cries one of the brilliant satellites of our Pléiade.[113]
It follows logically that the education it instituted and which was founded on the study of Greek and Latin drew a clear line of demarcation between the children thus brought up, who were destined to hold the highest social positions, and the others doomed to inferior tasks and studies. It will therefore be understood that the Renaissance influenced the condition of the workers. It swelled the tide which was carrying society towards class division; it helped to separate still further the tradesman and the manual worker; and above all it separated the artist and the craftsman, those twin brothers, who till then had shared the same life and the same ideals. The artist was no longer the interpreter of the thought of a whole people, but, working for the rich and powerful bankers or princes, who required him to reproduce archaic forms and consequently demanded of him a certain amount of education, he left the ranks of the people, rose to wealth, to the ranks of the upper middle classes, and figured at court; he and his fellows grouped themselves into special brotherhoods such as that of St. Luke at Rome, and before long formed academies inaccessible to the vulgar. Compare the life of Raphael with that of Giotto. In these days, the craftsman remained a working man, lost in the crowd, watching from afar and from his lowly station his successful comrade, who no longer recognized the poor relation he had left behind.
Separations of this kind abound in almost every direction. In the Middle Ages grocers and apothecaries, barbers and surgeons, were classed together. But in the sixteenth century the apothecary, on his admission to mastership, had to reply in Latin, and henceforth he no longer considered the spice merchant his equal. So in France, from the year 1514, the bond between the two professions was broken.
The historian can easily prove that this separation of art and craft was often harmful to both; that art, isolated from the warm heart of the people, became conventional, cold, stiff, and artificial; that craft, relegated to a lower position, no longer sought for beauty, and was condemned to express itself in inferior, routine work; but, taking the guilds alone, this separation certainly weakened the mediaeval system. Deprived of members whose gifts were their glory, they lost in power as in prestige.
In spite of all this, and although the Renaissance is from some points of view a retrogression towards social conditions which had long disappeared, it was more than this; it was the awakening of the spirit of initiative; it was a forward impulse, a bold step in advance. It was not limited to a mere renewal of relations with classical antiquity; it stimulated inventive effort, and taught men to think for themselves once more, to open their eyes and to observe. It thus gave a strong impetus to science. The age is rich in many-sided geniuses and seekers after truth, who widened the field of human knowledge and power in every direction. It saw the birth of those universalists, Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo, who may be likened to trees, which, by the mysterious process of grafting, bear twenty different kinds of fruit. In short, the Renaissance was a setting free of intelligence, a breaking forth of truths, which, thanks to printing, spread all over the world and became a lasting possession.
It is true, indeed, that mankind, like the Wandering Jew, is always moving forward, and never comes completely to a standstill. Man moves ceaselessly because he is alive. But after the great creative movement which is the glory of modern times, his progress is more apparent, surer, and more rapid. From this time must be dated a permanent alliance between science and industry, exemplified in that heroic potter, Bernard Palissy, who spent his life and fortune in rediscovering the secret of certain enamelled pottery. The pity is that this alliance, so fruitful in new methods, in the exploitation of new materials and new products, was formed at the expense of the guilds; for the innovations which it rendered necessary were the death of their rules governing manufacture. Everything contributed, as we can see, to the break-up of the organization of labour which they embodied.
The same may be said of the Reformation, the religious renaissance, which was both a development of and a reaction from its fellow. It could hardly be expected that a revolution which rent Western Christianity asunder should spare the unity of the craft guilds. True, it did not act in the same way: by making the reading of the Bible obligatory it encouraged the education of the people, and in this way it raised the craftsman. It found, and not without reason, its first adherents among workmen,—Saxon miners, carders from the town of Meaux; it turned towards democracy, towards theories of equality. Those who carried it to extremes, like the Anabaptists of Münster, pictured a government in which all the guilds, great and small, should be made equal; their ideal was to turn all organized crafts, superior and inferior, into a sort of public service; to establish a kind of Biblical communism. Their leader and prophet was John of Leyden, an aged working tailor.[114] If this was only a passing birth-throe of Protestantism at least the guilds took a large share in the great movements which shook Holland and England. It really seems that the Reformation brought a renewal of vigour and activity to those states in which it triumphed. But in many countries the fight between the two faiths was so fierce that many cities were devastated and ruined by it. In Germany, after the Thirty Years’ War, Magdeburg, Wurtzburg, Heidelberg, Spire, and Mannheim were simply heaps of ruins, almost deserted. The Teutonic Hanse which had been so powerful was a wreck; the Protestant and Catholic towns had broken the union in which their strength lay. In a hundred places, since it was admitted that the religion of the prince was law for his subjects (cujus regio, hujus religio) whole bodies of people and industries moved away; workmen and masters went in search of refuge among their co-religionists. The guild system was profoundly disturbed by this; the new-comers, when they were too numerous, were not always very warmly welcomed by their brothers in God, and even when they were received, they practically forced their way into a closed system which they strained to breaking.
In places where the population remained divided between the two creeds, or where, more from indifference to, than respect for, the beliefs of others, they made a lame attempt at tolerance, it was extremely difficult to get men of the two sects to live together in the same body. Just as the Jews had been excluded from the guilds in the Middle Ages, so now the Protestants were kept out. In France, from the time of Richelieu, fifty years before the repeal of the Edict of Nantes, the professions of a doctor, apothecary, grocer, and many others were forbidden to them.[115] Then came the great exodus of 1685, which scattered the French Huguenots over every place in Europe where they had friends, and planted colonies of refugees in Switzerland, England, Holland, Prussia, Denmark, and Sweden. “They carried commerce away with them,” says Jurieu, one of their pastors; and commerce in the language of those days included what we call industry. The fact is that they naturalized abroad many manufactures which had hitherto been unknown. England alone learnt from them the arts of silk-making, Gobelins tapestry-making, and sail-making. What then became of the guilds which remained in France, of the monopoly at which they aimed, and of the secrecy which was one of their methods of securing it? It was a terrible blow for them when, as at Abbeville, 80 families out of 160 left the country, or 1600 out of 2200, as happened at the election of Amiens.[116] How, thus mutilated, could they stand against the foreign competition of which their own members had become the most formidable allies?
3. The change in political conditions.—Changes in political conditions affected the guilds even more than intellectual and religious changes. Europe, in spite of waves of revolt, passed through a period in which great powers prevailed. The State, which was becoming centralized, increased its prerogatives and complacently interfered in economic matters. The motives which determined its intervention were sometimes a purely political interest, sometimes a fiscal interest, sometimes a public or national interest.
(a) The political interest of Sovereigns is to subdue rival powers within their territories. For this reason they first attacked the liberties of any cities where the spirit was bad, that is to say, as a King of Prussia said later, frondeur, intractable, or restless. In Spain their fueros were taken from them; in France, town liberties decreased, till they were almost entirely destroyed by Richelieu and Louis XIV. In Germany, the number of free Hanseatic cities dropped from eighty to three. The Italian republics fell one by one under the domination of a monarch, and, though Venice survived, she had concentrated her government in the hands of three State judges, magistrates as autocratic and irresponsible as kings. In the Low Countries, Bruges lost all jurisdiction over her suburbs in 1435, and Ghent lost the power in 1451, and also the right to nominate the aldermen. Liége, like her neighbour Dinant, was destroyed, crushed, reduced to nothing. In the following century Antwerp, suspected of sympathy with the Reformation, lived under the Spanish yoke, pillaged and down-trodden.
Municipal and guild life were so closely united that it was impossible to strike at one without injuring the other. In the city of Liége, the thirty-two crafts and the perron which was the emblem of its independence were taken away at a single stroke.
At Florence, no sooner had the Medicis become Dukes of Tuscany than the Constitution of the Arte was altered in such a way as to make it impossible for them to exercise any influence in the direction of public affairs. In England,[117] the king and Parliament agreed in forbidding the guilds to make ordinances without the consent of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Crown Treasurer, or to fix the price of goods, and aimed at supplanting them in supervising the quality of products. The Statute of Labourers in 1563, in the reign of Elizabeth, gave to justices of the peace, that is to say, to magistrates who were not craftsmen, the right of fixing workmen’s wages. In France, Philip the Beautiful ill-treated the confraternities and found no difficulty in modifying the rules of the Parisian industries.[118] The Crown, however, differentiated between the guilds: at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the doctor of theology, John Gerson, lays down in the clearest terms the alliance between the Crown and the rich burgesses: “All the harm,” he says, “arises from the fact that the king and the good burgesses have been put under servitude by the outrageous enterprise of men of small standing.... God has permitted it in order that we may know the difference between royal domination and that of any people whatever: for that which is royal is general and should be gentle: that of the low-born is a tyrannical domination which destroys itself.”[119] In accordance with this principle, royalty was tactful in its dealings with the great guilds, and willingly bestowed on them honorary privileges. Francis I. not only confirmed to the Six Guilds, which formed the merchant aristocracy of the capital, the precedence which they enjoyed at solemn functions, but of the thirty-six wardens of these Greater Guilds as they would have been called at Florence, he formed a High Council of Parisian industry.
Even with the others, the Crown proceeded gently at first. It desired to absorb, and not to suppress. It realized what an advantage it would be if these independent institutions, still under the influence of their feudal origin, could be transformed into State institutions, protected and obedient! It was with this end in view that Henry III. decided that their organization, hitherto local, should be extended throughout the whole kingdom, to the scattered villages as well as to the towns. The city (urban) guild was therefore converted into a national organism, and the guild was made compulsory at the same time that it was put under tutelage. This unification, which placed it under the direct supervision of royal agents, was, however, only to operate on paper. It encountered the displeasure of the craft guilds; worse still, it was in opposition to the first principle of the whole system. The ordinance allowed the inhabitants of the suburbs to follow their craft within the cities, and the inhabitants of one town to settle in any other, with the exception of Paris[120]—a last concession to an ancient tradition. It was something quite new for craftsmen to possess equal rights and for crafts to be organized like those of Paris throughout the whole of France; but it was only in accordance with the general trend of French civilization. This sudden enlargement of the guild system, however, was practically its death, and there were many who from this time did not hesitate to say so openly.[121] The edict, renewed by Henry IV. in 1597, was next extended to include merchants, and was completed by the abolition of the king of the mercers, who still exercised a certain amount of authority in the fairs; for even so trumpery a king made the king at the Louvre uneasy!
The Crown was the less willing to give up its ideas of realizing unity in the industrial domain in that it mistrusted the small crafts; it bore in mind the fact that, formerly, when the Holy League tried to create a sort of intermunicipal federal Republic, the masters’ and journeymen’s confraternities eagerly joined in the attempt. It did not forget that, in the time of the Fronde, the guilds were credited with having had the repeal of the privileges granted to the great merchants and the prohibition to import silks into the kingdom inserted in the peace treaty forced on the Regent by his rebel subjects. Little by little it reduced the authority remaining to them. It was tenacious in carrying into every sphere the form of organization at which it aimed. It made further attempts in 1673 and 1691; between the first date and the second the guilds officially constituted and classified rose from 60 to 127, and what clearly shows the meaning of this administrative classification is the fact that it nominated, or threatened the nomination of, the headmen by officers of the Crown.
A very inadequate idea, however, of the encroachments of royal authority will be gained if the solemn publication of edicts alone is remembered, and the daily, incessant attempt of its agents to restrict the jurisdiction both of local and of guild authorities is ignored. No doubt a good deal of the economic jurisdiction formerly exercised by the town magistrates still existed. Contraventions of regulations, and struggles between producers and consumers, between employers and employees, and between allied and rival crafts, were under municipal jurisdiction.[122] The right of pronouncing judgment on such points as falsifications, the observance of religious festivals, the price of merchandise and the rate of wages, was still left to the municipality by Colbert. Naturally its powers were greater or less according as the town was royal, seigneurial, or communal. But it was not unusual for it to retain the right of collecting taxes, and of nominating supervisors who controlled crafts; for it to create masterships and organize charity workshops which changed into regular factories; or to withhold the monopoly granted to the guilds.
It is none the less true that communal jurisdiction grew less year by year. Attention must be drawn to the fact that the craft guilds sometimes passed it by and of their own accord applied to the central authority for intervention. Thus, questions of provisions, public health, monopoly, speculation, regulations for the prevention of fraud, and the protection of apprentices, one by one came under the jurisdiction of parlements, ministers, governors, and of their delegates. Colbert, in his general rules for manufacture which date from 1666 to 1669, codifies, in the name of the State, the minute directions contained in the guild statutes on questions of apportionment, bad work, etc.
At the end of the seventeenth century, then, the guilds still existed, but had been subjugated and deprived of their principal rights. Behind the solid front which they still presented were ruin, desolation, and decay.
(b) It is probable that the Crown in France allowed them to live and decline in peace because they supplied an easy method of directing commerce and industry; but it was also because they were fruitful sources of production. The Crown often disguised with fine phrases the fiscal interest which inspired it; it is, however, easily discoverable in three different forms. Sometimes it confirmed, strengthened, and extended the monopoly of the guilds and made them pay for the favour; sometimes it sold to outsiders privileges which encroached on and compromised this monopoly; and finally, it sometimes threatened them, and only withdrew threats in return for ready money.
The great ordinance of 1581 and the special edict of taxes of 1673 may be taken as examples of the first method. In 1581 the strengthening of the organization of the guilds by purging them of certain abuses and irregularities was the pretext cited; the king spoke and appeared to act as the great national justice of the peace; but the real object of the measure, which extended to the kingdom a system hitherto localized, may well have been the filling of the royal treasury into which fell a part of the matriculation fees paid by each new master. In 1673 trouble was no longer taken to find a pretext; the work was done by a financial edict, that is, by the establishment of a method of taxation. The guilds themselves encouraged these calls on their funds; indeed, in 1636, when France was in danger of invasion, they offered their wealth and their services for the defence of the kingdom.
The second means, which consisted in creating privileges for which the guilds paid and by which the king’s coffers were filled, was invented by Louis XI., who in 1461 instituted letters of mastership, which exempted those who bought them from the examination of capability and the expenses which the ordinary reception entailed. Soon the kings introduced irregularities into the masters’ guilds on every possible occasion.[123] The blow could not miss its aim. If none were found to take these licences, the guilds hastened to buy them up to prevent the intrusion of new competitors. In vain they attempted to protest; the procedure became habitual and legal. The great ordinance of 1581 stated that the king would dispose of three letters of mastership in every town and every craft.
This led to a third procedure. The guild was vulnerable at many points, in its revenues and in its autonomy, as well as in its monopolies. If a pretence was made of attacking its weak spots, it would pay in order to be spared. It clung to the right of electing its own officers. Now Francis I. had already introduced among them royal officers who had naturally bought their office. At the end of the seventeenth century the Crown, being short of money, renewed this expedient on a large scale. In 1691 it declared its intention of replacing all the officers and syndics by agents of its own nomination, and the guilds had immediately to raise three hundred thousand pounds to avert the calamity which threatened them. It was thus that the Jews and Lombards had formerly liberated themselves. In 1694 the king took it into his head to institute auditors and examiners to control their accounts; another sacrifice of four hundred thousand pounds was demanded before these were removed. In this way from year to year posts were created and bought up. In 1711 the pressure brought to bear was even stronger and more direct; the admission of new masters was forbidden, and they were created by royal authority without the assent of the guilds. The guilds gave everything that was demanded of them, everything at least that was in their power; they borrowed, got into debt, became involved and were on the verge of bankruptcy; just as the communes had formerly succumbed under the weight of the too heavy burdens imposed on them by the Crown.
(c) The Crown was not always actuated by such personally interested motives; it sometimes happened that it was moved by nobler inspirations in its relations with the craft guilds, and studied the general interest when it restricted their exorbitant privileges.
In order to develop public assistance with little expense, those who participated in works of charity were recompensed by being exonerated from corporate obligations. In 1553 an edict conferred mastership on all craftsmen who consented to teach their craft to the children of the Hospital of the Trinity, and the hospital itself thus became a factory working against the guilds. Several hospitals were in a similar position. In the seventeenth century, however, it was with a different aim,—the development of national industry,—that the Crown deliberately created factories not under guild rule. Henry IV., in order to naturalize in France the silk industry, which diverted from the kingdom seven to eight thousand gold crowns annually, planted mulberry trees, and brought in Italian workmen on whom he lavished money and monopolies, and who were exempted from taxation, in order that they might teach the art of weaving these valuable stuffs. In 1607 he installed, in the great gallery at the Louvre, a colony of foreign craftsmen—a sort of industrial school of art where apprentices were trained—who might establish themselves anywhere in the kingdom without waiting to become masters. He thus launched the industry of luxury and attempted to organize, over the heads of the guilds, that which was most distasteful to them,—innovation, while their domain was still further restricted by the special conditions granted to merchants who followed the Court and became tradesmen by appointment to princes and to the most brilliant of the nobility.
Colbert built up into a system what Henry IV. had practised, and great factories rose at his command. These were of two kinds: first, royal factories properly so called—State establishments, in which all expenses were borne by the Treasury; the director was nominated by the king, and the privilege which they enjoyed was in perpetuity (the soap works of Beauvais, Aubusson, the naval workshops in the ports, etc.). Others, also called “royal factories,” were, in spite of this ambiguous name, private enterprises; they enjoyed important privileges, such as exemption from taxes, subsidies, or titles of nobility for those who directed them; but they were only temporary, and the company, with a private individual at its head, was worked at its own risk and peril. I will only quote one example, the cloth factory of the Van Robais at Abbeville. No matter what their methods of administration, for the guilds they were so many formidable competitors, and it is easy to imagine the futile complaints and remonstrances of which they were the object.
(d) We have described in detail the policy of the French Crown with regard to the craft guilds, partly because this book is written in France and for the French, but also because it developed with remarkable logic and continuity. In neighbouring countries, however, what happened was, if not exactly the same, at least similar.
In England, when we study the encroachments of the central authority, we find that, in spite of the Commons, who represented the commercial class, the kings authorized foreign merchants to reside in the ports where originally they had to sell their cargoes wholesale within forty days, and that in 1335 they were allowed to trade freely throughout the kingdom.[124] We find three Parliaments in turn making laws to impose certain industrial methods on the whole country, and many acts of legislation are to be found regulating “the size and weight of pieces of stuff, the methods of stretching and dyeing, the preparation of wool by means of certain ingredients the use of which was allowed or forbidden, the finishing of cloth, folding and packing, etc.”[125] A whole army of officials was needed to see that these complicated laws,—which from being guild laws became national laws,—were not broken. In 1563 the Statute of Labourers codified in this way, in the name of the State, rules for apprenticeship and for other matters which had hitherto been in force among the craft guilds.
At Florence, from the year 1580, under the rule of the Medicis, who had become sovereign princes, the statutes of the Guild of Silk or Por Santa Maria,—hitherto the most important Guild,—were reconstituted, and governors, whose jurisdiction extended over the whole of Tuscany, were set up beside the consuls. These were still elected by the masters, but if one of the chosen magistrates were not approved (la grazia) by His Serene Highness, that was enough to disqualify him. From this time no subject could be brought up for debate in the assemblies of the Arte unless it had first been submitted to the said Serene Highness, who could either allow it to be introduced or could stop its passage.[126] In 1583 His Highness took upon himself to unite two ancient guilds (Fabbricanti and Por San Piero); he had the seal of the new guild remade, and the statutes, which even fixed the salaries of the officers, reconstituted.
By degrees the consuls ceased to be chosen from Arti over which they nominally presided; they became personages who assumed honorary titles, and the actual power was in the hands of “deputies” (to-day we should call them delegates) nominated by the prince;[127] the organization of crafts became purely bureaucratic and the ancient Calimala a mere charitable body. Wherever tribunals and chambers of commerce or technical schools were formed, wherever foreign craftsmen were called in and welcomed, there it may be said that the doom of the guilds was sealed.
The guilds could only have been successful in their resistance to all these menaces if they had possessed plasticity, flexibility in adapting themselves, a desire for reformation, an eagerness to fall in with every new demand society might make, a spirit of continuity, unity, and justice,—in fact, such a combination of strong and great qualities as is rarely to be met with in the history of human institutions.
We shall find that, instead of this, they allowed their inherent faults and failings, which we have already discovered in germ, to develop at the very height of their prosperity.
It will be seen at a glance that three things grew up in their midst: a lack of solidarity between those who occupied the various degrees of the hierarchy; divisions between the different craft guilds; and a narrow traditionalism which could not even ensure the good quality of products.
Let us trace the disastrous effects of these three dissolvent forces.
I. Division in the heart of the Guilds.—(a) In principle there existed in the guild a hierarchy which justified its own existence. It was founded on age and election. On the one hand, an inequality which time corrected every day and finally did away with. Adolescence was the age of apprenticeship; early manhood that of the journeyman; maturity that of mastership; and a man’s earnings, independence, and power increased not only with the years, but according to his talent and capabilities. On the other hand—and here we have a still more provisional inequality—the elected officers received for a few months only, a power which they exercised under strict control, and then went modestly back into the ranks.
This order of things, however, was soon upset by the growing domination of hereditary power and of wealth.
The masters, anxious to secure a life of ease for their posterity, and filled with a sort of dynastic ambition, made the acquisition of mastership more and more difficult for those who had not the good luck to be their sons, nephews, or sons-in-law. Even in the Middle Ages they had given way to the influence of domestic affection, but, as modern times draw nearer, the circle of the privileged narrows. Those who were connected with the family by any tie received all the favours; periods of apprenticeship, rights and expenses of admissions, were reduced or done away with; technical proofs of ability degenerated into a simple formality which could be passed through at home. For every one else, old obligations were not only maintained but added to; expenses increased to such an extent that in France the Crown intervened more than once to prevent their rise;[128] crying injustices served as a pretext for the great ordinance of 1581; candidates were taken advantage of and made to give banquets, even when they had been refused admission; the tests became more and more complicated, cost more and more, and were often conducted with revolting partiality. As if this were not enough, the guilds arbitrarily reduced the number of masterships, some of them refusing to admit new masters for ten years, while others definitely decided only to admit the sons of masters. From the sixteenth century, the butchers in Paris, Poitiers, and other places quite frankly decreed that mastership was to be hereditary among them.
The same narrowing down applied to the attainment of magistracies. The duties of wardens and officers tended to be perpetuated in certain families: the electoral lists were weeded out in such a way as only to include the oldest masters. Sometimes even the officers nominated their successors, and this gave them the opportunity of forming a permanent oligarchy which divided the honours among its members. One step more in the same direction would have been enough to make them in turn hereditary.
The influence of money was combined with this family favouritism, counteracting it at times, but usually backing it up. None could be master unless he were rich, for the cost of admission, in the eighteenth century in France, rose to 1500 and 1800 francs. At the end of the seventeenth century, in the same country, the guilds which were in debt themselves sold letters of mastership to the highest bidder or contracted debts with their richest members, and even put up the wardenships for sale.
(b) These measures, which, through the fault of the guilds themselves, falsified the normal action of their statutes, were accompanied by an increasingly strict subjection of inferiors to superiors.
The journeymen were treated with growing severity. Not only were they forbidden as heretofore to set up for themselves, but their condition was certainly worse in the seventeenth century than in the thirteenth. The working day, which averaged twelve hours, was prolonged to sixteen during the lighter months. Holidays, reduced in number by the Reformation, were in turn reduced by the Catholics. La Fontaine’s cobbler, who worked on his own account, complained of M. le curé who
De quelque nouveau saint charge toujours son prône.
But the journeyman, who had no reason to dislike so many holidays; was not pleased to find their number decreasing in the following century. The increase in the nominal wages was not enough to compensate for the rise in the price of provisions and rent; the value of gold and silver had gone down considerably since the influx of precious metals which the New World had poured over Europe. More than this, at the very time when cheap labour was increasing through the employment of peasants, women, and children, the jealous persistence of the masters in barring entrance into the higher grade to those among their workmen who possessed the necessary capabilities made the price of hired labour fall still lower. Compagnonnage acted as a check on these causes of depression, but it was quite insufficient, and was hampered in many ways.
This ever-deepening separation between masters and journeymen was followed by separations between the masters themselves. In certain guilds they became divided into the young, modern, old, and bachelor masters—these last ex-officers,—each section possessing different rights.
The officers abused their rights to visit, search, seize, and fine; the regulations were so difficult to carry out literally, that it was always possible to discover some weak point in them by means of which a rival could be annoyed. Money could also be made at his expense if the delinquent would and could pay to be let off. The officers thus created a monopoly within a monopoly—and, if we may judge by the enquiries and lawsuits to which it gave rise,[129] an extremely profitable monopoly. In 1684 the officers of the cloth-of-gold and silk workers were convicted of having taken £72 for authorizing a breach of the rules. It may well be imagined what a source of angry discontent were those breaches of trust, and it will be seen to what an extent the guild system had been discredited by the very persons whose mission it was to see it loyally carried out.
2. Division between the craft guilds.—One is sometimes tempted to say that the guild system had no worse enemies than the guilds themselves, so much bitterness did they display in their quarrels and recriminations. Town fought with town, and in spite of the efforts made by the central authority to unite them they had no idea whatever of agreeing or combining among themselves. Every one has heard of the interminable disputes which dragged on between the Hanses of Paris and Rouen concerning the navigation of the Seine.[130] Each had, within its own region, the monopoly of the transport industry, one from the bridge of Charenton to that of Nantes, the other, from the latter point to the mouth of the river. The fight between the two powerful companies lasted several hundred years, till at last the day arrived when the two monopolies were impartially suppressed by the Crown.
In each town, as the line drawn between two crafts was often vague and purely conventional, the guilds were more rivals than allied neighbours. Lawsuits resulted which, on account of their length and the expense of legal proceedings, were absolutely ruinous to both parties. They are mentioned at Poitiers, which was at law for a century.[131] At Paris, the lawsuit between the wine-merchants and the Six Guilds lasted a hundred and fifty years. The founders within a few years[132] entered into actions “against the edge-tool makers to prevent them from making fire-dogs; against the needle and awl makers to contest their right of selling thimbles other than those of Paris; against the gilders to claim from them the exclusive right of founding, working up, and repairing copper goods; against the makers of weights and measures to claim equal rights with them in selling half-pound weights;[133] against the pin-makers, makers of kitchen utensils, button-makers, and sculptors.” In England, the bow-makers might not make arrows, and the right was reserved to a special class of arrow-makers. Legal expenses for the Paris guilds alone amounted to nearly a thousand a year towards the middle of the eighteenth century. From a sense of esprit de corps, however, they persisted in wasting their substance, to the benefit of the legal profession which made enormous profits, and they defied royal edicts which attempted to restrain their zeal in litigation. They were far from putting into practice the motto of the Six Guilds, Vincit concordia fratrum; far from realizing that solidarity which was the very object of the guild system.
3. Vexatious regulations.—The guilds were not only jealous of each other but also devoid of economic initiative. This was on account of the privileges they held. As each one possessed a monopoly, they were inclined to go to sleep in the little closed domain which belonged to them. How could they be expected to go in search of improvements, when they were so slow in adopting them? St. Routine was their common patron. The application of a new method might promise larger profits or lessen the cost of production; but it was certain to entail expense, risk, and effort. It seemed to them easier to shut themselves behind a wall like the Great Wall of China. Every innovation encountered their determined opposition. A few instances chosen from among a thousand will suffice to prove their obstinate conservatism. I will take one from Great Britain.[134] “In 1765, on the eve of those great inventions which were entirely to transform working appliances, it was forbidden, under penalty of a fine, to substitute metal carders for the teazles still in use in the greater number of the branches of the textile industry.” I will take two other instances from France; at Poitiers[135] the cap-makers greeted the advent of loom-made stockings with marked disfavour, and at Paris the disputes between Erard, the maker of clavecins, and the musical-instrument makers are well known.
This exaggerated respect for tradition was also the result of the change which had taken place in the internal government of the guilds. Their direction had passed into the hands of the old members, who, no doubt, possessed the experience of age, but had also that fear of everything new so common to those of advanced years.
Like so many other closed and static bodies, the guilds were faithful to the past, hostile to the future, and were to find themselves without resources and defenceless when they had to meet the cold but tonic breath of that competition, which is no doubt cruel for the weak and death to ill-timed enterprise, but which is also stimulating to human activity and an encouragement to the progress of industrial and commercial technique.
Would that their tyrannical regulations had succeeded in guaranteeing honest exchange and good quality of production! In this respect, however, they no longer exercised the least control. Antoine de Montchrestien in the time of Henry IV. denounced the deceptions of commerce and industry.[136] In England from the fourteenth century damp spices, second-hand furs, and sheep-skins passing as buck-skin were on the market, and in the woollen trade the principle arose that it is for the buyer to take his own precautions.[137]
Henceforth the statutes were broken by the very people who had made them and sworn to keep them. Men were found practising several professions, cornering raw materials and carrying on clandestine sales below the fixed tariffs; illegal practices for securing clients or for enticing away a colleague’s workmen became common. Over and over again the officers and wardens of a craft had to inflict severe punishments, but in many cases they were themselves guilty supervisors in need of supervision! Their frauds often merited the condemnation they received.
Thus, through their own failings, quite as much as through the action of unfavourable surroundings, the guild system dwindled away, till, near the end of the seventeenth century, it was little more than one of those worn-out institutions which live on from force of habit; institutions which one hesitates to help in destroying, because it is difficult to know how they can be replaced, but so weak and tottering that they are at the mercy of the first shock. The eighteenth century was to give them their coup de grâce.
1. Their suppression in European Countries.—(a) The eighteenth century, the first half of which was an age of analysis, criticism, and social satire, was in its second half a time of innovation and invention, bold in its theory and practice, eager to correct and reform social organization in accordance with an ideal of justice born of reason. It was therefore both destructive and constructive.
In its first years it saw the beginning of a new economic phase. A revolution, as serious as that caused by the discovery of America and the sea-route to the Indies, began to operate in the world. As usual, it was commerce which, by its vast extension, broke the bounds within which society had been circumscribed. It was conscious of its importance and dignity. Voltaire sang the praises of the merchant “who enriched the country, and from his office gives orders to Surata and Cairo, and contributes to the happiness of the world.” Sedaine, in the Philosophe sans le Savoir, calls the merchant “the man of universe,” and compares the traders to so many “threads of silk which bind together the nations and lead them back to peace by the needs of commerce.” In 1760 Turgot proposed to ennoble the great traders, and great lords were not above going into business. The Duke of La Force was a wholesale grocer. On the sea there was the continual coming and going of vessels which ploughed the oceans, ransacked the archipelagoes, and opened up yet another continent, Australia, to European conquest: on land, improved means of communication and transport trebled the passenger and goods traffic. England at that time had her “canal fever”: in France the wonderful network of roads was the admiration of all strangers.
In all civilized nations the enterprise of Banks, Bourses, great Companies and Chambers of Commerce resulted in such a circulation of money and boldness of enterprise as had never been seen. All this necessitated an intensity of production hitherto unknown, and the invention of new methods. It was now necessary to create and supply the demands of consumers who were no longer confined to the limits of a State, however large it might be, but scattered over the face of the globe; who no longer numbered a few hundred thousands, but amounted to dozens or hundreds of millions. In short, markets began to expand to the very ends of the earth, and the period of international economics set in.
In this commercial expansion, European capitalism played the chief part, and, in Europe, England held the chief place. Mistress of the sea and of a colonial empire of which India and North America were the most valuable possessions, she became enormously rich; France and Holland followed, but some distance behind. We already know the natural tendencies of “great” commerce: it dislikes all barriers and hindrances to its activity. It always had been and was once more inimical to the system of the closed market so dear to the small craft guilds. Its ideal was free trade. So true is this that in France, in 1654,[138] the Six Guilds strongly protested against the taxes which struck at the importation of goods made outside the kingdom; moreover the liberal movement against the guilds emanated from the merchant aristocracy, and Gournay, its exponent in France, held the title of director of commerce.
“Great” industry developed with unprecedented strength under the same impetus. The aged tree, in which the sap was still rising, suddenly put forth vigorous branches. In England, engineering and coal-mining are prime necessaries to its life, and the cotton industry imported from the Indies attracted many thousands of workers in a few years and kept them permanently employed. This industrial revolution took place both in those vast enterprises in which the ancient hierarchy of apprentices, journeymen, and masters became meaningless—since a handful of masters possessed the capital and appliances, while the mass of workmen possessed nothing:—and in those new enterprises which, like the manufacture of cotton fabrics, owed to their recent origin the fact that they had never been under the old guild system. The guilds themselves could not but suffer from the extraordinary growth which took place beside but outside their system.
Three forces in especial worked against them—three forces which led to invention, to the transformation of technique, and so to the overthrow of traditional rules: these were, the desire to save labour—a desire which dominates all human activity,—science, and fashion.
(b) At first, masters and workmen were agreed on one point—the reduction of effort which was imposed on them, and which meant reduction of expenses for the former, and reduction of labour for the latter. Workmen and workwomen had suffered from the imperfection of the tools they had used, and from the craft which they carried on; for generations they had contracted diseases and infirmities which were a trade-mark; the silk workers of Lyons for instance were recognized by their bent knees. Having seen their parents and grandparents die in hospital, tired and worn out before their time, they eagerly sought for means whereby they could save themselves, their children, and their comrades, from dangerous and exhausting work. They thought out and tried ingenious methods for lightening their tasks. The first inventors of improvements were thus workers, familiar with the machines which were their daily companions. From the time when the cotton industry became mechanical in England we can follow the rivalry—the struggle for speed which for half a century went on between spinning and weaving, each in turn getting ahead of and then being passed by the other;[139] it was a duel between inventors who were simple workmen and happened to be mechanics. In France, Vaucanson and Jacquard did the same thing for silk in Lyons, where labour was less regulated than elsewhere. They were encouraged and led by their masters and sometimes by the State; but they were unfortunate in unexpectedly encountering the hostility of the silk workers whom they thought to help. This was because (and there is nothing which more clearly demonstrates the faults in the organization of labour) the introduction of all new machinery, while it operates in favour of the master by advancing the speed of production, throws on the streets a certain number of workmen who are no longer wanted, and who, while waiting for increased production to give them back their means of livelihood, fall a prey to famine and misery. Montesquieu wrote on this subject:[140]
“If an article is of a fairly low price, and one which equally suits him who buys it and the workman who has made it, machines which would simplify its manufacture, that is to say diminish the number of workmen, would be injurious; and if water-mills were not everywhere established, I should not believe them to be as useful as people say, because they throw innumerable hands out of work....”
This explains the curious spectacle offered by the world of labour in the eighteenth century; the masters in “great” industry, like the wholesale traders, were the revolutionaries; their workmen, like the guilds, were the reactionaries.
(c) Science, however, was not long in coming to the rescue of the inventors who had risen from the working class. The scientists, whose function it is to increase human knowledge and the power of men over nature, gave proof in their turn of creative imagination; they captured and tamed hitherto unused or rebel forces: steam, subdued and enslaved, became the magician which began by giving movement to bands, wheels, hands of steel and iron, carriages and boats, and ended by carrying on every sort of craft. It could spin, weave, screw, rivet, plane, full, lift up, saw, cut off, glean, thresh corn, etc. Chemistry and physics were by no means inferior to mechanical science; they composed and decomposed bodies, transformed and melted them one into another, created new ones by bold combinations, produced heat, light, and energy. What weight had the old regulations in view of this transformation of methods and appliances? Who could uphold them? The guilds in defending them were like men with spades who should try to stop a train going at full speed.
(d) Fashion acts in the same manner, for the word is synonymous with change. It is a power in every country, but particularly where there is smart, worldly society. The guilds learnt this to their cost in a matter which was the talk of the court for years. In France an edict, inspired by them, had prohibited the use of printed cottons which came from India. They might be seized anywhere, even on people who were wearing them. But it was an absurd notion to try to check by force the changes of taste, when women, who love novelty in dress as much as they often do in matters of belief and custom, took it into their heads to wear a material which pleased them! The Marquise of Nesles appeared openly in the gardens of the Tuileries, dressed in Indian cotton. They dared not arrest her! Other Court ladies did as she had done, and, after a long struggle, printed cottons won the day; they were installed at the very gates of Paris, and made the fortune of Oberkampf their manufacturer, and were well known under the name of “toiles de Jouy”!
(e) While the defences behind which the guilds had taken refuge were thus battered down, a crusade against them was begun by public opinion. Economists and philosophers united in attacking their principles in the name of liberty and equality, two ideas which roused much enthusiasm in the world at that time. The guilds were denounced as opposed to the general interest of producers in that they stood for privilege and exclusiveness and prevented numbers of people, who could neither enter them nor set up beside them, from earning an honest livelihood. They were condemned as being contrary to the general interests of consumers; for, burdened with enormous debts, wasting their money in festivals, feasts, and legal expenses, condemned to laborious methods of manufacture through their inability to improve them, they were yet able by means of their monopolies to keep up prices and to make unduly large profits, without even being capable of satisfying their clients if they expressed the smallest desire to have something out of the ordinary.
The physiocrats had another grievance against the guilds: they were opposed to them because they diverted capital from the cultivation of the land, in which, according to them, it would have been used to much greater advantage. By degrees, among the two peoples which led the European thought of the time—Great Britain and France,—these accusations were condensed into a formula which was the death-warrant of the guilds: Laissez-faire! Laissez-passer! At Edinburgh in 1776 Adam Smith’s famous work appeared, and was looked on as the Gospel of the new doctrine. In 1775 there appeared in Paris a posthumous work by President Bigot of Sainte-Croix, entitled An Essay on the Freedom of Commerce and Industry.
2. It was in England, the country in which regulation was then weakest and where it had not touched great cities like Manchester and Birmingham,[141] where “great” commerce and “great” industry made the strongest and most rapid advances, that these theories most quickly triumphed, born as they were of surrounding realities. But, in accordance with the English custom, there was no violent rupture with the past, no solemn repudiation of theories hitherto followed, no complete and sudden abolition of the guild system. The change in economic organization came by a series of small local and partial measures. The Statute of Labourers had in 1563 unified and codified the rules of the Middle Ages; these were not wholly repealed, but, in 1728,[142] the master hat-makers, dyers, and cotton printers demanded of Parliament (and obtained their demand fifty years later) that they should be exempt from obeying the rules as to the number of apprentices, who might be replaced by men hands. In 1753 the statutes of the stocking-makers were abolished as “injurious and vexatious to the manufacturers” and “hurtful to the trade,” as “against all reason and opposed to the liberty of English subjects.” In vain the workers sometimes united with the small masters, and sought behind these crumbling shelters protection against the ills inflicted on them by the development of “great” industry and of machinery; in vain they hoped for the application of the law which entrusted to the justices of the peace the duty of fixing their wages; in vain they made enormous sacrifices to get their rights established in legal documents.[143] From the year 1756 the weavers of napery were abandoned to their fate by the House of Commons. After a period of hesitation and self-contradiction, “governmental nihilism” became under similar circumstances the policy of Parliament. But it was still more than half a century before the statute of 1563, which had survived from a former age, disappeared under the blows struck at it by the “great” tradesmen; it was suspended, then abolished for the wool industry in 1809, and finally done away with in 1814. Almost at the same date, in 1813, the right of fixing the wages of labour was taken away from justices of the peace. Of the economic legislation of the Middle Ages, there still remained the laws which prohibited workers from forming any sort of combination, and decided that in every dispute the word of a master should be accepted before that of a servant; but of the guilds nothing was left but atrophied and lifeless bodies, which were little more than memories, or names often given to what were far from being professional associations.
In France, where there is a love of unity, logic, and harmony, things developed differently. Guild monopolies continued, it is true, by means of bribery; but their domain was narrowed by the creation of the Sèvres factory and the Royal Printing Press, and by the working of many mines at the expense of the State. In 1762 all industrial privileges were limited to fifteen years, a serious menace directed against privileges which had been held to be perpetual. In the same year the freedom of rural industry was proclaimed; in 1763 that of the leather trade, and in 1765 that of wholesale trade for commons as well as nobles. The corn trade, in spite of the fear of monopoly, profited by a similar liberty for a short time (1763). Simultaneously, the guilds were stripped, and their doors thrown open. In 1755 it was decided that foreign journeymen might be hired in every town in the kingdom except Paris, Lyons, Lille, and Rouen. In 1767 the doors were opened wide to foreigners and Jews—competitors as much hated as feared. In the same year the invasion was completed by a large number of letters of mastership which gave every craft in Paris twelve new masters, and every craft in the provinces from eight to two, while the purchase of these licences by the Six Guilds was not authorized even if a larger sum were offered. Monopoly was therefore extended, not destroyed. But such a solution was merely a compromise, and things developed in the direction of suppression pure and simple.
It was Turgot, as every one knows, who took upon himself to do away with wardenships and masterships. A disciple of both Gournay and Quesnay, he condemned them in the name of industry and agriculture, and in the interests of consumers and producers. The famous edict of March 1776, which he signed as minister of Louis XVI., declared that they were abolished throughout the kingdom with four exceptions: the wig-makers, who held posts sold to them by the State itself; the printer-booksellers, the supervision of whom was kept by the authorities for political reasons; the goldsmiths, because the sale of precious metals was under special legislation; and the apothecaries, as the control of their trade was considered necessary for public health. The property of the guilds was sold and the proceeds, together with the funds in hand, were used for wiping out their debts. The confraternities were done away with at the same time, and their wealth handed over to the bishops. All associations of masters or journeymen were prohibited.
Such an edict, completely revolutionizing the organization of labour, could not pass without obstruction and resistance. The Parlement, as defender of the ancient traditions of France, only registered it under protest and at the express wish of the king; the Six Guilds were defended by the writings of a man whose name will for ever have a sinister sound—Dr. Guillotin. The unrest was intense; the freedom of the corn trade served as a pretext, if not a real cause, for riots known as the “flour war.” Turgot had made a St. Bartholomew of privileges, therefore all the privileged combined against him. The king said to him, “Only you and I love the people, M. Turgot.” Some days after, the king dismissed him, and, on August 28, the edict was repealed. Wardens and masters were reestablished, first in Paris and a little later in the other towns. But so decayed a system as this could not suffer even the most passing effacement with impunity. At first it did not reappear in its entirety and the number of free crafts remained considerably larger. It could only live at all by reforming itself, so the rights and expenses of reception were reduced by half, two-thirds, or sometimes even three-quarters; kindred crafts were fused and the practice of several crafts at once authorized; women were admitted to mastership in men’s communities and vice versa; foreigners, too, could now aspire to mastership. But the original narrowness persisted; a new inequality sprang up between masters and fellows; the rules for maintaining internal discipline and the domestic authority of the employers over the workmen became, not less, but more rigorous; the journeymen were still forbidden to have common funds, to assemble without permission, or to be together more than three at a time; to carry arms, to concern themselves with the hiring of labour, to leave work unfinished, or to present themselves without a letter of discharge from their last master. A strike could always be punished as a desertion of work. A maximum wage was always fixed as well as the time allowed for the mid-day meal. The regulations for manufacture, however, became less strict; under Necker’s ministry, the manufacturer might choose whether he would conform to them or not. If he did, he had the right to have his goods stamped, and stuffs so made were distinguished by a special selvage; other products received the “stamp of freedom.”
The commercial treaty, concluded with England in 1786, severely tried the system already so weakened. The guilds suddenly found themselves exposed at many points to foreign competition, and complained bitterly when the convocation of the States-General gave France the opportunity of expressing her opinion, along with other more important subjects, on the existence of the guilds.
The debate reports of 1789 betray a certain indecision on the matter; the two privileged classes—nobles and clergy—when they were not indifferent to the whole question, leant towards suppression; the Third Estate—for the election of which the small crafts had not received equal treatment with “great” commerce, the liberal professions, and the rich bourgeoisie—were divided almost equally, one half favouring the abolition, the other the reformation, which implied the retention, of the system.
Apparently at first the latter carried the day. On the night of August 4, 1789, the reformation of masterships was one of the numerous motions voted with enthusiasm. But less than two years later, in March 1791, in a bill for the taxation of licences, the mover, Dallard, had the following article (number 8), inserted:
From April 1 next, inclusive, every citizen will be free to carry on whatever profession or trade seems good to him, after having procured and paid for a licence.
This meant the end of masterships and wardenships. An indemnity was to be allowed the masters for the money they had spent, and to the wigmakers and to the barbers for the posts they had bought. With no fuss, almost without discussion, and without finding any one to defend them in the Assembly, the guilds ceased to be after an existence which had lasted for many centuries.
In June of the same year, a new law was destined to stifle any inclination they might have shown to come to life again. The pretext given for condemning them to their fate was the formation of societies of workers with the object of raising wages. Chapelier, affirming that it was the duty of the State to assist the infirm and find work for those who needed it in order to live, protested against every association which claimed to substitute a collective contract for the individual contract between master and workers.[144] Article 2 of the law in question reads:
Citizens of the same condition or profession, middlemen, those who keep open shops, workmen and compagnons of whatever art, may not, when they find themselves together, nominate president, secretary or syndic, keep registers, pass resolutions, make regulations for what they claim to be their common interests, or bind themselves by agreements leading to the concerted refusal or to the granting only at a certain price, of the help of their industry and labours.
According to a phrase taken from a petition addressed by the master-builders to the municipality of Paris, the above resolutions and agreements, if they ever happened to be made, had to be declared “unconstitutional, opposed to liberty and to the declaration of the rights of Man”; the authors, instigators, and signatories of these acts or writings were to pay a fine of £500 each, and to be deprived for a year of their rights of active citizenship. Severer penalties were provided in all cases of threat and unlawful assembly.
Thus pure reaction, excessive and impracticable, set in against trade combination; compulsory isolation was established under the false name of freedom of work, and in consequence the weak were abandoned to the mercy of the strong, and the poor to the mercy of the rich; the individual, naked and unarmed, was put face to face with the individual armed at every point; in the economic domain a mere agglomeration was substituted for any kind of organization. But besides being the culminating point of a long evolution, this reaction was the starting-point of a new development which created the modern Labour Movement. We must next take a rapid survey of Europe and see what was the fate of the guilds in other countries.
In Holland, where they had never been very strong, they counted for nothing after 1766. In Tuscany, from 1759 to 1766, a great inquiry was held into the state of the Arti, and following on the information obtained, the Archduke Peter-Leopold brought about, by means of decrees, a reform which was revolutionary in character. On February 3, 1770, he abolished enrolment fees throughout the duchy, with the exception of two or three small territories like that of Livurnia, and decided that, in order to ply a trade, it should be enough henceforth to be inscribed once and for all on a general register. In consideration of a fee of £2 at most, a man might, if he wanted to, follow more than one calling or open several shops. The only exceptions were the doctors, apothecaries, and goldsmiths, who were still subject to special obligations, and silk manufacturers, who kept a few ancient privileges. On February 17 of that year all the guild tribunals were abolished and all their powers vested in a Chamber of Commerce, Arts, and Manufactures, which had not only legal rights but also the duty of watching over the economic interests of the country, encouraging and assisting poor craftsmen, and administering the estates formerly held by the guilds which had thus been wiped out at a stroke of the pen. The clauses are curious and confirm what we have said concerning the action of princes. The Archduke expresses his wish that “such matters shall be regulated by a single authority, on fixed and uniform principles directed to the universal good of the State.” The bakers were no longer compelled to make loaves of a fixed weight; the merchants were exempted from paying for weights and measures which they hardly ever used but which they were forced to possess.[145] The glorious guilds of Florence had lived for centuries and were to leave their mark behind them for a long time to come; it was only in 1907 that the winding-up of the property which had belonged to the Arte della Lana was concluded.
In Lombardy, from 1771 onwards, under the rule of the Empress Maria Theresa, a similar reform took place; in 1786 it was Sicily’s turn; throughout the rest of Italy, all that remained of the ancient guild system disappeared under the French domination and the Napoleonic Code. The same thing happened in Belgium, where, after the decree of 17 Brumaire, Year IV., nothing was left but shadowy guilds, such as that of St. Arnoldus at Bruges, or the “Nations” at Antwerp.[146] In Germany the guild system was more tenacious and was only to disappear, in certain States, when German unity was almost realized. The Code of the Confederation of Northern Germany declared for its abolition in all the countries under its jurisdiction.
3. The guilds, then, were long in dying, and in addition to a few survivals,[147] there were even some attempts made here and there to revive them during the nineteenth century.
In France, from the days of the Consulate and of the Empire, professional guilds (notaries, lawyers, solicitors, law-court officers, stockbrokers, etc.) were formed and still exist. The practice of more than one profession—such as medicine, dispensing, printing—remained under the control of the public authority. Butchers and bakers, under new regulations, remained in this state till 1858 and 1863. In 1805, three hundred wine-sellers demanded, without success, the restoration of the old craft guilds and of their own in particular. Under the Restoration, which undertook the task of restoring institutions which the storms of the Revolution had destroyed, other petitions of the same nature found a few partisans in the “Chambre Introuvable” and in some of the General Councils;[148] but although “the small” crafts were in favour of this return to the past, “great” trade, which had been hostile to wardenships and masterships, was strongly opposed to it. The Chamber of Commerce of Paris and the bankers were among the first to fight and defeat these ideas.
It is among Catholics especially that such ideas have been awakened; inspired by sincere pity for the misery of the working classes who have been so long without protection, they have often been filled with the desire to create an organization for the propagation of social peace between masters and workers. During the reign of Louis-Philippe, Buchez, Villeneuve Bargemont, La Farelle, and Buret tried to bring the guild idea to life again. In 1848 it publicly reappeared for a short time, when the provisional government received hundreds of deputations classed according to their trades, and Louis Blanc nominated, according to craft guilds, delegates for the Commission of the Luxembourg, and when compagnonnage paraded its beribboned canes and splendid works of art in the processions of the republican festivals; but it was already modified; masters and workmen formed separate groups. More recently, in 1891, it has been advocated in eloquent but vague terms by Pope Leo XIII., and Catholic circles, founded by M. de Mun, have tried to put it into practice.