France, 1800-1914

A Social History

Roger Magraw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317892847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la France

Nineteenth-century France was a society of apparent paradoxes. It is famous for periodic and bloody revolutionary upheavals, for class conflict and for religious disputes, yet it was marked by relative demographic stability, gradual urbanisation and modest economic change, class conflict and ongoing religious and cultural tensions.

Incorporating much recent research, Roger Magraw draws both upon still-valuable insights derived from the 'new social history' of the 1960s and upon more recent approaches suggested by gender history, cultural anthropology and the 'linguistic turn'.

Chapter 1
Social elites

Introduction: a ‘bourgeois century’?

The bourgeoisie has dominated French society for the past two centuries, emerging largely unscathed from successive changes of regime. The state system – bureaucratic, military and judicial – which it has controlled since 1830, has remained intact and capable of repressing popular challenges such as those of 1848 or 1871. Nineteenth-century law consistently favoured individualism and property rights, and juries were composed of male property owners. Trade unions were banned until 1884, while employers’ associations received de facto toleration. There was no progressive income tax until the First World War. This was precisely because bourgeois influence was so pervasive, whether in education, the bureaucracy, the press, or in the framing of economic policies; it is difficult to discuss the bourgeoisie without involving the whole of society. Yet it is notoriously difficult to define ‘the bourgeoisie’. What, if anything, did an industrial magnate like Schneider have in common with a corner-shop grocer? Were not the bourgeoisie’s political, religious, regional, sectional and economic interests so diverse that any attempt to locate common features would be doomed? Or did most bourgeois – grand or petit, Catholic or Voltairean, conservative or liberal – share certain common interests and values (Daumard 1987)?

Analytical clarity is not helped by the multiplicity of usages of the term ‘bourgeois’. Originally it meant the inhabitant of a town (bourg). Hence it referred to urban civilians who were neither nobles, nor peasants nor soldiers. Yet peasants called the local landowner ‘le bourgeois’ – and historians have identified a ‘rural bourgeoisie’ of agrarian capitalists, rentiers or grain merchants. Confusions in debates over the French Revolution derive from the fact that after 1789 different uses of the term were in operation. It referred to non-noble rentiers and members of the professions and bureaucracy. However, dissemination of the discourses of Sieyes or St Simon led to an emphasis on ‘productive’ industrialists or businessmen as the typical ‘bourgeois’ (Sewell 1994). Older usages had not disappeared. The term ‘vivre bourgeoisement’ still usually evoked a leisured, rentier lifestyle. And in the 1840s a nouveau riche businessman could be dismissed as lacking the requisite culture and manners to be ‘authentically’ bourgeois.

Marxists concentrated attention on the ‘capitalist bourgeoisie’. Annalistes utilised inheritance and tax records – hard, quantitative data – to map structures of the bourgeoisie and chart the evolution of hierarchies of wealth and income. Cultural historians have been more willing to use soft data from diaries or etiquette books. Focus has shifted to the construction of collective professional or cultural identities or the role of voluntary associations in creating a bourgeois public sphere, an approach pre-figured in older studies which portrayed the French bourgeoisie as distinguished by its savoir, competence and cultural capital rather than by control of the means of production. Recent neo-liberal discourse has sought to equate bourgeois values with those of modern civilisation – freedom, economic dynamism, rule of law, probity, tolerance, initiative and independence (Daumard 1987).

Concern with lifestyle and personal values has also encouraged emphasis on domesticity and gendered separate spheres as central to emerging bourgeois identity. Photographs of the bearded paterfamilias surrounded by wife and children emphasise the importance of family values to the bourgeoisie’s self-image. As Davidoff and Hall (1987) have shown for Britain, middle-class wives were agents in the construction of domesticity. They authored etiquette books, more prescriptive than descriptive, which defined qualities to which all bourgeois should aspire – efficiency, respectability, moderation, reasonableness. A habit bourgeois came to denote smart but unostentatious clothing. A maison bourgeoise was clean and orderly. Cuisine bourgeoise provided wholesome, tasty but unpretentious food. Bourgeois speech was distinguished by its grammatically correct use of the subjunctive, but also by its ability to adapt flexibly to the different contexts of home, business or social gatherings. Bourgeois politesse, through avoidance of both vulgar familiarity and aristocratic disdain, permitted one simultaneously to show respect, avoid embarrassment and maintain a certain distance. It was good manners and savoir vivre, not mere wealth, which defined bourgeois identity.

It is modish to argue that class is ‘imagined’ – that classes should be viewed not as objective social structural formations but as constructs of discourses about them. Whereas the term ‘middle class’ was used tentatively and infrequently in Britain before 1830, in France the classe moyenne was already portrayed as a heroic agent of an emancipatory revolution against feudalism and absolutism, custodian of universal ‘rights of man’ and guardian of civilisation against mob rule. Alternative discourses imagined the middle class in more critical ways. Radicals argued that the bourgeoisie was creating a ‘new feudalism’ to exploit the people. The middle class once ‘was generous, it has become corrupt, it was enlightened, it has become boorish. It would like to see the people as greedy and as servile as itself’ (Wahrman 1995). A defining moment came in 1848 when, faced with socialist workers, the middle classes discovered an unprecedented unity. However, even if most bourgeois agreed on the need to defend property, they rarely agreed on how this might best be done. Moreover, some petty bourgeois viewed themselves as victims of ‘financial feudalism’ and as part of the ‘people’, while some lawyers and doctors espoused radical neo-Jacobin ideas.

The bourgeoisie had many critics. Aristocrats, disdainful of the parvenus who had displaced them, blamed bourgeois materialism and selfish individualism for declining moral standards. Marx was torn between admiration for a Promethean class re-making the world in its own image, and hatred of capitalist economic exploitation. Dominant images of the bourgeoisie were unflattering. Daumier’s cartoons portrayed cigar-smoking financiers with bloated stomachs and spindly legs, rack-renting landlord Monsieur Vautour and swindler Robert Macaire. Eugène Sue’s serialised novels portrayed a Paris of virtuous poor exploited by evil bourgeois. Such stereotypes appealed to some who were themselves objectively bourgeois – those excluded from the narrow property franchise of the 1840s, students, bohemians and writers. Flaubert, the son of a wealthy surgeon, lived off his family’s rentes and had no Left-wing sympathies. Yet he used ‘bourgeois’ as a term of abuse, as ‘all who think basely’. His typical bourgeois was boring, philistine, cowardly, materialistic, hypocritical, banal, pompous and self-satisfied. Unsurprisingly, the (bourgeois) city fathers of Rouen refused to dedicate a square to their famous native son! French novelists’ reluctance to portray an authentic ‘bourgeois hero’ stemmed from their resentment at being forced to survive in the marketplace, to depend on commercial publishers who treated literature as a commodity, and on philistine middle-class readers. Contemporary dictionaries confirm that the adjective ‘bourgeois’ came to mean ‘prejudiced’, ‘lacking in dignity’. Yearning for something more heroic, some bourgeois aped the refinements of aristocratic style – or even developed a taste for duelling as an affirmation of their masculinity (Girard 1969)!

The survival of aristocratic power?

The aristocracy and the Revolution

Until 1789, the ‘Second Estate’, some 1 per cent of the population, owned 25 per cent of the land and monopolised posts in Army, Administration and Church, giving aristocratic bishops and monastic heads access to income from church lands and tithes. Exempt from the land tax, it enjoyed lucrative seigneurial rights and controlled seigneurial courts. Critics denounced these as the privileges of a ‘parasitic’, corrupt class. Even Tocqueville, son of an aristocratic Normandy family, was later to admit that the nobility had become an object of hatred because it had ceased to perform useful social functions which once justified its hegemony. Opponents portrayed aristocrats as obstructing new economic ventures and squandering seigneurial dues squeezed from the peasantry on conspicuous consumption. They were accused of blocking the access to commoners to the officer corps and of preventing tax reforms, the prerequisite for successful state modernisation. Revisionist historiography rejects all this as liberal and Republican mythology. Nobles, some now claim, constituted an educated audience for the Enlightenment ideas, participating in political debates in Masonic lodges, salons and coffee-houses – the emerging ‘public sphere’. Imbued with a ‘service’ ethos, many engaged in reform projects reflecting utilitarian or free-market ideas, or directly in economic activities – as agronomes maximising yields from their estates or as partners in trading or industrial ventures. Nobles owned 80 per cent of Franche-Comté forges. Bordeaux nobles often originated in trading dynasties and possessed libraries of Enlightenment books. No clear contrasts between feudal aristocrats and dynamic bourgeois can be made, for they shared a common culture and a fusion of elites was occurring. The Revolution was neither inevitable nor necessary, but a disaster which created anti-aristocratic sentiments and polarisations that wrecked the chances of gradualist political and fiscal reform and economic modernisation. Yet, in the longer term, the Revolution did surprisingly little damage to the nobility. It survived, with most of its property intact, to form the nucleus of a stratum of landed grands notables which, allegedly, dominated French society into the following century (Figeac 1996; Cobban 1967; Tudesq 1964). Older orthodoxies may require modification, but revisionist re-evaluation of the aristocracy rests upon thin empirical evidence. Abbé Sieyes’s classic assault on aristocratic privilege, What is the Third Estate?, came from a gifted cleric whose career prospects were thwarted by aristocratic control of the church. A few nobles accepted the need for fiscal reform. Most clung obstinately to tax privileges. Forster’s (1971) study of a Burgundian aristocratic dynasty, the Saulx-Tavanes, shows that a ‘seigneurial reaction’ was occurring in the countryside, and its proceeds were spent on conspicuous consumption not agricultural investment. Similarly, the Marquis de Castries’s use of Court influence and seigneurial powers to obstruct the mining of coal deposits in the Gard suggests that entrepreneurial nobles remained the exception not the rule. Seigneurialism remained a real obstacle to capitalist development (Sewell 1994; Forster 1971; Lewis 1994).

The aristocracy were the net losers of the Revolution; 1158 were executed. Six such martyrs in Franche-Comté were the last males of their line. At least 16,000 spent time as émigrés. Estimates of the size of the pre-Revolution aristocracy vary from 400,000 to a mere 120,000, but a significant proportion of the 25,000 noble families contained at least one émigré. Revisionist assumptions that for every noble who emigrated there were dozens who remained quietly in France tending family estates is problematic. Most of the 25,000 who received compensation in 1825 for losses sustained in the Revolution were nobles, suggesting they had been severely affected by expropriations and sales of émigré property. Aristocrats lost their monopoly of bureaucratic, military and church posts and were now subject to the 16 per cent land tax. The loss of seigneurial dues had a variable impact. Larger nobles with diverse sources of income were less dependent on these, and the seigneurial burden had been relatively light in Brittany. But in the southern Amienois (Somme) smaller nobles lost 30 per cent of their income. The Revolution both exemplified and accelerated the erosion of peasant deference. Peasants fought aristocrats’ claims for redemption payments for loss of seigneurial dues. Aristocratic woodlands were invaded, seigneurial records burned. A quarter of commons confiscated from villagers by seigneurs before 1789 were reclaimed. Châteaux were destroyed, armorial insignia vandalised. Anti-seigneurial revolts occurred from Alsace to the Pyrenees, and anti-seigneurial hatreds persisting in some regions across the nineteenth century. At least one-fifth of aristocratic land was lost. Mayenne nobles eventually re-acquired 40 per cent of lost lands, yet re-purchasing alienated land could jeopardise a family’s subsequent financial stability. In the Somme, the Béry family, émigrés to Prussia, found their château acquired by Amiens merchant Dotin – now the department’s second-richest man. Four major noble families had liquidated all their assets in the Somme by 1800. In Toulouse seventy-two aristocratic town-houses (hôtels) were acquired by bourgeois.

In 1825 the Bourbon regime compensated aristocrats with the milliard des émigrés. Some large nobles secured generous handouts. In Franche-Comté the Duc de Choiseul received 1.5 million francs and 2000 hectares of forest. But the process created difficulties. The average handout was only 46,000 francs. Smaller nobles often felt aggrieved and not all émigrés could substantiate their claims. In Franche-Comté, only 273 of 450 émigré families were compensated. Debtors swarmed round to claim their share of the windfall. Quarrels over distribution of compensation worsened intra-family feuds already provoked by egalitarian inheritance laws. Attempts to restore primogeniture and strict entails, abolished by Revolutionary legislation, proved abortive. A law of 1806 – repealed in 1833 – authorised majorats, which gave the largest share of an inheritances to one son. But families such as the Saulx-Tavanes became embroiled in squabbles over distribution of inheritances. Although there were examples in Franche-Comté of families collaborating to prevent one branch ‘going under’, older aristocrats lamented the weakening of family solidarities. Wives who had secured ‘tactical’ divorces in order to shield lands of émigré husbands sometimes refused to surrender the property! Although some discerned a ‘new domesticity’ within aristocratic families, there were signs that the active role of aristocratic ladies during these crisis years bred a female assertiveness disruptive of family cohesion (Forster 1967; Wiscart 1994; Brélot 1992).

Claims that the nobility emerged virtually unscathed from the Revolution are unsustainable. By 1830 a quarter of noble lineages in the Somme had been extinguished. Analysis of 1830s electoral lists suggests that 40 per cent of the noble families of the 1780s were either extinct or no longer sufficiently wealthy to pay the 200 francs annual direct taxes to qualify for the franchise. According to Beck (1981) ‘There appears to have been either a substantial decline in the number of nobles or the creation of a noblesse pauvre of sizeable proportions’. Only 50 per cent of ancien régime families were still active in the Bordelais after 1815. Many suffered psychological blows from Revolutionary experiences. Franche-Comté noble Terrier de Loray began his 1811 diary by evoking the ‘terrifying void that filled (my) days, the painful nullity of life’.

The aristocracy re-invented?

Nevertheless, the aristocracy had survived, retained considerable assets – and found imaginative ways of re-inventing itself to adapt to the new society. Napoleon sought compromise with the old élites. The Concordat facilitated reconciliation with Catholic-Royalists. Émigrés were encouraged to return. If the new Napoleonic aristocracy was the butt of snobbish jibes from the old nobility, many of the latter tacitly accepted the regime. In Touraine only 24 of 150 aristocratic families openly rallied to Bonaparte, but few voiced pro-Bourbon sympathies in public. Resort to the courts to recover lost lands was implicit recognition of the legitimacy of the post-Revolution legal system. Nobles sent sons to the École Polytechnique to train for the military. By 1812, 10 per cent of Grande Armée officers were nobles, as were 28 per cent of Prefects. Some nobles felt reluctant admiration for Napoleon’s genius and disliked the glee shown by ultra-Royalists at French defeats after 1812. Patriotism could outweigh atavistic class prejudice. ‘Better to die on the scaffold of one’s own country’, insisted one ex-émigré, ‘than to owe one’s existence to foreigners’. Some bien-pensant bourgeois had never accepted the Revolution, and some former liberals, alarmed by revolutionary extremism, were now eager to bolster social hierarchy. The ‘politics of inegalitarianism’ appealed to bourgeois who aspired to the trappings of aristocratic culture and rentier lifestyle (Higgs 1987). In Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, the public prosecutor marries a nobleman’s daughter and metamorphoses into Cruchot de Bonfous. ‘New’ nobles created by Napoleon sought to jettison their specific identity after his fall, rallying to the Restoration and hoping that possession of a title would obscure their origins as army contractors or Biens Nationaux purchasers and, in time, permit them to blend with the old nobility.

Aristocratic revival was underpinned by a strong landed base. Their estates covered some 20 per cent of French land. By comparison with their British counterparts, who owned 80 per cent of the land, their hold on the countryside was rather patchy. Weak in the Limousin or the Alps, their bastions included the West, Southern Massif, Flanders, the South-West and the Morvan. In the Somme two-thirds of the richest notables were still nobles in 1806. In Franche-Comté several nobles prospered from speculation in church lands, and those retaining iron forges prospered from war orders. Confiscated woodlands were retu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Introduction: writing the social history of nineteenth-century France
• 1. Social elites
• 2. The making of the French working-class
• 3. The peasantry
• 4. Religion and anti-clericalism
• 5. Education and the uses of literacy
• 6. Crime and punishment
• 7. The medicalisation of nineteenth-century France
• 8. The birth of a consumer society?
• 9. Gender
• Conclusion
• Appendix I: Political regimes, 1789–1914
• Appendix II: Chronology of events, 1789–1914
• Appendix III: Glossary of terms
• Index