Apprenticeship and Learning by Doing
The Role of Privileged Enclaves in Early Modern French Cities
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Abstract
In France, formal guild training was not as ubiquitous a means of socializing young people into a trade as it has been portrayed by scholars. Guilds were limited geographically, and in many French cities privileged enclaves controlled by clerical or noble seigneurs curbed the sway of corporate structures, or even created their own. Eighteenth-century Bordeaux provides an extreme example of how limited guild training was in France's fastest-growing city. The clerical reserves of Saint-Seurin and Saint-André that housed much of the region's industrial production had quasi-corporate structures with far more open access and fewer training requirements. In Bordeaux, journeymen contested masters’ control over labor and masters trained almost no apprentices themselves. Formal apprenticeship mattered exceptionally little when it came to training people to perform a trade in Bordeaux.
Contributor Notes
Jeff Horn is Professor of History at Manhattan College. President of the Western Society for French History in 2013–2014, he is Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies in 2020–2021. Author or editor of seven books, he published The Making of a Terrorist: Alexandre Rousselin and the French Revolution with Oxford University Press in 2021. He is hard at work on A People's History of the World, which is also for Oxford University Press and slated to appear in 2022. Email: jeff.horn@manhattan.edu