The Artisanat in France

French artisans in this century have lacked neither testimonials nor eulogies. For every observer who has elegized artisans as the soul of the nation, as intrinsic, as necessary to France as Rocquefort and Beaujolais, there has been another, perhaps less poetic, who has pronounced the uselessness and imminent disappearance of the humble tradesman. Advocates of a petty bourgeois republic, generally associated with the name of Alain, viewed artisans, along with shopkeepers and smallholding peasants, as the social backbone of the Third Republic. Andre Siegfried wrote in this vein: There is no doubt that the type most representative of French qualities is that of the artisan; thus it is necessary to defend him, to encourage him, to permit him to survive.' On the contrary, social observers like Herbert Luethy pointed to small property as the Republic's albatross, as the source of the economic immobilisme that fatally weakened the regime. Luethy's unfavorable verdict on small property has often been shared by the economic rationalizers and technocrats of the twentieth century. They have seen artisanal production primarily as an impediment to the mass production and consumption that they wished to make the foundation of the social contract in contemporary France. Their lack of concern with, if not hostility towards

Art history · Portrait · French Historical and Cultural Studies · History