The Rites of Labor is the only full account of the brotherhoods of compagnonnage, secret associations of French journeymen that originated in the late medieval era and survived into the nineteenth century. In this major contribution to French social history and the anthropology of work culture, Cynthia Maria Truant re-creates the compagnons’ economic activities, their often violent clashes with one another, and the myths and rituals that sustained their bonds.
Built on models provided by family, church, guild—and in later periods, even Freemasonry—compagnonnage was among the few social institutions of old regime France to outlive the Revolution. These illegal trade-based associations were grouped into rival sects or rites, and they organized powerful interurban networks that survived the states repeated attempts to eradicate them. The compagnonnages fulfilled many functions for their young, itinerant members, from providing mutual aid to defending their rights.
Truant begins her story by discussing competing mid-nineteenth-century views of compagnonnage, at a time when new modes of production and new concepts of fraternity were quickly eroding the old artisanal culture. She then turns back to the formation of the compagnonnages in the seventeenth century and chronicles their development through the eighteenth century. Drawing on an array of sources including letters, memoirs, and songs, she presents both the experience of the compagnons themselves and the accounts of outsiders. Truant pays particular attention to the ways in which workers defined their social identity as they responded to enormous political, cultural, and economic change during the transition to the modern era.