Guilds

GUILDS

GUILDS. The guild, a formal organization of craftspeople, held an important place in a theoretical system of order called corporatism that emerged in the late Middle Ages in Europe and survived until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Medieval guilds began as devotional and mutual aid societies, but by the early modern period they had become identified with governance as well as with the regulation of economic activities. Guild masters responded to indiscipline in the workplace by drafting statutes or guild bylaws. Municipalities, and eventually monarchs, sanctioned these statutes for a fee, oversaw their enforcement by imposing fines for transgressions, and increasingly conferred legal status upon the guilds.

Corporatism laid out organizing principles that shaped social, political, and economic organization, embracing the concept of paternalism and restricting competition to preserve the livelihood of artisans and channel quality goods, fairly priced, to the consuming public. In keeping with these principles, monopoly over the manufacture and sale of particular items was a privilege widely protected by guild statutes. Statutes also frequently regulated the labor supply to reduce competition among masters, restricting the allowable number of journeymen a master might employ.

Guilds also had a social function. Membership placed an artisan—master, journeyman, apprentice, or widow—in the finely graded hierarchy that structured Old Regime society. Such a system was equally a power structure, and distinction and difference issued from a concern among male masters for subordination of inferiors, be they journeymen, apprentices, wageworkers, or women. Numerous provisions in guild statutes throughout Europe focused on status, above all by strictly regulating the access of workers to the corporation and to mastership within it. They also increasingly excluded women. Escalating fees, extended periods of apprenticeship, and the continuing refinement of masterpieces all pointed to a mounting preoccupation with discipline and a growing hierarchization in the world of work; the barriers between male and female, master and journeyman (that is, a worker with some institutional claim to guild membership), and journeyman and nonguild worker (those with no guild membership whatsoever) were being raised higher than ever before. Master guildsmen and the political authorities shared these values of institutionalization, and their common interests came together in the formulation of the corporate regime, enshrined in part in guild statutes.

EXPANSION OF THE GUILD REGIME

Guilds proliferated throughout Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries; in some places such as Sweden and Austria the high point was reached in the eighteenth century. The fifteenth century was a time of corporate expansion in most French towns, and the sixteenth century witnessed a similar development in the towns of the southern Netherlands and England, where expansion continued into the seventeenth century. The towns of the new United Provinces in the northern Netherlands, for example, had few guilds before the seventeenth century, but by 1700 there were about two thousand. The German "home towns" of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—polities that were relatively independent of external political authority and held between one thousand and five thousand inhabitants—epitomize the early modern European guild system. The guilds in these locations were political, economic, and social entities. All possessed statutes that stipulated, as elsewhere, the nature and duration of apprentice training, regulations for recruitment of workers and their distribution among the shops of the town, and monopolies. Guild masters enforced these rules with the sanctioning of the municipality. Regulating economic competition had the higher goal, however, of securing community peace and maintaining the social order. This order was rooted in social position defined by Ehrbarkeit or 'honorable status'. Guild masters everywhere, not just in the home towns, possessed this quality, characterized by "the respect of the respected," and jealously guarded it, for it defined one's exclusive position at the upper levels of society.

GUILDS AND ECONOMIC REGULATION

Determining the role that regulation played in economic practice has formed the research agenda of many historians of the early modern period, and the function of guilds is a central concern in this inquiry. Guilds were empowered and enjoined by municipal, ducal, ecclesiastical, or royal governments to regulate the economy—workshop inspections and access to courts are evidence of this. Many instances of artisans' workshops being searched for illegal materials or unacceptable workmanship can be cited, as can examples of litigation between guilds over encroachment of monopolies. The high-water mark of regulation came in the late seventeenth century and is best illustrated by the policies of the French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) and his immediate successors. Between 1673 and 1714 in France, the crown enacted 450 règlements, or rulings, on manufacture, and another 500 on the policing of the guilds and on jurisdictions between them. Similar regulatory policies were imitated by nearly every state in eighteenth-century Europe.

Historians have long been aware of this regulatory system but only recently have they probed its actual impact on economic activity. Indeed, historians now point to overwhelming evidence that reveals that in many places, normal economic practice was largely beyond regulation, as it comprised a flexible and spontaneous mixture of licit and illicit activity in production, distribution, and consumption. The early modern craft economy was too dynamic to be contained by regulation, since illegal activities such as operating multiple shops, smuggling, unlicensed peddling, and clandestine workers working outside of guilds proliferated. In 1748 in Amsterdam, for instance, nonguild workers—both male and female—were making more clothes than master tailors.

So what can we conclude about guild regulation and the craft economy? Certainly guilds did not suffocate the free-market economy. The regulatory regime, however, was not totally ineffective or irrelevant. Rather, it was extremely flexible, responding to the various needs of artisans and governments. There were different kinds of markets in the early modern economy, and regulation fit differently in them. There was the sprawling, heterogeneous, and unregulated clandestine and illegal craft economy. Alongside this economy there was the licensed one, but even here within the official organization of the guild we find ample room for flexibility and economic growth. Indeed, within this official, "regulated" structure, masters of the same guild competed with one another, even inviting regulation of their products as a form of advertising their quality precisely so that they could have an advantage over fellow guildsmen.

FROM CORPORATISM TO LIBERALISM: THE END OF GUILDS

Corporatism and guilds were embodied in most polities of early modern Europe. Guilds were simultaneously empowered by political authorities and rendered vulnerable to them, and so if these political authorities abandoned corporatism, guilds would disappear. In the eighteenth century, corporatism was increasingly challenged by a rival system, liberalism, and as governments came to embrace the principles of free trade and unregulated markets, corporatism was eventually displaced. Such a displacement, however, was hardly rapid or unconflicted. There was considerable ambivalence within the ranks of political authority about just what liberalism was and how it might be implemented. An episode involving the French controller general of finance, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781), illustrates this confusion. Turgot attempted to abolish the guilds in February 1776 and was abruptly dismissed in May. An advocate of free trade and therefore an opponent of the regulatory corporate regime, he saw guilds as impediments to growth in the French economy and asserted that abolishing them would liberate commercial and industrial activity. Turgot, however, was not thinking in simply narrow economic terms; nor were his opponents, the staunch defenders of corporatism. Both parties were fundamentally concerned with preserving social order, but equally fundamentally disagreed on how best to secure such order. Turgot sought to replace what he thought was the unnatural and stultifying hierarchy of corporatism with a natural and free one, and so he had no sympathy for his opponents, who clamored that his edict would dissolve the bonds of subordination and invite anarchy. Turgot assumed that masters and workers would form natural hierarchical relationships in the marketplace, that the natural law of the market would maintain order. Corporatists countered that Turgot's natural hierarchy was a dangerous illusion, and because the principle of incorporation linked all of France in a chain that led directly to the throne, to sever one link (as with the abolition of the guilds) would cut the chain and ultimately destroy the entire system and even the monarchy itself.

Turgot lost the battle, but liberalism eventually won the war. Over the long run liberalism did prove corrosive to corporatism in general and to guilds in particular, as attested by the liberal-inspired legislation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abolishing guilds all across Europe. The assault on corporations may have been largely inspired by demands for free trade and unregulated markets, but guilds were more than simply economic entities; rather, they were a fundamental unit of the entire early modern system of social representation and social control. Their dissolution, therefore, had widely felt cultural ramifications. As guilds disappeared, the very nature of the artisanry, and the identity of the artisan, was redefined.

See also Artisans ; Liberalism, Economic ; Proto-Industry .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Black, Antony. Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present. Ithaca, N.Y., 1984.

Chevalier, Bernard. "Corporations, conflits politiques et paix sociale en France aux XIVe et XVe siècles." Revue historique 268 (1982):17–44.

Crossick, Geoffrey, ed. The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900. Aldershot, U.K., 1997.

Farr, James R. Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.

Kaplan, Steven L. The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775. Durham, N.C., 1996.

Mackenney, Richard. Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650. Totowa, N.J., 1987.

Prothero, I. J. Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth- Century London: John Gast and His Times. Baton Rouge, La., 1979.

Sewell, William H., Jr. Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1980.

James R. Farr