Industrial Work and Workers 561

protest and gradual political involvement infused communities of workers
with a sense of moral struggle against economic and political forces they
could not control.

Workers’ views of themselves drew upon a corporate language of the Old

Regime that gave primacy to the idea of work as a value in itself and of the

community of workers as a moral entity. Many workers concluded that they,

not entrepreneurs with capital, were the source of wealth and were being

exploited. Other workers also began to feel a sense of class consciousness

because they collectively suffered unemployment or reduced wages. Resi­

dential patterns and leisure haunts (pubs, cabarets, music halls) contributed

to solidarities among such workers.

Workers' Associations and Social Protest

Workers’ associations helped shape working-class consciousness and mili­

tancy. In Britain, craft-based “friendly societies” had more than a million

members in 1815. More than 32,000 such organizations existed in 1872.

Their counterparts were journeymen’s associations and “mutual aid soci­

eties” in France and in the German states.

Fledgling trade unions developed in Britain, particularly after 1824 when

Parliament repealed the Combination Acts (1799-1800), which had banned

unions. Members sought to protect wage rates and conditions within their

trades. Yet, even in prosperous periods when workers could afford dues, less

than a fifth of workers belonged to such associations during the first half

of the century, and the vast majority of these were more skilled craftsmen.

Many of these men believed they had little in common with unskilled

workers, who, in any case, could not afford union dues and who lacked job

stability.

Some trade associations, including a minority organized by and for

women, provided assistance when a member fell sick (paid out of member­

ship dues) and assured members that they would be spared the indignity of a

pauper’s grave. They also provided funds to assist workers who refused to

agree to conditions imposed by employers or masters. These payments had

to be made covertly because strikes remained illegal in most places.

Artisans led movements of social protest. They had a much higher level of

literacy than did unskilled workers—printers were an obvious example, but

tailors and shoemakers were often literate, as well as many seamstresses,

who were often self-educated. Literate workers read newspapers and

brochures and related the news to those who could not read. The emergence

of political movements seeking universal male suffrage (or even universal

suffrage) and significant social reforms aided the development of a sense of

class by emphasizing the language of “liberty, fraternity, and equality,” a her­

itage of the French Revolution.

Francis Place (1771-1854), a tailor who had been a member of one of the

workers’ associations sympathetic to the French Revolution, became a