BY 1830 WORKERS' CORPORATIONS were well entrenched in cities all over France with a distinctive set of conventions, customs, rituals, and formulas to shape the day-to-day conduct of their affairs - what I have called a “corporate idiom.” Derived from the usages of corporations of the old regime and worked out in opposition both to the claims of the masters and to the proprietary individualism imposed by the state, this corporate idiom expressed and informed the workers' aspirations for a moral community of the trade. Moreover, whereas masters often rejected corporate claims and stood on their rights as individual proprietors, most of them certainly understood the workers' idiom and could themselves operate within its assumptions when necessary. As previously noted, they quite frequently negotiated agreements with workers that set collective controls over their trades. Within the urban skilled trades, then, the corporate idiom framed not only conflicts but also the accords that resolved them.

But if the corporate idiom could unify workers in a trade and could sometimes move the masters as well, it was powerless beyond the domain of the urban skilled trades, the former “mechanical arts.” It was by developing a corporate vocabulary that workers found their own voice in the early years of the nineteenth century, and although the workers' language served admirably for the internal affairs of their trades, it denied them all access to the larger realm of public discourse.