Trade unions, chambers of trades and public authorities tried to provide artisan coiffeurs with a commercial education to match their training.
If coiffeurs could control access to and commerce within their trade, they reasoned, they could blunt the pernicious effect of the market and prop up prices and wages.
Perhaps coiffeurs' experience can help clarify matters.
At the same time as market forces were once again pressing down upon the trade, patron coiffeurs also began to feel the weight of building a more just society.
The great mass of coiffeurs, however, operated in a saturated market, which inevitably worked, despite the repeated efforts of patrons and ouvriers, to depress prices.
The salad days of the 1920s, when business expanded more rapidly than the number of coiffeurs, gave way to much harder times in the 1930s.
Needless to say, coiffeurs were incensed at this cavalier treatment.
Politics aside, the foremost problem was to provide coiffeurs with the stuff they needed for work.
