Not so long ago the skilled worker was regarded by labor historians as the black sheep of the labor movement, and the artisan's attempt to preserve his position and to retain his shop-floor autonomy was condemned out of hand. No more. Spurred on by the studies of E. P. Thompson in England, Albert Soboul in France, and George Rudé in both countries, historians have discovered the skilled worker's importance in labor protest and rebellion; everywhere artisans have been found in the midst of what once were thought to be proletarian crowds. The continuing inspiration of Thompson, Soboul, and Rudé is apparent in all of the articles in this collection, although they are by no means simple reiterations of these historians’ insights. Viewing working-class life from the perspective of an entire century and two continents, the following essays suggest new generalizations and, inevitably, raise fresh questions.

On 11 August 1779 the magistrates of Lille published a minutely detailed ordinance designed to reform funeral and burial practices in that northern French city. Since the Middle Ages it had been the practice in Lille, as in other French cities, to bury the deceased within the parish grounds. Depending upon the status of the deceased, burial would take place under the choir of the church (solennels); under a lateral wing (demi-solennels); or in one of the two exterior cemeteries adjoining the church—the first of which was for ordinary parishioners (bourgeois), the second for unbaptized children. Briefly, the Ordinance of 1779 established a common cemetery outside of the city walls and forbade further burials in the five parish cemeteries of Lille. The four traditional distinctions by rank were maintained in the new cemetery and a system of funeral hearses drawn by horses was introduced by the magistrates to transport the deceased to the new cemetery. The ordinance was the product of several years of negotiation among the magistrates of Lille, the Bishop of Tournai, and royal authorities at Versailles. This reform was partially the result of a new campaign for urban hygiene or l’air pur and an attempt by the magistrates to appropriate valuable urban property since the ordinance stipulated that parishes would sell their cemetery land to the magistrates.

Much of political sociology has its roots in the history of the French Revolution of 1848. Between the collapse of the July Monarchy in February 1848 and the proclamation of the Second Empire in December 1852, powerful factions vied for control over the state. The outcomes were uncertain until the coup d’etat of December 1851 ended the Second Republic and secured the control of the Bonapartist party. Generations of analysts would carry on the debates of contemporaries over the failure of the working class to take state power in the months following the February Revolution.

Among contemporary interpretations, the most enduring was offered by Karl Marx. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx (1963) traced the shifting coalitions of class actors against the background of events which culminated in the demobilization of the democratic-socialist movement and the coup d’etat.

The strike, an organized work stoppage to compel employers to accept workers' demands, is a form of class struggle that predates the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century, however, the strike became one of the most common forms of collective action in Western Europe and a major expression of class struggle. “No doubt concerted work stoppages date back as far as organized work itself,” write Shorter and Tilly (1974: 34), “but the form of work stoppage we call the strike became a standardized and frequent form of collective action in western countries with the industrialization of the nineteenth and twentieth century.” Sociologists and historians have generally recognized that the nineteenth century marked the emergence of the strike as an important form of working-class collective action, but they have offered diverse interpretations as to why early industrialization generated intense strike activity.

Strikes have always held great fascination for historians of the working class. Collective work stoppages tear the tissue of “normal life,” and in doing so they provide historians with revealing glimpses of class relations and attitudes, which arise from but are disguised by the daily production and distribution of commodities. Because strikers have disobeyed social norms, which reflect capitalist ways of making and acquiring things and which are enforced by socially legitimized economic and legal sanctions, they must reorder relationships among themselves in accordance with their own social code and apply their own group sanctions to its violators.

In recent years many studies of strikes have analyzed particular episodes in detail, in an effort to shed light on the social relations of some epoch through local history (Gutman, 1963; Zeigler, 1977; Ham-mett, 1975; Cumbler, 1974). An older tradition, running from Dacus through Brecher, examined a series of strikes in order to derive political lessons from them (how to dampen or fan the flames of discontent) [Dacus, 1877; Brecher, 1972; Crook, 1931].

Relations between workers and managers underwent a profound transformation in the early years of the twentieth century. Employers began a systematic attempt to control production and rationalize shop floor processes through technological innovation, subdivision of tasks, and the scientific management (or Taylorism) movement. A concern for a tractable labor force compelled the development of the profession of personnel management and “corporate welfare” work on the part of employers. The all-round skilled craftsman, trained by a union apprenticeship and able to work in any area of the trade without management instruction and supervision, was replaced by the semiskilled machine operative trained by the company to work on a few tasks using modified and specialized machinery. On the other side, craftsmen accustomed to autonomy in their work and governed by a collective ethic felt their organized power threatened by this management offensive that debased skill, imposed new forms of discipline, and promoted individualism and competition. Craftsmen challenged management's encroachment upon the shop floor through militant union action, but in doing so they were forced, by the “dilution” of their trade (the British term for the destruction of skilled jobs), to rethink their traditional reliance on exclusive craft knowledge. The key to any new strategy was the ability of craftsmen to transcend old craft lines, join with the less skilled workers whose jobs were created by management reorganization, and formulate new demands. The World War I years and the production crisis produced by the war saw the permanent institutionalization of the “new factory system” in the United States and elsewhere. The metal trades were the industrial sector most affected by management reorganization, and during the war years this sector was the most strike-prone (Nelson, 1975; Taylor, 1967; Braverman, 1974; Montgomery, 1974, 1976; Nadworny, 1955; Hinton, 1973; Bing, 1921).

The modern working class is not especially noted for its optimism or idealism. Indeed, the industrial proletariat may well have pioneered in the adoption of those secular and cynical life-styles and values that have come increasingly to pervade twentieth-century society and culture (Hobsbawm, 1978a). This makes it all the more surprising, then, to rediscover the deep feelings and high expectations with which Europe's workers launched the greatest wave of strikes in their history just after World War I. For a brief moment, the apocalyptic hopes of the left-wing socialists and the fantastic fears of the forces of order seemed about to come true: Soldiers deserted en masse and turned against their officers and their governments; workers in almost every industry struck for unprecedented demands; workers’ councils were established from Limerick to Budapest (Kemmy, 1975-1976). And if Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Gramsci were wrong in their optimism, they were no more misguided than their panic-stricken opponents, such as Churchill, Lloyd George, the diplomats at Versailles, and the various generals and police commanders charged with controlling and suppressing the volatile crowds of urban workers and discontented ex-soldiers (Mayer, 1959, 1967).