Georges François Renard

“ Nor was the Florentine Arte di Calimala, so called after the ill-famed street in which its rich and sombre shops were situated, any more lenient to those of its agents who, especially in France, were set to watch over its interests. The merchants of the Calimala—buyers, finishers, and retailers of fine cloth, money-changers too, and great business magnates, constantly acting as mediums of communication between the West and the East—were far from treating their indispensable but untrustworthy subordinates in a spirit of brotherhood. ”

“ But it has always encountered obstacles which have arrested its progress. First there have been disagreements between those who favour the idea. Should the guild be optional or compulsory, open or closed? What share should masters and workmen take in it? Should it aim only at mutual assistance, or should it be competent to act in disputes between members? On the one hand there were those who were afraid of reviving the tyrannical monopoly of the old wardenships and on the other those who were afraid of forming, without meaning to do so, the framework for a socialistic organization of labour. ”

“ The economic aim comes first in time and importance. The guild was first and foremost a fighting organization for the defence of the trade interests of those who belonged to it. It was jealous both of the welfare and of the honour of the craft—two things intimately connected; for it realized that good reputation is one of the conditions of good business. Naturally the first means to suggest itself for the attainment of this double ideal was the regulation of production and sale.
With regard to production, the guilds prided themselves on giving an official guarantee to the consumer. ”

“ But the original narrowness persisted; a new inequality sprang up between masters and fellows; the rules for maintaining internal discipline and the domestic authority of the employers over the workmen became, not less, but more rigorous; the journeymen were still forbidden to have common funds, to assemble without permission, or to be together more than three at a time; to carry arms, to concern themselves with the hiring of labour, to leave work unfinished, or to present themselves without a letter of discharge from their last master. A strike could always be punished as a desertion of work. ”

“ This industrial revolution took place both in those vast enterprises in which the ancient hierarchy of apprentices, journeymen, and masters became meaningless—since a handful of masters possessed the capital and appliances, while the mass of workmen possessed nothing:—and in those new enterprises which, like the manufacture of cotton fabrics, owed to their recent origin the fact that they had never been under the old guild system. The guilds themselves could not but suffer from the extraordinary growth which took place beside but outside their system. ”

“ The great intellectual revolution which has been named the Renaissance was at first a return to Greek and Roman antiquity. Literary men and scholars, filled with adoration for a glorious past, abandoned their mother tongue for that of the great dead, imitated Virgil, Cicero, Demosthenes, swore by Jupiter and Mercury, insisted, like Montaigne, on being given the title of Roman citizens, or like Erasmus, Ramus, or Melanchthon, took neo-classical names. ”

“ Thus pure reaction, excessive and impracticable, set in against trade combination; compulsory isolation was established under the false name of freedom of work, and in consequence the weak were abandoned to the mercy of the strong, and the poor to the mercy of the rich; the individual, naked and unarmed, was put face to face with the individual armed at every point; in the economic domain a mere agglomeration was substituted for any kind of organization. ”

“ One serious result of this constant and perfectly legitimate effort to assure the success of the guild was that it produced a strong desire to reduce, or if possible do away with, competition. The Middle Ages did not understand rights except under the form of privileges, and the guild always tended to arrogate to itself the monopoly of the craft which it carried on in a city. It even tried to exclude neighbouring towns from the market, and this was the secret of the desperate struggles which set at enmity Bruges and Ghent, Siena, Pisa, and Florence, Genoa and Venice, etc. ”

“ The victorious bourgeoisie wanted to keep to themselves the spoils of victory; they attempted to keep the lower classes—their allies of yesterday—in a precarious and subordinate position, and not only excluded them from the magistracy, but stamped all politics with a strongly plutocratic character. They sold to or reserved for themselves all lucrative posts; they administered the finances according to their own ideas without giving any account of their actions; they multiplied wars to kill inconvenient competition, or to open up new outlets for their commerce. ”

“ The Syndicalist movement, native to France, but spreading the influence of its ideas over the whole industrialized world, the Industrial Unionist movement, the American equivalent of Syndicalism, and our own doctrine of National Guilds, or Guild Socialism, are all conscious attempts to build a policy upon the half-conscious tendencies of Trade Union action. In all these the claim is made in varying forms that the workers themselves shall control in the common interest the industries in which they are engaged. ”

“ Thus, through their own failings, quite as much as through the action of unfavourable surroundings, the guild system dwindled away, till, near the end of the seventeenth century, it was little more than one of those worn-out institutions which live on from force of habit; [Pg 115] institutions which one hesitates to help in destroying, because it is difficult to know how they can be replaced, but so weak and tottering that they are at the mercy of the first shock. ”

“ For various reasons it is difficult to state precisely what wages were paid; there are very few documents; the price of labour varied very much in different crafts and at different periods; the buying power of money at any given time is a difficult matter to determine; [17] and finally, it was the custom to pay a workman partly with money and partly in kind. It must not be forgotten too that a man ate with his master, a decided economy on the one hand, and on the other a guarantee that he was decently fed. ”

“ The traveller who visits Florence admires the bas-reliefs half-way up the Campanile attributed to Giotto, which represent the origin of arts and crafts in the earliest ages of mankind; it is the stamp and blazonry of the working classes on their common work. Guilds have passed away, as all human institutions must pass, imperfect and frail in their very nature ”

“ Almost at the same date, in 1813, the right of fixing the wages of labour was taken away from justices of the peace. Of the economic legislation of the Middle Ages, there still remained the laws which prohibited workers from forming any sort of combination, and decided that in every dispute the word of a master should be accepted before that of a servant; but of the guilds nothing was left but atrophied and lifeless bodies, which were little more than memories, or names often given to what were far from being professional associations. ”