From Orders to Classes
"While there is thus a progressive diminution in the number of capitalist magnates . . . there occurs a corresponding increase in the mass of poverty, oppression, enslavement, degeneration and exploitation; but at the same time there is a steady intensification of the wrath of the working class—a class which grows ever more numerous, and is disciplined, unified, and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist method of production."
What was important to his contemporaries? Working people worried about the influx of foreigners or the departure of their loved ones overseas to find work. They were terrified of the prospects of sickness, old age, or the possibility that technical innovations or short-term crises would put them on the scrap heap. The better off deplored expanding and unhealthy cities, baby abandonment, prostitution, the erosion of family values— all rolled up as the ‘social question’ for journalists, novelists, and politicians. They tended to write in the language of class, or even in an older vocabulary of orders. These terms were used quite loosely, but their lack of specificity does not mean that we can dismiss them.
The Numbers Game
In 1800 the total population of the German states was 24 million, reaching 40 million at unification in 1871 and soaring to be the largest in Europe, after Russia, with 60 million by 1900. The growth in the Russian population was the most dramatic, though the least well documented. Apparently around 70 million in the 1870s it had leapt to 170 million in 1914, of whom all but 30 million lived in European Russia. The Europe-wide increase in numbers appears to have been closely related to a falling death rate (precise figures are scanty for the years before 1850), and in Britain to a reduction in the age of marriage from around 30 to about 22, which would have led to a telescoping of generations, and possibly healthier stock.
Apparently couples continued to produce at least nine children at roughly twenty-month intervals throughout most of their reproductive life. What made the difference was that from the 1730s more infants survived birth, the vulnerable first year, and the years between 1 and 5. We do not know the full story of why the infant death rate fell. The most significant factor seems to have been a reduction in the pandemics which had eliminated whole communities in past centuries. Can this be attributable to a greater awareness of hygiene and health care?
More soap was used and cotton clothing worn, but by whom? More hospitals offered free care to the poor. But until the introduction of anaesthesia in the 1840s and antiseptics in the 1860s, mortality rates after surgery remained high. Hospitals were rightly thought of as merely places of death for the poor. Public health actually deteriorated badly with the increasing size and insanitary conditions of industrial towns and the municipal clean-up operation did not begin until around 1880. Smallpox vaccination reached nearly 80 per cent of children in France by the mid-nineteenth century and was made compulsory in England in 1852.
By then smallpox mortality rates in England had tumbled from 16.5 per cent of all deaths to 1–2 per cent. Vaccination against diphtheria, introduced in France in 1894, was another instant, and to the uneducated, magical cure. These successes were exceptional, but they had a huge psychological impact, giving bourgeois medicine a new status in comparison with the much cheaper treatment available from popular healers, who only charged if the patient recovered.Alth ough the cause of infections was not properly understood until towards the end of the century, the growing practice of isolation, and the accompanying increased attention to cleanliness, had a marked, though unquantified, effect on death rates from TB and other ailments. Unfortunately for our investigations, such improvements came after the period of most rapid population increase.
There were epidemics at intervals during the nineteenth century, spectacularly cholera, which arrived in Europe for the first time in 1816–17, reached France and Britain in the early 1830s, and did not begin to diminish until after the Hamburg epidemic of 1892. Contemporaries were inclined to ascribe cholera to the moral as well as the sanitary evils of the new industrial society. The disease was terrifying. Its cause and treatment were unfathomed; death was rapid and indiscriminate, in contrast to earlier killer diseases. Healthy prosperous adults were as likely to be affected as the obviously vulnerable young and elderly. However, cholera did not reduce numbers on the scale of earlier plagues.
How far were improved chances of survival related to better nourishment? We know that food production rose during the eighteenth century, but harvest failures and ineffective transport systems led to serious shortages until the 1860s. Food adulteration continued throughout the nineteenth century and until pasteurization was developed an increased availability of cows’ milk would not have contributed to the decline in infant mortality. However, it would seem perverse to see no connection between more food and more babies surviving. Recent research on the birth weight of children born in a number of hospitals (therefore to poor mothers) in different European countries shows a modest increase in birth weight, although there was a downturn in the later years of the nineteenth century.
The increase in live births and surviving babies must, in part, be due to social factors, especially parental care. The way in which children were represented in paintings might be said to indicate that childhood and individual children were more valued. Enlightened theoreticians like Rousseau in Emile urged mothers to breast-feed their own children. Wet-nursing was well established among all social classes in some countries, especially France. Church-run hospitals and parish priests often acted as wet-nursing agencies and provided moral sanction for a practice which was little more than infanticide. Even in 1869 only 59 per cent of babies were nursed by their own mothers and concern that this was in part responsible for an excess of deaths over births led to legislation which put wet-nurses under the supervision of the local doctor, an arrangement which neither enjoyed. However, wet-nursing had a limited geographical appeal.
Most English mothers, particularly the less well off, apparently had always fed their own children. Since the early eighteenth century French noble families had practised birth control. The fuss made by the Church of England in the eighteenth century and the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century in condemning coitus interruptus indicates that such primitive methods of contraception quickly reached poorer families. Popular medicine put faith in a variety of herbs and primitive douches. Barrier and interventionist methods of birth control were little developed until the 1880s and remained the playthings of the better off until 1914.
Contemporaries tended to assume that population growth was a consequence of industrialization. However, numbers grew fastest in poorer rural areas such as southern Italy, southern Germany, and Russia. Some, like Malthus, predicted uncontrolled growth and starvation. Did war decimate European populations less than at other times? The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792–1815) killed 1.5 million Frenchmen, the same number as in the First World War. Some French observers, including Zola in his hair-raising tale of family murder, Earth, were inclined to believe that the Napoleonic Civil Code was a potent contraception, because it replaced primogeniture with equal subdivision among heirs. But equal subdivision was the norm in southern Germany.
The Lure of New Worlds
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| Irish family arriving in the U.S.A |
By 1907 50 per cent of Germans lived a substantial distance from their birthplace. Middle-class observers were alarmed at the rootlessness, alienation, and godlessness of migrant towns. Their answer was to build cavernous churches. Many left their own country, some for Europe, especially for France, but more frequently for North, later for South, America and Australasia. In the 1850s over 1 million Germans left for the Prairies, a quarter of a million in one year alone. A nucleus, ‘pushed’ by economic and/or political desperation, tended to encourage neighbours and family to join them later. Overseas migration was probably the biggest single factor controlling European population growth. France, in contrast, kept her numbers steady with over 3 million resident foreigners by 1914. Belgians worked in mines and mills in the north-east, Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese worked on southern farms, deserted by the younger generations.
Social Effects of Industrial Growth
There was a decline in the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture over the century in almost all European countries, but the actual numbers involved and the activities themselves generally continued to increase until around 1914. In England in the 1850s agriculture was the largest single employer (1.8 million), followed by domestic service (1 million). During the first half of the century, the most significant change in industry everywhere was the expansion of the rural sector. Cotton-weaving was put-out from the new spinning factories until large-scale weaving machines were developed. In England at mid-century the cotton industry employed 800,000, but one-third were still working in small workshops or in their own home.
Merchants encouraged the growth of rural production in traditionally organized craft industries such as silk to undercut urban prices and controls, until technical innovations like the Jacquard loom allowed merchants to control the urban craftsman more directly by loaning him the cost of his equipment. A Jacquard loom cost 1,000 francs, a very considerable outlay for a master weaver whose daily earnings might be less than 3 francs, from which he had to pay assistants. At the beginning of the century, agrarian and industrial activities were often interdependent. Iron foundries were set up within the extensive forests of large landowners because charcoal was used for smelting. An increasing proportion of country dwellers sustained life by a mixture of craft industry and agriculture. For many rural communities the century was one of diversified growth and opportunity, followed by shrinkage, migration, and depopulation.
The Myth of Orders—and Classes
Did nineteenth-century industrial change transform independent craftsmen into dependent proletarians? Socialists were convinced it did; conservatives were scared that it had or would, while liberals hoped that the social corrosion of poverty would eventually disappear. In other words, the language of class helped to define political polemic. Eighteenth-century Europeans imagined themselves part of a society of orders or estates. For practical purposes the concept was anachronistic, intersected with more dominant ideas of class, and was soon to be romanticized by novelists such as Sir Walter Scott. Whereas class distinctions were and still are, at least in part, based on the type and scale of economic activity, the concept of orders rested initially on social duty. Class divides society into mutually dependent, but competing, elements.
The notion of orders rested on a belief in a static society. The first order was the clergy because they kept the devil at bay. The second order, the nobility, were responsible for organizing the defence of the community from more visible enemies. The third order, which included everyone else, provided for the bodily needs of society. During the medieval and early modern periods the wealthier members within each order acquired privileges, the most desirable of which were fiscal. By the eighteenth century the tail wagged the dog. Privilege, limited to a small, wealthy subsection of each order, came to be a definition of the order itself, while their original duties were performed by the poorer elements of each group. Financial standing and perceived status, the basis of a modern notion of class, emerged within the vertical subsections of the society of orders.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, writers, most memorably British economists such as Adam Smith, used class terms as subdivisions of orders. Some wrote with fear and nostalgia, some with hope, not just of a Europe in which monetary values had replaced a sense of duty and of a society polarized between rich and poor, familiar themes at all times, but of a change in the nature of wealth and of a new emerging entrepreneurial element. The events of the French Revolution contributed to the hardening and politicization of the notion of class. In his influential pamphlet ‘What is the Third Estate?’, published on the eve of the calling of the Estates-General in France in 1789, the abbé Sieyès appeared to speak on behalf of the Third Estate, which he defined in the traditional way as the vast majority and described as the true nation.
But for the practical purpose of the election to the assembly, he addressed the wealthy bourgeois educated élite only; in other words, he was speaking a language of class with an old-fashioned accent. Key episodes contributing to concepts of class were the cascading abolition of all privileged institutions on the night of 4 August 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen later that month. The remnants of the spectre of privileged orders were legislated away in France with the abolition of feudal rights, clerical privilege, particularly the right to collect the tithe, and the elimination of all privileged corporations of all kinds within the state, from the parlements, or courts of appeal, to the guilds.
Resistance to the dismantling of privilege helped to fuel a counter-revolution and, with it, not only class definition, but also class conflict. The noisy and belligerent emigration of opponents of the Revolution quickly transformed liberal definitions of citizenship into intolerant exclusions based on rough-and-ready class-type distinctions. The Revolution became anti-‘aristo’, even, for a time, anti-bourgeois. Ultimately, however, it was the traditional professional, official, and landowning bourgeoisie who gained most.
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, 1792–1814/15, ensured that the social conflicts experienced in France reverberated in conquered territories. As in France, the purchase of land and office by members of the old Third Estate, as well as gradual economic change, contributed to social stratification. In much of western Europe, professional, official, and landowning and entrepreneurial bourgeois groups advanced their claims during the Revolutionary years, aided by French territorial ambitions. Ironically, in the Russian empire the Romanovs were struggling to strengthen an aristocratic warrior element, midway between an order and a class, to reinforce their own power over an enormous and growing state.
What did it mean to be part of a society of classes? In France the Church was dismantled as the first order by the sale of its land. For a time in the 1790s it was denied the right to celebrate ceremonies to register births, marriages, and deaths. Its role in administering hospitals and schools was halted, although in the latter area only temporarily. In Spain, Portugal, and Italy (until the 1860s) the Catholic Church remained a major landowner as well as a powerful political, social, and spiritual force, although leading noble families were decreasingly interested in bishoprics for younger sons. In Protestant and Orthodox countries the Church owned no land, but senior clergy were drawn from leading families and exercised a strong moral influence. In Britain the bishops of the Established Church of England were automatically members of the House of Lords.
The second order, the nobility or aristocracy, was regarded as the leading element in the upper class. It included very rich aristocrats, who had a powerful national voice, and less wealthy gentry, whose influence was more local. The base of their power and influence was land, but they habitually had many other varied financial and economic interests, especially the top families. They formed a tight network, intermarrying carefully to preserve their economic position. Next in the hierarchy of classes was the top slice of the old Third Estate, the bourgeoisie or middle classes. The term meant little, beyond the assumption of a certain prosperity, freedom from manual labour, and the possibility that, while the husband enjoyed good health, the wife and daughters would not have to work outside the home. Observers often added upper, middle or middling, and lower to their definitions in a search for precision.
The middle classes included members of the professions, state servants, and men with financial, commercial, or industrial interests. Many were landowners and the richer elements intermarried with complaisant, usually impecunious, noble families. The most wealthy would certainly have included themselves within the upper class, but acceptance was limited. While the number of noble families remained fairly stable in the nineteenth century, apart from a sprinkling of invented titles, there was an astronomic growth in the numbers of those who called themselves middle class. Contemporary observers were most aware of the expansion of the entrepreneurial element, but there was a dramatic growth in the professions and especially in state service.
Finally, the largest element in any society remained those with the least economic security, who survived by the labour of their hands. Middle-class contemporary observers, at their most complimentary, would have referred to the ‘lower orders’, using old terms sloppily, or a ‘lower’ class or classes. Such terms defined little more than the ignorance and sense of superiority of the observer. Definition necessitates further subdivisions, sometimes based on levels of taxation, sometimes on lifestyle, often on geography. The rural community included everyone from small farmers, who might own or rent land, to landless labourers.
They ranged from the formally free in Britain and France, where feudal institutions, run merely as commercial operations, were abolished in the 1790s, to Russia, where a form of serfdom survived until the 1860s. Outside Britain the term peasant is often used for this, the numerically most substantial element in most European societies, but the word does not tell us much. Contemporaries would always subdivide the rural population according to the amount of land they farmed, frequently judged by land tax payments, since one family would habitually own or rent several scattered parcels of land. France had the highest proportion of country people owning some land, about 6 million; Russia, until the 1860s, the least. It must also be remembered that many country dwellers combined rural and artisan activities.
The largest group of urban workers, particularly among the 30 per cent females in the labour force, were often those in ‘service’, usually living in; their numbers did not begin to decline until about 1900. Urban industrial workers might be artisans who owned and ran their own workshops, ran a workshop wholly or partly financed by a merchant, or one which was part of a putting-out operation. They could be journeymen or apprentices within any of these. They might be highly skilled factory workers, the ‘labour aristocracy’ as they have been called by historians of Britain, less skilled and lower-paid factory workers, or unskilled labourers.
In town and country this worker element lost some economic independence during the century, although there was a distinct tendency to exaggerate lost freedom. The industrial sector became both larger and more urban, particularly towards the end of the century, but tidy, continent-wide statistics should be regarded with scepticism. An 1848 report on Parisian industry, intent on proving that unemployment had fallen, tried the ageless but unconvincing trick of calling unemployed journeymen self-employed or small employers. People grasped what work they could, where they could. What is absolutely certain is that working people did not think of themselves as a single united class in the sense used by Marx.
The Consequences of Class: A Stalled Society?
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| Crowning of Kaiser Wilhelm |
Social change was far less rapid. The revolutionaries in France in the 1790s may have raged about ‘aristos’, and heads of families, many of them noble, who emigrated during the Revolution lost some land, but the proportion of noble-owned land fell by only 5 per cent to 20 per cent. Recent research has shown that the nobility were still the richest group in France during the first half of the nineteenth century. The revolutionaries abolished nobility as an order, but Napoleon created new titles, and in 1814 an hereditary Chamber of Peers shared legislative power with an elected Chamber. From 1831 no new hereditary titles were created, but families continued to luxuriate in the social snobbery of the plethora which survived, and to invent new ones. Both before and after 1789 French nobles shared political and economic power with the wealthier elements in the bourgeoisie.
In Prussia nobles retained control of the top jobs in the state and army throughout the century, alongside some newer bourgeois families whose fortunes had been made in industry. In Britain the power and wealth of the aristocracy increased. Between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the 1780s the number of such families had stayed constant at about 200, but their wealth had grown immeasurably. Some, like the Bedfords and Devonshires, were richer than some German princes. Land was the basis of their wealth; there were the considerable rewards of patronage and government office; the richest owned very prosperous mines. All built, or ‘improved’ large houses on country estates. Investment in trade and in innovative transport developments completed a portfolio more varied than that of most other European aristocrats. The emergence of a money market at the end of the seventeenth century offered the large landowner alternative investments in property development and as directors of joint-stock companies.
Britain was supremely an aristocratic entrepreneurial society. The Russian Tsars tried to strengthen their noble élite, but the apparent static nature of Russian society concealed more rapid social change than elsewhere. The extravagant lifestyle of the nobility and their decreasing willingness to engage in trade and industry led to the rapid decline of some families. Some serfs, who made their fortunes in cotton, bought their freedom and a few were later ennobled. While never regarded as equal, they directed the civic life of Moscow. What of the middle classes? The entrepreneurial element were rarely self-made Cinderellas; most business and industrial enterprises were created by established families. Nor were entrepreneurs as numerous or as dominant in political life as the short-lived elevation of Laffitte and Périer might indicate (Périer died in the 1832 cholera epidemic).
It was the landed and professional middle classes, already established in state service, whose numbers and influence increased rapidly during the century.
Lawyers and doctors profited from the increased role of the state and were often in the lead in criticizing established rulers. Before 1789 the French appeal courts, the parlements, constantly blocked monarchist reform projects and led demands for the calling of an Estates-General. Lawyers from a less exalted social milieu were leading figures in the revolutionary politics of the 1790s. Such individuals represented the corporate interests both of professional and traditional craft organizations.
In the later years of the eighteenth century they condemned what they defined as the advance of absolutism and tried to defend their own corporate interests in the name of popular sovereignty under attack by rapacious rulers. In France in 1789 they were granted compensation when their venal privileges were abolished. Although reform went far beyond the self-absorbed demands of the members of the old parlements, lawyers successfully defended their own professional corporate identity in the name of national sovereignty and the separation of powers within the state.
Notions of self-selection, self-administration, and restricted entry were turned from detestable monopolistic privilege into the triumph of the freedom of the individual. Educational prerequisites, professional qualifications, and the role of the professions came increasingly under the scrutiny of the state. In Prussia degree courses were officially validated and no one could practise as a lawyer without a state appointment. In the early nineteenth century changes in the Prussian legal system made it the norm that after ten to twelve years of expensive legal training, a man had to spend nearly as long again working unpaid within the courts before he could hope to secure an official post, and even then his prospects for promotion were less than a generation earlier.
In France, although lawyers could practise without an official post, they complained that the rationalization,
standardization, and centralization involved in creating a single legal system for France in the 1790s reduced the autonomy of their profession. However, a glance at personnel dossiers reveals that many senior court officials in the nineteenth century would put high on their CV the fact that members of their family had occupied similar posts since the fifteenth century. The professions responded to increased centralization and state initiative by trying to establish more specific educational prerequisites for acolytes and to standardize training under their corporate control, which they hoped would develop a new sense of professional identity. The huge expansion of education during the century was the product of middle-class initiative.
Secondary and tertiary education was strictly confined to the élite by cost and content. Primary schooling was developed to define and discipline the less well off. Secondary school-leaving certificates, rarely completed by pupils from poorer families, became prerequisites for professional training. Professional associations were formed to replace old corporate interest. The professions reinforced their social élitism, but ironically they continued to be drawn into an expanding state bureaucracy—doctors vaccinating children against smallpox, taking part in state health insurance schemes, and so on.
Vocal sections of the leading professions remained critics of the state in the years up to 1848, and not entirely for selfish reasons. In Prussia, members of the judiciary were prominent in demands for a constitutional regime and took the lead in the 1848 revolution. But partly because of the fear which the scale of popular support for their protest engendered, lawyers were subsequently mostly transformed into faithful and obedient servants of autocracy. Their reward was employment; job opportunities in the German bureaucracy were increased and from the early 1880s growth was rapid as lawyers were allowed to practise privately.
Doctors had key roles in movements for social reform and in the 1848 republic in France. Their politicization was ethical and altruistic. A generation of European doctors was appalled at the social effects of industrial and urban change. In England in 1830 Dr Kay drew attention to the plight of women and children cotton operatives. In France Drs Villermé and Buret wrote influential commentaries, the first detailing conditions among workers, especially women and children, in all of the textile industries, the second comparing their circumstances in England and France. Villermé, although sympathetic to capitalism, drew up the first French legislation restricting child labour. Republican socialist doctors like Guépin in Nantes and Raspail in Paris set up free clinics to help the poor.
Traditional middle-class groups used the opportunities of modernization. The experience of the guilds is revealing. Some were substantial property-owners and developed massive financial interests in the capitalist economy. They used their resources to retain privileges for their members, long after their original significance as industrial leaders had passed. Their significance can best be gauged by the power and standing of the guild companies in the City of London, which became the financial centre of the world in this period.
They became more élitist in the process and comprised distinct and powerful pressure groups within the state, both facilitating and moulding centralization. The term ‘stalled society’ has been used in recent years to describe the problems created by the impact of the varied transformed corporate interests on the modern state. On the other hand, nineteenth-century reforming liberals such as Alexis de Tocqueville believed they represented ‘liberty’. The professional middle classes were not part of a class, but a series of powerful corporate interest groups. They came to dominate the elected institutions which developed, largely due to their own demands. The extent of their privilege is masked when they are labelled a ‘class’ and particularly when they are lumped together with the numerically much more numerous lower middle classes, the white-collar workers, who took up minor posts in the massive bureaucratic expansion of the second half of the century.
The privilege of wealth dominated the society of classes, just as it had dissected the society of orders. Money, whatever its source, bought access to power. The nineteenth century set store by education and everywhere attempts were made to provide primary education, eventually free, for all. But access to secondary education, which became institutionalized as a vital prerequisite to higher education and the professions, was often increasingly reserved for the rich. Education was used to reinforce existing hierarchies, to define the self-perpetuating professions, and thereby strengthen a sense of class barriers. More than ever, wealth controlled access to, and advance within, state service and the professions. Venality and patronage were gradually replaced by professional hurdles for state service and entry into the professions, but the net result was to limit the best jobs and access to the professions to the rich, if anything even more than under the old regime.
Class Consciousness—Class Conflict
Before Marx, with a few exceptions, socialists hoped to transform class conflict into harmony by peacefully replacing capitalist competition with co-operation. They proposed a variety of strategies ranging from Utopian experiments to government-primed co-operative workshops. The philanthropic British industrialist Robert Owen initiated experimental Utopian communities and artisan associations. For Proudhon a classless society would emerge when everyone took a hand at a variety of trades and skills. Cabet thought it would need the elimination (by persuasion) of private property and total equality and sameness in everything, including housing. Marx claimed that capitalist exploitation and class consciousness were unavoidable stages in economic development. A final revolution by a class-conscious proletariat would eliminate class and exploitation alike.
The first half of the nineteenth century was a time of popular unrest and protest. The impact of economic change and repeated economic crises like that of 1816–18 made rural areas as well as towns the scene of repeated violent upheaval. Popular unrest became endemic: at Peterloo in 1819, in the Captain Swing riots of 1830–1, among silk weavers in Lyons in 1831 and 1834, among tailors and printers in Paris, Berlin, and other cities in 1830, culminating in Chartism in Britain, and in the revolutions of 1848. The target of protesters was ‘government’, which, they claimed, was responsible for iniquitous taxes and tariffs and decreasingly willing, evidenced by recent legislation dismantling guilds and attacking freedom of association, to protect the traditional (rosily romanticized) moral economy.
Rioters were almost never committed to the overthrow of neglectful governments; they wanted government help to check damaging innovations. Grievances were specific and limited, involving attacks on property, especially new machines, forced grain sales, threats, but very little serious physical assault and almost no theft. The immediate target was often other workers, sometimes foreigners, sometimes women. Journeymen tailors complained that the growth in ‘ready-made’ production methods using cheap female labour reduced their income and belittled their trade. Printers were Luddites and rebels because they feared that new machinery would threaten both their skills and jobs. Silk weavers resented their increasing financial dependence on merchants. Poorer peasants protested about the erosion of communal rights, the better off that the vagaries of the market left them dependent on money-lenders, or that tariffs on imported manufactures blocked their foreign wine market— and that was just in France.
Factory workers were seldom involved in protest. There was no concerted class consciousness, but a series of particular, often regionally limited, issues which sometimes coincided in depression years. The rhetoric of class conflict was aired in the cheaper, sometimes worker-run, newspapers of the day, but it only had a wide audience when food prices soared and work was scarce. Governments responded to popular protest with violent repression. Real and mythical recollections of the Terror of the 1790s in France convinced all governments of the need to repress disorder before it could escalate. Socialists had far more success in convincing ruling élites of the imminence of class war than they had in converting and uniting working people. In 1843 Flora Tristan complained of artisan indifference and hostility to her idealistic plan for a single Union of all Workers.
Military repression at Peterloo, Lyons, Paris, Milan, and St Petersburg did far more to create a sense of lower-class solidarity than the writings of the socialists or the inequities of the capitalist economy.
Class Organization
Rioting was one way of drawing attention to problems in crisis years. During more ordinary times in the eighteenth century prosperous workers had formed insurance schemes to provide death and other benefits. Journeymen formed defensive, sometimes violent, groups. In the nineteenth century a variety of worker associations for mutual aid among groups of producers, employees, or consumers became more numerous. Popular associations, whether peaceful or violent, were feared by ruling élites. In France the liberal claims of the Declaration of Rights of 1789 were gainsaid by the Civil Code which put any association larger than twenty under the scrutiny of the prefect. Craft and the mutual-aid insurance associations might be tolerated, but a vague whiff of politics or violent action brought in the army. In 1834 even associations of under twenty were banned.
In Britain the right of workers to negotiate wages was denied in 1799, although from 1825 they were permitted to associate and collect funds. Robert Owen attracted considerable artisan support for the co-operative ideal in the 1820s and by 1830 500 societies with 20,000 members had been formed. In Britain, France, and the German states mutual-aid insurance associations and producer and especially retail co-operative associations took off, often harmonizing existing craft formations with the ideas of socialists such as Buchez, Blanc, and Proudhon as well as Owen. In these years small artisan formations did best. They usually began, like the Rochdale Pioneers, as self-sufficient primitive communist communities and, if they became successful, developed into profit-making concerns. By 1872 in Britain there were nearly one thousand groups with 300,000 members and sales of £10 million a year.
Specific trade unions, distinct from producer or consumer cooperatives, developed from earlier artisan trade associations. In Britain Owen planned a Grand National Consolidated Union in 1834, which very briefly attracted support among tailors and shoemakers. Unions were the self-defence schemes of the betterpaid crafts, the ‘labour aristocracy’ as they were regarded by less skilled workers. Individual trades organized many tiny local unions. In 1842 over 100,000 men belonged to separate small mining unions in Britain. In return for a small weekly fee members obtained death and limited unemployment benefits, but unlike mutual-aid or friendly societies, unions also tried to impose collective bargaining on merchants or, in a factory situation, on employers.
Strikes could result. The French silk weavers’ strikes of 1831 and 1834 were crushed by government troops, but in north-east England miners organized large-scale strikes in 1844 and 1863 and Lancashire cotton weavers were active in 1878. Large unions were also successful in collective bargaining; in 1853 a 20,000-strong strike of Preston weavers settled rates of pay and won middle-class support and cash donations. In the 1860s Boards of Arbitration emerged in England and in 1868 a Trades Union Congress was formed. In 1871 unions were recognized and four years later the peaceful negotiation of trade disputes permitted. In France in 1864 the right of unions to engage in peaceable bargaining was acknowledged.
Despite the formation of unions and socialist parties, worker organization remained embryonic compared with that of the landed, commercial, and industrial élites, who were associated by education, marriage, and common economic interests. They could operate in formal and informal pressure groups in and out of parliaments and through institutionally powerful industrial cartels and money markets, both to control and to override government policy.
The Family under Threat?
Reformers raised the alarm that poor families were threatened by urbanization and factory development. They argued that omnipresent poverty, prostitution, and illegitimacy were on the increase. Although child abandonment, then as now, was often seen as a touchstone of moral decline, it peaked only in times of economic crisis.
It was female and child employment in cotton mills and mines, in the former of which small children filled a technological gap for a couple of generations, which appalled educated reformers, shocked at the regimentation and publicly displayed inhumanity of hard manual labour and apparently unaware that women and children inevitably always contributed to the artisan family economy. At mid-century in France about 40 per cent of cotton workers were women, 12 per cent were children under 16. By the 1870s the figure for child labour had fallen to about 7 per cent because technical advances made them redundant. In Britain most female cotton operatives were unmarried, so the anticipated deleterious effect on family welfare presumably did not occur. In France, however, women artisans in Paris and Lyons, in particular, sent their babies to rural wet-nurses.
In many large-scale industries, such as mining and potbanks, teams of workers were paid as a unit and family groups traditionally worked together, imitating earlier artisan practices. In France unmarried female workers were habitually lodged in hostels run by nuns to protect their virtue and their fathers’ authority, for their wages were sent directly to him. From the 1860s the new department stores also ran hostels for unmarried workers, often on the top floor of the shop, carefully segregating the sexes and trying to encourage uplifting cultural experiences for their leisure time. Their workers, at least, received their own wages.
Factories did not, of their essence, affect family relationships. But the culture of the family meant that it was assumed that everyone lived in a mutually supportive nuclear, or in southern Europe more extended, family, and rates of pay for women (and of course children) were adjusted downwards accordingly. Single mothers, who had fled to a town to escape family condemnation, or who were widowed, found it impossible to sustain life by honest means. The greater visibility of prostitution in nineteenth-century towns was not the direct result of a collapse in morals, but because honest labour often paid a woman only 25 per cent of a man’s wage.
In rural and artisan economies women had a chance of respect and authority based on their interlocking work and family responsibilities and the mutual support of a small community. In the factory, both sexes were merely labour and the status of cheaper, less strong and skilled female workers dropped accordingly. Their position within the family would depend on personal circumstances, although traditional norms might prevail. Some men brought home their wage packet unopened to their wives, some only reluctantly contributed to food for the family, but was that new? In Rouen in the 1790s, when divorce was available, 75 per cent of petitioners were wives, many of whom had been deserted by their spouses. The effectiveness of family structures was closely related to the size of, and degree of anonymity within, the community.
While some feared that the poverty and drudgery of industrialization threatened the social fabric, others became concerned that better-off women might snatch the chance of education and economic independence to challenge male dominance. From time to time female writers alarmed men with the prospect of a ‘world turned upside down’. Cartoonists mocked the ‘liberated’ woman. But the reality was hardly a threat. Secondary and tertiary education for women was several generations behind provision for men; in Catholic countries the female orders were considered the most suitable educators for girls. The development of large-scale retail, commercial, and industrial organizations tended to reduce the role of wives in family firms, although widowhood might still demand their business acumen. Greater affluence for growing middle-class groups offered women an accentuated role in the family. Paid employment came later.
Elected Assemblies and the Biggest Myth
The social problems created by growing numbers, urbanization, and economic change, which at times brought violent confrontation, led to what was to be an even more pervasive alteration in social organization, the interventionist bureaucratic state. The pressure from middle-class reformers and popular unrest in the first half of the century ensured that institutional reform came to be seen as the panacea to the social problem. The state became the agency to legislate on industrial relations, town-planning, public health and the medical services, female and child labour, education, railway construction, etc. In France Napoleon III dreamt of turning worker insurance schemes into a national plan. In the newly united Germany, Bismarck, appalled by the growth of the Socialist Party, co-ordinated self-help mutual-aid sickness and pensions schemes into a state-run system in the 1880s.
Institutional reform was a peaceful route usually embarked upon by defensive ruling élites who feared both cholera and social unrest, but its results were revolutionary. At a positive level the nineteenth-century reformers constructed a cleaner, safer (less revolutionary), more harmonious social environment, and the transport revolution and urban building programme they generated sustained unprecedented economic expansion. However, it also risked transforming the state into the anonymous, bureaucratic omnivore depicted by Kafka—and a monopoly capitalist into the bargain as the biggest single employer in each country.
Radical reformers tried to ensure that the interventionist state did not become a massive, expensive, uncontrollable leviathan. Elected institutions were seen as the antidote to both popular unrest and a brake on the expansion of the role and cost of the state. The French revolutionaries of the 1790s campaigned unsuccessfully for representative institutions and acquired a dictatorial emperor at the head of their modernized state. After the Napoleonic wars British radicals demanded reform of the House of Commons and the French argued over voting rights within a constitution modelled to some degree on that of Britain.
Campaigns for suffrage reform were mainly, but not entirely, the initiative of middle-class reformers. In Britain the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, backed by some members of the lower middle classes, artisans, and better-off factory workers, pressed for a democratic electorate as did societies like the mainly middle-class Friends of the People in France. The French enfranchised all adult males after the 1848 revolution and in 1867 all male householders got the vote in Britain. Elected assemblies at all levels, municipal to national, gradually became the norm in all countries, although none rivalled the French until 1919 and few worried that 50 per cent of adults had no vote.
The extension of the right to vote tended to perpetuate traditional élites. In Britain the Reform Act of 1832 had no impact on the composition of Parliament. In 1840 80 per cent of members still represented the landed interest and the proportion of bourgeois entrepreneurs, 97 : 658, was the same as at the end of the eighteenth century. Perhaps this was unsurprising, given the limited nature of the legislation. However, the same was true in France, even after the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1848. In 1861 the new united Italy adopted a 40 lira tax qualification for voters, which produced an electorate comparable to that of France before 1848. The Italian ruling élite was not only wealthy, it was almost exclusively northern.
Universal male suffrage had to wait until 1919. Frederick William IV of Prussia established a graded suffrage for the elected Landtag in 1849 which allowed the richest 18 per cent of taxpayers to elect two-thirds of the new legislative assembly he created. This system was retained for the assemblies of the individual states after unification. The Reichstag, the representative assembly for the whole German empire created in 1871, was elected by all adult males, but it exercised little power. When elected local councils, Zemstvos, were set up in Russia in the 1860s and an imperial parliament, or Duma, after the 1905 revolution, an even narrower hierarchical voting system was inaugurated.
Elected assemblies only began to find a role for themselves in Russia during the First World War. Unsurprisingly, in an age of unpaid MPs, assemblies tended to represent the interests of wealthy élites. However, by 1914 the socialists were the largest single group in both the German Reichstag and the French assembly, and a growing, though a very divided, number in Italy. Socialist voters were mostly workers, but, significantly, their leaders and MPs tended to be members of the professional middle class, especially lawyers.
Social tensions were prominent in nineteenth-century Europe but conflict was reduced and fudged by social insurance schemes, private and state run, by the legalization of trade unions, by the provision of state-organized education, by the development of parliamentary institutions which created the illusion of consultation and democracy, and by the promotion of nationalist and imperialistic sentiments. Class war had never been on the cards, for working people at least. The Socialist International’s demand for international proletarian solidarity in 1914 went unheard. Yet, although society may not have become polarized quite in the way socialists including Marx had predicted, the gap between rich and poor had widened since 1789.
This was most visible at the top. In Britain in 1803 the top 2 per cent owned 20 per cent of the wealth of the country; by 1867 they owned 40 per cent. The aristocratic élite had not perished, they had merely diversified. The French revolutionaries in the 1790s and liberal, mainly middle-class reformers in the following century set their sights on the elimination of irrational privilege. But property rights were applauded and became the basic legitimation of nineteenth-century society. Guizot and many others maintained that a man’s independence and sense of social responsibility could be measured by his wealth.
Wealth had always corresponded pretty closely to power; the nineteenth century merely institutionalized the equation, while appearing to do the reverse. Hierarchically structured education systems, professions, and assemblies of all sorts reinforced improved policing, military control, and the monitoring and managing of public opinion. The wealthy made the mistake for much of the century of not recognizing that, while considerable wealth might protect political leaders from temptation and corruption (though this belief in the altruism of the wealthy was, and is, not borne out by experience), the less well off, and even, perish the thought, females, were also capable of participating in electoral politics, without wanting to turn the world upside down.
By Pamela Pilbeam in the book "The Oxford History of the Modern Europe" edited by T. C. W. Blanning, Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., 2000, excerpts from p. 101-125. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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