Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  To put these elements of Parisian existence in context, we need to consider the longer-term history of the city’s population expansion. To those accustomed to thinking of the era in terms of gradually advancing industrialization, it is difficult not to read developments of the end of the century back into its early part, and to assume that urban growth was tied up with a modernizing economy. But Louis Chevalier’s classic study of Parisian demographic development tells a different story. Looking at the social position of the immigrants, at the parts of the city they inhabited, the distribution of occupations in the individual arrondissements (administrative districts), and the degree to which these things changed over the century, Chevalier concluded that Parisian manufacture during the first half of the century was not directed primarily toward producing goods for export, but rather to supplying the needs of the city itself. Although some items were sold in distant markets, in particular the so-called articles de Paris, fine gloves, scarves, clothing, and so on, that used skilled urban labor, often female, what chiefly drew manufacturers and workers to Paris was the chance to be close to the capital’s own consumers. For a brief time in the century’s first years some merchant entrepreneurs made the city a place for modern cotton-spinning techniques, as well as hand looms to turn their thread into cloth, but the advantages of cheaper rent and labor elsewhere put an end to these projects by the time Napoleon fell. As in the eighteenth century, much of the power Paris had to attract new people depended on its role as the country’s administrative capital; as the number of government employees expanded, they constituted a significant sector of the local consumer market that drew makers of consumption goods into the city.

  Only from the 1850s did this situation begin to yield to a different one, first as the needs of railroad construction turned metal manufacturers toward making rails, engines, and other equipment for the new lines, and then, from the 1870s, as Paris followed the rest of France into greater involvement in the more integrated economic system that the completion of the railroad network and the new “second industrial revolution” industries were creating on the continent and beyond. At this time the suburbs grew into centers for major export industries, including bicycles and, later, automobiles. Until then, they too had chiefly hosted enterprises and workers devoted to supplying the needs of the Parisian market. The new phase in the city’s economy was accompanied by a marked shift in the origins of its immigrants. Until the mid century they came primarily from nearby provinces, the Île de France, Normandy, and the Loire Valley. Afterwards many more began to arrive from farther way, the east, south, and southwest of the country (as well as from outside it): the insertion of France into the modern industrial economy was part of a more general transformation that included the tighter social and economic integration of the country’s regions and provinces.14

  Given this marked change in the city’s demography and economy during the second half of the century, Chevalier ends by suggesting that the immigration that helped to double the population between 1800 and 1850 was largely continuous with a longstanding pattern of relations between urban and rural life. Pre-industrial cities regularly expanded and contracted as economic conditions changed, creating a shifting demand for labor and an up-and-down movement in wages. Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Lees even observe that early modern “European cities had almost a dual structure, a permanent cadre of inhabitants and a substantial floating group of recent immigrants, temporary residents, and transients.” A sense of sharp class divisions, and evidence of resentment among the poor had often surfaced at times when this second group was present, and there is reason to view the early nineteenth-century growth in Parisian population at least partly as a continuation of this earlier model. Many observers at the time spoke of the poorer among its newly arrived residents in terms that could just as well have applied to earlier instances of immigration, seeing them as foreign and threatening elements, a barbarian “dangerous class” in need of oversight and discipline because of their lack of integration into city life.15 It would be wrong to assimilate early nineteenth-century conditions wholly to older ones, but it was only the new phase of economic and social history ushered in by railroad construction on a large scale that brought the old model to an end.

  Early nineteenth-century Paris was no longer the city Turgot and the philosophes had known, but apart from sheer size the things that made it different belonged more to the realm of politics and culture than to production and exchange. The Revolution did not modernize the French economy, but it surely altered political and social relations. Adeline Daumard makes this point in considering whether the divisions inside the Parisian bourgeosie still left room for its existence as a unified class. The whole formation was like a pyramid sliced into layers. At the summit was a narrow group of important officials, well-known professionals, and large-scale (mostly wholesale) merchants who constituted a kind of urban aristocracy (some with ties to the Old Regime one); from these heights the bourgeoisie sloped downwards through the merely “good bourgeois” with prosperous but smaller businesses or stable but less exalted positions in government and the professions, the “middle bourgeois” of solid shopkeepers, lower state officials, neighborhood notaries, lawyers, and doctors (who mainly acquired their positions through apprenticeship, not formal education), to the bourgeoisie populaire of corner grocers or craftsmen with at most a couple of employees, often struggling to maintain an independent position and fading off into the larger group of dependent artisans and workers beneath them. These divisions were criss-crossed by oppositions of interest and orientation, not to mention competition and jealousy. But what mainly distinguished the group’s collective life from that of its ancestors in the eighteenth century, Daumard’s picture suggests, was that the old system of fixed orders and legal privileges that constituted an alternative to bourgeois existence itself, drawing some bourgeois inside it and leaving others in its shadow, was no more. Earlier the bourgeois world that lived under the sign of motion, acting inside the fluid arena of the market, aspiring to social ascension, acting in ways that altered conditions for others, had been a subordinate pole in a field whose dominant one operated under the sign of stability and (in theory) unchanging order. With its demise the whole urban world shifted toward the pole of motion, exemplified by the departure of the Old Regime itself, “opening careers to talent,” and the posing of a series of unanswered questions about what the future held. Whereas earlier commercial and professional people had looked to the monarchy as a source of honor and recognition, with the power to assign them a higher status, nineteenth-century bourgeois had to rely on the fruits of their own efforts and resources. Daumard concludes that these changes gave a new unity to the bourgeoisie, that their shared need to rely on themselves gave them a common soul, une même âme.16

  It is an appealing metaphor, and in some ways an illuminating one, but we need to guard against letting it give us a false sense of either bourgeois modernity or unity. Many bourgeois retained values their ancestors had absorbed under the Old Regime, admiring aristocrats and aspiring to be like them, valuing stability over change and motion, and (as we shall see later on) looking with suspicion and scorn on those whose devotion to novelty and speculation threatened the order, balance, and moral steadiness they thought essential to social life. To many early nineteenth-century bourgeois, no less in Paris than outside, owning property itself still appeared more as a defense against change than a way of seeking it, a perspective that, as we shall see in a moment, only began to be generally altered by the reconstruction of the city undertaken by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann from the 1850s. I noted in Chapter 3 that as the category of the bourgeoisie came to be employed in historical and political debates from the 1820s much confusion and uncertainty surrounded it, both in the contrasting images given by its supporters such as Thierry and Guizot and in the wavering understanding of whether bourgeois belonged to the past or the future developed by Saint-Simon. All these usages underline the degree to which the term “bourgeois”
often had a rhetorical function much as did “middle class” at the same time in England, a situation that persisted during the 1840s. In a parliamentary debate of 1847 an anti-government speaker berated Guizot’s resistance to widening the suffrage, on the grounds that the Revolution’s abolition of legal privileges meant that the term bourgeois could no longer apply to a category separate from other citizens. But he provoked laughter a moment later when he looked around the room and went on: “I see here many bourgeois.”17 A satirical pamphlet of the time, the Physiology of the Bourgeois, played on these uncertainties. “My bourgeois is not yours, or your neighbor’s,” its author observed. To a soldier the term indicated a civilian, to a grand seigneur a well-dressed person who was “not born, even though he may be seventy or eighty years old.” Workers used it for the boss, cab drivers for their fares, artists as a term of insult and abuse. “Properly so-called” a bourgeois was a person with a secure income and no debts, who lived comfortably, kept his feet warm, and carried a walking-stick.18

  The term “class” was often applied to the bourgeoisie, but some observers rejected it, arguing that the group’s permeability and the lack of clear barriers and boundaries between bourgeois and others made it at most “a condition,” one which, as the Journal des débats wrote in 1847, could be acquired by hard work, prudence, and talent, and just as easily lost through laziness or vice. Daumard recognized a considerable degree of fluidity in the population she studied, since it included a significant number of newcomers; their origins were often rural but some rose from the ranks of artisans and workers, especially in such industries as construction, where many patrons began as ouvriers. J.-P. Chaline’s study of the Rouen bourgeoisie shows that it too contained substantial numbers of self-made men in these years, particularly in the textile industry (although he notes that it often took two generations for members of worker families to become independent manufacturers). It was these features that the bourgeoisie’s defenders had in mind when they cited its social prominence as a sign of the openness and basic equality of nineteenth-century society. From the outside, however, these opportunities appeared as far too narrow to validate such claims, and spokesmen for workers, such as Proudhon and Victor Considerant, had no doubt that the great majority of those born in poverty remained there, while those born to ease and wealth often reproduced the social position of their forebears. It could hardly have been otherwise, given that the proportion of the population even in Paris who could be called bourgeois on the basis of wealth, income, or occupation was, in Daumard’s estimate, something around 15 percent.19

  These observations about the world of early nineteenth-century bourgeois help us to focus better on the most prominent features of the portrait offered by one of its greatest students and harshest critics, Honoré de Balzac. As many in his time rightly saw, Balzac was often moved by hostility to bourgeois people, values, and aspirations; this was one reason why Marx found him so sympathetic and appealing. Engels declared that he had learned more about French bourgeois life from Balzac than from all the other writers he had read put together.20 The stories and novels making up La Comédie humaine contain some of the classic portraits of bourgeois ambition, greed, determination, narrow-mindedness, and failure: Lisbeth Fisher, the spiteful cousin Bette of the novel named for her, Gobseck the usurer who appears in several stories, Goriot the newly rich pasta manufacturer ruined by his social ambitions for his daughters, Nucingen the shady banker and financier, Gaudissart the traveling salesman, César Birotteau the perfume merchant. Colorful and striking as these figures are, what needs to be remarked about them is that none were engaged in the kinds of activities most of us, inspired by Marx or not, associate with the bourgeoisie’s role in making the world modern – setting up or running industrial plants, trying out new technologies, reaching for new markets. Whether in Paris or the provinces, the modern industrial and professional bourgeoisie is strikingly absent from Balzac’s history of his times. Goriot was a pasta maker, but his wealth came from a rapid change of conditions during the Terror, when he was able to buy large quantities of flour cheaply and then sell it for ten times that cost. Nucingen was involved in house building in Paris but he made his money through fraud, not innovation or even clever speculation; he left no personal mark on the city. The great fortunes in Balzac’s world are still aristocratic and the ambitions of people on the make are to rise into their world, not to participate in making a new one; these are the goals of the exemplary Balzacian provincials, Eugène de Rastignac of Père Goriot and other stories and Lucien Chardon (later de Rubempré) of Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low (Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes).

  It was just such ambitions that tied Balzac himself to the people he portrayed so harshly, but also sometimes with sympathy. Coming to Paris from his native Tours as a student under the early Restoration, he quickly began to write, then abandoned his first tales and sketches in order to set up as a publisher. The business failed spectacularly, and one reason he worked so feverishly afterwards, producing his unending stream of stories and novels, was in order to pay off his debts. As he began to acquire both money and fame through his writing, he used his success to enter into some of the same precincts of the Parisian beau monde to which his characters aspired. Yet his achievements never erased from his mind the sense of injustice and oppression fostered by his early failure, and by his provincial’s sense that Paris was both the great prize and the great abyss at the center of French life, the “glory and infamy” of the country, as one of his characters put it.

  The power and the magnetic allure of bourgeois life as Balzac knew it was evident alongside its horrors in many of these famous stories, but the mix of qualities he saw in it was best revealed in a novel set outside Paris, although full of references and allusions to it, The Search for the Absolute. The title conveys perfectly what its author thought the human drama was most profoundly about, and could have been applied to many other of his stories, so rife with portrayals of people driven to great achievements and then to tragic failure by the force of some singular and Herculean passion. Lost Illusions (to many readers the most remarkable of the novels centered largely on Paris itself) names the repeated outcome of this pursuit, what is left in its aftermath: to Lucien Chardon forced to abandon the Paris he seemed at one moment to have conquered by literary talent; to “Honorine” (heroine of one of very few Balzac stories that might be read in a feminist spirit) after the collapse of her attempt to escape dependency and realize the dream of personal liberty; and to Frenhofer, the genius who destroys his paintings and dies after becoming aware that “The Unknown Masterpiece,” the painting he believed his repeated reworkings had turned into an image of beauty at once so fully ideal and so palpably real that it lived and breathed, had become an indecipherable chaos.

  In The Search for the Absolute this quest is undertaken by Balthazar Claes (his name enfolding Balzac as Honorine does Honoré), the descendant of an old bourgeois family in the northern French town of Douai. Claes becomes obsessed with a modern version of the alchemical dream of transmuting ordinary materials into gold, a passion mediated by his encounter with a Polish emigré in 1809, but rooted in his youthful stay in Paris just before the Revolution, where he had studied in the great chemist Lavoisier’s laboratory. Seized with (or by) this passion Claes brings his family to the brink of ruin, selling off his picture collection, furniture, house, and most of his land in order to buy equipment and chemicals, before being rescued by his wife and daughter, who send him off to Brittany to serve as a tax collector while they adroitly and patiently reassemble the family’s possessions. The qualities they display in doing so are not the heaven-storming aspirations that animate him, but the old virtues of steadiness, moderation, and the ability to find satisfaction inside a limited and imperfect world that marked the old bourgeoisie in which the family had its roots. The story pulses with the Swedenborgian spiritualism that infuses much of Balzac’s writing (left open at the end is the mysterious and tantalizing possibility
that, before he died, Claes may actually have succeeded in producing a nugget of gold in his laboratory), but it is also a clear allegory of contemporary life and politics. Critical turning points are coordinated with defining moments in the ascension and collapse of the Bonapartist empire, and Claes’s wife is named Josephine; we are clearly invited to look through Balthazar into the life history of that other heroic searcher for the absolute who brought his country to near ruin in the same years. That Claes’s obsession with chemical transformation had its roots in his stay in Paris (and in a laboratory devoted to identifying the elements of things and the effects of their combination) reminds us about the city’s power to set provincials (whether from Douai or Corsica or Tours) on a path that leads at once to glory and to destruction.

  What animates the Balzacian (and given Claes’s social identity, we can add bourgeois) search for the absolute is not some anticipation of subsequent paths to a new modernity, but the kind of tie to Paris, and to the ambitions to gain power over the world that develop there, that had long drawn people to the city. All the great virtues and vices of Balzac’s bourgeois figures revolve around this pole. Paris’s ability to set such lives in motion did not begin in the nineteenth century, or with the Revolution. Indeed one would be hard put to think of a more striking case than that of Balzac’s own father, one of eleven children of an illiterate (albeit not impoverished) peasant, and the only one who learned to read, who apprenticed himself to a notary in Albi, went to the capital in the 1760s, rose to be secretary to the royal council, and ended as a provincial administrator, having become very well-off. His marriage to a younger woman at once pleasure-loving and mystically inclined, the daughter of a prosperous Parisian grocer, was an unhappy alliance, with sad consequences for young Honoré, since his mother’s search for amorous satisfactions elsewhere left him feeling abandoned in childhood (he first encountered spiritualist writings in her library).