Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  The argument has been extended in a slightly altered form by David Bell:

  Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the crown did much to build up national lines of communication. Its new administrative officers, even if they often served principally as conduits of information rather than as governors, nonetheless brought vast numbers of Frenchmen into direct contact with the central government … The monarchy itself – rather than the capitalist interests described by Habermas – first sponsored a national press in France … the Gazette de France, followed by the Mercure and the Journal des savants.26

  Once this tissue of newspapers and contacts had been set up and employed by the king to propound his case, others quickly seized the opportunity to use the same means against him. Among the first to do this were the lawyers who held offices in the parlements where the king had to seek approval for legal changes (although if they refused he could force them to register his edicts in the famous lits de justice), and it was largely in the debates this occasioned that the new phenomenon of public opinion emerged. Public opinion became independent of the king by virtue of a transformation of the network by means of which he and his ministers had sought to constitute it.

  As long as the king had remained theoretically absolute, any attempt by the French to press claims upon each other (which is what politics is ultimately about) could proceed licitly only in the form of appeals to the king himself, or to bodies that acted in his name … After the middle of the eighteenth century, however, as royal authority declined, political claims increasingly took the form of appeals to the judgment of the ‘public’ … [The king now became] simply another litigant before this new ‘tribunal.’27

  In other words, by extending and thickening a web of relations intended to further the goals of the higher power on whose behalf it was organized, the government unwittingly provided means by which those connected to the network could discover and employ lines of communication that bypassed its putatively central and directing point. As its operations expanded, the volume of communications the network generated overwhelmed the principle according to which only those flows directed by royal authority should be regarded as legitimate; the new standard validated any communication, regardless of where it originated or to whom it was directed, as long as it contributed to the public interchange the network afforded.

  French observers maintained both that public opinion was a force emerging all over Europe and that it exhibited certain special features in their country. On the one hand, as one publicist wrote, through the agency of public opinion “an entire sect, an entire nation, the whole of Europe, is called to pronounce judgment upon a host of objects regarding which, previously, only despotism or the interest of particular individuals had the right to make themselves heard. From this gathering of ideas, from this concentration of enlightenment, a new power has formed that, in the hands of public opinion, governs the world and gives laws to the civilized nations.” On the other hand, French public opinion was seen as differing from other cases, in particular from the English one, first because, in a country without effective representative institutions, it had to be more powerful in order to restrain sovereign authority without the aid of an institution such as Parliament. At the same time, it was less individualistic, because in contrast to England, where “liberty … inspires in men more confidence in their own judgments, and one could even say that, jealous of every kind of empire, they cherish their own opinions to the point of independence and take a secret pleasure in diverging from the opinions of others,” French public opinion sought a rational consensus as a basis for national unity. In practice particular, groups sought to improve their position by appealing to public opinion, but public discussion was expected to give rise to general principles of government, not to compromises of the sort effected by the clash of parties and lobbies.28 Pierre Rosanvallon points out that many critics of absolutism in eighteenth-century France judged the legitimacy of laws not according to who made them, as they saw to be the case in Parliamentary England, but based on a belief in their rationality. The sovereign nation was imagined as the embodiment of this rationality rather than as a body assembled to represent the totality of groups and interests that composed it.29 Much of the later contrast between the roles the two countries would assign to intellect in politics seems already foreshadowed here. Despite this difference, however, both cases testified to a shift in the nature of the principles expected to regulate political and discursive interactions, from ones set out in advance and embodied in external and higher powers, toward ones generated out of those interactions themselves, giving autonomy to the expanding networks of communication through which they took place.

  This is not quite the whole story of eighteenth-century public opinion, however, since more strictly commercial developments also played a role in its emergence; chief among them was the expansion in publishing. “The production of books in France tripled between 1701 and 1770, the newspaper press went from three titles to several hundred, and the volume of pamphlet literature grew by leaps and bounds after mid century.”30 Much of this journalistic activity served mercantile purposes, and its marked growth in the later eighteenth century has inspired one historian to propose that we recognize a different ground for the development of a sphere of public discourse and discussion in France, namely advertising. The medium of this publicity was a network of papers established throughout the country called Affiches, literally public announcements. Much space in them was given over to offering a wide range of things for sale, including articles of everyday use, remedies for various ailments (often touted by people condemned as quacks or charlatans by established physicians, although they also feared their competition), urban and rural property, and venal offices, the latter sometimes recommended to buyers on the ground that they demanded little work. Services were advertised too, including legal and medical help, courses of instruction (some by well-known figures), and genealogical research. Employers and job-seekers advertised too, especially for domestic service at various levels. Alongside these annonces the papers printed articles and information, some commercial, listing arrivals of goods or grain prices, some literary, including poetry and observations about life (marriage and family were lauded, and women expected to devote themselves to domesticity), and some in praise of progress and improvement, including road-building, the Republic of Letters, and the Affiches themselves. The reach of these papers was local to begin with, but they were also drawn into more distant connections. Colin Jones, who argues strongly for their significance, observes that their animating spirit was that of “the parish pump,” but notes too that their localism was far from closed or introverted, opening out onto a wider world.31 The papers understood their role in just this way, seeing themselves not as the organs of any social group, but of public communication itself. “Men owe their enlightenment to communication and literary correspondence,” one paper wrote, “and it is by means of this priceless good of which the barbaric centuries of ignorance knew nothing that uncultivated man began to feel what he could be, and know his value.” Speaking of the progress of sciences and arts since the days of the Greeks and Romans, another paper declared that “communication has done everything,” and attributed the lesser progress of non-Europeans to “the small amount of communication they have with other peoples.”32

  Here was a public sphere with many of the features Habermas emphasizes, but it too came with a particularly French inflection. Unlike the eighteenth-century English press, which became national in scope as printers and publishers in London and elsewhere took advantage of Parliament’s decision to let the Licensing Act lapse in 1694, thus freeing journalism from censorship and restriction, the Affiches were indebted to government stimulus for their blossoming. They began in 1753 when the Paris-based proprietors of the Gazette de France conceived a plan to develop provincial journals by selling local printers the right to publish public notices in 35 French cities. The papers showed little life, however, until 1771,
when they became the instruments for carrying out a government edict requiring that all contracts for land sales be published, in order to protect mortgage holders. It was government action too that opened the papers up to things outside their localities, namely a provision requiring each paper to send a copy of every issue to all the others, in order to give the local intendants, who were responsible for censorship, easy access to what was being published.33 Not surprisingly, considering that the papers were censored, they contained poems and articles glorifying the monarchy. It may be that some readers took the praise of “nature” and the condemnation of luxury as veiled attacks on a social and political order in need of radical reform, as both Colin Jones and Jack Censer suggest, but it is well established by now that such criticisms were neither exclusively nor even characteristically “bourgeois” – how could they be, given what we have seen above about the Old Regime bourgeoisie? Support for Enlightened ideas, as Didier Masseau has noted, was not located on one or another side of a dividing line between classes or indeed of institutions, but ran “through the Church itself as well as through the elites that held the reins of political power.”34 Important as commercial activity was in giving substance to the segment of the French public sphere occupied by the Affiches, the papers’ history closely parallels the conclusion we have drawn from Keith Baker’s and David Bell’s accounts of the more strictly political realm: past a certain point of development, networks of communication fostered by the state in order to serve its own purposes could no longer be strictly controlled by it. As the means they offered were seized by individuals with no traditional claim to legitimate authority, it was their mutual connections and interactions that generated a new meaning for the term “public.”

  This conclusion can be reinforced by looking for a moment at the world of consumption to which the advertisements in the Affiches were tied, and comparing it to the English case considered earlier. The two were alike in important ways. In France as in England people at all social levels were buying and using more items of daily living, from plates, knives, forks, and furniture to textiles of all kinds, including curtains, rugs, underwear, shirts, and skirts. Especially in cities, life was becoming more comfortable, more varied in diet and dress, brighter, more civil and elegant, better provided with amusements, and for some more luxurious. In Paris the value of the clothing owned by people at their death mushroomed spectacularly during the century, tripling in the middle classes, quadrupling for domestic servants (whose wardrobe often included their employers’ cast-offs). The most attentive and insightful student of these changes, Daniel Roche, notes that they brought members of the urban working classes into the world of regular commercial consumption. In France as in England these developments were decried for creating breaches in the walls of social distinction, and in particular for the way they eliminated the visible signs of class and status cherished and even legislated in a frankly and self-consciously hierarchical social order. The Montpellier citizen referred to earlier bemoaned the way “the most vile artisans” in his city tried to live as the equals of people superior to them, spending and clothing themselves above their station. Like others, he saw such behavior as morally, not just socially, dangerous. It is this “increasingly materialistic, consumerist world” that Colin Jones sees represented in the Affiches, which therefore reveal “close links between the practices of commercial capitalism and the formation of the bourgeois public sphere.”35

  All the same, the French world of consumption had features that distinguished it from the British one. One was its greater fragmentation. Fashions, tastes, and desires for goods spread from Paris to the provinces and from cities to the countryside, but often very slowly. Daniel Roche notes that a place such as Limoges was fifty years behind Paris both in turning to more colorful clothing and in adopting underwear, and that Brittany and Alsace trailed still farther in the rear. Given the lack of connection between regional road networks, this is not surprising. In some places the spread of the new consumption patterns followed on the work of the ponts et chaussées officials mentioned above; in Le Mans the opening of a new grande route made upper-class women customers for Paris fashions, followed later by more ordinary people.36 Certain considerations suggest that active marketing was less important than social imitation in diffusing demand for goods in France. Neil McKendrick points out that in England by late in the century the “fashion dolls” used to advertise new styles of clothing and solicit orders were being made cheaply and printed by the thousands, at a time when the French equivalents remained life-size and expensive.37

  It is not wrong to associate the rising French interest in consumption goods with a society becoming more commercial and materialistic – more “bourgeois” in the ordinary sense – but the elites who led the way owed their wealth, much more than in England, to state employment. Administrative functions often contributed as much or more to urban growth than did economic ones: the expansion of Caen owed less to lace-making than to state officers and bureaucrats, and the quite rapid development of Dijon and Montpellier before the Revolution depended primarily on the increase in royal officials who worked there.38 In his invaluable book on cities and towns in the Old Regime, Bernard Lepetit pointed out that political economy before the nineteenth century regarded towns as economically important largely because of the mix of population they contained, and in particular because spending by their wealthiest inhabitants provided a stimulus to all forms of production and exchange; only after 1800 did writers such as Jean-Baptiste Say begin to theorize economic advance as a function of productive innovations, rather than attributing prosperity to the social emulation that town life promoted.39 “As the [eighteenth] century advanced,” Gwynne Lewis notes, “the increase in wealth of the top 5 percent of the population provided work for a legion of merchants, artisans and shopkeepers, all devoted to the task of gilding the lives and properties of the rich and the super-rich.” The persisting French orientation toward luxury production, in contrast to England, was grounded here. Paris was the great magnet for French consumption and fashion, and Daniel Roche points out that only a third of the city’s income, as calculated by Lavoisier in 1791, came from mercantile and agriculture activities; 20 percent derived from urban rents, and the rest, fully half, from the salaries, interest, and other payments that flowed out of the royal treasury.40 The expansion of French consumption was fed in good part by the very form of wealth mobilization that made financial intermediaries so important an element in the ancien régime bourgeoisie, and that made government employment a central feature in the more integrated quality of Parisian bourgeois existence visible by the end of the century.

  Revolution, state, and Third Estate

  All the same, the new attention given to public opinion and the relations out of which it arose testified to the way that autonomous principles were coming to challenge teleocratic ones in French life. This challenge would take a new and more practical form in 1789, as those elected to the Estates General called to aid the monarchy in reforming its institutions took them over on behalf of new grounds of legitimacy. We cannot enter very far into the thorny question of assigning causes to the Revolution, but near the top of any list would have to be the collapse of the royal financial system in the face of mounting debt, spurred on by the state’s inability to replace its complex and corrupt system of overlapping taxes and exemptions with one that mobilized the country’s resources efficiently. The inner contradictions to which we have pointed, surfacing in sometimes desperate attempts to push through reform measures, and the struggle they set off between the monarchy and the parlements that had to approve them, gave the regime a vulnerability to the decades-long critique of absolutism and privilege mounted by philosophes and popular writers far deeper than in any other country.

  Once in session, the Estates General found itself drawn away from regulative principles of government long claimed to reside in a sphere of values prior to political life and superior to it, and toward ones like those that critics such as Mon
tesquieu and Rousseau had been seeking to draw forth out of the structures of political interaction itself. Rousseau’s concept of sovereignty specifically reconceived the state on such a basis, making it arise out of the mutual interaction of a body of citizens, who simultaneously constitute themselves as the source of legitimate authority and agree to be subject to the laws they collectively sanction. The core of what Rousseau called the “General Will” was precisely the collective will to establish and maintain political life on this basis; the sole ground of legitimacy in civil society was the recognition that all who belonged to it, despite their many differences, were equal both as constituting members of the sovereign authority and as subject to its laws. Thus the principles of any state’s existence arose out of the interaction of its members, not from some prior or higher authority or end. It was just this elimination of any aim thought to be more exalted than the will citizens developed out of their mutual relations that made the new notion of legitimate sovereignty so worrisome to conservatives such as Joseph de Maistre. For them, only an “ordained” polity, one ruled by a goal or principle independent of its members wills, could have either legitimacy or the power to endure.

  The turn from a teleocratic to an autonomous organization of the French state was announced at the Revolution’s very beginning, in the famous “Tennis Court Oath” of June 20, 1789, through which the delegates of the Third Estate constituted themselves as the National Assembly and swore not to disband until they had provided France with a constitution. Giving authority to such a body implied the existence of a nation without division into Estates and founded on its own act of self-creation. This nodal point, marking the formal dissolution of the Old Regime, would be given substance in the succession of later moments of which the famous night of August 4, in which nobles renounced their special privileges, was the first; the successive Revolutionary assemblies would seek to establish institutions for the new regime in the following years. But the end of the Old Regime was also a culmination of certain tendencies within it, expressions of the logic that led the monarchy and its officials to give the country a more uniform and effective organization by reducing internal tariffs, freeing up the grain trade, reforming the taxation system, reorganizing the financial administration, and doing away with guilds. Reconstituting the nation on a basis that eliminated the regional and corporate divisions into which it had been divided was a more fundamental measure than any of these, but it shared with them the impulse to restructure society on a ground not mapped by privilege.41