to the interests of “a multitude of innumerable artisans and workers useful to construction” now had to be recognized as a crucial component in urban policy. Above all, Mangin concluded, Paris must become a magnet to talented provincials and to foreigners who would increase “the genius and the commerce of the entire Nation.”85 Mangin wrote amidst a vigorous application of the principle of competitive bidding for contracts and for positions on public works projects by the Legislative Assembly. An affirmed commitment to these national competitions (concours) spoke primarily to concerns about the abuse of patronage on revolutionary public works sites. Competitive bidding stimulated creative and practical endeavors through healthy rivalry between citizens.86 Also, Mangin’s optimism about a revolutionary urban policy extended to the integration of talented outsiders within the capital. In contrast to the prejudice we have seen toward the maçons

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de la Creuse and indigent unemployed provincials, Mangin affirmed the vital role of migration and even immigration. Now, the porous Capital – liberated from obstructive guild-based “controls” on the labor flow – summoned badly needed talent to participate in building the Revolution. Mangin grasped the broader aspiration of Revolutionary public works, as articulated earlier, for example by the liberal philanthropist La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. Certain types of labor performed in Paris could, ultimately, help workers become a useful part of society; they in turn would return to the provinces to help spread the values of the Revolution throughout a regenerated nation. Among the first crucibles of competitive bidding was the work site at the Pantheon. From its inception, the organization of labor at the Pantheon had exhibited a preoccupation with attracting meritorious specialized craftsmen and a team of technically proficient inspectors and supervisors.87 But upon the site’s opening, contracts for material were systematically awarded to ancien régime entrepreneurs, such as the masonry contractor, Pierre Poncet. In October 1791, the National Assembly passed a law that all public works, including tasks at the Pantheon, be awarded to private bidders at the lowest cost. This law also mandated new procedures: the itemization of salaries and attempted to impose equitable payscales, which, despite earlier draconian efforts at the site of the Pantheon, were apparently not widely respected.88 At the end of 1791, the Legislative Assembly approved 50,000 livres to employ laborers on the nation’s work site during the winter months of January and February. (This, despite the report by the Committee of Finances that 1.5 million livres were needed to complete work on the site.) Traditionally, in the cyclical rhythms of construction, the winter months were reserved for indoor reparations, with many laborers leaving Paris to return to their small landholdings in the Limousin region and the Creuse department. Citing the need to sustain indigent workers through the winter months, the Assembly sought to render the Pantheon an employment site for destitute building workers.89 Predictably, the separation between the exact needs of construction and the numbers of job contracts awarded to the poor fed the perception of deepening anarchy. Notwithstanding the implied promise of an efficient, bustling construction site, the campaign to hire more workers in 1792 brought more disarray than progress in the renovation of the Pantheon. Quatremère de Quincy would admit that he had only “imperfectly acquitted the mission that was confided,” placing blame for the fits and starts in construction squarely on the difficulty of “harmonizing the interests of the monument,

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without excessively setting back employment.”90 By his admission, conflict between the Pantheon’s design as national monument and as public works project had paralyzed the construction process. There was another reason for delays at the Pantheon also afflicting labor relations on the nation’s work site. Corruption among the entrepreneurs of the building was widely viewed as extensive, as we have seen, and was bitterly denounced by Marat and other journalists. Inflation of the cost by dishonest contractors and fictional payrolls of non-existent laborers was further exposed in a series of petitions and letters by a tireless, self-proclaimed whistleblower, Joseph Guibert. This particularly tenacious sculptor of ornaments launched a sulfurous letterwriting campaign throughout 1792 to denounce profiteering. The sculptor claimed that various entrepreneurs claimed four times more than the actual salaries paid to the sculptors. The problem, he complained to the administration of public works, was that the architect in charge, Quatremère de Quincy, was “more a literary figure than a builder,” that he was more adept in the theory than the practice of building, and that he had not actually verified the contractors’ bills – all deeply incisive critiques. The sculptor also declared he was fired as punishment for his crusade to expose corruption, and that ever since he had been boycotted, “the entrepreneurs of Paris having refused me in their workshops.” The ensuing inquiry by the architect Bourdon led to a superficial reorganization of the tasks of verification. But a perception of generalized corruption remained a recalcitrant problem besetting the Pantheon, and became the rallying cry of laborers on the site to denounce their disintegrating relations with entrepreneurs and inspectors.91 The lines of authority between architects, entrepreneurs, administrators, and even sectional officers were further entangled in the efforts to reconcile the dual mission of the building as full employment site and as national monument. Particularly distressing to the elites on the site, the laborers seemed increasingly defiant of policies established by the Legislative Assembly and municipality. The journeymen were further emboldened to contest labor practices by taking advantage of the freshly created office of the justice of the peace. The justices of the peace were created by the 1791 constitution, approved in September 1791, which assured that labor grievances and petty business squabbles involving less than 50 livres would be adjudicated by 48 elected officials attached to each Parisian section.92 The justice of the peace for the Panthéon-Français section, Durouzeau, was often sympathetic to laborers’ demands. In surprisingly contemporary terms, he had decided that workers must have prior notification “by several days” of an impending

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layoff and had the right to have their dossiers reviewed by directors at the Pantheon. If the appeal was made on the basis of hardship, workers dismissed upon the completion of specific tasks would be retained on the registers pending final decisions on their cases. Impoverished laborers at the site who were laid off were thus further encouraged to appeal – again through petitions – to stay on the job. A horrified Quatrèmere immediately fired off a vitriolic response to claim that “this immense atelier has coalitions whose continued existence will threaten us” and asking for suspension of the judgment.93 In view of the perceived loss of control over the labor force, the Paris administrators in May 1792 redoubled efforts to streamline the site’s direction by concentrating the right to hire and fire workers directly in the hands of the Director Quatremère de Quincy. The municipality reinforced an earlier order that all dismissed stonecutters, “who persist to work on the worksite can no longer be carried on the payrolls and will cease being paid.” The Paris administration thereby rejected all maneuvers to keep favored personnel on the payroll, and, most importantly, it reversed the judgment of the justice of the peace on the right of laid-off laborers to appeal. Further to rid the site of “superfluous” personnel, the Pantheon’s directors published a poster seeking to encourage aggrieved workers to search for positions elsewhere. Workers would “find it easier to go to other building sites” than to petition. The poster’s prosaic announcement that fired workers would “no longer be paid” restated the municipality’s position that petitions and appeals were no longer be taken into account by supervisors.94 While for most of the year work continued in fits and starts, progress was stopped at the Pantheon during much of the summer of 1792. The tasks were so sparse, in fact, that 26 sculptors wrote to demand that work be distributed widely “to feed the greatest numbers possible” rather than leading to dismissals as specific tasks were finished. These sculptors were convinced that unemployment would eventually affect all artisans at the Pantheon, if the increasingly specialized work on the project were not properly shared.95 Also for the site’s stonecutters, conditions appeared as precarious as they were for the sculptors. Salary rolls reveal irregular work rhythms throughout 1792–1793, with artisanal laborers on the site numbering between 86 and 159 – a sharp repudiation of the earlier promise of the site as a window on jobs-creating public investment. Evidently after 1791, the Pantheon rarely fulfilled its promise of providing steady employment to massive numbers of employees.96

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The 1793 revival of the ancien régime police idea The upheavals and disruptions at the Pantheon inspired more ambitious ventures for the articulation of a national policy of labor, applicable to all public works projects’ under the first Republic founded in September 1792. In the face of crises faced by the National Convention, police literature in particular tended to reflect the fear of the public building site as representing a dangerous opportunity for subverting the Republic. Calls for ever more intensive vigilance followed the 2–5 September 1792 massacres of 1,200 refractory priests and common criminals, when Parisians become increasingly alert against potential coups by internal enemies. In response to the “increasing spirit of cabal” found where there were mass assemblies of workers, the 48 police commissioners of the Paris sections published in January 1793, a collective pamphlet intended to warn against “attempts to organize workers in too great numbers.” The police commissioners skillfully produced a chronological narrative of the breakdown of the administration of public construction: the projects launched in 1790 exasperated the most energetic workers through their pointlessness, while those of 1792 were too hastily put together, badly organized, . . . put under a vacillating direction, perpetually obsessed with ministerial book keeping, and were beyond being onerous to the Republic; yet far from even accruing benefits to the workers, the organization (of public works) failed in the obligation to get rid of some laborers by compromising compliance with the law in favor of their interests.97 This strident assessment of “pointless” public works policies introduced a complex series of proposals to bring workers under greater surveillance by police commissioners. Unsurpisingly, the commissioners demanded, above all, a greater role for themselves in policing Paris through increased centralization. By attacking the “vacillating direction” of large-scale projects, the commissioners sought to reverse the devolutionist impulse of the early Revolution that had carved out diverse municipal and local jurisdictions to oversee certain public works projects. By January 1793, the spinning workshops, the Royal Manufactures, and the Pantheon had fallen under different authorities. In seeking alternatives to the decentralized network of public works, the commissioners proposed under the cover of innovation to revive the police organs of the abolished guilds.98

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The commissioners’ project featured a salaried commissioner who would periodically meet in general assemblies, organized by trade, and whose official function fully resembled that of the masters of the suppressed guilds. As with the corporation of the Chambre des Bâtiments, these assemblies would follow works in progress, and report on their “public spirit” in two separate chambers. One would follow the execution of plans which would be judged for their economy and utility to the Republic, while the other would pursue more mundane inspections of the solidity of work. Besides controlling the quality of construction, the ambition of the commissioners’ proposal was “pacification,” underscoring the perpetual fear of public works projects as potential hotbeds of sedition or counter-revolution. Particular attention was lavished on selecting and classifying the workforce. Laborers, artisans, women, and even children would be assigned work strictly “analogous to their faculties.” To judge more precisely the quality of labor performed, they were to return to task wages – a suggestion that repudiated the revolutionary bi-weekly pay system of national projects.99 The police commissioners also called for a revival of the guilds’ emphasis on “attestations” of past employment. As with a journeyman’s passbook, revived by Necker in 1785, a laborer was to be hired on a public site only upon documenting that work at a previous workplace had been halted or completed; barring this, the laborer must present an affirmation from her or his place of residence as evidence of lack of work during the past year. Finally, the commissioners sought to suppress the letter-writing and petitioning campaigns that, in their minds, had led to excessive concessions to workers. Contentious laborers were to bring demands to a committee of verifiers who would seek “to reconcile the public interest with the demands of claimants;” further disputes would be arbitrated before the justices of the peace of each section. In cases where workers continue to disturb the peace even after this process, a committee of auditors “will employ any means of pacification to bring to order those who isolate themselves; if no ways to disperse them are found, the commissioner of the section will act . . . to disband the public works project.”100 Clearly, this project embodied a nostalgia for the supposedly welldisciplined ancien régime workforce. It also betrayed a movement for rehabilitating the guilds, whose centralized assemblies were deemed effective in the campaign to stamp out the corrupt patronage of entrepreneurs and inspectors, as well as assuring quality control of production. The relationship between sectional police commissioners, justices of the peace, and the committee of verifiers replicated broadly

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the authority of ancien régime police commissioners, the masons’ corporation, and the building experts of the Chambre des Bâtiments. The commissioners’ plan thus sought to revive ancien régime structures in the face of perceived “anarchy” in Paris. The return to the corporate idea was henceforth a recurrent temptation in questions of policing the labor force on faltering public works sites. The reasons the police commissioners focused on “the vacillating direction” of these projects seem to be twofold. First, the nature of public contracts themselves was deemed open to abuse. Despite the reforms leading to greater competition, too much leeway was left to the whims of individual entrepreneurs, who were not given precise mandates in services to be rendered, work conditions, or salary structure. The Pantheon’s directors continued to use the ancien régime’s system of contracting entrepreneurs for specific tasks. This gave wide latitude to private individuals to decide questions on the building supplies to be used and salaries to be paid. The collapse of scaffolding and other material within the Pantheon’s dome in 1791 had marred the reputation of certain contractors when its cause was assumed to have been cheating on supplies.101 Second, besides imprecision in contracts, another disorder condemned by these commissioners was leniency shown toward laborers, in particular, after protests for higher pay among the skilled workers at the Pantheon. Petitions were a particular target of scorn by commissioners for their “arbitrary” nature. They were also too often received favorably by “lax” authorities like the justices of the peace. The significance of the July 1793 police report was in its prescient analysis of the nature of subsequent labor strife on public work sites. For perceived complaisance toward certain arguments in petition literature indeed created an opening for other claims, resulting in a gradual radicalization of the labor force. In April 1793, the sculptors at the Pantheon site launched a movement to increase their salaries. They were among the most highly trained artisans at the site, often referred to not as “workers” but as “artistes.” The sculptors had been hired to perform the arduous (and, to some, no doubt abhorrent) task of effacing freshly completed religious symbols from the capitals and the portico, and to replace them with simple classical motifs. For this highly precise labor, they were habitually paid less than their colleagues, earning the same amount as the less skilled but more contentious carpenters. In defending their right to a salary increase, the sculptors introduced a new leitmotif: the arduous work conditions on the site justified an increase in pay. Toiling so intensively on the site provoked much “physical punishment” and “destruction of tools and clothing.”102

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Insalubrious, hazardous, and strenuous work conditions – along with the cost of living – were grounds for a substantial raise. We see that artisans’ petitions began to evolve from classic indigence narratives, to broader issues of precarity, unhealthy work conditions, and workrelated illnesses. The patron saint of the stonemasons, Saint Roche, by this time had also lent his name to tuberculosis, extremely common among artisans who had breathed prodigious amounts of dust in their everyday tasks. Municipal authorities implicitly acknowledged that the salary of sculptors suffered from a serious discrepancy between skill and compensation. Salary rolls in the early spring of 1793 show a rise in daily rates, from 3 livres to 3.5 livres for sculptors. Also, this example of the systematic “capitulation” of worksite authorities, according to the police commissioners, was in fact simple surrender to the facts of hyperinflation.103 In an example of what Isser Woloch describes as the “contraction and expansion of democratic space,” laborers were starting to put health issues forward in petitions, just as the political opportunity for such broad social demands was about to slip away.104 (Notably, democratic contraction took form in the September 1793 Law of Suspects creating revolutionary tribunals with authority to judge worksite agitators.) The expansion from wage-based demands to broader work-related issues by builders on the Nation’s worksite created a distinctive pattern of argumentation, magnified with the success of each petition. The Pantheon’s workforce showed itself no longer absorbed by immediate subsistence issues, but was emboldened to exploit the difficulty of work at the Pantheon and the prestige of the site to appeal for ever greater amounts of compensation. The Pantheon’s carpenters, in early July 1793, similarly invoked a complex of health and economic issues in their petition for an increase in wages. They were no doubt bolstered by the radical Jacques Roux and the enragés’ petition to the Convention demanding radical economic controls on 25 June 1793, which helped to fashion a receptive climate for salary demands based on hyperinflation. Twenty carpenters, supported by “several declaring they do not know how to write,” submitted a petition in response to the municipality’s demand that work be accelerated to prepare the building for the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility on August 10. In response to intensified work rhythms on the site, the carpenters followed their sculptor colleagues by citing the “punishing” nature of their labor and a litany of “miserable drawbacks” in continuing work at the site including “falling rubble,” “contaminated dust,” and “excessive heat.” These brutal conditions, argued the journeymen,

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coupled with the spiraling cost of living, merited an increase from 3.5 livres per day to 4.5 livres.105 In reaction to emboldened wage demands, the administration of the Pantheon established a firm course of resistance to further calls for pay increases. On the day after the reception of the carpenters’ petition on 10 July 1793, the administration and Quatremère de Quincy responded with an order to change several longstanding practices at the Pantheon. Command authority was centralized. Rather than receive direction from intermediaries too-often sympathetic municipal employees, the carpenters would be directly supervised by the general inspector, the civil engineer Jean-Baptiste Rondelet. In a punitive measure, the carpenters would cease to receive a bi-weekly wage and instead be reimbursed with piece-rates, and only for specific tasks accomplished by each individual. Even very precise number of wood planks needed for the scaffolding on the site would be allotted to the laborers, for they had become too attached to a custom of bringing home unused materials, now seen as a veritable “right.” Finally, the precise responsibilities of each carpenter were narrowly defined to justify each employee’s activities on the site.106

On the limits of the revolutionary state The events at the Pantheon during the early Revolution exposed the dangers and limits of an entrepreneurial culture, brusquely imposed to replace ancien régime abuses. Elsewhere, at the nearby Gobelins Manufactory, in the armaments industries, national printing shops, tobacco processing plants, spinning establishments, and the metal works factories throughout Paris, similar scenes of petitioning, agitation, and strikes unfolded, involving tens of thousands of women and men laborers in Paris.107 In each of these sectors, a centralizing, consolidating movement to place greater authority in the hands of technical specialists gained momentum. Private contractors were systematically removed from positions of visibility and replaced with technicians, such as Rondelet. Eventually, civil engineers were the sole revolutionary caste who would put an end to disarray by finishing with older patronage and clientele networks. The rise of what Ken Adler calls the “techno-Jacobins” coincided with the impulsion to create a scientific elite to take over centralized command structures of public production. In sum, technical expertise trumped social status. Future civil engineers were less susceptible to the political charges of counterrevolution, corruption, or deliberate negligence. But before a functional

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labor hierarchy, integrating proficiency and skill, could be fully trained and placed in positions of responsibility, the context of the war, the Terror, and its aftermath would prove a singular and dramatic closing chapter to the earliest efforts to project revolutionary reform upon the public building sites of Paris.108 On the site of the Pantheon, the legitimacy of the Revolution was challenged by size, organization, and financing. The sheer magnitude of the tasks, the complex labor and contracting obligations, as well as the massive amount of state investment, were taken as opportunities to reinforce the Revolution’s authority in the patriotic glow that surrounded the site’s launching in April 1791. Unsurprisingly, the Revolution ultimately promised more than could be delivered. Administrative confusion between the municipality and the Assembly hardly helped. Hopelessly draconian work rhythms, insalubrious working conditions, and the spectacular collapse of materials in the dome were only three more factors that attested to the (social, political and physical) challenges of the site. Also, the Pantheon provided a stark public contrast to the relative successes of the private sphere. New cranes and scaffolding on many new sites produced not spiraling contentiousness but rather successful speculative adventures. The rue Mandar, strategically near both the stock market center (la Bourse) and the central market (les Halles), was entirely carved out of nationalized properties bought at auction and successfully built up between 1792 and 1795, complete with 17 model apartment buildings. The project was entirely conceived and realized by the entrepreneur-promoter Lecouteaux and the civil architect who gave the street his name, Charles François Mandar.109 In light of such real-estate development, the municipality and the state lagged behind in successful investments for construction projects actually brought to completion. As reflected in the warning by the police commissioners, numerous public sites became encounters between the old and new regimes that threatened to undermine confidence in the very competency of the revolutionary state (Figures 3.7, 3.8, 3.9). The labor contention on the Pantheon’s site also speaks to the deeper problem of reconstituting a statist labor police following guild abolition. “We know extraordinarily little about the artisanal reception and application of ‘scientific’ principles and procedures,” as Steven Kaplan notes.110 This is true as well of how early technocracy changed preindustrial supervision and production. In the case of public works, the appeal of new forms of inspection, administration, and verification by civil engineers was to strip labor politics from political considerations. The Pantheon’s direction attempted to impose a regime dictated

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Figure 3.7 Rue Mandar, named after its architect, Charles Mandar, a street and its buildings completed under the Revolution between 1792 and 1795. The 17 apartment buildings on the block shared the same sober façades, with no décor, demonstrating the public taste for homogenous streets and construction.

by civil architects, engineers, and advocates of “rational” labor management, emphasizing efficiency, transparency, and productivity. Building technicians like Jean-Baptise Rondelet and Charles Mandar, who adapted the stance of humble engineers, incarnated one ideal solution for completing the site’s tasks. The construction engineer – disinterested, rigorous, efficient – was a model public servant. His role was to supplant an artisanal work culture with ‘scientific’ methods assuring greater output. As a state employee, he replaced ex-masters-become-entrepreneurs the very moment in which labor relations were reconceived, assisted by Cordelier and Jacobin radicalism, in a new language of protest. It was surely a more complicated affair to accuse a building technician of aristocracy and counter-revolution than it was to charge contractors and architects – already deeply compromised by their association with the ancien régime – of the very same crimes. The Pantheon was thus an inconclusive experiment in the replacement of the culture of the suppressed corporations and that of royal architecture with the civil engineering ‘science’ of construction. Until 1791, work rhythms and salaries were determined by legal statutes and

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Figure 3.8 Rue Montmartre. Revolutionary-era bourgeois construction with classical sculptures and finely detailed porticos. An exuberant reaction, perhaps, to the excessive sobriety of contemporary construction.

long-standing procedures to settle differences, often based on collaboration between the local police and the masters, and the special favors doled out to the Crown’s stable of architects and contractors. Labor practices took into account customary practice measured against offer and demand, as well as flexible seasonal adjustments. For all their monopoly abuses, they also fit into a coherent social system based on a fragile equilibrium between custom and markets. The guilds, in particular, were backed by a deeply litigious culture of natural rights polished by the frequent use of lawsuits, partially explaining the persistence of corporate language in the French labor movement years later. But on public sites under the Revolution the suppression of fine distinctions between “species” of laborers – captured by a minute ancien régime nomenclature – and the stripping away of privileges over hiring practices on public sites overthrew a work culture based on long-standing hierarchies. This led to a politicized process of employment based on the petition and the capacity to wield a new discourse of patriotism, productivity, and pathos. The abolition of the ancien régime on public sites, then, created fresh opportunities for contention, seized upon by laborers desperate to make up for the loss of their wages at the end of the 1780s.

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Figure 3.9 Villa Riberolle. Uncertain date of construction, but an example of poorer-quality building with some of the motifs of the revolutionary era (columns and “Directory-style” porticos) in outer-lying areas.

The supposed liberalism of the early phase of the Revolution must therefore be deeply qualified. The rapid discrediting of the culture of entrepreneurship on public sites inspired more extensive control by the state over the world of work. On public sites, the organization of labor, redefinition of task specialization, and modern forms of hierarchy, salary structures, and specialized operatives, were imposed to supplant the culture of the abolished corporations. The movement toward “rationality,” then, was undertaken as a statist process of increasing productivity by reorganizing the worksite and its hierarchies, while opening the world of work to a new cast of characters embodied by technically proficient public servants. A technocratic world was perhaps not yet born, but one that integrated ruthless policing with the mass mobilization of materials and people was certainly prefigured in the ambitious public projects of the revolutionary state.

4 The Building Trades of Paris During the Terror and Thermidor, 1793–1795

The making of a Jacobin labor and industrial “policy”? Viewed “from above,” the perspective of high policy, the Jacobin or radical moment of the Revolution is invariably portrayed as a return to the statist dream. The period indeed featured an enormous expansion and centralization of the government’s authority. As an integral part of its wartime effort, the Convention prolonged the state’s reach deep into the economic sphere principally through measures for the mass requisitioning of grain and military wares. One ambitious project, more emblematic than characteristic, sought to redistribute wealth from accused counter-revolutionaries to the poor in early 1794. However, the revolutionary state’s primary socio-economic objective was not social leveling nor a long-term strategy of centralization. Rather, most domestic measures to increase state control over the urban economy sought to staunch the rapid erosion of wages and to stop other ravages of hyperinflation in a period of war. In particular, the revolutionary state’s answer to war-related economic challenges was wage and price controls. Imposed by the General Maximum of 29 September 1793, which capped salaries and the cost of items of “prime necessity,” it held the force of economic law in France for over a year. Henceforth, the General Maximum was the signature measure – for lack of a single, coherent strategy – of a de facto Jacobin labor and industrial policy. It was also the cornerstone of the Revolution’s crisis-driven system of production. The wartime measures’ legacy – indeed, its relative success in mobilizing people and resources – also inspired a much larger debate of the French Revolution’s socio-economic production. Did the Maximum, together with 146

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other instruments of emergency production, also comprise a “model” for future labor and industrial policies?1 Of course, the Jacobins did not attempt to abolish the ancien régime by legislating into existence new socio-economic relations for all citizens. Despite the evident statist ambitions of its partisans, the revolutionary government also followed a logic of improvisation and contingency. A rough equilibrium was established between unbending and repressive decrees and their application, often surprisingly in a pragmatic spirit of compromise and concession. A state-imposed grid of order and disorder, revolutionary unity and counter-revolution, were ideals attenuated in practice. In reality, the fear of “sedition” in labor and industrial relations on public sites such as the Pantheon compelled the revolutionary government also to address the real privations of the Parisian labor force.2 The need for domestic security and for loyal state employees in the face of war and terror counteracted a reflexive official repression against contentious elements. Sheer force, in sum, was not the only solution for resolving conflict. Finally, as this chapter demonstrates, the demand for fixed, transparent, and established procedures favored not only greater centralization but also a formalized and technocratic control of work. As a result, the rapid ascension of newly formed industrial elites such as civil engineers prepared the grounds for “rational” technical expertise as a broader basis for the reorganization of French industrial and artisanal production.3 Viewed “from below,” the forging of a common political identity among urban artisans, bridging over craft and skill, dissolving the identities of craftsmen into undifferentiated citizens, was accelerated in the political context of war, subsistence crises, and Terror. The political mobilization of a revolutionary citizenry developed in a direct relationship to plebeian militancy organized in political clubs, the 20,000 surveillance committees in France, as well as the 48 Parisian sections, elected neighborhood assemblies with full militia and police powers and local municipal authority. Often working together, these organs found particularly fertile ground in the Republic’s capital city during the French Revolution’s radical phase. In the highly charged political moment of 1793 to 1794, labor strife was a particularly volatile issue. It was increasingly subsumed under the categories of rebellion, subversion, and divisiveness in a state of national emergency – crimes condemned as “federalism,” a threat to national unity. Yet, while the movement from the earliest phase of the Revolution to its radical phase deepened economic centralization, in fact revolutionary institutions were not yet fully informed by the

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orthodoxies of liberalism and state control. The experiment in crafting the revolutionary economy was a fluctuating process in which the projection of command authority onto the Parisian worksite entailed negotiation and a careful mediation of relations between the state, capital, and labor.4 In the absence of a national labor code, beyond the ban on all coalitions, the General Maximum’s salary cap provided national and local authorities with a powerful instrument to clamp down on wage movements in a period of rapid inflation and grain shortages.5 Under its unyielding and detailed conditions, work-related strife as well as all speculative activity on foodstuffs were condemned. The Maximum was reinforced by the 17 September 1793 Law of Suspects creating revolutionary tribunals to punish “partisans of tyranny or federalism and enemies of liberty” with death.6 The Terror thus represented a particularly privileged moment for centralized control over, the urban labor force. Armed with these extraordinary measures, the revolutionary government wielded powerful mechanisms to command the world of work. As we will see, the highly visible worksite of the Pantheon was, once again, the focus of energetic efforts to impose hierarchical and fluid work structures. Despite its marginal use value to the war effort, the Pantheon’s patriotic symbolism rendered it a closely watched site. As elsewhere, raison d’état became its organizing principle. As a patriotic rallying cry, raison d’état contributed to galvanize the productive capacities of several key sectors of French industry. Even adversaries of the Jacobins were seduced by the long-term commercial possibilities for competition with the hated Albion, England, at war with France after February 1793. The massive mobilization of resources to produce massive quantities of arms, chemicals, uniforms, foodstuffs, and other wartime provisions, made economic control a compelling example beyond transitory emergency production. Raison d’état even effaced the qualms of some liberal opponents of the revolutionary government.7 What, precisely, constituted the Terror? The Montagnards’ policy, as formulated by the austere lawyer from the northern city of Arras, Maximilian Robespierre, implacably concentrated statist authority in the hands of the 12-member Committee of Public Safety. The vote by the Convention on 5 September 1793 to give Robespierre’s declaration – “Terror is the order of the day” – force of law, also represented deferment of the Constitution of 1793. The Constitution, passed by referendum, was definitively suspended on 10 October 1793, the date that coincides with the installation of revolutionary government. The “extraordinary”

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order which replaced the constitutional order had unparalleled powers to organize the war effort. The cadences of the Terror, its application of violence, were dictated above all by the desperate military circumstances after a series of French setbacks at the hands of royalist forces, whose invasion of France were reversed by the end of 1793 and the beginning of 1794. Simultaneously, the domestic revolt in the western Vendée and counter-revolutionary uprisings in other regions created siege-like conditions in the capital city, provoking unrestrained acts of popular urban violence with threats of much more to come. Under these circumstances, a labor policy was indeed a relatively marginal and improvised project, often reduced to a circumstantial resolve to clamp down on the seditious activity within key sectors of the Parisian economy. Priorities of the Parisian economy included labor requisitioning for defensive ramparts and walls; inventing and applying new techniques of metallurgy for guns, cannons, and swords; the rapid industrialization of saltpeter extraction for gunpowder; multiplying indigent women’s public spinning establishments for clothing after the breakdown of the textile market; the production of shoes, hats, and uniforms and other military accoutrements; road-building; and transport commodities such as wagons and saddles. A regime of intensive wartime production was put into place in each of these domains.8 In this context, resistance to the rapid pace of production was condemned as labor strife, considered as a “factional” threat to centralized authority, and even punishable by the death penalty under the provisions of the Law of Suspects. Furthermore, the very survival of labor identities among journeymen who assembled and petitioned according to task specialization defied the dissolution of past corporate solidarities into an undifferentiated and unmediated political identity. The new political identity of republican citizenship was thus not made overnight.9 The control, mobilization, and administration of the labor force in the capital city in the period of the Terror was long portrayed not as a series of measures concerning the world of work but rather as extensions of efforts to guarantee the subsistence and military security of French citizens. Indeed, the journées of 4–5 September 1793, where sectional radicals adopted the twin slogans for “terror” and “food by force of the law,” compelled the attention of the Convention on the police of provisioning. By the end of September, an urban consensus was forged which related the solution to urban famine to the threat of repression, particularly against those who menaced the equitable distribution of foodstuffs.10 As a result, in contrast to subsistence issues,

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the implementation of wage controls on Parisian industries during the Year II has been little researched by contemporary historians. Specialists of social and labor movements in the Revolution have tended to focus on the days of action (journées), the great periodic upheavals in which the crowd became key actors in influencing the course of the Revolution. The tenor of many labor protests throughout the Revolution was taken to be either purely “political” in nature or “consumer-oriented,” with the Revolutionary crowd looking “backward” more to the food riot than to the modern wage dispute.11

“What is a sans-culotte?” Despite the historians’ neglect of labor questions during the Terror, the urban world of work was indeed transformed by the radical politics of the period as well as by the wartime command economy. In Paris, the Revolution under attack from within and without rendered differences between craft, skill, and even neighbourhood to be negligible as the basis of social identity. Many Parisians unified under a collectivist identity, “sans-culottes,” urban producers named for the fact that they were supposedly too poor to afford the britches of social superiors and obliged to wear long trousers. They were particularly active in the 48 Paris sections the assemblies that also provided the political point of entry for many skilled tradesmen. Within the sectional movement, inter-trade disputes were eclipsed and a horizontal distinction came to be imposed between the people as sans-culottes versus counterrevolutionary clergymen, former nobles, wealthy merchants, and their minions. Plebeian radicals and their republican allies widely cited the militant artisan embodied by the sans-culotte as the archetypical patriotic citizen. He (as always male) is also the source of a long historical debate. Was this mythical personage a foreshadowing of a proletarian class and thus evidence of the movement from craft to class divisions within the urban world of work?12 Or was he, by contrast, a purely political invention of such radical newspapers as l’Ami du people, le père Duchèsne, and les Révolutions de Paris, which sought to mobilize readers around popular local figures via an essentially invented discursive montage?13 Revolutionary newspapers, in the wartime fervor of the Terror, repeatedly asked and responded to the question: “what is a sans-culotte”? The classic response was: the artisan earning his living by work with his hands who was the supreme citizen-worker of the revolutionary order (he was an “active citizen” as a taxpayer) who alone could be

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counted upon to defend the nation under siege from enemies within and without. During the radical phase of the Revolution, the skilled craftsman repeatedly asserted his identity by opposition to aristocracy, to the rentier, and to financial and speculative wealth.14 The sans-culottes’ history is the core of a broader question of the real impact of the Revolution within the urban world of work. The principal question, however, that inspired the research of the movement’s first great historian, Albert Soboul, was why sans-culottisme as a movement collapsed with Robespierre in 1794 and why a lasting class-based politics was not achieved during the Revolution.15 Soboul reached the conclusion that sans-culottisme was an essentially reactive ideology, the loosely conceived “petit bourgeois” doctrine of artisanal politics. Obscuring a clear conception of “the social function of work” was the “incoherent” ideology of a transitional economy, no longer feudal and not quite capitalist. The inherent contradictions of work in the Year II, seen through the fog of “shopkeeper,” “petit bourgeois,” and subsistence-driven convictions, in the end, depleted the radical movement of its collectivist vitality. In sum, according to Soboul, the sans-culotte movement failed precisely because it was preindustrial and heterogenous: without the clear experience of class struggle afforded by the industrial revolution and factory production, the revolutionary artisan viewed his experience more as the last of the consumer revolts than as among the first producer-conscious uprisings.16 Soboul’s analysis of sans-culotterie was deeply influential, as witnessed by a number of studies that deepen his analysis by using his own categories.17 Indeed the ubiquitous presence of the sans-culottes in the discourse and in the crowd of the Revolution presents the broader challenge of comprehending the inter-relationship of social change, economic activity, and political engagement. Convincingly estimated at around 3,800–4,000 elite artisans and entrepreneurs by Soboul’s most trenchant critic, Richard Mowery Andrews, their identity was formed mostly as the cadre of revolutionary Parisian sections. Andrews, however, developed the argument that the sans-culotte’s politics were “a double-edged blade that was swung both upwards and downwards in the social stratification of Paris.” The tradition engendered by Soboul’s interpretation only emphasized the upward cuts, as Andrews had it, in repeating all-too-literally the discourse of plebeian populism attacking merchant and aristocratic elites. He ignored the downward cuts making stark distinctions drawn between the sans-culottes and the working population of Paris. The sans-culottes were rather a “revolutionary bourgeoisie of work” who, as large-scale employers of labor, mobilized

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long-standing patronage networks that were channeled into the local sectional movements.18 Many sans-culottes shared a career trajectory toward municipal or the Jacobin state apparatus as petty functionaries. They were also the key link between municipal elites and the state, on the one hand, and local social and economic notables, on the other. After all, they had emerged in the temporary vacuum of local political, social, and economic power during the early years of the Revolution. Galvanized by a Jacobin discourse attacking inherited wealth, hoarding, as well as speculation in land, currency and grain, the sans-culottes represented an urban populist and paternalist “oligarchy” within the laboring world that sought to settle accounts with counter-Revolutionary monetary and landed elites. By coalescing around a political economy of social utility and productive labor, the sans-culotte was also distinguished from the lower classes of the parasitic, unskilled, laboring poor, of unsure political allegiances and dubious origins, such as the footloose and masterless vagabonds, the maçons de la Creuse.19 Before becoming the subject of an aristocratic insult, then a colorful epithet, and then a fully celebrated sobriquet, the sans-culottes materialized at the very moment the Revolution altered the nature of labor relations with the abolition of the guilds in the spring of 1791. Their movement represented the resurgence of the key interlocutors between the state and civil society in matters of organizing and policing the workforce – the 35,000–40,000 guild masters in France and several thousand corporate officers – many of whom had become modest municipal or state employees or simple employers in their trade. Simultaneous with abolition the local mechanism of the ancien régime labor administration, based on the Châtelet’s 48 Parisian police commissioners, had also been suppressed. What became of these guild masters after 1791? There is an appalling dearth of historical research on this very subject. An unsubstantiated historical conjecture dominates: guild masters were reconverted into entrepreneurs in a steady, onward march toward the triumph of liberal capitalism. In fact, many byways and alternative paths cluttered this supposedly teleological itinerary. A review of the invaluable repertory of the Parisian sectional personnel constituing the core of the sans-culotterie indicates a good number of former masters furnished the leadership cadre of the sections, as justices of the peace, police, or members of the civil committees.20 The ascension of former corporate officers, become sans-culotte militants, emerged from the obliteration of the guilds.

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Many guild masters benefited from a vestige of the legal and economic protections of the “ex”-(çi-devant) masters. The National Assembly sought to assure that the new business mantle would not be claimed by anyone with means. It adopted a social stratagem that dovetailed with fiscal policy. In order to replace the taxes and gratuitous contributions of the corporations, the National Assembly followed the recommendation of the Committee on Public Contributions and instituted a business license tax (patente), on 2 and 17 March 1791, upon entrepreneurs as a substitute for the suppressed but lucrative masterships. First intended to be calculated in proportion with the rent paid for a workshop or an office, the tax was expanded in September 1791 and again in July 1794 to comprise most merchants, shopkeepers, and entrepreneurs. Although resisted in some parts of the nation, the patente assured that only those with sufficient capital engaged in business in the new regime. It also furnished municipalities with a valuable fiscal source. The patente was justified and defended as an aspect of patriotic production. The sansculotte as “the revolutionary bourgeoisie of work” proudly paid this revolutionary tax. As sectional officers and as a merchant elite the former masters were deeply empowered by the Revolution. And as the sans-culottes they would defend it against all enemies.21 The sans-culottes were numerous in the building trades for they defended a revolution that advanced their interests. The Revolution under siege launched many public works projects, and the robust market for military and civilian construction in 1793–1794 provided a real stimulus to the entire sector. Employment prospects brightened even in this time of crisis, as witnessed by the quadrupling of migration from the provinces to Paris between 1789 and 1793: around 25,000 migrants in 1789 quadrupled to over 100,000 migrants by 1793. Stunningly, only 27 percent of Parisians over 15 years of age in 1793 were born in Paris.22 In particular, an influx of the maçons de la Creuse is partially explained by provincial grain shortages and the breakdown of rural authority. But their mass movement to the far-away and dangerously exposed capital in war also testifies to the opportunities opened up in the building trades – particularly in the construction of fortifications and wartime structures such as hospitals and barracks. The fate of laborers who temporarily became employees on revolutionary public sites was quite different from the masses of masters, journeymen, and apprentices who continued to labor in the private sphere. Public workers were more cruelly exposed to the vicissitudes of the wartime economy and the exigencies of directors who answered to the Jacobin state. There were other choices, of course, besides private and public construction

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sites. Many laborers had a temporary vocation in the militarization of Parisian society, for it is estimated that there were perhaps 116,000 revolutionary National Guardsmen in Paris in 1793 – up from 8,000 equivalent guards in the 1780s.23 How to control the masses of unskilled labor flowing into Paris in the Revolution’s Year II? The politically engaged building entrepreneur who appropriated the term of sans-culotte, and who could guarantee the effective command of labor as an honest employer, is fleshed out repeatedly in police and revolutionary tribunal dossiers.24 For a vital constituent of the sans-culotterie was its capacity to mobilize and discipline labor. Furthermore, the case of the Parisian building trades suggests the sharply contradictory nature of the term’s use and abuse. Rather than a small-scale workshop patron with the archetypical one or two employees, members of the sans-culotterie were large-scale employers and influential Jacobin office-holders who advanced their own substantial patronage networks, in politics and business alike, in a revolutionary political economy of patriotic production for the nation in danger. In the police dossiers of arrested militants, another frequently cited evidence of civic virtue besides participation in given journées was meritbased social mobility. The journeyman who came to Paris to work for others and who eventually worked his way up to entrepreneur offered clear-cut testimony of successful participation in a competitive world of work which led to justly won fruits of labor as valorized by the nation. The “Citizen-Mason” François du Bierre, for instance, was imprisoned for an anonymous denunciation as a counter-revolutionary. In his appeal for release, du Bierre based his Political Life on a fixed litany of predictable events. As a journeyman, du Bierre came to Paris when he was 20 years old and worked for ten years for various masters, before becoming a master mason himself, employing many workers at a time. At the ripe age of 52, he was arrested on 31 May 1793 during the Federalist uprising for having mobilized many of his own workers – his “comrades” – bringing them from the worksite to join the crowd besieging the Convention. Twenty masons in his employ successfully wrote a collective petition for his release underlying his patriotic presence in all the revolutionary uprisings. In Du Bierre’s own third-person narrative, he worked for ten years for the ci-devant masters in carrying out most scrupulously those duties demanding the utmost authority, he hired a great number of workers as a master’s assistant, and afterward for 20 years he kept them working on his own account, and can prove that by his prominent status that he made himself widely known,

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that no one can prove anything to wound his probity; he calls on the general good will of all who know him; he declares never having lived but by the fruit of his labors, and many have seen him enthusiastically fraternizing with true Republicans.25 Of course, the veracity of Du Bierre’s autobiographical sketch, written on 20 January 1794, cannot be established. Nonetheless, his evocative use of the language of Jacobinism bears the imprint of the defining principles of Republican citizenship. To Du Bierre, there was no tension between the claim to live “by the fruit of his labors” and the claim that he is an employer of “prominent status.” In the political economy of sans-culottisme, merit-based entrepreneurship was as elevated a social position as one could hope to attain. Moreover, the core of Du Bierre’s self-defense lies in his status as a notable of his own quarter. His proudest achievement is being “widely known,” as evidently having enjoyed great deal of influence over the labor force he controls. Du Bierre thereby advertised himself as well rooted in the community, his civic virtue stemming from a complex interplay of work, status, and economic power. The self-description of Du Bierre captures the fusion of political and economic status within the sectional movement. His claim to political liberty was predicated upon his command of labor and entrepreneurial capital. But while he was apparently never a master in the ancien régime – his social ascendancy was earned by hardwork and not granted by privilege – Du Bierre cast himself as having many of the attributes of ancien régime mastership: “prominence,” displaying “probity,” and living “by the fruits of his labors.” The qualities he ascribed to himself may have been partially myth, of course; yet his plea nevertheless reveals the essential mythology of sans-culottisme in the Terror. Unsurprisingly, Du Bierre was quickly liberated on appeal.26 The case of Du Bierre demonstrates that targeting suspected elites in the building trades, particularly over corruption charges and counterrevolution, also inspired a vivid exculpatory counter-discourse of the patriotism of large-scale employers. This entrepreneurial apologia was, paradoxically, a core component of the sans-culotte ideology of labor. In the person of the sans-culotte, the entrepreneur as an effective master of patronage networks also became a stock character. The position of major employer was often the first line of defense against charges of “aristocratic,” “idle,” or “moderate” tendencies. A municipal administrator and “architect-expert,” Louis Lemit, who had been a venal officeholder in the Chambre des Bâtiments in the last

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years of the ancien régime – and later an inspector of the Pantheon – was president of the Parisian civil committees of the 48 sections where the sans-culottes were most active. While never outright claiming their mantle, he was their prime representative within the municipality, and gleefully appropriated their discourse. Following his successful career under the Terror, Lemit took over administrative authority of the women’s spinning establishments (ateliers de filature) under Thermidor. His incendiary texts excoriated entrepreneurial corruption in public works projects, under both the Terror and Thermidor, in swaggering language rivaling that of Marat.27 Lemit was particularly harsh in a polemic against the misuse of public funds. He claimed, later, that the 2,000 destitute women – many, accompanied by children – in the spinning establishments were “in a state of disorder and insubordination” by the end of the Terror, due to scandalous mis-management. Lemit carved out a forceful image as an efficient troubleshooter in stamping out corruption and incompetence, who did not hesitate to use repressive measures against contentious laborers.28 Du Bierre and Lemit were simultaneously members of the Parisian urban class of notables, fully integrated in the world of work, and deeply involved in revolutionary politics. The two men demonstrate that the sans-culottes did not necessarily derive their identity from the intimate setting of the workshop, from direct production with their hands, nor did they coalesce around an idyll of work relations between small-scale former masters and journeymen. Rather, in articulating their most trenchant arguments for revolutionary civic activism, they highlighted their status as a reliably efficient revolutionary cadre in a crucial economic sector. In Paris of the Year II, sans culotte ideology extolled the capacity to mobilize tightly knit patronage networks. Such networks were crucial to Parisian revolutionary life, whether to vote, to assemble a loyal workforce for punctual demands of public works, or to rally citizens to a political day of action. For the building sector, the politics of construction during the Revolution – the funding of public works, the power to hire and fire workers, access to materials, the credit and financing of an enterprise, the policing of the workforce – were prized practical qualities, crucial to the Revolution’s survival, perhaps even surpassing the mythical capacity to work with one’s hands celebrated by revolutionary journalists. Beyond their weight in the Parisian economy, the patronage networks at the heart of building enterprises were deeply emblematic of Parisian politics in the Terror and Thermidor.

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Work in the Year II The Parisian labor force, of course, punctually resisted the provisions of the General Maximum’s cap on salaries with periodic but distinctive forms of protest in the period of the Terror. Surprisingly, in a period when unity and patriotic national solidarities dictated productive goals, and when intensified production constituted a raison d’état, the outcome of labor and commercial conflict was not predetermined. The tapestry weavers at the National (formerly Royal) Manufacture of Gobelins held out against the piecework that had temporarily replaced salaries, and were granted improved working conditions and better pay.29 The carpenters on the site of the Pantheon also won a series of judgment for back pay in a period of intensified inflation, the last in the spring of 1794. But where national security was endangered such as in the sensitive armaments industry, the Committee of Public Safety applied against unruly elements a draconian “purification based on civic virtue, probity, and tendencies toward order and serenity.” Even supervisors who could not keep the public peace were dismissed. Others who could not maintain basic quality control in factories or workshops would be imprisoned.30 Notwithstanding the political focus on inflation and provisioning as the crucial domestic issues during the Terror, labor organization was central to the consolidation of national unity in the wartime economy. The favored methods by which the Parisian labor force was primed for regeneration – and greater discipline in executing their tasks – included official methods of petitioning over grievances, civic engagement as a prerequisite for hiring, the appointment of politically sure technical elites on work sites, and tougher standards of verification. Efforts to promote the patriotism of public labor employees were even integrated into the programs of urban planning competitions. By feeding the workers’ conflicts through formalized procedures, the Committee of Public Safety emphasized its role as impartial arbiter. It was thus better-situated to employ a “just” response to the major economic challenge in the period of the Terror: the rapidly eroding standard of living during the precipitous decline of the revolutionary currency.31 Repression, however, was a more inspiring motivator than regeneration. The workers of Paris detained on worksites for agitating to increase wages were incarcerated under the provisions of the Maximum and the Law of Suspects. These criminalized urban labor movements, already forbidden under the provisions of the 1791 Loi Le Chapelier. Furthermore,

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the Committee of Public Safety issued labor regulations on 12 December 1793 that imposed a 14-hour day with only one free day out of ten workdays (la décade). This new code also defined with precision the minimal prerequisite of civic virtue for public workers: “integrity and the tendency to be orderly and tranquil.” It spelled out precise guidelines for airing collective workplace grievances. The workforce had to ask the foremen of the affected workshop for authorization to assemble, to write up the petitions, and to select two representatives to present the properly signed text to the authorities. Such procedures seemed sure to calm the ardor of aggrieved laborers. Finally, workshop foremen were made responsible for keeping unrest in check by the threat of being discharged in cases of “rebellion.”32 In such a context, the majority of workers’ protests in the Year II were intentionally kept far from public view, both by their leaders and by the organs of justice, which shared an interest in covering up actions widely perceived of as seditious. Grievances were rarely articulated by that archetypical genre of Revolutionary literature, the signed petition, nor for that matter, by any literature destined to find a hearing in the public sphere. Clandestine coalitions, work stoppages, and anonymous denunciations often replaced the petition, while revolutionary tribunals and committees succeeded the court of public opinion reflected in newspapers.33 Following the new guidelines to the letter, the journeymen carpenters of the Pantheon had representatives write to the Paris Public Works Department in March 1794 to demand a retroactive increase from five to six livres a day. This was in recompense for freshly implemented 12hour work days that began promptly at 6:00 in the morning. The text was drawn up as the site was undergoing arrangements to prepare for the transfer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s remains from his burial grounds in the northern town of Ermenonville (the town itself was renamed after Rousseau); frequent delays, though, ultimately pushed back the final ceremony to October 1794. Also, the request was sent on the very day of the mass demobilization of Revolutionary Army of the Interior charged with assuring the circulation of subsistence items and repressing the counter-revolution. The carpenters express urgency in the face of the news that droves of disarmed soldiers had joined an exodus toward the Capital in search of eventual employment. The labor shortage afflicting the Pantheon’s site, borne of war and counter-revolution, would hence shortly be over.34 The petition was transmitted to the Pantheon’s direction, which responded favorably: the carpenters would indeed see a retroactive raise

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to six livres. In the legalistic language of the direction, the salary was increased “except in cases where a decree establishing a new Maximum of the workers daily payscale would reduce this wage, or if a drop in the price of foodstuffs will demand” a reduction in pay. The contingent quality of this pay hike underscores a strict adherence to national policy. The Pantheon’s directors were committed to demonstrate respect for the strict parameters dictated by an economic order subordinate to security demands. The price of this adherence, however, was continued incertitude: had the carpenters won a salary increase or not? The (unstated) response was: yes, should present circumstances remain the same.35 The collective impact of this and other minor breaches of the Maximum contributed to the climate favoring the climate for a reorganization of the Revolutionary Government by spring 1794. The precedent set in yielding to the carpenters’ demands only confirmed that the Maximum on salaries could not be properly enforced in piecemeal fashion. The logic of centralization and bureaucratization that infused sectional policing authorities in the Republic would be applied to the discipline of the labor force as well. This logic was made clear in the Committee of Public Safety’s recourse to technocratic solutions as a method to administer public works projects and control their labor force. In March 1794, the Convention founded the national polytechnical institute (l’École centrale des travaux publics), under the direction of the maritime engineer, JacquesElie Lamblardi, with the objective of assuring rigorous state training for all French engineers. A year later, this vaunted school became the École polytechnique which continues to thrive to this day. Simultaneously, a proposal to streamline authority over public sites was introduced by Bertrand Barère, spokesman of the Committee of Public Safety, in a speech before the Convention. He argued in favor of a national public works authority to centralize all projects under a single administration. Only consolidation under government control, Barère declared, could stamp out the “civil war of intrigues” that took place on individual sites, many of which, like the Pantheon, had falled through the cracks of state, municipal, and local authorities. Only a massive centralization of authority would eliminate “federalism” as found at the site of the Pantheon, and would put an end to the “disguised aristocracy and ministerial machinations” that had corrupted public construction earlier in the Revolution. In Barère’s stern formulation, the Revolution’s public works projects must be reconceived as the political front line against enemies of the Republic, from within and without.36

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Barère’s technocratic vision of a centralized public works authority was realized when the Committee of Public Safety founded the Public Works Commission on 6 March 1794 (21 Ventôse, Year II). Following a recommendation by the former military engineer, Lazare Carnot, this Commission was placed under the authority of the Ministry of Interior, thereby completely removing public works projects from municipal and bailiwicks.37 Public works were henceforth controlled by both the executive and the legislative spheres of the revolutionary government. The priority given to the mobilization, command, and discipline of labor, as well as to the stamping out of corruption among contractors and state inspectors, was forcefully established by this dual tutelage of publicly funded construction. The Public Works Commission’s deep commitment to root out Barère’s detested “federalism” through a vigorous labor policy became clearer in May 1794, when it enlisted the civil engineer Jean-Baptiste Rondelet, repeatedly denounced by workers as the most “tyrannical” inspector of the Pantheon for his over-zealous application of the Maximum on salaries. The galvanizing effect of Rondelet’s appointment to the Public Works Commission would parallel that of Barère’s to the Committee of Public Safety. Rondelet’s ascendancy bolstered the revolutionary organs of the statist dream, that of Jacobin-directed public works projects in the Capital. He signed off on numerous decrees to requisition specific entrepreneurs to engage in vital tasks.38 Also, the firm control of workers became a central concern to the Commission, for now the construction of bridges, monuments, and civic structures was centralized under the same authority responsible for defensive fortifications. Furthermore, for security reasons, the Public Works Commission fell under the scrutiny of the Committee of Public Safety over the administrative of projects involving defensive fortifications of Paris.39 What impact did the committees and commissions charged with enforcing the Maximum on wages and prices on the daily routines of Parisian building workers? How were the Jacobin state’s policies relayed onto the Capital’s construction sites? The Convention’s and various committees’ many edicts were intended to contain the market’s disposition of labor as the sole property of entrepreneurs and workers. As in the treatment of subsistence items in the Terror, labor itself was no longer completely an item to be bought or contracted as with any other commodity. Offer and demand must be tempered by raison d’état. The immediate goal of the Convention’s labor policy in the Year II was to head off a work shortage which would drive up salaries or provoke “federalist” movements. Ultimately, its committees’

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and commissions’ sweeping acts ranged from the requisitioning hundreds of building workers for the emergency construction of hospitals in the city to granting military leave time to laborers involved in erecting vital structures.40 The mass mobilization of labor and sheer repression, however, were only two features among others of the Year II on the Parisian building sites. For the dictates of a harsh retributive justice could not, by themselves, encourage the projects of urbanism actively promoted by the Jacobin state. A lesser-known feature of the Year II featured the encouragement of a regenerated civic virtue (civisme) in construction projects of the Capital. The Terror inspired a thriving interest in urban design competitions meant to inspire revolutionary consolidation through a patriotic participation of all classes – from architects to lowly engineering students – in the arts. Following the definitive suppression of the Academies of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture on 16 August 1793, a deluge of ephemeral committees and juries were organized to pore over and select urban plans to revitalize the Republic’s capital city in its most beleaguered phase.41 The Academies’ suppression created the opportunity to found the 11-member Commission des artistes, which reunited seven of the most famous architects of Paris. They included Charles De Wailly who in 1789 produced an ambitious project for reorganizing Parisian streets and Edme Verniquet an urban cartographer and former commissioner of streets for the municipality who led a team of geographers and surveyors to create a detailed set of precise Parisian maps between 1780 and 1791. (The Verniquet plan was the basis of the Commission des artistes’ studies.) Seven architects collaborated with four engineers and inspectors attached to the roads department, la voirie. The democratic impulse in folding the two corps of architecture and civil engineering into one consultative administration accelerated the movement toward opening construction to new forms of expertise, informed by geographical precision, geometric measures, and scientific argumentation. Rather than aesthetics, for example, the exacting calculations of the durability, homogeneity, and cost of construction materials were increasingly privileged in urban planning.42 In 25 architectural competitions, the Commission des artistes received a total of 480 patriotic projects, sculptures, paintings, and designs. Fifteen ambitious plans were proposed for embellishing Paris, 25 monuments to Rousseau were submitted, and 209 propositions for individual sites were received including the future Arc de Triomphe and the Pantheon’s columns. (One wonders whether the free time of redundant

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architects and artists, whose principal projects had been made for the Crown, may have boosted the yield of these competitions.) A single contest for rebuilding Paris held by the Commission des artistes between May and August 1794 inspired 195 architectural programs and 110 proposals for public sculptures. Furthermore, the Commission published a series of ambitious plans for remaking Paris, integrating new boulevards and neighborhoods and focusing on neglected quarters in the outer northern and southern fringes of the capital. The map of the Commission des artistes sought to propose an orderly system to assimilate new zones carved out haphazardly after the confiscation and sale of over one-tenth of the land within Paris intra-muros as bien nationaux after 1790. Only partially realized during the Revolution and Empire, with the proposal for the future rue de Rivoli enacted by Napoleon, the sweeping propositions of the Commissions’ final “Map of the Commission des artistes” heralded Haussmannisation half a century later in its synthetic view of a fully integrated capital city (Maps 4.1, 4.2, 4.3).43

Map 4.1 Map of the Commission des artistes, in an 1887 reconstitution. This committee, including Charles de Wailly and Edme Verniquet, met between 1793 and 1797 and produced this map, considered to be an early example of “Haussmannisation before Haussmann.”

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Map 4.2 The Commission des artistes’ circular plan for the dismantled Bastille area anticipated the present place de la Bastille and parts of the Marais/SaintAntoine quarter remade by Haussmann.

Map 4.3 Demonstrating the depth of commitment to secularization, the Commission des artistes’ planned streets to run through nationalized and destroyed churches, abbeys, and convents.

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These urban plans, in Barère’s words during a meeting of the Public Works Commission held on 22 June 1794, were to be implemented “not only for the embellishment of the city of Paris, but for all matters of public utility, (and) for the serenity of its citizens.” The patriotic and utilitarian criteria of architecture were to be applied by the jurys des arts that had been launched earlier in the spring to review urban projects for Paris. The jurys, consisting of 109 members in two distinct committees, mingled artists with political leaders and scientists in order to coordinate the demands of urban “embellishment” with “public utility.” The published projects and the upright promises of future construction for prize-winning entries were never carried out.44 Nevertheless, the Committee of Public Safety continued to insist upon even greater egalitarian procedures in the direction of urban competitions. A project of 28 June 1794 (10 Messidor, Year II) established special councils on the communal level to be composed of “ordinary citizens.” They were nominated to stand in judgment of projects submitted to the Public Works Commission for the “moral purification and embellishment” of urban centers. This venture, bearing witness to Barère’s impulse to control “federalism,” charged the Public Works Commission with “supplying the jury with the locale, the maps, the plans necessary for its work, and to provide all the means at its disposition necessary for the proceedings of the jury.” Apparently written by Barère, the June 1794 draft decree also entailed the requisitioning of construction workers and the engagement of juries of non-artists to work in coordination with the Commission on the selection of urban design. The Commission was to be reconstituted as a thoroughly transparent administration in urban matters, one uncontaminated by “factional” entrepreneurial, artistic, or labor interests seen as incompatible with the dictates of public safety.45 The primary focus of the Public Works Commission, of course, did not comprise the visionary ambitions studied by the Commission des artistes. Its bureaucratic endeavors were focused on cracking down on infractions of the Maximum, reinforced by an ordinance published on 1 June 1794 (13 Prairial, Year II). Increasing salaries above the levels fixed by law would bring punishment upon the indulgent entrepreneur who would now be held “personally and individually responsible.” Soon after, however, the harsh requirements of pacification became a lesser priority with the revaluation of salaries under the Maximum on 9 August 1794. Wages were increased by 50 percent in all industries except for the thousands of specialized workers in armaments.46 Thereafter, through the overthrow of Robespierre and until the Maximum’s

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suppression on 24 December 1794, notable protests for wage hikes were much more rare.47 At the Pantheon, in particular, the laborers would fall largely quiescent until the fateful Prairial uprising of 20–23 May 1795. From the perspective of the nation’s building site, the Maximum on prices largely succeeded in subduing inflation and reducing subsistence shortages. The inconstant work and pay schedule on the site was to continue, however, to meet with periodic resistance.48 The mobilization of labor on public works sites, the repression and negotiation of worksite disputes, and the campaign to stir civic virtue among elites and workers alike were the complex elements that constituted the industrial and labor policies of the Terror. By these various means, the domestic wartime efforts of the Committee of Public Safety created domestic stability and a vibrant industrial precedent of emergency productivity. In particular, the wage and price controls of the General Maximum achieved their goals, albeit temporarily, of assuring subsistence for the working population and support for the public sector, which continued to function in providing vital services with the nation under siege. This fragile equilibrium would collapse in the years to follow, particularly, with the near-bankruptcy of the state in 1796. However, the balance sheet of industrial and labor policies during the Terror demonstrated the revolutionary state’s capacity to impose order in the world of work, particularly, on the Parisian building sites, previously, the most turbulent and perilous sector of the domestic economy in wartime.

Terror and reaction on the building sites of Paris: Public and private construction in the Years II and III In turning from the macro- to the micro-history of the Terror, an analysis of the dossiers of arrested or “suspect” builders makes clear that individual victims were never aware of being sacrificed for the brighter long-term picture for the Revolution. Historians’ estimates of suspects during the Terror and Thermidor denounced, pursued, arrested, or simply signaled to public authorities, range up to half a million individuals out of a nation of 26 million people. In Paris alone, 8,000 suspects were arrested, with 6,000 of these actually born in Paris – “foreigners,” as provincials were called, were not particular targets of suspicion, in a city where only a quarter of the capital’s adult population was born in the city by 1793. Arrested suspects were typically held on average for eight months, with the vast majority of the arrests and releases taking place in a one-year period between August 1793 and August 1794.

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Official executions were the ultimate fate of a minority of the suspects. Historians find between 16,600 and 40,000 such “legal” death penalties carried through for all of France, and 2,625 within Paris, although different forms of popular terror claimed far more lives. The total number of deaths among revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries in this period is beyond exact historical reckoning but this may total as many as 200,000 souls. Beyond these numbers, though, the mass of documentation resulting from the various legal procedures of the Terror – interrogations, denunciations, appeals, letters, and police reports – give a fine-grained quotidian account of workers’ movements and wage disputes to supplement the labor and industrial policy debates taking place in the Convention. Emerging from these dossiers in the police archives of accused or suspected partisans are traces of the real practices of workers, sans-culottes, and revolutionary officials in the wartime economy of the Years II and III.49 In the private sector, disputes and uprisings on the building sites of Paris continued to flare up in the Terror. The unfolding of labor contestation was rarely captured in petition literature of this time, considered treasonable, and thus, in many cases written accounts of participants’ demands are denied to the historian. The only archival recourse, then, are the many papers of the Committee of General Security (Comité de sûreté générale) and the Revolutionary Tribunal, the two most active repressive organs of the revolutionary government. The preponderance of evidence was examined by 16 magistrates, 60 jurors, and the public prosecutor Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, at the heart of the Terror’s justice system first established in March 1793. Dossiers were reviewed, verified, and presented by the 48 sections’ justices of the peace and police commissioners, qualified to intervene decisively in matters concerning the command of capital and labor on the building site. Wage disputes figure prominently in the papers of these jurisdictions, where conflict no longer provoked protracted negotiations, with, at times, inconclusive results based on compromise. Typically, the justice of the peace and police commissioner reviewed the denunciations of the sectional surveillance committees, and then forwarded reports to the Committee of General Security or Revolutionary Tribunal, depending upon the seriousness of the supposed crimes, for final review and implementation. At the bottom of this pyramid-shaped hierarchy were the simple militants of the 48 Parisian sections, each of which had between 12,000 and 25,000 members. An incident that epitomized the logic of revolutionary justice on the building sites of the Year II was provoked by the complaints filed by three entrepreneur carpenters of the Section du faubourg de Bondy

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between 18 and 24 June 1794 against journeymen who were accused of inciting fellow carpenters to strike on several public sites. Evidence of this dispute survives in the testimony of the striking carpenters, in supportive letters written by workmates, and in the denunciations of supervisors in charge of various ateliers. The case was reported by the section’s justice of the peace for the Committee of Public Safety, along with a recommendation on the final settlement of the dispute. The matter of contention was a “coalition” to raise the salary rate from 6 to 8 livres per day in flagrant violation of the Loi Le Chapelier and of the General Maximum.50 In criticizing the carpenters’ concerted work stoppage, “under the pretext of an augmentation of pay,” the justice of the peace focused on the peril of work stoppage to the national interest. The carpenters on these public sites were considered to be performing “work for the Republic,” and their delay was thus a grave “breach of engagements with the Republic.” However, the contentious carpenters were not condemned for having combined to breach the Maximum. They had struck to earn their market price, to match the salary of colleagues on nearby private sites who had persuaded masters to increase their wages. The justice found that, among the carpentry trades, it was collectively “the entrepreneurs (who) appear guilty in paying salaries superior to the Maximum to their workers.” The Maximum was breached by indulgent entrepreneurs elsewhere in Paris who had hired workers at excessively high wages. The Committee of Public Safety followed the justice’s recommendation not to prosecute the protagonists, and instead, voiced displeasure at the entrepreneurs’ lack of patriotic discipline. Here and elsewhere, the unfolding of wage disputes and other forms of strife in the building trades call into question the historical consensus about prosecutions under the Terror. In 1935, Donald Greer published findings – widely supported afterward – that the revolutionary government executed proportionately three times as many people from the “middling” ranks of artisans and laborers than from either social elites or the poor. Greer found that Parisian plebeian radicals aligned themselves with a revolutionary government vastly more open to arresting and executing individuals from their own milieu than from the top or bottom of the social scale. However, the problem with Greer’s findings is the social status of the sans-culottes. Having identified them as “middling,” the frequent appearance of suspects claiming the moniker of sans-culotte seemingly verifies a thesis of the Terror as a settling of accounts among sectarian artisans or laborers, with no discernable social objectives or ideological foundations. In the case of arrested building tradesmen,

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the revolutionary justices of the peace and police commissioners systematically arrested well-to-do entrepreneurs accused of corruption on public sites. These entrepreneurs wrote petitions, pleading for release, that minimized their social standing, while promoting their clientage networks, as we have seen with the “Citizen-Mason” François Du Bierre. Among Parisian builders, it would seem that there was some social and professional selection, albeit motivated by the demands of specific, extraordinary circumstances rather than by an overriding ideological commitment.51 Precautions against entrepreneurs were motivated principally not by class hatred but by apprehension about excessive liberty on the open market granted to employers in the building trades. Coinciding with the wartime emergency, building entrepreneurs had been granted wide latitude to pursue their affairs. The suppression of the moribund Academy of Architecture had liberated architects from all institutional constraints to engage in entrepreneurship, previously prohibited, while freeing entrepreneurs to seize on the moniker of architect to burnish their professional status. While the Revolution had clearly little to fear from most architects from a domestic security perspective, alarmingly, the very title of architect was often appropriated by entrepreneurs with absolutely no formal training in the art. Starting in August 1793, then, only the patente was required to organize and launch a building site. In the volatile period of the Terror and Thermidor, in the full chaos of constant administrative reorganization, the task of putting up buildings was basically open to all with the means to buy materials and hire workers.52 The confluence of real-estate opportunities and deregulation, in which the biens nationaux liberated much property for new construction while cheaper building materials such as plaster and rubble were substituted for cut stone, created well-grounded fears of chaos in construction. In the words of Robert Lindel of the Committee of Public Safety, ever-vigilant to repress dubious fabrication: “poor quality renders the Maximum illusory.” As revolutionary administrators dedicated much effort to the repression of inferior grades of cloth, the widespread use of compromised material in construction, such as damp wood fished out of the Seine or cracked shingles, was an even more ominous development. In addition, greater potential for profiteering, corruption, and fraud became a perceived and an actual threat. For this reason, the vigilance kept up against “suspect” social elements focused on construction entrepreneurs and architects to a greater degree than journeymen and day-laborers. Hence, the manuscript sources of the two authorities responsible to keep the domestic peace bolster one basic conclusion. Proportionately far more individuals arrested from the building

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trades were situated among the top ranks and not the middle or the bottom of the milieu’s socio-professional hierarchy.53 In the absence of an integrated building authority, the Revolutionary police became the sole arbiter to intervene on public and private work sites. As with the ancien régime commissioners, who worked hand in glove with the guilds of their quarter, the Revolutionary police was exceedingly zealous in the prosecution of sloppy construction. Those malfaçons typically penalized by a mild fine in the ancien régime – if ajudged to be due to negligence – now became a security breach, an imprisonable offense. The committee, for example, ordered the entrepreneur Clement on 23 Thermidor, Year II (10 August 1794) to be held in prison for unspecified blunders in the reconstruction of the building that housed the Ministère de la Guerre. He was freed after members of his own Section du Museum testified on his behalf that he always “paid the greatest attention to fulfill the duties of his état, and always gave unequivocal proof of his political zeal.” In the absence of sound workmanship Clement’s demonstrated revolutionary activism saved him from a longer sentence.54 In a sampling of 181 detained builders’ dossiers of the Committee of General Security and the Revolutionary Tribunal, during the two and a half year period between March 1793 and November 1795, elites on and off the construction site were much more likely to be imprisoned or denounced in relation to journeymen or apprentices. While 49 of the 181 detained builders (27 percent) could be identified as architects, entrepreneurs, or technical experts for the state, those workers in masonry, identified as “compagnon,” “garcon,” or as plain “mason” or “stone cutter,” totaled 81 (45 percent) arrested building tradesmen. By contrast, the same capacious category of elite in 1790–1791 numbered only 3.7 percent of all Parisian builders, while workers in masonry made up 67 percent of the building trades. The prominent number of detained elites is further underscored by the centralized structure of the building trades, and hence the relatively few entrepreneurs in an economic sector that averaged one employer – excluding architects and inspectors – for every 15 workers (Table 4.1). Architects, as we have seen, were an exceptional group for they were in a particularly delicate situation and thus invited particularly unwanted attention from Jacobin police organs. They were either new men on the construction site, and therefore were often entrepreneurs who had misappropriated the title of architects, free for all to use; or if correctly trained as architects they may have enjoyed a conspicuous relationship to the Crown. Association with the suppressed Academy of

1/93–10/95 Comité de Sûreté Générale

3/93–5/95 Tribunal Révolutionnaire

Totals

“Elites” ARCHITECTS COMMISSIONERS/INSPECTORS OF PUBLIC WORKS ENTREPRENEURS/MASTER MASONS

15 6 7

10 3 8

25 9 15

“Laborers” JOURNEYMEN (COMPAGNONS OR OUVRIERS) MASONS STONECUTTERS DAILY LABORERS (MANOUVRIERS) JOURNEYMEN CARPENTERS PAINTERS PAVERS ROOFERS PLASTERERS SCULPTORS

25 8 0 9 2 1 4 1 0

20 8 20 21 7 1 4 0 1

45 16 20 30 9 2 8 1 1

10.1057/9780230245280 - Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution, Allan Potofsky

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to University of MN Twin Cities - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-22

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Table 4.1 Socio-Professional Identities: Police dossiers of builders, 1793–1795

1/93–10/95 Comité de Sûreté Générale

3/93–5/95 Tribunal Révolutionnaire

Totals

“Elites” ARCHITECTS COMMISSIONERS/INSPECTORS OF PUBLIC WORKS ENTREPRENEURS/MASTER MASONS

28

21

49

“Laborers” JOURNEYMEN (COMPAGNONS OR OUVRIERS) MASONS STONECUTTERS DAILY LABORERS (MANOUVRIERS) JOURNEYMEN CARPENTERS PAINTERS PAVERS ROOFERS PLASTERERS SCULPTORS

50

82

132

COMBINED TOTALS

171

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Architectural expertise recognized by the ancien régime was no longer viewed in neutral fashion as a guarantee of technical prowess. The Crown’s domain that governed public structures relied on architects of the Academy, and a large part of academic training was, in fact, service to the Crown including such mundane affairs as inspections and verifying bills. Hence, Jacobin polemics against “academic despotism” were leveled against architects as well as philosophes and savants. The charge against the celebrated visionary-architect, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, for instance, was that he participated in “construction for the tyrant,” by designing the widely detested tollhouses largely dismantled on the eve of the fall of the Bastille. The accusations by the Committee of Public Safety contained in his 50-page dossier take his professional relationship with the Crown as collaboration with enemies of the Republic. Even the elimination of architects from the sampling yields an impressive 15 percent of detained members of building trades issued from the elite, meaning they were proportionately three times more likely to fall afoul of revolutionary jurisdictions. Furthermore, the political careers of architects in the Terror and Thermidor as related by their dossiers suggest that in many cases they were not targeted only as suspected royal conspirators – counter-revolution was a routine part of the litany of charges against almost all arrested former members of the suppressed royal academies, especially, that of architecture. Three architects confirmed Jacobin prejudices by engaging in lucrative yet dubious activities in the Revolution once sanctioned under the ancien régime. Their arrest and detention stemmed from the submission of false accounts to the Public Works Commission for phantom laborers or for unnecessary materials. In 1792, the abuses were corrected by reforms and tighter inspections; the Revolutionary Government of the Years II and III took punitive action by imprisoning, and occasionally, executing offenders through the deadly accusation that corruption was inspired by counter-revolutionary motives.55 The most severe sentences were meted out to architects and entrepreneurs who were condemned for cheating the republic out of precious revenues tied to national property. The architect Claude Phillipe Coqueau, for example, was executed in Thermidor, Year II, for the charge of corruption in his office as an assessor of the National Lands (Domaine national), which he systematically undervalued in hopes of profiting from the sale of biens nationaux. His political crime was to have personally profited from an office secured through a claim to technical expertise as surveyor, a widespread practice among holders of venal offices in the ancien régime.56 Also, the building entrepreneur, Despline,

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had earned a place as administrator in charge of contracting in the Commission of Public Works. He too was accused of seeking to fix the bidding of biens nationaux “to obtain a low price” to buy several lots for himself and his son. Despite the protest that he “was always a frank sans-culotte, an active and hard-working artisan,” Despline was arrested for “abuse of power” based on the low prices he paid for several lots that he himself had inspected for sale. More fortunate than Coqueau, Despline spent several months in prison.57 The often lethal accusation of corruption formed the crux of charges against the building entrepreneurs, architects, and inspectors of the Republic. With the Republic in danger, the profiteering of Coqueau and Despline was ruthlessly prosecuted by the Revolutionary police. The motivation to fold the Public Works Commission within the Ministry of Interior was to secure public projects against corruption and misuse of office.58 Later, however, preventive steps were taken along with punitive ones to preclude such abuses as profiteering and shoddy construction on private and public sites. On the local level, highly politicized sectional officers were a feeble substitute for technical experts to appraise the good faith of contractors. The national Public Works Commission by the summer of 1794 thus streamlined procedures for the hiring of an elite and politically reliable corps of builders. One prominent member of the Commission, the Pantheon’s Chief Inspector Rondelet, brought the meticulous and draconian sense of order over hiring, payment, and verification practiced on the site of the Pantheon. An elaborate table composed in Rondelet’s hand listing builders considered for positions of authority on work sites included a category on “recommendations.” A letter of political support by a member of the Convention, or, more effective yet, by a reputable architect colleague, was the determinant factor in securing a position on public works projects. Forty-six architects applied for employment on public sites in the Years II and III, and 11 were hired in various capacities; only 8 of the 46 petitions arrived accompanied by a dossier of at least one supporting letter, and six among these petitioners were hired. Apparently, the construction of civil structures required security guarantees at least as much as proof of genius or talent.59 Apart from the preponderance of elites, further examination of the numbers of detainees broken down by profession reveals that arrests among the more popular trades were relatively few, especially, in light of the reputation of building workers as deeply antisocial elements. For instance, only an average number of detentions occurred among the masonry trades which comprised 81 total arrests. They constituted

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61 percent of all building laborers arrested, entirely consistent with their numbers in 1790–1791 when they made up 67 percent of all building tradesmen. However, among these masonry workers the relatively few stonecutters (16) contrast sharply with their heavy presence on salary rolls, petitions, and pamphlet literature. Petition literature, such as that signed by 380 stonecutters and dated 28 July 1791 complaining of low salaries and conditions on public works projects, suggest that later even greater numbers were to be found on the site.60 Pamphlet literature used the popular image of the gruff, provincial stonecutter to evoke the militant revolutionary, who unflinchingly embraces the Terror as a reflexive reaction inspired by his own misery and ignorance. For example, one anti-Robespierrist Thermidorian pamphlet, written anonymously following the downfall of the Robespierrist Montagnards in 1794, vilifies a simple-minded stonecutter as Brise-Raison (“Reasonbreaker”), a play on stone-breaker. Brise-Raison passionately and absurdly defends the Terror’s course against the commonsensical military officer, Tranche-Montagne, who, true to his name, and without evident partisan fervor, coolly proclaims the need to “cut off the Montagne.” Here as elsewhere, stonecutters were associated with mindless radicalism, and were vividly connected by the popular imagination to the Terror.61 The stonecutters were not the only builders to have apparently escaped the brunt of persecution during the Terror and Thermidor. Another statistical anomaly among the building trades was represented by the building sculptors (sculpteurs en bâtiments). Judging from their vociferous agitation for more pay, one would expect large numbers of arrest dossiers of members of this trade. Sculptors should have ideally fit the bill of a classic definition of a sans-culotte, as a skilled “artisanal petit bourgeois” whose politics were forged in close proximity within the workshop. With slightly higher wages, and an employer/employee ratio of one master for ten workers, it was among the most paternalist skilled trades on the building site. Furthermore, they frequently petitioned denounce working conditions at the Pantheon, pointing to the probable existence of a literate cadre among this craft.62 In all of Paris, they numbered under a thousand at the beginning of the Revolution – comprising 5 percent of all Parisian builders – for their presence was demanded mostly for decorative work on the façades and inside of buildings. Yet, only a single sculptor in this period was arrested by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Alexandre Bernard worked on the Pantheon and was executed on 28 Prairial, Year II, for unspecified “counter-revolutionary activities.” Is it possible that, save this one exception, sculptors did not always accurately identify their trade before revolutionary organs in

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an effort to obscure politically suspect professional expertise? Bernard’s dossier, for example, occasionally interchanged his craft as stonecutter and sculptor.63 The one trade heavily over-represented by the arrest dossiers was that of the carpenters, who made up nearly one in ten of all building tradesmen. Their crime statistics under the ancien régime reflected the same proportion (8 percent of all builders arrested), signifying they were no more and no less susceptible to be apprehended for ordinary crime such as theft between 1770 and 1789.64 Under the Revolution, many were deeply politicized, as we have seen, flooding the municipality of Paris and national governments with petitions for higher pay. The temporary nature of their principal task on work sites – putting up and taking down scaffolding – added to the precarity of their employment and urgency of their demands for higher wages. The 1791 Loi Le Chapelier abolishing the guilds was, in fact, passed in response to upheavals in this trade.65 One would thus expect the frequent appearance of carpenters before revolutionary committees and tribunals. Indeed, the carpenters of Paris were often detained for worksite and political crimes, as they comprised nearly four in ten of the total number in this small sampling of building laborers arrested in the Terror and during Thermidor. The Parisian carpenters, almost entirely native to Paris, were proportionately two and a half times more likely to be targeted for political repression in the Years II and III. They, and not the often maligned provincials, the maçons de la Creuse, were the most heavily prosecuted laborers of the building site. Several conclusions may be drawn from the distribution of arrests and interrogations among builders in this limited sample. The structure of the building trades influenced the focus of policing during the Terror and Thermidor. As discussed above, the ancien régime carpenters’ guild was particularly dependent upon the local police commissioner to control its own. As opposed to the masons’ corporation, which became a repository of enlightened techniques of self-government, the carpenters’ guild was a closed corporation that relied heavily on police raids to guard its lucrative privileges. It also featured a predominance of native Parisians as members of the trade. The abolition of the guilds denied the carpenters the corporate mediation of police commissioners, and until the Terror they became tireless petitioners to resolve grievances. With the increased reliance of the centralized Committee of Public Safety upon elected justices of the peace and police commissioners, the ancien régime pattern of condemnations and surprise raids on workshops took hold once more.66 The ex-master carpenters knew how to use this

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system and once again the ex-journeymen carpenters ran afoul of it most often. Continuities between the personnel that staffed the ancien régime and Revolutionary policing institutions – and the mobilization of entrepreneurs and former masters as sectional officers – suggest that contentious carpenters were well known to many individual police officials and were closely watched by several jurisdictions. The case of the journeyman carpenter Jerome Benoit, imprisoned and interrogated for provoking a movement for wages surpassing the limits imposed by the Maximum, unfolded like an ancien régime labor dispute. Only now the usual grim procedure of police raid, adjudication, and judgment was overlaid with the full disposition of political power at the hands of the aggrieved entrepreneur. Benoit, previously known to hold “no opinions against the interests of the Republic,” was accused by the carpentry contractor Louis-François Dorigny (1754– 1794) of the section of Popincourt of “fomenting a cabal” and provoking a wage strike to demand an increase in pay from seven to an improbable ten livres. (Another denunciation put the demands at “twenty or thirty livres.”) The subtext of this labor dispute, however, is the status of the accuser, never made explicit in the police dossier, for Dorigny was not merely an ordinary entrepreneur and sectional militant. He was also a prominent political figure representing the Robespierrist faction in the Commune of Paris. Dorigny would be arrested and guillotined, along with 80 other Montagnard partisans, the very day after Robespierre and his immediate circle perished in Thermidor. The contradictory details that emerge from these 17 pages of interrogations agree on a few points: on 21 June 1794 (3 Messidor, II), the journeyman carpenter, accompanied by several other workers, abruptly left Dorigny’s carpentry workshop on the rue St. Denis without prior notification, never to return. In the words of Dorigny, “the turmoil that reigned among the workers has continued and a disorder quite troubling to the public good persists in my worksite.” Some of Benoit’s former “comrades” in fact signed a deposition to the effect that he had successfully intimidated journeymen to walk off the site over a wage dispute. In the course of the inquiry, however, Benoit testified that he quit the workshop simply to start his own enterprise (“entreprendre des ouvrages à mon comte”). He was supported in this matter by two carpenters who claimed that they had also left the site to work for the “former journeyman carpenter” Benoit.67 The charge against Benoit of a political crime, constituted by fomenting a wage movement in wartime, seems to mask another, much

The Terror and Thermidor, 1793–1795 177

older kind of dispute: namely, that of a former master carpenter wishing to restore abolished monopoly privileges over his labor force. The entrepreneur Dorigny used municipal and sectional political connections to charge Benoit as a suspect by transforming the core issue – an employee who wished to become a competing entrepreneur – into a violation of the Maximum. Dorigny was successful in this endeavor as the surveillance committee recommended that Benoit and his colleagues be imprisoned, where they languished for several months (although it is unclear when they were released). Not even the eventual execution of Benoit’s Robespierrist accuser the following month was sufficient cause to spare the journeyman from imprisonment.68 Benoit’s arrest dossier illustrates the mélange of political and social composants of the Terror. The smooth command of labor meant entrepreneurs made ready use of available repressive organisms which applied the General Maximum on wages and prices in order to stamp out counter-revolution. The range of worksite crimes treated as political offenses might have been extended to include any challenge to entrepreneurial authority. If, then, the extraordinary measures of the Terror were wielded as repressive measures against labor, how were the agents of entrepreneurial capital treated by the same police mechanisms? Was the Terror as harsh in treating the suspect activities of entrepreneurs, architects, and supervisory personnel? Apart from their frequent detentions, the elite cadres were carefully policed on public sites considered sensitive to the prosecution of the war and for domestic surveillance, as in the example cited earlier of the entrepreneur Clement, imprisoned for flawed and negligent construction (malfaçon). Working for the nation in peril, however, could have its rewards as well as its hazards. If corrupt builders were relentlessly pursued, then demonstrably competent ones were treated with leniency. The masonry entrepreneur Pierre Decressac was jailed between August and December 1793, after members of his section denounced him for counter-revolutionary statements. His participation in the construction of civil buildings, particularly prisons, allowed him to obtain a petition by an architect colleague that these projects “on the Republic’s account suffer in his absence, their security is compromised, and it is in the interest of the Republic which suffers from mistakes that might be made, for the arrest of this citizen obstructs us from preventing or repairing these mistakes.”69 Besides his role as a builder of the Revolution’s structures, the case of Decressac illustrates the social components of good citizenship in this period. The documents in his police file place his entrepreneurship of

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public buildings in a positive light as evidence of his virtuous “labor for the Republic.” Productive and industrious activity reinforced his good standing as a frequent provider of patriotic contributions, as an elector in elections for the justice of the peace, and as an upstanding member of the National Guard. A petition from an inspector-general of buildings of the Republic also testifies to his “utility for the public good as one of those who has acted vigorously to accelerate works for the Republic.” The disciplined command of entrepreneurial capital, if uncorrupted, was a vital symbol of Republican zeal. The final revolutionary days of action during the Thermidorian era focused renewed attention on agitation in the workshops, manufactures, and construction sites of Paris. Beginning with the journée of 12 Germinal (1 April 1795), and concluding with the journée of Prairial (20–23 May 1795), the Parisian crowd erupted twice inside the Convention, while in session, to protest against the scarcity and price of bread. On the first day of Prairial, the severed head of Jean Féraud, a conservative deputy, was bandied about the Convention. The populations of the faubourg Saint-Antoine and the faubourg Saint-Marcel were in open revolt, and the demand for subsistence was appended to a more politicized slogan: Bread and the suspended, never-applied Constitution of 1793 which had institutionalized universal manhood suffrage and the right to subsistence. To the Parisian crowd, this constitution embodied an egalitarian revolutionary promise buried by the Thermidorian regime. Following bloodshed within the Convention, the repression of the sectional movement following Prairial was merciless: over a hundred suspects from 34 of Paris’ 48 sections were imprisoned, with six “martyrs” condemned to be guillotined.70 Among the most fervent locales of militancy during Prairial was the site of the Pantheon, which had continued its secularization through war and mass mobilization, emptied government coffers, and inflation. With the exception of occasional ephemeral construction and repairs prompted by fêtes to install France’s “Great Men,” such as the exalted defender of the site’s laborers, Jean-Paul Marat in September 1794, the Pantheon was only sporadically active between the adoption of the Maximum and Napoleon’s revival of France’s imperial designs. (The secularization of the structure was completed in 1797, but in 1806 the Pantheon was restored to the Church, entailing further re-construction.) Stemming from the Prairial journée, several arrests were made on the Pantheon’s site. The investigating police commissioner heard testimony that the laborers had gotten in the habit of listening, at lunchtime, to a reading of an incendiary journal, L’auditeur national,

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by a 41-year-old journeyman stonecutter, Jacques Closménil (or, variously spelled, Closmesnil). Over a hundred stonecutters on the Pantheon’s site heard one public reading during Prairial lauding the attacks upon counter-revolutionaries in the Convention. Based on a denunciation by one of the masonry contractors, and by the damning testimony of two permanent guards posted at the site, Cloménil was accused of being a ringleader of Prairial. Although his condemnation was practically secured in advance, in a vain attempt to save their colleague, a petition signed by 30 masons from the site describe him as having been a good companion to their work, with all the wisdom and calm of a true Republican, having always respected all that radiated (sic) from the National Convention; and having always been the public reader chosen among us . . . . . ., he reads to us every day at lunch time the newspaper called the Auditor, that we collectively paid for in order to render us more avid (pour nous zélés) with fraternity for all. The Auditeur national of 21 May 1795 was indeed filled with deeply provocative calls to rise up against the “tyrannical” Thermidorian government. Fully embracing the “new insurrection” in Paris against the counter-revolutionary government, it listed demands for: (1) bread; (2) abolition of the present government; (3) application of the Constitution of 1793; (4) the arrest of all members of the government and the liberation of all imprisoned patriots; (5) convocation of the primary assemblies; (6) putting all proprietors under surveillance by the people. Furthermore, the crisis dictated the sealing up of the city of Paris itself: “the tollgates must be closed and all people prevented from leaving Paris, except for those citizens charged with provisioning.” In rousing terms, the Auditeur national called for nothing short than a veritable state of emergency in the capital.71 Another awkwardly rendered petition supporting Cloménil confirms the damning facts observed by the Committee of General Safety, but explain away the public readings during Prairial as having been an innocent mistake: (t)wo intruders without doubt spread several incendiary writings among the workers; and one of us who just received these writings asked the Citizen (Closménil) as the lector, to read the paper to us. And while sitting on the scaffolding (les pièces de bois) among us, he stood up and read aloud without knowing what the paper contained.

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And having read his, he said, “My God, this writing is not good it is over the top” (ma foy cette ecrit n’est pas Bon il est trop fort de caffé), this is his own expression and this is the truth, we hope you will be just and will be fair to a father of a family who committed a mistake (lerence (sic)) without having meant to.72 The awkward, analphabetic language of his co-workers’ petition sought to lay the responsibility upon unknown “intruders,” who were not attached to the site. Also, it was claimed, the Auditeur national was completely unfamiliar to the journeyman stonecutter (in contradiction to the declaration that he found it “over the top”). In the interrogations of his workmates, however, emerged details of organized public readings of other inflammatory literature on the site. Without the notable status of spared sans-culotte builders, the simple militant Cloménil was judged and condemned harshly for the crime of being a “Terrorist:” his sentence was two years of forced labor. Aggravating his case was that he lived in the relatively faraway neighborhood of Les Halles, and his Section des Marchés was targeted under Thermidor as the center of Robespierrist activity. Following Cloménil’s arrest and sentencing, the ardor of Pantheon laborers would be further cooled by politically motivated suspensions of work on the site.73 The search for a “police” of urban labor between 1793 and 1795, in the absence of a single, true, national labor policy, contained a core paradox: to build the ideal visionary city that embodied revolutionary virtue in wartime required a well-policed building site that exemplified, simultaneously, technical expertise in construction, Jacobin political steadfastness, and the manifest ability to mobilize patronage networks, all the while demonstrating an iron command of labor. For the ambition to police a productive construction site was driven simultaneously by utopian ambition and by false memory. The administrators of the Pantheon, the Public Works Commission, and the Jacobin builder were united in continually evoking an idyll of republican harmony: one which revolved around an ideal personage wielding a model of technocratic objectivity embodied by the building inspector and the justice of the peace. Simultaneously, given the insufficiency of revolutionary institutions to assure proper expertise and organization in construction ventures, the building site was progressively entrusted to notable building entrepreneurs, justices of the peace, and police commissioners who resembled their ancien régime equivalents in terms of mobilizing clientage networks, civic probity, and local power. The local notable and self-made “Citizen-Mason” Du Bierre cast himself as precisely this

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notable builder, deeply rooted in the particular needs and context of his neighborhood. To Du Bierre, a Jacobin builder was not only a competent craftsman, but also a “prominent” Republican citizen, for the command of labor at the work site was intimately linked to the recruitment of political actors in his section. By contrast, the journeyman stonecutter, Cloménil, from another neighborhood altogether than the faubourg Saint-Marcel, and much on the lower end of the Parisian world of work’s social scale, was supported merely by affirmations of innocence through a formulaic defense of his purity and his Republican credentials. Not surprising, in the repressive context of Thermidor, Du Bierre was quickly liberated and Closménil was condemned (His ultimate fate is not recorded in the police dossier.)

On the radicalization of the Year II The reign of technical experts alone, as the police commissioners’ reform project put it in January 1793, had given the capital little more than the “vacillating direction” of administrators on the disastrously mismanaged public work sites of the capital. The chief danger to the Republic lay in “immense assemblies of unknown men led by labor leaders (chefs des ouvriers) who are themselves dangerous to public tranquility.” The memory of the guild-based assemblies, raids, and police of workers was compelling enough for the police commissioners to seek and to obtain the imposition of revived corporate qualifications on the labor force, such as attestations from past employers and city residency requirements of at least one year to be eligible to be hired on public work sites. Even the most humiliating makework projects would thus demand proof of rootedness in the Republic – at least in its capital city.74 The drift toward a partial restoration of corporate structures was thus underway. Perceptions of disarray on public work sites, and of a spoiled workforce prematurely liberated from guild restrictions, began to clash with an increasingly attractive recollection of the well-policed and wellorganized building site. The next experiment in labor control would be founded on the faded memory of the institutions that had once embodied these qualities. Looking ahead, the broad project to revive ancien régime bodies for resolving labor and commercial disputes would indeed reach fruition under Napoleon. By creating a variety of industrial institutions, such as state-organized entrepreneurial guilds and chambers of commerce, and by articulating these with innovations such as the elected grievance boards (Conseils des Prud’hommes), the state revived the ancien régime corporate bodies – but henceforth on a centralized

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foundation. As we will see, the corporate revival to come was deeply conditioned by the Terror’s effective equilibrium of statist technoadministrators, individual entrepreneurs, and highly skilled, politicized artisans with trade-based concerns. The French exception of industrial development would eventually be modeled on a complex synergy between administrative state interventionism, technical expertise, and the well-policed labor force, as well as private entrepreneurship and corporate organization.75 Paradoxically, then, the Revolution’s innovations were also embedded in what it had helped to define as archaism. For along with its technocratic bias, the seeds were also sown in the period of the Terror for a partial recycling of the ancien régime corporate system of labor. Its method of control fused a historically sanctioned labor police with the particular demands of each craft – previously, the very definition of the police des métiers. The sans-culotte’s role in the Parisian world of work was particularly vital in this regard for he assimilated the ancien régime system of the command of labor to a revolutionary context. In the absence of the dismantled guilds, the clientelism and patronage networks mobilized by the sans-culottes was a time-tested form of labor control rooted in the abolished figure of the large-scale master artisan.76 Yet, the archaism of the sans-culotte was only one component of his complex social position. He collaborated not with journeymen and police commissioners, as in the ancien régime, but with employed labor, justices of the peace, techno-Jacobin officials in the role of inspectors, engineers, and architects, and, more broadly, the Revolution’s national institutions such as the Commission of Public Works. This elaborate hierarchy successfully stabilized wartime production through a formalized network of new bureaucracies that attempted to reform the worksite under reforged labor hierarchies. Only the exigencies of political upheaval and war cut short the elaboration of a true Jacobin labor system in this period to accompany its boldly formulated – and broadly successful – industrial policy. In the long run, the state controls of labor strife, in particular, the edicts and laws dictating work rhythms, as well as precisely defined methods for capital and labor to petition and file grievances, were precursors of future methods of centralized state interventionism in labor strife. They also partially provided the stuff the statist dream of commerce was made of.

5 Reconciling Commerce and Revolution, 1795–1805

“Republican” commerce under the Directory, 1795–1799 The Directory is portrayed by much of the Revolution’s historiography as a breakthrough moment for the liberal dream of commerce. Merchant trade was rehabilitated in public opinion, and revolutions and markets were finally reconciled. Private property in labor and capital, liberal commercial relations, and the cultural values of an industrial community were reconceptualized by statesmen, administrators, and intellectuals as vital components of a republican economy. Indeed, the Directory durably put into place the core social and political institutions of French capitalism by a public commitment to accommodate commercial exchanges and industrial development. Evidence of this conversion to laissez faire began with the 1795 foundation of the Institut’s Political Economy Section where the “Idéologues” emerged as a loose school with official capacities to spread the liberal doctrine. It continued with the 1797 law proclaiming free trade in grain. The ultimate legacy of the Directory’s labor and industrial policies was French acceptance of democratic capitalism.1 What form of commercial exchanges to favor, however, is the subject of a less consensual debate about the Republic’s “agrarians” and “industrialists.” Historians dispute the significance of a neo-physiocratic discourse promoting the citizen-farmer – in opposition to the politically unstable urban producer – as the archetypical commercial republican by the Directory’s defenders. Notwithstanding the persistent strength of agrarian interests, the Directory successfully imposed industrial production as the heart of market society. Industrial advocates, the most famous being the indefatigable Minister of Interior François de 183

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Neufchâteau, prevailed on many questions over investment priorities. The energy invested by Neufchâteau to launch an entrepreneurial ethos began to re-establish confidence by merchants, industrialists, and artisans. He cultivated urban commercial elites that had been deeply averse to engage in risky enterprises in the period following the Terror and Thermidor. Neufchâteau’s multiple endeavors focused on actively stimulating the investment of scarce financial resources in industrial production: his most exemplary act of promotion was to organize the first industrial exhibition on the Champ de Mars in 1798.2 This chapter reexamines a seemingly ineluctable movement from the statist dream of the Jacobin and Thermidor governments to the industrial forms of economic liberalism under the Directory. From the perspective of Parisian building sites, political discourse encouraging private investment masked deeper tensions between the state and the private entrepreneurs, particularly in the capital city. The Directory’s economic liberalism was instituted piecemeal, as a matter of pragmatic policy rather than as prefabricated ideology. For in this period, a two-pronged commercial debate took place. First, many private entrepreneurs were deeply hostile to a republic which had supposedly thwarted industrial growth during the war years. To this end, they widely reiterated the counter-factual myth of production in 1793–1794 as crippled by the General Maximum controlling wages and prices. The voices for an “anti-Robespierrist” economic policy were more absorbed by the critique of state interventionism writ large than by the articulation of a coherent ideological alternative. Second, the Republic’s political fragility disqualified it from squeezing growth out of the moribund economy, especially during the financial collapse in the summer of 1796. In the void that resulted, the entrepreneur was projected to assume the role of principal economic arbiter as well as the underwriter of certain public services. The state and the market were far from unified in theory and practice but were rather – temporarily and forcibly – engaged in a marriage of convenience under the Directory.3

The state and the construction entrepreneur: A rapprochement? Many state and Parisian municipal administrators, including freshly minted civil architects, engineers, and other public servants, were convinced that unbridled competition was an obstruction to the development of a market-driven economy. Unchecked market forces were blamed for the perception of generalized “anarchy” represented by

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legal and commercial conflicts between proprietors, entrepreneurs, contractors, and administrators. It also sowed the seeds of labor strife. The Directory’s administrators formulated a harsh assessment of some entrepreneurs’ appropriation of the functions of public service in the sensitive domain of public construction.4 The critical voices of public functionaries on this subject had real weight given their sheer numbers in the capital city. In 1796, 16,000 public servants worked in Paris alone meaning that 5 percent of the population was constituted by functionaries and their families. This phenomenon of a ten-fold growth from the ancien régime gave the French language the very word, bureaucratie.5 Despite controversy and crisis, public investment in people and stones continued. The pace of Parisian construction was sluggish, but even in the face of inflation, deflation, currency depreciation, forced loans from taxpayers, and other desperate expedients, a few projects were launched, albeit often half-heartedly. Over a million livres were engaged by three monumental enterprises at the founding of the Directory in November 1795. This sum of money was voted for the restoration and extension of major national palaces that had suffered neglect or plundering under the early Revolution largely as a result of their aristocratic origins. They were: the palais du Luxembourg used as a prison after its nationalization and the future seat of the five-person executive council; the PalaisBourbon, to be rehabilitated as the lower legislative chamber known as the Conseil des cinq-cents; and finally, the palais des Tuileries the seat of the disbanded Convention and assigned to the Directory’s upper legislative chamber, the 250-member Conseil des anciens. The physical dispersal of these three structures in the capital gave substance and symbol to the constitutional separation of powers, and as Annie Jourdan has argued, their distribution within Paris also represented the spatial logic of spreading the Revolution throughout the nation. They were also physically to represent popular access to the centers of power. The credits for restoration voted by the Directory included lavish touches to républicaniser the palaces’ salons with commissioned figurines, paintings, and busts, and to open areas surrounding the palaces to more traffic as accomplished in the south of Paris with the boulevard de l’ Observatoire.6 However, these three chronically underfunded projects were left incomplete when the state gave up on their refurbishing and rehabilitation on the grounds of lack of finances in 1798, a year before the Directory was overthrown in Bonaparte’s 18 Brumaire coup d’état (9 November 1799). In any case, they engaged highly specialized artisans and artists in the building trades; few unskilled laborers benefited from

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the republican restoration of palaces. Elsewhere, public works proposals between 1795 and 1799 repeatedly reconceived, reconfigured, and redeployed private enterprise in the service of the depleted state. Even prestigious national architectural competitions were brutally annexed as forms of ersatz urban development. A competition for embellishing the Champs Elysées, launched by Neufchâteau in October 1798, was a mere pretext to invite the submission of inexpensive plans to clean up the neighborhood.7 As the nearly bankrupt state could only invest in the most pressing structural repairs, administrators deployed an exculpatory discourse to justify paralysis. Proof of the breakdown of unchecked market forces included the lack of quality material and labor, as well as absent financial controls over the few public construction projects launched, typically, in extremis. A single analysis was often reprised: the responsibility for organizing labor had fallen excessively upon individual entrepreneurs who, for reasons of cutthroat capitalist practices, had failed to execute contractual obligations – and this was chiefly because of corrupt profiteering and the spoiled conditions on their workforce, indulged to excess under the Revolution.8 The focus on the workforce and entrepreneurship on public works projects reflects the troubling heritage of urban poverty after the inaction of the Thermidorian government. In a sweeping decree of 20 June 1795, the Thermidorians charged Louis Lemit, the former president of the Parisian sections’ civil committees who we have met as a self-proclaimed sans-culotte fellow traveller, with disbanding the public spinning establishments of Paris. These had furnished work to 2,000 destitute women, elderly men, and children. The dismissal and dispersal of this “marginal” workforce, obliging many women to work at home, left the republican government with chronic unemployment and with few visible statist levers to alleviate it. In the name of anti-Robespierrism, the Thermidor administrators had criticized public works as inciting laborers to flock to sites where the tasks were easiest and compensation the most generous. In a purportedly liberalizing economy, the Parisian public work sites were once again to take the blame for nurturing bad social habits.9 Upon its arrival in power amidst one of the most punishing winters of the century in 1795, the Directory had tried to respond to the desperate condition of the capital’s impoverished population with tentative measures. These were most frequently the investment of derisory amounts of devaluated money in failing Parisian welfare schemes.10 With only modest resources for poor relief measures, the Directory concentrated

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on infrastructure construction, crumbling after ten years of neglect, and conceived the need for waterways, quays, roads, and city streets with arguments that public workshops assured the peace by inculcating labor discipline in order to secure the social peace. Throughout its existence, the Directory held fast to the idea that industry was to be encouraged as an antidote to poverty. Indeed, Neufchâteau was deeply sensitive to the desperation of the indigent population. “No government can end the existence of poverty,” he would write later, “but the most dignified use of public authority is to aid the poor, to find a way to end indigence, which is the leprosy of states, and to prevent the disorders created by laziness and misery.”11 In fact, little had changed in the discourse on welfare since La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt’s efforts as the president of the Committee on Mendicity in 1790 to 1791. The Directory’s programs, however, were achieved by redoubling efforts toward clarity, equity, and precision in “utilitarian” public works, only now in a period of hyperinflation and under a chronically unstable regime deeply challenged by the demands of international hostilities that led to the War of the Second Coalition (1799–1801).12 A solution to the challenge of urban renewal and transport networks in a period of acute economic crisis and looming conflict was to utilize the private sphere to save public service. As with all but the most menial public works destined for the unskilled unemployed, such as thread spinning or debris collection, the street and road construction under the Revolution was in theory awarded to the entrepreneur who entered the lowest bid in a competition. This commercial “agent,” as he was occasionally called, proceeded to command labor and materials in broad accordance with the terms of a contract with the state. As clarified after the municipal reforms of 1792, entrepreneurs of materials and labor bid competitively for contracts, receiving exact sums of money in exchange for the promise to complete given projects. After winning the contract, however, private businessmen were relatively untroubled by state controls as there was little follow-up on how these funds were distributed. This lax approach would end in October 1795, when the Thermidorian government abolished private competitions for street and road construction as “harmful” to the public interest. In applying this reform, the Directory voted to favor centralized sites under the control of a single inspector nominated by the Department of Public Works. The Deputy Marie-François Bonguyot acted as reporter on this reform of road building and reparations. He marshaled forth a statist argument against the private entrepreneurship of public works projects that paralleled the

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revolutionary charge of corruption on more notable sites such as the Pantheon. The public function of road building was compromised by individuals paid by the state to dispense salaries who, as an advance, “often received the entire price of the works that they have not finished.” To earn more money the winning bidder delayed “finishing his obligations, at times under the pretext that he cannot find workers, or at times because the workers have deserted workshops.” Infrastructure and other forms of urban development must supersede the principle of open public markets based on competitive contract bids.13 Far from being a banal question of an expanding state’s authority, these debates on transport infrastructure represented, as Dominique Margairaz has argued, the origin of public service in the fully modern sense of the term. The state assumed full responsibility to assure equal access to a service and its uninterrupted use by one and all.14 However, with work on many projects halted by emptied state coffers and administrative paralysis, the practices followed by entrepreneurs engaged in public works to improve or extend France’s street and road networks become an increasingly troublesome issue. For street and road construction became a simple case of making virtue out of necessity. They represented prominent jobs-creating and construction projects whose proper organization also represented a showcase for the fragile regime. Paradoxically, at the same time, entrepreneurs were deemed unworthy of carrying out public policies in a disinterested manner as amply demonstrated by the heavy procedures of control and verification at the heart of the 1795 plan to reinforce the Public Works Department’s scope and authority. The project evinced a scarcely disguised skepticism toward entrepreneurs to make the most routine repairs, in targeting them as failing their charge and overcharging the Republic. In parliamentary debates and in the meetings of commissions, they were faulted, above all, for lacking the proper means to supervise workers. The construction of France’s infrastructure and the disciplining of its labor force were compound functions of public service. The republic must be vigorously protected from the avarice of profit-minded entrepreneurs, even as they were acknowledged to be essential for the proper command of the workforce and the acquisition of materials.15

Toward a new “bureaucratie” of building In Paris, as we have seen, a reaction to the haphazard private construction on former ecclesiastical and aristocratic properties sold at auctions of biens nationaux led to an administrative centralization of

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urban planning in the hands of the Commission des artistes in March 1793. The 11-member Commission, seconded by a bewildering system of public juries and inspectors and in a context of war and terror, was not able to impose its plans for a renewed Paris until the First Empire. It held its last meeting under the Directory on 31 March 1797. But while the Commission des artistes addressed vast projects to rehabilitate the center and the peripheries of Paris, revolutionary-era urban development suffered from chronic underfunding and lack of a thriving private sector to pick up the slack. Predictably, a dearth of credit, investment possibilities, and investors’ lost confidence undermined much of the housing market from 1793 until the end of the century. As provincial migrants flowed into the capital, fleeing wartime hardship or wartimerelated work, the demand for accommodations outripped supply. After 1793, perhaps 100,000 people in the capital were temporary migrants from the provinces. The unsatisfied demand for housing in the Revolution in the midst of this influx of laborers remained steady, and the rapid increase in rooming houses (chambres garnies) took up much of the slack. They were estimated to lodge 10 percent of the migrant population in Paris.16 However, a classic narrative of a complete breakdown of private investment during the Directory must also be tempered. A finer chronology of the end of the eighteenth century demonstrates several brief economic rallies, in some parts of the nation, amidst the collapse. The 1796 harvest had been plentiful, and 1798 was one of general recovery.17 And in the upheavals disrupting construction, there were a few successfully completed projects with deeper implications for later urban development in the capital. Two Parisian streets, including new buildings and infrastructure, were completed under the Directory: the rue Mandar and the rue des Colonnes, both now on the far edges of the Right Bank Sentier and Bourse neighborhoods. The two streets were situated at the opposite ends of a northern arc (now, the first, second, ninth and tenth arrondissements) that was to be deeply transformed in coming years. In addition to the “Directory style” apartment buildings on the nearby Chaussée d’Antin, they reflected marked expansion of useable urban space toward the north and northwest. Quarters with nationalized religious structures and unexploited agricultural land were the objects of particular interest for speculators, promoters, contractors, and architects in a depressed economy. They were to be heavily exploited by promoters in the coming years, most notably, under Napoleon. Measured in numbers of completed structures, the Directory’s direct contribution to Paris construction may have been modest. Nonetheless,

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it was a period which traced out future spatial and stylistic changes in an expanding capital city. While the rue Mandar and its 17 apartment buildings are a sober example of functional architecture, featuring four-story buildings without ornamentation, the rue des Colonnes was a bold venture in experimentation incorporating ornate columns and uniform façades. It was the inspiration for the nearby rue de Rivoli, begun in 1802 under Napoleon. The rue des Colonnes, extending nearly a hundred meters in length before its mutilation during early nineteenth-century urban renewal, was a singular development. The fruit of the collaboration between the architect Joseph Bénard and the entrepreneur Pierre Fichet from 1793 to 1795, the street was entirely built by individuals who were never distinguished by previous urban projects. They were the “new men” the Revolution, a real-estate and construction bourgeoisie which owed its success to speculation and investment in confiscated biens nationaux, with financial ambitions which dovetailed with an urban

Figure 5.1 The rue des Colonnes. A street entirely conceived by Nicolas-Antoine Vestier with buildings designed by Joseph Bénard, completed in 1795. Its location to the North reflected general expansion toward areas beyond the city walls of Louis XIII destroyed after 1670.

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vision based on a collective use of urban space. The vibrant example of this street exhibits how the Revolution might have made a deeper impact on the Parisian urban environment had financial circumstances permitted. Formerly a private street expropriated from aristocratic proprietors, and auctioned to the investors, the rue des Colonnes was the fruit of a vision to extend and rebuild an entire street and its buildings in a homogenous, antique style. The very architecture of the street’s buildings celebrated the developers’ social ascension with simple, affordable apartments constructed with “noble” materials and with references to antiquity in the form of the arches. But the rue des Colonnes was a relatively rare exception of a private revolutionary urban project begun and completed without interruption. Many other plans and attempted investment schemes ultimately were compromised by the difficult economic and political circumstances of the depression (Figures 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6).18 Given the paucity of resources, and the wretched record for completing projects, the Directory increasingly justified the rare public

Figure 5.2 The rue des Colonnes. Columns and covered sidewalks furnished the model for the Napoleonic conception of the nearby rue de Rivoli. Uniform façades were increasingly used thereafter in Parisian construction.

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Figure 5.3 The rue de Rivoli, begun in 1802. The creation of an east–west axis was crucial to the Revolution’s renewal projects of Paris, as this street was projected in the plans of the Commission des Artistes, completed under the Directory.

Figure 5.4 The northern Chaussée d’Antin quarter features much construction in the sober Directory style, here recognizable in the frontons and arches above the windows. The building on the left was completed in 1800.

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Figure 5.5 The rue de la Chaussée d’Antin features particularly sober structures, such as this building designed by Nicolas-Antoine Vestier, in 1792–1793, the architect of the more audacious rue des Colonnes.

Figure 5.6 The neoclassical and “visionary” style of Etienne-Louis Boullée and Charles-Nicolas Ledoux is evoked in this courtyard hôtel particulier built in 1797 by François-Nicolas Trou on the Chaussée d’Antin.

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economic intervention in terms of providing work to the unemployed. A workforce composed of the able-bodied poor who could be educated through rigorous work habits justified investment in the rare endeavor to alleviate unemployment. As with the sites opened in Paris between 1788 and 1791, the workshops at the end of the eighteenth century were to teach economic independence through arduous labor at subsistence wages. And finally, like their predecessors, the micromanagement of the workshops was exhaustive. No aspect of work or pay would slip through a surveillance grill that would bring all the elements of construction into clear, albeit rigid, harmony with one another. Public workshops would hire the indigent population and mobilize a corps of government engineers to administer the sites and adjudicate the rate of pay. The piecework wages would be based on tasks performed rather than by a daily rate. As exemplary of the equitable organization of labor, the crystalline simplicity of these workshops offered the Republic “efficiency, facility, and economy.”19 The 1795 public works plan established that the labor force be composed principally of indigents possessing a bare minimum of resources. But the project was all the more concerned with the top than the bottom of the social scale. It mandated a precise hierarchy of engineers, foremen, entrepreneurs, and workers who would conform to inflexible schedules, and who would periodically report to supervisors. It also dictated the appointment of a foreman to discipline colleagues; systemize weekly payments via a thorough network of verifiers and district officials; and through preprinted formulas prescribe the very format of reports, surveys, and invoices acceptable to the Committee of Public Works.20 Tidy regulations embodied a vision of a well-policed worksite that enticed and frustrated construction administrators through the Directory, Consulate, and Empire. In sheer scope, the 1795 public works plan was not principally about reforming street and road construction, but rather about creating a model and highly visible showcase for workforce discipline under a precisely defined authority. It was no accident that, with such far-reaching aspirations, the plan sought to bypass altogether competitive adjudication for contracts, for the open market took too much for granted and could never fulfill the demand for “clarity and precision.”21 The French state faced monetary uncertainties, labor shortages, and a severe scarcity of tools and supplies. In order to finance the plan, the Directory’s only solution was to rely heavily on poll taxes to rebuild and repair the infrastructure of France. Proposed in September 1796, by Jacques Defermont, the poll taxes were poorly

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enforced, brought in little relief to the states’ coffers, and would be abolished by Napoleon in September 1806.22 The Directory was compelled to turn increasingly to entrepreneurs and contractors as it grew desperately aware of the menace to trade and transport represented by crumbling infrastructure and insufficient investment public works. The vicious cycle of plummeting domestic and foreign commerce at century’s end was reinforced by the absence of adequate roads to transport goods and people. An accounting in 1799 by in state officials described a nation whose vehicles had constantly to endure “bumpy streets or muddy ditches, smashed up vehicles, bruised passengers.”23 Reports of road construction, sewer fitting, installation of lighting, the erecting of public structures, bridges, and other Parisian projects constantly brought to the fore underfunding and lack of labor power as the twin causes of obstruction. Paris’ streets would cease to be repaired, complained a state functionary in 1797, “because of the considerable augmentation of the wages of the workforce,” due to the scarcity of foodstuffs. For a lack of inspectors, several streets opened without names, an inconvenience that “affects public utility, as this confuses property deeds.” Otherwise, the walls surrounding Paris were breached at several points, and these have merely been “closed provisionally by wooden planks which continue to demand constant reparations; we think that it would be preferable . . . to make repairs with rubble, when it can be afforded.”24 “When it can be afforded”: harassed officials of public works had other priorities than creating the well-ordered worksite. On the ground, pragmatic, time-tested solutions to public projects on the cheap were making a comeback, in a context of repeated financial and monetary setbacks. In a return to ancien régime practice, for example, the newly reorganized Council of Public Works began anew to award projects to a single entrepreneur, who sub-contracted the material and labor to others. Upon completion, the on-site inspection returned to the jurisdiction of the Council of Public Works which processed paperwork submitted by entrepreneurs through a Bureau of Controls for evaluation of wages disbursed and prices charged. Long delays in compensating verified expenses were routine.25 In theory, at least, public works contracted out to private entrepreneurs under the Directory exemplified the period’s ideological liberalism. But in practice, a heavily regulated bureaucratic structure suggested that the well-ordered public work site needed the very visible hand of extensive government review. This haphazard use and abuse of private entrepreneurship – amidst economic and military crises – engendered much distrust. Contractors

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were repeatedly accused of profiteering by charging the state exorbitant amounts for their goods and services; in return, the state often deferred payments or compensated with devalued currency. Infrastructure guidelines would, in turn, affect the building trades, where tensions between entrepreneurs and the state were fanned by several controversies. An entrepreneur-less public works system increasingly seemed a most tempting solution indeed.26 Nowhere was the chasm between the state’s construction intentions and gritty reality realized to a great extent than in the powerful Conseil des bâtiments civils (Council of Civic Buildings). This unique administration, founded in 1791 as the guilds were abolished, survived all phases of the Revolution, albeit in amorphous form as a “division” under the authority of the Ministry of Interior. Starting in late 1795, the Directory gave this bureaucratic organ a broad mandate over public structures, distinguishing thereafter between infrastructure and buildings. Its directive was to centralize all public investment construction in the hands of the three celebrated public architects. The Pantheon’s Chief Inspector, Jean-Baptiste Rondelet, the prodigious civic architect, Alexandre-Théodore Brogniart, and the future architect of the Arc de Triomphe, Jean-François Chalgrin, three advocates of a classical and practical civic architecture, were put in charge of a team of six inspectors. In a finely defined schema, each inspector had complete responsibility over one of six “classes” of structures, in which the function of a given building – hospitals, barracks, prisons – defined its place in a hierarchy of investment priorities. In the new order, the administration of public edifices made steep demands on the time, labor, and equipment of construction entrepreneurs to engage in the large-scale recycling and reconversion of nationalized buildings: a form of requisition by another name. Finally, the mission of a pragmatic, cost-efficient, revolutionary architecture was defined and made the core of official policy.27 The council’s charge was formulated in a circular issued by Rondelet in the spring of 1796. Rondelet called for assurances that “no work relating to civic buildings be undertaken at national expense without its utility, necessity, or other possible advantages having been established beforehand.” He demanded scrupulous “perfection, solidity, and economy,” as well as methodical verification of all payments. In the minutes of nearly 200 meetings under the Directory, these directives were scrupulously applied to the letter. They were also often in contradiction with one another. In pursuit of economy, half of the numerous detention centers, prisons, courthouses, and police stations were located in recycled former religious structures. Choice edifices included churches,

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monasteries, convents, and their dependencies such as stables. These were systematically recalibrated and refurbished to suit the new circumstances and functions. However, a fixation on minutiae led inspectors to reject payments for the slightest discrepancy in following detailed proposals. As Lauren Marie O’Connell finds, hospitals designed with beds less than two feet apart were rejected and ordered to be completely overhauled as health hazards. Tribunals which did not allow for theatrical procedures of courtroom entries and presentations were similarly condemned to be completely redone. In sum, the Conseil des bâtiments civils created an architecture of design following as much as possible the letter of a written program, suited to the structures’ function rather than to aesthetic form (Figures 5.7 and 5.8).28 The highly circumscribed field of action, in terms of economy and aesthetics, created tensions between the council and architects, as well as building administrators and entrepreneurs. More fiscal complications in the payment of salaries and contracts followed the Directory’s disastrous abolition of the assignats on 16 February 1796. By then, the currency had

Figure 5.7 An example of revolutionary architectural “recycling.” This building on the rue de Charonne constructed in 1739 for a religious order was nationalized, sold, and turned into spinning establishments under the Directory.

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Figure 5.8 The faubourg Saint-Antoine neighborhood received its name from the sprawling Abby of Saint-Antoine des Champs founded in 1198. Its nationalization allowed the redeployment of the main pavilion as the hospital of Saint-Antoine, still in use today.

declined to a mere 1 percent of its face value. The Conseil des bâtiments civils announced it would pay public construction entrepreneurs the equivalent value in a new currency, the mandat territorial in accordance to the Law of 18 March 1796 (28 Ventose, Year IV). But by the time precise language was hammered out in mid-April, earlier contracts were reduced drastically in value. Entrepreneurs were to be paid the equivalent of two francs in quickly falling mandats for every hundred francs owed. Unsurprisingly, by the summer of 1796, the new currency completely collapsed.29 In Paris, the practical bankruptcy of the republic drove salaries down precipitously, provoking desertions of many workshops and manufactures, while diminishing the value of all work under way on public sites. Twenty-seven building contractors involved in public works projects petitioned the Council “for means of bringing about a more equitable way of making payments.” They evoked a bleak picture of demoralized workers erecting unsound structures, because “the workforce is diminished so that the labor will take three times as long to finish.”

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The entrepreneurs’ complaints predictably had little impact. They were refused any settlement and were left with abandoned worksites, halfcompleted structures, and no hope of just compensation.30 The following year, a particularly harsh city-wide strike of carpenters in November 1797 seemed to herald deeper conflicts between capital and labor that the enfeebled state was unable to mediate. Aggravating matters was the financial corruption of several currency dealers and military contractors, further undermining political support for the Directory. Hyperinflation and a breakdown in credit meant that the private building sector offered bleak prospects. One former select guildsman, an ancien juréexpert, pathetically peddled his services for a pittance “in the function of an architect and builder of hospices” which were sorely in demand during a period of great national hardship.31 The perception of the state’s hostility toward private entrepreneurs, and the reality of corruption among contractors used by the Conseil des bâtiments civils, aggravated tensions between the private sector and government administrators through the end of the Directory. Rondelet, in particular, was zealous to assert the authority of officially qualified civil architects, those in the first classes of the École Polytechnique, in supervising public and private structures. He mandated another “new administration” in early 1798, that effectively turned over control of public worksites to a complex network of reliable architects serving as verifiers who would “check, calculate and appraise” all the work done on public construction. The broader aspiration of Rondelet’s project seemed to be the assimilation of all building, public and private, under the tutelage of a single administrative body. This paralleled an equally ambitious statist project to absorb French metallurgy in the Bureau of Mines and Quarries in late 1795. Again, after the announcement of Rondelet’s plan, private entrepreneurs responded with a petition to denounce the “patent injustice” of being stripped of market risks and gains. Again, their campaign was to no avail.32 In a reversal of the liberal dream of commerce, the drive to regiment building provoked strife between administrators and entrepreneurs during the tenure of the Directory. In consolidating the authority of the six public works inspectors, now responsible to safeguard construction in the capital, the Conseil des bâtiments civils assured the nation that even minor repairs of obscure public structures were to be protected against profiteering by entrepreneurial capital. Any charges of the cutting of corners would be closely reviewed and severely penalized. Worse, for offending contractors, charges of corruption and excessive exploitation unfolded against a backdrop of depression and monetary crises.

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In particular, urban labor shortages provoked by repeated subsistence crises and numerous requisitions, resulting in escalating demands for wage increases, absorbed the attention of numerous officials over the next 15 years.33 Looking ahead, only the revival of the Parisian Chamber of Commerce at the start of 1803, under the Interior Minister Jean-Antoine Chaptal, put a partial end to the complexities of defining, controlling, and delimiting the role of private entrepreneurs in public projects. In the law that fixed the mission of the Chamber of Commerce, it was charged, in corporatist terms, “to increase commercial prosperity, to demonstrate to the government those causes that hinder its progress, to indicate resources should be procured, and to inspect those public works related to commerce.” Later in the nineteenth century, public service was to be performed increasingly by private entrepreneurs entrusted with an enlarged role on behalf of the state. The reconstruction of vast swaths of the capital using public credit and private capital, a half century later, was partially instituted as a result of the Directory’s generally calamitous economic record. Lessons learned in that catastrophic experience later inspired breakthroughs in the ambitious formalization and bureaucratization of public service, beginning notably in public construction.34

The state, capital, and labor in the debate over wages during the Consulate, 1799–1804 In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the search for an efficient police of the building trades consumed the efforts of the dynamic Police Prefect of Paris, Louis-Nicolas Dubois (1758–1847). This commanding figure imposed his views and proposals upon often recalcitrant administrators, entrepreneurs, and laborers. He eventually succeeded in shaping the professional organization of the building trades during the Consulate and Empire. Dubois’ image of the building site as infiltrated by dissolute and criminal elements informed most Napoleonic policies toward the construction trades. To subdue builders, in his eyes, would be the central project in a larger ambition to rekindle, under the aegis of his office, the ancien régime police idea. His enthusiasm to restore many ancien régime institutions in Napoleonic Paris, often with reckless abandon, was driven by his experience as a student of the police. For early on, Dubois was distinctly marked by the political crucible that firmly imprinted and reinforced the police idea as a steadfast conviction: namely, Turgot’s failed 1776 experiment in liberalization.35

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Just arrived from Lille in the fateful year of 1776, Dubois was closely associated with the camp of Turgot’s foes, whose geographic and political center was the Parisian police and judicial headquarters at the Châtelet. His formation up to the Revolution took him even deeper into the institutions of the ancien régime police. In 1782, he became a barrister at the Parlement of Paris, and by 1783, he was “received” as an attorney in the Châtelet, where he practiced in the company of the future Terrorist prosecutor, Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville. After keeping a low profile during much of the Revolution as a member of the Council of the Department of Paris, Dubois emerged from relative obscurity to denounce Robespierre before the Convention on behalf of the Section des Quatre-Nations on 30 Brumaire, Year II (20 November 1793). An appointment to the post of judge in the Tribunal civil of the department of the Seine in November 1795 was a recognition of Dubois’ political acumen. There, he eventually came to the attention of Bonaparte’s future Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché.36 Dubois’ immediate impact upon the office of Prefecture of Police, created under the Law of 28 Pluviôse, Year VIII (17 February 1800) with sweeping powers over the Parisian municipality, was in the daily reports filed during the Consulate and Empire on the “public spirit” of Parisians. These reports reflect the concerns and prejudices of Dubois, and in particular, they manifest the former prosecuter’s single-minded ambition to impose order both on the urban landscape and on the building sites of Paris. In scrupulous detail, the rhythms of builders’ activities were captured in police reports on the “public spirit.” In concise descriptions and commentaries of the builders’ “public spirit,” meaning their inclination to engage, or not, in labor actions, the police papers provide the social context of the dramatic reforms of the worksite undertaken during the Consulate and the early years of the Empire.37 “On the place de Grève a considerable number of building tradesmen are saying that the lack of jobs deprives them of their basic means of subsistence.”38 The fear in the spring of 1800 was that unemployment and inflation had combined to create a potentially incendiary situation. The police was particularly vigilant of daily gatherings of workers at traditional sites of hiring, as well as sites known for harboring the notorious boarding houses where migrants were housed: The Châtelet, place Maubert, the tour Saint-Jacques, and the quays of the Seine were particularly well policed; these sites surfaced often in these reports as potential hotspots. Yet no quarter was covered with the diligence and social hatred of the place de Grève where building workers congregated to be hired by the day or week in a giant labor market.39 The loathing this area inspired

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was only matched by apprehension, as it was often monitored for numbers of workers and their demeanor. Hence, in March 1800, “the number of those (workers) who are not hired is considerable; we count up to 600 each day on the place de Grève.”40 The cycle of complaints and reports of minor disturbances continued through the Consulate. Their tenor becomes alarmist in the wake of bad news from the war fronts, during food shortages and even with the approach of the anniversaries of the Revolution’s grandes journées. The promulgation of the Constitution of the Year VIII, for example, fell during the anniversary of the Prairial journée, in May 1800, sparking an uprising by building workers on a site next to the tollhouse in the south of Paris, the barrière des Gobelins. They were heard agitating for “the re-establishment of the Constitution of 1793, with modifications.” The example of upheavals among the stonecutters at the Pantheon who had rallied around the slogan five years earlier had apparently not been forgotten on other building sites of Paris.41 The repressive effectiveness of new organs such as the Prefecture of Police established under the Consulate and Empire was apparent to contemporary observers. In the words of the Gazette de Paris, by midSeptember 1802, “Public peace, formerly so tentative, so vacillating, is now supported by the most solid of methods . . . .”42 Reinforcing this judgment after the food shortages of 1801–1802, a simple phrase is frequently used to describe the disposition of workers in Paris: “Serenity reigns in the workshops and building sites.”43 But despite increased confidence in policing techniques, the problem of labor strife was sporadically evoked. A leitmotif running through police documents is that of persistent dissatisfaction with the traditional hiring practices of entrepreneurs. Congregations of builders milling about at the place de Grève were cited as demonstrations of “the laziness of a multitude of workers,” who passively waited for work instead of actively searching on their own account.44 It was, then, the impulse to make labor relations more routine, to force both employers and employees to be responsible for public safety, that gave rise to the first major labor reform during the Consulate. To Dubois, the Police Prefect of Paris, the formalization and standardization of labor relations created an opportunity to revive apprenticeships and workers’ livrets, or passbooks. By mandating that all workers carry such passbooks, the law of 22 Germinal, Year XI (12 April 1803) relied upon entrepreneurs’ “attestations” of a workers’ past employment to keep the workforce durably pacified. Upon demand, the law stipulated that the passbook, complete with the dates of employment, must

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be deposited in the hands of the employer on the first day on the job. It was to be returned, complete with an optional testimony to good performance, only when the worker fulfilled the original “engagement” or had notified the employer 40 days in advance of an intention to leave. The work history of every laborer, thus documented, assured that men and women had carried out their work contracts to the letter.45 Why were the passbooks instituted at this particular time? The preceding year had not featured any significant agitation by Parisian workers. Consoling police reports on the esprit public in Paris during the months encompassing the promulgation of the law convey the bustling activity of the streets with few notable disruptions of the social peace. In fact, on 8 April 1803, just four days before the law mandating the passbooks was announced, a work stoppage by a group of journeymen hatters illustrated the lighter and more confident touch of police intervention in this relatively quiet period. The hatters briefly stopped work one morning over a salary dispute, but after the swift mediation of the prefect in bringing workers and masters together, the journeymen took up work that very afternoon. There was no resort to the quick repression or punishment that typically signaled the end of such actions.46 By November 1803, the prefecture of Paris observed that “everyone is at work. The worksites, above all in the building trades, are still in full activity.”47 In mid-April 1804, the police noted with satisfaction a slashing of bread prices, accompanied by “no more talk of an increase of pay among carpenters or hatters.” At the beginning of May 1804, there was only “peace among the workers.”48 The passbooks seem to have succeeded in the “pacification” of the labor force. This period of relative labor calm, however, was widely though falsely believed to have been bought with higher wages and labor shortages. The passbooks were implemented during the brief Peace of Amiens (25 March 1802 to 18 May 1803) but the breakout of war between Britain and France the following year made scarce manpower and a dramatic increase of public construction preconditions for rampant wage inflation. Across the Atlantic, military expeditions to Saint Domingue and Guadeloupe, and the armed restoration of slavery in the colonies, after May 1802, created further sensitivity to strains on urban manpower. The great fear of labor scarcity drove competing entrepreneurs to raise salaries to attract workers from competitors’ sites. The conjuncture of the demands of war, the launching of many construction projects in Paris, and constraints on the migration of laborers to urban areas ineluctably drove up the wages of building workers. This cycle, favorable to Parisian labor, stirred fears of wage inflation in other sectors. The

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specter of a spiral of ascending salaries haunted future discussions of labor reform.49 Also apparently aggravating the labor shortage in the Capital were public works projects opened in the winter of 1802–1803 intended to keep the unemployed working during a particularly harsh winter. Performing such unskilled tasks as clearing away rubbish on roads and demolishing condemned structures were 1,500 laborers hired at near subsistence wages.50 The police prefect, by 1802, was alerted to the association between abundant work and spiraling wages: “The workers see with pleasure that work on bridges is start up in a few days . . . they will use this moment to demand an augmentation of salary.” To curb the bidding war for labor, and to stem the workers’ flow to the most lucrative sites, the system of passbooks was expanded to deter laborers from leaving their employers at will.51 While the passbooks may have originally been intended to inhibit competitive labor practices by entrepreneurs, the law did not include a system of quotidian administrative controls. It provided no institutional framework for hearing grievances brought under its provisions, despite fixing exact penalties for abuse of the system, particularly, fines and prison sentences for organizing coalitions.52 A police decree of December 1803 (9 Frimaire, Year XII) was to broaden comprehension of the passbook system by instructing workers on how to obtain the necessary papers from the local police. It also elaborated upon the procedures of depositing and retrieving the passbooks from employers. Finally, the police decree repeated its threat that all workers traveling without the passbook will be prosecuted as “vagabonds.”53 The passbook system may be comprehended as foreshadowing of the articles 291, 292, 414, 416, and 1781 of the Napoleonic Civil Code of March 1804 which forbade all “coalitions,” and notoriously made compulsory that a judge and jury credit the veracity of a master’s testimony over that of any laborer and before any tribunal. Associations constituted by more than 20 members were disbanded. This last measure was superficially an evenhanded abolition, suppressing employers’ combinations as well as laboring organizations and journeymen’s brotherhoods (compagnonnages). But the penalties for such combinations were predictably much harsher in the case of workers than the entrepreneurs. The livrets, in sum, were only one piece of a broader campaign to toughen an already harsh labor policy.54 A strike in the carpentry trades in September 1804, several months after the installation of the first Empire, shattered the illusion of a permanently pacified Parisian labor force. The carpenters on the site of

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the Pantheon, preparing scaffolding ahead of minor alterations, “abandoned their station and demanded, as they have the custom to do in pressing circumstances, an exorbitant raise.” They boldly sought an increase from 4 francs to 10 francs per day. Dubois reports having personally seen to the “removal of the mutinous ones, and after having examined them severely, I recognized that three among them were the principal ringleaders (chefs d’émeute) and the veritable provocateurs of this coalition.” He recited and dismissed their claim to be striking only for a predetermined “fixing of the wages of a workday,” concluding rather ominously that “this response is only evasive, and the information taken in this affair will leave no doubt as to their culpability.” The principals in this affair were sentenced to terms ranging from a week to a month in prison, in accordance with the dissuasive punishment outlined in the 1803 Frimaire Decree.55 In reaction to the strike, a circular was drawn up to reinforce labor peace on the building sites of Paris. In the project’s draft report, the prefect articulated his ambition to reduce competition in the labor market.56 Simultaneously, with the full elaboration of yet another repressive mechanism, the full apparatus of the system of passbooks was installed. Published evidence of this final, often overlooked postscript to the history of the passbooks consists of an Almanach des ouvriers, published in November 1804. The almanac directed all workers to new police institutions that would regulate laborers and centralize the hiring practices of entrepreneurs. This 50-page publication was intended for circulation to all workers in Paris; its portable size and cheap paper suggest that it was meant to be pocketed by workers for instant access to references to its addresses, regulations, and citations of the Napoleonic Code.57 The almanac underscored the importance to register all “apprentices” from the provinces at the local police commissioner’s office. Each commissioner was given jurisdiction over several categories of workers, with the building tradesmen joining the equally contentious hatters and, mysteriously, the luthiers, those dangerous makers of stringed musical instruments. Upon arrival in Paris, members of these professions were to report to Almain, police commissioner of the Right Bank Division de la Réunion, in the neighborhood of the rue Saint-Martin, to be issued the passbook and to enroll in a labor exchange. (The address of this labor exchange was situated next to the former Masons’ and Carpenters’ Guild dismantled in 1791.) The entrepreneur was invited to hire journeymen at this office for the fee of 1.5 or 2 francs, then about half a day’s pay for most building workers, to be paid by both employer and employee.

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Besides controlling the labor flow, this measure also had an evident fiscal advantage for the Napoleonic state.58 The new system most followed closely the dictates of the 48 Parisian commissioners’ project of January 1793, which, as we have seen, sought to centralize authority over worksites in the hands of a labor police. It also duplicated the employment agencies (bureaux d’adresse) for domestic servants, first set up in Paris in the seventeenth century, intended to guarantee the integrity of prospective employees entering bourgeois homes.59 Now, however, the commissioners’ offices were to serve as placement office to supplant the more anarchic labor market on the place de Grève. Hiring no longer would follow timeworn tradition and instead comply with a routine procedure carried out before the police commissaire in one of 16 placement offices in Paris. There, the commissioner would register workers and verify the soundness of their contracts with entrepreneurs.60 Taken as an ensemble, the labor reforms on the eve of Empire signal the partial restoration of the authority of the lieutenant général de police, the all-encompassing office of the Paris police in the ancien régime.61 The legislative proposals and projects clearly bear the imprint of Dubois and his experience and worldview as former prosecutor in the institutional defender of the ancien régime police idea, the Grande chambre du Parlement de Paris. Dubois’ successful advocacy on behalf of the restoration of guilds relating to foodstuffs in 1800, coupled with the movement from apprenticeships to passbooks to placement offices in 1803–1804, amplified the power of the state over relations between capital and labor. Subsistence and labor discipline were now codified as two Napoleonic exemptions to the dictates of the open market.62 A greater command over the workforce was intended, above all, to forestall competition for labor and to reverse the erosion of work habits withered under what was denounced as the Revolution’s lax liberalism. Wily journeymen, it was believed, had taken advantage of the open labor market to improve work conditions to work less for more pay. Following such reasoning, Dubois henceforth sought to restrict the authority of entrepreneurs to make underhanded private arrangements with workers. As symbolized by the frenetic place de Grève, repeatedly condemned for attracting provincials to its menacing quarters, the old labor market was to be replaced by the readily observable police commissioner’s office, open from 9:00 to 7:00, six days a week. The almanac’s requirement for migrants to enlist with commissioners stripped entrepreneurs of the authority to make explicit or implicit private contracts with journeymen. It thus embodied the objective of

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creating a national stable of reliable workers whose places of residence and employment were henceforth known to the state.63 The revival of ancien régime structures under Dubois gathered momentum in the Empire: a stream of circulars and projects between 1804 and 1806 elaborated an ever more complex system of state containment of the labor market. Also, to the dismay of the increasingly isolated advocates of liberalism within such institutions as the Paris Chamber of Commerce, voices were raised in favor of the restoration of the guilds. The debate over a statist or corporatist model of French commerce and industry took on renewed momentum.64 Most prominent among the ventures to reforge the workforce through a vigorously interventionist policy were ambitious efforts to regulate the rhythm of work among the building trades. Such a reform project emerged from the rivalry between the administration of public works and public edifices, on the one hand, and the police and the Ministry of Interior on the other, leading to heightened competition for imaginative administrative schemes to reorganize the police of the labor site. After a noted intervention on labor reform by Antoine Vaudoyer (1756–1846), one of the six national inspectors of the Conseil de Bâtiments civils and an architect specializing in modifying and creating extensions of significant historical structures, construction administrators poured forth circulars, proposals, and projects addressing the policing of the swollen population of building workers which descended upon Paris to find employment under the “new urbanism.”65 In 1805, Vaudoyer launched a concerted effort to control the working hours of builders. In a sweeping indictment of current practices on building sites, written as a series of suggestions to the Minister of Interior in 1805, Vaudoyer linked the decline in work discipline to the wider issue of decay in the quality of building construction. The root of both these ills was the excessive social “liberty” ushered in by the Revolution. Before 1790, building trades workers always started the longest days of the summer at 5:00 in the morning, (working) to 7:00 in the evening. Since this period, and because of the Revolution’s negligence, these workers have reduced the workday by one hour of work in the morning and one hour in the evening, while increasing their salaries. As a result, . . . they are less than dedicated and they no longer form apprentices or educate pupils in the difficult branches of the building trades, so that a structure takes a third time more to erect than before, and at much greater cost.66

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Vaudoyer put forth a comprehensive project formulated as a restoration of pre-revolutionary civic mindedness. His rationale was essentially to purge the projects of recalcitrant workers, to set an example so that the unwanted “will leave the building site.” Those who will cause “trouble will be deprived of their passbooks and find it impossible to gain work elsewhere.” Eliminating corrupted builders would set up models of a disciplined workforce. Hence, to implement the new system, Vaudoyer centered the proposal on establishing public sites as “examples for all the private workshops that will result in (promoting) the general good.”67 Vaudoyer excoriated a spoiled workforce corrupted by the Revolution to promote a tough standardization of labor conditions. Previously, the decay of working habits ushered in by the lax era of the Revolution had been widely denounced by Regnault, rapporteur of the law on passbooks in 1803, and who decried the “anarchy” that had reigned since the ancien régime: “Liberty was once too restricted; since then license has reigned unchecked.”68 In contrast to previous “balanced” critiques of both the ancien régime and the Revolution, Vaudoyer in 1805 highlighted a supposed revolutionary decline in light of a wistful view of the Crown. The loss of technical expertise was the unintended consequence of the suppression of apprenticeships by the d’Allarde Law of 1791. This was hardly a novel claim: among many other voices, in 1798, the Ideologue philosopher, Destutt de Tracy, as inspector of the Ecoles centrales and author of national textbooks for public schools, maintained that the revolutionary suppression of apprenticeships had been lethal to French industry.69 Vaudoyer, on the other hand, linked the observation of the lack of young specialized workers “in the difficult branches of the building trades” to the high cost of construction. Inflation led to the loss of qualified younger workers who were now deemed too expensive. They were systematically replaced by cheap unskilled labor. Vaudoyer’s plan would not merely create a prototype site – such as had been attempted at the Pantheon – that would convince by furnishing a model of efficiency. Rather, he sought to assure the exemplary nature of construction by applying a unique urban labor policy on all sites, public and private, in the capital city.70 By synthesizing these disparate ideas as the basis for one sweeping reform, Vaudoyer’s arguments provoked a series of circulars and meetings among the administrators within the Napoleonic building authority. The minutes of these policy debates convey a single unambiguous motif. Vaudoyer had successfully crystallized a broadly shared sentiment that the construction sites of Paris must be recast as a symbol of the well-policed state. The hours as well as the quality of work and

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workers represented on the worksite must embody the imperial aspiration to logic and rigor, one that sacrifices entrepreneurial methods of organization in favor of state-directed exactitude.71 Vaudoyer’s grand reforms unfolded in the specific context of high expectations for the imminent launching of grand projects. Based upon the much-watched evidence of the arrival of expensive cut stone, inspected and taxed upon entering Paris as construction material, the amount of quarried stone brought to Paris between 1801 and 1805 had more than doubled; and between 1805 and 1809, cut stone increased from around 20,000 square meters to 45,000 square meters.72 Napoleon’s ambitions to craft a new urban landscape were clearly proclaimed, and the widespread sense of opportunity risked provoking greater labor demands by the workforce – as the vigilant police was already well aware. In May 1805, a sense of urgency to tighten discipline among builders was compounded by a series of strikes among stonecutters. The alarmed Prefect Dubois noted that the stonecutters were committing “what they call ‘grève’ (that is to say, to quit work) to demand an increase in pay.” The patois term “grève” – strike – surfaced first in 1785, as we have seen, and emerged occasionally in police reports at the end of the eighteenth century but would enter the standard vocabulary of labor relations following this report.73 Notwithstanding such agitation within the public spirit, the Vaudoyer proposal first met unexpected opposition from the Parisian Police Prefect Dubois. Originally, Dubois seemed primed to act as a fervent partisan of the measure, having earlier condemned the dwindling work hours put in by builders. He calculated that, through lax administration, 20,000 workers lost 300 hours of work each building season, or every six months, meaning that France was paying 2 million more francs per year for the equivalent amount of construction than before the Revolution.74 Yet faced with actually implementing longer hours, in a letter written early in 1806, the Prefect admitted that more rigorous hours may “maintain accepted public manners (moeurs),” but concluded that the notion of a fixed standard of working hours was itself fictional. Underscoring the relative nature of definitions of a workday, Dubois cited edicts on the subject dating from the era of Charles IX and reasoned that, “it will be perhaps difficult to put ‘the’ former rules into practice . . . ” In conclusion, he returned to the issue of policing builders as a practical matter, concluding that the “application of the means of repression is foreign” to the primary preoccupations of government architects.75 The Vaudoyer project eventually won the favor of the Emperor. Napoleon requested a report on the means of executing it through the

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agency of the police.76 He also instructed Pierre Antoine Noël Mathieu Bruno Daru, Intendant General of the Emperor’s Domain (Maison de l’Empereur), to compel the architects contracted by Napoleon to employ only workers “who will consistently work in following the old (i.e., ancien régime) hours.”77 Starting on 1 April 1806, a new labor policy was to be put in place: Napoleonic building administrators were to dictate the hours and wages of all workers hired by entrepreneurs of public sites. In other French industries, the impassioned defenders of liberalization in the Parisian Chamber of Commerce successfully thwarted, for the time being anyway, the revival of proposed government restrictions on commercial ventures. Among the building trades, by contrast the state was fully engaged to clamp down on the competitive practices of entrepreneurs in the name of work discipline, quality control, and public safety.78 The recalcitrant prefect at first delayed the implementation of the Vaudoyer plan to impose fixed hours on public worksites. In a final reply addressed to the architects of the government, Dubois sought to impose an alternative solution, despite the administrative momentum toward a quick approval of the project. He now demanded “to apply the mode of execution” through consultations with the parties involved. At this point, the police prefect of Paris drew upon his earlier experience during the Maximum in organizing merchants dealing in subsistence items to propose the convocation of an all-encompassing assembly – a sort of Estates-General of builders – that would gather the police, state administrators, architects, and entrepreneurs together in a series of meetings on building reforms.79 Dubois’ proposal ultimately formed the blueprint for restoring the building entrepreneurs’ corporation in a reconfigured form in 1810. Collaboration between the police and builders followed Dubois’ conviction, forged in his legal work under the ancien régime, that la douce police – the soft or gentle police – was assured by the “establishment of order and economy in the world of work and that it is only proper for the government to give the primary impulse to this operation.” He affirmed that just as his office could organize and execute certain measures, so would it also rely upon the initiative of masters and entrepreneurs to be the cutting edge of true reform.80 In a concerted effort to deepen cooperation between the state and civil society, two meetings took place between Dubois, the General Secretary of the Prefecture of Police, Pierre-Antoine-Auguste Piis, the Minister of the General Police Joseph Fouché, as well as architects attached to the Maison de l’Empereur, the Council of Public Works, and the Conseil des bâtiments civils. Deliberations of these meetings

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indicate unanimity of purpose behind the Vaudoyer plan. On the table before the assembly was a definitive project to fix the working hours of Parisian builders to a 12-hour workday in summer, beginning at 5:00 and lasting until 7:00, with two one-hour breaks at 9:00 and at 2:00. In the winter, the shorter day would last from 7:00 to sunset, with a single break from 10:00 to 11:00. Although repeatedly described as a revival of ancien régime workday the plan in fact called for an increase in the conventional builders’ workday by at least an hour per day.81 The real novelty of the plan was to invent a tradition of a single rigorous and methodically followed workday. As we have seen, in fact, the typical journeyman’s day in the ancien régime and Revolution fluctuated greatly, between a fourth of a day and the occasional 13-hour day. Also, frequent absences or temporary layoffs by masters were consistently noted in salary rolls. The notion of “timediscipline,” in E. P. Thompson’s memorable formulation, was indeed learned on the task by many migrant builders in preindustrial Paris, such as the maçons de la Creuse, who had left behind peasant holdings where “task-discipline” instead was practiced from time immemorial. The rhythms of particular enterprises and, among other factors, unpredictable weather and unstable credit, made work – then as now – in the building trades perhaps the most irregular of occupations.82 Conscious of its own audacity, the assembly took the tone of a highminded project of social engineering. It condemned, once again, bad habits contracted during the Revolution, and directed blame on “the small number of those with the tendency to do nothing, and whose debauchery renders them apathetic to the sense of duty.” Balancing the harsh crackdown on lazy workers was a paternalist concern for those men in bad health forced to work “excessively for long stretches at a time.” All participants came together on these general principles of the project, with mild objections, previously voiced by Fouché, raised over its level of policing detail. As a result of the objection to excessive regulation, the meeting adjourned without proposing specific changes “which might plant in the minds of workers . . . incertitude and useless interpretations.” The most audacious aspect of the Vaudoyer plan was its ambition to apply equally to both public and private worksites to eliminate competition between the two spheres. No explanation was given and no opposition was expressed to the inherent difficulties in projecting a single workday in all Parisian construction. Interventionism in private commercial affairs was thus conceived as an organic extension of the role of the Napoleonic police. The new state of things would merely reflect

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“the return to order and general improvement of life which are carried out in other parts of the administrative regime.” Napoleonic administrators would oversee the application of a project to make Paris a vast experiment in labor discipline. 83 Trepidation informed the first reactions of the policy’s own enforcers. An architect attached to the Maison de l’Empereur succeeded in having the plan delayed in his ministry to late September by appealing for public calm during the féte “to the glory of the army” to be held in August 1806. He bluntly argued that the joy inspired by the fête could be “disturbed by the expected resistance of individuals to this new rule.”84 Shortly afterward, a police commissioner warned of dissatisfaction among many architects who were not convinced of the policy’s feasibility and who could not be expected “to fulfill its demands.” While predictable remarks by the Minister of Finance Martin Michel Charles Gaudin and the General Intendant of the Maison de l’Empereur Pierre Daru were favorable, there were real qualms about generalized defiance – from functionaries, entrepreneurs, and laborers – on a variety of fronts.85 Adding to a potentially incendiary reaction to the new working hours were generalized hostility to increases in indirect taxation. The government in April 1806 had temporarily reinstituted the hated ancien régime tax on salt, formerly called the gabelle, and proceeded to expand and increase the merchandise tax (octroi) to fund-strained municipal budgets. Finally, taxes on postage and wine were also increased. Grain prices were considered reasonably stable at this time, but general inflation and stagnant wages created the widespread impression of a decline in real earnings.86 Inflationary fears provoked a brief strike by the stonecutters at the Palais Impérial in June 1806. Their job action was conducted “on the pretext of the high cost of living,” according to the police bulletin. The stonecutters’ modest demand of a raise of 5 sous per day, from a base wage of 3.5 francs, was predictably refused. Lowly apprentices, moreover, declined to participate in the protest and continued to work. In the face of internal division and intimidated by the commissioner’s appearance, the stonecutters “clenched their tools and withdrew to avoid the appearance of forming a coalition.” This brief skirmish would shortly prove to be a failed rehearsal for a far more unified joint action.87 Besides questions raised about the equity of new fiscal policies, the administrators of this reform expressed doubt about the equity of imposing labor discipline from above: further complicating the process of implementing new hours among the building trades was the decision in May 1806, to launch an adjudicatory body to settle business and labor conflicts, the Conseils de prud’hommes, in smaller industries.

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While the first of these Conseils opened to regulate Lyons textile manufacturers, the state had acknowledged by these councils that disputes between employers and workers needed to be resolved through “impartial” elected bodies, founded on the presumption of a balanced hearing of all commercial grievances. Twenty-six Conseils de prud’hommes would be created between 1806 and 1813, but the glaring exclusion of simple laborers and the omission of such large-scale industries as construction could only have aggravated labor strife in the sector.88 Predictably, then, the language of the police ordinance promulgated on 26 September 1806 contained evidence of rethinking by the “new administrative regime” of public construction. Its final version imposed an 11-hour workday in the summer months, defined as the period between April 1 and September 30. In fact, the apparent reduction of one hour from the adopted version of the Vaudoyer project was a false concession to critics of the plan. For while the workday was to start an hour later, the ordinance also contained the added stipulation that workers had to show up at the place of work (chez les maîtres) an hour before starting work. Unmentioned was the actual innovation of this “new administrative regime:” the place de Grève was to be bypassed as the primary meeting place of building laborers and masters. Presumably, the master’s home or office represented a verifiable location of the rendezvous, where the time of arrival could be closely controlled. The feared reaction of construction workers to the new regulations began on 2 October 1806. Stonecutters, carpenters, sculptors, and roofers – apprentices and journeymen alike – who were attached to the Palais Impérial, the Corps legislatif, and other public sites, simultaneously walked off the job. They were quoted by the police bulletins: “we are treated like beasts of burden.” A broad solidarity, cutting across boundaries of craft and neighborhood, was manifested in this strike. Forty-five out of the 80 masons at the Pantheon, then restoring the structure back into a church, left their work posts and the new bridge, the pont d’Austerlitz, was deserted by all of its workers. Most of the 4,000 building trades workers employed on public sites were reported to have joined the movement, even in the face of the threat of vigorous repression. On the first day alone, 27 of the most “defiant” workers were arrested, and eventually around 150 builders would be incarcerated at the prison of the Bicêtre.89 Police bulletins during the following week were filled with narrative accounts of this movement. On 6 October 1806, a “slanderous poster” appeared in select areas, including the door of the prefecture of Police. It was composed by stonecutters inviting their allies “to preserve

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with all our power the hour of our meals as previously established and to not let ourselves be corrupted by sweet promises.” On 9 October, the public sites were still abandoned, with 600 to 700 striking public builders milling around the place de Grève seeking work with private entrepreneurs. Dubois commented on their increasingly “bitter” disposition.90 Shortly thereafter, the tide turned against the builders due, no doubt, to exhaustion and the threat of repression. By an edict of the police, the workers were locked out of private as well as public sites. By 12 October, they had returned to their workplaces and, it was remarked, had gathered and taken their meals at the appointed hours. On the following two days, the police turned back to their formulaic descriptions: “the stonecutters have reappeared in the workshops in fairly large number, and the entrepreneurs are satisfied. The greatest tranquility reigns everywhere.” Contention on the public sites had been resolved to the advantage of the state, the contractors, the entrepreneurs, and the investors of public construction.91 While labor contention may have been defused however, the primary effect of the 1806 ordinance and strike was to limit draconian labor policies to public worksites. The police was restricted to surveying and clamping down on state-run workshops. In conceding the private sites to individual negotiations between capital and labor, the Napoleonic police was unable and unwilling to impose universally the “new administrative regime.” The result was partial stalemate, for the public sites operated under the conditions set by the decree while the private workshops continued to function on the open labor market. Furthermore, the place de Grève never ceased to thrive as the central labor market for the building trades. While lengthening the workday on public sites, and conceding the contractual dispositions of the private sites, the Napoleonic police in collaboration with building administrators turned to other issues of labor reform. As will be shown, the 1806 ordinance and strike set the stage for a profound restructuring that would project the Napoleonic state deeper into relations between capital and labor. In the next series of reforms, movement in the labor market would be further restricted and the wage scale would be tightly regulated. Just as the debate on the workday compelled the invention of a “traditional” journée from time immemorial, so would the controversy over the daily rate inspire an administrative initiative of an ideal wage for each trade. Establishing statistical validity for the micro-management of the Parisian workforce in each of these domains would be the cornerstone of a statist industrial and labor policy. Monumental urban ambition informed by minute

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social scientific studies defined the next phase of the Napoleonic police of builders. In the decade separating the founding of the Directory from that of the Empire, the foundations of a market society – and the social conditions for its elaboration – developed in a symbiosis with state bureaucratic and policing mechanisms. The project to formalize relations, between the state and entrepreneurs on the one hand, and between entrepreneurs and labor on the other, generated momentum for ever-more ambitious efforts to launch a coherent urban policy merging private enterprise with public service and labor control. The urban projects to follow would be as deeply attentive to the housing market, to state-contracted architecture, and to the workforce that would erect the capital city of the Empire. The burgeoning “commercial republicanism” of the Directory was not sufficiently profound as to decouple commerce from statist centralization. Despite the forceful voice of a minority of industrialists and intellectuals in the period, the liberal dream of commerce was far from the chief aspiration of functionaries and statesmen.

6 Constraining Capital, Containing Labor: State Urban Planning of Paris, 1802–1815

The Napoleonic state and the Revolution In Parisian urban construction, as in other domains, the Napoleonic era appears the perfect synthesis of the ancien régime and the Revolution. Napoleonic policies in the realm of construction reinvented ancien régime structures, ultimately including a rehabilitation of corporations, as we will see. Simultaneously, the Empire forcefully reinvented and mobilized many of the Revolution’s urban institutions and ideologies to great effect. The very Janus-faced characteristics of the regime, nevertheless, still provokes an eternal question: was the Napoleonic moment more of an ancien régime restoration or revolutionary continuity?1 The argument privileging a return to the ancien régime often focuses on the rehabilitation of Empire by a vast program to engrave imperial representations upon the infrastructure of Paris. Among the more than one thousand “great monuments” constructed, the Arc de Triomphe continued with the monarchy’s tradition of copying Roman arches at the city’s entry points, including Louis XIV’s still-existent porte Saint Denis and porte Saint Martin, to commemorate national martial glory. Also, there was a distinctive family resemblance between Napoleonic and the monarchy’s state administration of public construction. The Conseil des bâtiments civils was reorganized on the centralized model of the Batîments du Roi, while the Maison de l’Empereur seemed to reprise the administration of the Maison du Roi. Napoleonic urban ambitions indeed seemed modeled on royal predecessors while ensconced in the ruins of the ancien régime state’s bureaucracy.2 This chapter will argue the Empire’s imperial building plans for Paris resuscitated and transformed Jacobin aspirations – to a much greater extent than ancien régime monarchical ambitions – for remaking 216

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Paris. The Revolution’s bequest to Napoleon was manifold, but its core was a unified and centralized vision of Paris. The capital city was reconceived as an urban space to be rendered more “rational” in organization; as a unique geographical space demanding greater access for provisioning; as a national treasure in need of embellishment; and finally as a treacherous political entity requiring close policing and surveillance. Although these components – rationality, circulation, beauty, order – seem disparate, the Napoleonic state handled them as an organic ensemble. The Napoleonic state wielded absolute power over municipal budgets and local revenue. It also absorbed for the central state in 1806 the integrity of administrative principles and of the general and municipal police. Very few strictly local functions remained for the Paris municipality, or for that matter, for any local French conglomeration with more than 2,000 individuals as repeatedly defined with scalpel-like precision by Napoleonic administrators.3 In fact, the Napoleonic state centralized so many functions of French municipal government that it may be said that Paris no longer existed as an administrative structure. By absorbing and synthesizing a range of objectives within an overall urban vision, the regime created a statist model divorced from municipal authority and from the constraints and opportunities of the burgeoning housing market. No detail escaped the imperial state’s scrutiny. This was particularly apparent in the construction and labor policies of the Napoleonic state. Harmonious and noble building materials, the precise hours of workers’ lunch breaks and other routine matters were ordained, measured, and verified by the state apparatus.4 In bypassing all local authority and in ignoring many financial concerns, a Napoleonic cornerstone also inspired future French statesmen. The compulsion to leave an indelible stamp upon the capital city with the grands travaux, the monumental public structures that grace (and in a few cases, defigure) the Parisian landscape was clearly a legacy of the Napoleonic statist dream. The Napoleonic regime also realized the Revolution’s project of consolidating the place of technical experts and civil engineers at the top of the building trades’ hierarchy. The Empire’s most notable projects were not architectural but utilitarian feats of civil engineering. Interventions that had quotidian impact on the lives of Parisians were favored for bringing more light, easier circulation, and greater safety to the city. Most notably, the rue de Rivoli on the Right Bank was pierced and its buildings and covered sidewalks were constructed on a standardized and

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uniform model that presaged Haussmannian construction of the Second Empire. Beyond this central street, three kilometers of accessible quays, extensive canals, numerous covered markets, several large-scale slaughterhouses, three grand cemeteries including Alexandre Brogniart’s Père Lachaise opened in 1804, several important boulevards, the systematic use of sidewalks, and many piazzas and squares were the direct result of Napoleonic goal to “carry out the last will and testament of the ancien régime.”5 Napoleon also had ambitions to make Paris “not only the most beautiful city that exists, the most beautiful city that has existed, and even the most beautiful city that could exist.”6 In the aesthetic realm, the construction of grandiose neoclassical structures, such as the Church of the Madeleine, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Bourse (the stock market, once again, designed by the prolific Brogniart), was pursued in earnest. Tireless creators of continuous, integrated, and homogenous façades, the regime gave a free hand to the most important government architects, in particular, Pierre-François Fontaine and Charles Percier. Imposing a neoclassical style – characterized as “Empire” in its more severe manifestations such as the Arc de Triomphe – Napoleon laid solid foundations for a large-scale transformation of the capital city via architectural coherence, administrative centralization, policing reforms, and massive public investment in infrastructure.7 In private building, a favorable real-estate conjuncture greatly boosted Napoleon’s dream of urban embellishment. The return of the émigrés began under the Directory and continued apace with the partial amnesties of October 1800 and April 1802; their homecoming often brought back to France repatriated fortunes sent abroad in more troubled times. Previously under-exploited parts of the city, in particular the Northwest quarters around the stock market (the Sentier, Bonnes Nouvelles, Palais Royal, faubourg Saint Honoré, and Chaussée d’Antin quarters), absorbed much of the new/old wealth and were active sites for private construction. More opportunities were opened up by the coup de grâce given to the remains of the immense complex of the Temple – a privately owned city (or Enclos) within the city, first created in the twelfth century as a real-estate investment for the vast fortune of the Knights Templars. These Right Bank neighborhoods became veritable enclaves of a Parisian bourgeoisie, and were distinguished in their dynamism to the still-abandoned aristocratic neighborhoods of

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the The Right Bank Marais and the Left Bank faubourg Saint-Germain. They encouraged much innovation as well. The first of Paris’ numerous arcades, the covered passageways that later absorbed the attention of Walter Benjamin were opened in 1799 (passage du Caire) and in 1800 (passage des Panoramas). Their many stores, lined up one after another and squeezed within a closed interior, made them a highly visible manifestation of intensified consumerism where for the first time, as Walter Benjamin noted, “customers perceive themselves as a mass.”8 The Left Bank, in the vast area occupied by the dismantled abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, was similarly transformed. The rue de l’Abbaye, the rue Bonaparte, and the place Furstenberg were partially opened on its former space after 1800, creating more axes running from the Seine to the south of the city. Other nationalized and razed convents, churches, and abbeys were sacrificed to create the rue d’Ulm and the rue d’Assas even further to the south.9 The revolutionary origins of the Napoleonic vision of Paris were outlined in the final plan of the Artists’ Commission, further refined by the Conseil des Bâtiments civils in 1796. As we have seen, the Commission had been attentive to the challenge of systematic development of new streets and buildings in neighborhoods where the haphazard appropriation of church and aristocratic lands as biens nationaux had deracinated the Parisian landscape. Napoleonic urban specialists seized the opportunity to focus on these areas to complete the demolition of numerous convents, churches, abbeys, and colleges, clearing the way for development on both the Right and the Left Bank. (In particular, Gothic religious architecture, execrated in the revolutionary period, paid a particularly heavy price.) The arcade, the passage du Caire, for example, was built on the exact emplacement of a thirteenth-century convent, nationalized in the early years of the Revolution but only razed under the Consulate. Walter Benjamin may have had this religious foundation in mind in his wry comment that “it may be said that something sacred, a vestige of the nave, still attaches to this row of commodities that is the arcade.”10 The law of 16 September 1807 greatly expanded the state’s prerogatives in matters concerning “public utility,” and created enormous advantages for the ruthless and expeditious appropriation of private property. Napoleon nationalized and tore down more Parisian structures than any Jacobin vandal, but rapid progress on many new Parisian sites created an indelible legacy of Napoleon the builder rather than the destroyer (Figures 6.1, 6.2, Maps 6.1, 6.2).11

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Figure 6.1 The canal of Saint-Martin was one of several Napoleonic grand urban projects employing the expertise of civil engineers. Constructed between 1802 and 1825, the 130 kilometers of Parisian canals brought fresh water to the city and disengaged water traffic on the Seine. But with few bridges, they also partially cut off parts of popular Northeast Paris from a contiguous relation with the rest of Paris.

Figure 6.2 The Palais Brogniart, known as the Bourse (the stock market). The neoclassical stock market was built by Alexandre-Théodore Brogniart as a Greek peristyle; its site was formerly that of a vast convent.

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Map 6.1 Turgot Map, 1739: The privately owned Enclos du Temple covered a vast stretch in what is now the northern Marais quarter, and was dismantled over the eighteenth century to create the neighborhood south of the place de la République today.

Map 6.2 Plan Routier de la Ville et Fauxbourgs de Paris . . . . (1810). Napoleon’s razing and clearance of remaining areas of the Enclos du Temple completed the city’s absorption of this quarter.

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Assessing, measuring, and policing the Parisian labor force Napoleonic prerequisites for the physical transformation of Paris included a deeper comprehension of the work rhythms and migratory movements of the nation’s workforce. Drawing on the lessons of the meandering and contradictory efforts of earlier revolutionaries, the Empire’s administrators were determined to establish a labor policy in harmony with the sociological and demographic facts on the ground. As they imposed the workers’ passbooks in 1803, the interior passports to control the labor flow, and the Civil Code in 1804, with its restrictions on associations for labor and capital, Napoleonic functionaries turned to measuring, appraising, and predicting the broader dynamics of the French population. Its availability as manual labor in a period of mass conscription, declining birth rates, and fluctuating population numbers, led to a larger query about its precise impact in swelling the numbers of manual laborers in the capital city. Would population numbers be sufficient to fulfill Napoleon’s promise of an efflorescent France? Or would the launching of large public worksites with an inadequate labor force drive up salaries and create an inflationary spiral? Only after responding to these questions would the regime’s efforts to codify work relations focus on repressing coalitions, capping salaries, and most ambitiously, restructuring the workday.12 The appointment of the chemist and medical doctor Jean-Antoine Chaptal as Minister of Interior (1801–1804) coincided with a largescale reorganization of the Bureau of Statistics which henceforth carved out a privileged place both within the Interior Ministry and the larger state hierarchy. In its ten years of existence (for its responsibilities were divided among other ministries in 1811) this bureau collected detailed statistics on population, hospitals, poverty, the price of grain, roads, taxes, and education in France. In the footsteps of his predecessors such as the previous Interior Ministers, François de Neufchâteau and the emperor’s younger brother, Lucien Bonaparte, Chaptal himself was greatly interested in the practical applications of eighteenth-century “political arithmetic” and launched a succession of studies to quantify the size, the movement, and the salary structure of the working population of France. His first demographic inquiry was the most ambitious. In a circular to all French prefects in September 1802, Chaptal attached a questionnaire seeking detailed statistical tables on each French department. In an introduction to the methods of his project, Chaptal wrote that “the just proportions between populations, births, deaths, and marriages are not well known,

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and we are easily misled by speculation in the most important areas of political economy.” The inquiry, addressed to the prefects, drew detailed responses as long as ten years after, and was the first trustworthy and comprehensive study of French demographics specifically concerned with labor migration.13 A particularly detailed report was produced for the Limousin region, whose southern area comprised the Department of the Creuse in 1790. It was renowned as the place of origin of the most talented masons and stonecutters working in Paris – to this day, the ageless limestone, granite, and stucco construction in this still-underpopulated region are a wonder to behold. (The area also gave its name to the common red brick, known as the brique creuse.) However, it was also notorious as the “archaic” region where Turgot served as the Crown’s intendant – the ancien régime equivalent of prefect – for 13 years from 1761 to 1774. As we have seen, more than half of the masons working in Paris during the Revolution were born there.14 The department’s Napoleonic prefect understood perfectly that the condition of these workers, their continued migration, their rural poverty and prospects of a better life would determine the success of imperial building ambitions in the capital.15 In his table submitted to the Statistics Bureau on March 1808, the prefect JeanFrédéric-Théodore Maurice estimated that 15,000 people left the Creuse yearly. (The total population of the department in 1809 was 226,224 inhabitants.) About 85 percent of migrant Creusois were building workers, a vast majority labored in the masonry trades, and almost all migrants headed for Paris, where wages were three to four times greater than in the provinces. Their success, however, in bringing back money to this impoverished region was minimal. The few immigrants who returned to the Creuse (estimated as one in four) arrived with an average of 130 francs, or the average of between 25–45 work days for a mason.16 For the prefect Maurice, the son of the former mayor of Geneva and imbued with a strict balance of trade perspective on economic matters, a mediocre sum of 130 francs in the pocket of a returning provincial meant healthy sums of money were left behind to circulate in the capital’s economy – and, of course, what was good for Paris was good for France. The paltry savings of migrant workers conclusively proved the effectiveness of subsistence wages that kept people working while assuring their earnings were pumped back into the Parisian economy. His blithe conclusions confirmed the darkest Malthusian prejudice that working salaries must be kept at a minimum and laborers locked into a cycle of perpetual insecurity for the national economy to remain sound.17

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Given a derisive return on such a vast undertaking as departure and return, why did the Limousins leave at all? What were the pressures that drove people north to the capital city? The response, in short, is the same attracting labor immigration today: grinding poverty and a dearth of good land. The small and subdivided properties of peasant families, in the words of the prefect, made land division among the children of peasants “extremely difficult and in general very uncommon. One of the effects of emigration was thus to prevent a greater subdivision of the property, which would render a great part of it unusable.”18 By migrating, many future building workers of Paris had opted for a grim but necessary alternative to indigence for the entire family. One conclusion of the inquest into migration for the Parisian labor market was that the capital city was assured a consistently cheap and abundant labor force for the construction trades. Never mind the macroeconomic context of the Continental System (1806–1813), the French boycott of British commerce, which shifted France’s economy away from Atlantic commerce and toward the European continent, disrupting agrarian sectors while strengthening certain domestic industries such as metallurgy, wool, and silk. Slower long-term demographic and agricultural pressures guaranteed that migratory patterns would continue in the future. In particular, the prefect seemed eager to lay to rest the anxieties of Parisian administrators that the Revolution, war, and blockade had dampened the zeal of rural masons to move northward. Responding to the question of the Revolution’s influence, the prefect concluded that its unfolding had all but passed by this region. The effect of political and social upheavals on migration, which varied greatly in other regions, was predictably enough thought to be quite minimal in the Creuse: “The emigration of the laboring class is an immemorial habit in this area and the Revolution did not appear to have brought the slightest change in this matter if we consider the total mass of emigrants.”19 A second statistical study of the population was a census of the mechanical arts of Paris. Organized by the Capital’s Police Prefecture under Dubois in 1807, upon a request by the Ministry of Interior, it responded to the administrators’ and entrepreneurs’ fear of a labor shortage. It confirmed the conviction of many observers that a migrant workforce continued to flow unimpeded into the Parisian labor market.20 The 1807 census was based on passbooks and surveyed 91,000 male laborers in Paris, whose largest sector by far comprised 24,148 building workers. Women and children were excluded from this census. We know this represented a decrease from the estimate of 37,800 Parisian building workers counted in 1790–1791 based on employers’

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requests for assignats (see table 1.1). However, this probably reflects more on the relative health of the booming housing sector of the earlier period than a real decline later on. While certain anomalies surface in the 1807 study – the roughly 800 Parisian carpenters, for instance, meant they had decreased dramatically from 1,700 carpenters in 1790– 1791 – the figures capture the consistent continuous movement of manual labor from the provinces to the capital city.21 Finally, a third area of inquiry focused on the black legend of the Revolution: that it corrupted the workforce and that Parisian laborers were putting in less daily work for more pay. Post-revolutionary workers resisted labor discipline, in sum, because they were spoiled by overlyindulgent entrepreneurs and political authorities. This Napoleonic trope gained wide currency, as we have seen, among functionaries such as the civil architect Antoine Vaudoyer, who in 1805–1806 had launched a project to reform work hours and salary structures in the building trades. An administrator working in the Interior Ministry wrote, “If the postrevolutionary workers are difficult it is because they are debauched by high wages.”22 The desire to quantify this trope, as a basis of applying harsh and centralized methods of labor control, was manifest in comprehensive studies of wage scales undertaken by the administration of the Maison de l’Empereur. This bureau, concerned with the maintenance of imperial property, commissioned four of its architects to compare real wage on the site of Sainte-Geneviève in 1784 and various public buildings (including Paris’ imperial palaces) in 1806. They had for ambition a quantified appraisal of salary scales on public sites before and after the Revolution. Their inquiry demonstrated a slow and steady increase in salaries over the revolutionary decade, demonstrating that, in constant terms, the stonecutters of 1784 were paid the equivalent of 2.25 francs for an 11-hour workday, as against 3.75 francs for a ten-hour workday in the Revolution.23 The use and abuse of statistical analyses of this time are certainly themselves an integral part of the history of the Empire. In fact, the workday did not shorten during the revolutionary decade. And average salaries varied greatly from year to year, oscillating by season and by site, a reality that was reflected by inconsistencies in other studies on wages. A report by the Paris prefecture found the average Parisian stonecutters’ real wages in 1789 was 2.4 francs as compared to the average of 3.5 francs in 1810.24 But whether one accepts the architects’ figure of a 40 percent rise in salaries, or the prefecture’s conclusion of a more probable 30 percent rise over these two decades, both figures were perfectly consistent with long-term fluctuations under the ancien régime. In fact, during the 30 year period between 1741 and 1771, an economic phase

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similar to the Revolutionary era for its grain shortages and crisis-driven inflation, Parisian masons enjoyed a rise in average salary of 36 percent. This, however, barely kept up with inflation, for the price of grain also spiraled upward by a comparable amount.25 The Revolution and Empire accelerated and deepened the pace of a half-century of steady increases in workers’ earnings. Thanks in great part to public investment, laborers in France saw their average income rise by about 20 percent in real wages. The Parisian building tradesmen were comparatively better off having gained up to 25 percent in real wage increases between 1789 and 1820. They were among the key beneficiaries of favorable public spending during the revolutionary period. Their positive balance sheet may also be contrasted to the salaries in some other major French economic sectors such as textiles, where weavers were adversely affected by the Continental System and early industrialization. Weavers over the same period saw real wages erode by 40 percent. Also, certain luxury trades suffered greatly under the Revolution which deterred royalist, noble, and ecclesiastic purchases of gold, silk, jewelry, enameled objects, or ribbons. Viewed in a comparative perspective of 20 major European cities from 1700 to 1850, the economist Robert C. Allen shows that Parisian building tradesmen progressed from earning average nominal wages for Western European construction to obtaining among the highest nominal wages of building tradesmen on the continent. Only in industrializing England did builders acquire higher salaries than in Paris. Clearly, the stimulus of public works and other forms of state intervention in the construction industry and the long-term tradition of collective organization assured Parisian building tradesmen of solid net gains in earning power.26 The wider significance of the population census, the survey of immigration, and the study of salary structures confirmed that Napoleonic urban ambitions could indeed assimilate an influx of laborers to the capital without inducing a demographic or social crisis. In fact, the population of Paris increased during the Empire by about 25 percent, with 160,000 people, mostly provincials settling in popular quarters in the center and in the peripheral faubourgs of Saint-Marcel and Saint-Antoine. Despite administrators’ fears that military conscription would create the opposite problem of a labor shortage, and thus provoke inflation, in fact only 1 percent of the Parisian population was mobilized in the Napoleonic wars.27 The steady increase of workers available to the building trades from the beginning of the Revolution to 1807 seemed ideally suited to the escalation of private and public works under Napoleon. But the new “administrative regime”

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was not in fact easily persuaded by its own empirical data. The vagaries of war, inflation, and a stagnant population had convinced Napoleonic administrators of the need to clamp down further on the building trades, out of fear that competitive hiring practices would ultimately lead to a mounting wage scale and a decline in the quality of workmanship. In search of a consummate verification of the salaries, the length of workdays, and the productivity of labor, the Napoleonic state moved toward expanding the state’s authority by extending control over private entrepreneurship in the building trades.

On the advantages and disadvantages of restoring the guilds, 1807–1810 Before applying the conclusions of this “political arithmetic,” Napoleonic administrators struggled to carve out a revitalized labor policy consistent with the demands of an imperial France. Vigorous policy debates were first launched in 1805 when the Parisian Prefect of Police Dubois sent a questionnaire to several entrepreneurs soliciting opinions on the “advantages and disadvantages” of reestablishing corporations.28 The general lines of argument in response reprised the terms of the classic debate between advocates of corporate society and proponents of the early Revolution’s legacy of economic decentralization. But utterly dominating the larger debate, as we will see, were administrators who were openly nostalgic for the ancien régime.29 On a less elevated level of discourse took shape a more pragmatic discussion of policy. The pressing conjunctural issue challenging administrators of private and public construction concerned the ripe conditions for labor strife created by unrestrained competition in a relatively-closed labor market. It was widely believed these circumstances had begun to drive up salaries and threatened to create an inflationary spiral. How to check wage inflation, in the context of broader debate on labor discipline, provoked a fundamental schism on the advantages of centralized state control versus an adapted state-controlled corporatism. Economic liberalism as articulated by the restored Chambers of Commerce was, in the rough and tumble world of builders, never seriously considered to be a viable solution. The synthesis around the question of labor policy was how best to thwart the entrepreneurs’ tendencies toward (further) corrupting a workforce that had been “debauched” by the Revolution. The architects Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin and J. Arnaud Raymond, former members of the Conseil des bâtiments civils and

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collaborators for the design of the Arc de Triomphe, were early voices to demand the repression of cutthroat competition among entrepreneurs, who were seen as irresponsibly inflating the salary scale. In March 1807, amidst a series of stonecutters’ strikes for higher wages, Chalgrin and Raymond petitioned the Ministry of Interior for the blanket imposition of a single rate for all building workers: 3.5 livres per day for the summer and 3 francs for the winter.30 This represented a slight net increase for most building workers, and was regarded as a concession to the inevitability of higher wages in a season of strikes.31 Chalgrin’s and Raymond’s counsel reflected a determination that a firm labor code required cracking down, first and foremost, upon entrepreneurs. The greatest menace to industry and discipline, they argued, was the tendency of businessmen to undercut one another by offering higher salaries to entice the best workers to their sites. Only the threat of a fine, they concluded, would dissuade employers from hiring away more talented artisans working on another site. Containing the impulse of capital to encourage the free movement of labor was a necessary step in creating a labor policy to control the workforce, for it is precisely the unscrupulous entrepreneurs who “provoke the desertion of the most pacified and well organized workshops, and encourage and stir up the restlessness we have observed. If, instead, the cost of labor was calculated and fixed for every season of the year, the current rumblings in the workshops would cease to have such an affect.”32 Henceforth policing the building trades’ workers by cracking down on competition among entrepreneurs formed the centerpiece of projects to legislate into existence new construction procedures. The strident tone of circulars and projects in 1807 reflected a turbulent year in labor relations. Many administrators were quick to blame strife on the spectacular failures of previous efforts at reform. Twentyseven separate workers’ movements were recorded in Paris in 1807, with the most outstanding that of two strikes for higher wages conducted in June and August by over 100 stonecutters working at the Louvre. This was one of five strikes that took place at the Louvre in a threeyear period over the question of wages.33 While the year 1808 was less contentious, a single incident seemed to crystallize a growing distrust of entrepreneurs – increasingly the explicit leitmotif of Napoleonic proposals scrutinizing the building site. The incident revolved around a master’s abuse of the notorious article 1781 of the Code Civil whose provisions expressly dictated that the affirmation of the employer was to be privileged over that of an employee by judicial organs. Yet in November 1808, stonecutters at the Temple de la Gloire testified that they had

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not been paid by the entrepreneur for over a month. Despite protests to the contrary, and the entrepreneur’s invocation of his “rights” under the Code Civil’s article 1781, he was brought to the local police commissariat to pay what he owed to the workers.34 The argument of Chalgrin and Raymond targeted the failure of state repression to keep laborers in check, in particular, in the unwieldy forms of passbooks, bureaux de placement, and police surveillance. Napoleonic state administrators’ growing disaffiliation with the micro-management of the workforce inspired a panoply of new projects, pamphlets, and circulars.35 One was written by an obscure civil architect, a certain Cumers whose first name has disappeared completely from the public record. He proposed a solution that went much further in policing building workers by containing the avarice of masters. Cumers attacked entrepreneurs who “are perhaps too divided, too isolated, for us to count on them alone to achieve satisfactory results.” In the absence of a consistent approach emanating from the private sector, the state must organize entrepreneurship to see to it that all building workers arriving in Paris will acknowledge their commitment to a single work contract. It is thus a corporate association which “must forbid all entrepreneurs from employing a worker who does not have a contractual obligation” and who has declined to take an oath to agree to work a full 11 hour day. And it is the obligation of the government to make sure that “the entrepreneurs of private worksites will not undermine the entrepreneurs of public works” by obliging all patrons in the construction industry to cooperate on a single labor policy.36 Cumers’ ardent memoir concentrated on the behaviour of entrepreneurs who pursued measures “contrary to their own interests.” Too ignorant to further their own welfare, they competed ferociously among themselves by slashing the workday while seeking to maximize production by increasing precipitously the salaries of skilled laborers. The most dignified role of the government, given such unenlightened competition between entrepreneurs, will be to “establish, voluntarily or forcibly, a perfect ensemble between all the Entrepreneurs, for it is more than probable that without a strict uniformity of conditions for delivering passports or identity papers, no worker will comply with the measure on workdays.”37 Cumer’s argument was overlaid with the conviction that unbridled competition in the labor market thwarted a full understanding of entrepreneurs’ mutual interests. It was up to the state to create a voluntary or forced “perfect ensemble.” To Cumers, the full revival of a guild economy in the building trades, created from above by the Napoleonic state, would ultimately mold the nucleus of

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a “perfect ensemble” of not just entrepreneurs, but of all commercial interests. The rift between functionaries and officials on a future labor policy in the building trades would grow between 1809 and 1811. The spotty enforcement of policies on passbooks and bureaux de placement rendered these institutions failures in the eyes of the police, and the sense of deterioration in public order was further compounded by a complete suspension of the new work hours on public sites.38 In June 1809 unfolded a disastrous attempt to keep stonecutters working until 8:00 in the evening in exchange for higher wages on the sites of the bridge of Jena and the Arc de Triomphe. The resulting turmoil on other sites prompted the inspector of the Arc de Triomphe to petition for an order to annul the edict dictating hours which was still applied to public worksites. The inspector successfully managed to invalidate the law, as public works entrepreneurs were told “to abstain from all innovation which could provide the pretext for disorder.”39 In the aftermath of the latest acts of insubordination, broader opportunities were opened for ever more expansive administrative schemes. Following Cumer’s lead, projects were drawn up to reorganize professional hierarchies to command authoritatively the building sites of Paris. Administrative paralysis was to be overcome through visionary proposals, issued by the corps of Napoleonic administrators, to restrain competition. The open conflicts between the Prefect of the Parisian police, the Minister of Interior, and the Minister of Police, as well as between the occasionally confused jurisdictions of public works and public buildings, had created openings for obscure functionaries to bring their own proposals to the table. The atmosphere of frank criticism and imaginative social engineering produced (often unsolicited) projects calling for the complete regulation of the daily lives of workers. One such proposal, with the improbable title, A Memoir on the Means Hereafter to Warn against Work Stoppages among Building Trades Workers, was received in July 1809 by the Conseil des bâtiments civils. Written by another obscure government administrator, a certain J. Riffé, it provoked much discussion among construction administrators as the organizational blueprint for the next reform to regulate the salaries of workers.40 To prevent further contention on the building site, Riffé believed, the mutual obligations of all “interests” would have to be clearly enforced. Citing the 1806 disturbances that led to the defeat of the previous reform, Riffé criticized the harsh method of dictating terms rather than reaching agreement by collective accords. The epoch of stringent government regulation must now

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be declared over, he argued, just as the Napoleonic Civil Code had abrogated previous contractual agreements ushered in by the National Assembly’s Loi Le Chapelier. Earlier requirements, such as passbooks and placement offices which sought to replace the chaotic labor market of the place de Grève, were mere preparatory measures for restoring harmony between masters and journeymen. Only an intimate collaboration between state administrators, the prefecture of police, and entrepreneurs would make it possible to predict the most ordinary cases of disputes and their outcome in the workshops; to articulate in a clear manner the reciprocal duties of Entrepreneurs and workers; to determine with justice the wage of workers in relation to their work; to indicate the hour in which the day must begin and end as well as the hours of repose for different seasons of the year; and finally to establish the means of obliging the Entrepreneurs to pay the workers on a regular basis and in good time.41 While Riffé claimed that “reciprocal duties” between entrepreneurs and journeymen must arise from agreement rather than upon statist coercion, he advocated an internal regime of masters to govern the laborers. The call for common purpose in settling disputes, salaries, workdays, and payment terms was intended to restore a corporatist spirit within the building trades. The utility of these memoirs was swiftly seized upon by the Conseil des bâtiments civils, which examined them in the course of emergency meetings in September 1809, called to respond to the spreading labor strife on public works sites.42 Compelling the participants’ immediate attention was Riffé’s advocacy of the principle of government standard pay scales, the tarifs, to be linked to craft differences and changing seasons. After extensive debate, the participants tabled Riffé’s central argument that such reforms must be made in the context of a general corporatist revival. The council recommended instead the immediate adoption, diffusion, and imposition of Riffé’s proposal for three sliding wage scales, the grande, moyenne, and petite journées corresponding to 12-, 10-, and 8-hour days. The prickly enforcement of such minutely defined hours was put entirely in the administrative bailiwick of the Ministry of Interior. The resulting detailed salary list represented the apotheosis of visionary ambitions to impose state control over the building site. For the authoritarian ambitions of the reform project reflected a total disregard for the limits of the possibilities of enforcement. The standardization

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of wages expressed – to Dubois and other policing and administrative voices – an overly exalted sense of state policy over the building trades. Dubois sought to carve out an alternative, more feasible policy, one that refrained from repressive mechanisms to enforce state-imposed fixed standards over labor practices. The government architects and administrators of the Conseil des bâtiments civils under the Empire were henceforth excluded from playing a major role in labor reform. The purely statist solution of longer hours, oaths, and precisely defined tarifs would be discarded precisely by the unwillingness of the Napoleonic state to implement them.43 The Parisian police prefecture, in turn, prepared a counter-thrust of its own, aimed at imposing its agenda for a police regime over the building trades. In January 1810, as a direct response to the proposal of Conseil des bâtiments civils, Dubois launched an endeavor to reincorporate the master builders of Paris.44 Dubois’ decision to create a corporation with the building trades was not a hasty innovation. The search for a “voluntary or forced perfect ensemble of Entrepreneurs” was the core argument of many a functionary’s memoirs. Now, for Dubois, this ensemble would rest on an informal commercial structure that entrepreneurs had already put in place. The private and public builders of Paris collaborated to publish a Nouvel Almanach des Bâtiments in 1809 as a registry of all architects, entrepreneurs, and self-styled “masters” who collaborated to advertise their addresses to the general public. The new almanac copied the format of the ancien régime Almanach des Bâtiments and the Napoleonic Almanach du commerce de Paris, which listed individuals who had purchased the business license (patente). Such publications sought to thwart unscrupulous business types who spuriously claimed to have commercial privileges. Consumers of construction, in sum, now had a reliable guide to the “honest builders” in various enterprises.45 “Honest builders” under the Empire, in fact, went further than their colleagues in other sectors to assure the public, appointing from within their ranks 14 “expert architects” responsible for inspections. By evoking such titles within their association, the builders deliberately conjured up links to the ancien régime corporate housing authority, the Chambre des Bâtiments, which had nominated the well-connected elites of the profession to precisely this venal office. Thus, construction entrepreneurs revived the trope of self-policing, dormant since the earliest anticorporate phase of the Revolution, and grounded entirely in internal trade hierarchies.46

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In 1810, Dubois used the model of the association of building inspectors to mandate a “perfect ensemble” of entrepreneurs into existence. He published a decree that resuscitated a builders’ corporation intended to institutionalize and centralize the construction trades’ informal business networks. It was signed by Napoleon in March 1810. Dubois recast the assembly of master masons in broadly similar fashion to Turgot’s “restoration” of the guilds in 1776; by dictating yearly assemblies of entrepreneurs to elect a “chamber” of 24 electors. They in turn would elect three delegates to answer to the prefect of police at his behest. Bypassing the state’s Conseil des bâtiments civils, this body of delegates would become a direct arm of the prefecture to serve as the internal surveillance organ of entrepreneurs in masonry.47 The following year, this body became the Chambre syndicale, an official trade association structured after the former guilds. To the mercantilist thinking of Napoleonic functionaries, the revival of such a closely watched structure of capitalist builders assured the enforcement of uniform conditions over all workers. The state, in sum, imposed the fusion of interests between capital and labor. In a more detailed clarification of the new corporation, the Dubois project was conceived as assigning precise meaning to the distinction between entrepreneur and master builder, a slippery task that had repeatedly frustrated the Crown and Paris municipality. The fluidity of titles in the business world of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France only underscored the broader imprecision of the social boundaries in France.48 As we have seen, this was particularly true for builders despite detailed regulations dating to the dim recesses of time. Finally, the status of entrepreneur and master builder was delineated and differentiated by the Conseil d’état in March 1810, in regulations upheld by the office of the Ministry of Interior. Dubois himself presented the plan to confer mastership only on those “conforming entrepreneurs” who would register with the police and declare “they will respond for their workers or journeymen.” After pledging to conform to the Germinal Law on passbooks, the masters would also be responsible to inscribe the names of all the workers they hire in a police registry, with the date of their entry into and (as important) their eventual departure from Paris. According to these requirements, the prerequisite for entrepreneurship – the business license – was now joined to mastership as necessary and sufficient conditions to be a qualified master builder.49 The declared inspiration of the Dubois plan was the restoration of building corporations, now formed in each arrondissement by building masters in the trades of masonry, carpentery, joinery (namely,

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menuiserie, the craft of carving and inserting woodwork chiefly in doors and window frames), and gilding for more luxurious construction. They were to hold monthly meetings and set up formal ties to the prefecture of police. Dubois hence created two levels of corporate bodies: one shared only the responsibility to meet every year to elect delegates, with the second regulating the construction industry as a whole with close ties to the Napoleonic police. The chief obligation of both corporate bodies was to establish and to enforce regulations for setting the daily wage every month: these would be fixed like “a kind of mercury,” according to season, demand, and the labor supply. While dramatic cuts in pay under this system were theoretically feasible, increases were formally restricted to no more than a tenth or a twelfth of the previous month’s wage.50 Ultimately, Dubois rehabilitated the ancien régime argument of promoting public safety and public order to justify this shift to the “perfect ensemble” of corporate interests. He was intimately familiar with the terms of the corporate debate, having supervised the reincorporation of Parisian bakers and butchers in 1800. With the builders, Dubois assigned to entrepreneurs strict accountability to the state. Evoking the specter of shoddy construction practices that menaced ordinary Parisians, Dubois ordered all entrepreneurs to declare in precise terms the work they were to undertake and periodically to verify the licenses of their collaborators. The need to hold entrepreneurs liable for sloppy work and to weed out fraudulent claims to construction privileges was based on “preventing all the vices and shoddy work which can compromise individual and public safety.” Consistent with the ambition to restore the comprehensive powers of the lieutenant général de police, Dubois was also assuming greater state responsibility for the solidity of construction. The Parisian prefect of police swept within his jurisdiction the all-encompassing social and economic authority of his ancien régime counterpart.51 How successful was Dubois in reforging the communities of master masons and carpenters in the image of the ancien régime corporations? Were restored associations established on the socio-professional foundations of the ancien régime, the Revolution, or did they embody a uniquely Napoleonic synthesis? In fact, the Chambres syndicales were founded only superficially upon the ancien régime’s corporate model. For rather than seeking to consolidate traditional craft elders, Dubois’ reform sought to forge a new elite within the construction sector. Generalizations drawn from the personnel registered in the building trades almanacs of the ancien régime and the Empire are inherently limited by

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an absence of first names. But based on listings of family names and addresses they suggest a dramatic rupture in dynasties between old and new masters. There is a concordance of only 14 family names in the 1791 and 1809 almanacs for master masons, the last publication before the abolition of the guilds and the first of the refounded Napoleonic guild regime. This is a markedly small number in a trade where family oligarchies thrived before and after the Revolution.52 Fewer individuals were also engaged as entrepreneurs in the masonry profession. While 409 masters figured in the final almanac of 1791, only 170 masters were listed in 1809. Even by collapsing the 104 entrepreneurs of public and private sites with the masters listed in 1809, the total of 274 represents a dramatic decline in overall numbers of officially sanctioned capitalist builders in masonry. In the incorporated Chambre syndicale of 1813, only 233 entrepreneurs of masonry in Paris could practice by way of the prerogative of having “fulfilled the new statutes.” The remarkable decline in numbers of masters was thus 42 percent over this 18-year span. A clear winnowing of elites also took place among the master carpenters, as only ten family names resurface in the Empire’s almanacs and the last building almanac published just before guild suppression in 1791. The numbers of master carpenters dwindled from 142 in 1791 to 95 masters in 1809, and finally to only 87 in the official corporation of 1813. This represented an overall diminution of close to 40 percent.53 The sharp contraction of numbers of construction magnates was a distinct legacy of the Revolution and Empire. The concentration of commercial privileges in fewer hands was the result of convulsive upheavals starting with political attacks upon many privileged ancien régime contractors and entrepreneurs, resulting in greater oversight of statesponsored projects, and concluding with the rehabilitation of corporations. An elite based on wealth and expertise had largely replaced the nobility and the monarchy’s inner circle. “New” men resembling more the Bastille’s dismantler Jean-François Palloy had scaled the pinnacle of the building trades at the social and economic expense of such types as the Pantheon’s masonry contractor, Pierre Poncet. (We have no reliable measure of the aftershocks of the Terror’s decimation of building oligarchies; was it bad for business for entrepreneurs, like Poncet, to be arrested and accused of corruption in 1793 and 1794?) Connections to the engineering school the Ecole Polytechnique was now more advantageous than domination of an ancien régime–style cliental network. The commercial skills, financial means, and motivation to enter bids on nationalized properties, and to plan, promote, and execute their

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exploitation – up to and including demolition and construction – hastened the distillation of this Parisian elite. The Empire further recast social hierarchies by qualifying a reduced number of master builders, re-inventing their functions, and imposing an exhaustive range of unfamiliar political roles on their charge. In a larger context, the long-term verdict on the era’s contraction/ expansion of different economic sectors is varied. Many wartime industries, predictably, benefited from the Terror and the war in receiving massive state investments as forms of long-term capitalization. Others, such as metallurgy, contracted as well but for other reasons, namely, to meet the demands of retooling due to the competitive challenges of new industrial technologies. The building trades here were rather unique, for their preindustrial techniques and materials barely changed over this period of time. Only the use of iron beams and other forms of structural reinforcement were more widespread – calling for more engineering skills – but this change started to occur toward the end of the ancien régime. Nor was the construction industry necessarily set back by short-term economic depression. While the period from 1807 to 1810 was relatively prosperous in France, Paris building experienced its greatest boom since 1791 during the depression of 1810–1812, when it was supported by massive public building ventures launched in the Capital. A total of 52 monumental works were launched under Napoleon, and precisely half of these were in progress in the midst of the economic depression which hastened the Empire’s decline and fall.54 The falling numbers of Parisian master builders was accentuated by political efforts to accelerate social and professional consolidation for purposes of greater state control. The Napoleonic project to constrain the competitive business practices of masters and entrepreneurs restricted access to commercial enterprises and increased the reach of the state’s visible hand in the economy. In order to facilitate surveillance, the police effectively imposed conditions that choked off public access to certain magnates in the trade, while effectively substituting public employees for private interests in matters of inspection and verification. These restrictions would be repealed after the Empire. Only by 1816 did the police relax distinctions between privileged “conforming entrepreneurs” who followed the new formalities, such as registering at the local police commissioner’s office, and those who did not. Acknowledging that entrepreneurs not “conforming to the new statutes” were too harshly penalized by being forbidden fully to exercise their trade, the Almanach of 1816 simply listed them in a separate category from “conforming entrepreneurs.” They were given an

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inferior probationary status pending their approval by the police. The conforming masonry entrepreneurs of that year made up around half the total of 407 entrepreneurs who could practice in Paris. Only, then, nearly three decades after the abolition of corporations did the capital reach pre-Revolutionary levels of active entrepreneurial elites in the building trades.55

The corporate revival under the Empire The restoration of the ancien régime guild idea was compelled by recognition of the limits of state power – and by the political will to display that power by other means. By imposing the internal regulation of labor practices, with constant verification by the police, Napoleonic administrators sought to establish the much vaunted 12-hour day and the cap on wages. They also conceded that the direct arm of the police could not extend as far as an “internal regime” of masters and entrepreneurs to govern its own. Reprising many of the very same pro-guild arguments voiced in the Paris Parlement’s dissent over Turgot’s 1776 suppression of the corporations, the internal “douce police” of the ancien régime was praised as superior to statist police repression. Once again, it would be Dubois who best conceptualized the corporate revival along these lines. In late March 1810, convinced that the Chambre syndicale was proving its value to the construction sector, Dubois proferred a soaring defense of the guild order. While the ostensible purpose of Dubois’ declaration was to justify new regulations of entrepreneurs in the new Chambres syndicales, his apologia was quickly recast into a commentary on the earlier project of the Conseil des bâtiments civils to regiment the workday. He began by dismissing it as “impossible, inexecutable, and therefore dangerous.” For once you start expecting to harmonize the hours of work by fixing the wages of labor, “then, the government must fix everything!”56 The thrust of Dubois’ argument, however, did not merely denounce the over-policed and over-worked building site. He aspired to conceptualize the political economy of labor in the building trades and to defend the corporate order as a third way between state and market diktats. To Dubois, both direct state intervention and economic liberalism create inflationary pressures by driving up salaries. Under both regimes, the interests of the master can only be advanced by resort to a relentless upward spiral of workers’ earnings. The interest of capital where the labor force is restricted in number is ultimately served by paying an all-too-healthy compensation to available workers.

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Too often, hurried entrepreneurs doled out “extravagant wages against the wishes of manual laborers themselves who do not wish to take advantage of the laziness of Entrepreneurs.” Carried away by his own rhetoric, Dubois fancied that some workers were forced to be overpaid!57 The only possible answer, then, was that which the architects Chalgrin and Raymond, and the administrators Cumers and Riffé, had suggested before: “Regulation must be directed against the entrepreneurs.” The corporatist solution of Chambres syndicales was here presented as security against cutthroat competition. On the one hand, economic freedom that had “repulsed actions undertaken in concert with the authorities” must be abandoned; on the other hand, excessive state regulation must be renounced. The recalcitrant “entrepreneur charged with an urgent task will caress the spirit of independence and of insubordination of workers by making a mockery of acts of government authority.” Dubois’ analysis created a vivid set of oppositions between “slack” entrepreneurs, “inert” workers corrupted by market forces, and state-driven “imperious regulation” of hours and salaries whose neglect would “make a mockery” of the government.58 Evidently emboldened by the favorable reception to his solution of Chambres syndicales to contain private business interests, Dubois felt free to put the new regulations in starker terms than earlier corporatist advocates. The corporate solution was based on repressive possibilities, not on a pretended “perfect ensemble” of interests. The natural activities of entrepreneurs and masters were here imagined as perilous to public order and safety. This assumption led Dubois to conclude that Chambres syndicales were the best opportunity to assert a vigorous network of surveillance over the excessively competitive practices of new commercial elites. Dubois’ harsh assessment of the new corporate order was hardly made in a vacuum. It was rather provoked by an immediate challenge to state authority. He wrote the essay with an eye to the disturbances at the site of the Arc de Triomphe in mid-March 1810. There, entrepreneurs had prevailed upon the architect Chalgrin to raise salaries to hasten the completion of a deeply symbolic task. The salaries of carpenters were doubled to 9 francs to finish an urgent project: that of a mock copy of the arch built for the entrance fête preceding the wedding of Napoleon and Marie-Louise. The hastened work rhythms to complete the structure, and its highly public nature created a favorable conjuncture for salary increases. The resulting carpenters’ strike for a wage increase was carefully chronicled by the inspector of the site who kept a Journal des ouvriers charpentiers, a daily account of the

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workers’ “public spirit,” which carefully recorded the strikes’ origins and precise unfolding.59 Five hundred carpenters on the site had been subjected to a grueling work routine between 7 and 21 March 1810 to prepare the wooden mock version of the Arc de Triomphe. The accidental death of a carpenter after a fall from the scaffolding on 17 March deepened the grievances arising from the firing of 300 men on 11 March. A relentless drive to complete the scale model prompted a movement for an increase from 9 to 18 francs, and then 24 francs. The impertinence of these demands was rooted in the ephemeral nature of the task and its perilous nature. The timing of the strike also coincided with the fête of Saint-Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters. To subdue the strike an “impressive” detachment of troops was ordered on the scene where they arrested six journeymen. Then, the site’s Inspecteur-General Veyrat read the riot act, which deterred the carpenters from continuing. They returned to work at reduced pay of 5 francs, guarded over by six dragoons, two officiers de paix, police inspectors, and assorted armed infantry. The architect Chalgrin wryly noted that “these steps have filled the workers with respect.” The troubles at the arch, it was assumed, also had an impact on builders at Versailles, who struck in May for higher wages, yet were quickly routed by the same dissuasive measures.60 From Dubois’ perspective, the strike was entirely the responsibility of entrepreneurs. Responding to an urgent request of the state, they had irresponsibly rewarded “insolence.” To get their workers to work, “the entrepreneurs had proposed to bargain,” higher wages for intensified rhythms, and this represented the breakdown of command authority on the building site. By “flattering the selfishness (amour-propre) of workers,” and thereby corrupting them, the entrepreneurs had not even achieved their goal of maximizing production. As seen through the priorities of the prefect of police, the unrest at the Arc de Triomphe was irrefutable evidence that higher wages were to the detriment of social peace and to the short-term interests of entrepreneurs, for when all was said and done the tasks that normally took ten days were completed in four days when the salaries were raised.61 A few months after the March discussions, Dubois was disgraced in a minor financial scandal. The aristocratic Etienne-Denis Pasquier succeeded him to the office of Parisian police prefect in October 1810. The legacy of corporatism in the later years of the Empire was to endure, with few nuanced changes. Pasquier carried on the incorporation of professions. Having arrived in his new capacity to find 13 incorporated professions in Paris, he doubled that number. Turning to the building trades, Pasquier demonstrated deeper nostalgia for the ancien

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régime with a singular devotion to the most authoritarian of Napoleonic innovations, the policy of passbooks. He launched a campaign in the summer of 1811 to impose the livret uniformly on public worksites, collaborating more often with the Bureau of Public Works than with the more exacting Conseil des bâtiments civils. Less imaginative than his predecessor, Pasquier’s engagement in the question of passbooks followed Dubois’ lead, down to repeating much of Dubois’ rhetoric in threatening injunctions against masters violating corporate labor policies.62 The pronouncements and policies of Dubois and Pasquier exposed a fundamental paradox in the nineteenth-century concept of labor at the core of the corporatist tradition. Napoleonic corporatism was deeply suspicious of the increasing wages for labor on two distinct grounds. First, the regime, haunted by the hyperinflation of the Directory, viewed salary increases – as well as entrepreneurial laxity – as a source of economic ruin. Second, the relative autonomy engendered by high wages in an unstructured economy was held in deep suspicion. Marketplace mechanisms threatened to “caress the workers’ spirit of independence,” as Dubois put it. And a spoiled workforce was deemed highly corrosive to the social peace. The Revolution’s most effective mechanisms of asserting state control over wages were discredited, in the eyes of the regime, by the distorted memory of the General Maximum on wages and prices. As witnessed by the failures of bureaucratic restructuring of the labor market, reliance on purely statist measures was not always effective. The practical advantages of an internal police of entrepreneurs and masters compelled corporatist administrators, in the tradition from Cumers to Riffé, and from Dubois to Pasquier, to turn to controlling builders from within. Here, the classic idiom of corporatism as a political and social culture – its defense of a society of orders, its organic conception of orders, its guarding of trade privilege for the worthy few who were “good and loyal” – was jettisoned in favor of sheer social control. The ambiguities implied by a “voluntary or forced perfect ensemble” of collective interests were thoroughly exploited. Dubois found it perfectly consistent to encourage state cooperation with masters to force an end to the “natural” capitalist activity to squeeze the most profit out of the labor market by endangering public safety, creating inflationary conditions, and corrupting the labor force. In the ancien régime corporate idiom, the police and the guild masters celebrated their organic cohesion. During the Napoleonic revival, they openly regarded each other with distrust about each others’ natural penchant for, respectively, control and money making.

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In reviving the corporations, Napoleonic administrators thus stripped away their historical and cultural referents. No longer privileged bodies protected against market forces and excessive state intervention, the corporations were wielded as instruments of state restrictions on entrepreneurial initiatives in building. No longer the dominion of largescale magnates and family oligarchies, they represented the wholesale recasting of construction trades elites. And no longer the institutional repositories of careful historical and legal definitions of work, they became a bureaucratized authority to project the power of the state onto the building site. Napoleon’s urban plan to rehabilitate the organization and parts of the landscape of the capital were realized without the impediments faced by previous regimes: neither royal police commissioners in alliance with guildsmen as under the ancien régime nor the Revolution’s sectional movement in alliance with new officials such as justices of the peace henceforth challenged the state’s authority. For while the restoration of the guilds might betray a wistful nostalgia for the ancien régime, Napoleonic administrators were also sober students of its mistakes. (Figures 6.3, 6.4).

Figure 6.3 Images of Builders, 1. Nicolas de Larmessin (1640–1725), engraving, “The Mason’s Costume.” The image of the mason as dandy reflects his relatively privileged status in the urban world of work. He is caricatured as a multi-tasking worker, ready to do a multitude of tasks. Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

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Figure 6.4 Images of Builders, 2. “They abridge and make labor easier by giving mutual aid.” From Arnaud, Berquin, Œuvres de Berquin, mises en ordre par L. F. Jauffret. Première partie. (1802) Illustrated by Dutailly and Voisard. A sympathetic Napoleonicera illustration underscoring the cooperative labor of construction workers. Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

Conclusion and Epilogue

“Unfree” yet prosperous: Labor and capital in construction, 1763–1871 Citizens of all classes are stripped of the right to choose the workers they prefer to employ, as well as the advantages that flow from open competition for lower prices and a higher quality of labor. We cannot carry out the simplest tasks without relying on several workers from different guilds, and without being slowed down by the lethargy, the fraud, and the expense which flatter or favor the self-importance of corporations as well as the caprice of their arbitrary and selfish systems. Controller General of Finances, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, February, 17761

Turgot’s apologia for guild abolition is a devastating indictment of trade corporations as a handicap to the French economy. Closed, reactionary, anticompetitive, opportunistic, they were a real deterrent to economic innovation. Thanks to their pernicious influence, the French economy was deeply indebted and excessively attached to traditional artisanal techniques, a closed labor market, and a corrupt ethos of protectionism. As Turgot’s Physiocratic collaborators argued, one needs only to contrast France’s sluggish economic performance with the brilliant industrial take-off of Great Britain in the eighteenth century, boosted by innovative mercantile policies and sustained by entrepreneurs freed of guild restrictions, as further proof that the French economic model was backward. Finally, the elusive ideal of economic liberty in France would never be attained because of an arrogant elite’s systematic and 243

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deeply ingrained dependency on a closed economy, sustained entirely by archaic forms of monopoly.2 The Parisian building trades, in the period 1763 to 1871, expose the limits of Turgot’s critique of corporations as prejudicial to French national interests. The construction industry’s history also challenges the binary categories of liberal capitalism and state interventionism as imposed by scholars who read back in time categories forged by nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates.3 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, market and state were not necessarily in opposition. Liberal reforms or centralized state diktat also did not replace but often coexisted with corporations in the professionalization, the methods of labor organization, the regulation of construction standards, and the capacity to mobilize capital and labor for monumental urban project. Archaic and innovative methods of organizing the building sites and the men working on them inhabited the same universe.4 Even the political perception of corporatism changed over time: reactionary in early 1776 and 1791, the years of their abolition, the guilds were at the core of progressive reform during the state’s corporate rehabilitation and revival in late 1776 and 1810. As with other sectors, a porous combination of three dreams of commerce – corporatism, statist, liberalism – assured the construction sector’s transition from the ancien régime to the Revolution, as well as from the preindustrial to the industrial era. Other than repudiating classic narratives of eighteenth-century social and economic development, the Parisian construction industry tells us much about the protean relationship of capitalism and the French Revolution. Recent methodological trends privilege political discourse over forms of social practice, even in discussions about the Revolution’s economic policies.5 This has greatly overstated the impact of ideology in preparing the terrain for ostensibly free market policies during the Revolution’s opening stages. In fact, the cornerstone of economic liberalism – that of the free disposal of property for production, labor, and consumption – was posed only in fits and starts during the Revolution. In sum, there was broad ideological and structural resistance, from nearly all significant political actors to bringing Turgot’s dream to fruition. And there was no single teleological movement from a contained and protected economy based on corporations to one guided by the principles of liberty and open markets. In principle, at least, the individual’s right to the free disposition of private property was the guiding ideological principle from the Revolution’s earliest moments. The “sacred and inviolable right” to

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property that the French revolutionaries enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in August 1789 announced the founding political principles of a new commercial society. But precisely what this right to dispose of one’s property meant in practice was far from determined in 1789 – it was primarily a project to abolish the ancien régime and its arbitrary system of taxation. The ideals of property right were, in fact, projected from the lofty principles of the Declaration to the grubby world of commerce with the vote to abolish the guilds in March 1791. But here the guilds were swept away as tariffs on imported goods were enacted and new taxes and economic controls were created suggesting deep ambivalence toward legislating into existence a world of Physiocratic laissez-faire. While the first phase of the Revolution is portrayed as the triumph of a liberal economic regime, in fact the complex of revolutionary institutions entailed a reconception of economic relations not yet informed by the orthodoxies of liberalism or statism. In practice, guild abolition reflected not free market ideology but simple pragmatism: the weakness of the reconstituted and artificial bastard guilds, created after the failure of Turgot’s 1776 abolition, meant few guild advocates rose to their defense during the Revolution. The reduction and consolidation from 120 Parisian guilds to 50 after the August 1776 restoration had rendered their coherence a sometime thing. Some were moribund decades before they were abolished while others, as we have seen, had been thriving. Overall, the deeply mixed results of the post-1776 guilds compelled few advocates to support their survival after 1789.6 The liberty embodied by the Le Chapelier Law of June 1791 sweeping away masters and journeymen’s associations, as well as all remaining corporate privileges throughout French society, was also curbed shortly afterward. That same month, the National Assembly instituted the business license as a substitute for the abolished masterships thus assuring that only those with sufficient capital could engage in entrepreneurship. This was also a prelude to the October 1791 suppression of the Chambers of Commerce as a monopolistic vestige of ancien régime privilege. As a result of stringent controls on entrepreneurship, in all phases of the Revolution, the numbers of master masons authorized to engage in public and private construction dipped from 409 in 1791 to 274 in 1809. Despite the myth of all-encompassing liberal “moments” in the Revolution, such as its opening years and that of the Directory, constraints on entrepreneurship were methodically applied in all revolutionary moments. Corrosive critiques of entrepreneurial abuse led to

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the erosion of the economic role of many contractors, promoters, and master builders, and this in turn created momentum for the principle – never realized in practice – of the entrepreneur-less public building site. Policy swings favoring, in turn, corporatism, statism, and liberalism, defined the narrow path toward a French model of capitalism. From the perspective of labor, the markets envisioned in 1791 were to be negotiated by private contracts between individuals. Henceforth, intermediate organizations and collective actions became infringements upon the principle of the liberty to dispose of one’s property in the free exercise of commercial relations. The entrepreneur vied on the open labor market rather than wield monopolistic privileges in patronage networks, while workers sold their labor on a contractual basis stripped of the paternal protections inherent in their journeymen’s status. Only the skills brought to the labor market, rather than a guild-dictated wage scale, determined salary structure and working conditions. In practice, however, here too labor from the end of the ancien régime through Napoleon remained profoundly “unfree.” Individuals were not considered at liberty to dispose of their labor in a contractual relationship, neither in France nor in Europe nor, of course, in the colonies abroad.7 Rare indeed were the moments in which a worker could leave the workplace in search of a better opportunity elsewhere. Even as revolutionaries attempted to put into practice liberalization of the conditions of production, wages, and cost, the perceived threat of a labor market breakdown was widely denounced by a range of ideological perspectives. Monarchists, liberal reformists, and radical republicans joined a chorus within weeks of guild abolition to heap opprobrium upon masterless men and women dangerously flaunting newfound liberties. The Parisian world of work was deeply feared as a magnet for a precarious mass of undesirable and unemployable seasonal labor from the provinces. The principal causes of labor’s “unfreedom” were also circumstantial. The revolutionary economic conjuncture was a poor moment for forcing wages and prices to be free: wartime conscription after the declaration of hostilities with Austria in April 1792 made urban labor increasingly dear, and nearly unceasing warfare added to an inflationary spiral during the Terror and under the Directory. This was only partially contained by the September 1793 General Maximum capping wages and prices, sparking protest movements that challenged the authoritative nature of dictated salary structures. The survival of time-honored, immutable labor practices also added to the general sense of anarchy in the Parisian world of

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work during the first ten years of the Revolution. For example, the daily gathering of hundreds of building laborers at the central labor market of the place de Grève that, for centuries, had been loathed as a locus of social conflict heightened Parisians sense of insecurity. The explosion of nearby rooming houses for migratory labor created even greater anxieties about public safety in the capital city. The provisions of Napoleonic consolidation, from the workers’ passbooks to the energetic surveillance of the labor markets, aggravated the “unfreedom” of work. The Napoleonic regime’s labor reforms resorted to repressive methods to control “foreigners” from the French provinces, the hours of work (and even rest times at work), and the daily wage of each laborer’s task. The state ultimately became the guarantor that entrepreneurs and laborers establish contractual relations with the creation of business corporations in 1810. What Steven Kaplan calls “bureaucratic corporatism” in which the state constituted social hierarchies in the work world became a French model for the next two centuries.8 Under a sharply guarded entrepreneurial and police regime, a given unskilled laborer in Paris was hardly at liberty to sell his or her work at the highest price without confronting Napoleonic controls on salaries, modes of payment, mobility, and even the micro-management of the rhythms of the workday.9 Yet, despite setbacks, the economic balance sheet in the building trades was favorable for the labor force. Even as the liberty to circulate was constrained and even as police repression increased – in this as in all industries – the Parisian construction trades were financially remunerated in relatively healthy terms. Real wages increased in the roughly half century studied in this book, from 1763 to 1815. They received augmentations of the order of 25 percent in the economically unstable period of the Revolution – to the dismay of inflation-wary Napoleonic functionaries. While buying power was lost to the inflation of staple items at the very end of the ancien régime, and during several short phases of the Revolution, a steady rise in wages favored the lowly unskilled migrant laborer as well as the specialized craft artisan. This (exceedingly) relative long-term “prosperity” contrasted with other sectors which suffered setbacks from industrial retooling, international war blockades, labor shortages, or chronic shortage of raw material. Of course, public investment, and under the Empire, massive infusions of funds, explains a good part of the construction industry’s advantage over other sectors. The exceptional nature of the Parisian building trades is also constituted by the resilience of a tradition of protest. The strike was “invented”

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as a term if not as a tactic on the very site of the place de Grève. Faced with recalcitrant and contentious building workers, concessions were often made by entrepreneurs and by authorities who rarely engaged in outright repression against this significant, mobile, and publicly exposed sector – the builders, of course, most often worked on highly visible sites. They earned a healthy wage because they clamored for it, frequently by staking their livelihoods on the outcome of open conflict.10 Political engagement was often inseparable from social and economic strife in the Revolution and Empire – and this study takes issue with historians who lay emphasis on political discourse detached from social referents. It also differs with monocausal arguments about single factors leading to contentiousness, whether subsistence, class, fiscality, or the catch-all idea of corporatism. In turning to the example of the survival of guild politics after abolition: we have seen how the corporate organization of professions in the ancien régime and the resulting conflict and mediation remained a core element of social relations in the postguild labor market. A litigious culture created corporate rights, hard-won in lawsuits, brought by guilds and journeymens’ compagnonnages alike, endured into the nineteenth century. Corporate culture, in sum, hardly died with guild abolition. But neither was it all-determinate. The corporate trades most elaborately policed in the ancien régime, such as that of masonry, were out of sync with habitually protectionist carpentry trades where former masters and journeymen were in deep conflict. Labor strife in the carpentry trades erupted in the radical categories of 1789 and 1791, and 1793–1794, whereas masons had moments of contentiousness in 1785 and under the First Empire. The lack of a single source of militancy is also demonstrated during the Terror where membership in particular popular sections did not necessarily lead to radical engagement such as participation in uprisings. Often, political activism was influenced not by the socio-economic status of sectional membership but rather by the politics of select and socially empowered groups which gained power in civil committees or had access to key posts such as justice of the peace and police commissioner. The patronage of powerful notables of the world of work – whether they called themselves sansculottes or not – was too important for their real or potential employees to oppose them openly in critical political moments.11 Other factors influencing revolutionary politics include occasional health and environmental controversies set in peripheral quarters, such as the faubourg Saint-Antoine and faubourg Saint-Marcel, where many of the poorer laborers lived and worked. As marginal “false towns” (faux

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bourgs) during the ancien régime they were the receptacles of greater numbers of industrial workshops, hospitals, “banished” crafts like tanning, and varieties of toxic waste materials that emanated from hazardous trade activites. The presence of the nauseating Bièvre tributary, now covered, was daily witness to the noxious effects of this manufacturing waste. The complaints by the Pantheon’s laborers of workplace-related illness – a rare grievance in the eighteenth century – reflected the popular revolt against the secondary status given to the world of work in the outskirts of the city. Insalubrious working conditions were a new cause for protest relayed by the radical press and in the sections and clubs of the more militant quarters of the periphery. (Despite a similar social profile, the three popular sections representing the faubourg Saint-Marcel were not always politically aligned.) Issues of health and environment entered the vocabulary of labor strife. Here, we see precisely how the Revolution expanded the political sphere to accommodate democratic demands. While very few of these demands were in fact satisfied, of course, they represent the social and economic legacy of the Revolution.12 A broader assessment of ancien régime and revolutionary experiences in the construction sector brings contingency and circumstance to the forefront. Experiments with policy were not predetermined to be exclusively corporatist, statist, or liberal. At the same time, the ideology of market society as a self-regulating mechanism was rarely embraced by revolutionary deputies or Napoleonic functionaries, despite the liberty lobby that inspired corporate suppression. The Empire made labor regulation and construction of a piece with industrial strategy and urban policy. Policing the world of work and city architecture were firmly related as two state sciences of France in the capital city of the Empire. The building trades were the crucible of a range of pragmatic, creative and supple strategies that guided the ancien régime and revolutionary state in its determined commitment to make Paris the capital of the eighteenth century.

Epilogue: The nineteenth-century career of corporatism The bookend that closes this study is furnished by the Napoleonic-era civil architect Antoine-Marie Peyre. In his 1813 reflections upon the controversies provoked by Parisian construction during the revolutionary period, Peyre offered a harsh indictment of its bequest. He portrayed the Revolution’s reforms, after the suppression of the Bâtiment du Roi in

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1791 as nothing less than the revenge of the philistines. He condemned the “new men” of the new order, the functionaries who did “not deserve the name of artists and whose ignorance about construction and administration plunged the arts into barbarism.” The banalization of building in the Capital by ordinary bureaucrats and the consequent debasement of the architect’s title had led to a profound deterioration of French architecture. Peyre underscored the corruption of taste and quality under the Revolution by contrasting it with the ancien régime building site which was “directed with order and executed with care.” The administration of the Maison du Roi was an idyll, a “wise administration” where “the architects were paid honorably, and entrepreneurs whose bills were carefully verified by inspectors received the just wage for their labor.” In Peyre’s revisionist account of the state of official building, a carefully cultivated French tradition was hopelessly subverted by the dilettantes who dangerously formed the cadre of the Revolution’s administrators and functionaries.13 This strident critique of the revolutionary administration of construction carved out an invented memory of a national tradition built upon order and hierarchy. It represents a highly selective recollection of the ancien régime, where the Crown’s lofty ambitions were rarely matched by the practical capacity to remake Paris. Also, it represented an attack on the professionalization of specialized trades and services during the Revolution, as well as an indictment of the opening of the building site to a new engineering and entrepreneurial elite whose capacities often surpassed the men they replaced of the ancien régime. Finally, it posits a revolutionary contempt for an aesthetics of visionary architecture and urban planning manifested by the “exclusive” favor given to civil construction in the new order. However, the example of the Pantheon, among other public structures, explodes the myth of a Revolution incapable of fusing aesthetic with practical considerations such as full employment and the protection of skilled craft labor in rough economic times. Elsewhere, these social and economic issues were seized upon to justify architectural projects carried out by the Conseil de Bâtiments civils. Henceforth, public investment in construction would seek the transformation of Paris, from a glittering repository of ancien régime symbols in structures as disparate as street signs and churches, to a platform for rather more plain-spun buildings, which in Bronislaw Bazcko’s words, “exalt both the civic virtues and the state that incarnates and inculcates them.” The social utility of architecture, in the Revolution through the Empire, would be its greatest justification.14

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Antoine-Marie Peyre’s nostalgic narrative of revolutionary construction attacked the political efforts of revolutionary administrators to transform the methods of decision-making as well as the organization of labor on the building sites of Paris.15 The Revolution had indeed toppled ancient building hierarchies, dismantled the corporate order, and swept away the Crown’s sprawling and ill-defined ancien régime building administration, replacing it with public functionaries seeking to make construction into a public service.16 In fits and starts, the movement from the ancien régime to the new civic order entailed the articulation of centralizing and formalized procedures for assuring access to positions on the worksite, controlling and verifying public investments of entrepreneurs and contractors, and assuring the policing of construction workers. After 1789, the Revolutionaries’ gradual containment and eventual absorption of Parisian municipal administration required the transfer of the functions of public works to the central state’s Conseil des Bâtiments civils, tellingly under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Interior. New administrative procedures for urban planning began – and often ended – with policies to broaden sharply police authority and responsibility over the building trades.17 Following Peyre’s ambition to shape a narrative of revolutionary decay leads us to broader questions: what was the balance sheet of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic state’s recasting of the Parisian building trades? More generally, which entrepreneurial practices, labor struggles, repressive mechanisms, and institutional reforms, from 1763 to 1871, had consequences for the industrial era to come? Clearly, the innovations of this period, as well as resistance to them, prepared the capital city for its metamorphosis into an immaculately modern city. Deepened labor conflict also extended and compounded the identity of Paris as the epicenter of the age of revolution. The first fall of Napoleon in 1814 did not spell the end of the controversy over the corporatist revival. By 1817, the national Commercial Council estimated that 20 Parisian trades were already incorporated.18 The clear durability of the entrepreneurial corporations stimulated debate on the utility of expanding the project to reincorporate more economic sectors. As the Napoleonic advocacy of these corporations confirmed, however, to re-establish guild institutions was not strictly to restore an ancien régime society of orders. More immediate and practical grounds for a defense of guilds were found. For example, lingering discontent over the business tax that effectively purchased the right to engage in entrepreneurship called into question the real difference between guild masterships and patentes. In the First

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Restoration, petition literature thus made the case for guild revival on purely fiscal terms, based upon the wealth that would flow to the state’s coffers by selling masterships. One anonymous memoir called for a full guild reinstatement by praising the fiscal advantages of the corporations. Reminiscing that the taxes paid by corporations were a financial boon to government services, their restoration held out the promise of expanding the state’s tax base. “The masterships produced not only revenues for the state; they also offered a great resource to humanity. Each apprenticeship contract produced a subsidy for the government, for hospitals, for colleagues, and for the cost of administration.” On this fiscal basis, the full restoration of corporate institutions was divorced from ancien régime society’s larger corporate ethos.19 Nevertheless, an evident bad press on ancien régime corporations informed one influential apologia of the entrepreneurial corporations. A stirring defense of these institutions was drafted in 1829 by the barrister Amyot, a specialist on Parisian building law. Amyot was hard put to defend the status quo of the building industry in Paris, which had suffered over 40 bankruptcies a year in the lean construction years, 1827–1829, around 10 percent of all failures in Paris.20 His argument assimilated the institutions into a larger discussion of the social responsibility of entrepreneurs to coordinate business and labor practices: We begin first by reassuring those who believe they are seeing in this organization the reestablishment of the old guilds (les corporations des arts et métiers), so happily destroyed by the Revolution and whose very existence was lethal to industry . . . . It is indeed a right, which belongs to all citizens, to share the common good of association to unite to enjoy freely and to promote the satisfaction that is their due . . . . We already see the merchants and industrialists of all classes assemble together in all the towns of the realm. The day will come when . . . all men exercising the same profession will meet regularly at fixed times to name their commissioners, who (in turn) will form a truly permanent Chambre syndicale.21 Thus were the builders’ Chambres syndicales championed in a deeply paradoxical formulation. As befitting a construction law specialist, steeped in the arcana of the judicial framework of building, Amyot captured the contorted and contradictory career of entrepreneurial corporatism, the Chambres were not a part of a guild revival. Rather, they embodied the movement from corporate privileges to individual rights,

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which leads finally to an obligation or duty to associate under the watchful gaze of the state. The corporate solidarity of building entrepreneurs was an exercise of the legal right of assembly ushered in by the Revolution. In Amyot’s portrayal, the incentive to collaborate was thrust upon entrepreneurs by the greater needs of society. The Chambre in its relation to the people of Paris represents merely “the discipline of the corps upon itself.” The Chambre is an appendage manipulated by the demands of the larger organism, society a large. Amyot thus seized upon organicist imagery to underline his argument. Laissez-faire entrepreneurial liberty was a threat to society for it opposed particular interests to the general interest of society. The liberty to engage in uncontained profiteering is a perilous misconception of rights, for “in a system of political economy, it will still be better to risk the feeble chance of the easing of competition than to resign oneself to support the intolerable weight of absolute liberty.”22 Amyot’s legal defense of corporatism is a clutter of mixed imagery: the entrepreneurs’ privilege to incorporate is a right; the entrepreneurs who could not be trusted with absolute liberty were still a vital part of the social corps; the “system of political economy” required “the easing of competition.” Amyot wielded the supple categories of the corporate debate, adapting them crudely to the conservative Bourbon Restoration. The essential “logic of association” begins with the right of entrepreneurs to assemble and combine on building matters. An incoherent jumble of political economy, corporatism, mercantilism, and authoritarianism lies at the heart of Amyot’s analysis. But emerging from his apologia of entrepreneurial culture were the contours of a durable neo-corporate discourse. Entrepreneurs exercised an organic right to assemble in banding together to make cooperative decisions on constructing buildings.23 Amyot’s treatise was published the year before the 1830 Revolution. It thus provides a discursive opportunity to explore affinities between entrepreneurial and artisanal corporatism, for the freedom of expression heralded in 1830 led to an outpouring of artisans’ journals, pamphlets, and petitions that lasted until repression was renewed in April 1834. In this brief instant of relative liberty, republican and socialist pamphlets once again articulated building workers’ aspirations. Their grievances, in turn, offer a glimpse into certain practices of building elites decided within the Chambres syndicales. The collected corpus of

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builders’ demands were a composite response to the argument of Amyot on the necessity of entrepreneurial associations.24 The 1830 Revolution deeply implicated Parisian building trades workers who were highly visible on the Parisian barricades, as reflected by the sheer numbers of lives sacrificed. Twenty percent of combatants killed in the repression were identified as builders in one contemporary estimate.25 In another appraisal, the numbers of casualities suffered among members of the masonry trades were more than double their proportion of the male working population of Paris. An historian estimates that building workers made up 19 percent of all Parisian rebels in 1830 and composed 28 percent of the crowds during the 1832 uprising.26 Again, the activism of building workers was aroused in inverse ratio to the organic cohesion of their craft, as the peripatetic maçons de la Creuse suffered many more casualties than closed Parisian trades where migrants were rarely welcomed. The 1830 Revolution once again throws into doubt the generalization that strong corporate solidarities provoked political engagement in the early industrial period.27 In the aftermath of the “three glorious days” of the 27–29 July 1830 Revolution, 80 Parisian journeymen masons signed a petition addressed to the newly ascended Louis Philippe. Heartened by the promise of reform, the masons added their voice to a chorus of demands, supplications, and appeals for improved salary and working conditions on behalf of Parisian skilled workers. By August 1830, these “patriots” had every reason to suppose that an appeal would receive a sympathetic hearing among the Orleanists just arrived in power. The newly installed prefect of Paris, Alexandre de Laborde, was nominated by the Parisian Municipal Council. He had presided over the prestigious school of civil construction, l’école de Ponts et Chaussées, during the Empire and was a popular advocate of massive investment in Parisian construction, focusing on the need for improved infrastructure in the capital. Trusting the comprehension of the engineer-prefect, the masons petitioned to protest a “prejudical” practice instituted on the building sites of Paris. They sought an abolition of piecework, whereby laborers were not paid for rejected wares or work adjudged to be shoddy. The masons pleaded for a return to fixed salaries as an acquired right recognized by the French Revolution. In petitioning, they “dare to take the liberty to come to supplicate before the finest King, named justly the father of the workers, to please protect timed labor as measured by the journée fully acknowledged by past usage, and to have the benevolence to suppress work paid by the task.”28

Conclusion and Epilogue, 1763–1871 255

In a distinct echo of 1789 revolutionary discourse and practice, building workers highlighted civic activism to protest the imposition of piecework. The masons of 1830 announced their good standing as patriots to bolster claims for equitable treatment – what later would be called the “collective rights” (acquis sociaux) gained in the first Revolution. Their actions were those of “citizens animated by patriotic sentiments, who have joined in all efforts in defense of the national liberties during the memorable days of action.”29 The masons’ efforts “in defense of national liberties” should be rewarded by a return to a fixed salary. (The precise amount of that wage was not discussed in the petition.) But in the interim between the drafting, posting, and reception of the masons’ petition, the civil engineer de Laborde had resigned his office. His replacement, a colorless career functionary, rejoined that the masons had forgotten “all the principles for which they had fought” and that “the liberty of industry is no less sacred than all our other liberties.” To the new prefect, the liberty of industry was narrowly defined as the right of entrepreneurs to be freed of state intervention.30 Such economic freedom was on an equal footing with a free press, a strengthened legislature, and a more open franchise. Thus, the new prefect conceived of entrepreneurs’ liberty of industry as a fundamental right, no less sacred than political freedom. The principles the masons had fought for, and forgotten, were those of economic and political citizenship, entailing clear-cut sets of obligations and duties to their masters, in a well-ordered liberal order.31 The struggles of the first French Revolution were hence revisited upon the actors of 1830. Succeeding the workers on the site of the Pantheon, the masons of 1830 protested the jettisoning of accepted practice – “acknowledged by past usage” – imposed by entrepreneurship in a liberalizing age. Following the logic of the Le Chapelier Law of 1791, the prefect of the Seine responded in 1830 by affirming the right of entrepreneurs to impose work conditions as they saw fit. Distinct from the petition literature in 1791, however, the masons of 1830 were silent on issues that effected the Paris population at large such as endangerment to public health and public safety by cost-cutting and profit-seeking masters. Labor’s critique of entrepreneurial culture was confined to unjust practices endured by skilled workers and not against citizens at large. Narrower categories of industrial class politics had entered the discourse of labor protest. Furthermore, economic association in 1830 was legitimized by the very presence of the Chambres syndicales. The logic of coalition, so virulently attacked in the first

256

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Revolution, was irrefutably authorized by 1830, despite the language on “the liberty of industry.” Buried within the paradox of a state that openly upheld the corporate interests of entrepreneurs, while suppressing the right of workers to exercise their right to organize, would be the seeds of later industrial conflict.32 The Chambres syndicales survived well into the nineteenth century, publishing its Almanach des bâtiments annually until 1865.33 Whether defended in terms of “the liberty of industry” or as argued by the barrister Amyot in terms of a modified neo-corporate organicism, the Chambres remained an arm of the state to secure the well-policed construction site. The protection of the liberty of industry and corporate hierarchies invited state intervention in the absence of a coherent national labor code. Here, we see how the three dreams of commerce easily co-existed. The same corps was simultaneously viewed as guardians of the flames of neo-corporatism, liberalism, and state control. “As the building trades go, so goes everything else.” By the time that prosaic adage was cited by the Chamber of Commerce’s annual report of 1851, it was already a cliché.34 Further, it was the conventional wisdom driving the visionary ambitions of Napoleon’s nephew, Napoleon III, who found much to admire in his uncle’s legacy of recasting the capital. By nominating the Baron Haussmann in 1853 as departmental prefect of the Seine comprising Paris the Second Empire engaged in major urban renewal once again. Haussmann found Parisians weary after almost two decades of revolution and repression; a nation in a deep economic slump; and many Parisians mired in an insalubrious capital in serious need of development and embellishment on a massive scale. A mere 40 years after the first Napoleon, this all must have seemed vaguely familiar. The vigorous stimulus represented by state and municipal projects sprouting throughout the capital of the Second Empire inspired a belief that salvation for the nation’s challenges came in the form of public investment to reconstruct Paris. One relieved witness was happy to return to Paris in the 1850s where “Bands of insurgents no longer roamed the streets but teams of masons, carpenters, and other artisans were going to work; if paving stones were pulled up it was not to build barricades but to open the way for sewer and gas pipes.” In the Second Empire, as well as in the First Empire, one solution to many of the seemingly intractable social and economic problems of the capital was to transform the urban fabric of the Capital, thereby supplying work for the unemployed while

Conclusion and Epilogue, 1763–1871 257

Figure Conclusion.1 Embellishments of Paris, the transformation of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève . . . (1850s). Artist unknown. We see another scale altogether of construction under Haussmann, in terms of both the labor force deployed and industrial technologies utilized – including flood lights to work at night. Here, the sewers of Paris are being laid in the quarter near the Pantheon. Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

carving out impressively monumental urban innovations to advertise the imperium’s grandeur (Figure Conclusion.1).35 Despite a comparable façade, however, the contrast between the accomplishments of the urban policies of the French Revolution and that of Haussmannisation was tremendous. Whole neighborhoods between 1789 and 1815, with mixed populations ranging from artisans to the bourgeoisie, were rebuilt or freshly opened in the north, northwest, and south by the appropriation, selling, and reconstructing of over a tenth of Parisian properties as biens nationaux. Only the wealthiest quarters of the ancien régime such as the aristocratic Marais suffered neglect. The near-destruction and reconstruction of entire neighborhoods were, of course, relatively unknown solutions to urban ills, with wholesale dismantling limited to religious structures (notably the vast abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés) as well as the vestiges of the enormous, privately owned complex known as the Temple near

258

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution

what is now the place de la République. Only the First Empire’s piercing of the rue de Rivoli from east to west led to major clearance. Finally, there was more absorption and incorporation than exclusion and eviction. A comprehensive political and urban integration of the contentious outlying city was achieved after 1789. For example, the faubourgs Saint-Marcel and Saint-Antoine were made constituent parts of Paris during and after the Revolution. Less than a half century later, and with much greater means at his disposal, the Baron Haussmann took another tack altogether in the monumental reconstruction of Paris. Between 1853 and 1870, the capital doubled its population to over a million souls through metropolitan expansion. The partial or full annexation of 24 villages to outlying neighborhoods also more than doubled the administrative size of Paris. In this period too Haussmann was granted nearly unlimited powers and vast quantities of public credit. He put both to full use. Over half the city was demolished and rebuilt to allow for the free flow of air, goods, and people – the central theme of a resurgent and recurrent “circulatory discourse” we met at the end of the ancien régime. Rapid movement through the city was made urban policy, if not urban gospel.36 The social cost of renewal on this scale was a marked erosion of Paris’ mixité. Popular neighborhoods in the center deemed to be slums were particularly devastated and the laboring population was pushed to the outskirts of the city or to the suburbs. Over 30,000 working-class people from the ten inner arrondissements were forced out of their homes. On the central Île de la Cité a labyrinthine medieval quarter was leveled to clear away Nôtre Dame’s now-soulless parvis (ironically so, as the word is derived from “paradise”). There, in the very heart of Paris, the population declined from 15,000 to less than 5,000 people. Speculation, rent increases, as well as the flattening of neighborhoods created new forms of social segregation. Fashionable quarters in the capital were socially and financially inaccessible to the poorer classes.37 The teeming working-class housing in newly incorporated, newly crowded outlying quarters, such as Belleville and Ménilmontant, clashed starkly with the sense of spaciousness created by parks and boulevards. An embellished western Paris was socially demarcated from the dilapidated squalor of poorer northeast and suburban areas. But in a final historical irony, Haussmann’s legacy in the remaking of Paris also hastened an eternal return to the French revolutionary tradition. Inflamed social tensions flowed from the confiscation of the city by elites and by the relegation of popular Paris to the city’s

Conclusion and Epilogue, 1763–1871 259

outer limits. A movement to “reappropriate” Paris by its expropriated working class partly inspired the uprising of the Paris Commune in the spring of 1871. A quarter of the participants in the revolutionary crowds and the barricades of the Commune were building tradesmen, many of who were maçons de la Creuse come to Paris to seize the economic opportunity created by the “Haussmannisation” of the capital. In terms of social violence, the Second Empire indeed reaped what it sowed.38

Appendix

Criminality, rootlessness, and “foreign” building laborers: A “dangerous” class? A myth about construction workers in Paris involved their conspicuous role as a “laboring class, dangerous class” in the Parisians’ imaginaire, that they were invading hoards of “foreigners” (speaking incomprehensible patois and dressed in regional clothing) who represented a threatening form of social chaos. This was a widely repeated trope in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, of course, it was the subject of a widely discussed book by Louis Chevalier, first published in 1958, which focused on the particular prejudice against the maçons de la Creuse.1 But was the “rootless” workforce of the Parisian building trades, composed as it was of unskilled laborers, a historical menace to the security of ordinary Parisians? A complex interplay of legal, material, and economic factors led to a coherent policing of the ancien régime building trades. The supposed criminality of provincial builders in Paris is not borne out in a study of a little over 200 arrested masons, carpenters, and roofers out of a total sample of over 3,000 individuals sentenced in the period, 1773–1789 (before the creation of the Department, the Creuse), in the Parisian police jurisdiction of the Châtelet. The results suggest that the Parisian construction site was far from a festering thieves’ den. In matters of ordinary crime – for this legal authority treated mostly property crimes and minor assaults – the Parisian builders were proportionately an average social group. The percentage of builders’ to all individuals sentenced (6 percent) coincides almost exactly with their representation within the overall population of Paris. The feeble extent of the builders’ implication in Parisian crime is also consistent with Arlette Farge’s smaller sampling of thieves of foodstuffs, in which just under one in ten such thefts were committed by building tradesmen.2 In sum, the percentage of “criminal” builders appears to correlate with their proportional relationship to the overall population.3 The “dangerous class” thesis is profoundly debatable for the nineteenth century; but it certainly may not be projected back to the eighteenth century. An analysis of building tradesmen’s crimes show that few Parisians were victims as they mostly concern escalating thefts of workplace tools and building materials. And more than half of the suspects of worksite crimes were accused of the theft of valuable lead roof slats. This can be partially attributed to a black market in stolen lead that thrived at the end of the eighteenth century. The ubiquitous eyewitnesses of all things Parisian at the end of the ancien régime, Mercier and Hardy, comment on the presence of merchants dealing in these and other building materials on the streets of Paris.4 More generally, the statistics on arrested builders in Paris explodes the correlation of the mythic “foreign element” and criminality. “Provincial” here 260

Appendix 261 Table A.1 Professional Analysis of Arrested Builders, 1773–1789 1773 1776 1779 1782 1785 1788 1789 TOTALS ARRESTED PARISIANS Other Individuals Under Arrest Builders Under Arrest GEOGRAPHIC ORIGINS OF ARRESTED BUILDERS Born in Paris Born in the Provinces CHARGED CRIMES OF ARRESTED BUILDERS Thefts of tools or materials Ordinary thefts or possession of false money Assaults or Murders

482

407

596

478

476

351

344

3,134

25

24

31

38

24

28

31

201

3 22

8 16

12 19

3 35

5 19

3 29

5 26

39 166

5

1

6

13

9

11

9

54

18

21

24

24

15

16

22

140

2

2

1

1

0

1

0

7

Source: A.N. Y 10526-30: “Registres de la Chambre Criminelle,” Le Châtelet

as elsewhere must remain an ill-defined label, referring narrowly to the selfdescription of the accused as being a “native” of a certain province, without indicating when the person immigrated, whether in Paris to stay, or just passing through. Crime statistics in fact reflect that provincial builders in Paris were arrested in direct proportion to their numbers in the Capital.5 In sum, the building trades were generally synonymous with migration, yet provincial labor did not appear to bring increased criminality to the capital city. Paris at the end of the eighteenth century was not facing inundation by migrant criminals using the cover of the bustling building site and the anonymity of the capital to commit criminal acts. The tightly bound networks of migrant colonies, coupled with trade solidarities, may have effectively checked the temptation of theft even among impoverished day laborers. Also the corporate order, despite the guilds’ bad press toward the end of the ancien régime, was in fact an effective mechanism for policing the labor force. Perhaps only social prejudice, the perception of Paris inundated, created the myth of a Parisian population suffering from rampant “insecurity.”6 The historical reconstruction of the building trades, through narrative, theoretical, and statistical sources, discloses a clean break between the perception of privileged Parisians and the reality of their encounters with builders. The building process was perceived as dangerously corrupt to the core; yet, the integrity of the

262

Appendix

Table A.2 Chambre Criminelle: Arrested Builders and Others, 1773–1789

596 482

478

407

476 344

351

25

24

38

31

31

28

24

1773 1776 1779 1782 1785 1788 1789 Others under arrest

Builders under arrest

Source: A.N. Y 10526-30: “Registres de la Chambre Criminelle,” le Châtelet

Table A.3 Parisian versus Provincial Origins of Arrested Builders, 1773–1789

35 29 26 22 19

19

16 12 8 5 3 1773

3 1776

1779

Born in Paris

1782 Year

5 3

1785

1788

1789

Born in the provinces

Source: A.N. Y 10526-30: “Registres de la Chambre Criminelle,” le Châtelet

corporate order in matters concerning criminality seemed to be largely intact, as evidenced especially by the mediocre levels of arrests on the sites around Paris. Thus, unfounded perceptions and not criminality accentuated the fear, social hatred, and opprobrium heaped upon building workers, as often remarked upon

Appendix 263 Table A.4 Nature of Builders’ Crimes, 1773–1789

24

24 22

21 18 13

15

16 11 9

9 6

5 2 1773

2 1

1

1776

1779

1 1782 Year

0 1785

1 1788

0 1789

Thefts of tools or materials Ordinary thefts or possession of false money Assaults or Murders Source: A.N. Y 10526-30: “Registres de la Chambre Criminelle,” le Châtelet

by the archetypical maçon de la Creuse, Martin Nadaud, in his memoirs. Simply put, Parisians’ suspicion of newcomers and rejection of the laborers’ patois and provincial ways may have fed a myth that placed many on the margins of society. The reality, was they comprise a diverse, closely controlled, and relatively wellpaid group of workers in the capital city during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.7

Notes

Introduction 1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (NY, 1979), 139. (Quotation by the Maréchal de Saxe, Réveries, 1756.) 2. Pierre Vinçard, Les Ouvriers de Paris (Paris, 1850), 15. A republican labor militant, Vinçard, only rarely displayed such social prejudices in his rendering of the French working class – a sign of the extent of the bad press on building workers. 3. Bertrand Bissuel, Clara Georges, “Un an après, récits de retour à la vie,” Le Monde, 08 Avril 2006. 4. Colin Jones, Paris. The Biography of a City (NY and Toronto, 2004), 252. 5. For a comprehensive connoisseurs’ treatment of Parisian history: Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris, 2 vols. (Paris, 2004, edition first published in 1963). An outstanding example of a structural approach: Françoise Boudon, André Chastel, Hélène Ciyzy, and Françoise Hamon, Système de l’architecture urbaine. Le quartier des Halles à Paris, 2 vols. (Paris, 1967). 6. An example of a micro-history of building: Gérard Béaur, L’immobilier et la revolution: marché de la pierre et mutations urbaines: 1770–1810 (Paris, 1994). A longer tradition exists on masons’ migrations from the center of France; see further below. Capturing the folkloric aspects of this migration is a rich and vast literature starting with, Louis Bandy de Nalèche, Les Maçons de la Creuse (Paris, 1859). On the legal history of builders: Robert Carvais, “La force du droit: Contribution à la définition de l’entrepreneur parisien du bâtiment au XVIIIe siècle,” Histoire, économie et société 2 (1995), 163–189; and Idem., “Le statut juridique de l’entrepreneur du bâtiment dans la France moderne,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 74 (1996), 221–252. For a definition and powerful critique of the “linguistic turn”: Miguel Cabrera, “Linguistic Turn or Return to Subjectivism? In Search of an Alternative to Social History,” Social History 26 (2001), 60–71. 7. A reference to and elaboration upon Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves du commerce. Entreprise et institution dans la région lilloise (1780–1860) (Paris, 1991). 8. Hilton Root thus condemns as a historical constant, the “French government’s redistributional (sic) capability”: The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England (Berkeley, 1994), 22, 23, 37. 9. Charles Rearick and Rosemary Wakeman, “Introduction, Paris Revisited,” French Historical Studies, vol. 27, no. 1 (Winter 2004), 1–8 (Special issue: “New Perspectives on Modern Paris.”). Karen Bowie, ed., La modernité avant Haussmann: Formes de l’espace urbain à Paris, 1801–1853 (Paris, 2001); Nicholas Papayanis, Planning Paris Before Haussmann (Baltimore & London,

264

Notes to Pages 7–8 265

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

2004). Victoria Thompson, “Telling ‘Spatial Stories’: Urban Space and Bourgeois Identity in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), 590–633. Pierre Casselle, “Les travaux de la Commission des embellissements de Paris en 1853: pouvait-on transformer la capitale sans Haussmann?” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 155 (1997), 645–689. François Dosse, L’Histoire en miettes. Des annales à la nouvelle histoire (Paris, 1987). On the wider debate regarding the excessive specialization of historians: Roger Chartier, Au bord de la falaise: l’histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude (Paris, 1998). And Gérard Noiriel, Sur la “crise” de l’histoire (Paris, 2005). Casey Harison, “An Organization of Labor: Laissez-Faire and Marchandage in the Paris Building Trades Through 1848,” French Historical Studies, 20 (1997), 357–80. On plebeian radicalism: E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?” Journal of Social History (May 1978), 133– 165. See also: Peter King, “Edward Thompson’s Contribution to EighteenthCentury Studies: The Patrician-Plebeian Model Re-examined,” Social History, 21 (1996), 215–228. For a critical overview, and rebuttal, of these methodological trends: Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne, 2000), 311–323. William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France. The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge & NY, 1980). Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages. Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge & NY, 1989). David Garrioch, Neighbourhood and Community in Paris, 1740–1790 (Cambridge and New York, 1986). Steven Kaplan, La fin des corporations (Paris, 2001). Two classic works will have to suffice to summarize the vast literature on Haussmannisation: François Loyer, Paris Nineteenth Century: Architecture and Urbanism (NY, 1988) and Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la ville, 1852–70: L’Urbanisme parisien à l’heure de Haussmann (Lille-Paris, 1976). A recent study on the nineteenth-century history of the migrant stonemasons of Paris has been published too recently for the purposes of this book: Casey Harison, The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Newark, 2008). David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (NY, 2003). Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Cambridge, 2002). David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (London, 2003), and Colin Jones, Paris, op. cit., take radically different approaches to the capital’s past and present. In their unique ways, these rich, synthetic studies call attention to the continued – and growing – popular, scholarly, and student interest in the history of Paris. Gérard Noiriel, “Monde et mouvement ouvriers dans le bâtiment: bilan et perspectives historiographiques,” in Histoire des métiers du bâtiment aux XIXe et XXe siècles, Jean-François Crola and André Guillerme (eds.) (Paris, 1991), 113–130, especially 124. Also: Gabriel Désert, “Aperçus sur l’industrie française du Bâtiment au XIX Siècle,” in Le bâtiment, enquête d’histoire économique, 14e-19e siècles. I: Maisons rurales et urbaines dans la France traditionnelle, Jean-Pierre Bardet, et al. (eds.) (Paris, 2002), 3–119. Richard Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social Study (Baltimore, 1980) and Elizabeth McKellar, The Birth of Modern

266

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

Notes to Pages 8–14 London. The Development and Design of the City 1660–1720 (Manchester and New York, 1999). Rearick and Wakeman, “Introduction, Paris Revisited, 1–8.” Hilary Ballon, The Paris of Henri IV: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). Istvan Hont, The Jealousy of Trade. International Competition and the NationState in Historical Perspective. (Cambridge, MA, 2005). For the expression, “doux commerce”: Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977). Catherine Larrère. L’invention de l’économie au XVIIIe siècle. Du droit naturel à la physiocratie (Paris, 1992). Kwass, Privilege and the Politics, 61–65. Voltaire, “Des embellissements de Paris” (1749), Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, Ulla Kölving, et al. (eds.) (Genève, Banbury, and Oxford, 1968–), vol. 31B, 199–233. Ralph Kingston, “The Bricks and Mortar of Revolutionary Administration,” French History, vol. 20, no. 4 (December 2006), 405–423. Cissie Fairchilds, “The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, Roy Porter and John Brewer (eds.) (New York & London, 1993), 228–248. Michael Sonenscher, The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1987). Cited in Jean-François Cabestan, La conquête du plain-pied. L’immeuble à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2004), 28. Fairchilds, “The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods.” Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, La naissance de l’intime. 3,000 foyers parisiens, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1988), 195–196. The August 1766 ordinance is discussed in Chapter 2. Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Des marchés sans prix: une économie politique du crédit à Paris, 1660–1870 (Paris, 2001), 204–205. Joseph Félix, “The Economy,” in Old Regime France, William Doyle (ed.), (Oxford, 2001), 25–26. Sonenscher, The Hatters. Stephen Miller, State and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: A Study of Political Power and Social Revolution in Languedoc (Washington, DC, 2008). Haim Burstin, Une Révolution à l’oeuvre. Le faubourg Saint-Marcel 1789–1794 (Seyssel, 2005), 332. This argument on the development of capitalism is contradicted, most recently, by the economic historian, Kevin H. O’Rourke, The worldwide economic impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793– 1815, Journal of Global History, 1 (1), 2006, 123–149. For an older challenge to the assertion that the French Revolution was synonymous with the origins of capitalism: George V. Taylor, “Non-capitalist wealth and the origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, 72 (1966–7), 469–496. For an overview and critique: Nancy L. Green, “The Politics of Exit: Reversing the Immigration Paradigm,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 77, no. 2 (June 2005), 263–289. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA, 1976). See the criticism by: Charles Tilly, “Did the

Notes to Pages 14–17 267

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

Cake of Custom Break?” in Consciousness and Class Experience in 19th and 20th Century Europe, John Merriman (ed.) (New York, 1980). Richard Cobb, Police and the People: Reactions to the French Revolution (London, 1972). Anne Conchon, Le Péage en France au XVIIIe siècle. Les privilèges à l’épreuve de la réforme (Paris, 2002). Alain Corbin, Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin au XIXe siècle, 1845–1880, 2 vols. (Paris, 1975). Abel Chatelain, Les migrants temporaires en France de 1800 à 1914, Histoire économique et sociale des migrants temporaires des campagnes françaises au XIX◦ siècle et au début du XX◦ siècle, 2 vols. (Lille, 1976), 781–784. Frédéric Tiberghien, Versailles. Le chantier de Louis XIV, 1662–1715 (Paris, 2002), 123. Annie Moulin, “La Haute Marche, terre d’émigration au XVIIIe siècle,” Les limousins en quête de leur passé, Bernadette Barrière, et al. (eds.) (Limoges, 1986), 81–92. A.N. F20 434–5 VIII, Enqûete sur les ouvriers: Creuse, 13 septembre 1808. Annie Moulin, Les maçons de la Creuse: les origines du mouvement (Clermont-Ferrand, 1994), 18, 70, 298. Martin Nadaud, Léonard, maçon de la Creuse (Paris, 1982), 67–76. The comings and goings of masons have been confused with the travelling rites of compagnonnages, the journeymen’s brotherhoods. Their rite of passage, the tour de France, typically lasted seven years and involved sejourning and training in most major cities. However, the masons were rarely involved in these compagnonnages and few, in any case, existed for Parisian building tradesmen. I have found no documentation on Parisian compagnonnages, nor have David Garrioch and Michael Sonenscher: “Compagnonnages, Confraternities and Associations of Journeymen in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” European History Quarterly, 16 (1986), 25–45. Cynthia Maria Truant concludes that “in the nineteenth century carpenters and stonecutters insistently claimed and were often believed to be the oldest and most important trades in compagnonnages. This trope is common in history and myth.” The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 290. Gérard Noiriel, Le creuset français (Paris, 1988). Françoise Raison-Jourde, La colonie auvergnate de Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1976), 110, 121–126. Vincent Milliot, “La surveillance des migrants et des lieux d’accueil à Paris du XVIe siècle aux années 1830,” in La ville promise – Mobilité et accueil à Paris (fin XVIIe-début XIXe siècles) (Paris, 2000), Daniel Roche (ed.), 21–76. JeanFrançois Dubost and Peter Sahlins, . . . Et si on faisait payer les étrangers? (Paris, 1999). Jean-François Dubost, La France italienne, XVIe-XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1997). Moulin, 449–451. Provincial laborers in Paris were “an army of dirty and wretched workers” according to Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur architecture (Paris, 1755), 2. Roche, The People of Paris, 24–26. Also, Idem., “Nouveaux Parisiens au XVIIIe siècle,” Cahiers d’Histoire 24 (1979), 3–20. Louis Henry, and Daniel Courgeau, “Deux analyses de l’immigration à Paris,” Population (1971), 1075–1092. Burstin, Le faubourg Saint-Marcel, 316. Garrioch, The Making, 314.

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Notes to Pages 18–24

47. Pierrre-Jacques Derainne, Le Travail, les migrations et les conflits en France: représentations et attitudes sociales sous la monarchie de Juillet et la seconde République (Thèse pour le doctorat, Université de Bourgogne, 1999), 2–13. Genoux, Les mémoires d’un enfant de la Savoie: les carnets d’un colporteur (Paris, 1994). Perdiguier, dit Avignonnais la Vertu, Mémoires d’un compagnon (Paris, 1982). Cf. also: Norbert Truquin, Mémoires et aventures d’un prolétaire à travers la Révolution (Paris, 1977). An exception to this narrative, for the sheer individualism and iconoclasm of its author, is that of the glazier Ménétra: Daniel Roche, editor, Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal de ma vie (Paris, 1982). 48. Nadaud, Léonard, maçon de la Creuse. Nadaud (1815–1898) had an impressive career as a worker-deputy from the Creuse who supported Louis Blanc in the Second Republic, later serving as the prefect from the Creuse in 1870–1871, an office he quit to join the Communards in Paris in 1871: Ibid., Introduction by Jean-Pierre Rioux, 5–18. Nadaud’s account of work and revolution has enjoyed a certain status for historians of nineteenth-century France: See, for example, his extensive use by David Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, 1958) and by William Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge, 1987), 98–101. 49. BNF V 21544, Almanach des bâtiments, 1776. AD XI 16 and BNF 21035, Les Statuts des maîtres couvreurs. The guild’s title was “La Communauté des couvreurs, plombiers, carreleurs et paveurs.” Cf. discussion in Sonenscher, Work and Wages, 175 and 208. 50. Fernand Braudel, Les structures du quotidien: le possible et l’impossible (Paris, 1979). 51. Patrick K. O’Brien and Caglar Keyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France, 1780–1914. Two Paths to the Twentieth Century (London, 1978), 119–127. Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1830 (Boston, 2006). Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, 2007). 52. Camille Richard, Le Comité de salut public et les fabrications de guerre sous la Terreur (Paris, 1921). Ken Adler, Engineering the Revolution. Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, 1997). André Guillerme, La naissance de l’industrie à Paris. Entre sueurs et vapeurs: 1780–1830 (Paris, 2007), 70–74. 53. See for example: The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity, Ferenc Fehér (ed.) (Berkeley, 1990). 54. Nicolas Lemas, “Les ‘pages jaunes’ du bâtiment parisien au XVIIIe siècle,” Histoire urbaine, no. 12, avril 2005, 175–182.

1 Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime: The Construction Trades, the Pre-Industrial Market, and the Guild Debate, 1750–1789 1. Louis Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 1, edited by Jean-Claude Bonnet, Livre 1, chapitre III: “Grandeur démesurée de la Capitale” (Paris, 1994), 32–33. This chapter is a deeply revised version of an article, “The Construction of Paris and the Crises of the Ancien Régime: The Police and the People of the Parisian Building Sites, 1750–1789,” first published in the French Historical

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3. 4.

5.

Studies, special issue, “New Perspectives on Modern Paris,” vol. 27, no. 1 (2004), 9–48, edited by Charles Rearick and Rosemary Wakeman. Despite the importance of the ancien régime construction industry to Paris, there are very few studies on this sector of the economy. From a perspective on the history of Parisian buildings, see: Youri Carbonnier, Maisons parisiennes des Lumières (Paris, 2006). Also: Gabriel Désert, “Aperçus sur l’industrie française du bâtiment,” op. cit. Denis Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France du XVIe siècle à nos jours (Paris, 1998, 3rd edition), 23. “Quand le bâtiment va, tout va.” Anthony Vidler, L’Espace des Lumières. Architecture et philosophie de Ledoux à Fourier (Paris, 1995). Jean-Louis Harouel, L’embellissement des villes. L’urbanisme français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1993). A. Picon, L’invention de l’ingénieur moderne. L’Ecole des ponts et chaussées 1747–1851 (Paris, 1992). Michel Gallet, Demeures parisiennes (Paris, 1964). Pierre Lavedan, Histoire et urbanisme à Paris (Paris, 1975). The estimate by Mercier: Tableau Livre 8, chapitre DCXXXVI. Similar estimates of buildings in Paris: Pierre-Denis Boudriot, “La Maison parisienne sous Louis XV: masse et poids,” in Cahiers du centre de recherches et d’études sur Paris et l’Ile-de-France, 12 (September 1985), 27–35, 28. Bibliothèque nationale (henceforth B.N.), Fonds français (henceforth F.F.) 6685, Siméon-Prosper Hardy, Mes Loisirs, ou Journal d’événemens tels qu’ils parviennent à ma connoissance (1753–1789), vol. 6; “Mardi, 15 novembre, 1785, Etat actuel des travaux publics,” fol. 227. Statistics for Tables A-1–3 are derived from the “Braesch Papers,” in the Archives nationales (henceforth, “A.N.”) F 30 109–204 and F 30 131–160, concerning the exchange of livres for the revolutionary currency, the assignats. This source has been unjustly dismissed for evoking an illusionary Parisian world of work with many more large-scale employers than was actually the case. But this author agrees with Richard Andrews on the “Braesch Papers” “utility and genuine social richness”: “Social Structures, Political Elites and Ideology in Revolutionary Paris, 1792–1794: A Critical Evaluation of Albert Soboul’s Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II,” Journal of Social History, vol. 19, no. 1 (Fall, 1985), 71–112, 77 and 104. On the debate, see Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages, 140–141. Also, cf., Albert Soboul, Les Sans-Culottes parisiens en l’an II (Paris, 1958), 435–436. It is quite true that only the patrons with a great number of laborers sought out assignats to pay wages. But this is precisely the point: in the construction sector, the majority of building entrepreneurs and contractors had large workforces. Finally, evidence that about 1 in 20 Parisians worked in the building trades may be confirmed by a comparison between this source of 1790–1791 and the more highly regarded (because more closely verified by revolutionary authorities) cartes de sûreté of 1792–1794. In a sampling of 12,000 of these cards, the demographers A. Blum and J. Houdaille found almost precisely the same number: 6 percent of the Parisian population were in the construction trades. More cross-checking in specific neighborhoods confirms the accuracy of the archival source for this sector. For the Faubourg Saint-Marcel and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the “Braesch Papers” indicate that the number of laborers and masters in this sector is 2,242. The cartes de sûreté two years later reveal an almost identical number: 2,345. On the cartes de sûreté: A. Blum and J. Houdaille, “12 000 parisiens en 1793 – Sondage dans les cartes

270

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Notes to Pages 28–31 de civismes,” Population, 2-1986, 259–302: Haim Burstin, Le faubourg SaintMarcel à l’époque révolutionnaire. Structure économique et composition sociale (Paris, 1983), 321–322: 324. Raymonde Monnier, Le faubourg Saint-Antoine (1789–1815) (Paris, 1981), 303. Durand, “Les salaires,” 466–480. Gallet, Demeures parisiennes, 18. Daniel Roche, The People of Paris. An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987; original French version, 1981), 18. Garrioch, The Making, 48. The term “liberty lobby”: Steven Kaplan, Bread, Politics, and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1976). James Farr, “On the Shop Floor: Guilds, Artisans, and the European Market Economy, 1350–1750,” The Journal of Early Modern History, vol. 1, no. 1 (February 1997), 24–54: 26. On the need to rethink and to synthesize the classic narratives of the decline of the ancien régime: Kwass, Privilege, 3–24: 13. The present author agrees with Kwass’ critique of current historical research that “divorce political culture from social referents of all kinds.” (10). Bien, “Old Regime Origins of Democratic Liberty,” in The French Idea of Freedom. The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, Dale van Kley (ed.) (Stanford, 1994), 23–71. Christine Métayer, Au tombeau des secrets. Les écrivains publics du Paris populaire. Cimetière des Saints-Innocents, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 2000). Isabelle Backouche, La trace du fleuve. La Seine et Paris (1750–1850) (Paris, 2000). Vincent Milliot, Les cris de Paris ou le peuple travesti. Les représentations des petits métiers parisiens (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1995). Clare Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham, NC, 2001). Philippe Minard, La fortune du Colbertisme. Etat et industrie dans la France des Lumières (Paris, 1998), 363–372. Colin Jones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivifed. 1789 and Social Change,” in The French Revolution. Recent Debates and New Controversies, Gary Kates (ed.) (London & New York, 1998; article first published in 1990), 157–191: 166. Liliane Hilaire-Perez, L’invention technique au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 2000), 51–52. For the persistence of an anglophile critique, which offers a comparison of a dynamic England to the “conservatism, protectionism and stagnation” of eighteenth-century France, see Hilton Root, The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England (Berkeley, 1994). Camille Pascal, “Contribution à une histoire économique de la maison parisienne au XVIIIe siècle. Patrimoine, entretien, revenus,” in Paris et ses campagnes sous l’Ancien Régime. Mélanges offerts à Jean Jacquart, Michel Blanchard, Jean-Claude Gervé, Nicole Lemaître (eds.) (Paris, 1994), 165–173. This social elite of proprietors consisted of the nobility, the magistrates, or the royal counselors. In addition, unskilled laborers (gens de métiers sans qualités) made up a surprising 7 percent of the sampling. Statistics derived from a sampling of 2,113 inventaires après décès: Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, La naissance de l’intime. 3,000 foyers parisiens, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1988), 195–196. Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Des marchés sans prix, une économie politique du crédit à Paris, 1660–1870 (Paris, 2001), 204. On the faubourgs in 1789: Burstin, Le faubourg Saint-Marcel, 28–59. Monnier,

Notes to Pages 32–35 271

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

Le faubourg Saint-Antoine, 49–88. And Steven Kaplan, “Les corporations, les faux ouvriers et le faubourg Saint-Antoine,” Annales: ESC 40 (March–April 1988), 253–278. Emile Ducoudray, Raymonde Monnier, et al., Atlas de la Révolution française, 11: Paris (Paris, 2000), 22–23. Pierre-Denis Boudriot, “La Maison à loyers. Étude du bâtiment à Paris sous Louis XV,” Histoire, économie et société, vol. 1, no. 2, 1982, 227–236. For a nineteenth-century comparison of building materials: Guillaume de Bertier Sauvigny, Nouvelle histoire de Paris. La Restauration, 1815–1830 (Paris, 1977), 75. On the labor practice of marchandage – “inside contracting” or “piece-mastering” – in the nineteenth century that also inspired fears of shoddy buildings: Casey Harison, “An Organization of Labor: Laissez-Faire and Marchandage in the Paris Building Trades Through 1848,” French Historical Studies, vol. 20, no. 3 (1997), 357–380. Youri Carbonnier, “Les maisons à ponts parisiens à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: étude d’un phénomène,” Histoire, économie et société, 17 (1998), 711–724. B.N. Joly de Fleury 1423, Mémoire sur la police des bâtiments (n.d.). B.N. Fonds Delamare, F.F. 21677, “La Chambre de Maçonnerie,” fols. 33–37, on an investigation by the Procureur de roi. A.N. A.D. XI Lettres Patentes du Roi, 20 mai 1782. Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée nationale (henceforth, B.A.N.) MS 1229, fol. 34, “Délibérations des Maçons.” This document consists of transcripts and financial records of the Communauté des maîtres maçons, dating from 1702 to 1762. It is a rarity: most Parisian guild deliberations and records were destroyed in the Hôtel de Ville fire of 1871. B.A.N. MS 1229, fols. 62–63. Cf., Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages, esp., chapter 3, “Journeymen and the Law,” 73–98. Hardy, Mes Loisirs, B.N. F.F. 6685–6687, vols. 6–7, in particular, vol. 6, fols. 171 and 423: 22 Aôut 1785, “Trois accidents affreux.” Mercier, Tableau, 1, chapitre V, “Les carrières”: 37. Even nowadays, a favorite expression of realestate agents on the possibility of buildings collapsing into ancient tunnels or abandoned quarries: “Paris est un gruyère.” B.A.N. MS 1229, fol. 21 novembre 1763, “Nouveaux statuts et règlements sur les sindics et adjoints . . . des Maître maçons et entrepreneurs de bâtiments,” fols. 65–94. Alain Thillay, “L’économie du bas au faubourg St-Antoine (1656–1776),” Histoire, économie et société, 17 (October–December 1998), 677–692: 680. Thillay, Le faubourg Saint-Antoine et ses “faux ouvriers.” La liberté du travail à Paris aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 2002). Kaplan, “Les corporations, les faux ouvriers et le faubourg Saint-Antoine.” Burstin, Le faubourg Saint-Marcel, 316–319. Monnier, Le faubourg Saint-Antoine, 300–302. Mercier, Tableau, 1, chapitre. LXXXV, “Le faubourg Saint-Marcel,” 217–218. P. Couperie and E. Le Roy Ladurie, “Le mouvement des loyers parisiens de la fin du Moyen Age au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales: ESC, juillet-août 1970, 1002–1023. The precipitous rise in rents was compounded by the wretched conditions in which a majority of laborers lived in Paris. In a sampling of 62 inventaires après décès of the working poor between 1721 and 1761, 70 percent lived in single rooms and 85 percent of these mal-logés were estimated to have belongings worth less than 1,000 livres at the time of their death: Pardailhé-Galabrun, La naissance de l’intime, 237. Durand, “Les salaires.”

272

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23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

Notes to Pages 36–43 Ernest Labrousse, et al., Histoire économique et sociale de la France, tome II (1660–1789), 560–561. Daniel Roche, The People, 68–76. Garrioch, “L’habitat urbain à Paris (XVIIIe-début XIXe siècle),” Cahiers d’histoire, 44 (1999), 573–589: 550. Neighborhood and Community in Paris, 1740–1790 (NY and Cambridge, 1986). Georges Poisson, “Le Paris de Louis XV,” Paris et ses campagnes, 175–185. Mercier, Tableau 1, chapitre CCCXXX, “Les heures du jour,” 873–881: 875. On the construction of the Church of Sainte-Geneviève and the Panthéon: Allan Potofsky, “Work and Citizenship: Crafting Images of Revolutionary Builders, 1789–1791,” in The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citizenship, Renée Waldinger, et al. (ed.) (Westport, 1993), 185–201: 193. On Panckoucke’s printing shop: Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley, 1991), 68 and 171. On the royal glassworks factory and Reveillon: George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959), 34. On the Gobelins: Burstin, Le faubourg, 224–225. Cf. the royal printed cloth manufacture, 15 kilometers outside of Paris, where a thousand workers labored: Alain Dewerpe and Yves Gaulupeau, La fabrique des prolétaires. Les ouvriers de la manufacture d’Oberkampf à Jouy-en-Josas, 1760–1815 (Paris, 1990), 31–34. Marcel Reinhard, Nouvelle histoire de Paris. La Révolution 1789–1799 (Paris, 1971), 78. Sabine Juratic, “Mobilités et populations hébergées en garni,” in La ville promise. Mobilité et accueil à Paris (fin XVIIe-début XIX siècles), Daniel Roche (ed.) (Paris, 2000), 175–220: 187. Mercier, Tableau 1, “Chambres garnies,” chapitre XLVII, 129–131. B.N. Fonds Delamare, F.F. 21677, La Jurisdiction royale des bâtiments, fols. 4–8. Official edicts promulgated in 1567; 1667; and 1712 officially set the workday of builders as between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. in the winter and between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. in the summer. For example: Bibliothèque nationale de France (henceforth B.N.F.) F-5011: Ordonnance de police portant défense aux maçons, charpentiers, couvreurs, tailleurs de pierre d’exiger des nouveaux venus des repas de bienvenue et de les empêcher de louer leur travail au dessous d’un certain prix, 21 mai 1667. Marie-Annie Moulin, Les maçons de la Haute Marche au XVIIIe siècle (Clermont-Ferrand, 1987), 444 and 448. For Statistics, see Table A. Hardy, Mes Loisirs, vol. 6, fols. 224–227, 315. B.N. F.F., fol. 6685. For instance, one of many accidents affreux, on August 28, 1785: “three mason’s assistants or laborers were crushed in a house that they repaired at the entry of the Faubourg St. Martin by the unseen fall of planks from the first floor,” fol. 171. On policing the place de Grève: Sentence de Police A.N. AD 125b (17 August 1787). Michel Le Moël and Jean Derens, La place de Grève (Paris, 1991). Tableau, vol. 8, chapitre. DCXXXIX, Charpentiers: 389. Mercier was a particularly virulent critic of the Parisian construction site: Tableau de Paris, vol. 8, chapitre DCXXXVI: Bâtiments, 378–382. Chapitre DCXXXVII: Ouvriers en bâtiment: 382–385. Chapitre DCXXXVIII: Maçons: 385–388. Chapitre DCXXXIX: Charpentiers: 389–391. Chapitre DCXL: Jurés experts: 391–392. A sampling of Mercier’s acerbic observations: “Les procès résultants de sa vicieuse construction ont mis dans un jour évident les fautes graves des ouvriers en bâtiment, et combien les malheureux propriétaires ont été

Notes to Pages 44–45 273

30.

31.

32.

33.

trompé par ces hommes . . . ”: “388.” Un seul homme se contenterait d’un profit honnête, mais il faut être mangé par plusieurs artisans, chacun dans son métier. Il faut donc appeler deux entrepreneurs, l’un pour la maçonnerie, l’autre pour la charpente. Il faut traiter séparément avec eux; mais le maçon et le charpentier s’entendent d’abord entre eux, ensuite avec les autres ouvriers, pour cacher leurs fautes et leurs malversations. Cette multitude de petits protégés que l’architecte encourage sous main à multiplier les frais se liguent pour accabler le propriétaire”, 382–383. “Les ouvriers en bâtiment sont plus rusés et encore plus heureux que les procureurs dans ce qu’ils piratent; car ils ont eu l’art jusqu’ici de conserver leur réputation. Un procureur, lorsqu’il manque la probité, est obligé, pour s’enrichir, de travailler sur deux cents affaires courantes . . . . Mais l’architecte, l’ouvrier en bâtiment ne ruinent ordinairement chaque année qu’un citoyen, qu’un père de famille. Le voilà donc qu’une voix s’élève: la bâtisse d’une maison vaut plus que dix procès”, 385. A.N. AD I 23A, “Edit du Roi portant création de 25 jurez architectes et (25) bourgeois.” The number of experts was increased to 60 in 1698: Arrêt du conseil d’Etat, 17 juin 1698, B.N. MS FR 21679, Fonds Delamare, Bâtiments, t. V, fols. 272–279. Not only were the 30 “architectes-experts-bourgeois,” forbidden to “engage in any enterprise either directly, or indirectly by intermediaries,” they were also not “to have any associations whatsoever with entrepreneurs”: A.N. AD I 23A: “Edit du Roi.” The Chambre des Bâtiment’s deliberations are preserved for the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the A.N. series “Z1J.” This immense repertory is divided into two parts: the procèsverbaux of the Chambre des bâtiments extends from A.N. Z1J 1 to 255; the “Greffier des bâtiments” for the on-site visits, Z1J 256 to 1314: Carbonnier, “Le bâti et l’habitat.” Also: Robert Carvais, “La force du droit. Contribution à la définition de l’entrepreneur parisien du bâtiment au XVIIIe siècle,” Histoire, économie et société, 2 (1995), 163–189. Carvais, “Le statut juridique de l’entrepreneur du bâtiment dans la France moderne,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger, vol. 74, no. 2 (1996), 221–252. Guide des corps des marchands et des Communautés des arts et métiers (1766). The earlier price was fixed by an Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat of 1745: René de Lespinasse (ed.), Les métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris, vol. 1: XIVe–XVIIIe siècles: Ordonnances générales (Paris, 1886), 612–613. On the corporation’s history focusing on statutes and ordinances: J.J. Letrait, “La communauté des maîtres maçons à Paris au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 4ème série t. 23 (1944–1947), 215–266. Part two: Ibid., t. 25 (1948), 96–136. On the numbers of masterships among guildsmen: B.N.F. V 21544: Almanach des bâtiments, 1776. B.N.F. V 29997: Almanach des bâtiments, 1790. Also: L. Vinsonneau, Du privilège des architectes, entrepreneurs, maçons et autres ouvriers (Thèse de droit, Bordeaux, 1903). Claude-Joseph de Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique (Paris, t. III, 1740), 429. See also: B.N. F.F. 13022, Ordonnance, statuts, règlements, & arrets concernant le mestier des Maîtres Maçons, Tailleurs de Pierres, Plastriers, Mortelliers, & la justice que le Maître général des oeuvres & bâtiments du Roy a sur lesdits Maîtres Maçons & autres ouvriers dépendans de l’Art de Maçonnerie (Paris, 1721). Mercier, Tableau, 1, Chapter LXXXIX, “Ameublements,” 228–229.

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34. Surviving editions of the Almanach in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: 1770, 1774, 1776, 1777, 1780, 1784, 1785, 1786, 1787, 1788, 1789, 1790, 1791. This publication appears to have had connections to the Chambre des Bâtiments. A valuable study of this elusive source: Nicolas Lemas, «Les “pages jaunes” du bâtiment parisien au XVIIIe siècle», Histoire urbaine, no. 12, avril 2005, 175–182. 35. Cf., Maurice Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1975), esp., 2e partie, chapitre III, 207–242. On the construction projects in Paris: Roche, The People of Paris, 100. 36. B.N. Joly de Fleury 1423, Mémoire sur la police des bâtiments (n.d., but from its contents, 1724–1725). The primacy of public interest over corporate solidarity was expressed in the condemnation of an entrepreneur by his peers in the Chambre for the use of “unqualified labor” in the construction of a foundation: A.N. Z1J 252, 26 September 1785. 37. B.N. Fonds Delamare F.F. 21677, March 1735. B.N. Fonds Delamare F.F. 21677: April, 1744. A.N. A.D. XI 20: June, 1747. B.N. F.F. 13023: April, 1762. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris 132217 and B.N. Joly de Fleury 419. 38. Despite a historical myth, this was not a discourse exclusive to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Youri Carbonnier, Maisons parisiennes, 123–124. 39. A formidable legal expertise was a requirement for membership in the Chambre des bâtiments which thus restricted access to its venal offices. The inventaire après décès of Jean-Baptist Depuisieux in 1776, an expert-bourgeois associated with the building of Ste. Geneviève, has no mention of an atelier and any tools. But Despuisieux had an extensive library comprising some 400 books. Included in the library were 28 volumes on building laws, 50 volumes on Parisian geography, and 80 volumes on geometry. He surely deserved his legal title of expert: A.N. Z2 3754: 6–13 fevrier 1776. 40. The fact that the Chambre did not see growth in membership during the eighteenth century is unusual. William Doyle found an expansion of venal offices after 1771, when hereditary privileges were attached to guild masterships; the overall number of masterships numbered 46,000 by the Revolution: Doyle, Venality. The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (New York & Oxford, 1996), 69, 121, and 309. The lieutenant général de police in 1775 complained that 400,000 livres each year were spent on legal costs by corporations: Garrioch, The Making, 74–75. 41. Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture, seconde édition (Paris, 1755), 2. 42. On the creation of a “liberty lobby” before Turgot, see the account of the debate between the liberal Normand magistrate Bigot de Saint-Croix and the inspector of manufacture and commerce from Reims, Simon Clicquot de Blervache, by: Kaplan, La fin des corporations, 29–47. 43. On the impact of architectural discourse upon public opinion: Richard Wittman, “Architecture, Space, and Abstraction in the Eighteenth-Century French Public Sphere,”Representations, vol. 102, no. 1 (2008), 1–26. 44. The Encyclopédie’s article on “Maçonnerie,” by the construction law specialist J.R. Lucotte, featured 60 pages of text illustrated by over 150 plates. Its success was such that it was republished separately: J.R. Lucotte, Description des

Notes to Pages 50–54 275

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46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

arts et métiers, L’art de la maçonnerie (Paris, 1783). Diderot citation in Vidler, L’espace des Lumières, 148. M. de Fremin, Mémoires critiques d’architecture contenant l’idée de la vraie et de la fausse architecture (1702). A. Desgodetz, Les lois des bâtiments suivant la coutume de Paris (1748). Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, Le guide de l’architecture pratique pour ceux qui veulent bâtir (2 vols., 1781). Le Camus, the innovative architect of les Halles aux Blés (1762), was an architecteexpert-bourgeois between 1750 and 1789. His was an insider’s critique of the excessive complaisance shown toward proprietors during the expertise: Carbonnier, Le bâti et l’habitat, 615–620. Jean Antoine, Traité d’architecture (1768). J.F. Blondel, Architecture françoise (1752). S.G. de Cordemoy, Nouveau traité de toute l’architecture (1706). Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory (London, 1962). Gallet, Demeures parisiennes: 51. Laugier, 118, 129–130. The study of “public opinion” in debates on the corporations bolsters the broad contours of Habermas’ argument. On construction issues, the appeal to the public by magistrates – public safety, public good, and public interest – indeed became a recurrent theme in this period following the 1771 Maupeou “coup” against the magistrates of the Parlement of Paris. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1989; original German version, 1962), 5, 9, 68–70. See also Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston, 1973; original German version, 1969), 77. Laugier, 136–138. “Cheating” is a translation of “les friponneries.” A.N. AD XI 12B, 8 March 1775, Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat privé du Roi rendu en faveur des Architectes-Experts-Entrepreneurs contre les Architectes-ExpertsBourgeois, 24–25. F. Bayard, Joel Félix, P. Hamon, Dictionnaire des surintendants et contrôleurs généraux des finances, XVI e -XVII e -XVIIII e siècles (Paris, 2000). De Lespinasse (ed.), Les métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris, vol 1: 612. The vital fiscal role of guilds, however, speaks to why Turgot’s abolition ultimately failed. The French state was heavily dependent on the contributions of the corporations: Kwass, Privilege, 12. Gail Bossenga, “Taxes,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.) (Cambridge, MA. and London, 1989, French edition first published in 1988), 582–589. De Lespinasse, Les métiers et corporations, vol. 1: “Édit du roi portant suppression des jurandes et communautés de commerce, arts et métiers.” Février, 1776, 162–175. On the broader context of previous efforts by reform ministers to bring laissez-faire to the grain trade in 1763–1764, cf.: Kaplan, Bread, Politics: “The irony of liberalization” was that it needed “a better disciplined and more extensive royal bureaucracy,” vol. 1, 228. Jules Flammermont, Remontrances du Parlement de Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1898) vol. 3, 2–4 March 1776, 297 and 349. Cf. Kaplan, La fin des corporations, 77–104. Flammermont, Remontrances, vol. 3, 2–4 March 1776, 309 and 333. Elsewhere, the Paris Parlement made explicit connections between previous, failed experiments in liberalization under Laverdy, 1763–1764 and under Turgot, 1775, when price controls on grain were lifted resulting in subsistence riots. The paternalist Parlementarians of 1776 evoked these food crises

276

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55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

Notes to Pages 54–58 as another instance where Parlement was “alerted by the cry” of the people to intervene. Remonstrances, vol. 3, 2–4 March 1776, 297, 313, and 318. Ibid., 310. As an example, in 1724 the King tried to delimit the boundary of outer Paris by erecting 300 markers as the effective “town limits.” Garrioch, The Making, 128. Remonstrances, 2–4 March 1776, 319 and 312. Ibid., 309–310. See Steven Kaplan, “Réflexions sur la police du monde du travail, 1700–1815,” Revue historique 261 (January–March 1979), 17–77: 69. Remonstrances, Août, 1776: 312. Hardy, a severe critic, registered numerous complaints about the abolition. A mere sampling: B.N. F. F. 6682, Hardy, Mes Loisirs, vol. 2: fols. 191, 192, 194 (16, 18, 21, 24 March 1776). On the returning journeymen: fol. 232 (11 June 1776). De Lespinasse, Les métiers, edict of August 1776, 175–188. On the postAugust 1776 building corporations: 616–632. See Steven Kaplan’s book on the end of the corporations that interprets the period, 1776–1791 – from the restoration of the guilds to their definitive abolition by the loi Le Chapelier – as a fertile moment of experimentation in which a rather pragmatic reformist guild policy was elaborated. This held out, if only too briefly, the possibility of an innovative corporatism in France: La fin des corporations, 320–323. Moulin, Les maçons, 444 and 448. See Necker’s attack on Turgot’s liberalism: Sur la législation et le commerce des grains (Paris, 1775). Also, B.N. Joly de Fleury 1732, Lettre patente, 1781. On the livrets: A.N. AD XI 20, Lettres patentes du Roi, 5 Septembre 1782. The commissaire Allix’s descents in the carpentry trade, 1785–1789, are documented in A.N. Y 10806 to Y 10810. On 5 November 1786, Allix engaged in five separate interventions: A.N. Y 10809C. Source on the place de Grève: A.N. AD XI 16. The recrudescence of labor strife toward the end of the ancien régime is confirmed by Jean Nicolas in his monumental study of popular uprisings in France from 1661 to 1789. Around 30 percent of Nicolas’ sampling of 462 dossiers of eighteenth-century labor conflict occurred in the period 1780–1789: La Rébellion française. Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale 1661–1789 (Paris, 2002), 292–293. David Garrioch argues “clusters of disputes” around salaries and labor conditions at century’s end “have no direct connection to the Revolution:” The Making of Revolutionary Paris, 66. A.N. Y 9949, Garde de Paris, Poste à Vaugirard, rapport de 2 Mai, 1785, à 6 heures du soir. Cf. Sonenscher, “Journeymen, the Courts, and the French Trades, 1781–1791”: Past and Present 114 (February 1987), 77–109: 84. Mois Tailleurs de Maçons Limousins Main-d’œuvre pierres (plasterers) Juillet 42 sous 42 s. 36 s. 28 s. Août 42 s. 42 s. 36 s. 28 s. Septembre 40 s. 40 s. 36 s. 28 s. Octobre 40 s. 40 s. 34 s. 26 s. Novembre 38 s. 38 s. 32 s. 24 s. Décembre 36 s. 36 s. 30 s. 22 s. Source: B.N. Joly de Fleury 557, fols. 2–28: Sentence de 1785: fols. 3–4. This sliding scale accurately reflects the weak demand in construction during the

Notes to Pages 59–64 277

65.

66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

winter months. But it is also very much a minimum wage in comparison to the salaries given in other sources, such as the haphazard but rich collection of documentation by bankrupt artisans and commerçants in the Archives de Paris (henceforth, “A.P.”) D5B6 1966, Grelet, Entrepreneur des bâtiments, “Brouillon de paie, 1777–1785.” Also, A.P. D5B6 983, De Lagenalle, Maître maçon. And A.P. D5B6 1105, salary rolls of the master mason, Dumontier. See also: Marcel Rouff, “Une grève de gagne-deniers en 1786 à Paris,” Revue historique 5 (December 1910), 332–347. Hardy, Mes Loisirs, vol. 6, fol. 149. The veracity of Hardy’s colorful account is confirmed by the fonds of Joly de Fleury, the Crown’s prosecutor of the Paris Parlement. These include a letter from Lenoir. True to his word, he argues to have the Chambre’s Sentence overturned. The Chambre had surpassed its mandate in “the jurisdiction over building” and had transgressed onto the Parisian police’s jurisdiction: B.N. Joly de Fleury, fol. 17, 26, July 1785, “Extrait des régistres du Parlement.” Fol. 9: Lettre au procureur général du Parlement (n.d.: 25, July 1785 from the content). Hardy, vol. 6, fol. 154, 29, July 1785. The Chambre’s efforts at classification coincided with the larger project to render the capital more uniform and “rational.” Other examples: the numbering of houses and the explosion of almanacs to help clients find particular businesses: Garrioch, The Making, 237–241. The Invention of Tradition, ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 1993). In another context, David Bell demonstrates how French lawyers at the end of the ancien régime used “an ideological construction in an all-too familiar attempt to contrast a lost, mythical golden age . . . with a corrupt and dispiriting present,” Lawyers and Citizens. The Making of a Political Elite in Old-Regime France (New York and Oxford, 1994), 205. One advocate of the corporate solution was Lenoir himself. On proposals to extend the power of building corporations: B.N. Joly de Fleury 1423: Mémoire sur la police des bâtiments, tome 2: Juridiction des maçons, folios 88– 89. B.N. Fonds Delamare: F. F. 21677, folios 4–8; 34–35. Cf. Kaplan, La fin des corporations, 324–362. For an overview of this historiography: William Beik, “The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration,” Past and Present, vol. 188, no. 1 (2005), 195–224. On the debate about a service nobility and its discourse on merit, see Jay Smith (ed.), The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century Reassessments and New Approaches (Philadelphia, 2006).

2 The Revolution and Construction Guilds, 1789–1793 1. On the impact of public opinion in weakening the monarchy: Lisa Jane Graham, If the King Only Knew. Seditious Speech in the Reign of Louis XV (Charlottesville and London, 2000). 2. Allan Potofsky, “The Construction of Paris.” 3. Steven Kaplan finds little sentiment throughout France in favor of simple guild abolition in the cahiers de doléances, with only a single community in Paris favoring suppression: Steven Kaplan, La fin des corporations, 376.

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5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

Notes to Pages 65–70 Timothy Tackett, Par la volonté du peuple. Comment les députés de 1789 sont devenus révolutionnaires (Paris, 1997). Archives de Paris (henceforth, A.P.), 4AZ 692, “Municipalité de Paris: les Administrateurs du Département à MM. les Syndics de la Communauté des maîtres maçons” (décember 1790). Also, cf., instructions in B.N. V 21549, Almanach des bâtiments, 1790, 23. Cf., Danielle Chadych and Dominque Leborgne, Atlas de Paris. Evolution d’un paysage urbain (Paris, 1999), 108–109. Hoffman, et al., Des marchés sans prix, 204–205. William Baer, “Is speculative building underappreciated in urban history?,” Urban History, vol. 34, no. 2, (August 2007), 296–316. In another context: Gérard Jacquemet, “Spéculation et spéculateurs dans l’immobilier Parisien à la fin du XIXe siècle,” Cahiers d’histoire, vol. 21, no. 3 (1976), 273–306. Robert Graves: 1962 interview on BBC-TV. Cabestan, La conquête, 18. Roche, The People, 99. B.A.N. MS 1229, fol. 34: “Délibérations des maçons,” 50–61. For the period, 1752–1763, the balance sheet was: 152,391 livres in receipts and 84,258 livres in expenses. A portion of the excess funds was flamboyantly given as a contribution (dons gratuits) to the Crown’s navy. The monarchy, indeed, had a vested interest in the health of the corporations. A.N. U 1384, “Bilan des faillites et dates des dépots au greffe du Châtelet,” 1751–1791. The Parisian Book Guild served in a similar manner. However, Carla Hesse also finds a heavy rate of bankruptcies in 1790 for Paris publishers: 13 out of the 21 bankruptcies between 1789 and 1793 occurred in 1790 alone: Hesse, Publishing, vol. 39, no. 71, 73–76. Isser Woloch, The New Regime. Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789– 1820s (New York and London, 1994). Youri Carbonnier, “Les maisons à ponts parisiens à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: étude d’un phénomène,” Histoire, économie et société, 17 (1998), 711–724. For a comprehensive analysis of revolutionary building projects, see: James A. Leith, Space and Revolution. Projects for Monuments, Squares, and Public Buildings in France, 1789–1799 (Montreal, 1991). Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom (Durham, NC, 1997), 151. On the origins of Palloy’s transformation of the Bastille into revolutionary relics: B.N.F. LB39–10260: Palloy, Adresse à l’Assemblée nationale législative. Discours prononcé à l’Assemblée nationale législative, le 7 octobre, 3e année de la liberté . . . (1791). Lüsebrink and Reichardt, The Bastille, 121–147. See the comments by: Colin Jones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivifed.” Op. Cit., 157–191. Palloy, B.H.V.P. B-1234, Plan général des terrains de la Bastille . . . appartenant au domaine national; B.N.F. 4-LB39-10467 (BIS) Projet d’un monument à élever à la gloire de la Liberté. (1790). Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille, 118–123. Louis Hautecoeur. Histoire de l’architecture classique en France. Paris, 1948– 1957, vol. 5: Révolution et Empire, 1792–1815. Werner Szambien, Les projets de l’An II. Concours d’architecture de la période révolutionnaire (Paris, 1986), 12, 18.

Notes to Pages 72–78 279 17. B.N.F. Le Senne 6410, C.P. Le Sueur, Projet d’utilité et embellissement pour la Ville de Paris, adressé aux sections (Paris, May 1790), 11. 18. B.N.F VP 3671, Florentin Gilbert, Adresse à tous les corps administratifs de la France et à tous les connoisseurs de l’art de l’architecture et de la construction des travaux publics (Paris, 1790), 3 and 5. On Florentin Gilbert: Werner Szambien, “Les architectes parisiens à l’époque révolutionnaire: Liste des artistes de l’Epoque révolutionnaire,” La Revue de l’Art, no. 83 (1989), 36–50: 46. 19. Honoré de Balzac, Scènes de la vie de province, vol. 1 (Paris, A. Houssiaux, 1855), 400. 20. Michel Bruguière, Gestionnaires et profiteurs de la Révolution: L’administrateur des finances françaises de Louis XVI à Bonaparte (Paris, 1986), 44–65. Jacques Godechot, Les institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris, 1989), 16–23; 228–232. 21. The jurisdiction consulaire was a commercial court that applied the principle of arbitration to bear for small disputes, typically, between merchants and artisans. Its functions were continued by the justice de paix of the sections during the Revolution. They were then transferred to the Conseil de Prud’hommes under Napoleon: Jacques Godechot, Les institutions de la France, 48–50; 615–617. 22. AP Series D4B6 for credit networks included in bankruptcy applications; series D5B6 for proof of indebtedness: D4 B6 111 7958 (2 March 1791), Antoine Marcomble, maître charpentier. D4B6 110 7879 (20 September 1790), Brunet fréres. D4 B6 97 6768 (6 September 1786), Duhamel. Cf. also D4 B6 101 7078 (20 February 1788), Joseph François, maître maçon. D4B6 76 5058 (9 March 1780 and 17 June 1785), Charles-François Morand, maître maçon. These bankruptcies were cross-referenced with A.N. U 1384: “Bilan des faillites et dates des dépots au greffe du Châtelet,” 1751–1791, where a sampling of 36 builders was studied. Nineteen (53 percent) of these bankruptcies were master masons, five (14 percent) were architects and only four (11 percent) were master carpenters. The other eight (22 percent) were made up of the smaller trades on the building site, the plumbers, painters, roofers, and plasterers. 23. For a broader study on the jurisdiction consulaire: Amalia D. Kessler, A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven, 2007). 24. Charles-Louis Chassin (ed.), Les élections et les cahiers de Paris en 1789, vol. 1 (Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1888–1889), 387–389. 25. Examples of Parisians’ complaints: B.N. F.F. 6685: Siméon-Prosper Hardy, Mes Loisirs, vol. 6: “Mardi, 15 Novembre 1785, Etat actuel des travaux publics,” fol. 227. Also, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, Chapitre CCCXXX, “Les heures du Jour,” 873–881: 875. 26. L’Assemblée générale des députés des arts & professions composant le bâtiment (Paris, 1790). Richard Bigo, La Caisse d’escompte (1776–1793) (Paris, 1927), 117–124. BN 4-Fm-35337, Pétition à monsieur le maire, 3. 27. B.N.F. 4-Fm-35337, Pétition à monsieur le maire, 10–11. Cf., a vitriolic riposte by proprietors: A.N. AD XIII 13, Observations sur le mémoire donné à l’Assemblée nationale par les entrepreneurs des bâtiments (Décembre, 1790).

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Notes to Pages 79–85

28. Haim Burstin, Une Révolution à l’oeuvre. Le faubourg St Marcel 1789–1794 (Seyssel, 2005), 175–178. 29. Allan Potofsky, “The Political Economy of the Debt Debate: The Ideological Uses of Atlantic Commerce, from 1787 to 1800,” William & Mary Quarterly, vol. 63, July 2006, 485–515. 30. These are now destroyed. Szambien, Les projets, 13–15. Leith, Space and Revolution, op. cit., 126–137. 31. Michael Sonenscher, “The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: the French Fiscal Deficit and the Politics of the Revolution of 1789,” History of Political Thought (1997), vol. 18, no. 1, 44–103 and vol. 18, no. 2, 267–325: I: 65–67. Also expanded and deepened in: Idem., Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, 2007). Michel Morineau, “Budgets de l’état et gestion des finances royales en France au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue historique, 264 (1980), 289–336. William Doyle, Venality. The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford & New York, 1996), 69, 121, 309. 32. A.N. U1384, “Bilan des faillites et dates des dépôts au greffier du Châtelet, 1757–1791.” Kwass, Privilege, 61–65. Thomas Luckett, Credit and Commercial Society in France, 1740–1789, PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1992, 197–203, 213. 33. Vidler, L’espace des Lumières. 34. Philip T. Hoffman, et al., Des marchés, 225–227. 35. Ducoudray, et al., Atlas, 11, 22–23, 33. Béaur, L’immobilier et la révolution, 119–126. Georges Lefebvre, Etudes sur la Révolution française (Paris, 1959), 336. Bernard Bodinier and Eric Teyssier, L’événement le plus important de la Révolution. La vente des biens nationaux (Paris, 2000). 36. Archives de la prefecture de police (hereafter, “A.P.P.”), Aa 215/426–434. B.N.F. 4◦ Fm 35345: Pétition présentée à la municipalité de Paris par les ci-devant Maîtres charpentiers (30 avril 1791). (Paris, 1791), 3–4. 37. Potofsky, “The Construction of Paris,” op. cit. 38. B.N.F. 4-FM 35345, Pétition présentée. Other petitions and police reports testifying to “troubles” among the carpentry trade in the period between the Lois d’Allarde and Chapelier: B.N.F. 4-FM 35346, Précis présenté à l’Assemblée Nationale par les entrepreneurs de la charpente (22 mai 1791). A.N. AD XI 65 and B.N.F. 4-FM 35347, Précis présenté à l’Assemblée nationale par les ouvriers de l’art de charpente, le 26 mai 1791. B.N.F. 4-FM 35355, Pétition par les maréchaux de Paris le 7 juin 1791. Also, B.N.F. FM 35357, Pétition des professions et arts de bâtiments (Décembre, 1790). 39. A.P.P., Aa 198 (Observatoire) April 1791. 40. A.P.P., Aa 219 (Popincourt), June 1791. A.P. Aa 224 (Roule), 6 Juin 1791. 41. A.P.P., Aa 198 folios 29–30, 21 April 1791 (Observatoire). 42. A.N. AD XI 16, articles 14–23. On corporate rituals among the journeymen: B.N.F. FM-4-35345: Pétition: les compagnons charpentiers ont “prêtés au commencement de leurs séances le serment de ne point travailler audessous de ce prix” (50 sous par journée) . . . . “Et de ne point laisser travailler d’autres ouvriers chez un Entrepreneur qui n’auraient pas fait sa soumission par écrit dans leur procès-verbal . . .” Augustin Cochin. La Crise de l’histoire révolutionnaire: Taine et Aulard (Paris, 1909), 85–102.

Notes to Pages 85–89 281 43. B.N.F. 4◦ Fm 35355, Pétition . . . par les maréchaux de Paris, op. cit., 4. Cf. Grace M. Jaffé, Le Mouvement ouvrier pendant la Révolution française (Paris, 1920), 117–125. As for the general veracity of the maréchaux’ claims, they fully conform the accounts of the commissaires of the section: B.N.F. 4◦ Fm 35345, Pétition: the compagnon carpenters were said to “prêter au commencement de leurs séances le serment de ne point travailler au-dessous de ce prix” (50 sous par journée) “et de ne point laisser travailler d’autres ouvriers chez un Entrepreneur qui n’auraient pas fait sa soumission par écrit dans leur procès-verbal . . . ” 44. B.N.F. F-4-35355, Pétition présentée à l’Assemblée nationale par les maréchaux de Paris, 2. Cf., Steven Kaplan, La fin des corporations, 463–465. Et Grace M. Jaffé, Le Mouvement ouvrier pendant la Révolution française (Paris, 1920), 117–125. 45. B.N.F. Fm 35355, Pétition. 46. Ibid., AN F13 1934, “Avis aux ouvriers,” Avril 1791. 47. B.N.F. 4◦ Fm 35345, Pétition préséntée à la municipalité de Paris par les ci-devant Maîtres charpentiers (Paris, 1791), 3–4. 48. Lynn Hunt, “The Rhetoric of Revolution,” in Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Ca., 1984), 19–51. 49. A.N. F13 1934, “Avis aux ouvriers . . . ” Avril, 1791. 50. B.N.F. 4-Fm-35345, Petition présentée à la municipalité de Paris, 3–4. Cf., Sewell, Work and Revolution, 92–113. 51. Kaplan, la Fin des corporations, 409. Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981). Allan Potofsky, “La Révolution sur les chantiers du bâtiment parisien: entre corporations et libéralisme,” Paris sous la Révolution, Raymonde Monnier (Paris, 2008), 93–103. 52. Emphasizing the labor movement in the abolition: Jaffé, Le Mouvement ouvrier. An even earlier example of this argument is Germain Martin’s, Les Associations ouvrières au XVIIIe siècle (1700–92) (Paris, 1900). Favoring a political explanation: Michael P. Fitzsimmons, The Remaking of France: The National Assembly and the Constitution of 1791 (New York & Cambridge, 1994). 53. On plebeian radicalism: E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?” Social History, 3 (May 1978), 133–165. 54. Haim Burstin, Le faubourg, 219–231. 55. 55 A.N. O1 1699, “Pétition des tailleurs de pierre,” 24 Juillet, an 2 (sic). F13 1936: “Pétition des sculpteurs de l’église Ste. Geneviève”: N.D., probably April, 1793 from context. Another industry-wide protest movement was among ouvriers maréchaux ferrants: A.N. AD XI 65. 56. B.N.F. 4-Fm 35337, Pétition par les professions du bâtiment, décember 1790: “le corps des maîtres maçons” had not met since 1789 to orchestrate demands. 57. In a later context, shoemaking has been similarly studied as a militant craft throughout Europe for structural causes specific to the trade: Eric Hobsbawm and Joan Scott, “Political Shoemakers,” in Hobsbawm, Workers: Worlds of Labor (NY, 1984), 103–130. 58. B.N.F. Fonds Delamare: FF 21677, “La jurisdiction royale des bâtiments,” folios 4–8. Official edicts promulgated in 1567; 1667; and 1712 officially set the workday of builders as between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. in the winter and between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. in the summer. Salary rolls kept in the

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60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

Notes to Pages 89–94 Archives de Paris, series D4B6, expose these long hours to be a fiction. The 14 day journée was extremely rare. Cf., Annie Moulin, Les Maçons de la Haute Marche, 165–166. Cf. AP D5B6 1966, Grelet, Entrepreneur des bâtiments, “Brouillon de paie, 1777–1785.” and AP D5B6 3514 Michel Normand, Maître Charpentier, “roll de compagnon”, 1781–1787. Mercier’s caricature of the bâtisseur has him as a rich parvenu who could even afford to hire carriages to go to the opera., op. cit., chapter DCXXXVIII, “Les maçons,” 118. Labrousse, Histoire économique, 491–492, 670–672. Durand, “Les salaires,” 466–480. Labrousse’s statistics are from the period 1726–1741 and 1785–1789: Ibid., 672. Potofsky, “The Construction of Paris.” A.N. AD XI 16, Lettres patentes du Roi portant homologation des statuts & règlements pour la Communauté des maîtres charpentiers de la Ville & Fauxbourgs de Paris. September 1785. Ibid., articles VII–IX. A.N. Y 10806-Y 10810, Series of raids by commissaire Allix on behalf of “La Communauté de Maîtres Charpentiers,” 1785–1789. See p. 57. “Lutter contre le travail au noir, une priorité européenne,” Le Monde économie, 24 November 2003. The European Commission estimates that, in 2002, between 3 percent and 15 percent of the European PIB is created by such clandestine labor. B.N.F. 8-Z Le Senne 13918, Almanach des bâtiments, 1790. Steven Kaplan finds the numbers of 141 master carpenters and 1,684 journeymen and 141 or 87 masters to be too low: la Fin des corporations, 701, note 7. On the Almanach, Lemas, “Les ‘pages jaunes’,” 175–182. B.N.F. Fm 35347, “Précis . . . ,” 2. B.N.F. V 29997, Almanach des bâtiments, 1790. The numbers of master masons had continued this steady increase throughout the eighteenth century. For one year only, the Almanach Royale in 1702 lists master masons, giving their number at 179: B.N.F. Lb 25 18. By the Revolution, the Almanach des bâtiments features 409 master masons: B.N.F. V 29997. For the year 1750 for masons and 1751 for carpenters: A.N. XXc 64: “Liste des Maistres des Bâtiments de sa Majesté” and “Liste des Jurez du Roy es Oeuvres de Charpenterie.” For 1776, B.N.F. V. 21544: Almanch des bâtiments. For 1790 and 1791, B.N.F. V. 29997: Almanch des bâtiments. The number of master masons in the early phases of the Revolution are verified by the “Braesch papers.” These are the request of chefs d’entreprises to change money into assignats for the salaries of workers. In 1791, they list 415 master masons – an increase of only 6 after 1790: A.N. F30 115–160. Truant, The Rites of Labor. Charles Loyseau, Traité des ordres et simples dignitez (Original edition: Paris, 1610). On the innovative practices of the ancien régime guilds in Lille, cf., Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves du commerce. Entreprise et institution dans la région lilloise, 1780–1860 (Paris, 1995). Also, Gail Bossenga, The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge, 1991). Cf., Edward J. Shephard, “Social and Geographic Mobility of the Eighteenth-Century Guild Artisan: An Analysis of Guild Receptions in Dijon, 1700–1790,” in Work in

Notes to Pages 94–101

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France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice, Steven Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp (eds.) (Cornell, 1986), 97–130. 73. Richard Cobb, Reactions to the French Revolution (London, 1972). 74. See critical comments on the linguistic turn in Dick Geary, “Labour History, the ‘Linguistic Turn’ and Postmodernism,” Contemporary European History, vol. 9, no. 3 (2000), 445–462.

3 Projecting the Revolution on the Parisian Work Site, 1789–1793 1. Potofsky, “La Révolution sur les chantiers du bâtiment.” 2. Dominique Margairaz, “L’invention du ‘Service Public’: entre ‘changement matériel’ et ‘contrainte de nommer,’ ” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no. 52–53 (July–September 2005), 10–32: 31. 3. Janis Langins. Conserving the Enlightenment: French Military Engineering from Vauban to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 426–427. 4. Allan Potofsky, “Work and Citizenship.” 5. Sharon Farmer. Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Cornell, 2002). 6. Woloch, The New Regime, 238, 254–255. 7. Haim Burstin, Une Révolution à l’œuvre. Le faubourg Saint Marcel (1789–1794) (Paris, 2005), 158. 8. Dominique Godineau, Citoyennes tricoteuses: les femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française (Aix-en Provence, 1988), 89–102. Lisa DiCaprio, The Origins of the Welfare State. Women, Work and the French Revolution (Urbana and Chicago, 2007), 9. Burstin, Une Révolution, 185–186. 9. A.N. H2 1959: Affiche de la Ville de Paris: Ateliers de charité, 2 décembre 1788. W. Olejniczak, “Working the body of the poor: The ateliers de charité in late 18th-century France,” Journal of Social History, 24 (1990–1991), 87–108. Alan Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor (Oxford, 1981). 10. A.N. H2 1959, Affiche: Ordonnance pour des ateliers de charité accordé par le Roi pour procurer du travail et des secours pendant l’hiver de 1788–1789. On polemics against the workshops: Marcel Reinhard, Nouvelle histoire de Paris: la Révolution, 1789–1799 (Paris, 1971), 93–94. The maximum wage that could be earned in an atelier – 18 sous per day – represented less than a third what a stonecutter on a public site earned. 11. B.N.F. 8- LB39-203 (D): Pierre-Francois Boncerf, Les inconvéniens des droits féodaux, ou réponse d’un avocat au Parlement de Paris . . . (Paris, 1776). 12. B.N.F. LB40-318: Idem., De la nécessité d’occuper avantageusement tous les gros ouvriers. Motion faite, le 20 août 1789, dans l’assemblée du comité du district de Saint-Étienne-du-Mont . . . (Paris, 1789–1791), 2, 10. 13. B.N.F. Lb 40 1185, Projet du plan de municipalité de la ville de Paris (August 1789), VIII, 23. Its precise jurisdiction in construction matters would be clarified by the municipality a few months later: B.N.F. Lb 40 3267, Règlement pour les ateliers publics, 11 November 1789. It was only fully put into place in the spring of 1790. Rapport des commissaires du Département des travaux publics (5 May 1790) in Sigismond Lacroix, ed., Actes de la commune de Paris pendant la Révolution, tome V (Paris, 1894–1914), 248–251.

284

Notes to Pages 102–107

14. “Rapport des commissaires du Département des travaux publics” (5 May 1790) Lacroix, Actes de la commune, tome V, 249. On the reorganization of municipal government in the early Revolution: Ted W. Margadandt, Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution (Princeton, 1992). 15. Ibid., 249 (August 1790), tome VII, 22–24. B.N.F. Lb 40 3267, Règlement pour les ateliers publics (11 Novembre 1789). 16. As a friend of Arthur Young and as a member of the physiocratic influenced Société de 1789, Liancourt was steeped in these “English” distinctions between the poor: G. R. Ikni, “La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt,” in Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, A. Soboul (ed.) (Paris, 1989), 647–648. On his philanthropic career, including his later exile in the United States: Allan Potofsky, “Emigrés et réfugiés de la Révolution française aux EtatsUnis,” in Réfugiés/exilés aux Etats-Unis: 1789–2000, Catherine Collomp et Mario Menendez (éds.) (Paris, 2003), 33–50. 17. Procès-verbaux et rapports du Comité de mendicité de la Constituante (1790– 91), Camille Bloch and Alexandre Tuetey (eds.) (Paris, 1911), “Séance du 30 aôut, 1790, ateliers de secours – projet de décret,” article 3, 125–126. 18. Ibid., “Introduction,” xxii. B.N.F. Lb 40 1185, Projet du plan de Municipalité, 23. A.N. O1 1701, Letter from Bailly to Pastoret, 17 May 1791. 19. A.N. O1 1699, Examen impartial de la demande faite au conseil général de la Commune de Paris, par les sculpteurs en ornements, employés au Département des travaux publics (no date, end of 1790 from content). 20. Archives de la préfecture de police (henceforth, “A.P.P.”), AA 198, pièce 29: “Pétition au commissaire de police, Section de l’Observatoire,” 21 April 1791. 21. A.P.P. AA 176, registre 3, fo. 5, “Registre des Procès-verbaux, déclarations, plaintes, et autres actes du commissaire de police,” 30 May 1791. 22. L’Ami du peuple, 473, 29 mai 1791. 23. A.N. AD XIII 13, Mémoire sur la nécessité d’entreprendre de grands travaux publics pour prévenir la ruine totale des Arts en France . . . . (n.d., but mid-1791 from context), 2–3. Skirting the ban on petition literature, in the crisis following the Champ de Mars massacre of 17 July 1791, this document was not addressed to a particular authority. 24. Burstin, Une Révolution, 18–23. Guillerme, La naissance, 66–76, 183–184. André Guillerme, Anne-Cécile Lefort, Gérard Jigaudon, Dangereux, insalubres et incommodes: paysages industriels en banlieue parisienne (XIXe–XXe siècles) (Paris, 2005). 25. See chapter 1. Annie Moulin-Bourret, Les Maçons de la Creuse: les origines du mouvement (Clermont-Ferrand: 1994), 201. Burstin, Le faubourg, 316–317. Most Parisian boarding houses were located in the Right Bank streets, on the rue de la Mortellerie and rue de la Tissanderie, clustering around the central Place de Grève, in front of the Hôtel de Ville where builders were hired. 26. B.N.F. V 41030, Charles-Axel Guillaumot, Mémoire sur les travaux ordonnés dans les carrières sous Paris, et plaines adjacentes, et exposé des opérations faites pour leur réparation (Paris, 1797). 27. Burstin, Une Révolution, 181–182. 28. Rachel Hammersley, French Revolutionaries and English Republicans: The Cordeliers Club, 1790–1794. (Rochester, NY, 2005).

Notes to Pages 108–114

285

29. Colin Jones, The Great Nation. France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London, 2002), 477. 30. Jack Censer, Prelude to Power (Baltimore, 1976), 37–55; 124–127. Jacques Godechot (ed.), Histoire générale de la presse française (Paris, 1969), 501, ff. 31. On the transformation of the abby into the Panthéon: Jean-Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon: essai sur le culte des grands hommes (Paris, Fayard, 1998). Mark Deming, “Le Panthéon révolutionnaire,” in Le Panthéon: Symbole des Révolutions, Barry Bergdoll, et al. (eds.) (Paris, 1989). Mona Ozouf, “Le Panthéon,” in Les lieux de mémoire, vol.1, La République, Pierre Nora (ed.) (Paris, 1987), 138–166. Also, Marie-Louise Biver, Le Panthéon à l’époque révolutionnaire (Paris, 1982). On the Panthéon in a broader context: Bronislaw Baczko, Lumières de l’utopie (Paris, 1979). 32. L’Ami du peuple, no. 487, 12 June 1791. 33. The work at Sainte Geneviève was never completely suspended by the Revolution. In 1789–1790, the municipality hired up to 22 stonecutters to complete the original ecclesiastical edifice: A.N. F 13 1137, Municipalité de Paris, registre à la comptabilité # 447, 12 March 1791. 34. Excessive “gaieté” was Quatremère’s dismissive term for the original plans by Jacques-Germain Soufflot. Cf., Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Political Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 166–174. 35. Quatremère’s position was commissaire à l’administration et direction générale de travaux. Ibid. R. Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy et son intervention dans les arts (Paris, 1910). Also, Mark Deming, “Le Panthéon révolutionnaire”. 36. Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy, 148–152. 37. B.N.F. V 29997, Almanach des bâtiments, 1790. 38. O’Connell, “Architects and the French Revolution,” 17–18. The crossed jurisdictions were further confused by the then barren existence of the Academy of Architecture which was dealt its coup de grâce on 9 August 1793. 39. A.N. F4 2020, Letter de M. de Lassart au Ministre de l’Intérieur, concernant Dutrescu, Director de la Trésorerie nationale, 12 May 1791. The architect Celestin-Joseph Happe, an inspector for the city of Paris, concluded that the Revolution owed to the King’s privileged entrepreneurs and architects a total of over 5 million pounds for services rendered in the construction and for the maintenance of all the buildings within the Maison du Roi, between 1780 and 1791. A.N.F 13 907: Justification faite par M, Happe pour les services des Bâtiments du Domaine (1791). 40. Lacroix, Actes de la Commune, vol. IV, 18 May–30 July 1791, 289–297. 41. Antoine Quatremère de Quincy wrote many detailed reports on the site: B.N.F. Lb 40 165, Rapport sur l’édifice de Sainte-Geneviève, (29 juillet 1791), 9–16. B.N.F. Lb 40 227, Rapport sur l’édifice dit de Sainte-Geneviève, fait au directoire du département de Paris (17 novembre 1792) And B.N.F. Lb 40 204, Rapport fait au Directoire du Département de Paris le 13 november, 1792 à l’an 1er de la République (1 Brumaire, An 2–22 novembre 1793). A.N. F13 1138, Etat comparatif des employés à l’édifice de Sainte Geneviève sous les différentes administrations. 1791. 42. Louis Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique en France, Tome IV (Paris, 1952). François Benoit, L’art français sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris, 1961).

286

Notes to Pages 115–123

43. Quatremère de Quincy, Rapport sur l’édifice (1791), 9. Idem., Rapport sur l’état actuel du Panthéon français, fait au Directoire du Département de Paris sur les travaux entrepris, continués, ou achevés au Panthéon (22 October 1793), 1–3: B.N.F. Lb 40 227. Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy. 44. A.N. F 13 1137 and O1 1700 for the Panthéon’s payrolls. 45. The total work hours put in by the stonecutters was 3,957 hours; they were paid a total of 9,496 livres. A.N. F 13 1137, “Role (sic) des Journées des tailleurs de pierre, vérifié par Soufflot.” 46. Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages. 47. The Archives de Paris series for compagnon rolls is: A.P. “D5 B6, Faillites” On Grelet, Entrepreneur des bâtiments: A.P. D5 B6 1966, “Rolle des compagnons.” 48. Yves Durand, “Recherches sur les salaires des maçons à Paris au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale, vol. XLIV, no. 44, 1966, 469–480. 49. A.P. D4 B6, dos. 101, chem. 7133: Bonfiont, Claude Nicolas, maître maçon, 30 April 1788. On the eve of the Revolution, Bonfiont’s bankruptcy dossier illuminates several abuses that Revolutionaries sought to reform. Bonfiont was responsible for masonry work at the prestigious site of Ledoux’s barrière de l’hôpital St. Louis. His dettes actives were 61,598, of which close to 5,000 livres were owed to journeymen. 50. These petitions are collected in A.N. F 13 333A-B. On revolutionary merit: William Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What Is the Third Estate? (Durham and London, 1994), 126–128. 51. A.N. F 13 333b. 52. Petitions are collected in A.N. F 13 333a, F 13 333b, and F 13 334. Most are for the specialized position of stonecutter (tailleur de pierre). 53. Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy, 167. 54. A.N. O1 1700, salary rolls, 1791–1793 (with many lacunae). 55. Burstin, Une Révolution, 175–176. 56. Potofsky, “Work and Citizenship.” 57. B.N.F. 4 Fm 35345, Pétition présentée à la municipalité de Paris par les ci-devant Maîtres charpentiers (Paris, 1791). B.N.F. 4 Fm 35346, Précis présenté à l’Assemblée nationale par les entrepreneurs de la charpente (22 Mai 1791). B.N.F. 4 Fm 35347, Précis présenté à l’Assemblée nationale, par les ouvriers en l’art de la charpente de la ville de Paris, le 26 mai 1791. 58. Quoted in Deming, “Le Panthéon,” 114. On the Pantheon: Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon. Ozouf, “Le Panthéon.” 59. Quotation from Burstin, 310. For context: Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). 60. A.N. O1 1699, Précis pour les entrepreneurs de l’ornement de l’église SteGeneviève (n.d., but May, 1791 by content), 9–10. The appellation “Panthéon français” did not take hold in the popular imagination before the end of 1791. 61. Réponse au précis des entrepreneurs de l’ornement de l’église Sainte-Geneviève (n.d., but mid-May 1791 by content), 13 and 14. 62. A.N. O1 1699, Réponse au précis, 12 and 14. 63. B.N.F. Lb 40 165, Quatremère, Rapport, 1791, 20. A.N. F 13 1935, Pétition, 29 July 1791. Rondelet, Mémoire historique sur le dôme du Panthéon (1797).

Notes to Pages 123–132 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

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A.N. F 13 1935. B.N.F Lb 40 165, Quatremère, Rapport, 19. ibid., 17. Dominique Margairaz, “L’invention du ‘service public.’ ” On public service, see B.N.F. Lb 40 3267: Règlement pour les ateliers publics, 11 November 1789 and is demonstrated in its practice by: A.N. F 13 1137, Municipalité de Paris, registre à la comptabilité, département des Travaux publics, 12 March 1791. B.N.F.: L’Ami du peuple, no. 487, 12 June 1791. G. Vauthier, “Le Panthéon Français sous la Révolution,” Annales révolutionnaires, 3 (1910), 395–416. B.N.F. Lb 40 165, Quatremère de Quincy, Rapport sur l’édifice dit de SainteGeneviève (1791), 19. Also quoted in Sonenscher, Work and Wages, 347. Quatremère’s progress reports are filled with vituperative outbursts against what he views as the improper handling of construction matters, for example: “The accounting of this precarious administration is filled with anarchic elements; and nothing is more close to despotism than the absence of authority . . . ,” 21. A.N. F 13 1935, “Pétition aux Travaux publics, 130 ouvriers employés par Poncet vs. Poncet,” 26 August 1791. Ibid., “Pétition,” 29 July 1791. Pétition “au nom de tous les compagnons travaillant au dit édifice”: A.N. F 13 1935, “Pétition à Monsieur le Président (Liancourt) au Département de Paris,” 30 August 1791. Scribbled across the top the petition listing accusations is the order to “faire un rapport.” This report was, A.N. F 13 1935, Au Quatremère, de la commission du Directoire (du Panthéon), 20 September 1791. And Rapport sur les plaintes des ouvriers, 22 September 1791. A.N. F774–79, dossier Poncet, Pierre (the police file on Poncet’s arrest in September 1793 contains information of the entrepreneur’s activities dating back to 1755). A.N. F774–79, dossier Poncet. G. Vauthier, “Le Panthéon français,” 395– 397. Burstin, Une Révolution, 689–694. L’Ami du peuple, no. 487, 12 June 1791. A.N. F 13 1935, Département de Paris: extrait des registres des délibérations du Directoire, 24 and 29 August 1791. The affiche was signed by La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. A.N. F 13 1935, Département de Paris: 24 August 1791. Ibid. The composition of the Pantheon’s workforce from 1 September 1791: 300 tailleurs de pierre, 32 scieurs de pierre, 6 poseurs, 12 limousins, 30 charpentiers, 27 bardeurs, and 15 manoeuvres. Keith Michael Baker, “A Script for a French Revolution: the Political Consciousness of the Abbé Mably,” in Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), 86–108. A.N. F 13 1935, Mémoire pour les ouvriers de Quatremère de Quincy, 21 September 1791. A.N. AD XIII 2B (N.D., probably September 1791), 2. Ibid., 3–4. Szambien, Les projets, 61–101. They are also discussed by Leith, Space and Revolution, 160–166. See chapter four of this book.

288

Notes to Pages 132–137

82. James Leith, Space and Revolution, 100–101. Mark K. Deming, La Halle au blé de Paris 1762–1813 (Brussels, 1984), 167–197. Dora Wiebenson, “The Two Domes of the Halle au Blé of Paris,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 55, no. 2 (June 1973), 262–279. 83. Michel Gallet, Les architectes parisiens du XVIIIe siècle. Dictionnaire biographique et critique (Paris: Edition Mengès, 1995), 358–359. 84. One exception: Anthony Sutcliff, Paris. An Architectural History (New York and New Haven, 1993), 62–65. 85. Charles Mangin, Réflexions d’un citoyen patriote: dont l’importance est telle qu’il peut en résulter deux ou trois cent millions de bénéfices . . . . (Paris, 1792), 6. A.N. A.D. XIII 13, Pétition du Mangin Père, Architecte (1792). Idem., Analyse des idées qui ont dirigé le citoyen Mangin père, architecte, dans la composition de son plan dédié à la République française: avec ses vues sur l’établissement d’un bureau, composé d’architectes (Paris, 1792). Idem., Exposé et analyse du plan et projet présenté à l’Assemblée Nationale: avec les moyens d’en opérer l’exécution (Paris, 1792). Idem., Pétition du Sr Mangin père, . . . et supplément au Mémoire instructif sur le plan dont il a fait hommage à l’Assemblée Nationale constituante en avril 1791 (Paris, 1792). 86. On the framework of competitive bidding, cf., M. Dorigny, “Economie libre” and “Propriété,” in Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution Française, Albert Soboul (ed.) (Paris, 1989), 401403; 869–870. Nira Kaplan, “Virtuous Competition among Citizens: Emulation in Politics and Pedagogy during the French Revolution,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, (Winter 2003), 241–248. 87. Cf. A.N. AD XIII, 13/6, Examen impartial de la demande faite au conseil général de la Commune par les sculpteurs en ornemens, employés à la nouvelle église Sainte-Geneviève, et renvoyé au département des Travaux publics; par délibération de ce Conseil (Paris, n.d., but mid-1791 by content), 10–11. 88. “Les travaux publics sont donnés à l’entreprise par adjudication au rabais,” promulgated 9 October 1791. 89. Archives parlementaires, XXXVI, 366: 24 December 1791: Decree by the Assemblée Législative “aux 50,000 livres versées par le trésorier national dans la Caisse du receveur du directoire du Département de Paris.” Also, A.N. F13 333A. 90. B.N.F. Lb 40 227, Soufflot, Rapport sur l’état actuel du Panthéon Français: Rapport fait au directoire du Département de Paris (Paris, 1793), 1–2. 91. A.N. F13 1137, 20 September 1792, Petitions by Joseph Guibert, sculpteur en ornemens, and resulting inquest by Bourdon. 92. Woloch, The New Regime, 307–312. 93. Burstin, 312–313. A.N. F 13 333a, Lettre de Quatremère à M. Durpuseau, justice de paix de la section de Ste. Geneviève (the section would be renamed “Pantheon-Français” in August 1792). 94. A.N. F 13 1935. A.N. F7 4774–79, dossier Poncet. 95. A.N. F 13 1935, “Pétitions des artistes et sculpteurs aux directeurs” (no date, but mid-1792 from content). 96. A.N. O1 1700, “Rôle des journées des tailleurs de pierres,” 18 July 1792–29 June 1793. 97. Parenthesis added. B.N.F. Lb 40 1305, Projet de travaux publics, proposé par les commissaires des 48 sections de Paris, assemblés à la maison commune, à

Notes to Pages 137–147

98.

99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

104.

105.

106. 107. 108. 109.

110.

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l’effet d’aviser aux moyens de procurer de l’ouvrage aux ouvriers qui ont besoin de travailler pour vivre. (19 janvier 1793.) 2. On the spinning workshops: DiCaprio, The Origins and Godineau, Citoyennes tricoteuses. On the Manufacture de Gobelins, cf. Burstin, Le faubourg, 216–231. B.N.F. Lb 40 1305, Projet de travaux publics, 7–8. Ibid., 12. For example, see the contract given to the entrepreneur sculptor A.N. O1 1700: 23 January, “an 2” (sic., 1793): “Je soussigné Jean Guillaume Moitte, sculpteur et membre de l’académie de peinture et de sculpture, en conformité de l’arrêté du Directoire, promesse de m’engager et m’obliger à ce qui suit.” A.N. F 13 1936. Moulin, Les maçons de la Creuse, 174. Arlette Farge, “Work-Related Diseases of Artisans in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Medicine and Society in France: Selections from the Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, vol. 6, Robert Foster and Orest Ranum (eds.) (Baltimore, 1980), 89–103. Although reflecting mid-nineteenth-century concerns: Durand, De la condition des ouvriers de Paris de 1789 à 1841 (Paris, 1841), 189–190. Isser Woloch, “The Contraction and Expansion of Democratic Space during the Period of the Terror,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 4, The Terror, Kenneth Michael Baker (ed.) (Oxford, 1994), 309–325. A.N. F 13 1936. The relation of wages to prices may be evaluated with reference to George Rudé’s estimate of a hypothetical salary and budget for a journeyman carpenter: in 1790, the average carpenter spent 60 percent of wages upon items of “primary necessity,” while in the 1793, these took up 75 percent of his earnings. The carpenters’ claim that a proposed wage increase of around 20 percent would barely keep up with the cost of subsistence was calculated with understated accuracy. Rudé, “Prices, Wages and Popular Movements in Paris during the French Revolution,” Economic History Review, vol. 6, no. 3 (1954), 246–267: 257–264. F 13 1936: 10 July 1793. Haim Burstin, “Problèmes du travail à Paris sous la Révolution,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no. 44, no. 4 (1997), 650–682. Ambroise Fourcy, Histoire de l’Ecole Polytechnique (Paris, Belin, 1987), 39–40. As described in Charles François Mandar, Études d’architecture civile, ou, Plans, élévations, coupes et détails nécessaires pour élever, distribuer et décorer une maison et ses dépendances (Paris, 1826). Steven Kaplan, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread, Question, 1700–1775 (Durham and London, 1996), 56.

4 The Building Trades of Paris During the Terror and Thermidor (1793–1795) 1. The leveling measures of February and March 1794 were the Ventôse Decrees. The Maximum was first applied to grain prices on 4 May and 11 September 1793, and then generalized to wages and prices. It was

290

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

Notes to Pages 147–150 only repealed in December 1794. Its finest study remains: Albert Mathiez, La vie chère et le mouvement social sous la Terreur (Paris, 1927). For a recent macro-economic overview of the Terror’s long-term impact, see the assessment of: O’Rourke, “The worldwide economic impact.” For a recent interpretation: Carla Hesse, “La logique culturelle de la loi révolutionnaire,” Annales: ESC, 57e année (July–August 2002), 915–933. Here, a distinction will be made between the period of the Terror and the specific system of state violence that constituted the Terror. Not all egalitarian efforts in this period, in other words, may be assimilated to the wartime measures known as the Terror. Thus, the “symbiosis” between egalitarianism and Terror, whereby some democratic practices were institutionalized for other reasons than furthering the Terror: Isser Woloch, “The Contraction.” Also: Jean-Clément Martin, Violence et Révolution. Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris, 2006). Adler, Engineering, 272–282. A recent overview: David Andress, The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution (London, 2005). The provisions of the General Maximum dictated the freezing of wages at 150 percent their 1790 value and fixing prices on commodities at their 1790 price, supplemented by around 50 percent for transport costs. In the minute calculations of revolutionary authorities, the Maximum was intended to assure a reasonable salary as well as a “just” profit margin for one and all – determined in early October 1793 to be 5 percent for a wholesaler and 10 percent for a retail merchant. A journeyman mason made 3 livres in 1790 and had his salary capped in 1793 at 4 livres 10 sols. As an anti-inflationary measure, other salaries in Paris, however, were fixed at rates that were below the Maximum’s cap. B.N.F. 8-LB40-1154, Commune de Paris, 1789–1795 – Extrait des registres des délibérations du conseil général de la Commune de Paris. For the application of Jacobin economic laws on the labor force: Jean-Pierre Gross, Egalitarisme jacobin et Droits de L’homme, 1793–1794. La grande famille et la Terreur (Paris, 2000), 340–351. On the Law of Suspects, Richard Mowery Andrews, “Boundaries of Citizenship: The Penal Regulation of Speech in Revolutionary France,” French Politics and Society, vol. 7, no. 3 (1989), 90–109. See the case of the deputy from Marseilles, Charles Jean-Marie Barbaroux: William Scott, Terror and Repression in Revolutionary Marseilles (London, 1973), 96–97. Guillerme, La naissance, 70–74. Dicaprio, The Origins. Potofsky, “Work and Citizenship.” Adler, Engineering, 258. The subsistence thesis was underlined by Albert Mathiez, whose emphasis on the “right to subsistence” as fundamental to the Terror’s “social policy” has steered historians toward the domain of prices rather than wages for over a half century: Cf., Mathiez, “La Terreur instrument de la politique sociale des Robespierristes,” Girondins et Montagnards (Paris, 1988 – original edition: 1928), 109–138. Colin Lucas, “The Crowd and Politics Between the Ancien Régime and Revolution in France,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 60, no. 3 (September 1988), 421–457. For Rudé, The Crowd, 218–236: “Apart from the armed insurrections of 10 August and 2 June 1793, it is perhaps only in the petitions of July 1791

Notes to Pages 150–151

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13.

14.

15.

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and June 1792 and the agitation of the arms workers of 1794 that we find the emergence of new forms of action that look forward to the urban-industrial society of the future.” (227). Sans-culottisme has also been examined by George Rudé and Michael Sonenscher in the labor history context of the rites, customs, and legal notions of rights associated with broader preindustrial movements. While drawing attention to the persistence of diverse plebeian traditions, they interpreted the French sans-culotte movement as essentially rooted in artisanal practices. Subsistence questions (in the case of Rudé) and legal and natural rights traditions (in the case of Sonenscher, who has also recently revisited and revised many of his early arguments) were central to sansculottisme. In sum, subsistence riots, guild procedures, and the classic lawsuit were transformed into political forms of formalized, ritualized protest by the Revolution. Rudé and Sonenscher thus emphasized the essential continuum to other historical moments of plebeian militancy; sans-culottisme cannot be isolated from preindustrial labor movements. George Rudé, The Crowd; Rudé and Albert Soboul, “Le maximum des salaires parisiens et le neuf thermidor.” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 134 (January– March 1954), 1–22. Michael Sonenscher, “The Sans-Culottes of the Year II: Rethinking the Language of Labour in Revolutionary France,” Social History 9 (1984), 301–328. Idem., Work and Wages, chapter 10. Idem., “Artisans, Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution,” in Reshaping France: Town, Country and Region during the French Revolution Alan Forrest and Peter Jones (eds.), (Manchester, 1991). For a re-examination: Idem., SansCulottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton, 2008). See, most particularly, Louis Marie Prudhomme’s response to: “Qu’est-ce qu’un sans-culotte” in the celebrated Révolutions de Paris, no. 214 (6–13 November 1793), 177–179. Albert Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II: Mouvement populaire et gouvernement révolutionnaire (La Roche-sur-Yon, 1958), 427 and 452. For an overview: Haim Burstin, L’Invention du sans-culotte – Regards sur le Paris révolutionnaire (Paris, 2005). An intellectual history of the composite ideas, throughout the eighteenth century and across Europe, embodied by the image of the sans-culotte: Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes. While proposing a critique of Soboul, this book’s social analysis also takes issue with the approach embraced and theorized by François Furet, and his followers Patrice Gueniffey, Ran Halevy, Mona Ozouf, Marcel Gauchet, and others with institutional connections to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Institut Raymond Aron. Methodologically, they favored representations of the Revolution’s actors by stimulating deeper historical interest in political and cultural histories of the Revolution. Ideologically, as an explicit rejection of Marxism they turned toward the research, disciplinary, and interpretive agendas of the study of political culture. Social structure and class analysis were marginalized as a mere parroting of the Marxist “catechism.” For example, according to François Furet, the archetypical demand of Parisian artisans to impose the Maximum did not emanate from a materialist cause such as the need to stabilize an artisanal economy, too fragile to withstand the variations of a market economy, as argued

292

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

Notes to Pages 151–156 here. Rather, the Maximum was a strictly political and legislative act and a hegemonic attempt to project “terrorist rhetoric” into an “economic dictatorship,” one that was never completely applied on the ground. Furet, “Maximum,” A Critical Dictionary, op. cit., 504–510. Ibid., 452. In another context, Jacques Rancière critiqued an excessive literalism among historians who were all ready to see the militant “carpenter turning his phrases as he turns wood, seeing the world through his tools.” Jacques Rancière, “The Myth of the Artisan,” in Kaplan and Koepp (eds.), Work in France, 317–334. See, for example: K.D. Tønnesson, La défaite des sans-culottes: mouvement populaire et réaction bourgeoise en l’an III (Paris, 1959). Daniel Guérin, La lutte des classes sous la première République. Bourgeois et “bras-nus” (1793–1795) (Paris, 1968). Gwyn A. Williams, Artisans and Sans-culottes: Popular Movements in France and Britain during the French Revolution (London, 1968). R.B. Rose, The Making of the “Sans-culottes”: Democratic Ideas and Institutions in Paris, 1789–92 (Manchester, 1983). Andrews, “Social Structure,” 74. Andrews drew inspiration, in turn, from Richard Cobb, but the latter’s iconoclasm and impressionism differed in spirit to Andrew’s more precise social classification. Cobb, “Some Aspects of the Revolutionary Mentality (April 1793-Thermidor, Year II),” in New Perspectives on the French Revolution: Readings in Historical Sociology, Jeffrey Kaplow (ed.), (New York and London, 1965), 305–337. The analysis here was aided by a consultation of Richard Mowery Andrews’ unpublished manuscript, “The Sans-Culotterie: Self Consciousness and Ideology.” Raymonde Monnier and Albert Soboul, Répertoire du personnel sectionnaire parisien en l’an II (Paris, 1985). Godechot, Les institutions de France, 1989, 169–170. The patente was made into the taxe professionnelle in 1976 which exists to this day. Annie Moulin, Les Maçons de la Haute Marche au XVIIIe siècle (ClermontFerrand, 1987), 429–430. A. Blum and J. Houdaille, «12 000 parisiens en 1793 – Sondage dans les cartes de civismes», Population, 2, 1986, 259–302: 275. An excellent overview: Haim Burstin, “Problèmes du travail à Paris sous la Révolution,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no. 4, no. 4 (1997), 650–682. Garrioch, The Making, 310. Andrews finds common ground with Soboul on patronage: Soboul, Les SansCulottes Parisiens, 472–474. A.N. F 7 4664, dossier Du Bierre, maçon. Du Bierre does not appear in the guidebook of masters in the profession, the Almanach des bâtiments. Louis Lemit, Le président du département aux comités civils des 48 sections (n.d., 1792 from content). Idem., Lemit, administrateur du département de Paris, à ses concitoyens (n.p., 1793). L. Lemit and August-Louis Lachevardière, Département de Paris. Bureau des travaux publics. Rapport sur les comptes du Panthéon français, pour les années de juillet 1791 à juillet 1792 et de juillet 1792 à juillet 1793 (Paris, 1793). Lemit, administrateur du département de Paris, à ses concitoyens. 17 ventôse an II. (February 1794). Idem., Département de Paris.

Notes to Pages 156–161

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

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Paris, le 18 nivôse l’an III . . . Le président du département aux comités civils des 48 sections. L. Lemit and Lachevardière, Département de Paris. A.N. F7 4664, dossier Du Bierre. Lisa Dicaprio, The Origins, 148. Haim Burstin, “La manifattura dei Gobelins di fronte alla Rivoluzione: lavoro, impresa, politica,” Studi Storici, 1988, 29, 161–174. Adler, Engineering, 271–272. Camille Richard, Le Comité de salut public et les fabrications de guerre sous la Terreur (Paris, 1922), 710–711. Garrioch, The Making, 308. François Crouzet, La grande inflation. La monnaie en France de Louis XVI à Napoléon (Paris, 1993), 260–272. Philip T. Hoffman, et al., Des marchés sans prix, 228–229. François-Alphone Aulard, Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public (Paris, 1889–1951), 11, 12 December 1793, 9: 322–323, 347–348. Horn, The Path, 138–140. Marcel Dorigny, “Les Girondins et le droit de propriété,” Bulletin historique économique et sociale de la Révolution française, 1980–1981, 15–31. Cf., Mathiez, “La Terreur instrument de la politique sociale des Robespierristes,” Girondins et Montagnards (Paris, 1988 – original edition: 1928), 109–138 and La vie chère. A.N. F 13 1138, “Lettre aux citoyens administrateurs du département des Travaux publics” with attached response from “La direction des travaux au Panthéon Français.” Both are dated 7 Germinal, l’an II. (27 March 1794). Richard Cobb, The People’s Armies (New Haven, 1987; first published in French in 1961), 600–606. A.N. F 13 1138, “Lettre aux citoyens administrateurs.” Barère speech was dated 21 Ventôse, an II: Archives parlementaires, LXXXVI, 336–341. Bulletin des Lois, 27 Ventôse, an II (12 March 1794): Nomination des membres de la Commission des travaux publics. A.N. AF II 80, plaquette 596, pièce 3: “Arrêté nommant Rondelet.” F 13 330: Des Douze Commissaires décrétés le 12 Germinal, an II, pour remplacer le Conseil exécutif. For a rich discussion of labor policy in general under the Committee of Public Safety, cf., R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled (Princeton, 1969), 239–243. A.N. AF II 80, plaquette 591, 30 Messidor and 11 Thermidor, an II. The baffling array of institutions dedicated to architectural reform and urbanism was meticulously reconstructed by Szambien, Les Projets, 26–29: the primary tradition of committees that stood in judgment of the concours began with the Commune générale des arts, from 18 July–6 September 1793. This was supplanted by the Commune des arts, from 10 September to 24 October 1793. Then, the Société populaire et républicaine des arts extended from 3 Nivôse, II (23 December 1793) to 29 Floréal, II (18 May 1794). This finally was transformed into the Société républicaine des arts, 3 Pairial, II (22 May 1794) to 28 Floréal, III (17 May 1795). One may add at least five different political institutions that had administrative power over these decentralized councils: the Convention, the Comité de salut public, the Comité d’Instruction publique, the Commission des travaux publics, and the Commission temporaire des arts. Leith, Space and Revolution, 153–156.

294

Notes to Pages 162–174

43. A.N. F 13 325 B, «Atlas des travaux de Paris.» Szambien, «Les Projet,» 19–22 and 152. Pierre Pinon and Bertrand Le Boudec, Les plans de Paris: histoire d’une capitale (Paris, 2004), 82–83. 44. Barère quotation and 1794 contest, cited in Leith, Space and Revolution, 155–157: 160. 45. A.N. AF II 80, plaquette 591, Arrêté du Comité de salut public relatif à la confection d’un plan général pour l’assainissement et l’embellissement de Paris et de plans relatifs aux autres communes de la République, articles 3, 4, and 7. On Barère: Leo Gershoy, Bertrand Barère, a Reluctant Terrorist (Princeton, 1962). 46. Crouzet, La Grande Inflation, 260–272. Adler, Engineering, 273, 284. 47. A.N. AF II 80, plaquette 590. 48. A.N. F 7 4649, dossier, Cloménil, Jacques, tailleur de pierres. 49. On the nature of these jurisdictions, Godechot, Les Institutions, 304–316; 376–383. J.-L. Mathurin, “Suspects,” Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, 1004–1008. 50. F7 4585, plaque 2, pièces 2 and 32, dossier, Ballu, Louis Marin, charpentier. 51. Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror (Cambridge, 1935). Also, James Logan Godfrey, Revolutionary Justice: A Study of the Organization, Personnel, and Procedure of the Paris Tribunal, 1793–1795 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1951), 137. For a convincing synthesis: Claude Mazauric, «Terreur,» Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française. Albert Soboul, et al. (eds.) (Paris, 1989), 1020–1025. Cf., Furet, «Terror,» A Critical Dictionary, 137–150. Both Mazauric and Furet cite Greer’s findings approvingly. 52. Emile Ducoudray, et al., Atlas, 11, 22–23. Janis Langins, La République avait besoin de savants: les débuts de l’École polytechnique: L’École centrale des travaux publics et les cours révolutionnaires de l’an III (Paris, 1987). 53. Horn, The Path, 146. 54. A.N. F 7 4649, dossier, Clément, entrepreneur de maçonnerie. 55. A.N. F 7 4580, plaquette 5, dossier. Antoine, Jacques-Denis, architecte et directeur des travaux de la clôture de Paris. Arrested 30 Brumaire, II and released 18 Thermidor, III. A.N. F 7 4592/8, dossier Belanger, Alexandre, architecte, arrested 15 Pluviose, II and released (?). A.N. F 7 4774/25, dossier Loir, Denis-Jean, architecte, arrested 17 September 1793 and released (?). 56. A.N. F 7 4653, dossier Coqueau, Claude Phillipe (32 p.). On his death sentence before the Tribunal révolutionnaire, W 433, dossier 973. 57. A.N. F 7 4667/3, dossier Despline, Alexis-Louis (7 p.). 58. Barère’s speech of 11 March 1794. 59. A.N. F 13 629, Tableau des demandes particulières adressées à la Commission des Travaux Publics depuis son établissement, 14 pages (n.d., but summer 1795 by content): Hiring of other builders was even less assured. Seventy-three petitions for inspectors on construction sites netted only six positions in the same period. More fortunate were the 39 “artistes,” including building sculptors and painters, who applied for merely six openings: Aesthetic considerations in these spartan times were minimal but existent. 60. A.N. F 13 1137, “Rôle des journées des tailleurs de pierres,” from 18–30 July 1791. Their number on the Panthéon between 31 December 1792–12 January 1793, was 159: A.N. O1 1700. A.N. F 13, 1935. 61. B.N.F. Lb41 720, Anonyme, Je ne suis plus Jacobin et je m’en f . . . ou Entretien de Tranche-Montagne, caporal de canonniers de la République, venant des Indes, avec

Notes to Pages 174–184

62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76.

295

Brise-Raison, tailleur de pierre et président d’un comité révolutionnaire (Paris, n.d., but Year III from contents). I thank Sergio Luzzatto for this reference. Many of these sculptors’ petitions are assembled in A.N. F 13 1935: For example: “Pétitions des artistes et sculpteurs aux directeurs” (no date, but mid-1792 from content). A.N. W 388, dossier 901. For the reconstitution of the numbers of Parisian building tradesmen between 1770 and 1789, see Chapter 1, Table 1.1. Jaffé, Le Mouvement, 65–73. The 48 Parisian commissaires de police were elected by section until 11 March 1795 (21 Ventôse, III), when they were appointed by the Committee of General Security. Later, on 11 October 1795 (19 Vendémaire, IV) the municipalities took over this function. Finally, during the Directory, they were once again elected to office. A.N. F 7 4594/7, dossier Benoit. On Dorigny’s subsequent successful career with the general council of the Paris commune during Thermidor: Soboul, Les sans-culottes parisiens, 1017 and 1018. On Louis-François Dorigny: Soboul and Monnier, Répertoire, 272. A.N. F 7 4665, dossier, Decressac, Pierre, entrepreneur de maçonnerie. Cf., also, F 7 4764, dossier Langlois, Jean-François, who pleads for a similar dispensation for his work on the canals of Paris. George Rudé, “The Motives of Popular Insurrection in Paris during the French Revolution,” in Paris and London in the 18th Century. Studies in Popular Protest (London, 1970), 130–162. B.N.F. LC-2207, L’Auditeur national, 964. A.N. F 7 4649, dossier, Cloménil, Jacques. Albert Soboul, Raymonde Monnier, Répertoire, 208. B.N.F. Lb 40 1305, Projet de travaux publics, proposé par les commissaires des 48 sections de Paris, assemblés à la maison commune, à l’effet d’aviser aux moyens de procurer de l’ouvrage aux ouvriers qui ont besoin de travailler pour vivre. (19 janvier 1793), 2 and 7. Alain Cottereau,“La désincorporation des métiers et leur transformation en ‘public intermédiaires’: Lyon et Elbeuf, 1790–1815,” in Steve Kaplan et Philippe Minard (eds.), La France, malade du corporatisme? XVIII e –XXe siècles (Paris, Belin, 2004), 97–145. A.N. F 7 4664, dossier Du Bierre.

5 Reconciling Commerce and Revolution, 1795–1805 1. This argument is made by James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge and London, 2001). The liberalization of grain was made law on 21 Prairial Year V (9 June 1797). Martin Staum, “Individual Rights and Social Control: Political Science in the French Institute,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 48, no. 3 (July–September 1987), 411–430. 2. Idem., “Agrarian Ideology and Commercial Republicanism in the French Revolution,” Past and Present, vol. 157 (1997), 34–121. Dominique Margairaz, François de Neufchâteau: biographie intellectuelle (Paris, 2005), 339–341.

296

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

Notes to Pages 184–189 Neufchâteau was the Minister of Interior during two stints in 1797 and 1798– 1799. On the vital importance of agricultural ideologies in this period: cf., Livesey, Making Democracy, 88–110. For a critique of the over-emphasis on the Directory’s bourgeois liberalism, and a subtle discussion of its ambivalent legacy under Napoleon, see Louis Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers parisiens du Directoire à l’Empire (Paris, 1978), 101–107. Cf., Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution. An Intellectual History of J. B. Say’s Political Economy (Oxford, 2000). The very imprecision of the period’s social taxonomy renders the controversial thesis of a bourgeois-less France irrelevant for this book: Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). Christopher Johnson, “Capitalism and the State: Capital Accumulation and Proletarianization in the Languedocian Woolens Industry, 1700–1789,” in The Workplace Before the Factory, T. Safley and L. Rosenband (eds.) (Cornell, 1993). Clive H. Church, “The Social Basis of the French Central Bureaucracy under the Directory 1795–1799.” Past and Present, vol. 36 (1967), 59–72: 70. Annie Jourdain, Les monuments de la Révolution, 1770–1804. Une histoire de représentation (Paris, 1997), 372–373. Ibid., 394–395. James Robert Munson, Businessmen, Business Conduct and the Civic Organization of Commercial Life Under the Directory and Napoleon (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1992). DiCaprio, The Origins of the Welfare State, 147. Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789– 1820s (New York, 1994), 260. Quoted in Livesy, 115. Michel Brugière, Gestionnaires et profiteurs de la Révolution (Paris, 1986), 116– 137. Before it was consecrated as a Church, the Madeleine was projected to be a commercial center housing the Bourse, the Banque de France, and Tribunal de Commerce: Jean Tulard, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris: Le Consulat et l’Empire, 1800–1815 (Paris, 1971), 220. On the history of road construction in this period: Jean-Marcel Goger, La politique routière en France de 1716 à 1815 (Thèse pour le doctorat, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1988). A.N. AD XVIII 312: L’opinion de Marie-François Bonguyot, sur le mode de réparer les routes Floréal, II, 2. The “opinion” is followed in this pamphlet by a decree by the Convention mandating the opening of workshops and stipulating the precise terms of their organization. Guy Arbellot, “La grande mutation des routes de France au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales: ESC, vol. 28, no. 3, May–June 1973, 765–791. Margairaz, “L’invention du ‘Service Public,’ ” 10–32: 31. Atlas de la Révolution française. Routes et communications, tome 1: Guy Arbellot, Bernard Lepetit, Jacques Bertrand (eds.) (Paris, 1987). Abellot, “La grande mutation.” 8,000 to 11,000 migrant workers in Paris were estimated to be crammed into these chambers garnies in 1795: Moulin, Les Maçons de la Creuse, 201. Denis Woronoff, The Thermidorian Regime and the Directory, 1794–1799 (Cambridge, 1972), 114–115.

Notes to Pages 191–197

297

18. Werner Szambien, De la rue des Colonnes à la rue de Rivoli (Paris, 1992), 45. Bernard Rouleau, Le Tracé des rues de Paris. Formation, typologie, fonctions (Paris, 1983). 19. A.N. AD XVIII 312, L’opinion de Marie-François Bonguyot, titre I, pp. 5–6. 20. A.N. AD XVIII 312, Projet Bonguyot, title II, p. 10. The Comité des travaux publics was organized on 7 Fructidor, Year II, and assigned by Thermidorians to oversee the Commission des travaux publics, which had become suspect as a vital organ of the Revolutionary government. Cf. A.N. F 13 646, on proposals “concernant l’organisation des Bâtiments civils, ans III-XII.” 21. Ibid., 2. 22. A.N. AD XIII 17, Jacques Defermont des Chapelières, Rapport fait à la Commission des finances du Conseil des Cinq-Cents sur l’opportunité d’un projet de taxe péagère, 9 vendémiaire An V. On the paucity of manuscript sources and documentation on workers under the Directory, cf.: Soreau, E., “Les ouvriers en l’an VII,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 8 (1931), 117–124. The lack of focus on policing social groups by the Paris Bureau central de la police under the Directory (A.N. series “F 7”) precludes a fuller understanding of their esprit public. The Police Minister Cochon was rather focused on clamping down on political associations: Isser Woloch, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement Under the Directory (Princeton, 1970), 218–220. Workers’ movements are largely absent from Alphonse Aulard’s invaluable research tool, Paris pendant la réaction thermidorienne et sous le Directoire, 5 vols. (Paris, 1898–1902). 23. Cited in Woronoff, The Thermidorian Regime, 109. 24. A.N. Fic III: Seine, 19, Compte rendu par les administrateurs du Département de la Seine, 1 Vendémiaire – 15 Floréal, l’an V, Chapitre III: “Travaux publics. Sections premiers. Travaux de la Commune de Paris,” p. 31; 33–34. The following report, from 15 Floréal to 18 Fructidor, l’an V, was even more grim. The report begins by complaining that the removal of mud – mostly horse excrement – from Parisian streets had been suspended, “faute de moyens.” “We find ourselves in an ever greater pauperization (dénuement), and these problems are due to increases in the daily wage”: Compte rendu . . . 2nd époque de l’an V, Ibid. 25. Ibid., “Travaux de la Commune de Paris,” pp. 19–20. 26. Louis Bergeron, “Profits et risques dans les affaires parisiennes à l’époque du Directoire et du Consulat,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française (1966), 359–389. 27. On the organization of Bâtiments civils under the Directory: Charles Gourlier and Charles-Auguste Questel, Notice historique sur le service des travaux et sur le conseil général des bâtiments civils à Paris et dans les départements, depuis la création de ces services en l’an IV (1795) jusqu’en 1886 (Paris, 1886). Lauren Marie O’Connell, “Architects and the French Revolution: Change and Continuity Under the Conseil des Bâtiments civils, 1795– 1799” (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1989). G. Teyssot, “Planning and Building in Towns: The System of the Batiments Civils in France, 1795–1848,” in The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture, R. Middleton (ed.) (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). 28. Lauren Marie O’Connell, “Redefining the Past,” 207–224.

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Notes to Pages 198–202

29. Jacques Godechot, Les Institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris, 2001), 508–509. Marcel Reinhard Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, La Révolution, 1795–99 (Paris, 1970), 357–359. 30. A.N. F 13 331, Pétition des entrepreneurs des travaux publics au Bureau des bâtiments civils, 9 Floréal, IV. Ibid., “Le conseil des Bâtiments civils au Ministre de l’Intérieur,” n.d, but late Floreal, IV, by content. Ibid., “Observations sur l’application de l’échec des propriétaires,” n.d. 31. A.N. F 13 331, Pétition de l’emploi, Le citoyen Buron, section de l’indivisibilité, cy-dev. architecte des Eaux et Forêts et ancien juré . . . ,” n.d., but late 1796 from content. Also, Ibid., «Demande de l”emploi, Bouvet, Maçon-entrepreneur, 14 Ventose, V:» “Privé par la suppression de plusieurs corporations, je viens avec confiance . . . J’exerce depuis 15 ans l’art de construction ayant l’approbation et l’estime des architectes avec lesquels j’ai travaillé.” Reinhard, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, 356. 32. A.N. F 13 327–328, Rondelet, Nouvelle organisation des Bâtiments civils, 3 Brumaire, l’an VII, title 3. And Ibid., on assorted reactions from entrepreneurs. On Rondolet and his grand ambitions, cf., O’Connell, “Architects and the French Revolution,” pp. 114–118. On equivalent reforms in sidérurgie, cf., Denis Woronoff, L’industrie sidérurgique en France pendant la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris, 1984), p. 40. 33. Woronoff, The Thermidorian Regime, 106. 34. Margairaz, “L’invention du ‘service public’,” op. cit. Law of 3 nivôse an XI (24 December 1802), cited in Francis Démier, “Economistes libéraux et ‘service public’ à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no. 52–53 (July–September 2005), 33–50: 41. Also: Claire Lemercier, Un si discret pouvoir. Aux origines de la Chambre de commerce de Paris 1803–1853 (Paris, 2003), 30–31. Also, Bowie, ed., La modernité. 35. It was at the Paris Parlement where many of Dubois’ forged the counterargument to physiocratic liberty in 1776 based on the natural integrity of corporate society. See Chapter One and Jean Arvegnas, “Le Comte Dubois, premier Préfet de police, 1758–1847,” Revue du Nord, vol. 39, no. 159 (April– June 1957), 125–145: 126. 36. Jacques Régnier, Les Préfets du Consulat et de l’Empire (Paris, 1907); and Tulard, Paris et son administration, 114–121. 37. These reports are edited by Alphonse Aulard as: Paris sous le Consulat: Recueil de documents pour l’histoire de l’esprit public à Paris, 4 volumes, 18 Brumaire, VIII- 27 Germinal, XI. (Paris, 1903). And Aulard (ed.), Paris sous l’Empire, 3 volumes (Paris, 1912). Police bulletins for the late Empire are collected by Nicole Gotteri, La Police secrète du Premier Empire. (6 vols, June–December 1810 to January–June 1813) (Paris, 1997–2003). 38. A.N. F 7 3701, “Feuille de travail,” 8 Germinal, VIII. 39. See chapter one. Also, Casey Harison, “The Rise and Decline of a Revolutionary Space. Paris’ Place de Grève and the Stonemasons of Creuse, 1750–1900,” The Journal of Social History, vol. 34, no. 2 (Winter 2000), 403–436. 40. A.N. F 7 3701, “Feuille de travail, Police,” 13 Ventose, VIII. 41. Aulard, Consulat, vol. I, 4 Prairial, VIII, 359. 42. Quoted in Tulard, Paris et son administration, 286. 43. Aulard, Consulat, Op. Cit. This is repeated on 4 Messidor, VIII and 15 Floréal, XIII.

Notes to Pages 202–206

299

44. Ibid., vol. 1: Nîvose, VIII, p. 108. 45. A.N. F 13 951, “La loi relative aux manufactures, fabriques, et ateliers: 22 Germinal, an XI,” title V. The stipulation on giving 40 days advanced notice duplicates the conditions of the law of 16 Fructidor, V (2 September 1796). 46. Aulard, Consulat., tome IV, p. 277. 47. Ibid., vol. IV, p. 510. 48. Ibid., pp. 743, 747, and 775. Raymonde Monnier concludes that the livrets were simply not implemented in most of the nation, excepting Paris. Once again, a Parisian exception: “Ouvriers,” Dictionnaire Napoléon, Jean Tulard (ed.) (Paris, 1999), 444–452. 49. Yves Benot and Michel Dorigny (eds.), Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises 1802. Ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale française (1800–1830). Aux origines d’Haïti (Paris, 2003). Alexandre Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements des revenus et de l’activité économique en France de 1798 à 1820 (Paris, 1949), 240–255. 50. F 13 715, “Rapport des Bâtiments civils,” 1803. 51. A.N. F 7 3830, “Rapport de la Préfeture de Police,” 3 Floréal, X. 52. Godechot, Les institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l’Empire, 668–689. On wider problems during their implementation, cf. Georges Bourgin, “Contribution à l’histoire de placement et du livret en France,” Revue politique et parlementaire 17 (1912), 105–126. And Abel Chatelain, “Le Monde paysan et le livret ouvrier,” Bibliothèque de la Révolution de 1848, vol. 15, no. 3, 1953. Idem., Les migrants temporaires en France de 1800 à 1914, 2 volumes (Lille, 1976). 53. Discussion of the legacy of the livrets, 1811–1829, in various documents of A.N. F 13 951. Paris et son administration, 288. 54. Civil Code articles 291, 292, 414, and 416. Monnier, “Ouvriers,” 448. Horn, The Path, 250. 55. A.N. F 7 3119, Feuille de travail, préfet de Police, 28 Fructidor, XII. 56. Recueil officiel des circulaires émanant de la Préfecture de police, vol. 1 (1797– 1848) Paris, 1882. And A.N. F 12 4668, Various drafts of projects concerning the livrets. 57. B.N.F. 8 V529, Almanach des ouvriers: contenant la désignation des professions comprises dans chaque classe, l’an XIII (Brumaire, XIII), especially pp. 5–7 and 44–45. 58. Ibid. 59. Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore, 1984), 67 and 157, ff. 60. Robert Marquant, “Les bureaux de placement en France sous l’Empire et la Restauration,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale, XL, no. 2, 1962, pp. 200–237. Marquant argues that these bureaux only became an effective presence in 1810 and 1811, when they handled 8,200 and 9,400 declarations of employment respectively. By 1812, these numbers dropped to 2,650 and fell further to 600 by 1815: p. 208. 61. Paolo Napoli, “Police: la conceptualisation d’un modèle juridico-politique sous l’Ancien Régime,” Droits, no. 20, 1994, 183–196 and no. 21, 1995, 151–160. 62. The restoration of the bakers’ and butchers guilds was formulated as assuring the quality control of food as well as the loyalty of apprentices: Levasseur,

300

63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

Notes to Pages 207–211 Classes ouvrières, II, pp. 335–342. A later effort, in 1803, was made by wine merchants to institute a corporation for their trade. Ibid., pp. 345–347. Cf. Louis Bergeron, “Approvisionnement et consommation à Paris sous le Premier Empire,” Mémoires publiés par la Fédération des sociétés historiques et archéologiques de Paris (1963), 197–232. Almanach des ouvriers, 7. James Robert Munson, Businessmen, Business Conduct, chapter 2, esp., 107–116. Vaudoyer’s projects included extensions of the Collège de France, the Sorbonne, and the Institut de France. Antoine L.T. Vaudoyer et L.P. Baltard, Grands prix d’architecture, projets couronnés par l’Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de France (Paris, 1818). A.N. F 13 521, Vaudoyer to the Ministre de l’Intérieur, 1 Germinal, XIII (22 March 1805). Ibid. Speech by Regnault de Seant-Jean d’Angély, in Moniteur, 10 Germinal, Year XI (April 1803). Text of Napoleonic discussions on livrets: Notice sur la législation relative aux livrets d’ouvriers: Sessions des conseils généraux de l’agriculture, des manufactures, et du commerce (Paris, 1842). Destutt’s response to an essay contest of the Institut national, Quels sont les moyens les plus propres à fonder la morale d’un peuple? (Paris, 1798). In 1800, Jean-Claude Chaptal, as he was about to become Minister of Interior, also sought the restoration of apprenticeships, in Essai sur le perfectionnement des arts chimiques, discussed in Munson, Businessmen, 91–93. See Chapter 4. Tulard, Nouvelle Histoire, chapter II: “L’urbanisme impérial,” esp., 196–197. Ibid., p. 185. In the peak building year of 1812, the papers of the octroi de Paris indicate that pierres de taille surpassed 50,000 cubic meters. Aulard, Empire, v. 1: 5 Prairial, XIII (25 May 1805), p. 801. The expression “faire grève” first appeared in a police report, also quoting the patois of stonemasons, from 1785: cf., chapter 1. On the later career of this term, cf., Raymonde Monnier, “Ouvriers,” in Soboul (ed.), Dictionnaire, 1281–1289. A.N. F 13 521, Lettre au ministre de l’Intérieur, 21 Thermidor, XIII. A.N. F 13 521, Le Préfet to Vaudoyer, 22 February 1806 (the emphasis is Dubois’). G. Pariset, Histoire de la France contemporaine: Le Consulat et l’Empire (Paris, 1927), 253–259. A.N. F 13 521, Ibid., Dubois has Napoleon saying, “Didn’t I already publish an ordinance to fix these work hours?” As to Napoleon’s request for a detailed proposal, Dubois writes that “The command of His Majesty has been maintained but without a follow up, to my great regret.” A.N. F 13 206, Letter from the Intendant général to the Ministre de l’intérieur, 30 March 1806. Ibid., Lemercier, Un si discret pouvoir. A.N. F 13 521, Lettre de Dubois aux architectes du gouvernement, 2 May 1806. Ibid., The phrase “la douce police” is from the Parlement’s remonstrance against Turgot’s edict abolishing the guilds in 1776, cf., chapter 1, p. 54. A.N. F 13 521, “Extrait des registres des délibérations du Conseil des Bâtiments civils,” 13–20 Juin, 1806.

Notes to Pages 211–223

301

82. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present, 38 (1967), pp. 56–97. On variations within the builders’ salary rolls, see chapter 1, p. 57–60. 83. Ibid. 84. A.N. F 13 521, “Note de M. Barbier-Neuville,” 25 July 1806. 85. F 13 521, Letters from Commissaire Gory, 2 August 1806; Ministre de Finances Charles Gaudin, 20 September; and Intendant de la Maison de l’Empereur Daru, 6 September 1806. 86. Godechot, Les Institutions, pp. 645–656. 87. Tulard, Empire, v. II, “Bulletin du 16 Juin 1806,” pp. 580–581. 88. William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900 (Cambridge, 1984), 70–75. 89. A.N. AF IV 1498, Bulletin du Préfet Dubois, 5 October 1806. A.N. F 7 3754, Bulletin de Police, 6 et 15 Octobre 1806. A.N. F 7 3188, Rapports des juges de paix, octobre 1806. Discussed in Tulard, Paris, 288–289 and in Michael Sibalis, The Workers of Napoleonic Paris, 1800–1815 (PhD thesis, Concordia University, 1979), 254–256. 90. A.N. F 13 205. 91. A.N. AF IV 1498. A.N. F 7 3754.

6 Constraining Capital, Containing Labor: State Urban Planning in Paris, 1802–1815 1. In this tradition, see the classic: Pieter Geyl, Napoleon, For and Against (New Haven, 1948; first published in Dutch in 1946). 2. Jean Tulard, Nouvelle histoire de Paris: le Consulat et l’Empire, 1800–1815 (Paris, 1971), 181–198. 3. Jean Tulard, Paris et son administration de 1800 à 1830 (Paris, 1976), 321–332. Igor Moullier, “Police et politique de la ville sous Napoléon,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no. 54, no. 2, 2007, 117–139: 118–119. 4. Margadandt, Urban Rivalries. Moullier, “Police et politique.” 5. David van Zanten, Building Paris. Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830–1870 (Cambridge, 1994), 45–46. Georges Poisson, “Paris” in Dictionnaire Napoléon (Paris, 1999), vol. 2, 467–473. 6. Poisson, 470. 7. Maurice Guerrini, Napoléon et Paris: trente ans d’histoire (Paris, 1967), 528–534. 8. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 60. 9. Colin Jones, Paris. The Biography of a City (NY and Toronto, 2004), 250. 10. Ibid., 160. 11. Moullier, “Police et politique,” p. 118. 12. Vincent Denis, “Surveiller et décrire: l’enquête des préfets sur les migrations périodiques, 1807–1812.” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no. 47–4 (octobre–décembre 2000), 706–730. 13. Chaptal cited in Joshua Cole, The Power in Large Numbers. Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell, 2000), 46. On the Bureau de statistique: Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France. La statistique départementale à l’époque napoléonienne (Paris, 1989), 129–151. Jean Tulard, “Statistiques,” Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 801.

302

Notes to Pages 223–225

14. From a portion of the cartes de sureté, issued by the Paris sections in 1793– 1794, one study found that 1,302 masons out of a total of 2,343 sampled cartes were Limousin by origin: Moulin, Les Maçons, pp. 443–444. 15. Georges Mauco, Les migrations ouvrières en France au début du XIXe siècle d’après les rapports des préfets de l’Empire de 1808–13 (Paris, 1932) Roger Breteille, “Les migrations saisonnières en France sous le Premier Empire: essai de synthèse, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no. 27 (1978), pp. 424–441. On the figures from 1790–1791, cf. chapter 1. 16. Denis Woronoff finds even a wider range among workers’ earnings in the metallurgy trades during roughly the same period, 1810–1811: From region to region, journeymen forgerons made between 30 sous and 2.25 francs: L’industrie sidérurgique en France (Paris, 1984), 176–177. 17. A.N. F 20 434–5, Enquête: La Creuse, 9 March–13 September 1808. On this “balance of trade” mentality, cf., Bergeron, Banquiers, 25–35. Franck Bouscau, “Maurice, Frédérick-Guillaume,” Dictionnaire Napoléon, op. cit., vol. 2, 290. 18. A.N. F 20 434–5. As with Turgot before him, the relentless and inescapable poverty of this region is given full voice in Maurice’s report. For a broader perspective of these inquests, cf. Georges Mauco, Les Migrations and Louis Bergeron (ed.), La statistique en France de l’époque napoléonienne (Paris, 1981). 19. On the Continental System and its lack of a significant impact on the Parisian economy: François Crouzet, Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (Cambridge, 1990), 305–306. Silvia Marzagalli emphasizes the creativity of merchants in largely invalidating the blockades’ measures: “Les boulevards de la fraude.” Le négoce maritime et le Blocus continental, 1806–1813 (Paris, 1999), 277–278. A.N. F 20 434–5. The prefect added that “More builders seem to be migrating from the poorer, southern areas of the Creuse thus balancing out a lower numbers of departures in the north.” For a more detailed interpretation of shifts in migratory patterns: Marie-Antoinette Carron, “Les Migrations anciennes des travaileurs creusois,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale, vol. 43 (1965), 289–320. Annie Moulin concludes that the Revolution originally curbed immigration, but that the new political and social networks open to the Limousins allowed those who arrived to integrate into the population with greater facility. They first came in fewer numbers, in other words, but those who arrived stayed permanently: Les maçons de la Haute Marche, 240–245. 20. The Empire launched very few public works in Paris as poor relief, out of concern about attracting more migrants and driving the wage scale upward by denying employers a reserve of cheap labor. State figures on the unemployed put to work on unskilled chores at Parisian public worksites ranged from 1,600 in 1802 to a low of 689 laborers in 1810. The impoverished were thus helped with less frequency and certainly less generosity than did the Crown during harsh winter crises of the ancien régime. And when the able-bodied poor were to be hired on the Empire’s ateliers de bienfaisance, administrators assured they were not placed in competition with regular workers. Indigent workers were contracted out to architects to be assigned appropriately menial tasks: A.N. F 13 531, “Renseignements demandés aux architectes sur le nombre d’ouvriers des ateliers de bienfaisance . . . ” 21. The 1807 census is considered far more reliable than the apparently inflated 1811 census, cf., Gabriel Vauthier, “Les ouvriers de Paris sous l’Empire,”

Notes to Pages 225–230

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

303

in Revue des Etudes napoléoniennes (Paris, 1913), 426–451: 426. Michael Sibalis, The Workers of Napoleonic Paris, 1800–1815 (PhD thesis, Concordia University, 1979), 39. Tulard, Nouvelle histoire, 87–88. Raymonde Monnier, “Ouvriers,” in Jean Tulard, Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 444–452. On the 1790–1791 figures from the “Braesch papers,” see table 2. Tulard, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, 269–272. A.P. 6AZ 754, Comparaison des prix des ouvrages de maçonnerie fait à la Nouvelle Eglise de Ste. Geneviève, maintenant Panthéon français, dans le cours de l’an 1784 . . . avec ceux fait en 1806, dans les palais imperiaux, n.d. A.N. F 13 521, Rapport sur la proposition de fixer le prix de la journée des ouvriers, 29 March 1810. An approximate average between the prefecture’s and architects’ figures was produced in 1949 by Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements des revenus, pp. 240–255: Starting with 1800, Chabert finds stonemasons making on average 2.75 francs while only in 1810 do they earn 3.5 francs. On the use and abuse of French statistics: Cole, The Power in Large Numbers, 45–53. On the period, 1741–1771, cf., Durand, “Recherches sur les salaires,” 476. Ernest Labrousse, Pierre Léon, Pierre Goubert, et. al., Histoire économique, vol. II, 386–390. For a generalized discussion of salary fluctuations and of the efforts to quantify them: Vauthier, “Les ouvriers.” Monnier, “Ouvriers,” Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 450. Robert C. Allen, “The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices, from the Middle Ages to the First World War,” Explorations in Economic History, vol. 38, no. 4 (October 2001), 411–447: 416. Poisson, 467. For a contemporary account of the Napoleonic guild debate, Antoine Levacher-Duplessis, Requête au Roi et mémoire sur la nécessité de rétabir les Corps de marchands et les Communautés des arts et métiers (Paris, 1817), 63. See the analysis of debates between Soufflot and Vital Roux on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce in Munson, “Businessmen, Business Conduct and the Civic Organization,” 111–133. Emile Levasseur, “Les Corporations sous le Consulat, l’Empire et la Restauration,” La Réforme sociale, 3 (1902), 144–178 and 227–242. And E. Martin-Saint-Léon, Histoire des corporations de métiers depuis leurs origines jusqu’à leur suppression en 1791 (Paris, 1922). On March 14 and 15, 1807, the stonecutters on several public ateliers demanded an increase of 15 sous and were offered only 5 sous per day. The strike lasted ten days, before work started up again on the entrepreneurs’ terms. Aulard, Empire, v. 3, 82–86. A.N. F 13 521, “L’opinion des architectes sur les nouveaux Règlements,” Chalgrin et Raymond au Ministre de l’Intérieur, 20 March 1807. Ibid. (Parenthesis added.) Aulard, Empire, v. III, 213 and 665. A.N. F 13 205, “Troubles au Temple de Gloire, notice du 3eme Bureau du ministre de l’intérieur,” November 1808. A.N. F 13 521, “Lettre du préfet Dubois au ministre de l’Intérieur,” 6 February 1809. A.N. F 13 521, “Cumers au ministre de l’intérieur.” 18 February 1809. Ibid. Marquant, “Les bureaux de placement en France,” 200–237.

304

Notes to Pages 230–237

39. A.N. F 13 206, “Lettre d’un architecte, Chancelier de l’Empire,” 8 June 1809. 40. A.N. F 13 521, Un mémoire sur les moyens de prévenir dorénavant parmi des ouvriers du bâtiment, les attroupements, les cessations des travaux, 11 June 1809. J. Riffé describes himself as an “employé au Bureau particulier du Ministère de l’Intérieur.” 41. Ibid. 42. See the archeologist, Toussaint-Bernard Emeric-David’s, Projet d’un mémoire qui pourrait être intitulé: Essai sur les maîtrises d’esarts et métiers et sur les Faillites (Paris, 1805). 43. A.N. F 13 521, “Le conseil des Bâtiments civils au ministre de l’Intérieur,” 7 September 1809. 44. As described in BHVP 19187, Ordonnance concernant les entrepreneurs de maçonnerie, 13 June 1810. 45. B.N.F. V 21550, Garnier, F.M. (ed.), Nouvel Almanach des bâtiments, 1809. 46. On the ancien régime Almanach des bâtiments and the Chambre des Bâtiments: Potofsky, “The Construction of Paris and the Crisis of the Ancien Régime.” Lemas, “Les ‘pages jaunes’ du bâtiment parisien.” Cf.: Duverneuil and Jean de la Tynna, eds., Almanach du commerce parisien (1787–1806) which became in 1807, Almanach du commerce de Paris, des départements de l’Empire français et des principales villes de l’Europe (an VIII-1813). 47. BHVP 19187, Ordonnance, and Ibid., Noms des délégués et électeurs des entrepreneurs de maçonnerie, pour l’année 1810. And B.N.F. 8o Z Le Senne 13895, Manuel des entrepreneurs des bâtiments organisés pour l’année 1813. The latter contains a project to incorporate carpenters as early as December 1808. The carpenters’ corporation was founded after clarifications of the masons’ corporation’s statutes. 48. Carvais, “Le statut juridique de l’entrepreneur.” Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers, 36. 49. Ibid. A.N. F 13 521, “Rapport de Séance,” 28 March 1810. Ibid., esp., the Projet de décret ayant pour objet la police des ouvriers maçons, charpentiers . . . employés dans la capitale. 2 April 1810. 50. Ibid., title II. 51. On food merchants’ corporations, cf., Arvengas, “Le Comte Dubois,” 132– 133. On builders, cf., B.H.V.P. 19187, Ordonnance, titles 1–2, and 7. Michael Sibalis,” “Corporatism After the Corporations: The Debate on Restoring the Guilds Under Napoleon I and the Restoration,” French Historical Studies, vol. 15, no. 4 (Fall 1988), 718–730: 728. 52. B.N.F. V 29997, Almanach, 1791 B.N.F. V 21550, Garnier, F.M. (ed.), Nouvel Almanach 1809. B.N.F. 8-Z-Le Senne-13895, Manuel des Entrepreneurs, 1813. 53. Ibid. Beyond forbidding “non-conforming” entrepreneurs and masons from practicing, the “official” 1813 Almanach stipulates that they would be pursued by the law (Manuel, article 14). 54. Woronoff, L’Industrie sidérurgique en France, 27–31. A comparative drop in the number of Paris bakers took place after their incorporation, when they declined from 2,000 to 800 in Paris between 1800 and 1802: Tulard, Paris et son administration, 304. Guerrini, Napoléon et Paris, 528–532. 55. B.N.F. V 21550(8), Almanach des bâtiments, 1816. The publication also lists 77 conforming and 36 non-conforming entrepreneur carpenters: The 113 chief carpenters were still far fewer than the 141 listed in 1791.

Notes to Pages 237–250

305

56. A.N. F 13 521, Rapport sur la proposition de fixer le prix de la journée des ouvriers, 28 March 1810 (Dubois’ exclamation). 57. F 13 521, Rapport, 28 March 1811. 58. Ibid. 59. A.N. F 13 206: Cajouez, “contrôleur des travaux,” Extrait du Journal sur les ouvriers charpentiers, 1–18 March 1810. Ibid., “Chalgrin au Ministre de l’Intérieur,” 19 March 1810. Ibid.: Le préfet de police de Paris aux charpentiers, 18 March 1810. 60. Ibid., A.N. O2 228, Affiche, 28 May 1810. A.N. O2 228, Lettre de Laumond, préfet de Seine et Oise, à Costas, Intendant, 29 May 1810. Lettre de M. Costas, Intendant des bâtiments de l’Empereur au préfet, 26 June 1810. 61. A.N. F 13 521, Rapport, 28 March 1810. 62. Tulard, Paris et son administration, 121–125; 289–292; 294–295.

Conclusion and Epilogue 1. A.N. AD XI 11, “Edit du roi portant suppression des jurandes et communautés de commerce, arts et métiers” (Février 1776). 2. See chapter 1, pp. 51–6, for a broader analysis of Turgot’s abolition. Jeff Horn, The Path, 2–4. 3. The anachronistic search for free-market liberalism in the age of Enlightenment is convincingly denounced by Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). 4. On the dynamic Parisian industrial economy of this period: Guillerme, La naissance, 13–15, 70–74. Guillerme demonstrates growth in metallurgy, arms production, the spinning trades, coal mining, silk production, industrial chemicals, among other sectors. 5. Historians of preindustrial labor, for example, have tended to be guided by a “central focus on ideology, whether liberalism, Physiocracy, natural law, corporatism, or even socialism”: Horn, The Path, 172. Cf. Kwass, Privilege, 10–11. 6. Kaplan, La Fin, 128–134, 229–230. 7. On the coexistence of “unfree” and “free” labor in another context, see: Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill, 1991). And, Idem., Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001). 8. Kaplan, La Fin, 604–605, 616. 9. Steinfeld, The Invention, 6–9. 10. Monnier, “Ouvriers,” Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 450. See chapter 6 on building wages, esp., p. 237–240, ff. 11. Raymonde Monnier, L’Espace public démocratique. Essai sur l’opinion à Paris de la Révolution au Directoire (Paris, 1994), 123–126. 12. Thomas Le Roux, “Les nuisances artisanales et industrielles à Paris, 1770– 1830,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, vol. 35 (2007), 161–208. 13. A.N. F13 204, Antoine-Marie Peyre, Note instructive pour . . . le Ministre de l’intérieur sur la nécessité de rétablir l’ancien organisation des bâtiments

306

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Notes to Pages 250–256 civils . . . (1813). Peyre developed these arguments in: Considérations sur la nécessité de rétablir l’académie d’Architecture . . . . (Paris, 1815), 4 and 5. Baczko, Lumières, 231. Leith, Space and Revolution. Margairaz, “L’invention du ‘Service Public,’ ” 31. Marie O’Connell, Architects and the French Revolution. Georges Bourgin and Hubert Bourgin (eds.), Les patrons, les ouvriers et l’Etat. Le régime de l’industrie en France de 1814 à 1830. 3 vols. (Paris, 1912–1941), vol. 1, 87. A.N. F 12 1560, Mémoire sur l’établissement des maîtrises et sur l’abus des patentes (n.d., but early 1820s by content), 4. Bourgin, Les Patrons, vol. 3, 260. BHVP Fp 2200, M. Amyot, Mémoire sur la Police et la jurisdiction des bâtiments à Paris (Paris, 1829), 7–8. Amyot is identified as a barrister in the Royal Court. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 17. La parole ouvrière, 1830–51, edited by Alain Faure and Jacques Rancière (Paris, 2007), esp., 25–35. Crochon’s numbers are cited and analyzed by Edgar Leon Newman, “What the Crowd Wanted in the French Revolution of 1830,” in John Merriman (ed.), 1830 in France (New York, 1975), 33–34. Also on the builders of 1830, cf., Octave Festy, Le mouvement ouvrier au début de la monarchie de juillet (1830–1834), 206–209. And Alain Faure, “Mouvements populaires et mouvement ouvrier à Paris (1830–1834), Le mouvement social, vol. 88 (July 1974), 65–68. David Pinkney, “The Crowd in the French Revolution of 1830,” American Historical Review, LXX (1964), 2–3. A more comprehensive analysis of the approximately 1,500 individuals and families who applied for compensation before the Commission des récompenses nationales, cf. Pinkney, The French Revolution of 1830 (NY, 1972), 253–273. They included 118 stonemasons. For a more recent discussion of these figures, cf., Pamela Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution in France. (Basingstoke, 1991), 61–3. Estimates of building trades workers on the barricades in February 1848: they constituted 25.4 percent of the Parisian crowds; later, they were 23.3 percent of the Communard movement in 1871: Harison, “The Rise and Decline,” 411. The argument of Sewell, Work and Revolution. Cf., Sewell’s qualifications of his earlier argument: “The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian,” in Logics of History. Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago & London, 2005), 22–80. Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830–1848 (New York and Basingstoke), 2002. B.H.V.P. N.A. 154, fo. 9, Pétition: “Le Sieur Roulley, au nom de tout ses camarades, maçons, soussignés,” 23 August 1830. Festy, Le mouvement ouvrier, 61. Faure, “Mouvements populaires,” 67. Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution, 80–81; 150–151. On continuities between 1830 and 1848, cf., Jean-Pierre Aguet, Les grèves sous la Monarchie de Juillet (1830–1847) (Geneva, 1954), 68–71. And Edouard Dolléans, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier, 1830–1871. 2 vols. (Paris, 1947),

Notes to Pages 256–261

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

307

vol. I, 20–25. Also, for a revisionist perspective: Lynn Hunt and George Sheridan, “Corporatism, Association, and the Language of Labor in France, 1750–1850” Journal of Modern History, vol. 58, no. 4 (December 1986), 815–825. The holdings of nineteenth-century almanachs in the Bibliothèque nationale features the entire post-Napoleonic series of the Chambre’s Almanach des bâtiments, whose 57th edition appeared in 1865. Afterward, it becomes L’annuaire des bâtiments. “Quand le bâtiment va, tout va.” Report cited in Leonard Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871–1914 (Baltimore, 1984), 8. Charles Merreau (1872). Cited by Pinkney, Napoleon II, 178. Carbonnier, Maisons parisiennes, 123–124. Bernard Marchand, Paris: Histoire d’une ville, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris, 1993), 82, 90, 132. Ann-Louise Shapiro. Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850–1902 (Madison, 1985), 32, 39, 42. I thank Charles Rearick for an informative exchange on this subject. Gérard Jacquemet, Belleville au XIXe siècle: du faubourg à la ville (Paris, 1984). Harrison, “The Rise and Decline,” 411. On the Commune as a reappropriation of Paris by workers: Jacques Rougerie, Paris libre 1871 (Paris, 2004).

Appendix 1. Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes, Dangerous Classes During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1958). On the controversy: Barry Ratcliffe, “Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siecle?: The Chevalier Thesis Reexamined,” French Historical Studies, vol. 17 (1991), 542–574. 2. Farge, Délinquance et criminalité: le vol d’aliments à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1974), 121. Her sampling is based on the dossiers of 145 condemned thieves. On more general issues surrounding the study of crimes, see François Billacois, “Pour une enquête sur la criminalité dans la France d’Ancien Régime,” Annales: ESC, vol. 22 (March–April 1967), 340–349. As Farge, Billacois, and most historians treating the question of labor and criminality in society have suggested, the fact of arresting a certain type of worker just as likely indicates repression against certain categories of the population as it does the “reality” of criminality. Still, these statistics signify a certain effectiveness of the corporate order to police its own; that such a closely watched social group as the builders would not have been arrested in greater numbers is also due to the well-paid nature of most work on the construction site. 3. A.N. Y 10526–10530, “Registres de la Chambre criminelle.” 4. A.N. Y 10529, 5 Aôut 1785. From 1776 to the Revolution, the percentage of worksite thefts doubles from an average of about 15–35 percent of all accusations. On executions at the Place de Grève: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 5. Annie Moulin, Les maçons de la Haute Marche au 18e siècle (Clermont-Ferrand, 1987), 444 and 448.

308

Notes to Pages 261–263

6. Hence, Martin Nadaud recounts his first trip home after three years of work in Paris; and his departures from Paris to the Creuse became even less common afterward, although he was elected deputy from the region in the Second Republic. Nadaud, Léonard, Maçon, 449–451. 7. Note the confusion between the reality and the perception of crime (or the signified and the signifier) among the popular classes on this question in Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes, esp., 33–48.

Bibliography Archival Material Archives de Paris (A.P.) Series of judgments by the Parisian Merchant Court, (Juridiction consulaire), concerning commercial and labor litigation: D.2B6. Series of bankruptcy records (mostly accounts of assets and debts): D.4B6 Series of confiscated documents relating to bankruptcies (such as salary rolls, business ledgers, and account books): D.5B6

Archives de la préfecture de police, Paris (A.P.P.) Series on the revolutionary Sections’ Police Commissioners and justices of the peace: Aa

Archives nationales, Paris (A.N.) Ancien Régime Series Series of Printed Material, particularly royal edicts and regulations: AD Series on the Chambre des bâtiments: inspections, building plans, contracting, and business ledgers of the building trades in private construction: Z1J. Series on meetings and ordinances of the Parisian municipality: H1 Maison du Roi: O1 Series on Parisian bankruptcies: U Series on the “police” papers of the Châtelet: Y Post-1789 Series Papers of the Committee of Public Safety: AF II Cartons on “Public Spirit”: Fic III: Seine Series on the Police Générale, particularly from the Revolution to the Empire. In particular, the papers of the Committee of General Security, individual dossiers: F7 4577–4775/53. Other police papers throughout the series: F7 Cartons on the public administration of commerce and industry: F12 Bâtiments civils, Civic Buildings, series concerning public construction, 1795– 1830: F13 Napoleonic Prefect Reports on departmental population growth and movement: F20 Cartons on employees, declarations of laborers (“la Statistique”) during the Revolution: F30 Series on special revolutionary jurisdiction, the Revolutionary Tribunal, responsible for applying the death penalty, 1793–1795: W. 309

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Index abbey of Saint-Germain-des-pres, 219, 257 absolutism, 17th century, 61 Academy of Architecture, 48, 73, 132, 161, 168–72 accidents, work related, 25, 33–4, 40, 48, 61, 122–3, 239 Adler, Ken, 20, 141 alignment, streets, 46 Allen, Robert C., 226 Allix (ancien régime police commissioner), 57, 92 Almain (Napoleonic police commissioner), 205 Almanach des bâtiments, 45, 92, 232, 256, 310 see also Nouvel almanach des bâtiments, 232 Almanach du commerce de Paris, 232 almanacs, trade and business, 21, 44, 205–6, 234–5 America, xv colonies, 9–10, 12 see also Haitian Revolution, War of Independence, United States Amiens, Peace of, 203 Amyot, M. (specialist in Parisian building law), 252–4, 256 Anderson, Perry, 61 Andrews, Richard Mowery, 151 Apprenticeships, 87, 202, 208 arcades, see passages Arc de Triomphe, 4, 162, 196, 216, 218, 228, 230, 238–9 architects, 3, 20, 27, 113–14, 169 and the Academy, 132–3 architectes-experts, 43–4, 46–7, 51–2, 55, 82, 139, 232 as artists, 104, 113–14, 118, 120 and engineers, 97, 133 and entrepreneurs, 82, 135 in the Revolution and Empire, 70, 98, 161–2, 164, 168–73, 177,

182, 184, 189–90, 193, 196–7, 199, 207, 209–10, 212, 215, 218, 225, 227–8, 232, 238, 250, see names, 21, 45, 58, 92, 118, 127, 195, 233–5 architectural competitions, see concours architectural criticism, see names of critics argot, Parisian, 15, 57 aristocrats, aristocracy, 61, 108, 150–3, 226 armaments industry, 141 arrondissements, 78, 81–2, 102, 189, 233, 258 artists, see architects, building trades, painters, sculptors Assembly General of the Deputies of the Arts and Professions Constituting the Building Trades, 77 assignats (revolutionary currency), 81, 92, 120–1, 197–8 ateliers de charité, de secours, see workshops for the indigent ateliers de filatures, see spinning establishments Atlantic trade, 11, 20, 203 Auditeur national (newspaper), 178–80, 309 Austerlitz, 4 Auvergnats in Paris, 16 Baczko, Bronislaw, 250 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain (first mayor of Paris), 64, 86, 101, 120 bakers, 234 Balzac, Honoré de, 75 bankruptcies, 12, 23, 65–6, 76–7, 79–81, 116–17, 198–9, 252, 309 Barère, Betrand (Committee of Public Safety), 159–60, 164 barracks construction, 196 333

334

Index

barrières (tollhouses), 24, 69 Bastille, fortress and place de, 68–9, 75, 118, 132, 172 Bâtiments du domaine de Paris, 113 Bâtiments du Roi, 78, 106, 113, 216, 249–50 Beik, William, 61 Belleville, xiii, 258 Benard, Joseph (architect), 190 Benjamin, Walter, xiii, xiv, 6 Benoit, Jerome (arrested journeyman carpenter), 176–7 Berrychons (natives of the Berry region), 16 Bien, David, 28 biens nationaux, 81–2, 133, 168, 172–3, 188–90, 219, 257 Bièvre, la, 105 blacksmiths, 84 Blondel, Jacques-François (architectural theorist), 49 Bonaparte, Lucien, 222 Boncerf, Pierre-François (physiocratic reformer), 100–2 Bondy, Section du faubourg de, 166–7 Bonguyot, Marie-François (legislator), 187 Bonne Nouvelle (neighborhood), 38, 218 bonnet makers, 105 boulevard de l’Observatoire, 185 Boullé, Étienne-Louis, xiii, 70 bourgeois, bourgeoisie, 11, 21, 30, 32, 89, 103, 144, 151, 153, 174, 190, 206, 218, 257 Bourse (stock market, also known as palais Brogniart), 80, 220 “Braesch Papers,”, 269–70 Braudel, Fernand, 18–19 bridges, 31, 67–8, 74, 82, 213 brique Creuse, 223 Brogniart, Alexandre-Théodore, 70, 87, 196 Brumaire 18 (Napoleon’s coup d’état of 1799), 185 Brunet frères (contractors), 76 Brunoy, château de, 58 building booms, 10, 46, 81

building codes, 8–9, 46 1766 Ordinance, 11, 65 building materials, 31 critique of poor quality, 50, 168, see also malfaçon building trades (general), xiv, 3–9, 13–15, 18–20, 24, 26, 29, 40–3, 47–8, 50, 55–7, 59, 61, 63, 65–6, 68, 77, 81–2, 88–91, 97–8, 100–1, 104, 107, 116, 123, 125, 129–32, 153–5, 167–9, 172, 174, 185, 196, 200–1, 203, 205, 207–8, 210–14, 217, 225–32, 234, 236–7, 239, 244, 247, 251–2, 254, 256, 259, 260–3 carpenters, joiners (charpentiers, menuisiers en bâtiments, often used interchangeably in this epoque), 41–3, 82–95, 100, 106, 119–20, 123, 125, 128, 130, 139–41, 157–9, 166–7, 175–7, 199, 203–5, 213, 225, 233–5, 238–9, 248, 256, 260, see also community of master carpenters, entrepreneurs journeymen, 35–7, 55, 56–7, 58, 59, 76, 83–7, 96, 103, 116–117, 121, 123, 125, 135, 138, 140, 149, 153, 154, 156, 158, 167, 168, 169–171, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 203, 204, 205, 206, 211, 213, 231, 233, 239, 245, 246, 248 locksmiths (serruriers), 55, 100 marble cutters (marbriers), 41–3 masons (maçons), 15–16, 18, 26, 32, 38–44, 46–7, 58–9, 64, 66, 71, 76, 87–90, 100, 111, 117, 119, 130, 139–40, 154, 170–1, 175, 179, 213, 223–4, 226, 233–5, 248, 254–6, 260, see also apprentices community of master masons painters (peintres en bâtiment), 33, 41–3, 88, 121, 170–1 pavers (paveurs), 33, 55, 88, 170–1 plasterers (plâtriers), 170–1, see also Limousins plumbers (plombiers), 41–3, 55

Index 335 roofers (couvreurs), 18, 26, 33, 39, 41–3, 45, 55, 88–9, 170–1, 213, 260 sculptors (sculpteurs en bâtiment), 41–3, 68, 88, 100, 103, 106, 115–16, 119–23, 125, 132, 135, 139, 170–1, 174–5, 213 stonecutters (tailleurs de pierre), 16, 26, 58–9, 68, 88, 100, 115–16, 119, 122–5, 127–8, 136, 170–1, 174–5, 179–81, 202, 209, 212–14, 223, 225, 228, 230 bureaucracy, 5, 97, 188–9, see functionaries Bureau de la filature, 99, see poor relief Bureau of mines and quarries, 199 Bureau of Statistics, 222–3 bureaux d’adresse (agencies for domestics), 203 bureaux de placement (employment agencies), 206, 229 Burstin, Haim, 79 butchers, 234 cahiers de doléances, 77 Caisse d’escompte, 77 Calonne, Charles Alexandre de, 62, 79–80 canal de l’Ourcq, 4 canal du Midi, 13 canal Saint-Martin, 220 canals (general), 77, 218 capitalism, xiv, 2, 6–7, 9, 11–14, 28, 48, 61, 94 French model of, 18–21, 246 and the French Revolution, 152, 183–4, 244–5 Carnot, Lazare (military engineer), 160 carpenters (charpentiers, menuisiers en bâtiments), see building trades cartes de sûreté, 92, 269–70 Cavilliez (revolutionary police commissioner), 82–3 certificats d’indigence, 102 Chalgrin, Jean-François (architect), 196, 227–9, 238–9 chambers of commerce, 200, 207, 210, 256

Chambre des Bâtiments, 25, 43–7, 50, 56–9, 63, 65, 83, 91, 97, 130, 132, 138–9, 155, 232, 309 chambres garnies (boarding houses), 29, 38, 106, 189, 201 Chambre syndicale (building entrepreneurs’ corporation), 4–5, 233, 235, 237, 252 Champ de Mars, 184 Champ de Mars massacre (July 1791), 120 Champs-Elysées, 186 Chaptal, Jean-Antoine, (Minister of Interior), 200, 222–3 Châtelet, 53, 56–8, 113, 152, 201–2, 260–4, 309 Chaussée d’Antin neighborhood, 82, 189, 192–3, 218 street, 193 Chevalier, Louis, 260 churches, see Madeleine, Ste-Genèvieve, ecclesiastical property circulation, 46, 258 citizens and citizenship, 98, 104, 107, 113, 115, 118, 120, 122–5, 129–31, 133 civic virtue (civisme), 117–18, 123–4, 128–31, 154–5, 157–8, 161, 165, 250 Civil Code, 204, 222 Clement (arrested public works entrepreneur), 169, 177 Cloménil (or Clomesnil), Jacques (stonecutter, arrested for activities during Prairial), 179–81 clientelism, see patronage networks clubs, see Cordeliers Club (Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man) Cobb, Richard, 94 Cochin, Augustin, 84–5 Colbert and Colbertism, 10, 27–8, 52 Commercial Council, 251 Commission des artistes, 161–4, 188–9, 219 Committee of General Security, (Comité de sûreté générale), 166, 169–71, 309

336

Index

Committee on Mendicity, 100, 102–3, 112, 114, 187 see also La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt Committee of Public Safety, (Comité de salut public), 148, 157–60, 164–5, 167, 172, 309 see also Barère, Fouquier-Tinville, Lindel, Robespierre Commune of Paris, 176 Community of Master Carpenters, 57, 82–95, 175–7 Community of Master Masons (ancien régime), 31–3, 82 credit-worthiness, 66 structure, 43–5 compagnons and compagnonnages (journeymen’s associations), 35, 93, 204, 248 see journeymen concours (competitions), 73, 132–3, 161–4, 186–7 conscription, military, 222, 226, 246 Conseil des anciens, 185 Conseil des bâtiments civils, 196–9, 210–11, 216, 219, 227, 230–3, 237, 240, 251, 309 Conseil des cinq-cents, 185 Conseil des Prud’hommes, 181–2, 212–13 Conseil d’état (Napoleonic), 233 Constitution of 1793, 148, 178–9 construction industry, see building trades Consulate, 200–2 consumer revolution, 8, 11–13, 18–19, 219 see also populuxe goods Continental System, 224, 226 contractors, 21, 44, 98, 101, 113, 121–2, 124, 126, 135, 139, 141, 143, 185, 189, 195–6, 198–200, 214 Convention, 146, 159–61, 166, 173, 178–9 Convers (architect), 130–1 Coqueau, Claude Philippe (architect assessor, executed in the Terror), 172–3

Cordeliers Club (Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man), 107–9, 111, 124, 143 corporations abolition, 47–8, 51, 1776 credit, 12, 64–6, 76–7 officers, 91, 152 restoration, 54–8, 1776 restoration, Napoleonic, 227, 229–41 suppression, 79, 82–95, 142–3, 151–3, 1791 survival, 86, 94–5, see also Chambre syndicale, Community of Master Masons, Loi d’Allarde, Loi le Chapelier corporatism (defense of guilds), 5–6, 46–7, 54–5, 241, 244, 249–56 Corps legislatif, 213 corruption, 103, 111, 122, 124, 126–7, 129, 135, 141, 156, 167–73, 176 credit, 65–6, 76, 79–81, 86, 94, 156–7, 189 Creuse (department), 16, 38, 58, 134, 175, 211, 223–4, 260 Creusois, 39, 87 see also maçons de la Creuse criminality, worksite, 55, 73, 86, 103, 129, 172–3, 175, 260–4 Crochon, Victor, 254 Crola, Jean-François, 8 cul de sac Saint-Martin, 82 Cumers (Napoleonic administrator), 229–30, 238, 240 custom and tradition, 45, 59 D’Alembert, see Diderot Danton, Georges, 107 Daru, Pierre Antoine Noël Mathieu Bruno (Intendant, Maison de l’Empereur), 210, 212 day laborers (manouvriers), 17, 58–9, 89–90, 100, 116, 212, 247 see unskilled labor debt, 12, 62, 65–6, 76, 80–1, 94, 116–17 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 63, 85, 94

Index 337 Decressac, Pierre (arrested masonry entrepreneur), 177–8 Defermont, Jacques (deputy), 194 Demachy, Pierre Antoine (painter), 108 demographics, 222–3, see population deregulation, see liberalism (economic) Désert, André, 8 Desgodetz, Antoine-Babuty (architect), 48 Desmoulins, Camille, 107 see also Révolutions de Paris, 150 Despline (arrested entrepreneur), 172–3 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine-Louis-Claude, 208 De Wailly, Charles (architect), 161–2 Dictionnaire d’architecture, 112 see also Quatremère de Quincy Diderot, Denis, see Encyclopédie Directory, 125, 145, 183–200, 215, 218, 240, 245–6 Districts, revolutionary, 102 domestic servants, 206 Dorigny, Louis François (contractor in carpentry), 176–7 Dosse, François, 6 doux commerce, 9 Du Bierre, François (arrested entrepreneur), 154–6, 168, 180–1 Dubois, Louis-Nicolas, (Napoleonic police prefect), 200–2, 205–7, 209–10, 214, 224, 227, 232–4, 237–40 Durand, Yves, 90 Durouzeau (justice of the peace), 135–6 ecclesiastical property, 96, 163, 189, 196, 257–8 see also biens nationaux Ecole centrale des travaux publics, 159 Ecole des ponts et chaussées, 14, 254 Ecole militaire, 36 Ecole polytechnique, 159, 199, 235 émigrés, 218 Empire, first, 214–41

Encyclopédie (Diderot and d’Alembert), 41, 48–9, 59 Encyclopédie méthodique (Pancoucke), 112, 128 engineers, civil, 3, 14, 20, 97, 114, 118, 128, 133, 138, 159–61, 182, 184, 194, 220, 235–6, 250, 254 and technocracy, 64, 141–3, 145, 147, 217 England, see Great Britain Enlightenment, 3, 8–9, 12, 21, 24, 27, 29, 42–3, 48–50, 112–13, 117, 128 entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, 13, 67, 78, 81, 96, 108, 113–14, 116, 160, 164, 166–73, 176–7, 180, 182, 190, 194, 212, 214–15, 243, 245–8, 250–6 conversion of former masters, 85–95, 152–3 corruption, 61, 79, 103, 122–6, 135, 160, 172–3, 199 as a lobby, 98, 106, 131, 133, 138–9 Napoleonic controls over, 224, 227–41 on public sites, 111, 121, 123–4, 126–9, 134–5, 141–3, 145, 195–200 within the radical movement, 151, 153–6, see also architects, capitalism ephemeral architecture, 13, 67, 87, 178 Estates General, 81, 210 experts and expertise, 28, 44, 46–7, 50–1, 97, 132 families and kinship, 11, 14, 21, 78, 92–3, 105, 118, 180, 185, 224, 235, 241 Farmers-General Wall, 25, 54, 69–70, 72 faubourg Saint-Antoine, 17, 30, 35–7, 40, 61, 90, 178, 226, 248 faubourg Saint-Germain, 218–19 faubourg Saint-Jacques, 34 faubourg Saint-Marcel, 30, 35, 78, 99, 104–11, 119, 125, 129, 178, 226, 248–9 faubourg Saint-Martin, 116 faubourgs (general), 17, 26, 37, 248–9

Index

federalism (charge of counter-revolutionary activity), 147–8, 159–60, 164, 177 Féraud, Jean (executed deputy), 178 Ferrière, Claude-Joseph de (legal scholar), 44–5 Fichet, Pierre (entrepreneur), 190 Florence, Italy, 8 Fontaine, Pierre François (architect), 70, 218 Foucault, Michel, 1 Fouché, Joseph (Minister of Police), 210–11 Fouquier-Tinville, Antoine Quentin, (Prosecutor of the Terror), 166, 201 Fremin, Michel de (architectural theorist), 49 functionaries, 97, 147, 152, 156, 185, 212, 215, 233, 247 Garrioch, David, 35 Gaudin, Martin Michel Charles (Minister of Finance), 212 Gazette de France, 36, 202 Geneva, Switzerland, 223 Gilbert, Florentin, 72–3 Girard de Bury, (Procureur du Roi de la Chambre des Bâtiments), 129–30 glassworks, royal, 37 Gobelins, barrière de, 202 Gobelins, manufacture (Royal, then National), 78, 88, 105–6, 119, 141, 157 grain trade, 6, 51 Graves, Robert, 65 Great Britain, 62, 148, 226 Great Fear (July and August 1789), 101 Greer, Donald, 167 Grelet (master mason at the Opera), 116 grève, faire (strike), origin of term, 57, 59, 209, 248–9 see also strikes Guadeloupe, 203 Guibert, Joseph (ornamental sculptor), 135 Guide to the Merchant Corps and the Corporations of Arts and Crafts, 44

guilds, see corporations Guillerme, André, 8, 20 Haitian Revolution, 13, 20, 203 Halle au blé (grain market), 10, 132 Halles, les, (central market), 4, 142, 180 Hardy, Siméon-Prosper, 24, 33–4, 40, 55–6, 58, 309 hatters, 203 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, Baron, 6–8, 16, 39, 66, 110, 163, 218, 256–8 Haussmanisation (1852–1870) xiii, 6, 110, 162, 257, 259 Haute Marche, see Creuse (department) heights, limits on, 30, 46 Henri IV, 8 hereditary offices, 47 hôpital des Incurables, 116 Horn, Jeff, 19–20 hospitals, 13, 105, 153, 161, 196–7, 222, 249 hôtel de la Monnaie, 36 hôtel de Salm, 26–7 Idéologues, 183–4, 201 Ile de la cité, xv, 258 immigration (from the African continent), 2–3 indigent population, see poor relief industrial revolution, industrialization, see capitalism industrial waste, see pollution inflation (in prices and wages), 26, 80, 90, 140, 146, 148, 157, 165, 178, 185, 187, 199, 201, 203–4, 208, 212, 222, 226–7, 237, 246–7 inspections of construction ancien régime, 43–4, 97, see also experts and expertise revolution, 103, 105, 113–16, 118, 121, 124–8, 134–5, 138, 141 Institut national, 183 insurrections, see journées inventaires après décès, 83

10.1057/9780230245280 - Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution, Allan Potofsky

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338

Index 339 Jacobinism, Jacobins, 3, 20, 84–5, 141, 143, 146–8, 152–5, 160–1, 169, 172, 180–2, 184, 216, 219 Jaillot map (1773), 71 Jefferson, Thomas, 27 Jones, Colin, 28 Jourdain, Annie, 185 Journal de France, 99 Journal des ouvriers charpentiers, 238 journalists, revolutionary, 156 journées (days of action), 13, 202 4–5 September, 149, 1793 Germinal (1 April 1795), 178 Prairial (20–23 May, 1795), 165, 174, 178–80, 202 Vendémiaire (1795), 113 journée, see workday journeymen, 35–6, 59, 76, 84–7 see also laborers jurés, see Community of Master Masons Jurisdiction consulaire (merchants’ court), 76–7 justices of the peace, 135–6, 152, 166–8, 175, 178, 180, 182 “just price”, 59 Kaplan, Steven, 87, 142, 247 Keyder, Caglar, 19 Laborde, Alexandre (Prefect of Paris), 254–5 labor migration, see migration Labrousse, Ernest, 89–90 laissez-faire, see liberalism L’Ami du peuple, see Marat Languedoc, 12–13 La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, François Alexandre Frédéric, Duc de, 102, 112, 122, 134, 187 La Rochelle, 1620s siege of, 15 Laugier, Marc-Antoine (architectural theorist), 47, 49–50, 60 lawsuits, 42, 144, 248 lawyers, 43, 47–8, 56, 86, 197 Le Camus de Mèzières, Nicolas (architect), 49, 132 Lecouteaux (entrepreneur-promoter), 142

Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas (architect), xiii, 24, 69–70, 73, 79, 172 Lefebvre, Georges, 81 Left Bank, 30, 38, 105, 132, 218–19 Legislative Assembly, 112, 127, 131, 133, 134, 135 Lemit, Louis (president, sectional civil committes), 155–6, 186 Lenoir, Jean-Charles-Pierre (Lieutenant General of Police), 58 Le Sueur, Charles-Philippe (urbanist, pamphleteer), 72 liberalism (economic), 5–6, 17, 29, 45, 49–51, 66, 249 the Directory and, 183–4, 195–6 the early Revolution and, 75–6, 82, 96, 121, 144–5, 148, 152, 244–5 Napoleonic debates and, 206–7, 215, 227, 237, 244, 256 Restoration and 1830 Revolution, 255 see also Physiocrats Lieutenant General of Police, 55–6, 58–9, 62, 206, 234 see also names, 21, 45, 58, 92, 118, 127, 195, 233–5 Lille, 201 limestone, see building materials Limousin (region), 15, 134, 223 Limousins (natives from and laborers), 15–16, 39, 58–9, 118, 129, 224 see also building trades, plasterers Lindel, Robert (Committee of Public Safety), 168 livrets (workers’ passbooks), 56–7, 83, 138, 202–6, 208, 222, 224–5, 229–31, 233, 239–40, 247 locksmiths (serruriers), see building trades Loi d’Allarde, 48, 82 Loi le Chapelier, (revolutionary law on guild abolition), 48, 82, 127, 158, 167, 175, 231, 255 Louisiana Purchase, 20 Louis-Philippe, 254 Louis XIV, 10, 216 Louis XV, 36 Louis XVI, 32, 51, 58, 120 Louvre, 82, 132

340

Index

Loyseau, Charles, Traité des ordres (1610), 93–4 Luddism, 20 luthier (stringed instrument makers), 205 luxury, 23, 89, 108, 119, 130–1 Lyons, 15 maçons de la Creuse, 3, 15–16, 18, 39, 133–4, 152–3, 175, 211, 254, 259–61, 263 see also Creuse, Creusois Madeleine, Church of, 81, 218 Maison de l’Empereur, 210, 212, 216, 225 Maison du Roi, 216, 250, 309 malfaçon (defective construction), 31–2, 50, 57, 91, 169 Malthusian, 223 Mandar, Charles François (civil architect), 142–3 mandat territorial, 197–8 Mangin, Charles (architect and former expert-bourgeois), 132–5 Marais, 31, 83, 163, 219, 221, 257 Marat, Jean-Paul, 103, 111–12, 124, 126, 135, 150, 178, 309 marble-cutters, 41–2 marchandage (piece-mastering), 6 Marchés, Section des, 180 Margairaz, Dominique, 188 masons (maçons), see building trades master artisans and mastership (general), 30, 152–6, 176–7, 182, 204, 210–11, 213, 229, 231–8, 240, 245, 248, 251–2 master masons, see Community of Master Masons Maurice, Jean-Frédéric-Théodore (Napoleonic Prefect to the Creuse), 223–4 Maximum (General), 146–8, 157–9, 164–5, 167–8, 176–8, 184, 210, 240, 246 Mayer, Arno J., 86 Ménilmontant (quarter), 258 mercantile balance of trade, 9, 223

merchants, 30, 151 Mercier, Louis Sébastien, 11, 22–4, 29, 34, 37–8, 45, 60–1 Mercure de France, 36–7 merit, meritocracy, 61–2, 99, 117–18, 127, 131–2 metallurgy, 6, 16, 20, 141, 149, 224 métiers jurés (sworn trades), 61 migration, migrant labor, xiv, 3, 14–18, 35, 38–40, 53, 56–7, 100, 105–6, 116, 129, 153, 189, 201, 206, 211, 223–5, 247, 254, 260–3 see also day laborers, unskilled labor Minard, Philippe, 28 Minister, Ministry of Interior, 183, 196, 200, 207, 222, 224–5, 228, 230–1, 233, 251 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, 106 monopolies, see privileges Montagnards, 107, 148, 174, 176 Mont Blanc, section de, 103 Moreau, Sylvain (master carpenter), 84, 111 Moulin, Annie, 39 Nadaud, Martin, 16–18 Napoleon I, 97, 112, 162, 178, 181, 189–90, 195, 209–10, 218–19, 221–2, 226, 233, 236, 238, 241, 246, 251, 253, 256 Napoleon III, 256 National Assembly, 64, 68, 75, 78–9, 97, 99–100, 106–7, 114, 120–1, 130, 134, 153 National Guard, 118, 154, 178 nationalism, see patriotism Necker, Jacques, 56–7, 62, 77, 83, 138 Neufchâteau, François de (Interior Minister), 183–4, 186, 222 nobility, see aristocrats Noiriel, Gerard, 8 Normands, Normandy, 16, 39 Nôtre Dame, archdiocese, 86 Nôtre Dame, parvis, 258 Nouvel almanach des bâtiments, 232 O’Brien, Patrick K., 19 Observatoire, section de l’, 84

Index 341 O’Connell, Lauren Marie, 197 ordonnance, 37 painters (peintres in bâtiment), see building trades Palais Bourbon, 185–6 Palais Brogniart, see Bourse Palais de Justice, 24, 76, 82, 113 Palais des Tuileries, 185–6 Palais du Luxembourg, 185–6 Palais Impérial (Tuileries), 212 Palais National, see Louvre Palais Royal, 218 Palloy, François, 68–9 Panckoucke, Charles-Joseph, 36–7 Pantheon, 11, 97, 106–7, 109–29, 131–2, 134–7, 139–43, 147–8, 155–62, 165, 173–4, 178–80, 188, 196, 202, 204–5, 208, 213, 235, 249–50, 255, 257 Panthéon-français, section, 129, 135 Paris-8, Université de, xiii, xvi Parker, David, 61 Parlement de Paris, 52–5, 58–9, 101, 201 Pasquier, Etienne-Denis (Parisian police prefect), 239–40 passages (arcades), 219 passbooks, see livrets patentes (business licences), 75, 153, 168, 232, 251 patois, 40, 57–8 patriotism, 9, 10–11, 61–2, 118, 124–5, 128, 144, 155, 157 patronage networks, 78–9, 152, 154–7, 180–2, 246, 248 pavers (paveurs), see building trades payrolls, 115–16, 118, 122–3, 125–6, 129, 136, 140, 309 Percier, Charles (architect), 70, 218 père Duchesne (newspaper), l, 150 père Lachaise, cemetery, 64 Peyre, Antoine-Marie (architect), 249–51 Physiocrats and Physiocracy, 9, 27, 51, 100, 183 Picardy (region), 39 piece-rate or task-rate (salaire à la tâche), 119, 254–5

pierre de taille (dimension stone), 30–1, 69, 209 Piis, Pierre-Antoine-August (Napoleonic General Secretary, Prefecture of Police), 210–11 place de Grève (now place de l’Hôtel de Ville), 18, 57, 59, 88–9, 201–2, 206, 213–14, 231, 247–8 place de la République, 82, 258 place de la Throne, (de la Nation), 72–3 place de la Victoire, 132 place de l’Estrapade, 111 place Louis XV (place de la Concorde), 10, 36 place Maubert, 201 place Maubert, 99, 105 place Vendôme (place Louis-le-Grand), 58 plasterers (platriers), see building trades plumbers (plombiers), see building trades police commissioners ancien régime, 57, 92, 169 Revolution, 103, 106, 117, 137–40, 142, 152, 161, 166–9, 175, 178, 180–2, 205–7, 212, 236, 241, 248, 252, 309 see also names political economy, see liberalism, Physiocrats pollution, 105, 140–1, 249 Poncet, Pierre (Pantheon’s masonry contractor), 125–9, 134 Pont Neuf, section de, 82 ponts, see bridges poor relief, poverty, 96–100, 102–6, 117, 130–1, 186–7, 191, 204, 214 Popincourt, section de, 176 population, 6, 15–17, 151, 165, 178, 255–8 mixité and stratification, 34–5, 258 studies of, 24, 29, 103, 108, 222, see also demographics, 222–3 populuxe goods, 11, 18 porte Saint Denis, 216 porte Saint Martin, 132, 216 potatoes, 15

342

Index

Poyet, Bernard (building inspector), 70, 103–4 Prairial (uprising), see journées Prefecture of Police, 201–2, 213–14 prices, 90, 93, 173 see also inflation, Maximum printing shops, national, 141 prison construction, 113, 126, 196 privileges, corporate, 44–6, 87 monopolies, 48, 52, 79 property, 2, 11–12, 63, 65, 83, 91, 96, 117, 124, 160, 168, 172, 183, 195, 219, 224–5, 244–6, 260 proprietors, 2, 11–12, 20–1, 23, 34, 46–8, 50–1, 65, 67, 75–6, 80–1, 85, 179, 184–5, 191, 270 public opinion, 49–50, 183 public service, 96, 98, 101, 107, 124, 188 Public Works Bureau (Napoleonic), 239–40 Public Works Commission, then, Council, 160, 164, 172–3, 195, 210–11 Public Works, Department (Municipality of Paris), 64–5, 101–3, 115, 121, 126, 158 public works projects, 96–104, 106, 111–15, 118, 120–4, 126, 130–5, 137–8, 142, 153, 156, 158–9, 160, 165, 170–4, 182, 186, 193, 204, 207, 210–1, 214, 222, 226, 229, 230–1, 239–40, 251, 302 quarries, 78–9, 105 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Chrysostôme (director of the Pantheon construction site) , 112–15, 117–18, 120, 123–6, 128, 134–6, 141 quays, 187 Raymond, Jean-Arnaud, 227–9 régies (state enterprises), 106 Regnault (rapporteur of law on passbooks), 208 religious buildings, see ecclesiastical property rentiers, 11, 30

republicanism, 107–8, 111–12, 124–5, 128 Restoration, 251–3 Réveillon, Jean-Baptiste, 37 1830 Revolution, 253–6 Revolution of, 1848, see Second Republic Revolutionary Army of the Interior, 158 revolutionary tribunals, 148, 154, 158, 166, 169–71, 174 Révolutions de Paris (newspaper), 150, 309 Riberolle, villa, 145 Richard, Camille, 20 Richelieu, Cardinal, 15 Riffé, J. (Napoleonic functionary), 203–11, 238, 240 Right Bank, 30–1, 38, 132, 189, 205, 217–18 riots, 37 roads, see street and road construction Robert, Hubert, 74 Robespierre, Maximilian, 148, 151–2, 164–5, 176–7, 180 Roche, Daniel, 17 Rondelet, Jean-Baptiste (chief inspector, engineer of the Pantheon), 114, 120, 123, 128, 141–2, 160, 173, 196, 199 roofers (couvreurs), see building trades Roosevelt, Franklin D., xiv Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 158 Roussel (guild architect), 130–1 Roux, Jacques, 140 Royal Society of Agriculture, 100 rue aux Ours, 39 rue de Charonne, 197 rue de l’Abbaye, 219 rue de la Mortellerie, 71, 89 rue de Lanneau, 110 rue de l’Ecole de medicine, 107 rue de l’Ulm, 219 rue de Montreuil, 37 rue de Rivoli, 162, 190–2, 217, 258 rue des Colonnes, 189–91, 193 rue Laplace, 110 rue Mandar, 142–3, 189–91 rue Ménilmontant, 84

Index 343 rue Monmartre, 38, 144 rue Mouffetard, 105 rue Saint-Georges, 79 rue Saint-Jacques, 99 rue Saint-Lazare, 79–80 rue Saint-Martin, 38, 205 Saint-Denis, xiii Saint-Domingue, see Haitian Revolution Saint-Etienne (city), 15 Saint-Etienne-du-mont (district), 99–100, 106 Saint Joseph, patron saint of carpenters and joiners, 239 Saint Roche, patron saint of masons, 140 Sainte-Geneviève, Church, 10, 24, 36, 78, 81, 105–9, 111–12, 115–16, 119, 125–6, 225 Montagne (neighbourhood), 99, 105, 107, 109, 257 see also Pantheon salaries, see tarif, wages, workday salary rolls, see payrolls saltpeter (for gunpowder), 149 Saltpetrière, hospital of, 105 sans-culottes, sans-culotterie, 98, 153, 166–7, 182, 248 in construction, 154–6, 180 defined by historians, 151–2 defined by revolutionary journalists, 150 scaffolding, 91–2, 108, 120, 122–3, 139, 141–2 sculptors (sculpteurs en bâtiments), see building trades Second Empire, 6–7, 218, 256, 259 see also Haussmann, Haussmannisation Second Republic, 16–17 sections, revolutionary, 72, 147, 206, 248 see also names Séguier, Antoine Louis (Parlement de Paris), 54 Seine (department), 255–6

Seine (river), 4, 31, 67–8, 91–2, 105, 168, 201, 219–20 see also bridges, 14, 31, 47, 49, 67, 101, 160, 195, 204 Sentier (Paris neighbourhood), 189, 218 September Massacres (1792), 137 Seven Years War, 2, 10, 24–5, 36, 65–6, 80 size of Paris, 54 Soboul, Albert, 151–2 Sonenscher, Michael, 59, 116 Sorbonne, la, 105 Soufflot, Jacques-Germain (architect of the Church of Sainte-Geneviève), 108, 111 Soufflot-le-Romain, Jacques-Germain (draftsman and inspector of the Pantheon), 114, 117, 125, 128 speculation, speculators in Parisian real estate, 51, 65, 189 Spicket (or Spiket), (revolutionary police commissioner), 84 spinning establishments (ateliers de filature), 99, 141, 149, 156, 186, 197 state employees, see functionaries statism (étatisme), 5–6, 50, 64 stock exchange, see Bourse stock market, 80–1 see also bourse, 142, 189, 218 stonecutters, see building trades street and road construction, 96, 149, 188, 195 strikes, 83–6, 94, 209, 228, 238 ancien régime, 56–60 Revolution and Empire, 83–93, 147–8, 167, 176, 199, 204–5, 209, 212–14, 228, 238–9, 247–9 see also grève surveillance committees, 108 Suspects, Law of (September 1793), 148–9, 157–8 syndics, see corporations, officers tanners and tanneries, 105, 249 tarif (wage scale), 26, 57–8, 83, 231–2

344

Index

taxes, 80–1, 92, 116, 153, 194, 212, 222, 245, 252 gabelle (salt), 212 ancien régime, 81 corvée (road-building), 14 octroi (on merchandise), 116, 119–20, 212 pèages (tolls), 14, 194–5 vingtième (5 percent tax on income), 10 Temple, neighborhood of, 218, 221, 257–8 Terror, the, 98–9, 129, 141, 146–50, 155–78, 182 textiles, 96, 105, 226 theaters, 13 theft, see criminality Thermidor and Thermidorian Government, 146, 156–7, 165, 168–72, 174–6, 178–81, 186 Third Republic, 14 Thompson, E. P., 211 Thuileries, 27, 186 tilers, 55 tobacco, 141 Tocquevillian interpretations, 27 tools, 91, 260–3 Tour Saint-Jacques, 201 trades, other than building, see also crafts, 7, 44, 129 tradition, see custom and tradition traffic, see circulation transparency, 67 Trou, François Nicolas (architect), 193 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 15, 17, 20, 44, 47, 51–2, 55–6, 58–9, 62, 66, 77, 83, 100–1, 119, 200–1, 223, 233, 237, 243–5 Turgot map (1739), xv, 31, 71, 107, 221 unemployment, 98–104, 134–5 “unfree” labor (Robert J. Steinfeld), 203–4, 243, 246 United States, 112 unskilled labor, (gens de métier sans qualité), 2, 14–15, 26, 39–40, 57,

89, 97–101, 105, 119, 131, 152, 154, 185–7, 204, 208, 247, 260–1 see also day laborers, 39, 57–9, 89, 168 urban planning, 4, 6, 8–9, 12, 157, 161, 189, 250–1 vandalism, xiii, xiv, 69, 219 Varennes, king’s flight to, 120 Vaudoyer, Antoine (architect), 207–9, 225 Vaudoyer Project, 208–11, 213, 225 venal offices, 44, 46, 61, 64 Verniquet, Edme (urban cartographer), 161–2 Versailles, 15, 97 Vestier, Nicolas-Antoine (architect), 190, 193 Veyrat (Inspector-General of the Arc de Triomphe), 239 Vichy and the corporations, 93 Vinçard, Paul, 1 vingtième, see taxes voirie (roads department), 101, 161, 187 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 10 wage and price controls, see Maximum wages, 26–7, 89–90, 100, 115–17, 122, 125, 139–40, 145, 184, 194, 203–6, 210, 212–14, 225–7, 231–2, 247–9 see also piece-rate or task-rate (salaire à la tâche) wars (revolutionary and Napoleonic), 3, 5, 9, 16, 142, 146–9, 153, 158, 177–8, 182, 184, 187, 189, 202–4, 224–6, 236, 247, see Seven Years War War of Independence (American), 10 War of the Second Coalition (1799–1801), 187

Index 345 weavers, 105, 226 Weber, Eugen, 14 welfare, see poor relief wheat, 90 Woloch, Isser, 140 women laborers, 102–3, 141, 149, 156, 224–5

wood (as building material), 90–3, 122 workday (journée), 39, 89, 116–18, 136, 194, 207, 210–11, 214–15, 254 work-related illnesses, 115, 139–41 see also accidents workshops for the indigent, see poor relief