TRADE CORPORATIONS were a ubiquitous feature of French cities of the old regime. Given the particularism of old-regime culture, corporations inevitably differed from one city to the next: Trades joined in a single corporation in one city would be rivals in another; the privileges and exemptions of corporations were never quite the same; ceremonies and rituals varied in minor or major respects; and even the legal forms according to which the corporation and its privileges were established by the state could be different in different cities. Yet across all the variations, not only from city to city but over time as well, French trade corporations from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century had certain essential characteristics in common. The purpose of this chapter is to describe these essential characteristics and to indicate their relation to the larger social and political order of the old regime.

CITIES IN AN AGRARIAN SOCIETY

The trade corporations of the old regime were a strictly urban phenomenon, and it is important to remember that they occupied a rather small and special niche in the overwhelmingly agrarian society of the old regime. According to Pierre Goubert, at least 85 percent of the population of the French kingdom lived in the countryside in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and most of these lived by agriculture It is true that French cities grew substantially during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries; moreover, beginning around 1750 there was a sustained quickening of industrial growth.