All these elements of the pre-Revolutionary economy and state contributed to forming the Old Regime bourgeoisie. Despite dissatisfactions that found expression in the famous criticisms of society and the state mounted by writers such as Voltaire and others, most French bourgeois were, in the words of Pierre Goubert cited in Chapter 1, “pillars of the régime and felt at home inside it.” Merchants, traders, and manufacturers were part of this group, and I will come to them in a moment. But in order to grasp the overall conditions of bourgeois existence the best starting point lies with those whose activities Goubert describes as “perhaps the essential functions of the old bourgeoisie,” namely “collection, taxation, conversion, and circulation of money.”16
The wealthiest and most influential of these bourgeois d’ancien régime were the financiers who performed this family of tasks in the higher reaches of the royal bureaucracy. That they were only partly bourgeois, or bourgeois only from a certain point of view, is one thing that makes their existence so revealing, since it was they who succeeded best in the ambition they shared with many other upwardly mobile commoners, namely to become ennobled through holding a state office. Such changes in status had gone on since the sixteenth century, producing the species of nobility called the noblesse de robe, in distinction from the “sword nobility” that constituted the original second estate. The financiers both did and did not belong to the category of robe nobles. As a group they were, in Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret’s account, “common in origin, noble by recent elevation, whose wealth was based on the manipulation of public funds and on various banking and commercial operations … they belonged both to the Third Estate, where some of their families were still stuck, and to the upper nobility, with whom they intermarried and shared sinecures and positions of power.” These were the very people who ran the unreformed financial administration, and it was their presence within it that made evident to many in the country how beholden the state was to both privilege and money. Indeed it was to them, more than anyone else, that the label “capitalist” was applied in the eighteenth century (the word was used in much the same way in Britain). People of this stripe were responsible for building or renovating many of the great chateaux in the Loire valley and elsewhere that remain jewels of the French tourist industry. In eighteenth-century Paris all the richest members of the parlements (sovereign courts) were descended from them. What made them so representative of the Old Regime was that, as Gwynne Lewis puts it,
they formed the elite of that financial group of intermediaries who controlled the economic communication lines between power and the people: the fermier, who collected rents and dues for absentee seigneurs; the receveur des biens du clergé, who collected tithes for absentee abbots; the customs official, responsible for the collection of local taxes. They were the essential cogs that activated the complicated, often corrupt, machinery of government at Versailles, machinery geared to ensuring the passage of money from the pockets of the poorest to the coffers of the richest subjects of the king.17
That such intermediaries were so common and important a feature of pre-Revolutionary life reminds us that during the Old Regime activities and structures dedicated to drawing resources out of separate localities, often from people whose other connections to the world outside remained very limited, were means of mobilizing wealth no less important, and in many respects more fruitful, than were market connections to distant producers and consumers. The networks set up to collect the revenues of landlords and church officials were not political in the sense of pertaining to the state and its powers, but like the conduits of taxation, they were dedicated to drawing wealth (whether in money or in kind) from people, mostly peasants, who would otherwise have consumed it somehow themselves. Exactions set up by both church and state added to the grinding poverty that afflicted many country people (and against which numbers of them revolted in moments of unusual hardship; during the Revolution the financiers would be raucously denounced as “bloodsuckers of the people”), but if there was a surplus it was often swallowed up at special moments of celebration such as holidays and carnival time.
To be sure, many French bourgeois devoted themselves to commerce of a more productive sort, seeking to generate wealth rather than simply gathering and mobilizing it. Chief among these were the négociants, traders and big wholesale merchants such as those who ran the commerce between Bordeaux and France’s Caribbean colonies, people with far-flung connections, often savvy, well informed, with direct knowledge of other countries, at once willing to take risks and careful in their account-keeping. Many lent money to other traders, and sometimes to the state as well. A level below them stood smaller merchants and fabricants, their operations as sellers, makers, or finishers of goods more locally based, although traffic in such goods as coffee, sugar, spices, or silks often linked their towns or regions to more distant places. Both these categories contained people who felt oppressed by government policies that reserved access to certain markets to the members of chartered trading companies, especially under Louis XIV and Colbert, and some of them fit a traditional Marxist description of “rising bourgeois” seeking liberation from “feudal” restrictions. Yet numerous sons of such people sought entry into the state’s system by buying offices, many of which imposed few duties and amounted to loans or investments, entered into for the sake of a safer return than the ups and downs of commerce provided, as well as for the tax exemptions and noble status they afforded (although usually it was only conveyed after two or more generations). Arrived at this point they commonly espoused views about the social world close to those voiced by the guild masters who denounced Turgot’s attempt to dissolve corporations in 1776 as turning people into mere “gnawing individuals”; indeed many of the protesting guild masters were hardly distinguishable from merchants and fabricants, and among their allies were members of the parlement de Paris, some of whose ancestors were bourgeois of this stripe.18
In order to appreciate the nature and extent of bourgeois insertion into the Old Regime system of privilege, we need to keep in mind the circumstance, so difficult to grasp from a perspective that equates bourgeois existence with a coming modernity against an aristocracy identified with resistance to it, that bourgeois status could itself be a form of nobility before the Revolution. French kings beginning in the thirteenth century had granted certain inhabitants of chartered towns privileges and exemptions similar to those enjoyed by nobles (if never quite so extensive), based on the assumption that such bourgeois du roi in Paris and elsewhere, lived “nobly” off rents and government investments. They could engage in certain economic activities such as money-lending without losing their status, but not in retail trade. This line between bourgeois and noble existence was blurred also from the other side, through noble participation in manufacturing and commerce, especially (but not uniquely) in such activities as mining and metals, that used resources derived from rural land. Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret may exaggerate the progressive character of this aristocratic activity, but his general point is surely correct: the line between those who resisted change and those who furthered it in the eighteenth century seldom ran clearly between nobles and commoners, but there was a marked distinction between those who sought to preserve existing forms of local life both rural and urban from wider economic or cultural connections that might undermine them, and those willing to see the first evolve along with the second.19
All the same, there were limits to how comfortable and satisfied bourgeois people could feel in the Old Regime. It was after all a society dominated by aristocratic activities and values (and in which religion fostered an other-worldly orientation that could question bourgeois doings and motives), and strongly hierarchical in its spirit. At least from the twelfth century, bourgeois had been the objects of satire and sarcasm in literature, sermons, and festivals, partly from jealousy perhaps, but partly from distaste for what they did. People who made money through trade and commerce but who sought to imitate aristocratic forms of behavior could easily be made to look silly, as Molière
showed in his bourgeois gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain. Anti-bourgeois sentiment seems to have been at its height under Louis XIV’s reign, and it may be that it receded somewhat as Enlightened ideas with their respect for practical accomplishment and material progress gained more influence. Figures like Voltaire and Diderot did not hesitate to voice sharp criticism of aristocrats. All the same, the old disdain for money-grubbing bourgeois never disappeared and it could be easily mobilized (as was still the case even in the nineteenth century) in personal relations. Right down to 1789 it seems that significant numbers of bourgeois felt themselves to be the objects of the “cascade of disdain” that was at least one possible description of social relations under the Old Regime.20
Sara Maza has these features of Old Regime life partly in mind when she maintains that few French in the eighteenth century (apart from Anglophiles such as Voltaire) “made a case for the intrinsic value of commercial activity,” and those who did defended it “as a means to higher ends, such as the glory of the state or the pursuit of honor in war.” She may exaggerate the point somewhat, since there were bourgeois perfectly capable of asserting the greater usefulness of economic and professional work over the leisured luxury of nobles. The anonymous citizen whose long description of his town Montpellier in the 1760s has been highlighted by Robert Darnton had no hesitation in referring to those like himself who belonged to the “bourgeois estate” (including professionals, financiers, merchants, tradespeople, and rentiers who lived off investments) as “the most useful, the most important, and the wealthiest in all kinds of countries,” noting that through their resources they supported the nobles above them and could “manipulate” those below them as they liked. He seemed unworried, perhaps even proud, that in his city people “were known exclusively by the extent of their fortune.” But he did not regard all bourgeois activity with the same favor, since he expressed particular doubt about the value of manufacturing, whose products he described as superfluous, in contrast to agriculture, and perhaps morally harmful, since they tempted people to live luxuriously. As John Shovlin has shown, many eighteenth-century French recipes for economic improvement relied less on competition, the motor identified by Smith, than on “emulation,” a striving for betterment that involved imitation and the desire for social recognition, encouraged through the prizes offered by various local organizations; for many, it was only when reconfigured as emulation that economic activity acquired moral value. The role assigned to emulation would persist into the nineteenth century, when many local societies continued to offer prizes for new techniques intended to improve both economic and moral well-being in their areas.21
The palpable but limited degree to which bourgeois might preserve an existence outside the Old Regime system of favor and patronage is suggested by a recent study of Paris. Mathieu Marraud distinguishes two largely separate groups of well-off bourgeois in the capital during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Both accorded with aristocrats in valuing family continuity and status above individuality, in their concern for honor, and in their attempts to gain it by occupying public offices; but those involved chiefly in commerce sought this affirmation inside the city’s own corporate institutions of administration and government, rather than through becoming part of the royal system of venal office-holding. Their lives were more strictly bourgeois than were those whose families sought to clothe themselves in quasi-noble forms of privilege, a difference heightened by the Jansenist religious identifications many of them shared, which encouraged a stricter kind of morality than did the casuistical reasoning of the Jesuits, often criticized as offering excuses for the lax moral demeanor of some courtly aristocrats. But the border between the two groups was permeable. Certain members of the more “bourgeois” group did seek a path to ennoblement: some as a next step after achieving high urban positions, while others looked to royal offices as a means of advancement when other paths failed to work out for them. Overall the more “bourgeois” group surely constituted no challenge to the hierarchical system of which the king was the head. Only the monarchy’s collapse and the failed attempt of the Restoration government to use royal patronage as a political vehicle to restore the fortunes of Old Regime nobles during the 1820s would remove the system of privilege as a major pole of attraction for ambitious French bourgeois.22
The incontrovertible role played by the state in the evolution of French bourgeois existence, even where other factors were at work in shaping it, appears also in David Garrioch’s study of the increasing integration he finds in the Parisian bourgeoisie from late in the eighteenth century. Garrioch observes that it makes little sense to speak of a unified bourgeoisie before then, since the manner of life of well-off Parisians splintered them almost into separate little worlds. Their wealth and status might derive from connections to distant markets or state agencies, but medieval and early modern bourgeois organized their existence through participation in the local life of their neighborhoods. Families (the very ones studied more recently by Marraud) remained in the same quartier over generations, participating in parish life, marrying neighbors, gaining their power and status from local office-holding, and finding both patrons and clients in their own section of the city. Over the course of the eighteenth century these separate aggregates began to interact more and fuse, as well-off individuals became increasingly involved in the city as a whole, moving about in their carriages, shopping for special articles in more distant parts of town (aided by street signs and house numbers that now appeared for the first time), and finding marriage partners outside their neighborhoods. One reason for this change was the expansion of commerce and consumption that accompanied the growth in international trade and the improvement in interior communication, drawing people from different areas of the city into similar activities beyond it, and into the more cosmopolitan and secular culture of the Enlightenment. But a still stronger factor in this heightened unity was the expansion of the royal bureaucracy, creating more positions, deepening the common interests and concerns of those who occupied them, and widening the gap between officials and the lesser people around them.
Already visible in the eighteenth century, this process was greatly accelerated during the Revolution. The number of office holders reached 670 in 1780, but by 1795 the number of employees in state service had exploded to around 13,000 (this included many in relatively modest employments, however, of a sort that may not have been counted in the earlier statistics). Many of these people participated in the Revolution, serving as leaders in its early phases and supporting the more moderate regimes that succeeded the radical Jacobin and sans-culotte phase of 1792–94. The challenges of those years, although chiefly directed against aristocracy and privilege and seldom targeting bourgeois as a class or group, nonetheless encouraged a defensive unity among property-owners anxious to protect themselves against egalitarian claims. Later the measures taken by the Restoration government in favor of Old Regime aristocrats would give non-nobles cause to defend themselves against a different danger, preparing for the moment when “bourgeois” could emerge as a political identity. Just what this meant and how far it should be taken as testimony to greater class unity are questions to which I will return in a moment.23
Public opinion, state action, and commerce
An important indicator of the special stamp that all these conditions put on bourgeois life in France was the way that “public opinion” emerged during the eighteenth century. Recent historians and theorists have agreed in recognizing the importance of public opinion, and of what Jürgen Habermas famously called the “public sphere,” both in preparing the ground for the Revolution, and in regard to the culture and politics of modernity more generally. For Habermas, this public sphere was unquestionably bourgeois, growing up in the spaces created by an increasingly commercialized society and given life by the institutions of communication and discussion – newspapers, reading societies, coffee houses – it brought forth.24 Although there are good reasons to accept much of this picture (I will spec
ify some of these in a moment), certain of Habermas’s critics have made a persuasive case that, at least in France, the emergence of public opinion owed more to actions of the monarchy than to economic or social changes independent of it.
What makes the process these critics describe particularly relevant here is that it exemplifies very well the movement through which “teleocratic” networks, originally established to serve goals defined outside themselves, evolve into “autonomous” ones that generate their principles of operation from within. The starting point was the monarchy’s need, from late in the seventeenth century, to gain support for attempts to extend its power in ways that infringed on established positions, or that required higher levels of support from its subjects. Louis XIV first directed his propaganda campaign of pamphlets and diplomatic connections outside of France, since it was intended to justify his conquests and annexations, but meeting the rising expenses of war soon required that he employ similar techniques at home. Faced with a need “to secure the legitimacy of claims that could no longer be made binding in the terms (and within the traditional institutional circuit) of an absolutist political order,” the state seemed to have no choice (as Keith Baker writes) but to
address its claims to a domestic ‘public,’ deploying pamphlets and other devices of political contestation in internal affairs with as much energy as it had previously done in the international arena. It also required that the government tolerate (and attempt to use to its advantage) the circulation within French borders of relatively independent newspapers such as the Gazette de Leyde, which in turn advanced their own competing claims to define the nature and content of public opinion. But by accepting the logic of a politics of contestation in this way, the royal government unwittingly conspired with its opposition to foster the transfer of ultimate authority from the public person of the sovereign to the sovereign person of the public.25
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 12