The French Revolution and the Customary Regulation of Labour

chapter 3 The French Revolution and the Customary Regulation of Labour

The last chapter showed that, until the closing decade of the Second Empire, the French economy was not organised on the basis of capitalist markets. Eco- nomic units were not subjected to the law of value and, consequently, economic development fell well short of the levels established in Britain. This assessment, of course, is at odds with a still widely-accepted reading of the French Revolution. For a long time the Revolution of 1789 has been perceived as a gateway to a liberalised economy on its way to capitalist industrialisation. This, as will be discussed in what follows, has been challenged by a ‘revisionist’ trend of historians, but the conception of the Revolution as a period in which obstacles to capitalist development were cleared away is still probably accepted as a truism by many today. Against the latter interpretation of the Revolution, the present chapter shows how social relations of production remained embed- ded in normative regulations during the revolutionary period and for decades afterward.1 The present chapter begins with a reconsideration of the historiography of the French Revolution. Building on contributions made by ‘political Marxists’, it offers a class understanding of the Revolution as bourgeois but not capitalist.The French bourgeoisie was not attempting to initiate a capitalist transition, but rather to insert itself in politically constituted channels of surplus appro- priation. In parallel, French workers waged important struggles that played a central part in the abolition of guilds in 1791. Contrary to a widespread conception, this abolition did not announce the triumph of economic liberalism in labour relations nor the rise of a capitalist industrial economy – just like it consolidated small peasant property and customary regulations of agrarian labour, the Revolution also preserved and actually expanded the bon droit, or moral economy of the working class. French workers actually gained signific-

1 Following Zmolek 2013 p. 28, who himself takes his cue from Polanyi’s anthropological usage of this notion, I use the concept of ‘normative regulations’ to refer to ‘“economic” relations directly governed by social conventions, mores and customs, typically of a local origin.’ The term will be used interchangeably with such other phrases as ‘customary regulations’, ‘moral economy’, or ‘bon droit’.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004276345_005 the revolution and the customary regulation of labour 93 ant new rights during the revolutionary period, which prevented the alienation of their labour and its subsumption by capital.

1 Reassessing the French Revolution

The literature on the French Revolution is immensely vast. Two main schools of interpretation have been central in this literature in the post-war period. The first is the ‘social interpretation’ of the Revolution, which can be traced to the early twentieth-century work of Jean Jaurès2 and is inspired by Marx’s discus- sion of the ‘bourgeois revolution’ in the Communist Manifesto. It was dominant until the 1960s and its leading exponents, George Lefebvre, Albert Mathiez, and Albert Soboul, present the Revolution as led by a bourgeoisie liberating itself from the shackles of feudalism, thus allowing capitalism to blossom fully in France.3 Here, the development of capitalism is connected with the fate of a bourgeoisie formed of merchants, manufacturers or capitalist yeomen arising from the interstices of feudal society.As it matures in the interstices of the abso- lutist regime, the bourgeoisie overcomes feudal obstacles, eventually engaging in a decisive revolutionary struggle and leading the popular masses to over- throw a retrograde aristocracy. This political victory of the bourgeoisie propels the development of capitalism as well as the emergence of a liberal democracy and public sphere.4 Beginning with Alfred Cobban in the 1950s, and continuing with influen- tial figures such as François Furet from the early 1970s, the social interpretation was radically questioned by a trend of ‘revisionist’ historians.5 The latter stressed that no capitalist development had taken place under the Old Regime, where industrial production had overwhelmingly involved small non- mechanised units. On the eve of the Revolution (and for decades afterward), commercial and financial wealth was not derived from the extraction of surplus value. Commerce and finance did not stand in opposition to, but in fact

2 Jaurès 2014–15 [1901–8]. 3 Lefebvre 2015 [1947]; Mathiez, 1964; Soboul, 1975. 4 Teschke 2005, pp. 4–5While often associated with Marxism, this paradigm actually has liberal origins and was rapidly put forth in the wake of the Revolution by Antoine Barnave and later by Toqueville (Minard 2007b, p. 22). The impact of Turgot’s and Smith’s liberal eschatologies of civilisational development (conceived as a progression of stages) on Marx’s first conception of historical materialism, systematised in the German Ideology, has been convincingly demonstrated by Comninel (1987) and Brenner (1989). 5 Cobban 1964; Furet 1978. Skocpol (1979) and Minard (2007) offer excellent summaries of the revisionist assessment of the Revolution.