Conflits et résistances autour du temps de travail avant l’industrialisation

Abstract

L’idée selon laquelle le temps, son organisation, sa discipline est un facteur discriminant permettant de séparer nettement la période industrielle de celle qui la précède a longtemps prévalu chez les historiens. Cet article s’inscrit en faux contre cette thèse : les conflits autour du temps de travail doivent être inscrits dans la longue durée des rapports sociaux de production. Nous dressons ici une esquisse large des conflits où le temps est un élément de la mobilisation des travailleurs, du XIVe au premier XIXe siècle. Alors qu’au Moyen-Âge, certains conflits portent clairement sur la remise en cause de la définition du temps de travail, à partir du XVIIe siècle, le thème semble s’estomper. Mais apparaissent alors des conflits qui portent sur le contenu du travail effectué dans un temps donné. La première industrialisation ne change pas véritablement la nature des revendications. Elles proviennent encore majoritairement d’ouvriers engagés dans des activités traditionnelles. Les ouvriers d’usine, quant à eux, ne sortent globalement pas de leur mutisme avant les décennies 1860/1870.

‘Life will pass quickly for me’: Women, Clocks and Timekeeping in Nineteenth‐Century France

“…103 Yet even with the introduction of gas cookers in the later nineteenth century, temperature regulation was inexact, and Maitte and Terrier are right to suggest that clock-time vocabulary in the nineteenth century was probably used to refer to task-based time measurement, which is consistent with the finding that most Parisian homes did not have a clock in the kitchen. 104 Beginning to appear as early as the seventeenth century, clock-time notations in recipes might seem to indicate the incursion of mechanical time into the home. However the cooking technologies of the time, for regulating heat for example, were rudimentary at best.…”

“…When considering, for example, women's time in the kitchen, devoted to completing a series of familiar tasks, this way of referring to units of clock time to denote task-oriented time is indeed significant. 11 Building on Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift's concept of multiple, overlapping temporal networks, this paper seeks to rethink the way histories of modern time have viewed women's quotidian experience. 12 In arguing that women like the anonymous Parisian diarist were flexible timekeepers who managed their families' routines and moved seamlessly between public clock time, cyclical routines, and more personal timekeeping practices, this paper seeks to demonstrate that nineteenth-century time cannot be seen as entirely mechanical, but rather as fluid and malleable, something which a more gendered reading can bring into clear relief.…”