Epilogue

Abstract

One hundred and sixty years ago, in his penetrating analysis of old-regime and revolutionary France, the French political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville called attention to the endurance of political and social attitudes and behavior before and after the French Revolution.¹ The history of the Bordeaux leather trades also reveals the importance of historical continuity in understanding the early-modern French manufacturing economy and the world of work. Far from amounting to a sudden cataclysm, the French Revolution marked the culmination of a liberal tempest that had been gusting through the Bordeaux corporate world throughout the second half of the eighteenth century.