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 theAge of RevolutionAllan PotofskyProfessor, Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7

© Allan Potofsky 2009

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Contents

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables x

Preface xiii

Acknowledgments xvi

Introduction 1The Three Dreams of Commerce: Corporatism, Statism,LiberalismThe builders’ great chain of being 4A symbiotic French capitalism? Post-1763 consumer

politics 8The building trades and labor migration: Meandering

masons, peripatetic plumbers, and others 13The French industrial “exception?” 18

1 Parisian Building at the End of the Ancien Régime: TheConstruction Trades, the Pre-Industrial Market, and theGuild Debate, 1750–1789 22Perceptions of urban decline and ancien régime construction

practices 29Architectural critics and the guild debate on the

construction sites of Paris 47The birth of the strike and the reform of Paris

construction 56On the capital’s “unbounded magnificience” 60

2 The Revolution and Construction Guilds, 1789–1793 63The construction of the Revolution’s public sphere 67Private construction and the credit crunch of the early

Revolution 75Dismantling the corporate order and demarcating the new

regime of Parisian building 81Guild abolition and labor conflict in the construction

trades, 1791 82

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viii Contents

Artisanal contention in the interstices of old and newregimes 87

Guilds and the post-corporate economy 93

3 Projecting the Revolution on the Parisian Work Site,1789–1793 96Public service and construction in the Revolution 96From municipal to national public works, 1789–1793 98The nation’s work site: The Panthéon français 105Contestation and public works 112Site-specific and neighborhood-based labor strife in the

Revolution 119“What is the citizen-builder?” 129From genius to commerce: Construction projects in 1792 131The 1793 revival of the ancien régime police idea 137On the limits of the revolutionary state 141

4 The Building Trades of Paris During the Terror andThermidor, 1793–1795 146The making of a Jacobin labor and industrial “policy”? 146“What is a sans-culotte?” 150Work in the Year II 157Terror and reaction on the building sites of Paris: Public and

private construction in the Years II and III 165On the radicalization of the Year II 181

5 Reconciling Commerce and Revolution, 1795–1805 183“Republican” commerce under the Directory,

1795–1799 183The state and the construction entrepreneur: A

rapprochement? 184Toward a new “bureaucratie” of building 188The state, capital, and labor in the debate over wages

during the Consulate, 1799–1804 200

6 Constraining Capital, Containing Labor: State UrbanPlanning of Paris, 1802–1815 216The Napoleonic state and the Revolution 216Assessing, measuring, and policing the Parisian labor force 222On the advantages and disadvantages of restoring the

guilds, 1807–1810 227The corporate revival under the Empire 237

Contents ix

Conclusion and Epilogue 243“Unfree” yet prosperous: Labor and capital in construction,

1763–1871 243Epilogue: The nineteenth-century career of corporatism 249

Appendix 260

Notes 264

Bibliography 309

Index 333

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables

Figures

1.1 Anonymous, Construction of the Hôtel de Salm, ca. 1788,detail 26

1.2 Anonymous, Construction of the Hôtel de Salm, ca. 1788,detail 27

1.3 Rue de Richelieu, building, 1765 321.4 Rue Volta and rue du Vert Bois: collapsing building 331.5 Rue de Charonne 341.6 Faubourg Saint-Antoine 361.7 Rue Montmartre 371.8 Rue Saint-Martin 381.9 Rue aux Ours 391.10 Courtyard, faubourg Saint-Antoine 401.11 “Architecture: Masonry”: Encyclopedia of Diderot and

d’Alembert 411.12 Professional Breakdown of the Building Trades of Paris,

1790–1791 421.13 Professional Breakdown of the Building Trades of Paris,

1790–1791 432.1 Tax collectors’ office for the toll house (1787) of the

Farmers-General Wall, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux 722.2 Detail of the tax collectors’ office at the place of the

Throne (now Nation) 732.3 “Demolition of houses on . . . the pont au change,” Hubert

Robert, 1788, detail 742.4 “The Church of the Feuillants in Demolition,” Hubert

Robert, 1805, detail 742.5 Souvenir Bastille, marketed by the entrepreneur, Palloy 752.6 “Masons at the hiring fare of the place de Grève,” Jules

Pelcoq, 1869 882.7 Rue de la Mortellerie, late-19th century 892.8 Revolutionary-era private construction 903.1 Pierre Antoine Demachy, the New Church of

Sainte-Geneviève, 1764 1083.2 The Pantheon 109

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List of Figures, Maps, and Tables xi

3.3 The Pantheon from a “medieval” street perspective 1093.4 Rue de Lanneau 1103.5 Rue Laplace 1103.6 Place de l’Estrapade. Faubourg Saint-Marcel 1113.7 Rue Mandar, 1792–1795 1433.8 Rue Montmartre: revolutionary-era bourgeois

construction 1443.9 Villa Riberolle: revolutionary-era construction 1455.1 Rue des Colonnes, 1793–1795 1905.2 Rue des Colonnes 1915.3 Rue de Rivoli, begun in 1802 1925.4 The northern Chaussée d’Antin quarter 1925.5 Revolution-era structure designed by Nicolas-Antoine

Vestier, 1792–1793 1935.6 Directory-era hôtel particulier 1935.7 The rue de Charonne 1975.8 The Abby of Saint-Antoine des Champs as the hospital of

Saint-Antoine 1986.1 The canal of St Martin, 1802–1825 2206.2 The neoclassical Palais Brogniart, called the Bourse 2206.3 Images of Builders, 1. Nicolas de Larmessin, “The Mason’s

Costume,” 18th century 2416.4 Images, 2. “They abridge and make labor easier by giving

mutual aid,” 1802 242C.1 Embellissements de Paris (1850s). Artist

unknown 257

Maps

P.1 The Turgot Map, 1739, detail: Île de la Cité xv1.1 Plan de la ville et faubourg de Paris . . . 1790 251.2 Turgot Map, 1739, detail: the Marais quarter 312.1 Plan de la ville et des fauxbourgs de Paris, 1789 702.2 Turgot Map, 1739, detail: the place de Grève 712.3 Jaillot Map, 1773, detail: the place de Grève 713.1 Turgot Map, 1739, detail: the faubourg Saint-Marcel 1074.1 Map of the Commission des artistes 1624.2 Map of the Commission des artistes, detail: Bastille 1634.3 Map of the Commission des artistes, detail: faubourg

Saint-Antoine 163

xii List of Figures, Maps, and Tables

6.1 Turgot Map, 1739, detail: Enclos du Temple 2216.2 Plan Routier de la Ville et Frauxbourgs de Paris . . . (1810):

detail, Temple 221

Tables

1.1 Professional Breakdown of the Building Trades of Paris,1790–1791 41

4.1 Socio-Professional Identities: Police Dossiers of Builders,1793–1795 170

A.1 Professional Analysis of Arrested Builders, 1773–1789 261A.2 Chambre Criminelle: Arrested Builders and Others,

1773–1789 262A.3 Parisian versus Provincial Origins of Arrested Builders,

1773–1789 262A.4 Nature of Builders’ Crimes, 1773–1789 263

Preface

Constructing Paris in the age of revolution

The fantasies of the decline of Paris are a symptom of the fact thattechnology was not accepted. These visions bespeak the gloomyawareness that along with the great cities have evolved the meansto raze them to the ground.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

One of the oldest discourses about Paris is that it is not what it usedto be. In the popular historical view, Paris’s past seems all-too-muchcentered on the violence of Haussmann’s renewal operations in themid-nineteenth century. Such a wistful reaction to Paris as a gleam-ing functional city – but paying too steep a price in brutal razing andreconstruction, in an implacable logic of gentrification – originated along time ago. The “modern” and beautifully symmetrical Paris cameat heavy cost to a less harmonious, more idiosyncratic past. This bookaspires to put the eighteenth-century city in a more favorable lightthan 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 adisappearing Paris, and they play a prominent role in this study.

I have had the pleasure of inhabiting the great city of Paris andthe metropolitan area of Île-de-France – living in the Northeast quar-ter of Belleville, teaching at the Université Paris-VIII in Saint Denis –for the past 15 years. Experience dictates that avoiding the well overhalf of the city rebuilt after the mid-nineteenth century is not alwayspossible or desirable. Still, many parts of the capital, like Belleville,remain labyrinthine, richly heterogenous, and hopelessly anchored inthe pre-Haussmannian. These compelling qualities, as I occasionallystill discover, are far from the exclusive domain of the centrally locatedand wealthy quarters, where the mammoth trail of Haussmannisation isoften the most deeply ingrained in the city fabric.

Think, then: construction and the French Revolution and one envi-sions not cranes, stones, mortar, and scaffolding, but their preciseopposite – vandalism, mutilation, and obliteration of the past withthe project to annihilate the ancien régime. They evoke, in sum,

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xiv Preface

de-construction and violence; the ground-clearing to prepare the wayfor a greater city. This is a “gloomy awareness,” indeed, as WalterBenjamin remarks. Alternatively, in a more aesthetic vein, constructionand the French Revolution bring to mind the monumental architectureof Étienne-Louis Boullé and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: colossal and whollyimpractical projects suggesting the dreams of radical and ruthless states-men who seek to bring the ideal City from heaven to earth. Here, theterms evoke grandeur and utopianism. In both extremes, the associationbetween construction and the French Revolution is at worst antony-mous and at best far-fetched or symbolic. Their co-existence, at firstglance, did not lead to lasting accomplishments before the NapoleonicEmpire.

Yet, in taking a longer view, the two were intimately linked. TheFrench building trades during the last half of the eighteenth centuryconstituted the second largest economic sector of preindustrial France –construction was only surpassed by agriculture and kept its runner-upstatus in France until the end of the nineteenth century. The vast liter-ature on the peasantry and the provinces is eloquent testimony to thegrip of rusticity on the historical imagination. By contrast, the build-ing trades have largely been overlooked by historians – which this workseeks to rectify – even if most Parisian construction workers in thisperiod were often also migrant peasant workers. The French Revolutionsucceeded in opening up rich possibilities for remaking the capital city.Yet, due perhaps to the persistence of the black legend of uninterruptedrevolutionary vandalism, very few historians have researched the con-struction of revolutionary Paris – particularly not in material progressionfrom the quarry and the stone-cutting workshop to the final inspection,nor in its more eminent quality as a core sector of revolutionary laborand industrial policy.

As I write the very word, construction, it summons forth darker fore-bodings of difficulties ahead. This year opened amidst a worldwideeconomic crisis of staggering proportions with the distinct possibilityof a ruinous global breakdown of employment, credit, and finances.The crisis was first brought on with the virtual disintegration of a rad-ically liberalized financial system supporting housing and real estate.Here, as in the past, the building sector was the primary vector for aspeculative bubble leading to a bust, followed by a deep crisis in confi-dence, and a worldwide reluctance to extend and to assume credit anddebt. It is indeed a good moment for the historians’ restoration of Pres-ident Franklin Roosevelt’s image and, with him, to rehabilitate statistsolutions to stimulate a depressed economy. This book seeks to remind

Preface xv

Map Preface.1 Turgot Map, 1739, detail. Nearly all the buildings featured in themedieval 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 serviceand public works was not born with Roosevelt or in America or in thetwentieth century. Perhaps the lessons of the French Revolution andEmpire with their sometimes imperfect but nonetheless decisive polit-ical engagements toward similar solutions – in particular the massiveinfusions of public funds to Walter Benjamin’s “great cities” – will be aninspiration during, and after, the current crisis (Map Preface.1).

Acknowledgments

As befitting the subject of building, I have accumulated intellectualdebts over the years that are simply staggering. Many friends and col-leagues have patiently and wisely commented on parts of this bookin embryonic form or as polished chapters. I hope they will forgivebeing mentioned in an impersonal list. Many thanks to: Barry Bergdoll,Paul Cheney, Paul Cohen, Youri Carbonnier, Nathalie Dessens, LisaJane Graham, Evan Haefeli, Carla Hesse, Dirk Hoerder, Colin Jones,Bertie Mandelblatt, Robert Mankin, Vera Manzi-Schacht, Silvia Marza-galli, 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, andexacting in their collaboration.

Eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century documentation used as thefoundation of this study would not have been possible without the gen-erous assistance of the conservators and librarians of the Archives deParis; the Archives Nationales; the Archives de la préfecture de la police;the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale; the Bibliothèque historiquede la ville de Paris; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, site Tolbiac;the Bibliothèque nationale, site Richelieu; the Musée Carnavelet andits Cabinet des arts graphiques. My gratitude toward the extraordinarystaffs of Parisian research collections is deep.

The National Endowment for the Humanities, the French-government Bourse Châteaubriand, Columbia University, and the ReidHall Institute in France, helped to underwrite the research. I have alsoreceived support from the Groupe de recherches sur l’histoire intellectuelle,UPRES/EA 1569. The Université Paris-VIII generously granted me a pre-cious sabbatical in 2007–2008. I appreciate these institutions’ supportand their confidence in my project.

A glance at the endnotes will show that this book on buildings isconstructed on credit. I am obliged to several outstanding historiansof the eighteenth-century world of work. Steven Kaplan has inspiredme for his sensitivity to the mysteries of preindustrial labor; his precisecommentary of earlier research constituted a virtual roadmap for futuredirections. Michael Sonenscher has also made tremendous insights onthe elusive artisanate and his oeuvre has egged me on with the anxietythat my own work is too little, too late. Haim Burstin’s masterwork on

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Acknowledgments xvii

the neighbourhood of Saint-Marcel during the Revolution is anotherstone of this edifice. Our (too brief) friendly encounters were an encour-agement when I despaired of finishing a less vast study. Finally, DanielRoche’s insightful commentaries on a section and on conference pre-sentations have deepened the project’s soundness and solidity. Hiscommitment to the history of the people of Paris reminded me that tocomprehend fully the capital’s construction, it is most vital to appreciateits often-refractory inhabitants as well.

I was particularly well directed by my university advisers and I wishto thank Charles Rearick who taught me to “see” the very city I work onand live in with greater insight. For years now, our wanderings in “downand out” Paris have followed his inspired and image-filled teaching ofFrench history. Isser Woloch, my graduate adviser and now my friend,taught me rigor and precision are never opposed to elegance and sophis-tication. Most importantly, he has borne witness that criticism andenthusiasm for this rich historical subject – the French Revolution – arefar from contradictory perspectives. In France, I have ironically foundmy own life to be an (Atlantic) prolongation of the peripatetic wander-ings of the maçons de la Creuse toward the capital city. I was welcomedat my previous institutional home, the Université Paris VIII with greatwarmth. My colleagues and friends, most notably Lazare Bitoun andMichel Cordillot, have eased my departure from the United States, andmay have even partially succeeded in their boisterous efforts to makeme a tiny bit “more French,” just as the provincial Creusois before me.

Although we are now separated by an ocean, my American family hasalways been “there” for me. My sisters Judy Finch and Donna Ritter gaveprecious help with thorny technical issues arising from my hopeless-ness with new technologies. My mother has inspired with confidencein all my choices. My late father was the amateur historian and Fran-cophile who (without knowing or intending) prepared me from myearliest youth for a new life in France. By accompanying him as a boyon long, meandering walks in New York, I first acquired taste to flânerthrough the obscure nooks and crannies of large urban spaces.

My wife, Isabelle Olivero, author and historian of the book, now at theBibliothèque nationale de France, site Arsenal, has been deeply empa-thetic and generous with her time, both at home and at work. I couldnot have had a finer and more critical reader as the one who had to waitthis project out. This book is dedicated to her.


IntroductionThe Three Dreams of Commerce:Corporatism, Statism, Liberalism

‘(I)t is impossible to erect any building or establish anymethod without understanding its principles. It is not enoughto have a fondness for architecture. One must also know stone-cutting.’ There is a whole history to be written about such‘stone-cutting’ – a history of the utilitarian rationalization ofdetail in moral accountability and political control.

Michel Foucault, 19791

These (building) workers do not have the elegance, the gen-tleness, the graciousness (l’aménité) which we see among theworkers who are involved in the luxury trades . . . Even in theirSunday best, you can tell who is a construction worker. Theyhave more of a rough exterior . . . they also are much moreoutspoken.

Paul Vinçard, 18502

As the comments by Michel Foucault and Paul Vinçard suggest, urbanconstruction was long a ripe subject for interpretive readings. InFoucault’s sense, stone cutting, as opposed to the more noble science ofarchitecture, is an analogy for the gritty material details needed to com-prehend the mechanisms of political control. For the much more prosaicreformer Paul Vinçard, the building trades worker is the archetypicalgruff plebeian: the laborer as member of la classe dangereuse. Whetherin Foucault’s or Vinçard’s optic, the building workers of France’s cap-ital city are indeed protean symbols of many historical developmentsthat convulsed the nation from the latter half of the eighteenth centurythrough the beginning of the twenty-first century. The entrepreneurs,masters, laborers, journeymen, and apprentices in this sector were, of

1

2 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 construc-tion. They formed the heart of artisanal movements in revolutions; theywere the first participants in the massive labor migration from the coun-tryside to the cities; they were victims and beneficiaries of the industrialre-organization of labor; and they experienced the great transformationof guild masters and journeymen into entrepreneurs and contractuallabor. Finally, during the nineteenth century, they constituted a core sec-tor for the rise of republican and socialist ideologies among the artisanaland working classes.

This book examines the decisive period of Paris construction thatextended from the conclusion of the Seven Year’s War in 1763 throughthe end of the Napoleonic era in 1815. For over half a century, Parisexperienced a real estate and housing boom, punctuated by several dra-matic downturns, but sustained by an ineluctable movement towardinvestment in property and stones. In this epoch, Parisian and nationalauthorities faced deeply contradictory pressures to decrease and toincrease oversight. They forged one of the oldest and continuous tropesconcerning Paris: the unregulated as well as the arbitrarily regulatedmarket destroys the social fabric of the city. Reformers repeatedly decriedthe human cost of rapid urban growth in the capital. The popular,squalid, shoddy, and insalubrious Parisian apartment, whose buildingcodes were flouted by proprietors, speculators, and entrepreneurs alike,were repeatedly denounced in a city lacking inexpensive housing. Thesmallest apartment rooms to let were out of the financial reach of thepoorest members of Parisian society, even to those hired to put up newconstruction. These social problems are by no means resolved today,as witness the tragedy of 2005 when 50 immigrant laborers and familymembers died in preventable fires in three overcrowded and unsoundParisian buildings in different neighborhoods. All were Sub-SaharanAfrican immigrants, unskilled laborers for the most part who themselvesworked on building sites.3

After 1763, city planners struggled to overcome inadequate publicfunding for affordable, sturdy, and well-designed housing. Then, asnow, a rising population density, where increasing numbers of peoplewere squeezed into decreasing amounts of space, challenged reformers,social critics, and political leaders alike. Then as now, tensions betweenfinancial constraints and political ideals were rarely conciliated. Thenas now, the ascent of market imperatives had real human costs. Forexample, Parisians regularly disappeared under the collapsed rubble ofpoorly built buildings to the point of inspiring the adage, “Paris is Swiss

Introduction 3

Cheese” (un gruyère), as a reference to the pock-marked substructureweakened by connecting cellars, tunnels, and quarries. Conserving ahomogenous capital, with well-aligned streets and buildings of approx-imately the same height, repeatedly clashed with the goal of renderingParis well organized, serviceable, and appropriately majestic in its suc-cessive 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, con-tradictory, and critical views toward of unleashing a new entrepreneurialculture 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 corporationsand dismantling of the Crown’s administrative apparatus, that the mostcompelling and durable arguments for statist policies emerged. A tumul-tuous series of strikes on private construction sites and at the site ofthe Pantheon, the very symbol of a national labor policy, helped todiscredit the liberal solution of granting promoters, speculators, andentrepreneurs greater leeway in Parisian construction. Not limited tomisgivings toward capital, revolutionaries were also wary of Paris’ roleas an urban magnet attracting seasonal migrant workers, many of themmaçons de la Creuse, who arrived in the Spring from the impoverishedcentral region of France (just as Paris and her suburbs now attract NorthAfrican and Sub-Saharan immigrants for the same reasons). Adding tothe Revolution’s challenges, the chronic instability of the new currency,the assignat, and dried-up credit networks provoked periods of crisisin the building sector.

In Paris, a combustible mix of international war, terror, and the weak-ness of municipal organs – as well as greater calls for strict oversightconcerning the world of work – compelled a centralized state to resistthe pull of market forces. Jacobin statist urban policies also provoked aclear and public rupture with the widely perceived failures of the ancienrégime’s corporate-based urban policies. The Revolutionary era’s legacyin Parisian building was thus an abiding critique of deregulated privateinterest as well as the economic domination of the guilds.

The book concludes with the building trades transformed underNapoleon, when new technocratic elites emerged to replace the net-works of building oligarchies of the ancien régime. Napoleonic admin-istrators generally favored the technical expertise of engineers, civiland military, over that of architects. The profession of architecture wastainted by former attachment to royalty and privilege, whereas engi-neering was depicted as a relatively new democratic and merit-based


specialization. Thus, the priority given to shoring up and expandingParisian infrastructure was framed as a technocratic choice. Napoleon’sfavored Parisian projects were not well-known extravagant structurescelebrating imperial grandeur but rather four feats of applied practicalscience: 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, render-ing fluid choked-up streets in the center of Paris, the distribution offoodstuffs, and easing access to wine were greater priorities than the Arcde Triomphe, constructed over a 20-year period to celebrate the ImperialArmy after the victory at Austerlitz.4

The centralization of urban planning, however, only partially resolvedthe problem of constituting a post-revolutionary state administrationof civil construction. A project to revive the guilds of the ancien régime,under the vigilant domination of the state and city police, was launchedby Napoleonic administrators at the turn of the nineteenth century.The Empire’s rehabilitation of state-structured corporatism was intendedabove all not only to maintain security and public order, but also torevive a system of quality control that had been discarded, accordingto certain high functionaries, with reckless abandon during the FrenchRevolution. The Chambres syndicales, as these statist entrepreneurialorgans were called, demonstrated the strength of French corporatismwithin a market-oriented political economy. Archaism and innova-tion were symbiotically used in corporate, state, and entrepreneurialinstitutions to bolster the commercial revolution in France.

The builders’ great chain of being

Architectural and urban history often treats the history of constructionthrough the exclusive optic of careers, intellects, and tastes of architectsand urban planners, or through the structure and aesthetics of build-ings, streets, and cities – as if the humans who erected the buildingswere a mere afterthought to connoisseurship or to the material his-tory of their own urban environment.5 At the other end of the greatchain of being on the building sites, micro-histories of the buildingtrades, examined strictly in the context of regions, migrations, tech-niques, or jurisprudence, overlook the full significance of the sectorwithin the broader urban, labor, and political history of France.6 Ratherthan enclose the history of the building trades within the disciplinaryconstraints of one historical school, method, or discipline, this bookuses diverse approaches to focus on three evolving contexts.

Introduction 5

First, this book examines the rise of construction in Paris as a specificform of public investment and private commerce during the buildingboom of the later eighteenth century. After 1763, an unprecedentedwave of private construction in the capital city created opportunitiesfor urban visionaries and reformers to remake Paris. Successive revo-lutionary governments and the Napoleonic regime appropriated thisélan for the public sector, and, despite several periods of depression pro-voked by a collapsing economy, capital flight, and war, they confirmedthat urban renewal was a state monopoly. Second, this book examinesthe policy debates on the urban transformation of Paris in a period ofreform, revolution, and Napoleonic centralization. It emphasizes theprimacy of policy and protest – where state and civil society meet –in the restructuring and “policing” of the building trades in preparationfor the remaking of the capital city’s urban environment. A technocraticdiscourse of urban reform whereby the state was seen to transcend theparticular interests of capital and labor further secured architecture as anofficial science. Third and finally, this book probes how the constructionindustry earned pride of place in the growth of the modern bureaucraticstate during and after the age of mercantile and corporate monopoliesover trade, production and the labor market. In sum, the policies ofliberalization during the Revolution were relatively short-lived reformsand were quickly supplanted by state “policing” – that is centralizedadministration and control of the urban labor force.

The core argument here is that a porous combination of three dreamsof commerce – corporatism, statism, and liberalism – assured the con-struction industry’s transition from the ancien régime to the Revolution.The French Revolution crystallized the terms and ultimate stakes of thestruggle between the three dreams of commerce. This book also suggestswhy France remains conflicted to this very day.7 For they were, in fact,never mutually exclusive, despite contending claims to the hegemonyof each idea. In the context of workers’ discourse and organization, forexample, continuities between corporatism and state interventionismwere prominent. The French labor movement often cited a collectivistidyll in the past to further demands of the state’s intervention. Outsidethe realm of labor ideologies and insurgencies, moreover, corporatismremained a strategy for the state’s centralizing policies as well. Far fromcompleting the dissolution of corporate structures of the ancien régime,the revolutionary and Napoleonic state reinvested entrepreneurial guildstructures, such as the Chambres syndicales, with vigorous authority topolice labor, to guarantee the competence of entrepreneurs within cer-tain sectors, and to implement a collaborative urban administration of


capital and labor. Finally, the absence of laissez-faire was not due toa “redistributive” impulse that at least one polemical historian sees asproviding a disastrous continuity between the ancien régime and the con-temporary French state.8 Rather, market mechanisms were finessed inrelationship to administrative and regulatory institutions that resem-bled modern housing authorities in their scope and ambition. Despite along historiography that tends to emphasize the exclusivity and sin-gularity of corporatism, statism, and liberalism in French history, infact, were largely political discourses masking symbiotic socio-economicpractices. In this manner, the industry corroborates recent historicalresearch in core sectors of the economy: the grain trade, metallurgy,arms production, the spinning trades, coal mining, silk weaving, andindustrial chemicals, among others.

Notwithstanding the rich history of labor and of capital in the Parisianconstruction sector, a full historical account of its actors has neverbeen written. The utter historiographical domination of the BaronGeorges-Eugène Haussmann’s nineteenth-century state-organized trans-formation of the capital city has all but obliterated the “pre-history” ofthe Parisian building trades. It has also created a teleological gold stan-dard of modern urban reform by which previous aspirations were boundto fail. Indeed, “Haussmannisation,” the monumental razing and recon-struction in the Second Empire (1852–1870) helped make Paris into “thecapital of the nineteenth century,” in Walter Benjamin’s famous phrase.Quite recently, however, historians have begun to rehabilitate the careerof “Haussmannisation before Haussmann.” This involved putting intoplace a centralized administration that could execute visionary urbanplanning as a long-term process, one that also involved evolving techni-cal changes, new forms of labor organization, innovative fiscal structuresfor state capitalization, and above all, the political urgency and ruthlesswill to destroy and remake vast swaths of the capital’s historic center.Other historians have questioned the exceptional nature of Hauss-mann’s urban reforms, noting that his efforts belong in a tradition ofadaptation undertaken in all great Western capitals to the realities ofpopulation explosions, the science of sanitation, and, above all, thechallenge of mass forms of vehicular transport. In sum, recent his-torical revisions on the question of the essential “modernity” of thenineteenth-century urban revolution have conspired to underscore thelong-term fits and starts in the evolution of Parisian development – andthe argument at the core of this book is a further contribution to thisthesis of essential and durable continuity.9

Introduction 7

Another challenge to the history of the Parisian building trades is notas much chronological as methodological. In particular, they have beenmarginalized by what François Dosse called the “crumbling” (émiette-ment) of history into varieties of specialized sub-disciplines.10 Historicalaccounts of the people who work in the core industries of the prein-dustrial urban economy have, at times, shorn social classes from largercontexts, including the state and municipal policies that structured thework environment; or they disregard the capitalist markets, be theyluxury or commodities, that rendered certain industries more economi-cally vital than others. In fact, the very concept of social classes withinthe large-scale and fluid economic sector of the building trades is oftenindefinable and always elusive. For laborers at times subcontracted workto 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 sociologicalabstraction, is to demonstrate how craft, skill, and labor hierarchies wereporous realities that were often made and remade.11

For these reasons, this study does not broach the hoary question offixing a particular definition upon class, while it is a class analysis ofthe relationship between many of the principal groups in French urbansociety.12 This book therefore is a departure with methodological trendsof the past few decades that focus increasingly on political culture. Rep-resentations and ideological debates on the Revolution have separatedpolitical culture from social causality. In reaction to inflexible formsof Marxist determinism, much recent scholarship on French history –indeed, it would seem as if nearly all of it! – followed the research, dis-ciplinary, and interpretive model of political history. This study is anexplicit call to return to the social, economic, and urban history of theRevolution and reconceptualizes the full scope of social referents in theirrelationship to political events. Its solution to historical “crumbling,”then, is a synthetic perspective that cuts across artificial disciplinarybarriers and thematic distinctions to comprehend Parisian history in abroadly inclusive perspective.13

Despite the importance of the construction industry to Parisian his-tory, there are very few works on this sector, and it is hoped this bookwill begin to fill the lacuna. The preindustrial building trades have beenlargely examined as case studies in larger histories of ancien régime guilds,particularly for scholars in the Anglophone world.14 For the nineteenthcentury, there are many important monographs on Haussmann and therebuilding of Paris during the Second Empire.15 Also, more recently,


several general histories of Paris provide a rich contextual basis for thisbook’s focus on urban policies and the laboring class.16 But as yet no sin-gle book synthesizes the broader history of the end of the ancien régimeand revolutionary period the urban history of Paris, and the buildingsector. The approach of this book brings together Parisian history, urbanpolicy, the history of construction, and the entrepreneurial and laborhistory of the building trades. Manifestos seemingly abound on theneed for historical research in this domain, and this book is inspiredby ambitious research projects of social and urban history, previouslyadumbrated by Gérard Noiriel, Jean-François Crola, André Guillerme,Gabriel Désert, among others, on the building trades.17

A symbiotic French capitalism? Post-1763 consumerpolitics

The argument for a history of corporate, statist, and liberal modes ofconstruction demands a good account, particularly, with attention tointerpretations of France’s social and economic development in theeighteenth century. Indeed, in the age of Enlightenment, urban plan-ning was claimed, in France more than elsewhere, as the government’sprerogative, and architecture became the state science. Central plan-ning of Parisian construction, that indeed reached its apotheosis withHaussmann, also created a master narrative which disregards other vitalthreads in the development of French capitalism. As in RenaissanceFlorence and seventeenth-century London, particularly after the 1666fire destroyed vast swaths of the English capital, eighteenth-centuryParis created the challenge of a western city compelled to rebuild toaccommodate new tastes and techniques, as well as to house people ofdifferent social strata, while functioning as vital administrative centersand inviting intensified forms of commerce.18

At the same time, however, the context of Paris construction in theancien régime was distinct from previous ambitions to construct great,beautiful, and functional cities. Exceptional factors specific to Parisianhistory preclude a fruitful comparative framework to other Europeancapitals or even to provincial French cities.19 True, of course, the cen-tralized monarchy was able to impose, more successfully in Paris thanelsewhere, the rules and regulations of safe and standardized build-ing. Most famous was Henry IV’s campaign to eradicate new woodenstructures with the abolition of combustible timber frame that accompa-nied a partial imposition of uniform façades in 1604. Height limitationswould follow in 1667 when buildings were restricted to a maximum

Introduction 9

of 16 meters. In a state-centered narrative, the modernization of Pariscontinued with the elaboration of building codes as the 1783 and 1784height limitation (five to seven floors, calculated as a coefficient ofstreet width), along with regulations concerning the proper alignmentof construction on Parisian streets.20

This book explores at length the statist concern with remaking themodern capital by controlling private construction practices. But, first,it attempts to broaden the historians’ perspective of Paris constructionbeyond that of official building codes and urban planning, and, sec-ond, it examines the expanding role of commerce in other contextsbesides building. For example, the expansionist policies of the Frenchcrown stimulated the production of national monumental architecture.In turn, mercantile adventures also provided the fiscal and politicalmeans for rebuilding Paris. Far from a self-regulating commercial space,developing doux commerce invisible hand economic institutions andmechanisms, the success of international commerce in the eighteenthcentury – in the first globalization of trade – stimulated nationalistrivalries. Moreover, challenges between the powerful states of Europeextending to the colonies of the Americas were not purely internationalin nature, but also turned on domestic economic and political con-cerns. International geopolitics had a deep impact upon the Parisianconstruction market when mercantile rivalries forced attention uponthe glorification of the state and its capacities to control, invest, andaesthetically embody new-found wealth and power.21

Aggressive nationalist debates over mercantile balance of tradepolicies and the place of commerce in ancien régime society, in fact,had the corollary consequence of energizing public opinion for stateintervention in remaking the capital city worthy of the nation’s impe-rial grandeur. For while the early modern state sought to interveneaggressively in the international realms of trade monopoly, coloniza-tion, and war, the domestic economy featured fewer visible levers topull. The agricultural sector, as the Physiocrats repeatedly complained,was resistant to political intervention, for when applied in the form ofprotectionism, it was often counter-productive.22 The one fully visiblelever of a national political economy, particularly to Parisians in theeighteenth century, was construction. Compelling veritable armies ofmen (for few women worked in the Parisian building trades outside ofwidows of entrepreneurs) to conform to modern regulations concerningwork rhythms, wages, and safety requirements, while razing and erect-ing large structures in the capital, were widely accepted as prerogativesof the centralizing state.


The chronological framework of this book thus begins in the build-ing boom after 1763 which also represented, in purely material terms, atemporary and cyclical pause from a wartime fiscal system, first elabo-rated by Louis XIV’s finance minister, Colbert. The tentative peace thatreigned in the period, that temporarily ended with the French entryinto the American colonies’ War of Independence in 1778, liberatedfinancial capital needed for private investment in stones. Indeed, warshad been borne with great difficulty by the average subject of the fiscal-military state – in such periods, as 1760 and 1763 and, again, from 1783to 1786, the vingtième, or the 5 percent tax, was tripled to becomea 15 percent tax on all income. Respite from war, then, mechanicallyfreed up investment capital.23 None other than Voltaire himself, writ-ing at mid-century, had sardonically argued that war and urban renewalprojects were antonyms:

For the greatness of his soul and his love for the people, the kingwould like to participate in making his capital city as dignified ashimself. But . . . the king, after a long war, is hardly in a state at presentto spend a lot of money for our pleasure, and, before tearing downthe houses that hide the façade of the Church of Saint-Gervais, hemust pay for the blood that he spilled for the fatherland.24

Thus, while ancien régime and revolutionary wars ultimately sapped thefiscal and material means by which Paris might be reconstructed, theyalso paradoxically created political opportunities for urban plans to raisethe capital of the kingdom to the level of ancient Rome. Patriotic move-ments to invest in the embellishment of Paris arose just after the mostbellicose moments of the eighteenth century. Such ambitious projectsas the Church of Sainte-Geneviève (in 1791, the Panthéon français),la Halle au blé (the Grain Market), and the place de Louis XV (after1792, la place de la Concorde) were conceived by the Crown at the endof the humiliating Seven Years War and, not coincidentally, undertakenbetween 1763 and 1764 after a year’s peace allowed for royal coffers tobegin to be refilled. The heightened significance of Parisian building wasalso determinative in resolving Paris’ ambivalent status as the capital ofthe French nation, with the monarchy and much of the governmentin Versailles. The flow of political power and the state’s administrationtoward Paris, as the undisputed state capital, began in 1789. Duringthe Revolution and Napoleonic eras, the building site in a regener-ated nation was the focus of numerous efforts to illustrate clearly thesteadiness and strength of the visible hand in the domestic economy.

Introduction 11

It provided, above all, a rare showcase for the revolutionary state todemonstrate its authority to give coherence and splendor to the urbancenter of a regenerated nation.25

The state-centered narrative of Parisian construction, to the exclu-sion of other factors, is as coherent as it is incomplete. It above allmarginalizes the private and corporate sectors of the French econ-omy, and relegates social causes which inflected the ability and willto construct in Paris. For example, Parisian building was also at theheart of the eighteenth-century consumer revolution, a European-widephenomenon, spurred largely by colonial commerce. The consumerrevolution occurred with the growing market for product innovation.Cheap copies of luxury goods cohabitated with a growing demandfor imported consumer items. Frequent disruptions in Atlantic trademade substitute items for “high-end” hats and umbrellas more desir-able and more accessible: an explosion in the production of inexpensivehats, fans, snuffboxes, imitation silver and gold watches for the massesresulted. The dynamic and expanding consumer market was stimulatedby changing fashions, innovative production methods, and new tastes.26

Among other commodities, the classic four-story Parisian rental apart-ment building (the ground floor and attic were, and are, of course, notcounted) increasingly became an object of consumption, accessible toa greater number of newly successful proprietors. The construction ofbuildings built for profit by landlords who rented entire floors to sin-gle families took off in the middle of the eighteenth century. Even asLouis Sébastien Mercier, in 1788, lamented that a typical Parisian fam-ily “home” was no more than a single apartment room with a fireplace,more buildings allowed for families to spread out in three or four smallrooms on a single floor.27 Balancing a greater investment in space wasthe use of cheaper materials. A “populuxe” method of construction forthe masses – decried for its built-in and dangerous evanescence – was toincrease the use of plaster of Paris, often mixed with mud, while limitingthe use of more expensive dimension stone.28

Thus, the liberal dream of commerce was partially realized in theform of increasing return on investment in landed rent. This openedup greater possibilities for new social classes to become proprietors.About three-quarters of the owners of Parisian houses and apartmentsin the eighteenth century were members of the professional bour-geoisie, including master artisans, or those rentiers living off investmentsor land.29 Money flowing to stones increased dramatically after theAugust 1766 ordinance enjoining that investors in a project could claimall property on a construction site if the contractors went bankrupt.


This ordinance paradoxically strengthened both the corporate andthe liberal lobbies, as witness the contestation that resulted betweenguilds and proprietors. For it virtually eliminated risk for speculation,while compounding the financial burden of credit-worthy guilds. Guildmasters, who would lose their total outlay in cases of the bankruptcyof a collaborating building contractor, came to rely increasingly upontheir guilds as credit unions. This early financial and building bubblefor investors had spectacular consequences. Between 1770 and 1789Parisians accumulated debts averaging 28 million livres per year; almosthalf, 12 million livres, of these debts were invested annually in apart-ments, houses, and land, with the vast majority of this real estate locatedin Paris. The presumed “seepage” of money from capital to land, fromurban to apparently more secure rural investments – long taken to beone of the fundamental causes for the tenacity of feudal conditions inthe 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 firstplace. The rise of consumer culture created a sharp tension between theliberty lobby and the corporate dream of commerce, increasingly por-trayed in the Enlightenment as masking monopolistic practices for theprivileged few. As evident to many observers, building entrepreneurs,like furriers or hatters, were drawn by cycles of offer and demand intoa system demanding more sub-contracting, less regulation, and greatercommercial liberty.31 In sum, market-driven production methods com-peted with quality control, the masters’ command of technical expertise,and urban planning. The guild system, in turn, came increasingly underideological attack by an elite French public opinion that demanded areformed political economy, progressive fiscal policies, and a transpar-ent administration or police, as it was called in the epoch. A rapidlybankrupt state during the waning years of the ancien régime began to faceinsurmountable challenges to serve convincingly as the honest brokerin assuming responsibilities assigned by corporate and liberal apologists.This final, corrosive challenge to the statist dream of commerce – and tothe state itself – was not adequately met before 1789. Nor was it fullymet afterward.

By situating the history of the building sector in a larger contextof public, private, and corporate production, the consumer revolutionwill be shown to reach deep into the popular classes. In the far-offsouthern region of Languedoc, for example, a deeply creative peas-antry increased productivity by cultivating new crops derived fromAfrican and American colonies, while exploiting the new markets of

Introduction 13

France’s first empire via the canal du Midi which linked the Atlanticto the Mediterranean. But it was by road that almost half of the newwealth accumulated in Languedoc in the eighteenth century flowedto Parisian creditors, financiers, and royal coffers. Fiscal hemorrhagingfrom the provinces to the capital of the national economy meant thatParis was the beneficiary as well as the financial source of prodigiouseighteenth-century growth.32 By the time of the French Revolution,crowds accustomed to the fruits of colonial commerce responded tomarket disruptions with vehemence. There were, for example, daysof action (journées) provoked by the mere rumor of sugar and coffeeshortages in the aftermath of slave riots in faraway Saint-Domingue.33

Ultimately, the irreconcilable difference between lofty promise andgritty reality led to the collapse of urban renewal projects at theend of the ancien régime. The fiscal shortfalls that fanned the fear ofnational decline largely undermined the Crown’s financial capacity toreconstruct Paris. By contrast, the opportunities represented by theRevolution’s 1791 abolition of the guilds and the massive appropria-tion and selling of properties – mostly tied to ecclesiastical institutions –created a long-term stimulus to the private building sector. In the case ofParis construction, then, the arrival of the Revolution and anticorporatepolicies provided a spur to private construction; while the Revolution-ary municipality’s investment in public structures such as hospitals,theatres, and “ephemeral architecture” during national ceremonies pro-vided precious capitalization of the building trades in a moment of deepcrisis. In the construction sector, in particular, the Revolution was aboon to capitalism, but in complex and unintended ways, combiningarchaic and innovative ideologies and practices.34

The building trades and labor migration: Meanderingmasons, peripatetic plumbers, and others

The three dreams of commerce engages as much the history of laboras that of capital. The context here emphasized is how the advocatesof the guilds, the state, and liberal markets applied symbiotic solu-tions to labor policies and, in particular, to the hoary issue of labormobility in the construction trades. This book, then, sees an alterna-tive to the classic ways the circulation of labor is recounted via theprism of the “push” of rural poverty or the “pull” of the urban labormarket.35 The founding of a national labor market in France, side byside with consumer markets and increased state and municipal invest-ment, was another vital component of French capitalism. And, here


too, the building sector was at the center of the French version of thegreat transformation from a feudal to a commercial capitalist economy.The attraction for the French peasantry of urban centers undergoingrenewal and expansion in the eighteenth century made labor flowtoward the cities, first, a seasonal and, increasingly during the Revolu-tion and the nineteenth century, a permanent migration. As is still thecase in the contemporary developed world, the building trades providedchoice opportunities for an unskilled migratory labor force. The buildingtrades of Paris underwent another variant of the classic assimilation of“peasants into Frenchmen” – Eugen Weber’s male-exclusive formulationis indeed applicable as the wives and families of peasant builders werealmost always left behind. Eventually, the transformation of displacedpeasants into urban labor contributed to elaborate a plebeian culturewith later implications for the French Revolution.36

This book will argue that the material changes during the eighteenthcentury created momentum for the industrial transformation of a labormarket – unlike Weber’s thesis, which put a chronological emphasison modernization squarely during the Third Republic and the end ofthe nineteenth century. Indeed, the Revolution, as will be shown, wasfar from an “irrelevance” to the masses of ordinary people. Massiveinvestment in infrastructure and – simultaneously – a centralizing andliberalizing state, competing with the corporate organization of thebuilding trades, laid the groundwork for the arrival of future laborersin the cities.37

The departure from a destitute countryside was the central act in theforging of a tragic national myth. In this optic, the French peasantry’sslow and often reluctant abandonment of le terroir – for the most urbaneParisian’s authentic identity still lies in the deep provinces – contributedto the “desertification” of the countryside. In fact, migration towardthe cities unfolded at a steady cadence through the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries and greatly accelerated in the post-war twentiethcentury. But a material precondition privileging the circulation of laborin France was the state’s successful creation of 40,000 kilometers of roadsbetween 1737 and 1787. In particular, the 1749 founding of the presti-gious Ecole des ponts et chaussées, the engineering school of bridges androads, was a decisive moment in the century-long state project to con-nect Paris to every major provincial city. Also, by the application of thecorvée, a widely hated tax constraining peasants to participate in roadconstruction, the French crown made greater mobility of goods and peo-ple a priority. The expanded means given to the state’s civil engineersunder the Revolution, coupled with the elimination of tolls, made roads

Introduction 15

accessible to all; in turn new infrastucture gave migrant workers freshopportunities to travel from the hinterland to urban centers.38

In the specific case of the masons of Paris, a vast majority orig-inated from Limousin, among the poorest, least accessible, and, forthe future physiocratic Finance Minister Anne-Robert Turgot, the royalintendant to the province from 1761 to 1769, one of the most back-ward regions in France. Turgot, as we will see, was an early advocateof the liberal dream of unfettered labor flow within the French nation,an idea imperfectly realized and imperfectly rescinded in 1776, withhis abolition and restoration of the guilds. He thus had direct experi-ence of the mountainous region, the Limousin, near the dead centerof France, notorious for its human misery built on miniscule land-holdings scraped out of rocky and recalcitrant soil. And he concludedthat the geographical conditions of the region could scarcely providesubsistence for its destitute peasantry, a situation he attempted to rem-edy through a series of far-reaching reforms, such as introducing thepotato for cultivation. Turgot’s energetic efforts were to little avail:the solution to misery for most Limousins was departure. Migrationtoward Paris reached such proportions that the region and the termLimousin became Parisian argot in the building trades, designating theunskilled laborers who mixed mortar and sometimes applied it on thefinished stonework. The liberal dream of commerce was, to Turgot, alsoa humane legitimation of a migratory flow deeply rooted in the region’schronic poverty.39

The dim recesses of collective memory place the beginning ofthe Limousins’ labor migration during the construction of CardinalRichelieu’s military fortifications during the siege against the FrenchProtestants of La Rochelle in the 1620s. More likely, however, was theinsatiable demand of the Versailles château for manpower that began anational exploitation of the Limousin’s knowledge of masonry. Massivemovements toward Versailles were noted in the 1680s when up to36,000 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 west-ern part of the Limousin that became a Department in 1790 – undertookthe journey by foot or on horses to migrate to the capital, or alterna-tively, to Saint-Etienne or Lyons. As the construction industry developedin France, the numbers of laborers leaving the Limousin grew fromabout 12,000 in the 1750s, or just under 20 percent of the Limousinadult 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


at the very height of Haussmann’s monumental reconstruction of partsof Paris.41

Despite a widely repeated myth, however, about an eternal returnin November or December of each year, the Limousins headed homeonly occasionally and for short periods of time. According to a detailedinquiry during the Napoleonic regime, about one in four builders bornin the Department of the Creuse returned to the provinces each year.The prospects of returning to cultivate the regions’ small and poorlandholdings were not at all enticing. Martin Nadaud, the archetypi-cal maçon de la Creuse, recounts his first trip home after three years ofwork in Paris; his departures from Paris to the Creuse became even lesscommon afterward, when he was elected deputy from the region in theSecond Republic.42

The experience of rejection, adaptation, and integration shared by theLimousins, as among many migrant workers in Paris, is another subjectof a vast historical literature. For the period after the Revolution, thenotion of a French “melting pot,” the France’s integrationist model thatsuccessfully reforged, first, provincials and, then, foreigners into Frenchcitizens, inspired research on communities of migrants and immigrants.In the early nineteenth century, the principal attraction of Paris forprovincial workers was, of course, the presence in the capital city ofcompatriots of certain regions who shared certain specialized skills anddominated whole sectors of production. The emergence of “colonies”of Auvergnats, Creusois, Berrychons, Normands, and still others wastied to craft-specific specialization: thus, the Auvergnats became tied tosmall commerce; and well before they were known as owners of cafés,they were often heavily represented in the trades of metallurgy andcobbling as well as casual labor. In parallel fashion, the maçons de laCreuse, the largest of any migrant community in Paris, took full advan-tage of the reputation of their region as the repository of a form ofcollective memory in their talent for construction. Up to three-quartersof the migrating Creusois worked in Paris as stonemasons.43 Other tradeswere similarly colonized by immigrants from one region, prized for spe-cialized talents. The stonecutters from the Lower Normandy area alsowere renowned for their precise work, and represented three out often members of the Parisian trades, the other provincials dominatedthe profession in the capital. Among stonecutting artisans working inParis, native Parisians represented a meager 15 percent of craftsmen inconstruction.44

Hence, one seemingly accurate source of criticism against the corpor-ate statist and liberal dreams of commerce was the “armies” of provincial

Introduction 17

workers marching into the capital city to fill increasing demand forlabor. Visibly, the guilds were scarcely able to maintain a monopolyover 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, attract-ing increasing numbers of migrant workers from the provinces andin almost all socio-professional categories. In turn, the liberal dreamseemed synonymous with social chaos. Up to 10 percent of the Parisianpopulation was “floating” in the summer months; that is, they werelargely “masterless” seasonal labor released from all community control.The rise of large manufactures in the unincorporated faubourgs of thecapital, particularly to the Northeast and South increasingly attractedthese provincials. The sheer poverty of these quarters, epitomized by thefaubourg Saint-Antoine where liberty of commerce was first guaranteedin 1657 and which erupted in revolt in July 1789, further repudiated theliberty lobby.

Labor migration was so intense that the appellation of “native”Parisian (i.e., born in Paris) was applicable to perhaps half of the popula-tion in the first half of the eighteenth century. The number of born andbred Parisians declined to less than 40 percent in the 1780s, and wouldbe reduced to less than a third of the Parisian population in the years ofthe Terror during the Revolution. Daniel Roche concludes that 7,000–14,000 migrants from the provinces arrived in Paris each year in theperiod, 1750–1790, with the number of freshly arrived migrants num-bering around 3–5 percent of most samples of the Parisian population.Paris, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hadbecome a magnet for migration. Fewer than half the capital’s popula-tion was born in the city during the entire second half of the eighteenthcentury. The specter of Paris inundated by migrant laborers was a tropeused by political adversaries and allies of the corporate dream. Either, asfor Turgot, unfettered labor circulation signified the breakdown of guildcontrols as a fait accompli; or, for advocates of corporatism, the arrival ofprovincial flotsam was a mere harbinger of real anarchy once the guildswould be swept away. Either way, labor could not be fully “policed”in a market economy. Even Napoleonic reformers, anxious to rehabili-tate the guild regime, would reprise this debate in the early nineteenthcentury.46

The memoirs of itinerant workers in France re-tell the same story asMartin Nadaud, the celebrated former mason and socialist politicianwho wrote his colorful memoir after his involvement in the 1848 Rev-olution and the 1871 Commune. Nadaud’s narrative is the classic tale


of how regional or provincial ties were transformed, first, into craft-specific solidarities and, then, into a broader class consciousness. Hiscolorful memoir of workers’ migration into Paris retraces the shock ofrejection and discrimination that accompanied the arrival of a provin-cial worker in the Capital. In particular, the seasonal arrival of thousandsof building workers stoked the social prejudices of Parisians of the ancienrégime and the nineteenth century. While the maçons de la Creuse wereseen as a necessary part of the Parisian landscape, they were often asdespised 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 oncein Paris.48

Some restrictive Parisian corporations overtly practiced exclusion ofprovincials from their trade: the roofers’ guild in 1768 won a lawsuitheard by the Paris Parlement to forbid provincials from entering theplace de Grève to look for work. A petition signed by 300 journeymenand apprentice roofers was cited in this decision, with the Paris Par-lement also agreeing to the request that “foreign journeymen” roofersbe compelled to perform a second apprenticeship in Paris before qualify-ing for journeymen status. This former of protectionism sometimes wasprofitable as the “closed” Parisian roofers’ guild guaranteed wages thatwere consistently superior by one-fourth than were the daily salariesassured by the “open” guild of masons.49 Despite the rigid categoriesof the corporatist, statist, and liberal dreams of commerce, the Parisianlabor market in Paris combined fluidity and protectionism, original-ity and tradition. This seemingly paradoxical situation – an elaborate,tried and true infrastructure for migrant workers and corporate restric-tions in some trades – created a fragile but largely functional balancebetween the “pull” and “push” of migrant labor from the provinces tothe capital city.

The French industrial “exception?”

As early migrant laborers, as consumers and producers of “populuxegoods,” 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 actorsin the origins of French capitalism. (While definitions of capitalism vary,this book will use the term in the broad sense given to it by FernandBraudel 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 economicdevelopment in the early industrial era. For before industrial machin-ery such as mobile steam cranes and new materials such as reinforcedconcrete transformed techniques for erecting the capital’s buildings, anindustrial division of labor became a fixture on the building sites ofParis. By the Napoleonic era, as we will see, each craft specialization hadspecific and circumscribed tasks, recompensed with regularly definedhourly wages, and with work rhythms dictated by the state’s labor codein accordance with a rigorous time-discipline: the very preconditions ofan industrial workforce.

The restructuring of the construction trades in accordance with thethree dreams of commerce – corporatism, statism, and liberalization –helped to mold the French model of industrialization. What, pre-cisely, constituted the French model has been widely debated sincewell before the 1978 publication of the economic historians PatrickO’Brien’s and Caglar Keydor’s comparative study of English and Frenchindustrialization. But O’Brien and Keydor convincingly concluded thatthe anglocentric notion of a French “lag” in nineteenth-century eco-nomic development was a misleading depiction, to be jettisoned infavor of a greater appreciation of an alternative “path to moderniza-tion.” In terms of per capita output and labor productivity, the Frencheconomy, from the 1780s to 1914, developed at a steady pace, roughlyequal to that of Britain.51 France’s passage to “modernity” was differ-ent, not inferior, to the British model of development. In absence ofcertain social traumas originating in deep inequalities, without the mas-sive diminution of its agricultural sector and rapid urbanization on aruinous scale, France managed to match British economic growth inthe long term. The broader challenge, then, for historians is to under-stand the singular nature of French economic development as a viableoption to British industrialization. Even more than in Britain, certainindustries depended heavily on artisanal production, leading to a peace-ful coexistence between workshops and factories until the twentiethcentury. But the French model continues to provoke the larger ques-tion of what constituted its distinctiveness, one which resisted theBritish formula based on the diffusion and adaptability of technolo-gies, 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 par-ticular, as a crucible for the three dreams of commerce, while neverfully embodying a single socio-economic model inherent in thesedreams.


Most persuasively, Jeff Horn has established that “the othergreat fear,” that of revolutionary violence by plebeian radicals, whoperiodically engaged in waves of Luddite-type machine-breaking intextile mills, consistently inflected the political economy of Frenchadministrators up to the middle of the nineteenth century. This bookwill amplify this argument and show that a deep tradition of laborcontestation in the building trades helped boost wages over the periodstudied. Also, the findings of Camille Richard and Ken Adler in arms fab-rication and of André Guillerme in biochemicals and metallurgy, focus-ing on the stunning rise in wartime revolutionary industrial productionduring the Years II and III (1793–1795), verify that the revolutionarystate created sound alternatives to British-style capitalism. The Jacobinplanned economy was a powerful, efficient model of technological com-petition in delivering goods while channeling, with often tragic results,the resurgence of popular violence. The state was the ultimate guarantorof equity in labor relations, and this, in turn, as a long-term consequencehelped to inspire a multifaceted transition to industrial capitalism.52

This book is thus inscribed in the historiographical tradition ofFrench exceptionalism. It demonstrates the Revolution’s legacy on thebuilding sites as one of modernity, particularly, in the validation ofexpertise in the form of a corps of rigorously formed state-trainedand state-employed civil engineers, urban planners, and architects. Thepost-revolutionary building trades also were to become a prime vec-tor for a technocratically defined and highly specialized labor force.53

These innovations, moreover, were partially accomplished in remobi-lizing what Turgot had condemned as “archaic” forms of ancien régimecorporate society. For example, as the state’s hand was made increas-ingly visible to all on outdoor construction sites, corporate self-policingwas also revived in the guise of entrepreneurial cooperation with stateauthorities. The Terror had made patronage networks vital to the mobi-lization of labor and resources in the wartime economy, and thesebrought to power in the local sections many of the urban notable eliteof the ancien régime. After 1806, Napoleonic administrators restored thetrade corporations in a deeply altered form. The ancien régime’s and Revo-lution’s paradoxical efforts to contain as well as to expand a burgeoningentrepreneurial culture thus had a tenacious life.

The technocratic and corporate regime in the construction sector bythe 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 nearlyunremitting warfare and a generally unfavorable demographic growth

Introduction 21

at the turn of the century, compelled the Parisian construction industryto adapt to a more restricted market, with fewer wealthy and middlingproprietors able to invest in stones and with a state heavily committedelsewhere. The entrepreneurial elite emerging in the Napoleonic period,as will be shown, was more restrictive in number, while more diversein background. Few were issued from the extended families of mas-ter builders and contractors and their kinship networks whose familynames dominated the ancien régime trade almanacs.54 The French Revo-lution had thus created the foundations of an industrial capitalist orderby concentrating wealth and talent in the hands of a technologicallyproficient and enterprising bourgeoisie. At the same time, the Revo-lution fostered the formation of a class of closely watched laborers,subjugated to time-discipline and well-versed in the imperative of obe-dience to new forms of state and entrepreneurial authorities. Even inthe absence of new technologies and techniques, the Parisian worldof work of 1815 would have been hardly recognizable to the laborerswho had produced the architecture of the Enlightenment after the mid-eighteenth century. In its account of the transformation of the Parisianbuilding site, this book will demonstrate how, precisely, the Frenchexception of industrialization was traced before the industrial revolu-tion, and in a contentious symbiosis of the three dreams of commerce,embodied by the Parisian building guilds, the centralizing state, andcapital and labor markets.

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

Paris is too large, seen politically; it’s an outsized head for thebody of the state. But today it would be too dangerous toremove the tumor rather than to let it subsist. There are diseasesthat, once they take root, are indestructible.

The great cities are very much favored by absolutist govern-ment: you need it all to herd people together; they lure thegreat proprietaires enticed by luxury and pleasure. They squeezecrowds in to the city, as if fencing in sheep on a prairie . . . .Paris is thus like an abyss where the human species is melteddown . . . .

Everyone has the right to live; subsistence is the first law. I seea flourishing city, but only at the expense of the nation as awhole. These six-story houses, packed with people, devouringthe harvest and the grapes for fifty miles around; these lack-eys, these priests, these do-nothings, they serve neither statenor society. But they all have the right to live. There are polit-ical evils that must be tolerated since we cannot find absolutesolutions, and such is the scope of the city: we cannot sweepoff the earth those who live in lodging houses and attics. Theyhave nothing, not even their own arms, which have withered.Stop, all those who would enter? We must preserve even thediseased parts, as we cannot extirpate them without puttinginto danger the political corps . . . . But let us not foretell whatwe 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 isto the kingdom.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier, 1782

Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s commentary with its mix of sarcasm, anx-iety, and resignation vividly conveys a complex set of views held bymany eighteenth-century observers of Paris. On the one hand, thedramatic spread of urban ills such as squalid boarding houses and dilap-idated garrets were seen as a malignancy on France’s “body politic.” Onthe other hand, Paris’ “tumor” could not be simply excised withoutinflicting greater harm. In the face of this paradox, Mercier counseleda resigned tolerance for the relentless growth of the lump constitutedby Paris.

Mercier expressed an elitist perspective on the urgency of urbanrenewal and social reform within the capital; but he also conveyed fatal-ism that neither consensus nor political will nor economic means mighttransform the capital in accord with a single vision of the city. His sar-donic call – “Stop, all those who would enter?” – reflects the widelyshared perception that the fragile equilibrium in the social compositionof Paris, with its range of characters, rich and poor alike, only coex-isted on borrowed time by the second half of the eighteenth century.His starkly alarmist conclusion that more harm than good would comefrom extirpating the undesirable parts of Paris was a call for a resignedtolerance that the Crown and the Parisian administration might haveheeded at the end of the ancien régime.

Contrary to Mercier’s remark about the affinity between large citiesand absolutist governments, late eighteenth-century Paris posed a num-ber of insurmountable challenges for the monarchy at the end of theancien régime. There was no consensus over specific reforms to enact andno practical way to carry out urban revitalization on a grand scale. TheCrown was, in fits and starts, boldly reformist in aspiration yet oftenindecisive in action, for it was on the verge of bankruptcy. In the absenceof a coherent and feasible public plan, Paris’ chaotic growth was drivenprincipally by a flourishing private sector, the “great proprietors enticedby luxury,” as Mercier had it. Out of their anarchic and frenzied devel-opment came, not a reformed capital of a kingdom, but the capital ofthe Revolution.

This chapter examines Paris as the unique theatre of a great transfor-mation that took place in multiple realms – in the physical constructionof the city, in the policies of its administration or what was broadlycalled the “policing” of its people, as well as in the thinking about


an architecture and labor market worthy of the capital of the republic ofletters.1 In particular, the city’s construction industry became the focusof efforts by the Crown, various courts, and trade corporations to reformwhat Mercier meant by the ”capital’s “unbounded magnificience”(grandeur démesurée de la Capitale). The building site was a crucible ofcompeting authorities, cooperating in the construction of buildingswhile seeking greater control over the tasks of construction. The sheerdiversity of tasks, from digging the foundations at the beginning tocarting away the debris at the end, and the cast of characters, from pro-prietors to master builders to building inspectors, rendered the construc-tion sector a vast social laboratory for the often contradictory efforts byEnlightenment reformers, la police, and the Crown to alter the physicallandscape of the capital and to streamline the administration of the city.

While the precise numbers of construction sites opened at the endof the ancien régime are not known, Mercier echoed the widely sharednotion of Parisians that fully one-third of the Capital had been rebuiltfrom the 1760s to the 1780s, boldly putting forth the estimate that10,000 new private homes had been erected in 25 years. As urbanhistorians put the number of buildings in Paris on the eve of the Rev-olution at between 25,000 and 30,000, Mercier’s estimate is probablywell founded. Furthermore, the rhythms of construction followed thatof the economy – for “as the building trades go, so goes everything else,”as the nineteenth-century expression had it – and particularly follow-ing the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the construction sectorenjoyed a rare burst of robust activity.2 Another Parisian commentator,the bookseller Siméon-Prosper Hardy, from his shop on the rue Saint-Jacques, noted with amazement the rapid pace of progress on the publicgrands projets of his day in the 1780s, citing Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’stoll houses, the barrières d’octroi, the church of Sainte-Geneviève (laterconverted 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 thecity’s economy: slightly more than one in 20 or between 5.4 percentand 6.3 percent of the total population (around 37,800 people outof the most widely accepted estimates of 600,000 to 700,000 inhab-itants) were employed or worked as masters in 1790–1791. With anaverage of 15 workers to one employer, the building sector becamethe locus of judicial and royal reforms that, as we will see, eventuallyundermined the ancien régime’s corporate order of construction, pavingthe way for labor strife and the breakdown of the system supplying theParisian housing market in the years leading up to the Revolution. As the


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

majority of builders worked in open air rather than in the closed ateliersof Parisian courtyards, the sense of crisis in this industry was furtherinflated by the sheer spectacular visibility of the occasional industrialaccident – a falling crane, collapsing building, or fissured structure hadrepercussions in the imaginaire far beyond the numbers of injured work-ers or ruined proprietors. In its statistical and symbolic importance,the Parisian construction sector heralded the industrial world of thenineteenth century.4

The turmoil within this sector affected, first and foremost, the prin-cipal building corporation of master builders, the Chambre royale desBâtiments. By the end of the ancien régime, this royal and municipalinstitution had evolved into a powerful quasi-public housing author-ity with jurisdiction over proprietors, entrepreneurs, private architects,and artisans alike. As a trade corporation overseeing private constructionsites, the Chambre enforced a precise system of controls, inspections,salary structures, and commercial transactions. In a feverish explosionof speculative activity after 1763, the Chambre’s members helped to


Figure 1.1 Anonymous, Construction of the Hôtel de Salm, ca. 1788, detail. Thestonecutters are in the foreground while the architect, with map in hand, appar-ently consults with the proprietor off in the distance. Courtesy of the muséeCarnavelet.

assure the expansion of Paris by carving out entire quarters in whathad once been the outer faubourgs to the west and northeast of Paris.For the artisans and unskilled laborers of the building trades, this vig-orous growth meant a long period of plentiful work rewarded by goodpay. The ample wage scale (tarif ) defined by the Chambre reflected theflourishing demand for Parisian construction that outstripped supply.

The wage scale was practiced by many urban guilds, but the con-struction industry distinguished itself from other sectors of the Parisianeconomy with salaries for laborers that rose by 15 percent more thanaverage workers’ salaries in Paris between mid-century and the Revolu-tion. Beneficiaries of a 50 percent average pay increase over 50 years,building workers were among the few Parisians who did not see asteady erosion of real wages in an inflationary period. In the popularimagination as well as in reality, the masons, stonecutters, carpenters,plasterers, roofers, locksmiths, and others represented the artisan eliteof Parisian laborers. Indeed, due in part to the relative “affluence” of


Figure 1.2 Anonymous, Construction of the Hôtel de Salm, ca. 1788, detail. In thebackground, the Hôtel de Salm was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson during his termas minister plenipotentiary to France and served as inspiration for his rebuild-ing of Monticello. 1787 March 2: “While in Paris, I was violently smitten withthe 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 ofdisgruntled proprietors, architects, city and monarchical administrators,as well as “the liberal lobby” of Enlightenment reformers who wished toput an end to the corporate system writ large. The construction indus-try was widely vilified as a sector where producers enjoyed exceptionaleconomic advantages vis-à-vis consumers.5

The history of the Parisian building sector calls into question themaster narratives of statism and liberalism in the period leading upto the French Revolution. Neither the effects of a Tocquevillian cen-tralizing state nor the unintended consequences of Physiocratic marketforces were responsible for the disruptions of the corporate order in theParisian construction market. Nor does the discourse of a decline and fallof Colbertism, according to which French state and society were onceinextricably linked through the tripartite relationship of corporations,privileges and state regulation, adequately frame the larger issues


posed by the building sector’s development in the eighteenth century.A fuller description of that sector challenges the linear historical concep-tualization of the end of the ancien régime as essentially and exclusivelycentralizing, liberal, or Colbertist. What is needed – what this chapterattempts – is a more complex account of the role of corporations inthe expansion of a market economy and the practices of preindustrialcapitalism.6

This discussion also seeks to complement and extend the directionof recent historical research of the French corporate universe. A (rare)consensus among historians has emerged that sees the guilds as oneresponse, in the words of David Bien, not to the question of whythe ancien régime collapsed, but rather, why the ancien régime lasted aslong as it did. In recent studies of various trades and guilds of Paris, amore favorable view of the corporate idea accentuates the role of nego-tiation and complicity between the municipal administrators, policecommissioners, and corporations. As a part of this process, the historianof Colbertism Philippe Minard demonstrates that the corps of state-nominated manufacture inspectors founded in 1669 became over thenext century a protean and supple, rather than imposed and dictatorial,form of state interventionism. By ensuring quality control, the inspec-tors helped stimulate French manufacturing interests, particularly inluxury goods. The French corporations were, in sum, a part of a complexstrategy for providing public service, avant la lettre, by effectively regu-lating labor, professionalizing certain trades, and creatively protectingmanufactures.7

Colin Jones suggestively sketches out two strategies that helped createa transition from the “corporative framework” to a capitalist economy.The first, based on “expertise, internal discipline, and segregation,” wasintended to distinguish a specific group of professionals from all others:the builders were experts in their domain and needed no interventionin their affairs. The second, based on “transcorporative, egalitarian, andhorizontal” qualities, stressed broader relations between a specific tradeand society in general. The building guildsmen, entrepreneurs, and cor-porate members of the Chambre were servants of public interest in assur-ing safe and quality construction practices. The first internal strategy ofbuilders as experts of their own exclusive domain was elaborated to keepa grip over the construction market against proprietors and state med-dling. The second transcorporative strategy was based on the claim tosafeguarding privileges in the name of fulfilling the functions of a publichousing authority. In this, the builders mirrored the novelty of Frenchcorporations in general, for whom “the prestige of experts” and the close


relationship between administrators and guildsmen broadly favoredinnovation.8

In light of newer perspectives on the Parisian world of work, theancien régime Parisian building trades invite a larger reconsideration ofthe tenacious Enlightenment-era liberal attack on reactionary corpora-tions, portrayed as mired in customary techniques and archaic formsof fabrication. The liberal critique of arduous guild procedure and lay-ers of bureaucracy, the favored targets of the “liberty lobby,” mistooka corporate discourse of privileges and tradition, typically reserved forlawsuits or guild statutes, for the real practices of corporations, moredynamic and more innovative than assumed. Rather than coming togrips with the socio-economic and demographic challenges of a cityrapidly becoming a large and densely populated metropolis, the voicesof criticism and reform of the eighteenth century were preoccupied withthe larger ideological project to sweep away the corporate system ofurban society. Such a reform would strengthen state oversight, liberalizecommerce and production, or further both objectives simultaneously.An influential critique emerged that represented quality control, profes-sional standards, and certain labor practices as cumbersome obstaclesboth to state regulation and to the “natural” cycles of offer and demandin the housing market. As this book will demonstrate, the call forprogress through sweeping deregulation and reform was itself a highlypartisan discourse that failed to comprehend the world it sought toanalyze and ultimately annihilate.9

Perceptions of urban decline and ancien régimeconstruction practices

Mercier’s perception of the social breakdown in Paris was based on mul-tiple rapid developments at the end of the ancien régime – in its changingpopulation and in the housing market, the economy, and the adminis-tration, or “police” of Paris during the second half of the eighteenthcentury. Specifically, he highlighted the accelerating social segregationbetween rich and poor; the rise of overcrowded apartment houses touspeuplés, the proliferation of boarding houses or chambres garnies; andthe rising population density where increasing numbers of people weresqueezed into decreasing amounts of space. These reflections on thedeclining condition of the city, and the fruitless efforts to reform it,expressed a prophetic insight into the erosion of Paris’s physical andsocial coherence.


At first glance, the housing market seemed steadily to fall behind thesocio-economic and demographic changes of the capital. Yet a closerexamination of the evidence of an overall decline in the quality andquantity of housing construction suggests that short-lived attempts atliberalization of the housing market were interspersed with long periodsof legal contention and state reforms that aggravated the very problemsthey were intending to solve. Indeed, it was largely the incoherenceof state-driven and court-ordered policies, rather than the excesses ofmonopolistic guild practices, that led to the perception of decline, andfor the widely repeated argument that the eroding buildings of Paris(sarcastically denounced as immeubles immuables) were unworthy of thecapital city.

Erected with techniques and an organization of labor that dated fromthe Middle Ages, the classic early eighteenth-century apartments, build-ings, largely concentrated in the old city center and averaging three orfour stories in height (five to seven floor structures began to appearonly in the 1760s), were, by the late eighteenth century, consideredfragile, unsanitary, and dilapidated, with cracks in walls and crumblingfoundations forming the basis of common complaints. After a mere 60years, the typical Parisian apartment building of the eighteenth centuryneeded a complete restoration, with just under half of the new workinvested in masonry, indicating serious structural problems.10 Of course,not every proprietor could afford such an investment. About 75 percentof the owners of Parisian houses and apartments were merchants, arti-sanal masters, “bourgeois,” (signifying an individual who lived off ofrents or investments) or members of the legal and medical professions,meaning that a relatively small number of Parisian proprietors, just over10 percent, were members of the French grand social elite.11 As increas-ing numbers of neighborhoods decayed, mostly in the city’s center aswell as on the periphery (most notably the Right Bank faubourg Saint-Antoine and Left Bank faubourg Saint-Marcel), the commercial, rentierand manufacturing elites that made up the majority of Parisian pro-prietors who could invest in restoration had little incentive to do so,choosing to move instead toward the more solidly built houses of thewestern quarters of Paris (Map 1.2, Figures 1.3, 1.4, 1.5).12

Some of the documentation on building materials bears out the harsh-est critiques of the practices of the builders of Paris. To begin with,France, compared to Britain or Italy in the early modern period, lackedabundant and accessible marble quarries. On average, less than 10 per-cent of construction materials of the private houses were properly ashlaror dimension stone (pierre de taille) – blocks and slabs cut to order – while


Map 1.2 Turgot Map, 1739, detail of the Right Bank Marais quarter with its 3–4story 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, ter-racotta, and metals. In the poorer quarters, a typical Parisian buildingcould be constituted by almost 90 percent limestone and plaster of Paris.Moreover, the quality of construction was not only a question of classor status. Even the luxurious houses of the four bridges that cross theSeine, the pont de Change, the pont Marie, the pont Saint-Michel, andthe pont Notre-Dame, structures torn down between 1786 and 1788 toallow for the free flow of traffic – except on the pont Saint-Michel wherebuildings survived until 1808 – featured a surprising absence of solidmaterials to distinguish them from those built on terra firma.13

But was the practice of using shoddy material the fault of cor-rupt or greedy building guildsmen? Was it indeed the monopolistic orcorrupt practices of master artisans that dictated that the least expen-sive materials be used in construction? Considerable evidence suggestsderegulation and not the archaic guild monopolies were the source of atleast some inferior construction. The deliberations of the Communityof Master Masons disclose the response of the guild to many lawsuits


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

engaged by proprietors who sued guildsmen over flimsy or defectiveconstruction (malfaçon). The lawsuit was a common weapon brandishedby wealthy proprietors who sought to strip corporate monopolies oftheir power over production.14 For example, in a series of deliberationsbetween 1759 and 1761, the guild met repeatedly to address the effectsof a “new jurisprudence,” upheld by several tribunals including the ParisParlement, to free up the construction market by stripping the rightof guildsmen to fix an industry-wide price for labor and materials (inparticular, stones, plaster, mortar, and wood). This “precedent createsan absolute liberty of enterprise which could lead to the ruin of mas-ter builders,” complained the syndics of the master masons’ guild.15

In March 1761, they obtained partial satisfaction for the sanctity ofcontractual accords over this “freedom of enterprise.” A compromiserendered more “transparent” the procuring of building materials bystipulating that the negotiations and prices of building materials be pub-lished in multiple copies. These documents would then be submitted for


Figure 1.4 Rue Volta and rue du Vert Bois. “Paris is a Swiss Cheese,” as the say-ing goes. Similar late seventeenth-century buildings, the one perfectly restored,the other with serious structural problems. To this day, older Parisian buildingscollapse 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 ofthe bidding and of the final price. In this case, and many others, it was acourt-driven liberalization and not guild monopoly that obliged buildersto cut corners in order to save costs. And, as the outcome suggests, itwas a private lawsuit rather than a corporate collectivism that addeda 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 ver-dicts that vividly reveal the weaknesses of their supposed unassailablemonopolies.16

Of course, the problem of sloppy or dangerous building practicescropped up in ways other than lawsuits. The bookseller Siméon-ProsperHardy noted in his journal 14 fatal accidents for the period 1785–1787alone, most with several victims among the laborers. The collapse ofhouses whose foundations were built upon abandoned stone quarriesled to half-measures in the 1780s such as their propping up on wooded


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

pilasters in the neighborhoods of the faubourg Saint-Jacques, the rue dela Harpe and the rue de Tournon. The practice of building entire neigh-borhoods upon hollowed out wood foundations led Mercier to muse:“All these towers, these steeples, these vaulted temples – so many signsthat show to the eye: what you see in the air is missing under yourfeet.”17 But here again, the pilasters were a symbol of the weakness andnot the strength of guild monopoly, for it was a strictly forbidden prac-tice in corporate regulations as first published 1763 after approval by theParis Parlement. In fact, some of the condemned construction sauvage ofproprietors, by-passing guilds to cut cost, were concentrated in areas ofParis that were not incorporated. The absence of corporate controls andnot their abuse created these evident hazards to public safety.18

Regardless of their cause, the uncertainties and disruptions in theParisian ancien régime housing market helped to aggravate social segre-gation in the eighteenth century. Earlier, the mixité of rich and poor,according to the classic iconography of the Parisian building, was


assured by a graduated rent scale, which imposed a vertical rather thanhorizontal social organization across the city. The occupancy of a givenstructure had the shops on the ground floor and the finest apartmentson the lower floors, where rents were the highest, with the least expen-sive and smallest rooms let out on the top floors; these were toppedoff with the miniscule rooms of the attic. But that image seems tohave dimmed and blurred over the course of the eighteenth century,with an increasing amount of social segregation replacing the mixitéof the typical Parisian building. The outskirts of Paris, particularly inthe eastern neighborhoods, where fewer guild controls, cheaper hous-ing, and exemption from many taxes led to what would later be calledzones franches, excise-free quarters, were magnets for poorer laborersand artisans. Many settled in the faubourgs Saint-Marcel and Saint-Antoine where up to 70 percent of the population was migrants fromthe provinces by the early 1790s. And, toward the end of the ancienrégime, the new housing market was increasingly focused on these areas,with private construction in the rest of Paris taking the form, mostly, ofrepair 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 ofinexpensive rental apartments: the average rents of Parisian apartmentssoared over the eighteenth century, by around 130–140 percent, with aconsiderable acceleration in the second half of the century. Wildly fluc-tuating grain prices added to the reality that spending was increasinglyreduced to basic necessities. The average Parisian laborer saw an increaseof 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 ofParis thus experienced a serious decline in their standard of living in theeighteenth century.20 Hence, the sheer lack of inexpensive rental apart-ments in Paris meant, for laborers and their patrons, the fading awayof the classic arrangement whereby lodging and often food – accordingto a popular myth, the origin of compagnon is cum panis, or the sharingof bread – were furnished by the master artisan. David Garrioch, in astudy of journeymen’s lodgings, concludes that 67 percent of Parisianjourneymen were put up in their master’s building in 1752, while only34 percent were similarly housed in 1788. The “modern” divorce ofhome and work was well underway in Paris of the eighteenth century.21

The building sector fully participated in the transformation of theParisian economy from one based in artisanal fabrication to a mode ofproduction based on large-scale industries such as textiles, food distri-bution, and transport. For while most workshops in Paris still featuredone master artisan and one or two journeymen under the same roof, the


Figure 1.6 Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Since 1657, the quarter was a tax-free andguild-free zone without many of the regulatory organs that “policed” Paris else-where. The resulting juxtaposition of haphazard construction was jarring tocontemporaries. The early eighteenth-century building in the center appearscrushed between earlier and later construction.

city’s economy was simultaneously evolving into one that favored pro-duction of scale. The shift from small-scale manufactures toward largeprojects, in turn, further exacerbated the city’s social segregation.

The rise of massive construction works, for example the Church of thepatron saint of Paris Sainte-Geneviève in the 1770s where 550 builderson average toiled during the summer, foreshadowed things to come.The public sites launched by Louis XV in the aftermath of Frenchdefeat in the Seven Year’s War – in the 1760s and 1770s – attractedgreat amounts numbers of laborers: the largest sites included the PlaceLouis XV (now the Place de Concorde), the école Militaire, l’Hôtel dela Monnaie, the theatre of the Odéon, and the Collège de France.22

These, though, were easily matched by the large-scale private indus-tries that thrived toward the end of the ancien régime: Charles-JosephPanckoucke’s printing shop, where La gazette de France and Le mercurede France were published, resembled a factory comprising 27 presses,


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

with 800 employees working regularly in 1788. The royal glassworksfactory in the faubourg Saint-Antoine engaged 500 workers; 350 laborersworked 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 undisciplinedneighborhoods,” as Mercier had it, where such large numbers of work-ers were amassed. These worksites, workshops, and industries, and thebustle of crowds of workers moving back and forth from the manu-factures to the faubourgs, marked the end of the era of a traditionaleconomy based exclusively on the small shop, with an atelier in thecourtyard, where a lone master was assisted by one or two journeymenof long standing who shared the same lodgings. As Mercier complained,the beginning of massive concentrations of labor deepened the growingrift between work and life, as bustling neighborhoods in the day weredeserted by night as workers returned to the faubourgs.23


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

The perception of geographic separation of rich and poor wasmatched by other ominous signs of the declining quality of life of ordi-nary Parisians. For example, the explosion of chambres garnies in thecapital, or boarding houses for itinerant laborers, created an increasingsense of dangerous over-crowding in the Left Bank and around the placede Grève. In the quarter of the Bonne Nouvelle on the Right Bank, thebuilding workers who migrated from the Creuse were clustered in sor-did lodgings: 30–50 masons could be found in the same buildings. Thechambres garnies were estimated to lodge 20,000 people in 1780 and upto 50,000 in the 1820s, and for the majority of cases, rarely for periodsexceeding six months. When Mercier wrote above that “we cannot driveback into the soil those who live in the boarding houses and attics,” hewas underscoring both the peasant stock and the ineluctable existenceof migrant workers in Paris.24

Commentators on life in Paris were, of course, quick to condemn thelack of adequate controls upon the migrant workers of the rooming


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

houses, singling out the maçons de la Creuse, the most peripatetic oflaborers on the construction site. In the early Spring each year, theymade an annual rite of passage from the Center of France (specifically,the historical region of the Haute Marche) to Paris, in particular, to theplace de Grève (the present place de l’Hôtel de ville). There, from 5:00to 7:00 every morning but Sunday and Feast Days, and also depend-ing on the season, the Creusois rubbed shoulders with crowds of skilledand unskilled laborers ranging from masons and carpenters to roofersand day-laborers waiting to be hired “à la journée,” by the workday,on building sites across the city.25 Annie Moulin found in her studyof eighteenth-century migrant masons that the Limousins and Creusoisrepresented 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 nativeParisians: thus roughly nine out of ten laborers on the building sitesof Paris were migrants.26 Perhaps their lack of Parisian roots and their


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

heavy drinking led them to be less than diligent in their daily work inthe Capital, as Hardy contemptuously remarked, noting that migrantworkers were commonly involved in sites experiencing accidents. Theperception of sloppy Parisian construction was inspired by a distrustof the key role played by these itinerant peasant-laborers in the build-ing sector. As patois-speaking masons were foreigners to the city, hiredas unskilled seasonal labor, they did not fit into the secure niches ofthe urban corporate universe (Table 1.1, Figures 1.12, 1.13, ProfessionalBreakdown, 1790–1791).27

In the ebb and flow of the hectic construction yards of the eighteenthcentury, an industrial labor market was elaborated at the core of a prein-dustrial economy. The hybrid composition of the construction trades,with their massive and migratory labor force and impressively largemachines and devices, such as gigantic cranes and complex scaffolding,seemed to clash starkly with their medieval techniques, poor build-ing materials, and “archaic” forms of guild organization. By the 1770s,the contradiction between the quotidian life of the building trades


Figure 1.11 Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopedia: Architecture: Masonry.

Table 1.1 Professional Breakdown of the Building Trades of Paris, 1790–1791

Workers Declaredby Profession

% Employers byProfession

Proportion ofWorkers toEach Employer

Masons 11,746 67.0 458 1:25.6Carpenters 1,684 9.6 87 1:19.4Painters 1,973 11.2 203 1:9.7Sculptors 872 5.0 87 1:10.0Roofers 806 4.6 53 1:15.2Marble-cutters 290 1.6 23 1:12.6Plumbers 173 1.0 18 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 corporationssharpened the criticisms of Parisian construction and galvanized areformist Crown to undertake an overhaul of the Parisian construc-tion industry. The resulting “judicial chaos” helped undermine the


0

2 000

4 000

6 000

8 000

10 000

12 000

Masonry 11 746

Carpenters 1 684

Painters 1 973

Sculptors 872

Roofers 806

Marble-cutters 290

Workers Declared by Profession

Workers declared by profession

67%

10%

11%

5%

5%

2%

1%

Masonry

Carpenters

Painters

Sculptors

Roofers

Marble-cutters

Plumbers

Figure 1.12 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 ofParis.28

Proprietors, commentators, and Enlightenment critics who assailedthe building corporations through lawsuits and polemical treatisesblamed the multiplication of privileged corps for making the building


Employers by profession0

100

200

300

400

500

Masonry 458

Carpenters 87

Painters 203

Sculptors 87

Roofers 53

Marble-cutters 23

Figure 1.13 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 cryingneed for more construction. A potential proprietor of a future Parisianbuilding had first to receive authorization from the Bureau de la ville deParis, consisting of the merchants’ provost, four échevins (a precursor ofdeputy mayors), and a host of lawyers and clerks. Once the City de Parisapproved a particular project, moreover, a proprietor also had to submitthe project and its site to the inspection of the 60 architectes-experts-bourgeois and architectes-experts-entrepreneurs. These were members of theChambre royale des Bâtiments, whose authority and structure derivedfrom a royal reform in 1690 that stripped most inspection rights fromthe elites of the masons’ guild, the jurés, in matters concerning privateconstruction.29 The incorporation of an exclusive body of architectsand master builders gave the Chambre monopoly control over deci-sions on the feasibility of architectural plans, the prices and qualityof materials (devis et marchés), the precision of construction (down tothe soundness of foundations and walls), and final inspection reportsof the building (procès verbaux de receptions d’ouvrages). It also had thelast word on any contention arising from the building site. As a guar-antee of the disinterested nature of their inspections and decisions, the


architectes-experts-bourgeois of the Parisian Chambre des Bâtiments – theterm “royale” was dropped in most eighteenth-century references to thisbody – were forbidden to engage in commerce. The venal status of halfof the Chambre’s members meant the fees collected on each certified act,for example, 5–7 livres for a routine inspection of the worksite, becamea lucrative substitute for engaging in actual building itself.30

As a corporation, the Chambre des Bâtiments was closely affiliatedwith – and was charged with the oversight of – the Community of Mas-ter Masons, whose senior members (les anciens) enjoyed privileges overyounger members (les modernes): for example, only les anciens were eli-gible to hold elected offices. Unlike the precisely demarcated number of60 experts who belonged to the Chambre, the numbers of master masonscontinued to grow in the eighteenth century, from 275 masters in 1761to 357 in 1776, before the first abolition of the guilds under Turgot, and409 in 1790, on the eve of the definitive abolition during the Revolu-tion. Accessibility to mastership was favored by its relatively low cost: aLettre-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 insti-tutional barriers to becoming one. According to the most widely usedParisian business almanac, the Guide to the Merchant Corps and the Cor-porations of Arts and Crafts, the average initial investment of a mastermason was 1,400 livres to build a particular apartment. In terms ofan average Parisian journeyman’s salary, this represented 700 workingdays.31

The master mason fulfilled the role of a contemporary building con-tractor, hiring artisans for specific tasks and paying laborers for servicesrendered. The costs of construction incurred by the master mason werelater reimbursed by the proprietor upon receiving the key from two ofthe Chambre’s experts, in a rigorously defined corporate ritual that fol-lowed the final inspection of the premises. This procedure was hardlyan outdated, quaint, or timeworn custom suggesting a preindustrialattachment to elaborate ritual void of content. For the reception of thekeys from the hands of the master mason directly into those of theproprietor via the experts symbolized a precise and market-consciousrite of quality control. The supervisory powers of the experts and thesupremacy of the master mason over all other trades on the build-ing site were represented as a guarantee of the final product’s solidity.Hence, as the eighteenth-century legal scholar, Claude-Joseph de Fer-rière, concluded, “The privileges of a mason, who builds one house andwho makes repairs in another house, outstrips (l’emporte sur) all other


privileges.” In particular, de Ferrière underscored the authority of themaster artisan over that of the proprietor, suspected of being too finan-cially compromised to assure safe construction practices in his or herown structure.32

Once having worked his or her way through the intricacies of theChambre des Bâtiments, the proprietor had then to consult the annualAlmanach des Bâtiments to contract the various guild masters, from thesculptors and carpenters to the locksmiths and roofers for the last stagesof construction. The Almanach was a listing of the names and addressesof each Parisian builder with the technical expertise and the mastershipthat 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 onlyspent a quarter of the overall cost.”33

To what extent do the layers of authority in the guild universe gov-erning the construction trades explain the housing shortage that droveup rents and accelerated the decline of socially diverse apartment build-ings? Did the complex bureaucracy of building aggravate or attenuatethe urban ills we have examined? While the corporate idea may havebeen lucrative for financing many functions of the French state, forassuring quality control, and for guaranteeing the commercial repu-tations of artisanal trades, its pertinence to sound construction maynot have been so evident to the average Parisian proprietor. For afternegotiation through the welter of contending authorities, the finalresult was that a declining number of building projects were seen tocompletion.

Once again, the numbers are eloquent. While at the beginning ofthe eighteenth century (1718–1722) 44 building projects out of the47 projects (94 percent) that received authorization from the Parisianhousing authorities were actually constructed; by the end of the ancienrégime (1788–1792) that number was 104 out of 122 (85 percent). Evenfewer projects for the restoration of older structures were completed inlater years. Despite a strong demand for housing, the very ability ofbuilders to construct in Paris seemed increasingly obstructed by corps ofconstruction interests run amuck, demonstrating to Parisians that thewell-policed state was not always a well-ordered one.34

Yet, this classic neo-liberal narrative of archaic guild masters under-mining an increasingly capitalist and “modern” construction marketinvites, in turn, a historical critique. The discourse of tradition-boundcorporations caught in a perpetual defense of custom against a reformmonarchy, in fact, was employed in specific contexts. Over time,the Châtelet, the courts, and the Parlement constantly redefined the


privileges of the Chambre des Bâtiments and the master masons’guild. They became flexible and adaptable corporate institutions thatresembled embryonic forms of a municipal housing authority. Whiledefending themselves against lawsuits and adjusting their practice tothe barrage of decrees and ordinances of the Crown, the Chambre’s offi-cers, in particular, articulated their essential mission as that of executingcoherent guidelines in a mix of public and private considerations. Therites of elaborate housing inspections, interventions to settle wage andpricing disputes, the approval of licenses to engage in construction –these and other functions heralded a world in which constructionentered the domain of state oversight and regulation.35

In the name of the public good, the process of construction washence partially divorced from private entrepreneurship and the inter-ests of proprietors; it was also to be stripped from market-driveninterests and made a function of venal offices reserved for the architectes-experts-bourgeois – not to be confused with the non-venal architectes-experts-entrepreneurs in the baroque nomenclature of corporatism. Thearchitectes-experts-bourgeois functioned as municipal officers with the taskof inspecting the sites before, during, and after construction. Theseexperts, accountable to colleagues and to the Crown, often found them-selves in a confrontational relationship with proprietors, who in turnhad recourse to the business-oriented architectes-experts-entrepreneurs. Inresponse to the multiplication of conflicts between corporations andproprietors, the experts were increasingly responsible for rendering theconstruction site a matter of public record.36

The experts’ charge was greatly heightened by eighteenth-centurypopulation growth and a fixation on facilitating increased air flow ina crowded city. This energized a movement to harmonize street andbuilding alignment in the 1760s. Lack of circulation, of course, was aleitmotif that covered a multitude of sins. Business and finance couldonly flourish where human and street traffic could flow unimpeded.Also, by restricting the size of buildings and seeking greater uniformityin construction more light would illuminate the city and air would flowmore freely. The cohabitation of structures of different heights and alack of sufficient control over the entire city plagued efforts to allowcity dwellers to breathe, move, and even to see. The Parisian buildingcorporations and their numerous officers became oriented toward theregulation and inspection of regulation amidst the frenzied atmosphereof post-1763 construction, culminating with the application of heightlimitations imposed by the Crown in 1783 and 1784.37

A wealth of documentation also suggests that the experts had anincreasingly difficult time doing their work in the face of a growing


number of obstacles: lawsuits by proprietors seeking “liberty of enter-prise” as in the case cited above of 1759–1761; by a complex of royalreforms in the 1770s (as we will see); and, perhaps most decisivelyof all, by the stagnant numbers of architectural experts. For the entireeighteenth century, the building inspectors attached to the Chambredes Bâtiments remained frozen at 60 hereditary offices, whereas thenumbers of master masons increased by 60 percent between 1761 and1790 alone. As at least two or three experts were assigned to super-vise the last stages of each construction site, and as legal conflictwas on the rise in all sectors of Parisian artisanal trades, the buildingtrades suffered from a decline of available officers qualified to overseeconstruction.38

In the building sector, the limits of the reach of Parisian corporatismand not the excesses of monopoly control were responsible for obstruct-ing the pace and rhythm of construction. Just as the Crown imposedcoherent architectural styles, materials, and decorative sculptures onthe bridges, places, and a few of the quays of Paris, so did market andlegal forces exert growing pressure for equitable procedures and stan-dard techniques to assure better quality construction. But in the faceof lawsuits, reforms, and polemics, the Chambre des Bâtiments neverfully carved out its potential role as a regulatory authority. And asthe production of houses appeared to be in disarray, private construc-tion inspired ever-greater demands for public oversight in the lives ofParisians.39

Architectural critics and the guild debate on theconstruction sites of Paris

We will discuss the art of building; of the confused heaps of annoy-ing debris; of the immense piles of crude materials; of the startlingnoise of hammers; of the perilous scaffolds; of a terrifying assem-blage of machines; of an army of dirty and wretched workers. It isall that is vulgar that presents itself to the imagination, (yet) this ismerely the disagreeable surface of an Art whose mysterious ingenu-ity is grasped by few and which excites the admiration of those whopenetrate it.40

Marc-Antoine Laugier, 1752

The corrosive critiques of the construction practices in Paris shed lighton the famous debate that preceded the first suppression of the guildsin France by Turgot in 1776 – and partially explain why so few revolu-tionaries deplored the coup de grâce of the corporations as stipulated by


the 1791 Loi d’Allarde and Loi Le Chapelier. For the execrable imageof the building trades, although undeserved, vividly illustrates the rea-sons why the larger corporate universe of Paris began to inspire deepdissatisfaction at the end of the ancien régime. In this particular sectorof the economy, the guild question – the source of a vigorous theoreti-cal debate from the 1750s to the 1770s – was transformed into a polemicthat unfolded in the illustrious halls of the Académie d’architecture as wellas in the law courts. Corporate monopolies were increasingly denouncedfor obstructing the implementation of an “enlightened” urban policy inthe overcrowded and insalubrious city.41

In the case of the building sector, a blurring of two controversiesinvolving the corporate universe took place in the last quarter of theeighteenth century. One involved the public’s demand for more strin-gent oversight of construction; the other called into question the guilds’role in policing and regulating the labor market. Here we see that theEnlightenment’s critique of corporations and the larger guild debatedid not flow exclusively from a purely ideological liberalism. They werealso grounded in the specific challenges of emergent sectors. Professionsstruggling to adapt to commercial and labor markets of preindustrialcapitalism were theaters of the great debate on political economy.

Nor were criticisms of the status quo in the construction industry lim-ited to those of “interested” entrepreneurs, proprietors, or the actorswho directly benefited from mounting litigation, the guild lawyers.Rather, architectural theorists, as we will see, turned out to be mosteffective critics of the construction site. They faulted the constructionprocess itself, dominated by what Laugier deemed an “army of dirty andwretched workers,” as a barrier to the creation of a capital worthy ofthe Republic of Letters. The inexpensive Parisian building was poorlyconstructed because of a system of corporate monopolies, inadequateadministration of craftsmen (police des métiers), and an overall declineof effective regulation. The proponents of a new Parisian architecturebitterly denounced both the houses and the men who put them up.42

The sense of a breakdown of quality control due to guild monopolygave rise to many proposals to found the well-ordered building site. Andas the concern for public safety evolved into a fear of the disarray inanarchic private construction, a wave of architectural treatises foundinspiration in Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–1772). Tothe circle of encyclopedists, to explicate construction as a “mechan-ical art” was an integral part of the larger project to bring a preciseand orderly method to every craft. As Diderot put it, “each laborer,each science, each art, each article, has its language and its style.” The


disorderly building process represented an opportunity and a challengeto eliminate turmoil borne of prejudice, and to bring a harmony of inter-ests to a deeply divided social milieu. Hence, both encyclopedists andarchitectural theorists sought to impose clear and distinct principles ofarchitecture on the building process, making Paris as well organized andas well constructed as befitting the capital of the kingdom.43

One of the earliest and most devastating salvos against the corporatebodies was published well before the Encyclopédie: Michel de Fremin’swidely cited Critical Memoirs on Architecture Concerning the Idea of a Trueand False Architecture (1702). This text was a furious condemnation ofthe deceitful practices of the ouvriers de Paris, meaning for the most partmaster artisans, who are excoriated page after page for ruining architectsand propriétaires by their systematic cost-cutting ruses. Enlightenmenttreatises on architecture published toward mid-century by architecturalcritics Antoine-Babuty Desgodetz, and Nicolas Le Camus de Mèzières,among others, denounced the domination of guildsmen in Parisian con-struction. But this grim assessment of the poor quality of building in thecapital was most famously articulated by the energetic promoter of Neo-classicism, Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713–1769), who castigated Parisianbuilding practices in a broader discussion promoting a return to ancientsources 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 heaffixed his name to the Essai’s frontispiece. Laugier became, togetherwith Jacques-François Blondel, an illustrious voice for an enlightenedarchitecture in France. His most notable and ambitious project soughtto unite all the Parisian ports of entry, places, and bridges with a densenetwork of interconnecting streets. Seeking as well to rid constructionpractices of “vain prejudices,” founded equally on “the laziness of work-ers” and the “timid spirit of masters,” Laugier launched a polemic forthe classical ideal of architecture in the guise of an impassioned pleato transform Paris for the benefit of the public that inhabited the city.In distinctive Enlightenment fashion, Laugier sought to bring and con-demn before the court of public opinion the building conventions ofParis. He was not content to complain of the use of massive foundationstones on aesthetic grounds alone: it is “the Public which groans fromthis annoying excess.” It is “the Public that disdains all practices dic-tated to save money.” The excessive use of wood to support masonry forinstance is the cause of too many fires: but this too is a practice that willstop “as soon as the Public will declare itself” against such a convention.Laugier took part in the wider crusade of philosophers and critics who


spoke for public opinion in advocating reform. His avowal to articulate“the enlightened result of the common and public reflection” made hima favored critic of the building trades.45

If following custom was routinely attacked – as being “superstitiouslyenslaved to bad practice” – it was forms of cheating that exasperatedLaugier the most. The systematic use of shoddy construction materials,the inflation of prices, the needless expansion of projects to the ruinof proprietors were regarded as rooted in the excessive trust granted tomaster artisans and guild syndics to police their own kind. The searchfor profit, to Laugier, even corrupted the experts of the Chambre desBâtiments who inspected the building site. Laugier saw many of theexperts as favoring fellow members of the corporation against propri-etors in exchange for payoffs by those who employed cheap labor orshoddy materials: “We must not trust the experts’ building reports: manyof them only have a poor grasp of construction, and some of them workin bad faith in order to give false assurances against the perils (of theconstruction site) which they only pretend to want to repress.”46

Laugier’s harsh attack on the construction trades linked the opacity ofinternal policing with the failure to reconstruct a capital city based onclear and distinct enlightened and classical models. This critique gainedwide currency in the last four decades of the ancien régime. Was the solu-tion, then, to create a competitive construction market or to strengthenthe visible hand of the state?

Laugier, as with Fremin, Le Camus, and many other distinct voices,articulated a forceful critique of contemporary building practices; butthey did not offer a single response to the cheating, shoddy practices,uncontrolled labor flow, and other forms of deceit. Despite the commoncomplaints put forth by Enlightenment-era critics, there was no consen-sus on reform. The only general points of agreement between reformersand legal authorities was, first, that the construction corporations hadceased to fulfill their charge, and, second, that the creation of a freemarket 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 – convergedin a radical first step: an attack on the layers of privilege and protectionsenjoyed by those who laid claim to a monopoly on the Parisian con-struction sites and who were seen as compromising precisely the publicsafety they were charged to protect. In the end, an audacious experi-ment to open the construction market to the laws of offer and demandwas one response to the cacophony of voices clamoring for an elusive“reform.”


In 1775, the controversy over building procedures reached the sum-mit of the state. Less than a year into his tenure as controller generalof Louis XVI (August 1774–May 1776), Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgotstripped away the venal privileges of the Parisian architecte-expert-bourgeois who was forbidden from engaging in entrepreneurship. Insist-ing that the office of “architect” signifies a “master artisan who knowsthe craft of building,” Turgot imposed the principle that only those whodo business in construction should take charge of the tasks of build-ing site inspections, verification, and controls. He attempted to stampout the “prejudice” that had bifurcated “architectural science” and“entrepreneurship” by arguing that commercial investment in buildingwas the only grounds for real expertise in construction. Turgot attackedstudents of “simple theory” in favor of the individual who “joins spec-ulation to daily practice to become a qualified architect – a man ofcapacity and of recognized experience.” Concluding with a flourish, that“there is no other veritable Architect than he who is at the same timean Entrepreneur,” Turgot’s impassioned defense of the capitalist builderheralded a new age which he sought to inaugurate with the liberaliza-tion of the grain trade later that year and the suppression of the guildsin February 1776.47

As with his later, more ambitious failures, Turgot attempted to tipthe balance of power on the building site completely in favor ofthe “new man,” the architect cum capitalist. His impassioned plea onbehalf of this mythic figure sought, with one fell swoop, to overturnthe fragile legal and economic equilibrium established through cen-turies of legal precedent and ordinances that directed relations betweenarchitects, entrepreneurs, and proprietors. Henceforth, those subject tomarket principles would alone direct the process of construction. Theopen market and unfettered entrepreneurship, rather than the Academyd’Architecture, the Chambre, or the guilds, was the proper traininggrounds for qualified experts.

Turgot’s 1775 reform to open the building site to entrepreneurialcontrol was withdrawn with his “disgrace” the following year. But itsimportance remains as a key preparatory to his ambitious project toabolish all corporations. For after the decree of March 1775, the politicaleconomy of the Physiocrats was projected beyond the building sites andinto all shops and ateliers of France. The analysis put forth by Turgotin his February 1776 edict suppressing the guilds closely followed theargument of his earlier attack on the privileges of venal experts. General-izing about all corporations, Turgot portrayed the guilds as responsiblefor all of France’s economic inadequacies. Due to the guilds’ pernicious


influence, the French economy remained wedded to traditional method,to a closed labor market, and to an ethos of protectionism and statistinterventionism. The decrepit guild idea undermined the productivecapacities of capital and labor by costing more than it could possiblybe worth to the nation.48

Hence, the debate on how to create an efficient construction mar-ket in Paris flowed a few months later into the liberal critique of whatTurgot himself called Colbertism. Turgot’s fierce polemic that consti-tuted the introduction of the 1776 reform was rife with denunciationsof “restraint on trade,” of “monopoly,” the “slowness of work,” andthe accumulation of “irrational statutes.” He dismissed with particularfervor the core routine of guilds, the antiquated practice of acquiringmasterships “only after having paid multiple fees or exactions, wherebya part of the business assets are consumed in pure wastefulness, ratherthan applied to commerce or to the atelier.” By suppressing masterships,Turgot portrayed his project as the liberation of the economy from theyoke of all corporate practices.49

Turgot’s edict was at first resisted by the Paris Parlement, whichrelented and approved it only after registering a protest. Its remon-strance, published a month after the edict was promulgated, focusedon the central assumption of Turgot’s 1776 reform: as the laws of themarketplace were universal, so the guilds could be utterly abolishedthroughout France without regard to the particularities of town or trade.In their rebuke to the author of the reform, the Parisian magistratesdwelled at length on the corrosive effects of liberalization upon Parisitself. 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 propercheck to the “license of the cities.” Such “license,” moreover, would beinevitably ushered in by the liberty of an unfettered labor market; itwas the natural corollary to the administrative chaos provoked by theabolition of the guilds. For without tight controls on journeymen andartisans:

the spirit of subordination will be lost, the love of independence willsprout in all the hearts; all workers will want to work for their ownaccount; the present masters will see their shops and stores aban-doned; the lack of work and the shortages that will follow will leadthis crowd of journeymen to escape their ateliers where they hadfound subsistence, and the multitude which will (henceforth) neverbe contained, will cause the greatest disorders.50


In this world turned upside down, the magistrates warned, liberty woulddegenerate into “license” and, worst of all, “independence” into insub-ordination. No policing authority was sufficiently vigilant to avoidbeing “drowned in the details of a city as vast as Paris.” By necessity,then, the police of Paris needed the corporations to maintain “interiordiscipline.” To the magistrates of the Paris Parlement, police authoritywas by its very nature “grounded in the intermediary authority of amultitude of domestic corps” – the corporations – “with power morewidespread than its (Parlement’s) own.”51

At the core of the Parlement’s remonstrance lay an indictment of lib-eral economic policies as a threat to ancien régime urban society. Thefree-play of the laws of the market might be salutary, but the particularissues of Paris – the flow of migrant labor to the city, the complicationsof establishing policing mechanisms over different trades, the questionof quality control of production in a major metropolis – made the capi-tal of the kingdom an exception to such “universal” laws. While libertymight be more desirable than containment, Paris was absolutely not theplace to experiment with liberalism. Paris was too vast and too unrulyfor central authority to govern the workforce without help from cor-porations. Again, the magistrates were preoccupied with the amountof administrative detail that the police of the Châtelet would have tomaster to assume the guilds’ authority:

(W)hat city is comparable to the Capital where details are lost inits immensity; where the citizen lives unknown in his own house,whereas, in the majority of the towns in the provinces, commonrelations between inhabitants establish between them a naturalsurveillance?

The ebb and flow of a liberated labor market was the greatest enemyof “natural surveillance.” Thus, it was precisely in their ability “toslow down the prodigious immigration toward the towns,” as in theyearly migration of seasonal workers, that corporations made their mostvital contribution to the policing of the Capital. The guilds substi-tuted an institutional means of surveillance where “common relationsbetween inhabitants” no longer held sway. Institutional and corporatecontrols over labor, otherwise unchecked in the “immensity” of the cap-ital, were the most compelling arguments for the preservation of theguilds.52

The alarm sounded by the Parlement that Paris was becoming a “dis-united multitude of interests” cut off from true communal ties by the


dismantling of its organic coherence, was hardly new to the eighteenthcentury. Fears of excessive and reckless expansion had since the reign ofHenri II inspired efforts to seal Paris off from what the parlementarianscalled this “prodigious immigration.” Yet before 1776 the question ofprotecting the social integrity of Paris focused on precisely demarcatingthe physical limits of the city. Between 1548 and 1766, the Crown, theParlement, and the municipality of Paris published 31 edicts attempt-ing to fix the size of the city. Most of these proclamations were effortsto institute a more efficient policy of taxation by the collectors of theFarmers-General Wall. But the lack of precision regarding where Parisended and where surrounding villages began, in particular to the North-east and Southeast, fed the sense that the borders of the city could neverbe policed without the corporations. In sum, the porousness of the ill-defined “town limits” of Paris was apparent to one and all. Official edictswere rarely successful in stemming the tide of those perceived as rootlessflotsam.53

By denouncing these “disunited multitudes of interests,” the Paris Par-lement helped to shift the focus of controversy on the overpopulationand physical integrity of the city to that of a fear of anarchy provokedby liberalism. The 1776 remonstrance conceptualized labor migration asrequiring social and economic containment, that of the police of Parisas embodied by the guilds. The usefulness of the guilds was also foundin the daily protection they offered over various “plagues” of industry,such as “fraud, bad faith, greed, imperfection of work” that could onlybe detected on an intimate scale, by those with inside knowledge of theindustry. 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 themembers that compose them,” and which can only be contrasted to thegeneral level of police surveillance. How could the office charged withassuring the policing of craftsmen, the lieutenant general of police, “suf-fice for the innumerable disputes that will arise?” How could he who isexpected to survey “the totality of a city so immense” also be expectedto “pause over details of an administration so complicated?”54

The parlementarians deftly opposed the heavy-handed nature of offi-cial police power to the “interior discipline of the corporations.” “Thepolice has only two means in its hands. Force, which it can only usewhen it is necessary. Terror, which demonstrates its vigilance, and bywhich it rules . . . .” By contrast, “what police could be more gentle(douce) than that of the guilds?” By remaining sensitive to the idiosyn-cratic nature of each craft, the “internal discipline of corporations”


would have means at its disposal a gentler power – and thus a morepersuasive one – than either force or terror. Corporate particularism wasnot 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 buildingtrades 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 findwork on Parisian building sites in the spring and summer, should not tobe allowed to enter at will an under-policed capital. While the level ofthe guild debate was mainly abstract, rarely descending to the specificsof any one trade, the parliamentarians marshaled a standard trope,focusing on the locksmiths and the fears they engendered. Without theguilds, journeymen locksmiths were free to use “false keys” to commitburglaries. Absent the master locksmith, thefts will “multiply, and whatclue could lead us to discover those who have abused the keys?” In fact,the parliamentarians argued, the power overseeing the locksmiths’ cor-poration ought to be enhanced not abolished. Those craftsmen demandan authority even more peremptory than that of mere guild masters tooverawe potential criminals, “and should attract the closest attention ofgovernment.” Mistrust of masterless building tradesmen compelled theadvocates of the guild economy to forget momentarily the superiorityof gentle policing.56

The wider resonance of the Parlement of Paris’s critique may bedetected in the very edict reinstating the guilds published after the fall ofTurgot in August 1776. In the eight-month interim, the Crown had beenconvinced that France lacked a policing mechanism sufficiently mages-terial to oversee a free labor market. In fact, the perceived fear of marketforces operating without police controls had already led to a de facto res-urrection of guild practices. The bookseller Hardy wrote that as of June1776, destitute journeymen returned to masters after their brief, failedexperiment in economic liberty.

The principal objective of the edict re-founding the guilds was tocreate a more “rational” and condensed corporate order. The Parisiancorporations were reduced from 120 before 1776 to 50 afterward, andsome of the guilds were synthesized into single all-purpose corporationssuch as the Community of Roofers, Plumbers, Tile Layers and Pavers.These new bastard guilds were conceived to be more easily broughtunder the expanded authority of the lieutenant general of police. Thelatter’s jurisdiction was extended with the power to review all electionsand decisions of guild officers, and with enhanced power to void statutes


and regulations leading to “excessive monopoly.” Such an arrangementwas a compromise in an era when both Physiocratic liberalism and tra-ditional corporatism had been largely discredited. The guilds may havebeen officially allowed to practice as before, but in the period betweenAugust 1776 and the Revolution, individual guild masters and journey-men increasingly used lawsuits to challenge ill-defined statutes or toappeal the arbitrarily strengthened mandate of some reconfigured cor-porations. As we will see, the turmoil of this stepped-up contestationinduced 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 1776and their August 1776 resurrection, the decade of the 1780s featuredrepeated experimentation to transform the Parisian world of work. Forthe guilds that had been briefly obliterated were only imperfectly re-founded by Turgot. Predictably, the merger of often disparate corps torender the guild economy more “rational” provoked more litigationthan it settled. Having swept away the jurisprudence concerning theworld of work in 1776, the Crown, the courts, and the police of thetrades now had to put it back together piecemeal.

Once again, the building site became a fertile ground for the stan-dardizing and analytic impulses of the various arms of the police:the lieutenant general of the police situated in the Châtelet, lawyersattached to the Chambre des Bâtiments, and the architectural expertscharged with responsibility over the building site. Their efforts to recon-figure the corporate boundaries of the building trades were to inspirea violent resistance by those most affected by designs for a “rational”taxonomy of the organization of labor – the laborers themselves. Dan-gerous innovation had only aggravated a general “insubordination andinsolence,” in Hardy’s words.58

A series of ordinances and royal edicts sought to fill a concep-tual vacuum in the guild statutes. These featured, in particular, theforceful 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, andsought to increase the collaboration between guild officers and policecommissioners of the Châtelet. In particular, he sought to revive thepolicy of a workers’ passport system (livrets), to stem the tide of migrantlabor flowing from the provinces into urban areas, especially Paris.


The livrets were imposed in an uneven fashion but proved a formidablydissuasive tool in controlling preindustrial labor.59

The revival of the guilds also created an occasion for the assertion ofwider powers by the 48 police commissioners attached to the Châtelet.The litigious 1780s represented, to them, an opportune moment tocrack down on possible abuses on the work site. Starting in 1785, theCommissioner Allix, whose jurisdiction comprised the bureau of theCommunity of Master Carpenters, raided building sites often in searchof unauthorized workmen in the carpentry trades performing skilledtasks (ouvriers sans qualités or faux-ouvriers), or the use of cheap con-struction materials (bâtir par économie), as well as shoddy workmanship(malfaçon). A further effort to end the putatively lax supervision of build-ing trades was a police ordinance of 1787, warning against the steadilymounting “disorder and excesses” provoked by laborers waiting to behired on the place de Grève. It was in this volatile context, in 1785,that building journeymen and unskilled laborers organized a series ofstrikes for higher wages. For the most part, these labor actions tookplace over one or two days, and were quickly resolved by the immedi-ate intervention of one of the 48 police commissioners attached to theChâtelet.60

A guild reaction at the end of the ancien régime accompanied there-founding of the corporate universe on the construction sites ofParis.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 com-missioner noted that faire grève meant to “not work in order to have thedaily wage increased.” This is “what they call (it) among themselves,”he explained, translating for his superiors this argot or patois term forstrike that would soon enter the modern terminology of labor conflict.The source of the expression was the place de Grève. A refusal to work atthis central locale, otherwise used for public executions, was no doubtan impressive act of defiance. By strictly enforced ordinance, the placede Grève was the site where most building masters and entrepreneursgathered early in the morning to hire day laborers.62

In the aftermath of a series of strikes in the construction sector duringthe summer of 1785, the Chambre des Bâtiments, in an accord with theCommunity of Master Masons, convened and passed a resolution seek-ing to eliminate “the infinitude of contestation” and to crack down onthe “slowness of construction.” In order to obtain closer collaborationbetween entrepreneurs, masters, and experts, the Chambre implementeda floating seasonally adjusted tarif or wage scale for laborers. Unlikeits previous incarnations, this tarif was established to fluctuate in


relationship to the health of the building industry and the price ofsubsistence items in Paris. Every December, the salaries for the follow-ing year were affixed to the door of the masons’ guild and distributedon the place de Grève. The Chambre thus claimed for itself the power torestrain the salaries of workers by a draconian measure: the impositionof 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 failedto account for the tenacity of quotidian practices of masters and jour-neymen. The very same day that the Chambre posted the new wagescale, the masons, stonecutters, limousins, and day laborers from themajor projects of Paris went on strike, left their workplaces, and assem-bled in two sites associated with centers of power. The first was theplace Louis-le-Grand (re-named the place Vendôme in 1799), home ofthe Châtelet’s Lieutenant General of Police, Jean-Charles-Pierre Lenoir(1774–1785). The second was the Château de Brunoy, 15 miles outsideof Paris, where it was rumored that Louis XVI had been present. Thesize of the crowd grew as it moved closer to its destinations, and, inthe eyewitness account of the bookseller Hardy, “forced certain of theircomrades who worked on individual houses to join them for the upris-ing.” Hardy estimated the crowd at some 700–800 builders who showedup at the home of the lieutenant general of police. Simultaneously, 300builders appeared at the King’s temporary residence, doing so menac-ingly, “with their tools in hand.” Lenoir granted an audience to a fewbuilders and “listened with benevolence to its statement.” Then, pre-dictably, he urged the laborers to return to work, promising due justice.Not so easily discouraged, the builders chose one worker “to interpretfor his colleagues” suggesting the majority of builders were provincialswho spoke the patois of the Creuse. Hardy recounts that the Creusoiscomplained that entrepreneurs:

fattened themselves on the blood and the proper substance of theirworkers . . . to which the Lt. General of Police, politically and withoutdoubt to appear to be more attentive to this affair, and so to managemore easily to calm the spirits, then wrote the names and addressesof the Entrepreneurs in question.64

This calmed the crowd until the following day, 26 July 1785, whenthe Paris Parlement in an emergency meeting rescinded the Chambredes Bâtiment’s wage scale on the technical grounds of irregular pro-cedure. In a final act of compliance with the journeymen’s wishes,


14 entrepreneurs received orders from the lieutenant general of policeto reimburse workers whose salaries were reduced by the voided sen-tence. Hardy noted with satisfaction, after the peaceful dénouement ofthe strike: “everything has returned to order.”65

The Parisian strike of July 1785 highlights several features of laborstrife on the building sites of Paris at the end of the ancien régime. Despitemany legal injunctions, most notably during the 1780s, there was noactive police repression of this movement to increase wages. What thecommissioners called faire grève (strike) among builders was an appealfor the mediation of conflict by the authorities; this was underscoredby the appearance of the crowd at the home of the lieutenant generalof police. After a decade of abolition, reform, and restoration of thebuilding trades, the settlement of the strike represented a tacit recog-nition of the dignity of customary practices of laborers by the Parisianpolice. The police and the people were here both moved by what Hardycalled a general “revulsion” at the Chambre’s action: its brutal attemptto fill the void of corporate regulation by imposing an industry-widelabor policy in one fell swoop. It did so by jettisoning employment prac-tices that, in the police reports of the crowd’s actions, were embeddedin tradition. Fluctuating salaries, permeable job categories, favoritism,the use of a core of loyal journeymen, the occasional days off here andthere for Feast Days – these were not to be weeded out to make way forstandardized practices on the building site in the name of greater trans-parency. Simply put, traditional practices of labor excluded preciselycircumscribed tasks assigned to fixed salaries. The Chambre’s preciseclassification 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 wascomprehended at the end of the ancien régime. A defense of the “cus-tomary” practices of journeymen was a strategy every bit as effective asthe Paris Parlement’s remonstrance against Turgot in 1776. As MichaelSonenscher has demonstrated, the recourse to a language of lost tradi-tion was in itself a legal tactic to protect guild privileges. In fact, therewas nothing “customary” in the demand for a flexible wage scale as itwas specifically guaranteed by previous guild statute. But the “inven-tion of tradition” in the strike of 1785 resulted in the radicalization ofa discourse about the privileges of labor, one that mobilized journey-men masons, stonecutters, limousins, and day laborers in a general strikethat shut down the construction sites of Paris. Furthermore, the resolu-tion of this movement confirmed the enhanced power and prestige ofthe Parisian police. The protest before Lenoir’s house demonstrated that


the influence of the lieutenant general of police had grown in inverseproportion to that of the reconfigured corporations. The decline of thebuilding guilds and the growing appeal of centralized authority wereplainly 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 keyconcepts of privilege, custom, and hierarchy) and the reform idea (con-ceived around liberty, progress, and meritocracy) became a drama playedout at the heart of the capital and before an audience of all who wishedto comment. It suggested to Mercier the impossibility of any meaning-ful change in the capital city of France. The resignation evident in hisobservation, the verbal equivalent of a Gallic shrug cited at the begin-ning, might have served as words of caution to the reforming Crown atthe end of the ancien régime: “There are political evils that must be tol-erated since we cannot find absolute solutions, and such is the scope ofthe city: we cannot sweep off the earth those who live in lodging housesand attics.”

The breakdown of confidence in the ancien régime construction indus-try represents a larger failure on the part of the state to breach the gapbetween the lofty promise of the corporate order and its very untidyrealities. The unintended consequences of attempts to reign in and toproject order onto what Mercier called “the Capital’s unbounded mag-nificence” was that this vital sector of the Parisian economy came toincarnate the breakdown of the institutions of the ancien régime in pub-lic opinion. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the strategiesof self-policing guilds, of liberal free agency, of statist centralization, of adespotism of “experts,” and, finally, of a return to direct police interven-tionism were successively favored by the reforming Crown, only to beabandoned in efforts to find other, more perfect solutions to an increas-ingly unruly process – and all this, to “reform,” in Laugier’s terms, “allthat is vulgar that presents itself to the imagination.” Whether it wasever possible to control labor migration, to put an end to fraud and poorconstruction, to mediate all work disputes, and, in general, to assurethe public of the well-policed building site, was perhaps a project tooimmense for a state rapidly going bankrupt to have assumed. The con-struction sector made the reforming Crown’s failure visible to all whowitnessed or experienced the precariousness of an eighteenth-centurybuilding.


In fact, the “problem” with the construction trades may not have beenan excess of corporatism but rather its limitations – or more specifically,the lack of its reach over the entirety of Mercier’s “expansive reach of thecapital.” The reform efforts of all ideological stripes to reign in the venalbuilding inspectors and to dismantle the entire apparatus of the guildsaccomplished a political objective beyond what the reformers had inmind. They marginalized the alternative solution: that of extending theauthority of the corporations to the unincorporated areas of Paris, suchas the faubourg Saint-Antoine, where many of the accidents, cases ofshoddy workmanship, and accusations of corruption had surfaced, andwhere the harsh public judgment of the building corporations resonatedwith urgency.68

Beyond the immediate capacity of the building trades to constructthe capital city, what does the history of Paris construction corporationsreveal about the collapse of the ancien régime? Historians of seventeenth-century French absolutism, including Perry Anderson, William Beik andDavid Parker, have amply demonstrated the vital role of collaborationbetween social elites and the monarchy in strengthening and main-taining the absolutist state. Their scholarship emphasizes the commonpolitical and social concerns fusing the Crown’s interests with the classof privilege, wealth and power. Projecting this interpretation forwardto the second half of the eighteenth century, common interests alsocompelled corporate elites to collaborate with the Crown by accommo-dating its growing fiscal and administrative needs. Within the world ofwork, guild masters at the pinnacle of the urban social hierarchy playeda collaborative role parallel to that of rural seventeenth-century elites.As with the discredited nobility and landed magnates, Parisian elites ofthe world of work aided and abetted the Crown with significant corpo-rate financial “contributions” and a veritable bureaucracy to support theestablished social and economic order. Corporations serving as shadowadministrative agencies practiced this particular form of “bureaucraticdelegation,” as David Stasavage argues.69

Guild elites, particularly in the capital city, used corporations as thenobility had wielded institutions such as the courts and tax farms: toappropriate new wealth. This was partially accomplished with a “patri-otic” language of “service” as captured by the denomination metiersjurés – sworn trades – to convey undying loyalty to the King. Evenin its sweeping, self-interested, and doomed endeavour to standardizeseasonal wage scales in 1785, the Chambre des Bâtiments and Com-munity of Master Masons seized upon a dubious claim to rationality toact on behalf of the nation and the Crown, thus provoking the first


recorded industry-wide grève (strike). Here, corporate officers in thebuilding trades acted like their colleagues in the administrative, mili-tary, and judicial spheres by vastly expanding the authority of venaloffices as indirect sources for greater revenue. Not discursive merit,honor, or patriotism, but a utilitarian relationship to power bolsteredthe collaboration between the corporate regime and the monarchy.70

Mutual dependency and bureaucratic delegation, however, also meantthat corporatism and absolutism declined together. As we have seen,the cycles of sweeping abolition, partial restoration, and wholesalere-invention of the corporations spearheaded by Turgot and Necker inthe last decades of the ancien régime eventually destabilized a vital andconstituent pillar of monarchy. The result not only discredited the cor-porations but also helped to undermine the ancien régime’s corporateorganization of society. (As we will see, however, a refounded corpo-ratism survived the Revolution once stripped of alleged anachronismsand abuses.) For the Crown, the enfeeblement of the guilds, as wellas the “disgrace” of those who tried to reform them in the 1770s, hadominous repercussions for the following decade. The erosion of corpo-rate finances that followed the guilds’ gerrymandered restoration meantthe Crown’s fiscal crisis of the 1780s was viewed by the public as adeeper threat to the state’s viability than was actually the case. Therewas little confidence in a nearly bankrupt French state cut off from itscorporate moorings; few entrusted the monarchy to overcome its finalfiscal crisis without reviving credit flows backed by guilds. The monar-chy’s debt thus only exposed and aggravated its own lack of politicalresiliency. It was condemned by public opinion even if, by some mea-sures, the French state by the end of the 1780s was in less dire straitsthan soaring Great Britain. The emergency triggered by the FinanceMinister Calonne’s 1787 announcement that the state’s finances wereinsolvent accelerated the coup de grace of the discredited guild economyand of absolutism.71

In this respect, the end of the ancien régime heralded the characterof the new regime. For after 1789 the stark visibility of the revolu-tionary “police” embodied by section-based officials, City, Communal,Departmental administrators, and other functionaries, clearly demon-strated that the era of privileged corps commanding the work site wasfinished. As with the role of the lieutenant general of police in 1785, thehigh drama of the massive intervention of officials who represented thenation, and later, the Republic, could not have been more reassuring toParisians after 1789. For they provided a sharp contrast to the internal,“gentle,” and ultimately failed police of the artisans of the annihilatedancien régime.

2The Revolution and ConstructionGuilds, 1789–1793

The perceived breakdown in the ancien régime construction industry rep-resented, to many observers, a larger failure of the state to reconcile theidea of the corporate order with its untidy practices. The unintendedconsequence of reforms in the second half of the eighteenth centuryengraved the image of this sector as duplicating the Crown’s disinte-grating institutions – foundering structures in declining neighborhoodssymbolized the collapsing foundations of the monarchy. The stagger-ing tasks of controlling labor migration, cracking down on fraudulentpractices, mediating in work disputes, and assuring the public of thewell-policed building site were too immense for a state rapidly goingbankrupt to have assumed.1

The Revolution’s transformation of the construction sector was sureto be far-reaching in light of the prominence of the Parisian buildingtrades in the political critique and the economic collapse of the ancienrégime. In place of corporate monopolies and the strict divorce of “exper-tise” and entrepreneurship, the building trades would be regulated bysupply and demand, by the free agency of labor, and by the protec-tion of the “sacred and inviolable right” of property enshrined in theDeclaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of August 1789. Aboveall, the dismantling of the ancien régime system of building followedthe implacable logic of anti-corporatism: the abolition of the guildsin 1791 was followed by the suppression of all corporate administra-tive and academic bodies, including the Parisian housing authority, theChambre des Bâtiments, in 1792 and the Academy of Architecture in1793.

The consolidation of the revolutionary state took place in manydomains, but the Parisian construction site demonstrated that civilfunctionaries paid with state salaries could fully assume supervisory,

63


administrative, and architectural responsibilities. These were previouslythe exclusive domain of venal office holders and accountable to theCrown. Thereafter, a new technocratic, entrepreneurial, and engineer-ing elite emerged to replace the networks of building oligarchies ofthe ancien régime. Simply put, by invoking the virtues of talent, experi-ence, and merit, the new officials of Parisian public construction assuredtheir central place in the new order, while ideologically lying to restthe corporate model of the ancien régime construction industry. Thiswas not merely an abstract political discourse formulated opportunis-tically in the meritocratic categories of the Revolution. For by investingin the construction of the capital during the Revolution and Empireconstruction magnates and state functionaries eventually carved outa niche for new elites at the pinnacle of the post-revolutionary urbaneconomy.2

Amidst the étatisation of construction oversight, however, the para-doxical endurance of the guilds flowed from the stabilizing effects of acorporate economy in the first two years of the Revolution. This chap-ter examines the assets of the guilds – in a figurative and literal sense –as among the reasons why the corporations were only suppressed atthe end of Revolution’s second year, in the élan that had swept awaymost other controls on production and exchange. The historiographicalconsensus on abolition focuses on parliamentary debates and decisionsrather than on socio-economic practice. But, as we have seen, the cor-porations were central to the stabilization of workplace and politicalauthority and the creation of networks of credit, materials, and person-nel. As we will see, they remained crucial to the organization of laborand to bureaucratic hierarchies, as well as to the application of qualitycontrols over production during the Revolution.3

The master masons’ guild, for example, was partially assimilated tothe Paris municipality by a decree to collaborate with the ParisianDepartment of Public Works in December 1790. Writing on behalfof the Department, Mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly called for officials ofthe community of master masons to do the impoverished municipal-ity’s bidding in construction and reparations by assuming inspectionresponsibilities over public works. The master masons’ guild was hence-forth conceived of as a “fraternal administration,” with that of themunicipality in assuring public safety. This experiment in the “munici-palization” of the master masons’ guild no doubt in part explains thebrief, peaceful cohabitation of corporations and urban authorities inthe decidedly anticorporatist political culture of the National Assembly.Furthermore, guild officials, particularly, the syndics and the adjuncts,

The Revolution and Construction Guilds, 1789–1793 65

figured prominently in the municipality’s struggle to assure Parisians’safety around construction sites.4

Perhaps an even more vital function was the corporations’ centralrole in helping to overcome the principal challenge of construc-tion in the transition from the ancien régime to the early Revo-lution: the crisis in credit and attitudes toward indebtedness andrisk-taking. Entrepreneurs and proprietors in the private constructionsector were awash in debt by the end of the 1780s. Parisians hadincreased their net arrears by 533 million livres between 1770 and1789. And among the reservoirs soaking up Parisians’ wealth, alongwith education and land acquisition, was a massive investment instones.5 Indeed, Paris is no exception to the lowly historical sta-tus of the unglamorous subject of real-estate speculation: it is, andremains, an entirely overlooked motor of urban development. (Or per-haps it is overlooked simply because there is no money in poetry,just as there is no poetry in money, as the classicist Robert Gravesput it.)6

Also, adding to the frenzied atmosphere of construction, the monar-chy encouraged real-estate investment and construction by stimulatingspeculative activities. The ordinance of 18 August 1766 eased the wayfor investors to take greater risks in building, for it mandated thatspeculators in a project could claim all property on a construction siteshould a contractor go bankrupt during construction. One result wasthat razing and erecting entirely new structures were greatly favored –for being more profitable – over rehabilitation. This fueled speculationin the construction market in the period leading up to the Revolution.The 1766 ordinance eliminated ponderous risk for wealthy investors inconstruction projects. Projects passed before the Chambre des Bâtimentsfor extensive repairs of older structures actually declined in Paris: 493plans for maintenance were approved between 1718 and 1722, whileonly 298 were submitted between 1788 and 1792. Taking advantage ofthese favorable conditions, Parisian elites found not only the construc-tion sector but the housing market writ large increasingly accessible togrowing numbers of newly wealthy individuals.7

As a result of unfettered Parisian construction after the SevenYear’s War, intensified financial risk fell heavily upon the construc-tion trades. These relied increasingly upon the corporations to stakelabor costs and other investments potentially lost with the bankruptcyof a single contractor. Two archival sources suggest that the financesof building tradesmen were particularly well protected by the sector’scorporations. For an earlier period, the credit-worthiness of the


community of master masons is itemized in a scrupulous balance sheetof guild arrears and assets. They show a net surplus of 68,133 livres in theperiod, 1752–1763, after which this rare paper trail tails off. While thisbalance sheet speaks little to the immediate pre-revolutionary period,the book-keeping in itself is an exercise of economic precision mosttelling for the financial health of this branch of the corporate universe.8

In a separate document, this time directly concerning our period, thebankruptcy registry of the Châtelet partially records the numbers ofbusiness failures in Paris. This shows a total of 1,617 bankruptciesdeclared between 1757 and 1791. A mere 36 of recorded economic fail-ures concerned the building trades, and proportionately fewer of thesewere identified in the early years of the Revolution. The post-SevenYear’s War construction boom did not end in a significant bust, despitethe shaky economic climate between 1789 and 1791, and, as we willsee, despite the general perception of impending crisis. The corpora-tions’ utility to the Revolution included the continuity in guaranteeing,securing, and backing credit. Guilds, indeed, were a credit union avantla lettre.9

Conditions during the Revolution were surprisingly favorable to con-struction. Aided by an opportune economic conjuncture in the sector,from the spring of 1791 to the summer of 1792, the national authori-ties viewed the Parisian housing market as an exemplar of how a sectorcould be restored to health once liberated from the archaic, corrupt, andmonopolistic corporations – a caricature, surely. But by these means,Revolutionaries created an “invented memory” of a catastrophic sys-tem of ancien régime Parisian construction. Their new order, furthermore,was to be supervised by national authorities with larger aspirations thanto carve out the municipal housing authority for the city of Paris. Forrevolutionary construction practices only proved enduring after beingperfected by the ambitious men who would re-make Paris in theirimage – from Napoleon to Haussmann. The tradition of wholesale raz-ing and constructing the grands travaux were made possible after boththe corporate model of society and the liberalism of Turgot had beenpolitically “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 build-ing sites of Paris and, in particular, how the trades employed in theconstruction trades were politicized in revolutionary categories. Thearrival of the post-1789 civic order in urban construction was to bringtransparency, flexibility, and creativity to Paris’ most highly visible – andexemplary – economic sector, that of the capital’s construction industry.


Over the revolutionary decade, reform proposals poured into the pub-lic sphere, many in the form of petitions and pamphlets, calling forgreater investment, “transparency” between proprietors, entrepreneurs,and laborers, as well for enlarging the regulatory scope of the state. Asduring the end of the ancien régime, the reform idea in this literatureincluded the paradoxical goals of easing and tightening regulations.Liberty could only be won by stripping intermediary corporate bod-ies of monopoly control over construction and the labor market. Atthe same time, the vacuum created by the suppression of the Crown’sregulatory institutions had to be dealt with. Of course, with the fallof the monarchy and the Prussian invasion of August 1792, the rev-olutionary state would begin to face deeper challenges in war andcounter-revolution. The quotidian inspection of cracks in Parisian build-ings and the settling of arcane legal differences between contractors andproprietors were not, at first glance, priority activities of the FrenchRevolution, roiled in the start of nearly 23 consecutive years of con-tinual warfare. And, yet, improving the lives of Parisians, particularlyin the domain of everyday life where the ancien régime had been fail-ing, was, indeed, a revolutionary ambition. The transformation of theurban environment of Paris, now unquestionably the capital of France,was more than ever an elusive challenge during the revolutionarydecade.

The construction of the Revolution’s public sphere

In the early years of the Revolution, the creation of new types of publicspaces, the transformation of former religious structures into hospi-tals, schools, prisons, and barracks and the boom in theatre building,stimulated a demand for the builders of Paris. Revolutionary construc-tion 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 receivesparse public commissions in the revolutionary decade were mostlyengaged in the creation of “ephemeral” architecture, namely, the stag-ing of festivals, such as the Fête de la Federation, or the completion ofbridges and roads launched under the ancien régime, such as the pontde la Concorde opened in 1791. The principal reasons were the eco-nomic facts on the ground which put an abrupt end to the preference forrazing and replacing older structures – or destroying them for purposesof aiding traffic; such was the fate of the luxurious buildings of mostof the bridges crossing the Seine, structures torn down between 1786


and 1788. Revolutionaries, then, as now, applied the simple truism: it isoften less expensive to build than to restore.11

There were also perhaps more jobs to be had, and more moneyto be made, in destruction than in construction. Wholesale demoli-tion 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 todismantle the Bastille, employed 400 construction workers before theoutbreak of the Revolution in 1789. Starting on the evening of July14, Palloy mobilized a massive labor force to dismantle the fortresswhile rendering its debris into souvenirs. Iron shackles were melted intomedals 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 thuscontributed a “patriotic cult of relics” to festive celebrations of thetaking of the Bastille.12

Palloy was a shrewdly ambitious and enterprising representative ofnew men in the building trades – in a less media-savvy age, he wasalso well ahead of his time. His sense of self-promotion inspired nofewer 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 auto-biography, 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, withhis marriage to a building contractor’s daughter. His wealth flourished inthe construction business during the Revolution but was squandered inmassive printing bills for publications. An increasingly distressed tonesuggests this master builder, who bragged in July 1789 to possessinghalf a million pounds and seven houses, was close to ruin by the end ofhis life.13

Palloy’s most exalted project was a contribution to the debate onreplacing the dismantled Bastille fortress. His plan for a 72-foot col-umn was typical of many others; however, the construction process wasshrewdly conceptualized for the Revolution. Palloy demanded that theNational Assembly create a national draft to compel each of France’s83 Departments to send four building workers to Paris, including twostonecutters, a stonemason, and an assistant, so that “each departmentcontribute by their co-citizens to erect a monument to the glory ofthe French nation.” Eventually abandoning this and other ambitious


ventures, Palloy focused on executing public contracts for revolution-ary festivals. Before exhausting his resources, he contributed, earlyand often, to the articulation of a revolutionary patriotism based onnational unity through participation in constructing symbols of thenation.14

Thus, the Revolution did not abolish architecture, despite the biasof certain art and architectural historians to limit the Revolution’sarchitectural contributions to vandalism alone.15 Palloy demonstratesthat even in the hothouse environment of Revolutionary Paris, oppor-tunities for commissioned private and public building enterprises arosein fully sustained cadence. Certain forms of architecture were promoted,with particular attention to principles of democratization of use, stan-dardization, and, above all, surveillance. Also, the physical materialsused in construction were chosen with greater attention to the bottomline. Scarcities during the Revolution imposed a greater use of plas-ter of Paris and even cheaper substitute materials to replace expensivecut stone.

With the shift in priorities of form and content, public discourseabout Paris construction also developed in a new direction. In order tocarve out a place for the construction sector – and to seek favored treat-ment for public funds to be funneled to large-scale projects – prominententrepreneurs such as Palloy, as well as artisans, contractors, and archi-tects, wielded a patriotic discourse of civic regeneration that attributedtransformative powers to the Parisian building sector. The revolutionaryprinciples of “liberty, equality, fraternity” would be physically incar-nated, with greater political impact than via the written word, throughrevolutionary construction that would represent a new order to the restof the world. The civic discourse that began with a benign and rou-tine “lobbying” for new construction projects became a language thatclaimed for the builders of revolutionary Paris an exalted role in thesensual transmission of the Revolution’s meaning through the physi-cal reconstruction of the Capital. Paris would be the Rome and not theBabylon of the end of the eighteenth century.

In practice, however, the Revolution’s reticence to launch large-scaleurban projects was a result of the dramatic state of financial arrears. Butthere was also the popular reaction against the ancien régime’s lavish andfar-reaching schemes to remake Paris. The extravagant plan to expandthe wall around the capital by the Farmers-General Wall completedin 1787 ringed with Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s tollhouses, the barrièresd’octroi, the first target of the revolutionary crowd, created a back-lash of sorts against futile monumentalism. Nevertheless, the National


Assembly received and published many projects for reconstructing Parisfrom prominent architects, critics, and connoisseurs, suggesting thatopportunities existed to erect expansive and monumental structuresin the capital city. Notable plans were submitted for commissions tothe National Assembly by De Wailly, Brogniart, Poyet, Ledoux, Boul-lée, Lequeu, Gisors, Rousseau, Legrand et Molinos, Percier et Fontaine,with little success for their authors. While no contemporary source cred-ibly suggests these projects were practicable, they indicate an ambitionamong elite architectural circles to put their art to use in the new order.In theory, the regeneration of the French nation would follow a sym-bolic appropriation of the public space of the capital city by architectsand urban specialists. In practice, however, there was little appetitefor monumental efforts to create a unified landscape around massiveprojects entailing whole-scale urban renovation. Parisians, after nearly25 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 newwall of tollhouses around the capital, 1789.” This illustrates the relationship ofthe 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 del’Hôtel de ville). As the daily site of the hiring fare of masons and other buildingworkers, 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 workand life: the hiring fare (Grève) was next to the street where many masons livedin lodging homes, the rue de la Mortellerie on the southeast corner.


Early revolutionary programs were indistinguishable from those of theclosing years of the ancien régime: inculcating patriotism and promotingthe grandeur of a regenerated nation inspired projects before and after1789. Characteristic of the many schemes presented before the NationalAssembly was Charles-Philippe Le Sueur’s Project of Utility and Embellish-ment for the City of Paris published in May 1790. Le Sueur sought tomemorialize the creation of the 48 sections of Paris by commissioningone sculpture to represent each section to be erected throughout Paris.The ultimate value of such a project was to “educate the public in theprinciples, practices, and morality of the public Virtues.” To Le Sueur,as to most early Revolutionary architects, utility referred strictly theedification of those who behold the statues, not those who labored toconstruct 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 houseof the Farmers-General Wall at the place of the Throne (renamed in 1794, place ofthe Dethroning; near the present-day place de Nation). Sixteen of 55 planned tollhouses were completed between 1785 and 1789 and were the first royal symbolsattacked in July 1789, 2 days before the Bastille.


to the Academy of Architecture’s August 1790 competition for the con-struction of a National Assembly. Gilbert extolled his contribution asa pure advancement of “the culture of the Arts.” The public utility ofhis project, as signaled by Gilbert, was to encourage creative endeavorsand to facilitate “the enlightenment of Artists to unite patriotism withthe competition of talents.” Gilbert sought to extend the Academy ofArchitecture’s mission into the Revolution by means of artistic competi-tions (concours) – “the competition of talents” – a notion of citizenshipbased on merit and creative labor, but narrowly conceived as appropri-ate to artists alone. In their relatively modest proposals, Le Sueur andGilbert restricted programmatic ambitions to generic patriotic formula-tions, suitable to a meritocratic revolutionary setting. The repudiationof ancien régime forms of monumental grandeur and aestheticism infavor 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, sym-bolizing the seeing-eye surveillance regime of the Crown. All crimes, to itsarchitect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, including excise tax evasion, were “offenses ofnon-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 damagebut elsewhere much material was recovered and reused. Courtesy of the muséeCarnavelet.

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


Figure 2.5 A souvenir Bastille, carved and sold out of a stone from the demol-ished fortress, and commercialized by the entrepreneur, Palloy. Courtesy of themusée Carnavelet.

Private construction and the credit crunch of the earlyRevolution

As Balzac observed in 1840, it is as difficult for towns and cities asit is for commercial houses to recover from ruin.19 The perceptionof a fragile state of affairs in the Revolution first became widespreadon private, rather than public, building sites. Then, as now, a conflu-ence of political incertitude and financial crises weakened the housingand labor markets. As the National Assembly haggled in 1790 overthe legal structure of a liberal economy – debating such issues as theprice of business licenses (patentes) for entrepreneurs and the eventualabolition of certain commercial courts (such as the jurisdiction con-sulaire) or the future powers of the chambers of commerce – work siteswere temporarily immobilized. With increasing impatience, buildingentrepreneurs and future proprietors awaited clarification on the truevalue of their investments in a new economy. Surely, also, relativelyfresh memories of disastrous experiments in economic liberalism, in1763–1764, 1775–1776, and 1787, caused apprehension among Parisian


entrepreneurs and propriétaires. Paradoxically, then, as the ConstituentNational Assembly proclaimed the freedom of commerce in five separatedecrees between October 1789 and September 1790, many constructionsites of Paris slowed down or were partially paralyzed. In the absence ofa fully achieved commercial code, the exact risks of a liberal economyremained to be determined. Liberty was as perilous to its supposed bene-ficiaries as it was exhilarating to the National Assembly which repeatedlydecreed its arrival.20

Thus, the immediate cause and repercussion of the 1789–1790 slow-down in the housing market was the fear of a breakdown of thecorporate economy and the drying up of elaborate networks of credit.Corporations and credit in this period were intimately linked, and disar-ray in the former brought about a crunch in the latter. The complex webof “active” and “passive” debts carried by guild members throughoutthe eighteenth century meant that Parisian builders relied heavily ontrust, firmly backed up by corporate ties, to keep their operations afloat.Membership in the guild implied a network of associates who couldbe sources of extended loans, services, or raw materials. Thus immu-nized from the normal pressures of entrepreneurship, guild membersallowed themselves to fall heavily into debt to workers, proprietors, andcontractors alike.

Declarations and papers concerning bankruptcies, stocked in theunderused departmental Archives de Paris, give a detailed profile ofordinary business in construction. The largest bankruptcy with a fullyconstituted dossier was filed by the Brunet brothers who had workedon the Palais de Justice. They were ruined in 1790 owing 122,604livres in liabilities.21 The smallest debt owed by a master who filed forbankruptcy was the dossier that the master mason Duhamel submit-ted to the Parisian Merchants’ Court in 1786, with a debt of 3,633livres. In general, however, the standard amount of liabilities to provokeeconomic failure for master masons was between 10,000 and 15,000livres: the core of these debts was made up of salary payments, buy-ing and shipping material, such as plaster, stone, gravel, and paymentsto the experts for inspections.22 This amounted to a massive layout.As a skilled employed laborer might earn around 2 livres for a dayworked, the typical venture required the wage equivalent of 5,000 to7,500 workdays for a journeyman. This prodigious cost would onlyby reimbursed by the proprietor upon receiving the key to his build-ing from the expert following a final inspection of the premises. Ofcourse, Parisian guildsmen were generally prepared to risk such an out-lay only because the corporation was the legal guarantor of the credit of


each of its members. Rare economic failure occurred when the guild,for any variety of reasons, did not or could not back the master indifficulty.23

The apparent fragility of previously secure credit networks is reflectedin a cascade of pamphlet literature urging the immediate launchingof new public works projects. These were joined and seconded by theParisian lists of grievances, the cahiers de doléances, concerning the con-struction trades in 1789.24 As a whole, these contrasted sharply withthe discourse of ancien régime enlightened critics of the capital in theambition to transform Paris’ urban landscape. Many reformers sought torepudiate the fervor for urban embellishments of a previous generationof utopian urban thinkers as symptomatic of monarchical megalomania.With the Revolution, the occasion to reign in the zeal of self-proclaimedurbanists had arrived.25

Further aggravating the sense of impeding disaster in the last yearsof the ancien régime was the Crown’s manipulation of the financialinstitution founded by Turgot in 1776, the Caisse d’escompte, whoseoriginal mission was to issue paper money and to control the kingdom’sstock of gold and silver. The Controller-General Necker destabilizedthis establishment during his failed bid to transform it into the Frenchnational bank, based on the British model of state financing. (The Caissed’escompte was abolished in August 1793.) These steps helped causeda fiscal crisis that prompted vociferous debate on overhauling Frenchcommerce. The discussion on restoring sound enterprise led to the aboli-tion of the ancien régime commercial courts on 16 August 1790. Withouteven this often ineffectual recourse guild members felt themselves fur-ther exposed to the vicissitudes of a shaky market, with no protectionfrom creditors.

One appraisal of the grim situation was offered in a pamphlet writtenby a group of 27 construction entrepreneurs representing the AssemblyGeneral of the Deputies of the Arts and Professions Constituting the Build-ing Trades in December 1790. Composed of some of the largest masterbuilders and guild masters of Paris, this emergency assembly denounceda coming crisis in which

a terrifying scarcity of projects, a commercial stagnation, the aban-donment of the trades, canals intended for greater circulation com-mandeered from their regular course, the artists and the artisanscondemned to an idleness that torments them; and whereas so manypeople suffer, simultaneously, several contractors and entrepreneursin each trade enjoy exclusive profits from the [Paris] Commune’s


expenses, while others are deprived and reduced to a profounddistress; everyone, contributing to public charges are owed at leastthis – they should share in the advantages offered in the contractingand in the public works of the [Paris] Commune.26

The new construction lobby portrayed itself as collectively victimizedby the fiscal reforms of the new order whose ambiguities aggravatedprecarious economic conditions in Paris. For months, contractors hadbeen denied payment for services rendered while financial innovationswere discussed ad infinitum. In the meantime they were forced to submitto a deluge of complicated procedures initiated by unscrupulous cred-itors, perhaps spurred on by the hazy approach taken by the NationalAssembly. Listing the series of costly brevets, financial charges, bail andsecurity arrangements imposed by creditors, the building contractorsforcibly made their case that commercial uncertainty was underminingParisian construction. Scant efforts of the National Assembly to formu-late a coherent commercial code provoked new forms of bureaucraticentrapment.

The proposed solution was a utopian scheme to reorganize Parisianconstruction. The builders urged the division of the capital into six dis-tinct construction arrondissements and the assigning of four suppliersand contractors from each building trade to handle future contracts. The24 contractors thus hired from each building trade would assure a highlycompetitive and efficient market, thus avoiding the monopoly controlof large-scale building entrepreneurs who could outbid or undersell thecompetition.27

Contradicting the perception of imminent economic collapse, fannedby catastrophic portrayals of paralyzed Parisian construction, the sheerdurability of credit-worthy building corporations tell a different story.In fact, the industry as a whole was not threatened in its daily busi-ness but rather by the collapse of the ancien régime’s market foundedupon monopoly patronage. An end to the masters’ economic cartelprovoked strife in nearly all sectors of the Parisian economy. Privi-leges to control such varied enterprises as the stone quarries of thefaubourg Saint-Marcel, the royal manufacture of Gobelins, or such pub-lic buildings as the Church of Sainte-Geneviève were subcontractedby the Crown to individual entrepreneurs based upon opaque cri-teria of favoritism, clientelism, family connections, and “friends offriends.” The public administration of the king’s domains, the Bâti-ments du Roi, reserved the right to inspect and to pay or not theinterested party at the reception, the final inspection and acceptance


of the finished product. But the Crown wielded ineffectual controlagainst 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 unparal-leled power to negotiate very low salaries, leading to controversy in theearly years of the Revolution as demands for restitution came pouringin to the National Assembly. Many grievances about ancien régime wagesassumed the Revolutionary state would pay damages for abuses com-mitted under the Crown. The miners of the stone quarry in faubourgSaint-Marcel, as Haim Burstin reveals, demanded compensation forsalary reductions dating back to 1777. The legitimacy of monopolycontrol itself came under attack by way of petitions and movementsagainst entrepreneurs who had benefited immensely by the ambigu-ity of their statute – although private merchants, they were protectedagainst the vicissitudes of the market by guaranteed state contracts.Neither suffering the indignities of risk in the private sphere, nor theaccountability 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 judgedby anyone but professional peers in case of contestation, and enjoyedeasy access to the policing institutions of the state. The collapse ofthe political edifice of the ancien régime exposed the contradictions ofentrepreneurs’ prerogatives and fed, in turn, the scathing critique ofmonopoly privilege that led to the abolition of the corporations in thespring of 1791.28

The Revolution, then, was never hostile to construction, only to themonopoly privilege widely practiced in the industry. Uncertain polit-ical conditions added to the unfavorable economic conjuncture andthe spiral of anticorporate sentiment focused on the undue advan-tages granted to privileged insiders. Moreover, the credit crunch thatstarted with the Controller-General of Finances Charles Alexandre deCalonne’s publication of a report demonstrating imminent nationalbankruptcy in February 1787 was, of course, based on a realistic assess-ment of the future of financial speculation in this perilous moment. Aseconomists have amply demonstrated, discount rates and interest ratesthat dictate the availability of credit are often determined by collectiveexpectations rather than by measurable economic data.29 Real economicopportunities in construction had not much changed since the frenzyof the previous decades, as witness the successful completion of severallarge-scale projects during the Revolution. The rapid opening of several


aristocratic urban mansions, the hôtels particuliers designed by Ledoux,such as the Hosten houses on the rue Saint-Georges completed in1792 and the Godet houses finished in 1795 on the rue Saint Lazare,clearly demonstrate that the housing market, especially for previouslycommissioned projects, was far from dead.30

But another and more decisive impact on revolutionary building –with deeper implications than the mere availability of inexpensivecredit – was the disposition to go into debt at the end of the eighteenthcentury. The debt consciousness that soared in popular opinion dur-ing the debate on the catastrophic state of finances was the principalobstacle to doing business as usual. Calonne’s announcement exposedthe structural weaknesses of a fiscal system based on a complex net-work of privileges and corporate bodies that supplied low-cost creditto the state. A second panic about imminent royal default in the sum-mer of 1787, spurred by draconian reform proposals, also aggravatedwidespread suspicion of the stock market. The fiscal crisis of the ancienrégime projected a harsh light on the foreign speculators who had beentaking ever greater risks in the 1780s. As vehement denunciations of thestock market demonstrated, the challenge of the national debt reachedinto the very economic foundations of ancien régime society and itslabyrinth systems of public finance.31

The question of who pays to reimburse the debt was increasinglyposed to those privileged echelons of French society that had profitedfrom the fruits of the building boom after the Seven Year’s War. The vul-nerability of certain privileged elites to foot the bill for the nationalcatastrophe became clearer with every proposal received by nationalauthorities. In August 1787, Calonne’s replacement as the controller-general, Loménie de Brienne attempted to pass an edict that would havetaxed heavily expensive stamped paper for all bills of exchange, loancontracts, and receipts – this represented, in fact, a tax on credit itself.On top of this new tax, a direct threat to the privileges of manufactur-ing and entrepreneurial elites, as well as the proprietors of France, wasembodied by a tax proposal on all landholdings. The aristocratic revoltof the early Revolution may have thus been partially provoked by theinclusion of more and more of the elite – previously exempted – in thetaxpaying pool. Only the Parlement’s refusal to register the edicts rais-ing taxes eased the panic, but this series of reform proposals inflamedcredit inflation. Lacking solvency, business bankruptcies in Paris, as reg-istered before several jurisdictions, increased from 262 in 1787 to 386 in1788 and 379 in 1789. Insolvency in Paris remained unusually high –344 – in 1790, and dropped to 144 with a return to relative prosperity in


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 debtwas the promise to eliminate most forms of ancien régime taxes. As earlyas 17 June 1789, taxes were abolished by the Estates-General and onlyby January 1791 would a national system for taxation be fully in place.This lack of a sure source of public funds had a predictably dissuasiveimpact on new public construction. In sum, the economics of debt, thementality of debt consciousness, and deeply uncertain fiscality createda complex and paradoxical situation. Work on such major public sitesas the Church of the Madeleine (until late 1790) and the Church ofSainte-Geneviève proceeded as if nothing had happened; at the sametime, however, fewer new sites in 1789 and 1790 would see the light ofday. In the construction sector, as with the entire French economy, theanticipation of an impending economic crisis loomed as an impendingself-fulfilling prophecy.33

Dismantling the corporate order and demarcating the newregime of Parisian building

In sharp contrast with the brittle economic conjuncture of the end ofthe ancien régime and early Revolution, a confluence of circumstancesin the spring of 1791 created a more favorable climate for the con-struction industry. This, in turn, facilitated a renaissance of privateand public construction after the April 1791 transformation of theassignats into the national paper currency. The assignat had the unin-tended consequence of promoting construction. For the financial basisof these assignats was nationalized property, the biens nationaux, seizedfrom their ecclesiastical and noble proprietors and sold by the state atauction.34

A virtuous cycle in Parisian construction became a minor boom in1791 and 1792, driven by the appropriation, sale, and rapid exploita-tion of 12 percent of all Parisian property as nationalized property.Georges Lefebvre concluded that over a thousand buildings were ulti-mately sold as biens nationaux in Paris: 505 structures were seized fromthe Church and 587 from the aristocracy. The reconversion, restoration,or destruction of these structures nursed the building sector back to vig-orous health. A sign of renewed financial confidence in the new orderwas the 115 contractors and entrepreneurs (13 percent of all acquirers)who purchased new properties as biens nationaux, mostly in the north-ern parts of the capital, and concentrated in the areas in what are nowthe second, third, ninth, tenth, and eleventh arrondissements (i.e., in a


sweeping arc from the northwest Chaussée d’Antin to slightly beyondthe northeast place de la République). Each new lot represented anopportunity to develop the peripheral neighborhoods of the capital.Adding to this burst of activity on the building sites was the liberal-ization of the architectural profession as more and more unscrupulousbuilding entrepreneurs appropriated the confidence-building mantle ofarchitects or, better still, architectes-entrepreneurs, a real oxymoron in thebaroque nomenclature of the ancien régime. Unqualified businessmenwere blithely passing themselves off as technical specialists.35

Brighter economic prospects in the private sphere had three corollaryaffects on construction in Paris. First, new employment opportuni-ties made makeshift public solutions to unemployment, such as publicworkshops, ever less appealing. Second, the revival of private construc-tion fed into at take-off at public sites: employment opportunities wereexpanded on the Palais de Justice, the Louvre, and the pont de LouisXVI, among other projects. Third and finally, the sheer visibility of thesemassive sites, along with the primitive cranes put up in the northeastoutskirts of the capital city, created a movement for salary increasesamong the building trades workers. In this heated conjuncture of theprosperous spring and summer of 1791, the crowning act of confidencein a new socio-economic order was passed as two separate laws: the Loid’Allarde (2 March), which specifically abolished the guilds, and themuch more sweeping Loi le Chapelier (14 June), which prohibited allcorporate bodies. In two fell swoops, the National Assembly reconceivedlabor relations on a new contractual basis, in which traditional privilegeswere dismantled in the name of the application of market principles tothe world of labor and capital.

Guild abolition and labor conflict in the constructiontrades, 1791

In virtue of the ordinance of the Department of Paris, we werebrought to a house on the cul de sac St. Martin whose first floor isoccupied by the bureau of the carpenters’ and masons’ guild in orderto address a summary of all its possessions.36

These solemn words were followed by an elaborate inventory and con-fiscation of the papers and belongings of the carpenters’ and masons’guilds. Thus did revolutionaries begin to dismantle the ancien régimecorporate universe in Parisian construction. The police commissionerCavilliez of the Section du Pont Neuf, accompanied by a secretaryand a bailiff, grimly followed the ritual of the notary’s inventories of


a deceased person’s property (inventaires après décès), by denominatingand sealing each and every document, piece of furniture, and tool keptin the office. As a revolutionary police commissioner, Cavilliez was wellaware of this procedure for had been a member of the corps of the policecommissioners under the ancien regime, and the center of his jurisdictionhad been the same neighborhood. The officials who accompanied himin disassembling the guild offices had formerly worked in close collab-oration with the commissioner as syndics of the defunct masons’ andcarpenters’ guilds. The Revolution hence used ancien régime corporateofficials to suppress the corporations themselves – indeed, who betterto do so?

This bastard carpenters’ and masons’ guild, located in a demolishedstreet on the outskirts of what is now the Marais, was a direct resultof the guild universe’s restructuring at the end of the ancien régime. Theenfeeblement of the urban guild structure had continued unabated sinceTurgot’s 1776 reforms and through Necker’s centralizing efforts of the1780s. This created a situation ripe for conflict reformulated in the revo-lutionary political categories of the 1790s. The absorption of many guildfunctions by the state, as in Necker’s 1781 project to impose workers’passports, or livrets, left the guilds as greatly weakened intermediariesbetween state and civil society. As the general building strike of 1785had amply demonstrated, the entrepreneurs’ Chambre des Bâtimentsdid not have the historical legitimacy to replace the masters’ guilds inpolicing the labor force. And, after 1789, when masters were forbiddento impose industry-wide fixed salary structures and pricing lists, amongother “monopolistic” practices condemned by the Revolution’s liberalvoices, the free agency of workers and master builders became botheasier to proclaim and to contest.37

In the weeks that followed the 1791 closing of the guild bureau, averitable deluge of pamphlet literature on behalf of “former” (çi-devant)master and journeymen carpenters brought to light the depth of laborconflict in Parisian construction – and the extent to which the guildpractices had remained a constant presence in the world of work. Strikes,usually one or two days in duration, were widespread in the three-month period between the two laws, as was an upsurge in other formsof strife between masters and laborers. The new order of labor andcapital was hardly structured around “invisible hand” mechanisms ofcontractual negotiation and supply and demand.

Among the first detailed accounts of the social movement in thissector was a petition signed by former master carpenters, and sentto the Parisian authorities six weeks after guild abolition. The formermasters seemed little aware of the irony in reconstituting themselves


as a corporate order in order to denounce an assembly of journey-men carpenters, meeting in the expropriated archdiocese of NotreDame. While their immediate concern was a movement to strikefor increased wages, the ex-master artisans appealed to anticorporatesentiment to signal alarm at the associative organization of the jour-neymens’ organization.38 From across Paris arrived similar reports ofmovements of journeymen carpenters. The wealthy master carpenterSylvain Moreau on 21 April 1791 – the maître d’ouvrage who had spon-sored the construction of the sumptuous Maison Moreau near thePantheon on the place de l’Estrapade in 1775 (figure 3.6) – denouncedthe threats of violence directed at his own recalcitrant journeymen. Hislaborers had resisted calls to to strike for salary increases as issued by“illicit” assemblies of laborers.39 Further provoked by the disbandingof public works projects on 7 May 1791, carpenters agitated to imposea new city-wide wage of 2.5 livres for a day of work. Declarations tothe police commissioners of the sections conveyed the entrepreneurs’dismay that the movement of journeymen carpenters spread from work-shops in the outer city to the center of Paris. One denunciation byan entrepreneur on the northeast rue Ménilmontant maintained that12 journeymen carpenters came to his atelier to force his workers toleave work. Another master carpenter complained of an illegal assem-bly of journeymen carpenters who conspired to force a wage of 2.5livres per day throughout the summer and the winter, representing anincrease of around 20 percent of customary salaries.40 In a more soberanalysis, Spicket or Spiket, the police commissioner of the section del’Observatoire in the south of Paris, conceded it would be impossiblethat the masters submit to “a unform tax” (sic) for that would destroythe entire trade by “alienating” the good workers while rewarding themediocre ones. Still, Spicket, himself a former worker in the quarries,concluded that entrepreneurs themselves had been in part responsi-ble for inflaming the movement by tolerating a great disparity in Pariswages, ranging between a mere 12 sous (a bit more than one half of alivre) 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 car-pentry entrepreneurs’ account of widespread social conflict in atelierswhere “uprisings and humiliations” threatened the social peace. Theblacksmiths provided a precious outsiders’ glimpse into the unfoldingof the journeymens’ meetings: “assemblies as illegal as dangerous andwhere provocative and anti-constitutional decrees are passed.” Corpo-rate rituals – every bit as much as the sociability and “club mechanisms”that Augustin Cochin suggested formed the link between ancien régime


associations and Jacobinism – were also an education in the forms ofdemocratic practice.42 In alarmist terms, the blacksmiths warned thatthe movement of carpenters risked becoming a coalition générale, gainingadherents among locksmiths, shoesmiths and joiners.

This might lead to another outcome, without doubt even morea more frightening one: a gang of these workers will report tothe different Departments whence they came, and they will spreadthe principles that infused them, principles capable of causing thegreatest disorders among other classes of citizens.43

The specter of a blossoming workers’ movement spreading into theprovinces led the blacksmiths to declare that the carpenters had suc-cessfully mobilized 80,000 workers in the capital – a claim that was nodoubt apocryphal, for that would represent much more than a tenth ofthe 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 jour-neymen carpenters focused on the “privileges of masterships” thatentrepreneurs of the new regime persisted in exercising. The foremost“abuse” to betray the principles of the new regime was monopolycontrol on the labor force, enforced by “coalition.”45 The journey-men carpenters thus sought to mobilize the anticorporatist bias ofthe Revolution to their own cause. Their petition denounced “self-ish” entrepreneurs in vivid terms, accusing them of being enemies ofthe Constitution, since they failed “to recognize the Rights of Manand are the most zealous partisans of the worst forms of aristoc-racy.” The journeymen thus echoed the masters’ claim to represent“public interest.” But whereas the journeymen put their argumentsin political terms, as adherence to new constitutional principles, themasters had placed theirs squarely in the economic sphere. To themasters “public interest” meant upholding their commitments towardthe proprietors who had hired them to perform work on the buildingsite. The contractual terms of the masters’ petitions were, of course,bound to have a favorable reception with the Parisian municipalityand National Assembly.46 As one former master carpenter described thestrikes:

Carpentry workers in the different workshops and building sites ofParis employed violence to peel away the workers who were workingpeacefully. The Entrepreneur Carpenters denounced them in theirsections and sought assistance from the municipality to contain them


and to obtain justice . . . . The workers should not be slaves; but, whenthey announce a resolve to harm society and attempt to perpetrateinjustice, the law and public force should be used to oblige them toreturn to their duties. A labor coalition that imposes the General Willtoday might present even more exaggerated claims tomorrow; theAdministration must establish a firm opposition to this as soon aspossible.47

The former master thus called for the repressive force of the law tooppose the former journeymen’s efforts to “impose the General Will”through strikes. Factionalism and self-interest had replaced rebellionand sedition as the crime of striking laborers. The Revolution had,indeed, transformed the terms of labor strife in the Parisian construc-tion trades.48 The final response by the municipality of Paris was toestablish in absolute terms the inviolability of the private contract.The Paris Mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly signed his name to a “warning tothe workers” that denounced the journeymen carpenters’ coalitions asillegal. He then shut down their meeting hall, in the former archdio-cese of Nôtre Dame, while dispersing the journeymen still present byforce.49

The unabashed interest politics implicit in the carpenters’ petitionsmade sophisticated use of the Revolution’s political vocabulary. Jour-neymen and entrepreneur carpenters wielded the same arguments tomake opposing claims: the other camp engages in corporate behaviorand seeks to betray the nation by putting its private interest ahead ofthe public good. Both thereby committed what the other saw as the car-dinal sin of grouping in a “coalitions of factions” to further a selfishagenda.50

While the discourse of protest had evolved in the Revolution, itis also clear that corporations continued to structure the political,social, and economic life of Parisian artisans. Revolutionary author-ities were pressed to intervene against ritualistic guild assemblies,the nomination of representatives of journeymen and masters, andlegalistic petitions adopting the language of lawsuits to claim newlyfound constitutional rights. Certain ancien régime socio-economic prac-tices continued to thrive within dense corporate credit networks,the quality inspection of finished goods, the organization of theworkforce, labor protections, and even the choreographed fashionthat limited one- or two-day strikes compelled “police” interven-tions. The “persistence of the old regime,” in Arno J. Mayer’s mem-orable phrase about another and later context, infused revolutionary


practices and institutions with ancien régime innovation and tradi-tion. Indeed, as Steven Kaplan concludes, the Revolution needed thecorporations.51

Artisanal contention in the interstices of old and newregimes

The vociferous builders compelled early twentieth-century historians ofworkers’ movements in the Revolution to portray some of the mostcontentious Parisian trades as almost single-handedly provoking thesuppression of the corporate universe. More recent research throws intodoubt this causality, and sees the suppression of the guilds as a singleideological blow to all corporations in an environment hostile to thevery existence of factional elements.52 But this debate between circum-stance and ideology, between the effect of labor strife and the largercommitment to end ancien régime privilege, may be confronted withother questions: what was the precise nature of the relationship betweenancien 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 capitaland labor?53

These “classic” questions about revolutionary politicization point tothe structure of work in the transition from the end of the ancien régimeto the Revolution. Carpenters, for example, were widely assumed atthe workplace to possess the characteristics that best lent themselvesto political activism. First, they represented a peripatetic workforce thatwas not easily policed. Second, their work, most often in large teams,did not lend itself to the sort of intimacy that united masters and jour-neymen in the shop or workshop. Third, they perceived themselves asdeeply underpaid for their talent and, as native Parisians, were not easilyintimidated into silence. Journeymen and apprentice Creusois masons,by contrast, were less active in craft-based contestation during the Revo-lution. Finally, many carpenters were skilled artisans involved in one ofthe most impermanent tasks on the worksite: that of putting up and tak-ing down scaffolding on building sites. The rhythms of carpentry workwere intensive, dangerous, and ephemeral.

Unsurprisingly then, the carpenters were seemingly the onlybuilding tradesmen to have petitioned the municipality of Parisand the National Assembly in a city-wide movement specificallyas former masters and journeymen in the years before abolition.Other contentious laborers focused on grievances through site-specific


demands. On the public work site of the Manufacture Royale desGobelins, the skilled workforce of tapestry weavers struck for fewerhours and higher wages.54 The specialized stonecutters and sculptors(the tailleurs de pierre and sculpteurs en ornements) of the Pantheon’sfaçade and columns grouped themselves together on similar groundsto denounce work conditions.55 On the other hand, within the buildingtrades, masons, painters, roofers, pavers, and others among the myriadtrades that collaborated in putting up private buildings only sporadicallyorganized themselves as trade-specific corporate groups in the early Rev-olution – and these were typically around specific and circumstantialissues.56

Why were contentious carpenters the most visibly contentious arti-sans of the French Revolution?57 The uniqueness of the carpenters’political engagement cannot be readily explained with reference onlyto the worksite. Other trades shared the characteristics and the workstructure of the carpenters. By police ordinance, they shared the samephysical 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.


the spring and summer, was teeming with skilled and unskilled laborersranging from masons and carpenters to roofers and day-laborers wait-ing to be hired à la journée, by the workday, on building sites acrossthe city.58 Also, the nature of the carpenters’ engagement cannot bedeciphered as expressing economic deprivation. Carpentry was gener-ally among the highest paid work on the labor market in the eighteenthcentury after such luxury trades as silkweaving, engraving, and jewelry.The pay scales for a journeyman carpenter matched that of an aver-age journeyman mason. While both varied at times, depending on thenature 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 bour-geoisie of the world of work. Ernst Labrousse found the national averagein 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 tradesa 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 for-mer rue de la Mortellerie, renamed la rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, known as “the streetof the masons.” The turret is that of the hotel de Sens. Courtesy of the muséeCarnavelet.


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

That said, the carpenters and masons, as with all rural and urbantrades, had witnessed a slow decay in real earnings at the end of theancien régime. Yves Durand found that the most well-paid and least-paid workers on the building site, the journeymen mason and the daylaborer, increased earnings between 42 and 44 percent from 1727 to1786. In that same period, however, Ernest Labrousse calculated thatthe price of wheat rose by 66 percent and firewood by 91 percent. Thesense of a steady economic privation and the general degradation ofliving standards was common to most members of the French worldof work at the end of the ancien régime. As we will see, however, thistendency would be reversed, at least in the building trades, during theRevolution. Labor contention in the 1790s and early nineteenth centurycontributed – with particular exceptions during the crises of 1793–1794and 1796 – to advantages acquired during the two decades of a generallyfavorable economic conjuncture in which many urban laborers made upfor lost earnings of the recent past.61

The origins of the confrontation between former masters and journey-men in the carpentry trade were embedded in the ancien régime, born in


the history of the carpenters’ corporation. The master carpenters consti-tuted a traditional and relatively closed guild that conducted its affairsautonomously of other building trades. Further, the guilds’ method ofsettling disputes provoked much dissension from both within and with-out, between masters and journeymen, as well as between itself andother guilds. Its procedures for policing its members and workers, ofgranting masterships and of practicing business, contrasted sharply withthe evolution of the master masons’ corporation and the Chambre desBâtiments as a professionalized housing authority.62

The contentious carpenters are most vividly captured in records ofpolice interventions at the workplace. These portray a carpenters’ guildfiercely protective of its privileges with officers that guarded member-ship in jealous fashion against the encroachment of clandestine artisans(contrevenants) who used their own tools and hired their own laborers indefiance of the guild. In Paris the procedure for police raids became grimroutine for the carpenters by the end of the eighteenth century. Guildrepresentatives, typically the sindics or adjoints, would denounce to oneof the 48 police commissioners a master or journeymen in violation ofcorporate statutes. The commissioner would follow the guildsmen tothe workplace of the accused where he would interrogate those present,seal with a wax stamp any evidence to prevent tampering, and examineall tools for markings indicating that they are indeed the guild’s prop-erty. Unmarked tools were prima facia evidence of “outsiders” usurpingguild privileges and were to be smashed, seized, or as the guild statutesof 1785 put it, “confiscated . . . to the profit of the master” who madethe original denunciation.63 Suspects and witnesses were interrogatedduring a hearing on the building site, where a fine was determined, thesealed “defective” woodwork was destroyed, and a settlement was usu-ally reached between the guild officials and offenders involving financialcompensation.

The corporate policing of master carpenters became so extensive,in fact, that in 1785, the guild passed a statute to grant the mastersexclusive monopoly over the ownership of tools. Alone among thebuilders, journeymen carpenters were forbidden to own the tools oftheir trade, making the journeyman absolutely dependent on the mas-ter for his livelihood. The statute also permitted the swift verificationof a journeyman’s status as the employee of a certified guild member,whose seal would mark all tools.64 Finally, the carpenters’ corpora-tion exercised firmly and routinely the privilege to raid constructionsites to inspect material and labor. The guilds’ officers concentratedon finding unmarked tools and cheap wood – often fished out of the


Seine – used in scaffolding, the most dangerous form of deceit for mas-ters, workers, and passersby alike. The increasingly high price of wood,which augmented dramatically in the winter of 1788–1789, made theuse of moldering or humid wood a very real danger for the carpentrytrades. In collaboration with the Police Commissioner Allix the syndicsof the guild engaged in 81 raids in the years between 1784 and 1790.Predictably, the raids provoked much rancor between journeymen andmasters in the waning years of the ancien régime.65

The force of the carpenters’ corporation is also substantiated by therestricted number of masters and journeymen granted access to thetrade. The most reliable source to quantify the Parisian world of workin 1790–1791, particularly for large-scale trades, indicates there were1,684 journeymen carpenters declared by 87 master carpenters, who reg-istered to receive the revolutionary currency, the assignats, to pay theirlabor force in 1790 and 1791. These numbers are no doubt excessivelylow, even if they seem to be partially corroborated by declarations forthe distribution of the cartes de sûreté in 1792 and 1793. Just as today,any account of construction employers and employees will leave outmany of those working “in the black,” or off the books, who do notdeclare their laborers to avoid taxes and, especially in today’s context,immigration restrictions.66 The dependable trade manual, the Almanachdes Bâtiments, in the year before abolition, indicates that 141 mastercarpenters were licensed to engage in carpentry enterprises in 1790, sug-gesting that a third of all Parisian master carpenters did not declare theirworkforce to municipal authorities. (Table 1.1 and Figures 1.12, 1.13.)67

Regardless of the raw numbers, the petitioning journeymen carpenterscontinued to make an issue of the limited availability of masterships. Inone petition after the abolition of 1791, the journeymen interpretedtheir want of social ascension or of any progress toward entrepreneur-ship as a vestige of the masters’ “repugnant right” to make their fortunesat 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 – aggravatedthis conflict.68 Out of the 141 masters in 1790, 43 were sons or son-in-laws and 15 others share the same family names without an indicationof their precise relationship. Thus, 41 percent of the master carpen-ters had apparent family connections with other masters.69 Also, theguild’s pattern of granting masterships appeared erratic and arbitrary. Itsporadically granted large numbers of masterships but alternated suchlargesse by restricting access to membership during the last half of theeighteenth century. Between 1751 and 1776, the number of masters


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

Guilds and the post-corporate economy

The closed, conservative, and rather classically “contentious” carpen-ters’ guild engendered deep tensions between masters and journeymenthat spilled into the public sphere with the Revolution and the abolitionof 1791. The structure of the guild and its impact on revolution-ary politicization underscores the diversity of corporate experiences ineighteenth-century France. They suggest that the historical image of asingle corporate “regime” dominated universally by oligarchies of firmlyentrenched families tends toward caricature. The idea of the guilds as a“block” was a description that originated with reform-minded collabo-rators of the Physiocrats, only to become policy within the Roussseauistcontext of revolutionary anticorporatism, and was finally elaboratedupon in the republican historiography of the Third Republic. Finally,the political recuperation of the corporations by France’s Vichy govern-ment – to the point of reviving the journeymen’s corporate organiza-tions, the compagnonnages – further disgraced their historical memory.71

In fact, as we have seen, the guilds followed shifting strategies andcrafted distinct responses to the challenges of an emerging marketsociety and the centralizing state. Reinforcing privileges or restrictingmasterships (or extending both) were often particular reactions to sin-gular contexts. Such practices did not express the essential “logic” ofthe corporate regime, described famously in such legal tracts as theseventeenth-century jurist Loyseau’s Traité des ordres, which gave theguild idea a theoretical basis as a hierarchical and organic order. Nor did


they only embody the “language of labor” in creating solidarities andantagonisms which would become the basis of class struggle in a futureindustrial order.72

Beyond the issue of political circumstances, and the conjunctureof a favorable but fragile economic revival in 1791, lie the socialconsequences 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 dif-ferent had final guild abolition taken place under the ancien régime?Did the 1791 eruption of strikes and labor petitions represent specif-ically 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 debateon the origins and effects of the French Revolution has largely beenfrozen in Cold War categories. The argument of a purely political revolu-tion is opposed to the thesis of socio-economic causes and implications.The construction guilds in the Revolution, however, illustrate that thisis a false dichotomy. The “municipalization” of guild officers withinthe Paris commune, the mobilization of corporate solidarities, the lan-guage of legal rights in citations of the Declaration of the Rights ofMan, clearly expose the sources of the Revolution’s politics in the guildorder. But the corporations were also deeply implicated in a fluid ancienrégime and revolutionary economy, particularly, in the credit networksand debt guarantees, on the one hand, and in the professionalization ofentrepreneurial capitalism, on the other. The guilds contributed heavilyto structure urban political and economic organization, the assets, andthe early Revolution’s financial foundations.

The eighteenth-century history of the construction guilds demon-strates that an exclusive emphasis on purely political or socio-economicfactors creates a tendentious portrayal of the origins of the FrenchRevolution. The classic narrative of moribund guilds swept away as amere anachronism in 1791, moreover, overlooks the extent to whichthe Revolution absorbed the corporate universe into its own institu-tions and practices – many of its officers became future functionaries(such as inspectors, administrators, or teachers); its economic net-works became business contacts; its policing mechanisms became themodel for a revolutionary inspection and surveillance regime in theTerror and afterward; finally, its political bodies were revived as lob-bies and commercial syndicates under the Napoleonic Empire. Theactual practice of the guilds – not merely their discursive and rhetorical


representations – was crucial to the politicization of the urban worldfrom the Revolution to the present day. Ultimately, the corporationswere not exclusively a category of social classification, nor the stabiliz-ers of the hierarchy and status of artisans, but were a material realitythat penetrated deep into French society throughout the revolutionarydecade and beyond.74

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

Public service and construction in the Revolution

Parisian builders experienced the early Revolution as both a politicalmoment and an economic opportunity in the rapidly changing capital.By the summer of 1791, the Revolution had simultaneously suppressedand absorbed the infrastructure of the corporations. The guilds’ exten-sive credit networks were converted into the private wealth of someentrepreneurs, former journeymen and apprentices became contractuallabor, and many former guild-masters followed new career trajectoriesas municipal officers or functionaries. Beyond dismantling the corpo-rate universe, the state expropriated and auctioned off ecclesiasticalproperties – a stimulus to private construction – all the while abolish-ing the onerous and arbitrary ancien régime tax system. This frenziedactivity created fresh incentives for investment in Parisian property andthus set in motion a temporary bonanza in construction. The boom ofnew structures in the northeast and southern quarters of the city nodoubt created deeper adherence to the Revolution. From the perspec-tive of the building site, the liberal dream of commerce indeed seemedascendant.

However, one exception to historical narratives of a triumphant eco-nomic liberalism in the early Revolution is the great expansion of publicworks projects and, as a corollary, the reconceptualization of public ser-vice. Street maintenance, brush clearing, textile spinning, and othertasks deemed menial were assigned to the municipal government. Theywere subsequently reorganized as showcases to display the changesdemanded by a progressive elite and to embody a decisive rupturewith the opaque, lax, and corrupt ancien régime. Many of these projectswere taken over as forms of bienfaisance or public assistance for the

96

Projecting the Revolution on the Parisian Work Site 97

indigent population of Paris by the National Assembly in 1790. Theearly Revolution also imposed stringent procedures upon public out-lays in welfare projects to render them fiscally and socially accountableto the nation. By these methods, a broad political consensus on thevital place of public works in the new order was achieved. Vital publicinvestment in construction stimulated the building trades by providingvaluable 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 committeessought, simultaneously, to legislate into existence equal access to ser-vices and guarantee the continuity of their utilization. Starting with thesimplest drudge work and ending with the intricate details of ornamen-tal sculpture in monuments the revolutionaries created criteria for thestandardization, exactitude, and economy of publicly funded projects.In the name of a newly found patriotic responsibility to the nation, rev-olutionaries reigned in expenditures, changed methods of supervision,and overhauled work rhythms and the daily wage. Finally, a transparentadministration, situated in Paris rather than in Versailles and composedof functionaries rather than servants to the Crown, promoted specificreformist goals for public works: to impose an ideal salary for an ideallyproductive day of labor.2

The bureaucracy also became a vector for new forms of public exper-tise. Paid employees replaced the venal inspectors, the experts, of themoribund Chambre des Bâtiments. Engineers, inspectors, and urbanplanners were solicited as building officials with responsibility for theefficacy of investments in public sites. As a footnote, a new rivalrybetween the “artistic” architect and the “scientific” engineer, betweenbuilding and construction, began to be sketched out among militaryspecialists concerned with fortifications, although the opposition wouldonly become generalized under Napoleon.3 Ultimately, functionariesand the Revolution’s legislators concluded that the true theatre for patri-otic public works were large-scale projects of national monuments. Onlypublic edifices demonstrate social utility and properly symbolize a col-lective effort to remake the Revolution’s capital in the image of ancientgrandeur. The key moment in the shift toward a utilitarian usage of laborfor the nation was in the spring of 1791. A transfer of credits – one mil-lion livres – intended for workshops for the poor was prepared in orderto finance the construction of the Pantheon. This signified a clear polit-ical choice of architecture over make-work, of technical expertise overpolicing, and of funding skilled craft labor over the unskilled labor ofthe working poor.4


The resulting policies clarified a trajectory of investment from humblemunicipal public works to bold manifestations of patriotic architecture.This, in turn, inspired new forms of politicization. From the perspectiveof the construction site, the history of public works in the Revolutionconfirmed the central place of productive labor in the new order. Thepamphlets and petitions by entrepreneurs, architects, and contractors,in lobbying for ever greater public investment in Parisian construc-tion, created a potent political identity as the industrious backbone ofthe Nation. This identity accentuated the builders’ potential to orga-nize collaborative undertakings between various professions, artisanalcraftsmen, and unskilled labor.

The emergence of this abiding image of the building site as an edu-cation in cooperative citizenship was also a political claim on theadvantages – for the indigent urban population as for entrepreneurs –of expanded public investment in construction projects. The makingand remaking of this political lobby of the building trades representedtheir transformation from the epitome of a deeply corrupted and violentcorporate milieu, as we have seen in the ancien régime, into iconic revo-lutionary professionals. Builders were deeply industrious, fully qualifiedcitizen-workers who embodied the ideals of the productive Third Estate.Further, it was not merely in the realm of representations that the heroicimage of the revolutionary producer took hold. The policies of publicworks and the transformation of the urban world of work in the Rev-olution were realms of practice, not of simple images. As the buildingtradesmen demonstrate, the early Revolution’s producer-citizen was ren-dered fully distinctive in the figure of the sans-culotte, who dominatedthe Revolution’s center stage during the Terror of 1793 and 1794. As wewill see in Chapter 4, the sans-culotte was the perfect militant revolution-ary incarnating the sanctity of work and radical political orthodoxy. Buthe most certainly did not come forth fully-formed like Athena from thehead of Zeus. The sans-culotte was partially the successor to the producer-citizen of 1791, selflessly laboring on behalf of public service on thestreets and monuments of the capital city. The Revolution’s “problemof work,” treated in most historical accounts as chronologically con-stituent to the Terror, was in fact posed from the earliest years of theRevolution’s pretended liberal phase.

From municipal to national public works, 1789–1793

Public works were perhaps among the oldest solutions to misery inthe capital, with publicly financed work projects to relieve poverty and


teach industrious work rhythms dating back to state-sponsored cathe-dral building in the thirteenth century.5 Following the catastrophicwinter of 1788–1789, and through the end of the Terror, the Parisianindigent population ebbed and flowed between 85,000 and 110,000people out of a population of about 600,000. The vast majority of theimpoverished was able to work; for only 15 percent of the arrestedpoor in eighteenth-century Paris were considered to be infirm or sick.Alleviating poverty, in the merit-driven political orientation of theRevolutionary decade, meant reinforcing and reforming public worksprojects rather than distributing gratuitous assistance.6

The very nature of urban renewal projects amalgamated the twindemands of improving Parisians’ daily life and providing work for thepoor, as the district of the Saint-Etienne du Mont argued in rapidlypetitioning for two new streets leading from the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève to the place Maubert.7 But among the first poor-relief projectsactually to be transformed was the ancien régime system of assistingindigent women, the spinning bureau (Bureau de la filature), providingwork and material for several thousand destitute seamstresses and theirchildren to engage in textile production. This decentralized system forhome relief was given new life in the form of massive spinning estab-lishments in December 1790. The National Assembly removed themfrom municipal and parish responsibility, changing them from centersof distribution and situating many of the indigents in a nationalizedconvent turned warehouse on the rue Saint-Jacques in the faubourgSaint-Marcel. There, up to 1,800 impoverished women, children, anda few elderly men spun cotton, hemp, and linen threads under closestate supervision.8

The revolutionary project to recast other forms of public work projectsfollowed a more convoluted itinerary. For the National Assembly alsoinherited nine Parisian charity workshops (ateliers de charité), based forthe most part in low-skilled terracing for roads and brush clearing,which had been opened in December 1788, in the midst of its finan-cial crisis and one of the harshest winters of the eighteenth century.Their malfunction made them ripe targets of blame for disruptions inthe Parisian economy. By the summer of 1789, the public workshopswere widely denounced as having forced up wages in competition withthe private sector, especially the wages of unskilled building workers.The Journal de France joined an outpouring of brochures to warn, inapocalyptic terms, that 200,000 unemployed laborers – an impossibil-ity as this was a third of the Parisian population – were educated inthe dubious lesson they could now make a living without learning how


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 sousa day, widespread rumors held that “generous” recompense for publicworks invited brigands to be paid to stay idle. In sum, there was lit-tle stomach for continuing public workshops in or near Paris, viewedas teaching bad habits by drudge work achieved in desultory fashion.Worse, they undermined the labor market by driving up the wages ofunskilled hands in the building trades. The traditional answer to unem-ployment and commercial stagnation was discredited, and providing analternative would compel the administrator’ attention in the openingyear of the Revolution. Predictably, then, one of the Revolution’s earli-est acts was to dissolve the Crown’s workshops in August 1789. Parisianmunicipal authorities even paid provincial migrants paltry incentives toreturn home.10

The Revolution’s brusque closing of the workshops, though, in themidst of a widespread food shortage, was quickly seized upon as an earlymis-step. On August 20, an authoritative voice on the subject of poverty,the liberal economist Pierre-Francois Boncerf, made a widely remarkedintervention to the assembly of St Etienne du Mont on the dangerousconsequences of the abrupt dispersal of indigent laborers. His speechwas considered so alarming (and prescient) as to be reprinted eight timesby the National Assembly between 1789 and 1791. For Boncerf was aPhysiocratic specialist on the question of poverty. Previously a secretaryin the Ministry of Finance during Turgot’s tenure as controller-general,Boncerf authored anti-feudal agrarian treatises; he was also an asso-ciate of the French Royal Society of Agriculture. As we will see, he laterserved as an illustrious member of the National Assembly’s Committeeon Mendicity.11

The masses of unskilled laborers discharged from the municipality’sateliers, Boncerf predicted, would join forces with unemployed buildingtradesmen to create social chaos. Warning of a potential cataclysm, theywere swelling the ranks of a dangerous underclass:

their numbers increase every day, because every day constructionsites proceed slowly or are suspended, and the multitude of day labor-ers, the masons the stonecutters, the locksmiths, the carpenters, thetransporters, the out-of-work foremen, keeps growing and adds tothe army of dangerous men which political compassion had tried toaid and assist. We must therefore find work for these men quicklyand, above all, prevent them from associating; because once theyunite they will incite fear. This heap of humanity, whose majority


is deeply corrupt, will proceed to subvert the masses and persuademany people to commit crimes.

Evoking the possibility that 60,000 unemployed laborers would turnto brigandage committing “atrocities” in the capital and its environs,Boncerf sought to evacuate all of Paris’ unemployed human flotsam intothe provinces. For the only possible solution was to empty the capitalof these potential criminals, “by transforming building tradesmen intofarm laborers who will work to save terrain abandoned to marshland.”12

Boncerf’s suspicion of peripatetic unskilled workers as ready to spreadmayhem expressed the darker fears of upper-class Parisians: the capitalin Revolution risked becoming an insalubrious megalopolis mobbed bya floating population of provincial undesirables. The immediate con-text of these qualms was the Great Fear of 1789, the rural uprising ofJuly and August against imaginary brigands which resulted in the ran-sacking of many a château – and led to the suppression of most feudalduties. As we have seen in the ancien régime, this trope of Paris indun-dated was also explicitly articulated in the Paris Parlement’s rebuke toTurgot’s suppression of the corporations in 1776. Guild abolition was tolead to a loss of control of the labor market, and, as the Paris Parlementput it, the “license of the cities” would hopelessly corrupt masterlessprovincial laborers flowing into Paris.

In 1789, Boncerf’s polemic and the pervasive nature of the GreatFear directly affected the status of construction workers in public worksprojects. Within days of disbanding the charity workshops, the munici-pality of Paris organized a Department of Public Works to impose orderin public service employment. This department was, at first, given themundane task of the ancien régime jurisdiction, the voirie, with respon-sibilities over roads, quays, bridges, fountains, and other public edifices.Administrators were charged with making sure that ancien régime ordi-nances were correctly applied, and that unscrupulous contractors wouldnot 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 aidof the Indigent and most Laborious Workers that unfortunate Circum-stances have deprived of an occupation.” It was the public employer ofdestitute Parisians in projects to clear away the debris, deposits, illegaland legal, and to drain cesspools after years of neglect – a public worksadministration without openly declaring its ambition to provide jobsfor indigent Parisians. The ancien régime’s charity workshops were thusreplaced by municipal public service.13


The municipality of Paris, contracted from 60 diffuse districts to48 administrative sections on 21 May 1790 (as precursors to today’s20 arrondissements), concurrently expanded the Department of PublicWorks’ authority over public construction in the Capital.14 In a direc-tive, the mayor outlined changes in the qualifications for employmenton municipal worksites. It would no longer be sufficient cause to calloneself destitute to find work on the Department’s sites. Rather, candi-dates had to hold a certificate of indigence, delivered by the local priest,and have proof of fixed residence within a Paris section. Even menialpositions in the Department were awarded in a competitive mannerbut now only to impoverished Parisians. Furthermore, the municipal-ity announced job offers based on specialization and experience. TheDepartment of Public Works thus enlarged its mission beyond that ofsurveying cracks in minor structures. It was to become a key administra-tion in the institutional transition from the old to the new regime onthe 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 confronta-tion with the authority of the central state, embodied by the Committeeon Mendicity of the National Assembly. Under the commanding handof the reformist philanthropic noble, François Alexandre Frédéric LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt, and seconded by Pierre-Francois Boncerf him-self, the Committee at the end of August 1790 took decisive steps toeradicate begging by reopening the ancien régime’s public workshopsalong new principles. Committed to the notion of eliminating povertythrough a systematic work regimen, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt pro-moted the English distinction between the deserving and undeservingpoor, between indigents who could work and those who would not.16

Projects aimed at eliminating poverty institutionalized this differen-tiation by offering a choice of tasks to the able-bodied poor whiledisciplining the idle poor, obliged to carry out lesser responsibilities.Moreover, the project for the relief workshops (ateliers de secours) wasconceived specifically to avoid the mistakes that had led to the undo-ing of the old charity workshops (ateliers de charité). (Eliminating theterm “charity” represented their divorce from religious connotations inmoving from charity to welfare.) Places were strictly reserved for Parisresidents who would be paid at a rate “inferior” to the current salaryfor the same genre of work as determined by on-site inspectors. Noone in his or her right mind would choose performing menial tasksin grueling workshops over proper opportunities to find employmentin the private sphere. Low wages averaging 20 sous a day, coupled with


mind-numbing tasks consisting mostly of clearing fields of debris, wereto offer a punishing lesson in work rhythms. They were truly the lastresort of the destitute.17

The numbers of indigent Parisians employed on the new sites fluc-tuated between 18,000 in October of 1790 to 31,000 (an astounding5 percent of the Parisian population) just before their permanent closurein June 1791. Despite the precautions of the Committee of Mendicity,the sight of these massive numbers of unemployed men and womenperforming meaningless tasks with little enthusiasm deeply offendedbourgeois and literate Parisians. Even within the Department of PublicWorks emanated strident criticism of the national workshops.18 A groupof ornamental sculptors employed by the Department of Public Workswrote to the municipality to complain that “in these workshops thehungry and idle poor are corrupted by the example and the violence ofthousands of wretched people who simply have the misfortune of beingthere . . . .”19

Outrage that the Revolution had launched such projects, with theirgrueling work conditions aggravated by the corruption and negligenceof those in charge, was widely echoed. Besides the moral indignationthese workshops aroused, their poor organization led to practical criti-cism as well: the workshops ruined the labor market by lax discipline.A petition by two master carpenters asked that any journeyman in theworkshops be immediately sent back to his master. The ateliers weredenounced as draining the private sites of their best workers, and inspir-ing further agitation for wage increases.20 Besides supposedly corruptingthe 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 commis-sioner of the Section de Mont Blanc passed on a litany of complaintsabout the local workshop: the workers at a nearby site had not beenpaid during a period between six weeks and two months, and inspectorswere no longer even making cursory appearances.21

In this atmosphere of crisis, many pamphlets and newspapers, includ-ing Jean-Paul Marat’s, L’Ami du peuple, called for disbanding the publicworkshops for reasons of finance and public safety.22 Another suchappeal was written by the architect and former inspector of municipalconstruction in Paris, Bernard Poyet. His anonymous brochure calledfor a massive investment of public funds in construction projects asa substitute for the public workshops. The needs of the nation wouldonly 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


class, those who are the most industrious, the most useful, & who nev-ertheless are the most distressed, the class of workers and artisans of theCapital.”

Poyet’s pamphlet collapsed a wide range of social prejudices and char-itable impulses into a single argument for prominent grands projets.While advocating the “embellishment” of Paris through a network ofboulevards and monuments, his objective was to marshal forth argu-ments for the rejuvenation of the nation around the building process.Poyet appealed for money to go to public building projects by distin-guishing industrious tradesmen from the masses of indigent poor whohad flocked to the public workshops. To fulfill the promise of the Revolu-tion is to reconceive the building process itself as a thorough educationof the nation in citizenship:

To give greater life to the liberal and mechanical arts, we must under-take large-scale public projects whose execution will demand thecooperation of a great number of workers of all types, and directed byconsiderations of general utility. Architecture, of all the arts, enjoysthe deepest influence in the future of a great empire; all the otherarts are mere tributaries of architecture, so artists and artisans of allthe classes are called to come together around the erecting of publicmonuments. It is thus these arts, so pleasant in their effects and sopowerful 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 thatmakework public assistance corrupts while productive labor edifies.And, for their social usefulness, the building trades alone embody thesupreme qualities of the Third Estate. The competitive yet cooperativenature of work on large public work sites; the unification of profession-als and artisans as productive laborers; the political results of virtuouslabor – these distinguished the building process as an education inactive citizenship within the French nation. Further, the specific qual-ities of building make the putting up of public monuments the mosteloquent symbols of architecture’s “general utility.” Poyet thereby laidthe groundwork for the great reversal in the Revolution’s labor policy.As becoming of a social experiment of this order, the policy’s first trialwould take place away from the city center but rather in the teem-ing, popular quarter in the southern outskirts of the city, the faubourgSaint-Marcel.


The nation’s work site: The Panthéon français

The Parisian neighborhood of the faubourg Saint-Marcel was amicrocosm of an urban preindustrial manufacturing quarter. Its finesthistorian, Haim Burstin, has described its social character in the Revo-lution with scalpel-like precision. Located on the Left Bank, populatedby about 10 percent of the Parisian population, its reputation as apoor, marginal, and insalubrious zone belied the reality of a mixedsocio-economic makeup. For the faubourg Saint-Marcel comprised alarge semirural and very poor southern sector. It featured a dense arcof religious institutions and hospitals such as the Salpêtrière to theeast; university annexes and bookshops associated with the Sorbonneto the north; and a series of slaughterhouses and some 33 tanners adja-cent to the famously polluted stream la Bièvre that flowed, or rathertrickled, into the Seine to the west. Here, the many paradoxes of lateeighteenth-century Paris were apparent to visitors and local inhabitantsalike. Ancient symbols of immense clerical wealth centered upon theadjacent Latin Quarter around the Saint-Etienne du Mont (the site ofthe Church of Sainte-Geneviève, soon to be transformed into the Pan-theon) which contrasted brutally with immense stretches of new formsof misery. The Salpêtrière hospitals and its dépendances – Paris had 48hospitals and hospices by 1789 – attracted a movement of sick andimpoverished families, mostly from outside of Paris, toward the easternpart of the neighborhood. To the west, the odors emanating from theindustrial waste material dumped into la Bièvre and various cesspoolswere so powerful as to overwhelm even the hardiest inspectors come toexamine sanitary conditions in the quarter. And in the heart of thisdense neighborhood, a multitude of stores and indoor and open airworkshops added to the social and economic predominance of manufac-turing and industry. Bonnet makers and blanket weavers were clusteredaround the Gobelins sector; a host of shoesmiths thrived near the siteof Sainte-Geneviève; and several breweries were installed on the rueMouffetard.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 technolo-gies in such fast-developing sectors as chemicals and the extraction ofsaltpeter for explosives, badly needed for demolition and military pur-poses. Economic opportunity in both old and new sectors attractednetworks of migrant unskilled laborers who congregated in areas suchas what is now the place Maubert in search of places to sleep – rooms to


let, chambres garnies, those run-down and inexpensive rooming housesrun by the often-condemned “sleep merchants,” (marchands de som-meil) who packed many laborers to a single small room. A police reportpublished in 1795 counted around between 8,000 and 11,000 migrantworkers crowded into these rooming houses each month. During theRevolution, 66 percent of the faubourg Saint-Marcel’s population wasmade up of provincials; these constituted also the majority of theindigent poor housed in the hospitals.25

At the very heart of this diverse neighborhood, a gigantic build-ing site was erected after 1764 following the demolition of much ofthe Romanesque cloister and the old Church of Sainte-Geneviève, thepatron saint of Paris. Following the sudden death of the NationalAssembly’s president, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti Mirabeau, the newly com-pleted Church of Sainte-Geneviève was reconsacrated, on 4 April 1791,the Panthéon français, a civil monument “to the great men, a gratefulnation,” as inscribed over the portico. Mirabeau’s body was to be thefirst occupant of the space’s crypt. Over the next quarter century, manysmall enterprises, grocers, and larger workshops owed their survival byfurnishing the building materials, the food, water and wine, and evenspecialized labor – especially, the skilled workmen such as sculptors, car-penters, and metalworkers. The tumultuous, anarchic character of thefaubourg Saint-Marcel would be politicized in the revolutionary yearsby the combustible mixture of labor strife, guild culture, and neigh-borhood conflict projected onto the national stage via the Pantheon’sworksite (Map 3.1, Figures 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6).

Numerous public enterprises in the faubourg Saint-Marcel reinforcedthe importance of state-managed enterprises (régies) to the Revolution’seconomy. The quarter comprised the thriving Gobelins tapestry fac-tory as well as several nearly exhausted stone quarries providing publicemployment opportunities.26 The relatively high rate of employmentat these state-run sites, however, was coupled with spasmodic rhythmsof labor. At the site of Sainte-Geneviève, lapses in funding, budgetarycutbacks, and frequent changes in the architectural plans contributedto a heightened sense that revolutionary public works were as precari-ous as private sites. Colliding headlong with the expectation that stateprojects would provide full employment, especially in the most difficultof times, these disruptions gave rise to a tradition of labor contentious-ness borne of low salaries, the arbitrary dismissal of workers, and thenear-dictatorial power of a few favored entrepreneurs.27 Aggravating thesocial problems of the faubourg, the National Assembly began to dis-mantle the administrative authority of many state-managed enterprises.


Map 3.1 Turgot Map, 1739, detail. The outlying faubourg Saint-Marcel beforethe construction of the eighteenth-century Church of Sainte-Geneviève. Theemplacement 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 thananticipated.

In the revolutionary years, the pent-up grievances of the artisans ofthe faubourg Saint-Marcel were given a new and powerful articulationin the language of republicanism. Many building trades workers on thesite of the Pantheon were politicized by radicals gathered at the heartof the Sainte-Geneviève quarter. Some had no doubt attended meet-ings at the radical Cordeliers club (or the Society of the Friends of theRights of Man and of the Citizen), located a brief stroll down the hillfrom the Pantheon, on the rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine. Starting as earlyas the spring of 1790, the Cordeliers drew up and circulated petitionsdenouncing employment conditions, reformulating labor protest in thenew political language of citizenship and radical populism.28

Cordeliers radicals, including the journalists Camille Desmoulins,Jean-Paul Marat, and the future Montagnard political leader GeorgesDanton, were only the most well-known republicans who met on theedges of the quarter. Nationally, about one million individuals, out of a


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

population of perhaps 27 million French people, attended as many as20,000 surveillance committees and many more political clubs duringthe revolutionary period.29 In particular, as we will see, the sophis-tication of the political vocabulary of laborers of the Pantheon sitesuggests strongly a connection between republicans and artisans. Atthe same time, evidence for the seductive thesis of worker radical-ization by vanguard revolutionaries is sketchy, for the former “Grubstreet” pamphleteers that made up the Cordeliers were concerned in thesummer of 1791 with more abstract notions of the people against thearistocracy.30

These political and moral categories omitted discussions of exploita-tion by entrepreneurs, stressing instead the counter-revolutionarytendencies of the idle classes, those parasites borne of luxury, andcorrupted by easy or inherited wealth. The Cordeliers at this timeaccused the nobility at every turn of plotting to starve the people, of

109

Figure 3.2 The Pantheon. Among the Revolution’s accomplishments was thesecularization of the sculptural programs and the blocking of windows whichtransformed 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 MontagneSainte-Geneviève.

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

Figure 3.5 Rue Laplace, near the Pantheon.


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

fomenting counter-revolution, and of committing treason. The crimeof entrepreneurial oppression or corruption did not fit this Manicheanmentality in easy fashion, for mere profiteering on public works projectspaled as seditious activity in the wake of the Revolution’s political criseswhich threatened the new order beginning in the spring of 1791.31

Yet, the publication of certain petitions on behalf of the Pantheon’slabor force in Marat’s newspaper, L’Ami du people, strongly suggeststhat the Cordeliers’ republicanism was circulated, received, and trans-lated in the categories of artisanal radicalism. For example, on 12 June1791, Marat published the “The Protests of the Artisan-Masons of Sainte-Geneviève,” which denounced a “cabal” by entrepreneurs who soughtto keep their positions on the site by scheming to dominate localpolitical instances. The archival record is silent on the question ofwhether Marat’s journal reprinted the masons’ petition verbatim or,more probably, interpreted the demand in the political vocabulary of theCordeliers Club.32


Contestation and public works

Later revolutionary days of action such as the Prairial journée con-firmed that the 550 laborers who came together on the site of thePantheon indeed created a ripe opportunity for republican proselytiz-ing. But Jean-Paul Marat and the Cordeliers’ particular interest in thesite of the Panthéon was fueled, at first at least, not as much by repub-lican hope as by political suspicion: in particular, they were wary of thepenetration of royalist politics within the site’s management. It was acharge inspired by the nomination of Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremèrede Quincy as director of the project to transform the church into a secu-lar national monument on 19 June 1791.33 Quatremère de Quincy, likethe former president of the Committee on Mendicity, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, represented the deeper paradoxes of applying Enlightenmentprinciples in the Revolution. Both men had brought to revolution-ary policy a peculiarly hybrid mix of innovation and archaism in thedomains of public labor policy; both applied ideas intended to furtherthe efficiency, rationality, and precision in the world of work; both alsobetrayed deep social prejudice in questions arising from disciplining,controlling, and policing the workforce and the indigent population ofParis. The brief arrest of Quatremère de Quincy in 1794 and the coercedflight of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt to the United States between 1793and 1798 were widely perceived as payback for their repressive disposi-tions toward personnel on public sites: at the Pantheon for the formerand in the relief workshops for the latter.

Quatremère de Quincy was deeply steeped in the culture of theEnlightenment’s architectural program, having made his reputationas an architect-theoretician, winning a national contest on ancientarchitecture and writing the Dictionnaire d’Architecture as a part ofCharles-Joseph Panckoucke’s Encyclopédie méthodique in 1785. (Qua-tremère’s closest collaborator on the Pantheon site, Jean-Baptiste Ron-delet, contributed 125 articles to the same Encylopédie méthodique.) Inhis first project of note, he served as architect and supervisor (commis-saire) of the structure’s reconception. He deeply modified the Churchof Saint Geneviève, suppressing the church towers and the lantern,while blocking the windows to give the building a solemn aspect befit-ting a mausoleum. The Revolution was to be commemorated withstark and austere neo-classical architectural principles, as befitting aRoman revival which would be particularly exalted under Napoleon.34

In the political sphere, Quatremère was elected deputy to the Legisla-tive Assembly by the departmental electors of Paris in recognition of his


service to the nation’s Beaux-Arts and for his commitment to the “regen-eration” of the nation. His politics, as divulged on site in conflicts withlaborers, were soundly conservative. After his brief imprisonment, hebecame a member of the royalist Clichy club, and participated in thedays of action of 12–14 Vendémiaire (4–6 October 1795), in favor of theoverthrow of the Republic and restoration of the king.35 Notwithstand-ing royalist politics, he was a forceful advocate for architectural policy inbuilding the new nation. As an extension of the Republic of Letters, hispamphlets on a “Republic of the Arts” drew parallels between the rela-tionship of citizens to the state and artists to the public. The “Republicof the Arts” brought together an “enlightened” human community onthe basis of manifest and intelligible artistic principles. Aesthetically andpolitically, a united nation would be borne of agreed-upon rules, clearlyand distinctly inscribed upon the urban environment and the constitu-tion. The harmony brought to a nation by classical architecture wouldreinforce the harmony created by the social contract.36

Despite Quatremère’s lofty ambitions for French architecture, a royal-ist as chief architect hardly inspired confidence among the Pantheon’semployees. For, as mandated by municipal officials, the Pantheon wassupposed to be organized as a deliberate departure from the ancien régimesystem of public construction. The arrangements of the ancien régime sitehad turned, above all, on privilege. A relatively small stable of architects,entrepreneurs, and furnishers within the Bâtiments du Roi had beenthe exclusive supervisors of the monarchy’s projects.37 With the sup-pression of most functions of this royal administration in April 1791,the municipality of Paris announced its intentions to throw wide openpublic construction by jettisoning the Crown’s closed system of procur-ing material, recruiting supervisors and labor, and appointing inspectorsand architects.

The confusion and disorder engendered by the reform of publicsites compounded a deepening sense that the entire enterprise ofputting up public buildings in the new order was assigned low pri-ority in a struggling transition.38 Shortly afterward, a spokesman forthe entrepreneurs and architects formerly attached to an evanescentParisian body (Bâtiments des domaines de Paris) wrote to the director ofthe national Treasury Department seeking payment for work done a yearearlier on the Palais de justice, le Châtelet, and several prisons. Claimingthat workers had gone unpaid for their services, the petition painted astark portrait of the ripple effect within the stagnant public sector ofthe economy. The delay in promised funds had obstructed the prin-cipal contractors engaged for Parisian public buildings from finishing


assorted projects in civil edifices; private construction was begin to beeffected as a result.39

Emergency meetings held at the City Hall from May to July 1791took on the delicate question of absorbing the Crown’s Parisian domainswithin the Paris municipality.40 Among the first decisions made was toaccept the finances of the new site by the National Assembly, which sup-pressed the Committee on Mendicity’s public workshops in June 1791and channeled remaining credits to the construction of the Pantheon.Beyond the financial issue was a host of questions concerning the orga-nization and administration of the site. In a sharp departure from theancien régime, the city of Paris set about recruiting the “unrecognized”talents of individuals slighted by the ancien régime authority. The eliteof the construction site was to represent new officers of the new order,types whose artistic sense, training, and craft specialization resembleda new form of “patriotic” civil engineer more than that of classicalarchitect. Above them stood the 14 member direction of the Pantheon,including two inspectors, verifiers, supervisors, accountants, and otherpublic officers. In theory, at least, as Quatremère argued in a pamphletjustifying the changes in personnel, the administrators of the buildingsite were to come from outside the Crown’s preferred building elites, aprincipled refusal of ancien régime privilege in the new civic order.41

In practice, however, technocracy did not come quickly to the site, asthe municipality turned repeatedly to the Crown’s stable, to architectswho earned reputations in glorifying the King’s domain. The archi-tects Jean-Baptiste Rondelet and Jacques-Germain Soufflot-le-Romain,who served the site in the new regime as inspectors, also had deepconnections to the project as an ancien régime church. Rondelet hadbegun his tenure on the site in 1774, working as a designer; he hadbecome an inspector in 1784. Soufflot-le-Romain was the nephew ofthe original architect, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, and had joined the siteas a draftsman after his uncle’s death in 1780. In fact, the politicalroyalist Quatremère was the only member of the Pantheon’s revo-lutionary directory not to have connections to the site during theancien régime.42

Yet, while most faces were familiar, they applied new techniques inthe organization of labor. The Pantheon’s administrators, galvanizedby the fresh purpose given to the site by the National Assembly andthe Parisian municipality, transformed the building site’s hiring poli-cies and work rhythms. No longer would employing and dismissinglaborers be a matter of patronage – of obligations owed to a specificmaster or entrepreneur – but now, they were dictated by rigorous charts


and timetables set by supervisors who answered only to the municipal-ity’s directory. Quatremère de Quincy’s principles of labor theory andpractice on the Pantheon’s site reveal an abiding impulse to render thework process “rational.” The uniformity of work hours and salaries wereenforced by an inspector who pored over every salary roll, making theoccasional report to denounce irregularities. The Pantheon also served asan employment bureau in which, ideally, all who qualified would findwork, while all who worked would receive the same pay for the samelabor. Laborers on the work site of the Pantheon were conceptualizedas freely contracted working citizens of the nation. Eventually, however,the contentiousness of the labor force would only be a measure of itsdisillusionment with the site’s lofty principles.43

Besides competitive employment practices, the innovations on thenation’s work site extended to the organization of labor. The very estab-lishment of pay scales and hours were fixed by the city of Paris, throughthe Public Works Department, rather than determined by the ebb andflow of the loosely organized economy of the ancien régime. Labor on thePantheon was to be rigorous and systematic, with every laborer receivingequitable daily rates that were to be applied to all in each task. The neworganization of labor was documented by salary rolls for the Pantheonduring the Revolution after April 1791. These show a consistent groupof workers retained for uniform (if low) salaries – hovering just above2 livres – and for near-12-hour days and six-day-work weeks. There waslittle evident favoritism and no indulgence shown toward those whowere sick or injured, who would be rapidly replaced. Rhythms of workand pay were rendered routine and disinterested, tough but fair, on thenation’s work site.44

The Revolution, briefly at least, brought a modicum of stability inthe organization of labor in the capital city. Consistency is particularlynoteworthy in the work rhythms, the steady wages, and the loyal coreof 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 laborerswho were paid at 2 livres 8 sous per day for 12 days of labor. (Wageswere paid every two weeks.) The average stonecutter at the Pantheon,then, worked 11.6 days every 14 days – an intensive pace of work fora relatively low wage.45 This rhythm continued throughout the sum-mer and fall, varying little with events such as the transfer of Voltaire’sremains in July 1791. Proper context, however, is difficult to establish:the ancien régime salary rolls of the construction of the Church of Sainte-Geneviève have not survived for a comparison with revolutionary-erawages on the Pantheon’s site. The unique source of salary rolls by master


artisans of the ancien régime exists in the Parisian archives as legal doc-umentation for bankruptcies. These archives, by definition, chroniclethe practice of soon to be insolvent private builders – hardly represen-tative of the profession as a whole. However, they demonstrate generalpatterns of hiring, payment, and even firing in the Parisian buildingtrades.

The routinization of labor at the Pantheon’s site stands in stark con-trast to standard ancien régime practices on public worksites. Ebb andflow characterized the constant movement of personnel. As MichaelSonenscher demonstrates, there was typically a core of a few regularjourneymen and a large periphery of occasional laborers.46 As is the caseof building enterprises today, the guild masters entrusted a few long-standing journeymen to do the most intricate forms of work, while tem-porary labor was allowed to do the more-routine and less-skilled tasks.The master mason Grelet’s workforce of 12 stonecutters – two core andten peripheral – was contracted for modifications of the Opera between22 April and 4 May 1782, earning salaries that fluctuated from 2 livres to2 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 journey-men and guildsmen, moreover. Similar fluctuations in personnel, workrhythms, and salaries on the public site of the public hôpital des Incur-ables (renamed hôspice des Incurables during the Revolution) between1727 and 1786 were caused by the irregular ebb and flow of the wor-force on the site. In turn, availability of labor was disrupted by theconstantly changing salary structure and the comings and goings ofmigrant workers. As with the Church of Sainte-Geneviève, this hospicehad considerable symbolic importance in raising the profile of the ancienrégime link between Church and State, and its salary structure was care-fully documented and closely controlled by inspectors. Above all, theydemonstrate that wages stagnated through the 1780s when the hospi-tal site, in the outer-lying faubourg Saint-Martin, was incorporated intoParis leading to higher taxes (the octroi) on building materials.48

In the urban world of work even the elementary question of whatconstituted the workday – the prix de la journée, the traditional salaryfor each “day” worked – was in contention. Not only would the lengthand value of a given task be under dispute, but the work week itself wasconstantly challenged by both journeymen and masters. In the publicsphere, salary rolls show many deviations from the standard two-weekpay period when financially strapped entrepreneurs continued direct-ing their assigned projects without paying their workers. Delays in the


payment of laborers lasted up to a month. But in private construction,even worse abuses occurred regularly as master masons had recourse todeclare 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 los-ing up to 200 livres for about six full two-week periods under the ancienrégime.49 In general, building workers would be engaged on a given worksite as infrequently as not, and often for tasks that would only takeup to as little as one-eighth of a day. With the exception of a steadycadre of well-paid assistants, continuity of the workforce was a some-time thing, with individuals changing often from month to month.Payscales were also tipped in favor of seniority and of what might becalled loyal insiders. Notwithstanding the efforts of the police of Parisand the guilds previous to the Revolution, there was no fixed sense of aregular workday, work week, or payscale.

Thus, in the spring of 1791, the superintendents of the Pantheon hadsought to create a model work site, an elusive utopia sought after bythe Crown, the police, administrative reformers, and even certain guildmasters throughout the age of Enlightenment. The projection of theRevolution onto the Pantheon was accomplished in three overarchingways. First, the organization of labor – of the rhythm, pay, and definitionof the tasks themselves – was made transparent and coherent. Two-weekpay periods replaced the more supple journée. Narrowly defined hierar-chies of tasks replaced the customary and loosely organized distinctionsbetween a “loyal” nucleus and a “fringe” of occasional laborers engagedfor a few days or a few hours for specific tasks. Labor at the Pantheon rep-resented unmediated contractual work which had consented to sell itsproperty, as embodied by its labor, for inflexible and precisely stipulatedconditions.

Second, the recasting of conventional work practices to create a bodyof trustworthy, regular, and, on paper at least, civic-minded laborerswould be guaranteed by a tough system of petitioning for work con-tracts. Quatremère de Quincy and Soufflot-le-Romain fully intendedthat a competitive meritocracy would replace patronage. Revolutionary“merit,” of course, meant at the same time social utility and politicalvirtue. Petitions for work on the Pantheon were drafted to advertisea worker as among the most militant of the politically engaged andas among the most deserving of the industrious poor. The process ofhiring workers was thereby deeply politicized. The competitive systemof petitioning for jobs meant that former masters and journeymenappealed on the basis of their civic virtue as well as on the basis of


talent. Petitions for employment typically presented the writer as a citi-zen without resources, the father of a family, a patriot, as well as a builderin good standing among colleagues.50

With competitive petitioning for jobs, the act of seeking work con-stituted a political appeal. Civic virtue was thereby introduced as acategory of public employment. The petitions were drawn up by publicwriters or by club members who cited the patriotism of the candidate –as a volunteer in the local battalion, a participant in the taking of theBastille, or an activist in the local district and later section – along withhis potential hardship as a “father of a numerous family.” Often, a labor-ers’ sectional colleagues would attach a letter to petitions addressed tothe Assembly to

(C)ertify and attest that Lamotte, sculptor, living on the rue de Lappen. 12 for six years, is an active citizen of the Popincourt section anda volunteer for the National Guard of the same section; that he hasthree children, and that his comportment is irreproachable, havingnever acted contrary to good mores and public tranquility.51

The flood of petitions to the Pantheon’s superintendents solicited workon behalf of those who claimed to fulfill four prerequisites. The peti-tioner was simultaneously impoverished, politically active, a “familyfather” ready to defend la patrie en danger, and technically proficient.52

Third, and finally, as the labor force at the Pantheon had been iden-tified by meritorious criteria, it was also consistently classified by nameand specialization in the Pantheon’s salary rolls. The nicknames thatfill the pages of ancien régime masters’ salary rolls – “le Rat,” “Victoire,”“Petit Jean,” even the generic “Limousin” – contrast dramatically withthe meticulous proper use of last names and tasks on the Panthéon.A process of sorting, surveillance, and individualization was the Rev-olution’s response to the fear of an anonymous labor force, such ascreated by the ancien régime and inherited by revolutionaries in theform of the public workshops. While labor was recast in revolutionarycategories of meritorious competition, Quatremère de Quincy removedthe nomination of elites on the site from any and all competitiveselection. The inspectors, engineers, and artists were chosen by Qua-tremère de Quincy himself. This division of labor between commonlaborers, hired on the basis of labor specialization and civisme, and atechnical and artistic elite handpicked by the site’s director, was anabsolute one.53


Over the course of the summer of 1791, a massive labor force ofmasons, carpenters, stonecutters, sculptors, and hundreds of unskilledassistants was engaged to complete the Pantheon’s transformation intoa secular shrine to the glory of the nation. This politically active, highlyskilled, and overworked body of workers would prove a lethal combi-nation for political leaders, threatening often the social peace of Paris.Paradoxically, the choice of hiring politically reliable builders wouldalso create a workforce capable of articulating work-related grievancesthrough the appropriate political channels.54

Site-specific and neighborhood-based labor strife in theRevolution

The Pantheon was hardly the only site to have experienced labor strifein the faubourg Saint-Marcel during the early Revolution. The RoyalManufacture of the Gobelins, specializing in the manufacture of artistictapestries, had been under the authority of the same royal adminis-tration as that of Sainte-Geneviève. Supervised by the Director of theBâtiments du Roi, the Marquis d’Angivillers, formerly a close associateof Turgot, an inclination toward productive methods often inspired hislabor politics. Under the Revolution, contention at the Gobelins’ sitecentered on an ancien régime reform, put in place by d’Angivillers in1785, imposing salaries based on a piece-rate wage (salaire à la tâche).A weaver received compensation for finished cloths rather than for theamount of time at work. The official preference for this policy was, ofcourse, to favor the quality control which it imposed in the particularlyclosely policed luxury industries. Inspections of finished goods wereconducted before the salaries were doled out. The new salary structurealso placed the burden of damaged goods on the laborer or artisan, whoreceived no compensation for rejected merchandise. In December 1790,following several months of collective petitioning, the piece-rate wagewas suppressed in exchange for a weekly salary. But, at the same time, ina cost-cutting move, many apprentices and unskilled workers were dis-missed. The Marquis d’Angivillers boasted that he had successfully “putan end to the demands of laborers in adopting a middle ground betweenextreme rigor and an excessive condescension.”55

There were more differences than similarities between the nearby sitesof the Pantheon and the Gobelins Manufactory. Above all, the fundsavailable for salaries in the lucrative and internationally acclaimed Gob-elins were rarely in doubt, whereas the Pantheon suffered from a seriesof financial problems and a lack of consistent deliveries of building


supplies. Aggravating the disruptions, the May 1791 abolition of themerchandise tax, the octroi, was accidentally announced in advance,leading to a line of carriages transporting heavy construction materialwhich waited up to several weeks outside the city limits to avoid payingthe fees. Adding to material disruptions, the erratic distribution of therevolutionary currency, the assignats, created a shortage of small coin topay wages. Finally, the funds advanced by the National Assembly for thePantheon were insufficient. The 1 million livres voted as funding for themonument in June 1791 was more an exemplary sum, determined notby the specific needs of the site – the material and labor – but was theamount of credits left over for the public workshops at the moment oftheir closure. Symbolism clearly trumped pragmatism, as Quatremère deQuincy bitterly estimated this was less than half the required amount offunding the Pantheon.56

Underlying labor conflict throughout the summer of 1791 were thetwo distinct yet contradictory objectives of the Pantheon. On the onehand, as a public works site, it held forth the promise of hiring theunemployed skilled citizens of Paris; but, on the other hand, as a par-ticular monument with limited tasks, it followed rhythms of labor thatdictated periodically laying off workers. The noted activism of carpen-ters, for example, was provoked because their primary task – puttingup and taking down of scaffolding – did not demand the continualengagement of regular workers.57 In late May 1791, amidst the bustleof reorganizing the worksite of the Pantheon, the exasperated ChiefInspector Rondelet wrote, “We might say that in dedicating this Templeto Glory, we were building a charity workshop.”58 Rondelet reacted towhat he viewed as a denigrating mix of artistic and social concerns inthe most immaculate province of French architecture. The dictates ofthe building as a “work of art” were, to Rondelet, beyond the ephemeralexigencies of the marketplace of labor. As work on the site was com-pleted, only very specialized artisans were needed for the highly precisefinishing of sculptures, capitols, and columns; yet, as the need for a largeworkforce faded, the municipality was simultaneously besieged with jobpetitions to treat the site as a “charity workshop.”

The hybrid charge of its mission and the shaky finances of thePantheon were further aggravated by the hothouse political contextof the spring and summer of 1791. On 25 June, a crowd estimated tobe several hundred thousand Parisians greeted the king and his familyupon their forced return to Paris, under arrest, after their failed “flight toVarennes.” On 17 July, 50 petitioners supporting the destitution of theking were killed after martial law was declared by Bailly and Lafayettein the “Champ de Mars massacre.” Financial volatility and political


instability resulted as capital seeped to Switzerland for safe-keeping andthe assignat was devalued by 30 percent. Shortly thereafter work stop-pages throughout Paris spread to the Pantheon, accompanied by angrypetitions, demanding increases in pay of up to 20 percent and a relax-ation of work rhythms set by the municipality. At the end of July, onepetition 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 privateentrepreneurs on a public works site also came under attack by thehighly skilled ornamental sculptors who had been agitating for reformssince their engagement by the Public Works Department earlier thatsummer. In a furious exchange of petitions between sculptors and con-tractors, who furnished raw material and doled out salaries after beingpaid by the National Assembly, a running pamphlet battle was waged onthe very principle of private entrepreneurship as the organizing princi-ple of furnishing material on a public site. The contractors exalted theircrucial role on the site by invoking the triumphant emergence of con-struction for the regeneration of the nation, for they alone had helpedthe “public economy” grow by their wise organization of time, work,and material.60

In response, the sculptors became stalwart critics of profiteering, find-ing it “incredible that in this century, in this moment of regeneration,the enlightened contractors would have us believe in the absolute neces-sity of their existence” for the construction sector. As self-describedartists, having trained with painters in the elite Corporation of Saint Lucand perfected their art through periodic visits to Rome, the sculptorsof the capitals, bas-reliefs, and tympanum of the Pantheon had tradi-tionally worked independently of the master-journeyman relationship.They now sought to restore a measure of their lost liberty under theRevolution’s system of tightly controlled patronage, in denouncing theexcessive

subjugation of journeymen toward the contractors; here we couldreveal too many horrors; but generally we only say that thedependence of the journeymen upon the individual who compelswork without being fully committed to the quality of contractorrequires an additional inspector paid for by the Municipality ofParis.61

In the midst of the liberal phase of the Revolution emerged a scathingcritique of private entrepreneurship on public sites. To the sculptors,the utility of private directors exacted “the payment of large amounts


of interest to intermediaries.” The latter only looked after their owngain on the building site, “too often forming coalitions between them-selves” to keep down wages. The contractors are incapable of imposingan efficient discipline upon the workforce because it was widely under-stood that “their selfish surveillance could be supplied by another,”more public-spirited administrator. In sum, the contractors representeda corruption of public investment for they were expendable middle-men adding needless expense while also skimming off sums of moneyfrom the salaries of employees. These “passive beings” even brazenlydisplayed their own lack of commercial probity by filching publiclyowned wood used in scaffolding to sell elsewhere. The sculptors pro-nounced their own patriotic whistle blowing as evidence of their ownunselfish and patriotic commitment to the new order, condemningthe ancien régime, where “we ran up against a police excessively inter-ested in enterprise” and who would sooner “condemn the citizen . . . whouncovers such abuses.” The obligations of citizenship now summonedthe sculptors publicly to air their grievances against the contractors.At bottom, the unaccustomed authority of private entrepreneurs inornaments, in a craft driven by artisanal independence, provoked avibrant defense of the rights and duties of citizenship in the neworder.62

The petition literature of workers at the Pantheon repeatedly calledinto question entrepreneurial domination of the work process. Thesculptors’ attack on the speculation and corruption of contractorswas reprised by stonecutters on 29 July 1791 in an appeal to LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt, then the president of the Paris Department.Three hundred and eighty stonecutters signed a petition claiming thatcorruption was rampant on the site. They maintained they were carriedon salary rolls at 3 livres per day, while being paid between 2 livres,5 sous and 1 livre, 16 sous. Unscrupulous entrepreneurs were accusedof pocketing the difference: “You may consult the payrolls,” this peti-tion concluded. In fact, the Pantheon’s payrolls for the second halfof July show stonecutters paid at the rate of 2 livres, 8 sous. Regard-less of the petition’s exactitude (or the payroll’s veracity), it had putforward another basis for refusing the authority of entrepreneurs onlarge public sites. Now, they were not only superfluous middlemen; theywere corrupt profiteers, whose immediate interests at the Pantheon alsocompromised the demands of public safety.

The circumstance that provoked the stonecutters’ wrath was the col-lapse of the scaffolding and of masonry stone inside the buildings’unfinished dome “that could have cost the lives of 50–60 men.” The


accident took place on a Sunday when no laborers were present. Theincident was mentioned only once elsewhere in the welter of contem-porary literature on the Pantheon’s construction site, and that in alater report by the Chief Inspector Rondelet, who only mentions anaccident costing 12–15,000 livres. No loss of life is noted nor is thegalvanizing affect on the workforce remarked upon.63 In the course oftheir bitter analysis of its causes, the stonecutters denounced a seriesof entrepreneurial decisions that had undermined the integrity of thestructure itself. The Pantheon was endangered by the “employment ofbad materials, by vices of construction”; the entrepreneurs skimmedoff funds meant for paying workers; and they prevented careful craft-ing of elements by micro-managing work practices.64 As Rondeletlater made clear, however, the perceived heavy-handed obstruction ofentrepreneurs was due to the demand for very precise cutting and prepa-ration of the Pantheon’s material. Nevertheless, the presence of privateentrepreneurs on the building site was now cast as figuratively andliterally eroding the structure from within.

While the newly competitive entrepreneurial regime on the Pantheonsite was the chief culprit in grievances of sculptors, stonecutters, andcarpenters, administrative paralysis was also contested in other petitionliterature. Throughout the summer of 1791, journeymen began to dis-pute the right of municipal officials to hire and fire workers uniquelyaccording to the demands of the Pantheon itself. Redundant carpenters,it was reported, had terrorized timid officials into staying on the pay-roll. Scaffolding could not be dismantled even after it was no longerneeded.65 As a result, Quatremère de Quincy became deeply disen-chanted with the revolutionary order on the Pantheon’s site. He notonly attacked the supposed self-indulgence of workers, but he criticizedthe abusive and negligent system of verification, finding that “bills arenot at entirely paid, the accounts are settled on blind trust, the tasksare only surveyed in form alone, and one senses well that inspectionis 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 intoits new life.66

A consequence of the unrest would be the crafting of a form ofpolitical self-representation of the building trades, one that was artic-ulated by journeymen sculptors and stonecutters. This was based oncivic virtue (civisme) alone. Transcending entrepreneurial despotism andbureaucratic ineptitude would be the exemplary citizenship of Parisianbuilding workers. Those who denounced corrupt practices sought to


demonstrate that they were more than self-interested employees: in theanticorporatist political culture of 1791, they advertised themselves asthe real guardians of the Revolution’s national temple, who cared for thepublic safety of the citizens of Paris, and were thus constantly vigilantof quality control in construction. The commitment of certain buildersto civic virtue was the point of distinction from the profiteering motivesof entrepreneurs and certain corrupt supervisors. A display of the will toprotect the safety of Parisians was conceived therefore, symbolically andliterally, as public labor transformed into a public service.67 Further, thisview of the active citizenship of civic-minded artisans clashed with theirtreatment on the Pantheon’s site as purely contract labor to be engagedand dismissed following the staccato rhythms of the worksite. Petitionliterature formulated the debate in terms of resistance to the impositionof “tyrannical” techniques of organizing work by individuals whose pre-cise interests were in conflict with national solidarity embodied by thePantheon. Workers who had met tough standards of civic virtue hadlittle tolerance for receiving orders from profiteering contractors whosepatriotic zeal for the nation was never a standard for engagement on thebuilding site.

The political origins of the discourse to promote the patriotism ofthe Pantheon’s workforce is elusive. As mentioned above, the physicalproximity of the Cordeliers club invited intervention by the most com-bative Parisian newspaper, Marat’s L’Ami du peuple in June 1791, whichprinted a petition signed by the Pantheon’s laborers that supported cor-ruption charges against 12 entrepreneurs with public works contracts.Marat himself added that “the bloodsuckers have enriched themselvesat the expense of the former administration and the workers.”68

The subversive implications of citizen-builders who derived theirsense of identity from civic virtue were fully drawn by the architect-theoretician, Quatremère de Quincy, as the chief inspector of thePantheon. He condemned the contentious workforce as forming “fac-tions” and as fostering “disorder and anarchy.” In a ringing denuncia-tion of the workers, Quatremère, in July 1791, focused on the influenceof Republicanism on their behavior:

This state of things is the inevitable consequence of the absurd systemestablished between the worker who, by an absurd parody of govern-ment, look upon their work as their property, and the building asa republic where they are co-citizens and believe as a consequencethat it is their right to name their chiefs, their inspectors and to dis-tribute the tasks arbitrarily. In such a hierarchy, we conclude that


all verification would be dangerous, all inspection would only bea vain formality, and a coalition would be formed . . . between thedestructive agents of all kinds of insubordination.69

Apparently, to Quatremère de Quincy, the building tradesmen hadlearned the wrong lessons in their education as citizens of the nationon the work site of the Pantheon.

In his denunciation of republicanism, Quatremère de Quincyaddressed himself to a movement by carpenters, stonecutters, and sculp-tors to appoint a particularly popular inspector as chief inspector ofthe site. A motif surfaced in workers’ petitions in August 1791 ofthe need to establish a labor commissioner (commissaire des gens del’art) on the nation’s work site. Rumors of imminent changes in thePantheon’s Directory had circulated widely, and journeymen in a vocif-erous series of petitions demanded that Soufflot-le-Romain, the nephewof the original architect of Sainte-Geneviève, take charge of organizingthe workforce. Known as sympathetic to workers through his meticu-lous execution of duties as inspector of salary rolls, he was praised ina petition signed by 130 sculptors as “a man as just and as virtuous,by his talents as by his impartiality.” Elsewhere, the carpenters admiredhis “talent, zeal, and patriotism.” In fact, Soufflot-le-Romain was par-ticularly appreciated as the military commander of one of the faubourgSaint-Marcel’s battalion – his fame as a fair-minded leader of men wasalso based on his patriotic engagement in the Revolution.70

The good press enjoyed by Soufflot-le-Romain was matched by theopprobrium heaped on the main contractor of the Pantheon’s masonrymaterials, Pierre Poncet. In an updated version of a medieval moralityplay, the two figures were juxtaposed as darkness and light. The stone-cutters denounced Poncet as a “tyrant”; a petition that claimed to speak“in the name of all the journeymen working at the edifice” enumer-ated a litany of complaints against Poncet. He skimmed 6 sous per dayoff the wages of each carpenter and even “prolonged their day in orderto increase his profit”; he surpassed the authorized funding by 14,000livres; he collected 60–80,000 livres in rents off national buildings forwhich he did not own a lease. In short, Poncet was blamed for “doingeverything 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 “reestablishedin their functions” by the administration. Apparently, Poncet sanc-tioned the dispatch of laborers unnecessary to construction or too risky


as political actors. The role of the entrepreneur on the nation’s work-site, to Poncet, did not include compromising its rapid achievementby stooping to satisfy its hybrid mission as full employment site andsymbolic monument. But Poncet’s “tyranny” in improperly dischargingworkers was added to further charges of corruption. He was accused offurnishing substandard materials and taking hidden profits off the mar-gins of his masonry supplies. These many charges were addressed in amid-September report by Quatremère de Quincy which concluded that“the complaints of the workers are dictated for the most part by hatredand discontent,” more personal than professional in nature. Poncetwould remain in place at the pinnacle of elites at the Pantheon, with thecapacity to impose a fierce regimen upon the workforce. This, however,would abruptly end with the contractor’s arrest in September 1793. Bythe time he was released from prison a few months later, the work on thesite 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 apprehensionover uncontained entrepreneurial practices on public works projects.Moreover, Poncet himself, 60 years of age in 1791, was a figure deeplyrooted in the ancien régime, having first started to supply masonry tothe site from the start of the destruction of the Church of Sainte-Geneviève in 1755. His advanced age, he wrote later, prevented hisattendance in revolutionary club meetings, and this absence no doubtfurther damaged his reputation. Like other masters, contractors, andsuppliers throughout the ancien régime, he took for granted a relativelyfree hand on public building sites. Poncet carelessly even claimed thatthe Pantheon “was no different from any other building enterprise.”Out of touch with the Revolution’s movement to delimit the authorityof entrepreneurs over supplies, materials, and employment decisions atpublic worksites, he attempted to elude the Revolution’s procedures onwages. He assumed the responsibility of directly paying the wages to thelaborers without accountability to the Pantheon’s direction.72 (This con-travened the elaborate controls established by the Assembly. Salary rollswere to be prepared and verified by the inspector, then submitted to thetreasurer of the Public Works Department, who would disburse the fundsto entrepreneurs as salaries for the workers.) Poncet’s execrable repu-tation 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 construc-tion,” who was able to steal exactly 90,000 livres “at the expense of the


workers” which were now invested in lucrative rentes.73 Poncet was notonly corrupt but an utter fraud.

At the end of August 1791 the collaborative regime of municipalexperts and entrepreneurs was temporarily replaced at the top of thePantheon’s construction hierarchy by the loathed and detested Poncethimself. Until the convening of the Legislative Assembly a month after-ward, Poncet had nearly unlimited means to suppress all conflict andeven broader powers to dismiss workers without due administrativeprocess. A troubled peace was temporarily restored by a harsh imple-mentation of a pitiless work regimen and employment schedules. Theentrepreneur began by making deep cuts in the workforce. A poster putup on the site announcing Poncet’s new function as superintendent alsoproclaimed that an unspecified reduction of stonecutters would takeplace because of “the confusion caused by such a great number of arti-sans is prejudicial to regular work procedures.” Starting in September1791, Poncet’s made it policy to reduce employees on the site to a bareminimum.74

Poncet also targeted the few traditional privileges of artisans thatremained after guild abolition. A few former ex-masters tenaciouslyclung to long-established monopoly employment practices in defianceof the dismantling of corporate privilege. The ex-masters obstructedthe hiring of meritorious public laborers by insisting on choosing theirformer apprentices as assistants on the site. According to municipalinspectors’ complaints, even by means of “physical assaults, these arti-sans employed by the municipality permitted themselves to choose oreven to reject” certain laborers who arrived in search of work.75 After thesuppression of the corporations, former masters took it upon themselvesto restore apprenticeship relations on certainly public sites. Custom-ary relations among the workers were not to be disposed of easily byrevolutionary policies.

Poncet mercilessly clamped down on these recalcitrant masters byclosing the stonecutters’ workshops nearby the building where mate-rial was measured, shaped, and sculpted. It was within the confines ofthese ateliers, it appears, that the revival of the masters’ ancien régimeprivileges took place. The Pantheon’s directors announced that thosewho wished to work under the “new order” ushered in by Poncet hadto conform to new restrictions: to be re-employed at the works, allworkers now had first to register directly with Poncet at his bureau.Presumably, this stipulation facilitated the weeding out of contentiouselements, while making readily available the names of provocateurs incase of trouble. Later the same year, the stonecutters’ workshop was


reopened with a diminished and tightly regulated workforce; the totalnumber of laborers at the site was reduced from 550 to 422 workers. Theexigencies of political containment overrode even the practical demandsof the construction site.76

What were the origins, meaning, and legacy of the conflicts engen-dered on the site of the Pantheon? At first glance, contention at thePantheon in the spring and summer of 1791 was sparked by whatappears to be the reinforcement of vestiges of ancien régime practice:the re-introduction of a cast of characters on the construction site, fore-most among them Poncet, with seemingly despotic powers to imposedraconian labor relations. More broadly, the protracted exchangesbetween the building workers, entrepreneurs, and administrators of thePantheon demonstrate how corporate politics were ended and hownew 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 restructuredsalaries, new forms of authority that engendered deep distrust, and awider rejection of entrepreneurial culture on a public work site werearticulated in the language of patriotism, civic virtue, and as Quatremèrede Quincy viewed it, republicanism. In these conflicts, the distinctionbetween those who worked with their hands and those who did not waspresent in outlined form – a clear harbinger of the radical discourse andpolitics of 1793–1794. The builders of the nation’s symbols designatedtheir natural ally as the patriotic local battalion commander Soufflot-le-Romain, a humble draughtsman (despite carrying the name of hisprestigious uncle) nominated to the post of inspector. Here, the localnotable, actively engaged in defending the Revolution and who partici-pated as an artisan in the national monument’s construction, was raisedto the status of local hero.

The main objective of the Pantheon’s supervisors, moreover, had beento reconceive the social hierarchy of work by replacing artisanal pro-duction with technocratic supervision. In theory, the Enlightenmentproject of technocracy embodied by the Encyclopedia – indeed, Qua-tremère de Quincy’s first significant publishing venue was his contribu-tion to the Encyclopédie méthodique – reinforced the greater transparencyof method and the streamlined systemization of work procedures asembodied by the well ordered work site. In fact, this upended erstwhilepractices. After imposing political hiring criteria, and by placing engi-neers such as Rondelet and Soufflot-le-Romain in new inspection andverification roles, the Pantheon’s direction proceeded also to underminetraditional craft identities. While trade boundaries were respected –the difference between a mason and carpenter was not in question, of


course – but within each trade, specialized craft categories, differentia-tion between limousins, manoeuvres, apprentis, garcons, commis, and manyother micro-occupations simply disappear from the salary rolls of thePantheon. The anarchic moment of social decomposition on the site ofa closely watched, highly symbolic monument created the opportunitiesfor the new forms of political contestation. Craft solidarities replaced acorporate culture tied to the great chain of being on work sites. Manyof the same laborers and artisans whose civic virtue was manifested insigned petitions denouncing corruption embraced the cause of defend-ing the Republic from enemies within and without. The trajectory toworkplace radicalism was partially sketched out in discourse if not yetin action.

Nevertheless, the Terror was, of course, hardly “scripted” in 1791, anymore than in 1789, for the issues that created a fragile unity to buildersat the work site of the nation were not tenable for long.77 At the sug-gestion of Pierre Poncet, the Pantheon’s directors decided to favor thehiring of Parisians over migrant laborers from the provinces, in particu-lar, those from the impoverished and backward region of the Limousin.At the end of September 1791, the municipality also announced thatfathers and “citizens of the city of Paris will be preferred to foreign(sic) workers.” Petition literature emanating from the building site nolonger claimed to speak for coalitions of the Pantheon’s building trades-men; rather the appeals were formulated along Paris-based demandsrelayed from the neighborhood section of the Panthéon-français. Thebuilding trades as a political constituency – earlier speaking as the indus-trious exemplars of the Third Estate – were transformed from site-specificor professional and occupational spokesmen into a politicized groupaddressing questions affecting the larger faubourg Saint-Marcel, Paris,and the nation as a whole. By the end of 1791, lingering animositiesbased on craft, status, or regional distinctions made long-term solidari-ties between Parisian public construction laborers a seemingly utopianaspiration.78

“What is the citizen-builder?”

Parisian building entrepreneurs and architects sought to maintain pub-lic confidence in construction for the fear of the construction site as acrucible of social unrest was plainly bad for the industry as a whole. Asan ancien régime trope the fear had created a deeply ingrained stereotypeof the building site as a dangerous agglomeration of criminality and ofcorrupt, vested interests. This concern is reflected in a pamphlet, pub-lished toward the end of 1791, that Girard de Bury the legal counselor


(Procureur du Roi) of the moribund mason’s corporation, the Chambredes Bâtiments, wrote in collaboration with two architects, Convers andRoussel. These elite members of the ancien régime construction industryhierarchy conceived a detailed proposal on reforming the building sitealong reformed principles. The resulting Réflexions were an attempt toposit an ideal construction site that incorporated the revolutionary ide-als of equal access to jobs by all professionals and workers and of a senseof esprit de corps unified under a regime of talent.

These construction notables became self-appointed spokesmen forthe building trades in proposing a corporate basis for restructuring thetrades: a respect for conventional differences of craft, specialty, seniority,and rank was the only grounds for encouraging the vigorous profession-alization of architects, masons, carpenters, and others. The creation ofan ideal work site, they argued, hinged on judging the utilitarian needof placing the arts before the court of public utility. The construction ofpublic buildings was ennobling precisely because as a process it servedthe practical needs of all citizens. In the words of these architects,

(B)y suppressing the Masterships and Guilds, by giving to all citizensthe liberty to exercise the profession of their choice, the NationalAssembly dissolved all the special traits that connect the Worker’sindustry with the scope of a particular Profession . . . But we mustnot confuse those professions borne of luxury, and which have merecomfort as an objective, with those whose labors are of interest topublic safety and the life of the Citizen. We can abandon the firstto the taste of the amateurs of the Beaux-Arts; but it is not the samething for the others, such as the practical Architect, the Mason, andthe Carpenter.79

Here, the building trades were not fused with the general class of undif-ferentiated Third Estate citizens nor were they distinguished from theindigent poor that depended on public workshops to survive. This dis-course also exhibits little evidence of the patriotic identity of “builders ofthe nation,” as displayed in the civic virtue of workers at the Pantheon.Rather, by late 1791, the spokesmen of the building trades carved out aniche for themselves, between poverty on the one hand, and the uselessluxury trades on the other that were corrupt for encouraging mere opu-lence. The building trades here emerged as uniquely occupied with laborin 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 practi-cal science that served only the public good was the antidote to the fresh


memories of unrest at the Pantheon. The builders are thereby depictedas an inclusive, cooperative, and harmonious milieu. The nation byits public works policies, now “multiplied to infinity,” embraced theunity of interdependent builders by assuring “all the laborers, all theentrepreneurs, all the artisans who have an equal right to share publicworks in common; it is thus only fair that they be all called to par-ticipate in these works, and that they be employed concurrently andproportional to their talent.”80

The meritocracy inherent in “building the nation” is here portrayedas collective citizenship based on talent alone. In these petitions, wewitness the builders of Paris move from characterizations as destitutelaborers, to industrious citizens, to civic-minded republicans, and finallyto interdependent and cooperative artisans, in response to shifting con-texts of the Revolution. This political debate was framed in terms thatultimately favored the industrious citizen-builder over the unskilledpoor. The adaptable categories of the political debate between publicworks versus the workshops for the indigent and the supremacy of pro-ductive over unproductive labor may also be detected in Girard de Bury’spolemic against useless luxury trades. This reaffirmed the privilegedplace of builders in constructing symbols of the Nation. Whether thecontrast was with the unskilled poor or with useless trades, the build-ing process emerged favored as exemplary of middling, socially usefulproductivity.

The career of these flexible and opportunistic political presentationsof the building trades demonstrate the lack of the hegemony of a sin-gle revolutionary notion of citizenship as derived from the organizationof labor. But they suggest the central place of a new standard of civicengagement, that of serving the public interest and the “life of theCitizen” in the new order. A more radical critique of both the bottomand the top of the urban social hierarchy, the unproductive poor andthe luxury-gorged elite, would be developed in the next phases of theRevolution.

From genius to commerce: Construction projects in 1792

The evanescent Legislative Assembly, which convened on 1 October1791 and was dissolved with the foundation of the Republic a year later,was not a period of great ambition in Parisian construction. The lack offinancial stability stymied even moderately ambitious projects. For themost part, statues of the Great Men were solicited, but also the sculptureprogram of the Pantheon’s columns, a sculpture on the Champ de Mars,


the amphitheaters (the arènes couvertes) at the Porte Saint-Martin, thesculpture for the place de la Victoire, and a never-to-be built Templeà l’Egalité at the former place de la Bastille. The Assembly encouragedpublic competitions for designs; however, these were often financialexpedients as explicitly acknowledged by the programs themselves.Prize winners were rarely remunerated while their drawings, maps, andplans provided valuable inspiration (often scarcely concealed plagia-rism) for civil structures in the Capital. As distinct from the Academyof Architecture’s competitions, the Assembly authorized open academicexercises. The Assembly’s architectural competitions were also focusedon specific buildings or locations in Paris. Rarely executed, the result-ing plans often embodied a mélange of utopianism and hard-headedfinancial calculation but also a conflation of antique and monarchi-cal aspirations – the overthrow of the Crown and the founding of theRepublic rendered null and void the near totality of these royalist urbanplans submitted before 20 September 1792.81

There were, nevertheless, notable exceptions to the humble projectssubmitted to the Assembly. Several were presented by Charles Mangin,closely affiliated with the ancien régime elite in the corporation of thebuilding trades. His reputation stemmed from his former status as anofficeholder, an expert-bourgeois (a paid inspector) for the Chambre desBâtiments, since 1780. His major architectural accomplishment hadbeen a close collaboration with Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières on themuch-admired grain market constructed with an experimental dome,the Halle au Blé.82 During the Revolution, Mangin advocated the thor-ough reorganization of the public works projects of the old Louvre tobe converted into a “Palais National.” In a separate proposal, he sub-mitted a sketch to transform nearly the entire Right Bank, arguing thatthis would create “work for an immense crowd of artists and artisansfor a century.” Another project, in collaboration with a certain architectCorbet, improbably sought to link the Left Bank palais Bourbon withthe Right Bank Tuileries. Needless to say these utopian ambitions werehardly feasible given the budget restrictions of the new order.83

The social justifications of Mangin’s projects, however, were seam-lessly interwoven into his revolutionary-era urban vision. Simultane-ously arguing for full employment and for his bold vision of thetransformed urban fabric of Revolutionary Paris, Mangin published nofewer than five separate pamphlets in 1792 in a vigorous campaign forthe capital’s renewal. These guide us to the ways in which Third Estateancien régime magnates were won over by the Revolution’s vibrant affir-mations of meritocracy. For Mangin did not belong to the caste of elite


academic architects but rather to a “lesser” species of successful tech-nician constructors who had one foot firmly in the world of promoters,developers, and speculators. Here as elsewhere, it is regrettable that stud-ies of the late eighteenth-century world of French architecture rarelytake into account the social distinctions between the academic world ofthe Crown’s architects and technicians, specialized entrepreneurs, andengineers who would emerge with superior positions under the Rev-olution. With the spread of five- to six-story structures in the 1780s,experiments with larger and larger domes, and the greater use of ironbeams and other new forms of technical reinforcement, the newerspecialists were indeed increasingly vital to urban construction.84

The revolutionary appeal to technocracy – eventually leading to agreater use of civil engineers over architects – was therefore grounded ina favored treatment of those whose career trajectories most resembledcivil servants. Mangin inserted himself squarely into this revolutionarymold of an advocate for the “rational” bureaucratization of architec-ture. One of his projects sought to create a public office of 12 salariedarchitects who would collaborate with clerks, designers, surveyors, writ-ers, and calculators in order to take responsibility for speculation anddevelopment of confiscated real estate, the biens nationaux. Previouslyhandled in haphazard manner, creating scattered urban development,the new office would distribute the land which will be “prepared andcombined by artisans whose talents will then be employed to expandpublic fortune”. This, to Mangin, was an example of affirming a nationalcommitment to competitive labor: “It is no longer sufficient to offervast and immense projects for the utility and the embellishment of themajor part of the Capital.” A regard to the interests of “a multitude ofinnumerable artisans and workers useful to construction” now had tobe recognized as a crucial component in urban policy. Above all, Man-gin concluded, Paris must become a magnet to talented provincials andto foreigners who would increase “the genius and the commerce of theentire Nation.”85

Mangin wrote amidst a vigorous application of the principle ofcompetitive bidding for contracts and for positions on public worksprojects by the Legislative Assembly. An affirmed commitment to thesenational competitions (concours) spoke primarily to concerns about theabuse of patronage on revolutionary public works sites. Competitivebidding stimulated creative and practical endeavors through healthyrivalry between citizens.86 Also, Mangin’s optimism about a revolution-ary urban policy extended to the integration of talented outsiders withinthe capital. In contrast to the prejudice we have seen toward the maçons


de la Creuse and indigent unemployed provincials, Mangin affirmedthe vital role of migration and even immigration. Now, the porousCapital – liberated from obstructive guild-based “controls” on the laborflow – summoned badly needed talent to participate in building the Rev-olution. Mangin grasped the broader aspiration of Revolutionary publicworks, as articulated earlier, for example by the liberal philanthropistLa Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. Certain types of labor performed in Pariscould, ultimately, help workers become a useful part of society; theyin turn would return to the provinces to help spread the values of theRevolution throughout a regenerated nation.

Among the first crucibles of competitive bidding was the work siteat the Pantheon. From its inception, the organization of labor at thePantheon had exhibited a preoccupation with attracting meritoriousspecialized craftsmen and a team of technically proficient inspectorsand supervisors.87 But upon the site’s opening, contracts for materialwere systematically awarded to ancien régime entrepreneurs, such asthe masonry contractor, Pierre Poncet. In October 1791, the NationalAssembly passed a law that all public works, including tasks at thePantheon, be awarded to private bidders at the lowest cost. This law alsomandated new procedures: the itemization of salaries and attempted toimpose equitable payscales, which, despite earlier draconian efforts atthe site of the Pantheon, were apparently not widely respected.88 At theend of 1791, the Legislative Assembly approved 50,000 livres to employlaborers on the nation’s work site during the winter months of Januaryand February. (This, despite the report by the Committee of Financesthat 1.5 million livres were needed to complete work on the site.) Tra-ditionally, in the cyclical rhythms of construction, the winter monthswere reserved for indoor reparations, with many laborers leaving Paristo return to their small landholdings in the Limousin region and theCreuse department. Citing the need to sustain indigent workers throughthe winter months, the Assembly sought to render the Pantheon anemployment site for destitute building workers.89

Predictably, the separation between the exact needs of construc-tion and the numbers of job contracts awarded to the poor fedthe perception of deepening anarchy. Notwithstanding the impliedpromise of an efficient, bustling construction site, the campaign tohire more workers in 1792 brought more disarray than progress inthe renovation of the Pantheon. Quatremère de Quincy would admitthat he had only “imperfectly acquitted the mission that was con-fided,” placing blame for the fits and starts in construction squarelyon the difficulty of “harmonizing the interests of the monument,


without excessively setting back employment.”90 By his admission, con-flict between the Pantheon’s design as national monument and as publicworks project had paralyzed the construction process.

There was another reason for delays at the Pantheon also afflict-ing labor relations on the nation’s work site. Corruption among theentrepreneurs of the building was widely viewed as extensive, as wehave seen, and was bitterly denounced by Marat and other journalists.Inflation of the cost by dishonest contractors and fictional payrolls ofnon-existent laborers was further exposed in a series of petitions andletters by a tireless, self-proclaimed whistleblower, Joseph Guibert. Thisparticularly tenacious sculptor of ornaments launched a sulfurous letter-writing campaign throughout 1792 to denounce profiteering. The sculp-tor claimed that various entrepreneurs claimed four times more than theactual salaries paid to the sculptors. The problem, he complained to theadministration of public works, was that the architect in charge, Qua-tremère de Quincy, was “more a literary figure than a builder,” thathe was more adept in the theory than the practice of building, andthat he had not actually verified the contractors’ bills – all deeply inci-sive critiques. The sculptor also declared he was fired as punishmentfor his crusade to expose corruption, and that ever since he had beenboycotted, “the entrepreneurs of Paris having refused me in their work-shops.” The ensuing inquiry by the architect Bourdon led to a superficialreorganization of the tasks of verification. But a perception of general-ized corruption remained a recalcitrant problem besetting the Pantheon,and became the rallying cry of laborers on the site to denounce theirdisintegrating relations with entrepreneurs and inspectors.91

The lines of authority between architects, entrepreneurs, administra-tors, and even sectional officers were further entangled in the effortsto reconcile the dual mission of the building as full employment siteand as national monument. Particularly distressing to the elites on thesite, the laborers seemed increasingly defiant of policies established bythe Legislative Assembly and municipality. The journeymen were fur-ther emboldened to contest labor practices by taking advantage of thefreshly created office of the justice of the peace. The justices of thepeace were created by the 1791 constitution, approved in September1791, which assured that labor grievances and petty business squabblesinvolving less than 50 livres would be adjudicated by 48 elected offi-cials attached to each Parisian section.92 The justice of the peace for thePanthéon-Français section, Durouzeau, was often sympathetic to labor-ers’ demands. In surprisingly contemporary terms, he had decided thatworkers must have prior notification “by several days” of an impending


layoff and had the right to have their dossiers reviewed by directors atthe Pantheon. If the appeal was made on the basis of hardship, workersdismissed upon the completion of specific tasks would be retained onthe registers pending final decisions on their cases. Impoverished labor-ers at the site who were laid off were thus further encouraged to appeal –again through petitions – to stay on the job. A horrified Quatrèmereimmediately fired off a vitriolic response to claim that “this immenseatelier has coalitions whose continued existence will threaten us” andasking for suspension of the judgment.93

In view of the perceived loss of control over the labor force, the Parisadministrators in May 1792 redoubled efforts to streamline the site’sdirection by concentrating the right to hire and fire workers directlyin the hands of the Director Quatremère de Quincy. The municipal-ity reinforced an earlier order that all dismissed stonecutters, “whopersist to work on the worksite can no longer be carried on the pay-rolls and will cease being paid.” The Paris administration therebyrejected all maneuvers to keep favored personnel on the payroll, and,most importantly, it reversed the judgment of the justice of the peaceon the right of laid-off laborers to appeal. Further to rid the site of“superfluous” personnel, the Pantheon’s directors published a posterseeking to encourage aggrieved workers to search for positions else-where. Workers would “find it easier to go to other building sites”than to petition. The poster’s prosaic announcement that fired work-ers would “no longer be paid” restated the municipality’s positionthat petitions and appeals were no longer be taken into account bysupervisors.94

While for most of the year work continued in fits and starts, progresswas stopped at the Pantheon during much of the summer of 1792.The tasks were so sparse, in fact, that 26 sculptors wrote to demandthat work be distributed widely “to feed the greatest numbers possible”rather than leading to dismissals as specific tasks were finished. Thesesculptors were convinced that unemployment would eventually affectall artisans at the Pantheon, if the increasingly specialized work on theproject were not properly shared.95 Also for the site’s stonecutters, con-ditions appeared as precarious as they were for the sculptors. Salary rollsreveal irregular work rhythms throughout 1792–1793, with artisanallaborers on the site numbering between 86 and 159 – a sharp repudi-ation of the earlier promise of the site as a window on jobs-creatingpublic investment. Evidently after 1791, the Pantheon rarely fulfilledits promise of providing steady employment to massive numbers ofemployees.96


The 1793 revival of the ancien régime police idea

The upheavals and disruptions at the Pantheon inspired more ambitiousventures for the articulation of a national policy of labor, applicable toall public works projects’ under the first Republic founded in September1792. In the face of crises faced by the National Convention, police liter-ature in particular tended to reflect the fear of the public building site asrepresenting a dangerous opportunity for subverting the Republic. Callsfor ever more intensive vigilance followed the 2–5 September 1792 mas-sacres of 1,200 refractory priests and common criminals, when Parisiansbecome increasingly alert against potential coups by internal enemies.In response to the “increasing spirit of cabal” found where there weremass assemblies of workers, the 48 police commissioners of the Parissections published in January 1793, a collective pamphlet intended towarn against “attempts to organize workers in too great numbers.”

The police commissioners skillfully produced a chronological narra-tive of the breakdown of the administration of public construction:

the projects launched in 1790 exasperated the most energetic workersthrough their pointlessness, while those of 1792 were too hastily puttogether, badly organized, . . . put under a vacillating direction, per-petually obsessed with ministerial book keeping, and were beyondbeing onerous to the Republic; yet far from even accruing benefits tothe workers, the organization (of public works) failed in the obliga-tion to get rid of some laborers by compromising compliance withthe law in favor of their interests.97

This strident assessment of “pointless” public works policies intro-duced a complex series of proposals to bring workers under greatersurveillance by police commissioners. Unsurpisingly, the commission-ers demanded, above all, a greater role for themselves in policing Paristhrough increased centralization. By attacking the “vacillating direc-tion” of large-scale projects, the commissioners sought to reverse thedevolutionist impulse of the early Revolution that had carved outdiverse municipal and local jurisdictions to oversee certain public worksprojects. By January 1793, the spinning workshops, the Royal Manu-factures, and the Pantheon had fallen under different authorities. Inseeking alternatives to the decentralized network of public works, thecommissioners proposed under the cover of innovation to revive thepolice organs of the abolished guilds.98


The commissioners’ project featured a salaried commissioner whowould periodically meet in general assemblies, organized by trade, andwhose official function fully resembled that of the masters of the sup-pressed 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 execu-tion of plans which would be judged for their economy and utility tothe Republic, while the other would pursue more mundane inspectionsof the solidity of work. Besides controlling the quality of construction,the ambition of the commissioners’ proposal was “pacification,” under-scoring the perpetual fear of public works projects as potential hotbedsof sedition or counter-revolution. Particular attention was lavished onselecting and classifying the workforce. Laborers, artisans, women, andeven children would be assigned work strictly “analogous to their facul-ties.” To judge more precisely the quality of labor performed, they wereto return to task wages – a suggestion that repudiated the revolutionarybi-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’spassbook, revived by Necker in 1785, a laborer was to be hired on a pub-lic site only upon documenting that work at a previous workplace hadbeen halted or completed; barring this, the laborer must present an affir-mation from her or his place of residence as evidence of lack of workduring the past year. Finally, the commissioners sought to suppress theletter-writing and petitioning campaigns that, in their minds, had ledto excessive concessions to workers. Contentious laborers were to bringdemands to a committee of verifiers who would seek “to reconcile thepublic interest with the demands of claimants;” further disputes wouldbe arbitrated before the justices of the peace of each section. In caseswhere workers continue to disturb the peace even after this process, acommittee of auditors “will employ any means of pacification to bringto order those who isolate themselves; if no ways to disperse them arefound, the commissioner of the section will act . . . to disband the publicworks project.”100

Clearly, this project embodied a nostalgia for the supposedly well-disciplined ancien régime workforce. It also betrayed a movement forrehabilitating the guilds, whose centralized assemblies were deemedeffective in the campaign to stamp out the corrupt patronage ofentrepreneurs and inspectors, as well as assuring quality control ofproduction. The relationship between sectional police commissioners,justices of the peace, and the committee of verifiers replicated broadly


the authority of ancien régime police commissioners, the masons’ cor-poration, and the building experts of the Chambre des Bâtiments. Thecommissioners’ plan thus sought to revive ancien régime structures inthe face of perceived “anarchy” in Paris. The return to the corporateidea was henceforth a recurrent temptation in questions of policing thelabor force on faltering public works sites.

The reasons the police commissioners focused on “the vacillatingdirection” of these projects seem to be twofold. First, the nature ofpublic contracts themselves was deemed open to abuse. Despite thereforms leading to greater competition, too much leeway was left to thewhims of individual entrepreneurs, who were not given precise man-dates in services to be rendered, work conditions, or salary structure.The Pantheon’s directors continued to use the ancien régime’s system ofcontracting entrepreneurs for specific tasks. This gave wide latitude toprivate individuals to decide questions on the building supplies to beused and salaries to be paid. The collapse of scaffolding and other mate-rial within the Pantheon’s dome in 1791 had marred the reputation ofcertain contractors when its cause was assumed to have been cheatingon supplies.101 Second, besides imprecision in contracts, another dis-order condemned by these commissioners was leniency shown towardlaborers, in particular, after protests for higher pay among the skilledworkers at the Pantheon. Petitions were a particular target of scorn bycommissioners for their “arbitrary” nature. They were also too oftenreceived favorably by “lax” authorities like the justices of the peace.

The significance of the July 1793 police report was in its prescientanalysis of the nature of subsequent labor strife on public work sites.For perceived complaisance toward certain arguments in petition litera-ture indeed created an opening for other claims, resulting in a gradualradicalization of the labor force. In April 1793, the sculptors at the Pan-theon site launched a movement to increase their salaries. They wereamong the most highly trained artisans at the site, often referred to notas “workers” but as “artistes.” The sculptors had been hired to performthe arduous (and, to some, no doubt abhorrent) task of effacing freshlycompleted religious symbols from the capitals and the portico, and toreplace them with simple classical motifs. For this highly precise labor,they were habitually paid less than their colleagues, earning the sameamount as the less skilled but more contentious carpenters.

In defending their right to a salary increase, the sculptors intro-duced a new leitmotif: the arduous work conditions on the site justifiedan increase in pay. Toiling so intensively on the site provoked much“physical punishment” and “destruction of tools and clothing.”102


Insalubrious, hazardous, and strenuous work conditions – along withthe cost of living – were grounds for a substantial raise. We see thatartisans’ petitions began to evolve from classic indigence narratives,to broader issues of precarity, unhealthy work conditions, and work-related illnesses. The patron saint of the stonemasons, Saint Roche, bythis time had also lent his name to tuberculosis, extremely commonamong artisans who had breathed prodigious amounts of dust in theireveryday tasks. Municipal authorities implicitly acknowledged that thesalary of sculptors suffered from a serious discrepancy between skill andcompensation. Salary rolls in the early spring of 1793 show a rise indaily rates, from 3 livres to 3.5 livres for sculptors. Also, this exampleof the systematic “capitulation” of worksite authorities, according tothe police commissioners, was in fact simple surrender to the facts ofhyperinflation.103

In an example of what Isser Woloch describes as the “contraction andexpansion of democratic space,” laborers were starting to put healthissues forward in petitions, just as the political opportunity for suchbroad social demands was about to slip away.104 (Notably, democraticcontraction took form in the September 1793 Law of Suspects creatingrevolutionary tribunals with authority to judge worksite agitators.) Theexpansion from wage-based demands to broader work-related issues bybuilders on the Nation’s worksite created a distinctive pattern of argu-mentation, magnified with the success of each petition. The Pantheon’sworkforce showed itself no longer absorbed by immediate subsistenceissues, but was emboldened to exploit the difficulty of work at thePantheon and the prestige of the site to appeal for ever greater amountsof compensation.

The Pantheon’s carpenters, in early July 1793, similarly invoked acomplex of health and economic issues in their petition for an increasein wages. They were no doubt bolstered by the radical Jacques Roux andthe enragés’ petition to the Convention demanding radical economiccontrols on 25 June 1793, which helped to fashion a receptive climatefor salary demands based on hyperinflation. Twenty carpenters, sup-ported by “several declaring they do not know how to write,” submitteda petition in response to the municipality’s demand that work be accel-erated to prepare the building for the Festival of Unity and Indivisibilityon August 10. In response to intensified work rhythms on the site, thecarpenters followed their sculptor colleagues by citing the “punishing”nature of their labor and a litany of “miserable drawbacks” in contin-uing work at the site including “falling rubble,” “contaminated dust,”and “excessive heat.” These brutal conditions, argued the journeymen,


coupled with the spiraling cost of living, merited an increase from 3.5livres per day to 4.5 livres.105

In reaction to emboldened wage demands, the administration of thePantheon established a firm course of resistance to further calls for payincreases. On the day after the reception of the carpenters’ petition on10 July 1793, the administration and Quatremère de Quincy respondedwith an order to change several longstanding practices at the Pantheon.Command authority was centralized. Rather than receive direction fromintermediaries too-often sympathetic municipal employees, the carpen-ters would be directly supervised by the general inspector, the civilengineer Jean-Baptiste Rondelet. In a punitive measure, the carpenterswould cease to receive a bi-weekly wage and instead be reimbursed withpiece-rates, and only for specific tasks accomplished by each individual.Even very precise number of wood planks needed for the scaffoldingon the site would be allotted to the laborers, for they had become tooattached to a custom of bringing home unused materials, now seenas a veritable “right.” Finally, the precise responsibilities of each car-penter were narrowly defined to justify each employee’s activities onthe site.106

On the limits of the revolutionary state

The events at the Pantheon during the early Revolution exposed thedangers and limits of an entrepreneurial culture, brusquely imposed toreplace ancien régime abuses. Elsewhere, at the nearby Gobelins Manu-factory, in the armaments industries, national printing shops, tobaccoprocessing plants, spinning establishments, and the metal works fac-tories throughout Paris, similar scenes of petitioning, agitation, andstrikes unfolded, involving tens of thousands of women and menlaborers in Paris.107 In each of these sectors, a centralizing, consoli-dating movement to place greater authority in the hands of technicalspecialists gained momentum. Private contractors were systematicallyremoved from positions of visibility and replaced with technicians,such as Rondelet. Eventually, civil engineers were the sole revolution-ary caste who would put an end to disarray by finishing with olderpatronage and clientele networks. The rise of what Ken Adler callsthe “techno-Jacobins” coincided with the impulsion to create a sci-entific elite to take over centralized command structures of publicproduction. In sum, technical expertise trumped social status. Futurecivil engineers were less susceptible to the political charges of counter-revolution, corruption, or deliberate negligence. But before a functional


labor hierarchy, integrating proficiency and skill, could be fully trainedand placed in positions of responsibility, the context of the war, theTerror, and its aftermath would prove a singular and dramatic closingchapter to the earliest efforts to project revolutionary reform upon thepublic building sites of Paris.108

On the site of the Pantheon, the legitimacy of the Revolution waschallenged by size, organization, and financing. The sheer magnitudeof the tasks, the complex labor and contracting obligations, as wellas the massive amount of state investment, were taken as opportu-nities to reinforce the Revolution’s authority in the patriotic glowthat surrounded the site’s launching in April 1791. Unsurprisingly, theRevolution ultimately promised more than could be delivered. Admin-istrative confusion between the municipality and the Assembly hardlyhelped. Hopelessly draconian work rhythms, insalubrious working con-ditions, and the spectacular collapse of materials in the dome were onlythree more factors that attested to the (social, political and physical)challenges of the site.

Also, the Pantheon provided a stark public contrast to the relativesuccesses of the private sphere. New cranes and scaffolding on manynew sites produced not spiraling contentiousness but rather success-ful speculative adventures. The rue Mandar, strategically near both thestock market center (la Bourse) and the central market (les Halles), wasentirely carved out of nationalized properties bought at auction andsuccessfully built up between 1792 and 1795, complete with 17 modelapartment buildings. The project was entirely conceived and realizedby the entrepreneur-promoter Lecouteaux and the civil architect whogave the street his name, Charles François Mandar.109 In light of suchreal-estate development, the municipality and the state lagged behindin successful investments for construction projects actually brought tocompletion. As reflected in the warning by the police commission-ers, numerous public sites became encounters between the old andnew regimes that threatened to undermine confidence in the verycompetency of the revolutionary state (Figures 3.7, 3.8, 3.9).

The labor contention on the Pantheon’s site also speaks to the deeperproblem of reconstituting a statist labor police following guild abo-lition. “We know extraordinarily little about the artisanal receptionand application of ‘scientific’ principles and procedures,” as StevenKaplan notes.110 This is true as well of how early technocracy changedpreindustrial supervision and production. In the case of public works,the appeal of new forms of inspection, administration, and verificationby civil engineers was to strip labor politics from political considera-tions. The Pantheon’s direction attempted to impose a regime dictated


Figure 3.7 Rue Mandar, named after its architect, Charles Mandar, a street andits buildings completed under the Revolution between 1792 and 1795. The 17apartment 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 man-agement, emphasizing efficiency, transparency, and productivity. Build-ing technicians like Jean-Baptise Rondelet and Charles Mandar, whoadapted the stance of humble engineers, incarnated one ideal solutionfor completing the site’s tasks. The construction engineer – disinterested,rigorous, efficient – was a model public servant. His role was to supplantan artisanal work culture with ‘scientific’ methods assuring greater out-put. As a state employee, he replaced ex-masters-become-entrepreneursthe very moment in which labor relations were reconceived, assisted byCordelier and Jacobin radicalism, in a new language of protest. It wassurely a more complicated affair to accuse a building technician of aris-tocracy and counter-revolution than it was to charge contractors andarchitects – already deeply compromised by their association with theancien régime – of the very same crimes.

The Pantheon was thus an inconclusive experiment in the replace-ment of the culture of the suppressed corporations and that of royalarchitecture with the civil engineering ‘science’ of construction. Until1791, work rhythms and salaries were determined by legal statutes and


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

long-standing procedures to settle differences, often based on collabora-tion between the local police and the masters, and the special favorsdoled out to the Crown’s stable of architects and contractors. Laborpractices took into account customary practice measured against offerand demand, as well as flexible seasonal adjustments. For all theirmonopoly abuses, they also fit into a coherent social system based on afragile equilibrium between custom and markets. The guilds, in particu-lar, were backed by a deeply litigious culture of natural rights polished bythe frequent use of lawsuits, partially explaining the persistence of cor-porate language in the French labor movement years later. But on publicsites under the Revolution the suppression of fine distinctions between“species” of laborers – captured by a minute ancien régime nomencla-ture – and the stripping away of privileges over hiring practices on publicsites overthrew a work culture based on long-standing hierarchies. Thisled to a politicized process of employment based on the petition andthe capacity to wield a new discourse of patriotism, productivity, andpathos. The abolition of the ancien régime on public sites, then, createdfresh opportunities for contention, seized upon by laborers desperate tomake up for the loss of their wages at the end of the 1780s.


Figure 3.9 Villa Riberolle. Uncertain date of construction, but an exampleof 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 musttherefore be deeply qualified. The rapid discrediting of the culture ofentrepreneurship on public sites inspired more extensive control by thestate over the world of work. On public sites, the organization of labor,redefinition of task specialization, and modern forms of hierarchy, salarystructures, and specialized operatives, were imposed to supplant the cul-ture of the abolished corporations. The movement toward “rationality,”then, was undertaken as a statist process of increasing productivity byreorganizing the worksite and its hierarchies, while opening the worldof work to a new cast of characters embodied by technically proficientpublic servants. A technocratic world was perhaps not yet born, but onethat integrated ruthless policing with the mass mobilization of materialsand people was certainly prefigured in the ambitious public projects ofthe revolutionary state.

4The Building Trades of ParisDuring 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 orradical moment of the Revolution is invariably portrayed as a returnto the statist dream. The period indeed featured an enormous expan-sion and centralization of the government’s authority. As an integralpart of its wartime effort, the Convention prolonged the state’s reachdeep into the economic sphere principally through measures for themass requisitioning of grain and military wares. One ambitious project,more emblematic than characteristic, sought to redistribute wealth fromaccused counter-revolutionaries to the poor in early 1794. However, therevolutionary state’s primary socio-economic objective was not socialleveling nor a long-term strategy of centralization. Rather, most domes-tic measures to increase state control over the urban economy soughtto staunch the rapid erosion of wages and to stop other ravages ofhyperinflation in a period of war.

In particular, the revolutionary state’s answer to war-related economicchallenges was wage and price controls. Imposed by the General Max-imum of 29 September 1793, which capped salaries and the cost ofitems of “prime necessity,” it held the force of economic law in Francefor over a year. Henceforth, the General Maximum was the signa-ture measure – for lack of a single, coherent strategy – of a de factoJacobin labor and industrial policy. It was also the cornerstone ofthe Revolution’s crisis-driven system of production. The wartime mea-sures’ legacy – indeed, its relative success in mobilizing people andresources – also inspired a much larger debate of the French Revolu-tion’s socio-economic production. Did the Maximum, together with

146

The Terror and Thermidor, 1793–1795 147

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 bylegislating into existence new socio-economic relations for all citizens.Despite the evident statist ambitions of its partisans, the revolutionarygovernment also followed a logic of improvisation and contingency.A rough equilibrium was established between unbending and repressivedecrees and their application, often surprisingly in a pragmatic spirit ofcompromise and concession. A state-imposed grid of order and disorder,revolutionary unity and counter-revolution, were ideals attenuated inpractice. In reality, the fear of “sedition” in labor and industrial relationson public sites such as the Pantheon compelled the revolutionary gov-ernment also to address the real privations of the Parisian labor force.2

The need for domestic security and for loyal state employees in the faceof war and terror counteracted a reflexive official repression against con-tentious elements. Sheer force, in sum, was not the only solution forresolving conflict. Finally, as this chapter demonstrates, the demand forfixed, transparent, and established procedures favored not only greatercentralization but also a formalized and technocratic control of work.As a result, the rapid ascension of newly formed industrial elites such ascivil engineers prepared the grounds for “rational” technical expertise asa broader basis for the reorganization of French industrial and artisanalproduction.3

Viewed “from below,” the forging of a common political identityamong urban artisans, bridging over craft and skill, dissolving the iden-tities of craftsmen into undifferentiated citizens, was accelerated in thepolitical context of war, subsistence crises, and Terror. The politicalmobilization of a revolutionary citizenry developed in a direct rela-tionship to plebeian militancy organized in political clubs, the 20,000surveillance committees in France, as well as the 48 Parisian sections,elected neighborhood assemblies with full militia and police powersand local municipal authority. Often working together, these organsfound particularly fertile ground in the Republic’s capital city duringthe French Revolution’s radical phase.

In the highly charged political moment of 1793 to 1794, labor strifewas a particularly volatile issue. It was increasingly subsumed underthe categories of rebellion, subversion, and divisiveness in a state ofnational emergency – crimes condemned as “federalism,” a threat tonational unity. Yet, while the movement from the earliest phase ofthe Revolution to its radical phase deepened economic centralization,in fact revolutionary institutions were not yet fully informed by the


orthodoxies of liberalism and state control. The experiment in craft-ing the revolutionary economy was a fluctuating process in which theprojection of command authority onto the Parisian worksite entailednegotiation 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 coali-tions, the General Maximum’s salary cap provided national and localauthorities with a powerful instrument to clamp down on wage move-ments in a period of rapid inflation and grain shortages.5 Under itsunyielding and detailed conditions, work-related strife as well as allspeculative activity on foodstuffs were condemned. The Maximum wasreinforced by the 17 September 1793 Law of Suspects creating revo-lutionary tribunals to punish “partisans of tyranny or federalism andenemies of liberty” with death.6 The Terror thus represented a par-ticularly privileged moment for centralized control over, the urbanlabor force. Armed with these extraordinary measures, the revolutionarygovernment wielded powerful mechanisms to command the world ofwork. As we will see, the highly visible worksite of the Pantheon was,once again, the focus of energetic efforts to impose hierarchical and fluidwork structures.

Despite its marginal use value to the war effort, the Pantheon’spatriotic 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 sev-eral key sectors of French industry. Even adversaries of the Jacobinswere seduced by the long-term commercial possibilities for competitionwith the hated Albion, England, at war with France after February 1793.The massive mobilization of resources to produce massive quantitiesof arms, chemicals, uniforms, foodstuffs, and other wartime provi-sions, made economic control a compelling example beyond transitoryemergency production. Raison d’état even effaced the qualms of someliberal 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 inthe hands of the 12-member Committee of Public Safety. The vote bythe Convention on 5 September 1793 to give Robespierre’s declaration –“Terror is the order of the day” – force of law, also represented defermentof the Constitution of 1793. The Constitution, passed by referendum,was definitively suspended on 10 October 1793, the date that coincideswith the installation of revolutionary government. The “extraordinary”


order which replaced the constitutional order had unparalleled powersto organize the war effort. The cadences of the Terror, its application ofviolence, were dictated above all by the desperate military circumstancesafter a series of French setbacks at the hands of royalist forces, whoseinvasion of France were reversed by the end of 1793 and the beginningof 1794. Simultaneously, the domestic revolt in the western Vendée andcounter-revolutionary uprisings in other regions created siege-like con-ditions in the capital city, provoking unrestrained acts of popular urbanviolence with threats of much more to come.

Under these circumstances, a labor policy was indeed a relativelymarginal and improvised project, often reduced to a circumstantialresolve to clamp down on the seditious activity within key sectors ofthe Parisian economy. Priorities of the Parisian economy included laborrequisitioning for defensive ramparts and walls; inventing and apply-ing new techniques of metallurgy for guns, cannons, and swords; therapid industrialization of saltpeter extraction for gunpowder; multiply-ing indigent women’s public spinning establishments for clothing afterthe breakdown of the textile market; the production of shoes, hats, anduniforms and other military accoutrements; road-building; and trans-port commodities such as wagons and saddles. A regime of intensivewartime production was put into place in each of these domains.8

In this context, resistance to the rapid pace of production was con-demned as labor strife, considered as a “factional” threat to centralizedauthority, and even punishable by the death penalty under the provi-sions of the Law of Suspects. Furthermore, the very survival of laboridentities among journeymen who assembled and petitioned accordingto task specialization defied the dissolution of past corporate solidar-ities into an undifferentiated and unmediated political identity. Thenew political identity of republican citizenship was thus not madeovernight.9

The control, mobilization, and administration of the labor force inthe capital city in the period of the Terror was long portrayed notas a series of measures concerning the world of work but rather asextensions of efforts to guarantee the subsistence and military securityof French citizens. Indeed, the journées of 4–5 September 1793, wheresectional radicals adopted the twin slogans for “terror” and “food byforce of the law,” compelled the attention of the Convention on thepolice of provisioning. By the end of September, an urban consensuswas forged which related the solution to urban famine to the threat ofrepression, particularly against those who menaced the equitable dis-tribution of foodstuffs.10 As a result, in contrast to subsistence issues,


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

“What is a sans-culotte?”

Despite the historians’ neglect of labor questions during the Terror, theurban world of work was indeed transformed by the radical politicsof the period as well as by the wartime command economy. In Paris,the Revolution under attack from within and without rendered differ-ences between craft, skill, and even neighbourhood to be negligibleas the basis of social identity. Many Parisians unified under a collec-tivist identity, “sans-culottes,” urban producers named for the fact thatthey were supposedly too poor to afford the britches of social supe-riors and obliged to wear long trousers. They were particularly activein the 48 Paris sections the assemblies that also provided the politicalpoint of entry for many skilled tradesmen. Within the sectional move-ment, inter-trade disputes were eclipsed and a horizontal distinctioncame to be imposed between the people as sans-culottes versus counter-revolutionary clergymen, former nobles, wealthy merchants, and theirminions.

Plebeian radicals and their republican allies widely cited the militantartisan embodied by the sans-culotte as the archetypical patriotic citi-zen. He (as always male) is also the source of a long historical debate.Was this mythical personage a foreshadowing of a proletarian class andthus evidence of the movement from craft to class divisions withinthe urban world of work?12 Or was he, by contrast, a purely politicalinvention of such radical newspapers as l’Ami du people, le père Duchèsne,and les Révolutions de Paris, which sought to mobilize readers aroundpopular local figures via an essentially invented discursive montage?13

Revolutionary newspapers, in the wartime fervor of the Terror, repeat-edly asked and responded to the question: “what is a sans-culotte”?The classic response was: the artisan earning his living by work withhis hands who was the supreme citizen-worker of the revolutionaryorder (he was an “active citizen” as a taxpayer) who alone could be


counted upon to defend the nation under siege from enemies withinand without. During the radical phase of the Revolution, the skilledcraftsman 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 realimpact of the Revolution within the urban world of work. The principalquestion, however, that inspired the research of the movement’s firstgreat historian, Albert Soboul, was why sans-culottisme as a movementcollapsed with Robespierre in 1794 and why a lasting class-based politicswas not achieved during the Revolution.15 Soboul reached the conclu-sion that sans-culottisme was an essentially reactive ideology, the looselyconceived “petit bourgeois” doctrine of artisanal politics. Obscuring aclear conception of “the social function of work” was the “incoherent”ideology of a transitional economy, no longer feudal and not quite cap-italist. The inherent contradictions of work in the Year II, seen throughthe fog of “shopkeeper,” “petit bourgeois,” and subsistence-driven con-victions, in the end, depleted the radical movement of its collectivistvitality. In sum, according to Soboul, the sans-culotte movement failedprecisely because it was preindustrial and heterogenous: without theclear experience of class struggle afforded by the industrial revolutionand factory production, the revolutionary artisan viewed his experi-ence more as the last of the consumer revolts than as among the firstproducer-conscious uprisings.16

Soboul’s analysis of sans-culotterie was deeply influential, as witnessedby a number of studies that deepen his analysis by using his owncategories.17 Indeed the ubiquitous presence of the sans-culottes in thediscourse and in the crowd of the Revolution presents the broaderchallenge of comprehending the inter-relationship of social change,economic activity, and political engagement. Convincingly estimatedat around 3,800–4,000 elite artisans and entrepreneurs by Soboul’smost trenchant critic, Richard Mowery Andrews, their identity wasformed 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 inthe social stratification of Paris.” The tradition engendered by Soboul’sinterpretation only emphasized the upward cuts, as Andrews had it,in repeating all-too-literally the discourse of plebeian populism attack-ing merchant and aristocratic elites. He ignored the downward cutsmaking stark distinctions drawn between the sans-culottes and the work-ing population of Paris. The sans-culottes were rather a “revolutionarybourgeoisie of work” who, as large-scale employers of labor, mobilized


long-standing patronage networks that were channeled into the localsectional movements.18

Many sans-culottes shared a career trajectory toward municipal or theJacobin state apparatus as petty functionaries. They were also the keylink between municipal elites and the state, on the one hand, and localsocial and economic notables, on the other. After all, they had emergedin the temporary vacuum of local political, social, and economic powerduring the early years of the Revolution. Galvanized by a Jacobin dis-course attacking inherited wealth, hoarding, as well as speculation inland, currency and grain, the sans-culottes represented an urban populistand paternalist “oligarchy” within the laboring world that sought to set-tle accounts with counter-Revolutionary monetary and landed elites. Bycoalescing around a political economy of social utility and productivelabor, the sans-culotte was also distinguished from the lower classes ofthe parasitic, unskilled, laboring poor, of unsure political allegiancesand 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 colorfulepithet, and then a fully celebrated sobriquet, the sans-culottes materi-alized at the very moment the Revolution altered the nature of laborrelations with the abolition of the guilds in the spring of 1791. Theirmovement represented the resurgence of the key interlocutors betweenthe state and civil society in matters of organizing and policing theworkforce – the 35,000–40,000 guild masters in France and several thou-sand corporate officers – many of whom had become modest municipalor state employees or simple employers in their trade. Simultaneouswith abolition the local mechanism of the ancien régime labor admin-istration, based on the Châtelet’s 48 Parisian police commissioners, hadalso been suppressed.

What became of these guild masters after 1791? There is an appallingdearth of historical research on this very subject. An unsubstantiatedhistorical conjecture dominates: guild masters were reconverted intoentrepreneurs in a steady, onward march toward the triumph of liberalcapitalism. In fact, many byways and alternative paths cluttered thissupposedly teleological itinerary. A review of the invaluable repertory ofthe Parisian sectional personnel constituing the core of the sans-culotterieindicates a good number of former masters furnished the leadershipcadre of the sections, as justices of the peace, police, or membersof the civil committees.20 The ascension of former corporate officers,become sans-culotte militants, emerged from the obliteration of theguilds.


Many guild masters benefited from a vestige of the legal and economicprotections of the “ex”-(çi-devant) masters. The National Assemblysought to assure that the new business mantle would not be claimed byanyone with means. It adopted a social stratagem that dovetailed withfiscal policy. In order to replace the taxes and gratuitous contributionsof the corporations, the National Assembly followed the recommenda-tion of the Committee on Public Contributions and instituted a businesslicense tax (patente), on 2 and 17 March 1791, upon entrepreneurs as asubstitute for the suppressed but lucrative masterships. First intendedto be calculated in proportion with the rent paid for a workshop or anoffice, the tax was expanded in September 1791 and again in July 1794to comprise most merchants, shopkeepers, and entrepreneurs. Althoughresisted in some parts of the nation, the patente assured that only thosewith sufficient capital engaged in business in the new regime. It alsofurnished municipalities with a valuable fiscal source. The patente wasjustified and defended as an aspect of patriotic production. The sans-culotte as “the revolutionary bourgeoisie of work” proudly paid thisrevolutionary tax. As sectional officers and as a merchant elite the for-mer masters were deeply empowered by the Revolution. And as thesans-culottes they would defend it against all enemies.21

The sans-culottes were numerous in the building trades for theydefended a revolution that advanced their interests. The Revolutionunder siege launched many public works projects, and the robust mar-ket for military and civilian construction in 1793–1794 provided a realstimulus to the entire sector. Employment prospects brightened evenin this time of crisis, as witnessed by the quadrupling of migrationfrom the provinces to Paris between 1789 and 1793: around 25,000migrants in 1789 quadrupled to over 100,000 migrants by 1793. Stun-ningly, only 27 percent of Parisians over 15 years of age in 1793 wereborn in Paris.22 In particular, an influx of the maçons de la Creuse ispartially explained by provincial grain shortages and the breakdown ofrural authority. But their mass movement to the far-away and danger-ously exposed capital in war also testifies to the opportunities openedup in the building trades – particularly in the construction of fortifica-tions and wartime structures such as hospitals and barracks. The fateof laborers who temporarily became employees on revolutionary publicsites was quite different from the masses of masters, journeymen, andapprentices who continued to labor in the private sphere. Public workerswere more cruelly exposed to the vicissitudes of the wartime economyand the exigencies of directors who answered to the Jacobin state. Therewere other choices, of course, besides private and public construction


sites. Many laborers had a temporary vocation in the militarization ofParisian society, for it is estimated that there were perhaps 116,000revolutionary National Guardsmen in Paris in 1793 – up from 8,000equivalent guards in the 1780s.23

How to control the masses of unskilled labor flowing into Paris inthe Revolution’s Year II? The politically engaged building entrepreneurwho appropriated the term of sans-culotte, and who could guaranteethe effective command of labor as an honest employer, is fleshed outrepeatedly in police and revolutionary tribunal dossiers.24 For a vitalconstituent of the sans-culotterie was its capacity to mobilize and disci-pline labor. Furthermore, the case of the Parisian building trades suggeststhe sharply contradictory nature of the term’s use and abuse. Ratherthan a small-scale workshop patron with the archetypical one or twoemployees, members of the sans-culotterie were large-scale employersand influential Jacobin office-holders who advanced their own substan-tial patronage networks, in politics and business alike, in a revolutionarypolitical economy of patriotic production for the nation in danger.

In the police dossiers of arrested militants, another frequently citedevidence of civic virtue besides participation in given journées was merit-based social mobility. The journeyman who came to Paris to workfor others and who eventually worked his way up to entrepreneuroffered clear-cut testimony of successful participation in a competitiveworld of work which led to justly won fruits of labor as valorized bythe nation. The “Citizen-Mason” François du Bierre, for instance, wasimprisoned for an anonymous denunciation as a counter-revolutionary.In his appeal for release, du Bierre based his Political Life on a fixed litanyof predictable events. As a journeyman, du Bierre came to Paris when hewas 20 years old and worked for ten years for various masters, beforebecoming 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 Fed-eralist uprising for having mobilized many of his own workers – his“comrades” – bringing them from the worksite to join the crowd besieg-ing the Convention. Twenty masons in his employ successfully wrote acollective petition for his release underlying his patriotic presence in allthe revolutionary uprisings. In Du Bierre’s own third-person narrative,

he worked for ten years for the ci-devant masters in carrying out mostscrupulously those duties demanding the utmost authority, he hireda great number of workers as a master’s assistant, and afterward for20 years he kept them working on his own account, and can provethat by his prominent status that he made himself widely known,


that no one can prove anything to wound his probity; he calls onthe general good will of all who know him; he declares never hav-ing lived but by the fruit of his labors, and many have seen himenthusiastically fraternizing with true Republicans.25

Of course, the veracity of Du Bierre’s autobiographical sketch, written on20 January 1794, cannot be established. Nonetheless, his evocative useof the language of Jacobinism bears the imprint of the defining prin-ciples of Republican citizenship. To Du Bierre, there was no tensionbetween the claim to live “by the fruit of his labors” and the claimthat he is an employer of “prominent status.” In the political econ-omy of sans-culottisme, merit-based entrepreneurship was as elevateda social position as one could hope to attain. Moreover, the core ofDu Bierre’s self-defense lies in his status as a notable of his own quar-ter. His proudest achievement is being “widely known,” as evidentlyhaving 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, andeconomic power.

The self-description of Du Bierre captures the fusion of political andeconomic status within the sectional movement. His claim to politicalliberty was predicated upon his command of labor and entrepreneurialcapital. But while he was apparently never a master in the ancien régime –his social ascendancy was earned by hardwork and not granted byprivilege – Du Bierre cast himself as having many of the attributes ofancien régime mastership: “prominence,” displaying “probity,” and liv-ing “by the fruits of his labors.” The qualities he ascribed to himself mayhave been partially myth, of course; yet his plea nevertheless revealsthe 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 inthe building trades, particularly over corruption charges and counter-revolution, also inspired a vivid exculpatory counter-discourse of thepatriotism of large-scale employers. This entrepreneurial apologia was,paradoxically, a core component of the sans-culotte ideology of labor. Inthe person of the sans-culotte, the entrepreneur as an effective masterof patronage networks also became a stock character. The position ofmajor employer was often the first line of defense against charges of“aristocratic,” “idle,” or “moderate” tendencies.

A municipal administrator and “architect-expert,” Louis Lemit, whohad been a venal officeholder in the Chambre des Bâtiments in the last


years of the ancien régime – and later an inspector of the Pantheon – waspresident of the Parisian civil committees of the 48 sections wherethe sans-culottes were most active. While never outright claiming theirmantle, he was their prime representative within the municipality, andgleefully appropriated their discourse. Following his successful careerunder the Terror, Lemit took over administrative authority of thewomen’s spinning establishments (ateliers de filature) under Thermidor.His incendiary texts excoriated entrepreneurial corruption in publicworks projects, under both the Terror and Thermidor, in swaggering lan-guage rivaling that of Marat.27 Lemit was particularly harsh in a polemicagainst the misuse of public funds. He claimed, later, that the 2,000destitute women – many, accompanied by children – in the spinningestablishments were “in a state of disorder and insubordination” by theend of the Terror, due to scandalous mis-management. Lemit carved outa forceful image as an efficient troubleshooter in stamping out corrup-tion and incompetence, who did not hesitate to use repressive measuresagainst contentious laborers.28

Du Bierre and Lemit were simultaneously members of the Parisianurban class of notables, fully integrated in the world of work, and deeplyinvolved in revolutionary politics. The two men demonstrate that thesans-culottes did not necessarily derive their identity from the intimatesetting of the workshop, from direct production with their hands, nordid they coalesce around an idyll of work relations between small-scaleformer masters and journeymen. Rather, in articulating their most tren-chant arguments for revolutionary civic activism, they highlighted theirstatus as a reliably efficient revolutionary cadre in a crucial economicsector.

In Paris of the Year II, sans culotte ideology extolled the capac-ity to mobilize tightly knit patronage networks. Such networks werecrucial to Parisian revolutionary life, whether to vote, to assemble aloyal workforce for punctual demands of public works, or to rallycitizens to a political day of action. For the building sector, the pol-itics of construction during the Revolution – the funding of publicworks, the power to hire and fire workers, access to materials, thecredit and financing of an enterprise, the policing of the workforce –were prized practical qualities, crucial to the Revolution’s survival, per-haps even surpassing the mythical capacity to work with one’s handscelebrated by revolutionary journalists. Beyond their weight in theParisian economy, the patronage networks at the heart of buildingenterprises were deeply emblematic of Parisian politics in the Terror andThermidor.


Work in the Year II

The Parisian labor force, of course, punctually resisted the provisionsof the General Maximum’s cap on salaries with periodic but distinctiveforms of protest in the period of the Terror. Surprisingly, in a periodwhen unity and patriotic national solidarities dictated productive goals,and when intensified production constituted a raison d’état, the outcomeof labor and commercial conflict was not predetermined. The tapestryweavers at the National (formerly Royal) Manufacture of Gobelins heldout against the piecework that had temporarily replaced salaries, andwere granted improved working conditions and better pay.29 The car-penters on the site of the Pantheon also won a series of judgmentfor back pay in a period of intensified inflation, the last in the springof 1794. But where national security was endangered such as in thesensitive armaments industry, the Committee of Public Safety appliedagainst unruly elements a draconian “purification based on civic virtue,probity, and tendencies toward order and serenity.” Even supervisorswho could not keep the public peace were dismissed. Others who couldnot maintain basic quality control in factories or workshops would beimprisoned.30

Notwithstanding the political focus on inflation and provisioning asthe crucial domestic issues during the Terror, labor organization wascentral to the consolidation of national unity in the wartime econ-omy. The favored methods by which the Parisian labor force wasprimed for regeneration – and greater discipline in executing theirtasks – included official methods of petitioning over grievances, civicengagement as a prerequisite for hiring, the appointment of politicallysure technical elites on work sites, and tougher standards of verifica-tion. Efforts to promote the patriotism of public labor employees wereeven integrated into the programs of urban planning competitions.By feeding the workers’ conflicts through formalized procedures, theCommittee of Public Safety emphasized its role as impartial arbiter.It was thus better-situated to employ a “just” response to the majoreconomic challenge in the period of the Terror: the rapidly erodingstandard of living during the precipitous decline of the revolutionarycurrency.31

Repression, however, was a more inspiring motivator than regenera-tion. The workers of Paris detained on worksites for agitating to increasewages were incarcerated under the provisions of the Maximum and theLaw of Suspects. These criminalized urban labor movements, already for-bidden under the provisions of the 1791 Loi Le Chapelier. Furthermore,


the Committee of Public Safety issued labor regulations on 12 December1793 that imposed a 14-hour day with only one free day out of tenworkdays (la décade). This new code also defined with precision the min-imal prerequisite of civic virtue for public workers: “integrity and thetendency to be orderly and tranquil.” It spelled out precise guidelinesfor airing collective workplace grievances. The workforce had to ask theforemen of the affected workshop for authorization to assemble, to writeup the petitions, and to select two representatives to present the prop-erly signed text to the authorities. Such procedures seemed sure to calmthe ardor of aggrieved laborers. Finally, workshop foremen were maderesponsible for keeping unrest in check by the threat of being dischargedin cases of “rebellion.”32

In such a context, the majority of workers’ protests in the Year II wereintentionally kept far from public view, both by their leaders and bythe organs of justice, which shared an interest in covering up actionswidely perceived of as seditious. Grievances were rarely articulated bythat archetypical genre of Revolutionary literature, the signed petition,nor for that matter, by any literature destined to find a hearing in thepublic sphere. Clandestine coalitions, work stoppages, and anonymousdenunciations often replaced the petition, while revolutionary tribunalsand committees succeeded the court of public opinion reflected innewspapers.33

Following the new guidelines to the letter, the journeymen carpen-ters of the Pantheon had representatives write to the Paris Public WorksDepartment in March 1794 to demand a retroactive increase from fiveto six livres a day. This was in recompense for freshly implemented 12-hour work days that began promptly at 6:00 in the morning. The textwas drawn up as the site was undergoing arrangements to prepare for thetransfer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s remains from his burial grounds inthe northern town of Ermenonville (the town itself was renamed afterRousseau); frequent delays, though, ultimately pushed back the finalceremony to October 1794. Also, the request was sent on the very day ofthe mass demobilization of Revolutionary Army of the Interior chargedwith assuring the circulation of subsistence items and repressing thecounter-revolution. The carpenters express urgency in the face of thenews that droves of disarmed soldiers had joined an exodus toward theCapital in search of eventual employment. The labor shortage afflictingthe Pantheon’s site, borne of war and counter-revolution, would henceshortly be over.34

The petition was transmitted to the Pantheon’s direction, whichresponded favorably: the carpenters would indeed see a retroactive raise


to six livres. In the legalistic language of the direction, the salary wasincreased “except in cases where a decree establishing a new Maximumof the workers daily payscale would reduce this wage, or if a drop inthe price of foodstuffs will demand” a reduction in pay. The contingentquality of this pay hike underscores a strict adherence to national policy.The Pantheon’s directors were committed to demonstrate respect for thestrict parameters dictated by an economic order subordinate to securitydemands. The price of this adherence, however, was continued incerti-tude: 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 Maxi-mum contributed to the climate favoring the climate for a reorganiza-tion of the Revolutionary Government by spring 1794. The precedentset in yielding to the carpenters’ demands only confirmed that the Max-imum on salaries could not be properly enforced in piecemeal fashion.The logic of centralization and bureaucratization that infused sectionalpolicing authorities in the Republic would be applied to the disciplineof the labor force as well.

This logic was made clear in the Committee of Public Safety’s recourseto technocratic solutions as a method to administer public worksprojects and control their labor force. In March 1794, the Conven-tion founded the national polytechnical institute (l’École centrale destravaux publics), under the direction of the maritime engineer, Jacques-Elie Lamblardi, with the objective of assuring rigorous state training forall French engineers. A year later, this vaunted school became the Écolepolytechnique which continues to thrive to this day. Simultaneously, aproposal to streamline authority over public sites was introduced byBertrand Barère, spokesman of the Committee of Public Safety, in aspeech before the Convention. He argued in favor of a national publicworks authority to centralize all projects under a single administra-tion. Only consolidation under government control, Barère declared,could stamp out the “civil war of intrigues” that took place on indi-vidual sites, many of which, like the Pantheon, had falled throughthe cracks of state, municipal, and local authorities. Only a massivecentralization of authority would eliminate “federalism” as found atthe site of the Pantheon, and would put an end to the “disguisedaristocracy and ministerial machinations” that had corrupted publicconstruction earlier in the Revolution. In Barère’s stern formulation,the Revolution’s public works projects must be reconceived as thepolitical front line against enemies of the Republic, from within andwithout.36


Barère’s technocratic vision of a centralized public works authoritywas realized when the Committee of Public Safety founded the PublicWorks Commission on 6 March 1794 (21 Ventôse, Year II). Followinga recommendation by the former military engineer, Lazare Carnot, thisCommission was placed under the authority of the Ministry of Interior,thereby completely removing public works projects from municipal andbailiwicks.37 Public works were henceforth controlled by both the exec-utive and the legislative spheres of the revolutionary government. Thepriority given to the mobilization, command, and discipline of labor, aswell as to the stamping out of corruption among contractors and stateinspectors, was forcefully established by this dual tutelage of publiclyfunded construction.

The Public Works Commission’s deep commitment to root outBarère’s detested “federalism” through a vigorous labor policy becameclearer in May 1794, when it enlisted the civil engineer Jean-BaptisteRondelet, repeatedly denounced by workers as the most “tyrannical”inspector of the Pantheon for his over-zealous application of the Maxi-mum on salaries. The galvanizing effect of Rondelet’s appointment tothe Public Works Commission would parallel that of Barère’s to theCommittee of Public Safety. Rondelet’s ascendancy bolstered the revolu-tionary organs of the statist dream, that of Jacobin-directed public worksprojects in the Capital. He signed off on numerous decrees to requisitionspecific entrepreneurs to engage in vital tasks.38 Also, the firm control ofworkers became a central concern to the Commission, for now the con-struction of bridges, monuments, and civic structures was centralizedunder the same authority responsible for defensive fortifications. Fur-thermore, for security reasons, the Public Works Commission fell underthe scrutiny of the Committee of Public Safety over the administrativeof projects involving defensive fortifications of Paris.39

What impact did the committees and commissions charged withenforcing the Maximum on wages and prices on the daily routinesof Parisian building workers? How were the Jacobin state’s policiesrelayed onto the Capital’s construction sites? The Convention’s andvarious committees’ many edicts were intended to contain the mar-ket’s disposition of labor as the sole property of entrepreneurs andworkers. As in the treatment of subsistence items in the Terror, laboritself was no longer completely an item to be bought or contractedas with any other commodity. Offer and demand must be temperedby raison d’état. The immediate goal of the Convention’s labor policyin the Year II was to head off a work shortage which would drive upsalaries or provoke “federalist” movements. Ultimately, its committees’


and commissions’ sweeping acts ranged from the requisitioning hun-dreds of building workers for the emergency construction of hospitals inthe city to granting military leave time to laborers involved in erectingvital structures.40

The mass mobilization of labor and sheer repression, however, wereonly two features among others of the Year II on the Parisian buildingsites. For the dictates of a harsh retributive justice could not, by them-selves, encourage the projects of urbanism actively promoted by theJacobin state. A lesser-known feature of the Year II featured the encour-agement of a regenerated civic virtue (civisme) in construction projectsof the Capital. The Terror inspired a thriving interest in urban designcompetitions meant to inspire revolutionary consolidation through apatriotic participation of all classes – from architects to lowly engineer-ing students – in the arts. Following the definitive suppression of theAcademies of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture on 16 August 1793,a deluge of ephemeral committees and juries were organized to poreover and select urban plans to revitalize the Republic’s capital city in itsmost beleaguered phase.41

The Academies’ suppression created the opportunity to found the11-member Commission des artistes, which reunited seven of the mostfamous architects of Paris. They included Charles De Wailly who in1789 produced an ambitious project for reorganizing Parisian streetsand Edme Verniquet an urban cartographer and former commissionerof streets for the municipality who led a team of geographers and sur-veyors to create a detailed set of precise Parisian maps between 1780and 1791. (The Verniquet plan was the basis of the Commission desartistes’ studies.) Seven architects collaborated with four engineers andinspectors attached to the roads department, la voirie. The democraticimpulse in folding the two corps of architecture and civil engineeringinto one consultative administration accelerated the movement towardopening construction to new forms of expertise, informed by geograph-ical precision, geometric measures, and scientific argumentation. Ratherthan aesthetics, for example, the exacting calculations of the durabil-ity, homogeneity, and cost of construction materials were increasinglyprivileged in urban planning.42

In 25 architectural competitions, the Commission des artistes receiveda total of 480 patriotic projects, sculptures, paintings, and designs.Fifteen ambitious plans were proposed for embellishing Paris, 25 monu-ments to Rousseau were submitted, and 209 propositions for individualsites were received including the future Arc de Triomphe and the Pan-theon’s columns. (One wonders whether the free time of redundant


architects and artists, whose principal projects had been made for theCrown, may have boosted the yield of these competitions.) A single con-test for rebuilding Paris held by the Commission des artistes betweenMay and August 1794 inspired 195 architectural programs and 110 pro-posals for public sculptures. Furthermore, the Commission publisheda series of ambitious plans for remaking Paris, integrating new boule-vards and neighborhoods and focusing on neglected quarters in theouter northern and southern fringes of the capital. The map of theCommission des artistes sought to propose an orderly system to assim-ilate new zones carved out haphazardly after the confiscation and saleof over one-tenth of the land within Paris intra-muros as bien nationauxafter 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 theCommission des artistes” heralded Haussmannisation half a centurylater 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. Thiscommittee, including Charles de Wailly and Edme Verniquet, met between1793 and 1797 and produced this map, considered to be an early example of“Haussmannisation before Haussmann.”

163

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

Map 4.3 Demonstrating the depth of commitment to secularization, the Com-mission des artistes’ planned streets to run through nationalized and destroyedchurches, abbeys, and convents.


These urban plans, in Barère’s words during a meeting of the PublicWorks Commission held on 22 June 1794, were to be implemented “notonly for the embellishment of the city of Paris, but for all matters ofpublic utility, (and) for the serenity of its citizens.” The patriotic andutilitarian criteria of architecture were to be applied by the jurys des artsthat had been launched earlier in the spring to review urban projects forParis. The jurys, consisting of 109 members in two distinct committees,mingled artists with political leaders and scientists in order to coordi-nate the demands of urban “embellishment” with “public utility.” Thepublished projects and the upright promises of future construction forprize-winning entries were never carried out.44

Nevertheless, the Committee of Public Safety continued to insist uponeven greater egalitarian procedures in the direction of urban competi-tions. A project of 28 June 1794 (10 Messidor, Year II) established specialcouncils on the communal level to be composed of “ordinary citizens.”They were nominated to stand in judgment of projects submitted tothe Public Works Commission for the “moral purification and embel-lishment” of urban centers. This venture, bearing witness to Barère’simpulse to control “federalism,” charged the Public Works Commissionwith “supplying the jury with the locale, the maps, the plans necessaryfor its work, and to provide all the means at its disposition necessaryfor the proceedings of the jury.” Apparently written by Barère, the June1794 draft decree also entailed the requisitioning of construction work-ers and the engagement of juries of non-artists to work in coordinationwith the Commission on the selection of urban design. The Commis-sion was to be reconstituted as a thoroughly transparent administrationin urban matters, one uncontaminated by “factional” entrepreneurial,artistic, or labor interests seen as incompatible with the dictates of publicsafety.45

The primary focus of the Public Works Commission, of course, didnot comprise the visionary ambitions studied by the Commission desartistes. Its bureaucratic endeavors were focused on cracking down oninfractions of the Maximum, reinforced by an ordinance published on1 June 1794 (13 Prairial, Year II). Increasing salaries above the levelsfixed by law would bring punishment upon the indulgent entrepreneurwho would now be held “personally and individually responsible.”Soon after, however, the harsh requirements of pacification became alesser priority with the revaluation of salaries under the Maximum on9 August 1794. Wages were increased by 50 percent in all industriesexcept for the thousands of specialized workers in armaments.46 There-after, through the overthrow of Robespierre and until the Maximum’s


suppression on 24 December 1794, notable protests for wage hikes weremuch more rare.47 At the Pantheon, in particular, the laborers would falllargely quiescent until the fateful Prairial uprising of 20–23 May 1795.From the perspective of the nation’s building site, the Maximum onprices largely succeeded in subduing inflation and reducing subsistenceshortages. The inconstant work and pay schedule on the site was tocontinue, however, to meet with periodic resistance.48

The mobilization of labor on public works sites, the repression andnegotiation of worksite disputes, and the campaign to stir civic virtueamong elites and workers alike were the complex elements that con-stituted the industrial and labor policies of the Terror. By these variousmeans, the domestic wartime efforts of the Committee of Public Safetycreated domestic stability and a vibrant industrial precedent of emer-gency productivity. In particular, the wage and price controls of theGeneral Maximum achieved their goals, albeit temporarily, of assuringsubsistence for the working population and support for the public sec-tor, which continued to function in providing vital services with thenation under siege. This fragile equilibrium would collapse in the yearsto follow, particularly, with the near-bankruptcy of the state in 1796.However, the balance sheet of industrial and labor policies during theTerror demonstrated the revolutionary state’s capacity to impose orderin the world of work, particularly, on the Parisian building sites, previ-ously, the most turbulent and perilous sector of the domestic economyin wartime.

Terror and reaction on the building sites of Paris: Public andprivate construction in the Years II and III

In turning from the macro- to the micro-history of the Terror, an anal-ysis of the dossiers of arrested or “suspect” builders makes clear thatindividual victims were never aware of being sacrificed for the brighterlong-term picture for the Revolution. Historians’ estimates of suspectsduring the Terror and Thermidor denounced, pursued, arrested, or sim-ply signaled to public authorities, range up to half a million individualsout of a nation of 26 million people. In Paris alone, 8,000 suspects werearrested, with 6,000 of these actually born in Paris – “foreigners,” asprovincials were called, were not particular targets of suspicion, in acity where only a quarter of the capital’s adult population was bornin the city by 1793. Arrested suspects were typically held on averagefor eight months, with the vast majority of the arrests and releases tak-ing place in a one-year period between August 1793 and August 1794.


Official executions were the ultimate fate of a minority of the suspects.Historians find between 16,600 and 40,000 such “legal” death penal-ties carried through for all of France, and 2,625 within Paris, althoughdifferent forms of popular terror claimed far more lives. The total num-ber of deaths among revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries in thisperiod is beyond exact historical reckoning but this may total as manyas 200,000 souls. Beyond these numbers, though, the mass of docu-mentation resulting from the various legal procedures of the Terror –interrogations, denunciations, appeals, letters, and police reports – givea fine-grained quotidian account of workers’ movements and wage dis-putes to supplement the labor and industrial policy debates taking placein the Convention. Emerging from these dossiers in the police archivesof accused or suspected partisans are traces of the real practices of work-ers, sans-culottes, and revolutionary officials in the wartime economy ofthe Years II and III.49

In the private sector, disputes and uprisings on the building sites ofParis continued to flare up in the Terror. The unfolding of labor contes-tation was rarely captured in petition literature of this time, consideredtreasonable, 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 desûreté générale) and the Revolutionary Tribunal, the two most activerepressive organs of the revolutionary government. The preponderanceof evidence was examined by 16 magistrates, 60 jurors, and the pub-lic prosecutor Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, at the heart of theTerror’s justice system first established in March 1793. Dossiers werereviewed, verified, and presented by the 48 sections’ justices of thepeace and police commissioners, qualified to intervene decisively inmatters concerning the command of capital and labor on the buildingsite. Wage disputes figure prominently in the papers of these jurisdic-tions, where conflict no longer provoked protracted negotiations, with,at times, inconclusive results based on compromise. Typically, the jus-tice of the peace and police commissioner reviewed the denunciations ofthe sectional surveillance committees, and then forwarded reports to theCommittee of General Security or Revolutionary Tribunal, dependingupon the seriousness of the supposed crimes, for final review and imple-mentation. At the bottom of this pyramid-shaped hierarchy were thesimple militants of the 48 Parisian sections, each of which had between12,000 and 25,000 members.

An incident that epitomized the logic of revolutionary justice on thebuilding sites of the Year II was provoked by the complaints filed bythree entrepreneur carpenters of the Section du faubourg de Bondy


between 18 and 24 June 1794 against journeymen who were accusedof inciting fellow carpenters to strike on several public sites. Evidenceof this dispute survives in the testimony of the striking carpenters, insupportive letters written by workmates, and in the denunciations ofsupervisors in charge of various ateliers. The case was reported by thesection’s justice of the peace for the Committee of Public Safety, alongwith a recommendation on the final settlement of the dispute. The mat-ter of contention was a “coalition” to raise the salary rate from 6 to8 livres per day in flagrant violation of the Loi Le Chapelier and of theGeneral Maximum.50

In criticizing the carpenters’ concerted work stoppage, “under thepretext of an augmentation of pay,” the justice of the peace focusedon the peril of work stoppage to the national interest. The carpenterson these public sites were considered to be performing “work for theRepublic,” and their delay was thus a grave “breach of engagementswith the Republic.” However, the contentious carpenters were not con-demned for having combined to breach the Maximum. They had struckto earn their market price, to match the salary of colleagues on nearbyprivate sites who had persuaded masters to increase their wages. Thejustice found that, among the carpentry trades, it was collectively “theentrepreneurs (who) appear guilty in paying salaries superior to theMaximum to their workers.” The Maximum was breached by indulgententrepreneurs elsewhere in Paris who had hired workers at excessivelyhigh wages. The Committee of Public Safety followed the justice’s rec-ommendation not to prosecute the protagonists, and instead, voiceddispleasure at the entrepreneurs’ lack of patriotic discipline.

Here and elsewhere, the unfolding of wage disputes and other formsof strife in the building trades call into question the historical consensusabout prosecutions under the Terror. In 1935, Donald Greer publishedfindings – widely supported afterward – that the revolutionary govern-ment executed proportionately three times as many people from the“middling” ranks of artisans and laborers than from either social elites orthe poor. Greer found that Parisian plebeian radicals aligned themselveswith a revolutionary government vastly more open to arresting and exe-cuting individuals from their own milieu than from the top or bottomof the social scale. However, the problem with Greer’s findings is thesocial status of the sans-culottes. Having identified them as “middling,”the frequent appearance of suspects claiming the moniker of sans-culotteseemingly verifies a thesis of the Terror as a settling of accounts amongsectarian artisans or laborers, with no discernable social objectives orideological foundations. In the case of arrested building tradesmen,


the revolutionary justices of the peace and police commissioners sys-tematically arrested well-to-do entrepreneurs accused of corruption onpublic sites. These entrepreneurs wrote petitions, pleading for release,that minimized their social standing, while promoting their clientagenetworks, as we have seen with the “Citizen-Mason” François Du Bierre.Among Parisian builders, it would seem that there was some socialand professional selection, albeit motivated by the demands of specific,extraordinary circumstances rather than by an overriding ideologicalcommitment.51

Precautions against entrepreneurs were motivated principally not byclass hatred but by apprehension about excessive liberty on the openmarket granted to employers in the building trades. Coinciding with thewartime emergency, building entrepreneurs had been granted wide lati-tude to pursue their affairs. The suppression of the moribund Academyof Architecture had liberated architects from all institutional constraintsto engage in entrepreneurship, previously prohibited, while freeingentrepreneurs to seize on the moniker of architect to burnish their pro-fessional status. While the Revolution had clearly little to fear from mostarchitects from a domestic security perspective, alarmingly, the very titleof architect was often appropriated by entrepreneurs with absolutely noformal training in the art. Starting in August 1793, then, only the patentewas required to organize and launch a building site. In the volatileperiod of the Terror and Thermidor, in the full chaos of constant admin-istrative reorganization, the task of putting up buildings was basicallyopen to all with the means to buy materials and hire workers.52

The confluence of real-estate opportunities and deregulation, in whichthe biens nationaux liberated much property for new construction whilecheaper building materials such as plaster and rubble were substitutedfor 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 theMaximum illusory.” As revolutionary administrators dedicated mucheffort to the repression of inferior grades of cloth, the widespread useof compromised material in construction, such as damp wood fishedout of the Seine or cracked shingles, was an even more ominousdevelopment. 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 onconstruction entrepreneurs and architects to a greater degree than jour-neymen and day-laborers. Hence, the manuscript sources of the twoauthorities responsible to keep the domestic peace bolster one basic con-clusion. Proportionately far more individuals arrested from the building


trades were situated among the top ranks and not the middle or thebottom of the milieu’s socio-professional hierarchy.53

In the absence of an integrated building authority, the Revolution-ary police became the sole arbiter to intervene on public and privatework sites. As with the ancien régime commissioners, who worked handin glove with the guilds of their quarter, the Revolutionary police wasexceedingly zealous in the prosecution of sloppy construction. Thosemalfaçons 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 theentrepreneur Clement on 23 Thermidor, Year II (10 August 1794) tobe held in prison for unspecified blunders in the reconstruction of thebuilding that housed the Ministère de la Guerre. He was freed aftermembers of his own Section du Museum testified on his behalf thathe always “paid the greatest attention to fulfill the duties of his état,and always gave unequivocal proof of his political zeal.” In the absenceof sound workmanship Clement’s demonstrated revolutionary activismsaved him from a longer sentence.54

In a sampling of 181 detained builders’ dossiers of the Commit-tee of General Security and the Revolutionary Tribunal, during thetwo and a half year period between March 1793 and November 1795,elites on and off the construction site were much more likely to beimprisoned or denounced in relation to journeymen or apprentices.While 49 of the 181 detained builders (27 percent) could be iden-tified as architects, entrepreneurs, or technical experts for the state,those workers in masonry, identified as “compagnon,” “garcon,” oras plain “mason” or “stone cutter,” totaled 81 (45 percent) arrestedbuilding tradesmen. By contrast, the same capacious category of elitein 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 bythe centralized structure of the building trades, and hence the rel-atively few entrepreneurs in an economic sector that averaged oneemployer – excluding architects and inspectors – for every 15 workers(Table 4.1).

Architects, as we have seen, were an exceptional group for theywere in a particularly delicate situation and thus invited particularlyunwanted attention from Jacobin police organs. They were either newmen on the construction site, and therefore were often entrepreneurswho had misappropriated the title of architects, free for all to use; orif correctly trained as architects they may have enjoyed a conspicuousrelationship to the Crown. Association with the suppressed Academy of

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

1/93–10/95Comité deSûreté Générale

3/93–5/95TribunalRévolutionnaire

Totals

“Elites”ARCHITECTS 15 10 25COMMISSIONERS/INSPECTORS OF PUBLIC WORKS 6 3 9ENTREPRENEURS/MASTER MASONS 7 8 15

“Laborers”JOURNEYMEN (COMPAGNONS OR OUVRIERS) MASONS 25 20 45STONECUTTERS 8 8 16DAILY LABORERS (MANOUVRIERS) 0 20 20JOURNEYMEN CARPENTERS 9 21 30PAINTERS 2 7 9PAVERS 1 1 2ROOFERS 4 4 8PLASTERERS 1 0 1SCULPTORS 0 1 1

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“Elites”ARCHITECTSCOMMISSIONERS/INSPECTORS OF PUBLIC WORKSENTREPRENEURS/MASTER MASONS 28 21 49

“Laborers”JOURNEYMEN (COMPAGNONS OR OUVRIERS) MASONSSTONECUTTERSDAILY LABORERS (MANOUVRIERS)JOURNEYMEN CARPENTERSPAINTERSPAVERSROOFERSPLASTERERSSCULPTORS 50 82 132


Architectural expertise recognized by the ancien régime was no longerviewed in neutral fashion as a guarantee of technical prowess. TheCrown’s domain that governed public structures relied on architects ofthe Academy, and a large part of academic training was, in fact, serviceto the Crown including such mundane affairs as inspections and veri-fying bills. Hence, Jacobin polemics against “academic despotism” wereleveled against architects as well as philosophes and savants. The chargeagainst the celebrated visionary-architect, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, forinstance, was that he participated in “construction for the tyrant,” bydesigning the widely detested tollhouses largely dismantled on the eveof the fall of the Bastille. The accusations by the Committee of PublicSafety contained in his 50-page dossier take his professional relationshipwith the Crown as collaboration with enemies of the Republic.

Even the elimination of architects from the sampling yields an impres-sive 15 percent of detained members of building trades issued fromthe elite, meaning they were proportionately three times more likelyto fall afoul of revolutionary jurisdictions. Furthermore, the politicalcareers of architects in the Terror and Thermidor as related by theirdossiers suggest that in many cases they were not targeted only as sus-pected royal conspirators – counter-revolution was a routine part of thelitany of charges against almost all arrested former members of the sup-pressed royal academies, especially, that of architecture. Three architectsconfirmed Jacobin prejudices by engaging in lucrative yet dubious activ-ities in the Revolution once sanctioned under the ancien régime. Theirarrest and detention stemmed from the submission of false accountsto the Public Works Commission for phantom laborers or for unnec-essary materials. In 1792, the abuses were corrected by reforms andtighter inspections; the Revolutionary Government of the Years II andIII took punitive action by imprisoning, and occasionally, executingoffenders through the deadly accusation that corruption was inspiredby counter-revolutionary motives.55

The most severe sentences were meted out to architects andentrepreneurs who were condemned for cheating the republic outof precious revenues tied to national property. The architect ClaudePhillipe Coqueau, for example, was executed in Thermidor, Year II, forthe charge of corruption in his office as an assessor of the National Lands(Domaine national), which he systematically undervalued in hopes ofprofiting from the sale of biens nationaux. His political crime was to havepersonally profited from an office secured through a claim to techni-cal expertise as surveyor, a widespread practice among holders of venaloffices in the ancien régime.56 Also, the building entrepreneur, Despline,


had earned a place as administrator in charge of contracting in the Com-mission of Public Works. He too was accused of seeking to fix the biddingof biens nationaux “to obtain a low price” to buy several lots for himselfand his son. Despite the protest that he “was always a frank sans-culotte,an active and hard-working artisan,” Despline was arrested for “abuse ofpower” based on the low prices he paid for several lots that he himselfhad inspected for sale. More fortunate than Coqueau, Despline spentseveral months in prison.57

The often lethal accusation of corruption formed the crux of chargesagainst the building entrepreneurs, architects, and inspectors of theRepublic. With the Republic in danger, the profiteering of Coqueau andDespline was ruthlessly prosecuted by the Revolutionary police. Themotivation to fold the Public Works Commission within the Ministry ofInterior was to secure public projects against corruption and misuse ofoffice.58 Later, however, preventive steps were taken along with punitiveones to preclude such abuses as profiteering and shoddy constructionon private and public sites. On the local level, highly politicized sec-tional officers were a feeble substitute for technical experts to appraisethe good faith of contractors. The national Public Works Commissionby the summer of 1794 thus streamlined procedures for the hiring of anelite and politically reliable corps of builders. One prominent memberof the Commission, the Pantheon’s Chief Inspector Rondelet, broughtthe meticulous and draconian sense of order over hiring, payment, andverification practiced on the site of the Pantheon.

An elaborate table composed in Rondelet’s hand listing builders con-sidered for positions of authority on work sites included a categoryon “recommendations.” A letter of political support by a member ofthe Convention, or, more effective yet, by a reputable architect col-league, was the determinant factor in securing a position on publicworks projects. Forty-six architects applied for employment on publicsites in the Years II and III, and 11 were hired in various capacities; only8 of the 46 petitions arrived accompanied by a dossier of at least onesupporting letter, and six among these petitioners were hired. Appar-ently, the construction of civil structures required security guarantees atleast as much as proof of genius or talent.59

Apart from the preponderance of elites, further examination of thenumbers of detainees broken down by profession reveals that arrestsamong the more popular trades were relatively few, especially, in lightof the reputation of building workers as deeply antisocial elements.For instance, only an average number of detentions occurred amongthe masonry trades which comprised 81 total arrests. They constituted


61 percent of all building laborers arrested, entirely consistent with theirnumbers in 1790–1791 when they made up 67 percent of all build-ing tradesmen. However, among these masonry workers the relativelyfew stonecutters (16) contrast sharply with their heavy presence onsalary rolls, petitions, and pamphlet literature. Petition literature, suchas that signed by 380 stonecutters and dated 28 July 1791 complain-ing of low salaries and conditions on public works projects, suggest thatlater even greater numbers were to be found on the site.60 Pamphlet lit-erature used the popular image of the gruff, provincial stonecutter toevoke the militant revolutionary, who unflinchingly embraces the Ter-ror as a reflexive reaction inspired by his own misery and ignorance.For example, one anti-Robespierrist Thermidorian pamphlet, writtenanonymously following the downfall of the Robespierrist Montagnardsin 1794, vilifies a simple-minded stonecutter as Brise-Raison (“Reason-breaker”), a play on stone-breaker. Brise-Raison passionately and absurdlydefends the Terror’s course against the commonsensical military officer,Tranche-Montagne, who, true to his name, and without evident partisanfervor, coolly proclaims the need to “cut off the Montagne.” Here aselsewhere, stonecutters were associated with mindless radicalism, andwere vividly connected by the popular imagination to the Terror.61

The stonecutters were not the only builders to have apparentlyescaped the brunt of persecution during the Terror and Thermidor.Another statistical anomaly among the building trades was representedby the building sculptors (sculpteurs en bâtiments). Judging from theirvociferous agitation for more pay, one would expect large numbers ofarrest dossiers of members of this trade. Sculptors should have ideally fitthe bill of a classic definition of a sans-culotte, as a skilled “artisanal petitbourgeois” whose politics were forged in close proximity within theworkshop. With slightly higher wages, and an employer/employee ratioof one master for ten workers, it was among the most paternalist skilledtrades on the building site. Furthermore, they frequently petitioneddenounce working conditions at the Pantheon, pointing to the probableexistence of a literate cadre among this craft.62 In all of Paris, they num-bered under a thousand at the beginning of the Revolution – comprising5 percent of all Parisian builders – for their presence was demandedmostly for decorative work on the façades and inside of buildings.Yet, only a single sculptor in this period was arrested by the Revolu-tionary Tribunal. Alexandre Bernard worked on the Pantheon and wasexecuted on 28 Prairial, Year II, for unspecified “counter-revolutionaryactivities.” Is it possible that, save this one exception, sculptors did notalways accurately identify their trade before revolutionary organs in


an effort to obscure politically suspect professional expertise? Bernard’sdossier, for example, occasionally interchanged his craft as stonecutterand sculptor.63

The one trade heavily over-represented by the arrest dossiers was thatof the carpenters, who made up nearly one in ten of all building trades-men. Their crime statistics under the ancien régime reflected the sameproportion (8 percent of all builders arrested), signifying they were nomore and no less susceptible to be apprehended for ordinary crime suchas theft between 1770 and 1789.64 Under the Revolution, many weredeeply politicized, as we have seen, flooding the municipality of Parisand national governments with petitions for higher pay. The temporarynature of their principal task on work sites – putting up and taking downscaffolding – added to the precarity of their employment and urgencyof their demands for higher wages. The 1791 Loi Le Chapelier abol-ishing the guilds was, in fact, passed in response to upheavals in thistrade.65 One would thus expect the frequent appearance of carpentersbefore revolutionary committees and tribunals. Indeed, the carpentersof Paris were often detained for worksite and political crimes, as theycomprised nearly four in ten of the total number in this small samplingof building laborers arrested in the Terror and during Thermidor. TheParisian carpenters, almost entirely native to Paris, were proportionatelytwo and a half times more likely to be targeted for political repressionin the Years II and III. They, and not the often maligned provincials, themaçons de la Creuse, were the most heavily prosecuted laborers of thebuilding site.

Several conclusions may be drawn from the distribution of arrests andinterrogations among builders in this limited sample. The structure ofthe building trades influenced the focus of policing during the Terrorand Thermidor. As discussed above, the ancien régime carpenters’ guildwas particularly dependent upon the local police commissioner to con-trol its own. As opposed to the masons’ corporation, which became arepository of enlightened techniques of self-government, the carpen-ters’ guild was a closed corporation that relied heavily on police raids toguard its lucrative privileges. It also featured a predominance of nativeParisians as members of the trade. The abolition of the guilds deniedthe carpenters the corporate mediation of police commissioners, anduntil the Terror they became tireless petitioners to resolve grievances.With the increased reliance of the centralized Committee of PublicSafety upon elected justices of the peace and police commissioners, theancien régime pattern of condemnations and surprise raids on workshopstook hold once more.66 The ex-master carpenters knew how to use this


system and once again the ex-journeymen carpenters ran afoul of itmost often. Continuities between the personnel that staffed the ancienrégime and Revolutionary policing institutions – and the mobilization ofentrepreneurs and former masters as sectional officers – suggest that con-tentious carpenters were well known to many individual police officialsand were closely watched by several jurisdictions.

The case of the journeyman carpenter Jerome Benoit, imprisonedand interrogated for provoking a movement for wages surpassing thelimits imposed by the Maximum, unfolded like an ancien régime labordispute. Only now the usual grim procedure of police raid, adjudica-tion, and judgment was overlaid with the full disposition of politicalpower at the hands of the aggrieved entrepreneur. Benoit, previouslyknown 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 pro-voking a wage strike to demand an increase in pay from seven toan improbable ten livres. (Another denunciation put the demandsat “twenty or thirty livres.”) The subtext of this labor dispute, how-ever, is the status of the accuser, never made explicit in the policedossier, for Dorigny was not merely an ordinary entrepreneur and sec-tional militant. He was also a prominent political figure representingthe Robespierrist faction in the Commune of Paris. Dorigny would bearrested and guillotined, along with 80 other Montagnard partisans,the very day after Robespierre and his immediate circle perished inThermidor.

The contradictory details that emerge from these 17 pages of inter-rogations agree on a few points: on 21 June 1794 (3 Messidor, II), thejourneyman carpenter, accompanied by several other workers, abruptlyleft Dorigny’s carpentry workshop on the rue St. Denis without priornotification, never to return. In the words of Dorigny, “the turmoil thatreigned among the workers has continued and a disorder quite troublingto the public good persists in my worksite.” Some of Benoit’s former“comrades” in fact signed a deposition to the effect that he had success-fully intimidated journeymen to walk off the site over a wage dispute.In the course of the inquiry, however, Benoit testified that he quit theworkshop simply to start his own enterprise (“entreprendre des ouvragesà mon comte”). He was supported in this matter by two carpenterswho claimed that they had also left the site to work for the “formerjourneyman carpenter” Benoit.67

The charge against Benoit of a political crime, constituted by foment-ing a wage movement in wartime, seems to mask another, much


older kind of dispute: namely, that of a former master carpenter wish-ing to restore abolished monopoly privileges over his labor force. Theentrepreneur Dorigny used municipal and sectional political connec-tions to charge Benoit as a suspect by transforming the core issue –an employee who wished to become a competing entrepreneur – intoa violation of the Maximum. Dorigny was successful in this endeavoras the surveillance committee recommended that Benoit and his col-leagues be imprisoned, where they languished for several months(although it is unclear when they were released). Not even the even-tual execution of Benoit’s Robespierrist accuser the following month wassufficient cause to spare the journeyman from imprisonment.68

Benoit’s arrest dossier illustrates the mélange of political and socialcomposants of the Terror. The smooth command of labor meantentrepreneurs made ready use of available repressive organisms whichapplied the General Maximum on wages and prices in order to stampout counter-revolution. The range of worksite crimes treated as polit-ical offenses might have been extended to include any challenge toentrepreneurial authority. If, then, the extraordinary measures of theTerror were wielded as repressive measures against labor, how were theagents of entrepreneurial capital treated by the same police mecha-nisms? Was the Terror as harsh in treating the suspect activities ofentrepreneurs, architects, and supervisory personnel?

Apart from their frequent detentions, the elite cadres were carefullypoliced on public sites considered sensitive to the prosecution of thewar and for domestic surveillance, as in the example cited earlier of theentrepreneur Clement, imprisoned for flawed and negligent construc-tion (malfaçon). Working for the nation in peril, however, could have itsrewards as well as its hazards. If corrupt builders were relentlessly pur-sued, then demonstrably competent ones were treated with leniency.The masonry entrepreneur Pierre Decressac was jailed between Augustand December 1793, after members of his section denounced him forcounter-revolutionary statements. His participation in the constructionof civil buildings, particularly prisons, allowed him to obtain a petitionby an architect colleague that these projects “on the Republic’s accountsuffer in his absence, their security is compromised, and it is in the inter-est of the Republic which suffers from mistakes that might be made, forthe arrest of this citizen obstructs us from preventing or repairing thesemistakes.”69

Besides his role as a builder of the Revolution’s structures, the case ofDecressac illustrates the social components of good citizenship in thisperiod. The documents in his police file place his entrepreneurship of


public buildings in a positive light as evidence of his virtuous “labor forthe Republic.” Productive and industrious activity reinforced his goodstanding as a frequent provider of patriotic contributions, as an electorin elections for the justice of the peace, and as an upstanding memberof the National Guard. A petition from an inspector-general of buildingsof the Republic also testifies to his “utility for the public good as one ofthose who has acted vigorously to accelerate works for the Republic.”The disciplined command of entrepreneurial capital, if uncorrupted, wasa vital symbol of Republican zeal.

The final revolutionary days of action during the Thermidorian erafocused renewed attention on agitation in the workshops, manufac-tures, and construction sites of Paris. Beginning with the journée of12 Germinal (1 April 1795), and concluding with the journée of Prairial(20–23 May 1795), the Parisian crowd erupted twice inside the Conven-tion, 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 conser-vative deputy, was bandied about the Convention. The populations ofthe faubourg Saint-Antoine and the faubourg Saint-Marcel were in openrevolt, and the demand for subsistence was appended to a more politi-cized slogan: Bread and the suspended, never-applied Constitution of1793 which had institutionalized universal manhood suffrage and theright to subsistence. To the Parisian crowd, this constitution embod-ied an egalitarian revolutionary promise buried by the Thermidorianregime. Following bloodshed within the Convention, the repression ofthe sectional movement following Prairial was merciless: over a hun-dred 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 thesite of the Pantheon, which had continued its secularization throughwar and mass mobilization, emptied government coffers, and inflation.With the exception of occasional ephemeral construction and repairsprompted by fêtes to install France’s “Great Men,” such as the exalteddefender of the site’s laborers, Jean-Paul Marat in September 1794, thePantheon was only sporadically active between the adoption of theMaximum and Napoleon’s revival of France’s imperial designs. (The sec-ularization of the structure was completed in 1797, but in 1806 thePantheon was restored to the Church, entailing further re-construction.)

Stemming from the Prairial journée, several arrests were made onthe Pantheon’s site. The investigating police commissioner heard tes-timony that the laborers had gotten in the habit of listening, atlunchtime, to a reading of an incendiary journal, L’auditeur national,


by a 41-year-old journeyman stonecutter, Jacques Closménil (or, var-iously spelled, Closmesnil). Over a hundred stonecutters on thePantheon’s site heard one public reading during Prairial lauding theattacks upon counter-revolutionaries in the Convention. Based on adenunciation by one of the masonry contractors, and by the damn-ing testimony of two permanent guards posted at the site, Cloménilwas accused of being a ringleader of Prairial. Although his condemna-tion was practically secured in advance, in a vain attempt to save theircolleague, a petition signed by 30 masons from the site describe him as

having been a good companion to their work, with all the wisdomand calm of a true Republican, having always respected all that radi-ated (sic) from the National Convention; and having always beenthe public reader chosen among us . . . . . ., he reads to us every dayat lunch time the newspaper called the Auditor, that we collec-tively paid for in order to render us more avid (pour nous zélés) withfraternity for all.

The Auditeur national of 21 May 1795 was indeed filled with deeplyprovocative calls to rise up against the “tyrannical” Thermidorian gov-ernment. Fully embracing the “new insurrection” in Paris against thecounter-revolutionary government, it listed demands for: (1) bread;(2) abolition of the present government; (3) application of the Consti-tution of 1793; (4) the arrest of all members of the government andthe liberation of all imprisoned patriots; (5) convocation of the primaryassemblies; (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 leavingParis, except for those citizens charged with provisioning.” In rousingterms, the Auditeur national called for nothing short than a veritablestate of emergency in the capital.71

Another awkwardly rendered petition supporting Cloménil confirmsthe damning facts observed by the Committee of General Safety, butexplain away the public readings during Prairial as having been aninnocent mistake:

(t)wo intruders without doubt spread several incendiary writingsamong the workers; and one of us who just received these writingsasked the Citizen (Closménil) as the lector, to read the paper to us.And while sitting on the scaffolding (les pièces de bois) among us, hestood up and read aloud without knowing what the paper contained.


And having read his, he said, “My God, this writing is not good it isover 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 bejust 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 soughtto lay the responsibility upon unknown “intruders,” who were notattached to the site. Also, it was claimed, the Auditeur national was com-pletely unfamiliar to the journeyman stonecutter (in contradiction tothe declaration that he found it “over the top”). In the interrogationsof his workmates, however, emerged details of organized public read-ings of other inflammatory literature on the site. Without the notablestatus of spared sans-culotte builders, the simple militant Cloménil wasjudged and condemned harshly for the crime of being a “Terrorist:”his sentence was two years of forced labor. Aggravating his case wasthat he lived in the relatively faraway neighborhood of Les Halles, andhis Section des Marchés was targeted under Thermidor as the centerof Robespierrist activity. Following Cloménil’s arrest and sentencing,the ardor of Pantheon laborers would be further cooled by politicallymotivated suspensions of work on the site.73

The search for a “police” of urban labor between 1793 and 1795, inthe absence of a single, true, national labor policy, contained a coreparadox: to build the ideal visionary city that embodied revolutionaryvirtue in wartime required a well-policed building site that exemplified,simultaneously, technical expertise in construction, Jacobin politicalsteadfastness, and the manifest ability to mobilize patronage networks,all the while demonstrating an iron command of labor. For the ambi-tion to police a productive construction site was driven simultaneouslyby utopian ambition and by false memory. The administrators of thePantheon, the Public Works Commission, and the Jacobin builder wereunited in continually evoking an idyll of republican harmony: onewhich revolved around an ideal personage wielding a model of tech-nocratic objectivity embodied by the building inspector and the justiceof the peace. Simultaneously, given the insufficiency of revolutionaryinstitutions to assure proper expertise and organization in construc-tion ventures, the building site was progressively entrusted to notablebuilding entrepreneurs, justices of the peace, and police commissionerswho resembled their ancien régime equivalents in terms of mobilizingclientage networks, civic probity, and local power. The local notableand self-made “Citizen-Mason” Du Bierre cast himself as precisely this


notable builder, deeply rooted in the particular needs and contextof his neighborhood. To Du Bierre, a Jacobin builder was not onlya competent craftsman, but also a “prominent” Republican citizen,for the command of labor at the work site was intimately linkedto the recruitment of political actors in his section. By contrast, thejourneyman stonecutter, Cloménil, from another neighborhood alto-gether than the faubourg Saint-Marcel, and much on the lower endof the Parisian world of work’s social scale, was supported merely byaffirmations of innocence through a formulaic defense of his purityand his Republican credentials. Not surprising, in the repressive con-text of Thermidor, Du Bierre was quickly liberated and Closménil wascondemned (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 morethan the “vacillating direction” of administrators on the disastrouslymismanaged public work sites of the capital. The chief danger to theRepublic lay in “immense assemblies of unknown men led by laborleaders (chefs des ouvriers) who are themselves dangerous to public tran-quility.” The memory of the guild-based assemblies, raids, and police ofworkers was compelling enough for the police commissioners to seekand to obtain the imposition of revived corporate qualifications on thelabor force, such as attestations from past employers and city residencyrequirements of at least one year to be eligible to be hired on public worksites. Even the most humiliating makework projects would thus demandproof of rootedness in the Republic – at least in its capital city.74

The drift toward a partial restoration of corporate structures was thusunderway. Perceptions of disarray on public work sites, and of a spoiledworkforce prematurely liberated from guild restrictions, began to clashwith an increasingly attractive recollection of the well-policed and well-organized building site. The next experiment in labor control would befounded on the faded memory of the institutions that had once embod-ied these qualities. Looking ahead, the broad project to revive ancienrégime bodies for resolving labor and commercial disputes would indeedreach fruition under Napoleon. By creating a variety of industrial insti-tutions, such as state-organized entrepreneurial guilds and chambersof commerce, and by articulating these with innovations such as theelected grievance boards (Conseils des Prud’hommes), the state revivedthe ancien régime corporate bodies – but henceforth on a centralized


foundation. As we will see, the corporate revival to come was deeplyconditioned by the Terror’s effective equilibrium of statist techno-administrators, individual entrepreneurs, and highly skilled, politicizedartisans with trade-based concerns. The French exception of indus-trial development would eventually be modeled on a complex synergybetween administrative state interventionism, technical expertise, andthe well-policed labor force, as well as private entrepreneurship andcorporate organization.75

Paradoxically, then, the Revolution’s innovations were also embed-ded in what it had helped to define as archaism. For along with itstechnocratic bias, the seeds were also sown in the period of the Terrorfor a partial recycling of the ancien régime corporate system of labor. Itsmethod of control fused a historically sanctioned labor police with theparticular demands of each craft – previously, the very definition of thepolice des métiers. The sans-culotte’s role in the Parisian world of work wasparticularly vital in this regard for he assimilated the ancien régime sys-tem of the command of labor to a revolutionary context. In the absenceof the dismantled guilds, the clientelism and patronage networks mobi-lized by the sans-culottes was a time-tested form of labor control rootedin the abolished figure of the large-scale master artisan.76

Yet, the archaism of the sans-culotte was only one component of hiscomplex social position. He collaborated not with journeymen andpolice 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 nationalinstitutions such as the Commission of Public Works. This elaboratehierarchy successfully stabilized wartime production through a for-malized network of new bureaucracies that attempted to reform theworksite under reforged labor hierarchies. Only the exigencies of polit-ical upheaval and war cut short the elaboration of a true Jacobin laborsystem in this period to accompany its boldly formulated – and broadlysuccessful – industrial policy. In the long run, the state controls of laborstrife, in particular, the edicts and laws dictating work rhythms, as wellas precisely defined methods for capital and labor to petition and filegrievances, were precursors of future methods of centralized state inter-ventionism in labor strife. They also partially provided the stuff thestatist dream of commerce was made of.

5Reconciling Commerce andRevolution, 1795–1805

“Republican” commerce under the Directory,1795–1799

The Directory is portrayed by much of the Revolution’s historiographyas a breakthrough moment for the liberal dream of commerce. Mer-chant trade was rehabilitated in public opinion, and revolutions andmarkets were finally reconciled. Private property in labor and capital,liberal commercial relations, and the cultural values of an industrialcommunity were reconceptualized by statesmen, administrators, andintellectuals as vital components of a republican economy. Indeed, theDirectory durably put into place the core social and political institutionsof French capitalism by a public commitment to accommodate commer-cial exchanges and industrial development. Evidence of this conversionto laissez faire began with the 1795 foundation of the Institut’s Politi-cal Economy Section where the “Idéologues” emerged as a loose schoolwith official capacities to spread the liberal doctrine. It continued withthe 1797 law proclaiming free trade in grain. The ultimate legacy ofthe Directory’s labor and industrial policies was French acceptance ofdemocratic capitalism.1

What form of commercial exchanges to favor, however, is the sub-ject of a less consensual debate about the Republic’s “agrarians” and“industrialists.” Historians dispute the significance of a neo-physiocraticdiscourse promoting the citizen-farmer – in opposition to the politicallyunstable urban producer – as the archetypical commercial republicanby the Directory’s defenders. Notwithstanding the persistent strengthof agrarian interests, the Directory successfully imposed industrialproduction as the heart of market society. Industrial advocates, themost famous being the indefatigable Minister of Interior François de

183


Neufchâteau, prevailed on many questions over investment priori-ties. The energy invested by Neufchâteau to launch an entrepreneurialethos began to re-establish confidence by merchants, industrialists, andartisans. He cultivated urban commercial elites that had been deeplyaverse to engage in risky enterprises in the period following the Terrorand Thermidor. Neufchâteau’s multiple endeavors focused on activelystimulating the investment of scarce financial resources in industrialproduction: his most exemplary act of promotion was to organize thefirst industrial exhibition on the Champ de Mars in 1798.2

This chapter reexamines a seemingly ineluctable movement fromthe statist dream of the Jacobin and Thermidor governments to theindustrial forms of economic liberalism under the Directory. Fromthe perspective of Parisian building sites, political discourse encour-aging private investment masked deeper tensions between the stateand the private entrepreneurs, particularly in the capital city. TheDirectory’s economic liberalism was instituted piecemeal, as a matterof pragmatic policy rather than as prefabricated ideology. For in thisperiod, a two-pronged commercial debate took place. First, many privateentrepreneurs were deeply hostile to a republic which had supposedlythwarted industrial growth during the war years. To this end, theywidely reiterated the counter-factual myth of production in 1793–1794as crippled by the General Maximum controlling wages and prices. Thevoices for an “anti-Robespierrist” economic policy were more absorbedby the critique of state interventionism writ large than by the artic-ulation of a coherent ideological alternative. Second, the Republic’spolitical fragility disqualified it from squeezing growth out of the mori-bund economy, especially during the financial collapse in the summerof 1796. In the void that resulted, the entrepreneur was projected toassume the role of principal economic arbiter as well as the underwriterof certain public services. The state and the market were far from uni-fied 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: Arapprochement?

Many state and Parisian municipal administrators, including freshlyminted civil architects, engineers, and other public servants, were con-vinced that unbridled competition was an obstruction to the devel-opment of a market-driven economy. Unchecked market forces wereblamed for the perception of generalized “anarchy” represented by

Reconciling Commerce and Revolution, 1795–1805 185

legal and commercial conflicts between proprietors, entrepreneurs, con-tractors, and administrators. It also sowed the seeds of labor strife.The Directory’s administrators formulated a harsh assessment of someentrepreneurs’ appropriation of the functions of public service in thesensitive domain of public construction.4 The critical voices of publicfunctionaries on this subject had real weight given their sheer numbersin the capital city. In 1796, 16,000 public servants worked in Paris alonemeaning that 5 percent of the population was constituted by functionar-ies and their families. This phenomenon of a ten-fold growth from theancien régime gave the French language the very word, bureaucratie.5

Despite controversy and crisis, public investment in people and stonescontinued. The pace of Parisian construction was sluggish, but even inthe face of inflation, deflation, currency depreciation, forced loans fromtaxpayers, and other desperate expedients, a few projects were launched,albeit often half-heartedly. Over a million livres were engaged by threemonumental enterprises at the founding of the Directory in November1795. This sum of money was voted for the restoration and extensionof major national palaces that had suffered neglect or plundering underthe early Revolution largely as a result of their aristocratic origins. Theywere: the palais du Luxembourg used as a prison after its nationalizationand the future seat of the five-person executive council; the Palais-Bourbon, to be rehabilitated as the lower legislative chamber knownas the Conseil des cinq-cents; and finally, the palais des Tuileries theseat of the disbanded Convention and assigned to the Directory’s upperlegislative chamber, the 250-member Conseil des anciens. The physicaldispersal of these three structures in the capital gave substance and sym-bol to the constitutional separation of powers, and as Annie Jourdanhas argued, their distribution within Paris also represented the spatiallogic of spreading the Revolution throughout the nation. They werealso physically to represent popular access to the centers of power. Thecredits for restoration voted by the Directory included lavish touchesto républicaniser the palaces’ salons with commissioned figurines, paint-ings, and busts, and to open areas surrounding the palaces to moretraffic as accomplished in the south of Paris with the boulevard de l’Observatoire.6

However, these three chronically underfunded projects were leftincomplete when the state gave up on their refurbishing and reha-bilitation on the grounds of lack of finances in 1798, a year beforethe Directory was overthrown in Bonaparte’s 18 Brumaire coup d’état(9 November 1799). In any case, they engaged highly specialized artisansand artists in the building trades; few unskilled laborers benefited from


the republican restoration of palaces. Elsewhere, public works proposalsbetween 1795 and 1799 repeatedly reconceived, reconfigured, and rede-ployed private enterprise in the service of the depleted state. Evenprestigious national architectural competitions were brutally annexedas forms of ersatz urban development. A competition for embellish-ing the Champs Elysées, launched by Neufchâteau in October 1798,was a mere pretext to invite the submission of inexpensive plans toclean up the neighborhood.7 As the nearly bankrupt state could onlyinvest in the most pressing structural repairs, administrators deployedan exculpatory discourse to justify paralysis. Proof of the breakdownof unchecked market forces included the lack of quality materialand labor, as well as absent financial controls over the few publicconstruction projects launched, typically, in extremis. A single anal-ysis was often reprised: the responsibility for organizing labor hadfallen excessively upon individual entrepreneurs who, for reasons ofcutthroat capitalist practices, had failed to execute contractual obliga-tions – and this was chiefly because of corrupt profiteering and thespoiled conditions on their workforce, indulged to excess under theRevolution.8

The focus on the workforce and entrepreneurship on public worksprojects reflects the troubling heritage of urban poverty after the inac-tion of the Thermidorian government. In a sweeping decree of 20June 1795, the Thermidorians charged Louis Lemit, the former presi-dent of the Parisian sections’ civil committees who we have met as aself-proclaimed sans-culotte fellow traveller, with disbanding the publicspinning establishments of Paris. These had furnished work to 2,000 des-titute women, elderly men, and children. The dismissal and dispersal ofthis “marginal” workforce, obliging many women to work at home, leftthe republican government with chronic unemployment and with fewvisible statist levers to alleviate it. In the name of anti-Robespierrism, theThermidor administrators had criticized public works as inciting labor-ers to flock to sites where the tasks were easiest and compensation themost generous. In a purportedly liberalizing economy, the Parisian pub-lic work sites were once again to take the blame for nurturing bad socialhabits.9

Upon its arrival in power amidst one of the most punishing winters ofthe century in 1795, the Directory had tried to respond to the desperatecondition of the capital’s impoverished population with tentative mea-sures. These were most frequently the investment of derisory amountsof devaluated money in failing Parisian welfare schemes.10 With onlymodest resources for poor relief measures, the Directory concentrated


on infrastructure construction, crumbling after ten years of neglect, andconceived the need for waterways, quays, roads, and city streets witharguments that public workshops assured the peace by inculcating labordiscipline in order to secure the social peace. Throughout its existence,the Directory held fast to the idea that industry was to be encouraged asan antidote to poverty. Indeed, Neufchâteau was deeply sensitive to thedesperation of the indigent population. “No government can end theexistence of poverty,” he would write later, “but the most dignified useof 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 bylaziness and misery.”11 In fact, little had changed in the discourse onwelfare since La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt’s efforts as the president ofthe Committee on Mendicity in 1790 to 1791. The Directory’s programs,however, were achieved by redoubling efforts toward clarity, equity, andprecision in “utilitarian” public works, only now in a period of hyper-inflation and under a chronically unstable regime deeply challengedby the demands of international hostilities that led to the War of theSecond Coalition (1799–1801).12

A solution to the challenge of urban renewal and transport networksin a period of acute economic crisis and looming conflict was to uti-lize the private sphere to save public service. As with all but the mostmenial public works destined for the unskilled unemployed, such asthread spinning or debris collection, the street and road constructionunder the Revolution was in theory awarded to the entrepreneur whoentered the lowest bid in a competition. This commercial “agent,” as hewas occasionally called, proceeded to command labor and materials inbroad accordance with the terms of a contract with the state. As clari-fied after the municipal reforms of 1792, entrepreneurs of materials andlabor bid competitively for contracts, receiving exact sums of moneyin exchange for the promise to complete given projects. After winningthe contract, however, private businessmen were relatively untroubledby state controls as there was little follow-up on how these funds weredistributed.

This lax approach would end in October 1795, when the Thermi-dorian government abolished private competitions for street and roadconstruction as “harmful” to the public interest. In applying this reform,the Directory voted to favor centralized sites under the control of asingle inspector nominated by the Department of Public Works. TheDeputy Marie-François Bonguyot acted as reporter on this reform of roadbuilding and reparations. He marshaled forth a statist argument againstthe private entrepreneurship of public works projects that paralleled the


revolutionary charge of corruption on more notable sites such as thePantheon. The public function of road building was compromised byindividuals paid by the state to dispense salaries who, as an advance,“often received the entire price of the works that they have not fin-ished.” To earn more money the winning bidder delayed “finishing hisobligations, at times under the pretext that he cannot find workers, orat times because the workers have deserted workshops.” Infrastructureand other forms of urban development must supersede the principle ofopen 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 DominiqueMargairaz has argued, the origin of public service in the fully modernsense of the term. The state assumed full responsibility to assure equalaccess to a service and its uninterrupted use by one and all.14 However,with work on many projects halted by emptied state coffers and admin-istrative paralysis, the practices followed by entrepreneurs engaged inpublic works to improve or extend France’s street and road networksbecome an increasingly troublesome issue. For street and road con-struction became a simple case of making virtue out of necessity. Theyrepresented prominent jobs-creating and construction projects whoseproper organization also represented a showcase for the fragile regime.Paradoxically, at the same time, entrepreneurs were deemed unwor-thy of carrying out public policies in a disinterested manner as amplydemonstrated by the heavy procedures of control and verification atthe heart of the 1795 plan to reinforce the Public Works Department’sscope and authority. The project evinced a scarcely disguised skepticismtoward entrepreneurs to make the most routine repairs, in targetingthem as failing their charge and overcharging the Republic. In parlia-mentary debates and in the meetings of commissions, they were faulted,above all, for lacking the proper means to supervise workers. The con-struction of France’s infrastructure and the disciplining of its labor forcewere compound functions of public service. The republic must be vigor-ously protected from the avarice of profit-minded entrepreneurs, evenas they were acknowledged to be essential for the proper command ofthe 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 con-struction on former ecclesiastical and aristocratic properties sold atauctions of biens nationaux led to an administrative centralization of


urban planning in the hands of the Commission des artistes in March1793. The 11-member Commission, seconded by a bewildering systemof public juries and inspectors and in a context of war and terror, wasnot able to impose its plans for a renewed Paris until the First Empire. Itheld its last meeting under the Directory on 31 March 1797. But whilethe Commission des artistes addressed vast projects to rehabilitate thecenter and the peripheries of Paris, revolutionary-era urban develop-ment suffered from chronic underfunding and lack of a thriving privatesector to pick up the slack. Predictably, a dearth of credit, investmentpossibilities, and investors’ lost confidence undermined much of thehousing market from 1793 until the end of the century. As provincialmigrants flowed into the capital, fleeing wartime hardship or wartime-related work, the demand for accommodations outripped supply. After1793, perhaps 100,000 people in the capital were temporary migrantsfrom the provinces. The unsatisfied demand for housing in the Revolu-tion in the midst of this influx of laborers remained steady, and the rapidincrease in rooming houses (chambres garnies) took up much of the slack.They were estimated to lodge 10 percent of the migrant population inParis.16

However, a classic narrative of a complete breakdown of privateinvestment during the Directory must also be tempered. A finer chronol-ogy of the end of the eighteenth century demonstrates several briefeconomic rallies, in some parts of the nation, amidst the collapse. The1796 harvest had been plentiful, and 1798 was one of general recovery.17

And in the upheavals disrupting construction, there were a few success-fully completed projects with deeper implications for later urban devel-opment in the capital. Two Parisian streets, including new buildingsand infrastructure, were completed under the Directory: the rue Man-dar and the rue des Colonnes, both now on the far edges of the RightBank Sentier and Bourse neighborhoods. The two streets were situated atthe opposite ends of a northern arc (now, the first, second, ninth andtenth arrondissements) that was to be deeply transformed in comingyears. In addition to the “Directory style” apartment buildings on thenearby Chaussée d’Antin, they reflected marked expansion of useableurban space toward the north and northwest. Quarters with nation-alized religious structures and unexploited agricultural land were theobjects of particular interest for speculators, promoters, contractors, andarchitects in a depressed economy. They were to be heavily exploitedby promoters in the coming years, most notably, under Napoleon.Measured in numbers of completed structures, the Directory’s directcontribution to Paris construction may have been modest. Nonetheless,


it was a period which traced out future spatial and stylistic changes inan expanding capital city.

While the rue Mandar and its 17 apartment buildings are a soberexample of functional architecture, featuring four-story buildings with-out ornamentation, the rue des Colonnes was a bold venture inexperimentation incorporating ornate columns and uniform façades. Itwas the inspiration for the nearby rue de Rivoli, begun in 1802 underNapoleon. The rue des Colonnes, extending nearly a hundred metersin length before its mutilation during early nineteenth-century urbanrenewal, was a singular development. The fruit of the collaborationbetween the architect Joseph Bénard and the entrepreneur Pierre Fichetfrom 1793 to 1795, the street was entirely built by individuals who werenever distinguished by previous urban projects. They were the “newmen” the Revolution, a real-estate and construction bourgeoisie whichowed its success to speculation and investment in confiscated biensnationaux, with financial ambitions which dovetailed with an urban

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


vision based on a collective use of urban space. The vibrant exampleof this street exhibits how the Revolution might have made a deeperimpact on the Parisian urban environment had financial circumstancespermitted. Formerly a private street expropriated from aristocratic pro-prietors, and auctioned to the investors, the rue des Colonnes was thefruit of a vision to extend and rebuild an entire street and its buildings ina homogenous, antique style. The very architecture of the street’s build-ings celebrated the developers’ social ascension with simple, affordableapartments constructed with “noble” materials and with references toantiquity in the form of the arches. But the rue des Colonnes was arelatively rare exception of a private revolutionary urban project begunand completed without interruption. Many other plans and attemptedinvestment schemes ultimately were compromised by the difficult eco-nomic 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 com-pleting projects, the Directory increasingly justified the rare public

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

192

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

Figure 5.4 The northern Chaussée d’Antin quarter features much constructionin the sober Directory style, here recognizable in the frontons and arches abovethe 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, thearchitect of the more audacious rue des Colonnes.

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


economic intervention in terms of providing work to the unemployed.A workforce composed of the able-bodied poor who could be edu-cated through rigorous work habits justified investment in the rareendeavor to alleviate unemployment. As with the sites opened in Parisbetween 1788 and 1791, the workshops at the end of the eighteenthcentury were to teach economic independence through arduous laborat subsistence wages. And finally, like their predecessors, the micro-management of the workshops was exhaustive. No aspect of work orpay would slip through a surveillance grill that would bring all theelements of construction into clear, albeit rigid, harmony with oneanother. Public workshops would hire the indigent population andmobilize a corps of government engineers to administer the sites andadjudicate the rate of pay. The piecework wages would be based ontasks performed rather than by a daily rate. As exemplary of the equi-table organization of labor, the crystalline simplicity of these workshopsoffered the Republic “efficiency, facility, and economy.”19 The 1795public works plan established that the labor force be composed prin-cipally of indigents possessing a bare minimum of resources. But theproject was all the more concerned with the top than the bottom ofthe social scale. It mandated a precise hierarchy of engineers, fore-men, entrepreneurs, and workers who would conform to inflexibleschedules, and who would periodically report to supervisors. It alsodictated the appointment of a foreman to discipline colleagues; system-ize weekly payments via a thorough network of verifiers and districtofficials; and through preprinted formulas prescribe the very format ofreports, surveys, and invoices acceptable to the Committee of PublicWorks.20

Tidy regulations embodied a vision of a well-policed worksite thatenticed and frustrated construction administrators through the Direc-tory, Consulate, and Empire. In sheer scope, the 1795 public works planwas not principally about reforming street and road construction, butrather about creating a model and highly visible showcase for work-force discipline under a precisely defined authority. It was no accidentthat, with such far-reaching aspirations, the plan sought to bypass alto-gether competitive adjudication for contracts, for the open market tooktoo much for granted and could never fulfill the demand for “clar-ity and precision.”21 The French state faced monetary uncertainties,labor shortages, and a severe scarcity of tools and supplies. In order tofinance the plan, the Directory’s only solution was to rely heavily onpoll taxes to rebuild and repair the infrastructure of France. Proposedin September 1796, by Jacques Defermont, the poll taxes were poorly


enforced, brought in little relief to the states’ coffers, and would beabolished by Napoleon in September 1806.22

The Directory was compelled to turn increasingly to entrepreneursand contractors as it grew desperately aware of the menace to tradeand transport represented by crumbling infrastructure and insufficientinvestment public works. The vicious cycle of plummeting domestic andforeign commerce at century’s end was reinforced by the absence ofadequate roads to transport goods and people. An accounting in 1799by in state officials described a nation whose vehicles had constantlyto endure “bumpy streets or muddy ditches, smashed up vehicles,bruised passengers.”23 Reports of road construction, sewer fitting, instal-lation of lighting, the erecting of public structures, bridges, and otherParisian projects constantly brought to the fore underfunding and lackof labor power as the twin causes of obstruction. Paris’ streets wouldcease to be repaired, complained a state functionary in 1797, “becauseof the considerable augmentation of the wages of the workforce,” dueto the scarcity of foodstuffs. For a lack of inspectors, several streetsopened without names, an inconvenience that “affects public utility,as this confuses property deeds.” Otherwise, the walls surrounding Pariswere breached at several points, and these have merely been “closedprovisionally by wooden planks which continue to demand constantreparations; we think that it would be preferable . . . to make repairs withrubble, when it can be afforded.”24

“When it can be afforded”: harassed officials of public works hadother priorities than creating the well-ordered worksite. On the ground,pragmatic, time-tested solutions to public projects on the cheap weremaking a comeback, in a context of repeated financial and monetarysetbacks. In a return to ancien régime practice, for example, the newlyreorganized Council of Public Works began anew to award projects toa single entrepreneur, who sub-contracted the material and labor toothers. Upon completion, the on-site inspection returned to the juris-diction of the Council of Public Works which processed paperworksubmitted by entrepreneurs through a Bureau of Controls for evaluationof wages disbursed and prices charged. Long delays in compensatingverified expenses were routine.25 In theory, at least, public works con-tracted out to private entrepreneurs under the Directory exemplifiedthe period’s ideological liberalism. But in practice, a heavily regulatedbureaucratic structure suggested that the well-ordered public work siteneeded the very visible hand of extensive government review. Thishaphazard use and abuse of private entrepreneurship – amidst eco-nomic and military crises – engendered much distrust. Contractors


were repeatedly accused of profiteering by charging the state exorbi-tant amounts for their goods and services; in return, the state oftendeferred payments or compensated with devalued currency. Infrastruc-ture guidelines would, in turn, affect the building trades, where tensionsbetween entrepreneurs and the state were fanned by several controver-sies. An entrepreneur-less public works system increasingly seemed amost tempting solution indeed.26

Nowhere was the chasm between the state’s construction inten-tions and gritty reality realized to a great extent than in the powerfulConseil des bâtiments civils (Council of Civic Buildings). This uniqueadministration, founded in 1791 as the guilds were abolished, sur-vived all phases of the Revolution, albeit in amorphous form as a“division” under the authority of the Ministry of Interior. Starting inlate 1795, the Directory gave this bureaucratic organ a broad mandateover public structures, distinguishing thereafter between infrastructureand buildings. Its directive was to centralize all public investmentconstruction in the hands of the three celebrated public architects.The Pantheon’s Chief Inspector, Jean-Baptiste Rondelet, the prodigiouscivic architect, Alexandre-Théodore Brogniart, and the future archi-tect of the Arc de Triomphe, Jean-François Chalgrin, three advocatesof a classical and practical civic architecture, were put in charge ofa team of six inspectors. In a finely defined schema, each inspectorhad complete responsibility over one of six “classes” of structures, inwhich the function of a given building – hospitals, barracks, prisons –defined its place in a hierarchy of investment priorities. In the neworder, the administration of public edifices made steep demands onthe time, labor, and equipment of construction entrepreneurs to engagein the large-scale recycling and reconversion of nationalized buildings:a form of requisition by another name. Finally, the mission of a prag-matic, cost-efficient, revolutionary architecture was defined and madethe core of official policy.27

The council’s charge was formulated in a circular issued by Rondelet inthe spring of 1796. Rondelet called for assurances that “no work relatingto civic buildings be undertaken at national expense without its utility,necessity, or other possible advantages having been established before-hand.” He demanded scrupulous “perfection, solidity, and economy,”as well as methodical verification of all payments. In the minutes ofnearly 200 meetings under the Directory, these directives were scrupu-lously applied to the letter. They were also often in contradictionwith one another. In pursuit of economy, half of the numerous deten-tion centers, prisons, courthouses, and police stations were located inrecycled former religious structures. Choice edifices included churches,


monasteries, convents, and their dependencies such as stables. Thesewere systematically recalibrated and refurbished to suit the new circum-stances and functions. However, a fixation on minutiae led inspectors toreject payments for the slightest discrepancy in following detailed pro-posals. As Lauren Marie O’Connell finds, hospitals designed with bedsless than two feet apart were rejected and ordered to be completely over-hauled as health hazards. Tribunals which did not allow for theatricalprocedures of courtroom entries and presentations were similarly con-demned to be completely redone. In sum, the Conseil des bâtimentscivils created an architecture of design following as much as possiblethe letter of a written program, suited to the structures’ function ratherthan to aesthetic form (Figures 5.7 and 5.8).28

The highly circumscribed field of action, in terms of economy and aes-thetics, created tensions between the council and architects, as well asbuilding administrators and entrepreneurs. More fiscal complications inthe payment of salaries and contracts followed the Directory’s disastrousabolition of the assignats on 16 February 1796. By then, the currency had

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


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

declined to a mere 1 percent of its face value. The Conseil des bâtimentscivils announced it would pay public construction entrepreneurs theequivalent value in a new currency, the mandat territorial in accordanceto the Law of 18 March 1796 (28 Ventose, Year IV). But by the timeprecise language was hammered out in mid-April, earlier contractswere reduced drastically in value. Entrepreneurs were to be paid theequivalent of two francs in quickly falling mandats for every hundredfrancs owed. Unsurprisingly, by the summer of 1796, the new currencycompletely collapsed.29

In Paris, the practical bankruptcy of the republic drove salaries downprecipitously, provoking desertions of many workshops and manufac-tures, while diminishing the value of all work under way on public sites.Twenty-seven building contractors involved in public works projectspetitioned the Council “for means of bringing about a more equitableway of making payments.” They evoked a bleak picture of demoral-ized workers erecting unsound structures, because “the workforce isdiminished so that the labor will take three times as long to finish.”


The entrepreneurs’ complaints predictably had little impact. They wererefused any settlement and were left with abandoned worksites, half-completed structures, and no hope of just compensation.30 The follow-ing year, a particularly harsh city-wide strike of carpenters in November1797 seemed to herald deeper conflicts between capital and labor thatthe enfeebled state was unable to mediate. Aggravating matters was thefinancial corruption of several currency dealers and military contractors,further undermining political support for the Directory. Hyperinfla-tion and a breakdown in credit meant that the private building sectoroffered bleak prospects. One former select guildsman, an ancien juré-expert, pathetically peddled his services for a pittance “in the functionof an architect and builder of hospices” which were sorely in demandduring 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 Conseildes bâtiments civils, aggravated tensions between the private sector andgovernment administrators through the end of the Directory. Rondelet,in particular, was zealous to assert the authority of officially qualifiedcivil architects, those in the first classes of the École Polytechnique, insupervising public and private structures. He mandated another “newadministration” in early 1798, that effectively turned over control ofpublic worksites to a complex network of reliable architects serving asverifiers who would “check, calculate and appraise” all the work done onpublic construction. The broader aspiration of Rondelet’s project seemedto be the assimilation of all building, public and private, under thetutelage of a single administrative body. This paralleled an equally ambi-tious statist project to absorb French metallurgy in the Bureau of Minesand Quarries in late 1795. Again, after the announcement of Rondelet’splan, 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 regimentbuilding provoked strife between administrators and entrepreneurs dur-ing the tenure of the Directory. In consolidating the authority of thesix public works inspectors, now responsible to safeguard constructionin the capital, the Conseil des bâtiments civils assured the nation thateven minor repairs of obscure public structures were to be protectedagainst profiteering by entrepreneurial capital. Any charges of the cut-ting of corners would be closely reviewed and severely penalized. Worse,for offending contractors, charges of corruption and excessive exploita-tion unfolded against a backdrop of depression and monetary crises.


In particular, urban labor shortages provoked by repeated subsistencecrises and numerous requisitions, resulting in escalating demands forwage increases, absorbed the attention of numerous officials over thenext 15 years.33

Looking ahead, only the revival of the Parisian Chamber of Com-merce at the start of 1803, under the Interior Minister Jean-AntoineChaptal, put a partial end to the complexities of defining, controlling,and delimiting the role of private entrepreneurs in public projects. Inthe law that fixed the mission of the Chamber of Commerce, it wascharged, in corporatist terms, “to increase commercial prosperity, todemonstrate to the government those causes that hinder its progress,to indicate resources should be procured, and to inspect those publicworks related to commerce.” Later in the nineteenth century, public ser-vice was to be performed increasingly by private entrepreneurs entrustedwith an enlarged role on behalf of the state. The reconstruction ofvast swaths of the capital using public credit and private capital, a halfcentury later, was partially instituted as a result of the Directory’s gen-erally calamitous economic record. Lessons learned in that catastrophicexperience later inspired breakthroughs in the ambitious formalizationand bureaucratization of public service, beginning notably in publicconstruction.34

The state, capital, and labor in the debate over wagesduring the Consulate, 1799–1804

In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the search for an effi-cient police of the building trades consumed the efforts of the dynamicPolice Prefect of Paris, Louis-Nicolas Dubois (1758–1847). This com-manding figure imposed his views and proposals upon often recalcitrantadministrators, entrepreneurs, and laborers. He eventually succeeded inshaping the professional organization of the building trades during theConsulate and Empire. Dubois’ image of the building site as infiltratedby dissolute and criminal elements informed most Napoleonic policiestoward the construction trades. To subdue builders, in his eyes, wouldbe the central project in a larger ambition to rekindle, under the aegisof his office, the ancien régime police idea. His enthusiasm to restoremany ancien régime institutions in Napoleonic Paris, often with reck-less abandon, was driven by his experience as a student of the police.For early on, Dubois was distinctly marked by the political crucible thatfirmly imprinted and reinforced the police idea as a steadfast conviction:namely, Turgot’s failed 1776 experiment in liberalization.35


Just arrived from Lille in the fateful year of 1776, Dubois was closelyassociated with the camp of Turgot’s foes, whose geographic and polit-ical center was the Parisian police and judicial headquarters at theChâtelet. His formation up to the Revolution took him even deeper intothe institutions of the ancien régime police. In 1782, he became a barristerat the Parlement of Paris, and by 1783, he was “received” as an attor-ney in the Châtelet, where he practiced in the company of the futureTerrorist prosecutor, Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville. After keeping alow profile during much of the Revolution as a member of the Councilof the Department of Paris, Dubois emerged from relative obscurity todenounce Robespierre before the Convention on behalf of the Sectiondes Quatre-Nations on 30 Brumaire, Year II (20 November 1793). Anappointment to the post of judge in the Tribunal civil of the departmentof the Seine in November 1795 was a recognition of Dubois’ politi-cal acumen. There, he eventually came to the attention of Bonaparte’sfuture Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché.36

Dubois’ immediate impact upon the office of Prefecture of Police, cre-ated under the Law of 28 Pluviôse, Year VIII (17 February 1800) withsweeping powers over the Parisian municipality, was in the daily reportsfiled during the Consulate and Empire on the “public spirit” of Parisians.These reports reflect the concerns and prejudices of Dubois, and in par-ticular, they manifest the former prosecuter’s single-minded ambition toimpose order both on the urban landscape and on the building sites ofParis. In scrupulous detail, the rhythms of builders’ activities were cap-tured in police reports on the “public spirit.” In concise descriptions andcommentaries of the builders’ “public spirit,” meaning their inclinationto engage, or not, in labor actions, the police papers provide the socialcontext of the dramatic reforms of the worksite undertaken during theConsulate and the early years of the Empire.37

“On the place de Grève a considerable number of building tradesmenare saying that the lack of jobs deprives them of their basic means ofsubsistence.”38 The fear in the spring of 1800 was that unemploymentand inflation had combined to create a potentially incendiary situation.The police was particularly vigilant of daily gatherings of workers attraditional sites of hiring, as well as sites known for harboring the noto-rious boarding houses where migrants were housed: The Châtelet, placeMaubert, the tour Saint-Jacques, and the quays of the Seine were partic-ularly well policed; these sites surfaced often in these reports as potentialhotspots. Yet no quarter was covered with the diligence and social hatredof the place de Grève where building workers congregated to be hired bythe day or week in a giant labor market.39 The loathing this area inspired


was only matched by apprehension, as it was often monitored for num-bers of workers and their demeanor. Hence, in March 1800, “the numberof those (workers) who are not hired is considerable; we count up to 600each day on the place de Grève.”40

The cycle of complaints and reports of minor disturbances continuedthrough the Consulate. Their tenor becomes alarmist in the wake ofbad news from the war fronts, during food shortages and even withthe approach of the anniversaries of the Revolution’s grandes journées.The promulgation of the Constitution of the Year VIII, for example, fellduring the anniversary of the Prairial journée, in May 1800, sparkingan uprising by building workers on a site next to the tollhouse in thesouth 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 whohad rallied around the slogan five years earlier had apparently not beenforgotten on other building sites of Paris.41

The repressive effectiveness of new organs such as the Prefecture ofPolice established under the Consulate and Empire was apparent tocontemporary observers. In the words of the Gazette de Paris, by mid-September 1802, “Public peace, formerly so tentative, so vacillating, isnow supported by the most solid of methods . . . .”42 Reinforcing thisjudgment after the food shortages of 1801–1802, a simple phrase isfrequently used to describe the disposition of workers in Paris: “Seren-ity reigns in the workshops and building sites.”43 But despite increasedconfidence in policing techniques, the problem of labor strife wassporadically evoked. A leitmotif running through police documents isthat of persistent dissatisfaction with the traditional hiring practices ofentrepreneurs. Congregations of builders milling about at the place deGrève were cited as demonstrations of “the laziness of a multitude ofworkers,” who passively waited for work instead of actively searching ontheir own account.44 It was, then, the impulse to make labor relationsmore routine, to force both employers and employees to be responsiblefor public safety, that gave rise to the first major labor reform during theConsulate.

To Dubois, the Police Prefect of Paris, the formalization and standard-ization of labor relations created an opportunity to revive apprentice-ships and workers’ livrets, or passbooks. By mandating that all workerscarry such passbooks, the law of 22 Germinal, Year XI (12 April 1803)relied upon entrepreneurs’ “attestations” of a workers’ past employmentto keep the workforce durably pacified. Upon demand, the law stipu-lated that the passbook, complete with the dates of employment, must


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 per-formance, only when the worker fulfilled the original “engagement” orhad notified the employer 40 days in advance of an intention to leave.The work history of every laborer, thus documented, assured that menand women had carried out their work contracts to the letter.45

Why were the passbooks instituted at this particular time? The preced-ing year had not featured any significant agitation by Parisian workers.Consoling police reports on the esprit public in Paris during the monthsencompassing the promulgation of the law convey the bustling activityof the streets with few notable disruptions of the social peace. In fact, on8 April 1803, just four days before the law mandating the passbooks wasannounced, a work stoppage by a group of journeymen hatters illus-trated the lighter and more confident touch of police intervention inthis relatively quiet period. The hatters briefly stopped work one morn-ing over a salary dispute, but after the swift mediation of the prefect inbringing workers and masters together, the journeymen took up workthat very afternoon. There was no resort to the quick repression or pun-ishment that typically signaled the end of such actions.46 By November1803, the prefecture of Paris observed that “everyone is at work. Theworksites, above all in the building trades, are still in full activity.”47 Inmid-April 1804, the police noted with satisfaction a slashing of breadprices, accompanied by “no more talk of an increase of pay among car-penters or hatters.” At the beginning of May 1804, there was only “peaceamong 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 falselybelieved 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 betweenBritain and France the following year made scarce manpower and a dra-matic increase of public construction preconditions for rampant wageinflation. Across the Atlantic, military expeditions to Saint Domingueand Guadeloupe, and the armed restoration of slavery in the colonies,after May 1802, created further sensitivity to strains on urban man-power. The great fear of labor scarcity drove competing entrepreneurs toraise salaries to attract workers from competitors’ sites. The conjunctureof the demands of war, the launching of many construction projectsin Paris, and constraints on the migration of laborers to urban areasineluctably drove up the wages of building workers. This cycle, favor-able to Parisian labor, stirred fears of wage inflation in other sectors. The


specter of a spiral of ascending salaries haunted future discussions oflabor reform.49

Also apparently aggravating the labor shortage in the Capital werepublic works projects opened in the winter of 1802–1803 intended tokeep the unemployed working during a particularly harsh winter. Per-forming such unskilled tasks as clearing away rubbish on roads anddemolishing condemned structures were 1,500 laborers hired at nearsubsistence wages.50 The police prefect, by 1802, was alerted to the asso-ciation between abundant work and spiraling wages: “The workers seewith pleasure that work on bridges is start up in a few days . . . they willuse this moment to demand an augmentation of salary.” To curb thebidding war for labor, and to stem the workers’ flow to the most lucra-tive sites, the system of passbooks was expanded to deter laborers fromleaving their employers at will.51

While the passbooks may have originally been intended to inhibitcompetitive labor practices by entrepreneurs, the law did not include asystem of quotidian administrative controls. It provided no institutionalframework for hearing grievances brought under its provisions, despitefixing exact penalties for abuse of the system, particularly, fines andprison sentences for organizing coalitions.52 A police decree of Decem-ber 1803 (9 Frimaire, Year XII) was to broaden comprehension of thepassbook system by instructing workers on how to obtain the neces-sary papers from the local police. It also elaborated upon the proceduresof depositing and retrieving the passbooks from employers. Finally, thepolice decree repeated its threat that all workers traveling without thepassbook will be prosecuted as “vagabonds.”53

The passbook system may be comprehended as foreshadowing of thearticles 291, 292, 414, 416, and 1781 of the Napoleonic Civil Code ofMarch 1804 which forbade all “coalitions,” and notoriously made com-pulsory that a judge and jury credit the veracity of a master’s testimonyover that of any laborer and before any tribunal. Associations consti-tuted by more than 20 members were disbanded. This last measure wassuperficially an evenhanded abolition, suppressing employers’ combina-tions as well as laboring organizations and journeymen’s brotherhoods(compagnonnages). But the penalties for such combinations were pre-dictably much harsher in the case of workers than the entrepreneurs.The livrets, in sum, were only one piece of a broader campaign totoughen an already harsh labor policy.54

A strike in the carpentry trades in September 1804, several monthsafter the installation of the first Empire, shattered the illusion of a per-manently pacified Parisian labor force. The carpenters on the site of


the Pantheon, preparing scaffolding ahead of minor alterations, “aban-doned their station and demanded, as they have the custom to doin pressing circumstances, an exorbitant raise.” They boldly sought anincrease from 4 francs to 10 francs per day. Dubois reports having per-sonally seen to the “removal of the mutinous ones, and after havingexamined them severely, I recognized that three among them were theprincipal ringleaders (chefs d’émeute) and the veritable provocateurs ofthis coalition.” He recited and dismissed their claim to be striking onlyfor a predetermined “fixing of the wages of a workday,” concludingrather ominously that “this response is only evasive, and the informa-tion taken in this affair will leave no doubt as to their culpability.” Theprincipals in this affair were sentenced to terms ranging from a weekto a month in prison, in accordance with the dissuasive punishmentoutlined in the 1803 Frimaire Decree.55

In reaction to the strike, a circular was drawn up to reinforce laborpeace on the building sites of Paris. In the project’s draft report, theprefect articulated his ambition to reduce competition in the labormarket.56 Simultaneously, with the full elaboration of yet anotherrepressive mechanism, the full apparatus of the system of passbooks wasinstalled. Published evidence of this final, often overlooked postscriptto the history of the passbooks consists of an Almanach des ouvriers,published in November 1804. The almanac directed all workers to newpolice institutions that would regulate laborers and centralize the hir-ing practices of entrepreneurs. This 50-page publication was intendedfor circulation to all workers in Paris; its portable size and cheap papersuggest that it was meant to be pocketed by workers for instant access toreferences to its addresses, regulations, and citations of the NapoleonicCode.57

The almanac underscored the importance to register all “apprentices”from the provinces at the local police commissioner’s office. Each com-missioner was given jurisdiction over several categories of workers, withthe building tradesmen joining the equally contentious hatters and,mysteriously, the luthiers, those dangerous makers of stringed musicalinstruments. Upon arrival in Paris, members of these professions were toreport to Almain, police commissioner of the Right Bank Division de laRéunion, in the neighborhood of the rue Saint-Martin, to be issued thepassbook and to enroll in a labor exchange. (The address of this laborexchange was situated next to the former Masons’ and Carpenters’ Guilddismantled in 1791.) The entrepreneur was invited to hire journeymenat this office for the fee of 1.5 or 2 francs, then about half a day’s payfor most building workers, to be paid by both employer and employee.


Besides controlling the labor flow, this measure also had an evident fiscaladvantage for the Napoleonic state.58

The new system most followed closely the dictates of the 48 Parisiancommissioners’ project of January 1793, which, as we have seen, soughtto centralize authority over worksites in the hands of a labor police. Italso duplicated the employment agencies (bureaux d’adresse) for domes-tic servants, first set up in Paris in the seventeenth century, intendedto guarantee the integrity of prospective employees entering bourgeoishomes.59 Now, however, the commissioners’ offices were to serve asplacement office to supplant the more anarchic labor market on theplace de Grève. Hiring no longer would follow timeworn tradition andinstead comply with a routine procedure carried out before the policecommissaire in one of 16 placement offices in Paris. There, the commis-sioner would register workers and verify the soundness of their contractswith entrepreneurs.60

Taken as an ensemble, the labor reforms on the eve of Empire sig-nal the partial restoration of the authority of the lieutenant généralde police, the all-encompassing office of the Paris police in the ancienrégime.61 The legislative proposals and projects clearly bear the imprintof Dubois and his experience and worldview as former prosecutor inthe institutional defender of the ancien régime police idea, the Grandechambre du Parlement de Paris. Dubois’ successful advocacy on behalf ofthe restoration of guilds relating to foodstuffs in 1800, coupled with themovement from apprenticeships to passbooks to placement offices in1803–1804, amplified the power of the state over relations between cap-ital and labor. Subsistence and labor discipline were now codified as twoNapoleonic 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 workhabits withered under what was denounced as the Revolution’s laxliberalism. Wily journeymen, it was believed, had taken advantage ofthe open labor market to improve work conditions to work less for morepay. Following such reasoning, Dubois henceforth sought to restrictthe authority of entrepreneurs to make underhanded private arrange-ments with workers. As symbolized by the frenetic place de Grève,repeatedly condemned for attracting provincials to its menacing quar-ters, the old labor market was to be replaced by the readily observablepolice commissioner’s office, open from 9:00 to 7:00, six days a week.The almanac’s requirement for migrants to enlist with commissionersstripped entrepreneurs of the authority to make explicit or implicitprivate contracts with journeymen. It thus embodied the objective of


creating a national stable of reliable workers whose places of residenceand employment were henceforth known to the state.63

The revival of ancien régime structures under Dubois gathered momen-tum in the Empire: a stream of circulars and projects between 1804 and1806 elaborated an ever more complex system of state containmentof the labor market. Also, to the dismay of the increasingly isolatedadvocates of liberalism within such institutions as the Paris Cham-ber of Commerce, voices were raised in favor of the restoration of theguilds. The debate over a statist or corporatist model of French com-merce and industry took on renewed momentum.64 Most prominentamong the ventures to reforge the workforce through a vigorously inter-ventionist policy were ambitious efforts to regulate the rhythm of workamong the building trades. Such a reform project emerged from therivalry between the administration of public works and public edifices,on the one hand, and the police and the Ministry of Interior on theother, leading to heightened competition for imaginative administra-tive schemes to reorganize the police of the labor site. After a notedintervention on labor reform by Antoine Vaudoyer (1756–1846), oneof the six national inspectors of the Conseil de Bâtiments civils andan architect specializing in modifying and creating extensions of sig-nificant historical structures, construction administrators poured forthcirculars, proposals, and projects addressing the policing of the swollenpopulation of building workers which descended upon Paris to findemployment under the “new urbanism.”65

In 1805, Vaudoyer launched a concerted effort to control the work-ing hours of builders. In a sweeping indictment of current practiceson building sites, written as a series of suggestions to the Minister ofInterior in 1805, Vaudoyer linked the decline in work discipline to thewider issue of decay in the quality of building construction. The rootof both these ills was the excessive social “liberty” ushered in by theRevolution.

Before 1790, building trades workers always started the longest daysof the summer at 5:00 in the morning, (working) to 7:00 in theevening. Since this period, and because of the Revolution’s negli-gence, these workers have reduced the workday by one hour of workin the morning and one hour in the evening, while increasing theirsalaries. As a result, . . . they are less than dedicated and they no longerform apprentices or educate pupils in the difficult branches of thebuilding trades, so that a structure takes a third time more to erectthan before, and at much greater cost.66


Vaudoyer put forth a comprehensive project formulated as a restorationof pre-revolutionary civic mindedness. His rationale was essentially topurge the projects of recalcitrant workers, to set an example so that theunwanted “will leave the building site.” Those who will cause “troublewill be deprived of their passbooks and find it impossible to gain workelsewhere.” Eliminating corrupted builders would set up models of a dis-ciplined workforce. Hence, to implement the new system, Vaudoyer cen-tered the proposal on establishing public sites as “examples for all theprivate workshops that will result in (promoting) the general good.”67

Vaudoyer excoriated a spoiled workforce corrupted by the Revolutionto promote a tough standardization of labor conditions. Previously, thedecay of working habits ushered in by the lax era of the Revolutionhad been widely denounced by Regnault, rapporteur of the law on pass-books in 1803, and who decried the “anarchy” that had reigned sincethe ancien régime: “Liberty was once too restricted; since then license hasreigned unchecked.”68

In contrast to previous “balanced” critiques of both the ancien régimeand the Revolution, Vaudoyer in 1805 highlighted a supposed revolu-tionary decline in light of a wistful view of the Crown. The loss oftechnical expertise was the unintended consequence of the suppres-sion of apprenticeships by the d’Allarde Law of 1791. This was hardly anovel claim: among many other voices, in 1798, the Ideologue philoso-pher, Destutt de Tracy, as inspector of the Ecoles centrales and author ofnational textbooks for public schools, maintained that the revolution-ary suppression of apprenticeships had been lethal to French industry.69

Vaudoyer, on the other hand, linked the observation of the lack ofyoung specialized workers “in the difficult branches of the buildingtrades” to the high cost of construction. Inflation led to the loss of qual-ified younger workers who were now deemed too expensive. They weresystematically replaced by cheap unskilled labor. Vaudoyer’s plan wouldnot merely create a prototype site – such as had been attempted at thePantheon – that would convince by furnishing a model of efficiency.Rather, he sought to assure the exemplary nature of construction byapplying a unique urban labor policy on all sites, public and private, inthe capital city.70

By synthesizing these disparate ideas as the basis for one sweep-ing reform, Vaudoyer’s arguments provoked a series of circulars andmeetings among the administrators within the Napoleonic buildingauthority. The minutes of these policy debates convey a single unam-biguous motif. Vaudoyer had successfully crystallized a broadly sharedsentiment that the construction sites of Paris must be recast as a symbolof the well-policed state. The hours as well as the quality of work and


workers represented on the worksite must embody the imperial aspira-tion to logic and rigor, one that sacrifices entrepreneurial methods oforganization in favor of state-directed exactitude.71

Vaudoyer’s grand reforms unfolded in the specific context of highexpectations for the imminent launching of grand projects. Based uponthe much-watched evidence of the arrival of expensive cut stone,inspected and taxed upon entering Paris as construction material, theamount of quarried stone brought to Paris between 1801 and 1805 hadmore than doubled; and between 1805 and 1809, cut stone increasedfrom around 20,000 square meters to 45,000 square meters.72 Napoleon’sambitions to craft a new urban landscape were clearly proclaimed, andthe widespread sense of opportunity risked provoking greater labordemands by the workforce – as the vigilant police was already wellaware. In May 1805, a sense of urgency to tighten discipline amongbuilders was compounded by a series of strikes among stonecutters. Thealarmed Prefect Dubois noted that the stonecutters were committing“what they call ‘grève’ (that is to say, to quit work) to demand an increasein pay.” The patois term “grève” – strike – surfaced first in 1785, as wehave seen, and emerged occasionally in police reports at the end of theeighteenth century but would enter the standard vocabulary of laborrelations following this report.73

Notwithstanding such agitation within the public spirit, the Vau-doyer proposal first met unexpected opposition from the Parisian PolicePrefect Dubois. Originally, Dubois seemed primed to act as a ferventpartisan of the measure, having earlier condemned the dwindling workhours put in by builders. He calculated that, through lax administra-tion, 20,000 workers lost 300 hours of work each building season, orevery six months, meaning that France was paying 2 million morefrancs per year for the equivalent amount of construction than beforethe Revolution.74 Yet faced with actually implementing longer hours,in a letter written early in 1806, the Prefect admitted that more rigoroushours may “maintain accepted public manners (moeurs),” but concludedthat the notion of a fixed standard of working hours was itself fictional.Underscoring the relative nature of definitions of a workday, Duboiscited edicts on the subject dating from the era of Charles IX and rea-soned that, “it will be perhaps difficult to put ‘the’ former rules intopractice . . .” In conclusion, he returned to the issue of policing buildersas a practical matter, concluding that the “application of the meansof repression is foreign” to the primary preoccupations of governmentarchitects.75

The Vaudoyer project eventually won the favor of the Emperor.Napoleon requested a report on the means of executing it through the


agency of the police.76 He also instructed Pierre Antoine Noël MathieuBruno Daru, Intendant General of the Emperor’s Domain (Maison del’Empereur), to compel the architects contracted by Napoleon to employonly workers “who will consistently work in following the old (i.e.,ancien régime) hours.”77 Starting on 1 April 1806, a new labor policywas to be put in place: Napoleonic building administrators were to dic-tate the hours and wages of all workers hired by entrepreneurs of publicsites. In other French industries, the impassioned defenders of liberal-ization in the Parisian Chamber of Commerce successfully thwarted, forthe time being anyway, the revival of proposed government restrictionson commercial ventures. Among the building trades, by contrast thestate was fully engaged to clamp down on the competitive practicesof entrepreneurs in the name of work discipline, quality control, andpublic safety.78

The recalcitrant prefect at first delayed the implementation of theVaudoyer plan to impose fixed hours on public worksites. In a final replyaddressed to the architects of the government, Dubois sought to imposean alternative solution, despite the administrative momentum towarda quick approval of the project. He now demanded “to apply the modeof execution” through consultations with the parties involved. At thispoint, the police prefect of Paris drew upon his earlier experience dur-ing the Maximum in organizing merchants dealing in subsistence itemsto propose the convocation of an all-encompassing assembly – a sort ofEstates-General of builders – that would gather the police, state admin-istrators, architects, and entrepreneurs together in a series of meetingson building reforms.79

Dubois’ proposal ultimately formed the blueprint for restoring thebuilding entrepreneurs’ corporation in a reconfigured form in 1810. Col-laboration between the police and builders followed Dubois’ conviction,forged in his legal work under the ancien régime, that la douce police – thesoft or gentle police – was assured by the “establishment of order andeconomy in the world of work and that it is only proper for the govern-ment to give the primary impulse to this operation.” He affirmed thatjust as his office could organize and execute certain measures, so wouldit also rely upon the initiative of masters and entrepreneurs to be thecutting edge of true reform.80

In a concerted effort to deepen cooperation between the state andcivil society, two meetings took place between Dubois, the GeneralSecretary of the Prefecture of Police, Pierre-Antoine-Auguste Piis, theMinister of the General Police Joseph Fouché, as well as architectsattached to the Maison de l’Empereur, the Council of Public Works,and the Conseil des bâtiments civils. Deliberations of these meetings


indicate unanimity of purpose behind the Vaudoyer plan. On the tablebefore the assembly was a definitive project to fix the working hoursof Parisian builders to a 12-hour workday in summer, beginning at5:00 and lasting until 7:00, with two one-hour breaks at 9:00 and at2:00. 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 describedas a revival of ancien régime workday the plan in fact called for anincrease in the conventional builders’ workday by at least an hourper day.81

The real novelty of the plan was to invent a tradition of a sin-gle rigorous and methodically followed workday. As we have seen,in fact, the typical journeyman’s day in the ancien régime and Rev-olution fluctuated greatly, between a fourth of a day and the occa-sional 13-hour day. Also, frequent absences or temporary layoffs bymasters were consistently noted in salary rolls. The notion of “time-discipline,” in E. P. Thompson’s memorable formulation, was indeedlearned on the task by many migrant builders in preindustrial Paris,such as the maçons de la Creuse, who had left behind peasant holdingswhere “task-discipline” instead was practiced from time immemorial.The rhythms of particular enterprises and, among other factors, unpre-dictable weather and unstable credit, made work – then as now – in thebuilding trades perhaps the most irregular of occupations.82

Conscious of its own audacity, the assembly took the tone of a high-minded project of social engineering. It condemned, once again, badhabits contracted during the Revolution, and directed blame on “thesmall number of those with the tendency to do nothing, and whosedebauchery renders them apathetic to the sense of duty.” Balancing theharsh crackdown on lazy workers was a paternalist concern for thosemen in bad health forced to work “excessively for long stretches ata time.” All participants came together on these general principles ofthe project, with mild objections, previously voiced by Fouché, raisedover its level of policing detail. As a result of the objection to excessiveregulation, the meeting adjourned without proposing specific changes“which might plant in the minds of workers . . . incertitude and uselessinterpretations.”

The most audacious aspect of the Vaudoyer plan was its ambition toapply equally to both public and private worksites to eliminate compe-tition between the two spheres. No explanation was given and no oppo-sition was expressed to the inherent difficulties in projecting a singleworkday in all Parisian construction. Interventionism in private com-mercial affairs was thus conceived as an organic extension of the roleof the Napoleonic police. The new state of things would merely reflect


“the return to order and general improvement of life which are carriedout in other parts of the administrative regime.” Napoleonic adminis-trators would oversee the application of a project to make Paris a vastexperiment 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 hav-ing the plan delayed in his ministry to late September by appealingfor public calm during the féte “to the glory of the army” to be heldin August 1806. He bluntly argued that the joy inspired by the fêtecould be “disturbed by the expected resistance of individuals to thisnew rule.”84 Shortly afterward, a police commissioner warned of dissat-isfaction among many architects who were not convinced of the policy’sfeasibility and who could not be expected “to fulfill its demands.” Whilepredictable remarks by the Minister of Finance Martin Michel CharlesGaudin and the General Intendant of the Maison de l’Empereur PierreDaru 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 hourswere generalized hostility to increases in indirect taxation. The govern-ment in April 1806 had temporarily reinstituted the hated ancien régimetax on salt, formerly called the gabelle, and proceeded to expand andincrease the merchandise tax (octroi) to fund-strained municipal bud-gets. Finally, taxes on postage and wine were also increased. Grain priceswere considered reasonably stable at this time, but general inflation andstagnant wages created the widespread impression of a decline in realearnings.86 Inflationary fears provoked a brief strike by the stonecuttersat the Palais Impérial in June 1806. Their job action was conducted “onthe 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 basewage of 3.5 francs, was predictably refused. Lowly apprentices, more-over, declined to participate in the protest and continued to work. In theface of internal division and intimidated by the commissioner’s appear-ance, the stonecutters “clenched their tools and withdrew to avoid theappearance of forming a coalition.” This brief skirmish would shortlyprove to be a failed rehearsal for a far more unified joint action.87

Besides questions raised about the equity of new fiscal policies, theadministrators of this reform expressed doubt about the equity of impos-ing labor discipline from above: further complicating the process ofimplementing new hours among the building trades was the deci-sion in May 1806, to launch an adjudicatory body to settle businessand labor conflicts, the Conseils de prud’hommes, in smaller industries.


While the first of these Conseils opened to regulate Lyons textile man-ufacturers, the state had acknowledged by these councils that disputesbetween employers and workers needed to be resolved through “impar-tial” elected bodies, founded on the presumption of a balanced hearingof all commercial grievances. Twenty-six Conseils de prud’hommes wouldbe created between 1806 and 1813, but the glaring exclusion of simplelaborers and the omission of such large-scale industries as constructioncould only have aggravated labor strife in the sector.88

Predictably, then, the language of the police ordinance promulgatedon 26 September 1806 contained evidence of rethinking by the “newadministrative regime” of public construction. Its final version imposedan 11-hour workday in the summer months, defined as the periodbetween April 1 and September 30. In fact, the apparent reduction ofone hour from the adopted version of the Vaudoyer project was a falseconcession to critics of the plan. For while the workday was to startan hour later, the ordinance also contained the added stipulation thatworkers had to show up at the place of work (chez les maîtres) an hourbefore starting work. Unmentioned was the actual innovation of this“new administrative regime:” the place de Grève was to be bypassed asthe primary meeting place of building laborers and masters. Presum-ably, the master’s home or office represented a verifiable location of therendezvous, where the time of arrival could be closely controlled.

The feared reaction of construction workers to the new regulationsbegan on 2 October 1806. Stonecutters, carpenters, sculptors, androofers – apprentices and journeymen alike – who were attached tothe Palais Impérial, the Corps legislatif, and other public sites, simul-taneously walked off the job. They were quoted by the police bulletins:“we are treated like beasts of burden.” A broad solidarity, cutting acrossboundaries of craft and neighborhood, was manifested in this strike.Forty-five out of the 80 masons at the Pantheon, then restoring thestructure 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 the4,000 building trades workers employed on public sites were reported tohave joined the movement, even in the face of the threat of vigorousrepression. On the first day alone, 27 of the most “defiant” workers werearrested, and eventually around 150 builders would be incarcerated atthe prison of the Bicêtre.89

Police bulletins during the following week were filled with narra-tive accounts of this movement. On 6 October 1806, a “slanderousposter” appeared in select areas, including the door of the prefecture ofPolice. It was composed by stonecutters inviting their allies “to preserve


with all our power the hour of our meals as previously established andto not let ourselves be corrupted by sweet promises.” On 9 October,the public sites were still abandoned, with 600 to 700 striking publicbuilders milling around the place de Grève seeking work with pri-vate 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, theworkers were locked out of private as well as public sites. By 12 October,they had returned to their workplaces and, it was remarked, had gath-ered and taken their meals at the appointed hours. On the following twodays, the police turned back to their formulaic descriptions: “the stone-cutters have reappeared in the workshops in fairly large number, and theentrepreneurs are satisfied. The greatest tranquility reigns everywhere.”Contention on the public sites had been resolved to the advantage ofthe state, the contractors, the entrepreneurs, and the investors of publicconstruction.91 While labor contention may have been defused how-ever, the primary effect of the 1806 ordinance and strike was to limitdraconian labor policies to public worksites. The police was restrictedto surveying and clamping down on state-run workshops. In conced-ing the private sites to individual negotiations between capital andlabor, the Napoleonic police was unable and unwilling to impose univer-sally the “new administrative regime.” The result was partial stalemate,for the public sites operated under the conditions set by the decree whilethe private workshops continued to function on the open labor market.Furthermore, the place de Grève never ceased to thrive as the centrallabor market for the building trades.

While lengthening the workday on public sites, and conceding thecontractual dispositions of the private sites, the Napoleonic police incollaboration with building administrators turned to other issues oflabor reform. As will be shown, the 1806 ordinance and strike set thestage for a profound restructuring that would project the Napoleonicstate deeper into relations between capital and labor. In the next seriesof reforms, movement in the labor market would be further restrictedand the wage scale would be tightly regulated. Just as the debate on theworkday compelled the invention of a “traditional” journée from timeimmemorial, so would the controversy over the daily rate inspire anadministrative initiative of an ideal wage for each trade. Establishingstatistical validity for the micro-management of the Parisian workforcein each of these domains would be the cornerstone of a statist indus-trial and labor policy. Monumental urban ambition informed by minute


social scientific studies defined the next phase of the Napoleonic policeof builders.

In the decade separating the founding of the Directory from thatof the Empire, the foundations of a market society – and the socialconditions for its elaboration – developed in a symbiosis with statebureaucratic and policing mechanisms. The project to formalize rela-tions, between the state and entrepreneurs on the one hand, andbetween entrepreneurs and labor on the other, generated momentumfor ever-more ambitious efforts to launch a coherent urban policy merg-ing private enterprise with public service and labor control. The urbanprojects to follow would be as deeply attentive to the housing mar-ket, to state-contracted architecture, and to the workforce that woulderect the capital city of the Empire. The burgeoning “commercial repub-licanism” of the Directory was not sufficiently profound as to decouplecommerce from statist centralization. Despite the forceful voice of aminority of industrialists and intellectuals in the period, the liberaldream of commerce was far from the chief aspiration of functionariesand statesmen.

6Constraining Capital, ContainingLabor: State Urban Planning ofParis, 1802–1815

The Napoleonic state and the Revolution

In Parisian urban construction, as in other domains, the Napoleonicera appears the perfect synthesis of the ancien régime and the Revolu-tion. Napoleonic policies in the realm of construction reinvented ancienrégime structures, ultimately including a rehabilitation of corporations,as we will see. Simultaneously, the Empire forcefully reinvented andmobilized many of the Revolution’s urban institutions and ideologiesto great effect. The very Janus-faced characteristics of the regime, never-theless, still provokes an eternal question: was the Napoleonic momentmore of an ancien régime restoration or revolutionary continuity?1

The argument privileging a return to the ancien régime often focuseson the rehabilitation of Empire by a vast program to engrave imperialrepresentations upon the infrastructure of Paris. Among the more thanone thousand “great monuments” constructed, the Arc de Triomphecontinued with the monarchy’s tradition of copying Roman arches atthe city’s entry points, including Louis XIV’s still-existent porte SaintDenis and porte Saint Martin, to commemorate national martial glory.Also, there was a distinctive family resemblance between Napoleonicand the monarchy’s state administration of public construction. TheConseil des bâtiments civils was reorganized on the centralized model ofthe Batîments du Roi, while the Maison de l’Empereur seemed to reprisethe administration of the Maison du Roi. Napoleonic urban ambitionsindeed seemed modeled on royal predecessors while ensconced in theruins of the ancien régime state’s bureaucracy.2

This chapter will argue the Empire’s imperial building plans forParis resuscitated and transformed Jacobin aspirations – to a muchgreater extent than ancien régime monarchical ambitions – for remaking

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State Urban Planning of Paris, 1802–1815 217

Paris. The Revolution’s bequest to Napoleon was manifold, but itscore was a unified and centralized vision of Paris. The capital citywas reconceived as an urban space to be rendered more “rational”in organization; as a unique geographical space demanding greateraccess for provisioning; as a national treasure in need of embellishment;and finally as a treacherous political entity requiring close policingand surveillance. Although these components – rationality, circula-tion, beauty, order – seem disparate, the Napoleonic state handledthem as an organic ensemble. The Napoleonic state wielded abso-lute power over municipal budgets and local revenue. It also absorbedfor the central state in 1806 the integrity of administrative princi-ples and of the general and municipal police. Very few strictly localfunctions remained for the Paris municipality, or for that matter,for any local French conglomeration with more than 2,000 individ-uals as repeatedly defined with scalpel-like precision by Napoleonicadministrators.3

In fact, the Napoleonic state centralized so many functions of Frenchmunicipal government that it may be said that Paris no longer existedas an administrative structure. By absorbing and synthesizing a rangeof objectives within an overall urban vision, the regime created astatist model divorced from municipal authority and from the con-straints and opportunities of the burgeoning housing market. Nodetail escaped the imperial state’s scrutiny. This was particularly appar-ent in the construction and labor policies of the Napoleonic state.Harmonious and noble building materials, the precise hours of work-ers’ lunch breaks and other routine matters were ordained, measured,and verified by the state apparatus.4 In bypassing all local authorityand in ignoring many financial concerns, a Napoleonic cornerstonealso inspired future French statesmen. The compulsion to leave anindelible stamp upon the capital city with the grands travaux, the mon-umental public structures that grace (and in a few cases, defigure)the Parisian landscape was clearly a legacy of the Napoleonic statistdream.

The Napoleonic regime also realized the Revolution’s project of con-solidating the place of technical experts and civil engineers at the topof the building trades’ hierarchy. The Empire’s most notable projectswere not architectural but utilitarian feats of civil engineering. Interven-tions that had quotidian impact on the lives of Parisians were favoredfor bringing more light, easier circulation, and greater safety to the city.Most notably, the rue de Rivoli on the Right Bank was pierced and itsbuildings and covered sidewalks were constructed on a standardized and


uniform model that presaged Haussmannian construction of the SecondEmpire. Beyond this central street, three kilometers of accessible quays,extensive canals, numerous covered markets, several large-scale slaugh-terhouses, three grand cemeteries including Alexandre Brogniart’s PèreLachaise opened in 1804, several important boulevards, the systematicuse of sidewalks, and many piazzas and squares were the direct result ofNapoleonic goal to “carry out the last will and testament of the ancienrégime.”5

Napoleon also had ambitions to make Paris “not only the mostbeautiful city that exists, the most beautiful city that has existed,and even the most beautiful city that could exist.”6 In the aestheticrealm, the construction of grandiose neoclassical structures, such asthe 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 mostimportant government architects, in particular, Pierre-François Fontaineand Charles Percier. Imposing a neoclassical style – characterizedas “Empire” in its more severe manifestations such as the Arc deTriomphe – Napoleon laid solid foundations for a large-scale transfor-mation of the capital city via architectural coherence, administrativecentralization, policing reforms, and massive public investment ininfrastructure.7

In private building, a favorable real-estate conjuncture greatly boostedNapoleon’s dream of urban embellishment. The return of the émigrésbegan under the Directory and continued apace with the partialamnesties of October 1800 and April 1802; their homecoming oftenbrought back to France repatriated fortunes sent abroad in more trou-bled times. Previously under-exploited parts of the city, in particularthe Northwest quarters around the stock market (the Sentier, BonnesNouvelles, Palais Royal, faubourg Saint Honoré, and Chaussée d’Antinquarters), absorbed much of the new/old wealth and were active sitesfor private construction. More opportunities were opened up by thecoup de grâce given to the remains of the immense complex of theTemple – a privately owned city (or Enclos) within the city, first createdin the twelfth century as a real-estate investment for the vast fortuneof the Knights Templars. These Right Bank neighborhoods became ver-itable enclaves of a Parisian bourgeoisie, and were distinguished intheir dynamism to the still-abandoned aristocratic neighborhoods of


the The Right Bank Marais and the Left Bank faubourg Saint-Germain.They encouraged much innovation as well. The first of Paris’ numer-ous arcades, the covered passageways that later absorbed the attentionof Walter Benjamin were opened in 1799 (passage du Caire) and in1800 (passage des Panoramas). Their many stores, lined up one afteranother and squeezed within a closed interior, made them a highly vis-ible 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 ofSaint-Germain-des-Prés, was similarly transformed. The rue de l’Abbaye,the rue Bonaparte, and the place Furstenberg were partially opened onits former space after 1800, creating more axes running from the Seine tothe south of the city. Other nationalized and razed convents, churches,and abbeys were sacrificed to create the rue d’Ulm and the rue d’Assaseven further to the south.9

The revolutionary origins of the Napoleonic vision of Paris were out-lined in the final plan of the Artists’ Commission, further refined bythe Conseil des Bâtiments civils in 1796. As we have seen, the Com-mission had been attentive to the challenge of systematic developmentof new streets and buildings in neighborhoods where the haphazardappropriation of church and aristocratic lands as biens nationaux hadderacinated the Parisian landscape. Napoleonic urban specialists seizedthe opportunity to focus on these areas to complete the demolition ofnumerous convents, churches, abbeys, and colleges, clearing the way fordevelopment on both the Right and the Left Bank. (In particular, Gothicreligious architecture, execrated in the revolutionary period, paid a par-ticularly 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 underthe Consulate. Walter Benjamin may have had this religious founda-tion in mind in his wry comment that “it may be said that somethingsacred, a vestige of the nave, still attaches to this row of commoditiesthat is the arcade.”10 The law of 16 September 1807 greatly expanded thestate’s prerogatives in matters concerning “public utility,” and createdenormous advantages for the ruthless and expeditious appropriation ofprivate property. Napoleon nationalized and tore down more Parisianstructures than any Jacobin vandal, but rapid progress on many newParisian sites created an indelible legacy of Napoleon the builder ratherthan the destroyer (Figures 6.1, 6.2, Maps 6.1, 6.2).11

220

Figure 6.1 The canal of Saint-Martin was one of several Napoleonic grand urbanprojects employing the expertise of civil engineers. Constructed between 1802 and1825, the 130 kilometers of Parisian canals brought fresh water to the city and disen-gaged water traffic on the Seine. But with few bridges, they also partially cut off partsof 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 neoclas-sical stock market was built by Alexandre-Théodore Brogniart as a Greek peristyle; itssite was formerly that of a vast convent.

221

Map 6.1 Turgot Map, 1739: The privately owned Enclos du Temple covered avast stretch in what is now the northern Marais quarter, and was dismantledover the eighteenth century to create the neighborhood south of the place de laRépublique today.

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


Assessing, measuring, and policing the Parisian labor force

Napoleonic prerequisites for the physical transformation of Parisincluded a deeper comprehension of the work rhythms and migra-tory movements of the nation’s workforce. Drawing on the lessons ofthe meandering and contradictory efforts of earlier revolutionaries, theEmpire’s administrators were determined to establish a labor policy inharmony with the sociological and demographic facts on the ground. Asthey imposed the workers’ passbooks in 1803, the interior passports tocontrol the labor flow, and the Civil Code in 1804, with its restrictionson associations for labor and capital, Napoleonic functionaries turnedto measuring, appraising, and predicting the broader dynamics of theFrench population. Its availability as manual labor in a period of massconscription, declining birth rates, and fluctuating population numbers,led to a larger query about its precise impact in swelling the numbers ofmanual laborers in the capital city. Would population numbers be suf-ficient to fulfill Napoleon’s promise of an efflorescent France? Or wouldthe launching of large public worksites with an inadequate labor forcedrive up salaries and create an inflationary spiral? Only after respondingto these questions would the regime’s efforts to codify work relationsfocus on repressing coalitions, capping salaries, and most ambitiously,restructuring the workday.12

The appointment of the chemist and medical doctor Jean-AntoineChaptal as Minister of Interior (1801–1804) coincided with a large-scale reorganization of the Bureau of Statistics which henceforthcarved out a privileged place both within the Interior Ministry andthe larger state hierarchy. In its ten years of existence (for its respon-sibilities were divided among other ministries in 1811) this bureaucollected detailed statistics on population, hospitals, poverty, the priceof grain, roads, taxes, and education in France. In the footsteps ofhis predecessors such as the previous Interior Ministers, François deNeufchâteau and the emperor’s younger brother, Lucien Bonaparte,Chaptal himself was greatly interested in the practical applicationsof eighteenth-century “political arithmetic” and launched a succes-sion of studies to quantify the size, the movement, and the salarystructure of the working population of France. His first demographicinquiry was the most ambitious. In a circular to all French prefectsin September 1802, Chaptal attached a questionnaire seeking detailedstatistical tables on each French department. In an introduction tothe methods of his project, Chaptal wrote that “the just proportionsbetween populations, births, deaths, and marriages are not well known,


and we are easily misled by speculation in the most important areas ofpolitical economy.” The inquiry, addressed to the prefects, drew detailedresponses as long as ten years after, and was the first trustworthy andcomprehensive study of French demographics specifically concernedwith 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 andstonecutters working in Paris – to this day, the ageless limestone, granite,and stucco construction in this still-underpopulated region are a wonderto behold. (The area also gave its name to the common red brick, knownas the brique creuse.) However, it was also notorious as the “archaic”region where Turgot served as the Crown’s intendant – the ancien régimeequivalent of prefect – for 13 years from 1761 to 1774. As we haveseen, more than half of the masons working in Paris during the Revolu-tion were born there.14 The department’s Napoleonic prefect understoodperfectly that the condition of these workers, their continued migra-tion, their rural poverty and prospects of a better life would determinethe success of imperial building ambitions in the capital.15 In his tablesubmitted to the Statistics Bureau on March 1808, the prefect Jean-Frédéric-Théodore Maurice estimated that 15,000 people left the Creuseyearly. (The total population of the department in 1809 was 226,224inhabitants.) About 85 percent of migrant Creusois were building work-ers, a vast majority labored in the masonry trades, and almost allmigrants headed for Paris, where wages were three to four times greaterthan in the provinces. Their success, however, in bringing back moneyto this impoverished region was minimal. The few immigrants whoreturned to the Creuse (estimated as one in four) arrived with an averageof 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 andimbued with a strict balance of trade perspective on economic matters,a mediocre sum of 130 francs in the pocket of a returning provin-cial meant healthy sums of money were left behind to circulate inthe capital’s economy – and, of course, what was good for Paris wasgood for France. The paltry savings of migrant workers conclusivelyproved the effectiveness of subsistence wages that kept people workingwhile assuring their earnings were pumped back into the Parisian econ-omy. His blithe conclusions confirmed the darkest Malthusian prejudicethat working salaries must be kept at a minimum and laborers lockedinto a cycle of perpetual insecurity for the national economy to remainsound.17


Given a derisive return on such a vast undertaking as departure andreturn, why did the Limousins leave at all? What were the pressures thatdrove people north to the capital city? The response, in short, is thesame attracting labor immigration today: grinding poverty and a dearthof good land. The small and subdivided properties of peasant families,in the words of the prefect, made land division among the children ofpeasants “extremely difficult and in general very uncommon. One ofthe effects of emigration was thus to prevent a greater subdivision of theproperty, which would render a great part of it unusable.”18 By migrat-ing, many future building workers of Paris had opted for a grim butnecessary alternative to indigence for the entire family.

One conclusion of the inquest into migration for the Parisian labormarket was that the capital city was assured a consistently cheap andabundant labor force for the construction trades. Never mind the macro-economic context of the Continental System (1806–1813), the Frenchboycott of British commerce, which shifted France’s economy awayfrom Atlantic commerce and toward the European continent, disruptingagrarian sectors while strengthening certain domestic industries suchas metallurgy, wool, and silk. Slower long-term demographic and agri-cultural pressures guaranteed that migratory patterns would continuein the future. In particular, the prefect seemed eager to lay to restthe anxieties of Parisian administrators that the Revolution, war, andblockade had dampened the zeal of rural masons to move northward.Responding to the question of the Revolution’s influence, the prefectconcluded that its unfolding had all but passed by this region. The effectof political and social upheavals on migration, which varied greatly inother regions, was predictably enough thought to be quite minimal inthe Creuse: “The emigration of the laboring class is an immemorialhabit in this area and the Revolution did not appear to have broughtthe slightest change in this matter if we consider the total mass ofemigrants.”19

A second statistical study of the population was a census of themechanical arts of Paris. Organized by the Capital’s Police Prefec-ture under Dubois in 1807, upon a request by the Ministry of Inte-rior, it responded to the administrators’ and entrepreneurs’ fear of alabor shortage. It confirmed the conviction of many observers that amigrant workforce continued to flow unimpeded into the Parisian labormarket.20 The 1807 census was based on passbooks and surveyed 91,000male laborers in Paris, whose largest sector by far comprised 24,148building workers. Women and children were excluded from this cen-sus. We know this represented a decrease from the estimate of 37,800Parisian building workers counted in 1790–1791 based on employers’


requests for assignats (see table 1.1). However, this probably reflectsmore on the relative health of the booming housing sector of the ear-lier period than a real decline later on. While certain anomalies surfacein 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 ofmanual labor from the provinces to the capital city.21

Finally, a third area of inquiry focused on the black legend of theRevolution: that it corrupted the workforce and that Parisian laborerswere putting in less daily work for more pay. Post-revolutionary workersresisted labor discipline, in sum, because they were spoiled by overly-indulgent entrepreneurs and political authorities. This Napoleonic tropegained wide currency, as we have seen, among functionaries such asthe civil architect Antoine Vaudoyer, who in 1805–1806 had launched aproject to reform work hours and salary structures in the building trades.An administrator working in the Interior Ministry wrote, “If the post-revolutionary workers are difficult it is because they are debauched byhigh wages.”22 The desire to quantify this trope, as a basis of applyingharsh and centralized methods of labor control, was manifest in compre-hensive studies of wage scales undertaken by the administration of theMaison de l’Empereur. This bureau, concerned with the maintenance ofimperial property, commissioned four of its architects to compare realwage on the site of Sainte-Geneviève in 1784 and various public build-ings (including Paris’ imperial palaces) in 1806. They had for ambitiona quantified appraisal of salary scales on public sites before and after theRevolution. Their inquiry demonstrated a slow and steady increase insalaries over the revolutionary decade, demonstrating that, in constantterms, the stonecutters of 1784 were paid the equivalent of 2.25 francsfor an 11-hour workday, as against 3.75 francs for a ten-hour workdayin the Revolution.23

The use and abuse of statistical analyses of this time are certainlythemselves an integral part of the history of the Empire. In fact, theworkday did not shorten during the revolutionary decade. And averagesalaries varied greatly from year to year, oscillating by season and bysite, a reality that was reflected by inconsistencies in other studies onwages. A report by the Paris prefecture found the average Parisian stone-cutters’ real wages in 1789 was 2.4 francs as compared to the average of3.5 francs in 1810.24 But whether one accepts the architects’ figure of a40 percent rise in salaries, or the prefecture’s conclusion of a more prob-able 30 percent rise over these two decades, both figures were perfectlyconsistent with long-term fluctuations under the ancien régime. In fact,during the 30 year period between 1741 and 1771, an economic phase


similar to the Revolutionary era for its grain shortages and crisis-driveninflation, Parisian masons enjoyed a rise in average salary of 36 percent.This, however, barely kept up with inflation, for the price of grain alsospiraled upward by a comparable amount.25

The Revolution and Empire accelerated and deepened the pace of ahalf-century of steady increases in workers’ earnings. Thanks in greatpart to public investment, laborers in France saw their average incomerise by about 20 percent in real wages. The Parisian building trades-men were comparatively better off having gained up to 25 percentin real wage increases between 1789 and 1820. They were among thekey beneficiaries of favorable public spending during the revolution-ary period. Their positive balance sheet may also be contrasted to thesalaries in some other major French economic sectors such as textiles,where weavers were adversely affected by the Continental System andearly industrialization. Weavers over the same period saw real wageserode by 40 percent. Also, certain luxury trades suffered greatly underthe Revolution which deterred royalist, noble, and ecclesiastic purchasesof gold, silk, jewelry, enameled objects, or ribbons. Viewed in a com-parative perspective of 20 major European cities from 1700 to 1850,the economist Robert C. Allen shows that Parisian building tradesmenprogressed from earning average nominal wages for Western Europeanconstruction to obtaining among the highest nominal wages of build-ing tradesmen on the continent. Only in industrializing England didbuilders acquire higher salaries than in Paris. Clearly, the stimulus ofpublic works and other forms of state intervention in the constructionindustry and the long-term tradition of collective organization assuredParisian building tradesmen of solid net gains in earning power.26

The wider significance of the population census, the survey of immi-gration, and the study of salary structures confirmed that Napoleonicurban ambitions could indeed assimilate an influx of laborers to thecapital without inducing a demographic or social crisis. In fact, thepopulation of Paris increased during the Empire by about 25 percent,with 160,000 people, mostly provincials settling in popular quartersin the center and in the peripheral faubourgs of Saint-Marcel andSaint-Antoine. Despite administrators’ fears that military conscriptionwould create the opposite problem of a labor shortage, and thus pro-voke inflation, in fact only 1 percent of the Parisian population wasmobilized in the Napoleonic wars.27 The steady increase of workersavailable to the building trades from the beginning of the Revolu-tion to 1807 seemed ideally suited to the escalation of private andpublic works under Napoleon. But the new “administrative regime”


was not in fact easily persuaded by its own empirical data. The vagariesof war, inflation, and a stagnant population had convinced Napoleonicadministrators of the need to clamp down further on the buildingtrades, out of fear that competitive hiring practices would ultimatelylead to a mounting wage scale and a decline in the quality of workman-ship. In search of a consummate verification of the salaries, the lengthof workdays, and the productivity of labor, the Napoleonic state movedtoward expanding the state’s authority by extending control over privateentrepreneurship 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 pol-icy consistent with the demands of an imperial France. Vigorous policydebates were first launched in 1805 when the Parisian Prefect of PoliceDubois sent a questionnaire to several entrepreneurs soliciting opinionson the “advantages and disadvantages” of reestablishing corporations.28

The general lines of argument in response reprised the terms of the clas-sic debate between advocates of corporate society and proponents of theearly Revolution’s legacy of economic decentralization. But utterly dom-inating the larger debate, as we will see, were administrators who wereopenly nostalgic for the ancien régime.29

On a less elevated level of discourse took shape a more pragmatic dis-cussion of policy. The pressing conjunctural issue challenging adminis-trators of private and public construction concerned the ripe conditionsfor labor strife created by unrestrained competition in a relatively-closedlabor market. It was widely believed these circumstances had begun todrive up salaries and threatened to create an inflationary spiral. How tocheck wage inflation, in the context of broader debate on labor disci-pline, provoked a fundamental schism on the advantages of centralizedstate control versus an adapted state-controlled corporatism. Economicliberalism as articulated by the restored Chambers of Commerce was,in the rough and tumble world of builders, never seriously consideredto be a viable solution. The synthesis around the question of laborpolicy was how best to thwart the entrepreneurs’ tendencies toward(further) corrupting a workforce that had been “debauched” by theRevolution.

The architects Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin and J. ArnaudRaymond, former members of the Conseil des bâtiments civils and


collaborators for the design of the Arc de Triomphe, were early voices todemand 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 andRaymond petitioned the Ministry of Interior for the blanket impositionof a single rate for all building workers: 3.5 livres per day for the sum-mer and 3 francs for the winter.30 This represented a slight net increasefor most building workers, and was regarded as a concession to theinevitability of higher wages in a season of strikes.31

Chalgrin’s and Raymond’s counsel reflected a determination thata firm labor code required cracking down, first and foremost, uponentrepreneurs. The greatest menace to industry and discipline, theyargued, was the tendency of businessmen to undercut one another byoffering higher salaries to entice the best workers to their sites. Only thethreat of a fine, they concluded, would dissuade employers from hiringaway more talented artisans working on another site. Containing theimpulse of capital to encourage the free movement of labor was a nec-essary step in creating a labor policy to control the workforce, for it isprecisely the unscrupulous entrepreneurs who “provoke the desertion ofthe most pacified and well organized workshops, and encourage and stirup the restlessness we have observed. If, instead, the cost of labor wascalculated and fixed for every season of the year, the current rumblingsin the workshops would cease to have such an affect.”32 Henceforthpolicing the building trades’ workers by cracking down on competitionamong entrepreneurs formed the centerpiece of projects to legislate intoexistence new construction procedures.

The strident tone of circulars and projects in 1807 reflected a turbu-lent year in labor relations. Many administrators were quick to blamestrife on the spectacular failures of previous efforts at reform. Twenty-seven separate workers’ movements were recorded in Paris in 1807, withthe most outstanding that of two strikes for higher wages conductedin 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 three-year period over the question of wages.33 While the year 1808 was lesscontentious, a single incident seemed to crystallize a growing distrust ofentrepreneurs – increasingly the explicit leitmotif of Napoleonic pro-posals scrutinizing the building site. The incident revolved around amaster’s abuse of the notorious article 1781 of the Code Civil whose pro-visions expressly dictated that the affirmation of the employer was to beprivileged over that of an employee by judicial organs. Yet in November1808, stonecutters at the Temple de la Gloire testified that they had


not been paid by the entrepreneur for over a month. Despite proteststo the contrary, and the entrepreneur’s invocation of his “rights”under the Code Civil’s article 1781, he was brought to the local policecommissariat to pay what he owed to the workers.34

The argument of Chalgrin and Raymond targeted the failure of staterepression to keep laborers in check, in particular, in the unwieldy formsof passbooks, bureaux de placement, and police surveillance. Napoleonicstate administrators’ growing disaffiliation with the micro-managementof the workforce inspired a panoply of new projects, pamphlets, andcirculars.35 One was written by an obscure civil architect, a certainCumers whose first name has disappeared completely from the pub-lic record. He proposed a solution that went much further in policingbuilding workers by containing the avarice of masters. Cumers attackedentrepreneurs who “are perhaps too divided, too isolated, for us tocount on them alone to achieve satisfactory results.” In the absence ofa consistent approach emanating from the private sector, the state mustorganize entrepreneurship to see to it that all building workers arrivingin Paris will acknowledge their commitment to a single work contract.It is thus a corporate association which “must forbid all entrepreneursfrom 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 hourday. And it is the obligation of the government to make sure that “theentrepreneurs of private worksites will not undermine the entrepreneursof public works” by obliging all patrons in the construction industry tocooperate on a single labor policy.36

Cumers’ ardent memoir concentrated on the behaviour ofentrepreneurs who pursued measures “contrary to their own interests.”Too ignorant to further their own welfare, they competed ferociouslyamong themselves by slashing the workday while seeking to maximizeproduction by increasing precipitously the salaries of skilled laborers.The most dignified role of the government, given such unenlightenedcompetition between entrepreneurs, will be to “establish, voluntarilyor forcibly, a perfect ensemble between all the Entrepreneurs, for itis more than probable that without a strict uniformity of conditionsfor delivering passports or identity papers, no worker will comply withthe measure on workdays.”37 Cumer’s argument was overlaid with theconviction that unbridled competition in the labor market thwarted afull understanding of entrepreneurs’ mutual interests. It was up to thestate to create a voluntary or forced “perfect ensemble.” To Cumers,the full revival of a guild economy in the building trades, created fromabove by the Napoleonic state, would ultimately mold the nucleus of


a “perfect ensemble” of not just entrepreneurs, but of all commercialinterests.

The rift between functionaries and officials on a future labor pol-icy in the building trades would grow between 1809 and 1811. Thespotty enforcement of policies on passbooks and bureaux de placementrendered these institutions failures in the eyes of the police, and thesense of deterioration in public order was further compounded bya complete suspension of the new work hours on public sites.38 InJune 1809 unfolded a disastrous attempt to keep stonecutters work-ing until 8:00 in the evening in exchange for higher wages on thesites of the bridge of Jena and the Arc de Triomphe. The resulting tur-moil on other sites prompted the inspector of the Arc de Triompheto petition for an order to annul the edict dictating hours whichwas still applied to public worksites. The inspector successfully man-aged to invalidate the law, as public works entrepreneurs were told“to abstain from all innovation which could provide the pretext fordisorder.”39

In the aftermath of the latest acts of insubordination, broader oppor-tunities were opened for ever more expansive administrative schemes.Following Cumer’s lead, projects were drawn up to reorganize profes-sional hierarchies to command authoritatively the building sites of Paris.Administrative paralysis was to be overcome through visionary pro-posals, issued by the corps of Napoleonic administrators, to restraincompetition. The open conflicts between the Prefect of the Parisianpolice, the Minister of Interior, and the Minister of Police, as well asbetween the occasionally confused jurisdictions of public works andpublic buildings, had created openings for obscure functionaries to bringtheir own proposals to the table.

The atmosphere of frank criticism and imaginative social engineeringproduced (often unsolicited) projects calling for the complete regulationof the daily lives of workers. One such proposal, with the improbabletitle, A Memoir on the Means Hereafter to Warn against Work Stoppagesamong Building Trades Workers, was received in July 1809 by the Conseildes bâtiments civils. Written by another obscure government adminis-trator, a certain J. Riffé, it provoked much discussion among construc-tion administrators as the organizational blueprint for the next reformto regulate the salaries of workers.40 To prevent further contention onthe building site, Riffé believed, the mutual obligations of all “inter-ests” would have to be clearly enforced. Citing the 1806 disturbancesthat led to the defeat of the previous reform, Riffé criticized the harshmethod of dictating terms rather than reaching agreement by collec-tive accords. The epoch of stringent government regulation must now


be declared over, he argued, just as the Napoleonic Civil Code hadabrogated previous contractual agreements ushered in by the NationalAssembly’s Loi Le Chapelier. Earlier requirements, such as passbooksand placement offices which sought to replace the chaotic labor mar-ket of the place de Grève, were mere preparatory measures for restoringharmony between masters and journeymen. Only an intimate col-laboration between state administrators, the prefecture of police, andentrepreneurs would make it possible

to predict the most ordinary cases of disputes and their outcome inthe workshops; to articulate in a clear manner the reciprocal dutiesof Entrepreneurs and workers; to determine with justice the wage ofworkers in relation to their work; to indicate the hour in which theday must begin and end as well as the hours of repose for differentseasons of the year; and finally to establish the means of obligingthe Entrepreneurs to pay the workers on a regular basis and in goodtime.41

While Riffé claimed that “reciprocal duties” between entrepreneurs andjourneymen must arise from agreement rather than upon statist coer-cion, 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 withinthe building trades.

The utility of these memoirs was swiftly seized upon by the Conseildes bâtiments civils, which examined them in the course of emergencymeetings in September 1809, called to respond to the spreading laborstrife on public works sites.42 Compelling the participants’ immediateattention was Riffé’s advocacy of the principle of government standardpay scales, the tarifs, to be linked to craft differences and changingseasons. After extensive debate, the participants tabled Riffé’s centralargument that such reforms must be made in the context of a generalcorporatist revival. The council recommended instead the immediateadoption, diffusion, and imposition of Riffé’s proposal for three slidingwage scales, the grande, moyenne, and petite journées corresponding to12-, 10-, and 8-hour days. The prickly enforcement of such minutelydefined hours was put entirely in the administrative bailiwick of theMinistry of Interior.

The resulting detailed salary list represented the apotheosis of vision-ary ambitions to impose state control over the building site. For theauthoritarian ambitions of the reform project reflected a total disregardfor the limits of the possibilities of enforcement. The standardization


of wages expressed – to Dubois and other policing and administra-tive voices – an overly exalted sense of state policy over the buildingtrades. Dubois sought to carve out an alternative, more feasible policy,one that refrained from repressive mechanisms to enforce state-imposedfixed standards over labor practices. The government architects andadministrators of the Conseil des bâtiments civils under the Empire werehenceforth excluded from playing a major role in labor reform. Thepurely statist solution of longer hours, oaths, and precisely defined tarifswould be discarded precisely by the unwillingness of the Napoleonicstate to implement them.43 The Parisian police prefecture, in turn,prepared a counter-thrust of its own, aimed at imposing its agendafor a police regime over the building trades. In January 1810, asa direct response to the proposal of Conseil des bâtiments civils,Dubois launched an endeavor to reincorporate the master buildersof Paris.44

Dubois’ decision to create a corporation with the building tradeswas not a hasty innovation. The search for a “voluntary or forcedperfect ensemble of Entrepreneurs” was the core argument of manya functionary’s memoirs. Now, for Dubois, this ensemble would reston an informal commercial structure that entrepreneurs had alreadyput in place. The private and public builders of Paris collaborated topublish a Nouvel Almanach des Bâtiments in 1809 as a registry of allarchitects, entrepreneurs, and self-styled “masters” who collaboratedto advertise their addresses to the general public. The new almanaccopied the format of the ancien régime Almanach des Bâtiments andthe Napoleonic Almanach du commerce de Paris, which listed individ-uals who had purchased the business license (patente). Such publica-tions sought to thwart unscrupulous business types who spuriouslyclaimed to have commercial privileges. Consumers of construction, insum, now had a reliable guide to the “honest builders” in variousenterprises.45

“Honest builders” under the Empire, in fact, went further than theircolleagues in other sectors to assure the public, appointing from withintheir ranks 14 “expert architects” responsible for inspections. By evokingsuch titles within their association, the builders deliberately conjured uplinks to the ancien régime corporate housing authority, the Chambre desBâtiments, which had nominated the well-connected elites of the pro-fession to precisely this venal office. Thus, construction entrepreneursrevived the trope of self-policing, dormant since the earliest anti-corporate phase of the Revolution, and grounded entirely in internaltrade hierarchies.46


In 1810, Dubois used the model of the association of building inspec-tors to mandate a “perfect ensemble” of entrepreneurs into existence.He published a decree that resuscitated a builders’ corporation intendedto institutionalize and centralize the construction trades’ informal busi-ness networks. It was signed by Napoleon in March 1810. Dubois recastthe assembly of master masons in broadly similar fashion to Turgot’s“restoration” of the guilds in 1776; by dictating yearly assemblies ofentrepreneurs to elect a “chamber” of 24 electors. They in turn wouldelect three delegates to answer to the prefect of police at his behest.Bypassing the state’s Conseil des bâtiments civils, this body of delegateswould become a direct arm of the prefecture to serve as the inter-nal surveillance organ of entrepreneurs in masonry.47 The followingyear, this body became the Chambre syndicale, an official trade asso-ciation structured after the former guilds. To the mercantilist thinkingof Napoleonic functionaries, the revival of such a closely watched struc-ture of capitalist builders assured the enforcement of uniform conditionsover all workers. The state, in sum, imposed the fusion of interestsbetween capital and labor.

In a more detailed clarification of the new corporation, the Duboisproject was conceived as assigning precise meaning to the distinc-tion between entrepreneur and master builder, a slippery task that hadrepeatedly frustrated the Crown and Paris municipality. The fluidity oftitles in the business world of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuryFrance only underscored the broader imprecision of the social bound-aries in France.48 As we have seen, this was particularly true for buildersdespite detailed regulations dating to the dim recesses of time. Finally,the status of entrepreneur and master builder was delineated and differ-entiated by the Conseil d’état in March 1810, in regulations upheld bythe office of the Ministry of Interior. Dubois himself presented the planto confer mastership only on those “conforming entrepreneurs” whowould register with the police and declare “they will respond for theirworkers or journeymen.” After pledging to conform to the GerminalLaw on passbooks, the masters would also be responsible to inscribe thenames of all the workers they hire in a police registry, with the date oftheir 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 andsufficient conditions to be a qualified master builder.49

The declared inspiration of the Dubois plan was the restoration ofbuilding corporations, now formed in each arrondissement by build-ing masters in the trades of masonry, carpentery, joinery (namely,


menuiserie, the craft of carving and inserting woodwork chiefly in doorsand window frames), and gilding for more luxurious construction. Theywere to hold monthly meetings and set up formal ties to the prefec-ture of police. Dubois hence created two levels of corporate bodies: oneshared only the responsibility to meet every year to elect delegates,with the second regulating the construction industry as a whole withclose ties to the Napoleonic police. The chief obligation of both corpo-rate bodies was to establish and to enforce regulations for setting thedaily wage every month: these would be fixed like “a kind of mercury,”according to season, demand, and the labor supply. While dramatic cutsin pay under this system were theoretically feasible, increases were for-mally restricted to no more than a tenth or a twelfth of the previousmonth’s wage.50

Ultimately, Dubois rehabilitated the ancien régime argument of pro-moting public safety and public order to justify this shift to the “perfectensemble” of corporate interests. He was intimately familiar with theterms of the corporate debate, having supervised the reincorporation ofParisian bakers and butchers in 1800. With the builders, Dubois assignedto entrepreneurs strict accountability to the state. Evoking the specter ofshoddy construction practices that menaced ordinary Parisians, Duboisordered all entrepreneurs to declare in precise terms the work theywere to undertake and periodically to verify the licenses of their col-laborators. The need to hold entrepreneurs liable for sloppy work andto weed out fraudulent claims to construction privileges was based on“preventing all the vices and shoddy work which can compromise indi-vidual and public safety.” Consistent with the ambition to restore thecomprehensive powers of the lieutenant général de police, Dubois wasalso assuming greater state responsibility for the solidity of construc-tion. The Parisian prefect of police swept within his jurisdiction theall-encompassing social and economic authority of his ancien régimecounterpart.51

How successful was Dubois in reforging the communities of mastermasons and carpenters in the image of the ancien régime corporations?Were restored associations established on the socio-professional foun-dations of the ancien régime, the Revolution, or did they embody auniquely Napoleonic synthesis? In fact, the Chambres syndicales werefounded 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. Gen-eralizations drawn from the personnel registered in the building tradesalmanacs of the ancien régime and the Empire are inherently limited by


an absence of first names. But based on listings of family names andaddresses they suggest a dramatic rupture in dynasties between old andnew masters. There is a concordance of only 14 family names in the1791 and 1809 almanacs for master masons, the last publication beforethe abolition of the guilds and the first of the refounded Napoleonicguild regime. This is a markedly small number in a trade where familyoligarchies thrived before and after the Revolution.52

Fewer individuals were also engaged as entrepreneurs in the masonryprofession. While 409 masters figured in the final almanac of 1791,only 170 masters were listed in 1809. Even by collapsing the 104entrepreneurs of public and private sites with the masters listed in1809, the total of 274 represents a dramatic decline in overall numbersof officially sanctioned capitalist builders in masonry. In the incorpo-rated Chambre syndicale of 1813, only 233 entrepreneurs of masonryin Paris could practice by way of the prerogative of having “fulfilledthe new statutes.” The remarkable decline in numbers of masters wasthus 42 percent over this 18-year span. A clear winnowing of elites alsotook place among the master carpenters, as only ten family names resur-face in the Empire’s almanacs and the last building almanac publishedjust before guild suppression in 1791. The numbers of master carpen-ters dwindled from 142 in 1791 to 95 masters in 1809, and finally toonly 87 in the official corporation of 1813. This represented an overalldiminution of close to 40 percent.53

The sharp contraction of numbers of construction magnates was adistinct legacy of the Revolution and Empire. The concentration of com-mercial privileges in fewer hands was the result of convulsive upheavalsstarting with political attacks upon many privileged ancien régimecontractors and entrepreneurs, resulting in greater oversight of state-sponsored projects, and concluding with the rehabilitation of corpo-rations. An elite based on wealth and expertise had largely replacedthe nobility and the monarchy’s inner circle. “New” men resemblingmore the Bastille’s dismantler Jean-François Palloy had scaled the pin-nacle of the building trades at the social and economic expense of suchtypes as the Pantheon’s masonry contractor, Pierre Poncet. (We have noreliable measure of the aftershocks of the Terror’s decimation of build-ing oligarchies; was it bad for business for entrepreneurs, like Poncet,to be arrested and accused of corruption in 1793 and 1794?) Connec-tions to the engineering school the Ecole Polytechnique was now moreadvantageous than domination of an ancien régime–style cliental net-work. The commercial skills, financial means, and motivation to enterbids on nationalized properties, and to plan, promote, and execute their


exploitation – up to and including demolition and construction –hastened the distillation of this Parisian elite. The Empire further recastsocial hierarchies by qualifying a reduced number of master builders,re-inventing their functions, and imposing an exhaustive range ofunfamiliar 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 indus-tries, predictably, benefited from the Terror and the war in receivingmassive 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 challengesof new industrial technologies. The building trades here were ratherunique, for their preindustrial techniques and materials barely changedover this period of time. Only the use of iron beams and other forms ofstructural reinforcement were more widespread – calling for more engi-neering skills – but this change started to occur toward the end of theancien régime. Nor was the construction industry necessarily set back byshort-term economic depression. While the period from 1807 to 1810was relatively prosperous in France, Paris building experienced its great-est boom since 1791 during the depression of 1810–1812, when it wassupported by massive public building ventures launched in the Capital.A total of 52 monumental works were launched under Napoleon, andprecisely half of these were in progress in the midst of the economicdepression which hastened the Empire’s decline and fall.54

The falling numbers of Parisian master builders was accentuatedby political efforts to accelerate social and professional consolidationfor purposes of greater state control. The Napoleonic project to con-strain the competitive business practices of masters and entrepreneursrestricted access to commercial enterprises and increased the reach ofthe state’s visible hand in the economy. In order to facilitate surveil-lance, the police effectively imposed conditions that choked off publicaccess to certain magnates in the trade, while effectively substitutingpublic employees for private interests in matters of inspection and ver-ification. These restrictions would be repealed after the Empire. Onlyby 1816 did the police relax distinctions between privileged “con-forming entrepreneurs” who followed the new formalities, such asregistering at the local police commissioner’s office, and those whodid not. Acknowledging that entrepreneurs not “conforming to thenew statutes” were too harshly penalized by being forbidden fully toexercise their trade, the Almanach of 1816 simply listed them in a sep-arate category from “conforming entrepreneurs.” They were given an


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

The corporate revival under the Empire

The restoration of the ancien régime guild idea was compelled by recog-nition of the limits of state power – and by the political will to displaythat power by other means. By imposing the internal regulation of laborpractices, with constant verification by the police, Napoleonic adminis-trators sought to establish the much vaunted 12-hour day and the capon wages. They also conceded that the direct arm of the police couldnot extend as far as an “internal regime” of masters and entrepreneursto govern its own. Reprising many of the very same pro-guild argumentsvoiced in the Paris Parlement’s dissent over Turgot’s 1776 suppressionof the corporations, the internal “douce police” of the ancien régime waspraised as superior to statist police repression. Once again, it wouldbe Dubois who best conceptualized the corporate revival along theselines.

In late March 1810, convinced that the Chambre syndicale was prov-ing its value to the construction sector, Dubois proferred a soaringdefense of the guild order. While the ostensible purpose of Dubois’declaration was to justify new regulations of entrepreneurs in the newChambres syndicales, his apologia was quickly recast into a commentaryon the earlier project of the Conseil des bâtiments civils to regimentthe workday. He began by dismissing it as “impossible, inexecutable,and therefore dangerous.” For once you start expecting to harmonizethe hours of work by fixing the wages of labor, “then, the governmentmust fix everything!”56 The thrust of Dubois’ argument, however, didnot merely denounce the over-policed and over-worked building site.He aspired to conceptualize the political economy of labor in the build-ing trades and to defend the corporate order as a third way betweenstate and market diktats. To Dubois, both direct state intervention andeconomic liberalism create inflationary pressures by driving up salaries.Under both regimes, the interests of the master can only be advancedby resort to a relentless upward spiral of workers’ earnings. The inter-est of capital where the labor force is restricted in number is ultimatelyserved by paying an all-too-healthy compensation to available workers.


Too often, hurried entrepreneurs doled out “extravagant wages againstthe wishes of manual laborers themselves who do not wish to takeadvantage of the laziness of Entrepreneurs.” Carried away by hisown rhetoric, Dubois fancied that some workers were forced to beoverpaid!57

The only possible answer, then, was that which the architectsChalgrin and Raymond, and the administrators Cumers and Riffé,had suggested before: “Regulation must be directed against theentrepreneurs.” The corporatist solution of Chambres syndicales washere presented as security against cutthroat competition. On the onehand, economic freedom that had “repulsed actions undertaken in con-cert with the authorities” must be abandoned; on the other hand, exces-sive state regulation must be renounced. The recalcitrant “entrepreneurcharged with an urgent task will caress the spirit of independence and ofinsubordination of workers by making a mockery of acts of governmentauthority.” Dubois’ analysis created a vivid set of oppositions between“slack” entrepreneurs, “inert” workers corrupted by market forces, andstate-driven “imperious regulation” of hours and salaries whose neglectwould “make a mockery” of the government.58

Evidently emboldened by the favorable reception to his solution ofChambres syndicales to contain private business interests, Dubois feltfree to put the new regulations in starker terms than earlier corporatistadvocates. The corporate solution was based on repressive possibilities,not on a pretended “perfect ensemble” of interests. The natural activ-ities of entrepreneurs and masters were here imagined as perilous topublic order and safety. This assumption led Dubois to conclude thatChambres syndicales were the best opportunity to assert a vigorous net-work of surveillance over the excessively competitive practices of newcommercial elites.

Dubois’ harsh assessment of the new corporate order was hardly madein a vacuum. It was rather provoked by an immediate challenge to stateauthority. He wrote the essay with an eye to the disturbances at thesite of the Arc de Triomphe in mid-March 1810. There, entrepreneurshad prevailed upon the architect Chalgrin to raise salaries to hastenthe completion of a deeply symbolic task. The salaries of carpenterswere doubled to 9 francs to finish an urgent project: that of a mockcopy of the arch built for the entrance fête preceding the weddingof Napoleon and Marie-Louise. The hastened work rhythms to com-plete the structure, and its highly public nature created a favorableconjuncture for salary increases. The resulting carpenters’ strike for awage increase was carefully chronicled by the inspector of the sitewho kept a Journal des ouvriers charpentiers, a daily account of the


workers’ “public spirit,” which carefully recorded the strikes’ origins andprecise unfolding.59

Five hundred carpenters on the site had been subjected to a gruel-ing work routine between 7 and 21 March 1810 to prepare the woodenmock version of the Arc de Triomphe. The accidental death of a carpen-ter after a fall from the scaffolding on 17 March deepened the grievancesarising from the firing of 300 men on 11 March. A relentless drive tocomplete the scale model prompted a movement for an increase from9 to 18 francs, and then 24 francs. The impertinence of these demandswas 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 sixjourneymen. Then, the site’s Inspecteur-General Veyrat read the riot act,which deterred the carpenters from continuing. They returned to workat reduced pay of 5 francs, guarded over by six dragoons, two officiersde paix, police inspectors, and assorted armed infantry. The architectChalgrin wryly noted that “these steps have filled the workers withrespect.” The troubles at the arch, it was assumed, also had an impacton builders at Versailles, who struck in May for higher wages, yet werequickly routed by the same dissuasive measures.60

From Dubois’ perspective, the strike was entirely the responsibility ofentrepreneurs. Responding to an urgent request of the state, they hadirresponsibly rewarded “insolence.” To get their workers to work, “theentrepreneurs had proposed to bargain,” higher wages for intensifiedrhythms, and this represented the breakdown of command authority onthe building site. By “flattering the selfishness (amour-propre) of work-ers,” and thereby corrupting them, the entrepreneurs had not evenachieved their goal of maximizing production. As seen through the pri-orities of the prefect of police, the unrest at the Arc de Triomphe wasirrefutable evidence that higher wages were to the detriment of socialpeace and to the short-term interests of entrepreneurs, for when all wassaid and done the tasks that normally took ten days were completed infour days when the salaries were raised.61

A few months after the March discussions, Dubois was disgraced ina minor financial scandal. The aristocratic Etienne-Denis Pasquier suc-ceeded him to the office of Parisian police prefect in October 1810. Thelegacy of corporatism in the later years of the Empire was to endure,with few nuanced changes. Pasquier carried on the incorporation ofprofessions. Having arrived in his new capacity to find 13 incorpo-rated professions in Paris, he doubled that number. Turning to thebuilding trades, Pasquier demonstrated deeper nostalgia for the ancien


régime with a singular devotion to the most authoritarian of Napoleonicinnovations, the policy of passbooks. He launched a campaign in thesummer of 1811 to impose the livret uniformly on public worksites,collaborating more often with the Bureau of Public Works than withthe more exacting Conseil des bâtiments civils. Less imaginative thanhis predecessor, Pasquier’s engagement in the question of passbooksfollowed Dubois’ lead, down to repeating much of Dubois’ rhetoricin threatening injunctions against masters violating corporate laborpolicies.62

The pronouncements and policies of Dubois and Pasquier exposed afundamental paradox in the nineteenth-century concept of labor at thecore of the corporatist tradition. Napoleonic corporatism was deeplysuspicious of the increasing wages for labor on two distinct grounds.First, the regime, haunted by the hyperinflation of the Directory, viewedsalary increases – as well as entrepreneurial laxity – as a source of eco-nomic ruin. Second, the relative autonomy engendered by high wagesin an unstructured economy was held in deep suspicion. Marketplacemechanisms threatened to “caress the workers’ spirit of independence,”as Dubois put it. And a spoiled workforce was deemed highly corrosive tothe social peace. The Revolution’s most effective mechanisms of assert-ing 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 labormarket, reliance on purely statist measures was not always effective. Thepractical advantages of an internal police of entrepreneurs and masterscompelled corporatist administrators, in the tradition from Cumers toRiffé, and from Dubois to Pasquier, to turn to controlling builders fromwithin.

Here, the classic idiom of corporatism as a political and social culture –its defense of a society of orders, its organic conception of orders, itsguarding of trade privilege for the worthy few who were “good andloyal” – was jettisoned in favor of sheer social control. The ambigui-ties implied by a “voluntary or forced perfect ensemble” of collectiveinterests were thoroughly exploited. Dubois found it perfectly consis-tent to encourage state cooperation with masters to force an end to the“natural” capitalist activity to squeeze the most profit out of the labormarket 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 withdistrust about each others’ natural penchant for, respectively, controland money making.


In reviving the corporations, Napoleonic administrators thus strippedaway their historical and cultural referents. No longer privileged bodiesprotected against market forces and excessive state intervention, thecorporations were wielded as instruments of state restrictions onentrepreneurial initiatives in building. No longer the dominion of large-scale magnates and family oligarchies, they represented the wholesalerecasting of construction trades elites. And no longer the institutionalrepositories of careful historical and legal definitions of work, theybecame a bureaucratized authority to project the power of the stateonto the building site. Napoleon’s urban plan to rehabilitate the orga-nization and parts of the landscape of the capital were realized withoutthe impediments faced by previous regimes: neither royal police com-missioners in alliance with guildsmen as under the ancien régime northe Revolution’s sectional movement in alliance with new officials suchas justices of the peace henceforth challenged the state’s authority. Forwhile the restoration of the guilds might betray a wistful nostalgia forthe ancien régime, Napoleonic administrators were also sober students ofits 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 relativelyprivileged status in the urban world of work. He is caricatured as a multi-taskingworker, ready to do a multitude of tasks. Courtesy of the musée Carnavelet.

242

Figure 6.4 Images of Builders, 2. “They abridge and make labor easier by givingmutual aid.” From Arnaud, Berquin, Œuvres de Berquin, mises en ordre par L. F. Jauffret.Première partie. (1802) Illustrated by Dutailly and Voisard. A sympathetic Napoleonic-era illustration underscoring the cooperative labor of construction workers. Courtesyof 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 theworkers they prefer to employ, as well as the advantages thatflow from open competition for lower prices and a higher qual-ity of labor. We cannot carry out the simplest tasks withoutrelying on several workers from different guilds, and withoutbeing slowed down by the lethargy, the fraud, and the expensewhich flatter or favor the self-importance of corporations aswell as the caprice of their arbitrary and selfish systems.

Controller General of Finances, Anne-Robert-JacquesTurgot, February, 17761

Turgot’s apologia for guild abolition is a devastating indictment of tradecorporations as a handicap to the French economy. Closed, reactionary,anticompetitive, opportunistic, they were a real deterrent to economicinnovation. Thanks to their pernicious influence, the French economywas deeply indebted and excessively attached to traditional artisanaltechniques, a closed labor market, and a corrupt ethos of protectionism.As Turgot’s Physiocratic collaborators argued, one needs only to con-trast France’s sluggish economic performance with the brilliant indus-trial take-off of Great Britain in the eighteenth century, boosted byinnovative mercantile policies and sustained by entrepreneurs freed ofguild restrictions, as further proof that the French economic modelwas backward. Finally, the elusive ideal of economic liberty in Francewould never be attained because of an arrogant elite’s systematic and

243


deeply ingrained dependency on a closed economy, sustained entirelyby archaic forms of monopoly.2

The Parisian building trades, in the period 1763 to 1871, exposethe limits of Turgot’s critique of corporations as prejudicial to Frenchnational interests. The construction industry’s history also challengesthe binary categories of liberal capitalism and state interventionismas imposed by scholars who read back in time categories forged bynineteenth- and twentieth-century debates.3 In the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, market and state were not necessarily in oppo-sition. Liberal reforms or centralized state diktat also did not replacebut often coexisted with corporations in the professionalization, themethods of labor organization, the regulation of construction standards,and the capacity to mobilize capital and labor for monumental urbanproject. Archaic and innovative methods of organizing the building sitesand the men working on them inhabited the same universe.4 Even thepolitical perception of corporatism changed over time: reactionary inearly 1776 and 1791, the years of their abolition, the guilds were at thecore of progressive reform during the state’s corporate rehabilitation andrevival in late 1776 and 1810. As with other sectors, a porous combina-tion of three dreams of commerce – corporatism, statist, liberalism –assured the construction sector’s transition from the ancien régime to theRevolution, as well as from the preindustrial to the industrial era.

Other than repudiating classic narratives of eighteenth-century socialand economic development, the Parisian construction industry tellsus much about the protean relationship of capitalism and the FrenchRevolution. Recent methodological trends privilege political discourseover forms of social practice, even in discussions about the Revolution’seconomic policies.5 This has greatly overstated the impact of ideol-ogy in preparing the terrain for ostensibly free market policies duringthe Revolution’s opening stages. In fact, the cornerstone of economicliberalism – that of the free disposal of property for production, labor,and consumption – was posed only in fits and starts during the Rev-olution. In sum, there was broad ideological and structural resistance,from nearly all significant political actors to bringing Turgot’s dream tofruition. And there was no single teleological movement from a con-tained and protected economy based on corporations to one guided bythe principles of liberty and open markets.

In principle, at least, the individual’s right to the free dispositionof private property was the guiding ideological principle from theRevolution’s earliest moments. The “sacred and inviolable right” to

Conclusion and Epilogue, 1763–1871 245

property that the French revolutionaries enshrined in the Declarationof the Rights of Man and Citizen in August 1789 announced the found-ing political principles of a new commercial society. But precisely whatthis right to dispose of one’s property meant in practice was far fromdetermined in 1789 – it was primarily a project to abolish the ancienrégime and its arbitrary system of taxation. The ideals of property rightwere, in fact, projected from the lofty principles of the Declaration tothe grubby world of commerce with the vote to abolish the guilds inMarch 1791. But here the guilds were swept away as tariffs on importedgoods were enacted and new taxes and economic controls were createdsuggesting deep ambivalence toward legislating into existence a worldof Physiocratic laissez-faire.

While the first phase of the Revolution is portrayed as the triumphof a liberal economic regime, in fact the complex of revolutionary insti-tutions entailed a reconception of economic relations not yet informedby the orthodoxies of liberalism or statism. In practice, guild abolitionreflected not free market ideology but simple pragmatism: the weaknessof the reconstituted and artificial bastard guilds, created after the fail-ure of Turgot’s 1776 abolition, meant few guild advocates rose to theirdefense during the Revolution. The reduction and consolidation from120 Parisian guilds to 50 after the August 1776 restoration had renderedtheir coherence a sometime thing. Some were moribund decades beforethey were abolished while others, as we have seen, had been thriving.Overall, the deeply mixed results of the post-1776 guilds compelled fewadvocates to support their survival after 1789.6

The liberty embodied by the Le Chapelier Law of June 1791 sweepingaway masters and journeymen’s associations, as well as all remainingcorporate privileges throughout French society, was also curbed shortlyafterward. That same month, the National Assembly instituted the busi-ness license as a substitute for the abolished masterships thus assuringthat only those with sufficient capital could engage in entrepreneurship.This was also a prelude to the October 1791 suppression of the Cham-bers of Commerce as a monopolistic vestige of ancien régime privilege.As a result of stringent controls on entrepreneurship, in all phases ofthe Revolution, the numbers of master masons authorized to engagein public and private construction dipped from 409 in 1791 to 274in 1809. Despite the myth of all-encompassing liberal “moments” inthe Revolution, such as its opening years and that of the Directory,constraints on entrepreneurship were methodically applied in all rev-olutionary moments. Corrosive critiques of entrepreneurial abuse led to


the erosion of the economic role of many contractors, promoters, andmaster 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 wereto be negotiated by private contracts between individuals. Henceforth,intermediate organizations and collective actions became infringementsupon the principle of the liberty to dispose of one’s property in the freeexercise of commercial relations. The entrepreneur vied on the openlabor market rather than wield monopolistic privileges in patronage net-works, while workers sold their labor on a contractual basis strippedof the paternal protections inherent in their journeymen’s status. Onlythe skills brought to the labor market, rather than a guild-dictated wagescale, determined salary structure and working conditions.

In practice, however, here too labor from the end of the ancien régimethrough Napoleon remained profoundly “unfree.” Individuals were notconsidered at liberty to dispose of their labor in a contractual relation-ship, neither in France nor in Europe nor, of course, in the coloniesabroad.7 Rare indeed were the moments in which a worker could leavethe workplace in search of a better opportunity elsewhere. Even asrevolutionaries attempted to put into practice liberalization of the con-ditions of production, wages, and cost, the perceived threat of a labormarket breakdown was widely denounced by a range of ideological per-spectives. Monarchists, liberal reformists, and radical republicans joineda chorus within weeks of guild abolition to heap opprobrium uponmasterless men and women dangerously flaunting newfound liberties.The Parisian world of work was deeply feared as a magnet for a pre-carious mass of undesirable and unemployable seasonal labor from theprovinces.

The principal causes of labor’s “unfreedom” were also circumstantial.The revolutionary economic conjuncture was a poor moment for forcingwages and prices to be free: wartime conscription after the declaration ofhostilities with Austria in April 1792 made urban labor increasingly dear,and nearly unceasing warfare added to an inflationary spiral during theTerror and under the Directory. This was only partially contained by theSeptember 1793 General Maximum capping wages and prices, sparkingprotest movements that challenged the authoritative nature of dictatedsalary structures. The survival of time-honored, immutable labor prac-tices also added to the general sense of anarchy in the Parisian world of


work during the first ten years of the Revolution. For example, the dailygathering of hundreds of building laborers at the central labor marketof the place de Grève that, for centuries, had been loathed as a locusof social conflict heightened Parisians sense of insecurity. The explo-sion of nearby rooming houses for migratory labor created even greateranxieties about public safety in the capital city.

The provisions of Napoleonic consolidation, from the workers’ pass-books to the energetic surveillance of the labor markets, aggravated the“unfreedom” of work. The Napoleonic regime’s labor reforms resorted torepressive methods to control “foreigners” from the French provinces,the hours of work (and even rest times at work), and the daily wageof each laborer’s task. The state ultimately became the guarantor thatentrepreneurs and laborers establish contractual relations with the cre-ation of business corporations in 1810. What Steven Kaplan calls“bureaucratic corporatism” in which the state constituted social hier-archies in the work world became a French model for the next twocenturies.8 Under a sharply guarded entrepreneurial and police regime,a given unskilled laborer in Paris was hardly at liberty to sell his or herwork at the highest price without confronting Napoleonic controls onsalaries, modes of payment, mobility, and even the micro-managementof the rhythms of the workday.9

Yet, despite setbacks, the economic balance sheet in the buildingtrades was favorable for the labor force. Even as the liberty to circulatewas constrained and even as police repression increased – in this as in allindustries – the Parisian construction trades were financially remuner-ated in relatively healthy terms. Real wages increased in the roughly halfcentury studied in this book, from 1763 to 1815. They received augmen-tations of the order of 25 percent in the economically unstable periodof the Revolution – to the dismay of inflation-wary Napoleonic func-tionaries. While buying power was lost to the inflation of staple items atthe very end of the ancien régime, and during several short phases of theRevolution, a steady rise in wages favored the lowly unskilled migrantlaborer as well as the specialized craft artisan. This (exceedingly) rela-tive long-term “prosperity” contrasted with other sectors which sufferedsetbacks from industrial retooling, international war blockades, laborshortages, or chronic shortage of raw material. Of course, public invest-ment, and under the Empire, massive infusions of funds, explains a goodpart of the construction industry’s advantage over other sectors.

The exceptional nature of the Parisian building trades is also consti-tuted by the resilience of a tradition of protest. The strike was “invented”


as a term if not as a tactic on the very site of the place de Grève.Faced with recalcitrant and contentious building workers, concessionswere often made by entrepreneurs and by authorities who rarelyengaged in outright repression against this significant, mobile, and pub-licly exposed sector – the builders, of course, most often worked onhighly visible sites. They earned a healthy wage because they clamoredfor it, frequently by staking their livelihoods on the outcome of openconflict.10

Political engagement was often inseparable from social and economicstrife in the Revolution and Empire – and this study takes issue withhistorians who lay emphasis on political discourse detached from socialreferents. It also differs with monocausal arguments about single factorsleading to contentiousness, whether subsistence, class, fiscality, or thecatch-all idea of corporatism. In turning to the example of the survivalof guild politics after abolition: we have seen how the corporate orga-nization of professions in the ancien régime and the resulting conflictand mediation remained a core element of social relations in the post-guild labor market. A litigious culture created corporate rights, hard-wonin lawsuits, brought by guilds and journeymens’ compagnonnages alike,endured into the nineteenth century. Corporate culture, in sum, hardlydied with guild abolition. But neither was it all-determinate. The corpo-rate trades most elaborately policed in the ancien régime, such as that ofmasonry, were out of sync with habitually protectionist carpentry tradeswhere former masters and journeymen were in deep conflict. Labor strifein the carpentry trades erupted in the radical categories of 1789 and1791, and 1793–1794, whereas masons had moments of contentious-ness in 1785 and under the First Empire. The lack of a single source ofmilitancy is also demonstrated during the Terror where membership inparticular popular sections did not necessarily lead to radical engage-ment such as participation in uprisings. Often, political activism wasinfluenced not by the socio-economic status of sectional membershipbut rather by the politics of select and socially empowered groups whichgained power in civil committees or had access to key posts such as jus-tice of the peace and police commissioner. The patronage of powerfulnotables of the world of work – whether they called themselves sans-culottes or not – was too important for their real or potential employeesto oppose them openly in critical political moments.11

Other factors influencing revolutionary politics include occasionalhealth and environmental controversies set in peripheral quarters, suchas the faubourg Saint-Antoine and faubourg Saint-Marcel, where manyof the poorer laborers lived and worked. As marginal “false towns” (faux


bourgs) during the ancien régime they were the receptacles of greater num-bers of industrial workshops, hospitals, “banished” crafts like tanning,and varieties of toxic waste materials that emanated from hazardoustrade activites. The presence of the nauseating Bièvre tributary, nowcovered, was daily witness to the noxious effects of this manufacturingwaste. The complaints by the Pantheon’s laborers of workplace-relatedillness – a rare grievance in the eighteenth century – reflected the popu-lar revolt against the secondary status given to the world of work in theoutskirts of the city. Insalubrious working conditions were a new causefor protest relayed by the radical press and in the sections and clubs ofthe more militant quarters of the periphery. (Despite a similar social pro-file, the three popular sections representing the faubourg Saint-Marcelwere not always politically aligned.) Issues of health and environ-ment entered the vocabulary of labor strife. Here, we see preciselyhow the Revolution expanded the political sphere to accommodatedemocratic demands. While very few of these demands were in fact sat-isfied, of course, they represent the social and economic legacy of theRevolution.12

A broader assessment of ancien régime and revolutionary experiencesin the construction sector brings contingency and circumstance to theforefront. Experiments with policy were not predetermined to be exclu-sively corporatist, statist, or liberal. At the same time, the ideology ofmarket society as a self-regulating mechanism was rarely embraced byrevolutionary deputies or Napoleonic functionaries, despite the libertylobby that inspired corporate suppression. The Empire made labor regu-lation and construction of a piece with industrial strategy and urbanpolicy. Policing the world of work and city architecture were firmlyrelated as two state sciences of France in the capital city of the Empire.The building trades were the crucible of a range of pragmatic, creativeand supple strategies that guided the ancien régime and revolutionarystate in its determined commitment to make Paris the capital of theeighteenth century.

Epilogue: The nineteenth-century career of corporatism

The bookend that closes this study is furnished by the Napoleonic-eracivil architect Antoine-Marie Peyre. In his 1813 reflections upon the con-troversies provoked by Parisian construction during the revolutionaryperiod, Peyre offered a harsh indictment of its bequest. He portrayedthe Revolution’s reforms, after the suppression of the Bâtiment du Roi in


1791 as nothing less than the revenge of the philistines. He condemnedthe “new men” of the new order, the functionaries who did “not deservethe name of artists and whose ignorance about construction and admin-istration plunged the arts into barbarism.” The banalization of buildingin the Capital by ordinary bureaucrats and the consequent debasementof the architect’s title had led to a profound deterioration of Frencharchitecture. Peyre underscored the corruption of taste and qualityunder the Revolution by contrasting it with the ancien régime buildingsite which was “directed with order and executed with care.” The admin-istration of the Maison du Roi was an idyll, a “wise administration”where “the architects were paid honorably, and entrepreneurs whosebills were carefully verified by inspectors received the just wage fortheir labor.” In Peyre’s revisionist account of the state of official build-ing, a carefully cultivated French tradition was hopelessly subverted bythe dilettantes who dangerously formed the cadre of the Revolution’sadministrators and functionaries.13

This strident critique of the revolutionary administration of con-struction carved out an invented memory of a national tradition builtupon order and hierarchy. It represents a highly selective recollectionof the ancien régime, where the Crown’s lofty ambitions were rarelymatched by the practical capacity to remake Paris. Also, it representedan attack on the professionalization of specialized trades and servicesduring the Revolution, as well as an indictment of the opening ofthe building site to a new engineering and entrepreneurial elite whosecapacities often surpassed the men they replaced of the ancien régime.Finally, it posits a revolutionary contempt for an aesthetics of visionaryarchitecture and urban planning manifested by the “exclusive” favorgiven to civil construction in the new order. However, the exampleof the Pantheon, among other public structures, explodes the mythof a Revolution incapable of fusing aesthetic with practical considera-tions such as full employment and the protection of skilled craft laborin rough economic times. Elsewhere, these social and economic issueswere seized upon to justify architectural projects carried out by theConseil de Bâtiments civils. Henceforth, public investment in construc-tion would seek the transformation of Paris, from a glittering repositoryof ancien régime symbols in structures as disparate as street signs andchurches, to a platform for rather more plain-spun buildings, whichin Bronislaw Bazcko’s words, “exalt both the civic virtues and thestate that incarnates and inculcates them.” The social utility of archi-tecture, in the Revolution through the Empire, would be its greatestjustification.14


Antoine-Marie Peyre’s nostalgic narrative of revolutionary construc-tion attacked the political efforts of revolutionary administrators totransform the methods of decision-making as well as the organizationof labor on the building sites of Paris.15 The Revolution had indeedtoppled ancient building hierarchies, dismantled the corporate order,and swept away the Crown’s sprawling and ill-defined ancien régimebuilding administration, replacing it with public functionaries seek-ing to make construction into a public service.16 In fits and starts,the movement from the ancien régime to the new civic order entailedthe articulation of centralizing and formalized procedures for assuringaccess to positions on the worksite, controlling and verifying publicinvestments of entrepreneurs and contractors, and assuring the polic-ing of construction workers. After 1789, the Revolutionaries’ gradualcontainment and eventual absorption of Parisian municipal administra-tion required the transfer of the functions of public works to the centralstate’s Conseil des Bâtiments civils, tellingly under the jurisdiction ofthe Ministry of Interior. New administrative procedures for urban plan-ning began – and often ended – with policies to broaden sharply policeauthority and responsibility over the building trades.17

Following Peyre’s ambition to shape a narrative of revolutionary decayleads us to broader questions: what was the balance sheet of the Revolu-tionary and Napoleonic state’s recasting of the Parisian building trades?More generally, which entrepreneurial practices, labor struggles, repres-sive mechanisms, and institutional reforms, from 1763 to 1871, hadconsequences for the industrial era to come? Clearly, the innovations ofthis period, as well as resistance to them, prepared the capital city for itsmetamorphosis into an immaculately modern city. Deepened labor con-flict also extended and compounded the identity of Paris as the epicenterof the age of revolution.

The first fall of Napoleon in 1814 did not spell the end of the con-troversy over the corporatist revival. By 1817, the national CommercialCouncil estimated that 20 Parisian trades were already incorporated.18

The clear durability of the entrepreneurial corporations stimulateddebate on the utility of expanding the project to reincorporate moreeconomic sectors. As the Napoleonic advocacy of these corporationsconfirmed, however, to re-establish guild institutions was not strictlyto restore an ancien régime society of orders. More immediate andpractical grounds for a defense of guilds were found. For example,lingering discontent over the business tax that effectively purchasedthe right to engage in entrepreneurship called into question thereal difference between guild masterships and patentes. In the First


Restoration, petition literature thus made the case for guild revival onpurely fiscal terms, based upon the wealth that would flow to the state’scoffers by selling masterships. One anonymous memoir called for a fullguild reinstatement by praising the fiscal advantages of the corporations.Reminiscing that the taxes paid by corporations were a financial boon togovernment services, their restoration held out the promise of expand-ing the state’s tax base. “The masterships produced not only revenues forthe state; they also offered a great resource to humanity. Each appren-ticeship 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 ancienrégime society’s larger corporate ethos.19

Nevertheless, an evident bad press on ancien régime corporationsinformed one influential apologia of the entrepreneurial corporations.A stirring defense of these institutions was drafted in 1829 by the bar-rister Amyot, a specialist on Parisian building law. Amyot was hard putto defend the status quo of the building industry in Paris, which hadsuffered over 40 bankruptcies a year in the lean construction years,1827–1829, around 10 percent of all failures in Paris.20 His argumentassimilated the institutions into a larger discussion of the social respon-sibility of entrepreneurs to coordinate business and labor practices:

We begin first by reassuring those who believe they are seeing in thisorganization the reestablishment of the old guilds (les corporationsdes arts et métiers), so happily destroyed by the Revolution and whosevery existence was lethal to industry . . . . It is indeed a right, whichbelongs to all citizens, to share the common good of association tounite to enjoy freely and to promote the satisfaction that is theirdue . . . . We already see the merchants and industrialists of all classesassemble together in all the towns of the realm. The day will comewhen . . . all men exercising the same profession will meet regularly atfixed times to name their commissioners, who (in turn) will form atruly permanent Chambre syndicale.21

Thus were the builders’ Chambres syndicales championed in a deeplyparadoxical formulation. As befitting a construction law specialist,steeped in the arcana of the judicial framework of building, Amyotcaptured the contorted and contradictory career of entrepreneurial cor-poratism, the Chambres were not a part of a guild revival. Rather, theyembodied the movement from corporate privileges to individual rights,


which leads finally to an obligation or duty to associate under the watch-ful gaze of the state. The corporate solidarity of building entrepreneurswas an exercise of the legal right of assembly ushered in by theRevolution.

In Amyot’s portrayal, the incentive to collaborate was thrust uponentrepreneurs by the greater needs of society. The Chambre in itsrelation to the people of Paris represents merely “the discipline ofthe corps upon itself.” The Chambre is an appendage manipulatedby the demands of the larger organism, society a large. Amyot thusseized upon organicist imagery to underline his argument. Laissez-faireentrepreneurial liberty was a threat to society for it opposed particu-lar interests to the general interest of society. The liberty to engage inuncontained profiteering is a perilous misconception of rights, for “ina system of political economy, it will still be better to risk the feeblechance of the easing of competition than to resign oneself to supportthe 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 entrepreneurswho could not be trusted with absolute liberty were still a vital partof the social corps; the “system of political economy” required “theeasing of competition.” Amyot wielded the supple categories of thecorporate debate, adapting them crudely to the conservative BourbonRestoration. The essential “logic of association” begins with the rightof entrepreneurs to assemble and combine on building matters. Anincoherent jumble of political economy, corporatism, mercantilism,and authoritarianism lies at the heart of Amyot’s analysis. But emerg-ing from his apologia of entrepreneurial culture were the contours ofa durable neo-corporate discourse. Entrepreneurs exercised an organicright to assemble in banding together to make cooperative decisions onconstructing buildings.23

Amyot’s treatise was published the year before the 1830 Revolution.It thus provides a discursive opportunity to explore affinities betweenentrepreneurial and artisanal corporatism, for the freedom of expressionheralded in 1830 led to an outpouring of artisans’ journals, pam-phlets, and petitions that lasted until repression was renewed in April1834. In this brief instant of relative liberty, republican and socialistpamphlets once again articulated building workers’ aspirations. Theirgrievances, in turn, offer a glimpse into certain practices of buildingelites decided within the Chambres syndicales. The collected corpus of


builders’ demands were a composite response to the argument of Amyoton the necessity of entrepreneurial associations.24

The 1830 Revolution deeply implicated Parisian building trades work-ers who were highly visible on the Parisian barricades, as reflected bythe sheer numbers of lives sacrificed. Twenty percent of combatantskilled in the repression were identified as builders in one contempo-rary estimate.25 In another appraisal, the numbers of casualities sufferedamong members of the masonry trades were more than double their pro-portion of the male working population of Paris. An historian estimatesthat building workers made up 19 percent of all Parisian rebels in 1830and composed 28 percent of the crowds during the 1832 uprising.26

Again, the activism of building workers was aroused in inverse ratioto the organic cohesion of their craft, as the peripatetic maçons de laCreuse suffered many more casualties than closed Parisian trades wheremigrants were rarely welcomed. The 1830 Revolution once again throwsinto doubt the generalization that strong corporate solidarities provokedpolitical engagement in the early industrial period.27

In the aftermath of the “three glorious days” of the 27–29 July 1830Revolution, 80 Parisian journeymen masons signed a petition addressedto the newly ascended Louis Philippe. Heartened by the promise ofreform, the masons added their voice to a chorus of demands, suppli-cations, and appeals for improved salary and working conditions onbehalf of Parisian skilled workers. By August 1830, these “patriots” hadevery reason to suppose that an appeal would receive a sympathetichearing among the Orleanists just arrived in power. The newly installedprefect of Paris, Alexandre de Laborde, was nominated by the ParisianMunicipal Council. He had presided over the prestigious school of civilconstruction, l’école de Ponts et Chaussées, during the Empire andwas 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 peti-tioned to protest a “prejudical” practice instituted on the building sitesof Paris. They sought an abolition of piecework, whereby laborers werenot paid for rejected wares or work adjudged to be shoddy. The masonspleaded for a return to fixed salaries as an acquired right recognized bythe French Revolution. In petitioning, they “dare to take the liberty tocome to supplicate before the finest King, named justly the father of theworkers, to please protect timed labor as measured by the journée fullyacknowledged by past usage, and to have the benevolence to suppresswork paid by the task.”28


In a distinct echo of 1789 revolutionary discourse and practice, build-ing workers highlighted civic activism to protest the imposition ofpiecework. The masons of 1830 announced their good standing as patri-ots to bolster claims for equitable treatment – what later would be calledthe “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 dur-ing the memorable days of action.”29 The masons’ efforts “in defense ofnational liberties” should be rewarded by a return to a fixed salary. (Theprecise amount of that wage was not discussed in the petition.)

But in the interim between the drafting, posting, and reception of themasons’ petition, the civil engineer de Laborde had resigned his office.His replacement, a colorless career functionary, rejoined that the masonshad 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 theright of entrepreneurs to be freed of state intervention.30 Such economicfreedom was on an equal footing with a free press, a strengthened leg-islature, and a more open franchise. Thus, the new prefect conceived ofentrepreneurs’ liberty of industry as a fundamental right, no less sacredthan political freedom. The principles the masons had fought for, andforgotten, were those of economic and political citizenship, entailingclear-cut sets of obligations and duties to their masters, in a well-orderedliberal order.31

The struggles of the first French Revolution were hence revisitedupon the actors of 1830. Succeeding the workers on the site of thePantheon, the masons of 1830 protested the jettisoning of acceptedpractice – “acknowledged by past usage” – imposed by entrepreneur-ship in a liberalizing age. Following the logic of the Le Chapelier Lawof 1791, the prefect of the Seine responded in 1830 by affirming theright of entrepreneurs to impose work conditions as they saw fit. Dis-tinct from the petition literature in 1791, however, the masons of 1830were silent on issues that effected the Paris population at large suchas endangerment to public health and public safety by cost-cuttingand profit-seeking masters. Labor’s critique of entrepreneurial culturewas confined to unjust practices endured by skilled workers and notagainst citizens at large. Narrower categories of industrial class poli-tics had entered the discourse of labor protest. Furthermore, economicassociation in 1830 was legitimized by the very presence of the Cham-bres syndicales. The logic of coalition, so virulently attacked in the first


Revolution, was irrefutably authorized by 1830, despite the languageon “the liberty of industry.” Buried within the paradox of a state thatopenly upheld the corporate interests of entrepreneurs, while suppress-ing the right of workers to exercise their right to organize, would be theseeds of later industrial conflict.32

The Chambres syndicales survived well into the nineteenth century,publishing its Almanach des bâtiments annually until 1865.33 Whetherdefended in terms of “the liberty of industry” or as argued by the barris-ter Amyot in terms of a modified neo-corporate organicism, the Cham-bres remained an arm of the state to secure the well-policed constructionsite. The protection of the liberty of industry and corporate hierarchiesinvited state intervention in the absence of a coherent national laborcode. Here, we see how the three dreams of commerce easily co-existed.The same corps was simultaneously viewed as guardians of the flames ofneo-corporatism, liberalism, and state control.

“As the building trades go, so goes everything else.” By the timethat prosaic adage was cited by the Chamber of Commerce’s annualreport of 1851, it was already a cliché.34 Further, it was the conven-tional wisdom driving the visionary ambitions of Napoleon’s nephew,Napoleon III, who found much to admire in his uncle’s legacy ofrecasting the capital. By nominating the Baron Haussmann in 1853as departmental prefect of the Seine comprising Paris the SecondEmpire engaged in major urban renewal once again. Haussmann foundParisians weary after almost two decades of revolution and repression;a nation in a deep economic slump; and many Parisians mired in aninsalubrious capital in serious need of development and embellish-ment on a massive scale. A mere 40 years after the first Napoleon,this all must have seemed vaguely familiar. The vigorous stimulus rep-resented by state and municipal projects sprouting throughout thecapital of the Second Empire inspired a belief that salvation for thenation’s challenges came in the form of public investment to reconstructParis.

One relieved witness was happy to return to Paris in the 1850swhere “Bands of insurgents no longer roamed the streets but teams ofmasons, carpenters, and other artisans were going to work; if pavingstones were pulled up it was not to build barricades but to open theway for sewer and gas pipes.” In the Second Empire, as well as in theFirst Empire, one solution to many of the seemingly intractable socialand economic problems of the capital was to transform the urban fab-ric of the Capital, thereby supplying work for the unemployed while


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

carving out impressively monumental urban innovations to advertisethe imperium’s grandeur (Figure Conclusion.1).35

Despite a comparable façade, however, the contrast between theaccomplishments of the urban policies of the French Revolution andthat of Haussmannisation was tremendous. Whole neighborhoodsbetween 1789 and 1815, with mixed populations ranging from arti-sans to the bourgeoisie, were rebuilt or freshly opened in the north,northwest, and south by the appropriation, selling, and reconstruct-ing of over a tenth of Parisian properties as biens nationaux. Onlythe wealthiest quarters of the ancien régime such as the aristocraticMarais suffered neglect. The near-destruction and reconstruction ofentire neighborhoods were, of course, relatively unknown solutions tourban ills, with wholesale dismantling limited to religious structures(notably the vast abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés) as well as the vestigesof the enormous, privately owned complex known as the Temple near


what is now the place de la République. Only the First Empire’s pierc-ing of the rue de Rivoli from east to west led to major clearance.Finally, there was more absorption and incorporation than exclusionand eviction. A comprehensive political and urban integration of thecontentious outlying city was achieved after 1789. For example, thefaubourgs Saint-Marcel and Saint-Antoine were made constituent partsof Paris during and after the Revolution.

Less than a half century later, and with much greater means at hisdisposal, the Baron Haussmann took another tack altogether in themonumental reconstruction of Paris. Between 1853 and 1870, the capi-tal doubled its population to over a million souls through metropolitanexpansion. The partial or full annexation of 24 villages to outlyingneighborhoods also more than doubled the administrative size of Paris.In this period too Haussmann was granted nearly unlimited powersand vast quantities of public credit. He put both to full use. Overhalf the city was demolished and rebuilt to allow for the free flow ofair, goods, and people – the central theme of a resurgent and recur-rent “circulatory discourse” we met at the end of the ancien régime.Rapid movement through the city was made urban policy, if not urbangospel.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 wereparticularly devastated and the laboring population was pushed to theoutskirts of the city or to the suburbs. Over 30,000 working-class peoplefrom the ten inner arrondissements were forced out of their homes. Onthe central Île de la Cité a labyrinthine medieval quarter was leveled toclear away Nôtre Dame’s now-soulless parvis (ironically so, as the wordis derived from “paradise”). There, in the very heart of Paris, the popu-lation declined from 15,000 to less than 5,000 people. Speculation, rentincreases, as well as the flattening of neighborhoods created new formsof social segregation. Fashionable quarters in the capital were sociallyand financially inaccessible to the poorer classes.37

The teeming working-class housing in newly incorporated, newlycrowded outlying quarters, such as Belleville and Ménilmontant,clashed starkly with the sense of spaciousness created by parks andboulevards. An embellished western Paris was socially demarcated fromthe dilapidated squalor of poorer northeast and suburban areas. Butin a final historical irony, Haussmann’s legacy in the remaking ofParis also hastened an eternal return to the French revolutionary tra-dition. Inflamed social tensions flowed from the confiscation of thecity by elites and by the relegation of popular Paris to the city’s


outer limits. A movement to “reappropriate” Paris by its expropriatedworking class partly inspired the uprising of the Paris Commune in thespring of 1871. A quarter of the participants in the revolutionary crowdsand the barricades of the Commune were building tradesmen, manyof who were maçons de la Creuse come to Paris to seize the economicopportunity created by the “Haussmannisation” of the capital. In termsof 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 asa “laboring class, dangerous class” in the Parisians’ imaginaire, that they wereinvading hoards of “foreigners” (speaking incomprehensible patois and dressedin regional clothing) who represented a threatening form of social chaos. Thiswas 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, firstpublished in 1958, which focused on the particular prejudice against the maçonsde 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 ofordinary Parisians?

A complex interplay of legal, material, and economic factors led to a coher-ent policing of the ancien régime building trades. The supposed criminality ofprovincial builders in Paris is not borne out in a study of a little over 200arrested masons, carpenters, and roofers out of a total sample of over 3,000individuals sentenced in the period, 1773–1789 (before the creation of theDepartment, the Creuse), in the Parisian police jurisdiction of the Châtelet.The results suggest that the Parisian construction site was far from a fes-tering thieves’ den. In matters of ordinary crime – for this legal authoritytreated mostly property crimes and minor assaults – the Parisian builders wereproportionately an average social group. The percentage of builders’ to allindividuals sentenced (6 percent) coincides almost exactly with their represen-tation within the overall population of Paris. The feeble extent of the builders’implication in Parisian crime is also consistent with Arlette Farge’s smaller sam-pling of thieves of foodstuffs, in which just under one in ten such theftswere committed by building tradesmen.2 In sum, the percentage of “criminal”builders appears to correlate with their proportional relationship to the overallpopulation.3

The “dangerous class” thesis is profoundly debatable for the nineteenth cen-tury; but it certainly may not be projected back to the eighteenth century. Ananalysis of building tradesmen’s crimes show that few Parisians were victims asthey mostly concern escalating thefts of workplace tools and building materi-als. And more than half of the suspects of worksite crimes were accused of thetheft of valuable lead roof slats. This can be partially attributed to a black marketin stolen lead that thrived at the end of the eighteenth century. The ubiqui-tous eyewitnesses of all things Parisian at the end of the ancien régime, Mercierand Hardy, comment on the presence of merchants dealing in these and otherbuilding materials on the streets of Paris.4

More generally, the statistics on arrested builders in Paris explodes the cor-relation 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

ARRESTEDPARISIANS

Other IndividualsUnder Arrest

482 407 596 478 476 351 344 3,134

Builders UnderArrest

25 24 31 38 24 28 31 201

GEOGRAPHICORIGINS OFARRESTEDBUILDERS

Born in Paris 3 8 12 3 5 3 5 39Born in the

Provinces22 16 19 35 19 29 26 166

CHARGED CRIMESOF ARRESTEDBUILDERS

Thefts of tools ormaterials

5 1 6 13 9 11 9 54

Ordinary thefts orpossession offalse money

18 21 24 24 15 16 22 140

Assaults or Murders 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 self-description of the accused as being a “native” of a certain province, withoutindicating when the person immigrated, whether in Paris to stay, or just pass-ing through. Crime statistics in fact reflect that provincial builders in Paris werearrested in direct proportion to their numbers in the Capital.5 In sum, the build-ing trades were generally synonymous with migration, yet provincial labor didnot appear to bring increased criminality to the capital city. Paris at the end ofthe eighteenth century was not facing inundation by migrant criminals usingthe cover of the bustling building site and the anonymity of the capital to com-mit criminal acts. The tightly bound networks of migrant colonies, coupled withtrade solidarities, may have effectively checked the temptation of theft evenamong impoverished day laborers. Also the corporate order, despite the guilds’bad press toward the end of the ancien régime, was in fact an effective mechanismfor policing the labor force. Perhaps only social prejudice, the perception of Parisinundated, created the myth of a Parisian population suffering from rampant“insecurity.”6

The historical reconstruction of the building trades, through narrative, theo-retical, and statistical sources, discloses a clean break between the perception ofprivileged Parisians and the reality of their encounters with builders. The buildingprocess 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

482

407

596

478476

351344

25 24 31 38 24 28 31

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

3

8

12

35

35

22

16

19

35

19

2926

1773 1776 1779 1782 1785 1788 1789Year

Born in Paris Born in the provinces


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

Appendix 263

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

5

1

6

13

9

11

9

18

2124 24

1516

22

2 21 1 0 1 0

1773 1776 1779 1782 1785 1788 1789Year

Thefts of tools or materials

Ordinary thefts or possession of false money

Assaults or Murders


by the archetypical maçon de la Creuse, Martin Nadaud, in his memoirs. Simplyput, Parisians’ suspicion of newcomers and rejection of the laborers’ patois andprovincial 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 well-paid group of workers in the capital city during the last quarter of the eighteenthcentury.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 mili-tant, Vinçard, only rarely displayed such social prejudices in his rendering ofthe French working class – a sign of the extent of the bad press on buildingworkers.

3. Bertrand Bissuel, Clara Georges, “Un an après, récits de retour à la vie,” LeMonde, 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, editionfirst published in 1963). An outstanding example of a structural approach:Françoise Boudon, André Chastel, Hélène Ciyzy, and Françoise Hamon, Sys-tème 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 larevolution: 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 richand vast literature starting with, Louis Bandy de Nalèche, Les Maçons de laCreuse (Paris, 1859). On the legal history of builders: Robert Carvais, “Laforce du droit: Contribution à la définition de l’entrepreneur parisien dubâtiment au XVIIIe siècle,” Histoire, économie et société 2 (1995), 163–189;and Idem., “Le statut juridique de l’entrepreneur du bâtiment dans la Francemoderne,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 74 (1996), 221–252. Fora definition and powerful critique of the “linguistic turn”: Miguel Cabrera,“Linguistic Turn or Return to Subjectivism? In Search of an Alternative toSocial History,” Social History 26 (2001), 60–71.

7. A reference to and elaboration upon Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves ducommerce. Entreprise et institution dans la région lilloise (1780–1860) (Paris,1991).

8. Hilton Root thus condemns as a historical constant, the “French govern-ment’s redistributional (sic) capability”: The Fountain of Privilege: PoliticalFoundations 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 modernitéavant 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

2004). Victoria Thompson, “Telling ‘Spatial Stories’: Urban Space andBourgeois Identity in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Journal of Modern His-tory, 75 (2003), 590–633. Pierre Casselle, “Les travaux de la Commission desembellissements de Paris en 1853: pouvait-on transformer la capitale sansHaussmann?” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 155 (1997), 645–689.

10. François Dosse, L’Histoire en miettes. Des annales à la nouvelle histoire (Paris,1987). On the wider debate regarding the excessive specialization of histori-ans: 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).

11. Casey Harison, “An Organization of Labor: Laissez-Faire and Marchandage inthe Paris Building Trades Through 1848,” French Historical Studies, 20 (1997),357–80.

12. On plebeian radicalism: E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Soci-ety: Class Struggle Without Class?” Journal of Social History (May 1978), 133–165. See also: Peter King, “Edward Thompson’s Contribution to Eighteenth-Century Studies: The Patrician-Plebeian Model Re-examined,” Social History,21 (1996), 215–228.

13. For a critical overview, and rebuttal, of these methodological trends: MichaelKwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France(Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne, 2000), 311–323.

14. William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France. The Language of Labor fromthe Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge & NY, 1980). Michael Sonenscher, Workand Wages. Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades(Cambridge & NY, 1989). David Garrioch, Neighbourhood and Community inParis, 1740–1790 (Cambridge and New York, 1986). Steven Kaplan, La fin descorporations (Paris, 2001).

15. Two classic works will have to suffice to summarize the vast literature onHaussmannisation: François Loyer, Paris Nineteenth Century: Architecture andUrbanism (NY, 1988) and Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la ville, 1852–70: L’Urbanismeparisien à l’heure de Haussmann (Lille-Paris, 1976). A recent study on thenineteenth-century history of the migrant stonemasons of Paris has beenpublished too recently for the purposes of this book: Casey Harison, TheStonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Newark, 2008).

16. David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (NY, 2003). PatriceHigonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Cambridge, 2002). David Harvey, Paris:Capital of Modernity (London, 2003), and Colin Jones, Paris, op. cit., take rad-ically different approaches to the capital’s past and present. In their uniqueways, these rich, synthetic studies call attention to the continued – andgrowing – popular, scholarly, and student interest in the history of Paris.

17. Gérard Noiriel, “Monde et mouvement ouvriers dans le bâtiment: bilanet perspectives historiographiques,” in Histoire des métiers du bâtiment auxXIXe et XXe siècles, Jean-François Crola and André Guillerme (eds.) (Paris,1991), 113–130, especially 124. Also: Gabriel Désert, “Aperçus sur l’industriefrançaise du Bâtiment au XIX Siècle,” in Le bâtiment, enquête d’histoireéconomique, 14e-19e siècles. I: Maisons rurales et urbaines dans la Francetraditionnelle, Jean-Pierre Bardet, et al. (eds.) (Paris, 2002), 3–119.

18. Richard Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic andSocial Study (Baltimore, 1980) and Elizabeth McKellar, The Birth of Modern

266 Notes to Pages 8–14

London. The Development and Design of the City 1660–1720 (Manchester andNew York, 1999).

19. Rearick and Wakeman, “Introduction, Paris Revisited, 1–8.”20. Hilary Ballon, The Paris of Henri IV: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge,

Mass., 1991).21. Istvan Hont, The Jealousy of Trade. International Competition and the Nation-

State in Historical Perspective. (Cambridge, MA, 2005). For the expression,“doux commerce”: Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: PoliticalArguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977).

22. Catherine Larrère. L’invention de l’économie au XVIIIe siècle. Du droit naturel àla physiocratie (Paris, 1992).

23. Kwass, Privilege and the Politics, 61–65.24. Voltaire, “Des embellissements de Paris” (1749), Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire,

Ulla Kölving, et al. (eds.) (Genève, Banbury, and Oxford, 1968–), vol. 31B,199–233.

25. Ralph Kingston, “The Bricks and Mortar of Revolutionary Administration,”French History, vol. 20, no. 4 (December 2006), 405–423.

26. Cissie Fairchilds, “The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods inEighteenth-Century Paris,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, Roy Porterand John Brewer (eds.) (New York & London, 1993), 228–248. MichaelSonenscher, The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1987).

27. Cited in Jean-François Cabestan, La conquête du plain-pied. L’immeuble à Parisau XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2004), 28.

28. Fairchilds, “The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods.”29. Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, La naissance de l’intime. 3,000 foyers parisiens,

XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1988), 195–196.30. The August 1766 ordinance is discussed in Chapter 2. Philip T. Hoffman,

Gilles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Des marchés sans prix: uneéconomie politique du crédit à Paris, 1660–1870 (Paris, 2001), 204–205. JosephFélix, “The Economy,” in Old Regime France, William Doyle (ed.), (Oxford,2001), 25–26.

31. Sonenscher, The Hatters.32. Stephen Miller, State and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: A Study of

Political Power and Social Revolution in Languedoc (Washington, DC, 2008).33. Haim Burstin, Une Révolution à l’oeuvre. Le faubourg Saint-Marcel 1789–1794

(Seyssel, 2005), 332.34. This argument on the development of capitalism is contradicted, most

recently, by the economic historian, Kevin H. O’Rourke, The worldwideeconomic impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815, Journal of Global History, 1 (1), 2006, 123–149. For an older challenge tothe assertion that the French Revolution was synonymous with the originsof capitalism: George V. Taylor, “Non-capitalist wealth and the origins of theFrench Revolution,” American Historical Review, 72 (1966–7), 469–496.

35. For an overview and critique: Nancy L. Green, “The Politics of Exit: Reversingthe Immigration Paradigm,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 77, no. 2 (June2005), 263–289.

36. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France,1870–1914 (Stanford, CA, 1976). See the criticism by: Charles Tilly, “Did the


Cake of Custom Break?” in Consciousness and Class Experience in 19th and20th Century Europe, John Merriman (ed.) (New York, 1980).

37. Richard Cobb, Police and the People: Reactions to the French Revolution (London,1972).

38. Anne Conchon, Le Péage en France au XVIIIe siècle. Les privilèges à l’épreuve dela réforme (Paris, 2002).

39. Alain Corbin, Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin au XIXe siècle, 1845–1880,2 vols. (Paris, 1975). Abel Chatelain, Les migrants temporaires en France de1800 à 1914, Histoire économique et sociale des migrants temporaires des cam-pagnes françaises au XIX◦ siècle et au début du XX◦ siècle, 2 vols. (Lille, 1976),781–784.

40. Frédéric Tiberghien, Versailles. Le chantier de Louis XIV, 1662–1715 (Paris,2002), 123. Annie Moulin, “La Haute Marche, terre d’émigration au XVIIIesiècle,” Les limousins en quête de leur passé, Bernadette Barrière, et al. (eds.)(Limoges, 1986), 81–92.

41. A.N. F20 434–5 VIII, Enqûete sur les ouvriers: Creuse, 13 septembre 1808. AnnieMoulin, Les maçons de la Creuse: les origines du mouvement (Clermont-Ferrand,1994), 18, 70, 298.

42. Martin Nadaud, Léonard, maçon de la Creuse (Paris, 1982), 67–76. The com-ings and goings of masons have been confused with the travelling rites ofcompagnonnages, the journeymen’s brotherhoods. Their rite of passage, thetour de France, typically lasted seven years and involved sejourning and train-ing in most major cities. However, the masons were rarely involved in thesecompagnonnages and few, in any case, existed for Parisian building trades-men. I have found no documentation on Parisian compagnonnages, nor haveDavid Garrioch and Michael Sonenscher: “Compagnonnages, Confraterni-ties and Associations of Journeymen in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” EuropeanHistory Quarterly, 16 (1986), 25–45. Cynthia Maria Truant concludes that “inthe nineteenth century carpenters and stonecutters insistently claimed andwere often believed to be the oldest and most important trades in com-pagnonnages. 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.

43. Gérard Noiriel, Le creuset français (Paris, 1988). Françoise Raison-Jourde, Lacolonie auvergnate de Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1976), 110, 121–126. VincentMilliot, “La surveillance des migrants et des lieux d’accueil à Paris du XVIesiècle aux années 1830,” in La ville promise – Mobilité et accueil à Paris(fin XVIIe-début XIXe siècles) (Paris, 2000), Daniel Roche (ed.), 21–76. Jean-François Dubost and Peter Sahlins, . . . Et si on faisait payer les étrangers? (Paris,1999). Jean-François Dubost, La France italienne, XVIe-XVIIe siècles (Paris,1997).

44. Moulin, 449–451.45. Provincial laborers in Paris were “an army of dirty and wretched workers”

according to Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur architecture (Paris, 1755), 2.46. 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.


47. Pierrre-Jacques Derainne, Le Travail, les migrations et les conflits en France:représentations et attitudes sociales sous la monarchie de Juillet et la secondeRépublique (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 traversla Révolution (Paris, 1977). An exception to this narrative, for the sheer indi-vidualism and iconoclasm of its author, is that of the glazier Ménétra: DanielRoche, editor, Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal de ma vie (Paris, 1982).

48. Nadaud, Léonard, maçon de la Creuse. Nadaud (1815–1898) had an impressivecareer as a worker-deputy from the Creuse who supported Louis Blanc in theSecond 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., Introduc-tion by Jean-Pierre Rioux, 5–18. Nadaud’s account of work and revolutionhas enjoyed a certain status for historians of nineteenth-century France: See,for example, his extensive use by David Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuild-ing of Paris (Princeton, 1958) and by William Reddy, Money and Liberty in Mod-ern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge, 1987), 98–101.

49. BNF V 21544, Almanach des bâtiments, 1776. AD XI 16 and BNF 21035, LesStatuts des maîtres couvreurs. The guild’s title was “La Communauté des cou-vreurs, plombiers, carreleurs et paveurs.” Cf. discussion in Sonenscher, Workand 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 Revolu-tion, 1750–1830 (Boston, 2006). Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: PublicDebt, 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 laTerreur (Paris, 1921). Ken Adler, Engineering the Revolution. Arms and Enlighten-ment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, 1997). André Guillerme, La naissancede 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: TheConstruction Trades, the Pre-Industrial Market, and theGuild 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 ofParis and the Crises of the Ancien Régime: The Police and the People of theParisian Building Sites, 1750–1789,” first published in the French Historical


Studies, special issue, “New Perspectives on Modern Paris,” vol. 27, no. 1(2004), 9–48, edited by Charles Rearick and Rosemary Wakeman.

2. Despite the importance of the ancien régime construction industry to Paris,there are very few studies on this sector of the economy. From a perspectiveon the history of Parisian buildings, see: Youri Carbonnier, Maisons parisi-ennes des Lumières (Paris, 2006). Also: Gabriel Désert, “Aperçus sur l’industriefrançaise du bâtiment,” op. cit.

3. Denis Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France du XVIe siècle à nos jours (Paris,1998, 3rd edition), 23.

4. “Quand le bâtiment va, tout va.” Anthony Vidler, L’Espace des Lumières. Archi-tecture 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 chaussées1747–1851 (Paris, 1992). Michel Gallet, Demeures parisiennes (Paris, 1964).Pierre Lavedan, Histoire et urbanisme à Paris (Paris, 1975). The estimate byMercier: Tableau Livre 8, chapitre DCXXXVI. Similar estimates of buildingsin Paris: Pierre-Denis Boudriot, “La Maison parisienne sous Louis XV: masseet 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, ouJournal d’événemens tels qu’ils parviennent à ma connoissance (1753–1789), vol.6; “Mardi, 15 novembre, 1785, Etat actuel des travaux publics,” fol. 227.

5. Statistics for Tables A-1–3 are derived from the “Braesch Papers,” in theArchives nationales (henceforth, “A.N.”) F 30 109–204 and F 30 131–160,concerning the exchange of livres for the revolutionary currency, the assig-nats. This source has been unjustly dismissed for evoking an illusionaryParisian world of work with many more large-scale employers than was actu-ally the case. But this author agrees with Richard Andrews on the “BraeschPapers” “utility and genuine social richness”: “Social Structures, PoliticalElites and Ideology in Revolutionary Paris, 1792–1794: A Critical Evalua-tion of Albert Soboul’s Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II,” Journal of SocialHistory, vol. 19, no. 1 (Fall, 1985), 71–112, 77 and 104. On the debate, seeMichael Sonenscher, Work and Wages, 140–141. Also, cf., Albert Soboul, LesSans-Culottes parisiens en l’an II (Paris, 1958), 435–436. It is quite true thatonly the patrons with a great number of laborers sought out assignats topay wages. But this is precisely the point: in the construction sector, themajority of building entrepreneurs and contractors had large workforces.Finally, evidence that about 1 in 20 Parisians worked in the building tradesmay be confirmed by a comparison between this source of 1790–1791 andthe more highly regarded (because more closely verified by revolutionaryauthorities) cartes de sûreté of 1792–1794. In a sampling of 12,000 of thesecards, the demographers A. Blum and J. Houdaille found almost precisely thesame number: 6 percent of the Parisian population were in the constructiontrades. More cross-checking in specific neighborhoods confirms the accu-racy of the archival source for this sector. For the Faubourg Saint-Marcel andthe Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the “Braesch Papers” indicate that the num-ber of laborers and masters in this sector is 2,242. The cartes de sûreté twoyears 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


de civismes,” Population, 2-1986, 259–302: Haim Burstin, Le faubourg Saint-Marcel 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.

6. Durand, “Les salaires,” 466–480. Gallet, Demeures parisiennes, 18. DanielRoche, The People of Paris. An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th Cen-tury (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).

7. James Farr, “On the Shop Floor: Guilds, Artisans, and the European Mar-ket 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 theclassic narratives of the decline of the ancien régime: Kwass, Privilege, 3–24: 13.The present author agrees with Kwass’ critique of current historical researchthat “divorce political culture from social referents of all kinds.” (10).

8. Bien, “Old Regime Origins of Democratic Liberty,” in The French Idea of Free-dom. The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, Dale van Kley(ed.) (Stanford, 1994), 23–71. Christine Métayer, Au tombeau des secrets. Lesécrivains publics du Paris populaire. Cimetière des Saints-Innocents, XVIe–XVIIIesiècles (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.

9. Colin Jones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivifed. 1789 and Social Change,” inThe 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.

10. For the persistence of an anglophile critique, which offers a comparison ofa dynamic England to the “conservatism, protectionism and stagnation” ofeighteenth-century France, see Hilton Root, The Fountain of Privilege: PoliticalFoundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England (Berkeley, 1994).

11. Camille Pascal, “Contribution à une histoire économique de la mai-son parisienne au XVIIIe siècle. Patrimoine, entretien, revenus,” in Pariset ses campagnes sous l’Ancien Régime. Mélanges offerts à Jean Jacquart,Michel Blanchard, Jean-Claude Gervé, Nicole Lemaître (eds.) (Paris, 1994),165–173.

12. This social elite of proprietors consisted of the nobility, the magistrates, orthe royal counselors. In addition, unskilled laborers (gens de métiers sans qual-ités) made up a surprising 7 percent of the sampling. Statistics derived froma sampling of 2,113 inventaires après décès: Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, Lanaissance de l’intime. 3,000 foyers parisiens, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1988),195–196.

13. Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Des marchéssans 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,


Le faubourg Saint-Antoine, 49–88. And Steven Kaplan, “Les corporations, lesfaux ouvriers et le faubourg Saint-Antoine,” Annales: ESC 40 (March–April1988), 253–278.

14. 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 buildingmaterials: Guillaume de Bertier Sauvigny, Nouvelle histoire de Paris. La Restau-ration, 1815–1830 (Paris, 1977), 75. On the labor practice of marchandage –“inside contracting” or “piece-mastering” – in the nineteenth century thatalso inspired fears of shoddy buildings: Casey Harison, “An Organization ofLabor: Laissez-Faire and Marchandage in the Paris Building Trades Through1848,” French Historical Studies, vol. 20, no. 3 (1997), 357–380. Youri Car-bonnier, “Les maisons à ponts parisiens à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: étude d’unphénomène,” Histoire, économie et société, 17 (1998), 711–724.

15. B.N. Joly de Fleury 1423, Mémoire sur la police des bâtiments (n.d.). B.N. FondsDelamare, F.F. 21677, “La Chambre de Maçonnerie,” fols. 33–37, on aninvestigation by the Procureur de roi. A.N. A.D. XI Lettres Patentes du Roi,20 mai 1782.

16. Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée nationale (henceforth, B.A.N.) MS 1229, fol.34, “Délibérations des Maçons.” This document consists of transcripts andfinancial records of the Communauté des maîtres maçons, dating from 1702to 1762. It is a rarity: most Parisian guild deliberations and records weredestroyed in the Hôtel de Ville fire of 1871.

17. B.A.N. MS 1229, fols. 62–63. Cf., Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages, esp.,chapter 3, “Journeymen and the Law,” 73–98.

18. 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 real-estate agents on the possibility of buildings collapsing into ancient tunnelsor abandoned quarries: “Paris est un gruyère.”

19. B.A.N. MS 1229, fol. 21 novembre 1763, “Nouveaux statuts et règlements surles sindics et adjoints . . . des Maître maçons et entrepreneurs de bâtiments,” fols.65–94.

20. Alain Thillay, “L’économie du bas au faubourg St-Antoine (1656–1776),” His-toire, 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 auxXVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 2002). Kaplan, “Les corporations, les faux ouvri-ers 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.

21. P. Couperie and E. Le Roy Ladurie, “Le mouvement des loyers parisiensde la fin du Moyen Age au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales: ESC, juillet-août 1970,1002–1023. The precipitous rise in rents was compounded by the wretchedconditions in which a majority of laborers lived in Paris. In a sampling of 62inventaires après décès of the working poor between 1721 and 1761, 70 per-cent lived in single rooms and 85 percent of these mal-logés were estimatedto 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.”


Ernest Labrousse, et al., Histoire économique et sociale de la France, tome II(1660–1789), 560–561. Daniel Roche, The People, 68–76.

22. Garrioch, “L’habitat urbain à Paris (XVIIIe-début XIXe siècle),” Cahiersd’histoire, 44 (1999), 573–589: 550. Neighborhood and Community in Paris,1740–1790 (NY and Cambridge, 1986).

23. Georges Poisson, “Le Paris de Louis XV,” Paris et ses campagnes, 175–185.24. 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 RevolutionaryBuilders, 1789–1791,” in The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citi-zenship, Renée Waldinger, et al. (ed.) (Westport, 1993), 185–201: 193. OnPanckoucke’s printing shop: Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics inRevolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley, 1991), 68 and 171. On the royalglassworks factory and Reveillon: George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revo-lution (Oxford, 1959), 34. On the Gobelins: Burstin, Le faubourg, 224–225. Cf.the royal printed cloth manufacture, 15 kilometers outside of Paris, wherea thousand workers labored: Alain Dewerpe and Yves Gaulupeau, La fab-rique des prolétaires. Les ouvriers de la manufacture d’Oberkampf à Jouy-en-Josas,1760–1815 (Paris, 1990), 31–34.

25. Marcel Reinhard, Nouvelle histoire de Paris. La Révolution 1789–1799 (Paris,1971), 78. Sabine Juratic, “Mobilités et populations hébergées en garni,” inLa ville promise. Mobilité et accueil à Paris (fin XVIIe-début XIX siècles), DanielRoche (ed.) (Paris, 2000), 175–220: 187. Mercier, Tableau 1, “Chambresgarnies,” chapitre XLVII, 129–131.

26. 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 work-day of builders as between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. in the winter and between5:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. in the summer. For example: Bibliothèque nationalede France (henceforth B.N.F.) F-5011: Ordonnance de police portant défense auxmaçons, charpentiers, couvreurs, tailleurs de pierre d’exiger des nouveaux venus desrepas de bienvenue et de les empêcher de louer leur travail au dessous d’un certainprix, 21 mai 1667.

27. Marie-Annie Moulin, Les maçons de la Haute Marche au XVIIIe siècle(Clermont-Ferrand, 1987), 444 and 448.

28. 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 theyrepaired at the entry of the Faubourg St. Martin by the unseen fall of planksfrom the first floor,” fol. 171. On policing the place de Grève: Sentence dePolice A.N. AD 125b (17 August 1787). Michel Le Moël and Jean Derens, Laplace de Grève (Paris, 1991).

29. Tableau, vol. 8, chapitre. DCXXXIX, Charpentiers: 389. Mercier was a par-ticularly virulent critic of the Parisian construction site: Tableau de Paris,vol. 8, chapitre DCXXXVI: Bâtiments, 378–382. Chapitre DCXXXVII: Ouvri-ers en bâtiment: 382–385. Chapitre DCXXXVIII: Maçons: 385–388. ChapitreDCXXXIX: Charpentiers: 389–391. Chapitre DCXL: Jurés experts: 391–392.A sampling of Mercier’s acerbic observations: “Les procès résultants de savicieuse construction ont mis dans un jour évident les fautes graves desouvriers en bâtiment, et combien les malheureux propriétaires ont été


trompé par ces hommes . . . ”: “388.” Un seul homme se contenterait d’unprofit honnête, mais il faut être mangé par plusieurs artisans, chacun dansson 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 maçonet le charpentier s’entendent d’abord entre eux, ensuite avec les autres ouvri-ers, pour cacher leurs fautes et leurs malversations. Cette multitude de petitsprotégés que l’architecte encourage sous main à multiplier les frais se liguentpour accabler le propriétaire”, 382–383. “Les ouvriers en bâtiment sont plusrusés et encore plus heureux que les procureurs dans ce qu’ils piratent; carils ont eu l’art jusqu’ici de conserver leur réputation. Un procureur, lorsqu’ilmanque la probité, est obligé, pour s’enrichir, de travailler sur deux centsaffaires courantes . . . . Mais l’architecte, l’ouvrier en bâtiment ne ruinent ordi-nairement chaque année qu’un citoyen, qu’un père de famille. Le voilà doncqu’une voix s’élève: la bâtisse d’une maison vaut plus que dix procès”, 385.

30. A.N. AD I 23A, “Edit du Roi portant création de 25 jurez architectes et (25) bour-geois.” The number of experts was increased to 60 in 1698: Arrêt du conseild’Etat, 17 juin 1698, B.N. MS FR 21679, Fonds Delamare, Bâtiments, t. V, fols.272–279.

31. Not only were the 30 “architectes-experts-bourgeois,” forbidden to “engage inany enterprise either directly, or indirectly by intermediaries,” they were alsonot “to have any associations whatsoever with entrepreneurs”: A.N. AD I23A: “Edit du Roi.” The Chambre des Bâtiment’s deliberations are preservedfor the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the A.N.series “Z1J.” This immense repertory is divided into two parts: the procès-verbaux 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. Contributionà la définition de l’entrepreneur parisien du bâtiment au XVIIIe siècle,” His-toire, économie et société, 2 (1995), 163–189. Carvais, “Le statut juridique del’entrepreneur du bâtiment dans la France moderne,” Revue historique de droitfrançais et étranger, vol. 74, no. 2 (1996), 221–252.

32. 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: Renéde Lespinasse (ed.), Les métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris, vol. 1:XIVe–XVIIIe siècles: Ordonnances générales (Paris, 1886), 612–613. On thecorporation’s history focusing on statutes and ordinances: J.J. Letrait, “Lacommunauté des maîtres maçons à Paris au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles,” Revuehistorique 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 amongguildsmen: 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).

33. 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 Roya sur lesdits Maîtres Maçons & autres ouvriers dépendans de l’Art de Maçon-nerie (Paris, 1721). Mercier, Tableau, 1, Chapter LXXXIX, “Ameublements,”228–229.


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 desBâtiments. A valuable study of this elusive source: Nicolas Lemas, «Les “pagesjaunes” du bâtiment parisien au XVIIIe siècle», Histoire urbaine, no. 12, avril2005, 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 fromits contents, 1724–1725). The primacy of public interest over corporate sol-idarity was expressed in the condemnation of an entrepreneur by his peersin the Chambre for the use of “unqualified labor” in the construction of afoundation: 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 Fleury419.

38. Despite a historical myth, this was not a discourse exclusive to thenineteenth and twentieth centuries: Youri Carbonnier, Maisons parisiennes,123–124.

39. A formidable legal expertise was a requirement for membership in theChambre des bâtiments which thus restricted access to its venal offices. Theinventaire après décès of Jean-Baptist Depuisieux in 1776, an expert-bourgeoisassociated with the building of Ste. Geneviève, has no mention of an atelierand any tools. But Despuisieux had an extensive library comprising some400 books. Included in the library were 28 volumes on building laws, 50volumes on Parisian geography, and 80 volumes on geometry. He surelydeserved 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 duringthe eighteenth century is unusual. William Doyle found an expansion ofvenal offices after 1771, when hereditary privileges were attached to guildmasterships; the overall number of masterships numbered 46,000 by theRevolution: Doyle, Venality. The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France(New York & Oxford, 1996), 69, 121, and 309. The lieutenant général de policein 1775 complained that 400,000 livres each year were spent on legal costsby 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 andthe inspector of manufacture and commerce from Reims, Simon Clicquot deBlervache, by: Kaplan, La fin des corporations, 29–47.

43. On the impact of architectural discourse upon public opinion: RichardWittman, “Architecture, Space, and Abstraction in the Eighteenth-CenturyFrench Public Sphere,”Representations, vol. 102, no. 1 (2008), 1–26.

44. The Encyclopédie’s article on “Maçonnerie,” by the construction law specialistJ.R. Lucotte, featured 60 pages of text illustrated by over 150 plates. Its suc-cess was such that it was republished separately: J.R. Lucotte, Description des


arts et métiers, L’art de la maçonnerie (Paris, 1783). Diderot citation in Vidler,L’espace des Lumières, 148.

45. M. de Fremin, Mémoires critiques d’architecture contenant l’idée de la vraie etde la fausse architecture (1702). A. Desgodetz, Les lois des bâtiments suiv-ant la coutume de Paris (1748). Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, Le guide del’architecture pratique pour ceux qui veulent bâtir (2 vols., 1781). Le Camus,the innovative architect of les Halles aux Blés (1762), was an architecte-expert-bourgeois between 1750 and 1789. His was an insider’s critique ofthe 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, Nouveautraité de toute l’architecture (1706).

46. 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 contoursof Habermas’ argument. On construction issues, the appeal to the public bymagistrates – public safety, public good, and public interest – indeed becamea recurrent theme in this period following the 1771 Maupeou “coup” againstthe magistrates of the Parlement of Paris. The Structural Transformation ofthe Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1989; original German version, 1962), 5, 9,68–70. See also Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston, 1973; original Germanversion, 1969), 77.

47. Laugier, 136–138. “Cheating” is a translation of “les friponneries.”48. 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-Experts-Bourgeois, 24–25. F. Bayard, Joel Félix, P. Hamon, Dictionnaire des surintendantset contrôleurs généraux des finances, XVIe-XVIIe-XVIIIIesiècles (Paris, 2000).

49. 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 ulti-mately failed. The French state was heavily dependent on the contributionsof the corporations: Kwass, Privilege, 12. Gail Bossenga, “Taxes,” in A Criti-cal Dictionary of the French Revolution, François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.)(Cambridge, MA. and London, 1989, French edition first published in 1988),582–589.

50. De Lespinasse, Les métiers et corporations, vol. 1: “Édit du roi portant suppres-sion des jurandes et communautés de commerce, arts et métiers.” Février,1776, 162–175. On the broader context of previous efforts by reform minis-ters 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 disciplinedand more extensive royal bureaucracy,” vol. 1, 228.

51. 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.

52. Flammermont, Remontrances, vol. 3, 2–4 March 1776, 309 and 333.53. Elsewhere, the Paris Parlement made explicit connections between previous,

failed experiments in liberalization under Laverdy, 1763–1764 and underTurgot, 1775, when price controls on grain were lifted resulting in subsis-tence riots. The paternalist Parlementarians of 1776 evoked these food crises


as another instance where Parlement was “alerted by the cry” of the peopleto intervene. Remonstrances, vol. 3, 2–4 March 1776, 297, 313, and 318.

54. Ibid., 310. As an example, in 1724 the King tried to delimit the boundary ofouter Paris by erecting 300 markers as the effective “town limits.” Garrioch,The Making, 128.

55. Remonstrances, 2–4 March 1776, 319 and 312.56. Ibid., 309–310. See Steven Kaplan, “Réflexions sur la police du monde du

travail, 1700–1815,” Revue historique 261 (January–March 1979), 17–77: 69.57. Remonstrances, Août, 1776: 312.58. 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 June1776). De Lespinasse, Les métiers, edict of August 1776, 175–188. On the post-August 1776 building corporations: 616–632. See Steven Kaplan’s book onthe end of the corporations that interprets the period, 1776–1791 – from therestoration of the guilds to their definitive abolition by the loi Le Chapelier –as a fertile moment of experimentation in which a rather pragmatic reformistguild policy was elaborated. This held out, if only too briefly, the possibilityof an innovative corporatism in France: La fin des corporations, 320–323.

59. Moulin, Les maçons, 444 and 448.60. 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. Onthe livrets: A.N. AD XI 20, Lettres patentes du Roi, 5 Septembre 1782.

61. The commissaire Allix’s descents in the carpentry trade, 1785–1789, are doc-umented in A.N. Y 10806 to Y 10810. On 5 November 1786, Allix engagedin five separate interventions: A.N. Y 10809C. Source on the place de Grève:A.N. AD XI 16.

62. The recrudescence of labor strife toward the end of the ancien régime isconfirmed by Jean Nicolas in his monumental study of popular uprisingsin France from 1661 to 1789. Around 30 percent of Nicolas’ sampling of462 dossiers of eighteenth-century labor conflict occurred in the period1780–1789: La Rébellion française. Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale1661–1789 (Paris, 2002), 292–293. David Garrioch argues “clusters of dis-putes” around salaries and labor conditions at century’s end “have no directconnection to the Revolution:” The Making of Revolutionary Paris, 66.

63. A.N. Y 9949, Garde de Paris, Poste à Vaugirard, rapport de 2 Mai, 1785, à 6heures du soir. Cf. Sonenscher, “Journeymen, the Courts, and the FrenchTrades, 1781–1791”: Past and Present 114 (February 1987), 77–109: 84.

64. Mois Tailleurs depierres

Maçons Limousins(plasterers)

Main-d’œuvre

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. Thissliding scale accurately reflects the weak demand in construction during the


winter months. But it is also very much a minimum wage in comparison tothe salaries given in other sources, such as the haphazard but rich collectionof documentation by bankrupt artisans and commerçants in the Archivesde Paris (henceforth, “A.P.”) D5B6 1966, Grelet, Entrepreneur des bâtiments,“Brouillon de paie, 1777–1785.” Also, A.P. D5B6 983, De Lagenalle, Maîtremaçon. 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,” Revuehistorique 5 (December 1910), 332–347.

65. Hardy, Mes Loisirs, vol. 6, fol. 149. The veracity of Hardy’s colorful accountis confirmed by the fonds of Joly de Fleury, the Crown’s prosecutor of theParis Parlement. These include a letter from Lenoir. True to his word, heargues to have the Chambre’s Sentence overturned. The Chambre had sur-passed its mandate in “the jurisdiction over building” and had transgressedonto the Parisian police’s jurisdiction: B.N. Joly de Fleury, fol. 17, 26, July1785, “Extrait des régistres du Parlement.” Fol. 9: Lettre au procureur général duParlement (n.d.: 25, July 1785 from the content).

66. Hardy, vol. 6, fol. 154, 29, July 1785.67. The Chambre’s efforts at classification coincided with the larger project to

render the capital more uniform and “rational.” Other examples: the num-bering of houses and the explosion of almanacs to help clients find particularbusinesses: Garrioch, The Making, 237–241.

68. The Invention of Tradition, ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger(Cambridge, 1993). In another context, David Bell demonstrates how Frenchlawyers at the end of the ancien régime used “an ideological construction inan all-too familiar attempt to contrast a lost, mythical golden age . . . witha corrupt and dispiriting present,” Lawyers and Citizens. The Making of aPolitical Elite in Old-Regime France (New York and Oxford, 1994), 205.

69. One advocate of the corporate solution was Lenoir himself. On proposalsto 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 descorporations, 324–362.

70. For an overview of this historiography: William Beik, “The Absolutism ofLouis XIV as Social Collaboration,” Past and Present, vol. 188, no. 1 (2005),195–224.

71. On the debate about a service nobility and its discourse on merit, see JaySmith (ed.), The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century Reassessments andNew Approaches (Philadelphia, 2006).

2 The Revolution and Construction Guilds, 1789–1793

1. On the impact of public opinion in weakening the monarchy: Lisa JaneGraham, 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 communityin Paris favoring suppression: Steven Kaplan, La fin des corporations, 376.


Timothy Tackett, Par la volonté du peuple. Comment les députés de 1789 sontdevenus révolutionnaires (Paris, 1997).

4. Archives de Paris (henceforth, A.P.), 4AZ 692, “Municipalité de Paris: lesAdministrateurs du Département à MM. les Syndics de la Communauté desmaîtres maçons” (décember 1790). Also, cf., instructions in B.N. V 21549,Almanach des bâtiments, 1790, 23. Cf., Danielle Chadych and DominqueLeborgne, Atlas de Paris. Evolution d’un paysage urbain (Paris, 1999),108–109.

5. Hoffman, et al., Des marchés sans prix, 204–205.6. 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 àla fin du XIXe siècle,” Cahiers d’histoire, vol. 21, no. 3 (1976), 273–306. RobertGraves: 1962 interview on BBC-TV.

7. Cabestan, La conquête, 18. Roche, The People, 99.8. 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 livresin expenses. A portion of the excess funds was flamboyantly given as a con-tribution (dons gratuits) to the Crown’s navy. The monarchy, indeed, had avested interest in the health of the corporations.

9. 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 publish-ers: 13 out of the 21 bankruptcies between 1789 and 1793 occurred in 1790alone: Hesse, Publishing, vol. 39, no. 71, 73–76.

10. Isser Woloch, The New Regime. Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York and London, 1994).

11. Youri Carbonnier, “Les maisons à ponts parisiens à la fin du XVIIIesiècle: étude d’un phénomène,” Histoire, économie et société, 17 (1998),711–724.

12. For a comprehensive analysis of revolutionary building projects, see: JamesA. Leith, Space and Revolution. Projects for Monuments, Squares, and PublicBuildings in France, 1789–1799 (Montreal, 1991). Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink andRolf Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Free-dom (Durham, NC, 1997), 151. On the origins of Palloy’s transformationof the Bastille into revolutionary relics: B.N.F. LB39–10260: Palloy, Adresseà l’Assemblée nationale législative. Discours prononcé à l’Assemblée nationalelégislative, le 7 octobre, 3e année de la liberté . . . (1791).

13. Lüsebrink and Reichardt, The Bastille, 121–147. See the comments by: ColinJones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivifed.” Op. Cit., 157–191.

14. Palloy, B.H.V.P. B-1234, Plan général des terrains de la Bastille . . . appartenant audomaine national; B.N.F. 4-LB39-10467 (BIS) Projet d’un monument à élever àla gloire de la Liberté. (1790). Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, TheBastille, 118–123.

15. Louis Hautecoeur. Histoire de l’architecture classique en France. Paris, 1948–1957, vol. 5: Révolution et Empire, 1792–1815.

16. Werner Szambien, Les projets de l’An II. Concours d’architecture de la périoderévolutionnaire (Paris, 1986), 12, 18.


17. B.N.F. Le Senne 6410, C.P. Le Sueur, Projet d’utilité et embellissement pour laVille de Paris, adressé aux sections (Paris, May 1790), 11.

18. B.N.F VP 3671, Florentin Gilbert, Adresse à tous les corps administratifs de laFrance et à tous les connoisseurs de l’art de l’architecture et de la construction destravaux publics (Paris, 1790), 3 and 5. On Florentin Gilbert: Werner Szambien,“Les architectes parisiens à l’époque révolutionnaire: Liste des artistes del’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’administrateurdes finances françaises de Louis XVI à Bonaparte (Paris, 1986), 44–65. JacquesGodechot, 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 princi-ple of arbitration to bear for small disputes, typically, between merchantsand artisans. Its functions were continued by the justice de paix of thesections during the Revolution. They were then transferred to the Conseil dePrud’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 September1790), 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 thesebankruptcies were master masons, five (14 percent) were architects and onlyfour (11 percent) were master carpenters. The other eight (22 percent) weremade 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 Rev-olution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of CommercialSociety 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, MesLoisirs, vol. 6: “Mardi, 15 Novembre 1785, Etat actuel des travaux publics,” fol.227. Also, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, Chapitre CCCXXX, “Lesheures 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 vitriolicriposte by proprietors: A.N. AD XIII 13, Observations sur le mémoiredonné à l’Assemblée nationale par les entrepreneurs des bâtiments (Décembre,1790).


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 IdeologicalUses 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 andRevolution, op. cit., 126–137.

31. Michael Sonenscher, “The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Repub-lic: 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 theDeluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolu-tion (Princeton, 2007). Michel Morineau, “Budgets de l’état et gestion desfinances royales en France au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue historique, 264 (1980),289–336. William Doyle, Venality. The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-CenturyFrance (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 CommercialSociety 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 laRévolution. 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-devantMaîtres 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 tes-

tifying to “troubles” among the carpentry trade in the period between theLois d’Allarde and Chapelier: B.N.F. 4-FM 35346, Précis présenté à l’AssembléeNationale par les entrepreneurs de la charpente (22 mai 1791). A.N. AD XI 65 andB.N.F. 4-FM 35347, Précis présenté à l’Assemblée nationale par les ouvriers de l’artde charpente, le 26 mai 1791. B.N.F. 4-FM 35355, Pétition par les maréchaux deParis le 7 juin 1791. Also, B.N.F. FM 35357, Pétition des professions et arts debâtiments (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 journey-

men: B.N.F. FM-4-35345: Pétition: les compagnons charpentiers ont “prêtésau commencement de leurs séances le serment de ne point travailler au-dessous de ce prix” (50 sous par journée) . . . . “Et de ne point laisser travaillerd’autres ouvriers chez un Entrepreneur qui n’auraient pas fait sa soumissionpar écrit dans leur procès-verbal . . .” Augustin Cochin. La Crise de l’histoirerévolutionnaire: Taine et Aulard (Paris, 1909), 85–102.


43. B.N.F. 4◦ Fm 35355, Pétition . . . par les maréchaux de Paris, op. cit., 4. Cf. GraceM. Jaffé, Le Mouvement ouvrier pendant la Révolution française (Paris, 1920),117–125. As for the general veracity of the maréchaux’ claims, they fullyconform the accounts of the commissaires of the section: B.N.F. 4◦ Fm 35345,Pétition: the compagnon carpenters were said to “prêter au commencementde leurs séances le serment de ne point travailler au-dessous de ce prix” (50sous par journée) “et de ne point laisser travailler d’autres ouvriers chezun Entrepreneur qui n’auraient pas fait sa soumission par écrit dans leurprocès-verbal . . . ”

44. B.N.F. F-4-35355, Pétition présentée à l’Assemblée nationale par les maréchaux deParis, 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 Révo-lution sur les chantiers du bâtiment parisien: entre corporations et libéral-isme,” Paris sous la Révolution, Raymonde Monnier (Paris, 2008), 93–103.

52. Emphasizing the labor movement in the abolition: Jaffé, Le Mouvementouvrier. An even earlier example of this argument is Germain Martin’s, LesAssociations ouvrières au XVIIIe siècle (1700–92) (Paris, 1900). Favoring apolitical explanation: Michael P. Fitzsimmons, The Remaking of France: TheNational Assembly and the Constitution of 1791 (New York & Cambridge,1994).

53. On plebeian radicalism: E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Soci-ety: 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., proba-bly April, 1793 from context. Another industry-wide protest movement wasamong 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 orchestratedemands.

57. In a later context, shoemaking has been similarly studied as a militant craftthroughout Europe for structural causes specific to the trade: Eric Hobsbawmand Joan Scott, “Political Shoemakers,” in Hobsbawm, Workers: Worlds ofLabor (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 setthe workday of builders as between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. in the winterand between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. in the summer. Salary rolls kept in the


Archives de Paris, series D4B6, expose these long hours to be a fiction. The14 day journée was extremely rare. Cf., Annie Moulin, Les Maçons de la HauteMarche, 165–166.

59. Cf. AP D5B6 1966, Grelet, Entrepreneur des bâtiments, “Brouillon de paie,1777–1785.” and AP D5B6 3514 Michel Normand, Maître Charpentier, “rollde compagnon”, 1781–1787.

60. Mercier’s caricature of the bâtisseur has him as a rich parvenu who could evenafford to hire carriages to go to the opera., op. cit., chapter DCXXXVIII, “Lesmaçons,” 118. Labrousse, Histoire économique, 491–492, 670–672.

61. Durand, “Les salaires,” 466–480. Labrousse’s statistics are from the period1726–1741 and 1785–1789: Ibid., 672.

62. Potofsky, “The Construction of Paris.”63. A.N. AD XI 16, Lettres patentes du Roi portant homologation des statuts & règle-

ments pour la Communauté des maîtres charpentiers de la Ville & Fauxbourgs deParis. September 1785.

64. Ibid., articles VII–IX.65. A.N. Y 10806-Y 10810, Series of raids by commissaire Allix on behalf of “La

Communauté de Maîtres Charpentiers,” 1785–1789. See p. 57.66. “Lutter contre le travail au noir, une priorité européenne,” Le Monde

économie, 24 November 2003. The European Commission estimates that, in2002, between 3 percent and 15 percent of the European PIB is created bysuch clandestine labor.

67. B.N.F. 8-Z Le Senne 13918, Almanach des bâtiments, 1790. Steven Kaplan findsthe numbers of 141 master carpenters and 1,684 journeymen and 141 or 87masters to be too low: la Fin des corporations, 701, note 7. On the Almanach,Lemas, “Les ‘pages jaunes’,” 175–182.

68. B.N.F. Fm 35347, “Précis . . . ,” 2.69. B.N.F. V 29997, Almanach des bâtiments, 1790.70. The numbers of master masons had continued this steady increase through-

out the eighteenth century. For one year only, the Almanach Royale in 1702lists master masons, giving their number at 179: B.N.F. Lb 25 18. By theRevolution, 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 duRoy es Oeuvres de Charpenterie.” For 1776, B.N.F. V. 21544: Almanch desbâtiments. For 1790 and 1791, B.N.F. V. 29997: Almanch des bâtiments. Thenumber of master masons in the early phases of the Revolution are verifiedby the “Braesch papers.” These are the request of chefs d’entreprises to changemoney into assignats for the salaries of workers. In 1791, they list 415 mastermasons – an increase of only 6 after 1790: A.N. F30 115–160.

71. Truant, The Rites of Labor.72. 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 dansla région lilloise, 1780–1860 (Paris, 1995). Also, Gail Bossenga, The Politics ofPrivilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge, 1991). Cf., Edward J.Shephard, “Social and Geographic Mobility of the Eighteenth-Century GuildArtisan: An Analysis of Guild Receptions in Dijon, 1700–1790,” in Work in


France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice, Steven Kaplan andCynthia 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 ‘change-

ment matériel’ et ‘contrainte de nommer,’ ” Revue d’histoire moderne etcontemporaine, no. 52–53 (July–September 2005), 10–32: 31.

3. Janis Langins. Conserving the Enlightenment: French Military Engineering fromVauban 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 pen-

dant 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 inlate 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 parle Roi pour procurer du travail et des secours pendant l’hiver de 1788–1789.On polemics against the workshops: Marcel Reinhard, Nouvelle histoire deParis: la Révolution, 1789–1799 (Paris, 1971), 93–94. The maximum wagethat could be earned in an atelier – 18 sous per day – represented less thana third what a stonecutter on a public site earned.

11. B.N.F. 8- LB39-203 (D): Pierre-Francois Boncerf, Les inconvéniens des droitsféodaux, 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 grosouvriers. Motion faite, le 20 août 1789, dans l’assemblée du comité du district deSaint-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 (August1789), VIII, 23. Its precise jurisdiction in construction matters would beclarified by the municipality a few months later: B.N.F. Lb 40 3267, Règle-ment pour les ateliers publics, 11 November 1789. It was only fully put intoplace in the spring of 1790. Rapport des commissaires du Département destravaux publics (5 May 1790) in Sigismond Lacroix, ed., Actes de la communede Paris pendant la Révolution, tome V (Paris, 1894–1914), 248–251.


14. “Rapport des commissaires du Département des travaux publics” (5 May 1790)Lacroix, Actes de la commune, tome V, 249. On the reorganization of munici-pal government in the early Revolution: Ted W. Margadandt, Urban Rivalriesin the French Revolution (Princeton, 1992).

15. Ibid., 249 (August 1790), tome VII, 22–24. B.N.F. Lb 40 3267, Règlement pourles ateliers publics (11 Novembre 1789).

16. As a friend of Arthur Young and as a member of the physiocratic influencedSociété de 1789, Liancourt was steeped in these “English” distinctionsbetween the poor: G. R. Ikni, “La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt,” in Dictionnairehistorique 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 Etats-Unis,” in Réfugiés/exilés aux Etats-Unis: 1789–2000, Catherine Collomp etMario 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 30aôut, 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 laCommune de Paris, par les sculpteurs en ornements, employés au Départementdes 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 April1791.

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-1791from context), 2–3. Skirting the ban on petition literature, in the crisis fol-lowing the Champ de Mars massacre of 17 July 1791, this document wasnot 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, insalu-bres et incommodes: paysages industriels en banlieue parisienne (XIXe–XXesiècles) (Paris, 2005).

25. See chapter 1. Annie Moulin-Bourret, Les Maçons de la Creuse: les origines dumouvement (Clermont-Ferrand: 1994), 201. Burstin, Le faubourg, 316–317.Most Parisian boarding houses were located in the Right Bank streets, onthe rue de la Mortellerie and rue de la Tissanderie, clustering around thecentral Place de Grève, in front of the Hôtel de Ville where builders werehired.

26. B.N.F. V 41030, Charles-Axel Guillaumot, Mémoire sur les travaux ordonnésdans les carrières sous Paris, et plaines adjacentes, et exposé des opérations faitespour 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).


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. JacquesGodechot (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: Sym-bole 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 révo-lutionnaire (Paris, 1982). On the Panthéon in a broader context: BronislawBaczko, 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 Rev-

olution. In 1789–1790, the municipality hired up to 22 stonecutters tocomplete the original ecclesiastical edifice: A.N. F 13 1137, Municipalité deParis, registre à la comptabilité # 447, 12 March 1791.

34. Excessive “gaieté” was Quatremère’s dismissive term for the original plansby Jacques-Germain Soufflot. Cf., Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy andthe Invention of a Modern Political Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA,1992), 166–174.

35. Quatremère’s position was commissaire à l’administration et direction généralede travaux. Ibid. R. Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy et son intervention dansles 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 theAcademy 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, concernantDutrescu, Director de la Trésorerie nationale, 12 May 1791. The architectCelestin-Joseph Happe, an inspector for the city of Paris, concluded thatthe Revolution owed to the King’s privileged entrepreneurs and architects atotal of over 5 million pounds for services rendered in the construction andfor the maintenance of all the buildings within the Maison du Roi, between1780 and 1791. A.N.F 13 907: Justification faite par M, Happe pour les servicesdes 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 audirectoire 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’an1er 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 différentesadministrations. 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).


43. Quatremère de Quincy, Rapport sur l’édifice (1791), 9. Idem., Rapport sur l’étatactuel du Panthéon français, fait au Directoire du Département de Paris sur lestravaux 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 destailleurs 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, Fail-

lites” On Grelet, Entrepreneur des bâtiments: A.P. D5 B6 1966, “Rolle descompagnons.”

48. Yves Durand, “Recherches sur les salaires des maçons à Paris au XVIIIe siè-cle,” 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 dossierilluminates several abuses that Revolutionaries sought to reform. Bonfiontwas responsible for masonry work at the prestigious site of Ledoux’s barrièrede l’hôpital St. Louis. His dettes actives were 61,598, of which close to 5,000livres 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 WhatIs 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 présentéà 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 enl’art de la charpente de la ville de Paris, le 26 mai 1791.

58. Quoted in Deming, “Le Panthéon,” 114. On the Pantheon: Bonnet, Nais-sance du Panthéon. Ozouf, “Le Panthéon.”

59. Quotation from Burstin, 310. For context: Timothy Tackett, When the KingTook Flight (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

60. A.N. O1 1699, Précis pour les entrepreneurs de l’ornement de l’église Ste-Geneviève (n.d., but May, 1791 by content), 9–10. The appellation “Pan-théon français” did not take hold in the popular imagination before theend 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).


64. A.N. F 13 1935.65. B.N.F Lb 40 165, Quatremère, Rapport, 19.66. ibid., 17.67. Dominique Margairaz, “L’invention du ‘service public.’ ” On public ser-

vice, see B.N.F. Lb 40 3267: Règlement pour les ateliers publics, 11 November1789 and is demonstrated in its practice by: A.N. F 13 1137, Municipalitéde Paris, registre à la comptabilité, département des Travaux publics, 12 March1791.

68. B.N.F.: L’Ami du peuple, no. 487, 12 June 1791. G. Vauthier, “Le PanthéonFrançais sous la Révolution,” Annales révolutionnaires, 3 (1910), 395–416.

69. B.N.F. Lb 40 165, Quatremère de Quincy, Rapport sur l’édifice dit de Sainte-Geneviève (1791), 19. Also quoted in Sonenscher, Work and Wages, 347.Quatremère’s progress reports are filled with vituperative outbursts againstwhat he views as the improper handling of construction matters, forexample: “The accounting of this precarious administration is filled withanarchic elements; and nothing is more close to despotism than theabsence of authority . . . ,” 21.

70. A.N. F 13 1935, “Pétition aux Travaux publics, 130 ouvriers employéspar Poncet vs. Poncet,” 26 August 1791. Ibid., “Pétition,” 29 July1791.

71. Pétition “au nom de tous les compagnons travaillant au dit édifice”: A.N. F13 1935, “Pétition à Monsieur le Président (Liancourt) au Département deParis,” 30 August 1791. Scribbled across the top the petition listing accu-sations 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 Septem-ber 1791. And Rapport sur les plaintes des ouvriers, 22 September 1791.A.N. F774–79, dossier Poncet, Pierre (the police file on Poncet’s arrestin September 1793 contains information of the entrepreneur’s activitiesdating back to 1755).

72. A.N. F774–79, dossier Poncet. G. Vauthier, “Le Panthéon français,” 395–397. Burstin, Une Révolution, 689–694.

73. L’Ami du peuple, no. 487, 12 June 1791.74. A.N. F 13 1935, Département de Paris: extrait des registres des délibéra-

tions du Directoire, 24 and 29 August 1791. The affiche was signed by LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt.

75. A.N. F 13 1935, Département de Paris: 24 August 1791.76. Ibid. The composition of the Pantheon’s workforce from 1 September

1791: 300 tailleurs de pierre, 32 scieurs de pierre, 6 poseurs, 12 limousins, 30charpentiers, 27 bardeurs, and 15 manoeuvres.

77. Keith Michael Baker, “A Script for a French Revolution: the PoliticalConsciousness of the Abbé Mably,” in Inventing the French Revolution(Cambridge, 1990), 86–108.

78. A.N. F 13 1935, Mémoire pour les ouvriers de Quatremère de Quincy, 21September 1791.

79. A.N. AD XIII 2B (N.D., probably September 1791), 2.80. Ibid., 3–4.81. Szambien, Les projets, 61–101. They are also discussed by Leith, Space and

Revolution, 160–166. See chapter four of this book.


82. James Leith, Space and Revolution, 100–101. Mark K. Deming, La Halle au bléde Paris 1762–1813 (Brussels, 1984), 167–197. Dora Wiebenson, “The TwoDomes of the Halle au Blé of Paris,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 55, no. 2 (June1973), 262–279.

83. Michel Gallet, Les architectes parisiens du XVIIIe siècle. Dictionnairebiographique et critique (Paris: Edition Mengès, 1995), 358–359.

84. One exception: Anthony Sutcliff, Paris. An Architectural History (New Yorkand New Haven, 1993), 62–65.

85. Charles Mangin, Réflexions d’un citoyen patriote: dont l’importance est telle qu’ilpeut 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 desidées qui ont dirigé le citoyen Mangin père, architecte, dans la composition deson plan dédié à la République française: avec ses vues sur l’établissement d’unbureau, composé d’architectes (Paris, 1792). Idem., Exposé et analyse du plan etprojet présenté à l’Assemblée Nationale: avec les moyens d’en opérer l’exécution(Paris, 1792). Idem., Pétition du Sr Mangin père, . . . et supplément au Mémoireinstructif sur le plan dont il a fait hommage à l’Assemblée Nationale constituanteen avril 1791 (Paris, 1792).

86. On the framework of competitive bidding, cf., M. Dorigny, “Economielibre” and “Propriété,” in Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution Française,Albert Soboul (ed.) (Paris, 1989), 401403; 869–870. Nira Kaplan, “VirtuousCompetition among Citizens: Emulation in Politics and Pedagogy duringthe French Revolution,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, (Winter2003), 241–248.

87. Cf. A.N. AD XIII, 13/6, Examen impartial de la demande faite au conseil généralde la Commune par les sculpteurs en ornemens, employés à la nouvelle égliseSainte-Geneviève, et renvoyé au département des Travaux publics; par délibérationde 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 theAssemblée Législative “aux 50,000 livres versées par le trésorier nationaldans 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, sculpteuren 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, jus-

tice 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


l’effet d’aviser aux moyens de procurer de l’ouvrage aux ouvriers qui ont besoin detravailler pour vivre. (19 janvier 1793.) 2.

98. On the spinning workshops: DiCaprio, The Origins and Godineau,Citoyennes tricoteuses. On the Manufacture de Gobelins, cf. Burstin, Lefaubourg, 216–231.

99. B.N.F. Lb 40 1305, Projet de travaux publics, 7–8.100. Ibid., 12.101. 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 confor-mité de l’arrêté du Directoire, promesse de m’engager et m’obliger à ce quisuit.”

102. A.N. F 13 1936.103. 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, RobertFoster and Orest Ranum (eds.) (Baltimore, 1980), 89–103. Although reflect-ing mid-nineteenth-century concerns: Durand, De la condition des ouvriersde Paris de 1789 à 1841 (Paris, 1841), 189–190.

104. Isser Woloch, “The Contraction and Expansion of Democratic Space duringthe Period of the Terror,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Mod-ern Political Culture, vol. 4, The Terror, Kenneth Michael Baker (ed.) (Oxford,1994), 309–325.

105. A.N. F 13 1936. The relation of wages to prices may be evaluated withreference to George Rudé’s estimate of a hypothetical salary and budgetfor a journeyman carpenter: in 1790, the average carpenter spent 60 per-cent of wages upon items of “primary necessity,” while in the 1793, thesetook up 75 percent of his earnings. The carpenters’ claim that a proposedwage increase of around 20 percent would barely keep up with the cost ofsubsistence was calculated with understated accuracy. Rudé, “Prices, Wagesand Popular Movements in Paris during the French Revolution,” EconomicHistory Review, vol. 6, no. 3 (1954), 246–267: 257–264.

106. F 13 1936: 10 July 1793.107. Haim Burstin, “Problèmes du travail à Paris sous la Révolution,” Revue

d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no. 44, no. 4 (1997), 650–682.108. Ambroise Fourcy, Histoire de l’Ecole Polytechnique (Paris, Belin, 1987), 39–40.109. As described in Charles François Mandar, Études d’architecture civile, ou,

Plans, élévations, coupes et détails nécessaires pour élever, distribuer et décorerune maison et ses dépendances (Paris, 1826).

110. 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 andThermidor (1793–1795)

1. The leveling measures of February and March 1794 were the VentôseDecrees. The Maximum was first applied to grain prices on 4 May and11 September 1793, and then generalized to wages and prices. It was


only repealed in December 1794. Its finest study remains: Albert Math-iez, La vie chère et le mouvement social sous la Terreur (Paris, 1927). For arecent macro-economic overview of the Terror’s long-term impact, see theassessment of: O’Rourke, “The worldwide economic impact.” For a recentinterpretation: Carla Hesse, “La logique culturelle de la loi révolutionnaire,”Annales: ESC, 57e année (July–August 2002), 915–933.

2. Here, a distinction will be made between the period of the Terror and the spe-cific system of state violence that constituted the Terror. Not all egalitarianefforts in this period, in other words, may be assimilated to the wartime mea-sures known as the Terror. Thus, the “symbiosis” between egalitarianism andTerror, whereby some democratic practices were institutionalized for otherreasons than furthering the Terror: Isser Woloch, “The Contraction.” Also:Jean-Clément Martin, Violence et Révolution. Essai sur la naissance d’un mythenational (Paris, 2006).

3. Adler, Engineering, 272–282.4. A recent overview: David Andress, The Terror: Civil War in the French

Revolution (London, 2005).5. The provisions of the General Maximum dictated the freezing of wages at

150 percent their 1790 value and fixing prices on commodities at their 1790price, supplemented by around 50 percent for transport costs. In the minutecalculations of revolutionary authorities, the Maximum was intended toassure 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 per-cent for a retail merchant. A journeyman mason made 3 livres in 1790 andhad his salary capped in 1793 at 4 livres 10 sols. As an anti-inflationary mea-sure, other salaries in Paris, however, were fixed at rates that were below theMaximum’s cap. B.N.F. 8-LB40-1154, Commune de Paris, 1789–1795 – Extraitdes registres des délibérations du conseil général de la Commune de Paris. For theapplication of Jacobin economic laws on the labor force: Jean-Pierre Gross,Egalitarisme jacobin et Droits de L’homme, 1793–1794. La grande famille et laTerreur (Paris, 2000), 340–351.

6. On the Law of Suspects, Richard Mowery Andrews, “Boundaries of Citizen-ship: The Penal Regulation of Speech in Revolutionary France,” French Politicsand Society, vol. 7, no. 3 (1989), 90–109.

7. See the case of the deputy from Marseilles, Charles Jean-Marie Barbaroux:William Scott, Terror and Repression in Revolutionary Marseilles (London, 1973),96–97.

8. Guillerme, La naissance, 70–74. Dicaprio, The Origins.9. Potofsky, “Work and Citizenship.”

10. Adler, Engineering, 258. The subsistence thesis was underlined by AlbertMathiez, whose emphasis on the “right to subsistence” as fundamental tothe Terror’s “social policy” has steered historians toward the domain of pricesrather than wages for over a half century: Cf., Mathiez, “La Terreur instru-ment de la politique sociale des Robespierristes,” Girondins et Montagnards(Paris, 1988 – original edition: 1928), 109–138.

11. Colin Lucas, “The Crowd and Politics Between the Ancien Régime and Revo-lution in France,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 60, no. 3 (September 1988),421–457. For Rudé, The Crowd, 218–236: “Apart from the armed insurrectionsof 10 August and 2 June 1793, it is perhaps only in the petitions of July 1791


and June 1792 and the agitation of the arms workers of 1794 that we find theemergence of new forms of action that look forward to the urban-industrialsociety of the future.” (227).

12. Sans-culottisme has also been examined by George Rudé and MichaelSonenscher in the labor history context of the rites, customs, and legalnotions of rights associated with broader preindustrial movements. Whiledrawing attention to the persistence of diverse plebeian traditions, theyinterpreted the French sans-culotte movement as essentially rooted in arti-sanal practices. Subsistence questions (in the case of Rudé) and legal andnatural rights traditions (in the case of Sonenscher, who has also recentlyrevisited and revised many of his early arguments) were central to sans-culottisme. In sum, subsistence riots, guild procedures, and the classic lawsuitwere transformed into political forms of formalized, ritualized protest bythe Revolution. Rudé and Sonenscher thus emphasized the essential con-tinuum to other historical moments of plebeian militancy; sans-culottismecannot be isolated from preindustrial labor movements. George Rudé, TheCrowd; Rudé and Albert Soboul, “Le maximum des salaires parisiens et leneuf thermidor.” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 134 (January–March 1954), 1–22. Michael Sonenscher, “The Sans-Culottes of the YearII: Rethinking the Language of Labour in Revolutionary France,” SocialHistory 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 andPeter Jones (eds.), (Manchester, 1991). For a re-examination: Idem., Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton,2008).

13. See, most particularly, Louis Marie Prudhomme’s response to: “Qu’est-cequ’un sans-culotte” in the celebrated Révolutions de Paris, no. 214 (6–13November 1793), 177–179.

14. Albert Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II: Mouvement populaire etgouvernement révolutionnaire (La Roche-sur-Yon, 1958), 427 and 452. For anoverview: Haim Burstin, L’Invention du sans-culotte – Regards sur le Parisrévolutionnaire (Paris, 2005). An intellectual history of the composite ideas,throughout the eighteenth century and across Europe, embodied by theimage of the sans-culotte: Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes.

15. While proposing a critique of Soboul, this book’s social analysis also takesissue with the approach embraced and theorized by François Furet, andhis followers Patrice Gueniffey, Ran Halevy, Mona Ozouf, Marcel Gauchet,and others with institutional connections to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes enSciences Sociales and the Institut Raymond Aron. Methodologically, theyfavored representations of the Revolution’s actors by stimulating deeperhistorical interest in political and cultural histories of the Revolution. Ideo-logically, as an explicit rejection of Marxism they turned toward the research,disciplinary, and interpretive agendas of the study of political culture. Socialstructure and class analysis were marginalized as a mere parroting of theMarxist “catechism.” For example, according to François Furet, the archetyp-ical demand of Parisian artisans to impose the Maximum did not emanatefrom a materialist cause such as the need to stabilize an artisanal econ-omy, too fragile to withstand the variations of a market economy, as argued


here. Rather, the Maximum was a strictly political and legislative act and ahegemonic attempt to project “terrorist rhetoric” into an “economic dic-tatorship,” one that was never completely applied on the ground. Furet,“Maximum,” A Critical Dictionary, op. cit., 504–510.

16. Ibid., 452. In another context, Jacques Rancière critiqued an excessive lit-eralism among historians who were all ready to see the militant “carpenterturning 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.

17. See, for example: K.D. Tønnesson, La défaite des sans-culottes: mouvement pop-ulaire et réaction bourgeoise en l’an III (Paris, 1959). Daniel Guérin, La lutte desclasses sous la première République. Bourgeois et “bras-nus” (1793–1795) (Paris,1968). Gwyn A. Williams, Artisans and Sans-culottes: Popular Movements inFrance 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).

18. Andrews, “Social Structure,” 74. Andrews drew inspiration, in turn, fromRichard Cobb, but the latter’s iconoclasm and impressionism differed inspirit to Andrew’s more precise social classification. Cobb, “Some Aspects ofthe Revolutionary Mentality (April 1793-Thermidor, Year II),” in New Perspec-tives on the French Revolution: Readings in Historical Sociology, Jeffrey Kaplow(ed.), (New York and London, 1965), 305–337.

19. The analysis here was aided by a consultation of Richard Mowery Andrews’unpublished manuscript, “The Sans-Culotterie: Self Consciousness and Ide-ology.”

20. Raymonde Monnier and Albert Soboul, Répertoire du personnel sectionnaireparisien en l’an II (Paris, 1985).

21. Godechot, Les institutions de France, 1989, 169–170. The patente was madeinto the taxe professionnelle in 1976 which exists to this day.

22. Annie Moulin, Les Maçons de la Haute Marche au XVIIIe siècle (Clermont-Ferrand, 1987), 429–430. A. Blum and J. Houdaille, «12 000 parisiens en1793 – Sondage dans les cartes de civismes», Population, 2, 1986, 259–302:275.

23. An excellent overview: Haim Burstin, “Problèmes du travail à Paris sous laRévolution,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no. 4, no. 4 (1997),650–682. Garrioch, The Making, 310.

24. Andrews finds common ground with Soboul on patronage: Soboul, Les Sans-Culottes Parisiens, 472–474.

25. A.N. F 7 4664, dossier Du Bierre, maçon.26. Du Bierre does not appear in the guidebook of masters in the profession, the

Almanach des bâtiments.27. Louis Lemit, Le président du département aux comités civils des 48 sections

(n.d., 1792 from content). Idem., Lemit, administrateur du département deParis, à ses concitoyens (n.p., 1793). L. Lemit and August-Louis Lachevardière,Département de Paris. Bureau des travaux publics. Rapport sur les comptes du Pan-théon français, pour les années de juillet 1791 à juillet 1792 et de juillet 1792 àjuillet 1793 (Paris, 1793). Lemit, administrateur du département de Paris, à sesconcitoyens. 17 ventôse an II. (February 1794). Idem., Département de Paris.


Paris, le 18 nivôse l’an III . . . Le président du département aux comités civils des 48sections.

28. L. Lemit and Lachevardière, Département de Paris. A.N. F7 4664, dossier DuBierre. Lisa Dicaprio, The Origins, 148.

29. Haim Burstin, “La manifattura dei Gobelins di fronte alla Rivoluzione:lavoro, impresa, politica,” Studi Storici, 1988, 29, 161–174.

30. Adler, Engineering, 271–272. Camille Richard, Le Comité de salut public et lesfabrications de guerre sous la Terreur (Paris, 1922), 710–711. Garrioch, TheMaking, 308.

31. François Crouzet, La grande inflation. La monnaie en France de Louis XVI àNapoléon (Paris, 1993), 260–272. Philip T. Hoffman, et al., Des marchés sansprix, 228–229.

32. François-Alphone Aulard, Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public (Paris,1889–1951), 11, 12 December 1793, 9: 322–323, 347–348.

33. Horn, The Path, 138–140. Marcel Dorigny, “Les Girondins et le droit depropriété,” Bulletin historique économique et sociale de la Révolution française,1980–1981, 15–31. Cf., Mathiez, “La Terreur instrument de la politiquesociale des Robespierristes,” Girondins et Montagnards (Paris, 1988 – originaledition: 1928), 109–138 and La vie chère.

34. A.N. F 13 1138, “Lettre aux citoyens administrateurs du département desTravaux publics” with attached response from “La direction des travaux auPanthéon Français.” Both are dated 7 Germinal, l’an II. (27 March 1794).Richard Cobb, The People’s Armies (New Haven, 1987; first published inFrench in 1961), 600–606.

35. A.N. F 13 1138, “Lettre aux citoyens administrateurs.”36. Barère speech was dated 21 Ventôse, an II: Archives parlementaires, LXXXVI,

336–341.37. Bulletin des Lois, 27 Ventôse, an II (12 March 1794): Nomination des membres

de la Commission des travaux publics.38. A.N. AF II 80, plaquette 596, pièce 3: “Arrêté nommant Rondelet.”39. 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 theCommittee of Public Safety, cf., R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled (Princeton,1969), 239–243.

40. A.N. AF II 80, plaquette 591, 30 Messidor and 11 Thermidor, an II.41. 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 con-cours began with the Commune générale des arts, from 18 July–6 September1793. This was supplanted by the Commune des arts, from 10 September to24 October 1793. Then, the Société populaire et républicaine des arts extendedfrom 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 leastfive different political institutions that had administrative power over thesedecentralized councils: the Convention, the Comité de salut public, theComité d’Instruction publique, the Commission des travaux publics, andthe Commission temporaire des arts.

42. Leith, Space and Revolution, 153–156.


43. A.N. F 13 325 B, «Atlas des travaux de Paris.» Szambien, «Les Projet,» 19–22and 152. Pierre Pinon and Bertrand Le Boudec, Les plans de Paris: histoire d’unecapitale (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 con-fection d’un plan général pour l’assainissement et l’embellissement de Paris et deplans relatifs aux autres communes de la République, articles 3, 4, and 7. OnBarère: 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 Révolutionfrançaise, 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, andProcedure of the Paris Tribunal, 1793–1795 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1951), 137. Fora convincing synthesis: Claude Mazauric, «Terreur,» Dictionnaire historique dela Révolution française. Albert Soboul, et al. (eds.) (Paris, 1989), 1020–1025.Cf., Furet, «Terror,» A Critical Dictionary, 137–150. Both Mazauric and Furetcite Greer’s findings approvingly.

52. Emile Ducoudray, et al., Atlas, 11, 22–23. Janis Langins, La République avaitbesoin de savants: les débuts de l’École polytechnique: L’École centrale des travauxpublics 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 andreleased 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, dossierLoir, Denis-Jean, architecte, arrested 17 September 1793 and released (?).

56. A.N. F 7 4653, dossier Coqueau, Claude Phillipe (32 p.). On his deathsentence 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 1795by content): Hiring of other builders was even less assured. Seventy-threepetitions for inspectors on construction sites netted only six positions inthe same period. More fortunate were the 39 “artistes,” including build-ing sculptors and painters, who applied for merely six openings: Aestheticconsiderations in these spartan times were minimal but existent.

60. A.N. F 13 1137, “Rôle des journées des tailleurs de pierres,” from 18–30July 1791. Their number on the Panthéon between 31 December 1792–12January 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 deTranche-Montagne, caporal de canonniers de la République, venant des Indes, avec


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.

62. Many of these sculptors’ petitions are assembled in A.N. F 13 1935: Forexample: “Pétitions des artistes et sculpteurs aux directeurs” (no date, butmid-1792 from content).

63. A.N. W 388, dossier 901.64. For the reconstitution of the numbers of Parisian building tradesmen

between 1770 and 1789, see Chapter 1, Table 1.1.65. Jaffé, Le Mouvement, 65–73.66. The 48 Parisian commissaires de police were elected by section until 11 March

1795 (21 Ventôse, III), when they were appointed by the Committee ofGeneral Security. Later, on 11 October 1795 (19 Vendémaire, IV) the munici-palities took over this function. Finally, during the Directory, they were onceagain elected to office.

67. A.N. F 7 4594/7, dossier Benoit. On Dorigny’s subsequent successful careerwith the general council of the Paris commune during Thermidor: Soboul,Les sans-culottes parisiens, 1017 and 1018.

68. On Louis-François Dorigny: Soboul and Monnier, Répertoire, 272.69. A.N. F 7 4665, dossier, Decressac, Pierre, entrepreneur de maçonnerie. Cf.,

also, F 7 4764, dossier Langlois, Jean-François, who pleads for a similardispensation for his work on the canals of Paris.

70. George Rudé, “The Motives of Popular Insurrection in Paris during theFrench Revolution,” in Paris and London in the 18th Century. Studies in PopularProtest (London, 1970), 130–162.

71. B.N.F. LC-2207, L’Auditeur national, 964.72. A.N. F 7 4649, dossier, Cloménil, Jacques.73. Albert Soboul, Raymonde Monnier, Répertoire, 208.74. 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 moyensde procurer de l’ouvrage aux ouvriers qui ont besoin de travailler pour vivre. (19janvier 1793), 2 and 7.

75. Alain Cottereau,“La désincorporation des métiers et leur transformationen ‘public intermédiaires’: Lyon et Elbeuf, 1790–1815,” in Steve Kaplan etPhilippe Minard (eds.), La France, malade du corporatisme? XVIIIe –XXe siècles(Paris, Belin, 2004), 97–145.

76. 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 Rev-olution (Cambridge and London, 2001). The liberalization of grain was madelaw on 21 Prairial Year V (9 June 1797). Martin Staum, “Individual Rightsand Social Control: Political Science in the French Institute,” Journal of theHistory of Ideas, vol. 48, no. 3 (July–September 1987), 411–430.

2. Idem., “Agrarian Ideology and Commercial Republicanism in the FrenchRevolution,” Past and Present, vol. 157 (1997), 34–121. Dominique Margairaz,François de Neufchâteau: biographie intellectuelle (Paris, 2005), 339–341.


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.

3. For a critique of the over-emphasis on the Directory’s bourgeois liberal-ism, and a subtle discussion of its ambivalent legacy under Napoleon, seeLouis Bergeron, Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers parisiens du Directoire àl’Empire (Paris, 1978), 101–107. Cf., Richard Whatmore, Republicanism andthe French Revolution. An Intellectual History of J. B. Say’s Political Economy(Oxford, 2000). The very imprecision of the period’s social taxonomy ren-ders the controversial thesis of a bourgeois-less France irrelevant for thisbook: Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the SocialImaginary, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

4. Christopher Johnson, “Capitalism and the State: Capital Accumulation andProletarianization in the Languedocian Woolens Industry, 1700–1789,” inThe Workplace Before the Factory, T. Safley and L. Rosenband (eds.) (Cornell,1993).

5. Clive H. Church, “The Social Basis of the French Central Bureaucracy underthe Directory 1795–1799.” Past and Present, vol. 36 (1967), 59–72: 70.

6. Annie Jourdain, Les monuments de la Révolution, 1770–1804. Une histoire dereprésentation (Paris, 1997), 372–373.

7. Ibid., 394–395.8. James Robert Munson, Businessmen, Business Conduct and the Civic Organi-

zation of Commercial Life Under the Directory and Napoleon (PhD dissertation,Columbia University, 1992).

9. DiCaprio, The Origins of the Welfare State, 147.10. Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–

1820s (New York, 1994), 260.11. Quoted in Livesy, 115.12. Michel Brugière, Gestionnaires et profiteurs de la Révolution (Paris, 1986), 116–

137. Before it was consecrated as a Church, the Madeleine was projectedto be a commercial center housing the Bourse, the Banque de France, andTribunal de Commerce: Jean Tulard, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris: Le Consulat etl’Empire, 1800–1815 (Paris, 1971), 220.

13. On the history of road construction in this period: Jean-Marcel Goger, Lapolitique routière en France de 1716 à 1815 (Thèse pour le doctorat, Ecole desHautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1988). A.N. AD XVIII 312: L’opinion deMarie-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 man-dating the opening of workshops and stipulating the precise terms of theirorganization. Guy Arbellot, “La grande mutation des routes de France auXVIIIe siècle,” Annales: ESC, vol. 28, no. 3, May–June 1973, 765–791.

14. Margairaz, “L’invention du ‘Service Public,’ ” 10–32: 31.15. Atlas de la Révolution française. Routes et communications, tome 1: Guy

Arbellot, Bernard Lepetit, Jacques Bertrand (eds.) (Paris, 1987). Abellot, “Lagrande mutation.”

16. 8,000 to 11,000 migrant workers in Paris were estimated to be crammed intothese chambers garnies in 1795: Moulin, Les Maçons de la Creuse, 201.

17. Denis Woronoff, The Thermidorian Regime and the Directory, 1794–1799(Cambridge, 1972), 114–115.


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 Thermidoriansto oversee the Commission des travaux publics, which had become suspectas a vital organ of the Revolutionary government. Cf. A.N. F 13 646, onproposals “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 Com-

mission des finances du Conseil des Cinq-Cents sur l’opportunité d’un projet detaxe péagère, 9 vendémiaire An V. On the paucity of manuscript sources anddocumentation on workers under the Directory, cf.: Soreau, E., “Les ouvriersen 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 dela police under the Directory (A.N. series “F 7”) precludes a fuller under-standing of their esprit public. The Police Minister Cochon was rather focusedon 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 invaluableresearch tool, Paris pendant la réaction thermidorienne et sous le Directoire, 5vols. (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 fol-lowing 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 horseexcrement – from Parisian streets had been suspended, “faute de moyens.”“We find ourselves in an ever greater pauperization (dénuement), and theseproblems are due to increases in the daily wage”: Compte rendu . . . 2nd époquede 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: CharlesGourlier and Charles-Auguste Questel, Notice historique sur le service destravaux et sur le conseil général des bâtiments civils à Paris et dans les départe-ments, 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, “Planningand 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.


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 Révolu-tion, 1795–99 (Paris, 1970), 357–359.

30. A.N. F 13 331, Pétition des entrepreneurs des travaux publics au Bureau des bâti-ments civils, 9 Floréal, IV. Ibid., “Le conseil des Bâtiments civils au Ministrede l’Intérieur,” n.d, but late Floreal, IV, by content. Ibid., “Observations surl’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 fromcontent. Also, Ibid., «Demande de l”emploi, Bouvet, Maçon-entrepreneur, 14Ventose, V:» “Privé par la suppression de plusieurs corporations, je viens avecconfiance . . . J’exerce depuis 15 ans l’art de construction ayant l’approbationet l’estime des architectes avec lesquels j’ai travaillé.” Reinhard, NouvelleHistoire de Paris, 356.

32. A.N. F 13 327–328, Rondelet, Nouvelle organisation des Bâtiments civils, 3 Bru-maire, l’an VII, title 3. And Ibid., on assorted reactions from entrepreneurs.On Rondolet and his grand ambitions, cf., O’Connell, “Architects and theFrench Revolution,” pp. 114–118. On equivalent reforms in sidérurgie, cf.,Denis Woronoff, L’industrie sidérurgique en France pendant la Révolution etl’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 ‘servicepublic’ 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 discretpouvoir. 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 counter-argument to physiocratic liberty in 1776 based on the natural integrity ofcorporate 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: Recueilde 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, 3volumes (Paris, 1912). Police bulletins for the late Empire are collected byNicole Gotteri, La Police secrète du Premier Empire. (6 vols, June–December1810 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 Revolution-

ary 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.


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 noticeduplicates 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. Onceagain, 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 lescolonies françaises 1802. Ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale française(1800–1830). Aux origines d’Haïti (Paris, 2003). Alexandre Chabert, Essai surles 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, “Con-tribution à l’histoire de placement et du livret en France,” Revue politique etparlementaire 17 (1912), 105–126. And Abel Chatelain, “Le Monde paysan etle 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 ofA.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 concerningthe livrets.

57. B.N.F. 8 V529, Almanach des ouvriers: contenant la désignation des professionscomprises dans chaque classe, l’an XIII (Brumaire, XIII), especially pp. 5–7 and44–45.

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 effectivepresence in 1810 and 1811, when they handled 8,200 and 9,400 declarationsof employment respectively. By 1812, these numbers dropped to 2,650 andfell further to 600 by 1815: p. 208.

61. Paolo Napoli, “Police: la conceptualisation d’un modèle juridico-politiquesous 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 assuringthe quality control of food as well as the loyalty of apprentices: Levasseur,


Classes ouvrières, II, pp. 335–342. A later effort, in 1803, was made by winemerchants to institute a corporation for their trade. Ibid., pp. 345–347. Cf.Louis Bergeron, “Approvisionnement et consommation à Paris sous le Pre-mier Empire,” Mémoires publiés par la Fédération des sociétés historiques etarchéologiques de Paris (1963), 197–232.

63. Almanach des ouvriers, 7.64. James Robert Munson, Businessmen, Business Conduct, chapter 2, esp.,

107–116.65. Vaudoyer’s projects included extensions of the Collège de France, the Sor-

bonne, 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-Artsde France (Paris, 1818).

66. A.N. F 13 521, Vaudoyer to the Ministre de l’Intérieur, 1 Germinal, XIII (22March 1805).

67. Ibid.68. 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 législationrelative aux livrets d’ouvriers: Sessions des conseils généraux de l’agriculture, desmanufactures, et du commerce (Paris, 1842).

69. Destutt’s response to an essay contest of the Institut national, Quels sont lesmoyens 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, alsosought the restoration of apprenticeships, in Essai sur le perfectionnement desarts chimiques, discussed in Munson, Businessmen, 91–93.

70. See Chapter 4.71. Tulard, Nouvelle Histoire, chapter II: “L’urbanisme impérial,” esp., 196–197.72. 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.73. Aulard, Empire, v. 1: 5 Prairial, XIII (25 May 1805), p. 801. The expres-

sion “faire grève” first appeared in a police report, also quoting the patoisof stonemasons, from 1785: cf., chapter 1. On the later career of thisterm, cf., Raymonde Monnier, “Ouvriers,” in Soboul (ed.), Dictionnaire,1281–1289.

74. A.N. F 13 521, Lettre au ministre de l’Intérieur, 21 Thermidor, XIII.75. 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.

76. A.N. F 13 521, Ibid., Dubois has Napoleon saying, “Didn’t I already pub-lish an ordinance to fix these work hours?” As to Napoleon’s request fora detailed proposal, Dubois writes that “The command of His Majesty hasbeen maintained but without a follow up, to my great regret.”

77. A.N. F 13 206, Letter from the Intendant général to the Ministre del’intérieur, 30 March 1806.

78. Ibid., Lemercier, Un si discret pouvoir.79. A.N. F 13 521, Lettre de Dubois aux architectes du gouvernement, 2 May 1806.80. 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. 54.81. A.N. F 13 521, “Extrait des registres des délibérations du Conseil des

Bâtiments civils,” 13–20 Juin, 1806.


82. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Pastand Present, 38 (1967), pp. 56–97. On variations within the builders’ salaryrolls, 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 del’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, TheWorkers 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 UrbanPlanning in Paris, 1802–1815

1. In this tradition, see the classic: Pieter Geyl, Napoleon, For and Against (NewHaven, 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’histoiremoderne 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 Transfor-

mation of the French Capital, 1830–1870 (Cambridge, 1994), 45–46. GeorgesPoisson, “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, Pol-itics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell, 2000), 46. On theBureau de statistique: Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France. La statis-tique départementale à l’époque napoléonienne (Paris, 1989), 129–151. JeanTulard, “Statistiques,” Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 801.


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 sampledcartes were Limousin by origin: Moulin, Les Maçons, pp. 443–444.

15. Georges Mauco, Les migrations ouvrières en France au début du XIXe siècled’après les rapports des préfets de l’Empire de 1808–13 (Paris, 1932) RogerBreteille, “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 themetallurgy trades during roughly the same period, 1810–1811: From regionto 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 inescapablepoverty of this region is given full voice in Maurice’s report. For a broaderperspective of these inquests, cf. Georges Mauco, Les Migrations and LouisBergeron (ed.), La statistique en France de l’époque napoléonienne (Paris, 1981).

19. On the Continental System and its lack of a significant impact on theParisian economy: François Crouzet, Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies inFranco-British Economic History (Cambridge, 1990), 305–306. Silvia Marzagalliemphasizes the creativity of merchants in largely invalidating the block-ades’ measures: “Les boulevards de la fraude.” Le négoce maritime et le Blocuscontinental, 1806–1813 (Paris, 1999), 277–278. A.N. F 20 434–5. The prefectadded that “More builders seem to be migrating from the poorer, south-ern areas of the Creuse thus balancing out a lower numbers of departuresin the north.” For a more detailed interpretation of shifts in migratory pat-terns: Marie-Antoinette Carron, “Les Migrations anciennes des travaileurscreusois,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale, vol. 43 (1965), 289–320. AnnieMoulin concludes that the Revolution originally curbed immigration, butthat the new political and social networks open to the Limousins allowedthose who arrived to integrate into the population with greater facility. Theyfirst came in fewer numbers, in other words, but those who arrived stayedpermanently: Les maçons de la Haute Marche, 240–245.

20. The Empire launched very few public works in Paris as poor relief, out of con-cern about attracting more migrants and driving the wage scale upward bydenying employers a reserve of cheap labor. State figures on the unemployedput to work on unskilled chores at Parisian public worksites ranged from1,600 in 1802 to a low of 689 laborers in 1810. The impoverished were thushelped with less frequency and certainly less generosity than did the Crownduring harsh winter crises of the ancien régime. And when the able-bodiedpoor were to be hired on the Empire’s ateliers de bienfaisance, administratorsassured they were not placed in competition with regular workers. Indi-gent workers were contracted out to architects to be assigned appropriatelymenial tasks: A.N. F 13 531, “Renseignements demandés aux architectes surle nombre d’ouvriers des ateliers de bienfaisance . . . ”

21. The 1807 census is considered far more reliable than the apparently inflated1811 census, cf., Gabriel Vauthier, “Les ouvriers de Paris sous l’Empire,”


in Revue des Etudes napoléoniennes (Paris, 1913), 426–451: 426. MichaelSibalis, The Workers of Napoleonic Paris, 1800–1815 (PhD thesis, ConcordiaUniversity, 1979), 39. Tulard, Nouvelle histoire, 87–88. Raymonde Monnier,“Ouvriers,” in Jean Tulard, Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 444–452. On the1790–1791 figures from the “Braesch papers,” see table 2.

22. Tulard, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, 269–272.23. A.P. 6AZ 754, Comparaison des prix des ouvrages de maçonnerie fait à la Nou-

velle Eglise de Ste. Geneviève, maintenant Panthéon français, dans le cours de l’an1784 . . . avec ceux fait en 1806, dans les palais imperiaux, n.d.

24. 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 archi-tects’ figures was produced in 1949 by Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements desrevenus, pp. 240–255: Starting with 1800, Chabert finds stonemasons makingon average 2.75 francs while only in 1810 do they earn 3.5 francs.

25. 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.

26. Ernest Labrousse, Pierre Léon, Pierre Goubert, et. al., Histoire économique,vol. II, 386–390. For a generalized discussion of salary fluctuationsand of the efforts to quantify them: Vauthier, “Les ouvriers.” Mon-nier, “Ouvriers,” Dictionnaire Napoléon, vol. 2, 450. Robert C. Allen,“The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices, from the Mid-dle Ages to the First World War,” Explorations in Economic History,vol. 38, no. 4 (October 2001), 411–447: 416.

27. Poisson, 467.28. For a contemporary account of the Napoleonic guild debate, Antoine

Levacher-Duplessis, Requête au Roi et mémoire sur la nécessité de rétabir les Corpsde marchands et les Communautés des arts et métiers (Paris, 1817), 63.

29. See the analysis of debates between Soufflot and Vital Roux on behalf ofthe Chamber of Commerce in Munson, “Businessmen, Business Conductand the Civic Organization,” 111–133. Emile Levasseur, “Les Corporationssous 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 demétiers depuis leurs origines jusqu’à leur suppression en 1791 (Paris, 1922).

30. On March 14 and 15, 1807, the stonecutters on several public ateliersdemanded an increase of 15 sous and were offered only 5 sous per day. Thestrike lasted ten days, before work started up again on the entrepreneurs’terms. Aulard, Empire, v. 3, 82–86.

31. A.N. F 13 521, “L’opinion des architectes sur les nouveaux Règlements,”Chalgrin et Raymond au Ministre de l’Intérieur, 20 March 1807.

32. Ibid. (Parenthesis added.)33. Aulard, Empire, v. III, 213 and 665.34. A.N. F 13 205, “Troubles au Temple de Gloire, notice du 3eme Bureau du

ministre de l’intérieur,” November 1808.35. A.N. F 13 521, “Lettre du préfet Dubois au ministre de l’Intérieur,” 6 February

1809.36. A.N. F 13 521, “Cumers au ministre de l’intérieur.” 18 February 1809.37. Ibid.38. Marquant, “Les bureaux de placement en France,” 200–237.


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 Ministèrede 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 demaçonnerie, 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 Jeande la Tynna, eds., Almanach du commerce parisien (1787–1806) which becamein 1807, Almanach du commerce de Paris, des départements de l’Empire françaiset des principales villes de l’Europe (an VIII-1813).

47. BHVP 19187, Ordonnance, and Ibid., Noms des délégués et électeurs desentrepreneurs de maçonnerie, pour l’année 1810. And B.N.F. 8o Z Le Senne13895, Manuel des entrepreneurs des bâtiments organisés pour l’année 1813. Thelatter 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, négo-ciants et manufacturiers, 36.

49. Ibid. A.N. F 13 521, “Rapport de Séance,” 28 March 1810. Ibid., esp., the Projetde décret ayant pour objet la police des ouvriers maçons, charpentiers . . . employésdans 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. MichaelSibalis,” “Corporatism After the Corporations: The Debate on Restoring theGuilds 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.), NouvelAlmanach 1809. B.N.F. 8-Z-Le Senne-13895, Manuel des Entrepreneurs, 1813.

53. Ibid. Beyond forbidding “non-conforming” entrepreneurs and masons frompracticing, the “official” 1813 Almanach stipulates that they would bepursued by the law (Manuel, article 14).

54. Woronoff, L’Industrie sidérurgique en France, 27–31. A comparative drop inthe number of Paris bakers took place after their incorporation, when theydeclined from 2,000 to 800 in Paris between 1800 and 1802: Tulard, Paris etson administration, 304. Guerrini, Napoléon et Paris, 528–532.

55. B.N.F. V 21550(8), Almanach des bâtiments, 1816. The publication also lists 77conforming and 36 non-conforming entrepreneur carpenters: The 113 chiefcarpenters were still far fewer than the 141 listed in 1791.


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 del’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 commu-nautés 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 Enlighten-ment 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, Lanaissance, 13–15, 70–74. Guillerme demonstrates growth in metallurgy, armsproduction, the spinning trades, coal mining, silk production, industrialchemicals, among other sectors.

5. Historians of preindustrial labor, for example, have tended to be guided bya “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 inEnglish 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 onbuilding wages, esp., p. 237–240, ff.

11. Raymonde Monnier, L’Espace public démocratique. Essai sur l’opinion à Paris dela 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 Ministrede l’intérieur sur la nécessité de rétablir l’ancien organisation des bâtiments


civils . . . (1813). Peyre developed these arguments in: Considérations sur lanécessité de rétablir l’académie d’Architecture . . . . (Paris, 1815), 4 and 5.

14. Baczko, Lumières, 231.15. Leith, Space and Revolution.16. Margairaz, “L’invention du ‘Service Public,’ ” 31.17. Marie O’Connell, Architects and the French Revolution.18. 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.

19. A.N. F 12 1560, Mémoire sur l’établissement des maîtrises et sur l’abus despatentes (n.d., but early 1820s by content), 4.

20. Bourgin, Les Patrons, vol. 3, 260.21. 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.22. Ibid., 14.23. Ibid., 17.24. La parole ouvrière, 1830–51, edited by Alain Faure and Jacques Rancière (Paris,

2007), esp., 25–35.25. 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 mou-vement ouvrier à Paris (1830–1834), Le mouvement social, vol. 88 (July 1974),65–68.

26. David Pinkney, “The Crowd in the French Revolution of 1830,” AmericanHistorical Review, LXX (1964), 2–3. A more comprehensive analysis of theapproximately 1,500 individuals and families who applied for compen-sation before the Commission des récompenses nationales, cf. Pinkney,The French Revolution of 1830 (NY, 1972), 253–273. They included 118stonemasons. For a more recent discussion of these figures, cf., PamelaPilbeam, The 1830 Revolution in France. (Basingstoke, 1991), 61–3. Esti-mates of building trades workers on the barricades in February 1848:they constituted 25.4 percent of the Parisian crowds; later, they were23.3 percent of the Communard movement in 1871: Harison, “The Rise andDecline,” 411.

27. The argument of Sewell, Work and Revolution. Cf., Sewell’s qualifications ofhis earlier argument: “The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural His-tory, or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian,” in Logics of History.Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago & London, 2005), 22–80.

28. Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830–1848(New York and Basingstoke), 2002.

29. B.H.V.P. N.A. 154, fo. 9, Pétition: “Le Sieur Roulley, au nom de tout sescamarades, maçons, soussignés,” 23 August 1830.

30. Festy, Le mouvement ouvrier, 61. Faure, “Mouvements populaires,” 67.31. Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution, 80–81; 150–151.32. On continuities between 1830 and 1848, cf., Jean-Pierre Aguet, Les grèves

sous la Monarchie de Juillet (1830–1847) (Geneva, 1954), 68–71. And EdouardDolléans, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier, 1830–1871. 2 vols. (Paris, 1947),


vol. I, 20–25. Also, for a revisionist perspective: Lynn Hunt and GeorgeSheridan, “Corporatism, Association, and the Language of Labor in France,1750–1850” Journal of Modern History, vol. 58, no. 4 (December 1986),815–825.

33. The holdings of nineteenth-century almanachs in the Bibliothèquenationale features the entire post-Napoleonic series of the Chambre’sAlmanach des bâtiments, whose 57th edition appeared in 1865. Afterward,it becomes L’annuaire des bâtiments.

34. “Quand le bâtiment va, tout va.” Report cited in Leonard Berlanstein, TheWorking People of Paris, 1871–1914 (Baltimore, 1984), 8.

35. Charles Merreau (1872). Cited by Pinkney, Napoleon II, 178.36. Carbonnier, Maisons parisiennes, 123–124.37. 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 (Madi-son, 1985), 32, 39, 42. I thank Charles Rearick for an informative exchangeon this subject.

38. Gérard Jacquemet, Belleville au XIXe siècle: du faubourg à la ville (Paris,1984). Harrison, “The Rise and Decline,” 411. On the Commune as a reap-propriation of Paris by workers: Jacques Rougerie, Paris libre 1871 (Paris,2004).

Appendix

1. Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes, Dangerous Classes During the First Half ofthe Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1958). On the controversy: Barry Ratcliffe,“Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitiédu 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 con-demned thieves. On more general issues surrounding the study of crimes,see François Billacois, “Pour une enquête sur la criminalité dans la Franced’Ancien Régime,” Annales: ESC, vol. 22 (March–April 1967), 340–349. AsFarge, Billacois, and most historians treating the question of labor and crimi-nality in society have suggested, the fact of arresting a certain type of workerjust as likely indicates repression against certain categories of the popula-tion as it does the “reality” of criminality. Still, these statistics signify acertain effectiveness of the corporate order to police its own; that such aclosely watched social group as the builders would not have been arrestedin greater numbers is also due to the well-paid nature of most work on theconstruction 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 accu-sations. On executions at the Place de Grève: Michel Foucault, Discipline andPunish.

5. Annie Moulin, Les maçons de la Haute Marche au 18e siècle (Clermont-Ferrand,1987), 444 and 448.


6. Hence, Martin Nadaud recounts his first trip home after three years of work inParis; and his departures from Paris to the Creuse became even less commonafterward, although he was elected deputy from the region in the SecondRepublic. Nadaud, Léonard, Maçon, 449–451.

7. Note the confusion between the reality and the perception of crime (or thesignified and the signifier) among the popular classes on this question in LouisChevalier, Laboring Classes, esp., 33–48.

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Index

abbey of Saint-Germain-des-pres,219, 257

absolutism, 17th century, 61Academy of Architecture, 48, 73, 132,

161, 168–72accidents, work related, 25, 33–4, 40,

48, 61, 122–3, 239Adler, Ken, 20, 141alignment, streets, 46Allen, Robert C., 226Allix (ancien régime police

commissioner), 57, 92Almain (Napoleonic police

commissioner), 205Almanach des bâtiments, 45, 92, 232,

256, 310see also Nouvel almanach des

bâtiments, 232Almanach du commerce de Paris, 232almanacs, trade and business, 21, 44,

205–6, 234–5America, xv

colonies, 9–10, 12see also Haitian Revolution, War of

Independence, United StatesAmiens, Peace of, 203Amyot, M. (specialist in Parisian

building law), 252–4, 256Anderson, Perry, 61Andrews, Richard Mowery, 151Apprenticeships, 87, 202, 208arcades, see passagesArc de Triomphe, 4, 162, 196, 216,

218, 228, 230, 238–9architects, 3, 20, 27, 113–14, 169

and the Academy, 132–3architectes-experts, 43–4, 46–7, 51–2,

55, 82, 139, 232as artists, 104, 113–14, 118, 120and engineers, 97, 133and entrepreneurs, 82, 135in 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, seeconcours

architectural criticism, see names ofcritics

argot, Parisian, 15, 57aristocrats, aristocracy, 61, 108,

150–3, 226armaments industry, 141arrondissements, 78, 81–2, 102, 189,

233, 258artists, see architects, building trades,

painters, sculptorsAssembly General of the Deputies of

the Arts and ProfessionsConstituting the BuildingTrades, 77

assignats (revolutionary currency), 81,92, 120–1, 197–8

ateliers de charité, de secours, seeworkshops for the indigent

ateliers de filatures, see spinningestablishments

Atlantic trade, 11, 20, 203Auditeur national (newspaper),

178–80, 309Austerlitz, 4Auvergnats in Paris, 16

Baczko, Bronislaw, 250Bailly, Jean-Sylvain (first mayor of

Paris), 64, 86, 101, 120bakers, 234Balzac, Honoré de, 75bankruptcies, 12, 23, 65–6, 76–7,

79–81, 116–17, 198–9, 252, 309Barère, Betrand (Committee of Public

Safety), 159–60, 164barracks construction, 196

333

334 Index

barrières (tollhouses), 24, 69Bastille, fortress and place de, 68–9,

75, 118, 132, 172Bâtiments du domaine de Paris, 113Bâtiments du Roi, 78, 106, 113, 216,

249–50Beik, William, 61Belleville, xiii, 258Benard, Joseph (architect), 190Benjamin, Walter, xiii, xiv, 6Benoit, Jerome (arrested journeyman

carpenter), 176–7Berrychons (natives of the Berry

region), 16Bien, David, 28biens nationaux, 81–2, 133, 168, 172–3,

188–90, 219, 257Bièvre, la, 105blacksmiths, 84Blondel, Jacques-François

(architectural theorist), 49Bonaparte, Lucien, 222Boncerf, Pierre-François (physiocratic

reformer), 100–2Bondy, Section du faubourg de, 166–7Bonguyot, Marie-François

(legislator), 187Bonne Nouvelle (neighborhood),

38, 218bonnet makers, 105boulevard de l’Observatoire, 185Boullé, Étienne-Louis, xiii, 70bourgeois, bourgeoisie, 11, 21, 30, 32,

89, 103, 144, 151, 153, 174, 190,206, 218, 257

Bourse (stock market, also known aspalais Brogniart), 80, 220

“Braesch Papers,”, 269–70Braudel, Fernand, 18–19bridges, 31, 67–8, 74, 82, 213brique Creuse, 223Brogniart, Alexandre-Théodore, 70,

87, 196Brumaire 18 (Napoleon’s coup d’état

of 1799), 185Brunet frères (contractors), 76Brunoy, château de, 58building booms, 10, 46, 81

building codes, 8–9, 461766 Ordinance, 11, 65

building materials, 31critique of poor quality, 50, 168, see

also malfaçonbuilding 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, oftenused interchangeably in thisepoque), 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 alsocommunity of mastercarpenters, 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, 100marble cutters (marbriers), 41–3masons (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 alsoapprenticescommunity of master masons

painters (peintres en bâtiment), 33,41–3, 88, 121, 170–1

pavers (paveurs), 33, 55, 88, 170–1plasterers (plâtriers), 170–1, see also

Limousinsplumbers (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, seefunctionaries

Bureau de la filature, 99, see poor reliefBureau of mines and quarries, 199Bureau of Statistics, 222–3bureaux d’adresse (agencies for

domestics), 203bureaux de placement (employment

agencies), 206, 229Burstin, Haim, 79butchers, 234

cahiers de doléances, 77Caisse d’escompte, 77Calonne, Charles Alexandre de, 62,

79–80canal de l’Ourcq, 4canal du Midi, 13canal Saint-Martin, 220canals (general), 77, 218capitalism, xiv, 2, 6–7, 9, 11–14, 28,

48, 61, 94French model of, 18–21, 246and the French Revolution, 152,

183–4, 244–5Carnot, Lazare (military engineer), 160carpenters (charpentiers, menuisiers en

bâtiments), see building tradescartes de sûreté, 92, 269–70Cavilliez (revolutionary police

commissioner), 82–3certificats d’indigence, 102Chalgrin, Jean-François (architect),

196, 227–9, 238–9chambers 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 (buildingentrepreneurs’ corporation), 4–5,233, 235, 237, 252

Champ de Mars, 184Champ de Mars massacre (July

1791), 120Champs-Elysées, 186Chaptal, Jean-Antoine, (Minister of

Interior), 200, 222–3Châtelet, 53, 56–8, 113, 152, 201–2,

260–4, 309Chaussée d’Antin

neighborhood, 82, 189, 192–3, 218street, 193

Chevalier, Louis, 260churches, see Madeleine,

Ste-Genèvieve, ecclesiasticalproperty

circulation, 46, 258citizens 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, 222Clement (arrested public works

entrepreneur), 169, 177Cloménil (or Clomesnil), Jacques

(stonecutter, arrested for activitiesduring Prairial), 179–81

clientelism, see patronage networksclubs, see Cordeliers Club (Society of

the Friends of the Rights of Man)Cobb, Richard, 94Cochin, Augustin, 84–5Colbert and Colbertism, 10, 27–8, 52Commercial Council, 251Commission des artistes, 161–4,

188–9, 219Committee 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-LiancourtCommittee 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, 176Community of Master Carpenters, 57,

82–95, 175–7Community of Master Masons (ancien

régime), 31–3, 82credit-worthiness, 66structure, 43–5

compagnons and compagnonnages(journeymen’s associations), 35,93, 204, 248

see journeymenconcours (competitions), 73, 132–3,

161–4, 186–7conscription, military, 222, 226, 246Conseil des anciens, 185Conseil des bâtiments civils, 196–9,

210–11, 216, 219, 227, 230–3,237, 240, 251, 309

Conseil des cinq-cents, 185Conseil des Prud’hommes, 181–2,

212–13Conseil d’état (Napoleonic), 233Constitution of 1793, 148, 178–9construction industry, see building

tradesConsulate, 200–2consumer revolution, 8, 11–13,

18–19, 219see also populuxe goods

Continental System, 224, 226contractors, 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), 130–1Coqueau, Claude Philippe (architect

assessor, executed in the Terror),172–3

Cordeliers Club (Society of the Friendsof the Rights of Man), 107–9, 111,124, 143

corporationsabolition, 47–8, 51, 1776credit, 12, 64–6, 76–7officers, 91, 152restoration, 54–8, 1776restoration, Napoleonic, 227,

229–41suppression, 79, 82–95, 142–3,

151–3, 1791survival, 86, 94–5, see also Chambre

syndicale, Community of MasterMasons, Loi d’Allarde, Loi leChapelier

corporatism (defense of guilds), 5–6,46–7, 54–5, 241, 244, 249–56

Corps legislatif, 213corruption, 103, 111, 122, 124, 126–7,

129, 135, 141, 156, 167–73, 176credit, 65–6, 76, 79–81, 86, 94,

156–7, 189Creuse (department), 16, 38, 58, 134,

175, 211, 223–4, 260Creusois, 39, 87

see also maçons de la Creusecriminality, worksite, 55, 73, 86, 103,

129, 172–3, 175, 260–4Crochon, Victor, 254Crola, Jean-François, 8cul de sac Saint-Martin, 82Cumers (Napoleonic administrator),

229–30, 238, 240custom and tradition, 45, 59

D’Alembert, see DiderotDanton, Georges, 107Daru, Pierre Antoine Noël Mathieu

Bruno (Intendant, Maison del’Empereur), 210, 212

day laborers (manouvriers), 17, 58–9,89–90, 100, 116, 212, 247

see unskilled labordebt, 12, 62, 65–6, 76, 80–1, 94,

116–17Declaration of the Rights of Man and

Citizen, 63, 85, 94

Index 337

Decressac, Pierre (arrested masonryentrepreneur), 177–8

Defermont, Jacques (deputy), 194Demachy, Pierre Antoine

(painter), 108demographics, 222–3, see populationderegulation, see liberalism

(economic)Désert, André, 8Desgodetz, Antoine-Babuty

(architect), 48Desmoulins, Camille, 107

see also Révolutions de Paris, 150Despline (arrested entrepreneur),

172–3Destutt de Tracy,

Antoine-Louis-Claude, 208De Wailly, Charles (architect), 161–2Dictionnaire d’architecture, 112

see also Quatremère de QuincyDiderot, Denis, see EncyclopédieDirectory, 125, 145, 183–200, 215,

218, 240, 245–6Districts, revolutionary, 102domestic servants, 206Dorigny, Louis François (contractor in

carpentry), 176–7Dosse, François, 6doux commerce, 9Du Bierre, François (arrested

entrepreneur), 154–6, 168, 180–1Dubois, Louis-Nicolas, (Napoleonic

police prefect), 200–2, 205–7,209–10, 214, 224, 227, 232–4,237–40

Durand, Yves, 90Durouzeau (justice of the peace),

135–6

ecclesiastical property, 96, 163, 189,196, 257–8

see also biens nationauxEcole centrale des travaux publics, 159Ecole des ponts et chaussées,

14, 254Ecole militaire, 36Ecole polytechnique, 159, 199, 235émigrés, 218Empire, 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 BritainEnlightenment, 3, 8–9, 12, 21, 24, 27,

29, 42–3, 48–50, 112–13, 117, 128entrepreneurs 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, 138–9Napoleonic controls over, 224,

227–41on 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, 178Estates General, 81, 210experts 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, 218–19faubourg Saint-Jacques, 34faubourg Saint-Marcel, 30, 35, 78, 99,

104–11, 119, 125, 129, 178, 226,248–9

faubourg Saint-Martin, 116faubourgs (general), 17, 26, 37, 248–9

338 Index

federalism (charge ofcounter-revolutionary activity),147–8, 159–60, 164, 177

Féraud, Jean (executed deputy), 178Ferrière, Claude-Joseph de (legal

scholar), 44–5Fichet, Pierre (entrepreneur), 190Florence, Italy, 8Fontaine, Pierre François (architect),

70, 218Foucault, Michel, 1Fouché, Joseph (Minister of Police),

210–11Fouquier-Tinville, Antoine Quentin,

(Prosecutor of the Terror),166, 201

Fremin, Michel de (architecturaltheorist), 49

functionaries, 97, 147, 152, 156, 185,212, 215, 233, 247

Garrioch, David, 35Gaudin, Martin Michel Charles

(Minister of Finance), 212Gazette de France, 36, 202Geneva, Switzerland, 223Gilbert, Florentin, 72–3Girard de Bury, (Procureur du Roi de la

Chambre des Bâtiments), 129–30glassworks, royal, 37Gobelins, barrière de, 202Gobelins, manufacture (Royal, then

National), 78, 88, 105–6, 119,141, 157

grain trade, 6, 51Graves, Robert, 65Great Britain, 62, 148, 226Great Fear (July and August 1789), 101Greer, Donald, 167Grelet (master mason at the

Opera), 116grève, faire (strike), origin of term, 57,

59, 209, 248–9see also strikes

Guadeloupe, 203Guibert, Joseph (ornamental

sculptor), 135Guide to the Merchant Corps and the

Corporations of Arts and Crafts, 44

guilds, see corporationsGuillerme, André, 8, 20

Haitian Revolution, 13, 20, 203Halle au blé (grain market), 10, 132Halles, les, (central market), 4, 142,

180Hardy, Siméon-Prosper, 24, 33–4, 40,

55–6, 58, 309hatters, 203Haussmann, 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, 46Henri IV, 8hereditary offices, 47hôpital des Incurables, 116Horn, Jeff, 19–20hospitals, 13, 105, 153, 161, 196–7,

222, 249hôtel de la Monnaie, 36hôtel de Salm, 26–7

Idéologues, 183–4, 201Ile de la cité, xv, 258immigration (from the African

continent), 2–3indigent population, see poor reliefindustrial revolution,

industrialization, see capitalismindustrial waste, see pollutioninflation (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 constructionancien régime, 43–4, 97, see also

experts and expertiserevolution, 103, 105, 113–16, 118,

121, 124–8, 134–5, 138, 141Institut national, 183insurrections, see journéesinventaires après décès, 83

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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), 71Jefferson, Thomas, 27Jones, Colin, 28Jourdain, Annie, 185Journal de France, 99Journal des ouvriers charpentiers, 238journalists, revolutionary, 156journées (days of action), 13, 202

4–5 September, 149, 1793Germinal (1 April 1795), 178Prairial (20–23 May, 1795), 165,

174, 178–80, 202Vendémiaire (1795), 113

journée, see workdayjourneymen, 35–6, 59, 76, 84–7

see also laborersjurés, see Community of Master

MasonsJurisdiction consulaire (merchants’

court), 76–7justices of the peace, 135–6, 152,

166–8, 175, 178, 180, 182“just price”, 59

Kaplan, Steven, 87, 142, 247Keyder, Caglar, 19

Laborde, Alexandre (Prefect of Paris),254–5

labor migration, see migrationLabrousse, Ernest, 89–90laissez-faire, see liberalismL’Ami du peuple, see MaratLanguedoc, 12–13La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, François

Alexandre Frédéric, Duc de, 102,112, 122, 134, 187

La Rochelle, 1620s siege of, 15Laugier, Marc-Antoine (architectural

theorist), 47, 49–50, 60lawsuits, 42, 144, 248lawyers, 43, 47–8, 56, 86, 197Le Camus de Mèzières, Nicolas

(architect), 49, 132Lecouteaux (entrepreneur-promoter),

142

Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas (architect),xiii, 24, 69–70, 73, 79, 172

Lefebvre, Georges, 81Left Bank, 30, 38, 105, 132, 218–19Legislative Assembly, 112, 127, 131,

133, 134, 135Lemit, Louis (president, sectional civil

committes), 155–6, 186Lenoir, Jean-Charles-Pierre

(Lieutenant General of Police), 58Le Sueur, Charles-Philippe (urbanist,

pamphleteer), 72liberalism (economic), 5–6, 17, 29, 45,

49–51, 66, 249the Directory and, 183–4, 195–6the early Revolution and, 75–6, 82,

96, 121, 144–5, 148, 152, 244–5Napoleonic debates and, 206–7,

215, 227, 237, 244, 256Restoration and 1830

Revolution, 255see 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, 201limestone, see building materialsLimousin (region), 15, 134, 223Limousins (natives from and laborers),

15–16, 39, 58–9, 118, 129, 224see also building trades, plasterers

Lindel, Robert (Committee of PublicSafety), 168

livrets (workers’ passbooks), 56–7, 83,138, 202–6, 208, 222, 224–5,229–31, 233, 239–40, 247

locksmiths (serruriers), see buildingtrades

Loi d’Allarde, 48, 82Loi le Chapelier, (revolutionary law on

guild abolition), 48, 82, 127, 158,167, 175, 231, 255

Louisiana Purchase, 20Louis-Philippe, 254Louis XIV, 10, 216Louis XV, 36Louis XVI, 32, 51, 58, 120Louvre, 82, 132

340 Index

Loyseau, Charles, Traité des ordres(1610), 93–4

Luddism, 20luthier (stringed instrument

makers), 205luxury, 23, 89, 108, 119, 130–1Lyons, 15

maçons de la Creuse, 3, 15–16, 18, 39,133–4, 152–3, 175, 211, 254,259–61, 263

see also Creuse, CreusoisMadeleine, Church of, 81, 218Maison de l’Empereur, 210, 212,

216, 225Maison du Roi, 216, 250, 309malfaçon (defective construction),

31–2, 50, 57, 91, 169Malthusian, 223Mandar, Charles François (civil

architect), 142–3mandat territorial, 197–8Mangin, Charles (architect and former

expert-bourgeois), 132–5Marais, 31, 83, 163, 219,

221, 257Marat, Jean-Paul, 103, 111–12, 124,

126, 135, 150, 178, 309marble-cutters, 41–2marchandage (piece-mastering), 6Marchés, Section des, 180Margairaz, Dominique, 188masons (maçons), see building

tradesmaster 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 ofMaster Masons

Maurice, Jean-Frédéric-Théodore(Napoleonic Prefect to theCreuse), 223–4

Maximum (General), 146–8, 157–9,164–5, 167–8, 176–8, 184, 210,240, 246

Mayer, Arno J., 86Ménilmontant (quarter), 258mercantile balance of trade, 9, 223

merchants, 30, 151Mercier, Louis Sébastien, 11, 22–4, 29,

34, 37–8, 45, 60–1Mercure de France, 36–7merit, meritocracy, 61–2, 99, 117–18,

127, 131–2metallurgy, 6, 16, 20, 141, 149, 224métiers jurés (sworn trades), 61migration, 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 laborMinard, Philippe, 28Minister, Ministry of Interior, 183,

196, 200, 207, 222, 224–5, 228,230–1, 233, 251

Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, 106monopolies, see privilegesMontagnards, 107, 148, 174, 176Mont Blanc, section de, 103Moreau, Sylvain (master carpenter),

84, 111Moulin, Annie, 39

Nadaud, Martin, 16–18Napoleon 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, 256National Assembly, 64, 68, 75, 78–9,

97, 99–100, 106–7, 114, 120–1,130, 134, 153

National Guard, 118, 154, 178nationalism, see patriotismNecker, Jacques, 56–7, 62, 77, 83, 138Neufchâteau, François de (Interior

Minister), 183–4, 186, 222nobility, see aristocratsNoiriel, Gerard, 8Normands, Normandy, 16, 39Nôtre Dame, archdiocese, 86Nôtre Dame, parvis, 258Nouvel almanach des bâtiments, 232

O’Brien, Patrick K., 19Observatoire, section de l’, 84

Index 341

O’Connell, Lauren Marie, 197ordonnance, 37

painters (peintres in bâtiment), seebuilding trades

Palais Bourbon, 185–6Palais Brogniart, see BoursePalais de Justice, 24, 76, 82, 113Palais des Tuileries, 185–6Palais du Luxembourg, 185–6Palais Impérial (Tuileries), 212Palais National, see LouvrePalais Royal, 218Palloy, François, 68–9Panckoucke, Charles-Joseph, 36–7Pantheon, 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, 135Paris-8, Université de, xiii, xviParker, David, 61Parlement de Paris, 52–5, 58–9,

101, 201Pasquier, Etienne-Denis (Parisian

police prefect), 239–40passages (arcades), 219passbooks, see livretspatentes (business licences), 75, 153,

168, 232, 251patois, 40, 57–8patriotism, 9, 10–11, 61–2, 118,

124–5, 128, 144, 155, 157patronage networks, 78–9, 152, 154–7,

180–2, 246, 248pavers (paveurs), see building tradespayrolls, 115–16, 118, 122–3, 125–6,

129, 136, 140, 309Percier, Charles (architect), 70, 218père Duchesne (newspaper), l, 150père Lachaise, cemetery, 64Peyre, Antoine-Marie (architect),

249–51Physiocrats and Physiocracy, 9, 27, 51,

100, 183Picardy (region), 39piece-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’Hôtelde Ville), 18, 57, 59, 88–9, 201–2,206, 213–14, 231, 247–8

place de la République, 82, 258place de la Throne, (de la Nation),

72–3place de la Victoire, 132place de l’Estrapade, 111place Louis XV (place de la Concorde),

10, 36place Maubert, 201place Maubert, 99, 105place Vendôme (place

Louis-le-Grand), 58plasterers (platriers), see building tradesplumbers (plombiers), see building

tradespolice commissioners

ancien régime, 57, 92, 169Revolution, 103, 106, 117, 137–40,

142, 152, 161, 166–9, 175, 178,180–2, 205–7, 212, 236, 241,248, 252, 309

see also namespolitical economy, see liberalism,

Physiocratspollution, 105, 140–1, 249Poncet, Pierre (Pantheon’s masonry

contractor), 125–9, 134Pont Neuf, section de, 82ponts, see bridgespoor relief, poverty, 96–100, 102–6,

117, 130–1, 186–7, 191,204, 214

Popincourt, section de, 176population, 6, 15–17, 151, 165, 178,

255–8mixité and stratification, 34–5, 258studies of, 24, 29, 103, 108, 222, see

also demographics, 222–3populuxe goods, 11, 18porte Saint Denis, 216porte Saint Martin, 132, 216potatoes, 15

342 Index

Poyet, Bernard (building inspector),70, 103–4

Prairial (uprising), see journéesPrefecture of Police, 201–2, 213–14prices, 90, 93, 173

see also inflation, Maximumprinting shops, national, 141prison construction, 113, 126, 196privileges, corporate, 44–6, 87

monopolies, 48, 52, 79property, 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, 183public service, 96, 98, 101, 107,

124, 188Public Works Bureau (Napoleonic),

239–40Public 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, 105Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine

Chrysostôme (director of thePantheon construction site) ,112–15, 117–18, 120, 123–6, 128,134–6, 141

quays, 187

Raymond, Jean-Arnaud, 227–9régies (state enterprises), 106Regnault (rapporteur of law on

passbooks), 208religious buildings, see ecclesiastical

propertyrentiers, 11, 30

republicanism, 107–8, 111–12,124–5, 128

Restoration, 251–3Réveillon, Jean-Baptiste, 371830 Revolution, 253–6Revolution of, 1848, see Second

RepublicRevolutionary Army of the

Interior, 158revolutionary tribunals, 148, 154, 158,

166, 169–71, 174Révolutions de Paris (newspaper),

150, 309Riberolle, villa, 145Richard, Camille, 20Richelieu, Cardinal, 15Riffé, J. (Napoleonic functionary),

203–11, 238, 240Right Bank, 30–1, 38, 132, 189, 205,

217–18riots, 37roads, see street and road constructionRobert, Hubert, 74Robespierre, Maximilian, 148, 151–2,

164–5, 176–7, 180Roche, Daniel, 17Rondelet, Jean-Baptiste (chief

inspector, engineer of thePantheon), 114, 120, 123, 128,141–2, 160, 173, 196, 199

roofers (couvreurs), see building tradesRoosevelt, Franklin D., xivRousseau, Jean-Jacques, 158Roussel (guild architect), 130–1Roux, Jacques, 140Royal Society of Agriculture, 100rue aux Ours, 39rue de Charonne, 197rue de l’Abbaye, 219rue de la Mortellerie, 71, 89rue de Lanneau, 110rue de l’Ecole de medicine, 107rue de l’Ulm, 219rue de Montreuil, 37rue de Rivoli, 162, 190–2, 217, 258rue des Colonnes, 189–91, 193rue Laplace, 110rue Mandar, 142–3, 189–91rue Ménilmontant, 84

Index 343

rue Monmartre, 38, 144rue Mouffetard, 105rue Saint-Georges, 79rue Saint-Jacques, 99rue Saint-Lazare, 79–80rue Saint-Martin, 38, 205

Saint-Denis, xiiiSaint-Domingue, see Haitian

RevolutionSaint-Etienne (city), 15Saint-Etienne-du-mont (district),

99–100, 106Saint Joseph, patron saint of

carpenters and joiners, 239Saint Roche, patron saint of

masons, 140Sainte-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 Pantheonsalaries, see tarif, wages, workdaysalary rolls, see payrollssaltpeter (for gunpowder), 149Saltpetrière, hospital of, 105sans-culottes, sans-culotterie, 98, 153,

166–7, 182, 248in construction, 154–6, 180defined by historians, 151–2defined by revolutionary

journalists, 150scaffolding, 91–2, 108, 120, 122–3,

139, 141–2sculptors (sculpteurs en bâtiments), see

building tradesSecond Empire, 6–7, 218,

256, 259see also Haussmann,

HaussmannisationSecond Republic, 16–17sections, revolutionary, 72, 147,

206, 248see also names

Séguier, Antoine Louis (Parlement deParis), 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), 137Seven Years War, 2, 10, 24–5, 36,

65–6, 80size of Paris, 54Soboul, Albert, 151–2Sonenscher, Michael, 59, 116Sorbonne, la, 105Soufflot, Jacques-Germain (architect of

the Church of Sainte-Geneviève),108, 111

Soufflot-le-Romain, Jacques-Germain(draftsman and inspector of thePantheon), 114, 117, 125, 128

speculation, speculators in Parisianreal estate, 51, 65, 189

Spicket (or Spiket), (revolutionarypolice commissioner), 84

spinning establishments (ateliers defilature), 99, 141, 149, 156,186, 197

state employees, see functionariesstatism (étatisme), 5–6, 50, 64stock exchange, see Boursestock market, 80–1

see also bourse, 142, 189, 218stonecutters, see building tradesstreet and road construction, 96, 149,

188, 195strikes, 83–6, 94, 209, 228, 238

ancien régime, 56–60Revolution and Empire, 83–93,

147–8, 167, 176, 199, 204–5,209, 212–14, 228, 238–9, 247–9

see also grèvesurveillance committees, 108Suspects, Law of (September 1793),

148–9, 157–8syndics, see corporations, officers

tanners and tanneries, 105, 249tarif (wage scale), 26, 57–8, 83, 231–2

344 Index

taxes, 80–1, 92, 116, 153, 194, 212,222, 245, 252

gabelle (salt), 212ancien régime, 81corvée (road-building), 14octroi (on merchandise), 116,

119–20, 212pèages (tolls), 14, 194–5vingtième (5 percent tax on

income), 10Temple, neighborhood of, 218, 221,

257–8Terror, the, 98–9, 129, 141, 146–50,

155–78, 182textiles, 96, 105, 226theaters, 13theft, see criminalityThermidor and Thermidorian

Government, 146, 156–7, 165,168–72, 174–6, 178–81, 186

Third Republic, 14Thompson, E. P., 211Thuileries, 27, 186tilers, 55tobacco, 141Tocquevillian interpretations, 27tools, 91, 260–3Tour Saint-Jacques, 201trades, other than building, see also

crafts, 7, 44, 129tradition, see custom and

traditiontraffic, see circulationtransparency, 67Trou, François Nicolas

(architect), 193Turgot, 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, 246United States, 112unskilled 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, 219Varennes, king’s flight to, 120Vaudoyer, Antoine (architect),

207–9, 225Vaudoyer Project, 208–11,

213, 225venal offices, 44, 46, 61, 64Verniquet, Edme (urban cartographer),

161–2Versailles, 15, 97Vestier, Nicolas-Antoine (architect),

190, 193Veyrat (Inspector-General of the Arc

de Triomphe), 239Vichy and the corporations, 93Vinçard, Paul, 1vingtième, see taxesvoirie (roads department), 101,

161, 187Voltaire, François Marie Arouet

de, 10

wage and price controls, seeMaximum

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 (salaireà 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 SevenYears War

War of Independence(American), 10

War of the Second Coalition(1799–1801), 187

Index 345

weavers, 105, 226Weber, Eugen, 14welfare, see poor reliefwheat, 90Woloch, Isser, 140women laborers, 102–3, 141, 149, 156,

224–5

wood (as building material), 90–3, 122workday (journée), 39, 89, 116–18, 136,

194, 207, 210–11, 214–15, 254work-related illnesses, 115, 139–41

see also accidentsworkshops for the indigent, see poor

relief

Documents

Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution