Millet depicts a new era of surveillance and control amid the end of communal property.

Cover photo: The Gleaners, oil on canvas, by Jean-François Millet (1857). Via Wikipedia.

The Art of Labor

At the height of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, American workers — including children — suffered twelve hour work days and seven day work weeks. Labor Day originated in 1882 as an annual mass rally in New York organized by socialists and leftist organizations to demand shorter hours, higher pay, safer working conditions, and a labor holiday. President Grover Cleveland would declare Labor Day a federal holiday in 1894.

COVID-19 has revealed who are the essential workers and who performs the unnecessary “bullshit jobs”. This once-in-a-century pandemic has also demonstrated the global interdependency of resources, labor, and supply chains — what we commonly refer to as globalization.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and likely their healthcare. This has inspired me to create a new series on the art of labor through the centuries, with a focus on how work has been valued and represented.

This is the ninth work of a twenty part series.

Revolutionary France

Louis-Philippe, who had been appointed by King Charles X as lieutenant general of the kingdom, ascended to the French throne in 1830, following Charles’ abdication prompted by the July Revolution. The bloody uprising had begun after the monarch’s publication of four ordinances which “suspended the liberty of the press, dissolved the new chamber [of Duties], reduced the electorate, and allowed him to rule by decree.”

Declared the Roi Citoyen (Citizen King), Louis-Philippe was greeted with much optimism. As wrote 19th century author Alfred E. Douglas, the French “were too eager to establish the throne before they had established the republic; too dependent on men, instead of trusting to institutions.”

Unlike his predecessor, Louis-Philippe embraced a more “gentle tyranny”. Angered by his media portrayals, the Citizen King had satirist and cartoonist Honoré Daumier imprisoned and held in a mental hospital for a total of six months, suggesting that anyone who opposed him was mad.

Undeterred, Daumier produced the portrait of Louis-Phillip as a three-faced monster for the weekly magazine La Caricature, less than a year after his release, in early 1833. The pear-headed king’s forgotten smile of the past morphs into an unsettled grimace of the present and outright horror at the future. According to the Brandeis Institutional Repository, “This deterioration was caused by the Republican uprisings of the Lyon workers resulting in increased tension between the Monarch and the Republican press.”

Louis-Philippe would rule until the French Revolution of 1848 — France’s fourth revolution in just sixty years — which overthrew the monarchy. Louis Napoleon is elected president later that year, and ultimately declares himself emperor in 1852, establishing the Second Empire.

Economics professor Paul Hohenberg writes, “Under the Second Empire, France experienced rapid growth in industry, urban construction, railroad building, finance, and commerce.” Industrialization was paired with dreams of democracy. Ross Finocchio of the Metropolitan Museum of Art explains, “As French society fought for democratic reform, the Realists democratized art by depicting modern subjects drawn from the everyday lives of the working class.”

Automation and its Opposition

Working class depictions include the canuts — silk weavers — of Lyon, who rebelled against economic strife in the 1830s. Workers across the country made demands of limiting competition, shorter working days, and even the outlaw of machinery. Republican and socialist agitation lead to strikes and ultimately violent uprisings throughout the decade.

In early 19th century England, groups of hand weavers — who called themselves Luddites — had began to destroy power looms over fears of automation. According to humanities professor Kevin Binfield, Luddites were not totally opposed to technological advancement, but sought to ensure that machinery was not used in “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” that reduced the quality of goods or depressed the wages of workers.

Industrial Revolutions were characterized not only by the introduction of machinery, but the accumulation of private capital which determined the production and organization of work. Canuts were an exception as they did not work in a factory, but in their own home, which allowed for more autonomy and less oversight than other industrial professions.

Lyon had become Europe’s center of silk weaving in the 16th century, when King Francis I granted the city a monopoly on all raw silk imports in the monarchy. Despite this monopoly, canuts — among the most tenuous workers in the silk industry — were under constant threat of bankruptcy. They demanded a local tariff to ensure a minimum fixed price for their ready silks.

In 1831, strikes in Lyon became violent after shots were fired at the canuts by the French National Guard. Some 200 civilians and 75 guards were killed. Canuts adopted the motto “Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant” (“Live by working or die fighting”). German philosopher Friedrich Engels declared the protest in Lyons “the first working-class rising”.

France’s poor economic conditions — at least in comparison to those of England — lead to political unrest and revolution, which slowed the speed of transition from an agrarian economy to one of industry.

The French Industrial Revolution was among the slowest in Europe, spanning most of the 19th century. The first train station in Paris, Gare Saint-Lazare, didn’t open until 1837. In 1850, over 75% of France’s inhabitants still lived in the countryside. In fact, prompted by a city-wide outbreak of the disease Cholera, artist Jean-François Millet left Paris in 1849 for rural Barbizon.

The agricultural systems and patterns of ownership in rural France resulted in just two groups on opposite ends of the wealth spectrum: poor laborers who had “failed to establish or maintain a viable farm, and those who had succeeded so well they, or their children, could aspire to bourgeois status,” writes Paul Hohenberg. As a result, he concludes, “Few peasants swelled the army of proletarian factory workers in the nineteenth century”.

Gleaning and Enclosures

The 1554 French royal edict Article R-26.10 had decreed that, “Gleaning is allowed from sunup until sundown” which “allows the poor, the wretched, the deprived to enter the fields once harvesting is over.”

Gleaning is the practice of gathering grains missed by workers during harvest. Paid laborers did not collect the lost grains, as doing so is incredibly time consuming and thus inefficient. Landowners would instead choose to leave the leftovers for grazing cattle and peasants.

The gleaning of one evening would likely not even produce one loaf of bread. The season-long gleaning of a family might result in one whole sack of flour, which would generate over a hundred loaves. In England, gleaning is estimated to have accounted for as much as one-eighth of a peasant’s annual earnings.

Landowners were eager to discontinue the practice. They complained that gleaners were undeserving and “that able-bodied men and women shun the wages that they might earn during harvest and instead take part in the cowardly occupation of gleaning”.

Since its inception, gleaning had been a communal act, including anyone who wished to participate. Writes foreign language professor Ione Crummy, “It is a social event that brings together the entire peasant community, attracting peasants of all ages and erasing economic differences, for even those who are not poor glean.”

“Until the end of the eighteenth century, the harvest fields where gleaning took place were considered communal land, or Commons. The idea of the Commons has been around since the fourth century BC, when Plato argued that it breeds a sense of cooperation and prevents divisiveness,” finds scholar Anna Clare Gorman.

The right of the poor to glean also had Biblical provenance. “Thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest,” said God to Moses in Leviticus 19:9-10; “…neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger.”

As writes history professor Liana Vardi, “the community had operated under the assumption that the local poor were entitled to subsistence. Communal rights had embodied claims by the poor to share in the village’s bounty. They had also enshrined the community’s sense of responsibility for everyone’s welfare. These practices were seriously challenged by a different set of assumptions that stressed individual profit and individual property.”

Landowners believed that because the land was their property, they should be able to decide who is worthy of gleaning. Gleaning should not be legally sanctioned, but merely a form of nobless oblige, a philanthropic social obligation on behalf of the nobility. The term had been coined by the French novelist Honoré de Balzac in 1835. “Equating gleaning with charity destroys its status as an economic right,” notes Crummy, a tenuous concession that may be therefore “eased out of existence by the landowners.”

Vardi writes, “With the development of a market economy, these customary rights came to interfere with newly individualistic notions of property and insisted demands for productivity period in the 18th century, conflicts over gleaning rights became more and more common. Profit-oriented farmers resented communal claims to the land and fought encroachments on their property, and the state supported their claims.

The Parliament of Paris passed multiple regulations to limit who was allowed to glean, partly in effort to protect taxes. As documents Vardi, “Except for the few debilitated or deserving individuals allowed to glean, all others were treated as lazy and made to work at harvest. This was the quid pro quo offered [to] the farmers: the state would secure them a cheap labor force in return for their abandoning the leftovers.”

This dissolution of public rights came to be called “enclosure”. “The enclosures destroyed communal property rights, privatizing land that had previously been held for food cultivation and gathering by peasants,” summarizes Gorman. Vardi concludes, “No longer would the community freely pasture animals, or collect the leftovers of the harvest, or scavenge in the forest.”

“[T]he attack on gleaning encapsulates the ruthlessness of a new capitalist ideology,” argues Vardi. The threat of starvation was necessary to compel the impoverished to join the labor market. 19th century British designer and socialist William Morris observed, “So that in one way or other there had been created a vast body of people who had no property except the power of labour in their own bodies, which in consequence they were obliged to sell to anybody who would buy on the terms of keeping them alive to work.”

By the 19th century, gleaning had been largely abandoned, resulting in a “widespread exodus of laborers from the country to the growing urban and industrial centers.” The Forest Laws of 1827 enclosed the remaining commons in France, ending grazing and wood-collection by the public.

With some exception, gleaning became an idea of the past. In an 1841 illustration, Daumier appropriates the practice to that of an elderly woman combing through public parks for forgotten items, left behind by the wives of bankers. She decries, “they leave nothing behind!”

In his novel Les Paysans (The Peasantry) — first published as a series starting in 1844, with the completed version released posthumously in 1855 — Honoré de Balzac wrote, “Nobody ought to glean without a certificate of poverty from the mayor of the commune, and a commune ought on no account to allow any but the very poor to glean at all,” later adding, “For sixty poor people in the commune, there are forty more who will not do a day’s work; and, as a matter of fact, even those who have set up for themselves will leave their work to glean in the fields or the vineyards.”

For Balzac, “French civilization, and the French nation, becomes defined as the counter to the savagery of the countryside,” writes history professor James Lehning. “France has been trying to persuade mankind, against all evidence to the contrary, that all men are equal,” wrote Balzac.

“[T]he rich have passions, [however] the peasant knows nothing beyond natural cravings,” derided Balzac. The rich, of course, had their needs met, while the poor were forced to worry about their next meal. “Balzac’s controversial novel may have served as a catalyst” for Jean-François Millet’s painting The Gleaners, argues Crummy. Millet’s friend and biographer Alfred Sensier describes his gleaners as “neither proud nor ashamed”. It appears as if they are acting out of instinct, an animalistic desire to survive.

The yearly harvest required enormous amounts of manual labor, therefore gleaning was often “relegated to women once crops had been stacked and the men were busy carting and threshing them.” Millet paints three women, each bent in a different angle, to establish the repetition of the back-breaking practice.

“Much is thus at stake in the history of gleaning: the nature of communal life, agricultural methods, labor relations within the village, approaches to property, changing perceptions of charity, as well as definitions of criminality and marginality,” Vardi concludes.

The Panopticon

In The Gleaners, Millet masterfully juxtaposes rich and poor, plenty and scarcity. The three impoverished gleaners search for scarce leftover grains, separated from the plentiful harvest.

History professor Liana Vardi writes, “In the background, an abundant crop has been gathered. Golden towers of wheat rise behind the gleaners, and an indistinct group of harvesters is busy bundling, stacking, and carting the sheaves. On the right, a single figure on horseback, the landowner or his steward, observes the scene. The contrast between wealth and poverty, power and helplessness, male and female spheres is forcefully rendered.”

Crummy writes that Millet captures “the importance of surveillance in relations between the landowner and the rural proletariat and the increased isolation and social distance between the two groups.” The likelihood of being watched threatens the gleaners, encouraging self-discipline. According to Crummy, The Gleaners “reflects the poorest peasant’s economic marginalization and the landowners’ growing power through surveillance — analogous to Foucault’s panopticon.”

French philosopher Michel Foucault utilized the idea of the Panopticon as a modern concept of internalized subjugation, in which citizens are trained to police themselves through self-control: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

The Panopticon was first developed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century as a design for an omniscient prison. The circular building would feature an outer wall only one room wide, which would be completely exposed to a central tower in the middle of the facility. The view of the guards would be obscured, so that the inmates inside could not know precisely when they were being watched.

“The Panopticon is a machine that creates a semblance of God,” write Jaqcues-Alain and Richard Miller, within “an area of totalitarian control.” The crucial tenet of the surveillance system is “the invisibility of the eye.” In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault wrote that the foundation of Bentham’s system is “the principle that power should be [both] visible and unverifiable.”

Another key facet of Bentham’s Panopticon is the regulated individualism, which abolishes the concept of community. He emphasizes “the importance of the individual dimension and its priority over the collective one.” In the Panopticon, Bentham replaces the intrusions of privacy by helpful neighbors with that of the emotionless state.

There were growing suspicions of being watched and subsequent ideas of paranoia throughout the 19th century. For the character of a journalist in Les Paysans, Balzac wrote, “Wherever you may be in the country, sure though you feel that you are quite alone, you are the focus of attention of two eyes under a cotton cap.”

Humanity

In 1883, the Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh wrote to a friend, “Millet is above all, and more than anyone else, the painter of mankind.” The French artist Jean-François Millet had been raised in a religious farming family and rose to prominence as one of the best known painters of the 19th century. Millet is the first European painter to make rural labor a central subject in his art. His work would inspire countless artists.

Millet was awarded a stipend to move to Paris — the urban capital of France — in 1837, where he studied history painting at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His first work accepted to the Paris Salon was exhibited in 1840. One of his first rural paintings The Sower, was displayed at the Salon of 1850-1851 and was met with mixed reception. From then on, Millet would continuously revisit the themes of countryside.

Remarking upon a visit to Millet’s studio in Barbizon, British artist Henry Wallis wrote for the London Times, “His appearance was decidedly more provincial than Parisian. He wore a straw hat, loose shooting-coat, and sabots.” According to Wallis, “‘My ancestors were peasants,’ said [Millet], ‘and I was born a peasant.’

“Herein was the secret of his success, and of his power in reaching the hearts of men. He painted what he had known and loved,” Wallis observed, adding, “His works have nothing theatrical or cynical about them.”

In a manuscript of unpublished sketches, Millet once wrote, “It is the treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime that gives art its true power.”

Displayed at the Salon of 1857, Millet’s The Gleaners shocked viewers with an ennobled subversion of rural poverty. The three gleaners are hunched over, completely absorbed in their task, with their faces hidden and anonymous. Despite their status as peasants, the woman are not degraded, instead bathed in a soft light that emphasizes their physicality. They are the focal point of the painting, isolated from the work of the paid harvesters in the background.

Millet’s sympathetic portrayal was immediately met with controversy. “His three gleaners have gigantic pretensions; they pose like the three Fates of pauperism,” derided contemporary author and critic Paul de Saint-Victor.

That same year, Edmond Hédouin exhibited his work Glaneuses a Chambaudoin (Gleaners of Chambaudoin). In comparison to Millet, however, Hédouin takes a mythological approach. Surprised by an impending storm, Hédouin’s gleaners appear, as describes scholar Maia Lea Beyler-Noily, “like frolicking nymphs in the fields”.

In contrast, Millet’s painting is startlingly mundane. In Hédouin’s work, nature is the villain, while Millet’s painting seems to condemn poverty itself. History professor Liana Vardi summarizes that The Gleaners was received as “a dangerous reminder of social inequities.”

According to Millet’s friend and biographer Alfred Sensier, Millet was not a socialist, however “he suffered from the suffering of others” and that he was merely compelled to express his empathy. The same year Millet completed The Gleaners, poverty had nearly driven him to suicide.

Today

At the turn of the 21st century, French filmmaker Agnès Varda released her documentary The Gleaners and I, inspired by Millet’s famous painting. Varda captures the urban gleaning of contemporary subjects in post-industrial France.

“To attach the basics of life to a job is to make a decent life itself artificially scarce in a modern economy,” observes author Umair Haque. In 2016, France passed a law to prevent grocery stores from disposing edible food.

According to 2009 estimates, the world produces enough food to feed 10 billion people, over one and a half times the current global population, yet some 700 million are hungry. The UN predicts that “the COVID-19 pandemic may add an additional 83 to 132 million people to the ranks of the undernourished in 2020.”

Just last month, police in the U.S. city of Portland guarded dumpsters filled with food disposed by the grocery chain Fred Meyer. Allegedly, police threatened dumpster-diving ‘gleaners’ with arrest for trespassing. So summarizes author and activist David Bollier, “The whole productive system, it becomes clear, is built on tolerating massive amounts of waste while depriving those in need.”

Surveillance has become an ever-growing part of contemporary society, both of workers and consumers. The online shopping company Amazon has earned a reputation of rigid productivity standards that involve monitoring the speed of warehouse laborers. Companies extend these practices to their customers through what social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism”. This surveillance is not only accepted but encouraged by younger consumers who freely offer their personal information to social media services.

Says video essayist Evan Puschak, known as The Nerdwriter, about the classic American film The Truman Show, “[Director] Peter Weir and writer Andrew Niccol were prophetic about so much from the vantage of 1998, [such as] the ubiquity of reality television and the rise of mass surveillance. They keyed in perfectly to my parents’ generation of Cold War paranoia of being watched or bugged, and my own generation of narcissism, where it bugs us not to be watched.”

Tech companies have established domination over the publicly created internet. Additionally, Silicon Valley is in direct competition with government services offline as well. Ahead of Uber’s IPO (Initial Public Offering) in 2019, the ride-hailing app admitted that mass public transit is a direct competitor.

Nadia Daar and Nona Tamale of OXFAM International write, “low spending on public healthcare, weak social safety nets, and poor labor rights meant most of the world’s countries were woefully ill-equipped to deal with COVID-19”.

High ranking party member of Britain’s Labour party, John McDonnel, argues, “If we are to build the resilience to cope with any further waves of this virus, or other future unknown threats, our new society needs to be built on fully funded, publicly owned and democratically controlled public services.”