Child Labor Legislation

in Nineteenth-Century France

France was one of the first countries to follow England on the road to
industrialization, and it became one of the major industrial nations of the
nineteenth century. Yet the issue of child labor in France, unlike the child
labor issue in England, has received little attention from historians in the
past. Several surveys of French history, a number of legal texts, and a few
monographs on other subjects have made some mention of child labor
legislation in nineteenth-century France, but the accounts in such works are
extremely brief, as are the law theses which constitute the most important
contributions to the limited secondary literature on early French factory law.
My doctoral dissertation was written in an attempt to fill the gap left in the
literature of social and economic history by the absence of serious studies of
child labor in nineteenth-century France. It is the first examination of that
subject in half a century and is the only study based on extensive research in
primary sources. .
It is not surprising that a movement for child labor legislation arose as
France became increasingly industrialized. What is somewhat surprising is
that the adoption of child labor legislation was so arduous a process, and its
implementation so incomplete. The legislation was enacted and im-
plemented in France with great reluctance and with only belated public
support. Initially, few people saw child labor as a problem worthy of serious
attention. Most manufacturers, intellectuals, and working-class families, as
well as most legislators and government functionaries, opposed the idea of
government intervention to restrict the employment of the young. Pre-
industrial practices and standards had allowed child labor, and most people
failed to recognize that the vastly different conditions of factory employment
necessitated new practices and standards.
Only a few isolated voices were raised in a demand for protective legisla-
tion as the nineteenth century entered its second quarter and French
industry grew. Interestingly, the few individuals who did speak out came
almost exclusively from the ranks of those very groups which, as a whole,
were most consistently opposed to factory legislation of any kind. Clearly,
humanitarian sentiment was the motive force behind the early appeals for
child labor reform. The first calls for the legal protection of laboring children
came from a small group of industrialists in the Alsatian town of Mulhouse.
Abandoning the traditional objection of manufacturers to government inter-
vention in industry, they appealed to Paris several times during the 1830s to
adopt legislation that would protect working children. Later in the decade
the Alsatian entrepreneurs who had made child labor reform a crusade were
joined by a few other champions of legislation, again from among the ranks of
those usually most opposed to such an idea. Notable among those who joined
the crusade for a child labor law in the 1830s were the conservative Catholic
268
 Child Labor Legislation 269
writer Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont, the liberal intellectual Doctor Louis
Villerme, and the reforming industrialist Daniel Legrand. It took several
years for these unlikely crusaders to convince France's legislators and some
of her opinion leaders of the need for a child labor law. Both a commitment
to laissez faire and general bureaucratic inertia had to be overcome. Finally
in 1841, following two rather extensive inquiries into the child labor situa-
tion, the legislature passed France's first child labor law.
It is instructive to note how much more support there seems to have been
for child labor reform in England than in France. One might have expected
that the pattern established in the first nation to face the problem of child
labor would have been duplicated in thefollowercountries, but such was not
?he case. Studies of child labor legislation in England indicate that the
movement for its adoption enjoyed very broad support from many segments
of society. Several studies even tell of widespread worker agitation in favor of
legislation and of expressions of popular sympathy for it. The same was not
true in France.
The child labor law of 1841 was made applicable in shops employing
twenty or more workers, and in those which relied on mechanical power or a
continuous fire. It set the minimum age for employment at eight years. The
law prohibited children under twelve from working more than eight hours a
day, and it allowed children twelve to sixteen a maximum work day of twelve
hours. Further, the measure severely restricted the employment of
youngsters at night and on Sundays and legal holidays, and set minimal
education requirements for factory children. At the time the child labor law
was passed, there were about 150,000 child laborers in French factories,
representing about 12 percent of the industrial workforce.
The passage of the child labor law was one thing, but its implementation
was another. As the 1840s progressed it became clear that the supporters of
the law were fighting a losing battle to see it fully observed. Though the
child labor law was by no means a radical measure and did not necessitate
any major industrial reorganization, it faced stiff opposition, including that of
the two groups most intimately involved with child labor: factory owners and
working-class families. Industrialists disliked the incursion of the law for
both practical and philosophical reasons, and working-class parents objected
to the loss of income their families faced. To the problem of resistance to the
law was added that of faults in the law itself. Chief among these faults was the
enforcement of the new factory legislation by honorary local councils. Where
these local councils functioned at all, they generally represented the interests
of the entrepreneur. The English had recognized by 1833 the indispensabil-
ity of paid factory inspectors functioning within a centralized inspection
system, but the French had failed to profit from the lesson the English had
learned by trial and error.
Throughout the late 1840s, and into the 1850s and 1860s, there remained a
concern for making the child labor law effective. But in these years people
who devoted themselves to further reform, urging above all a paid inspecto-
rate, were few in number. Government officials who were truly interested in
making the law work were powerless in the face of the intransigence of most
of the parties involved. The labor of those who crusaded for an improved
270 Weissbach
system of factory inspection was almost rewarded in 1848, but the revolution
of that year prevented the passage of a new factory act. The Second Repub-
lic, contrary to what might have been expected, paid little attention to child
labor, though it did place a law governing apprenticeship on the books. The
first decade of the Empire of Napoleon III saw the question of child labor
recede even further into the background. The implementation of child labor
regulations met with significant, though by no means total, success only in
the handful of departments, such as the industrial Nord, which appointed
their own salaried factory inspectors.
As the Empire entered its second decade there was a renewed interest in
the plight of laboring children. Partly, no doubt, because of the concern for
childhood which came with the increasingly dominant bourgeois value sys-
tem, more and more people became interested in the child labor problem.
For the first time some labor interests turned their attention to it, and the
central government was stirred to deal with the problem in a more serious
fashion than it had in the past. By 1868 the Ministry of Commerce had
prepared a new child labor bill correcting many of the faults of the 1841 law,
and had taken a step in the direction of salaried inspection by placing
enforcement of the factory act in the hands of the government's Mining
Engineers. Action on a new child labor law seemed imminent in 1870, but,
as in 1848, armed upheaval and a change of government disrupted the
adoption of a long-awaited and clearly necessary reform measure. Not until
1874 was France's second child labor law enacted. In passing what was one of
the few reform measures of the Third Republic's early years, the legislature
was influenced both by the religious and humanitarian sentiment of its
largely conservative membership, and by its new concern for the nation's
youth in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. The law passed in 1874
extended the applicability of child labor regulations to virtually all shops,
raised the basic minimum age for employment to twelve, and created a
centralized, salaried inspectorate.
Implementation of the child labor law, however, proved to be as difficult
after 1874 as it had been after 1841. Many of the same factors which had
stood in the way of complete enforcement in earlier years obstructed the
enforcement of the new law as well. In general, those provisions of the law
which were easily observed were obeyed, while those provisions which
caused greater hardships and required a departure from existing employ-
ment practices were often ignored. By the time child labor regulations finally
did gain widespread support and a large measure of acceptance late in the
century, the child labor issue had lost its prominence to other concerns, such
as education reform and factory legislation covering all workers.
The child labor reform movement in France had very broad implications
for the entire question of government intervention in the affairs of business
and industry in the post-Revolutionary period. The early crusaders for child
labor reform were for the most part supporters of the status quo, yet they
saw the welfare of working children as one interest which should transcend
an orthodox adherence to the philosophy of laissez faire. The issue of child
labor was the first to place in question the relatively strict laissez faire policy
which had held sway in France since 1789, and the child labor law of 1841
 Child Labor Legislation 271
represented the first major break with that policy in the nineteenth century.
At the center of the controversy over the restriction of child labor there
remained always the argument over how far a national community could go
in imposing its collective will on individuals, and since child labor legislation
remained at the vanguard of welfare reform throughout most of the last
century in France, it set important precedents. Thus the child labor issue
had crucial implications for the entire legislative, social, economic, and even
intellectual history of the nation, no less than it had important implications
for thousands of individual children who grew up in nineteenth-century
France.
LEE S. WEISSBACH, Harvard University