Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  24 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989; original German edn., 1962).

  25 Keith Michael Baker, “Public Opinion as Political Invention,” in Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge and New York, 1990), 171–72.

  26 David A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: the Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (New York and Oxford, 1994), 12–13. It should be noted, however, that Habermas was well aware of the importance of governmental action in provoking individuals and groups outside it to constitute themselves as a “public” in opposition to its heightened claims. See Structural Transformation, 22–23.

  27 Bell, Lawyers, 10–11.

  28 Baker, “Public Opinion,” 195–97.

  29 Pierre Rosanvallon, “Political Rationalism and Democracy in France in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Philosophy and Social Criticism 28:6 (2002), 687–701.

  30 Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: the Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1993), 36, citing various statistical studies of publishing.

  31 Colin Jones, “The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review (February, 1996), 13–40. See also Jack R. Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (London and New York, 1994), 54–86.

  32 Quoted by Gilles Feyel, “Négoce et presse provinciale en France au 18e siècle: méthodes et perspectives de recherches,” in Cultures et formations négociantes dans l’Europe moderne, ed. Franco Angiolini and Daniel Roche (Paris, 1995), 448.

  33 On the beginnings of the papers see Feyel, “Négoce et presse,” 439–40; on censorship and the intendants, Jones, “The Great Chain,” 26.

  34 Quoted in Lewis, France, 103.

  35 On French consumption in this period the fundamental works are those of Daniel Roche: La Culture des apparences: une histoire du vêtement (xviie–xviiie siècle) (Paris, 1989); La France des lumières (Paris, 1993), Histoire des choses banales: naissance de la consommation, xviie–xixe siècle (Paris, 1997). Also Cissie Fairchilds, “The Production and Marketing of Pupuluxe Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London, 1993); and Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, La Naissance de l’intime: 3000 foyers parisiens xviie–xviiie sècles (Paris, 1988). Also Joan Thirsk, “Luxury Trades and Consumerism,” and Gillian Lewis, “Producers, Suppliers, and Consumers: Reflections on the Luxury Trades in Paris, c. 1500–c. 1800,” both in Luxury Trades and Consumerism in Ancien Régime Paris, ed. Robert Fox and Anthony Turner (Aldesshot, Hampshire, and Brookfield, VT, 1998) 257–62 and 287–98. There is a good summary of recent literature on this subject in Maza, Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, 41–51. For the Montpellier chronicler, Darnton, “A Bourgeois Puts His World in Order,” 134–35.

  36 Roche, Histoire des choses banales, 232–34.

  37 Birth of a Consumer Society, 43–45.

  38 For Caen see Bernard Lepetit, The Pre-industrial Urban System, 130, citing the work of Jean-Claude Perrot. On Montpellier see Frederick M. Irvine, “From Renaissance City to Ancien Régime Capital: Montpellier, c. 1500–c. 1600,” in Philip Benedict, ed., Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France (London, 1989), 105–33; and on Dijon, James R. Farr, “Consumers, Commerce, and the Craftsmen of Dijon: the Changing social and economic Structure of a Provincial Capital, 1450–1750,” Ibid., 134–73.

  39 Lepeit, The Pre-industrial Urban System, ch. 10.

  40 Lewis, France, 106. Roche, La France des lumières, 585.

  41 For the best summary see Woloch, The New Regime, ch. 1.

  42 Sewell, A Rhetoric, 40. For the cascade of disdain, see 63–64.

  43 See Sara Maza’s discussion of this writing in The Myth of the French Bourgeosie, 76ff.

  44 On this topic see the concise and illuminating discussion by T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution: aristocrats versus bourgeois? (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1987), 41–46. Blanning also notes that the economic effects of the Revolution were far from favorable to modern industry. Lynn Hunt gives a certain twist to the image of the revolutionaries as bourgeois by noting a shift away from urban groups with established Old Regime positions to newer ones as the decade progressed (Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984], part II), but such generational or segmental shifts do not amount to a change from one class to another.

  45 The point has been made by a number of writers. Maza gives a good summary in the pages cited just above.

  46 Sewell, A Rhetoric, 76, citing Sieyès, Écrits politiques, 32.

  47 Sewell, A Rhetoric, 78–79.

  48 Ibid., 102–04.

  49 Ibid., 93; 103–06.

  50 Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, 138–43.

  51 Ibid., 150–60, and Dietrich Gerhard, “Guizot, Augustin Thierry und die Rolle des Tiers État in der französischen Geshichte,” Historische Zeitschrift 190 (1960), 290–310.

  52 For Saint-Simon and his influence see Shirley Gruber, “The Revolution of 1830 and the Expression ‘Bourgeoisie,’” in The Historical Journal 11:3 (1968), 462–71.

  53 These general principles of Guizot’s politics are well described by Douglas W. J. Johnson, Guizot: aspects of French history, 1787–1874 (London, 1963), ch. 2; see 57 for the quotation about French political rivalries and passions. For the expulsion and return of the aristocrats, see Patrick-Bernard Higonnet, “La Composition de la Chambre des Députés de 1827 à 1831,” Revue Historique 239 (1968), 351–79, and Patrick Higonnet and Trevor B. Higonnet, “Class, Corruption, and Politics in the French Chamber of Deputies, 1846–48,” French Historical Studies 5 (1967), 204–24.

  54 Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris, 1985), 65–72.

  55 Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot, 44–51 (the quotation from Guizot is on 51).

  56 Ibid., 92–93. On centralization, see 61–63.

  4 Localism, state-building, and bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Germany

  1 David Blackbourn, History of Germay, 1780–1918: the Long Nineteenth Century (2nd edn., Malden, MA, and Oxford, 2003), 7–8. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, I: von Feudalismus des Alten Reiches bis zur defensiven Modernisierung der Reformära (Munich, 1987), 48–50.

  2 “Others make war; you, happy Austria, marry.” On the politics of the Holy Roman Empire and its later consequences for German history, see the still valuable analysis by Geoffrey Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (Oxford, 1957), esp. chs. 8 and 9 for the medieval situation and 361–67 for the continuity with early modern German politics; and, more recently, Sheilagh Ogilvie, “The State in Germany: a Non-Prussian View,” in Rethinking Leviathan: the Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany, ed. John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford, 1999), 167–202.

  3 Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca, NY, 1971, 2nd edn., 1998). Blackbourn, History of Germany, 10, 14. Outside powers were happy to aid the small states in preserving their independence, so as to prevent the formation of a serious rival in Germany. See Brendan Simms, “Political and Diplomatic Movements, 1800–1820: Napoleon, National Uprising, Restoration,” in Germany, 1800–1870 (Oxford, 2004), 26–27.

  4 Quoted in Thorsten Maentel, “Zwischen weltbürgerlichen Aufklärung und stadtbürgerlicher Emanzipation. Bürgerliche Geselligkeitskultur um 1800,” in Bürgerkultur im 19. Jahrhundert. Bildung, Kunst und Lebenswelt, ed. Dieter Hein and Andreas Schulz (Munich, 1996), 142–43.

  5 Thomas Ertman, “Explaining Variation in Early Modern State Structure: the Cases of England and the German Territorial States,” in Rethinking Leviathan: the Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany, ed. John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford, 1999), 35.

&n
bsp; 6 Blackbourn, History of Germany, 15.

  7 Ertman, “Explaining Variation,” 42.

  8 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, I: von Feudalismus des Alten Reiches bis zur defensiven Modernisierung der Reformära (Munich, 1987), 211.

  9 See Vivian R. Gruder, The Royal Provincial Intendants: a Governing Elite in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, 1968).

  10 Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca and London, 1996), 171.

  11 Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in fin-de-siècle Hamburg (Ithaca and London, 2003), 19–20. Andreas Schulz, “‘…Tage des Wohllebens, wie sie noch nie gewesen…’: Das Bremer Bürgertum in der Umbruchszeit 1789–1818,” in Vom alten zum neuer Bürgertum: Die mitteleuropäische Stadt im Umbruch, 1780–1820, ed. Lother Gall (Munich, 1991), 26–27. Chapters on other cities in the same volume describe similar arrangements.

  12 Much of this account relies on R. Steven Turner, “The Bildungsbürgertum and the Learned Professions in Prussia, 1770–1830: the Origins of a Class,” Histoire Sociale–Social History XIII (1980), 105–35 (122 and 124 for the quoted passages), but I have not followed Turner’s interpretation completely.

  13 Anthony J. La Vopa, “Specialists against Specialization: Hellenism as Professional Ideology in German Classical Studies,” in German Professions, 1800–1950, ed. Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad H. Jarausch (New York and Oxford, 1990), 32–34. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society, 203.

  14 On the officials as state dependents, see Hansjoachim Henning, Das westdeutsche Bürgertum in der Epoche der Hochindustrialisierung, 1860–1914: Soziales Verhalten und Soziale Strukturen, I: Das Bildungsbürgertum in den Preussischen Westprovinzen (Wiesbaden, 1972), 22–26. Kant noted the requirement of Unabhängigkeit for membership in the Bürgertum: James J. Sheehan, “Wie bürgerlich war der deutsche Liberalismus?” in Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich. Dreissig Beiträge, Mit einem Vorwort von Jürgen Kocka, ed. Dieter Langewiesche (Göttingen, 1988), 32.

  15 For a clear and insightful description of the difference, see Jeffrey Freedman, A Poisoned Chalice (Princeton and Oxford, 2002), 88–91.

  16 Wolfgang Ruppert, Bürgerlicher Wandel: Studien zur Herausbildung einer nationalen deutschen Kultur im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1981), 43. Sheehan, “Wie bürgerlich war der deutsche Liberalismus?” 32.

  17 See their introduction to Rethinking Leviathan: the Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany, ed. John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford, 1999), 17.

  18 Quoted, from a magazine article of 1785, by Ruppert, Bürgerlicher Wandel, 101. On the promotion of a national language, ibid., 35–37.

  19 Sheehan, “Wie bürgerlich war der deutsche Liberalismus?” 33; Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society, 201–02 and passim. The phrase “communicative connection” is Ruppert’s, referring to Kant and Moses Mendelssohn (Bürgerlicher Wandel, 149–50).

  20 Étienne François, “Négoce et culture dans l’Allemagne du 18e siècle,” in Cultures et formations négociantes dans l‘Europe moderne, ed. Franco Angiolini and Daniel Roche (Paris, 1995), 29–48.

  21 Quoted by Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society, 214.

  22 Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity, 126–28. For an interesting account of the transformation from the earlier to the later notion of citizenship in a single town see Hans-Werner Hahn, “Von der ‘Kultur der Bürger’ zu ‘bürgerlichen Kultur’: Veränderungen in der Lebenswelt der Wetzlaurer Bürgertums zwischen 1700 und 1900,” in Armut, Liebe, Ehre: Studien zur historischen Kulturforschung, ed. Richard van Dülmen (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 144–85.

  23 The most explicit analysis of this tension is Sheehan, “Wie bürgerlich war der deutsche Liberalismus?,” cited above. The general themes of this paragraph are also well developed by Ruppert, Hull, and Jenkins.

  24 Quoted in Sheehan, “Wie bürgerlich…,” 34.

  25 Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, “Bürger zweier Welten? Juden und Freimaurer im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Juden, Bürger, Deutsche: Zur Geschichte von Vielfalt und Differenz, 1800–1933, ed. Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke, and Till van Rahden (Tübingen, 2001), 99, citing Lessing, Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freimaurer… ed. Ion Contiades (Frankfurt, 1968), 24–25. The passage is also quoted by Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, I, 217.

  26 See Sheehan, “Wie bürgerlich war der deutsche Liberalismus?” 31, and Ruppert, Bürgerlicher Wandel, 41.

  27 For Herder’s career, and for the impact that his experiences made on his theory of language and of the public, see Anthony J. La Vopa, “Herder’s Publikum: Language, Print, and Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29:1 (1996), 5–24.

  28 Franklin Kopitzsch, Grundzüge einer Sozialgeschichte der Aufklärung in Hamburg und Altona (Hamburg, 1982), I, 142–44.

  29 Ibid., 135–37 for the traveler; 269–77 for Der Patriot.

  30 Ruppert, Bürgerlicher Wandel, 122.

  31 Kopitzsch, Grundzüge, 260–68 on the beginnings of the Enlightenment in Hamburg, and 280–85 on religion and the content of Der Patriot.

  32 Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: from Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. William Doyle (Cambridge and New York, 1985), ch. 5. For Wahrman’s work see above, Chapter 2.

  33 Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866, trans. Daniel Nolan (Princeton, 1996; orig. edn., 1983), 1.

  34 For developments in German cities before, during, and after the Napoleonic occupation, see the essays collected in Vom alten zum neuer Bürgertum: Die mitteleuropäische Stadt im Umbruch, 1780–1820, ed. Lother Gall (Munich, 1991). For a general discussion of Gall’s work and that of his students in comparison with the “Bielefeld” school of Jürgen Kocka and others, see Jonathan Sperber, “Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and Its Sociocultural World,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997), 271–97.

  35 David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: the Long Nineteenth Century, 54–65, 74–76.

  36 Walker, German Home Towns, 123–38.

  37 Blackbourn, History of Germany, 76–78 (although I am not certain he would quite share this conclusion).

  38 Ibid., 80–88.

  39 James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford and New York, 1989), 503–04. Sheehan’s conclusion reflects especially the research of Frank Tipton, “The National Consensus in German Economic History,” Central European History 7 (1974), 195–224. For the regional character of German economic development see Tipton’s still valuable book, Regional Variations in the Economic Development of Germany during the Nineteenth Century (Middletown, CT, 1976) and more generally Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: the Industrialization of Europe, 1760–1970 (Oxford and New York, 1981).

  40 F. D. Marquardt, “Pauperismus in Germany during the Vormärz,” Central European History II (1969). Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. and with notes by T. M. Knox (Oxford and New York, 1952), paras. 241–45. For the Zwanziger and discussions of them, as well as the sense of the term Fabrikant, see Christina von Hodeberg, “Der Fluch des Geldsacks: Der Aufstieg des industriellen als Herausforderung bürgerlicher Werte,” in Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel: Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman (Göttingen, 2000), 79–104. I admit I do not read the evidence quite as she does.

  41 Manfred Hettling, “Bürgertum und Revolution 1848 – ein Widerspruch,” in Bürger in Gesellschaft der Neuzeit: Wirtschaft – Politik – Kultur, ed. Hans-Jürgen Puhle (Göttingen, 1991), 210–22.

  42 Pierre Ayçoberry, Cologne entre Napoléon et Bismarck: la croissance d’une ville rhénane (Paris, 1981), 119–21. Marx was not the only socialist who turned to the French term; for another example, Otto Lüning, see Wolfgang Hartwig, “Strukturmerkmale und Entwicklungstendenzen des Vereinswesens in Deutschland 1789–1848,” in
Vereinswesen und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, ed. Otto Dann (Historische Zeitschrift Beihefte, New Series, 9, Munich, 1984), 48.