Neither master nor laborer: The identity of the unincorporated worker in early modern Lyon

Dean Thornburg Ferguson, Purdue University

Abstract

In seventeenth and eighteenth century Lyon, as in other early modern French cities, a carnivalesque economy of mustard hawkers, cesspool cleaners, horse-skinners, rag-pickers, shoe shines, cap cleaners, stocking menders, muleteers, faggot-porters, chimney-sweeps, women ferry pilots, water carriers, litter bearers, market women, and laundresses operated alongside the regulated world of artisanal guilds. These "unincorporated" workers represented the constitutive outside to the French kingdom's hierarchically organized social body of which the guilds formed only one part. My study poses this question: how did workers in this miscellany of trades situate themselves within a corporately ordered urban world hostile to their presence. It is an exploration, therefore, of the intersection of the classificatory, segregative powers of policing authorities and the tactics employed by Lyon's poorest laborers to establish order and identity in their work despite formal exclusion from the dominant categories underpinning early modern understanding of labor. This dissertation, furthermore, departs from traditional labor history by shifting the focus from work as production, an analytical category which shares many of the assumptions ordering early modern conceptions of work, to an examination of the peculiar niches within the early modern city in which the urban poor carved out their own occupational identity. The "tactical" nature of unincorporated workers' seizure of urban spaces, tentative and temporary though it was, may be seen in Lyon's criminal courts in practices as diverse as battling over control of ports and plazas, maintaining common purses for bands' earnings, informally establishing purchasing agreements among market women, even walking distinctively through the city or engaging in confrontations with police commissioners over places to hang laundry. In these and other ways groups of unincorporated laborers sought to combine, order their work places, and defend fragile social identities and economic positions.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Farr, Purdue University.

Subject Area

History|European history|Labor relations|Social structure

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