Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  13 Clark and Slack, English Towns in Transition, 108–09 on the general situation, and 79 on London merchant guilds.

  14 See Christopher Friedrichs, “Capitalism, Mobility and Class Formation in the Early Modern German City,” in Towns in Societies: Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology, ed. Philip Abrams and E. A. Wrigley (Cambridge, London, and New York, 1978), 187–214. For the German story in a wider frame see the essays on individual towns collected in Vom alten zum neuen Bürgertum: die mitteleuropäische Stadt im Umbruch, 1780–1820, ed. Lother Gall (Munich, 1991). Gall’s emphasis on the pressures growing up in various towns for economic liberalization seems justified, but the evidence provided by his students whose work is collected here shows clearly enough that only the French occupation led to effective reform.

  15 Steven Laurence Kaplan, “Social Classification and Representation in the Corporate World of Eighteenth-Century France: Turgot’s ‘Carnival’” in Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice, ed. Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp (Ithaca and London, 1986), 176–228; 194 for the quoted passage. For a broader perspective on guild history in France see James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and their World in Dijon, 1550–1650 (Ithaca and London, 1988), where the distinction between villes libres and villes jurées is explained on 16–17, and Farr’s essay in Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France, ed. Philip Benedict (London, 1989). For useful essays on the history of guilds in various countries see Das Ende der Zünfte: ein europäischer Vergleich, ed. Hans-Gerhard Haupt (Göttingen, 2002). Unfortunately however, this volume is devoted chiefly to revising various old saws about guild history; it does not provide a comparative history of how the end of guild power arrived in different countries.

  16 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: the Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982), ch. 1, passim. The quotation from N. Forster, An Enquiry into the Present High Price of Possessions (1767), is on 11>; the excise statistics on 29, McKendrick’s comment on 22–23. The quotation about milkmaids (by John Byng) is cited by Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: a New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester and New York, 1995), 129.

  17 Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge and New York, 2009); see 140 for a summary of Allen’s views, 22 for his recognition that the factor prices on which he lays emphasis depended on “the commercial expansion of the early modern economy,” 87ff. for the effect of London on the demand for fuel and the history of the decline in prices, and tables 4.2 and 4.3 for the statistics. Allen emphasizes the role of international commerce in London’s expansion but he also recognizes its role as a wellspring of domestic consumption. The view I give above fits in general with the conclusions of the recent analysis of the whole issue of foreign and domestic markets in European industrial innovation developed in A Deus Ex Machina Revisted: Atlantic Colonial Trade and European Economic Development, ed. P. C. Emmer, O. Pétré-Grenouilleau, and J. V. Roitman (Leiden and Boston, 2006).

  18 Samuel Lilley, “Technological Progress and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1914,” in The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. III: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, ed. Carlo Cipolla (London, 1976), 187–254.

  19 See especially Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton and London, 2002), who speaks of an “industrial enlightenment” that was particularly well developed in England. Also Jack A. Goldstone, “Efflorescence and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of World History 13:2 (2002), 323–89. The point is also made by David Landes in The Unbound Prometheus, 60–63. It may be that the continuities between “learned” and “practical” knowledge were less acknowledged or recognized in the countryside, where “gentlemen” credited themselves with a breadth of perspective not vouchsafed to ordinary farmers, but the separation seems to me exaggerated by James Livesey in “Improving justice: communitarian norms in the Great Transformation,” ch. 2 of Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World, ed. Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann (Cambridge and New York, 2004). Livesey makes no distinction between French and British cultures in this regard, and seems to me to ignore his own evidence that the innovations in practice and knowledge brought about by “subaltern” figures were at the very least encouraged, if not spurred by their participation in distant relations that also brought them into contact with people more deeply inserted into them.

  20 Jan de Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 54.2 (1994), 249–70. McKendrick, 23. In his book developing further the ideas in his article, de Vries cites the work of Hans-Joachim Voth, Time and Work in England, 1750–1830 (Oxford, 2001), showing that Londoners “increased their hours of annual labor by at least 40 percent in the period 1750–1830.” The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge and New York, 2008), 91–92.

  21 I take this to be the argument of Joel Mokyr, “Demand vs. Supply in the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History, 1977, 981–1007. The importance of fossil fuels in raising productivity and income levels has been rightly emphasized by David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (London and Cambridge, 1969).

  22 See the figures in Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, 96, 104.

  23 Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, 118–20. Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London and New York, 1965). Raphael Samuel, “Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain,” History Workshop Journal 3 (Spring, 1977), 3–71. On retailing see the still useful work by James B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 1850–1950 (Cambridge, 1954). Jefferys has been criticized by later writers but mostly in details; see the literature cited in Gordon Boyce and Simon Ville, The Development of Modern Business (New York, 2002), 178–79.

  24 Richard Price, British Society, 1680–1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (Cambridge and New York, 1999),. For the debate about the relative importance of domestic and foreign markets and resources in the rise of European and especially British industry see A Deus Ex Machina Revisted, cited above.

  25 Price, British Society, 1680–1880, 28–38. The point about the mix of factory production with older techniques is not new (see, e.g. Szostak, The Role of Transportation, esp. 9–28 and 137), but Price’s notion that we should distinguish between an “economy of manufacture” and an “industrial economy” puts these developments in a different light. Jan de Vries points out that recent econometric studies show that actual economic growth, usually attributed to the new technologies, was much slower than earlier writers had assumed. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present, 7–8. For warehouses, Briggs, Victorian Cities, 106.

  26 For a still useful summary see Peter Mathias’s review of E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, A Population History of England, 1514–1871 (London, 1981) in Medical History 28.4 (April, 1984), 214–15.

  27 Price, British Society, 1680–1880, 24. Malthus quoted from the First Essay on Population (1798) by Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton, 1987), 20–21. Even Robert Owen, whose experience as a manufacturer gave him a precocious sense that machinery opened up a new prospect of “permanent abundance,” still thought workers were bound to remain in poverty as long as middlemen retained their central role in the economic system, since the income they extracted kept “productive workers” (a group that included masters) from receiving the full produce of their labor. See Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium, 35–64.

  28 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London and New York, 1988). Brewer acknowledges the importance of early centralization, and notes that the “system of
provincial governance” was strong because it “relied for its implementation on local dignitaries.” This amplified the “acceptance of the institutions of central government,” so that “when king, lords and commons acted in unison, they were an overwhelming force … The lack of resistance is attributable to the universal (if tacit) consent to taxes obtained through the approval of Parliament and unchallenged by regional estates.” 22.

  29 Brewer, The Sinews of Power, 75–86.

  30 Ibid., 126–33.

  31 Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000 (New York and London, 2001). This point is stressed in the thoughtful review of Ferguson’s book by Alan Milward in Times Literary Supplement 20 (April, 2001), 14.

  32 J. G. A. Pocock, “The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge and New York, 1985), 110.

  33 Brewer, The Sinews of Power, 233, 243, 248.

  34 See Brewer’s chapter on “Commercialization and Politics,” in Birth of a Consumer Society; 237–39 on the souvenirs; 260 on newspapers.

  35 Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), 286, 146, 270.

  36 Dror Wahrman, “National Society, Communal Culture: an Argument about the Recent Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Social History 17 (1992), 43–72; Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance, 289, 300–01. Wahrman associates this alternative with a split between those who accepted patrician power based in London and those who opposed it, but such a division is questionable in light of the use the Wilksites made of the national press and the growing national market as anti-aristocratic instruments.

  37 For the trade figures, see Colley, Britons, 68–69.

  38 Antoinette Burton’s Introduction to her edited volume, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, NC, and London, 2003), 5.

  39 See Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” ch. 10 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. ii: the Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall and Alaine Low (Oxford and New York, 1998).

  40 See Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: the Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, 1999), 35 for one instance of such a conflict. Schneer cites most of the literature that stresses the impact of imperial experience on British identity and everyday life in the nineteenth century, nn. 17–20, and in general shares the views of these writers, but he also notes the presence of anti-imperial voices (chs. 7–9). For an interesting and balanced discussion of the tensions between imperial ambition and attempts to preserve commitment to the values thought to justify it in the first half of the nineteenth century, see John Clive, Macaulay: the Shaping of the Historian (London, 1973), 305–15. Half a century later J. R. Seeley emphasized the conflict of opinions about empire in the well–known series of lectures he gave on The Expansion of England (London, 1883); see esp. 293–94.

  41 P. J. Marshall, “No fatal impact? The elusive history of imperial Britain,” Times Literary Supplement (March 12, 1993), 10. For the importance of rivalry with France and Germany in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, see, for instance, Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: a Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–1995 (London and New York, 1976; 3rd edn., 1996), ch. 3.

  3 Monarchical centralization, privilege, and conflict: France

  1 For the last part of this paragraph, Jean-Pierre Daviet, La Société industrielle en France, 1814–1914: Productions, échanges, répresentations (Paris, 1997), 83–84. For the earlier part, Gérard Noiriel, Les Ouvriers dan la société française: XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris, 1986), 12–14.

  2 Paul Butel, L’Economie française au xviiie siècle (Paris, 1993), 272–75.

  3 Ibid., and Robin Biggs, Early Modern France, 1560–1715 (Oxford and New York, 1998), 66–71.

  4 For physiocratic theory see A. R. J. Turgot’s “Eloge de Vincent de Gournay” and other writings in A. R. J. Turgot, Écrits économiques, with a preface by Bernard Cazes (Paris, 1970). Also Butel, L’Économie française, 46–47.

  5 For a focused and clear discussion of French agriculture, informed by recent work, see Gwynne Lewis, France, 1715–1804: Power and the People (Harlow, London, and New York, 2004), 62–66. On attempts to abolish guilds see Steven Laurence Kaplan, “Social Classification and Representation in the Corporate World of Eighteenth-Century France: Turgot’s ‘Carnival’” in Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice, ed. Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp (Ithaca and London, 1986), 176–228.

  6 François Caron, Histoire des chemins de fer en France, I: 1740–1883 (Paris, 1997), 50.

  7 Caron, Histoire des chemins de fer, 13–21. Bernard Lepetit, The Pre-industrial Urban System: France, 1740–1840, trans. Godfrey Rogers (Cambridge and New York, 1994).

  8 Szostak, The Role of Transportation in the Industrial Revolution (cited above in Chapter 2), 74–75.

  9 Lewis, France, 95; the quotation is from Peter Jones.

  10 For a summary of much literature, see Butel, L’Économie française, 61–67.

  11 Butel, L’Économie française, 228–31.

  12 Liana Vardi, The Land and the Loom: Peasants and Profit in Northern France, 1680–1800 (London, 1993), 11; partly quoted in Lewis, 97; see also Lewis, 107 (where she is wrongly named Linda), and Vardi, 199ff. for the social consequences.

  13 Butel, L’Économie française, 228–31 and 237–38.

  14 Ibid., 67.

  15 For this and the preceding paragraph, John Bosher, French Finances, 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1970). The figures on the ferme générale are from Lewis, France, 13. For a more recent account of French administrative history see François Burdeau, Histoire de l’administration française: du 18e au 20e siècle (2nd edn., Paris, 1994). Bosher’s account seems still to hold up for the Revolutionary period. On the later period Burdeau focuses mostly on the absence of social policy on the part of governments, thereby neglecting the important effect of government action on such things as railroad building. For a fine-grained study of the mix of continuity and change in the relations between state organs and local life, including tax-collecting, see Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York and London, 1994), esp. chs. 1 and 5.

  16 Pierre Goubert, The Ancien Régime: French Society 1600–1750, trans. Steve Cox (New York, 1973), 241.

  17 Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: from Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. William Doyle (Cambridge and New York, 1985), 114–15. For the rest of this paragraph, Lewis, France, 104–05 (who also cites Chaussinand-Nogaret). For British uses of the term “capitalist” to refer to “fundholder” see Gregory Claeys, Money, Machinery and the Millennium: from Moral Economy to Socialism, 1816–60 (Princeton, 1987), 29 and passim.

  18 See Lewis, France, and Goubert, Ancien Régime, 238–52.

  19 For bourgeois as a noble category see Joseph di Corcia, “Bourg, Bourgeois, Bourgeois de Paris from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History 50 (1978), 207–33. On the nobility and capitalism, Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility, ch. 5.

  20 For recent comments on this aspect of Old Regime society, see William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge, 2001), 148. William H. Sewell, jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: the Abbé Sièyes and What Is the Third Estate? (Durham, NC, and London, 1994), 64. I discuss this aspect of Old Regime life including some recent dissents from the view given above in the text, in The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge and New York, 2005), ch. 6. For evidence that bourgeois were treated more respectfully in French plays as the century went on, see Laurence Croq, “Les ‘bourgeois de Paris’ au XVIIIe siècle: identification d’une catégorie soicale polymorphe.” Thèse de doctor
at nouveau régime, Université de Paris I, Décembre, 1997 (there is a copy in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris).

  21 Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: an Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2003), 39. Robert C. Darnton, “A Bourgeois Puts His World in Order: the City as Text,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 124, 126, 128. John Shovlin, “Emulation in Eighteenth-Century French Economic Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36:2 (1993) 224–30. For the earlier history of such attitudes see Henry C. Clark, “Commerce, the Virtues, and the Public Sphere in Early Seventeenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 21:3 (1998), 415–40.

  22 Mathieu Marraud, De la Ville à l’ état: la bourgeoisie parisienne, XVIIe–XVIIIe-siècle (Paris, 2009). For the later situation see below Chapter 7.

  23 David Garrioch, The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690–1830 (Cambridge, MA, 1996). The figures for office holders are on 213. Garrioch does not ask whether they mean quite what they appear to, but he suggests that some of those employed in 1795 may have been “Grub street writers who had made a precarious living in the pre-Revolutionary capital.” Another vehicle for unity among Parisian bourgeois was provided by the monarchy’s designating some of them as bourgeois du roi or francs bourgeois. Until late in the seventeenth century the privileged bourgeois de Paris were often regarded as indistinguishable from aristocrats, but this situation changed as Louis XIV, pressed by the need to increase tax revenues, began to attack some of their privileges. See Laurence Croq, “Les ‘bourgeois de Paris’ au XVIIIe siècle,” 137–241 and conclusion; also his essay and Robert Descimon’s in Le Prince, la ville et le bourgeois, XIVE–XVIIIE SIèCLES, ed. L. Croq (Paris, 2004). These writings indicate that the old attachment to local quartier life still retained much of its force among Parisian bourgeois through the end of the eighteenth century and may have coexisted with the tendencies toward bourgeois unity rather than receding in the face of them.