Abstract
On June 3, 1676, 30 Bordeaux guilds participated in a public procession in honor of the feast of Corpus Christi.1 The city’s master glove-makers marched in the 16th position, followed by the parchment-makers (20th), and the cobblers who proceeded three places behind them. Each guild deputation was led by the bearer of the trade community’s armorial guild banner, which depicted the guild’s colors and symbols. The master shoemaker’s standard displayed a gold boot flanked by two gold fleur-de-lis on a blue background. Meanwhile, the bearing of the community of master tanners portrayed two crossed silver tanner’s knives on a sable background, whereas the cobbler’s armorial seal bore three gold-handled silver knives on a sable background.2 These guild banners, displaying the tools and wares of their professions, clearly expressed the economic function of the trade corporations, but the craftsmen’s participation in these processions also served to publicly acknowledge and project their identity, status, and unity within the corporate society of orders.
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Notes
Steven L. Kaplan, “Social Classification and Representation in the Corporate World of Eighteenth Century France: Turgot’s Carnival,” in Steven L. Kaplan and Cynthia Koepp, eds., Work in France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 182.
Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 20–21; Kaplan, “Turgot’s Carnival,” p. 177.
Dean T. Ferguson, “The Body, the Corporate Idiom, and the Police of the Unincorporated Worker in Early-Modern Lyon,” French Historical Studies 23, (2000), pp. 545–575; Farr, Artisans in Europe, p. 116.
Claude Sturgill, “Le rôle des miliciens de Bordeaux de 1722,” Annales du Midi 86, (1974), pp. 165–180; Gallinato, Les corporations à Bordeaux, pp. 197–198.
Steven L. Kaplan, “The Character and Implications of Strife Among Masters Inside the Guilds of Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Journal of Social History 19, (1986), p. 634.
The onerous nature of the guild leaders’ duties prompted the prévôts of the shoemakers of Brest to renounce their elections, causing tumult within the guild during the eighteenth century (E. Vo Duc Hanh, “La corporation des cordonniers des Brest au xviiie siècle,” Bulletin des la société archéologique du Finistère 102, (1974), pp. 76–77).
A. Dupré, Esprit chrétien des anciennes corporations d’arts et métiers à Bordeaux (Bordeaux: O.L. Favraud, 1887).
Étienne Martin Saint-Léon, Histoire des corporations des métiers depuis leur origins jusqu’à leur suppression en 1791 (Paris: F. Alcan, 1922), pp. 437–442.
Jacques LeGoff, “Merchant’s Time and Church’s Time in the Middle Ages,” in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 29–42.
David Bien, “Offices, Corps, and a System of State Credit: The Uses of Privilege under the Ancien Régime,” in Keith Michael Baker, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. Vol. 1 (Oxford: Pergamon, 1987), p. 92.
Kaplan, “The Guilds of Eighteenth-Century Paris,” p. 635; Cynthia Truant, Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 67.
Ellis Knox, “The Guilds of Early-Modern Augsburg,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1984), p. 8; Farr, Artisans in Europe, pp. 22–25.
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© 2014 Daniel Heimmermann
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Heimmermann, D. (2014). The Guild Communities. In: Work, Regulation, and Identity in Provincial France. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438591_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438591_4
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