6 - Reform, renewal, collapse

Summary

There is a philosophical wind blowing toward us from England in favor of free, anti-monarchical government; it is entering minds, and one knows how opinion governs the world. It could be that this government is already accomplished in people's heads, to be implemented at the first chance, and the revolution might occur with less conflict than one thinks.

Minister of state d'Argenson

The master metal workers of Nantes complained regularly to the local courts to the mayor, even to the Parlement at Rennes about their unruly journeymen. It seems these disreputable and disorderly souls organized “cabals” among themselves, swore secret oaths (borrowed from the Freemasons), intimidated journeymen who would not join them and boycotted masters who would not heed them. They wanted to control their own labor, not to submit to the work bureaux run by the masters. The frequent complaints make it clear that the journeymen succeeded. We have other evidence, such as the journal of Jacques Ménétra, a Parisian glazier who took his tour de France between 1757 and 1764, that journeymen everywhere controlled their labor. In every town, Ménétra goes straight to the first journeyman for work, never to the work bureau.

The language of the offended masters of Nantes alerts us to the death of the Old Regime. It passed away, as most social systems do, in its sleep, leaving its citizens unaware that it was gone. No society more fully reflects Hegel's dictum that the Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk; few people in eighteenth-century France understood that the Old Regime was no more.