Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  40 Ibid., 251–52. Hobrecht is also quoted by Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 218. On Weber’s politics the great work is Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, trans. Michael S. Steinberg (Chicago, 1984; orig. edn., Tübungen, 1974).

  41 Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 182–85 (English edn., 202–05); Sheehan, German Liberalism, 134–37.

  42 Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, passim; Langeiwesche, 219ff. (English edn., 237ff.).

  43 See for instance the forthright admission of this by Gabriel Riesser in Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 64.

  44 Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 115–18; Sheehan, 91ff., 152ff. and passim.

  45 See Richard J. Evans’s monumental study, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1987).

  46 Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 200–11 (206 for the quoted passage); English edn., 218–28.

  47 Karl Heinrich Pohl, “Power in the City: Liberalism and Local Politics in Dresden and Munich,” in Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830–1933, ed. James Retallack (Ann Arbor, 2000), 289–308.

  48 Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 224–27, English edn., 241–45; Sheehan, German Liberalism, 26–71. Langewiesche’s assessment of the state of the party on the eve of the war is somewhat more positive than Sheehan’s.

  49 See Chapter 4.

  50 See, for instance, David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York and Oxford, 1984), 193–94, where Otto von Gierke’s judgment to this effect is cited with approval.

  51 Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 274–75. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Geofrey Nowell Smith and Quintin Hoare (London, 1971 and later edns.). There is a more complete English translation of the Quaderni del carcere in three vols., by Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York, 1991–2007).

  52 Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, 144.

  53 Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1914, 264. For a similar view see Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1977), 202.

  8 Time, Money, Capital

  1 Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap, Chicago and London, 1996; orig. edn., 1992), 107–08.

  2 Ibid., ch. 5 esp. 156, and ch. 8, 245–51.

  3 Ibid., 346, and ch. 10.

  4 For an insightful and convenient account of Simmel’s thinking in this regard, see Laurence Scialom, “De ‘Philosophie de L’Argent’ à la compréhension de la cohesion d’une économie monetaire décentralisé: une esquisse,” in À Propos de ‘Philosphie de l’argent’ de Georg Simmel, ed. Jean-Yves Grenier (Paris, 1993), 163–88. Somewhat similar ideas about money, in the face of the litany of complaints often made about it, were voiced by earlier writers. We noted Bernard Mandeville’s view of money as “a thing more skillfully adapted to the whole Bent of our Nature, than any other of human Contrivance,” in Chapter 1. Some decades later, the German poet and philosopher Novalis referred to the commercial exchanges made possible by money in a similar way, writing in his notebook that “The commercial spirit is the spirit of the world. It is the great spirit altogether.” See Novalis’s Allgemeine Brouillon, in Novalis Werke, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Munich, 1981), 495. The passage is discussed by Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley, 1993), 17–18.

  5 Much of this account relies on Glynn Davies, A History of Money: from Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff, Wales, 2002).

  6 Quoted in Davies, ibid., 294. For the radical critique of paper money see Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton, 1987), 25.

  7 Davies, A History of Money, 305–16.

  8 Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: a Description of the Money Market (London, 1873; I cite the New York, 1910 edn.), 55. A somewhat similar understanding had already been put forward at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Henry Thornton; see Forrest Capie, “Banking in Europe in the Nineteenth Century: the Role of the Central Bank,” in The State, the Financial System and Economic Modernization, ed. Richard Sylla, Richard Tilly, and Gabriel Tortella (Cambridge and New York, 1999), 120–21.

  9 Davies, 343–44. In addition, private banknotes continued to circulate as well. As Davies notes, “One of the purposes of the Bank Charter Act of 1844 had been to replace private banknotes with those of the Bank of England–though it was a long process which took nearly seventy years before the last note-issuing joint-stock bank, Fox, Fowler & Co., gave up issuing when absorbed by Lloyds in 1921, so enabling the Bank of England to increase its fiduciary issue to its eventual maximum under the 1844 Act, i.e. to £19 1/4 million” (376).

  10 See Paul Butel and Jean-Pierre Pousssou, La Vie quotidienne à Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1980), 80.

  11 Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, trans. Herbert J. Hunt (Harmondsworth, Eng., and Baltimore, 1971); see 417 and ch. 35. For the dominance of such practices among early nineteenth-century French publishers, see Elisabeth Parinet, Une Histoire de l’édition à l’époque contemporaine (xixe–xxe siècle) (Paris, 2004), 27, and Frédéric Barbier and Catherine Bertho Lavenir, Histoire des médias: de Diderot à Internet (Paris, 1996), 68ff. For an example of the role of bills of exchange in bringing about an actual bankruptcy in the early 1830s see Jean-Baptiste Curmer, “Souvenirs d’un bourgeois de Rouen,” in Jean-Pierre Chaline, ed., Deux Bourgeois en leur temps: documents sur la société Rouennaise du XIXe siècle (Rouen, 1977), 112, where Curmer describes the failure of his brother-in-law.

  12 Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la ville (1852–1870), ed. Florence Bourillon and Jean-Luc Pinol (Paris, 1997), 272–76. That many businesses continued to operate in the old way is evident from the account in the autobiography of a commerçant who suffered bankruptcy as a result: Romain Lhopiteau, Soixante-deux annèes de ma vie: recits intimes et commerciaux, 1828–90 (Paris, 1891). For similar practices in the Nord see Gaston Motte, Les Motte: Étude de la descendance Motte-Clarisse, 1750–1950 (Roubaix, 1950), 68.

  13 See Davies, A History of Money, 555–62, Alain Plessis, La Banque de France et ses deux cents actionnaires sous le second empire (Geneva, 1982), and François Caron, An Economic History of Modern France, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1979), 54–59. Eugen Weber finds that this situation persisted even longer in many parts of the French countryside: Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976), 33–40.

  14 Quoted in Plessis, La Banque de France, 31.

  15 As Glynn Davies notes: “just when the banks in France, and even more so in Germany, were forging their close links with industry and strengthening the regional bases of their financial institutions, the British banks were loosening their ties with local industry, strictly avoiding becoming entangled in medium and long-term lending, and began centralizing financial flows and decision-making in London. Partly as a consequence the failure rate of the British banks declined–as did the growth rate of British industry together with Britain’s long-held lead” in industrial finance. Davies, A History of Money, 562.

  16 Richard Tilly, Geld und Kredit in der Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Suttgart, 2003), 86–99.

  17 Ron Chernow, The Death of the Banker: the Decline and Fall of the Great Financial Dynasties and the Triumph of the Small Investor (New York, 1997). Louis Bergeron, Les Rothschilds et les autres: la gloire des banquiers (Paris, 1991), 95–96. For the story of a number of French banking families that gained great power in the nineteenth century but lost it later on, see René Sedillot, Les Deux Cents Familles (Paris, 1988).

  18 Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: the World’s Banker, 1849–1999 (New York and London, 1999), xxv. On Frankfurt as a center for government finance in Germany, see Bergeron, Les Rothschilds et les autres, 39–40.

  19 Philip Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power: a history of one of the grea
test of all banking families, the House of Barings, 1762–1929 (New York, 1988), 85.

  20 Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, 65.

  21 Ibid., 40–61.

  22 Plessis, La Banque de France, 62–63, 256.

  23 Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, 74, 159.

  24 Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power, 199–202.

  25 Chernow, Death of the Banker, 91.

  26 Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ed. with an introduction by Stewart Edwards, trans. Elizabeth Fraser (New York, 1969), 42–43.

  27 Ibid., 45.

  28 The summary of Marx’s economic theory in these paragraphs is taken over from chs. 10 and 11 of my book, Marx’s Fate: the Shape of a Life (Princeton, 1978), where all the texts are cited and analyzed at much greater length.

  29 For the quotation in this paragraph and the context in which it appears, see Marx’s Fate, 312.

  30 On Engels’s editing of the later parts of Capital and the complex relations between Marx’s views on this topic and his friend’s, see ibid., 336–47.

  31 Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London, 1873), 705. Marx’s Fate, 315.

  9 Men and women

  1 Quoted from Meyer’s Grosse Conversations-Lexicon by David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: the Long Nineteenth Century (2nd edn., Malden, MA, and Oxford, 2003), 162.

  2 From John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Householde Gouernment (London, 1614), as reported in Kathleen M. Davis, “The Sacred Condition of Equality: How Original Were Puritan Doctrines of Marriage?” Social History, 5 (1977), 510, cited by Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel (New York and London, 1987), 18–19.

  3 James McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: the Woman Question in France under the Third Republic (New York, 1980), 9. For similar assumptions in the eighteenth century see Françoise Mayeur, L’Éducation des filles en France au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1979), 22–23.

  4 Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” The Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 383–414 (404–05 and 413 for the passages quoted above, save that the list of occupations is from the summary she gives in the introduction to her book, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998), 4–5. The target of her critique was the (in many ways still valuable) work of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago and London, 1987). There is a wide literature on female contributions to the economy, referred to by Angélique Janssens in the introduction to her edited volume, The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? (International Review of Social History Supplement, 5; Cambridge and New York, 1997), but Janssens somewhat confuses things by conflating the question of what women contributed quantitatively to incomes with the different issue of separate work spheres. For male power in guilds almost any history of the subject can be consulted (see those cited in the early chapters above), but there is overwhelming evidence for instance in Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca and London, 1996).

  5 Marion G. Gray, Productive Men, Reproductive Women: The Agrarian Household and the Emergence of Separate Spheres during the German Enlightenment (New York and Oxford, 2000). The kinds of relations Gray describes were even older, and deeply embedded in the early history of family life. As Raffaela Sarti notes, the word family originally meant the dependents of the family’s head, typically the pater familias. “For a long time the etymological meaning of family as a group of servants extended its tentacles like an octopus to wives and children in the name of the dependency they shared with the servants, thus impeding unity between spouses or between parents and children. So ‘family ‘often meant the wife, children and servants as a group distinct from the father, who was head of this group without being part of it.” Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800, trans. Alan Cameron (New Haven and London, 2002), 36. See also Otto Brunner, “Das ‘ganze Haus’ und die alteuropäische Gesellschaft,” in Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte (Göttingen, 1956).

  6 Gray, 297–300. My way of drawing on Gray’s work gives a somewhat different tone to these developments than he does, and as I will make clear in a moment I think the long-term implications of his argument are rather different from the ones he draws from it.

  7 Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996), 131. Theodore Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban-Industrial Society: Bradford 1750–1850 (Cambridge and New York, 1990), 224.

  8 Karin Hausen, “Family and Role-Division: the Polarisation of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century – an Aspect of the Dissociation of Work and Family Life,” in The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans and W. R. Lee (London and Totowa, NJ, 1981), 68–69. Also Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, trans. Stuart McKinnon-Evans (Material Word) in association with Terry Bond and Barbara Norden (Oxford and New York, 1989), esp. 32–33.

  9 Sarah Hanley, “Family and State in Early Modern France: the Marriage Pact,” in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert, with a foreword by Joan W. Scott (New York and Oxford, 1987), 54.

  10 David Warren Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge and New York 1998), 11, 414–15.

  11 Jürgen Kocka, “Familie, Unternehmer, und Kapitalismus. An Beispielen aus der frühen Industrialisierung,” in Die Familie in der Geschichte, ed Heinz Reif (Göttingen, 1982), 177–78. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolodation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–96 (Cambridge and New York, 2001), 33.

  12 Kocka, ibid.; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes.

  13 Hanley, “Family and State in Early Modern France,” 54. She notes that the modern situation is “characterized politically by the separation of public (state) and private (individual) interests, and economically by sustained industrial growth, which supports large populations. Citizenship in a state underwrites the life chances of individuals by guaranteeing basic social services (education, social security, welfare, etc.).”

  14 Caroline Chotard-Lioret, “Correspondance en 1900, le plus public des actes privés, ou la manière de gérer un réseau de parenté,” Ethnologie française XV (1985), 63–71.

  15 Viviane Isambert-Jamati, Solidarité fraternelle et réussite sociale: La Correspondance familiale des Dubois-Goblot, 1841–82 (Paris, 1995), 94 for the letter quoted.

  16 Davidoff and Hall, 335–38. Frevert, Women in German History, 45, 187. Michelle Perrot, and Anne Martin-Fugier, “The Actors,” in A History of Private Life, IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1990), 196–201.

  17 I gave an account of the Marx family in Marx’s Fate: the Shape of a Life (Princeton, 1978), 279ff.

  18 David Newsome, The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change (New Brunswick, 1997), 87.

  19 The point is, I think, far too little appreciated by Davidoff and Hall in their account of women writers, Family Fortunes, 180–97. For other examples see Dagmar Herzog, “Liberalism, Religious Dissent, and Women’s Rights: Louise Dittmar’s Writings from the 1840s,” in In Search of a Liberal Germany, ed. Jarausch and Jones, 55–85, and Frevert, Women in German History, 79, and 124–26 for the persistence among feminists of the view that motherhood had to remain a touchstone of their strategy even at the end of the century. Dittmar rejected the claim that the general principle of equality had to be tempered in accord with the natural differences between men and women, but her point was that the differences that existed were not relevant to either education or the need for individual independence, not that no differences existed. Th
is point is not clearly recognized by Lynn Abrams, “Companionship and conflict: the negotiation of marriage relations in the nineteenth century,” in Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency and Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC, 1997), 103.

  20 Richard Price, British society, 1680–1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (Cambridge and New York, 1999), 192–214. Fawcett is quoted in Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1990), 197. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall make a similar point in the book cited above.

  21 See her comments in Le Journal intime de Caroline B[rame]. Enquête de Michelle Perrot et Georges Ribeill (Paris, 1985), 222, n.24: “c’est sans doute sous le Second Empire que la distinction des sphères et celle des rôles sexuels ont atteint son degré le plus fort. Mais elle commence à être contestée et c’est ce qui fait l’apreté des discussions sur l’education des filles dans les années 1860 qui aboutissent à une véritable crise en 1867.”