Society

Colin Heywood
Conceptualizing change
To live in nineteenth-century Europe was to witness social change on a scale
that was both exhilarating and disturbing. It was exhilarating in that the
developments associated with the Industrial and French revolutions
encouraged hopes of conquering some of the age-old scourges of humanity,
such as food shortages, ignorance, and oppression. At the same time, it was
disturbing, in that these same revolutionary forces appeared to threaten the
whole fabric of society. The nineteenth century was self-consciously an age
of improvement, but it was also haunted by the ‘social question’ (the plight
of the rural and urban poor). Frederic Ozanam (1818-53), the liberal
Catholic founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in France, wrote in
1837:

The question which divides men in our day is no longer a question of

political forms, it is a social question—that of deciding whether the spirit of
selfishness or the spirit of sacrifice is to carry the day; whether society is to
be a huge traffic for the benefit of the strongest, or the consecration of each
for the benefit of all, and above all for the protection of the weak.

He feared a terrible struggle between rich and poor, ‘the power of gold’ and
‘the power of despair’. Reactions to social change could range from the
warm embrace of a liberal industrialist like Friedrich Harkort in Westphalia,
to the utter repulsion of a reactionary figure like Joseph de Maistre. Most
contemporaries probably felt some form of ambivalence to the ‘progress’
around them.

How have historians conceptualized this transformation of the old social

order in Europe? They began by depicting it as a shift from a

hierarchically organized society of orders (such as the French Ancien

Regime , with its three Estates) to a more fluid one of classes. Briefly stated,
this involved an industrial revolution sooner or later transforming the social
structure of each nation, paving the way for a ‘bourgeois revolution’. With
the old aristocratic order swept away, in the western part of Europe at least,
the industrial bourgeoisie was ready to confront a newly emerging working
class. During the late twentieth century, however, historians have become
dissatisfied with this essentially Marxist account. In the first place, recent
findings in economic history tend to undermine some of its key assumptions.
They indicate that, even in Britain, industrialization was such a gradual and
fragmented process that it would have been unable to produce a clear-cut
polarization of society into a dominant bourgeoisie and a subordinate
working class. The notion of a ‘bourgeois revolution’, whether if the
dramatic type that convulsed France in 1789, or the ‘silent’ version at work
in Spain during the early nineteenth century, becomes difficult to sustain. In
its place there is evidence of some form of fusion or accommodation
between landed and commercial interests.

A more radical critique of the established view calls into question the whole
‘base-superstructure’ model of social change associated with Marxism, and
its assumption that economic forces ultimately determine the political and
cultural life of a society. The recent tendency has been to ‘unhook’ political
from socio-economic change. Historians now give more weight to what is
perceived to be relatively autonomous change in the political and cultural
sphere. Above all, for those who have taken the ‘linguistic turn’, the way
language shapes our perception of the world is a major preoccupation. They
argue that language produces ‘reality’, rather than simply reflecting it. From
this perspective, it is not simply the experience of exploitation or wealth that
leads to different forms of class consciousness, but, to quote Gareth Stedman
Jones, ‘a particular linguistic ordering of experience’. The task of the
historian is then to focus on ‘the making of meaning as a central human
activity’ (Patrick Joyce). The upshot, in the wake of post-structuralism, is a
move to abandon relatively fixed and stable notions of classes and social
structures in favour of ‘mobile, fractured and contradictory’ identities. These
can be understood only in their particular historical contexts. Instead of
envisaging, say, a working class taking its final form under capitalism and

seeking its political expression in the form of socialism, we are invited to

consider a ‘working class’ that is a social construct, serving to unite various
groups at particular periods and places (such as Europe in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries) for political purposes. People might well
consider themselves to be workers, therefore, but at the same time (and, in
many cases, more importantly) they would act as parents, inhabitants of a
neighbourhood, members of a church, enthusiasts of a sport or a hobby, and
so on. In true ‘postmodern’ fashion, all such identities are thought to be
overlapping, indeterminate, and unstable, since they cannot be tied to a
material base in the economy. Even society becomes ‘society’, discursively
constructed in the early nineteenth century as an object to be studied and
reformed.

What emerges from all this is a ‘new social history’ left in some disarray, as
political and cultural history invades much of its territory, and an orthodox
view of nineteenth-century social change severely mauled by historians who
have taken the ‘linguistic turn’. A remnant of the older view remains in the
general consensus among historians that there was a shift from the language
of orders to the language of classes. On the one hand, during the eighteenth
century, people in most parts of Europe still talked in terms of a society
divided into three (or occasionally four) estates: those who fought, those
who prayed, and those who worked with their hands, for example. On the
other hand, from around the 1750s, they referred more and more to class,
such as the familiar triptych of higher, middle, and lower class. Karl Marx
(1818-53), lining up bourgeois and proletarians in his Communist Manifesto
of 1848, famously declared that ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is
the history of class struggle’. This shift occurred more rapidly in western
Europe than in the east. Russians were accustomed to using a system of four
estates ( sosloviia ) to describe their society throughout the nineteenth
century, though latterly they had to recognize anomalies such as the
‘working class’ (rabochii klass). However, throughout Europe, many
contemporaries used the old and the new terminology interchangeably for
much of the period, suggesting that their understanding of class might be
different from our own. They also made use of other, moral- cum-political
divisions when discussing their society, such as the industrious and the
privileged idle, or the People and its oppressors.

More damagingly still for the older orthodoxy, historians have come to
realize that its implicit assumption that a class was a
‘coherent, homogenized, anthropomorphized actor’, or, as E. P. Thompson
witheringly put it, a ‘thing’, is now scarcely tenable. In other words, they are
reluctant to suggest that classes were composed of people with similar social
backgrounds who could act like an individual to defend their interests, with
expressions such as ‘the bourgeoisie realized the danger’ or ‘the working
class was suspicious of this policy’. Instead they emphasize the varied nature
of people’s identities, with gender in particular looming large. There remains
the contentious issue of deciding the relationship between the ‘social’ and
the ‘linguistic’. In principle, everyone agrees, it should be reciprocal, but in
practice historians leave themselves open to charges of ‘socio-economic
reductionism’ or ‘linguistic determinism’. If, on the one side, reading
politics directly from the social structure appears all too simple, on the other,
focusing exclusively on language leaves little scope for explaining much
social and political change.

This chapter will seek to convey a sense of this more complex, and in some
ways more intriguing, account of social change in nineteenth-century
Europe. It is structured around contemporary representations of what would
now be called the ‘good society’. Such representations would, of course,
have been legion, and so the focus is on some of the more influential ones,
which have been grouped under the three headings of liberal, socialist, and
conservative. The Marxist influence caused many scholars to assert that such
ideologies promoted the interests of, respectively, the middle, working, and
upper classes. There is a grain of truth here, but we are all now too conscious
of middle-class socialists, Tory workers, and the like, to pursue this line
uncritically. The material will, therefore, be reworked to explore the
constituencies, real or ‘imagined’, to which these competing visions of
society appealed, the constant process of formation and reformation of
collective identities, and the mingling of hope and disillusionment associated
with the pursuit of an ideal. The pervading impression conveyed by the
nineteenth-century sources is of a yearning for social harmony in the midst
of change, and a certain unease about the direction in which industrial
society was moving.

Liberalism, the ‘middling strata’, and the

competitive society
At first sight, nineteenth-century liberalism appears an unlikely path to
social harmony The main priorities for liberals were in the political and
economic spheres. They campaigned above all for some form of
representative government in place of absolutism, and a laissez- faire regime
in place of bureaucratic regulation of the economy In these respects, their
influence was of course enormous, particularly in the western part of
Europe. Like the Thatcherites and Reaganites of the 1980s, they can be
accused of some indifference to ‘social’ affairs, meaning that they often had
little sympathy for the predicament of the poor. Liberals were inclined to
blame poverty on the moral failings of the poor themselves, the Spanish poet
Ramon de Campoamor, for example, asserting that it was ‘the product of
laziness, vice and ineptitude’. The hard line among liberals was that, under a
laissez-faire regime, material progress would eventually benefit all members
of society. The answer to poverty, therefore, lay in the realm of economic
policy. John Prince Smith was a notable apologist for Manchestertum in
Germany, insisting during the 1840s that the poor had an ‘aversion to labour’
that poor-relief schemes would only encourage. Other liberals were more
compassionate, proposing various measures to help people help themselves,
such as savings banks and adult education classes, and even a limited
amount of state intervention, to protect child labour, for example.

Certainly, the individual stood at the centre of the liberal theory of progress:
in principle at least, they would oppose anything that interfered with
individual freedom. This could lead to a rather narrow view of social
relations. During the 1820s, for example, Harriet Martineau (1802-76)
envisaged society as nothing more than an ‘aggregate of individuals’. What
they hoped to create was a bracing environment in which education, talent,
and hard work would be rewarded, at the expense of aristocratic privilege.
Such competitive individualism was not to everyone’s taste. Critics
dismissed it as producing an ‘atomized’ form of society, based on the
principle of ‘everyone for himself, and all . . . for riches, nothing for the
poor’, as the French socialist Pierre Leroux (1797-1871) put it during the
early

1830s. Was liberalism, then, simply a weapon for the new middle class in its
struggle against the aristocracy? Did it have any sense of a broader good
society? And how far were its ideals for society realized over the course of
the century?
In the long term, the liberal ideal implied a classless society of free and
equal individuals. In the short term, though, liberalism appealed quite
unashamedly to the ‘middling strata’ of society. On the one hand, this
involved denigrating those above and below them: the aristocracy and the
‘lower orders’. For example, the former were depicted in a number of
German novels of the 1850s and 1860s as too effete, devious, and ignorant
to cope with the modern world. The latter were always considered too
dependent on employers and charitable institutions for full citizenship. On
the other hand, those in between were idealized in various ways. For this to
happen, it is important to realize, they had to be defined in moral and
political terms, as much as in the economic ones we conventionally associate
with class.

Dror Wahrman has recently argued that commercial and industrial

development provided the backdrop in both England and France for the
narrative of a rising middle class, yet in neither country had it proceeded far
enough by the 1820s to provide a compelling reason for such a
conceptualization. The most pressing forces intervening were, for him,
political ones: the need for French doctrinaires to stake a claim against an
embattled aristocracy, and for English Whigs to come to terms with another
supposedly ‘post-aristocratic society’ after 1832. Fie depicts these liberals
conjuring up an ‘imagined constituency’, the ‘middle-class’, which was
wooed with assertions of its intelligence and independence, making it
eminently suitable to represent the interests of society as a whole. In 1831
Lord Brougham famously declared: ‘By the People, I mean the middle
classes, the wealth and intelligence of the country, the glory of the British
name.’ Similarly, in the German states, liberals defined their social identity
in terms of a conveniently vague Mittelstand or Mittelklasse. There was the
claim once again that this group amounted to something more than an
intermediate level of society. Friedrich Dahlmann, writing in 1847, called it
the ‘core of the nation’, which managed to combine the wisdom of the old
clerical estate with the wealth and power of the old nobility. Where the
middling strata were thin on the ground, as in Spain or Hungary, liberalism
could take on a strong aristocratic tinge.

Generally, though, these groups provided the bulk of liberal support during
the first half of the century. In Germany, for example, liberalism attracted the
odd aristocrat and a few skilled workers, but mostly it was a cause for
government officials, members of the professions, businessmen, craftsmen,
and independent farmers.

Indeed, it might be said that the ideal society for the liberals was one that
would be classless, because most people would be middle class. Social
harmony would be guaranteed by avoiding substantial differences in the
ownership of property. Benjamin Constant (1767- 1830), in Restoration
France, looked forward to a nation of independent property-owners, with the
‘rich and hard-working bourgeoisie’ accounting for 99 per cent of the
population. Liberals were firm believers in progress, but, being solid
members of the ‘respectable’ part of society, were determined to keep as
tight a rein on change as was possible. In the political sphere, before 1848
the majority favoured the juste milieu of a constitutional monarchy and some
form of restricted suffrage. However, there was also a radical wing to
liberalism, which eventually blended into socialism. Politically it might be
committed to republicanism or democracy, and, unlike orthodox liberals, it
was prepared to countenance state intervention in such areas as primary
education and progressive income tax. Yet it remained faithful to the vision
of a society of small property-owners. Republican leaders in Paris during the
1840s idealized a democratic and fiercely egalitarian society, revolving
around independent peasants, shopkeepers, and small workshop masters. At
the same period, Chartists in England floated a Land Plan, which would have
allowed some of the population at least the independence of a life on a small
farm. This project proved extremely popular in the factory districts of
northern England, anticipating later working-class support for Liberalism
and the commitment to land reform.

There were other variations on the liberal ‘good society’ that took account of
local circumstances, especially the preponderance of either industry or
agriculture. In the north of England, a wealthy elite promoted the vision of
an industrial community described by the historian R. J. Morris as ‘a society
of independent, hard-working, self- disciplined owners of small units of
property’. At the extreme, there was the logic of a competitive industrial
society producing an elite of savants and industrialists, and a mass of
labourers doomed to a rather grim existence—as foreseen by Charles
Dunoyer in 1825. However,
most liberals were not interested in industrial society: at mid-century they
still yearned for a world of small-scale enterprise in agriculture and the
handicraft trades. In the southern and western states of Germany, for
example, liberals remained committed to the old trade guilds, on the grounds
that they helped preserve small, independent workshop masters.

Fundamental to the existence of any form of liberal vision for society was a
thriving ‘public sphere’. This is defined by Jurgen Habermas as a sphere
where private individuals, ideally independent of influence from the family
and business on one side, and the state on the other, come together in various
institutions to form public opinion. Habermas links its formation during the
eighteenth century to the rise of a capitalist economy and a ‘bourgeoisie’ of
merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers. However, as his
critics have pointed out, the ‘public sphere’ can also be seen as an arena
where various types of identity, by no means exclusively ‘bourgeois’, could
be forged. The outstanding institutional change facilitating this process was
the mushrooming of voluntary associations in western Europe during the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their activities included poor relief,
popular education, moral reform, thrift, scientific investigation, and leisure.
In Marburg, a small university town in Hesse, the early nineteenth century
witnessed a flurry of foundations, from the socially exclusive social circle
Son- ntagsgesellschaft to more popular clubs involved with gymnastics,
shooting, and music. Similarly, Manchester had its Subscription Library, its
Literary and Philosophical Society, its Royal Manchester Institute, and its
Billiard Club, to name but a few of its institutions. Such associations
undoubtedly offered solutions to pressing problems for property-owners in
the towns that the state was failing to address—notably, public order and
poverty. They sponsored ‘rational’ leisure pursuits (reading, as opposed to
drinking, for example), and facilitated control of charitable initiatives. They
also enabled those with sufficient leisure and affluence to relax in the
company of their own kind. The diary of J. W. Shorthouse, the son of a
Quaker manufacturer in Birmingham, revealed a remarkably sociable
existence during the 1850s, including sports, reading, lectures, concerts, and
travel.

Some historians have asserted that the voluntary associations had the
function of encouraging middle-class consciousness in the face of
some very obvious material and ideological differences. However, this
seems unduly dogmatic, there being little evidence that class was a focus of
their interests. The associations might well pander to feelings of
exclusiveness in the highly status-conscious societies of Europe. At the same
time, it is worth emphasizing that the liberals prized debate and dissent in
their social order. The ‘public sphere’ had the scope to form a whole series
of collective identities, some of which competed, whilst others overlapped.
People might see themselves as, say, aristocrats or middle class, Catholics or
Protestants, monarchists or republicans, members of a town choir, supporters
of a gymnastic club, part of a scientific community, or devotees of various
charities. Take belonging to a church. This could be an important part of an
individual’s identity, given the time and effort required, and the loyalties
generated by rivalry with other denominations. The example of Bradford
reveals the established Anglican church struggling to come to terms with the
new urban and industrial society, whilst three Nonconformist sects—the
Baptists, the Congregationalists, and the Methodists—went from strength to
strength. The historian Theodore Koditschek has shown how even the
busiest entrepreneurs were prepared to become deacons or lay readers in
their congregations, and to work with Sunday schools, bible societies, and
charities. The snuff- maker William Whitaker even went bankrupt in i860
after making excessive contributions to his Wesleyan Methodist church. In
Lille, a small group of employers in the Association catholique des patrons
du Nord worked hard to defend the Catholic faith—without a great deal of
success, it must be said. The other camp in France was the anticlerical one,
which also had its share of crusaders. The stock character here is Monsieur
Homais, the chemist in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary , who laboured tirelessly
to defend his principles: ‘My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin,
Voltaire and Beranger! I am for the Savoyard Curate’s Confession of Faith
and the immortal principles of ’89!’

Women were not entirely excluded from these voluntary associations, being
particularly involved in charitable activities such as visiting the poor and
setting up soup kitchens. In principle, such associations should have formed
part of a liberal project for society more favourable to the emancipation of
women than a conservative one. Liberals did, after all, have in common with
feminists a commitment to individual liberties and to educational reform.
However, in practice, the realities of existing power relations between the
sexes intervened, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that nineteenth-
century liberalism did more to empower men than women. Liberals took for
granted what they considered to be the ‘natural’ and eternal inequality of
women, rarely offering them the vote in the nineteenth century, or even legal
equality with men. At the heart of their thinking was the age-old notion of
‘separate spheres’ for men and women: a ‘public’ world of business and
politics for the former, and a ‘private’ one revolving around the home and
child- rearing for the latter. Whether the ‘domestic ideology’ that
underpinned this sexual division of labour within the family should be
particularly associated with the middle class is a matter of some debate.
What is clear is that most women from this background committed
themselves to home and hearth (though not necessarily to idleness, of
course) rather than to a career—helped by the relative affluence of their
husbands, and the employment of a domestic servant. Conversely, there was
a tendency for married women to be excluded over the course of the century
from direct involvement in the running of the larger farms and businesses.
The context here was the more pressing need for some kind of scientific or
technical training. In the French town of Roubaix, for example, during the
earlier part of the century, women like Pauline Motte-Bredart (1795-1871)
could establish a reputation as shrewd business operators, as they shuttled
back and forth between their homes and the family cotton mill. From mid-
century onwards, this option was effectively closed to them, as they were
expected to devote all their energy to domesticity. Bonnie Smith asserts that
these women were eventually alienated from the values of industrial society,
being drawn into perceiving the social order as a static and hierarchical
construct. This did not prevent women from being important sources of
capital in family firms: indeed, to quote Ute Frevert on marriages, ‘a match
at the right time and place could write off debts, win over loyal members of
a firm, create business relationships and cement political coalitions’.

Yet there was always a certain tension between the very particular type of
femininity imposed by the ‘domestic ideology’, and the reality of many
women’s aspirations in the later part of the century. Even when they
operated within the general framework of a mothering role, seeking the
opportunity for a broader secondary education and careers in caring
professions such as teaching or medicine, they
encountered fierce opposition from defenders of the status quo. Pilar
Tauregui, one of the first women to attend a medical school in Spain, had
stones thrown at her by her classmates in r88i. Male teachers in Germany
tried around r900 to prove that there was no advantage in employing
(cheaper) females on the grounds that the women took more sick leave and
had more nervous breakdowns than they did! In the end, the gains made by
women in education and the professions before 1914 were very limited,
leaving the impression of seething discontent in various quarters.

This leads to the question of how far the pleasing vision from the r83os and
1840s of a society of hard-working, independent property- owners survived
into the latter part of the century. The answer must be that it was steadily
forced into retreat everywhere in Europe. Even the ‘middle class’ itself was
increasingly pulled apart by competing status groups and economic interests.
At the very top, a small number of merchants, industrialists, and, above all,
bankers increasingly distanced themselves from their peers. The Industrial
Revolution had thrown up a new figure in the form of the self-made man:
someone who had risen from rags to riches on the basis of sheer hard work
and technical competence. He was, in truth, something of a myth, given that
most of the very wealthy in business came from anything but humble
backgrounds. None the less, huge fortunes could be made in business, and
the occasional parvenu managed to impose himself, such as Titus Salt, who
built up a huge woollen spinning empire in Bradford, or August Borsig, who
began his career as a carpenter and ended it as a manufacturer of
locomotives in Berlin. By the late nineteenth century, new forms of wealth
were beginning to rival, and even surpass, the old. In Britain, businessmen
(predominantly in the financial sector rather than in industry) began to
overtake land- owners from around 1880. According to W. D. Rubinstein, of
the 100 millionaires who died in Britain during the period 1900-14, seventy-
two had a business background. In France, studies of wealth in several major
cities reveal the growing weight of big business from the Second Empire
period onwards: in Paris, it was merchants and bankers who took the lead, in
Lyons and Lille, manufacturers.

These wealthy bourgeois bought landed estates, established their own

exclusive social networks, and sought honours such as a place in the British
House of Lords or membership of the German reserve officer corps. Some of
them established contacts with the traditional
landed elites, though these took different forms across the continent. In
Russia, the Romanovs managed to co-opt the embryonic middle class into a
late version of the society of orders, granting them privileges and
establishing a special chin (rank) for merchants and industrialists in the
Table of Ranks. Meanwhile German businessmen were held at arm’s length
by the landed elite. A big armaments’ manufacturer like R A. Krupp might
have his Villa Hiigel, invite members of the old elite to dine with him, and
appear in court circles, but most other top businessmen had to be content
with an opulent lifestyle without the titled connections. In Britain, by
contrast, a long tradition of younger sons of the gentry going into trade and
the professions helped lower the barriers between the two sides a little, the
integration through marriage of merchant bankers from the City of London
and landed aristocrats being particularly striking. In Naples, too, a new
commercial oligarchy managed to intermarry with the lower reaches of the
local aristocracy, helped by the proliferation of minor titles. In these various
ways, a new plutocracy was emerging in western Europe during the late
nineteenth century, composed of aristocratic and bourgeois elements, which
compromised the original liberal ideal.

Meanwhile, what might be called the foot soldiers of that particular vision,
the petite bourgeoisie of master artisans and shopkeepers, faced an
increasingly hostile environment. Their numbers may have expanded, above
all on the retail side, but in general they fared relatively poorly as societies
became wealthier during the nineteenth century. In Paris, for example,
Adeline Daumard estimates that they owned 20 per cent of the total wealth
in 1820, but only 3 per cent in 1911. The independence that they prized
above all else was always threatened by their need to solicit contracts and
credit from merchant wholesalers. Some were more vulnerable than others:
one can distinguish a core of well-established craftsmen and shopkeepers,
and a more peripheral group of men and women who were short of both
capital and training, and who drifted in and out of the trades more rapidly. In
Bremen, during the years 1890-1914, one-third of all shops ceased trading
within their first six years. At the same period the Parisian handicraft trades
had both a ‘luxury’ and a ‘current’ branch. The former relied on an elite of
highly trained artisans, who flourished in the manufacture of such luxuries as
fine furniture, jewellery, and artistic bronzes. The latter, by contrast,
spawned an army of more
specialized (and less skilled) craftsmen, typified by the ubiquitous tailors
and shoemakers, who worked with cheaper materials and were subject to a
more extensive division of labour. One can also note, as David Blackbourn
has done in the case of imperial Germany, divergences between artisans and
retailers on the issue of free trade, and between this ‘old’ section and a
newer one composed of white- collar workers in the public sector.

Early signs of disgruntlement were registered in England at midcentury by

Samuel Smiles (1812-1904). According to the historian R. J. Morris, the
famous work Self Help (1859), far from being a celebration of material
success, was a desperate effort by the petite bourgeoisie to assert itself when
caught between a selfish and violent ruling class and a poverty-stricken and
no less violent working class. In the end, small masters and shopkeepers
continued to be thought of as part of a larger middle class in Britain. Their
counterparts on the continent were perceived more clearly as a small
business group, identified by the German term Mittelstand or the French
classe moyenne. Whereas members of the British petite bourgeoisie
remained faithful to the Liberal Party and the individualist ideal, their
neighbours were sometimes tempted by political associations such as the
Allgemeiner deutscher Handwerkerbund (General Union of German
Artisans), founded in 1882, or the Belgian Association nationale de la petite
bourgeoisie, established in 1900. This did not rule out many from this milieu
having close links with workers in their neighbourhoods, though there was
always the potential for conflict over credit and price levels.

A further distinction within the ‘middle class’ can be made between business
and professional interests, particularly in those countries that were
latecomers to industrialization. In Germany the Wirtschaftsburgertum of
entrepreneurs, managers, and rentiers stood further apart from the
Bildungsburgertum of lawyers, judges, university-educated civil servants,
journalists, and so on, than was the case in Britain and France. The business
interest in Germany was relatively slow to materialize during the nineteenth
century, while the state bureaucracy remained exceptionally large and
prestigious. Sons of businessmen generally attended a Realgymnasium and a
technical university, leaving the Gymnasien and law or philosophy faculties
to the sons of officials. Intermarriage between the two wings was rare, and,
if those with a business background sometimes entered the
professions, movement in the other direction was most exceptional.
Similarly, in Italy the professional borghesia of the state bureaucracy had
become something of a caste by the end of the century, able to rival the
power of a newly emerging industrial interest. A more gradual process of
industrialization in other parts of western Europe encouraged an
intermingling of families with different occupational backgrounds. French
lycees and British public schools allowed some scope for a common
secondary education, and marriage barriers were less in evidence. The
Heywoods, a wealthy banking family in Manchester, had family links with
local industrial and commercial interests, the Church of England (a Bishop
of Winchester), and the legal profession (two barristers with landed estates
in Bedfordshire and Cornwall). Even so, some tension remained, as the
historian Harold Perkin emphasized, with his struggle in England between
the ‘entrepreneurial’ and the ‘professional’ ideal.

In sum, the ‘middle class’, as Dror Wahrman observes in the British case,
turned out to be more middle than class. There were many appeals for
middle-class support in the political arena of nineteenth- century Europe. It
may be that the Burgertum of continental Europe (which excluded the lower
middle class) was a more coherent and self-conscious status group than the
British or American middle class. More in evidence, though, was a constant
process of formation and reformation. As the threat from absolutism and
aristocratic patronage eased in the West, so various sectional interests came
to prevail. ‘Monopoly capitalism’ began to supplant the original competitive
form, and the professions fought hard to enhance their status, doctors and
lawyers leading the way with specialist organizations. All this was a long
way from the spirit of harmony that the liberal version of the ‘good society’
hoped for among the ‘middling sort’. No less importantly, liberal hopes that
the ownership of property in various forms would become generalized as the
economy developed proved hopelessly optimistic. Doubtless many people
did manage to enjoy a measure of independence because of their property
and education, but gross inequalities persisted through the century. By the
final third of the century, it was becoming clear that classic liberal
‘philanthropic’ initiatives to help the poor could not eliminate the
impoverished ‘residuum’ obstinately floundering in the midst of plenty. The
original liberal vision of society was well and truly blighted by this
persistence of the ‘social question’, which called into question its faith
in progress, social harmony, and a ‘civil society’ free from state interference.
In the French case, Jacques Donzelot has traced the invention of ‘the social’
after 1848, provoked by the declining faith in individual responsibility so
dear to the liberals, and the corresponding willingness of the Republican
state to begin shouldering the burden of some of the hazards of daily life.
This development arguably laid the foundations for social legislation
covering problems such as accidents at work, unemployment, and old age.
Socialism, the workers, and the
cooperative society
Various critiques of liberalism and its alleged consequences for social
relations appeared almost from the beginning. Whether radicals or
conservatives, they all seized on mass pauperization as the Achilles’ heel of
a project dedicated to progress. Already by the 1830s and 1840s, they had
established in a flood of pamphlets and articles the stock image of a labour
force demoralized by long working hours, low wages, and poor housing. A
French journalist warned in 1831 that ‘the barbarians who threaten society
are not in the Caucasus or the steppes of Tartary; they are in the faubourgs of
our manufacturing towns’. Whereas liberals saw harsh conditions as a test of
character, which some would pass and others fail, their opponents
considered them an indictment of liberal political economy. The early
socialists were vehement in their condemnation of the competitive society:
Louis Blanc (1811-82), for example, described it as ‘a system of
extermination’, which he held responsible for a long list of evils, from
poverty and moral degradation to crime and industrial crises. They also came
up with a rich crop of socialist versions of the ‘good society’, elaborated in
far more detail than any proposed by the liberals. But what did the
‘barbarians’ themselves have to say? In other words, is there space for
something between the well-known socialist doctrines of Marx, Proudhon,
and company, on the one hand, and the catalogue of harsh living and
working conditions repeatedly documented by contemporaries and history
books on the other? Recent work by historians concerned with the cultural
dimension to the Industrial Revolution has made this possible. For evidence,
they have

turned to the writings of people who were often only marginally involved
with the day-to-day life of the proletariat, but whose exceptional talents gave
them considerable authority in their communities: above all, militants in the
labour movement, worker-poets, and contributors to working-class
newspapers. What this section will investigate is how workers viewed their
plight, what their vision of the ‘good society’ might have been, the role of
‘artisans’ among them, and how they responded to socialist appeals to act as
a ‘working class’.

Needless to say, workers (that is to say, manual labour dependent on wages)

resented being written off as ‘barbarians’, ‘slaves’, or any other type of
subhuman. The Parisian tailor Grignon admitted in 1833 that his comrades
might have to work for fourteen to eighteen hours a day, and that they had
little time for education. However, he blamed this on a government that
favoured the rich over the poor, denying workers their human dignity. In
emphasizing the political causes of social problems, he was typical of his
milieu: ‘advanced’ opinion among workers pinned great faith on winning the
vote, achieving a republic, securing lower taxes, and so on, as the way
forward. Otherwise, workers were particularly critical of the way their
independence was being undermined by the wage system. They frequently
complained that they were being deprived of the enjoyment of the fruits of
their labour. They were rather less impressed than the liberals with the new
middle classes, seeing most of them as useless intermediaries: ‘a crowd of
traffickers, merchants, commission- agents, trustees, traders, dealers, etc.’, as
the weaver Charles Noiret put it in 1840. While these usurpers wheedled
their way in between producers and consumers to take their cut, unrestrained
competition was forcing down wages to unbearable levels. The ‘social
question’, then, was a matter of a new ‘financial aristocracy’ expanding far
beyond its proper role in trading and lending, upsetting what Grignon called
the ‘relationships of independence and equality’ between masters and men.
Workers looked back with some nostalgia to a time when communities had
not been undermined by individualism: to the ‘cottage economy’ of
handloom weavers, for example, so dear to operatives in the Lancashire
cotton mills.

‘Association’ was the key to the ‘good society’ for the early socialists during
the 1830s and 1840s. They emphasized the benefits of cooperation within a
free and voluntary association, in contrast to

the competition between workers and the oppressive discipline of the

workshops imposed by capitalism. To some extent, workers owed the idea to
the detailed schemes proposed by middle-class theorists such as Robert
Owen (1771-1858) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837). The famous
phalansteres dreamed up by Fourier were to operate like vast hotels, lodging
around 1,600 people, and, at the same time, serve as units of production. To
solve the problem of making work both attractive and productive, it would
be rewarded with a system of dividends instead of wages, and be performed
among groups of friends. Some of these ‘utopian’ socialists, such as Fourier
and Wilhelm Weitling (1808-71), virtually ignored industrial machinery,
whilst others, notably Owen at New Lanark and Etienne Cabet (1788- 1856)
in his Icaria , welcomed it. The majority were suspicious of the state, but
Louis Blanc gave it a pivotal role in establishing his social workshops. There
were diverse approaches to private property, with Fourier defending it, but
Cabet and Owen inclining more towards communism. Finally, they all
assumed that their communities would be based on some form of religion,
Cabet contending that communism was really Christianity in practice. The
idea of association also emerged among workers themselves, particularly in
a political hothouse like Paris, as part of their struggle against exploitation
by employers. During a strike against the masters, it was tempting to think
about doing without them entirely. The early phase of the 1848 Revolution
provoked a flurry of associations dedicated to the emancipation of labour,
Parisian building workers, for example, asserting that they wished to escape
from ‘bondage’, so that henceforth they would work only for themselves and
their families.

Such gentle visions of community and cooperation barely survived the

violent denouement to 1848, and the harsh political climate that followed.
During the second half of the century, it became increasingly clear that the
capitalist system was firmly established in western Europe. None the less,
there were many continuities right down to the First World War period. A
number of socialist groups, particularly on the continent, maintained their
faith in producers’ cooperatives as a means of emancipating trades from the
wage system. There were also echoes of the old search for relationships of
mutual respect between masters and skilled labour, evident among trade
unionists in the engineering and shipbuilding trades on Tyneside. Towards
the end of the century, the various socialist groups talked increasingly in

terms of class and class struggle, and envisaged relying more on the state to
help the poor and disadvantaged. For some, the ‘good society’ would have to
await apocalyptic revolutionary change, leading to the classless society
dreamed of by Marxists, or the collectivism of the anarchists. For others,
perhaps the majority of socialists in Europe at this period, the ideal was
closer to existing conditions, a series of reforms to promote the interests of
workers being sufficient to achieve their aims. A survey of German workers
on the eve of the First World War found many hankering after a simple rural
life. A young miner hoped for plenty of food, a little beer, and a good night’s
sleep after work, and added, ‘I’d build myself a nice house so that I could
live in something I owned.’ Similarly, a metal-fitter in the Central Industrial
Region of Russia idealized for the engineer F. R Pavlov a glassworks where
he had once worked, in which each family had a hut, a little barn for cattle, a
vegetable garden, and access to grazing for its cattle.

The leaders of the early ‘Utopian’ forms of socialism hoped to rally support
from most parts of the social spectrum. In the end, most of their followers
came from the ranks of skilled craftsmen. Almost four-fifths of Cabet’s
Icarians, perhaps 50,000 strong in France during the 1840s, were employed
in the handicraft trades, tailors and shoemakers being particularly prominent.
Historians have often been tempted to link ‘Utopian’ socialism with the
preoccupations of the ‘artisan’. John Breuilly has gone as far as to suggest
that the ideas of Weitling, himself a tailor, were based completely upon a
vision of craft production in small workshops. The assumption has been that
‘artisans’ played a prominent role in the early labour movement because, on
the one hand, their status as skilled workers was under threat from capitalist
forces, and, on the other, they had the capability to mount a spirited
resistance. Christopher Johnson was influential in pursuing this line of
argument, using the history of the tailors in Paris as a case study. He
attributed their militancy during the 1830s and 1840s to the precarious
position of skilled males in the bespoke tailoring trade once confection (the
production of ready-made clothing) took a hold. Tailoring risked becoming a
typically ‘sweated’ trade, relying on cheap, mainly female labour for the
bulk of its output. The tailors retaliated with well-organized militancy,
fortified by their pride in a skilled trade. There were indeed many
communities of urban artisans across Europe, whose solidarity rested on
men living,

working, and relaxing together in a particular neighbourhood. Perhaps the

most notorious at mid-century were the canuts (silk- weavers) of Lyons.
Their uprising in 1831 sent a tremor throughout the continent, as they took
over their city and swore ‘to live working or die fighting’. The ‘radical-
artisan’ model is therefore a compelling one.
However, there are two main drawbacks to it. In the first place, it suffers
from a narrow focus: it tells us a good deal about the plight of skilled males
during the early stages of industrialization, but very little about other
workers, women in particular. Some of the early socialists, notably Owen,
Fourier, and the Saint-Simonians, were, by the standards of the time,
outstanding feminists. Fourier asserted that ‘the best nations have always
been those which concede the greatest amount of liberty to women’. On
these grounds, for what it is worth, he thought the French ‘the foremost
civilized nation’, the Spanish ‘the least indulgent towards the fair sex’. In his
phalansteres he proposed that women work on equal terms to men, and that
they be freed from the constraints of marriage. However, there were signs of
a certain divergence of male and female visions within the socialist camp.
Joan Scott has highlighted these in a study of skilled labour in the Parisian
garment trades during the 1830s and 1840s. The tailors, while not denying
women the right to work for wages, favoured a clear separation between
home and work, allowing the trade to be dominated by teams of skilled
males in the workshops. The seamstresses, by contrast, would accept both
workshop and household forms of organization, seeing their interests better
served by measures to regulate piece rates in their trade. Underlying their
stance was a Saint-Simonian vision of a social republic in which women
could obtain a divorce, control their own wages, refuse the domination of a
selfish husband, and combine childcare with the ‘right to work’. In the words
of La Voix des femmes in 1848: ‘The working woman will contribute her
share to her family income and we, who have demanded the right to work
for all, will dare also to believe in equality, the religious and fraternal
expression of the two sexes.’ Unfortunately for women, their male
colleagues all too often failed to share their enthusiasm for equality. Sally
Alexander noted the way that radicalism in Britain during the early
nineteenth century spoke the language of its leaders: small master craftsmen,
displaced domestic workers, artisans, and skilled factory workers. These
men

looked back to the eighteenth century for their vision of a new social order.
They took it for granted that work for women should merely involve
‘assisting’ skilled male workers, and that a woman’s place in the family
should be one of subordination to a male head of household.
A further drawback to the ‘radical-artisan’ thesis is its focus on shoemaking
and tailoring. Jacques Ranciere asks why these two trades featured so
prominently among radical movements when they were the least respected
of all trades in the community. He cites the worker-poet Hilbey, who
admitted that he worked only on children’s clothes because they required a
minimum of care and intelligence: ‘Let those who want nicely stitched and
fashioned clothes make them for themselves, if they like. I, for my part,
intend to brutalize myself as little as possible.’ So much for pride in the
craft! It may be that militancy in these two trades can be attributed to the
very weakness of their trade solidarity, encouraging them to rally to values
external to the trade—such as republicanism or utopianism.

A number of historians have therefore moved on to seek the source of

collective identities among workers in the cultural sphere. They have noted
the influence of the past on nineteenth-century categories. The brotherhood
of Christianity became the solidarity of workers, for example, or the
bourgeois Third Estate of the Ancien Regime was complemented by the
Fourth Estate of ‘the people’. For the socialist leader Alexander Herzen
(1812-70), the peasant commune in Russia, the mir or obshchina , would
form the basis for an anarchist system of small, self-governing units of
production. The historian William Sewell has pursued this line in some
depth, arguing that artisans in France took the lead in class-consciousness
activity up to 1848 largely under the influence of an ethos inherited from the
ancient guild system. The guilds, he argued, defended the material interests
of a trade, but also created a ‘moral community’ held together by oaths of
loyalty and devotion to a patron saint. The workers’ movement of the early
nineteenth century persisted with notions of the trade as an ordered moral
and spiritual community, since they bolstered its opposition to competitive
individualism. It also updated its political and organizational language to
account for the French Revolution: manual labourers became ‘the people’,
for example, and the corporation became a free and voluntary association.
The story ends in the spring of 1848, with workers in Paris struggling to
construct an entire, new social

order based on labour. In this way, the responses of workers to the challenge
of the new industrial system were shaped by ‘pre-existing values,
assumptions, practices, expectations, and sentiments’.
Jacques Ranciere has gone even further in cutting the workers’ dreams of the
1830s and 1840s from their experiences in the workshops. In his view, the
past gives way to a small band of eccentric workers as the pivotal influence.
These men were more interested in ideas than in the dreary routines of
manual labour. Their ‘contradictory relations’ with Saint-Simonians,
Icarians, and other prophets of the new world were what forged the
discourse of worker identity. Although ignored by the masses in normal
circumstances, they came to the fore during periods of struggle. In 1833 the
striking tailors turned to Andre Troncin, ‘a man who divided his free time
between the student cafes and his reading of the great thinkers’. In 1848 the
house-painters sought their plan of action from ‘their bizarre colleague
Confais the cafe-keeper, who ordinarily bored them to death with his
Fourierist harmonies and his phrenological experiments’.

Later versions of socialism often appealed to an explicitly proletarian

constituency. Yet socialists were to discover that the ‘working class’ was as
fragmented as any ‘middle class’. Even as they worked to forge a solidarity
among workers, their own prejudices served to exclude some potential
members. A close look at socialist visions for the future reveals that they
were generally skewed towards the aspirations of skilled male labour in the
workshops and factories: of mule- spinners, metalworkers, engineers,
railwaymen, building-workers, and the like. British historians in particular
have debated whether this type of worker constituted an ‘aristocracy of
labour’, bribed by good wages, authority over others, and a certain amount
of control over their work into accepting the existing social order. Socialist
leaders could certainly reveal themselves to be every bit as suspicious of
casual and unskilled labour as the bourgeoisie. The world of the militant was
perhaps too austere and work-oriented for the taste of those whose lives were
dominated by bouts of unemployment, violence, and petty crime. Socialists
sometimes tried to accommodate peasant interests, but without much
success. The Populist movement was an early experiment in bringing
socialism to the peasantry, peculiar to Russia, that failed to arouse much of a
response. From the late 1860s onwards, Spanish and Italian anarchists were
able to harness to their cause massive discontent among landless agricultural
labourers,

on the huge latifundia of western Andalusia and in the Po valley

respectively. Other militants sought to channel the collectivist traditions of
rural communities to socialism, the French Parti Ouvrier, for example,
making some headway among small peasant-proprietors in Provence during
the early twentieth century. In general, though, the socialists were reluctant
to countenance any redistribution of land, holding to the initial Marxist view
that the peasantry was doomed to disappear under capitalism.

The militants also continued to struggle with the general socialist

commitment to advance the cause of women workers. Later socialist
theorists were usually vaguer on women’s issues than the ‘Utopians’, Marx,
for example, confining himself to the prediction that the ‘bourgeois’ family
would vanish along with capitalism. The German August Bebel (1840-1913)
was something of an exception, his Woman under Socialism (1879) arguing
that an end to ‘sex slavery’ would be possible only if ‘the existing state and
social order were radically transformed’. Certainly, many women workers
pinned their faith in socialism, from the Owenites and Saint-Simonians of
the 1830s, to the Russian ‘Amazons’ and the German feminists in the Social
Democratic Party of the late nineteenth century. Towards the end of the
century, certain groups of organized labour began to demand that men be
paid a ‘family wage’ that would allow them to support their families without
the need for their wives or children to engage in paid work. In the French
case, this was particularly marked in trades such as printing and leather-
working, where males were threatened by competition from cheaper female
labour. Many working women, who were accustomed to operating in both
the so-called public and private spheres, were unimpressed. The German
feminist Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) had no illusions but that ‘work is the
indispensable condition for economic independence’.

Even male workers were divided by differences such as those of status, skill,
trade, religious affiliation, political ideology, local and regional loyalties,
geographical origins, and so on. In the mines and steelworks of the Basque
province, employers were able to use strong regional identities among
workers to their own advantage during the early twentieth century. The
fierce Basque nationalism of the natives, which was heavily tinged with
Catholicism and antisocialism, set them apart from immigrants from Galicia,
Valencia, and Zamora. Similar divisions between immigrants and natives
erupted with the
Irish in Lancashire, Belgians in northern France, and Poles in the Ruhr.
Many trades had elaborate hierarchies of status, to which workers were
acutely sensitive. Metalworkers in St Petersburg listed over 100 separate
occupational categories when replying to a survey of their industry in 1908.
One of these men, S. I. Kanatchikov, recalled in his memoirs that skilled
patternmakers were contemptuous of peasant workers, not least because they
looked different: ‘they wore high boots, traditional cotton-print blouses
girdled with a sash, had their hair cut “under a pot”, and wore beards that
were rarely touched by a barber’s hand.’ Likewise, the established villauds
of Limoges scorned the bicanards , fresh in from the countryside, as dour
rustics, still listening for the call of the rooster rather than the factory bell.
Sometimes operatives developed loyalties to a particular firm, the family
that owned it, and the neighbourhood that they dominated. Patrick Joyce has
uncovered the remarkable phenomenon of rival cotton mills voting solidly
Conservative or Liberal during the 1868 elections in Blackburn.

The labour movements of the various countries of Europe did, of course,

have some success in persuading such disparate groups to act to promote
common interests, and perhaps even to think of themselves as a working
class. They had to their credit over the course of the century a contribution to
reformist measures to improve shop- floor conditions, housing, education,
social security, and so on. They also had many failures, as workers chose to
support very different versions of the ‘good society’, such as those of the
liberals or conservative Catholics. That the movements never managed to
conquer any of the European states before 1914 is hardly surprising. Yet
many historians have been inclined to judge each case on the extent to which
it approached ‘revolutionary consciousness’. It is easy to see the German
labour movement, with its huge membership, centralized administration, and
ostensible commitment to Marxist doctrines as ‘advanced’, and its smaller,
more reformist British counterpart as ‘backward’. But such a teleological
approach betrays the residual influence of ‘vulgar’ Marxism. As the Fox-
Genoveses later admitted somewhat ruefully, the luxury enjoyed by Marxist
historians until the 1950s was that they knew the end of the story: the
accession to power of the working class. Now that this appears an unlikely
outcome, historians are freer to consider each national (and indeed regional)
labour movement according to its circumstances.
The revolutionary stance of many workers in Russia and Germany might be
attributed partly to the disruptive effects of belated but rapid industrialization
in these two countries, and partly to the authoritarian character of the state.
Conversely, the reformist approach of the British can be linked to a certain
willingness among employers to enter into collective bargaining with trade
unions, and to the existence of a parliamentary state. There were several
versions of the socialist ‘good society’, it should be remembered, not all of
which required a violent political revolution.
Conservatism, the ‘upper strata’, and
the hierarchical society
It might seem perverse to end a survey of the nineteenth century with the
ideal of a stable, hierarchical society. Such a vision certainly harked back to
the Ancien Regime conception of a society of ranks and orders. Traditional
images of the Great Chain of Being had suggested a divinely ordained
hierarchy, in which, according to the Anglican catechism, each should labour
truly ‘to do his duty in that state of life to which it shall please God to call
him’. During the 1750s Soame Jenyns had drawn out the conservative
implications for the social order of this view of the cosmos:

The universe resembles a large and well-regulated family, in which all the
officers and servants, and even the domestic animals, are subservient to each
other in a proper subordination; each enjoys the privileges and perquisites
peculiar to his place, and at the same time contributes, by that just
subordination, to the magnificence and happiness of the whole.

By the late eighteenth century, under the influence of the Enlightenment,

such notions were beginning to fall out of favour. However, the coming of
the French Revolution, and in particular its violent turn during the Terror,
provoked a strain of counter-revolutionary thought that would resonate
through the nineteenth century. Some thinkers evidently looked to the past
for inspiration. Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) was convinced that the only
way people could live in society was through unquestioning obedience to
what he admitted to be irrational institutions, such as the hereditary
monarchy, the

Catholic Church, and lifelong marriage. He perceived the enemies of the

social order in France to include Protestants, lawyers, metaphysicians,
journalists, Jews, American revolutionaries, intellectuals, scientists, and
critics: anyone who might lead people to criticize existing sources of
authority. Social Catholics in France like Armand de Melun also looked back
nostalgically to the Bourbon monarchy, though they were no less impressed
by the medieval guilds. During the 1840s Melun hoped to resurrect the
corporative system in a new form appropriate to nineteenth-century
conditions, by bringing together Christian masters and their apprentices in a
patronage.

The most influential of this counter-revolutionary wave was the Irish-born

politician Edmund Burke (1729-97), his Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1790) arguably laying the foundations for modern conservatism. The
‘good society’ for Burke approximated to the one around him in late-
eighteenth-century Europe. His aim was to ensure that change allowed the
organic growth of established institutions to continue. In accepting that
societies might progress slowly towards more complex and civilized forms,
Burke distanced himself from a purely reactionary position. What he took
exception to was the belief that societies could be refashioned according to
abstract principles, as the French Revolutionaries had tried to do during the
1790s in the name of liberty and equality. He asserted that each society had
its own set of prejudices, which were the basis for harmony: ‘we cherish
them because they are prejudices, and the longer they have lasted, and the
more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them.’ The wise
legislator would build upon these, rather than attempt the hazardous business
of attempting to improve them. This led him to defend existing institutions,
such as the Church of England (and the Roman Catholic Church in France),
and the existing social hierarchy. He, no less than the liberals, thought of
property- owners as the backbone of society, though in his case it was the
big aristocratic ones who counted most: ‘the great Oaks that shade a
country.’ He accepted inequalities between individuals, anticipating that
even in England the majority of the population would remain poor and
ignorant. His influence was by no means confined to England; indeed, his
most receptive audience was to be found in the German states.

Supporters of the old order were among the most ardent critics of the social
consequences of individualism and the new laissez-faire

economics: the very Catholic and very conservative Comte Alban de

Villeneuve-Bargemont in France, say, or the maverick Tory Thomas Carlyle
in England. Their general contention was that the 'cash nexus’ was
destroying the paternal concern of the rich for the poor that had flourished in
the traditional organic and hierarchical society. Villeneuve-Bargemont
lambasted the new ‘English’ science of economics during the 1830s,
accusing it of breaking the fraternal bonds that linked master and worker, the
strong and the weak. On the one hand, to produce goods as cheaply as
possible, industry was reducing the wages of its workers to the bare
minimum. On the other, to stimulate consumption, it was fostering new
tastes and new needs among these same workers. Such a contradictory
system, based on ‘an insatiable egoism and a profound disdain for human
nature’, was having a disastrous effect on the moral and material condition
of labour. Villeneuve-Bargement was one of the first to detect a shift from
the old problem of poverty to the new one of pauperism—a whole class
allegedly reduced to indigence by the progress of industry. The debate on the
‘social question’ raged with no less intensity in central and eastern Europe.
Faced with the liberal reforms of the early nineteenth century in Prussia,
Ludwig von der Marwitz sounded off in fine style against their chief
protagonist, Baron vom Stein:

He . . . began to revolutionize the fatherland. He began the war of the

propertyless against property, of industry against agriculture, of the
transitory against the stable, of crass materialism against the divinely
established order, of imaginary profit against justice, of the present moment
against the past and the future, of the individual against the family, of
speculators and counting houses against fields and trades, of government
bureaucrats against relationships derived from the history of the country, of
learning and conceited talent against virtue and honorable character.

During the 1840s, the Prussian king Frederick William IV and his advisers
were able to resist demands for a constitution by exploiting liberal weakness
in this sphere. Only an autocratic regime, they asserted, could defend the
poor and the weak, advance social justice and promote works of Christian
charity. (This was a bit rich from a regime so obviously devoted to landed
and even business interests!)

The strategy of attempting to forge an alliance between the crown and the
proletariat against a liberal bourgeoisie that these Prussian conservatives
liked to discuss would have a long history. In 1844, for

example, Frederick William helped found the Central Society for the
Welfare of the Working Classes in Berlin. Later in the century Bismarck
would make his famous bid to tie workers to the fate of the Prussian state by
means of social insurance schemes. The key question was always whether
those consigned to the lower ranks would accept the legitimacy of a rigidly
hierarchical vision of the social order. Evidence on this point is difficult to
muster: how far peasants or workers were coerced into submission, and how
far they accepted the authority of father figures above them, remains a moot
point. It seems likely that in certain circumstances it was possible to secure
something more than mere outward signs of deference from the ‘lower
orders’. Employers in the early textile mills were often conspicuously
successful in encouraging a family type of atmosphere among their
operatives. They were helped by their daily contacts with their employees on
the shop floor, and the relative isolation of their communities: one thinks of
the calico-printers Oberkampf at Jouy and Gros-Davillier at Wesserling. The
factory districts of Lancashire, so influential in forming the views of Marx
and Engels on the nature of capitalism, may, ironically have been the
location for one of the most genuinely deferential labour forces in Europe.
Patrick Joyce argues that northern employers were skilled in the arts of an
elite, with the result that the factory worker of the mid-nineteenth century
‘knew his place’ in the hierarchy. Large-scale enterprises in mining and
metallurgy, such as the Schneiders at Le Creusot or the Krupps at Essen,
attempted to adapt this paternalist tradition to their own circumstances.
Although they needed to delegate authority more to managers and overseers,
they too managed to generate considerable loyalty to their companies by
means of an aggressively paternalist regime.

A more common stereotype of the deferential worker would be someone like

old Hodge, the English farm labourer. Again, where the landowner was
present on his estate, and his farm labour generally isolated from external
influence, as in parts of the Midlands, or, in Prussia, in the eastern provinces
of Brandenburg and Pomerania, paternalism may have worked. However,
even on the land, by the nineteenth century there were too many sources of
friction between employers and labourers for this type of loyalty to have
been the norm. In central and eastern Europe, the draconian powers
exercised by serf-owners and later the fraught process of emancipation
caused

problems, whilst in England there was the background of enclosure and the
New Poor Law of 1834 to sour relations. Robert Berdahl concludes that, on
the estates of the Prussian nobility, outward deference concealed an inward
‘secret war’ against the masters: ‘deference was frequently coupled with the
mocking laugh behind the master’s back, the smirk that undermined the
bow.’ There was indeed a tradition of ‘unbridled passion for litigation’
among the peasantry in Prussia, which, as William W. Hagen has argued,
bore witness to their determination to emancipate themselves as far as
possible from the ‘baleful powers’ of the Junkers.

This leads to the obvious point that, for all the talk of mutual respect at all
levels, any elaborate hierarchy along the lines of a Great Chain was bound to
remain, in the words of Arthur Lovejoy, ‘more gratifying to the higher than
consoling to the lower ranks’. The Prussian Junkers were typical of those
who promoted this model of society during the nineteenth century, claiming
to run their estates as good ‘house-fathers’, and attempting to preserve the
traditional notion of the three stande : the nobility, the peasantry, and the
townspeople. Similarly in Russia it was privileged groups such as the gentry,
the clergy, and the industrial and commercial elites who attempted to
maintain their identities within the soslovie system during the upheavals of
the early twentieth century. One should be wary of writing off too easily the
effectiveness of such attempts at conserving ancient hierarchies. Arno Mayer
made a well-documented case to show that the outbreak of war in 1914 was
part of a rearguard action by the anciens regimes in Europe to resist the rise
of industrial capitalism. He asserted that historians have generally
underestimated the endurance of old forces and old ideas during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably those of the peasant
economy, the hereditary and privileged nobility, and the Church. The
consensus among historians is now that Mayer overplayed a good hand. All
the evidence points to new forms of industrial and commercial wealth
overhauling landed wealth towards the end of the nineteenth century, as we
have already noted. None the less, his emphasis on the capacity of the forces
of inertia and resistance to contain a dynamic new industrial society is a
useful antidote to much of the literature.

How did the ‘old order’ manage to survive for so long? Certainly not by
simply looking back to a golden age of deference and community. The fact is
that many of those who defended the traditional

hierarchy also ‘bought in’ heavily to the new liberal order. Take the
strategies of the landowning aristocracy. First, it often profited from a
liberalization of the market to increase or at least consolidate its
landholdings, even though measures such as disentailment and bans on the
sale of land to commoners were directly aimed at its interests. Spanish
nobles, for example, accepted the process of desamortizacion during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, since it recognized their property
rights, and compensated them with Treasury obligations for the loss of their
feudal dues. Secondly, aristocrats sometimes became ‘entrepreneurs of the
soil’, profiting from the buoyant market for cereals, at least until the Great
Depression of 1873-96 made life difficult. The Junkers of eastern Prussia
provided the outstanding example here. They took advantage of their large
estates, and the feeble position of emancipated serfs, to supply urban
markets in western Europe. The Russian nobility attempted to follow suit,
but generally found the going harder: the peasant commune proved resistant
to change, the climate inhospitable, and communications difficult. Finally,
aristocrats diversified beyond their traditional agricultural interests, investing
in industry or urban property. Genuinely entrepreneurial noblemen were few
and far between: the Prussian Prince Guido Henckel von Donnersmarch
sounds an unlikely candidate, but he developed interests in a number of
‘new’ industries, such as cellulose, wire, chrome, viscose, and paper. More
to aristocratic taste was exploiting coal deposits under their land, or
collecting rents from urban properties: a few English families such as the
Grosvenors and the Russells became fabulously wealthy through their
ownership of estates in London. Of course, there was a cost to these
strategies: it became increasingly difficult for, say, the Junkers to talk of their
paternal concern for their peasants on their land when estates were being
bought and sold for profit. In other words, big landowners probably did as
much as anybody else to undermine the type of society they claimed to be
defending.

The question remains as to whether there was any coherence to this ‘old
order’: was conservatism a focus for an ‘upper class’ formed from elements
of the old landed aristocracy and a newer elite of outstandingly wealthy
landowners, bureaucrats, and businessmen? There is a suggestion of this
type of outcome in parts of western Europe, above all in England. However,
it is the least convincing of all classes. There was a world of difference in
status between, say, the great families of
the English peerage and the lower gentry, not to mention the awareness of
differences in rank between nobles and commoners. In Paris during the
1840s, according to a gossip columnist, the best families kept themselves
apart, the likes of the Polignacs, the Bauffremonts, the Sainte-Aldegondes,
the Bondys, the Crillons, the Villoutreys, and the Brissacs meeting regularly
in a town house near the Boulevard St Germain.

The ‘landed interest’ was a possible alternative source of cohesion, typified

by the mobilization of German farmers under aristocratic leadership in the
Bund der Landwirte following the Great Depression in agriculture (1873-
96). But, of course, landowners came in all sizes. In England, the new
Domesday Book of 1874-6 revealed that there were one million owners,
amongst whom a favoured minority of 7,000 had 80 per cent of the land. In
France, the contrast was all too obvious between the big, wealthy holdings of
the Paris basin and the poorer ones in the south. East of the Elbe an ‘upper
class’ was even less plausible. The Russian nobility remained aloof from the
business elite, and was held in contempt by the intelligentsia. Moreover,
there were similar disparities in wealth and status: magnates of the Silesian
nobility had little in common with backwoodsmen like the Prussian Junkers.
The conclusion must be that elements of the ‘organic’, hierarchical society
idealized by conservatives survived through to 1914. At the same time, the
French Revolution of 1789 was an ominous warning of what might lie ahead
for the ‘old order’. Deference to traditional rank was increasingly difficult to
secure, as Marwitz reflected in his memoirs:

In my youth, a man of my standing was considered to be foremost wherever

he allowed himself to be seen; people tipped their hats to him, they stepped
aside for him. Now, in my old age, I cannot, to be sure, say that my personal
presence does not command proper respect, but the Estate [Stand] no longer
does. One is lost in the crowd, no one steps aside, no one tips his hat, but
they will run over you if you don’t get out of the way.
Conclusion
The nineteenth-century concern to study and reform an abstract ‘society’
resulted in vast numbers of competing conceptions of the

ideal. These ranged from detailed blueprints for a new social order to
supposedly pragmatic defences of the existing one. If it was potentially
subversive ideas along liberal and socialist lines that made much of the
running over the course of the century, one should not forget the continuing
influence of faith in the old hierarchies. Such a conflict of ideas on the ‘good
society’ gives a hint of the complex, pluralistic nature of the social order in
Europe. Can one say anything more precise about it? Past generalizations
based on class terminology, such as a ‘bourgeois society’, or a bourgeois one
compromised by feudal influences, or even a surviving ancien regime , now
find little favour among historians. The classes involved appear too
monolithic, the frame of reference too limiting. Instead, the recent
historiography depicts a more variegated and less stable pattern of identities,
in which class is merely one among many forms. It invites us to think in
terms of various communities that formed and reformed, partly as people
moved from the country to the town, found new jobs, developed new leisure
interests, and so on, and partly as they reflected on the meaning of their
experiences. These communities might be large-scale ‘imagined’ ones, such
as a nation or a class, or small-scale, face-to-face ones, such as a
neighbourhood or a sports club. The way is open to avoid some of the
resounding abstractions of the past on ‘industrial society’ or ‘the
bourgeoisie’. Instead, historians can give a more subtle view of the
institutions and relationships in which people lived, and the ways in which
they constructed their identities.