The new rôle now begun to be played by these ancient guilds is an interesting phase of the religious wars. If France in the sixteenth century was laboring in the throes of a religious revolution, she was also in a state of industrial transformation. In origin the economic revolution was independent of the Reformation, yet so influential were its social and economic effects upon the Reformation that in a very true sense the religious movement may be said to have been the subordinate one.[778] The identity and fulness of this change in the old order of things coincides with the Reformation, which in large part became the vehicle of its expression. The crisis coincides with the reign of Charles IX and Henry III, although the beginnings of it are very manifest in the time of Louis XI (cf. the ordinances of 1467, 1474-76, 1479). The change particularly involved the guilds, whose traditional practices had now reached the point of an industrial tyranny. More and more, from the middle of the fifteenth century, control of the guilds had tended to fall into the hands of a few. This growth of a social hierarchy within the guilds had serious political and economic results. For inasmuch as city government was so largely an out-growth of guild life, this exclusiveness threw political control of the cities into the hands of a “ring” composed of the upper bourgeoisie, who formed an oligarchy and gradually squeezed the lower classes out of all participation in the government. The general body of the commonalty everywhere, in France, in Germany, in England, tended to disappear or to be replaced by a select group from the inner circle of the guild. The lower bourgeoisie was shut out of the council at Nevers in 1512, at Sens in 1530, at Rheims in 1595. But the economic revolution implied in this change was of far greater importance than the political. The _gens de métier_ became a monopolist, a capitalist class, controlling the “hoards” of the guilds as well as being the ruling class in local politics. The old guild was transformed into a mercantile association, operated in favor of a few rich families who were possessed of capital and regulated wages and fixed the term of apprenticeship to their own advantage. In order to secure cheap labor the masters increased the number of apprentices, lengthened the time of service, raised the requirements of the _chef-d’œuvre_, made membership in the guild increasingly difficult, and reduced wages by employing raw, underpaid workmen in competition with skilled labor. The result was that the distance widened continually between the upper and lower working classes.[779] The social democracy and honorable estate of guild life, as it had been in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, passed away and was replaced by a strife between labor and capital, between organized labor and free labor, which brings the sixteenth century, remote as it is in time, very near to us in certain of its economic conditions.