15

In seventeenth-century Paris the trade guilds and their confraternities were, in most cases, two aspects of the same institution. They often had the same administrators, elections were often held on the feast-day of the trade’s patron saint, and their finances were intertwined. Religious services organized by the confraternity, including funerals for deceased masters, were central to the trade identity of Paris artisans. So were the corporate celebrations on religious feast-days. The inseparability of guild and confraternity was part of a world in which religious practice and everyday life were similarly interconnected. This article seeks to explain why that connection was broken, and why the trade confraternities were abolished in the late eighteenth century. The monarchy, despite its religious underpinnings, was the key secularizing agent. In order to maximise the revenue it drew from the guilds – the Crown imposed a separation between the accounts of the confraternity and those of corporation, and placed strict limits on their spending. It in effect secularized the guilds by separating religious from non-religious activity, and undermined the confraternities. The intention was not to attack religion. On the contrary, the monarchy’s reforms reflected a world view characteristic of the Catholic Reformation, in which sacred and profane needed to be separated in order to protect the sacred. At the same time, the religious dimension of the guilds was also threatened by their bureaucratization, by urban growth, and disaffection among the members. This was why, after the guilds were abolished and then re-established in 1776, the trade confraternities were not restored.