Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  All the same, Bernstein’s distinction has much relevance to cultural history, even if we need to guard against viewing workers’ language and thinking in the narrow terms it may suggest. Some of the reasons for its relevance as well as evidence for its effects during the nineteenth century are provided by careful and insightful studies of working-class and rural culture by David Vincent for England and by Deborah Reed-Danahay for France. Both are concerned to understand the disappointment bred by reformers’ hopes that the cultural differences between classes would be effaced by the expansion of public schooling and the consequent spread of education and literacy, fostered by the English Education Act of 1870 and the Third Republic’s enlarged system of primary education. Instead, working-class culture remained in many ways just as separate from its bourgeois counterpart as before. Vincent, in an analysis driven by sympathy and identification with non-elite people and their experience, offers two chief reasons for this outcome in the English case, both of which apply largely to the French one as well. First, working-class and village communities retained their ties to a deeply rooted and robust oral culture, through which everyday skills and habits were handed down, and which imparted still-useful folk- and home-based knowledge. The therapeutic value of traditional lore about health and medicine (herbal remedies, for instance) was not superseded by scientific advances until well into the twentieth century. And second, the content of formal education was much less useful to those destined for working-class or peasant occupations than it was for those who would take up middle-class ones, a difference magnified by the limited opportunities that existed for social mobility.

  In giving a central place to these two considerations, Vincent (like other recent students, including Jonathan Rose) calls into question earlier views that portrayed literacy as an instrument for imposing middle-class ideas and values on the poor: popular culture was an active and constructive response to the conditions in which it developed. But the schools where literacy was taught had an uncomfortable relationship to lower-class life. Vincent notes that whereas only one or two individuals in a typical community were able to show young people how to thatch a roof or shoe a horse, many adults knew enough to teach a “child its letters, yet reading and writing became the only skills which had to be acquired in a specialized building from a specialized teacher.” Such learning had a similarly inorganic relationship to many who were exposed to it in France, where the Third Republic’s educational system (although never so hostile to local cultures and languages as has sometimes been claimed) offered much that students and their families regarded as largely irrelevant to the everyday lives most urban and rural workers would face as adults. Individuals and groups welcomed book learning as a tool, using it where it was helpful (French peasants evinced a robust interest in literacy and arithmetic as aids in managing farms and other occupations, and English school-age children were taken to silent movies to read the titles to their unlettered parents), and they quickly learned to “make sophisticated shifts between written and oral forms in order to advance or defend their interests.” But they never succeeded in fusing the two cultural worlds, both because the educational system that brought exposure to the first “rendered the tools of literacy both strange to handle and difficult to employ for any but the most mundane tasks,” and because literate adult workers continued to inhabit “a limited field of practices and a subordinate system of meanings … The children who spent more and more of their lives in school were denied the opportunity of connecting their basic training to higher forms of learning or to most of the problems they would face beyond the classroom.” The continuity middle-class youngsters enjoyed between school and the work-life that awaited them deepened as education came to be a vehicle of preparation for professional tasks, government employment, or more highly organized forms of business; some in addition were exposed to elements of a literate and sophisticated culture inside their homes that was close to the one they encountered in classrooms. But for those below them “home and school, school and work remained widely separated forms of learning and activity, and over time it became more rather than less difficult to integrate practical and abstract work knowledge, sensational and ‘classic’ literature, oral and written history, botanic and ‘scientific’ medicine.”19

  Vincent’s conclusions provide reasons for giving heed to Bernstein’s application of the distinction between restricted and elaborated codes to the differences between middle-class and working-class language and culture, at least insofar as we do not allow it to become rigid or exclusive. The contrast Bernstein describes is not merely linguistic, it distinguishes two cultural styles, two ways by which forms of symbolic expression organize and communicate experience and the expectations it breeds. Only after recognizing the existence of many exceptions can this contrast of cultural styles be mapped on to class differences, but it takes on another level of significance in the perspective on modernity we are seeking to develop here. Whether in regard to popular or aristocratic language, a restricted code that ties a particular idiom to a bounded community is an example of the kind of regulative principle we have called ordained or teleocratic, one that directs the exchanges between individuals connected through some shared medium of interaction toward an outcome established in advance. By contrast an elaborated code is an instance of an autonomous principle, one that arises out of the developing exchanges and interactions themselves, and that aims to facilitate and extend those exchanges and their products. In the case of language as in others, the two alternatives become increasingly evident as formerly local or separated groups become more involved in networks that link their members to outside and often distant people and circumstances, presenting them with the choice between submitting their behavior to general and abstract standards that might challenge features of a group’s existing identity, and resisting such changes in order to maintain communal ties and the principles and practices that underlie them. It is a contrast that has continued to find many expressions in the world of the twenty-first century; we shall now see that it also illuminates the relations between the largely elite forms of culture discussed in Chapter 12 and the “popular” ones that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century.

  Networks and the new popular culture

  As networks of communication expanded and grew thicker at the end of the nineteenth century, people and activities outside the middle classes were increasingly drawn into cultural forms infused with distant ties and connections. The more closely integrated and organized world that provided a foundation for modern industry and for modern political parties also opened up new spaces of leisure and entertainment, bringing into being novel and modern forms of information, amusement, and self-expression. Their emergence and expansion would radically alter the cultural landscape, and in particular the relations between “high” and “popular” culture. At the start this alteration may be described as mainly quantitative, as new energies flowed into popular forms of leisure and expression and gave them greater prominence; but the change would come to be qualitative as well, replacing the long-assumed hierarchical relations between cultural levels with more shifting and uncertain mix of interacting components. In the process the very meaning of culture would change, as longstanding connotations of refinement and cultivation receded in favor of a loose and multi-layered realm of representation and reflection, its various components free from regulation by any common and ordained goal.

  A good starting point for approaching these changes is provided by the spread of popular literature and the rise of mass-circulation newspapers, two phenomena that were linked together by common bodies of writers and readers. Books and pamphlets aimed at people with limited education had long existed, to be sure, their chief genres consisting of practical tools such as almanacs, devotional tracts, and manuals, and popular novels, some based on chivalric themes and some romantic in a more everyday sense. The latter in particular had expanded from late in the eighteenth century, begetting much criticism about their ability to infl
ame undisciplined imaginations and corrupt morals, but the public for such work still remained small; some of the outcry against such literature seems to have been inspired by male fears about its effects on women.20 The broad expansion of literacy after the mid nineteenth century created a much enlarged popular reading public, one part increasingly concentrated in cities, another in rural areas now made more accessible through railroads. Serious literature was a part of what this new public consumed, both classics such as Shakespeare or Goethe and modern works by writers like Victor Hugo or Jules Verne, but a larger part of the diet consisted of books written especially to appeal to the new audience. Often published serially in newspapers or pulp magazines, these texts were the products of a newly prominent breed of authors, some of whom (along with their publishers) reaped huge profits from their work. The writers displayed a variety of social origins, some having unsuccessfully sought careers at a higher literary level before finding their niche in detective and adventure stories, others taking to fiction writing for fun and profit, or coming to it from daily journalism and retaining much of its spirit in their books. Many, such as the French feminist Jeanne Lapauze, who wrote under the name of Daniel Lesueur, are mostly forgotten today, but others, or the characters they created, remain famous at least in their own countries: Maurice Leblanc, father of Arsène Lupin; Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, begetters of Fantomas; Gustave Le Rouge, who like Jules Verne was a pioneer of science fiction; and Karl May, perhaps the most popular German writer of all time, and a fount of adventure stories set in the American Wild West as well as in the Near and Far East.21

  The period when this genre of writing emerged was the very one when art and music were acquiring the more formal and stable kinds of organization already noted. In publishing, a kind of counterpart to picture dealers such as Durand-Ruel was provided by a new breed of literary agents who offered “for a fee the sorts of services that had previously been performed informally and gratis by relatives and friends of successful authors,” introducing them to editors, providing publicity for their work. Alongside them worked an expanding category of publishers’ readers, charged with considering the growing volume of manuscript submissions. These figures operated at various literary levels, but other new features were more closely related to the new breed of authors described a moment ago. One was the appearance of correspondence schools for aspiring writers, often connected to literary advice bureaus, some of which offered prepackaged plots on which those who needed such aids could construct their own variations. Periodicals addressed to literary hopefuls appeared too, and by the 1920s they had begun to spawn “writers’ circles” (whose members made contact through the magazines) for mutual help and support. Relations among such people were not always so harmonious, however, nor were their lives easy, as George Gissing made clear in his melancholy novel about them of 1891, New Grub Street.22

  In an age when figures such as Proust, Mann, and Joyce were creating a classic modernist canon whose philosophical and aesthetic ambitions made strong demands on readers, these popular works exhibited very different qualities, particularly appreciated by their pre-World War I readers, of whom Anne-Marie Thiesse was still able to interview some around 1980. Even when set in some exotic place, these writings never departed very far from the experiences and attitudes familiar to readers from the world around them, infusing whatever stories they told with the hopes, passions, disappointments, and occasional triumphs known to people whose situations offered little expectation of transcending the limited horizons of their lives. What these readers sought in books was not cultivation and self-development, but a heightened and more colorful version of the world they already knew, the common universe they shared with those around them. They seldom thought of authors as individuals whose overall oeuvre was the product of a particular personality, so that it is appropriate that the names of Arsène Lupin and Fantomas are more recognizable now than those of their creators. Thiesse depicts the difference between such a popular mode of reading and the one aspired to by people whose education and circumstances made them a possible audience for more intellectually ambitious writing as comparable to that between two ways that have since emerged of going to the movies. The popular one was like the “neighborhood picture-show” (cinéma du quartier) where the fare was limited to films intended to appeal to the taste of a popular audience, so that both the content of the film and the experience of seeing it were tied to familiar features of life; the other manner was like going to a “movie-house district” (quartier du cinéma) where viewers can choose among a variety of offerings, at least some of them with ambitions to represent forms of thought and feeling not encountered before. The parallel to Basil Bernstein’s contrast between restricted and elaborated codes is hard to miss, but in the expansion of popular literature what would later be called mass culture was retaining its older horizons while drawing new energy and vitality from means and relations formerly associated chiefly with more-educated and better-off readers.23

  I will come back to movies in a moment, but first we need to consider the new mass-circulation papers. These drew on industrial techniques not available in the days of Girardin’s innovations, using steam-powered rotary presses (practicable from around 1850) to serve the larger public, partly gathered in the era’s exploding cities and partly reachable outside them by railways and better roads. But the technology had been developed in response to a sense that new opportunities beckoned to those who could take advantage of the larger cultural spaces the new means made accessible. Among the pioneers of the new journalism in France was Polydore Millaud, whose Petit Journal began publication in 1863, reaching a daily circulation of over 250,000 only three years later and a million by the end of the century. The paper owed its success to its founder’s determination (as Jean-Yves Mollier notes) to eliminate every mark that tied earlier ones to the traditions of elite culture, selling individual copies at a sou instead of by subscription, putting a humorous column on the front page, publishing only popular novels as feuilletons, and reporting news in the style of detective or adventure stories. A prominent, even defining, feature of the new journalism was the central place it gave to what was called the fait divers, a term applied to reports on everyday occurrences, curious (sometimes invented) happenings, human interest stories, and reports on crime and violence. One reason Millaud turned to such material was to avoid paying the tax levied on papers that dealt with politics (the levy would be eliminated in 1881), but he also seems to have had an intuition that he could appeal to a large and expanding audience by way of it. Crime stories were particularly effective in building up circulation, which jumped at moments when especially sensational or shocking events (such as the brutal murder of an entire family by an Alsatian immigrant, Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, in 1869) could be exploited. Other dominant fin-de-siècle papers, notably Le Petit Parisien and Le Matin began with ambitions to be more serious than Millaud, but in the end all took on some of the features that made the Petit Journal so successful.24

  A similar evolution was visible a bit later in Berlin, where the first highly successful counterpart to the Petit Journal was August Scherl’s Lokal Anzeiger, started in 1883 and aimed especially at newcomers to the city, providing them with much practical information alongside feuilletons of a racy sort. Leopold Ullstein’s Berliner Morgenpost served similar functions and became the city’s largest paper after it was founded a few years afterwards. All adopted sensationalistic styles similar to their French cousins (even publications linked to the social democrats did the same); in both places readers sought out papers for the information contained in advertisements (for activities and entertainments as well as goods) no less than in news columns, and papers sought to attract readers by calling attention to themselves, often through stunt-like competitions (such as challenging readers to spy out the journalist sent out to report on them) with prizes, so that the aura of mass publicity infused their whole existence. By World War I some three out of four French people were reading a newspaper
every day. In Germany the number seems to have been closer to one in two, but people spoke of a Lesewut, an addiction to reading the papers.25

  The large degree of attention the new publications gave to local happenings and conditions set them off from their predecessors. Earlier papers had devoted far less space to such things. News sheets had their origins in letters and reports that provided information on distant events and conditions, political, economic, or cultural; there was little need for them to report on local doings because most readers had direct or word-of-mouth access to the ones that mattered to them. When Hegel described reading the daily newspaper as a kind of counterpart to the morning prayer, orienting moderns such as himself toward the actual world much as religious rituals put medieval people in touch with a divine beyond, the reports he had in mind came from capital cities and distant correspondents, still the main content of journalism in the 1820s and 1830s.26 As cities grew, papers began to include local news and features, but reported it in a restrained style modeled on their treatments of distant happenings. This was true of the French Gazette des tribunaux, founded in 1825 as a paper for lawyers; it attracted a large readership interested in the many stories of private life and public scandal that unfolded in courtrooms, but its tone remained calm and restrained.27 The same was the case for Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont’s very popular accounts of the “unknown occupations” – métiers inconnus – hidden in the shadowy reaches of Paris (published in the daily Le Siècle beginning in 1852); similarly, the scenes sought out by mid century flâneurs in their urban wanderings might harbor mysteries but the accounts they gave seldom ran to the lurid. The new papers made a clear departure from these precedents, not only giving much greater emphasis to local doings, but writing about foreign events in a manner modeled on adventure stories or other popular reading, a practice aided by the growing interest in extra-European exploration and conquest, its locations made exotic by distance and cultural difference, features the papers pumped up through this kind of reporting.28