The point holds even more clearly for the appearance in these same years of the term bourgeoisie used in a more critical and pejorative sense, as a kind of new aristocracy separate from the mass of French people, and either standing in the way of further progress or exploiting the work of others for their own profit. The most influential source of this usage was Saint-Simon, who arrived at it only by stages. Casting about during the early Restoration for an explanation of the Revolution’s failure to establish a regime devoted to developing l’industrie and ending privilege and domination, he found it in a conception of social division based on a distinction between idle and productive classes (oisifs and industriels) much as had Sièyes. Saint-Simon assigned the great majority of his countrymen to the category of producers, at one point estimating it at 96 percent of the population. What had prevented the Revolution from establishing an order in accord with their activities and principles was that the political leaders of the 1790s had not been industriels but Old Regime office holders and hangers-on, people he characterized variously as légistes, avocats, métaphysiciens, all of them linked to the monarchy and aristocracy, and infused with their spirit of domination. That he did not label such people bourgeois was partly due to the close ties he still maintained to liberal economists and publicists, particularly Thierry, who portrayed the bourgeoisie he championed as similarly encompassing the great majority of Frenchmen, making it more or less equivalent to Saint-Simon’s industriels.
But Saint-Simon’s ties to liberals weakened as he saw how willing were Guizot and those close to him to work with the restored Bourbon regime. Put off by such cozying up to the aristocracy, Saint-Simon now began to equate the bourgeois the liberals were claiming to represent with those he blamed for the failure of the Revolution. The bourgeois he targeted included “soldiers who were not noble, lawyers who were commoners, and rentiers who were not privileged,” all people whose roots lay outside the dominant groups of the Old Regime, but who did well in it and thus became its supporters. It was a motley assemblage, but one he saw as unified by failure to stand on the side of social and political progress. Such bourgeois had little or no connection to the new “industrious” society Saint-Simon identified with the future, and it was this separation that accounted for the narrow results of the Revolution. Saint-Simon’s followers picked up on this usage in the years after 1830, picturing bourgeois not just as idlers but as exploiters of the great mass of productive people, a narrow class that sought to grow rich on the work of others, and whose power blocked the coming of the new society where the fruits of heightened productivity would include not just general well-being but also social justice as well. Many elements of later critical views of the bourgeois as a class had their roots here, and the story of Saint-Simon’s evolving thinking and vocabulary highlights just how fluid and uncertain the term bourgeois was in the moment when it was becoming part of the political vocabulary.52
Once the new regime was established in 1830, its ruling groups turned out to resemble Saint-Simon’s narrow and restricted image of the bourgeoisie more than the expansive and inclusive one proposed by liberals such as Thierry. Guizot had propounded a similarly limited but more positively toned image of the group even before 1830, and the qualifications established for voting and office-holding in the July Monarchy hewed close to it. Under the Restoration perhaps 100,000 people, or around one percent of the population had the right to vote; the number was increased by about two-thirds in 1830, and probably reached something between 200,00 and 300,000 (in a population of between 30 million and 40 million) by 1848. England, with a much smaller population, had something over 400,000 voters after 1832. Although it makes little sense to say that the middle class or bourgeoisie as a whole held power in either country, the French “Bourgeois Monarchy” was clearly a much narrower regime than the one across the Channel; many people whose bourgeois status was incontestable could not vote (much less run for office, since requirements for doing so were still higher). And since the government (of which Guizot was the prime minister through most of the 1840s) determinedly resisted calls to extend the suffrage, many of its opponents were no less bourgeois than those it placed in power. The campaigns that eventually led to the crisis of February, 1848, were organized mostly by middle-class politicians and writers. By dividing France into the “legal country” (pays legal) that was enfranchised and the remainder (the pays réel) that was not, the regime drew a line through the general category of “bourgeois” much like the one set up by the contrast between ordinary town-dwellers and the privileged among them before the Revolution.
Guizot became notorious for rejecting one demand for suffrage extension with the retort “enrichissez-vous,” easily taken as a motto of bourgeois materialism. Like his historical work, however, Guizot’s political notions focused less on the bourgeoisie as an economic force than on the professional and administrative groups who still predominated within it. His recommendation that those in search of political rights should earn them by enriching themselves included the proviso “by work and saving,” and it was the moral qualities made possible by economic independence he valued, not mere material power. With his “doctrinaire” associates, Guizot justified suffrage restrictions on more sophisticated and revealing grounds, marshaling two closely linked arguments noteworthy for the continuities they displayed with pre-Revolutionary ideas and attitudes. One was that it was “reason” not interest that should govern society, as well as constitute public opinion; the second was that the realization of freedom required the intervention of political power: society needed to have the state operate inside it in order to become free.
Like other French liberals at the time, Guizot regarded France as a particularly divided and contentious place, as both the outbreak of the Revolution and its continued influence in French life showed. Whereas English politics proceeded through compromise, with parties willing to make and accept concessions to and from each other, France needed a stronger and more coercive mode of government because it was divided by quarrels between “the most hostile interests, the most violent passions, the most contrary intentions.” In such a place, the restricted franchise was necessary in order to assure that power rested with those whose work did not tie them to everyday needs and the passions they aroused, and who had sufficient leisure and intelligence to exercise self-control and cultivate rationality. Included in this group were both upper bourgeois and aristocrats, and the regime Guizot served drew on both: although the contentious spirit that dominated public life for a few years following the upheaval of July, 1830, frightened many aristocratic supporters of the Bourbons out of politics, the government welcomed many of them back as time went on, re-establishing something like the social synthesis sought by the early Restoration (which Guizot himself had served until he was forced out after 1820). The “Bourgeois Monarchy” was dominated by the Old Regime’s elite of privilege, reconstituted in the name of the bourgeois element that the second phase of the Restoration had sought to exclude from it.53
An important constituent of the political system Guizot believed the July Monarchy represented, and an essential vehicle for the rationality and liberty he thought it made possible, was public opinion. Like earlier liberals, Guizot described the press as the means by which citizens communicate freely with each other and become aware of their common concerns, in the process enlightening authority about the nation’s condition and beliefs. But he also approved of the government’s using the press to form and lead opinion, drawing people away from their particular interests toward what the state knew to be the general interest. Public opinion was partly a product of discussion and exchange, but it was also, and essentially, a means by which government knit an otherwise scattered and contentious society together, bringing it toward a unity of rational understanding. And since unity and rationality were the grounds of freedom, the state’s ability to shape the public opinion it required was essential to the country’s enjoyment of liberty.54
What made it possible for the stat
e to nurture freedom at the same time it imposed direction was its quality of lying at once outside society and within it. At certain moments in his writings and speeches, Guizot seems to describe society in terms that suggest its autonomy from political power: society is capable of existing independently of any exterior force, many kinds of human relations go on without any reference to outside authority, and the range of these kinds of interactions grows wider as civilization advances. But it turns out that Guizot all along premises this autonomy of social life on the presence of a species of government within society itself, which comprised an essential component of social interaction. Society contains its own system of regulative powers in which “heads” give guidance to “members”: in the family, in communities, in formal and informal activities of all kinds. Thus government is able to serve as a kind of mirror of social existence, reflecting it, summing it up, making its common features manifest. Pierre Rosanvallon sees a kind of Hegelian substrate to Guizot’s thinking: for both thinkers the state constituted at once the underlying presupposition of social life and the higher form to which it tends. In contrast to Hegel, however, Guizot did not locate the unity the state imparts to society in the monarch (although he assumed that there would and should be one) or in any institutional locus, but in what he called “an abstract unity that can only produce and realize itself through the concourse of all the intelligences and forces within which its elements are scattered.”55
Such an image of the relations between state and nation recalls Sieyès, who rested the ability of the Third Estate to sustain national life on the presence within it of a class of officials whose task in the division of labor is to represent the whole, thus both framing and animating the “network of representations” through which social and economic exchanges take place. Guizot’s theory establishes a similar synergy between government and society, the first giving stability and energy to the second by realizing its potential unity in a self-representation that reflects its own life back in a more developed form. In modern life social power is decentralized, spread throughout society, but a common spirit of civilization and progress animates all these separate points, preparing them to be drawn together by the active political force that realizes their unity. Because the spirit that the state diffuses into the separate regions of local life is the synthesis of all the nation’s potential sources of unity, state power does not dampen local energies, it liberates them, and “a large administrative organization, general, regular, and centralized” will serve to establish “a regime of political liberty.” As Rosanvallon puts it, what we find in Guizot’s liberalism is no “invisible hand” in the manner of Smith, but an “irresistible hand” that, by bringing society to unity and reason, makes political liberty possible.56
Thus both the regime that established “bourgeois” as a term in the European political vocabulary and the political theory that justified it testify to the continuing weight that the forms of integration characteristic of the ancien régime maintained in nineteenth-century France. Paul Butel’s observation that in eighteenth-century political practice (as in physiocratic theory) “monarchical interventionism and liberal policy were closely allied” applies just as well to Guizot’s theory of society and government: without the state’s nurture and direction of public opinion and its ability to draw society’s scattered bits and pieces of rationality together in one central place, the country’s potential to advance and to rule itself would remain unrealized. It was just this equation of liberty with centralized authority that Tocqueville deplored as the chief barrier to the development of effective institutions of self-government in his country, the consequence of the bourgeoisie’s having learned politics in the same school of monarchical interventionism as the aristocracy. France would eventually evolve other institutions and forms of political practice, making Tocqueville’s pessimism less applicable. Like the country’s economic transformation, however, they would emerge in the space created by the more extended and thicker networks made possible by railroad building and telegraphy, providing an effective basis for national integration of a kind about which Guizot, like the ponts et chaussées officials of the Old Regime, could only dream. We shall see later on how this space allowed France to confront the complex fabric of its past in new ways.
4 Localism, state-building, and Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Germany
Fragmentation, consolidation, and the Bürgertum
No less paradoxical than the status of England as both the most bourgeois country and the least, or the case of France as at once the homeland of modern revolution and the country whose transformation during the nineteenth century was most gradual and the least complete, is the case of Germany. By many measures the country of the three where bourgeois groups retained their pre-modern features for the longest time, and where middle-class influence over the direction of government policy was weakest, it was nonetheless the place where the characterization of modern society and politics as “bourgeois” first found clear expression.
In its fully fledged form the notion only emerged during the 1840s, in the writings of Marx and Engels, and soon after, rather differently, in their contemporary W. H. Riehl (whom we will meet later in this chapter). But all of them relied greatly on Hegel’s theorization of bürgerliche Gesellschaft in his Philosophy of Right of 1821. In Hegel as in his German predecessors, bürgerliche Gesellschaft had a meaning best rendered in English as “civil society” rather than “bourgeois society” (Bürger also means a citizen in German), and their use of the term owed much to earlier discussions about it in other countries, notably eighteenth-century Scotland. But Hegel’s theorization differed from these others in a way that revealed its peculiarly German lineage. As will be seen when we consider his analysis in a bit more detail later on, he made a clearer distinction between civil society and the state than earlier thinkers did. The general notion of civil society as an organized form of social life governed by laws made it seem natural to consider political authority as part of it; but rulers and administrators in Germany sowed the seeds of their separation by taking bürgerliche Gesellschaft as an object of state action and policy, focusing on social relations and private behavior as targets of their efforts to improve and develop their territories. Hegel’s clear distinction between society and the state gave more explicit theoretical form to this division. In doing so he provided the starting point from which Marx, in a dialectical reversal of a kind he first learned from Hegel, would turn the notion of bourgeois society as a formation whose development and elaboration served the aims of state policy into the idea that state power had to be subservient to the needs of society’s dominant forces. That Germany provided the ground where this development could take place had much to do with the particular relations that obtained between politics, economics, and culture in the German lands, which is to say with the unusual configuration that developed there between the three major species of networks.
Whereas the French monarchy during the Old Regime drew the country’s diverse and economically fragmented regions into a powerful – albeit conflicted and tangled – web of ties to a political center, the German lands remained without effective threads of unity in either sphere to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond. There were many reasons for this persisting disunity, some of them rooted in geography. As Hans-Ulrich Wehler points out, early modern Germans inhabited a wide range of landscapes and conditions. Rural life in the west, where small independent farms were common, contrasted with the big Junker estates worked by unfree peasants in the east; some cities survived mostly from trade or manufacturing (usually for local markets, although places like Hamburg and Cologne were important exceptions) while others, including some of the most prosperous, were Residenzstädte, housing princely courts and living chiefly off their revenues and expenditures. The country was religiously divided into sizable Protestant and Catholic areas (the first chiefly in the north, the second in the south), and linguistic variations were so great that well into the nineteenth century peop
le speaking only a single regional dialect could not converse with those who spoke a different one (many dialects still survive today). The underdeveloped state of transport helped maintain these divisions. As David Blackbourn observes, “it was not until the 1820s and 1830s that the course of major rivers, including the Rhine, Neckar, Mosel and Danube, was straightened to make season-round river traffic easier (and to reduce flooding).” Good roads were rare everywhere, even more in the north of the country than in the south.1
Many of these conditions existed in France before the nineteenth century too, but in Germany they were both solidified and amplified by political division. The region’s nominal rulers, the heads of the Holy Roman Empire, never pursued the territorial consolidation that came to England with the Norman Conquest, and that the French kings undertook over a long period. Already in the thirteenth century the unpromising prospect offered by Germany as a field for establishing power contributed to the decision of the brilliant Hohenstaufen ruler Frederick II to seek resources for his ambitions by establishing power in Italy, and in particular in the then-prosperous region of Sicily, rather than Germany (his intervention in the fierce partisan struggles of the peninsula was welcomed by those such as Dante who hoped he could give victory to their imperial or “Ghibelline” party in local politics), and in order to facilitate his efforts there he left German princes and cities relatively free to develop their domains on their own. Later the Habsburgs exhibited a similar willingness to allow independent centers of power to flourish inside Germany in order to pursue goals outside it, a stance that contributed to their famous preference for expanding their imperial pretensions through dynastic marriages rather than by warfare.2
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