Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  25 Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 221.

  26 I have followed these events in Marx’s career in Marx’s Fate.

  27 Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 207.

  28 Marcel Roncayolo, “Logiques urbaines,” in La Ville de l’âge industriel: le cycle Hausmannien, ed. Maurice Agulhon (Paris, 1983, paper edn., 1998), vol. IV of Histoire de la France urbaine, sous la direction de Georges Duby, esp. 105; Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la ville (1852–1870) (Paris, 1976; 1997 edn., ed. Florence Bourillon and Jean-Luc Pinol), 30–39.

  29 Edmond About, “Dans les ruines,” in Paris Guide, par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France (Paris, 1867), 916–17. Roncayolo, “Logiques urbaines,”106–07.

  30 Gaillard, Paris, la ville, 65–67. For an example of a commerçant whose business included ready-to-wear articles, hats, lingerie, and who increasingly sold his wares (including wine in the later part of his life) in England, see Romain Lhopiteau, Soixante-deux Années de ma vie: recits intimes et commerciaux, 1828–90 (Paris, 1891). Lhopiteau fell foul of the difficulties in getting credit during the 1860s, as well as of the shifting winds of fashion, and had to declare bankruptcy at one point, but worked his way back to a measure of prosperity and respectability. I discuss what his memoir tells about gender relations later on.

  31 Gaillard, Paris, la ville, 257–67, 429–30.

  32 Adeline Daumard et al., Les Fortunes françaises au XIXe siècle (Paris and The Hague, 1973), ch. 5.

  33 Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton and London, 1981). For the politics of the shopkeepers see Philip G. Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton, 1986).

  34 On Mme Boucicaut see Miller, 46 and 127; on Boucicaut’s politics see Gaillard, Paris, la ville, 413.

  35 Miller, The Bon Marché, 226–27. For a similar persistence of older and more familial-based values and practices with more “extroverted” ones in French bourgeois of another city, Lille, see Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves du Commerce: Entreprise et institution dans la region lilloise (1780–1860) (Paris, 1991).

  36 For the légitimités see Maurice Agulhon, La République: l’élan fondateur et la grande blessure (1880–1932) (2 vols; rev. and enlarged edn., Paris, 1990), I, 26.

  37 On Thiers see J. P. T. Bury and R. P. Tombs, Thiers, 1797–1877: a Political Life (London, 1986). For the passages quoted see 123, 34; and for Thiers in the 1870s 197ff. I am grateful to Philip Nord for a conversation about Thiers.

  38 Ibid., 28.

  39 For the importance of the Second Empire in this respect, see the works of Hazareesingh and Nord cited just below in note 41.

  40 François Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Antonia Nevrill (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1992), 523–34.

  41 Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: the Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton, 1998). Raymond Huard, La Naissance du parti politique en France (Paris, 1996). Philip G. Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995).

  42 Furet, Revolutionary France, 525.

  43 Agulhon, La République, I, 69–70.

  44 For the two careers see ibid., 53–59, and Jean-Michel Gaillard, Jules Ferry (Paris, 1989), 52–55.

  45 I owe the suggestion in the first part of this sentence to Raymond Huard, La Naissance du parti politique en France, 205.

  46 On them, see Jean Garrigues, La République des hommes d’affaires, 1870–1900 (Paris, 1997); and Agulhon, La République, i, 51.

  47 Huard, La Naissance du parti politique en France, 268.

  48 Ibid., 287.

  49 For the history of legislation and much else on associations, see Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford, 1999), ch. 2; also Huard, La Naissance du parti politique en France, 289–310, and Pierre Sorlin, Waldeck-Rousseau (Paris, 1966), 439–49. On the general hostility to intermediate bodies, see Lucien Jaume, L’Individu effacé, ou le paradoxe du liberalisme français (Paris, 1997). Also Jean-Claude Bardout, L’Histoire étonnante de la loi 1901: le droit d’association en France avant et après Waldeck-Rousseau (Paris, 2001).

  50 See Huard, La Naissance du parti politique en France, 243.

  51 Sara Maza, “Luxury, Morality, and Social Change: Why There Was No Middle-Class Consciousness in Prerevolutionary France,” Journal of Modern History 69 (June, 1997), 228.

  52 Huard, La Naissance du parti politique en France, 315; but I admit to going somewhat beyond him in this paragraph.

  7 One special path: modern industry, politics, and bourgeois life in Germany

  1 It may be that those who originally proposed the Sonderweg thesis were guilty, as Detlev Peukert puts it, of setting up “a ‘normal’ model of modernization against which individual non-normal ‘deviations’ can be measured” (Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: the Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson [New York, 1992], xiii). But arguing as he and others do that because modern societies are often on the edge of crisis all have basically the same history simply inverts the model, blotting out the way that differing relations between the several spheres of life mark each case. The classic critique of the Sonderweg thesis as developed by Jürgen Kocka and Hans-Ulrich Wehler is David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York and Oxford, 1984). I take up some of their assertions at the end of this chapter. A different kind of dissent was registered by Jonathan Sperber, “Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and its Sociocultural World,” Journal of Modern History, 69 (June, 1997), 271–97. On the National Society see Theodore S. Hamerow, The Social Foundations of German Unification, 1858–1871: Ideas and Institutions (Princeton, 1969), and on the unification process, Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, I: the Period of Unification, 1815–71 (Princeton, 1963; reprinted 1990).

  2 Hamerow, The Social Foundations of German Unification, 24.

  3 Knut Borchardt, “Germany, 1700–1914,” trans. George Hammerley, in The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. IV: the Emergence of Industrial Societies, ed. Carlo M. Cipolla (London and New York, 1973), 142–43.

  4 W. O. Henderson, The Industrial Revolution in Europe: Germany, France, Russia, 1815–1914 (Chicago, 1961), 19–20.

  5 Hamerow, The Social Foundations of German Unification, 25–26.

  6 David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: the Long Nineteenth Century (2nd edn., Malden, MA, and Oxford, 2003), 262.

  7 Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918, 135–41. For a similar view see the chapter by Borchardt referred to just above.

  8 Ibid., 143–44, 148–49, 158–59.

  9 See Rudolf Boch, “Von der ‘begrenzten’ zur forcierten Industrialisierung: zum Wandel ökonomischer Zielvorstellungen im rheinischcn Wirtschaftsbürgertum 1815–1845,” in Bürger in Gesellschaft der Neuzeit: Wirtschaft – Politik – Kultur, ed. Hans-Jürgen Puhle (Gôttingen, 1991), 133–55. For similar discussions between Germans in Bavaria, see Franz J. Bauer, Bürgerwege und Bürgerwelten: Familienbiographische Untersuchungen zum deutschen Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1991), 62–64.

  10 On Rochau see James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford and New York, 1989), 853–54; Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1986; translated into English by Christiane Bannerji as Liberalism in Germany [Princeton, 2000], 70. On the “blood and iron” speech see Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, I, 180–84.

  11 Karin Kaudelka-Hanisch, “The Titled Businessman: Prussian Commercial Councillors in the Rhineland and Westphalia during the Nineteenth Century,” in David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans, eds., The German Bourgeiosie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the late Eighteenth to the
early Twentieth Century (London and New York, 1991), 87–114, 107 for the quotation. See also Dolores L. Augustine, Patricians and Parvenus: Wealth and High Society in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford and Providence, RI, 1994), ch. 1. Some German businessmen did seek nobility and hereditary titles, for instance the banker Gerson Bleichröder. His behavior was often ridiculed by the more practical and prosaic Rothschilds, but Bleichrôder’s acceptance of hereditary nobility from Bismarck did not lead him away from business either. Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1977), 168. On the duels as seen by an English visitor see Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred (New York, 1993), 9–33.

  12 Clive Trebilcock, The Industrialization of the Continental Powers, 1780–1914 (London and New York, 1981). For a somewhat more skeptical view see Jürgen Kocka, “Entrepreneurship in a Latecomer Country: the German Case,” in his book Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society: Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany (New York and Oxford, 1999), 70–102. There is a succinct and colorful account of the Gründerkrise and its effects in Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (New York and Oxford, 1980), 78–85.

  13 For the material in this paragraph see R. Steven Turner, “The Growth of Professorial Research in Prussia, 1818 to 1848 – Causes and Context.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 3 (1971), 137–82. On Liebig and his followers there is a fine concise account in Sheehan, German History, 808ff. On the associations see Everett Mendelsohn, “The Emergence of Science as a Profession in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in The Management of Scientists, ed. Karl Hill (Boston, 1963), 3–48.

  14 Franz J. Bauer, Bürgerwege und Bürgerwelten: Familienbiographische Untersuchungen zum deutschen Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1991). For the points emphasized here about Sattler’s career see 28–32, 55–60, and for the general point suggested at the end of this paragraph, 280–84. I have not quite taken over all of Bauer’s interpretations of these connections, however.

  15 Kocka, “Family and Bureaucracy in German Industrial Management, 1850–1914: Siemens in Comparative Perspective,” in Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society, 27–50 (40–41 for the quoted phrases).

  16 Menachem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: the Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1994), 194–95, and Menachem Blondheim, “When Bad Things Happen to Good Technologies: Three Phases in the Diffusion and Perception of American Telegraphy,” in Technology, Pessmimism, and Postmodernism, ed. Yaron Ezrahi et al. (Dordrecht, Boston, London, 1994), 85–86.

  17 The literature on professions is of course enormous. For some of the points made in this paragraph see Konrad H. Jarausch, “German Professions in History and Theory,” in German Professions, 1800–1950, ed. Geoffrey Cocks and Jarausch (New York and Oxford, 1990), 9–24; Claudia Huerkamp, “The Making of the Modern Medical Profession, 1800–1914: Prussian Doctors in the Nineteenth Century,” in ibid., 56–84; the essays by Kees Gispen and Jeffrey A. Johnson on engineers and chemists in the same volume; Charles McClelland, “Zur Professionalisierung der akademischen Berüfe in Deutschland,” in Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, I, ed. Werner Conze and Jürgen Kocka (Stuttgart, 1985), 233–47, and Ivan Waddington, “Medicine, the Market, and Professional Autonomy: Some Aspects of the Professionalization of Medicine,” in the same volume, 388–416. For France, Toby Gelfand, “A ‘Monarchical Profession’ in the old Regime: Surgeons, Ordinary Practitioners, and Medical Professionalization in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Professions and the French State, 1700–1900, ed. Gerald L. Geison (Philadelphia, 1984), 149–80, and Matthey Ramsey, “The Politics of Professional Monopoly in Nineteenth-Century Medicine: the French Model and its Rivals,” in ibid., 225–305.

  18 Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton and London, 2002), 101, 140.

  19 See the electoral figures in Robert Hofman, Geschichte der deutschen Parteien, von der Kaiserzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1993), 23. For the social-democratic movement and its organizations one can still rely on Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture. Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford, 1985).

  20 Sheehan, German History, 885–88, and German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, 93, and for the election statistics, 82–83, and Hofman, Geschichte der deutschen Parteien; Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 120; Karsten Rudolph, “On the Disappearance of a Political Party from German History: the Saxon people’s Party, 1866–69,” in Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830–1933, ed. James Retallack (Ann Arbor, 2000), 211. Thomas Adam, “How Proletarian Was Leipzig’s Social Democratic Milieu?” in the same volume, 255–70.

  21 James J. Sheehan, “Wie bürgerlich war der deutsche Liberalismus?” in Langewiesche’s already-cited collection Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, 37.

  22 Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland, 58–59, 145.

  23 Sheehan, German Liberalism, 231–33. See also 148–52 for the earlier history of the same matters, and Hofmann, Geschichte der deutschen Parteien, 30–53. John Boyer notes a similar ambivalence toward organization on the part of Austrian liberals: Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897 (Chicago and London, 1981), 324–25, 369.

  24 Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland, 59–60.

  25 Ibid., 206–07.

  26 Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland, 153, 233–38.

  27 Hofmann, Geschichte der deutschen Parteien, 107–08.

  28 On the conservatives, Hofmann, ibid., 92–94. For a general discussion of the Verbände see Thomas Nipperdey, “Interessenverbände und Parteien in Deutschland vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” originally in Politische Viertelsjahrschrift, I: 2 (1961), reprinted in Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Düsseldorf, 1981), 369–88. On the Bund der Landwirte, Hans-Jürgen Puhle, Agrarische lnteressenpolitik und Preussischer Konservatismus im Wilhelminischen Reich (Hanover, 1967). On the Zentralverband deutscher Industriellen, see Hartmut Kaelble, Industrielle Interessenpolitik in der Wilhelminischen Gesellschaft (Berlin, 1968). There is an valuable review of the last two titles by J. C. G. Röhl in Central European History, vol. I (1968), 182–86.

  29 Nipperdey, “Interessenverbände,” 387.

  30 Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: a Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago and London, 2000), 23–24.

  31 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Die Geburtsstunde des deutschen Kleinbürgertums,” in Bürger in Gesellschaft der Neuzeit: Wirtschaft–Politik–Kultur, ed. Hans-Jürgen Puhle (Göttingen, 1991), 199–209. Wehler specifically cites Walker as one of the few historians whose work identifies the roots of the distinction between Bürger and Kleinbürger.

  32 Quoted in Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe, 1780–1914: Enterprise, Family, and Independence (London and New York, 1995), 113.

  33 Crossick and Haupt, 9. For the similar chronology in France, see Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford, 1999).

  34 Crossick and Haupt, 122–26 and passim. A pioneering discussion of the persistence of small enterprise is Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in 19th-Century Industrialization,” Past and Present, 108 (August, 1985), 133–76. On Paris shopkeepers see J. Le Yaouang, “Trajectoires sociales à Paris au XIXe siècle: le monde de la boutique,” in Bulletin du Centre Pierre Léon, 4 (1993), 25–40, and for their relations with department stores and their politics, Philip G. Nord’s important work, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton, 1986).

  35 David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: the Long Nineteenth Century (2nd edn., Malden, MA, and Oxford, 2003), 239, 245. Blackbourn also discusses the survival of small merchants and manufacturers, emphasizing the uncertainties many such peop
le faced, 246–47. Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, vol. I: AMBITION, LOVE AND POLITICS (Oxford, 1973), 114. For the earlier period, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London and Oxford, 1964; orig. edn., 1962), 226–33.

  36 Wolfgang Köllman, Sozialgeschichte der Stadt Barmen im 19ten Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1960), chart on 102–04. For a similar development see David F. Crew, Town in the Ruhr: a Social History of Bochum, 1860–1914 (Cambridge and New York, 1979).

  37 Geoff Eley, “The Wilhelmine Right: How It Changed,” in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans (London and New York, 1978), 125, 129. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York, 2004), 72–73. For a persuasive demonstration that lower-middle-class people could be drawn both to democratic and authoritarian forms of populist politics depending on the opportunities offered by forms of organization see Philip Nord, Paris Shopkeepers (cited above).

  38 Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 133, 137–39.

  39 As noted by Sheehan, German Liberalism, 246–47.