Le Chapelier Law
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French law passed by the National Constituent Assembly in 1791 that declared the destruction of all corporations of citizens of the same trade or profession to be a fundamental basis of the constitution, forbidding their re-establishment under any pretext or form. It barred employers with open shops, workers and journeymen of the same trade from electing officers, keeping registers or adopting resolutions on their supposed common interests, and forbade administrative and municipal bodies to receive or answer petitions submitted in the name of a trade.
In depth
Enactment context
The Allarde Decree of 2 and 17 March 1791 proclaimed freedom of enterprise and expressly abolished guilds and corporations; the Le Chapelier Law completed that liberalisation with a repressive prohibition of worker association. Presenting the bill, Isaac René Guy le Chapelier described an alarming pre-union movement of workers coalescing in assemblies spreading through the Kingdom to impose minimum daily wages and to found mutual aid societies, arguing that free contracts between individuals should fix each worker's day rate. Echoing Rousseau's Social Contract, from which he took whole passages, he held that while all citizens may assemble, citizens of particular professions may not assemble for their supposed common interests, because only individual and general interests may exist in the state. The debate in the Assembly was very brief; without contesting the substance, deputy Jean-François Gaultier de Biauzat tried unsuccessfully to postpone the vote and raised concern that the law threatened citizens' rights to assemble and associate.
Penalties and enforcement
Bodies, heads and instigators of wage-fixing deliberations or agreements were fined 500 livres each and suspended for one year from the rights of active citizenship, and public works were to exclude those who promoted or signed such agreements. Threats against outside workers or against those accepting lower wages carried fines of 1,000 livres and three months' imprisonment. Article VIII classified workers' gatherings aimed at obstructing the free exercise of industry and labour as seditious assemblies (attroupements séditieux) to be dispersed by public force and punished with the full rigour of the law. The prohibition covered both workers' and employers' associations, but enforcement was asymmetric: any workers' coalition could be punished by imprisonment, whereas employers' coalitions were punished only when their aim was to lower wages.
Repeal and legacy
The law effectively barred guilds and trade unions in France from 1791 until 1864, and remained in force in Belgium until it was repealed there in 1867. Repeal came in two stages: the loi Ollivier of 25 May 1864 abolished the délit de coalition, and the loi Waldeck-Rousseau of 21 March 1884 legalised trade unions. The law also produced resistance. Private defence leagues appeared among carpenters from 1800, and the ban on workers' coalitions was renewed by the law of 12 April 1803, by Articles 414-415 of the 1810 Penal Code, and again by the law of 15 March 1849. It did not prevent the formation of real employers' syndicates or the organisation of compagnonnage societies, and worker cooperatives from 1834 were treated as coalitions under the law until the law of 24 July 1867.
Assessments
The common formulation that the law 'abolished the right to strike' requires qualification: it barred guilds, trade unions and compagnonnage and removed the possibility of collective action, but it cannot literally have abolished a right to strike, since no such right existed in French law before 1791. Marx called the law prohibiting workers' combination a veritable coup d'État des bourgeois; Émile Durkheim regarded it as the origin of the destruction of a social bond in modern societies. Historian Steven Kaplan, while finding the Marxist reading tempting, argues it is better read as a Rousseau-like horror of intermediate or partial associations that contested the superiority of the general will.
In the chronology
The law is also referred to as the Le Chapelier laws of 22 May and 14 June 1791; renewed by the 1810 Penal Code, strikes remained prohibited until the law promulgated 25 May 1864. Together with the decree of 18 August 1792 it contributed to the dissolution of the university and medical faculties in the name of free medical practice, until the health schools of Paris, Montpellier and Strasbourg were created on 4 December 1794.