Unreliable Mills: Maintenance Practices in Early Modern Papermaking

On 16 January 1772, a notary, a papermaker, and a carpenter entered the Prélat paper mill to complete their inventory of the estate of Claude Chapon, the owner of the mill, who had died two days earlier. On the ground floors of what were in fact two adjacent buildings they found a worn-out vat, two sets of five stamping mills in dire need of repairs, a leaky retting vat, a partly broken sorting table, and two crumbling masonry storage tanks. Only two screw presses were deemed in fair shape. Upper floors also drew disparaging comments, the notary recording, for instance, the thinness of the drying loft ropes and the worrisome conditions of several beams. However, almost four hundred reams of fresh or ready-to-ship, high-quality paper were found on the premises. The Prélat was an active mill, and work had stopped only that very morning, after all remaining processed rags had been made into paper. It would soon resume. The contrast evident at the Prélat on that January morning between a high level of activity and a derelict work environment will not surprise those familiar with legal or paralegal inventories of early modern worksites. ¹ It is the starting point of the present inquiry.

Regardless of the technology used, the performance of a manufacturing unit depends on the state of repair of its machinery and buildings. Even in a preindustrial context, the maintenance of mills and workshops presented challenges that their owners could not ignore. Maintenance expenditures are indeed common in surviving records of manufacturing activities. However, preindustrial maintenance practices have received only indirect and cursory attention, and no pattern has emerged. ² At least two reasons account for this lack of interest: maintenance has traditionally been regarded as secondary to the initial choice, design, and evolution of a technology, and the interpretation of maintenance costs requires chronological series that are difficult to assemble. An outstanding exception to this indifference is a bold statement by Fernand Braudel. Adopting, not surprisingly, a long and organic perspective, this leading French historian summed up the negative consequences of the constant deterioration of equipment during the early modern period as “a pernicious economic disease.” Braudel went on to suggest that this debilitating condition limited the accumulation of capital in the industrial sector, and that the expression “fixed capital” remained inappropriate during this era. ³ The present study seeks to redress this historiographical neglect and refine Braudel’s general statement through an investigation of the maintenance records of early modern French paper mills. It reveals a pattern of parsimonious repairs and infrequent but decisive renovations suited to the circumstances in which they operated.

Recent explorations of the business strategies pursued by entrepreneurs during the early modern and modern eras have emphasized the multiplicity of paths available to them. In particular, studies of the methods, the tools, or the materials used by manufacturers have demonstrated the diversity of factors that shaped their decisions and their cognizance of various options. ⁴ This article adds maintenance to the list of variables upon which producers could play to match their ambitions to their environment. Preindustrial production levels were determined not only by the levels of technology and activity but also by irregular maintenance cycles, and these are worthy of historians’ attention. Indeed, the evolution of a trade was influenced by the attachment of its practitioners to the flexibility we see in their array of options. Thus, the fixed capital characteristic of a concentrated trade such as papermaking cannot simply be seen as evidence of an irresistible process of accumulation traditionally associated with industrialization. “Fixed” capital was partly reversible and managed. The core of this study will contrast yearly repair budgets with reconstruction schedules. Before that, however, brief introductions to the theme of maintenance and to the paper industry are necessary.

The Maintenance of Mills

Maintenance refers to the procedures necessary to keep a productive system in a satisfactory state of repair. All definitions acknowledge the range of possible maintenance goals (and measurements), and recent nomenclatures range from “operate-to-failure” to “total productive maintenance” through...