Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  There is something to be said for this claim, but it also contains considerable hyperbole. The French occupation itself had a deep impact, and both during and after it German states sought to respond to the French challenge by reforms, intended at once to stir up political energies, improve military organization, and remove restraints that had hindered economic development. Supporters of these initiatives described their purpose as to arouse “sleeping forces,” and there can be no doubt that they helped to infuse new vitality into what many regarded as a dormant country. But many of the reforms proceeded along lines already traced out by the vision of bürgerliche Gesellschaft that inspired similar efforts in the eighteenth century, some novel proposals were never carried out (in particular those for giving more power to representative institutions), and in many ways the new measures fell short of their hoped-for effects. The decades after 1850, and especially after 1870, would bring far more profound changes than the previous half-century, radically and rapidly transforming every level of life.

  All the same it was through these early nineteenth-century reforms that such elements of civil society as legal equality, uniform administration, and protection of property rights were furthered in post-Napoleonic Germany; even though they are well known, we need to give attention to them for a moment because the measures undertaken reveal much about the ways the interests and aims of states on the one hand and bourgeois on the other both came together and diverged. What especially spurred the changes was the demonstration that state power could be hugely enhanced by the kinds of restructuring the Revolution brought: putting an end to Old Regime social and corporate divisions, increasing the efficiency of financial administration, and drawing a population of formally equal citizens into national life and especially military service. Echoes of the Revolutionary slogans of universal citizenship and careers open to talents sounded in all the German reforms. Under the occupation both territorial states and independent cities responded to the need to meet French fiscal exactions with measures to reform tax structures, abolish guilds, and establish uniform conditions of citizenship. Once the foreign troops were gone some independent cities reverted to their old regimes, restoring both guilds and the older forms of unequal citizen rights, but the demonstrated effects of French-style reconstruction inspired an era of state-led reform intended to profit from the foreign example.34

  The Prussian instance was the most famous; its measures included eliminating guilds, establishing more participatory forms of municipal government, giving a more uniform organization to the army (with expanded opportunities for non-noble officers), an end to serfdom (but on terms that turned out to benefit large landowners far more than the legally liberated peasants), greater access by commoners to ownership of estates formerly reserved to nobles, and the promise (not kept) of a new constitution. Despite its limitations the program helped give people a sense that things were moving in Germany. Prussia became an object of admiration to many liberal supporters of progress (including Hegel and his more left-wing followers, a group that included the young Marx), and in people’s minds “this period established the state as the motor of modernization.” At the same time however some states did not hesitate to regulate such minor matters as where people could smoke and when property owners had to remove snow from their roofs, so that the measures amounted to a “growing penetration of the state into many spheres of life.”35

  Within the Bürgertum, people reacted differently to these policies, according to their particular situations. Those most opposed to the reforms were people such as the “hometownsmen” studied by Mack Walker, chiefly craftsmen and small traders still devoted to the independence their towns had developed over the centuries, even though many of them lost it in 1815. They were, as Walker notes, “middle-class and even bürgerlich,” but in a special way, more concerned about the position they held inside the world shielded by their walls than about the possibility of achieving something in the wider one outside. They saw their own milieu as egalitarian and democratic, but in a way that rejected the value liberals bestowed on “the individual capacity to move, to change, to differ.” In their eyes the outsiders who threatened them were all “movers and doers,” a term Walker sees as equally applicable to the officials who carried out state policies and to merchants and traders who sought to expand production and evade economic regulation by setting up their operations where traditional guild controls were weak; the category also included university students moving about in search of general education, and even pastors, since their profession was sometimes a vehicle of social mobility and they were members of “a mobile institution hierarchically organized like a bureaucracy.” Recognizing them all as “movers and doers” takes on special significance here because it points to the way that all the people whose activities took place through participation in extended and distant networks, economic, political, or cultural, constituted the same kind of threat to a way of life that defined itself in local and traditional terms.36

  For other kinds of Bürger, however, the reforms provoked more complex reactions. David Blackbourn notes that “businessmen welcomed the promotion of commerce and communications, but chafed at bureaucratic regulation. The more class-conscious merchants and entrepreneurs wondered why, if economic restrictions could be loosened, political controls could not also be relaxed. … But the official mind was convinced that true liberty was founded on administration, not constitutions.” Overall, and despite the benefits some Wirtschaftsbürger received through the reform programs, the social group most favored by them were the bureaucrats themselves; their status as both an independent power in state and society and a group dependent on princely favor now became more marked.37

  Only after 1850 (as Jürgen Kocka has observed) did Wirtschaftsbürger begin to replace Bildungsbürger as the dominant section of the Bürgertum as a whole. One reason this did not occur earlier was that change in the economy was slow to take off. As in other places before the mid century – including England – new techniques were confined to certain regions, in Germany chiefly those with favorable access to raw materials or markets, leaving most of the economic landscape untouched. The most dramatic advance was in cotton textiles, the only branch in which mechanized spinning and weaving could be employed, but even there growth occurred chiefly in areas where the old putting-out system had expanded during the eighteenth century, and many “factories” were simply assemblages of workers using traditional techniques in a single place, not sites for large-scale machine production. Iron output rose significantly from around 1830, driven by the beginnings of railroad construction, but the scale was still far smaller than would be the case from the 1850s. Some rural workers produced goods for outside markets, but snails or dried fruit and cherry juice (the staple exports of two villages in Württemberg) were neither novel products nor vehicles of economic expansion, and most rural energies still went into subsistence farming or items for local exchange. Hunger and food shortages were recurring problems. Meanwhile particular cities largely continued to focus on the activities that had sustained them earlier. The old urban economy predicated on a stable hierarchy of social groups and values was showing many strains, but it was far from clear what would replace it.38

  A longstanding commonplace about the period, put forward by enthusiasts at the time and developed by a number of modern historians, portrays the Prussian customs union, to which other states could adhere after 1834, as an important engine of economic change, but recent writers have cast considerable doubt on this claim, arguing that its impact was much smaller. To be sure some businesses were helped by access to new bodies of consumers, but the Zollverein was far from giving Germany a national market of the kind England already possessed a century earlier, and many barriers to trade between states and regions remained until political unification and the advent of large-scale rail transport removed them in the 1860s and 1870s. Because members of the customs union remained at odds over how to tax goods that individual states treated as government monopolies suc
h as tobacco and wine, some commodities could not move across political boundaries, and local and regional variations in weights, measures, and currencies reduced the ease with which other products could travel too. Roads in many places still left much to be desired. As James Sheehan concludes, the Zollverein “was created by bureaucrats, who were interested in fiscal reform and administrative consolidation rather than nation-building”; it was an event in the history of state construction much more than in the coming of modern industry.39

  These limits affected both the lives of middle-class Germans and their relations with people in other social groups. People at the lower reaches of the scale were still threatened with hunger and unemployment whenever bad weather reduced harvests, driving up food prices and draining away the demand for manufactured goods. Such situations had long obtained, but they were now made worse by population growth, evident in the cities but even more marked in the countryside, where improvements in public health, the abolition of earlier legal restrictions on marriage, and expanded opportunities for part-time work in rural industry when times were good, led to a marked increase in numbers, especially among landless peasants, who made up around half the population everywhere and as much as 80 percent in some areas. The proportion was particularly high in the Prussian East, where many “emancipated” peasants were unable to pay the fees required in order to acquire property, leaving them shorn of their earlier rights to glean harvested fields, gather fallen branches, or pasture animals, so that they had only their labor to sustain themselves. Such people provided an opportunity eagerly exploited by the more unscrupulous among the entrepreneurs who organized the putting-out system in the countryside, a group epitomized by the Zwanziger family in Silesia whose notoriously heartless treatment sparked the revolt of weavers there in 1844, later dramatized by Gerhard Hauptmann. There was much discussion in newspapers and pamphlets of what people called Pauperismus, and Hegel described the existence of a “rabble of paupers” as an inescapable consequence of civil society’s inability to provide for all its members on the basis of the limited productive resources it could command (a view in close accord with the pessimism of contemporaries such as Ricardo and Malthus). Although some of the people these writers had in view were traditional craft workers unable to survive in the face of falling prices for their goods, what brought them to this pass was not competition from machine industry but the expansion of traditional rural production and the spread of “factories” that were in fact assemblages of workers using longstanding techniques in a single place. In some parts of Germany the term Fabrikant was used to describe the proprietors of these sorts of Fabriken through most of the century.40

  Such conditions were far from universal in the country, however. In the southwest, at the opposite corner from Prussia, there were few landless peasants and a high proportion of small but independent artisans, conditions that, as Manfred Heitling argues, made the liberal vision of a bürgerliche Gesellschaft as a highly inclusive body of independent citizens far from illusory there. Politics had a different character than in Prussia too, particularly in Württemberg, where relations between the king and both urban and rural citizens (many of whom had the right to vote) were based on considerable cooperation and compromise. The new constitution established in 1819 was not the product of a royal decree, like the Prussian Allgemeine Landrecht of 1794, but a contract between the king and the representative assembly. In Prussia the monarchy’s accelerating retreat from the reform program of the century’s first years in the 1830s and 1840s, and the widening gulf it opened up between advocates of reform and the militaristic, authoritarian state, made Berlin fertile soil for revolutionary agitation when rising food prices, unemployment, and the news of the July Monarch’s collapse in Paris touched off the crisis of March, 1848. By contrast neither Württemberg nor most of the other southwestern states saw violent clashes during the revolutionary year (although disputes over reform measures broke out once agitation for them spread through the country), leading Heitling to conclude that “what was revolutionary in 1848 was not bürgerlich and what was bürgerlich was not revolutionary.”41 Even in places where social divisions were sharper than in cities such as Mannheim or Stuttgart, the sense that Bürgerlichkeit could encompass very large proportions of the population had considerable resonance. In Cologne (officially part of Prussia, but a very different kind of place from the garrison city Berlin) as Pierre Ayçoberry notes, Bürgertum still served as a broadly inclusive term, retaining the possibility that it could refer to all the city’s residents; thus master carpenters referred to themselves and their colleagues elsewhere as Bürger Arbeiter, “citizen-workers.” As Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl recognized (we will look more closely at him in a moment), Germans in the 1830s and 1840s who wanted a term to designate the bourgeoisie as a distinct and exclusive group (such as did Marx) took up the French one, first because it had largely lost the original sense of citoyen that still clung to the German equivalent, and second because it was by then colored by the repeated resistance of the “Bourgeois Monarchy” to extending voting rights, and the conflicts it provoked (even though, as noted above, bourgeois were prominent on both sides of these struggles).42 In Germany bürgerliche Gesellschaft did not mean the rise of bourgeois to political dominance (Bürger rule of independent cities was an old story, and diminished in the Napoleonic period and after, with the territorial changes effected in 1815); it was precisely by attaching the French adjective to what was a distinctively German notion that Marx gave the idea of “bourgeois society” a new sense.

  Bürgerliche Gesellschaft probed and mirrored: Hegel, Riehl, Freytag

  To sound out the resonances of bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Germany before the unification I end this chapter with three prominent writers who focused on it: the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, the journalist, folklorist, musician, and critic W. H. Riehl, and the novelist Gustav Freytag.

  Hegel spent most of his career in Prussia, but he was a native of Württemberg, and his work bears the marks of both environments, emphasizing at once the separation between society and the state and the continuity between them.43 As noted above, his major work of social and political theory, The Philosophy of Right, contrasted society and the state more sharply than earlier writers had. Departing from the old notion of a societas civilis that was at once political and social, Hegel portrayed bürgerliche Gesellschaft as resting on a basis diametrically opposite to that of the state. Drawing at once on his observation of contemporary conditions, on his reading in British economists and social theorists, notably Smith, Ricardo, and Adam Ferguson, and on the characteristically German manner of taking civil society as an object of state policy, Hegel portrayed society as the sphere in which individuals act to meet their needs and pursue their interests through work and exchange. As a form of life it had many positive features to which we will come in a moment, but in principle little restrained this quest for personal satisfaction from becoming mere selfishness; by putting their own aims and interests first and making others means to these ends, society’s inhabitants created “a spectacle of extravagance and want as well as the physical and ethical degeneration common to them both.”44 In contrast the state was the realm of universality, “the actuality of the ethical idea,” where the same individuals are drawn to seek the higher kind of freedom that results from affirming and obeying laws that rein in selfish desires, rest on general principles of understanding, and give a definite and rational shape to their common life. The divergence between the sometimes arbitrary and willful “particularity” exhibited by individuals as denizens of society and the “rational universality” to which all were called as members of the state made the two levels of existence polar opposites.

  Despite this contrast, an inner unity joined society and the state together. One root of this reconciliation lay in social relations. By encouraging exchanges of goods and services and extending them over an ever-wider range, society draws individuals to recognize both their dependence on others and the need to treat them as
bearers of rights who like themselves were deserving of legal protection; thus exchange relations prepare the transition from the first level to the second. The passage between the two was also smoothed by the existence of guilds and other corporate groups where individual interest was moderated through being pursued in concert with others, and through education and culture, which drew people toward universally valid ideas and moral principles.

  The same unification had a different, and in Hegel’s view more profound, basis on the side of the state. The major agent of the harmonization of the two realms was the class of government officials, the allgemeine Stand, whose task was to develop “the universal interests of the community,” and in whose activity alone “private interest finds its satisfaction in its work for the universal.” In contrast to the two other classes or estates (Stände, not Klassen) that made up civil society, the business class of the towns and the agricultural class of the countryside, the officials had their origins not in the needs and activities of private individuals, but in the state policies that brought the special Stand into being. This was a difference of great importance to Hegel because it provided support for the conclusion to which his whole argument was directed: in one of the dialectical reversals that characterized his thinking, Hegel argued that even his own account of the way that the state seemed to emerge out of the needs of social life was a matter of mere appearance. The true and right relationship was that the state is “not so much the result as the beginning,” the “true ground” in which are rooted all those aspects of civil society through which individual existence is drawn away from itself and toward some kind of “universality.” This was true not only of the extension of exchange relations that brought individuals into contact with increasing numbers of others, and of education, since it was state action that fostered both, but also of the family, whose limited, private orientation toward a collective ethical existence remained unable to infuse life as a whole without the presence of the state.45 To present the state in this way as the very ground out of which civil society developed marked Hegel as the German thinker he was, calling up the unique history followed in this chapter.