The nineteenth century in Europe is, in many ways, synonymous with the rise of the bourgeoisie. It is misleading, however, to consider this newly dominant middle class as a homogenous group; rather, the century may be more accurately described in terms of the rise of plural middle classes. While the classes comprising this group were united by their search for power based on property rights rather than hereditary privilege, they were otherwise strikingly diverse. Contemporary stereotypes of the bourgeois as a grasping philistine ought to therefore be nuanced. Along with the real, undeniable cruelty of many capitalists with respect to their workers, the middle classes also pioneered the first philanthropic voluntary associations, broadened the reach of public education, and inspired the development of effective birth control.

Transcript



October 1, 2008



Professor John Merriman: You know why I am dressed up? When I do this course and when I do the first half of the French course I do a lecture on the bourgeoisie, the middle classes. Middle class was a form of self-identity that was constructed in the way being a worker was constructed, or being a noble. One day I was about to go out among you all and talk about Daumier, and show you some Daumier slides about the bourgeoisie, and my wife said to me, "You can't go talk about the bourgeoisie looking like you usually do. You've got to look like you mean it, like you have a vague sense of knowing it."



So, as a result, look at this. I wear this about once a year. Unfortunately, I wear it to funerals. The last time I wore it was something Bill Clinton had, some mutual friends. I only have one tie that I share with my son. We had to find him another tie underneath his soccer shoes. Then we got into New York and went to this party, and we're all dolled up and all that. Then we went out to a restaurant and I lost my one tie. The last time I bought a tie, ties cost fifteen dollars. In Ann Arbor I bought a tie. This is a seventy-five dollar tie. This is my only tie. That's a long way of answering your question about why I look like this today. But I hope to make some sense of that in the lecture. So, thank you very much. I didn't set that question up, did I? I didn't ask you, "Please ask that question."



When you're looking at me dressed, it's not Halloween. That's the first thing I thought. When you look at me dressed like this, please try to think, knowing me a little bit as you do, why it was that it meant a lot to dress like this in the nineteenth century. The middle classes started dressing like this in the nineteenth century, dark with a little bit of color. When you see Daumier or you see Delacroix's famous, which I forgot the slide, Liberty Leading the People, and you see the bourgeois, there with his top hat, he's dressed in a bourgeois uniform like this. That emerges out of the bourgeois century.



While last time we talked about the construction of class identity for ordinary people, for working people, the bourgeoisie had as strong a sense of self-identity as any social class you could imagine. It was, as I'll make the point in a minute, difficult to get into that class if you weren't born into it. The fear of falling out of it was something that helps motivate lots of political things in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, in terms of being the bourgeois century--one of the things you see in countries, particularly in western Europe and Great Britain, in France and in Germany, and in Italy, is you see the middle classes wanting the political power commensurate with their economic status.



If, in the eighteenth century--this is one of those truisms that happens to be true and can be exaggerated--the aristocracy, you were born into the aristocracy. If you hit the big time and you get lucky, you can buy your way in, thanks to the broke French monarchy. But the ideal aristocrat, and this is how an aristocrat would have talked about him or herself, was born into the aristocracy through blood, through family. It was an ascribed status. In the nineteenth century one of the things that happens with the French Revolution and with Napoleon is that the middle-class person and middle-class values seem to be something to be emulated.



Once we've got an increase in the wealth of the middle classes and the diversity and complexity that I'll talk about in a minute, then you wanted the political power. You wanted the right to vote. You wanted access to information through the press and print culture. All of these things are closely tied to the middle classes. That's what I'm going to talk about today. Most of it is about bourgeois culture. That's why I'm dressed like this. I assure you that the minute this lecture is over, I will go back and like--I could never compare myself to Clark Kent--but I will find my phone booth and change back into normal duds. Let's talk a little bit about the middle class in the bourgeois century.



The middle classes or the bourgeoisie are terms that we conveniently use. Marx talked about the bourgeoisie as being this extremely homogenous class. In fact, the word "bourgeois" has really more cultural connotations, maybe, than objective or social categorization, living in a bourgeois manner. We'll see some aspects of that in terms of access to private space, middle-class concepts of childhood, and that sort of thing. Middle classes is probably a better term. Bourgeois is equivalent of burgher, but middle classes is probably, for our point of view, a better term. It seems rather odd to be talking about the English bourgeoisie of Leeds, about which there is an excellent book, because bourgeois, after all, started out as a French word.



In using and indeed insisting on the term "middle classes," what I'm suggesting is the enormous complexity of the middle class. There wasn't just one middle class. Yet the middle classes shared some cultural values and symbols in common and when challenged by ordinary people could snap back in an extremely cohesive class-based manner. Marx had some of that quite correctly. In a Parisian newspaper called the Journal des Débats in 1847, someone actually did a pretty damn good job of describing the bourgeoisie. "The bourgeoisie is not a class," the person argued. "It is a position. One acquires that position and one loses it. Work, thrift, and ability confer it," he argued, referring to himself, of course. "Vice dissipation and idleness mean that it can be lost."



And, so, that old kind of aristocratic ethos of not working, of being idle, although it can be exaggerated, as we've seen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nonetheless there was something to it. An eighteenth century noble let his fingernails grow long, sort of just hung out showing his good taste by living in an idle, aristocratic manner. The bourgeoisie did anything but that. Work was part of how they believed to get ahead, and getting ahead is what they wanted to do. The French Revolution, and here's an important point, I guess, opened the way by removing legal blocks in very many places to the career open to talents.



Napoleon used to say tediously that in each soldier's backpack there was a marshal's baton, or staff that you could get promoted with good work, hard work, if you didn't get your head blown off in one of these battles. But certainly one of the things that comes out of his insistence on service to the state is creating a whole series of rewards that recompensed virtuous action and hard work. That's what the Légion d'honneur, the Legion of Honor was all about. Making money was part of it. Of course, it was always in the nineteenth century sort of classic to poke fun at bourgeois culture, and in some cases the lack of it, and to ascribe to the middle classes philistine habits in which making money was really the only thing that counted.



Certainly, Friedrich Engels, Marx's socialist partner--obsessed, as well he should have been, with the slums of the satanic mills of Manchester--he once wrote the following. He says, "One day I walked with one of these middle class gentlemen into Manchester. I spoke to him about the disgraceful, unhealthy slums and drew his attention to the disgusting condition of that part of town in which the factory workers lived. I declared that I'd never seen so badly built a town in my life. He listened patiently and at the end of the corner of a street at which we parted, he remarked, ‘And yet, there is a good deal of money to be made here. Good morning, sir. And he walked away."



One employer wrote in the 1830s that, relative to his workers--is that the worker, I couldn't invent this, "should be constantly harassed by need, for then he will not set his children a bad example and his poverty will be the guarantee of good behavior." Of course, this is a caricature of middle class self-absorption, of narcissism, of this inveterate cruelty to the classes below them. On the other hand, the more we study the middle classes--and in the 1960s people really didn't study the middle classes because they didn't like them very much. They studied workers. But there's been an awful lot of good work done on the middle classes. Among them my dear friend Peter Gay, his five volumes of the Bourgeois Century, take on the idea that the middle class lived without passion, and were philistines, and that sort of thing.



The more we look at the middle class now, we see certainly that no matter where you look one of the things the middle class people did was form voluntary associations. Aristocrats didn't form voluntary associations. They didn't need to. The middle class formed voluntary associations, and many of these were for extremely charitable purposes, particularly in Britain. Again, the study that I referred to by somebody called Morris--I think it's Morris--on Leeds shows the kind of richness and depth to these voluntary associations in which people try to do an awful lot for ordinary people. It has a sense of moralizing. There's always this sort of top-down look about moralizing them, and trying to get the workers to drink less, trying to get them to go to church, trying to get them, when it was possible, for their children to become educated and stay in school.



There's always this tension between families who needed children's income, however small that was. Across the nineteenth century, over a very long period, laws finally by the end of the century in most places made at least primary education obligatory, and in most cases free. Here's a ridiculous example. It's not a ridiculous example if you love animals. I'm a cat person, as I already said. The Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals, these sorts of organizations really are one of the classic examples of bourgeois voluntary associations doing good things. They also get together to hang out with each other and sort of try to gauge who has more money than the other, and they get together for social reasons in the coffeehouses of England, and in the clubs, circles you call them in France, and their equivalents in Germany, and Italy, and Spain.



One of the more ludicrous kind of mottos, we call it a devise, a motto, of the Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals was in one of the organizations in France, which said, "One must love animals, but not fraternize with animals." I don't know what that means, but the main thing is that they wanted to save animals from being beaten, almost beaten to death in many cases of horses. You can see how, in places in which bullfighting over the long run in the nineteenth and twentieth century, such as the very south of France and in Spain--there were always movements to try to protect the bulls, which seems like a reasonable thing to do.



For all the bad press that the middle class has had, and you can read some of this bad press in what you're reading, there is also this good side that should be evoked as well. That's a period. Certainly, in terms of organized religion, the middle class goes to church more than ordinary people, than workers, for sure. In the case of peasants it depends on where. As I said before, in many parts of France, the example that's well studied, you still had this de-Christianization. But certainly religion was a fundamental part of the British middle class's view of itself. The percentage of people who went to church could be exaggerated.



There was a study in all of England. I don't think it was in Wales and Scotland, but at least it was in England, maybe in Wales, too, probably in Wales as well. I think it was in 1851 where they decided to look at every single church in England and Wales, let's say, and to see how many people went to church. They found to their horror that it was less than they thought. They also discovered that if everybody who had wanted to go to church had gone to various churches, Methodist for more ordinary people, Anglican, Catholic for the Irish and for a certain minority of British citizens, or Jews going to synagogue in the east end of London, that they couldn't have accommodated all these people. So there's a massive kind of church building campaign that has its counterpart in almost every country as well. Certainly in France after the Paris Commune of 1871 they start building churches in the working class districts perched on the edge of cities. More about that in another lecture. One could go on and on about this.



Religion for the middle classes has a greater role in their lives than in working class cities. In the case of the peasants, there weren't any peasants left in England. I'll talk about that and it will be fun to talk about in one of these lectures. Anyway, there we go. How many people would have considered themselves middle-class? Again, self-identity, how people thought of themselves is one of those aspects that we want to discuss. How do we know? How would you know who is middle-class? When they first started doing censuses--and censuses are really a nineteenth-century phenomenon, and subsequent centuries, as I said before. The first census was in Copenhagen, I think, in the eighteenth century.



The first real censuses do not come until the nineteenth century almost everywhere. They didn't ask people--they asked you your name and where you lived. In some cases they asked you your profession. But they did not say, "Are you middle class?" or "Are you not middle class?" There was a whole lot of work done in the 1970s on what they used to call the new urban history, which is counting people up and deciding who might well have considered themselves middle-class. There are a lot of dissertations written on that kind of thing. There was one in the case of Paris. Inevitably I have to talk some about Paris because the work is so rich there.



A woman called Adeline Daumard wrote a dissertation that was subsequently published called Les Bourgeois de Paris, or The Bourgeois of Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. What she did is she looked at wills. The middle-class people had enough money to leave wills, therefore, their inventories after death. That's what you call them. That's one of the reasons we know about the explosion of print culture, because they inventoried the books that people read. I mentioned this in the context of Enlightenment, too, because you do have that, too. Taking the kinds of ways that she looked at social class, she determined that somewhere between seventeen and nineteen percent of the Parisian population in the first half of the nineteenth century would have been considered bourgeois, and would have considered themselves bourgeois, that is, in the middle classes. In Britain the percentage is higher. It probably approaches twenty-five percent. I can't remember the exact figures. That percent will continue to increase in the nineteenth century.



You can already very well anticipate, from what you already know, where other parts of Europe that have large important middle classes. The old Hanseatic port cities of German, the German free cities that would become part of unified Germany in 1871--northern German cities in general, like Bremen, and Lübeck, and Hamburg above all. Hamburg's a huge port city. It's got a very enormous bourgeoisie. If you went to Madrid, you'd find a sizeable middle class, but it would be nothing that you would have if you compared Madrid to Barcelona. Barcelona is a really natural economy based upon important economic relations between its hinterland and Barcelona, and between Barcelona and the world, because it's a major port. So, you've got this big teaming middle class there as well.



In the case of France, obviously places that have lots of industry and small businesses have middle-class people in large numbers, though not as large numbers as workers. Lyon would be a good example. Lyon has the most tightly closed middle class that you can imagine and still is. Lyon is very Lyon. What can one say? Again, northern Italy you find a huge vibrant middle class, but not in southern Italy. Naples is one of the biggest cities in Europe right through the early-modern period. You've got a large middle class, but most of Italy is extremely rural and what you had in Rome is you had clergy. It's a city, so you've got an important middle class.



The further east you get, the smaller the middle class gets. In Russia, the estimates are about two percent of the population were middle class. Two percent, which isn't very much at all. And, of course, they are clustered in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, and in Kiev, now Ukraine, always Ukraine but then part of Russia, in the large cities. In Poland, Warsaw had a large--I was just at a history museum, a fascinating one at Warsaw Museum a couple months ago. Warsaw, as Krakow, had a big middle class. GdaÅ

1. Introduction
2. Absolutism and the State
3. Dutch and British Exceptionalism
4. Peter the Great
5. The Enlightenment and the Public Sphere
6. Maximilien Robespierre and the French Revolution
7. Napoleon
8. Industrial Revolutions
9. Middle Classes
10. Popular Protest
11. Why no Revolution in 1848 in Britain
12. Nineteenth-Century Cities
13. Nationalism
14. Radicals
15. Imperialists and Boy Scouts
16. The Coming of the Great War
17. War in the Trenches
18. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Guest Lecture by Jay Winters)
19. The Romanovs and the Russian Revolution
20. Successor States of Eastern Europe
21. Stalinism
22. Fascists
23. Collaboration and Resistance in World War II
24. The Collapse of Communism and Global Challenges

This course offers a broad survey of modern European history, from the end of the Thirty Years' War to the aftermath of World War II. Along with the consideration of major events and figures such as the French Revolution and Napoleon, attention will be paid to the experience of ordinary people in times of upheaval and transition. The period will thus be viewed neither in terms of historical inevitability nor as a procession of great men, but rather through the lens of the complex interrelations between demographic change, political revolution, and cultural development. Textbook accounts will be accompanied by the study of exemplary works of art, literature, and cinema.

Course Structure:



This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 50 minutes, was recorded for Open Yale Courses in Fall 2008.

About Professor John Merriman



John Merriman is Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University. Specializing in French and modern European history, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. His publications include The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848-1851, A History of Modern Europe Since the Renaissance, and Police Stories: Making the French State, 1815-1851. He is currently at work on Dynamite: Emile Henry, the Café Terminus, and the Origins of Modern Terrorism in Fin-de-Siecle Paris. In 2000, Professor Merriman was the recipient of the Yale University Byrnes-Sewall Teaching Prize.