ABSTRACT
The artisanal workplace was a place of interaction between petits bourgeois and workers only for those workshops where non-family labour was employed. In many trades, especially the most populous, those were a minority. Agricol Perdiguier, in the memoirs of his tour de France as a journeyman joiner round the workshops of provincial towns, vividly portrays the great variety of relations that existed between masters and journeymen in the 1820s. The fracturing of the craft community did not simply involve a break between masters and men, but a division amongst small masters themselves between those who sought to defend the customs and practices of the craft community as they saw it, and those who cut themselves adrift as small businessmen. The use of the law by workshop masters provides further evidence of the strains within artisanal trades.
