Chapel Members in the Workplace: Tension and Teamwork in the Printing Trades in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

The process by which journeymen became masters and came to run printing houses of their own was seriously undermined in Europe from the sixteenth century on. As a rule, there was a concentration of a few printing presses in a handful of urban workshops. These were dominated by several fairly well-known families which encouraged the development of state control. This was a period of religious and political turmoil, particularly in England and France. Few studies on the early history of the printing industry are as thorough and illuminating as Natalie Zemon Davis's work on Lyons. In this large and prosperous French city, the rapidly expanding sixteenth-century printing industry employed many male immigrants who often spent all their adult lives as wage earners working as pressmen or compositors in a trade that was very different from that of their fathers. Both government and guild intervention contributed extensively and almost continuously to the expansion of this urban body of permanent journeymen in the capital-intensive Printing trade before the Industrial Revolution. Looking back on his career as a journeyman and foreman in the mid eighteenth-century Parisian world of printing, Restif de la Bretonne presumably articulated a widespread opinion when he wrote in his autobiographical writings that among printers “un ouvrier ne devient jamais maitre […] les maîtres engendrent des maîtres, et les compagnons des compagnons et ainsi de génération en génération.” In fact, the position of foreman in a printing establishment was the pinnacle of a lifetime of waged labour. The Dutch journeyman and overseer David Wardenaar in his manual Beschrijving der Boekdrukkunst (1801) described the journeymen (knechts) together with other wage earners as being without alternative prospects (“arbeiders […] bedongen loon […] om dat hij geen ander uitzicht heeft”) and as the workers of an unpayable craft (“gezellen de beärbeiders zijn van het nut […] door deze onbetaalbare kunst”).