Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  43 On the influence of Württemberg politics and religion on Hegel’s thinking see Lawrence W. Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807 (Cambridge and New York, 1987).

  44 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, ed. Knox, para. 185, 123. On Ferguson and his relations to German thinkers, see Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1995).

  45 Para. 256, p. 154–55.

  46 Paras. 190–92, p. 127.

  47 See the note to para. 189, p. 268.

  48 Para. 260, p. 161.

  49 The quotes from the Preface are on 10–12. The comment about “vexation” as the typical modern mood is from Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, cited by Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Princeton, 1986), 220. I discuss this aspect of Hegel’s thinking more at length in The Idea of the Self (Cambridge and New York, 2005), ch. 12.

  50 Preface to Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, 12.

  51 W. H. Riehl, Die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft (1851; I cite the Stuttgart, 1861 edn.); for the passages referred to in this paragraph, see 247, 260. In quotations I have modernized Riehl’s spelling of Bürgerthum. Blackbourn is among many modern writers who translate bürgerlich as bourgeois, History of Germany, 158.

  52 Ibid., 248–51, 257; 246 for the Revolution and “Seitdem drückt das Bürgertum den Universalismus des modernen gesellschaftlichen Lebens am entschiedensten aus. Viele nehmen Bürgertum und moderne Gesellschaft für gleichbedeutend.”

  53 Ibid., 256, 245, 268.

  54 See esp. 246–48.

  55 He speaks about this in the introduction, 7–8.

  56 For these parts of Riehl’s argument, see both the introductory sections of his book, 5–11, and 322–36.

  57 Gustav Freytag, Debit and Credit, trans. L. C. C. (New York, 1858; German edn., 1855; photographic repr., New York, 1990), 27, 125, 167. Peasants are altered by such relations in the novel too: “For five days of the week, the peasant had to cultivate his plot of ground, or to render feudal service to his landlord, and on Sunday his heart was divided between the worship of the Virgin, his family, and the public house; but the market-day led him beyond the narrow confines of his fields into the busy world.” There he could feel his own shrewdness among strangers, “he greeted acquaintances whom else he would never have met; saw new things and strange people, and heard the news of other towns and districts.” 372–73.

  5 Modern industry, class, and party politics in nineteenth-century England

  1 See the figures in B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1970 (Abridged edn., New York, 1978), 315–18, and William L. Langer, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge and New York, 1969), 194. There was a significant increase in Britain between 1848 and 1852, as shown by the maps reproduced in Samuel Lilley, “Technological Progress and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1914,” in The Fontana Economic History of Europe, III: the Industrial Revolution, ed. Carlo Cipolla (London, 1976), 208–09.

  2 Lynn Hollen Lees, “Urban Networks,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. III: 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), 83. Richard Price, British Society, 1680–1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (Cambridge and New York, 1999), 47–49. Langer, The Unbound Prometheus, 222–24.

  3 Price, British Society, 1680–1880, 85.

  4 Lilley, “Technological Progress,” 211. For steam and water power and the importance of the turbine engine see Price, British Society, 1680–1880, 28–29.

  5 Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge and New York, 1981). For similar themes, Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981), esp. ch. 2.

  6 For the educational systems see Fritz Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920 (Cambridge and New York, 1992).

  7 There is a detailed account in Glynn Davies, A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff, Wales, 2002), 285–93. See also Price, British Society, 1680–1880, 75–76, and Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 75.

  8 For the material in this and the previous paragraph see Price, 78–87, and Davies, A History of Money, 340–64. For capital formation see the table in Walter Minchonton, “Patterns of Demand, 1750–1914,” The Fontana Economic History of Europe, III, 84–85, reporting figures from Simon Kuznets, “Quantitative aspects of the economic growth of nations, VII: the share and structure of consumption,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, X (1962), 72–3. Such numbers are far from perfectly reliable and figures for the rate of investment given by others are lower; however, the proportion between British and German rates is what matters here. For other dimensions of the relations between banking and industry in this period, see the still useful discussion in Langer, The Unbound Prometheus, 348–52.

  9 Duncan Bell, “John Stuart Mill on Colonies,” Political Theory 38:1 (2010), 55–56.

  10 Penelope J. Corfield, “Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” History 72 (1987), 38–61. Asa Briggs, “The Language of ‘Class’ in early 19th-Century England,” in Essays in Labour History in Memory of G. D. H. Cole, ed. Briggs and John Saville (London, 1960); also in M. W. Flinn and T. C. Smout, eds., Essays in Social History (Oxford, 1974). For French usages similar to the ones Corfield notes in England, see Marie-France Piguet, Classe: histoire du mot et genèse du concept des physiocrates aux historiens de la Restauration (Lyon, 1996).

  11 Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: the Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1740–1840 (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 7; the quotation from James Mackintosh’s essay is on 247.

  12 See the speech in Macaulay, Selected Writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney (Chicago and London, 1972), 172. Wahrman refers to it, 357, but does not quote the whole passage.

  13 See Price, British Society, chs. 7 and 8.

  14 In addition to Price, British Society, see David Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: the Aristocracy and the Towns, 1774–1967 (Leicester, 1980), ch. 1, esp. 26–36, and Rohan McWilliam, Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England (London and New York, 1998), 44–46, where relevant literature is cited.

  15 Ibid., 272–74. On the electoral registration lists see M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, vol. i: England, trans. Frederick Clarke, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (Chicago, 1964; orig. edn., 1902), 75–77.

  16 For examples of all these usages see Briggs, “The Language of Class,” and Penelope Corfield, “Class by Name and Number.” For the harmony of interests see Wahrman, 90ff.

  17 “The landed interest alone has a right to be represented; as for the rabble who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them?” Cited from a court case of 1793 by Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, n. 5.

  18 Briggs, Victorian Cities (London and New York, 1963, 1968), 88.

  19 Ibid., 122–23.

  20 See ibid., 120, 129; on divisions in London over the Corn Law and the League, see also David Kynaston, The City of London, vol. i: a World of Its Own, 1815–1890 (London, 1994), ch. 11 (and ibid., 97 for the Reform Bill). Sidney Pollard, “Free Trade, Protectionism, and the World Economy,” in Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford, London, and New York, 2001), 48.

  21 Briggs, Victorian Cities, 123–24.

  22 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago and London, 1987), 110.

  23 Theodore Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban-Industrial Society: Bradford 1750–1850 (Cambridge and New York, 1990), 184–98.

  24 Ibid., 200, quoting from Edward Miall, The British Churches in Relation to th
e British People (London, 1849).

  25 A notable example is the book by Davidoff and Hall, cited just above.

  26 Thomas Walter Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven and London, 1976), 239.

  27 See Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (Harmondsworth and Baltimore, 1964, 1967), 133–45.

  28 For examples of this usage see James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago and London, 1978), 15–16, for early nineteenth century instances, and 128–29 for its survival into the 1860s and 1870s.

  29 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York, 1987), 110.

  30 Moira Donald, “Workers of the World Unite? Exploring the Enigma of the Second International,” in Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The Mechanics of Internationalism (Oxford, 2001), 188–89.

  31 Sheehan, German Liberalism, 141–42.

  32 Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 94.

  33 John Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–1868 (London, 1966), 257–58, and 77 for Gladstone and working-class voters. A similar analysis of Gladstone was offered much earlier by J. L. Hammond in Gladstone and the Irish Nation; see the discussion by Peter Clarke in Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge and New York, 1978), 278–80.

  34 The growth and importance of these organizations is a story retold by many writers, but the original account by Ostrogorski in Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties remains a basic source, as Barraclough notes in An Introduction to Contemporary History.

  35 See H. V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals, and Social Politics, 1892–1914 (Cambridge, 1973), 285–87.

  36 On the LRL see Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge and New York, 1993), 265, and 132–33 for the Chartists after 1848.

  37 See Briggs, Victorian Cities, 187–88.

  38 G. R. Searle, The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration, 1886–1929 (London and New York, 1992), 37–38.

  39 Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840–1914 (Manchester and New York, 2000), 24 for these quotes.

  40 Among the many histories of the Liberal Party, I rely chiefly on Searle, The Liberal Party.

  41 For these developments see Flinn, After Chartism.

  42 D. S. Gadian, “Class Consciousness in Oldham and other North-West Industrial Towns, 1830–50,” in R. J. Morris and Richard Rodger, eds., The Victorian City: a Reader in British Urban History, 1820–1914 (London and New York, 1993), 251–52.

  43 On “the two Hobs” there are excellent discussion in both Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats and Emy, Liberals, Radicals, and Social Politics.

  44 See David Powell, “The New Liberalism and the Rise of Labour,” The Historical Journal 29 (1986), 369–93, who argues that a major tension between liberalism and workers in the years when the latter were gaining more independent power and organization was that the liberals were a governing party, and thus necessarily given to compromise and the balancing of interests, while Labour represented a sectional interest based on a suspicion of the capitalist state, which gave it a degree of freedom of action that the liberals did not have. Powell notes all the same that the traditional liberal opposition to class politics was an important element of this contrast; see esp. 388.

  6 France and bourgeois France: from teleocracy to autonomy

  1 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976). Pierre Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2007). Susan Carol Rogers, Shaping Modern Times in Rural France: the Transformation and Reproduction of an Aveyronnais Community (Princeton, 1991). Stéphane Gerson, The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 2003). Gérard Noiriel, Les Ouvriers dans la société française: XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris, 1986).

  2 Noiriel, Les Ouvriers, 33, 49.

  3 For one example, see Claude Fohlen, Une affaire de famille au XIXe siècle: Mequillet-Noblot (Paris, 1955), 14.

  4 Yves Lequin, Les Ouvriers de la région Lyonnaise (1848–1914) (Lyon, 1977). For a good account in English see Robert J. Bezucha, The Lyons Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy (Cambridge, MA, 1974).

  5 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976), 281; Noiriel, Les Ouvriers, 51.

  6 Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 196, 233, 212ff.

  7 Auguste Mimerel, Du pauperisme et de ses rapports avec l’industrie en France et en Angleterre (Lille, n.d.[1841]). Jean-Pierre Daviet, La Société industrielle en France, 1814–1914: productions, échanges, répresentations (Paris, 1997), 39–40, discusses this pamphlet, but he underplays Mimerel’s emphasis on the English reliance on production for export. For some other examples of such sentiments see Yves Leclercq, Le Réseau impossible: la résistance au système des grandes compagnies ferroviaires et la politique économique en France, 1820–52 (Geneva, 1987), 24.

  8 Noiriel, Les Ouvriers, 69; 78–79.

  9 Jean-Pierre Daviet, La Société industrielle en France, 123–32; Noiriel, Les Ouvriers, 58. For workers struggles over workplace control and tarifs, see Robert Bezucha, The Lyons Uprising of 1834, cited above, and William M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: the Textile Trade and French Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge and New York, 1984). Jeff Horn emphasizes worker resistance to innovation as an important factor in slowing down industrial change in The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1789–1830 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2006).

  10 All the texts are cited, with references, in Yves Leclercq, Le Réseau impossible, 13–17.

  11 François Caron, Histoire des chemins de fer en France, I: 1740–1883 (Paris, 1997), 95–121; the quotation is on 113. Caron also draws on Leclercq, Le Réseau impossible.

  12 Ibid., 124–26.

  13 For the thesis about the modern quality of workers, Charles Tilly and Lynn Lees, “The People of June, 1848,” in Revolution and Reaction, 1848 and the Second French Republic, ed. Roger Price (London, 1975). For their traditional features, see Christopher H. Johnson, “Communism and the Working-Class before Marx: the Icarian Experience,” American Historical Review 76 (1971), 642–89, and Utopian Communism: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839–51 (Ithaca, NY, 1974). William Sewell, jr., Work and Revolution in France: the Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge and New York, 1980), combines both views, but emphasizes the way workers in general preserved a corporate idiom from the Old Regime.

  14 Louis Chevalier, La Formation de la population parisienne au xixe siècle (Paris, 1950). For cotton manufacturing in early nineteenth-century Paris, see David Pinckney, “Paris, Capitale du coton sous le Premier Empire,” Annales ESC V (1950), 50–60.

  15 Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1985), 96. For the fears of the immigrants see Chevalier’s other famous book, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York, 1973).

  16 Adeline Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne de 1815 à 1848 (Paris, 1963), 647–50.

  17 Ibid., xi. The speaker was Garnier-Pages.

  18 Henri Monnier, Physiologie du bourgeois (Paris, n.d. [1841?]). I argue in Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life (New York, 1986; Baltimore, 1999) that the emerging figure of the bohemian in these years served in part to give more clarity to the image of the bourgeois.

  19 Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne, 220–46, and passim.

  20 For Marx’s literary interests in general, and for later socialist fascination with Balzac, see S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford, 1976), still the best survey of Marx’s literary interests. But see also my account
of their relations in Marx’s Fate: the Shape of a Life (Princeton, 1978). Engels’s letter about Balzac is cited in Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets (Chicago, 1967), 173–74.

  21 Michel Chevalier, Religion Saint-Simonienne. Le bourgeois.–Le Revélateur (Paris, 1834?), 3–4.

  22 E. H. Labrousse, “1848, 1830, 1789: How Revolutions are Born,” in François Crouzet, W. H. Challoner, and W. M. Stern, eds., Essays in European Economic History (New York, 1970).

  23 Caron, Histoire des chemins de fer, 166–210; Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 207–10, and Daviet, La Société industrielle en France, 184. For resistance by local bourgeois to railroad building that required the intervention of the state, see also Louis Desgraves, Georges Dupeux et al., Bordeaux au XIXe siècle, vol. vi of Histoire de Bordeaux, 8 vols., general editor Ch. Higounet (Bordeaux, 1969), 202.

  24 Daviet, La Société industrielle en France, 182.