Introduction
For an extended period, historiography has predominantly framed respectability as an alternative goal to resistance in analysing the practices of the “mutualist universe”. This encompasses all voluntary organizations where individuals contribute labour, products, or money to a collective fund, which is then distributed among members based on predefined rules.Footnote 1 Cooperatives and mutual aid societies are crucial components of this ensemble. Throughout the nineteenth century, alongside trade unions, they served as fundamental instruments of working-class organization within a broader context marked by the emergence of a public sphere increasingly independent from political power.Footnote 2 The literature emphasized how liberal and Christian reformers perceived cooperatives and mutual societies as mechanisms for educating workers in self-help, instilling middle-class values, and fostering reconciliation between capital and labour. Concurrently, the socialist movement interpreted those same practices as instruments for achieving working-class emancipation within the framework of class struggle.Footnote 3
This article aims to integrate and challenge this perspective, demonstrating that workers’ agency through associationism cannot be reduced to the binary framework of respectability, which operates entirely within the spectrum of either acceptance or rejection of the social norms imposed by the dominant classes. Adopting a bottom-up approach, based on an analysis of the reports drafted by the delegates of Parisian trade bodies at the 1867 Universal Exposition, this study illustrates how workers articulated a distinctive demand for dignity. While this claim bore certain similarities to the behavioural codes and lifestyles of the middle class, it was not merely an attempt at emulation. On the contrary, workers displayed a shared notion of self-worth that did not require external validation from social elites. Rather, it legitimized and reinforced resistance to the progressive imposition of industrial capitalist logic within French society, advocating for the organization of cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and trade chambers to defend collective interests.
However, resistance was not necessarily synonymous with class struggle. While the language of associationism was ubiquitous in working-class milieus throughout the nineteenth century, it was interpreted in different ways, particularly among skilled workers.Footnote 4 Between 1866 and 1868, Marx’s growing influence propelled the International Working Men’s Association toward a collectivist position, viewing cooperatives and mutual aid societies as instruments of social conflict, intended to organize and finance the fight against capitalists from a revolutionary perspective.Footnote 5 However, within the tradition of French working-class politics, association was primarily linked to a republican political framework centred on the defence of bon droit – a shared sense of social justice concerning productive relations.Footnote 6 Bon droit was not aimed at abolishing social classes but at safeguarding the autonomy of skilled trades from the repeated attempts by employers and state administrations to replicate in France the same dynamics of work discipline and division of labour that had characterized industrialization in Britain. According to this ideology, aptly described by Bernard H. Moss as the “socialism of skilled workers”,Footnote 7 cooperatives were not instruments of collectivization, but rather a democratized version of the ancient guild structure, whose formal abolition after the French Revolution had not weakened artisans’ strong sense of professional identity and collective belonging.Footnote 8
In this context, the 1867 Universal Exposition occurred at a critical historical juncture for French society and economy. While the country’s industrial development materialized under the Third Republic, its foundations were established during the Second Empire. No nineteenth-century French regime was as committed to implementing a liberal economic policy as that of Napoleon III, to the extent that recent historiography has identified a state-led capitalist strategy aimed at importing the British industrial model into France through three interconnected initiatives: i) a free trade policy, initiated with the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 and further pursued through domestic measures, particularly the liberalization of bread prices in 1863 and the 1867 commercial law reform; ii) labour market deregulation; and iii) large-scale public works projects intended to stimulate private investment according to capitalist principles in a country where the elites’ primary sources of wealth remained real estate rents and the accumulation of public offices.Footnote 9
The 1867 Exposition marked the apogee of the Second Empire,Footnote 10 showcasing the social model pursued by Napoleon III: a liberal economic power capable of rivalling British capitalism while maintaining a robust philanthropic apparatus under state control. Overseen by the renowned social reformer Frédéric Le Play, the Exposition reflected the regime’s concern for the labouring classes, featuring, for the first time in world fair history, a dedicated section on social economy.Footnote 11 For this occasion, the French government organized an extensive consultation of the Parisian working class to assess the social needs of capital labourers. This initiative was entrusted to the Commission d’encouragement pour les études des ouvriers, chaired by the industrialist and former Bonapartist parliamentarian François-Jules Devinck. The consultation involved summoning each Paris trade body, approximately 100 in total, to elect 315 delegates to represent them at the Exposition. Subsequently, representatives from each professional category were tasked with drafting reports that outlined the social demands of their respective sectors.Footnote 12 Despite the well-known limitations of the Second Empire in terms of civil liberties and a relatively low voter turnout, approximately eleven per cent, the election of delegates was genuinely competitive.Footnote 13 Similarly, delegates were granted considerable autonomy as trades attached great importance to the consultation, fiercely guarding their independence in both the selection of delegates and the drafting of reports, motivated by the determination to allow workers to speak on their behalf.Footnote 14
From this perspective, the 1867 delegates do not appear as a labour aristocracy economically, socially, and culturally detached from the broader working classes, merely assimilating middle-class values.Footnote 15 Rather, they emerge as spokesmen of an imagined community that reflects the values and social norms of a specific segment of the Parisian working class, predominantly composed of better-paid urban workers. The electorate of 246,877 workers that selected them constituted approximately half of Paris’s workforce. These voters primarily represented the upper segments of the capital’s working population organized within a profession. Consequently, significant portions of the active Parisian population, such as unskilled labourers and minors, were effectively excluded from the selection process. Additionally, women were only marginally represented among the delegates, primarily in sectors such as clothing and artificial flowers, despite making up nearly one third of the Parisian workforce.Footnote 16
The near-total male composition of the delegation introduced a significant gender bias. According to the male breadwinner model, most of the reports reflected a point of view on labour issues that assigned men the productive role and women the reproductive and caregiving roles. Within this framework, the widespread presence of women’s labour as a supplementary source of household income was depicted as an unfortunate consequence of inadequate men’s wages, believed to have severe repercussions such as the weakening of family ties, the moral corruption of women in workshops, where they were exposed to harassment from foremen and workmen, and downward pressure on wages due to increased labour market competition.Footnote 17
Despite this limitation, the reports constitute a corpus of immense value for studying professional identity and the political and social imaginary of skilled urban workers under the Second Empire. The Archives Nationales in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine hold reports from 102 professions, most of which were published in three volumes of approximately 500 pages each.Footnote 18 For reasons of space, only the key points of these reports can be included in this article. Nevertheless, they clearly illustrate how the 1867 workers’ consultations provided an institutionalized space for criticizing the regime’s economic and social policies.
As we shall see, worker delegates expressed a strong aspiration for a decent standard of living while simultaneously denouncing how the state-led transition to capitalism generated social conditions that made a dignified existence materially unsustainable. It would be overly reductive to interpret these demands solely through the lens of respectability politics – that is, the process by which privileged members of marginalized social groups conform to dominant norms and values to enhance their social standing.Footnote 19 Such an interpretation would imply that the 1867 worker delegates acted in a purely strategic and instrumental manner, an assumption not supported by the sources.
Rather than a discourse of respectability, French workers’ reports reveal a pervasive and deeply rooted sense of morality that is entirely independent of external validation by social elites. This attitude displays striking affinities with the concept of dignity at the centre of Michèle Lamont’s sociological studies on the French and American working classes.Footnote 20 For these groups, dignity does not function as a form of assimilation into norms promoted by the upper classes. Rather, it represents an alternative moral standard to the economic definition of success: by emphasizing self-discipline, a strong work ethic, order, and the ability to provide a stable life for their families, workers establish clear boundaries in the social hierarchy, both upwards and downwards. While one must exercise caution regarding the risks of anachronism – Lamont’s study concerns the working class of the twenty-first century – her framework nonetheless provides a valuable heuristic tool for a diachronic analysis of working-class subjectivity. Indeed, it is noteworthy to observe that, as with the workers interviewed by Lamont,Footnote 21morality was also central to the world of the 1867 delegates: the terms moralité and dignité appear twenty-nine and fifty-four times, respectively, in the published workers’ reports.
Thus, it would be more accurate to posit that Parisian workers advanced a politics of dignity, aligning with recent calls to reconsider or transcend the category of respectability and its dichotomous relationship with resistance.Footnote 22 Along these lines, we can define the politics of dignity as a form of collective agency through which subordinate groups affirm their moral and social worth not merely by assimilating elite norms, but by establishing autonomous standards of justice rooted in a lexicon of dignity. From this perspective, it is important to recognize that dignity has increasingly been advocated as a framework for interpreting collective demands for identity that challenge twenty-first-century democracies.Footnote 23 This study seeks to contribute to the historicization of this concept, demonstrating how dignity and morality frequently emerge as key elements of popular politics during major economic and social transitions. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, the idea of the dignity of labour has its origins in Christian thought but experienced a significant revival in the context of nineteenth-century industrialization. However, the relationship between dignity, morality, and the assertion of boundaries, interests, and identities by marginalized groups remains an underexplored field of research, one that demands further study to move beyond simplistic portrayals of moral discourse as the false consciousness of the subaltern. Proudhon, whose ideas exerted greater influence than those of Marx within the French labour movement of the Second Empire, grounded much of his critique of capitalism on its capacity to deprive workers of their humanity, advocating for a reorganization of society on mutualist principles to emancipate labour from exploitation.Footnote 24 This orientation is not far removed from how dignity and morality were invoked in the reports from the 1867 Exposition. The demands of worker delegates were not limited to simple appeals to state authorities to address their needs. Instead, they articulated a vision of direct action through associationism to secure a life that aligned with their moral sense of self-worth. This vision materialized through a range of complementary institutions: mutual aid societies, which provided workers with protection against social risks; trade chambers, which negotiated collective interests with employers; and, finally, cooperatives. The latter encompasses a diverse set of practices that vary across trade. Depending on the specific needs of each profession, some groups placed greater emphasis on workers’ cooperatives, which, in turn, could either include or exclude collective ownership of equipment, while others prioritized consumer and housing cooperatives. Despite these differences, cooperation remained a central pillar of the politics of dignity, providing a crucial framework for understanding the various notions of association that coexisted among Parisian workers at the time. Let marginalized groups speak through a truly bottom-up perspective, and we may discover how the testimony of a Second Empire French worker asserting his right to drink wine and coffee contains an unsuspected clue to latent imaginaries of social change.
Association Versus Social Control: Preserving Trade Identities
In 1867, industrialization had yet to exert profound effects on French society. Most workers remained engaged in agriculture, which employed 7.3 million individuals compared to 4.1 million in manufacturing, a sector still largely dominated by craftsmanship. Furthermore, the boundaries between the primary and secondary sectors were extremely indistinct as many workers alternated seasonally between agricultural and processing activities. Thus, with few exceptions, nearly the entire French workforce remained largely unaffected by the realities of large-scale industry.Footnote 25
Nevertheless, French workers were cognizant of the implications of introducing industrial capitalism to their production relationships. In Britain, industrialization led to a profound restructuring of hierarchies within workplaces, subjecting workers to rhythms and production methods that were unilaterally dictated by factory owners. In contrast, in France and other pre-industrial European economies, workers retain significant autonomy over working hours and production choices. The vision of orderly English factories filled with bustling machinery did not correspond to the actual working conditions in France. Here, primitive manufacturing sites were characterized by workers producing in a semi-craft manner, moving freely, and engaging in activities such as drinking and smoking.Footnote 26
Consequently, the reports of the workers at the Universal Exposition were permeated with apprehension that the ongoing economic transformations would reproduce in France the same process of labour discipline already witnessed in England. Some trades experienced the initial manifestations of this phenomenon. Blacksmiths expressed concerns about the introduction of fixed hours in establishments where work had previously been compensated per task, rather than based on hours worked. Nevertheless, the demands of manufacturers had not diminished; indeed, they had appointed overseers who monitored workers and reduced their wages.Footnote 27 Cabinetmakers reported the opening of a new factory on the outskirts of Paris where production was mechanized: here, the subordination, physical and mental exhaustion, and poverty of the workers had reached such a level that the factory earned the sobriquet “Cayenne”, reminiscent of the notorious penal colony in Guyana.Footnote 28
One should not be misled by the narratives adopted by the workers’ delegates. Even before industrialization, labour conditions were arduous and hazardous to human health. As early as 1840, in his renowned treatise on the living conditions of textile workers, the physician Louis René Villermé calculated that in Mulhouse, workers’ life expectancy was forty-three years, compared to the sixty years of factory owners.Footnote 29 However, faced with the advancement of the industry, a widespread reaction among workers was the construction of an idealized past in which craftsmanship ensured dignity, autonomy, and healthiness for workers, a romanticization that recurs persistently in the testimonies of delegates at the Expo. It was in these tones that the impassioned social denunciation of the shoemakers was based, who traced the initial indications of the breakdown of rural manufacturing in Normandy:
About forty years ago, the weaver worked at home, at his own loom, in the little cottage of which he was almost the owner. He lived there, surrounded by his family. The factory arrived, it competed with the weavers, crushed the loom, absorbed the worker. So, goodbye little cottage, goodbye small garden, goodbye family life. He works in the factory, lives day by day. The father on one side, the mother on the other, the children wherever they can. And this population, once robust half a century ago, is now weakened, faded. Today, men are old at forty, young people can no longer provide their contingent to the army.Footnote 30
Hence, resistance to the penetration of industry was motivated by a set of interrelated arguments: safeguarding workers’ health from diseases and injuries and protecting professional identities from degradation into simpler tasks that could be performed by less qualified workers, whose entry into factories would depress wages. The intertwining of these issues prompted workers to envision a set of common solutions, wherein mutual aid and cooperative practices played a central role. Specifically, numerous delegates assigned to worker cooperatives a fundamental regulatory function in the labour market, at a historical juncture when various local courts and conciliation bodies were becoming increasingly ineffective in defending bon droit from deregulation attempts conducted by employers and state administration.Footnote 31 Confronted with the prospect of mechanization and the division of labour, which threatened to “destroy in the worker the spirit of initiative and enterprise, [brutalize] him, preventing his physical development, annihilating his intelligence and, in a word, making him nothing but a machine”,Footnote 32 cooperatives enabled workers to maintain ownership of the tools of work and control over the production processes.
For this reason, collective ownership of machinery by workers united in cooperatives was a common demand of various categories.Footnote 33 Particularly noteworthy is the report of the mechanics, according to which cooperatives could absorb technological unemployment by redistributing work among an increasing number of workers until achieving the complete liberation of man from manual labour:
This is the issue: work for all; adequately remunerated work that does not absorb a man’s entire life, in order to give him the necessary time to educate himself and to engage a bit in public life, or, according to his inclination, giving him the time to pursue the implementation of his ideas to improve work. Because our goal is to have all manual work performed by machines and to have enough machines to supervise them only for a few hours a day.Footnote 34
The second regulatory function that delegates attributed to cooperatives concerns income redistribution. Cabinetmakers and hatters argued that, by eliminating the intermediation of employers, it would be possible to share profits among workers, thus supplementing individual wages. Specifically, cabinetmakers viewed cooperatives as a tool to counteract the proliferation of different methods of calculating labour remuneration, which exacerbated competition among artisans in the sector. According to delegates from this profession, cabinetmakers’ cooperatives should only admit two forms of remuneration: the à la façon method, in which the worker received part of the pay at the beginning of the product’s manufacturing and the remainder at the end, or hourly wages.Footnote 35 In this context, cooperatives assumed a role similar to that of trade unions, still banned in France, whose legalization was a demand expressed across many professional categories. Delegates extended this supplementary function to workplace mutual aid societies, known as sociétés d’atelier. Under the Second Empire, these associations were widespread, but the regime maintained tight control over them by appointing factory owners as their presidents. As the mechanics explained, this arrangement meant that in cases of workplace accidents, employers acted as both “judge and party”, with mutual aid societies merely providing workers with a small subsidy while failing to defend their interests.Footnote 36 Moreover, these societies often became instruments of workforce control, as workers who left their company forfeited all contributions they had paid into the mutual aid fund. These distortions led various professional groups to call for the democratic election of sociétés d’atelier officers, arguing that if workers truly controlled these organizations, they would have a vested interest in seeking compensation from employers for injured workers, thereby pushing factory owners to improve workplace safety conditions. Cabinetmakers went so far as to advocate for a general sickness insurance scheme for their entire trade, ensuring that contributions to sociétés d’atelier would not become a means of binding workers to their employers.Footnote 37
In other cases, the object of redistribution could not be either the profit of the enterprise or workers’ contributions, but the work itself. As highlighted by the delegates of the stonemasons, it frequently occurred that, due to market fluctuations, artisans refused jobs during periods of high demand because they were already overcommitted, while at other times they found themselves without work. Production societies could have more evenly distributed the workload.Footnote 38 The woodturners wrote in their report, with a degree of admiration, of having encountered a cooperative among artisans from Hamburg that essentially performed this task during the Expo. During periods of low demand for work, it functioned as a credit cooperative, providing loans to workers in need. During busier periods, it temporarily transformed into a production cooperative, distributing customer orders among its members, who were compensated at a predetermined rate by the society.Footnote 39
The corpus of documents allows us to infer how French workers of that era conceptualized production cooperatives; specifically, as assemblies of semi-autonomous workers who, on an ad hoc basis, implemented binding forms of mutual coordination, collectively procured tools and raw materials, jointly marketed their products, and, consequently, enhanced their negotiating power in the market. It was this form of autonomy that French workers endeavoured to preserve against industrial advancement. Moreover, the reports elucidate how the delineation between various types of cooperative enterprises was significantly indistinct, as the social issues that these institutions were expected to address were profoundly interconnected. Mechanics advocated the establishment of consumer cooperatives alongside production cooperatives, enabling the former to accumulate capital for reinvestment in the latter. Delegates representing theatre machinists, a profession in which the formation of production cooperatives was particularly challenging, proposed focusing on consumer cooperatives to augment the purchasing power of wages.Footnote 40 Beyond the specific characteristics of each trade, the majority of workers’ reports at the 1867 Expo were imbued with the conviction that associationism presaged “the dawn of a new era”,Footnote 41 as articulated by the tailors’ delegation:
Through association, everyone’s salary will increase, consumption will rise, leading to increased production, which in turn will raise everyone’s salary; and then, finally, man will be in a cycle that will give him the founded hope of progressively abolishing this moral and physical misery that still stains societies and threatens to lead them to death.Footnote 42
This response mirrored that of Britain, several decades earlier. Since the late eighteenth century, a logic of profit maximization within the free market had gradually emerged in Britain, detached from religious and moral considerations.Footnote 43 The predominance of liberal political economy over pre-capitalist moral economy prompted the English masses to establish new practices of production and associated consumption, giving rise to the initial manifestations of cooperative enterprise.Footnote 44 Similarly, the bon droit, which customarily regulated labour relations in France, constituted a form of moral economy. Naturally, the particularities of each national context must not be disregarded, as they significantly influenced the development of the labour movement in both countries. In France, the popularity of the association resulted from the convergence of long-standing corporate identities with the revolutionary lexicon of 1789. In contrast, in Britain, the cooperative movement emerged as a product of a working class that had been disciplined and homogenized by the daily realities of industrial capitalism.Footnote 45 Nevertheless, the proliferation of cooperatives and mutual aid societies in both countries also fostered exchanges between the two sides of the Channel, facilitating the circulation of practices and narratives of workers’ associationism. English Christian Socialists, for example, regarded the workers’ cooperatives of the French Second Republic as a model. In 1864, the first British-style consumer cooperative was established in Paris, inspired by the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, founded twenty years earlier by textile workers in the outskirts of Manchester. This cooperative sold goods to the public – not exclusively to members, as was more common in continental Europe – and redistributed profits to customers in proportion to their purchases.Footnote 46
However, workers were not the sole group seeking to alleviate poverty through associationism. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the expansion of the mutualist sphere attracted increasing interest from reformers who perceived these institutions as a focal point of competing political interpretations and agendas. Following the subsistence crisis of the 1840s, and the revolutionary upheavals of 1848, significant segments of the European elites increasingly embraced the practices of the mutualist universe as mechanisms for integrating the working classes into the existing social order. This vision of associationism, however, was deliberately stripped of its more contentious and oppositional elements. At the International Philanthropic Congress in Brussels, in 1856, the German intellectual Victor A. Huber presented cooperative enterprise as a “Christian, conservative, and above all, reasonable phalanstery”.Footnote 47 To support his argument, Huber asserted that the communitarian bonds underpinning mutualist practices would enhance both the moral and material conditions of domestic life, thereby reinforcing the stability of the family as a fundamental social institution.
Huber’s remarks encapsulated a central theme of mid-nineteenth-century conservative discourse, which emphasized personal hygiene, propriety in social customs, and domestic order as outward manifestations of internalized moral discipline. Meanwhile, the liberal-progressive bourgeoisie championed the mutualist universe as a set of vehicles for incorporating the working classes into the industrial capitalist system. In 1864, in an influential essay on popular credit among French liberals, economists Anselme Batbie and Édouard Horn argued that workers’ and artisans’ associations would become indispensable in mitigating the impact of large-scale industry, whose competitive pressures threatened the survival of small producers.Footnote 48 Around the same time, British middle-class liberals constructed an ideal of working-class respectability centred on the self-reliant, self-taught labourer, who was expected to reject public charity and instead participate in mutual aid societies and cooperative initiatives. This image was strategically deployed in the political campaign for the 1867 Reform Act to demonstrate that the upper echelons of the British working class had attained the moral and civic maturity necessary to exercise electoral suffrage.Footnote 49
Naturally, conservatism and liberalism diverged significantly in both their political objectives and their assessment of industrial capitalism, whose social consequences elicited particular concern among conservatives, primarily due to their potential to disrupt established hierarchies.Footnote 50 However, despite these ideological differences, both conservative and liberal visions of workers’ associationism ultimately sought to regulate the subordinate classes, albeit underpinned by genuinely benevolent and philanthropic intentions. This broader “civilizing offensive” was centred on the moral and social elevation of the working classes through the imposition of behavioural discipline. It promoted industriousness, self-sufficiency, and the aspiration to a domestic environment aligned with specific standards of hygiene and privacy.Footnote 51 The 1867 Universal Exposition adhered to this same ideological framework. Its social economy section featured an international jury tasked with identifying and rewarding initiatives that fostered social stability while simultaneously discouraging behaviours deemed immoral, such as cohabitation outside of marriage, frequenting cabarets, and women’s participation in the labour market.
Although at first glance the worker delegates of 1867 appeared to espouse the same set of values promoted by the Exposition’s organizers, this impression is misleading. Their objectives were fundamentally opposed to those of the civilizing offensive, as they employed the language of morality to challenge the elites’ illusion that the social ills affecting the working classes could be resolved through social control and paternalism. This was not a straightforward opposition between two monolithic blocs, as liberal and conservative discourses also permeated Parisian labour politics. For instance, the republican cabinetmaker Jean-Pierre Beluze, leader of the influential cooperative bank Société du crédit au travail, shared a perspective remarkably similar to that of Batbie and Horn, believing that cooperatives were a crucial instrument for transforming workers into capitalists.Footnote 52 However, even in such cases, bourgeois narratives were typically reinterpreted through the lens of workers’ lived experiences, which differed profoundly from those of the ruling classes. A striking example of this divergence concerned the consumption of alcohol. While drunkenness was universally condemned, worker delegates recognized that this social problem could not be eradicated through authoritarian control over workers’ conduct but rather by ensuring that they could provide adequately for their families:
How many workers, at the beginning of their marriage, full of goodwill and courage, have seen their resolve shattered by the impossibility of meeting their family’s needs! How many have seen their inner peace broken by the insufficiency of their wages! And often, in despair, losing all hope, many have, unfortunately, sought in drunkenness an escape from their misery.Footnote 53
At the same time, French workers established precise social contexts in which alcohol consumption was considered acceptable or even desirable, based on concrete everyday needs. They regarded red wine as an essential source of energy, comparable to meat but more affordable. Low-alcohol wines, often diluted with water, were widely consumed in the workplace to alleviate physical exertion, alongside other stimulants such as coffee and tobacco. Access to such substances was perceived as an indicator of well-being and economic stability. For this reason, French consumer cooperatives provided their members with affordable wines and liquors, unlike in Britain, where the temperance discourse was more deeply rooted, even within the cooperative movement.Footnote 54
Thus, a fundamental distinction emerged between the moralization projects imposed by social elites and workers’ conception of morality. Whereas the civilizing offensive of mid-nineteenth-century social reformers and philanthropists sought to improve workers’ living conditions by disciplining their behaviour, workers instead asserted their right to determine autonomously which behaviours were consistent with a dignified life, rejecting top-down control. For workers, dignity was not a means of legitimizing themselves within the existing social hierarchies, but rather a framework through which they exposed the hypocrisy of a social order that demanded strict behavioural standards from the working classes while simultaneously denying them the material means to attain them. This social critique was fuelled by workers’ perception of a rising cost of living, which they attributed to the combined effect of two factors. On the one hand, workers displayed an increasing unwillingness to forgo a set of essential goods and services that they considered fundamental to leading a dignified life. On the other hand, essential commodities and services included within this basket had indeed become more expensive due to the state-led transition to capitalism under the Second Empire.
Dignity Comes at a Cost: The Perceived Inflation of Parisian Workers
The inadequacy of family incomes was perceived by worker delegates as a fundamental obstacle to achieving a moral standard of living, to the extent that this concern can be regarded as the key unifying factor among the various forms of associative practices implemented by workers. One reason why the worker reports from the 1867 Universal Exposition are such valuable sources is that they provide detailed estimates of family budgets across different professions. These documents offer not only insight into the annual incomes of Parisian workers but also a deeper understanding of their consumption habits and the hierarchy of needs shaped by their socio-cultural background.
Specifically, nine professional categories included calculations on the cost of living for a family of four in their reports. The level of detail in these family budgets varied considerably from one profession to another, which accounts for the broad range of estimated annual expenses. Wood turners, for instance, reported a minimum of 1,350 francs per year, while woodworking equipment operators calculated a much higher figure of 2,978.05 francs. However, by averaging the figures provided across all nine reports, we arrive at an approximate sum of 2,000 francs. While inevitably an estimate, this amount can be considered a minimum threshold for meeting the basic needs of a household with two children.Footnote 55
Moreover, the composition of this “basket of dignity” can be reconstructed with particular clarity thanks to the highly detailed report by the woodworking equipment operators – an aspect that also accounts for their relatively high total estimate. Essential expenses included rent for a small apartment, home maintenance, heating, lighting, kitchen use, as well as groceries and laundry costs. Slightly lower in the hierarchy were the so-called useful expenses, which encompassed contributions to the municipal mutual aid society for both spouses, wages for a nursemaid or school fees for children, and 0.6 litres of wine per day. At the lowest level were occasional expenditures deemed essential for family well-being, such as books and Sunday outings.Footnote 56
Only a limited number of professions could guarantee such a standard of living. Woodworking equipment operators reported an average annual income of nearly 1,500 francs, supplemented by approximately 500 francs from their wives’ earnings. Wallpaper printers, furriers, and alabaster craftsmen earned salaries ranging from 1,750 to 1,900 francs. However, within each profession, income disparities could be significant. The most striking case was that of musical instrument makers, whose wages ranged from as little as 900 francs per year to over 2,000 francs for the most highly skilled workers. Many other professions failed to exceed an average daily wage of five francs, with fewer than 300 working days per year.Footnote 57
As for how these families managed to survive on such modest earnings compared to the bare minimum required, the delegates themselves provided a stark response: “No wine, little meat”, wrote the woodworking equipment operators, “and rarely laundry or new clothes”.Footnote 58 Any further economic setback within this precarious balance risked forcing workers to seek assistance from pawnshops or the bureaux de bienfaisance, municipal philanthropic institutions established in 1796. Resorting to these forms of aid was experienced with profound humiliation and indignation, as lamented by waxed canvas manufacturers, who criticized the bureaucratic obstacles imposed by the bureaux de bienfaisance:
An unfortunate man must present himself, make his application, expose his needs, spread his misery! – Go for information, scrutinize his belongings: “But sir, you have a watch, a mirror, your furniture is still comfortable, you must appear more unhappy to get assistance!”.Footnote 59
Discontent among the working classes toward public and private charity had steadily intensified over the preceding two decades. At the heart of this growing divide was a fundamental difference in how social classes perceived assistance. The notables, who controlled the bureaux de bienfaisance and provided donations, regarded philanthropy as an act of voluntary generosity, expecting, in return, social recognition from the poor. In contrast, among the lower classes, it was widely believed that the wealthy had an obligation to contribute to assistance. Increasingly aware of the underlying social control embedded in philanthropic institutions, workers began to exhibit a sense of disdain toward gifts from the affluent. For example, in January 1856, the Société de Saint Vincent-de-Paul in Metz recorded that many workers insisted on paying the symbolic price of five centimes for their meals, even when food was distributed for free.Footnote 60
Philanthropy was most rejected by those segments of the working class who were generally able to sustain themselves but occasionally fell into hardship due to economic downturns or seasonal fluctuations in employment. Against the paternalism of the wealthier classes, they asserted a discourse of social rights grounded in mutualism. A particularly revealing testimony comes from the waxed canvas workers, who expressed both their resistance to charity and their aspiration for forms of solidarity and mutual aid that preserved their dignity and autonomy:
If a worker, head of a family, falls ill and is forced to go to the hospice, he is obliged to pay if he is not registered in the records of the bureau de bienfaisance of his district. We workers reject this charity that would make us blush in front of our children. Let us create mutual credit funds in every professional category to eliminate pawnshops and usurious loans in the countryside. With cooperative societies based on universal brotherhood, sincerity, and good faith, and with labour and thrift as principles, every worker will be able to provide assistance and receive it without humiliation, as it will be an acquired right that no one can dispute.Footnote 61
Although the delegates’ reports painted a stark picture, the living conditions of French workers had improved slightly. Since the 1850s, real wages had begun to rise, first in the provinces and then in Paris during the following decade. However, this reality stood in sharp contrast to the widespread perception among workers that the cost of living was increasing. How can we account for this discrepancy between workers’ testimonies and historical evidence? Two complementary explanations appear particularly plausible.
The first is that the relative improvement in living conditions generated new social expectations among workers, fuelling their aspiration for a higher quality of life. An indication of this can be found in the report of the delegates of the wood gilders:
Many improvements have been made in the last twenty years: the worker feels his dignity, self-respect enhances his character, he possesses the necessary energy for every fruitful work and dreams of comfort that he sometimes achieves; the sanctity of family life interior brings significant improvements to its customs. Large families no longer sleep in the same room, morals and hygiene benefit. The worker loves to dress appropriately. As for nutrition, without insisting on the high cost of food, which is hoped to be temporary, it is indisputable that the worker lives better. Once, he had lunch in the workshop in half an hour, drank water, and returned to work; today, forced to live outside, he eats better, drinks wine, and takes his coffee. The increase in wages has created new needs that the worker can satisfy, as well as his family, whose fate has improved significantly in the last twenty years.Footnote 62
The second explanation is that, despite the overall trend of rising real wages, some essential items in family budgets had indeed become more expensive. The increase in wages under the Second Empire did not lead French working families to significantly alter their consumption patterns. While the quality of their diet improved substantially, they did not diversify their spending by increasing their consumption of manufactured and discretionary goods.Footnote 63 The rising costs of consumer staples and services, which were difficult to substitute and thus characterized by a certain rigidity of demand, likely contributed to workers’ perception of inflation as being more severe than it actually was. This dynamic was meticulously documented in the report of the furriers. Between 1846 and 1866, wages in the sector had increased by approximately 18 per cent, from 1,105 to 1,300 francs per year. However, in the same period, certain expenditures rose at an even steeper rate. A household of four spent 24 per cent more on heating and lighting. The cost of clothing and footwear had increased by 33 per cent, reaching a peak of 46 per cent for laundry services. Food expenses had also risen: a family reported spending 20 per cent more on meat, fish, and vegetables in 1866 than they had in 1846. The most striking increase was in the price of bread, which surged by 29 per cent.Footnote 64
Thus, a perceived inflation emerged among workers, fuelled by two interconnected factors. On the one hand, they were indeed spending more to cover their basic needs; on the other hand, they were increasingly unwilling to sacrifice the basket of essential goods that they now regarded as the minimum threshold for a dignified existence. At the level of worker experience, dignity and the construction of class subjectivity were deeply intertwined. This explains why, despite the official instructions of the International Working Men’s Association advising militants to prioritize the establishment of production cooperatives over consumer cooperatives, the latter remained a crucial component of French socialism.Footnote 65
Examining the reports of worker delegates at the 1867 Universal Exposition, it becomes evident that consumer cooperatives were regarded as fundamental instruments for securing a moral standard of living. Beyond providing access to goods at lower prices, many consumer societies also extended small loans to their members in times of need, allowing them to avoid the humiliation of seeking aid from the bureaux de bienfaisance. Additionally, depositing family savings in consumer cooperatives often proved more profitable than traditional banking investments. For instance, the report of the nail makers noted that some consumer societies distributed dividends as high as 10.5 per cent, roughly three times the interest offered by savings banks.Footnote 66 Furthermore, the 1860s witnessed the emergence of hybrid cooperative models that combined elements of both consumer and production cooperation to ensure workers’ access to affordable food. Among these, cooperative restaurants and, most notably, cooperative bakeries became increasingly widespread, facilitated by the liberalization of the bread market in 1863.Footnote 67
However, it was in the realm of housing that the discourse of morality and dignity most directly fuelled criticism of the Second Empire’s alliance between economic liberalism and social paternalism. At the heart of this debate lay the extensive urban renewal of Paris under the direction of Georges-Eugène Haussmann, prefect of the Seine, whose modernization efforts were replicated on a smaller scale in cities across France. This ambitious transformation was deeply intertwined with the Second Empire’s state-led capitalist strategy, which leveraged public works to stimulate private investment with a strong profit-oriented logic.Footnote 68 One of the most striking consequences of Haussmannization was the dramatic rise in rent prices, a primary concern for worker delegates, as no other expenditure had increased as sharply in household budgets. The furriers’ report, for example, revealed that between 1846 and 1866, the average annual rent for a working-class family had surged from 125 to 300 francs, marking an increase of 140 per cent. In addition to the financial burden, workers expressed profound frustration over the restrictive conditions often imposed by landlords, such as refusing to rent to families with children or to artisans who worked from home, circumstances that were far from rare.Footnote 69 To reduce costs, families were frequently forced to relocate to insalubrious and overcrowded alleys or to share a single room. The woodworkers’ report highlighted the detrimental effects of such living conditions on both children’s education and broader moral standards:
Who does not understand the danger of letting children sleep in their parents’ room? How many words, how many deplorable acts they witness? What education is prepared for them? Finally, what becomes of filial respect? And worse, poverty forces parents to make children of different sexes sleep in the same bed.Footnote 70
Public and private philanthropic initiatives in the housing sector also failed to satisfy workers’ expectations. Napoleon III had shown a strong personal interest in improving workers’ housing, but the solutions promoted by both state and private institutions were marked by a clear segregationist logic. Detailed regulations and strict social control characterized both public housing projects – such as the Cité Napoléon, built in Paris in 1849 – and private developments, including the numerous cités ouvrières constructed by industrialists for their employees. The expansion of the latter was actively encouraged by the state, which allocated a ten-million-franc fund in 1852 to support industrial housing projects.Footnote 71 Yet, worker delegates, particularly those representing mechanics, voiced strong opposition to these attempts to discipline the daily lives of working-class people:
The regulations of the cités are the reason why the workers of Paris do not want them, nor do the inhabitants of Aveyron want them anymore. In Decazeville (Aveyron), the workers completely abandoned a worker barracks, that is to say, three hundred housing units that had been offered to them at a reduced price. […] In the Doubs department, the workers of the Peujot frères house, in Valentigney, Herimoncourt, and Beaulieu, also abandoned the cites ouvrières. […] We wonder who then has an interest in enclosing the population when we see ourselves that all classes of society tend every day to come closer.Footnote 72
Another source of criticism was the size and structure of workers’ housing, which often failed to meet the real needs of working families. The mechanics described the workers’ dwellings built by the Ministry of the Interior in Passage du Trône as “Lilliputian”, noting that the rooms were so small that they could barely accommodate “three Newfoundland dogs lying on the floor”.Footnote 73 Reports also reflected a strong emphasis on the need for privacy, both within families and among individuals. Regarding another set of government-built workers’ houses in Avenue Daumesnil, designed according to the direct wishes of Napoleon III, the mechanics observed that these lodgings failed to resolve the issue of domestic overcrowding: “If you make one room the bedroom of the father and mother, and the other one that of the children, there is no more dining room; and with the growth of the children, the difference in sexes forces you to have one more room: without this, there is immorality.”Footnote 74 Moreover, upon learning that the Avenue Daumesnil residences featured a common garden, the same delegates wryly commented on the potential conflicts that could arise from shared space, remarking: “How many arguments will a flower give rise to?”Footnote 75
This strong emphasis on privacy and respect for personal space also revealed a gap between the actual needs of workers and the cooperative reform plans envisioned by social experts, who often sought to instil the spirit of cooperation through the shared use of physical spaces. A notable example of this approach was the Bremerhöhe housing complex, built in Berlin in the mid-nineteenth century at the initiative of Victor Huber, whose project was awarded a silver medal at the Paris Exposition. Inspired by the ideas of Robert Owen, Huber designed a set of six English-style cottages with gardens and workshops, intended to foster collaboration among residents and lay the foundation for broader forms of cooperative living.Footnote 76 However, this vision generated little interest among workers, who instead aspired to a private and clearly defined domestic space, distinctly separated from their neighbours.
By contrast, a housing model devised directly by a group of workers under the guidance of Chabaud, a politically active tinsmith with ties to Bonapartist circles, received much more favourable assessments. A prototype of this house, financed by the Empire, was exhibited at the Champ de Mars during the 1867 Exposition. It was a six-apartment building that included a dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms, and a cellar. The mechanics’ delegates particularly applauded the decision to provide private sanitary facilities, as this arrangement ensured that each household was responsible for its own hygiene. Many of the amenities featured in Chabaud’s design – such as tiled kitchens, wood and gas stoves, faucets, a communal laundry area, and a clear separation between clean and wastewater – were largely absent from the dwellings where most workers lived.Footnote 77
Chabaud’s workers’ house was especially appreciated for striking a balance between comfort and economic sustainability. Given the sharp rise in land prices in Paris, worker housing could not afford to occupy excessive space. However, as housing supply remained critically inadequate, cooperative solutions became an essential response. While housing cooperatives were already expanding, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, the 1867 Exposition marked the official recognition of their significance. Two cooperative housing projects received silver medals from the jury: one presented by the Société coopérative immobilière de Paris, which was linked to liberal parliamentary opposition, and the other by Chabaud himself.Footnote 78 While his initiative embodied workers’ aspirations for better living conditions amidst the upheavals of Haussmannization, translating these ideals into reality proved challenging, particularly due to financial constraints. The capital required for housing cooperatives often exceeded what workers could afford, compelling them to seek assistance from notables and philanthropists, who prioritized their own social expectations of workers over the desires of the latter. This was precisely the case with Chabaud and his colleagues. While Napoleon III supported the establishment of their cooperative, the house design praised by worker delegates remained merely a prototype. Instead, in a propagandistic gesture, the Emperor donated to the society the houses on Avenue Daumesnil, which reflected his own perception of workers’ housing needs rather than the workers’ actual preferences, as they found them small and overcrowded.
A similar process of filtering workers’ demands was carried out by the Commission d’encouragement pour les études des ouvriers, the body that organized the workers’ consultation. François-Jules Devinck, president of the Commission, compiled a document summarizing workers’ social demands to be presented to Napoleon III. In drafting his report, Devinck made deliberate decisions about which requests merited inclusion. He recommended the legalization of certain forms of trade unionism, arguing that they could help regulate conflicts between capital and labour and thus prevent sudden and violent disputes. However, he entirely disregarded demands related to the cost of living, the protection of consumption levels, and housing conditions, evidently considering these issues of secondary importance in light of the Empire’s social policy objectives. Similarly, Devinck ignored the claims for the democratization of mutual aid societies.Footnote 79 His synthesis reflected a vision of workers’ associationism as a means of harmonizing relations among the productive forces while maintaining the working classes in a subordinate position. This perspective stood in clear contrast to that of the worker delegations, who viewed association as a means of reaffirming the collective identities of their trades and securing the right to a morally dignified existence.
Motivated by this spirit of autonomy, the workers’ delegations did not merely draft reports for the commission chaired by Devinck but also organized independently, demonstrating a desire to advocate for their demands without intermediaries. As early as the summer of 1867, delegates began to convene spontaneously to engage in more profound discussions on the social issues raised during the Expo, ultimately forming a Workers’ Commission led by a nineteen-member executive committee. The government adopted a tolerant stance toward this initiative: in January 1868, the Minister of Public Works, Trade, and Agriculture, Adolphe Forcade de la Roquette, received workers’ representatives, who reiterated their demands, particularly the legalization of trade chambers and the guarantee of the right to assembly. These requests were indeed addressed by the executive, which, between March and June of that year, first granted a regime of partial trade union freedom and subsequently recognized the unrestricted right to hold public assemblies. Meeting weekly until April 1868, the Workers’ Commission represented a genuine experiment in workers’ political participation, in which the various perspectives expressed by the delegations on forms of workers’ associationism converged and intertwined. This organ, increasingly dominated by the International Working Men’s Association, became the primary catalyst from which trade unions proliferated in Paris, eventually forming a union federation in November 1869.Footnote 80
The acceleration of trade unionism proceeded concurrently with the diffusion of cooperative practices, several of which originated in the Exposition context: we have previously mentioned the case of the two housing cooperatives of liberal and Bonapartist origin, but they were not the only ones. To provide another example, the Parisian nail makers, convened in a general assembly by their delegates, decided to establish a production cooperative open to all workers in the category.Footnote 81 These events, along with those of the Workers’ Commission, underscore the high degree of interconnection between the various forms of association. Despite the competing meanings and specificities that were identifiable within the skilled workers milieu, contingent upon trade differences and competing political currents, the practices of the mutualist universe and trade unionism complemented one another with a dual purpose. Primarily, they aimed to enable workers to achieve a dignified life by protecting professional autonomy and wage levels, ensuring access to basic goods, and securing morally adequate housing conditions. Additionally, they sought to claim a political space in which workers could resist the social control exerted by the ruling classes, challenge the economic transition whose consequences they endured, and redefine the meanings and boundaries of social intervention.
Conclusion
Nineteenth-century workers’ associationism, particularly in the forms of cooperatives and mutual aid societies, has often been framed in historiography as a dichotomy between assimilation into middle-class respectability and engagement in class struggle. However, the workers’ motivations were significantly more complex. In France, the idea of association remained closely tied to a republican tradition that sought to preserve professional identities and customary labour regulations from the disruptive effects of industrial capitalism. Concurrently, workers articulated a distinct moral framework that, while occasionally aligning with elite values, could not be equated with respectability. Rather than seeking validation through bourgeois norms, they asserted an independent moral order and sense of justice. The reports drafted by Parisian trade delegates at the 1867 Universal Exposition reflect this perspective. Though diverse in approach, a common thread runs through their testimonies: the desire to construct, through association, an economic and social order that ensured workers a dignified life, free from reliance on charity. Such a claim was not directed at gaining elite approval, but at challenging a social hierarchy that advocated these values while denying workers the material means to uphold them.
The state-led transition to capitalism during the Second Empire reinforced this tension. Rising real wages made skilled workers increasingly reluctant to sacrifice consumption or rely on public and private assistance. Simultaneously, the gradual introduction of industrial production threatened their professional identities and bargaining power, while the profit-driven urban reforms of the regime made housing costs particularly burdensome and endangered the moral integrity of family life. In response to these challenges, association in its various forms became a crucial strategy. Productive cooperatives sought to safeguard semi-artisanal modes of production or, in some cases, collectivize the ownership of machinery to manage the impact of industrialization. Consumer cooperatives ensured access to basic goods and, in trades where productive cooperatives could not be established, helped to increase workers’ purchasing power. Housing cooperatives provided workers with living spaces designed for their actual needs, in contrast to the paternalistic housing projects of social reformers, which often sought to exert control over them.
Cooperative organization, however, was just one facet of a broader working-class agency in the Second Empire Paris. The delegates did not merely serve as petitioners to the government; they also autonomously formed a Workers’ Commission to negotiate for expanded freedom of association and assembly, and lay the groundwork for organized trade unions in the capital. Mutualism, civil rights advocacy, and trade unionism emerged as interconnected instruments within the politics of dignity, a strategy aimed at establishing spaces of autonomy for the working class, resisting constraints of economic order and transforming it in alignment with the values and collective identities of skilled workers.
Certainly, the role of gender dynamics in shaping these values should not be overlooked. This study invites further research into women’s agency within the Parisian working-class milieu and how women workers engaged with and potentially redefined the language of dignity and morality.Footnote 82 Similarly, a broader comparative perspective would be valuable in identifying institutional, economic, and political-cultural divergences across different national contexts. While this article has primarily drawn comparisons with Britain, where the contrast between respectability and dignity is particularly revealing and a well-established transfer of associational practices existed, continental European cases warrant further exploration. Belgium, which experienced an early transition to industrial capitalism, and Germany, where corporate traditions remained deeply influential, would provide especially useful points of comparison.Footnote 83 Such inquiries would contribute significantly to shaping a long-term perspective on the social history of dignity at work.
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