This wide-ranging and thorough study contributes a valuable chapter to the rich historiography on labor and its organization in eighteenth-century France. The author places himself firmly within the perspective of scholars such as Steven L. Kaplan and James Farr by emphasizing the social, political, and cultural functions of corporate associations while at the same time acknowledging their internal hierarchies and conflicts as well as the increasingly robust challenges they faced from unincorporated labor. Without referring explicitly to the ongoing historiographical debate on guilds, his study comes down in favor of those who consider guilds as impediments to economic development rather than a helpful response to information asymmetries and high transaction costs.Footnote ¹ In his view, stubborn guild masters blocked technological innovation in the name of tradition and corporate exclusivity; in all of the leather guilds in the second half of the eighteenth century, it was “nearly impossible” for outsiders to become masters (p. 58, 143). Echoing Bernard Gallinato's study on the guilds of Bordeaux during this period, the author argues that by 1789 the guilds had failed to resist the assault of liberal economic principle and practice.Footnote ² In the context of massive immigration from the countryside, itself a response to the economic boom of Atlantic commerce, the leather guilds tried but failed to exert effective control over most aspects of their operations.

The book develops these arguments through seven chapters that prove once again the richness of provincial, rather than Parisian, archives for studies of labor and the guilds. Drawing on a broad set of archival sources—police investigations, guild archives, royal and local regulations, official correspondence, court records, notarial contracts, and tax documents—the author competently and convincingly takes us through a list of issues familiar from previous studies of Old Regime guilds: corporate organization and conflicts, training, techniques of production, the organization and control of the labor market, wages, guild entry, establishment in the trade and, in a final chapter, the vicissitudes of corporate organization through the French Revolution.

Several important points emerge. Like the faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris, the districts of Saint-André and Saint-Seurin fell under ecclesiastical jurisdiction exempt from corporate control. Heimmermann shows the crucial role these districts played in providing a niche for free laborers, who met rising demand that guild masters were insufficient to satisfy. The author argues that this flexibility in the labor supply constituted the period's most important economic innovation, rather than changes in techniques or organization of production. Impotent to resist this competition, masters also faced the highly organized resistance of journeymen, particularly shoemakers, against their efforts to govern the labor market. In 1775, at the peak of resistance, the journeymen's leader received ten years in the galleys in the wake of a massive riot that resulted in the death of two soldiers. The author also shows that stereotypes of the “exclusive” guilds notwithstanding, the leather guilds were remarkably open to outsiders, with 87 percent of new masters being apparently unrelated to guild members.

This last point raises a seeming tension underlying the study. Given these guilds' almost total openness to outsiders, how are we to read the author's repeated assertion that by the second half of the eighteenth century “it was nearly impossible” for most aspiring journeymen (p. 58, 143) to join the guild? How can a guild contain almost all newcomers and yet be virtually impregnable to outsiders? This is a question with high stakes, given criticism of the exclusionary nature of guilds and their correspondingly negative effects on would-be masters themselves and economic production as a whole. The answer to this question seems to emerge in the final chapter, with the revelation that no rush of new enterprises ensued from abolition of the guilds in 1791; it appears that capital costs for establishment constituted the most important barrier to entry, not those imposed by the guild.

This finding suggests that recasting the story away from the rather teleological perspective of the late eighteenth century might have allowed the author to assess the leather guilds in a manner less over-determined by their apparently inevitable doom. For example, one wonders if the “tradition” and “custom” that serves as a continual foil to seemingly new “liberal” practices, ever existed at all or was not rather a convenient rhetorical fiction of the corporate world in all periods. The few tantalizing references to similar forms of labor unrest in the earlier decades of the eighteenth century seem to call for a longer durée study, particularly given the extensive attention Gallinato has already accorded to late-eighteenth century Bordeaux guilds.

Moreover, the representative status of both Bordeaux and the leather trades deserve further scrutiny. Given the weakness of guilds in Bordeaux (only 49 of 85 trades were incorporated) and the relatively modest status of shoemakers and cobblers, to what extent do they help us understand the larger question of corporate organizations and their evolution in this period? Is Bordeaux's status as a significant center of compagnonnage merely coincidental or is it a sign of the weak control exerted by the guilds in the city? Did Bordeaux serve as a mentor to journeymen on the tour de France in the acquisition of “liberal” sensibilities? Moreover, how should we interpret the relative lack of apprenticeship, another pillar of the liberal critique? Are artisanal skills minimal and apprenticeship, as critics from Adam Smith onward have argued, therefore unnecessary? Or is there a black box of rural skill transmission that scholars have so far failed to penetrate?

These lingering questions point to the unresolved issues at stake in evaluating corporate associations and their economic impact. It is to this author's credit that he has furnished so much rich material for the ongoing discussion.