This gargantuan book (400,000 words of text, another 100,000 in the notes!) is an extraordinary capstone to the author's scholarship on work that is unparalled in its brilliance and its quantity. No one has contributed more to our understanding of the history of work in eighteenth-century France than Steven L. Kaplan. Although his chronological focus is a short one here—1776–1791—his objective is broad and important. Corporatism was an essential component of early modern French culture, and Kaplan's analysis of its demise offers a compelling re-reading of the social and political history of the eighteenth century and the crisis of the Ancien Regime at the end of it. The “great chain of the corporate condition” was effectively the “political constitution” of the realm, (p. xiii) and at its core rested the twofold notion of discipline—in the policing of the realm and in the subordination of workers to employers. Kaplan has published path-breaking articles exploring the varied manifestations of police and resistance in the workplace, and here he channels his unrivalled insights about their fundamental importance into a remarkable convergence of liberal and revolutionary ideas championing a society of autonomous, free, and equal individuals and everyday practices in the labor market.

Kaplan begins with a review of the Enlightened liberal critique of guilds that condemned them as unfree and thus unnatural. No idle challenge here, for it refuted the entire system of classification that supported the social and political hierarchy, and when it found a champion in a government minister, the Controller General Turgot, a world-turned-upside-down became reality. “Turgot's carnival,” (p. 77) as Kaplan aptly calls it, begins with the abolition of corporations in February 1776, and whatever Turgot's liberal hopes, the immediate aftermath appeared to many as an “apocalypse” of rampant insubordination of workers in the labor market.

Neither Turgot nor his carnival lasted long, for he was recalled in May and a new decree reinstating corporations was promulgated in August. The “New Corporatism” sought to eliminate the social confusion that Turgot's edict had unleashed, but it was no simple restoration of the old corporatism. Open access to guilds was the August decree's primary objective, because this would have the double benefit of stimulating competition in the market and luring the ubiquitous illicit workers into a regulated system. All that was necessary to join a guild was for a man or a woman to pay a fee.

Kaplan, with prodigious research in both Paris and the provinces packed into five dense chapters, explores for the first time how this new corporatism actually worked in practice between 1776 and 1789. He never loses sight of the fundamental importance of the labor market and the conflict over its control. Despite government hopes that the system be “rational and national,” (p. 129) the decree was adopted piecemeal across the realm, delayed for years in some places, never even registered in others. Kaplan concludes that the neo-corporatist reforms never achieved their objectives “and resulted in a France without a doubt less coherent in 1789 than it had been for more than a century” (p. 162).

When the Revolution erupted in 1789, guildsmen had no initial sense that the quality of citizen was in any contradiction with their status as master, nor that the corporate system stood in the way of national renovation. They embraced the Revolution's defense of property as a natural right and understood mastership as property, but above all they felt that guilds were required to protect the new nation from anarchy. They well remembered the nightmare of Turgot's carnival.

The revolutionary leaders in the National Assembly seemed to agree with them, at least in part. On the night of August 4–5 when privileges were abolished, it at first seemed as though guilds were included but when the final version was promulgated a week later guilds were spared. This was only the beginning of a struggle to define the Revolution and the place of work within it. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen later in the month further confused matters. It secured property as a natural right, but also individual liberty and equality, which workers took to mean freedom from corporate regulation and the hierarchy it was built upon. There can be no better example for Kaplan of the “ambiguity of the Revolution” (p. 446) than this, and the question of who would control the labor market of the enormous world of work was at the heart of it.

From this perspective, the d'Allarde and Le Chapelier Laws seem inevitable. The former was Turgot's revenge for it abolished corporatism both new and old when promulgated 1 April 1791. Henceforth, payment of a fee granted the right of anyone to practice a trade. The immediate aftermath was a time of “incertitude and confusion,” (p. 542) and the popular press reported a general eruption of worker coalitions and assemblies. The Revolutionary leaders responded to this “urban Great Fear” (p. 546) with the Le Chapelier Law in June prohibiting permanent worker associations.

Kaplan ends with a coda on the sans culottes, that group of masters and workers who, most historians have agreed, somehow overcame their differences and melded into a new patriotic movement. Kaplan reviews this historiography—Albert Soboul, Michael Sonenscher, Richard Andrews, and William Sewell all receive their due—and in one way or another finds it wanting. He counters that the sans culottes were many things at once, divided more than we have realized, possessed no “mentalit,” and comprised no “movement” at all.

In a book so dense and rich, to ask for more may seem unfair, but given Kaplan's relentless focus on the labor market and some of his own earlier scholarship, the faux workers remain shadowy figures here. Kaplan acknowledges that they were everywhere, but he addresses them mostly when discussing the privileged faubourgs where they worked legally. He recognizes but does not develop the implications of galloping artisanal specialization and greater division of labor that made corporate regulation that much more difficult to enforce, a chaotic situation compounded by journeymen ignoring workshop regulations and countless illicit workers, many subcontracted by guild masters (and often, their widows) themselves, working beyond the regulatory reach of guilds. Granted Kaplan's story is about “The Collapse of a World” (p. 600) in social and political terms more than just economic, but one conversant with the current debate about guilds, unregulated labor, and economic growth in the eighteenth century cannot help but wish that Kaplan had more directly brought his enormous skill, sweeping knowledge, and boundless energy to this debate.