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Ritual
guild escort of the journeyman Labrie L'Ile d'Amour. His training
achieved, this carpenter leave Bordeaux to his native town Paris.
Pen drawing with watercolor. around 1826.
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When works
are produced in workshop conditions, skills are transmitted in a completely
different way. Blacksmiths, potters (pt. 338), or engravers usually work
as families, so that the relationship between teacher and learner is a dual
one: master-apprentice and parent-child. Unlike home production, workshop
production, even within a family, is organized along professional lines.
One example will suffice to show how this affects the mechanisms of tradition
and innovation: the organization of the Haguenau potters as described by
Adolphe Riff.1 It is known that as early as the fourteenth century the Haguenau
craftsmen formed guildes, or Zünfte, Originally seventeen in number,
these guilds soon increased to twenty-one. One was the guild of masons,
to which potters also belonged. It was not until the eighteenth century
that the potters were numerous enough to form a guild of their own. Every
year from 1745 on, the potters elected a master, or Zunftmeister, who was
invested on Trinity Sunday, according to the ceremonial customs of the other
guilds. The guild apportioned the burden of taxes among its members and
elected delegates to appoint representatives of the Third Estate to the
States General. It had statutes, approved by the city council in 1736 as
"in compliance with ancient custom," and scrupulously enforced them, especially
the ones dealing with manners, dress, and the minimum number of pots -one
thousand- journeyman had to be able to throw in a fortnight. They had a
meeting hall, or Zunftstube, and their own seal. Superimposed on the basic
unit of the workshop was a larger unit, the guild, which set standards of
propriety and norms -a network within which people and ways of doing things
circulated. Even more than the closed world of the workshop, the professional
organization became the place where knowledge and techniques were transmitted,
the agency that passed along new discoveries and methods. How high quality
was maintained in large-scale production cannot be properly understood without
taking into account the role of craft guilds in the transmission and renewal
of skills in the nineteenth century. Under the ancien régime, journeymen
and apprentices were organized in "corporations" under the supervision of
master craftsmen. They usually lived under the roof of one of the masters,
where they received bed and board. This custom persisted in many trades
right tip to the Revolution. And even after the abolition of the corporations,
craftsmen did not find themselves isolated. Since the Middle Ages craft
guilds had existed to promote the material and moral well being of the workers
and provide material aid where necessary. These were soon to become centers
for the transmission of skills and, with the introduction of the journeyman's
compulsory tour of France, a powerful force for innovation. "Pendant l'Ancien
Régime, les compagnons et les apprentis étaient groupés
en corporations, dans la dépendance des maîtres. Ils vivaient
le plus souvent sous le toit de l'un d'eux 'à son pain, pot, lit
et maison' . Cet usage demeurait encore en vigueur dans beaucoup de métiers
à la veille de la Révolution. Après l'abolition des
corporations, les ouvriers des métiers ne se sont pas trouvés
isolés. Des isntitutions existaient depuis le Moyen Age, les compagnonnages,
qui avaient pour but la défense matérielle et morale des ouvriers,
ainsi que la distribution de secours. Elles allaient devenir, en peu d'années,
le lieu privilégié de la transmission des savoirs et un facteur
puissant d'innovation par la pratique généralisée du
Tour de France.(...) Le but de l'institution est , d'après les compagnons
eux-mêmes,'la transmission du métier, n on seulement dans ce
qu'il a de purement technique, mais dans ce qu'il présente de formateur'
. Toute l'organisation est donc dominée par le souci pédagogique:
'Le Compagnonnage est non seulement une société de secours
mutuel, mais l'académie de la classe ouvrière' , affirme un
compagnopn de 1860, Chivin, de Die, dit François-le-Dauphiné.
C'est en fonction de ces buts qu'il faut en comprendre les deux dispositifs
majeurs: l'initiation qui passe par l'adoption, la réception et la
finition, et le Tour de France".
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