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Councils of Prud'hommes

The Councils of Prud'hommes were a labour council created by Napoleon. As one of Napoleon’s many working class reforms, they were elected councils which solved disputes between workers and their employers.

Historian Robert B. Holtman called them “an early attempt at satisfactory management-labor relations in the new era of industrialization” and said “Through the councils of prud'hommes France became the first modern state to have a court for industry” (The Napoleonic Revolution).

First appearing in Lyon in 1806, conseils de prud'hommes were conceived as industrial justices of the peace that also developed a conciliatory approach while specialising in the regulation of economic activities. Proposals to establish such councils had already been formulated in the context of eighteenth-century conflicts between artisans and guild officials, in order to cope with the issue of subordination in labour relations. The need to establish local institutions to monitor labour relations had also been noted by the Constituent Assembly in 1791. But the creation of conseils de prud'hommes also resulted from powerful struggles led by workers over the revolutionary period. As noted by Guicheteau, it represented the outcome of multiple experiments led by different actors, most notably in Lyon, with the aim of applying revolutionary principles to the field of labour relations.

The councils’ officials were representatives elected from within trade communities—merchants, master-artisans and eventually also workers. Their success was also impressive, and new councils were soon created in other cities, so that by the end of the century they had spread throughout the country. In cities where prud'hommes remained absent, justices of the peace continued to deal with labour conflicts. Though at first also created to deal with commercial matters such as brand and quality control, prud'hommes rapidly narrowed their focus down to labour relations. It is crucial to note that, though they were ruling on individual disputes, their decisions had crucial collective implications.

Prud'hommes pronounced judgements and gave conciliatory advice on every aspect of labour relations, and thus played a pivotal role in the structuring of social relations of production. In doing this, they systematically refused to grant arbitrary powers to employers or to let unfettered market competition determine working conditions. A close analysis of prud'hommes’ decisions conducted by Cottereau clearly and amply confirms this. Whenever they felt that their rights were not respected, workers would appeal to these courts.

Employers were not granted the right to define individual tasks or the organisation of work. Methods of production could only be established by workers alone or jointly with employers, according to local trade usages, but could not simply be imposed from above by employers. Until the last third of the nineteenth century, prud'hommes objected to the establishment of all internal factory or workshop regulations that did not respect customary trade customs. In this, they were often backed up by municipal and regional political authorities.

Bargaining also took place within a framework defined by municipal policies and the decisions of conseils des prud'hommes, establishing minimum wages and tariffs; and whenever the bon droit was infringed upon, discussions, arguments and (sometime violent) conflicts emerged.

The point is not simply that the employers’ powers were importantly circumscribed. Over the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, such powers, at least in a unilateral form, were nowhere to be found. Prud'hommes and local or regional authorities justified their decisions and interventions by stressing the fact that issues pertaining to labour relations and the organisation of production were ‘public matters’. The separation of ‘economic’ and ‘political’ spheres specific to capitalism, which implies the privatisation of political powers to organise production, and their confinement to an ‘economic’ sphere, simply did not exist in France until the last decades of the nineteenth century, an authentic relationship of reciprocity characterised labour relations and was largely accepted, and sometimes even actively defended, by most employers, as well as by workers. As Cottereau explains, justices de paix and prud'hommes enforced, and helped to define the contours of, a moral economy, and this economy was at times also upheld by collective struggles.

The reason why so many historians have overlooked prud'hommes:

Importantly, these trade communities were also no longer backed by the central state. Sets of customary norms represented a kind of local and semi-clandestine legislation. Consequently, prud'hommes made sure not to over-publicize some of their decisions, as many could have been—and were, in fact, on relatively rare occasions, until the last third of the nineteenth century—recognised as illegal by superior law courts and high state officials and politicians. This partly explains why their crucial regulatory role within the nineteenth-century French economy has been so often ignored by historians.

Thus, for instance, after the central state’s intervention to abolish the tariffs set by Lyon’s municipal government for the silk industry in 1831, and following the popular revolts that ensued that same year and in 1834 (which will be discussed in the next chapter), the city’s prud'hommes continued to administer and to enforce piece rates clandestinely, with the support of the trade community and in direct opposition to the official liberalism.

Source:

Xavier Lafrance, The Making of Capitalism in France — Class Structures, Economic Development, the State and the Formation of the French Working Class, 1750-1914, ch. 3

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