Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  22 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), 43 (for the quotation from Condorcet) and 203.

  23 Karin Hausen, “Family and Role-Division: the Polarisation of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century,” cited above. Only the last quotation comes from her article, however (61); the others are from the text cited by Ute Frevert in her introduction to her edited volume, Bürgerinnen und Bürger: Geschlechterverhältnisse im 19. Jahrhundert, Zwölf Beiträge, mit einem Vorwort von Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen, 1988), 12.

  24 On Hippel see Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State and Civil Society in Germany, where the passage quoted appears on 328. Hippel’s works on this subject have been translated into English by Timothy F. Sellner: On Marriage (Detroit, 1994), and On Improving the Status of Women (Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber) (Detroit, 1979). That the more complex and potentially more liberal relations between the sexes suggested here extended to other sections of German opinion has recently been argued by Brian Vick, “Liberalism, Nationalism, and Gender Dichotomy in Mid-Nineteenth Century Germany: the Contested Case of German Civil Law,” Journal of Modern History 82 (2010), 546–84, where a large body of literature there is no space to list here is cited.

  25 Richard J. Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840–1920 (London and New York, 1977), 33. For a particularly striking example see Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven and London, 2004).

  26 A very similar experience of liberal family values unrealized by action lies at the center of a persuasive explanation given for the formation of some later activists: Kenneth Kenniston, Young Radicals (New York, 1968).

  27 Quoted in Women, the Family, and Freedom: the Debate in Documents, vol. II: 1750–1880, ed. Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen (Stanford, 1988), 247.

  28 Romain Lhopiteau, Soixante-deux années de ma vie: recits intimes et commerciaux, 1828–90 (Paris, 1891). Lhopiteau’s story gives the lie to the commonly expressed notion that bourgeois marriages entered into with full respect for the practical and social constraints imposed by decorum and social standing were ordinarily loveless. For another example see Gustave-Emmanuel Roy, négociant, Souvenirs: 1823–1906 (Nancy, 1906), esp. 83–89 on his courtship and marriage.

  29 Sabean, Kinship, 507.

  30 Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: the Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1981); Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?” 405–07. These examples should be sufficient to show how careless and exaggerated are the assertions of some writers that bourgeois status was incompatible with wives working for pay or profit, a notion put forward for instance by Anne Martin-Fugier in various writings, e.g. “Les repas dans l’horaire quotidien des ménages bourgeois à Paris au XIXe siècle,” in Le Temps de manger: alimentation, emploi du temps et rythmes sociaux, ed. Maurice Aymard et al. (Paris, 1993), 227: “On est bourgeois au XIXe siècle à deux conditions: 1) La femme ne travaille pas pour gagner sa vie, ni à l’extérieur de la famille ni à l’intérieur…”

  31 See Evans, The Feminists, cited above.

  32 The texts are all printed in John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Chicago and London, 1970). For the presence of these ideas among their friends see Rossi’s introduction to this volume.

  33 Evans, The Feminists, 18–19.

  34 See Peter Gay, Education of the Senses (New York, 1984), 255–77, who emphasizes the new ground contraception opened up for making sexual pleasure a legitimate part of marriage. I will return to this question later on. Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford and New York, 1994), 62–64 and his companion volume, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford and New York, 1994), 179–88 and 195,. J. A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood: a Study of Family Planning Among the Victorian Middle Classes (London, 1954).

  35 F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: a Social History of Victorian Britain (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 64–66. Some evidence exists that lower-middle-class families were also early users of contraception in England, but Michael Mason notes that this may have been at least partly a continuation of pre-industrial attempts at family limitation, Making of Victorian Sexuality, 54–57. Frevert, Women in German History, 119. Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford, 1991), 42–43; Gunilla-Frederike Budde, Auf dem Weg ins Bürgerleben: Kindheit und Erziehung in deutschen und englischen Bürgerfamilien, 1840–1914 (Göttingen, 1994), 51–53; Karin Hausen, “‘…eine Ulme für das schwanke Efeu.’ Ehepaare im deutschen Bildungsbürgertum,” in Bürgerinnen und Bürger, ed. Frevert (cited above), 97–98.

  36 Thompson, Rise of Respectable Society, 65. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London, 1999), 152. Eleanor Rathbone’s father supported her desire to study at as university (she went to Oxford) even over the objections of her mother, a pattern visible in a number of other families: Pederson, Eleanor Rathbone, 36–39.

  37 Françoise Mayeur, L’Éducation des filles en France au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1979); for Simon and Duruy, 114–15. For a liberal position that went somewhat beyond Simon’s but still drew back from full equality and left women in a separate sphere, see Louis Legrand, Le mariage et les moeurs en France (Paris, 1878). Legrand was a lawyer and republican deputy.

  38 Mayeur, L’Éducation des filles, esp. 156–58. Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 65–66.

  39 Edouard Charton, Dictionnaire des Professions ou Guide pour le choix d’un état, indiquant les conditions de temps et d’argent pour parvenir à chaque profession, les études à suivre, les programmes des écoles spéciales, les examens à subir, les aptitudes et les facultés nécessaires pour réussir, les moyens d’établissement, les chances d’avancement et de succès, les devoirs, 3rd edn., publiée avec le concours de Mm. Paul Laffitte et Jules Charton (Paris, 1880), 218–24. Cf. Guide pour le choix d’un état ou Dictionnaire des professions, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1851). For a similar recognition that women were entering into the professions, in particular medicine, see Paul Jacquemart, Professions et métiers, Guide pratique à l’usage des familles et de la jeunesse pour le choix d’une carrière (Paris, 1892) s.v. “Femmes médicins.”

  40 Frevert, Women in German History, 121–24. Augustine, Patricians and Parvenus, 118–19. Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 138–43. There is also an excellent general discussion in Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (New York and Oxford, 1980), 207–13. The future psychoanalyst Karen Horney attended the female Gymnaisum set up in Hamburg in 1900, after both her mother and brother worked on her father to gain his permission; see The Adolescent Diaries of Karen Horney (New York, 1980), 19. I am grateful to Samara Heifetz for this reference.

  41 Budde, Auf dem Weg ins Bürgertum, 416–7; Augustine, Patricians and Parvenus, 122.

  42 Robert Max Jackson, Destined for Equality: the Inevitable Rise of Women’s Status (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1998), 3.

  43 See the concluding essays by Jürgen Kocka and Ute Gerhard in Bürgerinnen und Bürger: Geschlechterverhältnisse im 19. Jahrhundert, 206–14.

  44 Jackson, Destined for Equality, 31. The previous quotes are on 251 and 22. Similar considerations operated in England, alongside others. See Ursula Vogel, “Property Rights and the Status of Women in Germany and England,” in Jürgen Kocka and Allan Mitchell, eds., Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford and Providence, RI, 1993), 241–69. Vogel’s overall views however are not in accord with the argument being made here. In every country the right of husbands over their wives’ property was an inheritance from medieval law, a point Vogel recognizes for Germany as well as England but with too little acknowledgment of its implications. Some developments that foreshadow the ones Jackson ci
tes were already visible in eighteenth-century England. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, abridged edn. (London and New York, 1977), 221.

  45 Jackson, Destined for Equality, 251–52.

  46 Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900–2000 (London and New York, 2004), 27.

  47 On the “crisis of masculinity,” see Annelise Maugue, L’Identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle, 1871–1914 (Paris, 1987); Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris (New York, 1993); and for an intelligent discussion of the whole question, Gerald N. Izenberg’s introduction to his book, Modernism and Masculinity: Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky through World War I (Chicago and London, 2000). For the range of opinions, mostly negative on the part of academics, expressed in a survey published in 1897, see Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, I: the Education of the Senses (New York, 1984), 221–25. For a skeptical view of the notion of a crisis of masculinity see the general account of gender relations in the Belle Epoque in James F. McMillan, France and Women 1789–1914: Gender, Society and Politics (London and New York, 2000; this book is a revision of Macmillan’s earlier Housewife or Harlot, cited above), ch. 10. For the theme of a crisis in gender relations rather than masculinity see for instance Ann Taylor Allen, “Patriarchy and Its Discontents: the Debate on the Origins of the Family in the German-Speaking World, 1860–1930,” in Germany at the fin de siècle: culture, politics, and ideas, ed. Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld (Baton Rouge, LA, 2004), 81–101. On the “new woman” see Silverman, Art Nouveau, 66–74; Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siècle (Manchester and New York, 1997); Talia Schaffer, “‘Nothing but Foolscap and Ink’: Inventing the New Woman,” in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminism, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (London, 2001), 39–52. For English cartoons about the “new woman” see Richardson’s and Willis’s introduction to the volume.

  48 Patrick K. Bidelman, Pariahs Stand Up! The Founding of the Liberal Feminist Movement in France, 1858–1889 (Westport, CT, and London, 1982), xx.

  49 Camille Mauclair, “La Femme devant les peintres modernes, “ La Nouvelle revue, N. S. vol. I, (15 November 1899), 190–213. The article is discussed by Debora Silverman in Art Nouveau, 69, but focusing on different passages from it. Silverman cites in addition an article with some similar notions, Marius-Ary Leblond, “Les Peintres de la femme nouvelle,” La Revue (formerly La Revue des revues) xxxix (November 1, 1901), 275–90. I am grateful to Tamar Garb for reminding me about Mauclair’s essay at a time when I had forgotten about it.

  10 Bourgeois morals: from Victorianism to modern sexuality

  1 Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, vol. I: Education of the Senses (New York and Oxford, 1984). See 420–21 for a particularly interesting point of entry to the general question. For the bourgeois sources of the obsession with hypocrisy and its dangers in nineteenth-century America, see Karen Haltunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: a Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–70 (New Haven and London, 1982). For a similar point about England see Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford and New York, 1994), 127, who discusses the relations between accusation of “cant” and actual behavior. I will return to this issue, and to the implications of Mason’s studies of this subject, just below.

  2 Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford and New York, 1994), 43–62. I have elaborated a bit on what he says, but in his spirit, I think. See also his companion volume, The Making of Victorian Sexuality, cited just above. I draw greatly on both books below, referring to them as, respectively, Victorian Attitudes and Victorian Sexuality.

  3 Alain Corbin, “Backstage,” 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), 476–77.

  4 See, for a general statement on this point Josef Ehmer, “Marriage,” ch. 9 of Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1789–1913, vol. II of The History of the European Family, ed. David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (New Haven and London, 2002), 292–301, and the literature cited there.

  5 Laurence Croq, “Les ‘Bourgeois de Paris’ au XVIIIe siècle: identification d’une catégorie sociale polymorphe.” Thèse de doctorat nouveau régime, Université de Paris I, Décembre, 1997 (Copy in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris), 50–55.

  6 Croq, “Bourgeois de Paris,” 85–90. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1982), vol. I, ch. 1, part I. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (abridged edn., New York, 1979), part IV. Various historians have pointed out that there were companionate marriages earlier as well, but Stone’s evidence that the phenomenon was more diffused and had greater weight in the eighteenth century seems to me persuasive.

  7 Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900–2000 (London and New York, 2004). On some of these conflicts, see 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).

  8 Norbert Elias notes both aspects of aristocratic life; for the first see The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1982), for the second, the same author’s The Court Society (New York, 1983), e.g. 129–30. Therborn, Between Sex and Power, 23.

  9 Les Liaisons dangereuses has sometimes been thought to be a satirical attack on courtly mores, but Choderlos de Laclos was close to a number of high aristocratic figures, including the Duc d’Orléans, who read and admired the book, and it seems that only after the French Revolution was it seen in this way. On Pepys see Lawrence Stone’s discussion of him in The Family, Sex, and Marriage, esp. 348–49, and for a broader account Claire Tomalin’s fine biography, Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self (New York, 2002). For the general point about families or households as working units see also Ehmer, “Marriage,” 297ff., who describes the shift to the “male-breadwinner–female homemaker model,” 300. See also Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York and London, 2005), 154–57. For the increase in aristocratic debauchery see Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: the Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britian, 1650–1950 (New Haven and London, 1995), 126.

  10 Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996), 37, 40. A page later she notes: “What came, rather later, to be called ‘middle class values’ initially emerged less from an urge to organize other people’s labor more efficiently than as a result of common experiences with regard to credit and the mechanisms of commerce and investment.”

  11 P. S. Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (Oxford and New York, 1979). Thomas L. Hakell, “Capitalism and the Humanitarian Sensibility,” American Historical Review 90 (1985), 339–61 and 547–66. For Kant see his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale, IL, 1978). The connection between character and relations between strangers is suggested in an as-yet unpublished introduction to a volume on sociability and character to be edited by Susan Manning and Thomas Ahnert. For the later history of character see Stefan Collini, “The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 35 (1985), 29–51, where the connection between character and the need to prepare for action in unknown circumstances is stressed. In nineteenth-century London many firms kept “character books” in which they listed the features of people with whom they had dealings, indicating their degrees of trustworthiness. See David Kynaston, The City of London, vol. I: a World of Its Own, 1815–1890 (London, 1994), 80ff. For the impact of this concern for character on child-rearing
see Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: the Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge and New York, 1981).

  12 See Claude Labrosse, Lire au xviiie siècle. La Nouvelle Héloise et ses lecteurs (Lyon, 1985); Robert C. Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau: the Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), and Jean M. Goulemot and Didier Masseau, “Naissance des lettres addressées à l’écrivain,” in Écrire à l’écrivain, Textes réunis par José-luis Diaz, Textuel, 127 (February, 1994).

  13 It is worth recalling, in connection with Göran Therborn’s notion about the relationship between family history and middle-class morality developed above, that Goethe’s hero Wilhelm Meister also becomes an estate manager, leaving behind his earlier attraction for a career in the theater. Like Julie and Saint-Preux, he comes to accept the practical basis of family survival as the determining ground for personal existence and moral choice.

  14 Rousseau generalized this principle in the project he told about in his Confessions to make himself into the kind of person he was not but wished to be, which he named – it was to be a book title – Sensory Morality or the Materialism of the Sage (La Morale sensitive ou le matérialisme du sage). Since he, like others, was driven in unpredictable directions by things and events around him, he sought a solution through controlling all these circumstances. Thus he would be able always to direct his will in a virtuous and consistent direction. The plan was a kind of generalization of the way Wolmar managed Saint-Preux and Julie’s feelings toward each other. Here, however, Rousseau himself is to be at once the manager of the scene and the object formed by it. Whether he realized how deeply self-contradictory the scheme was we do not know (he never wrote the book he contemplated about it), but Jean Starobinski is clearly correct that the scheme ignores “the fact that he deliberately created what he wants to experience as an independent force,” which means that he was trying at once “to orchestrate the mystery and to be duped by it.” To be sure he sometimes attributed the gulf between natural virtue and actual human behavior to the doleful influence of social relations, but on a deeper level he knew that human beings only existed inside society and that the contradictions they displayed there were part of what made them human from the start. See my discussion of Rousseau in The Idea of the Self, ch. 7, and Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, with an introduction by Robert J. Morrissey (Chicago and London, 1988; orig. edn., 1971), 213–14.