ABSTRACT
Proletarianization involves the artisans’ loss of control over their work, usually through a degradation of the skills needed on the job. Labour historians have been very receptive to the proletarianization model as an explanation for class conflict. The large-city artisans of France, proletarianized by structural change, thus formed one wing of the working-class movement. But the form and ideology of their struggle reflected the peculiarities of their artisan past and the rather isolated experiences of their proletarianization. The transformation of the eighteenth century was decisive. It evolved in two basic stages: first, the drastic alterations accompanying the initial impact of large army orders and most keenly felt during the War of Austrian Succession; and, second, the more subtle changes occurring during and after the American War for Independence that commenced the trent towards a factory system without machines. The tailors and other large-city artisans undergoing proletarianization bequeath, to the later nineteenth-century labour movement, a powerful ideology of craft-conscious trade socialism.
