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This decentralized method was a great fit for both Swiss and English watchmaking, for various reasons โ in Switzerland, it meant that you could be an รฉtablisseur (the word is derived from the French for a watchmaker's bench, un รฉtabli) without a great deal of investment and many watch factories in the Jura had only a few people working in them, with most of the work being done in private homes. These home-workers enjoyed a degree of independence and in many cases, ownership of the means of production; the system was so ingrained in Swiss rural society that, as Jonathan Steinberg writes, in Why Switzerland, the number of factory workers in the watch industry did not exceed the number of those working at home until (almost unbelievably) 1910, according to a Swiss federal census. Nonetheless, centralization of movement manufacturing in actual manufactures continued to advance in the early-to-mid-20th centuries, and was indeed essential to the survival of the industry.
The best workers barely found work a few days a weekโฆ
Destitution hung over the city, indeed over the region as a whole."
โ KROPOTKIN, THE CONQUEST OF BREAD
"Formerly the individual work of a Nuremberg artificer, the watch has been transformed into the social product of an immense number of detail labourers, such as mainspring makers, dial makers, spiral spring makers, jewelled hole makers, ruby lever makers, hand makers, case makers, screw makers, gilders, with numerous subdivisions, such as wheel makers (brass and steel separate), pin makers, movement makers, acheveur de pignon (fixes the wheels on the axles, polishes the facets, &c.), pivot makers, planteur de finissage (puts the wheels and springs in the works), finisseur de barillet (cuts teeth in the wheels, makes the holes of the right size, &c.), escapement makers, cylinder makers for cylinder escapements, escapement wheel makers, balance wheel makers, raquette makers (apparatus for regulating the watch), the planteur dโรฉchappement (escapement maker proper); then the repasseur de barillet (finishes the box for the spring, &c.), steel polishers, wheel polishers, screw polishers, figure painters, dial enamelers (melt the enamel on the copper), fabricant de pendants (makes the ring by which the case is hung), finisseur de charniรจre (puts the brass hinge in the cover, &c.), faiseur de secret (puts in the springs that open the case), graveur, ciseleur, polisseur de boรฎte, &c., &c., and last of all the repasseur, who fits together the whole watch and hands it over in a going state." >>20407755
ecentralized nature of Swiss watchmaking in the 1800s, and the inherent independence of those making components in the Jura during that period, made the area a hotbed of radical, if not revolutionary, sentiment. Marx was far from the only figure on the Left who found the area anthropologically and economically interesting; the tolerance of the Swiss federal government (such as it was) tended to invite what most of the European great powers considered troublemakers, to take up residence. Another individual who spent a good deal of time there was the anarchist, Kropotkin (Prince Kropotkin, u
til his family disowned him). Kropotkin, in The Conquest of Bread, says several interesting things about the Jura (there is a most charming and very sad story about a Spanish anarchist friend of his, who left Le Locle after freezing during the winter when he could only find work as a sign-painter, and expired of tuberculosis in Spain, "raving about a white horse," but I digress). Kropotkin relates that:
"This was the milieu in which I spent the winter and summer of 1877, trying to improve our propaganda in La-Chaux-de-Fonds and neighboring Le Locle. I will not say that the enterprise was very successful โฆ Machine-made American watches were reducing the market for cheap Swiss watches, which had sold in huge numbers previously, especially in America. The best workers barely found work a few days a week โฆ Destitution hung over the city, indeed over the region as a whole."
It was only the shift towards industrialization, centralization, and verticalization, and away from hand-crafting of watches, that saved the Swiss watch industry โ and not for the last time.
Now this is obviously not what we think of when we think of "traditional" Swiss watchmaking โ remember, each of those tasks enumerated was actually an entirely separate job, done by individuals doing that job but no other, and generally at home. It is certainly a manual-craft way of doing things but it's not the "one craftsman at the bench" of fantasy. In fact, this distributed system was characteristic of English watchmaking as well โ in 1747, Campbell's The London Tradesman (an account of all the different trades in London at the time) related:
"At the first appearance of Watches they were but rude to what they are now; the were began and ended by one Man, who was called a Watch-Maker; but of late Years the Watch-Maker, properly so called, scarce makes any thing belonging to a Watch; he only employs the different Tradesmen among whom the Art is divided โฆ the Springs are made by a Tradesman, who does nothing else, and the (fusรฉe) chains by another: These last are frequently made by Women, in the Country about London, and sold to the Watch-Maker by the dozen โฆ When the Watch-Maker has got home all the Movements of the Watch, and the other different Parts of which it consists, he gives the whole to a Finisher, who puts the whole Machine together โฆ The Watch-Maker puts his Name upon the Plate, and is esteemed the Maker, though has not made in his Shop the smallest Wheel belonging to it."
One of the most interesting and less well-known tidbits of Swiss watchmaking history, is that for some decades in the 19th century, the way watches were made in the Jura โ especially in Le Locle and La-Chaux-de-Fonds โ was of great interest to some people you might be surprised to find interested in Swiss watchmaking, one of whom was none other than economist, radical thinker, and beard aficionado Karl Marx. Marx was fascinated by the highly distributed nature of the รฉtablisseur system of watchmaking, in which individual workers specialized to an almost unbelievable degree. In fact, it turns out that the single longest sentence in Marx's Capital is actually an enumeration of all the specialist types of worker that existed in the Jura in the mid-19th century. Marx is interested, in this passage, in distinguishing between two types of manufacturing: one in which everything's made under one roof, and another, in which it isn't. We reproduce it herewith for your edification, from Capital, Vol. I, which was published in 1867. Marx first remarks, "A locomotiveโฆconsists of more than 5,000 independent parts. It cannot, however, serve as an example of the first kind of genuine manufacture, for it is a structure produced by modern mechanical industry. But a watch can; and William Petty used it to illustrate the division of labour in manufacture."
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