The Body, the Corporate Idiom, and the Police of the Unincorporated Worker in Early Modern Lyons

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Lyons, as in other early modern French cities, a carnivalesque economy of petty trades and manual laborers operated alongside the orderly world of artisanal guilds. Characterized by the base physicality of their labor, these “unincorporated” workers represented, for the French kingdom’s hierarchically organized social body, a chaotic and unruly outside without which the corporations’ own boundaries could not be defined. These laborers found themselves excluded from the social bodies that defined juridical personalities in early modern France. Paradoxically, efforts undertaken in Lyons to police these workers exposed instabilities within corporatism as a regulatory idiom. The inclusion of porters, ferryboat pilots, or market women in socially sanctioned guilds threatened to undermine categories of social distinction so important to guild identities. Therefore, the Lyons authorities, anticipating the liberal reforms instituted by Turgot in 1776, devised a regulatory regime that did not depend on situating unincorporated workers within corporate bodies but rather on marking the physical bodies of the unincorporated, situating them in space and making them available for observation and discipline.