Three Views on the Guilds

This issue of French Historical Studies presents three articles derived from a session at a meeting of the Western Society for French History in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in October 1987. They deal with French guilds and their fate from the Old Regime through the Restoration. The editors believe they are justified in devoting this space to the guilds, because these institutions were so central to the history of France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only did the guilds perform vital economic functions, controlling the production and distribution of goods and the training and disciplining of labor during the Old Regime, they also had political and ideological dimensions. Politically, the guilds were the major instruments through which the prerevolutionary state regulated the economy; they were also important sources of state revenue. Ideologically, they came to symbolize the other privileged corporations of the Old Regime and indeed the whole hierarchical corporate society which would be swept away by the democratic individualism of the French Revolution. In fact, historians of the guilds-from the corporatists of the thirties to William Sewell and Steven Kaplan, whose recent work has sparked a revival of interest in the topic-have often paid more attention to the guilds' political and ideological dimensions than to their economic roles

Political science · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History

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