Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  This family history provided a major inspiration for what would become a central theme of the Comédie humaine, set out explicitly in the preface to the whole project published in 1842, namely the dire fates prepared for people drawn outside their original milieu by ambition and opportunity. Such individuals – Goriot and his daughters among them – end up weighed down by the difficulties of operating in a social world for which their birth and experience has not prepared them. One path into this wilderness was economic to be sure, as Goriot himself illustrates, but in Balzac’s world the more powerful and meteoric trajectories were those traced by characters more plugged into the power sources of Paris itself, notably Lucien Chardon (or de Rubempré) and Eugène de Rastignac, both able to draw on aristocratic connections. Even Goriot’s ascent depended on his connections to the Revolutionary state, as Bernard-François Balssa’s (as he spelled his name) did to its predecessor. What made Balzac’s France so full of splendors and pitfalls, a place where the search for absolutes and the illusions it breeds could constitute the recurring theme of the moral history of his time, was the effect on everyday life of politics and the disruptions it effected, not the country’s economy. The bourgeois inhabitants of this world might be mean spirited and self-centered, drawn to projects that could be both self-destructive and dangerous to others, but like their real-world models they acted inside an economy little changed from before the Revolution, giving them a character still close to that of their Old Regime ancestors, as the Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier insisted in 1837, when he depicted them as too mired in the past to take on the heroic features of the industrial révelateur to whom he looked to usher in a new age.21

  Expanding the web

  In the overall history of France, Europe, and bourgeois life in the nineteenth century, one crucial thing to which all these considerations point is the nature of the crisis that engulfed the continent in the 1840s, and that gave birth to the revolutionary struggles that began in 1848. It was this crisis that led Marx, as others have noted, to mistake the birth pangs of modern capitalism for its death throes; although in part brought on by English industrial overproduction, it was chiefly, as E. H. Labrousse put it, “a crisis of the old type,” generated like many before chiefly by a series of harvest failures that drove up agricultural prices, sapped the demand for manufactured goods, pushed hungry people to cities in search of state-organized poor relief, and deprived political authorities of the legitimacy that came from ruling over a system that seemed to provide for people’s basic needs. It was the last such juncture the continent would experience. Economic breakdowns would recur, to be sure, but not until the 1930s would Europe as a whole experience a crisis of such magnitude, when it would occur in a radically different context, its foundations laid down by the various post-1850 developments to which we give attention throughout this book.22

  That the crisis of the 1840s turned out to be the last of its type can be attributed to a number of factors, among them the development of new chemical fertilizers that improved agricultural productivity and lessened the impact of weather conditions, and the beginning of a large-scale exodus from the crowded and impoverished countrysides where the traditional economy was rooted on the continent. Overall, however, the largest catalyst for the change that now began was the resumption of railroad building that Napoleon III sponsored as part of his program of gaining support for his regime through fostering economic development, prosperity, and social peace. His formula of giving long-term concessions to operate new routes to companies willing to invest in building them, thereby assuring their profits (while preserving the state’s right both to decide where the lines would go and to oversee operations) quickly drew capital from well-heeled bankers such as the Rothschilds and the Péreires, the latter also assembling funds from smaller investors through the new Crédit Mobilier, sponsored by the government for just this purpose. In the years before Napoleon III’s fall in 1870 the government pursued a policy of consolidation among the private companies, thus increasing its control and preparing a still larger role for the state later on. Under the Third Republic the network would be completed by the building of many links to localities left out of the original plans. In addition, governments beginning in 1879 undertook a vigorous program of road construction, intended partly to improve the economic infrastructure, and partly to make it easier for politicians (now elected by universal male suffrage, with results to which we will come in a few moments) to reach voters at election time. It was thus that the old program of the ponts et chaussées officials to integrate the country with an effective transport network, making the whole territory a far more unified national space, was finally realized.23 There has been much argument about the role of the state in French economic development, and it may never be possible to say just how important its activities were, compared with those of private individuals stimulated by the opportunities and pressures of the market. But Jean-Pierre Daviet’s conclusion puts the situation neatly: “Everything happened as if the state … prepared the conditions for the passage to a more sustained kind of economic growth.”24

  The importance of these accomplishments for the economy, and for much else, has been properly stressed by Eugen Weber. Economically the roads and railroads were at least as important as new machines in bringing industrial society into being because (as the contemporaries quoted above already understood) they “created a truly national market in which the wares that the machines turned out could be bought and sold.”25 This meant that investments previously avoided because they would have offered insufficient – or even negative – returns now became attractive. Added to the impetus given to construction and employment by the infrastructural projects themselves, the result was a major boost to growth, which helped to make the Second Empire and at least the early years of the Third Republic a time of prosperity for many people. Real wages for workers began a rise that continued for most of the rest of the century. Like other countries France became far more stable, quickly leaving behind the conditions that made the later 1840s so agitated and tense. Marx, who expected the crisis to return within a short period, waited through the 1850s with puzzlement, briefly regained his confidence with the renewed downturn of 1857, and again in 1866; but he spent these years working out his economic theory in such a way that it could encompass a long period of waiting before the expected demise of capitalism would take place. Whereas before 1848 he had repeatedly spoken about the way that underlying class conflicts were making themselves visible on the surface of society in the present, now he adopted a very different vocabulary, describing how both politics and economics created veils and screens, covering over and concealing the underlying forces whose eventual emergence he continued to believe would one day confirm his expectations and hopes.26

  For France these changes did not mean only a spurt in economic growth but a reconfiguration of national life. The situation Bernard Lepetit described in his book on French cities up to the middle of the nineteenth century now came to an end: what had been a congeries of separate and only loosely linked economies, many of them producing and consuming most of the goods that sustained their inhabitants, now became a much more integrated national space in which a lessening of local distinctiveness in some regards coexisted with its preservation in others. Regional specializations were fostered by mutual exchange and trade, but many local styles in dress faded away (or turned into costumes reserved for special occasions), as people gained access to nationally distributed articles that were perhaps less colorful and evocative but more comfortable, often of higher quality, and giving people a sense – sometimes pressured to be sure – of participation in a wider world. There were surely many losers in this redrawing of the bounds of economic life, and some of what was lost doubtless deserves the nostalgia often directed toward it. But much was gained as well. Contemporaries referred to what the railroad brought as “an infusion of life,” and Weber’s remark about an Alpine village can serve to represent the way many situations changed: “The outside
world, which until then had little bearing on their own life, now came in with a rush: skills like writing invoices and bills of lading, counting, and schooling in general acquired concrete meaning as occasions to use them multiplied.”27

  Remaking Paris and its bourgeois

  No place was more strikingly transformed than Paris, where the web of connections that railway building spread in the country as a whole had a kind of counterpart in the reconstruction of the city under Napoleon III and his prefect, Baron Haussmann. Much has been written about this transformation, and we cannot enter much into the debates about its motives and purposes. These included staving off a recurrence of the kind of violence that erupted in June, 1848 (although it should be remembered that the chief lesson of the bloody days was that barricades could not withstand modern artillery even as things then stood), giving prestige to the regime, improving public health (always a problem in urban areas and now compounded by increased rates of immigration), and easing travel inside the city, including traffic between the railway stations that were portals to and from different parts of the country. Taking stock of the various reasons for the reconstruction, one recent French historian of urban life and development, Marcel Roncayolo, sees the rebuilding (not just in Paris but in other urban places as well) as inspired by a vision of the modern city as a single integrated space for interaction and exchange (a situation to which Paris had already been moving on a smaller scale, as we saw earlier, in the eighteenth century), one whose potential could only be realized by removing the barriers to movement accumulated over the centuries and opening up new channels for transporting people and things. The model displayed a certain harmony with the spirit of the stock exchange as a place where values could circulate from one person to another unimpeded, but industry as such played little part in the schemes. Jeanne Gaillard, who has made the most careful study of Paris in this period, sees things a bit differently, emphasizing the desire of Bonaparte and Haussmann to establish the regime’s domination over the city, partly by clearing out the old center, the area around the Hôtel de Ville and the Rue de Rivoli where government and administrative offices were clustered but which was also the center of insurrection, and partly by creating new streets that at once facilitated keeping order against possible insurrections and offered sites for ceremonial display of the Empire’s regal pretensions. Both Gaillard and Roncayolo recognize that the spirit of the enterprise was liberal and dirigiste at the same time, a perhaps paradoxical combination but one deeply rooted in French history and politics, as we had occasion to note in regard to state policy in the eighteenth century.28

  When the plans became public they generated opposition in a number of quarters, among them Parisian property owners, who complained that the government’s self-proclaimed power to seize houses or lots in order to build new streets for reasons of “public utility” trampled on their rights. Many of these opponents were soon converted to the project, however, drawn in by a government decree of 1858 that allowed those whose property was taken to put in a claim of restitution for the parts of it that were not actually used by the new roadways, especially once it became clear that the values of parcels adjacent to the new avenues and boulevards would rise dramatically. Their situation was well understood at the time by a journalist named Edmond About, writing in a Paris Guide of 1867. How was it possible, he asked, that a mere fraction of a property valued for a certain amount before could be worth several times that total once the debris had been cleared away? The answer was that the new avenues and boulevards met the needs of modern city dwellers, people impatient to “produce, exchange, enjoy, and be seen,” and who did not want to put up with the delays and obstacles created by the streets and squares and stairways and turnings left over from earlier phases of urban life. “A straight, broad, smooth street puts two points a league apart from each other so to say in direct contact,” and this kind of immediate communication was of great value both to merchants in search of customers, and to idle people desirous of going wherever pleasure calls them. “This explains the added value that an apparently brutal destruction adds to demolished neighborhoods.” Marcel Roncayolo remarks that About’s article testifies to the way the reconstruction effected a reversal of bourgeois values, replacing the respect long accorded to property as an anchor of stability with a heightened appreciation of the virtues of movement and fluidity.29

  Jeanne Gaillard characterizes this overall reorientation of Parisian life and especially the city’s economy in terms of a shifting balance from a traditional stance of “introversion” toward one of “extraversion.” The old city had always been open to outside influences and connections, to be sure, but it was simultaneously shut up inside its walls like “the old bourgeoisie, frugal and turned in upon its family life and its [already acquired] riches.” Gaillard is careful not to make this contrast absolute, for instance seeing the style of the residential buildings that still give the city so much of its character as a mix of aristocratic and modern urban features. But she describes the general reorientation of the economy in terms that fit well with Louis Chevalier’s history of its population. Manufacturers in a number of industries now turned more toward external markets, including the makers of the luxury articles de Paris who had always produced for export (as well as for the aristocratically toned home consumption that inspired them in the first place), an example followed (mostly from the 1870s) by entrepreneurs in the new metallurgical and chemical industries that grew up in the suburbs.30

  Gaillard documents these changes through a study of the business licenses (patentes) issued before and after the reconstruction made its impact. Between 1847 and 1860 it was the city’s own custom that fed business expansion, and “no business could even remotely compare in its growth with the food industries. Paris made and sold first of all to nourish and lodge itself.” After 1860 this came less and less to be true, as older kinds of manufacture turned increasingly to the export market, joined by new industries, and the city’s share in national exports began a marked rise. To be sure, the new networks, both the roads and streets inside the city and the railroads outside it, did not simply impose these changes; it was individuals with an eye open to new opportunities who were the agents. But the tighter connections provided the ground where they could seize these chances to act. As in the countryside, industry was a beneficiary of such links before it began to create them on its own. What Gaillard called the city’s “better insertion into the modern world” also now protected it from being subject to the kinds of economic fluctuations rooted in rural conditions that had brought it to a crisis point in the 1840s.31 And it was from the Second Empire that the wealth of Parisians (followed at a distance by families in other French cities) prosperous enough to pay a tax on property left at their death began to shift from an earlier preponderance of real estate to a growing proportion of mobile holdings, including stocks and shares.32

  One feature of the new Paris that Gaillard sees as exhibiting at once the older more introverted style of bourgeois life and its newer more extraverted manner is the appearance of the grands magasins, department stores of the kind that also sprang up in other European (and American) cities at the same time. Often located along the new boulevards, the stores drew in thrifty customers with lower prices, but they also used advertising and imaginative displays to entice buyers by associating goods with exotic places or vaguely invoked desires and pleasures. Not content with satisfying already-recognized needs, they announced a world, at once promising and problematic, in which consumption would become a need on its own. They belonged to Zola’s Paris rather than Balzac’s, the larger and more impersonal city where the metaphor of the machine was often invoked to describe a form of life some no longer felt to be on a recognizable human scale, but also the lighter, airier, more lively urban milieu that gave birth to impressionism. (Robert Herbert, in a study of the new painting on which we will draw later, notes that romantic depictions of urban space were often dark and somber, in contrast to the vivid, colorful atmosphere
evoked by the impressionists.)

  Among the new stores the still flourishing Left Bank emporium the Bon Marché stands out because it is the one for which we have the best information. The Bon Marché was the model for the place Zola described in his novel The Ladies’ Paradise (Au bonheur des dames), but it is also the subject of an excellent social and cultural history. The novelist’s account depicts a world fiercely divided between old-style commerçants loyally or obstinately devoted to their cloth or hats or umbrellas and the many-armed mutant beast methodically squeezing the life out of its puny competitors, but Zola also recognized the new stores as sources of previously unavailable energy and of a promise of abundance and well-being that the older-style shops could not provide, sites of a modern kind of urban adventure and even poetry, represented by the indefatigable, romantic, and seductive owner and manager, Octave Mouret, and by the book’s heroine Denise Baudu, whose open-mouthed fascination with Mouret’s place at the moment of her first arrival from the country forecasts the career she will make there.33