Revolutionary competition : coalitions, labor, and the birth of French antitrust, 1791-1864
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In 1791, The revolutionary French National Assembly enacted the Le Chapelier Law, abolishing all corporate bodies and collective economic associations. The old guilds were the embodiment of ancien régime privilege and a scourge to economic liberty and social progress. Though the law was primarily concerned with the regulation of labor, the animating principles behind it revealed a much broader and more sweeping anti-corporatist social vision. In introducing his proposal, Isaac Le Chapelier declared emphatically, "Corporate bodies no longer exist in this country. There exists only the particular interests of every individual and the general interest." But just what an economy lacking corporate "intermediary interests" was supposed to look like—and how it was supposed to function—remained an open question. The Napoleonic Penal Code of 1810 cleaved the Le Chapelier Law's anti-corporatist prohibitions into separate labor and antitrust statutes. Articles 414, 415, and 416 prohibited "coalitions" of workers and employers, while Article 419 prohibited business "coalitions." Despite their conceptual similarities and overlapping terms, these provisions governed different activities and different parties within the economic system. The Penal Code's creation of separate but related and coevolutionary bodies of law encouraged both workers and businesses accused of coalition to be opportunistic in the way they defended themselves, glomming on to developments in one area of the law to support their cause or defend their actions in the other. This dissertation traces the nineteenth-century history of the Le Chapelier Law, from its enactment in 1791, to its bifurcation in the 1810 Penal Code, to its effective abolition following the 1864 Ollivier law. It shows how, when French courts ruled that companies could not be guilty of coalition under Article 419 if they acted in parallel and charged similarly predatory prices—but did not explicitly agree to work in concert to put a competitor out of business—workers opportunistically began to defend their own collective actions in similar terms, as consciously parallel but not part of a concerted agreement. Similarly, when Articles 414, 415, and 416 were amended in 1864 to remove the prohibition of peaceful, non-violent coalitions, producers and legal commenters immediately argued that the amendment applied equally to business coalitions, effectively nullifying Article 419
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Schupanitz, Andrew Paul | |
|---|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Baker, Keith Michael | |
| Thesis advisor | Baker, Keith Michael | |
| Thesis advisor | Daughton, J. P. (James Patrick) | |
| Thesis advisor | Kessler, Amalia D | |
| Degree committee member | Daughton, J. P. (James Patrick) | |
| Degree committee member | Kessler, Amalia D | |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Andrew Schupanitz |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Andrew Paul Schupanitz
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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