Isaac René Guy Le Chapelier (12 June 1754 – 22 April 1794) was a French jurist and politician of the Revolutionary period.
Biography
Le Chapelier was born in Rennes in Brittany, where his father was bâtonnier of the corporation of lawyers, a title equivalent to President of the Bar. He entered the law profession, and was a noted orator. In 1775, Le Chapelier was initiated as a freemason at the Grand Orient de France.[1]
Le Chapelier introduced a motion in the National Assembly which prohibited guilds, trade unions, and compagnonnage, and which also abolished the right to strike. The law did not "abolish the right to strike", no right to not turn up for work and not be dismissed, had ever existed in French law, a "right" that did not exist, and had never existed, can not have been "abolished" by the law of 1791. Le Chapelier and other Jacobins interpreted demands by Paris workers for higher wages as contrary to the new principles of the Revolution. The measure was enacted law on 14 June 1791 in what became subsequently known as the Le Chapelier Law. The law effectively barred guilds and trade unions in France until 1864. There had been an effort, by Turgot, to abolish the compulsory guilds (producer cartels) in 1776 - but it did not go into effect. The Estates General proclaimed against the guilds on August 4, 1789 - but the end of these compulsory producer cartels did not come till 1791.
In May, 1789, when the Estates General were still meeting, Le Chapelier was one of the founders of the Breton Club,[2] a collection of deputies initially all hailing from his home province of Brittany, but which in the weeks to come drew all sorts of deputies sharing a more radical ideology. After the October Days (5–6 October) and the National Assembly's move to Paris, the Breton Club rented a Dominican monastery and became the Jacobin Club, of which Le Chapelier was the first president.
Like many radical deputies, Le Chapelier wished for the central role played by such popular societies early in the French Revolution to come to an end with the settling of the state and the pending promulgation of a new constitution. This conviction was increased by the Champs de Mars Massacre of 17 July 1791. Within days, Le Chapelier joined the mass exodus of moderate deputies abandoning the Jacobin club in favour of a new organisation, the Patriotic Society of 1789 and later the Feuillant club.
Le Chapelier, in his capacity as chairman of the Constitutional Committee, presented to the National Assembly in its final sessions a law restricting the rights of popular societies to undertake concerted political action, including the right to correspond with one another. It passed 30 September 1791. By the virtue of obeying this law, the moderate Feuillants embraced obsolescence; the radical Jacobins, by ignoring it, emerged as the most vital political force of the French Revolution. The popular society movement, largely founded by Le Chapelier, was thus inadvertently radicalised contrary to his original intentions.
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