Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  15 The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1952) para. 88 (vol. II, 124), but I have substituted the translation given in Veronique Zanetti, “Teleology and the Freedom of the Self,” in The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy, ed. Karl Ameriks and Dieter Sturma (Albany, 1995), 53.

  16 For a fuller elaboration and justification of this account of Kant, see ch. 9 of The Idea of the Self. The discussion there relies on a number of other writers, in particular Dieter Henrich, The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Richard L. Velkley (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1994), especially the essays “The Unity of Subjectivity” and “The Concept of Moral Insight”; Henry Allison, “Spontaneity and Autonomy in Kant’s Conception of the Self,” in The Modern Subject, ed. Ameriks and Sturma, 11–30; and John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago and London, 2002). Kant introduced the same teleological principle appealed to in the Critique of Judgment into history in his well-known essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,” in The Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel Kant’s Moral and Political Writings, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York, 1949).

  17 The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, ed. J. P. Mayer (London, 1948), 83.

  18 Kant, “The Contest of Faculties,” in Kant’s Political Writings, trans. H.B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge, 1970), 184–87.

  19 For the relations between Godwin and Malthus and for these comments, see Mason, Victorian Sexuality, 262–74.

  20 They give this title to ch. 6 of The Facts of Life. For a similar perspective on nineteenth-century American sexual culture see the remarkable study by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2002). Painting a vivid and wide-ranging picture of alternative attitudes toward sex, she speaks of “competing conversations” and distinct “frameworks” within which very different ideas found expression.

  21 See Mason, Victorian Sexuality, 20–32 and Porter and Hall, The Facts of Life, 126–27. Morality in the French working class both before and after the Revolution seems to have mixed strict appeals to discipline and restraint with much violent and ribald language and behavior; see William H. Sewell, jr., Work and Revolution: the Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambidge and New York, 1980), and Robert C. Darnton, “Workers Revolt: the Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin,” ch. 2 of The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984).

  22 Françoise Barett-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality, Class and Gender in Nineteenth-Century London, trans. John Howe (London and New York 1991), e.g. 24, 33. For similar views see Mason, Victorian Sexuality, 141–43.

  23 Mason, Victorian Sexuality, 15–43; 19ff. for Kingsley.

  24 Porter and Hall, The Facts of Life, 127. On the French groups see Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris: Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Comte (Cambridge, MA, 1962; New York, 1965).

  25 The letter is quoted by Alice S. Rossi in her introduction to John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, Essays on Sex Equality (Chicago and London, 1970), 50.

  26 Manuel The Prophets of Paris, 289–93. Auguste Comte and Positivism: the Essential Writings, ed. Gertrude Lenzer (New York, 1975), 379.

  27 James Smith Allen, Poignant Relations: Three Modern French Women (Baltimore and London, 2000), 147.

  28 Porter and Hall, The Facts of Life, discuss both books and their circulation. For Venette’s influence in France and the fears about it see Jean Flouret, Nicolas Venette, médecin rochelais, 1633–1698 (La Rochelle, 1992), who gives 1668 as the date of the first edition. The earliest edition in the Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue is 1671. For Venette’s influence in Germany see Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca and London, 1996), 246. (She gives 1711 as the date of the earliest German version, but I have found a reference to a Leipzig edition of 1698 in a bookseller’s catalogue. She rightly notes that some of its many editions were “knock-offs” by others.)

  29 Porter and Hall, The Facts of Life, 128. Flouret, Nicolas Venette, 16–17.

  30 Mason, Victorian Sexuality, 217. Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York and Oxford, 1993), 69. Gay, Education of the Senses, esp. part I. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London, 1999), 57–58.

  31 Mason, Victorian Sexuality, 218–20; Alain Corbin notes that “vigorous intercourse was believed to increase the likelihood of successful conception” in France too, Histoire de la vie privé, IV, 591.

  32 Nye Masculinity, 69. Mason, Victorian Sexuality, 195–96, 217–27.

  33 Mason, Victorian Sexuality, 116–18. For an example of a French woman who felt liberated by the chance marriage gave her to go about by herself in public see Mémoires de Madame Lafarge, née Marie Cappelle, écrits par elle-même (Paris, 1867), 183–84. Anne Martin-Fugier, La Bourgeoise: femme au temps de Paul Bourget (Paris, 1983), 86–92.

  34 Gustave Droz, Monsieur, Madame, et Bébé (Paris, 1884), 125–26, 131–33, 147–49. The information given about editions and translations comes from the online catalogues of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the New York Public Library and the British Library.

  35 Droz, 96–102.

  36 See Yvonne Knibiehler, “L’Éducation sexuelle des filles au XXe siècle,” in Le Temps des jeunes filles, ed. Gabrielle Houbre (Paris, 1996), 139–60. A book published in 1885 and partly inspired by Monsieur, Madame et Bébé, did propose sex education as a defense against the dangers of the wedding night, but only for male students, not for young women. See Dr. Charles Montalban, [pseudonym of Charles Thomas-Caraman] La Petite Bible des jeunes époux, suivie de considérations sur la possibilité d’avoir un Garçon ou une Fille, et de l’examen des doctrines, théories, fictions émises depuis Hippocrate jusqu’à la découverte de la loi de l’alternance des germes ou ovules (Paris, 1885). In Germany the key figure was Helene Stöcker. See Gudrun Hammelmann, Helene Stöcker, der “Bund für Mutterschütz,” und “Die Neue Generation” (Frankfurt am Main, 1998) and the works cited below, n. 47.

  37 The cartoon in La Vie parisienne appeared in the issue of October 17, 1866. For the Third Republic see Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York and Oxford, 1993), 81–82.

  38 For the traditional view see for instance Laure Adler, Secrets d’Alcove: Histoire du couple, 1830–1930 (Paris, 1983), ch. 2, and Denis Bertholet, Le Bourgeois dans tous ses états: le roman familial de la Belle Epoque (Paris, 1987). Both rely largely on literary accounts. Anne-Marie Sohn, Du premier baiser à l’acove: la sexualité des Français au quotidien (1850–1950) (Paris, 1996), 221–24.

  39 Laure Adler in the book cited just above gives a number of examples of the genre, but in my view without sufficiently crediting nineteenth-century people for such concerns.

  40 The diary was given to Denis Berthelot by Mireille de Bondeli’s descendants; see Le Bourgeois dans tous ses états, 56–77. Betholet provides much interesting information on this subject, but I think his desire to see both incipient revolt and repressed sexual feeling in the text lead him astray.

  41 Alain Corbin, “Backstage,” 594–602.

  42 Mason, Victorian Sexuality, 120–22, and Victorian Attitudes, ch. 4.

  43 Ibid., 212 for the quotation.

  44 Mason, Victorian Attitudes, 189–213; the quotation is on 211. There is now a fine biography of Carpenter by Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: a Life of Liberty and Love (London, 2009). For the reaction to Burton’s translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night see the collection of press notices he assembled in the appendix to Supplemental Nights, vol. VII (London, 1887), 457–500. In 1883 Burton and some friends had succeeded in getting an English translation of the Kama Sutra published in London, but only by pretending it had been printed in Benares, and it receiv
ed little attention.

  45 Leon Blum, Du mariage (Paris, 1907).

  46 For the discussion see section 4 of ch. 1 (46ff. of the Flammarion, 1978 edn.) of La Garçonne. For some indications of the polarization of discussion in France before World War I, see Corbin, “Backstage,” 608–09. An organization called L’Union de l’action morale conducted various campaigns for decency in the 1890s, notably against publicity posters that employed suggestive images. See Christian-Marc Bosséno, “Le Répertoire du grand écran,” in La Culture de masse en France de la Belle Époque à aujourd’hui, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris, 2002), 157 and the literature he cites.

  47 See Tracie Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890–1930 (Ithaca and London, 2008), 21–22 on the Ethical Culture Society; and Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: anti-politics and the Search for Alternatives (Cambridge, MA, 2000), as well as Repp’s essay “Sexualkrise und Rasse”: Feminist Eugenics at the Fin de Siècle,” in Germany at the fin de siècle: culture, politics, and ideas, ed. Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld (Baton Rouge, LA, 2004), 102–26.

  48 Gay, Education of the Senses, 256ff. Corbin, “Backstage,” 600–01. Mason, Victorian Attitudes, 138–66, esp. 146ff., and 213ff. Sohn, Du premier baiser, 308–09.

  49 Histoire de la vie privée, IV, 598, 605–8. Adler, Secrets d’alcove, 166.

  50 For a comprehensive discussion of the increasing presence of women in the public spaces of later nineteenth-century cities see Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge and New York, 2008), ch. 6. On Germany, where the phenomenon came a bit later than to France, see Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1996), 63–66.

  51 Therborn, Between Sex and Power, 139.

  52 Sohn, Du premier baiser, 37; 163–66; 174.

  53 Peter Fryer, Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery (London, 1963), see esp. 76–78, 83.

  54 Sohn, Du premier baiser, 20, 153.

  55 Sohn, ibid., 23–37.

  56 Hanley, “Family and State in Early Modern France,” in Connecting Spheres, ed. Boxer and Quataert, 54. Hunt’s work is discussed earlier in this chapter.

  11 Jews as bourgeois and network people

  1 For the spread of connections between Jews in various places during the era of Ghettoization, see Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 (Oxford, 1985), 70–86; for the effect of this situation on many aspects of Jewish life, including marriage practices, see Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford, 1991).

  2 Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein, with an introduction by Bert F. Hoselitz (Glencoe, IL, 1951), 172–75.

  3 Ibid., 177, 181, 225–38.

  4 Jonathan Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires, 1540–1740 (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne, 2002), 458. Evelyne Oliel-Grausz, “Networks and Communication in the Sephardi Diaspora: an Added Dimension to the Concept of Port Jews and Port Jewries,” in Jews and Port Cities 1590–1990: Commerce, Community, and Cosmopolitanism, ed. David Cesarani and Gemma Romain (London and Portland, OR, 2006), 61–76. Other studies in the same volume also contribute information on this score.

  5 Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656–2000 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), 92–93.

  6 David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1740–1840 (Oxford and New York, 1987), 109–10. Simone Lässig makes the transformation out to be somewhat slower but with the same results; see Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kaptal und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2004), 601.

  7 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1958), 181.

  8 This and the previous paragraph rely on Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism; 132 for the passages quoted.

  9 Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 172.

  10 In England, where government policy never turned against Jews after their readmission in the 1650s, anti-Jewish sentiments were still widespread; see Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 70–71.

  11 Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 173, 160.

  12 Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1977), 175.

  13 For these developments see Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora, 247–49.

  14 Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 74.

  15 For these debates see David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven and London, 1994), ch. 1 (35 and 43 for the passages quoted). Feldman also provides a good account of anti-Semitic attitudes in Victorian England (ch. 4 and passim; see 76 for Macaulay’s letter), and of the greater emphasis placed on them by recent historians critical of the too-rosy picture presented by earlier writers such as Cecil Roth.

  16 Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 54–62. For a similar comparison between English and German Jewish relations to the countries they inhabited see David Sorkin’s conclusion to The Transformation of German Jewry.

  17 Ibid., 115, 108–09.

  18 Michael Graetz, Les Juifs en France au XIXième siècle: de la révolution française à l’alliance israélite universelle, trans. from the Hebrew by Salomon Malka (Paris, 1982), esp. 45. There is a useful mise au point available online: Jean-Marc Chouraqui, “Les Communautés juives face au processus de l’Émancipation”, in Rives nord-méditerranéennes, Révolution et minorités religieuses, http://rives.revues.org/document407.html.

  19 Graetz, Les Juifs en France au XIXIèME SIèCLE, 64–78. Paula E. Hyman, “The Social Contexts of Assimilation: Village Jews and City Jews in Alsace,” in Assimilation and Community: the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge and New York, 1992), 110–29. There is a good general account of mid-nineteenth-century Jewish life in Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998), ch. 4.

  20 See Michael Graetz, “The History of an Estrangement between Two Jewish Communities: German and French Jewry during the Nineteenth Century,” in Toward Modernity: the European Jewish Model, ed. Jacob Katz (New Brunswick, NJ, and Oxford, 1987), 159–69.

  21 Phyllis Cohen Albert, “Israelite and Jew: How Did Nineteenth-century French Jews Understand Assimilation?” in Assimilation and Community: the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge and New York, 1992), 88–109.

  22 Albert discusses Lazare’s place in this history in the article just cited. For his career, see Nelly Wilson, Bernard Lazare: antisemitism and the problem of jewish identity in nineteenth-century France (Cambridge and New York, 1978), and Jean-Denis Bredin, Bernard Lazare (Paris, 1992).

  23 It is for this reason that I think Yuri Slezkine is wrong to equate Jews with modernity in his imaginative and thoughtful book The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2004). That Jews were able to play the special role they did in the Russian Revolution, a topic on which he provides valuable illumination, seems to me to tell more about the special conditions of Russian life than about modernity in general. Modernity is not a condition of pure fluidity (“Mercurian” in Slezkine’s idiom), because it relies even more than earlier forms of life on large organized structures of interaction. To describe these structures as autonomous in the sense developed here is to recognize in them some of the features that Slezkine highlights, but without assimilating them to a “Mercurian” fluidity. We will return to these questions in the Conclusion to this book.

  24 See above, Chapter 4.

  25 Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 29–30.

  26 Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2004), 580–94. On the ties between German Jews and England in this period
see Todd M. Endelman, “German Jews in Victorian England: a Study in Drift and Defection,” in Assimilation and Community, 57–87.