Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  35 Cécile Dauphin, “Les Manuels épistolaires au xixe siècle,” in La Correspondance, 238. For a similar point see also Roger Charter, “Des secrétaires pour le peuple?” in the same volume, 198–203.

  36 Marie-Claire Grassi, “La Correspondance comme discours du privé au XVIIIè Siècle,” in L’Épistolarité à travers les siecles, ed. Mireille Bossis and Charles A. Porter (Stuttgart, 1990), 180–83.

  37 Michelle Perrot in From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War: a History of Private Life, IV, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 132. For an example of such a reticence see Marie Dolle-Ollier, “Les Silences de la correspondance de Victor Segalen,” in Les Écritures de l’intime: la correspondance et le journal, Actes du colloque de Brest, October 23–25, 1997, ed. Pierre-Jean Dufief (Paris, 2000), 139–48.

  38 Cited in Jean-Michel Gaillard, Jules Ferry (Paris, 1989), 38–39. For similar examples of highly emotional language in letters between siblings and cousins see Christopher H. Johnson’s articles, “Das Geschwister Archipel: Brüder-Schwester-Liebe und Klassenformation im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts,” L’Homme. Zeitschift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 13:1 (2002), 50–67; and “Kinship, Civil Society, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Vannes,” unpublished paper.

  39 Christine Planté “L’Intime comme valeur publique,”in La Lettre à la croisée de l’individuel et du social, ed. Mireille Bossis (Paris, 1994), esp. 87–89.

  40 James Johnson, Listening in Paris: a Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), parts I and II.

  41 For Ella, McVeigh, “Musician as Concert promoter,” 83. Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class, 138–48; the quoted passage, 146. For the United States, Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1988), 186–95. I think, however, that Levine’s description of conductors’ intentions as “to render audiences docile” (189) understates the degree to which numbers of listeners themselves were part of the campaign, in America as well as in Europe, as Levine himself recognizes in other connections. I will return to the question of how this shift affected the relations between “popular” and “high” culture in Chapter 13.

  42 Johnson, Listening in Paris, 228–29, 231–33.

  43 Raynor, 74. Edward Rothstein, “Connections: Orchestras Still Preserve the Myths, but Who Cares Now?” in the New York Times, February 10, 2001. Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class, 150.

  44 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 93, 51. Dahlhaus finds this attitude toward listening emerging in the 1790s, the decade in which Haydn wrote his final symphonies, in London. Like Gluck’s operas they were praised for their ability to evoke and represent feeling and by early in the nineteenth century his compositions would be increasingly re-evaluated as “pure music,” generated from their own internal elements. Important features of Haydn’s work always marked it as generated by the relations between its own motivic elements, despite the external references it sometimes announced; see Pierre Barbaud, Haydn, trans. Kathrine Sorley Walker (New York and London, 1959). For his public re-evaluation in this direction, Johnson, Listening in Paris, 271. Peter Gay, The Naked Heart (New York, 1995), 15–19.

  45 Gay, The Naked Heart, 26–28. Just how far we should recognize the presence of Beethoven’s special personality, with its vulnerabilities, idiosyncrasies, and obsessions in his music has been a matter of debate. The best account I know that seeks to preserve the independence of Beethoven’s creative power while still recognizing how closely it was tied to his peculiar individuality (much in the manner Kant had in mind) is Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: the Music and the Life (New York and London, 2003), where the issue is explicitly discussed, 15–21. See also his discussion of Beethoven and Wackenröder, 172–73.

  46 Budde, Auf dem Weg ins Bürgerleben, 142. For the individuality of responses recognized from late in the eighteenth century, see Johnson, Listening, 272–74. Gunn notes that in Manchester the inner and suggestive nature of music was given emphasis in concert programs, but that collective self-absorption was to take precedence over individual displays of emotion.

  47 John Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge and New York, 2004), 212. Gay, The Naked Heart, 23.

  48 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks. The Decline of a Family, trans. John E. Woods (New York, 1993), 495, 716.

  13 Bourgeois and others

  1 Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of the Museum: What the Visitors Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1974), 4, 15. Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge and New York, 1994), 7–8.

  2 McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, 9–12.

  3 Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979), trans. by Richard Nice as Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA, 1984). Among those who have applied his views to the history of museums are Nick Prior, “Museums: Leisure between State and Distinction,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford and New York, 2002), 27–44, and Daniel J. Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1989), although both offer materials that can be employed to support a different reading.

  4 Seth Koven, “The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing,” in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (Minneapolis, 1994), 22–46.

  5 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1988), 203–08 for the quoted passages.

  6 Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New York, 2002), 97–99. Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: an American History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994), esp. 322–24, 210–11.

  7 See Bourdieu, La Distinction, cited above, and the literature noted just above, n. 3.

  8 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg, 2nd edn. (London and New York, 1990), 439–40, 442. The translation they give, however, does not quite convey the German text, which reads: “Die scheinbare Gleichheit, mit der sich der Bildungsstoff jedem bietet, der ihn ergreifen will…” (Philosophie des Geldes, 2nd edn., Leipzig, 1907, 493).

  9 Ibid. (English version), 291.

  10 See the discussion of cultural goods in Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Marekts and Freedom (New Haven and London, 2006), 36–37. I will return to some of the issues that arise from this notion, and that Benkler treats, in the Conclusion.

  11 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London, 2001).

  12 Coombes is quoted by Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: the Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2006), 2.

  13 Daumard, Les Bourgeois et la bourgeoisie en France, 33–34.

  14 Angelika Linke, “Zum Sprachgebrauch des Bürgertums im 19. Jahrhundert. Überlegungen zur kultursemiotischen Funktion des Sprachverhaltens,” in Rainer Wimmer, ed., Das 19. Jahrhundert: Sprachgeschichtliche Würzeln des heutigen Deutsch (Berlin and New York, 1991), 250–81; 255 for the quotation and the reference to Simmel.

  15 K. C. Phillipps, Language and Class in Victorian England (London and New York, 1984), 67–70. The quotation from Middlemarch comes from ch. 56.

  16 Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, vol. I: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language (London, 1971), 108. Meredith is quoted by Phillipps, Language and Class in Victorian England, 36–37, who applies the description to aristocrats as well.

  17 The passage is quoted from M. E. Loane, The Next Street but One (London, 1907), ch. 1, by Phillipps, Language and Class in Victorian England, 81. Loane wrote a number of books about working-class life before World War I.

&nb
sp; 18 For Germany see Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture. Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York, 1985).

  19 David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914 (Cambridge and New York, 1989), 14–15, 273–74, 279. Deborah Reed-Danahay, Education and Identity in Rural France (Cambridge and New York, 1996). Phillipps notes (88) that in 1888 a report to the English Dialect Society said that children sent to the new schools set up by the Education Act of 1870 were learning correct grammar and pronunciation there and could use it at home but seldom did, reverting to the speech of their parents “at home and among [their] fellows.” On the basis of the analysis he offers, Vincent comes to a conclusion about working-class intellectuals somewhat at odds with the one toward which Jonathan Rose works in the book cited just above: “The reciprocal relationships between individual and collective inquiry, between books and deprivation, and between literary and oral communication ensured that the working-class intellectual was unable to abstract himself completely from the lives of those with whom he lived and worked” (263). For a critique of the longstanding notion that the Third Republic’s schools were hostile to popular culture and language, see Jean-François Chanet, L’École républicaine et les petites patries, Préface de Mona Ozouf (Paris, 1996).

  20 A point developed in a too rigidly theoretical way but with much interesting information by Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “High/Low and Other Dichotomies,” in High and Low Cultures: German Attempts at Mediation, ed. Reinhod Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison, WI, 1994), 3–18.

  21 There were, to be sure, popular novels and writers known for producing them earlier, but the subject matter was usually quite different, often involving upper-class characters and milieus; their appeal was more like that of the popular letter collections discussed in Chapter 12, and the audience was much narrower, given the lower level of literacy in society as a whole. For one interesting account, see Richard Switzer, Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon et le roman populaire Français de 1800 à 1830 (Toulouse, 1962).

  22 Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise our Talents: the Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, MA and London, 2006), ch. 1. Some publishers had used readers earlier, but their numbers expanded in the fin-de-siècle: William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, 160.

  23 Anne-Marie Thiesse, Le Roman du quotidien. Lecteurs et lectures populaires à la belle époque (Paris, 1984).

  24 Jean-Yves Mollier, “Le Parfum de la belle époque,” in La Culture de masse en France de la belle époque à aujourd’hui, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris, 2002), 72–115. Michael Beaussenat Palmer, Des Petits Journaux aux grandes agences: naissance du journalisme moderne, 1863–1914 (Paris, 1983). Le Fait divers, catalogue of the exhibition held at the Musée national des arts et traditions populaires, November 19, 1982 to April 18, 1983, by Alain Monestier and Jacques Cheyronnaud (Paris, 1982). Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), ch. 6. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998), ch. 1.

  25 Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1996), esp. 59–86.

  26 See Terry Pinkard, Hegel: a Biography (Cambridge and New York, 2001), 242. Fritzsche emphasizes this change, Reading Berlin 1900, 59.

  27 As it promised in the prospectus published in the paper’s first number, November 25, 1825, although the editors recognized the emotional kinship of its reportage with what readers sought in fiction.

  28 For an insightful recent account of this interest see Edward Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2010).

  29 Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 26, 30.

  30 Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900, 212.

  31 See ibid., 73, 130. That workers were in some sense “depoliticized” by such involvements may be true in a way, but we need to guard against preserving the questionable assumption that to be politicized must be the natural state or destiny of workers, rather than one among varied and diverse possibilities.

  32 The best comprehensive history of the early French cinema is Richard Abel, The Ciné goes to Town: French Cinema 1896–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994), see xiv–xv for the distinction between the two phases in early cinema history. Peter Jelavich, “‘Darf ich mich hier amüsieren?’ Bürgertum und früher Film,” in Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel, ed. Manfred Hettling und Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, (Göttingen, 2000), 282–303 (in English in Germany at the fin de siècle: culture, politics, and ideas, ed. Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld (Baton Rouge, LA, 2004), 227–49. Christophe Prochasson, “De la culture des foules à la culture des masses,” in Choix culturels et memoire, vol. III of Histoire de la France, ed. André Burguière and Jacques Revel (Paris, 1993; paper edn., 2000), 183–232, where Gide is quoted on 211. For relations between intellectuals and movies in Germany see Adelheid von Saldern, “Popular Culture: an Immense Challenge in the Weimar Republic,” in The Challenge of Modernity: German Social and Cultural Studies, 1890–1960, trans. Bruce Little (Ann Arbor, 2002), 278–79.

  33 Christian-Marc Bosséno, “Le Répertoire du grand écran: le cinéma ‘par ailleurs’” in La Culture de masse en France de la belle époque àaujourd’hui, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris, 2002), 157–219, as well as the article of Jean-Yves Mollier already cited from the same volume. There is much more detail in Richard Abel’s account cited in the previous note.

  34 For a good summary see Ludovic Tournès, “Reproduire l’oeuvre: la nouvelle économie musicale,” in La Culture de masse en France, 220–58. On the provincial music halls see Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainments and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (New Haven and London, 1985), 94.

  35 Lenard R. Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871–1914 (Baltimore and London, 1984), 134.

  36 This paragraph summarizes the account of the cabarets I give in Bohemian Paris, ch. 8.

  37 This account of Bruant draws on the longer one in Bohemian Paris, 235–39, where more attention is paid to the strictly political side of his career.

  38 Ludovic Tournès, “Reproduire l’oeuvre: la nouvelle économie musicale,” in La Culture de masse en France, 220–58.

  39 Mollier, “Le Parfum de la belle époque,” 89–90.

  40 David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 296–300.

  41 In addition to Blackbourn, see Saldern, “Popular Culture,” cited above. On the Heinze Law see Peter Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 141–42. For France see Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: from the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton and Oxford, 2010), ch. 4.

  42 Saldern’s conclusion, “Popular Culture,” 295–97. But I think she is wrong on the basis of her own evidence to attribute confusion and uncertainty only or chiefly to bourgeois figures and circles: Benjamin was at least as deluded. For a similar and earlier caution about attributing too much power to popular culture from a figure who was an acute critic of it, see Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957, and later edns.), 131, 250–51.

  43 Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, I: ARTS DE FAIRE (Paris, 1980), trans. by Stephen Rendall as The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984).

  14 Bourgeois life and the avant-garde

  1 Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (New York, 1968), 38.

  2 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1952), para. 247, p. 151.

  3 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 4th edn., London, 1773 [1st edn., 1767], 15, 12.

  4 Ibid., 67–68. Cf. also 81: Happiness “arises more from the pursuit, than from the attainment of any end whatever … it depends more on the degree in which our minds are properly employed, than it does on the circumstances in which we are destined to act, on the materials which are placed
in our hands, or the tools with which we are furnished.” Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (reprint of the Glasgow edn. of Smith’s Works, Indianapolis, 1984), IV:i, 10; 183. The kinship with which W.H. Riehl’s view of what modern society bürgerlich should also be noted.

  5 Breton’s appreciation of Duchamp can be found in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York, 1951), 209–11; there is an abridged version in The Autobiography of Surrealism, ed. Marcel Jean (New York, 1980), 84–86. I have substituted “crab-apple tree” for the “manchineel tree” of the original in the hope of making the meaning more evident.

  6 Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford, 1987), 88–89.