Book Review

What motivated an employer, and what actions did they take, when they wanted to seize complete control of labour practices by engineering the wholesale sacking of a skilled workforce, and their replacement by newly-trained (and docile) 'novices'? If this outline sounds vaguely familiar in the light of recent episodes in Australian workplace relations, then Leonard N. Rosenband's history of the Montgolfier family's paper mills in south-eastern France reminds us of how closely we stand to our eighteenth-century inheritance. It has become fashionable, of course, for some people to emphasise just how 'modern' and 'relevant' the Enlightenment's agenda remains for the twenty-first century. But rather than evoke the enduring 'truths' pronounced by the likes of Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rosenband has written a brief but extremely detailed work, which highlights the historical distinctiveness of 'enlightened' attitudes in the eighteenth-century. He also pays due attention to their many ambiguities.	1
Two of the Montgolfiers achieved fame through their pioneering exploits with balloons in the 1780s, yet the family's fortune rested on their ownership of several papermills, especially in the Vivarais (just south of Lyons). At the largest mill, Vidalon-le-Haut, a dispute broke out late in 1781 which led to a walk-out by most of the skilled paperworkers. The Montgolfiers responded with litigation and summary dismissals, with the result that by early in 1782, they had managed to install an almost entirely new workforce. Rosenband argues that this represented an attempt by the millowners to seize control of labour discipline by eradicating the pervasive influence of the journeymen paperworkers' workplace authority (henceforth it would be the employers who assigned workers to particular tasks) and their self-regulation: the 1781 dispute was provoked by the Montgolfiers' support for an apprentice who refused to make his 'customary' initiation payment to the local journeymen, as required by their 'modes' (or 'self-styled laws', as Pierre Montgolfier called them).	2
Drawing occasional comparisons with other eighteenth-century entrepreneurs (such as Wedgwood, Oberkampf, Owen or Boulton) who also sought greater output and economic efficiency by developing a more 'regular' and 'malleable' labour force, Rosenband is careful to point out the specific features of his case-study. French papermaking was undergoing only limited technological change at this time, so the Montgolfiers' keenness to introduce processing techniques adopted from the Netherlands did not amount to 'sweeping mechanization' (p. xi). Rather, the millowners aimed to achieve a new (and 'better') form of labour discipline by creating a workforce of settled 'employees' in place of the itinerant journeymen who worked and moved on when it suited them. The Montgolfiers sought to ensure that these 'new' paperworkers' training and employment wold be dependent on their attachment to the employers, rather that their loyalty to the modes. The author points out that this response cannot be regarded as 'deskilling' or 'proto-Taylorist', since there was no 'ever-widening division of labor' in which workers' skills were ultimately 'rendered obsolete' (p. 106). The journeymen paperworkers' customs' were not some pre-industrial, pre-capitalist residue, but had evolved through the long-term development of this fundamentally market-oriented industry (p. 67). Rather, the Montgolfiers' lockout of 1781 represented a decisive moment, which cut off workers' skills from their 'cultural moorings' (p. XI). The practical knowledge and traditions of these paperworkers were effectively appropriated by the employers, and all in the name of economic advantage and 'applied science' (p. 50). It is an argument that meshes well with James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998).	3
Rosenband has been able to explore this fascinating micro-study because of the extraordinarily rich records left by the Montgolfier family. If there is a regret, it is that the millowners' attitudes and actions tend to dominate this work. Rosenband is undoubtedly sympathetic to the plight of the paperworkers, but he feels obliged to quote Steven L. Kaplan on how little we can know about artisans' responses to these new forms of 'scientific' management and production (pp. 116-17). However, the author also observes the many instances of petty theft, shoddy work, absenteeism, and (individual) acts of workplace sabotage around the mill at Vidalon (pp. 112-13). Perhaps local judicial records might have offered some insights into the prevalence of 'everyday resistance' by these French paperworkers who were on one of the paths to 'proletarianization'.	4
University of New South Wales HAMISH GRAHAM

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