Ironically, I was poring over microfilmed versions of the original papers, which were then housed in the belly of the Montgolfier mill in the distant Ardèche. The grainy images provided clear evidence of what the Montgolfiers—stern Pierre, calculating Etienne, and rambunctious Jean-Pierre—and their workers—loyal Payan, mutinous Deschaux, and besotted Joseph Etienne—made of their craft, their labor, and each other. I was far from sure what historiographical contests I could enter with these documents, but I knew they offered an unusually intimate vantage on a distant world of production. That world of production was the manufactory, as Karl Marx termed it, large workshops with substantial concentrations of skilled hands. Such workplaces had appeared in a number of trades, including brewing, ceramics, dyeing, glassmaking, shipbuilding, and, of course, papermaking. Yet, most scholars focused their attention elsewhere, on riotous urban artisans and dispersed rural textile production. By the time I landed in French archives, unruly, irrational mobs in Pitt's London and Voltaire's Paris had evolved into unruly, purposeful crowds. The butcher, the candlestick-maker, and a host of other artisans sacked the baker's shop in ritual fashion during inflationary times, and paid for the bread they seized at the traditional, or "just," price. Economic The Vatman's Shake and the Lure of Papermaking History leonard n. rosenband The vat crew, in a woodcut by Jost Amman, sixteenth century. Courtesy of Robert C. Williams American Museum of Papermaking, Atlanta. - hand papermaking and social historians also considered the city craftsmen's expectations about labor markets and recruitment, forms and amount of compensation, and festive calendars of their own making. There was reason in the workers' misrule and in their efforts to govern their crafts—much as there was reason in more recent demonstrations in Paris, Prague, and Berkeley, as well as the newfound self-governance symbolized by the Summer of Love.1 The custom of the French paperworkers, known as their "modes," deserved this sort of scrutiny; I provided it. Domestic textile manufacture also had political and economic implications. For Marxist and marxisant historians, who trusted in a stage theory of industrial capitalism, it represented a sharply delineated interval of accumulation and exploitation on the high road to mechanization. For conservative historians, such as David Landes, dispersed spinning and weaving unleashed the animal spirits of putting-out masters. They located the cheapest available labor (peasant families during idle winter months), learned the intricacies of highly specialized product markets, avoided overhead, and slashed the cost of their wares.2 Compared to all this, manufactories, many of which enjoyed state subsidies and lavish furnishings, appeared sluggish and swollen to scholars across the political spectrum. Still, vital industrial experiments took place in these settings, such as Josiah Wedgwood's pioneering version of flow production at his pottery works. Dispersed production, I concluded, did not encompass the full range of daring industrial practice before large-scale mechanization. As I matured as an historian, I relished the controversies that swirled among scholars of early modern European manufacture. Yet, my doctoral dissertation, an exercise in social advocacy (on behalf of the workers) now struck me as rarefied and incomplete. If I had brought the journeymen's and the Montgolfiers' needs to life, both remained vectors in a perennial squabble, the competition between capital and labor. Issues such as the meaning of skill, the life cycle of the skilled, the power of applied science, and the reach of the Enlightened French bureaucracy loomed ever larger in my thinking. A son of the working class myself, I had nevertheless offered a flat depiction of the gritty experience of the shopfloor and the emotionally charged process of turning out thousands of sheets of paper per day. I had largely neglected the absent fingernails and scarlet arms that marked this work. And I had failed to take real advantage of the Montgolfiers' gift of brief portraits of their men (and some female hands), as well as their thick descriptions of the desires and wisdom that united and divided the workers. Finally, I was slow to realize the broad significance of the Montgolfiers' dream of transforming tramping men into employees. So I returned to the sources with fresh questions, determined to write the social history of work and of the management of that work rather than an account of a moment in the impersonal trajectory of industrial capitalism. I began this journey by reconsidering the clash between the Montgolfiers and their journeymen during the autumn of 1781. A year before this confrontation, the Montgolfiers installed Hollander beaters in their principal mill. This device permitted the fabricants to dispense with the fermentation of discarded linen, the expensive raw material of hand papermaking, and the wooden mallets that pulped the rags. The beaters saved time, water, and money. Less linen was lost and more became the substance of sheets. This instrument, which had limited effects on the journeymen's tasks around the vats, also allowed the Montgolfiers to expand their shops. And that was the rub. The Montgolfiers offered apprenticeships to local youngsters with little or no connection to the craft and its custom. Their veteran hands rebelled and abandoned the mill en masse. The masters responded with a lockout and suddenly supervised shops manned almost entirely by novices. It was a risky circumstance This document is a Montgolfier mill ordinance, the "Plan to establish order in a paper mill, general rules for male and female workers." Rule number one delineated the penalties for eating and drinking in the workshops. Courtesy of Montgolfier Archive, Annonay, France. winter 2007 - for an enterprise famed for its high-quality reams. Still, these events permitted the Montgolfiers unprecedented control over the hiring, training, promotion, and dismissal of their workers. Armed with this monopoly over the transmission of skill and its rewards, the Montgolfiers aimed to uncouple the journeymen's know-how from its venerable cultural moorings. They shared Wedgwood's fantasy of a labor force that responded as a single set of hands. The workers would do so as appendages of a design, the Montgolfiers' "nouvel ordre," a refined system of labor discipline. Perhaps their paper would then rival the desirable stationery fashioned by the Dutch. The Montgolfier documents that I tripped over in the Archives Nationales thirty years ago revealed the family's determination to profit from the fresh circumstances of 1781. Aroused by the "industrial Enlightenment" and their novel latitude over machines and men, the Montgolfiers treated their shops as a theater of experiment.3 They restlessly tested hands, devices, and processes. Their watchwords were those of the applied science of the eighteenth century—reproducible results and accountable workers. To master their shops and measure their handiwork, they issued a series of detailed mill ordinances. (Circulated first among the members of the family responsible for the invention of the hot-air balloon, these regulations were both imperious and, fittingly, provisional.)4 Elaborate hiring arrangements introduced the sons and daughters of dayworkers and vinedressers to the Montgolfiers' expectations. The mill village and the Montgolfiers' studied paternalism provided green hands with new reciprocities and insulation from the "modes." The wage system cultivated stability and self-interest. Impersonal discipline spelled out standards and responsibilities. Taken together, these time-honored and innovative practices were geared to produce an unconventional sort of paperworker: an employee. The Montgolfiers, however, were not engaged in deskilling, at least as it is conventionally construed. Instead, they intended to demystify skill and reduce it to mere manipulation, whose mastery earned a reward from the boss in place of a toast by revered journeymen. Etienne Montgolfier calculated that the "effective workday" for a vatman or a coucher at his family's mill was thirteen hours. He reached this conclusion in a stray memorandum, one of countless notes preserved in the Montgolfier collection. But the gems of this deposit are two lengthy registers. A daybook kept by the canny Jean-Pierre Montgolfier tracked the arrival and departure of workers from 1784 through 1789, and also recorded numerous advances and payments the Montgolfiers made to their men. (Husbands generally received their wives' earnings.) In this brief article, I can hardly do justice to the bounty of information in this journal. For instance, it reveals the hamlet of origin, the family connections (orphelin de père? papermaking roots?), and the pledges sworn by newcomers to the art. It also contains remarkable evidence concerning the journeymen that the Montgolfiers strained from the tramping streams to replenish their labor force. On the basis of their certificats de congé—a domestic work passport and a reference at once—the length and duration of the journeys from their former masters to the Montgolfiers can be traced. And the last hours of employment at the Montgolfier mill are equally illuminating. The daybook discloses whether a worker's decision to move on was hasty or drawn out, silent or violent, alone or with his family, encumbered by fines or unblemished, occasioned by illness or debility or both. Most notably, Jean-Pierre Montgolfier sketched lively portraits of many men and women as they left the mill. Of course, these characterologies—adaptable or stiff-necked, prudent or drunken, tight-lipped or headstrong—reflected the assumptions of his era and social rank, but they were immediate and candid, and likely the more authentic since they set the terms for rehire. In this document, the workers negotiated output quotas. Very few documents survive in the journeymen's own voice. This is their "Representation to the master" of the weights and dimensions of a variety of papers that the workers agreed to make "at three-quarters of an hour \[per\] post." Courtesy of Montgolfier Archive, Annonay, France. The Old Regime entrepreneur who looked beyond the bonds of kin for managers was thought to be at risk. Thus, there was a division of labor within the Montgolfier family as well as among the workers. This document detailed the wide-ranging responsibilities of Jean-Pierre Montgolfier. He was expected to keep track of output, purchase planks of wood, and alert workers about their shortcomings, among other duties. Courtesy of Montgolfier Archive, Annonay, France. - hand papermaking His elderly father, Pierre, a devout Catholic, may have wanted to people the family mill with choir boys, but Jean-Pierre, who had made his tour de France, readily accepted that boys will be boys. So long as a worker did not threaten him, threaten to reignite solidarity among the millhands, or threaten the output and quality of his paper, Jean-Pierre tolerated a certain indocility in the men charged with the work of fashioning three or four thousand sheets of paper each day. Even the most capable of men, the Montgolfiers maintained, drank immoderately. "Without reason" when he imbibed, the vatman Joseph Etienne lost his job at the Montgolfier mill on March 1, 1785. Etienne began his bumpy career there in January 1784. He was fired and rehired nine and a half months later. By February 1785, things appeared to be going well between Etienne and the Montgolfiers; he had even stepped up to a vatman's station. But he evidently went on too many binges—usually twice a month—and forfeited his job on March 1. Jean-Pierre took Etienne back a day later, with the promise that he would discharge the vatman the next time he caught him drinking. Three days later, an exasperated Jean-Pierre wrote, "Etienne, who has not ceased to besot himself since the second of the month, has been booted out." Out of "consideration for \[Etienne's\] wife," Jean- Pierre relented once again and rehired the skilled man on April 11. He also informed Etienne once again that should he "return to drunkenness," he would surely be shown the door. On August 21, 1785, Etienne reappeared in Jean-Pierre's accounts. He left that day with a certificat de congé that depicted him as an "incorrigible drunkard." In a note to himself, Jean-Pierre observed that Etienne was insolent when drunk and completed his self-destruction with staggering quantities of tobacco. On November 27, Etienne was back with the Montgolfiers. Eleven months later, he abandoned them because Jean-Pierre no longer permitted him to work the moulds. Etienne was no longer sure of his weights, Jean-Pierre reported, but had been fairly well behaved during his last stint. Perhaps Etienne was accurate only when the monotony of promenading fresh sheets was broken by regular drinking bouts. He was willing to drink himself out of a job but not to step down to the coucher's felts; Etienne never returned to the Montgolfier mill. As far a Jean-Pierre was concerned, his skill was gone, and so was he.5 Joseph Etienne's story may also be read as an account of the Montgolfiers' vulnerability and of the strength embedded in the workers' skill. As producers of quality reams, the Montgolfiers searched ceaselessly for skilled hands, which left them liable to the workers' desires, pressures, and ruses. The Montgolfiers' old hands knew they could buckle the masters' knees by menacing to quit amid vatfuls of perishing pulp. Tramping journeymen landed a meal and a bed of straw, and then fled the next morning without touching a mould. Even the Montgolfiers' prized, homegrown hands learned their way around the "nouvel ordre." These youngsters would head home to settle family business, an obligation respected by their masters, and never return. Those who stayed had to be hounded to return linen and tools to their proper places at the end of the workday—both items had considerable value in illicit markets. And the new men found licit means to turn the Montgolfiers' new regime to their own account. They obtained work for wives and children, moved up the hierarchy of vats, and garnered annual bonuses. Here was their payoff for mastering the intricate skills of hand papermaking and for accommodating to their masters' demanding shopfloor codes. The Montgolfiers had secured a productive, persistent work force of relatively mild-mannered men. But they were men: the mill still echoed with their tumult, and the cabarets of nearby Annonay still beckoned. If the Montgolfiers shared Wedgwood's dream of making "such Machines of the Men as cannot err," they had not succeeded.6 Moreover, the Montgolfiers trembled when This entry by Jean-Pierre Montgolfier in the mill's daybook in August 1785 revealed the tasks, wages, and habits of the journeyman Joseph Etienne. It referred to penalties for leaving his station, advances he had taken, and his bonus pay ("avantage"). Jean-Pierre concluded that Etienne was an "incorrigible drunkard" and "insolent" when he drank, and that he also possessed an incredible and destructive appetite for tobacco. Courtesy of Montgolfier Archive, Annonay, France. winter 2007 - one journeyman they hired in the unsettled year of 1789 tried to reintroduce the "modes" in their mill. The second jewel in the Montgolfier archive is an output register. Maintained from 1789 through 1805, it included the names and assignments of five and sometimes six vat crews, the sorts of paper they fashioned, and their daily output. There are few ledgers before the onset of large-scale mechanization that match this record. Of course, the brief compass of this essay precludes a detailed assessment of the possibilities of this source. Above all, it reveals the holiday calendar at the Montgolfier mill (almost Calvinist in its spare number of feast days), the workings of the ladder of vats (skill mattered more than steadfastness in upward mobility), and quota-making (quite regular for a handicraft or even a mechanized factory). Indeed, the machine, often depicted as the antidote to irregular craft productivity, simply continued regular output at the Montgolfier mill. Thus the genesis of modern industrial management, particularly the management of skilled men in the midst of incomplete technological transformation, was neither uniquely British nor confined uniquely to dispersed textile production. I had located my chalice in a paper mill near Lyons. In a justly famous piece, Isaiah Berlin spoke of the Greek poet who drew an essential distinction between the fox and the hedgehog: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."7 Berlin used this polaric pairing to consider those who seize upon a single principle or cause and those who favor diffuse explanations and commitments. In crafting my historical work, I am a foxy hedgehog. The questions I raise change with the seasons of historiography, but I inevitably address them to familiar sources: the ledgers and letterbooks of master papermakers. Only a few words written by journeymen survive in the Montgolfier collection; I would be deeply indebted to any reader who could provide an eighteenth-century paperworker's own ruminations about his art and life. My current project is a comparative history of French and English papermaking, circa 1650–1850. It is not intended as an exhaustive, encyclopedic study of the two industries. Nor does it follow the usual script of comparative economic history, in which one state (almost always England) is the prime innovator and the other (almost always France or continental Europe in general) is merely a recipient, with little to add to the rush of technological change. (Once again, this model rests on British advances in cotton textile production and largely ignores manufactory-based trades.) Instead, I am writing this volume as a history of both reciprocal transfers and independent development. It explores a wide range of topics, including state policy, the dynamic, transnational cultures of masters and men, and the restless exchange of innovative techniques and tastes across the Channel. My argument is still evolving, but I am certain that the arrival of skilled craftsmen, refined reams, and advanced devices (such as the Hollander beater) from the Continent transformed the English trade. This maturation, however, conjured up fresh challenges. The regional journeymen's coalitions of the geographically dispersed French craft became a national trade union in the more concentrated British industry. Turning out fine paper required more fine linen, which pressed hard on an England primarily devoted to the manufacture of woolens and calicos. Economic historians now claim that a distinctive British scientific culture and its attendant, Enlightened optimism, resulted in the island's early turn to mechanical solutions. But new shopfloor and supply issues as well as old problems of cost and quality also prompted the aggressive, even desperate, creation of a commercially successful papermaking machine in Bermondsey. I expect this book to absorb the next several years of my scholarly labors. I find this prospect invigorating, since I have never tired of exploring the skills, custom, and sheer stamina of early modern Europe's papermakers. ___________ notes 1. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 97–123. 2. David Landes, "What Do Bosses Really Do?" The Journal of Economic History 46 (1986), 601–604. 3. On the "industrial Enlightenment" and its consequences, see Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 4. For a full discussion on the Montgolfiers' contribution to aviation history, see Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783–1784 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Editor's note: Also see Marie-Hélène Reynaud, "The Montgolfiers, Papermakers Who Conquered the Skies," Hand Papermaking vol. 21, no. 1 (Summer 2006): 3–6. 5. For Joseph Etienne's story, see Leonard N. Rosenband, Papermaking in Eighteenth- Century France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761–1805 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 133. 6. Josiah Wedgwood, quoted in Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 213. 7. Archilochus, quoted in Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 436. On October 30, 1785, Jean-Pierre Montgolfier noted that he had hired Jean Tissier of Prades 21 days earlier. Tissier began his stint as a day laborer and then began to make paper. In order to land his spot, Tissier pledged to behave "with decency," and never to interfere in the affairs of other workers nor to quit his work without the permission of his master. Courtesy of Montgolfier Archive, Annonay, France.