Yet across a variety of trades in diverse regions, this situation began to change on the eve of the French Revolution. Perhaps the most notable outbreak of resistance to the machine before 1789 took place in Saint-Étienne, southwest of Lyon. Beginning in 1785, labour agitation in the region exploded; the issue was the defence of customary practice when faced with innovations involving mechanization, the division of labour, and manufacturing techniques brought from abroad. Motivated partly by a kind of xenophobia of industrial custom, the agitation began in the metallurgical trades when two workers from Liège brought new methods to forge musket barrels using trip hammers that would eliminate one step — and thus one job — from local production routine, while simultaneously increasing the productivity of others. The metal workers responded by driving the Belgians from the city. The municipality supported the workers and explicitly defended local manufacturing custom. Between 1785 and the spring of 1789, metal workers, silk ribbon-makers, and coal miners intervened publicly on at least seven occasions to prevent the introduction of advanced machinery and to cast out Swiss, Belgian, and German workers who had brought new industrial techniques. While the ancien régime lasted, the violent tactics of the workers of Saint-Étienne enjoyed substantial if temporary success in conserving their customs.[39] By the mid-nineteenth century, a workforce of many thousands had been trained in textile engineering. The best paid and highest skilled were considered part of an aristocracy of labour. Alongside was a multitude of shop-floor engineering workers concentrated on narrowly defined duties in large factories, arguably with little independence or discretion compared with their immediate predecessors. The ways in which engineering workers were employed and trained had evolved, and the trade had changed. Whether this group was less skilled overall, and how far it might have lost touch with the industry's earlier ethos, are less certain. The Age of Machinery (TAoM) is a case study of the machine builders who catered to and often inspired the textile manufactures of West Yorkshire. The setting is Keighley and Leeds but Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow are on the horizon. The study is organised chronologically; chapters follow cohorts of initially unspecialised artisans with various primary occupational designations (carpenters, turners, mechanics, whitesmiths, millwrights) as they developed more specialised titles (spindle, flyer and roller manufacturers), and eventually founded a new industry: textile engineering.

This assertion rests on the work of Eric J. Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers,” (1952) in Laboring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (Garden City, NY 1964), 7–26, esp. 9–13; George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England 1730–1848 (New York 1964) and Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century: Studies in Popular Protest (New York 1970); and E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York 1963), 452–602. For a recent survey of the literature on the subject, see John E. Archer, Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England 1780–1840 (Cambridge, UK 2000), 44. Make sure that contractors and visiting drivers have clearly defined directions on where to park, load and unload and where to wait. This is particularly important if you are aware of public access routes across yards or if the delivery zone is adjacent to the farmhouse. The risks from animals

Summary

Yet, the evidence from Troyes suggests the converse. Nor were the Troyens alone in fearing the consequences of labour militancy if they attempted to mechanize production. In 1792, officials in Amiens endorsed a suggestion made in Paris that they discontinue their pre-1789 use of “a portion of public funds to create workshops dependent on the use of new machinery” in favor of a strategy designed to permit a “progressive increase” in the number of workers who could be offered employment through a “limitation of the number of machines … at work in the textile industry of the department of the Somme.”[65] In the Year IV [1796], other departmental administrators complained of their inability to combat “the prejudice in public opinion against machines because they limit the amount of work available to the poor … this prejudice against machinery has led the commercial classes … to abandon their interest in the cotton industry.”[66] According to departmental administrators and later the Somme’s first prefect, fear of reprisals by the working classes — as in 1789 — appears to have amplified this shift in attitude by industrial entrepreneurs towards the machine.[67] Here I am following the current literature to dispute an assertion by E.P. Thompson, see below. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York 1944), 149. Already in the first sentence, Carlyle qualifies and defines "mechanical" by what it is not: "Heroical, Devotional, Philisophical, or Moral." The Age of Machinery, he writes, exists in "every outward and inward sense," a phrase that subtly foreshadows his discussion of marginalized individual inspiration. Carlyle echoes this sentiment when he describes the "living artisan," a phrase that connotes human innovation, replaced by "a speedier, inanimate one:" an inferior, dead machine. Although the rest of the passage seems to laud the power of technology, Carlyle maintains his tone of critique to the last phrase, "We war with rude Nature; and...come off always victorious." Humanity has departed so much from the natural to reduce itself to "resistless engines," and Carlyle reminds us that Nature is neither rude nor a justifiable adversary.

High-speed printing presses, enabling the production of low-cost newspapers and mass-market magazines This litany of the activities of the popular classes that, taken together, transformed how France would be governed later, came to be termed by its critics: the “threat from below.” If the outline of popular activities in 1789 is well-known, one element, namely machine-breaking, is mentioned only in passing, if at all. However, the incidence and effect of French machine-breaking, both on entrepreneurs and the state, demands more attention, particularly in light of the parallel with English developments for understanding their divergent paths of industrialization and the potential importance of machine-breaking as a wedge for understanding the economic ramifications of revolutionary situations more generally.

Resources

Pétrus Faure, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier dans le département de la Loire (Saint-Étienne 1956), 54; and Galley, L’Élection de Saint-Étienne, 58. Early in the nineteenth century, the throstle and the mule (a hybrid created by combining elements of jenny and water frame) had come to dominate spinning. The models worked alongside each other, with the throstle producing medium and coarser counts of yarn, in which it had a speed advantage. Historians of industrialization have taken a technological turn. We are not yet struggling beneath a ‘wave of gadgets’ but Joel Mokyr has emphasized the links between the enlightenment and invention, ideas pump-priming industrialization, while Robert Allen has claimed that relatively high British wages caused the industrial revolution by making labour-saving machinery profitable. Meg Jacob has made a strong case for the role of science in invention, while other authors, Gillian Cookson among them, have argued that the industrial revolution was the product of modest education and artisanal empiricism. People should be competent for the work they undertake. Training, along with knowledge, experience and skill, helps develop such competence. However, competence may (in some cases) necessarily include medical fitness and physical / mental aptitude for the activity. What you must do

E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, 50 (1971), 76–136.

Rule, “Trade Unions, the Government and the French Revolution, 1789–1802,” 112–38, esp. 118–22; and Leonard Rosenband, “Comparing Combination Acts: French and English Papermaking in the Age of Revolution,” Journal of Social History, 29, 2 (May 2004), 165–85.