Patron Leather Artisans

Abstract

Establishment in the trades could come in many different ways. Those leather craft artisans who established independent enterprises, whether guild or unincorporated, possessed a certain social and material standing that ranked above the city’s journeymen and other semiskilled and unskilled workers. Generally speaking, guild masters enjoyed a social and economic status that was higher than their non-guild counterparts and placed them in the middle or lower-middle of the socioeconomic hierarchy of old-regime Bordeaux. Despite paternalistic corporate regulations aimed to promote the fair and broad distribution of labor and wealth, there existed disparities in workshop size among masters as well as a wide variation of fortune between and within the trades. Economic differentiation among masters often exposed and correlated with varying levels of compliance with paternalistic guild regulations and allegiance to corporate leadership. As economic and political disparities among guild brethren became more pronounced and professional differences between guild masters and neighboring tradesmen and non-guild workers became less apparent, corporate officials were ever more determined to assert and defend their differentiated corporate status and identity, which, like their economic prerogatives, increasingly were challenged during the second half of the eighteenth century.¹