From 23 to 25 August of 1791, the city of Hamburg was filled with songs and old-world pageantry. Processions of journeymen paraded through the streets to music, waving flags and green boughs. The Honourable Council was terrified.
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Just a few days before, a trivial altercation had started in a locksmith’s workshop over the way the master favoured one journeyman over the others. The man in question was betrothed to the master’s daughter, so jealousy probably played a role here. The men first called on the self-governing body of their guild to fine their colleague for shirking, but after he refused to accept the judgement, they decided that the unfair employer was at fault. He was declared geschimpft which meant no journeymen would work for him until the ban was revoked.
Things escalated rapidly from here. A few days later, the entirety of 80 journeymen locksmiths refused work until the sanction was honoured and the masters called on the council. With ill-considered heavy-handedness, the city government arrested three ringleaders and expelled the rest of the protesters from the city without their papers, tools, or even change of clothes.
These were not abject exploited wretches. Artisanal production in Hamburg, as in many other places in Europe, was controlled by the Ämter, the artisan guilds, who regulated every aspect of it. Entry was by apprenticeship and rigorous testing, and the number of workshops in a city was limited to reduce competition and ensure an adequate livelihood to all. This meant that most journeymen could never aspire to mastership unless they inherited or married into one. But they still were credentialed, skilled craftsmen with established rights and protections, earning easily twice as much as unguilded workers. These men had their pride, and they would not be pushed around. Hamburg’s journeymen took to the streets.
The atmosphere was almost festive as they brought out all the traditional flags, signs and tools of their brotherhoods. They also came with a good deal of pent-up anger. Hamburg was a rich city, by any reasonable measure an independent maritime republic, but it was also increasingly crowded with French refugees and Holstein peasants, suffering from rising food prices, sky-high rents, and depressed wages.
Journeymen had been able to support families on their pay, rent rooms, and eat well. Their estate did not usually reach to the famous Hamburg beef – a dish of cold-smoked salt meat often erroneously linked to the history of the hamburger – but they could expect a respectable diet of bread, meat, and a variety of vegetables as well as occasional treats like the famous Braune Kuchen or Hamburg Klöben.
Klöben was nothing special – a kind of enriched bread with dried fruit, sugar butter, milk, and spices in the same family as the more famous Stollen. It was not tied to Christmas, but eaten on festive occasions, often served with tea of coffee, and we can well imagine the exuberant strikers of 1791 eating it as they marched through the streets. We do not have a recipe from the 1790s, but the Hamburgisches Kochbuch of 1830 preserves one:
IX No. 88: To bake good Klöben
Take 10 pounds of flour, 2 pounds of butter, half a Loth of cinnamon, half a pound of currants, a quarter pound of sugar, 1 cup of syrup, 2 cups of large raisins, 4 beer glasses of warm milk, 2 glasses of yeast, and prepare it as Hannoverschen Kuchen. From this dough, you can prepare 5 Klöben, brush them with egg yolk, and bake them in an oven.
Helpfully, it also explains the reference:
IX No 106: Hannoverscher Butter Cake
Take two pounds of good wheat flour, a quarter pound of ground sugar, cardamom, three egg yolks, and grated lemon peel in an earthen bowl. Lay one pound of butter and a little salt in the centre of the flour and pour on a large beer glass full of warm milk and a little less warm white beer yeast. Stir it all well together and if the dough is not soft enough, add a little more warm milk. When all is stirred well and the dough detaches from the bowl, work them thoroughly with your hands on a table and roll it out as evenly as the sheet on which it is meant to be baked. …
I have made this and can attest that it is quite good as described here. Sugar syrup, something like molasses, was an inexpensive byproduct of sugar refining, a major industry in Hamburg, and cinnamon and currants would also have been on hand at reasonable prices. The recipe produces a dense, firm loaf that can be sliced more easily than broken and is excellent dipped in hot tea or spread with extra butter. It is well suited to sharing with comrades and can be carried wherever it is needed. Bakers in the city made it regularly.
We do not know for sure what the journeymen ate on their excursions, not what they thought they were doing, other than standing up for their unjustly mistreated comrades. All our records come from the side of the Honourable Council and the good citizens of Hamburg, and they were deeply concerned. These were not arch-reactionaries. Hamburg was, after all, a republic that abhorred hereditary aristocracy to the extent it forbade any nobleman from obtaining citizenship and any citizen from accepting ennoblement. Many of its leading men were liberals. Just a year previously, they had raised a liberty tree and celebrated the success of the French Revolution! But, like many of the revolutionaries of Paris, they had little time for demands for equality, especially when they came from people on whose labour their comfort depended. Their version of liberty embraced a complex accretion of privilege and an absolute protection of property rights. Beyond lay chaos and destruction.
The thought of local sans-culottes horrified them, and as protest continued, labourers, sailors, and factory workers joined, armed with fenceposts and looking scary. If we can trust our accounts, many journeymen shared these reservations and the groups occasionally came to blows. They, after all, were here to defend their traditional rights, not those of some upstart sugar-refiner or smelly longshoreman. The council, probably wary of repeating the mistakes of Louis XVI, repented of their overreaction and agreed to allow the expelled men to return. At this point, though, things had already proceeded farther than they were willing to allow. Labourers – the great unwashed – were consorting with respectable journeymen, and the orderly parades of the previous days became noisier, more riotous assemblies. Paris provided a warning, and the large exile community could tell the tale. They called out the army.
Unlike France, Hamburg did not actually have a large army, but its soldiers, supplemented by the militia of wealthy citizens, made up in assertive brutality what they lacked in numbers. Numerous protesters were shot, three journeymen tailors killed, and a curfew imposed at gunpoint. The general strike ended with no further resistance.
Tellingly, the government did not feel like they had won. This was new territory for everyone, the thought that the working class could make common cause against the wealthy terrifying beyond what the fairly banal events warranted. They actually informed the expelled journeymen locksmiths that they were welcome to return to work and after they, understandably, refused, sent them their papers, personal effects, and additional travel money. The treatment of the injured and the funerals of the dead were paid for by the city fisc. It was the strangest “no hard feelings” gesture imaginable.
Of course nothing had really been resolved. The journeymen knew that the council was willing to meet protest with violence. The council felt sure they could not stand up to any repetition of this groundswell of anger. Prussia and Austria were convinced that French secret agents had orchestrated the whole thing and put pressure on the republic to crack down on its refugee population. Meanwhile, well-meaning reformers suggested that the traditional institutions of the guilds were to blame for leading good men astray and educating the artisans would heal the rifts in society.
Over the coming years, the government of Hamburg attempted valiantly, if vainly, to address the problems the protest had laid bare. An expanded effort to support paupers and educate their children for vocational careers, a school for apprentices, and an effort to uplift the lower classes from their deplorable habit of being poor all had some effect, but their most significant impact was providing us with a wealth of statistics on rents, food prices, wages, and the baffled question how anyone could possibly survive being working class. In the face of rising industrialisation, population pressure, and competition from unguilded labour, the journeymen of Hamburg were rapidly becoming proletarians.
We can only imagine what solution might have been attempted by the genuinely creative and well-meaning liberals on the council if the city had not been conquered by Napoleon’s armies in 1806. Over the coming decade, it saw a brief period as capital of the Département Bouches d’Elbe, wrenching liberalisation of its economy, a trade embargo, a brutal winter siege, and a long, slow recovery in the hungry years after 1816.
But it is equally intriguing to imagine what might have happened had the protesting journeymen decided to embrace the labourers who came to join them. In the end, they were ready to jealously defend their higher pay and job security, but twice starvation wage is still uncomfortably close to starvation. Joining hands, they might have been able to get more. Unity in strikes can open purses in the way appeals to customary right seldom does.