Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  THE PETITE BOURGEOISIE

  One of the characters in Balzac’s Cousin Pons (1847) is an Auvergnat, Rémonencq, who came to Paris in 1831 and rented a former café to set up as a scrap-metal dealer. He builds up his business to include porcelain and pictures, so that it becomes more like a museum than a junk shop, and exchanges his rough jacket for a redingote, guarding his treasure like a dragon. All that he now requires is a wife, and he fastens on Madame Gibot, the tailor’s wife, with her ‘virile beauty, vivacity and market acumen’, although to win her he must slowly poison her husband.

  Balzac’s Rémonencq is only a caricatured version of the rise of a trader from rural origins to substantial wealth. While the Limousin produced masons and in some cases developers, the Auvergne produced scrap-metal dealers, coal and wine merchants, and by extension café-owners. The presence of an Auvergnat colony in Paris, concentrated around the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, provided the initial contacts, advice and loans for countrymen coming to Paris to make their fortune. The problem of finding a wife who would also be a business partner was generally solved by marrying a girl from home, using her dowry or a mortgage raised on her prospects of inheriting land to expand the family firm, and putting her at the front of the shop to deal with the clientele. Jean-Joseph Lavaissière, who came to Paris from the Cantal, set himself up as a metal dealer, married a local girl whose father had been killed by highwaymen in 1795 and left her a good fortune, bought a house in Versailles and in 1811 started calling himself a négociant (merchant). His sons, Jean-François and Guillaume, did even better, marrying outside the Auvergnat milieu into other trading families, and jointly buying a château at Auteil in the 1830s. Jean-François became a colonel in Louis-Philippe’s National Guard while Guillaume was awarded the Legion of Honour and a medal at the 1855 Exhibition.36

  Naturally the streets were not paved with gold for all Auvergnats. Many Auvergnats who came to Paris did no better than to find work as coachmen, working for firms such as the Compagnie Générale des Voitures, and to marry servants.37 Moreover many shopkeepers rose from a peasant or working-class origin only to return there after a generation or two. Among shopkeepers in the 4th arrondissement of Paris between 1835 and 1845 whose fathers had also had their own businesses, only 38 per cent managed to keep their business going for most of their lives. They were more likely to succeed if their grandfathers had also had their own businesses, less likely if those grandparents had been servants or labourers. Similarly their chances of marrying into a small business family were increased if they came from one themselves.38 That said, there were some extraordinary success stories highlighting the emergence of the department store. Aristide Boucicaut, whose father was a hatter in the Orne, the area that the clogmaker Pinagot never left, came to Paris in 1835 to work as a salesman in one of the new fashion stores, the Petit Saint-Thomas. With his wife Marguerie Guérin, a laundress, he managed to find 50,000 francs to acquire the Bon Marché, which then had twelve employees and a turnover of 450,000 francs. The year Aristide died, in 1877, the store had 1,788 employees and a turnover of 73 million francs, and in 1887, when Marguerite died, the store reopened in the iron and glass palace built by Gustave Eiffel that still stands.39 Meanwhile Félix Potin, from a farming family in the Paris basin and destined to become a solicitor, abandoned his studies at sixteen to work for a Paris grocer. He founded his own cut-price grocery business in 1844, moving to Haussmann’s new boulevard Sébastopol in 1859, which he supplied with groceries from his own food-processing factory in the suburb of Pantin and with wine from a vineyard he acquired in Tunisia. His final coup during the siege of Paris in 1870, when the population was starving, was to purchase one of the two elephants in the Jardin des Plantes and sell that.

  The petite bourgeoisie was composed not only of small employers and shopkeepers but also of black-coated workers who made the best use of their elementary education to return to it as instituteurs. Under the Guizot law of 1833 every commune in France was required to found an elementary school and provide a teacher’s stipend, while each department was to found an École Normale d’Instituteurs or teacher-training college. Most children of rural families attended school, at least in the winter when there was no work in the fields, until they took their first communion at the age of eleven; in the towns the use of child labour made popular education similarly rudimentary. The expansion of the elementary education system created opportunities for the brightest boys from the popular classes. Among trainees at the École Normale d’Instituteurs of Nîmes between 1842 and 1879, for example, 53 per cent were drawn from peasants’ families, 23 per cent from workers’ or artisans’ families and 7 per cent from shopkeeping.40 Their mission was without brilliance but it was an honourable one, as Guizot explained in his 1833 letter to instituteurs. ‘Each family’, he wrote, ‘requires you to give it back a decent man and the country a good citizen. The sentiments you must develop are faith in Providence, the sanctity of duty, submission to paternal authority, respect due to the law, the king and the rights of others.’41

  The reality of the instituteurs’ career was rarely as exalted. The minimum stipend a commune had to pay was 200 francs per year, and this often became a maximum. Families who sent their children to school were expected to pay school fees, but families deemed indigent by the commune did not have to pay and communes were as generous in this respect as they were mean towards instituteurs. In 1842 schoolteachers received under 350 francs per year or a franc a day in four departments, between 350 and 700 francs a year or 2 francs a day in sixty-six departments, and over 700 francs in only six departments, including Paris. This was much less than an industrial worker, and on a par with a labourer or domestic servant.42 The main advantage of the job was exemption from military service, provided that the instituteur committed to teach for ten years. It was also a valuable sedentary job for young men who were crippled or otherwise unfit for physical toil. That said, the mayor often required the teacher to undertake a second job, that of secretary to himself and the commune, while the parish priest might insist that he work as choirmaster, sexton or gravedigger. This may have increased his income a little, but the teacher enjoyed no more than genteel poverty and far from being an apostle of civilization in the benighted countryside he was constantly the butt of mayors, priests, parents and the notables who served on the local education committee. A man of the people, the instituteur never escaped from serving the people; to go any higher required a secondary education.

  COMPETITION FOR PLACE

  What marked out the elite of French society was both education and property. The peasantry had a little property, the working class none, and rarely did they have an education past the elementary level. The petite bourgeoisie of small employers had more property and maybe spent a few years in secondary education, but seldom beyond the age of sixteen. The education that led to the elite was secondary education in lycées (one in each department) and colleges (usually one in each arrondissement, without a sixth form), for boys only, expensive except for the minority of scholars, based on the classics, leading to the baccalauréat at about the age of eighteen which was the passport to the liberal professions. In the Nord department in 1855, sons of landowners, public officials, liberal professions and industrialists made up 83 per cent of the clientele of the prestigious Lycée of Douai in 1855 and 34 per cent of that of the small nearby college of Saint-Amand, where 17 per cent of pupils were sons of shopkeepers, 18 per cent sons of artisans, 24 per cent sons of peasants and 7 per cent sons of workers.43 At the fictional college of Sarlande, modelled on that of Alès where he was a pion or supervisor in 1857, Alphone Daudet described a cohort of ‘fifty-odd rascals, chubby mountain-people of twelve to fourteen years old, sons of enriched métayers [share-croppers] whose parents had sent them to college to have them made into petits bourgeois for 120 francs a term’.44 These would never reach the baccalauréat and would doubtless return to follow their fathers. The secondary school population was only 50,000–60,000 between 1810 and 1840, after
which it expanded to 150,000 in 1880, but it still accounted for no more than one boy in forty-five in 1842, one in twenty-one in 1876. Higher education existed in the form of law and medical faculties which dispensed professional degrees – about 1,000 law degrees and 400 medical doctorates around 1860 – arts and sciences faculties which simply awarded degrees but offered no teaching, and specialized grandes écoles to train the military, administrative, engineering and academic cadres of the state.45

  Education, however, was never enough to access the elite. Success in a chosen profession or the public service required not only qualification but independent resources, usually acquired by a ‘good’ marriage, together with connections and patronage. In Balzac’s Père Goriot (1835) the worldly Vautrin advises the ambitious young law student Rastignac:

  If you have no patronage you will rot in a provincial court. At thirty you will be a magistrate on 1,200 francs a year… at forty you will marry some miller’s daughter with about 6,000 livres in rent. Thank you. If you have a patron you will become a procureur du roi at thirty, with 1,000 écus [3,000 livres] salary and you will marry the mayor’s daughter. If you make one or two political gestures… you might be a procureur général at forty, and a deputy. But I should inform you that there are only twenty procureurs généraux in France and 20,000 competitors for the post.46

  Balzac’s analysis, although dramatized, certainly reflects contemporary anxiety about competition for place. A legal training was not an end in itself; it was a passport to public office which offered security and status. Alexandre Dumas, the son of a republican general who fell out of favour with Napoleon and died when he was four, received an education from the Church and was lucky to enjoy the patronage of General Foy in order to obtain a post in the secretariat of the Duc d’Orléans, the future Louis-Philippe.47 Georges Haussmann, who had a law degree, saw his father’s career in the war administration interrupted in 1815 because of his loyalty to Napoleon, and his career in the prefectoral corps interrupted by the death of his patron, the Duc d’Orléans, Louis-Philippe’s son, in 1842. Though he married the daughter of a rich Bordeaux businessman he vegetated for nearly twenty years in subprefectures before landing the prefecture of Bordeaux in 1851 and that of the Seine in 1853.48 Léon Gambetta, on the other hand, the grandson of a Genoese sailor and son of a grocer of Cahors, educated at the seminary, then at the Lycée of Cahors, went to Paris in 1857 to study law, qualifying in 1861. Though he never married he enjoyed the patronage of leading barrister Adolphe Crémieux, by origin a Sephardic Jew from Avignon, deputy for Chinon in the 1840s and minister of justice in 1848, who gave him his big chance of a political trial, defending Delescluze in 1868.49 Regime change was a job-creation scheme on a large scale and it was the return of the Republic in 1870 that catapulted Gambetta, along with other republican lawyers, into government office.

  For the cream of those qualified in the law the fastest route to a top career in the administration was to become an auditeur in the Conseil d’État, which drafted legislation. These énarques of their day had the best connections. Among the seventy-eight auditeurs in 1840, around 20 per cent were related to peers or deputies and 42 per cent were sons of high civil servants, including magistrates and army officers.50 Under the Second Empire the proportion of the administrative elite, defined as conseillers d’État, permanent secretaries in government ministries and prefects, who were the sons of high civil servants rose to nearly 60 per cent, the rest drawn from the liberal professions and large landowners.51 Thus while venal office had been abolished by the Revolution a hereditary administrative elite, recalling the noblesse de robe, still existed. A good marriage was also required for career success. High civil servants were more likely to marry into the landowning and business classes, with their superior resources, than the daughters of professionals or civil servants. Charles de Franqueville recalled that the income of his father, a technical civil servant at Soissons, was only 12,000–14,000 francs, but that his marriage in the 1840s brought him 6,500 francs a year from government bonds and 10,000 in land revenues, more than doubling his income, so that in 1859 taxes accounted for 12 per cent of his outgoings but 24 per cent went on the house and 6 per cent on carriages.52

  In the armed forces the officer corps before the Revolution was confined to those of noble blood while the Revolution opened it to talent, qualified by survival on the battlefield. Napoleon claimed that there was a marshal’s baton in every soldier’s knapsack, and promotion from the ranks was always an option, but the École Militaire Spéciale he set up in 1802, which moved to Saint-Cyr in 1808, was costly, exclusive and calculated to attract former noblesse d’épée back into his service. Louis XVIII hoped to restore noble privilege in the army in full but the Charter of 1814 ruled that ‘the French are equally admissible to civil and military employments’. Such endorsements for meritocracy did not make family background and connection redundant, and in 1825 Legitimist nobles were awarded 24 per cent of sublieutenancies. This proportion fell in 1835 to 7 per cent, with 3 per cent going to families ennobled by the emperor, but increasingly what counted for advancement was a military background. Charles du Barail was unable to compete for Saint-Cyr because his Legitimist noble father briefly refused to serve the July Monarchy before resuming his career in Algeria in 1833, obliging his son to interrupt his secondary education. He joined the army in Algeria as a common soldier, hoping to join the cavalry but finding it ‘overcrowded with sons of noble families’ therefore joined a less glamorous arm, the spahis. This complaint was disingenuous from a noble who also described himself as ‘scion of a race of soldiers’. Rising through the ranks, he took advantage of the fact that Algeria was the only theatre to see fighting in the July Monarchy, and was promoted captain in 1848 and colonel in 1857.53

  Saint-Cyr and the École Polytechnique were highly competitive schools which provided a specialist training and fast track to military service. The École Polytechnique did not just train for the military; it gave a mathematical and scientific education that led on to further specialist schools such as the École des Mines and the École des Ponts et Chaussées, training state engineers and technical civil servants. Michel Chevalier, born in Limoges the son of a tax official, graduated from the Polytechnique and in 1829 from the École des Mines and became a mining engineer at Valenciennes. Caught up in the 1830 Revolution, he became involved in the utopian socialist and feminist Saint-Simonian movement alongside Pierre Leroux, whose father was a café-owner and who had studied at the Lycée Charlemagne but was unable to accept an offer from the Polytechnique because of the poverty of his family. Although Chevalier spent eight months in prison in 1832–3 following the government clampdown on the Saint-Simonian movement as immoral, he then secured the patronage of Thiers who sent him on a mission to the United States to study its railway system and in 1840 appointed him professor of political economy at the Collège de France. His marriage to the daughter of a rich cloth merchant of Lodève in 1845 gave him the wherewithal to be elected deputy for the Tarn. Meanwhile Leroux, without the benefit of a Polytechnique training, became a socialist thinker and propagandist. He published a Revue Sociale at Boussac in the Limousin from 1845 with moral and financial support from George Sand, who was also interested in radical ideas, and was elected to the National Assembly in 1848. Whereas, however, Chevalier rose to become senator of the Second Empire and negotiated a free-trade treaty with Great Britain in 1860, Leroux opposed the coup d’état of 1851 and went into exile in London and Jersey.54

  A humble background was usually, but not always, a bar to a brilliant career, and teaching and the Church were the most open to scholarship boys. Victor Cousin was a clockmaker’s son whose education at the Lycée Charlemagne, it is said, was paid for by the mother of a young lycéen whom Cousin had protected from bullying. Winning all the prizes at the Lycée Charlemagne he entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1810, himself becoming a lecturer in philosophy there in 1813 and at the Sorbonne after 1815, although between 1820 and 1828 gover
nment repression silenced him. Under the July Monarchy he represented the educational establishment and became Thiers’ education minister in 1840. More importantly, he was the patron of all normaliens, receiving his ‘regiment’ twice a year to hear their requests and placing them in colleges in Paris and the provinces, all of whose headmasters he knew. Thus Jules Simon, who came from the College of Vannes in Brittany to the École Normale, was placed by Cousin in the College of Caen in 1836, on a salary of 2,900 francs a year, at a time when a third of secondary school masters were paid 1,200–2,000 francs. In 1840, meanwhile, Simon deputized for Cousin as professor at the École Normale for a princely 6,000 francs.55