[CHAPTER VII]
INTERNAL CAUSES OF DECAY
The guilds could only have been successful in their resistance to all these menaces if they had possessed plasticity, flexibility in adapting themselves, a desire for reformation, an eagerness to fall in with every new demand society might make, a spirit of continuity, unity, and justice,—in fact, such a combination of strong and great qualities as is rarely to be met with in the history of human institutions.
We shall find that, instead of this, they allowed their inherent faults and failings, which we have already discovered in germ, to develop at the very height of their prosperity.
It will be seen at a glance that three things grew up in their midst: a lack of solidarity between those who occupied the various degrees of the hierarchy; divisions between the different craft guilds; and a narrow traditionalism which could not even ensure the good quality of products.
Let us trace the disastrous effects of these three dissolvent forces.
I. Division in the heart of the Guilds.—(a) In principle there existed in the guild a hierarchy which justified its own existence. It was founded on age and election. On the one hand, an inequality which time corrected every day and finally did away with. Adolescence was the age of apprenticeship; early manhood that of the journeyman; maturity that of mastership; and a man’s earnings, independence, and power increased not only with the years, but according to his talent and capabilities. On the other hand—and here we have a still more provisional inequality—the elected officers received for a few months only, a power which they exercised under strict control, and then went modestly back into the ranks.
This order of things, however, was soon upset by the growing domination of hereditary power and of wealth.
The masters, anxious to secure a life of ease for their posterity, and filled with a sort of dynastic ambition, made the acquisition of mastership more and more difficult for those who had not the good luck to be their sons, nephews, or sons-in-law. Even in the Middle Ages they had given way to the influence of domestic affection, but, as modern times draw nearer, the circle of the privileged narrows. Those who were connected with the family by any tie received all the favours; periods of apprenticeship, rights and expenses of admissions, were reduced or done away with; technical proofs of ability degenerated into a simple formality which could be passed through at home. For every one else, old obligations were not only maintained but added to; expenses increased to such an extent that in France the Crown intervened more than once to prevent their rise;[128] crying injustices served as a pretext for the great ordinance of 1581; candidates were taken advantage of and made to give banquets, even when they had been refused admission; the tests became more and more complicated, cost more and more, and were often conducted with revolting partiality. As if this were not enough, the guilds arbitrarily reduced the number of masterships, some of them refusing to admit new masters for ten years, while others definitely decided only to admit the sons of masters. From the sixteenth century, the butchers in Paris, Poitiers, and other places quite frankly decreed that mastership was to be hereditary among them.
The same narrowing down applied to the attainment of magistracies. The duties of wardens and officers tended to be perpetuated in certain families: the electoral lists were weeded out in such a way as only to include the oldest masters. Sometimes even the officers nominated their successors, and this gave them the opportunity of forming a permanent oligarchy which divided the honours among its members. One step more in the same direction would have been enough to make them in turn hereditary.
The influence of money was combined with this family favouritism, counteracting it at times, but usually backing it up. None could be master unless he were rich, for the cost of admission, in the eighteenth century in France, rose to 1500 and 1800 francs. At the end of the seventeenth century, in the same country, the guilds which were in debt themselves sold letters of mastership to the highest bidder or contracted debts with their richest members, and even put up the wardenships for sale.