Itinerant merchants: between networks of migrants and survival strategy (16th–20th)

ABSTRACT In dictionaries as well as in literature, the pedlar is an ambiguous figure. Urban sources testify to the desire of the urban authorities and sedentary merchants to exclude them. A few bankruptcy files do, however, make it possible to document failures as well as to provide information on the tours and the credit necessary to exercise the trade. However, to overcome the purely urban viewpoint, one must leave the town behind and concentrate instead upon the home villages and its notarial archives in order to link individual departures to the social framework to which they belonged and to understand the organisation of these networks of migrants. However, the municipal archives on poverty, on markets, as well as the archives of the police, justice and guilds allow us to enter into certain economic practices of the most destitute. In the first part, the essay describes the organisation of migrant networks and their evolution between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. In the second part, it analyses urban peddling, which is the economic resource of the poorest people, particularly women, and the battles waged against them by the elites and established merchants in order to keep them off the streets.