Marx assumed that the proletariat would only become class conscious when the entrepreneurial sections of the bourgeoisie had taken over economic, social, and political power. The high profile of cotton and railways kings encouraged the view that this was happening. Publicists like Samuel Smiles eagerly created the idea that entrepreneurial growth liberated society from old bonds, offering new opportunities for the self-made man. In the mid-eighteenth century the brewer, Whitbread, bought big estates and a seat in Parliament. In 1830-1 successively, two bankers, Laffitte and Perier, were chief ministers in France. Marx assumed that their elevation showed that the 1830 revolution had replaced the nobility with a financial aristocracy.
Social change was far less rapid. The revolutionaries in France in the 1790s may have raged about ‘aristos’, and heads of families, many of them noble, who emigrated during the Revolution lost some land, but the proportion of noble-owned land fell by only 5 per cent to 20 per cent. Recent research has shown that the nobility were still the richest group in France during the first half of the nineteenth century. The revolutionaries abolished nobility as an order, but Napoleon created new titles, and in 1814 an hereditary Chamber of Peers shared legislative power with an elected Chamber. From 1831 no new hereditary titles were created, but families continued to luxuriate in the social snobbery of the plethora which survived, and to invent new ones. Both before and after 1789 French nobles shared political and economic power with the wealthier elements in the bourgeoisie. In Prussia nobles retained control of the top jobs in the state and army throughout the century, alongside some newer bourgeois families whose fortunes had been made in industry.
In Britain the power and wealth of the aristocracy increased. Between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the 1780s the number of such families had stayed constant at about 200, but their wealth had grown immeasurably. Some, like the Bedfords and Devonshires, were richer than some German princes. Land was the basis of their wealth; there were the considerable rewards of patronage and government office; the richest owned very prosperous mines. All built, or ‘improved’ large houses on country estates. Investment in trade and in innovative transport developments completed a portfolio more varied than that of most other European aristocrats. The emergence of a money market at the end of the seventeenth century offered the large landowner alternative investments in property development and as directors of joint-stock companies. Britain was supremely an aristocratic entrepreneurial society.
The Russian Tsars tried to strengthen their noble elite, but the apparent static nature of Russian society concealed more rapid social change than elsewhere. The extravagant lifestyle of the nobility and their decreasing willingness to engage in trade and industry led to the rapid decline of some families. Some serfs, who made their fortunes in cotton, bought their freedom and a few were later ennobled. While never regarded as equal, they directed the civic life of Moscow.
What of the middle classes? The entrepreneurial element were rarely self-made Cinderellas; most business and industrial enterprises were created by established families. Nor were entrepreneurs as numerous or as dominant in political life as the short-lived elevation of Laffitte and Perier might indicate (Perier died in the 1832 cholera epidemic). It was the landed and professional middle classes, already established in state service, whose numbers and influence increased rapidly during the century.
Lawyers and doctors profited from the increased role of the state and were often in the lead in criticizing established rulers. Before 1789 the French appeal courts, the parlements, constantly blocked monarchist reform projects and led demands for the calling of an Estates-General. Lawyers from a less exalted social milieu were leading figures in the revolutionary politics of the 1790s. Such individuals represented the corporate interests both of professional and traditional craft organizations. In the later years of the eighteenth century they condemned what they defined as the advance of absolutism and tried to defend their own corporate interests in the name of popular sovereignty under attack by rapacious rulers. In France in 1789 they were granted compensation when their venal privileges were abolished. Although reform went far beyond the self-absorbed demands of the members of the old parlements, lawyers successfully defended their own professional corporate identity in the name of national sovereignty and the separation of powers within the state.
Notions of self-selection, self-administration, and restricted entry were turned from detestable monopolistic privilege into the triumph of the freedom of the individual. Educational prerequisites, professional qualifications, and the role of the professions came increasingly under the scrutiny of the state. In Prussia degree courses were officially validated and no one could practise as a lawyer without a state appointment. In the early nineteenth century changes in the Prussian legal system made it the norm that after ten to twelve years of expensive legal training, a man had to spend nearly as long again working unpaid within the courts before he could hope to secure an official post, and even then his prospects for promotion were less than a generation earlier. In France, although lawyers could practise without an official post, they complained that the rationalization, standardization, and centralization involved in creating a single legal system for France in the 1790s reduced the autonomy of their profession. However, a glance at personnel dossiers reveals that many senior court officials in the nineteenth century would put high on their CV the fact that members of their family had occupied similar posts since the fifteenth century.
The professions responded to increased centralization and state initiative by trying to establish more specific educational prerequisites for acolytes and to standardize training under their corporate control, which they hoped would develop a new sense of professional identity. The huge expansion of education during the century was the product of middle-class initiative. Secondary and tertiary education was strictly confined to the elite by cost and content. Primary schooling was developed to define and discipline the less well off. Secondary school-leaving certificates, rarely completed by pupils from poorer families, became prerequisites for professional training. Professional associations were formed to replace old corporate interest. The professions reinforced their social elitism, but ironically they continued to be drawn into an expanding state bureaucracy-doctors vaccinating children against smallpox, taking part in state health insurance schemes, and so on.
Vocal sections of the leading professions remained critics of the state in the years up to 1848, and not entirely for selfish reasons. In Prussia, members of the judiciary were prominent in demands for a constitutional regime and took the lead in the 1848 revolution. But partly because of the fear which the scale of popular support for their protest engendered, lawyers were subsequently mostly transformed into faithful and obedient servants of autocracy. Their reward was employment; job opportunities in the German bureaucracy were increased and from the early 1880s growth was rapid as lawyers were allowed to practise privately.
Doctors had key roles in movements for social reform and in the 1848 republic in France. Their politicization was ethical and altruistic. A generation of European doctors was appalled at the social effects of industrial and urban change. In England in 1830
Dr Kay drew attention to the plight of women and children cotton operatives. In France Drs Villerme and Buret wrote influential commentaries, the first detailing conditions among workers, especially women and children, in all of the textile industries, the second comparing their circumstances in England and France. Villerme, although sympathetic to capitalism, drew up the first French legislation restricting child labour. Republican socialist doctors like Guepin in Nantes and Raspail in Paris set up free clinics to help the poor.
Traditional middle-class groups used the opportunities of modernization. The experience of the guilds is revealing. Some were substantial property-owners and developed massive financial interests in the capitalist economy. They used their resources to retain privileges for their members, long after their original significance as industrial leaders had passed. Their significance can best be gauged by the power and standing of the guild companies in the City of London, which became the financial centre of the world in this period. They became more elitist in the process and comprised distinct and powerful pressure groups within the state, both facilitating and moulding centralization. The term ‘stalled society’ has been used in recent years to describe the problems created by the impact of the varied transformed corporate interests on the modern state. On the other hand, nineteenth-century reforming liberals such as Alexis de Tocqueville believed they represented ‘liberty’.
The professional middle classes were not part of a class, but a series of powerful corporate interest groups. They came to dominate the elected institutions which developed, largely due to their own demands. The extent of their privilege is masked when they are labelled a ‘class’ and particularly when they are lumped together with the numerically much more numerous lower middle classes, the white-collar workers, who took up minor posts in the massive bureaucratic expansion of the second half of the century.
The privilege of wealth dominated the society of classes, just as it had dissected the society of orders. Money, whatever its source, bought access to power. The nineteenth century set store by education and everywhere attempts were made to provide primary education, eventually free, for all. But access to secondary education, which became institutionalized as a vital prerequisite to higher education and the professions, was often increasingly reserved for the rich. Education was used to reinforce existing hierarchies, to define the self-perpetuating professions, and thereby strengthen a sense of class barriers. More than ever, wealth controlled access to, and advance within, state service and the professions. Venality and patronage were gradually replaced by professional hurdles for state service and entry into the professions, but the net result was to limit the best jobs and access to the professions to the rich, if anything even more than under the old regime.
World History
