Modernity and Bourgeois Life
To be modern may mean many different things, but for nineteenth-century Europeans “modernity” suggested a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes, and values all played key roles. Jerrold Seigel’s panoramic new history offers a magisterial and highly original account of the ties between modernity and bourgeois life, arguing that they can be best understood not in terms of the rise and fall of social classes, but as features of a common participation in expanding and thickening “networks of means” that linked together distant energies and resources across economic, political, and cultural life. Exploring the different configurations of these networks in England, France, and Germany, he shows how their patterns gave rise to distinctive forms of modernity in each country and shaped the rhythm and nature of change across spheres as diverse as politics, money and finance, gender relations, morality, and literary, artistic, and musical life.
Jerrold Seigel is Kenan Professor of History Emeritus, New York University. His previous publications include The Idea of the Self (Cambridge, 2005), Bohemian Paris (1986), and Marx’s Fate (1978).
Modernity and Bourgeois Life
Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France, and Germany since 1750
Jerrold Seigel
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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© Jerrold Seigel 2012
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2012
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Seigel, Jerrold E.
Modernity and bourgeois life : society, politics, and culture in England, France and Germany since 1750 / Jerrold Seigel.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-01810-5 (hardback) – isbn 978-1-107-66678-8 (paperback)
1. Middle class–Europe, Western–History. 2. Social classes–Political aspects–Europe,
Western–History. 3. Civilization, Modern. I. Title.
HT690.E73S57 2012
305.5′5094–dc23
2011049200
ISBN 978-1-107-01810-5 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-107-66678-8 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of illustrations
Preface
1 Introduction: ends and means
Part I Contours of modernity
2 Precocious integration: England
3 Monarchical centralization, privilege, and conflict: France
4 Localism, state-building, and bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Germany
5 Modern industry, class, and party politics in nineteenth-century England
6 France and bourgeois France: from teleocracy to autonomy
7 One special path: modern industry, politics, and bourgeois life in Germany
Part II Calculations and lifeworlds
8 Time, money, capital
9 Men and women
10 Bourgeois morals: from Victorianism to modern sexuality
11 Jews as bourgeois and network people
Part III A culture of means
12 Public places, private spaces
13 Bourgeois and others
14 Bourgeois life and the avant-garde
15 Conclusion
Notes Notes
Index Index
Illustrations
1 Degas, Edgar, Cotton Merchants in New Orleans. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Art Museum, Gift of Herbert N. Straus, 1929.90. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
2 Degas, Edgar, Portraits in an Office (New Orleans). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau, France. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.
3 Degas, Edgar, Portraits at the Stock Exchange. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.
4 Manet, Édouard, The Railway. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
5 Caillebotte, Gustave, Man at the Window. Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.
6 Monet, Claude, The Gare St-Lazare. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.
7 Klimt, Gustav, Auditorium of the “Altes Burgtheater,” the old Court Theatre. Wien Museum Karlsplatz, Vienna, Austria. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.
8 Klimt, Gustav, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Neue Galerie, New York. Photo: Neue Galerie New York/Art Resource, New York.
9 Klimt, Gustav, Philosophy. Ceiling panel for the Great Hall of Vienna University (destroyed). Photo: Public domain.
10 Kokoschka, Oskar (© ARS, NY), The Tempest (Bride of the Wind). Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.
Preface
In my second semester of graduate school, the professor who soon became my main advisor – a deeply serious man with a broad streak of playful irony – assigned me the boggling task of regaling the following week’s seminar with ten minutes of reflection on the question: “What is the bourgeoisie?” How I sought to meet his challenge is not worth recalling, but in many ways I have been trying to face up to it ever since. Among the disparate subjects I have attempted to teach and write about over the years, a number turn out to have been linked together by a not-always-evident effort to chisel out bits and pieces of an answer: Karl Marx, French bohemianism, the history of modern thinking about the self, even the career of Marcel Duchamp. Except that I have come to think that we do better to recast the question, replacing its traditional nominative formulation with ones that are more adjectival and historical: why does the modifier “bourgeois” bear a range of meanings that often apply to people, things, actions, and ideas outside the social group it is supposed to designate? What does this array of meanings tell us about the link often posited between bourgeois life and modernity? How does this relationship between the things we call bourgeois and those we call modern alter as both of its components change over time? These questions are not always explicitly addressed in Modernity and Bourgeois Life – the Introduction sets out the ones that are – but they outline the historical and analytical space the book attempts to explore.
I am pretty sure my teacher would not have anticipated that a project with such an agenda would have operated, as this one does, with the notion of networks – more specifically “networks of means” – at its center. I admit to a certain unhappiness with what may seem to be close ties between my use of the term “network” and its ubiquity in contemporary discussions of all kinds, but my discomfort is lightened by the conviction that historians like everyone else are bound to have their thinking shaped by the world around them; and I accept, even welcome, Max Weber’s demonstration that the necessity to operate from within some distin
ct perspective is a source of illumination as well as of limitation, since we are creatures who can make sense of our vast and complex world only by approaching it (responsibly, to be sure) from some particular point of view. Had I been able to substantiate the basic intuitions on which this book rests ten years ago, when I first spoke about “networks of means” in public (more accurately in a small invitational seminar), I might be able to argue a stronger case for my independence from its current omnipresence, but there is little to be gained by making much of this now. I hope, all the same, that readers may find in my way of giving substance to what can be a highly malleable and banal notion a capacity to illuminate some worthwhile matters and issues.
Over the years of working on this book I have been aided by the help and support, and sometimes by the strictures and skepticism, friends and colleagues have offered in regard to it. Among those who have listened and questioned, or who have read proposals or chapters in earlier versions, I need particularly to thank Carl Schorske, Philip Nord, Isser Woloch, Theodore Koditschek, Laura Lee Downs, John Gillis, Suzanne Marchand, Robert Seltzer, Mitchell Cohen, Jacques Revel, Gilles Pecout, Edward Berenson, Herrick Chapman, Samuel Moyn, Andrew Sartori, and (his words all the more resonant in my head because he is, alas, no longer here to add to them) Tony Judt. I owe debts of both a similar and a different kind to three anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press and to Thomas Laqueur, all of whom firmly and rightly insisted that an earlier and much longer text had to be subjected to major surgery before it could see the light, and to Louis Sass, who not only read some early chapter drafts but helped me through the difficulties of recognizing the path I had to take at that moment. My attempt to follow that path has been much aided by the patient good sense and critical attention of my Cambridge editor, Michael Watson. Alison Walker’s careful and attentive copy-editing added clarity and accuracy to both the text and the notes. Some of my work was carried out while I was supported by a Gugggenheim Fellowship in 2004–05, and during the months I very happily spent at the Luguria Study Center, Bogliasco, in 2006. As with all my books, I do not see how I could have completed this one without my wife Jayn Rosenfeld’s wonderful ability to provide sympathy and sustenance of all kinds while never letting me take myself too seriously.
1 Introduction: ends and means
Modernity, money, networks of means
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century many people agreed – not always happily – that Western Europe was giving birth to a new form of life, often called modern, in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes, and values all played a large role. How should we understand the relations between this European modernity and the bourgeois life that was so important an element in it? The question is a thorny one for many reasons, first because what people meant by the two terms is far from clear.
“Modern” was an uncertain notion partly because it was not a new one, in use to describe present or recent times at least from the sixteenth century, and partly because the things to which it was applied differed from place to place, not least in the three large countries whose nineteenth-century transformations were most striking: England, France, and Germany. A similar uncertainty surrounded the range of phenomena designated by “bourgeois,” or rather by the French term and its German and English counterparts, bürgerlich and middle class. The social formations called up by the three were kindred but also distinct, and each term reflected a particular historical experience. A bourgeois was originally a town-dweller, especially one who possessed some special status or privileges; a Bürger was a townsperson too but the German word also meant a citizen, a difference that would be of some moment in the history of both; as for “middle class,” it was the least specific of the set, and unlike the others never designated a legally defined group. The shifting and uncertain meanings of both “modern” and “bourgeois,” combined with the generations of controversy that have accumulated around each, make attempting to start out with a precise definition of either a bootless task. But the links often posited between them suggest that we may be able to move toward a better understanding by considering them together.
For reasons I will come to later it was “bourgeois” rather than its cousins in other languages that gained currency as the nineteenth century went on; as it did its original reference yielded to a broader range of meanings, calling up a species of society or a form of life not limited to well-off urbanites, however prominent they remained within it. Marx was an early proponent of this usage, and he would be partly responsible for its spread, but it was already in the air when he began to develop it in the 1840s. That the regime set up following the brief revolution of July, 1830, in Paris acquired the label “Bourgeois Monarchy” encouraged people to couple the adjective to other nouns as well; in addition, the term’s broadening sense owed much to the common German employment of bürgerliche Gesellschaft to translate the Latin phrase societas civilis, civil society, meaning an organized form of social life governed by laws. Marx’s great predecessor G. W. F. Hegel had given the German term greater range and substance in his political lectures and writings, especially The Philosophy of Right elaborated in the 1820s; here bürgerliche Gesellschaft designated the specifically modern form of social existence in which individuals satisfy many of their needs through market exchanges, at once enjoying the opportunities and suffering from the limitations such relations entail. Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft was not ruled by bourgeois, however. His work reflected the situation of Prussia, where he lived and taught, and where landed aristocrats long retained far better access to political authority than Bürger. Marx, however, convinced that the latter’s needs and interests determined the form and direction of existence in the present, and taking advantage of the term’s ambiguity in German, shifted its meaning toward “bourgeois society,” making class power the determining element of modern social life. To him “bourgeois society” was a deeply significant but temporary historical configuration, powered by commodity exchange and wage labor, and ruled by the capitalist owners of the means of production, whose actions had the unintended effect of preparing the way for a more just and egalitarian form of life to come, grounded in worker-based socialism. This better world would fully inherit the advances humanity owed to bourgeois efforts, however: the development of new and more powerful productive forces, the liberation of human energies, the elaboration of global interchange in every sphere, the revelation of previously hidden truths about individual and social life, and the possibility of fulfilling both material and more broadly human needs.
The residue of Marx’s powerful analysis of nineteenth-century modernity, combined with the failure of his most cherished predictions, continues both to inspire and to weigh on attempts to understand the historical role of bourgeois people, activities, and values. Many features of the world we inhabit in the twenty-first century are ones he and other nineteenth-century observers rightly associated with bourgeois doings and aspirations: the urbanization and globalization of life, the ascendancy of market relations, the opening of new paths and opportunities for individuals, the expansion of education, the extension of political rights; all of them, now as then, combined with a litany of associated discontents, chief among them persisting social inequality. When we look back on the ways this world has come about, however, we find much that Marx and many of his contemporaries did not grasp or foresee.
First, historical research in the past half-century has cast much doubt on earlier convictions about the political role once assigned to bourgeois people as a class. Individual bourgeois exercised certain kinds of power to be sure (as they still do), but attempts to identify particular regimes with some generalized middle-class interest separate from others have become increasingly difficult to maintain, and the governments that did most to foster economic advance, expand education, and secure property rights often had a markedly non-bourgeois character. Formerly it was common even for non-Marxists to regard the great French Revolution that began in 1789 as in some way the wor
k of the bourgeoisie. A well-known French book bore the title Les Bourgeois conquerants, “the conquering bourgeois”; the textbook most widely used in European history courses in the United States in the 1950s (when this writer first studied the subject) confidently summed up the results of reforms and regime changes in the early 1830s as “The Triumph of the West-European Bourgeoisie.” These certainties are much diminished now. Writers have emphasized that the Revolution of 1789 took place in a country whose economy was still largely untouched by modern industry and remained in many ways closer to what it had been in 1650 than to what it would be in 1914, that many bourgeois were among the privileged groups the Revolution displaced (“pillars of the regime,” as Pierre Goubert put it, and – with exceptions – quite “at home inside it”), and that the Revolution probably did as much to retard French economic development as to further it. Even at the next revolution in 1830 the country’s economic life still went on almost wholly inside structures already in place a century earlier. The main bourgeois supporters of the government set up then were bankers, financiers, office holders, and landowners much like those who had flourished in a cozy relationship to the old monarchy, and recent historians have offered good reasons to understand the regime as one dominated by what people in the time called “notables” (a term to which I will return below) rather than bourgeois. Restrictive electoral laws denied many (even most) merchants, manufacturers, and professionals the right to vote or hold office, and some among them were important contributors to the opposition and agitation that helped produce the return of revolution in 1848, out of which emerged not a more broadly bourgeois government but the authoritarian Bonapartist Second Empire. During its two decades of life the Empire fostered railroad building, urban reconstruction, and industrial investment, but bourgeois groups often opposed these measures, fearful that their own vested interests would be damaged or that the state would gain too much power.1
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