A body. No, not Foucault or Spinoza. More from Sewell.
“In 1848, both in the discourse of revolutionary workers and in French culture generally, the word travail (labor) carried strong connotations of productivity and even of creativity. But under the old regime, these creative connotations of labor were absent. Rather, labor had the traditional Christian connotations of pain, burden, and penitence. Travail was defined in the dictionary of the Academie francaise of 1694 as the “toil, pain, fatigue taken to do something.” and travailler was defined, “to do a task, a painful work, to take some fatigue out of the body or the spirit.” Travail, in short, was not the work (oeuvre, ouvrage) that is created but the pain required to create it.”
Sewell continues, explaining how “Art, by contrast, was uplifting and ennobling.” (22.) Like the mixture metals in the souls of those who make up the city, different activities had a difference in their quotient, so to speak, of art versus labor, and were ranked accordingly.
“[T]he liberal arts - defined as those arts “whose productions appertain more to the mind [esprit] than to the hand” - were ranked above the mechanical arts - defined as appertaining “more the hand thank to the mind.” The same principle of ranking was also employed within the category of mechanical arts.” (And above both ranked the clergy and nobility.) (23.)
The distinction in the mechanical arts was described as that between and artiste and artisan, with the former being the name for those engaged in the mechanical arts that “suppose intelligence” and the latter not: “One says of a good shoemaker, that he is a good artisan, and of a clever watchmaker, that he is a great artist.”
Art here was defined as “method for executing a thing well according to certain rules.” (22; Sewell quotes from the Grand Vocabulaire francois of 1762-4.)
The distinction played into who was allowed to organize collectively, into corporations. The gens de bra (literally “men of arms,” day laborers and “handworkers”), could not. As Sewell writes, “If their labor lacked all rule and regularity” - that is, if it lacked all art - “how could it be governed by the detailed technical regulations of a corporation?” (24.) Inability to be governed by a corporation meant no license to act collectively. The gens de metier, tradesmen, however, were allowed to organize in corporations as their work contained a quantity/quality of art.
The condition of not being able to organize in a corporation was to be “sans etat.” Sewell glosses the term thus: “Etat, in the old regime, had a multiplicity of meanings; it implied stability of condition and regularity; and it also meant occupation or profession.” The term also means literally, I think, to be “without state.” Sewell describes prevailing attitudes as “Gens de bras were incapable of internal discipline and were kept in order only by external authority and by the press of hunger and want.” (24.) I don’t know if I’m right that “sans etat” can also mean “stateless,” but this description resonates with reactionary conceptions of immigrants (not deserving or capable of any self activity, including participation through representative political channels) as well as with Odysseus’s decrying of the Cyclops as simultaneously a people without ‘laws to bless them’ and as un- or less productive.
Those who were not sans etat were allowed to form corporations, to join together and ply for privileges from the state and to negotiate collectively with groups and individuals.
“According to juridical doctrine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the act that created a trade corporation was the ratification of its statutes by lettres patentes of the king. This made the trade into what was known as a metier jure (sworn trade) or jurande, so called because its members were required to swear (jurer) an oath of loyalty upon entering the mastership. The nature and importance of this act of ratification can be illustrated by examining a particular case. In 1585 Parisian wine sellers and tavernkeepers were involved in a dispute with vinegar makers, who were contesting the wine sellers’ and tavernkeepers’ practice of converting soured wine into vinegar, thereby competing with them in the fabrication and sale of their product. The wine sellers and tavernkeepers found themselves at a disadvantage in this dispute because the vinegar makers were organized as a metier jure and they were not. Hence, they offered King Henri III a finance moderee, asking him to “establish them as a body and community [en corps et communaute].” The king responded by ratifying their statutes in a lettre patente. By this means he established “en perpetuite ledit etat … en etat jure pour y avoir corps, confrairie et communaute” (in perpetuity the said trade … as a sworn trade in order to have body, confraternity and community.) […] When a trade was erige en corps et communaute (instituted as a body and community), all those practicing the trade were united into a single, recognized unit with a legally secure and fixed place in the state. In the jurisprudence of the old regime, a legally constituted corps or communitaute was considered to be a single person, a subject of the king, empowered to address requests or remonstrances to the sovereign, to initiate lawsuits, and to own property like any other subject. […] By making the wine sellers and tarvernkeepers into a fictitious person, the king was granting them full legal powers as a recognized royal subject and thus a status equal to the vinegar makers.” (26-7.)
“For a trade to be a corps, or body, also implied that it had a common will or spirit - an esprit de corps - and a deep and indissoluble bond such that harm done to any one “member” is felt by all.” (33.)
To be such a grouping required government approval. All others were illegal. That is not to say they didn’t exist, to the contrary, these illegal groupings make up a lot of what I’ve read so far of Sewell’s book.
(This is off topic, but I like it a lot: “Seventeenth and eighteenth-century journeymen [grouped into illegal organizations], and the brotherhoods they created, were not marching - nor were they even groping - toward the new world of the nineteenth century.” 58.)
After the French revolution corporations were abolished on April 1, 1791, legally speaking, by the d’Allarde law. There were to be, in theory at least, no mediating bodies between individual citizens and the state, and no difference in legal standing between any citizens. This abolition “could only abolish those corporations that had existence in law; it had no effect on corporations whose existence was purely extralegal.” These, particularly journeymen’s groups, remained active. They were placed in an even better position to deal with the masters by the abolition of the masters’ corporation (87.)
“In May 1791 the carpenter compagnons [that is, the grouped together journeymen carpenters,] presented the master carpenters with a request that they join in drafting regulations to govern their trade. When the master refused - and May their corporation had in any case ceased to exist - the workers wrote a regulation of their own and attempted to impose it on the masters. This led the master carpenters to petition the National Assembly in June, warning it of a “general coalition of 80,000 workers in the capital.” The result of this petition was the Le Chapelier law, which forbade workers to form “coalitions” under penalty of fines and imprisonment and completed the abolition of corporations that was begun by the d’Allarde law. […] Le Chepalier presented the “coalition” of carpenters as “a contravention of the constitutional principles that suppress the corporations, a contravention which gives birth to great danger in public order.” The workers’ actions in Le Chepalier’s eyes and in those of the Assembly, were attempts to “re-create the abolished corporations.” Even associations formed for the ostensible purpose of “procuring aid to workers of the same profession who are sick or out of work” must not be allowed.”
Sewell quotes Le Chepalier justifying this view based on the reasoning that the associations “tend to bring about the rebirth of the corporations.” Furthermore, while “It must without doubt be permitted to all citizens to assemble,” it can not
“be permitted to citizens of certain professions to assemble for their supposed common interests. There are no longer corporations in the State; there is no longer anything but the particular interest of each individual, and the general interest. It is permitted to no one to inspire an intermediary interest in citizens, to separate them from the public interest [le chose publique] by a spirit of corporation.” (88.)
The Le Chepalier law began “The annihilation of all sorts of corporations of citizens of the same trade or profession, being one of the fundamental bases of the French constitution, it is forbidden to re-establish them in fact, under any pretest or under any form whatsoever.” It continues:
“If, against the principles of liberty and of the constitution, citizens attached to the same professions, arts and trades, should make deliberations, should make agreements among themselves tending to refuse in concert, or to accord only at a determined price the aid of their industry or of their labors, the said deliberations and agreements … are declared unconstitutional and against the declaration of the rights of man, and of null effect.” (89.)
Violators engaging in these forbidden acts were subject to fine and the suspension of their rights as citizens for one year. “Thus the National Assembly had found that its suppression of the privileges of corporation in the d’Allarde law was an insufficient guarantee of the liberty of industry so necessary to its conception of a free nation and was forced explicitly to forbid citizens of the same profession to act together on the common interests of their profession. Citizens, in the view of the Assembly, not only had to be liberated from the legal shackles of corporate privilege. They also had to be constrained to shun “the spirit of corporation,” to be forced to act as free individual citizens.” (89-90.)
While all of this is easily seen through the lens of class domination, as it should be, it is important to note that the way it was played out was not in terms of a protection of the rich and so forth but rather of equality. Le Chavelier’s argument was not against higher wages, he argued for those. Rather it was “for willfully and perversely denying their dignity as citizens by attempting to reconstitute corporations, for voluntarily contravening natural law and the rights of man and citizen.”
In the new order
“the existence of corporations in any form, with or without legal privileges, was in profound contradiction to the fundamental principles of the new, regenerated state. No intermediary body could stand between the individual - now armed with his natural rights - and the nation - now the repository and guarantor of natural rights and the sole arena for the exercise of public will. Corporations, by inspiring an intermediary interest, by giving rise to a corporate spirit that stood between and perverted relations between the individual and the nation, were inherently counterrevolutionary. Thus, when the final draft of the French constitution was approved in 1791, it began by explicitly abolishing “irrevocably the institutions that have injured liberty and the equality of rights.” And in the honor roll of iniquity that followed, corporations were listed side by side with nobility, peerage, hereditary distinctions, orders of chivalry, the sale and inheritance of public office, religious vows, and the privileges of provinces and cities as unconstitutional and “contrary to natural rights.” Corporations had been an integral part of the old regime. As such, they were incompatible with the new.” (91.)
I wonder, then, if Gabriel’s remark on Schmitt’s anti-modernity might be qualified, as Schmitt is not fond of differences within the nation.