Viktor Mataja’s historical journal article traces the enactment, retreat, and administrative neutralization of French working-time legislation after the February Revolution. Its chronological argument makes the working day a measure of shifting political power: workers obtained protection through revolutionary pressure, but their defeat allowed legislators and administrators to hollow out that achievement. The decrees nevertheless marked a conceptual threshold in modern social legislation, extending protection beyond women and children to the working class as such.
C'était la classe ouvrière tout entière qui devait être prise en considération et non pas seulement la femme et l'enfant.
English translation: It was the entire working class that was to be taken into consideration, and not only women and children.
Beginning with the economic distress and class antagonisms of the July Monarchy, Mataja explains why the provisional government could not ignore workers’ demands. At the Luxembourg Commission, shorter hours promised both wider access to employment and time for intellectual cultivation and family life. Employers’ hurried assent produced the decree of 2 March: ten hours in Paris and eleven in the provinces. Mataja treats that assent principally as submission to political pressure, not evidence of social reconciliation.
His sympathy for protection does not soften his criticism of legislative improvisation. The decree assumed inaccurate existing hours, imposed undifferentiated rules across occupations, and initially provided neither sanctions nor means of enforcement. Subsequent interpretations confused a maximum working day with a prescribed normal day; penalties introduced in April covered Paris but left the provinces unprotected.
Ce décret ressemblait plutôt à un programme qu'à une loi destinée à être immédiatement appliquée.
English translation: This decree resembled a programme rather than a law intended to be applied immediately.
The distinction between declaring a right and organizing its execution governs the article. Mataja declines to isolate the decree’s economic effects from the revolutionary crisis, while emphasizing its importance to workers as an officially recognized claim. He also challenges liberal economists’ representations of the measure. Prohibiting employers from making people work beyond a limit was not equivalent to prohibiting workers from working; nor did establishing a maximum authorize the extension of previously shorter days. Legislative defects, in his account, did not vindicate polemics that blurred these distinctions.
The central parliamentary narrative follows the reversal after the June uprising. Initial proposals for outright repeal gave way to the September law, which established a twelve-hour maximum confined to factories and manufacturing establishments, with exceptions for particular industries. Mataja reconstructs competing positions, including Pierre Leroux’s argument that longer hours would not necessarily raise wages, and the support of some manufacturers for a statutory limit. The decisive defect, however, was the renewed failure to establish effective supervision. Legislators deferred enforcement questions despite earlier experience with inadequately supervised child-labour legislation.
Later parliamentary admissions expose the political calculation behind this omission: the law had offered reassurance without seriously restricting employers. Mataja then follows implementation through ministerial consultations, proposed exemptions, and restrictive administrative interpretations. He gives particular attention to an industrial council’s unsuccessful demands for broader coverage, common inspection of child labour and maximum hours, and published inspectors’ reports. These proposals identify the institutional machinery that could have converted nominal protection into an operative right.
The conclusion contests Marx’s praise of the French method of legislating a uniform working day at a stroke. For Mataja, that judgment mistakes the formal breadth of a statute for practical power and confuses revolutionary achievement with its reactionary containment.
Ce n'est pas la révolution de février qui a produit la loi des douze heures, mais bien la réaction, dans le but de faire écouler dans le sable le résultat de la victoire des combattants des barricades; pour pouvoir dicter, il ne manquait au décret de septembre rien moins que tout.
English translation: It was not the February Revolution that produced the twelve-hour law, but rather the reaction, with the aim of letting the result of the barricade fighters’ victory drain away into the sand; to be able to dictate, the September decree lacked nothing less than everything.
The article’s relevance lies in this separation of protective principle, legislative form, and administrative reality. A statutory maximum could survive precisely because it remained ineffective. Social legislation must therefore be understood through the political forces sustaining it and the institutions enforcing it, not merely through the rights its wording appears to confer.
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