ABSTRACT
Artisans were rather like villages. In the modern European imagination they came to represent a world in which harmony and community ruled, in contrast with the inadequacies of urban industrial society. It is taken for granted that in an unspecified past things were better. At the end of the nineteenth century, when urban consumers used images of a harmonious and natural countryside to reassure themselves in the face of the anxieties induced by urban society, the postcards which they bought in such profusion were often of traditional village craftsmen and craftswomen. The artisan and the village came to occupy similar spaces in the urban imagination as inversions of the menace of modernity. These idealizations of the past pose problems for the historian of the artisan, for the implications of the term go beyond the merely occupational. The implicit meanings of artisanship include expectations about the nature of work and workplace relations, place within the urban social order, the role of family, and much else. Artisans, like villages, evoked interest at the end of the nineteenth century because they were in decline, and because their past seemed to represent an alternative to the harsher face of modernity. The meanings of artisanship were thus embedded in a particular reading of the past, 1 and historical study of artisans must take account of the myths which successive generations have woven around them and which they indeed wove around themselves - myths that were about the past.
