Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART ONE THE RURAL BACKGROUND
- PART TWO THE IMPACT OF INDUSTRIALIZATION
- 4 CHILD LABOUR IN THE INDUSTRIAL SETTING
- 5 WORKING CONDITIONS FOR CHILDREN IN INDUSTRY
- 6 A PHYSICAL DECLINE IN THE RACE?
- 7 A MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL DECLINE?
- PART THREE THE STATE INTERVENES
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - WORKING CONDITIONS FOR CHILDREN IN INDUSTRY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART ONE THE RURAL BACKGROUND
- PART TWO THE IMPACT OF INDUSTRIALIZATION
- 4 CHILD LABOUR IN THE INDUSTRIAL SETTING
- 5 WORKING CONDITIONS FOR CHILDREN IN INDUSTRY
- 6 A PHYSICAL DECLINE IN THE RACE?
- 7 A MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL DECLINE?
- PART THREE THE STATE INTERVENES
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The issue of whether the plight of child workers improved or deteriorated with industrial development was hotly disputed in the nineteenth century. The general drift of opinion has always been that their work became more onerous, with the long, gruelling hours of the early textile mills firmly implanted in the popular view of the Industrial Revolution. The oft-quoted passage from Villermé, describing conditions in the cotton and woollen industries of Alsace during the 1830s, has set the tone for much subsequent discussion:
They remain on their feet for sixteen or seventeen hours a day, at least thirteen in an enclosed space, without changing either their place or their position. This is no longer work, or a task, it is torture; and it is imposed on children of six to eight, badly fed, badly clothed, and obliged to cover, at five in the morning, the long distance which separates them from the workshops, and which finally exhausts them in the evening when they return home.
Although no enemy of the factory system in general, Villermé concluded that excessive working hours were one of its major drawbacks, which could only be changed by administrative decree or by law. The industrialists, for their part, took a more optimistic view. Without necessarily denying that life for the proletariat in the towns was becoming increasingly miserable, they argued from the 1830s onwards that the extension of the factories was the most likely source of benefits for employer and employee alike.
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- Childhood in Nineteenth-Century FranceWork, Health and Education among the 'Classes Populaires', pp. 127 - 145Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988