Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

Before leaving this discussion of England’s precocious integration I need to say a word about the relationship between the developments I have highlighted and a phenomenon of great importance to them, namely the rise of Britain as an imperial power. England’s empire (British after the unification with Scotland in 1707) had been growing from early in the sixteenth century, but its economic and political importance swelled in the eighteenth with the expansion of the East India Company’s operations in one direction and the bourgeoning trade with an increasingly populous and prosperous North America in the other. Although continental Europe remained Britain’s most important foreign market through most of the eighteenth century, the value of trade there grew only very slowly after 1700, whereas commerce with foreign and colonial areas expanded dramatically; the value of tea imported by the East India Company multiplied some forty times by 1760, imports from North America rose fourfold and those with the West Indies doubled in the same period. By the mid century nearly 40 percent of the goods Britain sold on the continent were colonial in origin, and the expanding domestic market absorbed large quantities of them too, in the process instilling new tastes and habits – tea-drinking prominent among them – in consumers. The energy and riches pumped into the British economy by these connections and the need to defend them against jealous foreigners were the chief reasons that made the Admiralty and Navy Boards (in the words of John Brewer quoted a moment ago) “too vital to the national interest to be held hostage by the forces of graft and corruption.”37

  Historians have long been aware that imperial connections were central to English history over centuries but this awareness has recently assumed different forms as historical understanding has been reshaped by a series of connected factors: the collapse of European empires during the twentieth century, the sense evolved and propagated by formerly colonized peoples and writers seeking to speak on their behalf that Europe’s chief importance in global history lies in the rise and decline of its world domination, the heightened attention to the suffering and disruption brought on by the violent and inhumane practices put in place to enforce colonial control, and resolute critiques of the pretentious and self-righteous claims developed to justify it. Much new and valuable awareness has been gained by these developments, but they have also generated more questionable claims, in particular through attempts to assign empire a place so central in historical understanding that forms of national experience become radically dependent on it. The editor of a recent volume propounding this kind of interpretation chides those who stand outside the enterprise she and her colleagues pursue for their unwillingness to embrace “the notion that the nation is not only not antecedent to empire, but that as both a symbolic and material site the nation – as Judith Butler has argued for identity and Joan Scott for gender and experience – has no originary moment, no fixity outside of the various discourses of which it is itself an effect.”38

  Such a view (present in more nuanced form in other writings) makes sense if it is taken to mean that the particular features attributed to a nation by those who seek to define its character to itself and others are produced through assertion, discussion, and debate, and that these interchanges involve spoken or unspoken comparisons with outsiders. But the claim such a formula puts forward reaches beyond this to include “nation” in a second sense, the “material” one that I presuppose here when I take the term “nation” to refer to a definable population whose mutual interactions, economic, political, and cultural, establish characteristic and distinctive patterns of relations between its components that persist in some degree over time. Even before coming to our substantive treatments of other countries, the comparisons we have begun to make with them suggest how deeply rooted in geography and history the defining qualities of the English national community were. Empire was to be sure far from irrelevant to the precocious integration that gave a special shape to so many features of the country’s life, and by the middle of the eighteenth century imperial connections had become important factors in strengthening it. But the account I have been developing makes clear that the special shape of English history had many other roots. France had an empire in the eighteenth century too, but its impact on national life as a whole was much weaker, in good part because the country was more fragmented and the state far less interwoven with the varied social forces who could make their voices heard in Parliament; it was the form given to English national life by the webs of interaction constituting it that determined the role empire played, not the other way around.

  One point often urged by those who give empire priority over the nation is that pride in imperial power infused English people’s self-understanding (and later that of other Europeans). Indeed a “cult of commerce” had become part of British national identity by the mid eighteenth century, and both the far-flung reach of trade and its role in spreading English ideas and institutions throughout the world heightened the value attached to it. Here too, however, empire fit inside a larger and older national frame, largely constructed out of other elements. The first and core component of national self-esteem was the celebration of “English liberty” and the laws and institutions that protected it, to which defense of the “true,” that is Protestant, Christianity was added after the Reformation (and especially after the union with Scotland). The moral worth ascribed to trade and empire rested on their supposed ability to spread these advantages elsewhere, and the recognition that instead imperial domination often led those it empowered to behave in ways unworthy of the civilization they claimed to represent – by profiting from the horrors of the slave trade or exploiting and corrupting natives in India (a cause taken up with force by Edmund Burke) and elsewhere – soon became a reason for critics to see imperial relations in a much more negative light.39

  These nay-sayers never became a majority, although the successful revolt of the American colonies put more wind in their sails for a time, so that during the early nineteenth century the ability to manage relations with non-European areas by economic rather than political means – dubbed “the imperialism of free trade” by some historians – was often preferred to formal control. What underlay the opposite turn to a “new imperialism” after 1860 was less popular support for empire (although there was much of that) than competition with other countries, a rivalry that became sharper as France and Germany, their national spaces remade through new networks of transport and communication, were able to achieve the tighter kind of integration England had exhibited more than a century earlier, and on that basis move to new and more modern forms of industry and politics. I will argue later that it was the creation of these more closely structured national frames that made the era of heightened imperial competition also the moment when England lost the advantages her precocious integration had yielded before: at this point as earlier the relationship between empire and nation was part of the broader evolution of networks of means within which both developed. In the later period as in the earlier one the various purported elements of national identity could conflict with each other, and when they did the imperial one did not always win out.40 These are sketchy observations perhaps, but hopefully they suffice to indicate why I think we should agree with the eminent imperial historian P. J. Marshall that “The Empire … reflected and reinforced trends in British history, but rarely seems to have pushed it into radically new directions.”41 We need now to recognize a similar power in the longstanding historical patterns that defined national life in other countries.

  3 Monarchical centralization, privilege, and conflict: France

  The mosaic of privilege

  If England was at once the most bourgeois country and the least, a correspondingly revealing paradox for France was that the country which became the homeland of modern revolution was also the one whose transformation between the eighteenth century and the twentieth was the slowest and least complete. The nation that provided the exemplary instance of large-scale social and political upheaval and gave the term “bourgeois” to the world might be expected to be
a trailblazer in modernity and an exemplary case of fundamental and sweeping social change, but it was neither. The Revolution changed much to be sure but it left many features of French life intact, as Alexis de Toqueville famously argued. No major European economy grew as slowly and with so little transformative impact on daily life, at least until the last years of the nineteenth century, as did the French.

  A few statistics tell the story. In 1880 approximately half of the active population of France was still working in agriculture. In England that number had declined to 25% by 1840, forty years earlier, a level that France would not reach until the 1950s. In 1861 only 11% of French people lived outside the Département where they had been born; in 1881 the number was still only 15%. Save for Paris and a few other cities, it was only after 1850 that urban population grew faster than that of the country as a whole; until then cities expanded at a rate equal to or below that of France overall. Even at the end of the nineteenth century the country’s urban fabric exhibited a pattern remarkably continuous with the Old Regime. Of the fifteen French cities with a population greater than a hundred thousand in 1906, only two, Roubaix and Saint-Étienne, had what Jean-Pierre Daviet calls “a character broadly determined by the industrial urbanism we associate with the nineteenth century.” All the others had already figured among the country’s biggest cities before the Revolution, continuing to grow largely on their earlier foundations, so that “the nineteenth century gave clearer shape to a pre-existing urban hierarchy, without really creating its own.”1 The contrast between the gradual, unhurried pace of French economic change and the country’s agitated political history, punctuated by revolutionary moments in 1830, 1848, and 1871, should caution us against believing that the two spheres of the economy and politics must necessarily develop in tandem (that economic conditions often have a powerful impact on politics is a different matter), and historians have been too slow to take the lessons of this rhythmic discord. We will see that both the French version of modernity and the French bourgeoisie was deeply marked by this two-sided quality of the country’s life.

  As in the English case, we can best understand this paradox by considering the configuration of networks through which France achieved its particular mode of unification over the centuries. Monarchy was a main vehicle of integration for both, but two features of the French instance gave it a distinctive character. First, in contrast to its rival, geography offered little support for creating links between cities, towns, or regions. Distances were significantly greater than in England, rivers (as noted in the previous chapter) provided less favorable arteries for travel, and it was far more difficult to connect major cities by coastal shipping. The factors that favored the spontaneous growth of trade between distant areas in England and contributed to the early rise of a national market there worked instead to impede such a development in France. This meant that royal attempts to draw regions into a web of political ties could not rest on an underlying weave of economic connections; sometimes they had to substitute willful policy for unplanned growth. Second, unlike the Normans in England, the French kings had to confront feudal competitors often no less and at some moments more powerful than they, so that their centuries-long efforts to draw together the territories that eventually became the French nation had to be carried out against strong resistance. The need to make various compromises with these rivals led them to create what Joseph Strayer revealingly called a “mosaic state,” a collection of variously shaped and colored pieces whose setting into a single frame left the differences between them an important determinant of the overall pattern. As Robert Darnton observed some time ago, if any single word can characterize the structure and spirit of the Old Regime it is “privilege,” a term that literally means private law. The French monarchy was a public entity, but one based on relations that often had the character of private transactions, dealing with both regions and categories of people by offering them exemptions from principles and arrangements it aspired to make general. Individuals and groups in all three of the estates of the realm (clergy, nobility, and the Third Estate that included everyone else) had relations to the government based on complex and often baroque combinations of obligations and exemptions. Nobles were the most famously privileged group, but we will see that numerous bourgeois acquired privileges of various kinds too, and they were no less committed to maintaining them. The tissue of threads that wove the country together was strewn with a variety of messy knots.

  Central to this peculiarly French pattern of integration was the issue of taxation, especially thorny because it was the juncture where the two main species of privilege, social and regional, came together; the Revolution could not abolish the first without also targeting the second. Despite the national status of certain taxes, they were differently levied and collected in different parts of the kingdom; some regions were exempt from certain levies, or paid them at a lower level, and the exemptions enjoyed by social groups were woven into these geographical distinctions. The regions that paid less were determined to maintain this favorable treatment, creating a barrier against reformers’ attempts to institute a more uniform and efficient system. Since, in addition, customs barriers separated some of these same regions from the rest of the country, efforts to eliminate internal duties on goods were resisted too, for fear that the tax privileges would disappear with the tariffs.2

  It was widely recognized that barriers to the flow of goods detracted from prosperity, making commodities more expensive and putting a rein on both trade and manufacturing. Even some figures whose policies are usually seen in terms of regulation and restriction, such as Louis XIV’s famous minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, argued that French well-being could be furthered by simplifying and lowering internal tariffs, and to the very end of the Old Regime royal officers sought to inject more regularity into the system, aiming to foster what one recent historian calls “greater efficacy of government policy in economic matters.”3 But these efforts were constantly stymied by the architecture of regional privilege through which the kings had built up political unity. The monarchy that was the chief vehicle of national integration was saddled with a contradictory logic, pitting its efforts to give the country a more coherent and workable structure against the compromises with privileged groups it had found it necessary to adopt in order to pursue its goal.

  The Old Regime and the limits of reform

  We can see these patterns at work in the decades between the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the outbreak of the Revolution by looking at a series of attempts by the government to improve the economy and rationalize political life, and at the underlying economic situation these efforts sought to manage and reshape. This survey will show both that people in the Old Regime were well aware of the need to extend and develop distant connections inside the country, and that the difficulties of doing so made the transition from the kinds of regulative principles we have called teleocratic to ones that can be seen as autonomous much slower in France than in England.

  A good place to start is with the theoretical grounds offered for economic integration, not because these ideas determined the outcome of reform efforts, but because they revealed much about the character of the country. By the eighteenth century the voices long raised on behalf of eliminating barriers to internal commerce had swelled to a chorus. Because those who made it up called for freer trade, they have often been linked to their contemporary Adam Smith, and to later liberal writers, who advocated reduced regulation as a spur to more efficient production. But many of these French figures shared a view at odds with Smith’s belief that the key to heightened productivity and thus to national well-being lay in the more efficient organization of industry; in their eyes only one productive activity possessed the power to create new wealth: agriculture.

  The best-known proponents of these views, and the originators of the oft-repeated slogan laisser-faire, laisser passer, were the group called the physiocrats, among them François Quesnay and Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, whose influence on o
fficials such as Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot and Daniel-Charles Trudaine gave them considerable practical importance. The reason they saw farming as the only enterprise able to yield a product greater than the materials and labor invested in it was that land alone benefitted from the vital powers lodged in nature that made seed grow into crops. By contrast, manufacturing merely turned raw materials into finished goods without adding any new value to the product, trade only moved existing values from one place to another, and labor merely transferred the value of wages to the things workers produced. In such a perspective the purpose of reducing trade barriers was not to encourage the division of industrial labor but to allow the surplus product that could not be consumed where it was produced to flow to places that could not meet their own needs by themselves, at once shoring up well-being in these less-favored locales and further stimulating production by sending the realized surplus, in the form of payments, back to a region where it could be profitably invested in renewed agricultural production.4

  Along with the elimination of trade restrictions, the physiocrats advocated agricultural improvements in line with those practiced in England, land-clearing, fertilization, and the removal of traditional and communal restrictions on how farms were organized, seeing them as an important lever of prosperity. The advantages to such a policy in their eyes were not only economic: as production expanded on this basis, the higher incomes generated would allow the state to institute a more uniform tax system (based on the rising net product of agriculture), and with it a national bank something like the English one. These notions led the physiocrats to posit a close connection between the greater economic freedom they called for and vigorous government action to effect and manage it. They were thus supporters at once of liberal policy and of central control, a position less paradoxical than it may seem, once we remember that the state was the chief creator of national space in France, and that state officials were among the main proponents of economic integration, often desiring it at a higher level than their own unavoidable compromises with privileged interests allowed. The economic thinking behind such proposed reforms focused on freeing up natural forces by a kind of governmental fiat, since fearful private people were often resistant to change, rather than looking to the power of demand to stimulate investment and raise productivity. Policies along these lines were actually adopted in the 1760s, when Louis XV’s minister Choiseul introduced reforms aimed at freeing up the grain trade and ending other economic restraints. But the measures could hardly have been enacted at a worse moment, since a series of poor harvests put the ability of many rural people to survive in jeopardy, breeding pressures to provide grain at cheap prices, rather than giving market forces a freer rein. The government quickly abandoned its experiment. Historians have argued about how much improvement took place in French agriculture before the Revolution (as indeed for some decades after); there was surely some, but innovations of the kind associated with the spread of enclosures in England were largely limited to the area around Paris, where the pull of so large an urban market made itself directly felt. In many ways French agriculture remained traditional and locally oriented until after the middle of the nineteenth century. Other reform proposals, such as various attempts to abolish guilds, called forth even greater protests (as noted in Chapter 2), so that they too had to be given up.5