Download PDF | (Themes in Comparative History) Pamela M. Pilbeam (auth.) - The Middle Classes in Europe, 1789–1914_ France, Germmany, Italy and Russia-Macmillan Education UK (1990).
336 Pages
General Editor’s Preface
SINCE the Second World War there has been a massive expansion in the study of economic and social history generating, and fuelled by, new journals, new academic series and societies. ‘The expansion of research has given rise to new debates and ferocious controversies. This series proposes to take up some of the current issues in historical debate and explore them in a comparative framework.
Historians, of course, are principally concerned with unique events, and they can be inclined to wrap themselves in the isolating greatcoats of their ‘country’ and their ‘period’. It is at least arguable, however, that a comparison of events, or a comparison of the way in which different societies coped with a similar problem — war, industrialisation, population growth and so forth — can reveal new perspectives and new questions. The authors of the volumes in this series have each taken an issue to explore in such a comparative framework. The books are not designed to be path-breaking monographs, though most will contain a degree of new research. The intention is, by exploring problems across national boundaries, to encourage students in tertiary education, in sixth-forms, and hopefully also the more general reader, to think critically about aspects of past developments. No author can maintain strict objectivity; nor can he or she provide definitive answers to all the questions which they explore. If the authors generate discussion and increase perception, then their task 1s well done.
CLIVE EMSLEY
Who Were the Middle Classes?
IF man could have moved from rural society directly to the age of the microchip, the vast expansion of the middle classes in the nineteenth century might never have happened, indeed social structures would have been entirely different, and R.H. Tawney might never have been provoked to remark: “The word “class” is fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as a symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit.”
The aim of this book is to compare the middle classes in four of the major states in continental Europe — France, Russia, Germany and Italy — from the French Revolution of 1789 until the outbreak of the First World War. This was a period of considerable change, both in the use of the term ‘middle class’, and in the social groups which belonged to the category. Qualitative and quantitative changes in industry led to an expansion in the size and composition of the entrepreneurial element within the middle class. Population growth and urbanisation also contributed to the ‘professionalisation’ of the professions and to the vast burgeoning of the role of the state and with it the huge expansion of the bureaucracy and of all aspects of the ‘white-collar’ element. Generations of unsuspecting undergraduates have found the phrase ‘middle class’ a morass, a minefield, even a veritable Pandora’s box. It is certainly a chameleon among definitions, whether flopped down vaguely to cover multifarious ignorance, used with attempted precision by social scientists searching for rigour and objectivity, or employed by political commentators as a term of praise or a weapon in an ideological armoury. Are ‘middle class’ and ‘bourgeois’ interchangeable?
What do ‘upper’, ‘middle’ and ‘lower’ gradations of either term signify? When do ‘class’ definitions take over from ‘orders’ or ‘estates’? Which of the following criteria should the historian employ in trying to explain class: financial, occupational, economic, political, status, cultural or other? How appropriate for the historian are ‘models’ presented by social scientists, who may be more concerned with a static analysis than with social change over a period of time? Definitions of ‘middle class’ are varied, ambiguous and vague, and the rapid introduction of a large element of political ideology, puritanical moralising and invective, especially by the early socialists, has certainly muddied the waters. Fervent attempts to disprove Marx’s prognosis for industrial society and the numerous modifications of his ideas proposed by his followers have not helped in making definitions of class more precise, rather the reverse. The acclaimed experiences of ‘bourgeois’ revolutions in France in 1789 and Russia in 1917 have not facilitated the debate. In this first chapter we shall consider two aspects: first how the use of class terminology has changed through time, and secondly which groups in the four countries chosen need to be examined.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries men stopped thinking of their society as split into estates or orders, in which status was based on a range of factors of which economic function was one element among many, to one of classes, where a man’s job and the amount he was paid counted for much more. In the traditional structure of estates, the Church in France was the First Estate, the nobility the Second and everyone else the Third. The different estates were further distinguished by the rights and privileges of the corporate, constituent groups. By the eighteenth century these divisions gave no hint of economic function, as the ‘warrior second estate eagerly engaged in trade, nor did they illuminate social distinctions, since non-nobles could buy feudal privileges and exploit them for financial gain, with no hint of reciprocal social obligation. Within each estate were huge differences in wealth, lifestyle and occupation, to such a degree that some nobles and clergy deemed it more fitting to sit with the Third Estate than with their own in the Estates General of 1789. By the eighteenth century the existence of the obligations and, more significantly, the privileges of each estate, were often irrelevant, even harmful to social relations and the effective conduct of government.
At the end of the eighteenth century the groups we would describe as middle class were encompassed within the Third Estate, but this latter term had become vague and virtually meaningless. When the abbé Siéyes wrote his polemical pamphlet What is the Third Estate? on the eve of the resuscitation of the Estates General in 1789, he noted that the Third included all outside the nobility and clergy, that the vast majority of Frenchmen had no role in running their country, and that this situation must be remedied; but he was actually only interested in the political liberation of the better-off, educated element. In pursuit of this goal, he was apparently content to leave the issue of definition fudged and ambiguous. Throughout his pamphlet he used the language of ‘estates’ and did not probe the enormous divisions within the ‘Third’ Estate, for this would have revealed how narrow a sector of the estate he wanted to liberate politically, the richer bourgeoisie.
Within the society of estates, ‘bourgeois’ was once a precise subsection: the wealthy, corporate members of an urban community. It referred to corporate status, wealth and the source of income. By 1789 it was used much more loosely, to include social and economic categories, as well as to cover various status groups and those who lived by certain standards or norms. Describing a man as ‘bourgeois’ told one nothing about his job; he would not be a king or labourer, but he might be a state official, a man of letters, a professional, merchant, banker, industrialist or academic. He might simply live from the income he derived from rural or urban property or from money invested, perhaps in government securities. His occupation did not mark him out as essentially distinct from some nobles, churchmen or betteroff peasants. His ranking in tax obligations and privileges would help further to define him, as would his education, lifestyle, selfimage and social and family relationships.
‘Class’ terminology was first used by the physiocrats, a section of the philosophes, in the mid-eighteenth century. By the late 1760s Mably was describing groups with different economic functions as classes. The British writer, Adam Smith, split society into traditional orders, and then subdivided each order into classes. His followers abandoned orders in favour of classes.* The groups thus described were very vague, amorphous economic entities. The use of ‘middle class’ rather than ‘bourgeois’ seems to indicate the perceived need for new categories in a time of social change. But by the nineteenth century the two terms were interchangeable, although some writers used ‘bourgeois’ to imply a higher financial and social rank, reserving ‘middle class’ for the less wealthy. The range of status, occupation and wealth encompassed led to the adoption of subdivisions, grande, moyenne, petite bourgeoisie; upper, middle and lower middle class. De Tocqueville, in describing the middle class of the ancien régime, concentrated on those who held public appointments, with their preference for town living, their desire to buy office and thereby to enlarge their privileges, and the resulting myriad divisions within the group.
He observed that the notable citizens of one small town were split into 36 distinct sections, which were constantly trying to define their group so as to exclude some of their number. As a result some had only three or four members, and each group was made distinct by a mass of small privileges. Indeed an eighteenth-century office-holder had bought his post and was free from interference by central government. In this sense he was better off than his nineteenth-century successor.’ This was a traditional and privileged section of the bourgeoisie, almost a pseudo-aristocracy, especially since such privileges could be handed down to sons.* However it was only one of many varied groups, and towards the end of the eighteenth century a bourgeois, in receipt of various privileges, might yet be at war with the concept of privilege. The term ‘bourgeois’ was, as a recent Marxist historian has concluded, ambiguous; the bourgeoisie was a ‘classe intermédiare’ or ‘classe carrefour which historians might try to group together, but whose constituent parts were almost infinitely varied.”
Before 1789 the term ‘bourgeois’ might help to illuminate some social, economic and cultural attitudes and functions but would mask diversity, hiding more than it revealed. ‘The 1789 revolution fudged its meaning even more by adding a political dimension. Longestablished social categories, notably ‘aristocrat’, ‘bourgeois’, and ‘sans-culottes’ (a term used to describe the group of Parisian artisans active in the unrest of the early 1790s), were transformed into political slogans. At times ‘bourgeois’ was used almost as the equivalent of ‘citoyen’. As the economic circumstances of many French families worsened in the 1790s, ‘bourgeois’ itself became a term of opprobrium and abuse, and the new class terminology, previously used to sketch different levels of wealth, followed suit. The attempt made in the constitutions of the 1790s to define the politically active by the tax they paid also helped to transform the new ‘class’ terms into political labels. In the 1790s Babeuf rated conflict between classes, which he defined in general economic terms, as more significant than the political debate. He argued that the achievement of political harmony had to be predicated upon the equalisation of wealth.
Qualitative and quantitative changes taking place in industry were beginning to impinge on the consciousness of a growing number of writers. Accelerated urbanisation and the establishment of factory industry heightened the awareness of some to the gross inequalities of wealth prevailing. Praise of free competition in capitalist development was countered by criticism of new social cleavages, determined solely by money and unchecked economic exploitation.’ The language of class seemed to echo the inadequacies of industrial society. Saint-Simon wrote of a ‘classe industrielle’ and a ‘classe travailleuse’ in a manner which still corresponded to traditional ‘order’ concepts, but he also used class terms, as did Babeuf, to describe the iniquities of the ‘classe paresseuse’, the privileged who had survived the French Revolution.® Early socialists, anxious to eliminate the inequalities and oppression of industrial society, also effectively lumped economic and political definitions of class together, assuming a close connection between the French Revolution and social change.
It was left to Marx to attempt a scientific analysis of the development of capitalism and predict future change. He associated the concept of class wholly with labour exploitation; he defined class according to the relationship of the individual to the means of production. The basis of class rested essentially in the growth of capitalist industry and was partly economic, partly psychological and partly political. Class came into existence only when groups were aware of their conflict with others. Both financial deprivation and psychological oppression and their opposites were crucial to the existence of a working class and a middle class. But they only crystallised as classes when they united in mutually hostile political formations.
Thus, Marx argued, the nineteenth-century French peasantry were not a class, because they lacked awareness of a political identity.” It would appear that the language of class had great historical specificity. Marx saw the revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848 as stages in the establishment and decline of bourgeois power. Marx himself used also class terms to describe pre-capitalist society.'° However, he claimed that the modern bourgeoisie was uniquely a property-owning, entrepreneurial group, who exercised power entirely as a consequence cf their accumulation of capital — a situation which was destined to produce unrelenting political conflict.'' Marx also recognised the existence of other elements within the bourgeoisie, notably professional, bureaucratic groupings and the intelligentsia. Unlike later followers, he also included landowners, for instance in the wealthy bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy. Curiously, Marx’s attempt to define class in the last section of Das Kapital was unfinished. Most of his comments on class occur in his historical works, where he sometimes refers simply to ‘the bourgeoisie’, or to sub-groups such as the ‘financial’, ‘commercial’, ‘petty’ bourgeoisie, etc., using the phrases without definition as if assuming that his readers would automatically comprehend."
For Marx class was less a system of social categorisation than a prophetic war-cry. He challenged those who chose to use its terminology to express a belief in gradual or evolutionary social change, a challenge which was couched in Das Kapital in the language of science and objectivity, not emotion, and whose essentials seemed to be borne out in the nineteenth century by the cyclical economic crises of 1817-18, 1827-32, 1845-8, the late 1850s and the world depression of the 1870s. It appeared as if the claims made by Marx and earlier socialists such as Louis Blanc, that capitalist competition would shrink the bourgeoisie and enlarge the size and grievances of the working class, were credible.'* Political upheaval certainly seemed to accompany these crises. The idea that class was the cornerstone of inevitable conflict was fundamental to the socialist movement which grew rapidly in the later years of the nineteenth century and seemed a real challenge to bourgeois society.
While socialist and social-reforming writers used a language of class to criticise new capitalist changes, others welcomed the new terminology and capitalism itself as elements in the liberation of society from traditional privilege. Writers and politicians like Guizot, longest-serving of Louis-Philippe’s senior ministers, never ceased their praise for the freedom, equality and opportunity which existed in modern society. To Guizot the middle class typified this liberation. He argued that, since the 1789 revolution had eliminated old irrational privileges, everyone had the opportunity to make enough money to be considered middle class and qualify to vote.'* For him class terms belonged to a world of liberty. He argued that man and society were gradually progressing, both in the realm of ideas and in man’s material condition.'? Industrial development and _ the accumulation of wealth benefited all. Social harmony, not conflict, was the essential precondition of such progress. “All classes, all social forces amalgamate, combine and live in peace within the great moral unity of French society.’'® Class was based on levels of wealth, but also on layers of moral obligation and duty. For Guizot the ability to make money and the possession of a moral conscience were inextricably linked, just as poverty was a sign of moral degradation. Thus non-socialists used an emasculated language of class, replacing inevitable conflict with moral obligation. For them morality reposed mainly in the middle class; for the socialists, in the working class.
Marx had argued that class and class conflict would only exist until the inevitable proletarian revolution cleared the way for a classless society. By the end of the nineteenth century, governments were making some effort both to improve the material condition of the poor and to persuade the latter to identify with existing society and believe that their material circumstances were actually improving. A number of social commentators rationalised persistent inequalities. The permanence of an élite based on political domination was asserted by writers like the Sicilian Mosca'’ and Pareto, the latter of whom argued that although social conflict was itself inescapable so was the existence of an élite.'® The need for positive and conscious social harmonisation was pressed by Durkheim. Sociologists began to study society not just in historical terms; they tried to agree on objective criteria. Elements other than economic began to feature in class definition.
Max Weber added the dimension of religion’? and education, and also pointed out that the development of capitalism now put less emphasis on the individual entrepreneur than on the manager.” Thus he split society into four social classes: the working class; the lower middle class; the intelligentsia, which included civil servants and highly trained white-collar workers; and property-owners of all kinds, including in this group all with higher education, whether owning property or not. But he argued that groups and individuals were motivated by a myriad of factors, tradition, religion, different value attitudes, etc.*' An increasingly significant determinant of social development was the expanding role of the state and its bureaucracy. Class interests, he suggested, were far less dominant than had been thought previously.”” Moving even further away from economic imperatives, writers hke Schumpeter stressed the social factors uniting groups. Schumpeter argued for the existence of a class spirit, which was a compound of social relationship, intermarriage etc.”
Views on class differentiation have always been subjective, often the product of a specific political or social-reforming ideology, sometimes imbued with messianic fervour masquerading as science, sometimes over-anxious to refute perceived ‘Marxist’ dogma. In this century there has been not only conflict among Marxists, deviant Marxists, non-Marxists and anti-Marxists, but also between those who take an empirical historical starting-point and those who work from an ‘ideal’ or ‘model’ stance. Until recent years historians, while utilising the tools of the social scientist, have resisted many of his concepts. Much of the work of this generation of historians illustrates the actual ‘backwardness’ of nineteenth-century European society, the slowness of social change, compared with the advanced industrialism described by Marx. Historians stress the resilience of landed élites, in both concrete and normative terms. Marx placed the entrepreneurial middle class centre-stage in_ political conflict, whereas empirical investigations demonstrate the continued role of more traditional bourgeois groups.
Having looked briefly at some of the ways in which class divisions have been described, we should note: class can have no objective reality; it was a chameleon offspring of economics and morality, later used to describe a process of social and political change which never matured according to the most famous model postulated by Marx. Marx included in his definition of class economic, political and psychological factors. We must be prepared to look at criteria such as: income levels and sources of wealth; occupational and professional links; access to political power and influence; status indicators; and the ‘gorilla’ factor, that is, the desire to identify with a particular group, which may include intermarriage, the acceptance of common cultural standards such as education and the degree to which such striving is reciprocated. We shall use ‘bourgeois’ and ‘middle class’ interchangeably, but accept that others may not. Whichever term is used we must be prepared for writers to subdivide either in different ways. What is the morphology of a quicksand?
Our particular area of quicksand will be the middle classes of four major European states. France is an obvious starting-point for an investigation into the role of the middle class because in 1789 and subsequent years she experienced what many near contemporary and subsequent commentators described as ‘bourgeois’ revolution. She was also the most important continental power in 1789 and in the following two decades conquered most of the European land mass, leaving no other major state untouched. Her influence reached far beyond the military sphere. Already French culture and ideas, most recently through the work of philosophes like Voltaire and Rousseau, were increasingly dominant within the ruling élites of Europe. The wars of 1792 to 1815 gave her the opportunity to graft her own revolutionary legislation, codes of law, and political and administrative systems on to new territory, especially the German and Italian lands. It has also been suggested that French conquest allowed an alternative middle-class ruling élite to emerge, particularly in the Italian peninsula.** Even after the fall of Napoleon, French ideas, institutions and her own turbulent political experience continued to have reverberations on her neighbours. In recent years a whole school of revisionist historians in France has debated at length whether 1789 was indeed a bourgeois revolution and has questioned the extent of bourgeois power in the nineteenth century. By the end of our period in 1914 France had been a republic for over 40 years, theoretically a land based on equality of both rank and opportunity, apparently an advanced model of a bourgeois state. It is therefore fitting that this study should centre around her middle class and that she should be stressed as a benchmark against which other countries can be discussed.
Specialists on Italian and German history have also paid close attention to the impact of the French Revolution and conquest on social change. The conviction that the ultimate defeat of France was due to middle-class, even ‘popular’, patriotism, itself a reversal of earlier enthusiasm for the revolution as a liberating phenomenon, has been questioned by empirical investigations of actual responses to French rule and the institutions set up by the French.”° Increasingly historians point out that the French Revolution, in France as elsewhere, had only a marginal impact on social change. Of far greater significance to the evolution of middle-class groups were long-term economic and demographic trends. The German states, or the German Empire as they became after Prussian military victories between 1863 and 1871, offer valuable comparisons with France. In a state which became the leading industrial power in continental Europe before 1914, with a wealthy entrepreneurial and a traditional and influential bureaucratic and professional middle class, it will be interesting to ask why aristocratic values, and indeed the aristocracy itself, continued to dominate, and actually became even more entrenched as the ruling élite.
Italy, a united country in name from 1861, is a nation of contrasts, with conflict between north and south exacerbated in these years by hostility between the middle class of the south, who represented the almost feudal poorer regions, and the rapidly growing industrial and commercial middle class of the north, represented by families like Agnelli and Olivetti, standing for a world of capitalist investment, innovation, modernity and international business deals. Russia may appear to be somewhat of a maverick choice to include in a comparative investigation, as she is often designated as an empire virtually devoid of a middle class, to which absence the revolutionary disturbances of 1905 and 1917 are frequently attributed. Valuable contrasts will emerge between Russia and the rest, which will throw light on the development of each. At the onset it is clear that the autocracy — and Russia, unlike the rest of these states, remained an absolute monarchy until 1905 — tried to bolster its aristocracy, and encouraged division and dissension within the middle class in pursuit of a moribund ideal of aristocratic support for the monarchy.
Only a small minority of the bourgeoisie of early-nineteenthcentury France were businessmen and industrialists, and many of them were primarily landowners. Governments were, however, responsive to their needs, and visibly so from around 1840 when the pace of economic change began to quicken.” Very many of those we would identify as quintessentially bourgeois were landowners and cherished this aspect of their lifestyle. The French middle class also included professional families, many different levels of officials, members of the intelligentsia as well as, at the bottom of the scale, a lower middle class of small businessmen, shopkeepers and artisans — in other words, much the same mix as before 1789. For the bulk of these groups the nineteenth century was far from being a bourgeois century in terms of the development of their influence and prestige. Revisionist historians have underlined the fact that the 1789 revolution did little to change the balance of power among the political and social forces in the country.
The élite remained a combination of wealthy nobles and bourgeois, and the neutral contemporary term ‘notable’ has come to be used widely to describe this element. ‘Tudesq’s monumental thesis has exhaustively explored an even smaller minority of grands notables, using as a yardstick all who paid tooo fr. or more in direct taxation. The choice of whom to include was a contemporary one; in Restoration France this was the cut-off point for eligibility to the Chamber of Deputies and encompassed about 15000 individuals.
The survival of some electoral lists from the Restoration and the July Monarchy, in which amounts paid in each category of direct tax were listed, creates a comprehensible statistical basis for Tudesq’s well-rounded assessment of the ruling élite.*? One is in no doubt that landed wealth was the prime ingredient in notability. Except in a few large towns, the /fonciére or land-tax payment invariably qualified a man to vote. It should be remembered that the land tax was proportionately more onerous than the patente or industrial tax, for only the property, not profits, were taxed. The term ‘notable’ has its uses. It gets the historian off the hook of the Marxist—antiMarxist debate, but only superficially, because in reality revisionists are often anti-Marxists, or are invariably regarded as such by offended Marxists. In other respects it is inclined to be too broad, too much of a catch-all, immediately overemployed and underdefined, needing to be subdivided into grands notables, the extremely wealthy families with national as well as local influence, and other notables, presumably less prosperous, although there is no obvious yardstick by which to measure the latter group. There is sometimes an implication that ‘notable’ means more than ‘the very rich’, and includes common political and other beliefs. ‘Tudesq was scrupulous in delineating different political tendencies, but without further definition the term can be ambiguous. In this study ‘notable’ is used simply as the equivalent for the very wealthy, primarily landowners with a local power base. Tudesgq used one precise financial definition, other French historians have employed different ones and historians writing on Italy and elsewhere also refer to ‘notables’. ‘There can be no statistically comparable criteria.
‘Notable’ is fast becoming as much of a minefield as ‘bourgeois’. Let us agree that it is the equivalent of ‘rich élite’ and carries no implications that those discussed identified themselves as a group. Contemporaries used the word, but they also drew distinctions between its noble and bourgeois components and were aware that the hierarchical, pyramid-like social and political structures, which were perhaps overpainted by de Maistre and Marx, were in some respects intact, although nobles and wealthy non-nobles may have both been part of a landowning élite which managed its own locality and exerted a national influence. It has been suggested that land may have been even more important as a vital prerequisite of notability and for official appointments after 1789 than before.” The biggest divide, however, was not the possession or non-possession of a title, although the number of forgeries underlines its significance, but was political, involving attitudes to the monarchy, the Church and, later, education.
The German and Italian states fall between the extremes of France and Russia. In both areas a substantial educated professional and entrepreneurial middle class existed in 1789, and gained from the subsequent period of French rule. In the Italian peninsula there were three main divisions among the middle classes, one whose origins were historical, two which were the product of geography. The mercantile past prosperity of the city states had given rise in many regions, like Venice, to a bourgeois patriciate which governed and dominated in the manner ofa nobility. In the northern provinces were professional and entrepreneurial groups whose prosperity and power were growing in the first half of the nineteenth century.
They challenged both foreign rulers and the old patriciate for a say in politics, bought noble and Church lands where possible and were very interested in the extension and improvement of markets and the creation of an Italian zollverein or free trade area. They welcomed and profited from unification under Piedmont. Unification provided more jobs in government service, land to buy when the Church was dispossessed and opportunities when a liberalised economy was declared. In the southern provinces the entrepreneurial group was smaller, less wealthy and had fewer opportunities to exploit foreign investment than its northern counterparts. The professional middle class was also less assertive than the northern group, accustomed to living in a semi-feudal society and hostile to unification, because it brought economic exploitation and neglect by the north and the takeover of plum jobs by thrusting northerners.
Within the German states those groups who would be included in a modern definition of ‘middle class’ were very varied. Quite the opposite of France, where the revolutionaries proclaimed legal equality and the abolition of privileges, in 1794 the new Prussian Code reiterated the legal reality of inequality by listing the differences between the three main social groups in the state: nobles, burghers and peasants. The Prussian Code named three kinds of towndweller. There were rich patricians, who were state citizens, answerable to state jurisdictions only and exempt from local rules. Then there were the ‘actual burghers’, whether artisans, retailers or local merchants, who held full citizenship and took part in local political and economic life without restraint. Finally there were ‘tolerated’ residents who did not qualify, either by birth or by membership of a guild, for citizenship.
In 1789 the Holy Roman Empire, in which most Prussian land was situated, consisted of 300 states, 50 free cities and 1000 tiny territories held by imperial knights. In the free cities burghers had been left in control; but in many cities they retained only the facade of civic and guild independence. In Prussia the entrepreneurial group tended to be dependent on the state. The Prussian Code described the privileges of a traditional society of orders, but recognised that there were additional sectors. The most prominent middle-class groups were not the old-style burghers, but the bureaucrats, writers and professors, men with university training and endowed with bildung, a status resting on education. The Prussian Code accorded senior bureaucrats special ranking and privileges, giving them a status similar, if not superior, to that of the nobility. Senior bureaucrats thought of themselves as independent arbiters, indeed a substantial section became outspokenly critical of the king in the first half of the nineteenth century. After the revolutions of 1848 this independence disappeared, but the bureaucracy, including university professors, retained their social status at the pinnacle of the middle class. As the role and power of the centralised state and its bureaucracy grew, so the concept of city government changed and municipal autonomy of the old burghers was seen to be an anachronistic fiction. With economic development these old categories and rules ceased to have any meaning.
In his reforming programme at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Stein tried to revive elements of the old autonomy. His definition of a burgher in the City Ordinance rested on income, not birth, and was expressed in the language of the French Constitution of 1791. Stein hoped to establish modern concepts of citizenship, not based on the old idea of status acquired through birth, but gradually introducing an electoral principle, first in local and then in national affairs. According to the reform, in the free cities burghers had the right and obligation to elect their own town council and to serve on it without payment. They had exclusive rights to own urban property and engage in industry. Any adult male of substance and standing could be a burgher, with the exception of Jews and soldiers. But this attempt to revive the concept of a burgher did not succeed. While the western lands were favourable, eastern Junker society was hostile. In reality the non-noble, non-peasant and nonartisan section of society was both too large and too heterogeneous for the term ‘burgher’ to be more than an anachronism, applicable in a vague manner to a wealthy, urban élite. However it was again revamped, in a purely financial and functional form, as part of the three-class franchise set up by Frederick William IV of Prussia (1840-60) after the 1848 revolution. In other respects Stein’s reform successfully expressed the changed relationship between nobles and the bourgeoisie. The idea that stande, status, was restricted to certain professions disappeared. The reform asserted that peasants and artisans could, in future, train for the professions. But there was much successful resistance to the opening up of the professions, and new educational and training conditions were imposed.
There was considerable opposition to the evolution of society from one of orders to one based on class.” This resistance tended to make groups more rigid and more fragmented. The senior bureaucrats moved socially nearer to the aristocracy, restricting their intake to the very wealthy. The entrepreneurial and professional middle class began to identify itself more with landowners, officials and the nobility. The traditional Rhenish, often Protestant, merchant élite fulfilled the role of an aristocracy in the manner born and indeed had social relations with the small local aristocracy. The new factory entrepreneurs were equally eager to marry into the aristocracy and buy the estates of bankrupt nobles. Thus Krupp’s heiress married von Bohlen und Halbach and Stumm’s granddaughter wed ambassador von Kulhmann.”' All links with the lower middle class were severed. The wealthy did not identify with a middle class. They thought of themselves as part of a privileged part of a society of orders and refused to renounce traditional notions, clinging to the idea of corporate rights and fearful that concepts of civil equality would threaten their livelihood and undermine their social position. The term mittelstand, which until mid-century was used for everyone from Rhenish patrician to Saxon artisan, came to be used solely for the lower middle class. ‘The educational opportunities of this latter group were increasingly restricted, they took less and less of a role in civic affairs and were inclined ineffectually to regard more wealthy elements as ostentatious outsiders. Thus although, for neatness, historians use the term ‘middle class’, the wealthy, comfortably-off and poorer elements within the middling ground of German society would not have identified with each other.
Some historians of nineteenth-century Europe have observed the increasing distinctness and separation of the upper middle class, while others have paid unprecedented attention to the lower middle class. Here the question of social parameters becomes quite vexed. At the beginning of this period better-off artisans, minor public servants, clerks, etc. would fit into a category of families ever anxious to escape the epithet ‘poor’ and merit the description ‘respectable’. By the end of the century they were joined by a vastly expanded body of shopkeepers and a huge growth of a sector with little or no independence, including state employees of all kinds and a wide range of other white-collar workers in offices, supervisory grades in industry and the service trades, embracing too the fast-expanding department stores. Such groups entirely lacked the modest independence of artisans and shopkeepers and were all the more intent on defining themselves and being accepted as middle class, through their dress, housing, social interests, education, etc., in order to insist on the differences between themselves and the working class. Sections of the lower middle class have been studied in recent years, although here because of pressure of space only brief reference will be made to them. Shopkeepers and craftsmen in particular have been the subject of detailed studies.”?
Shopkeepers were a relatively new group; previously markets, fairs, pedlars and direct sales by craftsmen to consumers satisfied demand. Small, specialised retail shops developed, often in conflict with craftsmen because shopkeepers at this stage tended to favour free trade and the end of guild restrictions. The development of factory industry encouraged the growth of retail trade. The number of shops in Germany grew by 42 per cent from 1895 to 1907, the population by only 8 per cent.** Gradually the artisan-retailer gave way to shops that were purely retail outlets, except in the food trade. The prosperous shopkeeper, often trading in luxury goods, tended to stay in the same location and pass his shop on to his heirs. The less well-off were often precariously financed. In the years after 1900 20 per cent of businesses changed hands each year.** Shops were often started by wives of craftsmen or factory workers, sometimes women who had worked alongside their husbands in the factory and opened a shop in the front room of their house when a family kept them at home. If the shop succeeded, the husband might leave the factory to help his wife expand the business, but such shops had many problems. Their property was often rented and in poor areas where customers expected ‘tick’ and would go elsewhere if refused. Cash flow was thus a continual headache. Small food retail outlets, especially dairies, were often set up by a branch of a farming family, selling their own produce. The names of many shops in Paris and London still reveal these rural origins. At this poorer end of the retail business, fewer shops were passed on to children. The family would hope that through education children would ‘better’ themselves: perhaps a son might train as an engineer or win a scholarship to a lycée or gymnasium and become a teacher; for daughters a clerical job would offer shorter hours, more security and a better chance of meeting a well-heeled husband.
The development of department stores from the 1860s was seen as a threat by specialised small businessmen, who could not compete with the variety, price and novelty of the Bon Marché or the Samaritaine, but the numbers of both continued to grow,” producing yet another lower-middle-class/working-class group in the retailing staff of the department stores. Some of this staff, through commission, commanded high wages, and all of them eagerly aped a ‘middle-class’ lifestyle, portrayed in the stores and their ubiquitous catalogues. The phenomenon of the department store and its contribution to teaching the members, especially the female ones, of the new lower middle class how to be ‘bourgeois’ has thus received a fair amount of attention in the last decade. Additionally, the politicisation of the small retailers, squeezed between department stores and the even newer workers’ co-operatives, who tried to defend themselves by creating political pressure groups, has been examined. The political élite was willing to exploit the grievances of shopkeepers, but drop them when inappropriate to its own objectives.*°
Artisans are a more tricky subject because of the difficulty of assessing whether they were prosperous and independent or merely cheap ‘putting out’ agents for factories and department stores. Historians have noted that artisans were not solely towndwellers. The rural economy of the poor was a delicate blend of agrarian and artisan activities, laced with the product of surviving communal elements, such as wood-collecting or the use of common pasture. In addition to the substantial portion of the rural population which was neither solely artisan nor solely peasant, there were a sizeable number who were full-time craftsmen. In the Beauce, a wheatgrowing region, 25 per cent of the active population were at least part-artisan, of whom one-fifth were comfortably-off, middle-class craftsmen.*’ Historians have attempted to assess the impact of industrialisation on artisans. Were they devastated by factories and the concentration of production, did ruin predate industrialisation or did industrial change actually rescue the independent craftsman? Statistics can be fielded to support both an optimistic and apessimistic stance. Certainly guild organisations had long ceased to protect the craftsman, from either competition or the demands of merchants. The Le Chapelier law, passed during the 1789 revolution in France, underlines the loss of status of the craftsman, by obliging even master craftsmen to carry a passbook or /ivret. The Napoleonic Civil Code even rendered artisan co-operative organisations like the compagnonnage outside the letter of the law by permitting associations only of fewer than twenty members. In no German state around 1800 did the ratio of master to man exceed 1:1; often it was lower, and craftsmen in the food, clothing and furniture trades often had neither journeymen nor apprentices. In 1895 50 per cent of craftsmen worked alone.* If one is attempting a historical, not just a polemical assessment, one should probably conclude that the answer varied both between regions and between trades. Industrialisation enabled some craftsmen to become successful entrepreneurs, but some were subcontractors working for big firms and very vulnerable in times of economic crisis. Many were already struggling on a knife-edge of survival and were not helped by economic change. A revisionist view of industrialisation takes a rosy view of craft industry, but statistics reveal a decline. In Germany in 1875 two-thirds of manufacturing employees were in firms of five or less, but by 1907 it was only one-third.
In what respects were groups like shopkeepers or artisans part of the middle class? In many ways their own position was fluid, their attitudes were part working class, part middle class. The lines between artisans and shopkeepers were often blurred; some were both artisans and retailers, such as butchers and bakers. For some craftsmen and married women, shopkeeping was a semi-retirement. Both shopkeepers and artisans operated with their own limited capital, often rented their premises and employed few outside their own family, which was crucial in shaping attitudes both to the family unit and to society. For artisans and shopkeepers the family was the vital unit of work and tended to cut them off from a wider society. Their own social uncertainty led to pressure to improve the position of their children and stimulated aspirations for more recognisably ‘middle-class’ occupations, often as minor civil servants or elementary school teachers. Such jobs would provide the social and economic security lacking in their own field.
Thus in France, Germany and Italy the middle class ant heap, when disturbed, proves to be very diverse, indeed including groups who would have had little in common, economically, politically, socially or culturally. In the chapters which follow we shall need to consider in what respects such varied elements actually constituted a single class.
Turning to Russia we find a very different society and a proportionately much smaller and less developed middle class than in Western Europe, more fragmented and with different assumptions about status and social mobility. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Russian population was reckoned to be about 41 million, 2 per cent were listed as middle class or priests. By the end of the century 10 per cent were middle class, of whom 0.5 per cent were priests. The survival of serfdom and the predominantly agrarian character of the country delayed the development of a substantial middle class. The groups which roughly corresponded to the middle class elsewhere in Europe were infinitely fragmented by privileges, some of considerable value, some honorific and some wholly sartorial, such as the provision of different uniforms to match the individual’s rank. The middle classes were split into caste-like groups, with both wealth and occupation cementing divisions enforced by law and respected by social custom. There was such fundamental mutual antipathy between the intellectual and industrial and commercial elements that the Russian term to describe the middle class as a whole, sredny klass, is little used. The idea that they might be lumped together as a middle class along with entrepreneurs so disgusted professionals, members of the intelligentsia, better-off peasants and artisans that the merchants referred to themselves merely as the ‘trade and industry class’. In many respects Russia remained a society of orders, or sosloviia, as established in Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks, until after emancipation in the 1860s.
The Table of Ranks conferred status on the individual according to his record of service to the state. Basically society was divided into a tiny privileged section, which was exempt from the direct tax, the poll tax, and the vast unprivileged majority which was not. The former were also exempt from military service and corporal punishment. Outside these broad divisions the Table and subsequent rulings set up a myriad of shades of privilege. The Table, and unpredictable decisions of tsars to override it, made social groups, with their myopic obsession with privilege, pawns in the hands of governments. Existing nobles constantly tried to accelerate their own progress through the Table and delay that of others, especially merchants.
Many social distinctions were of recent origin. It was only in 1762 that the ownership of serfs was restricted to hereditary nobles, merchants were exempted from corporal punishment in 1782, and other distinctions were not set out until the Charter of Nobility of 1785. The success of the nobility in restricting the access of merchants to the higher levels of the Table of Ranks led to the institution of a new grade of privilege. Legislation in the 1830s allowed first guild merchants of ten years’ standing to be made honoured citizens, which gave them automatic, life-long guild membership. There were just over a third of a million honoured citizens, including merchants, professionals and some descendants of personal nobles. The most successful merchants were thus separated from the rest. In some respects the society of orders was demolished with the ending of serfdom in the 1860s. All individuals were personally free and land could be bought and sold without restriction. Corporal punishment was abandoned in the towns and left to the discretion of the mir or communal assembly in the countryside. In 1874 all exemptions from military service were withdrawn and in 1886 the poll tax was abolished. But emancipation did not end the soslovita, for nervous governments preserved many legal and status distinctions despite the reform programme.” Old norms and institutions thus hobbled the emergence of self-conscious middle-class elements.
At the apex of the middle class were the members of the two senior merchant guilds, whose status was determined solely by their income. Members of the two senior guilds bought their membership annually, together with substantial rights and privileges. They were vulnerable; a poor year’s trading would force them to apply to a lower guild. They shared some of the privileges of the nobility, but they could not own serfs and nor could they buy land until after emancipation. They were a small group, fewer than 500 000 including their families in the 1897 census, the same number as clerics and only one-third the number of nobles and officials. Senior merchants never developed the autonomous urban tradition of western Europe. Towns had tended to grow around fortresses or kremlin set up by the centralised state and the fortress aspect remained dominant. The government turned merchants into a closed caste yoked by heavy taxation. The tsars held on to lucrative trading rights, including all foreign trade, themselves, farming out the right to trade to individuals in an unpredictable manner.
It was possible to exploit the system and become extremely rich, but the individual’s financial security was always at the whim of the tsar. Elsewhere entrepreneurial activity gave rise to an independent middle class, but in Russia from Peter the Great’s time the state also dominated in this arena. Enterprises were created with state initiative, finance and subsidies, in villages not towns. Guilds were set up merely to facilitate the more efficient collection of tax. Despite these obstacles, successive merchant families worked themselves up from the position of trading peasants to acquire sufficient fortunes to move into the nobility. An outstandingly successful element emerged from the Old Believers, a group which grew up from a section of the Church which in the seventeenth century had refused to accept changes in the Orthodox Church designed to strengthen the power of the state. Old Believers were important in all subsequent rebellions against royal authority. They were exiled to remote rural areas until the time of Catherine II, when their entrepreneurial skills began to be appreciated. By the early nineteenth century all the main industrial and commercial activities of Moscow were in their hands. They ran the city and were its cultural leaders, forming an upper class in a way that the St Petersburg entrepreneurs, overshadowed by the nobility and the Court, were never able to do.* Regional differences split the wealthier merchant groups into autonomous, self-contained and mutually antagonistic fragments. When industry started to expand rapidly in the 1880s, the importance of foreign capital and the initiative of the state hindered the evolution of a native bourgeoisie. Jewish and foreign entrepreneurs predominated, which divided and weakened the native group.
Below the senior merchant guilds was the raznochintsy. This was an amorphous group, between merchants and peasants. It included minor officials, clergy, some teachers, doctors and the new and growing body of technically trained men, for all of whom a new term, ‘intelligentsia’, was used from the 1860s. There was considerable mutual hostility between them and the merchants, on a scale not encountered in Western Europe and perhaps due to the superiority accorded to the latter in law. Some of the intelligentsia were noble, men who had travelled in Western Europe and on their return entered one of the professions or became university teachers. In the West such individuals would probably have become senior clerics, but in Russia the Church was mostly a lower-middleclass preserve. Non-noble members of the intelligentsia were often journalists. The older generation tended to be romantic, the younger nihilistic, frustrated by the limited professional opportunities open to them. Partisans of modernisation, they opposed capitalism. Until the turn of the century they were associated with political opposition, but subsequently the term ‘intelligentsia’ tended to be used more neutrally simply to describe professions which required a high level of education. This was a period of rapid growth within the professions. New economic institutions, the judiciary, the zemstvos (elected local councils) and the duma (national assembly set up in 1905), all called for professionally trained men. There was a corresponding rise in the number of graduates, especially of economic and engineering specialists. An offshoot was the growth of professional and charitable organisations like the Writers’ Union, the Pirogov Society of Russian and so on. The sense of association was strengthened by the publication of journals and the holding of conferences, significant in a country deprived of political debate and organisation. Although the intelligentsia were far less absorbed in opposition politics than past generations, they were the dominant influence in the formation of the main political parties.*!
The meschane or townsmen came next in the hierarchy. They were not burghers in a Western European, privileged sense, nor were they necessarily towndwellers. Half of the 13.5 million meschane in the 1897 census lived outside towns. They could be tradesmen, artisans, white-collar workers, or even labourers or factory operatives. Thus this group was broader than the Western European concept of a lower middle class. Most were former peasants and their first step up the social ladder was to gain acceptance as meschane. Indeed many trading peasants successfully rose not only through meschane ranks but also to become first-grade merchants, despite the need before the 1860s to buy their freedom first.
Although these varying grades were distinct and looked on each other with rivalry and envy, movement between them was possible and indeed frequent. The senior merchant guilds were constantly renewed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and aristocratic status was both desired and achievable, despite the active jealousy of established nobles. Between 1825 and 1845 20 000 rich merchants gained ennoblement and 30 000 did so between 1875 and 1896. Social mobility could be surprisingly swift. Of the score of very wealthy merchant families in Moscow at the end of the nineteenth century, 50 per cent were only three generations awayfrom their peasant ancestors. The rest came from families of minor artisans or merchants whose families had left the countryside for Moscow within the previous hundred years.*”
There was movement into the middle class and within the bourgeoisie itself, but no sense of class identity or cohesion developed in the years before 1914. The merchant sector, constantly renewed by the rise of trading peasants and in the second half of the nineteenth century by the emergence of a new type of technically educated entrepreneur, might have given a lead. They were most comparable with Western European middle classes, but were a general staff with no soldiers. ‘This was partly for cultural reasons. They were at the top of the economic hierarchy, but they had no marked impact on politics beyond the municipal level, nor did they set standards for cultural behaviour for those beneath them. They assumed that because men in their position in Western Europe were influential and respected they too should be accorded moral and political authority by those beneath them. But they were socially isolated, by the almost ghetto-like separation which still hung around the otherwise wealthy and powerful Moscow Old Believers, and by the actual foreignness of many merchants or their heavy dependence on foreign capital. By 1914 merchants were no longer a caste, but they had failed to develop into leaders of a class.*° Warring cultural norms rather than smallness deprived Russia of a stabilising middleclass initiative. The Bolsheviks did not have to turn Russia’s bourgeoisie into objects of class hatred; the potential members of that class had long been mortal enemies. The Russian middle class did not exist because its constituent elements were determined to avoid fusion and identification. The relics of serfdom and the policies of tsarist governments nurtured their mutual antipathy.
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