Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  Keeping distance at a distance

  In England, industrial development took place in a still regionally divided country, but it was one in which a functioning national market made an impact in many places, encouraging investment in new forms of production. French economic regionalism was of a more pronounced kind, leaving local economies relatively unaffected by changing market conditions, so that traditional techniques remained dominant practically everywhere. As Gérard Noiriel notes, until late in the nineteenth century French industry expanded primarily inside long-established structures, resting “on the dispersal of industrial work in the countryside, accentuating forms of production and a type of working class born under the Old Regime.” For most French workers before the advent of the Third Republic “industrial work was seen above all as a kind of rural work.”2 When people spoke of a French city’s fabrique they had in mind not a place but a system, well established before the Revolution, in which merchant entrepreneurs organized production carried out chiefly by part-time workers in the countryside, with only the stage of final finishing assigned to skilled urban craftspeople.3 Even in such famous manufacturing centers as the silk capital Lyons, rural work expanded through most of the nineteenth century, and production continued to be organized by merchant masters who both provided the raw materials and sold the products, as the city’s historian Yves Lequin has shown.4 This mix in which workshop production remained more important than factory labor had much in common with the structure we noted in Britain, but with the difference that for most French workers manufacturing continued to be a seasonal activity. Inhabitants of little-changed rural communities, they devoted most of their time to agriculture, turning to mining or weaving or metal work only when the rhythm imposed by planting and harvest cycles allowed. In some places this pluriform economy was compatible with production of goods for export, and it certainly made working for money wages part of some workers’ lives. But such activities were carried out inside a loosely linked assemblage of largely unconnected local economies, each producing most of the goods its inhabitants consumed.

  Both Noiriel and Eugen Weber, in his classic account of the transformation of French rural life during the Third Republic, emphasize that most French regions retained these characteristics at least into the 1870s. Agricultural rhythms determined the season for other kinds of work in the coal-mining region near Aix-en-Provence (where operations began only after the olive harvest was completed), and in the cases of silk spinning in the southeast and sugar manufacture in Picardy. Some rural people who engaged in manufacturing or construction as secondary activities traveled great distances to find such work, but they went back to their places of origin every year, where they often used the income they brought home to shore up or improve their local positions. People from the Massif Central who labored in the Paris construction industry when the city was undergoing its transformation in the 1850s and 1860s devoted their urban earnings to purchasing a piece of village land, or paying off a local debt, for instance to a brother who renounced his portion of the family inheritance in exchange for a money payment, thus maintaining the family property intact (those who gave up their shares often used the compensation paid by siblings to establish themselves nearby, or to improve a position acquired by a local marriage). These part-time Parisians were typical in believing that whatever work they took on outside their community had the purpose of assuring or improving their position within it, and thus maintaining social ties across generations. Weber observes that such doings were typical of a world in which people moved about a great deal physically, but “mentally they stayed at home,” traveling with their neighbors and living among them, birds of passage inside cities where they kept to themselves. Their migrations “did not break up the solidarity of the village, but on the contrary reinforced it, staving off deterioration.” Noiriel details some of the activities on which such people lavished resources in order “to preserve their traditional ways of life,” spending their savings for instance on the festive meals organized by mutual aid societies, a sign that reaffirming the strength of local solidarities was more important than husbanding assets for productive investments.5 Distant networks formed part of such people’s lives, but the means these provided were expected to serve ends woven into a dense fabric of long-established local relationships and values.

  Eugen Weber portrays this world as one in which outside connections were both materially limited and culturally held in check, leaving it in many ways turned in upon itself. In much of France, roads were still poor and often in bad repair, limiting the kinds of vehicles that could use them. Traffic might be heavy but it was short-distance, directed to or from a nearby market or service; routes passed through the countryside in ways that left most people unaffected by them. Houses were often situated without regard to roads, implicitly turning their backs on possible openings to the outside. Many towns had an analogous character, giving at best a glimmer of distant resources or horizons. Where they housed such potential links to Paris as a sub-prefect’s office, a tribunal, or a garrison, these appeared as “islands for marooned representatives of the central power,” living apart from the world around them; other towns were mere “dependent extensions of the countryside,” often overrun with animals and possessed of few or no recognizably urban elements such as paved streets or sanitary facilities. This added up to very little of the kind of symbiotic interaction between central and local life that marked the development of English regions even earlier. Only after 1880, when new roads and railroads reduced transport costs, would many areas replace mediocre local goods with cheaper and better ones from outside, and seek enlarged markets for what they themselves were better at producing. Both the Vosges in the east and Dordogne in the south were long dotted with small iron workshops that would quickly disappear once these changes set in. In any given area for most of the century the number of brandy stills depended on the relative proximity of a navigable river: the easier it was for better quality drink from somewhere else to be distributed, the less likely local production would command the market.6

  It was not only rural people – one hardly knows whether to call them peasants or workers – who valued this complex of arrangements for its ability to sustain traditional ways of life. Their bourgeois patrons shared this perspective too, and for several reasons. First, there was a substantial current of opinion among French businesspeople in the nineteenth century that welcomed the persistence of traditional social relations as a barrier against the stark distinctions between rich and poor visible in English industrial cities, and the threat they posed to social tranquility. An early spokesman for this view was Auguste Mimerel, a cotton spinner from Roubaix who in a pamphlet of 1841 applauded both French manufacturing’s lesser orientation toward export markets with their rapid ups and downs, and the ability of many French workers to remain rural people, supplying some of their needs through growing food on their own plots; because France enjoyed these props of social stability, he maintained, it would be able to introduce machines alongside traditional manufacture without incurring the misfortunes of its northern neighbor (we shall see later that he had counterparts in Germany).7 Mimerel did not say so, but some of the advantages he identified in the French situation were the consequences of Revolutionary land redistribution, which expanded the number of small proprietors in the countryside. Gérard Noiriel points out that a range of writers on industry, including the conservative theorist Fréderic Le Play and the liberal Émile Cheysson, long a director of the ironworks at Le Creusot in Burgundy, regarded property ownership as a vehicle for giving stability to a working class that often resisted disruptions in its traditional mode of life. All these observers regarded people habituated to saving and preserving their own property as the most reliable kind of workers. In several parts of France patrons sought to provide housing and small plots near their establishments in order to attract workers, and offered other benefits aimed at securing such a semi-rural and more stable workforce. Clearly they did not share the
view of the Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier that the availability of an urban workforce cut off from the countryside was an advantage that France ought to envy its neighbor. The general orientation toward rural landownership in French society provided workers and bourgeois with a common set of assumptions; like their workers, businessmen often prided themselves on ownership of country land, displaying a “nostalgie de la terre” that tied them materially and culturally to older ways of life.8

  These attitudes have been recognized by economic historians as part of the complex of conditions and orientations that contributed to the slow pace of French industrial development, but it is less-often noticed that the persisting dominance of local conditions and practices in France also put employers in a relatively weak position vis-à-vis their workers. Given both the narrowness of markets and the near-complete absence of banks willing to lend funds, employers had neither the incentive nor the resources to alter the behavior or expectations of workers devoted to traditional forms of life, and who had little or no reason to put their confidence in alternative ways to sustain themselves and their families. In consequence, as Jean-Pierre Daviet points out, factory or workshop masters were often led to delegate “part of the control [over the labor process] by negotiating with the leader of a crew or accepting other forms of worker control.” Even an employer who felt exempt from traditional obligations to workers was likely to find himself alone in the face of a “workers’ world bound together by a tissue of moral obligations woven into old solidarities.” Noiriel adds that the need to rely on skills that workers brought with them compounded this dependency, because practical knowledge and training were still passed on inside families or communities that regarded them as a kind of patrimony, and hence the source of a right both to live at a certain level and to retain control over how work was done. Many early nineteenth-century conflicts between workers and employers focused on just these issues, with workers demanding the preservation of piece rates, called tarifs, calculated to support a certain expected level of life, while also retaining forms of workshop organization designed to assure continuity of employment inside families and communities. To be sure, patrons were sometimes the winners in these struggles, especially in large cities, but historians are increasingly aware that many features of the old world of work survived all the same.9

  The impossible network

  Nothing would be more important in transforming the basic features of this social landscape that the construction of railroads, and lively debates emerged over their likely benefits and costs as soon as news of the new technology began to spread. Quickly voices were heard that tied the country’s future to realizing the potential much more rapid travel could unleash. A writer of 1832 insisted that investing in new industrial machines alone would never give France the means to catch up with England: what the nation chiefly needed was better transport. A few years later a reformer in Bordeaux argued similarly for measures that would “throw men, ideas, and capital into the whirlwind of rapid circulation. Put people’s minds [les intelligences] into continual relation with each other from one end of the country to the other,” and the whole of life would be transformed. A lawyer in the same city early in the 1840s compared the influence railroads would have to that of the compass and printing press, all things that “push people into contact with each other … expand a society’s sphere of activity … Thinking, instead of remaining scattered and recumbent wherever it finds itself, which is to say sterile and inactive, sees its power grow infinitely.”10

  Despite these enthusiasms, actual construction was slow to begin. Businessmen who favored building lines often did so for narrow or selfish reasons (opposed on similar grounds by others), and their resources were only sufficient to cover small projects. More visionary figures, including some Saint-Simonians, hoped to get things going on a bigger scale by setting up cooperation between the state and high finance, thus drawing on people with large capital resources, such as the Rothschilds. But these proposals bred much conflict. The debate in part reflected the greater challenges that railroad building posed in France than in Britain, where the distances were shorter, but also the more fundamental transformation in the country’s conditions that the new means promised. Against the expectation that bringing formerly isolated places into contact with each other would energize production and exchange, there grew up fears that the new means would upset the existing balance of social relations, either giving the state dangerous powers over society, or providing certain individuals with new means to dominate others. As François Caron puts it:

  In the imagination of contemporaries railroads quickly took on the dimensions of a monster with unlimited powers, capable of overturning fortunes and upsetting acquired position to the profit of some few. If this power fell into the hands of the administration, it could only increase its power immeasurably, to the detriment of individual liberty; if it fell into the hands of capitalists, it threatened to deliver the whole nation to the will of the money powers, to destroy the balance of fortunes.

  The issue split French bourgeois opinion. What stood in the way of getting construction underway was not a lack of vision but “the real difficulties of the French case”: first the practical problems created by the size of the challenge; and second a variety of fears that meeting it through strong action would strengthen either a dominating central power or selfish private interests.11

  Onto these debates there was overlaid another, about where the lines should go. For some it was essential that Paris constitute the center of the network, in order to assure that it would both serve the needs of administration and strengthen efforts to overcome local particularisms. The Revolution had only begun the process of making the French all citizens of a single country, one ponts et chaussées official wrote in 1837; now it was necessary to set up the railroad network in a way that would allow the civilizing influence of Paris to radiate out to all the country’s corners. Such a vision, whether the writer knew it or not, echoed the hopes for roads and canals voiced by his Old Regime predecessors. Like these earlier figures, those who took this tack in the nineteenth century also recognized the military importance of good connections between the capital and the country’s borders (but the incompleteness of the attention given to having the lines serve this purpose would be demonstrated when war against Prussia came in 1870). On the other side were Saint-Simonians and others who saw railroads above all as implements for inserting France into worldwide networks of commerce and trade. Their ideal grid was dominated by lines tying the Channel port of Le Havre to the Mediterranean city Marseilles, and Nantes on the Atlantic to Strasbourg on the Rhine. But it was the first group that represented the decisive viewpoint of the government, first in the July Monarchy and then in the Second Empire, both regimes that cherished their continuity with the centralizing mission of the Bourbons and the Revolution.12

  The 1840s saw the beginnings of construction on a sizable scale, financed both by state money and by an investment boom and speculative fever in the early part of the decade; but things turned sour as the crisis of the later 1840s led lenders to call in their funds, stopping the work and leaving many investors badly burned. The suspicion about railroads as an investment generated by this episode added to the existing tensions between the state and private entrepreneurs, slowing down building activity during the Second Republic (1848–52). In the end it was only Louis-Napoleon’s dirigisme that was able to get things moving again, creating confidence and heightened activity by giving private companies long-term concessions to operate the lines, while insisting on the state’s right to determine where they would go, and to oversee operations. I will come to the effects of his actions in a moment.

  Paris and its bourgeoisie before 1850: the post-Revolutionary condition

  First, however, we need to recognize some ways in which these general features of French life in the first half of the nineteenth century left their mark on Paris and its inhabitants in the same years. As the country’s largest urban area and the pl
ace where many tensions and conflicts were most sharply felt, the capital appeared to many of its residents and observers (including Balzac, Baudelaire, and Marx) as the quintessential modern city, “the capital of the nineteenth century” as Walter Benjamin would later call it. So it was in some ways. And yet in others the city in the years before Napoleon III’s reconstruction projects, like the country it dominated, remained close to what it had been a century before. Although much altered by the Revolution, it would acquire many characteristic features of modernity only after the mid century.

  The city grew impressively after the end of the Revolutionary decade, from around half a million inhabitants in 1800 to twice that by the 1840s. A large part of the growth came from immigration, bringing people of all social classes into the city, at once putting some newcomers on a path to a better life while subjecting others to disappointment, frustration, and pain. Those who did well often obtained considerable wealth, and by 1847 the gap between the city’s richest people and others (measured by the property listed in the official declarations required when a death was reported) was significantly wider than it had been a quarter-century before. Poorer immigrants, sometimes able to find work and sometimes not, often lived in squalid and unhealthy conditions, making them particularly susceptible to the scourges of cholera and tuberculosis; many observers linked such people to the rising crime rates that made the capital seem a dangerous place in these decades. These widening class differences certainly contributed to the passions unleashed in the revolutionary period that began in February of 1848, and on display with particular asperity and brutality in the “bloody June days” when army and militia forces put down a rebellion sparked by the abolition of the “national workshops” that had provided relief for the large numbers of unemployed workers (their proportion as high as 50 percent in some industries). Marx was not alone in seeing this as an exemplary moment of class conflict, and some more recent historians have found evidence that the largest proportion of participants in the uprising were workers in industries that were becoming “more modern,” at least in the sense that their sectors of the economy had the highest proportion of male to female labor, and of employees to employers. All the same, the Parisian workforce in the 1840s was still overwhelmingly composed of traditional artisans and laborers, very few of them in factory-like conditions, albeit many (such as tailors) hurt by the increased discipline and the downward pressure on wages imposed by merchant entrepreneurs faced with heightened competition and attempting to organize larger workforces. Workers’ responses to these challenges still drew heavily on Old Regime traditions of guild life and cooperation.13