KING COMMANDS REGISTRATION OF EDICTS AGAINST GUILDS AND FORCED ROAD LABOUR

PARIS, 1776-03-12. — PARIS, March 12.—His Majesty Louis XVI has this day required the Parlement of Paris, assembled in a bed of justice, to register the six edicts brought forward under M. Turgot, Controller-General of the Finances. Among these measures stand the suppression of the compulsory labour exacted for the making of roads, and the abolition of the sworn trade corporations which govern admission to much of commerce and manufacture. The King’s personal authority has thus overcome the magistrates’ resistance to registration. A contest over the expense of labour and the privileges of trades has become a public trial of the Crown’s power to reform the kingdom.

The edict concerning trades strikes at restrictions familiar in almost every considerable town. In occupations governed by a corporation, a man’s ability to work does not alone entitle him to establish himself as a master. Apprenticeship, service as a journeyman, fees, examinations and the rules of the particular community may intervene. These obligations differ among trades, but their common effect is to make entry dependent upon an established body of masters. The new measure opens occupations much more generally, subject to its reservations and to public regulation. It also attacks the barriers by which corporations have divided related employments and disputed the right to make or sell particular articles.

The royal preamble rests its argument upon a principle more extensive than an ordinary adjustment of fees. God, it declares, by giving men wants and making labour necessary to satisfy them, has made the right to work the property of every man; that property is described as “the first, the most sacred and the most imprescriptible of all.” The language leaves little doubt concerning the minister’s purpose. The exercise of a useful calling is not to be treated merely as a favour purchased from a privileged community. The Crown presents freedom of employment as an existing right which its own former regulations have too often obstructed.

Against this reasoning the magistrates have set the claims of order, established obligation and the public interest. Their objections are not confined to the loss of particular entrance payments. Corporations, they maintain, provide responsible bodies through which trades may be supervised, standards upheld and disorder restrained. In the resistance associated with the Advocate-General, Antoine-Louis Séguier, the several orders and communities of the realm appear as the “links of a great chain,” joined beneath the sovereign. To loosen the constitution of the trades is therefore, in this account, to disturb something greater than a collection of inconvenient commercial rules: it is to weaken the arrangements by which subjects are bound to the monarchy.

The other principal measure concerns the corvée for the highways. Under that system, rural inhabitants liable to the demand must furnish labour for road construction and maintenance, losing time which might otherwise be employed upon their holdings. The burden falls with particular severity when the summons interferes with agricultural work. M. Turgot proposes that hired labour should replace these compulsory services, with the expense met through a charge upon landed property. The dispute consequently reaches beyond the villages. It concerns both the manner in which the roads shall be made and the distribution of their cost among those whose estates benefit from improved communication.

M. Turgot brings to these questions experience acquired before his appointment to the finances in 1774. As intendant at Limoges, he had already sought to substitute paid work for compulsory road service. His present measures carry that reforming disposition into the government of the kingdom. Roads, workshops and markets are treated as connected parts of national prosperity: cultivation must not be needlessly interrupted, and industry must not be denied useful hands. Yet the minister’s programme requires more than the removal of a prohibition. Payments must be collected, work arranged and existing obligations settled, so that a promised economy does not merely become a fresh confusion.

For commerce, the immediate prospect is a change in the conditions under which a business may be begun or enlarged. Men excluded from mastery may find an opening; established masters face competitors who have not borne the same charges of admission. Customers may obtain a wider choice of makers and sellers, though no decree can by itself establish what any article will fetch. The corporations also possess debts and financial engagements which cannot be dismissed as though their books were blank. The settlement of those affairs forms a material part of the reform. Liberty of entry is one question; the discharge of liabilities accumulated under royal authority is another.

The political opposition is already plain in the necessity for today’s ceremony. The Parlement is a sovereign court, not an assembly elected to levy supplies, but its practice of registration and remonstrance gives it an important place in disputes over royal legislation. By coming in person to command registration, the King has settled the immediate legal contest without reconciling the opposing arguments. Defenders of the edicts may point to relief for cultivators and opportunity for working men. Their adversaries may answer that the Crown is overthrowing arrangements which it formerly recognised, regulated and, in various instances, made instruments of its own revenue.

Nor does the controversy arise in a season free from apprehension over economic change. Last spring’s disturbances over grain and bread remain recent memories. M. Turgot’s policy of greater freedom in the grain trade has already encountered the fear that liberty for dealers may bring hardship to consumers. The present edicts concern different burdens, and cannot fairly be judged as though they were another ordinance upon the corn market. Nevertheless, they place the same minister once more against defenders of regulation and accustomed protection. His contention that restraints injure prosperity must now meet the daily experience of workshops and villages, where benefits and losses will not necessarily appear together.

The King’s command therefore marks a decisive passage, but not the completion of the undertaking. The authorities must give effect to the new rules, distinguish the occupations still subject to special provisions, arrange the consequences of corporate suppression and establish the replacement for compulsory road labour. Whether the promised freedom produces more employment, and whether the new road arrangements distribute expense more equitably, remain questions for administration and experience. For the present, His Majesty has given M. Turgot the support necessary to carry the edicts past the court. The argument over privilege, public order and the liberty to earn a livelihood now passes from registration into execution.