The family was honoured as the basic unit of society by all nineteenth-century observers, apart from a tiny number of socialists and the occasional satirist. The family home, even of the poor, was changed from a functional dwelling, shared with animals in rural areas, to an idealized, plush, aspidistra’d temple, complete with thick curtains, drawn almost together in poorer homes, which did not sport the required ‘best’ room furniture and piano. In the later years of the century the catalogues of the burgeoning ‘palaces of purchasing’, the department stores, shaped the standards of a new middle-class consumer society. Poorer families in their ‘two-up, two-down’ terrace house or rooms in a tenement imitated the norm of ‘respectability’ to the limits of their wages.
Reformers raised the alarm that poor families were threatened by urbanization and factory development. They argued that omnipresent poverty, prostitution, and illegitimacy were on the increase. Although child abandonment, then as now, was often seen as a touchstone of moral decline, it peaked only in times of economic crisis.
It was female and child employment in cotton mills and mines, in the former of which small children filled a technological gap for a couple of generations, which appalled educated reformers, shocked at the regimentation and publicly displayed inhumanity of hard manual labour and apparently unaware that women and children inevitably always contributed to the artisan family economy. At mid-century in France about 40 per cent of cotton workers were women, 12 per cent were children under 16. By the 1870s the figure for child labour had fallen to about 7 per cent because technical advances made them redundant. In Britain most female cotton operatives were unmarried, so the anticipated deleterious effect on family welfare presumably did not occur. In France, however, women artisans in Paris and Lyons, in particular, sent their babies to rural wet-nurses.
In many large-scale industries, such as mining and potbanks, teams of workers were paid as a unit and family groups traditionally worked together, imitating earlier artisan practices. In France unmarried female workers were habitually lodged in hostels run by nuns to protect their virtue and their fathers’ authority, for their wages were sent directly to him. From the 1860s the new department stores also ran hostels for unmarried workers, often on the top floor of the shop, carefully segregating the sexes and trying to encourage uplifting cultural experiences for their leisure time. Their workers, at least, received their own wages.
Factories did not, of their essence, affect family relationships. But the culture of the family meant that it was assumed that everyone lived in a mutually supportive nuclear, or in southern Europe more extended, family, and rates of pay for women (and of course children) were adjusted downwards accordingly. Single mothers, who had fled to a town to escape family condemnation, or who were widowed, found it impossible to sustain life by honest means. The greater visibility of prostitution in nineteenth-century towns was not the direct result of a collapse in morals, but because honest labour often paid a woman only 25 per cent of a man’s wage.
In rural and artisan economies women had a chance of respect and authority based on their interlocking work and family responsibilities and the mutual support of a small community. In the factory, both sexes were merely labour and the status of cheaper, less strong and skilled female workers dropped accordingly. Their position within the family would depend on personal circumstances, although traditional norms might prevail. Some men brought home their wage packet unopened to their wives, some only reluctantly contributed to food for the family, but was that new? In Rouen in the 1790s, when divorce was available, 75 per cent of petitioners were wives, many of whom had been deserted by their spouses. The effectiveness of family structures was closely related to the size of, and degree of anonymity within, the community.
While some feared that the poverty and drudgery of industrialization threatened the social fabric, others became concerned that better-off women might snatch the chance of education and economic independence to challenge male dominance. From time to time female writers alarmed men with the prospect of a ‘world turned upside down’. Cartoonists mocked the ‘liberated’ woman. But the reality was hardly a threat. Secondary and tertiary education for women was several generations behind provision for men; in Catholic countries the female orders were considered the most suitable educators for girls. The development of large-scale retail, commercial, and industrial organizations tended to reduce the role of wives in family firms, although widowhood might still demand their business acumen. Greater affluence for growing middle-class groups offered women an accentuated role in the family. Paid employment came later.
Elected Assemblies and the Biggest Myth
The social problems created by growing numbers, urbanization, and economic change, which at times brought violent confrontation, led to what was to be an even more pervasive alteration in social organization, the interventionist bureaucratic state. The pressure from middle-class reformers and popular unrest in the first half of the century ensured that institutional reform came to be seen as the panacea to the social problem. The state became the agency to legislate on industrial relations, town-planning, public health and the medical services, female and child labour, education, railway construction, etc. In France Napoleon III dreamt of turning worker insurance schemes into a national plan. In the newly united Germany, Bismarck, appalled by the growth of the Socialist Party, co-ordinated self-help mutual-aid sickness and pensions schemes into a state-run system in the i88os.
Institutional reform was a peaceful route usually embarked upon by defensive ruling elites who feared both cholera and social unrest, but its results were revolutionary. At a positive level the nineteenth-century reformers constructed a cleaner, safer (less revolutionary), more harmonious social environment, and the transport revolution and urban building programme they generated sustained unprecedented economic expansion. However, it also risked transforming the state into the anonymous, bureaucratic omnivore depicted by Kafka — and a monopoly capitalist into the bargain as the biggest single employer in each country.
Radical reformers tried to ensure that the interventionist state did not become a massive, expensive, uncontrollable leviathan. Elected institutions were seen as the antidote to both popular unrest and a brake on the expansion of the role and cost of the state. The French revolutionaries of the 1790s campaigned unsuccessfully for representative institutions and acquired a dictatorial emperor at the head of their modernized state. After the Napoleonic wars British radicals demanded reform of the House of Commons and the French argued over voting rights within a constitution modelled to some degree on that of Britain. Campaigns for suffrage reform were mainly, but not entirely, the initiative of middle-class reformers. In Britain the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, backed by some members of the lower middle classes, artisans, and better-off factory workers, pressed for a democratic electorate as did societies like the mainly middle-class Friends of the People in France. The French enfranchised all adult males after the 1848 revolution and in 1867 all male householders got the vote in Britain. Elected assemblies at all levels, municipal to national, gradually became the norm in all countries, although none rivalled the French until 1919 and few worried that 50 per cent of adults had no vote.
The extension of the right to vote tended to perpetuate traditional elites. In Britain the Reform Act of 1832 had no impact on the composition of Parliament. In 1840 80 per cent of members still represented the landed interest and the proportion of bourgeois entrepreneurs, 97 : 658, was the same as at the end of the eighteenth century. Perhaps this was unsurprising, given the limited nature of the legislation. However, the same was true in France, even after the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1848. In 1861 the new united Italy adopted a 40 lira tax qualification for voters, which produced an electorate comparable to that of France before 1848. The Italian ruling elite was not only wealthy, it was almost exclusively northern. Universal male suffrage had to wait until 1919. Frederick William IV of Prussia established a graded suffrage for the elected Landtag in 1849 which allowed the richest 18 per cent of taxpayers to elect two-thirds of the new legislative assembly he created. This system was retained for the assemblies of the individual states after unification. The Reichstag, the representative assembly for the whole German empire created in 1871, was elected by all adult males, but it exercised little power. When elected local councils, Zemstvos, were set up in Russia in the 1860s and an imperial parliament, or Duma, after the 1905 revolution, an even narrower hierarchical voting system was inaugurated. Elected assemblies only began to find a role for themselves in Russia during the First World War. Unsurprisingly, in an age of unpaid MPs, assemblies tended to represent the interests of wealthy elites. However, by 1914 the socialists were the largest single group in both the German Reichstag and the French assembly, and a growing, though a very divided, number in Italy. Socialist voters were mostly workers, but, significantly, their leaders and MPs tended to be members of the professional middle class, especially lawyers.
Social tensions were prominent in nineteenth-century Europe but conflict was reduced and fudged by social insurance schemes, private and state run, by the legalization of trade unions, by the provision of state-organized education, by the development of parliamentary institutions which created the illusion of consultation and democracy, and by the promotion of nationalist and imperialistic sentiments. Class war had never been on the cards, for working people at least. The Socialist International’s demand for international proletarian solidarity in 1914 went unheard. Yet, although society may not have become polarized quite in the way socialists including Marx had predicted, the gap between rich and poor had widened since 1789.
This was most visible at the top. In Britain in 1803 the top 2 per cent owned 20 per cent of the wealth of the country; by 1867 they owned 40 per cent. The aristocratic elite had not perished, they had merely diversified. The French revolutionaries in the 1790s and liberal, mainly middle-class reformers in the following century set their sights on the elimination of irrational privilege. But property rights were applauded and became the basic legitimation of nineteenth-century society. Guizot and many others maintained that a man’s independence and sense of social responsibility could be measured by his wealth.
Wealth had always corresponded pretty closely to power; the nineteenth century merely institutionalized the equation, while appearing to do the reverse. Hierarchically structured education systems, professions, and assemblies of all sorts reinforced improved policing, military control, and the monitoring and managing of public opinion. The wealthy made the mistake for much of the century of not recognizing that, while considerable wealth might protect political leaders from temptation and corruption (though this belief in the altruism of the wealthy was, and is, not borne out by experience), the less well off, and even, perish the thought, females, were also capable of participating in electoral politics, without wanting to turn the world upside down.
It was not the entrepreneur who visibly triumphed, but the aristocracy, assisted by traditional professional and official middle-class elements which by 1914 had gained considerable ground, both in state service and in elected assemblies. On the eve of the First World War the aristocratic section of the society of orders remained powerful; but the society of classes and class rivalries which the nineteenth century had anticipated, some in hope, most in fear, had not emerged. However, the idea of class was a powerful myth, as the Bolshevik revolution and the fascist dictatorships were to show. The absence of trust between middle - and working-class elements was crucial to the polarization of politics in the twentieth century, especially when laced with the most destructive demon to emerge from Pandora’s box, nationalism.
World History
