This review may be of interest to some ATHG subscribers, if for no
other reason than the book's discussion of artisan drinking places.
 
*******************************************
Jack Blocker
History, Huron College, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6G 1H3 Canada
(519) 438-7224, ext. 249 /Fax (519) 438-3938
 
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 12:13:38 -0500
From: Elizabeth S Kent <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: H-NET Urban History Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
To: Multiple recipients of list H-URBAN <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Review: Bruehlman on Prothero _Radical Artisans in England and
     France, 1830-1870_
 
Reviewed for H-Urban by Lynne Bruehlman, Michigan State University
<[log in to unmask]>
 
Iorwerth Prothero. _Radical Artisans in England and France, 1830-1870_.
Cambridge University Press, 1997.  xvi + 424 pp.  Notes, select
bibliography, and index.
 
Iorwerth Prothero's _Radical Artisans in England and France, 1830-1870_ is
a valuable contribution to a (by now) standard tradition in labor
historiography that locates the origins of labor activism before 1870
among male artisans in the cities rather than factory workers.  Prothero,
Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester, focuses
primarily on men employed in skilled and semi-skilled handicraft
production in urban workshops, especially in London and Paris.  However he
departs from previous interpretations of artisanal activism in several
ways.
 
First, he rejects the notion that it took distinctive national paths,
arguing instead that there were "great similarities in the structures,
technologies, developments and experiences of the artisan trades" (1-2) in
both England and France.  Differences in the strategies and tactics
employed by artisan organizations, and in the results that they achieved,
cannot be adequately explained by reference to a "reformist" English or
"revolutionary" French political tradition.  Both countries experienced
periods of repression and liberalization in the period between 1830 and
1870, and the options available to artisans for collective action
fluctuated with specific political circumstances, but were not dissimilar
under analogous conditions.
 
Second, Prothero disputes the notion that there was a characteristic
"artisanal" radicalism or trade socialism, or that artisans shared a
common mentality, tradition, or set of values.  He emphasizes instead the
diversity of values, attitudes and cultural influences that fed into
artisanal radicalism.  Third, Prothero is skeptical of the influence of
ideology, particularly utopian socialism, in shaping the way that artisans
thought and behaved.  He believes that post-structuralist linguistic
approaches which focus on the analysis of formal discourse (programs,
manifestos, radical journalism) miss a crucial dimension--how artisans
themselves received ideas and what if anything they did with them.
Studying artisans' practices rather than platforms and polemics indicates
that they were preoccupied with pragmatic material issues, such as
unemployment relief, job placement, and the establishment of arbitrated
wage scales (_tarifs_), rather than reorganizing society or production
along co-operative or collectivist lines.
 
Like Jacques Ranciere, Prothero rejects "culturalist" interpretations of
artisanal activism that emphasize the continuity of craft-based
traditions or solidarities, or which locate the roots of collective
mobilization in the culture of the workplace and workplace relations.  He
contends that most workplaces were riven by divisions, rivalries and
antagonisms that rendered them unlikely bases for wider collective
action, and that "craft peculiarity and labor solidarity cannot be
treated as complementary" (3).  What brought artisans together across
trade lines were typically provocative actions by power-holders, either
employers, or political authorities, or the two acting in tandem, which
directly threatened workers' precarious economic security or deeply
offended their sense of justice and manly dignity.  Artisan activism was
primarily reactive and generally limited in its aims and objectives.
 
The primacy which Prothero accords to politics is one of most salient
features of his study.  Prothero repeatedly stresses that political
conditions, that is, levels of freedom or repression, were the most
important variables affecting the form and timing of artisanal collective
action.  This primacy is also evident in the centrality which he accords
to radicalism, an essentially political ideology, in providing
inspiration for plebian idealism and activity.  Prothero uses radicalism
as a leitmotif to structure and give coherence to a very detailed
overview of artisan solidarity and social groups, including, but not
limited to, mutual benefit societies, trade unions, production, credit
and consumer co-operatives, religious sects, and convivial
organizations.  He argues that radicalism, with its essentially political
critique of the existing order, had wide appeal to artisans, who had not
yet embraced a socio-economic or class-centered analysis of their
situation.  By attacking "privilege," personified by entrenched political
elites and their corrupt clients, and championing "equality," in the form
of universal manhood suffrage, progressive direct taxation, and the
extension of civil liberties, radicalism facilitated cross-trade and
cross-class alliances in ways that purely trade-based or class-based
solidarities could not.  Radicalism was also sufficiently porous as a
political orientation to permit a wide range of syncretisms.  According
to Prothero, it was compatible with perspectives as diverse as
enlightenment rationalism, Methodism, social Catholicism, pantheism and
occultism in the religious sphere, and left-liberalism, utopian communism
and anarchism in the political.  There is a tension in Prothero's
approach, however, between a refusal to oversimplify artisanal activism
by ascribing it to ideology or some monocausal variable
(proletarianization, modernization, class conflict), and the opposing
tendency to subsume all sorts of left-wing ideological and activist
currents under the rubric of "radicalism."  Prothero tends to vitiate the
explanatory power of this concept by making so many nuanced
qualifications in his analysis of artisanal ideals and activities that it
is sometimes difficult to see how radicalism provided a common
denominator among them.  It is not always clear, either, how Prothero is
defining the boundaries between "political," "economic" and "social"
explanations for radical activism.
 
Specialists in social, labor and urban history will find Prothero's work
a rich trove of information on all kinds of (male) artisanal
organizations, particularly convivial groups that catered to
non-workplace needs for amusement, sociability, and self-improvement.
His extensive use of primary sources and comparative approach yield many
provocative insights that will fuel future scholarship and debate.  For
those interested in nineteenth-century urban culture, Prothero's
examination of the role of free and easies (_goguettes_), wine-shops,
eating-houses (_gargotes_), singing societies, theaters, dance halls and
other proletarian haunts is fascinating.  So too is his exploration of
radical religiosity, particularly the millenarian and mystical currents
promoted by early nineteenth-century romanticism.  Prothero's insistence
on the importance of family and leisure to an understanding of popular
radicalism, however, cries out for more attention to the role of women
and gender in plebeian culture.
 
Prothero never oversimplifies, and it is difficult to do justice to the
subtlety and complexity of his arguments in a short review.  However,
from this reviewer's perspective, he does underestimate the ideological
and material appeal of associational socialism to Parisian workers during
the Second Republic, particularly as manifested in their support for
production cooperatives and mutualism.  The failure of such initiatives
was due more to state repression and credit shortages than lack of
enthusiasm on the part of workers, and the fact that they revived quickly
in the late 1860's in a more permissive political environment testifies
to their intrinsic appeal, not just their function as a _pis aller_.
 
For an historian who insists on the importance of paying attention to how
artisans interpreted the situations in which they found themselves,
Prothero makes surprisingly little use of linguistic or symbolic
analysis.  He is correct to argue that politics is not just about "ideas"
or "language", but "language" in turn should not be construed as merely a
synonym for political rhetoric.  Language involves a process of
meaning-making and symbolic communication that influences every aspect of
daily life.  The perfunctory attention to gender in this study seems to
be related to Prothero's resistance to post-structuralist linguistic
approaches.  Thus "artisans" are by definition male, and women workers
are routinely described as "unskilled," without reference to how
definitions of "skill" are discursively constructed and enforced.
Prothero alludes only briefly to an impressive body of work (by Genevieve
Fraisse, Lynn Hunt, Joan Landes, Sally Alexander, Barbara Taylor and Anna
Clark, among others) that demonstrates how republican and radical
definitions of the rights-bearing individual, and artisanal concepts of
"manliness" and "dignity" were gendered, thereby excluding women from
most public functions.  In a study this ambitious and thoroughly
researched, it is unfortunate that gender constructs and the role of
women in artisanal workshops, solidary organizations and urban
sociability are relatively neglected.  Nevertheless Prothero has made an
important contribution to our understanding of male patterns of
collective action and conviviality in a crucial period of working-class
formation.  He should be particularly commended for undertaking a
demanding comparative approach which reveals important similarities
between plebeian idealism and activism in both England and France.
 
 
 
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