Itinerant merchants: between networks of migrants and survival strategy (16th–20th)

ABSTRACT

In dictionaries as well as in literature, the pedlar is an ambiguous figure. Urban sources testify to the desire of the urban authorities and sedentary merchants to exclude them. A few bankruptcy files do, however, make it possible to document failures as well as to provide information on the tours and the credit necessary to exercise the trade. However, to overcome the purely urban viewpoint, one must leave the town behind and concentrate instead upon the home villages and its notarial archives in order to link individual departures to the social framework to which they belonged and to understand the organisation of these networks of migrants.

However, the municipal archives on poverty, on markets, as well as the archives of the police, justice and guilds allow us to enter into certain economic practices of the most destitute.

In the first part, the essay describes the organisation of migrant networks and their evolution between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. In the second part, it analyses urban peddling, which is the economic resource of the poorest people, particularly women, and the battles waged against them by the elites and established merchants in order to keep them off the streets.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant networks
• pedlars
• urban poor
• France

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Braudel, La Méditerranée, 30, 39.

2 See: Fontaine, History of Pedlars, 94–115.

3 Fontaine, “Montagnes et migrations de travail”, 26–48.

4 Kintz, “Savoyards et grand commerce”, 32–38.

5 Departemental archives of the Isère 1J 1102.

6 Departemental archives of the Rhône, B series, 8 May 1690.

7 Arnaud, Histoire des protestants, vol. 1, 499–510.

8 Fontaine, History of Pedlars, 13.

9 Augel, Italienische Einwanderung,196.

10 Mellot, “Rouen et les “libraires forains”.

11 Infelise, L'editoria veneziana nel ‘700.

12 For a detailed study of these networks, see Fontaine, History of Pedlars, 50–72.

13 Martin, Livre, pouvoir et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle, 1598–1701, 324–25.

14 Sauvy, “Noël Gille”, 185. Moulinas, L'Imprimerie, 136. Infelise, L'editoria veneziana, 259.

15 Guichonnet, “l'émigration alpine vers les pays de langue allemande”, Revue de Géographie alpine, 553–76 Dietz, Frankfurter Handelsgeschichte, t. 2, 414–15. Merzario, “Una fabbrica di uomini. L'emigrazione dalla montagna comasca (1650–1750)”, 153–75.

16 For a detailed analysis see Fontaine, History of pedlars, 120–39.

17 Quoted by Casselle, “Recherche sur les marchands”, 74–93.

18 Sauvy, “Noël Gille”, 177–90 and 184–85. Darnton, “Un colporteur sous l'Ancien Régime”.

19 Mellot, “Rouen et les “libraires forains”, 529.

20 Kane, The Homeland.

21 Examples of these lives in Poitrineau, “Aspects de l'émigration”, 36–37 and Sarti, Long Live the Strong. A History of Rural Society in the Apennine Mountains, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1985, p. 88-89.

22 A. D. Isère, 1Mi 155, canton de Bourg d'Oisans.

23 Fontaine, “Family Cycles”, 43–68.

24 Schenda, Folklore e letteratura popolare, 213 ; Lerch, Imagerie et Société, 243; R. Sarti, Long Live the Strong … , p. 84; Darmon, Le Colportage de librairie, 30–41 ; Poitrineau, Les “Espagnols” de l'Auvergne et du Limousin du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, Aurillac: Mazel-Malroux, 1985.

25 This study, detailed in Fontaine, Le Voyage et la mémoire, 147–203, is based on notarial contracts, the register of copies of letters from the gantier Nicolet who financed many of these trips (Archives départementales de l'Isère, 1J 829) and letters and memoirs, visiting cards and other publicity material preserved by the Musée Dauphinois.

26 Montenach, “Legal trade.”, 17–34. Van den Heuvel, Women & Entrepreneurship.

27 Reynald, Le grand marché.

28 Fontaine, Le marché, 70–101.

29 Wiesner, “Paltry Peddlers?”, 3–13. For Paris, see, Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, Etre veuve, 282.

30 Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 1, 548–51.

31 Duval, Foires et marchés, 327.

32 Blasquez, “ Foires et marchés”, 118.

33 Van den Heuvel, “Food, markets and people.” 94–95.

34 Fontaine, The Moral Economy, 104–11 and Alternative Exchanges.

35 Roche, La culture des apparences, 328 et 344.

36 Mercier, Le Nouveau Paris, 1296–9.

37 Ibid.

38 Quoted by Cobb, La Mort est dans Paris, 170–71.

39 Fontaine, Le marché, 85–95. Van den Heuvel, “Policing peddlers”, 367–92.

40 Mercier, Tableau de Paris, t. 2, chap. 143–4.

41 Étude-action sur les « biffins ».

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laurence Fontaine

Laurence Fontaine is Emeritus Senior Researcher in the CNRS attached to the Center Maurice Halbwachs (Paris Sciences et Lettres). She was professor at the History and Civilisation department of the European University Institute (Florence-Italy) from 1995 to 2003. She has published numerous articles and among her books: History of Pedlars in Europe, Polity Press and Duke University Press, 1996; Household Strategies for Survival, 1600-2000: Fission, Faction and Cooperation, Laurence Fontaine and Jürgen Schlumbohm (eds), Cambridge University Press, 2000; Alternative Exchanges: Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to The Present, L. Fontaine (ed.), Berghahn, Oxford, 2008; The Moral Economy. Poverty, Credit and Thrust in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press 2014, Le Marché. Histoire et usage d'une conquête sociale, Paris Gallimard, 2014 and Vivre pauvre. Quelques enseignements tirés de l'Europe des Lumières, Paris, Gallimard 2022. She has worked of migrations, mountain societies, poverty, on the economic, social and cultural dimensions of different economic practices and on the encounter between different political economies.