European Society in the Nineteenth Century PAMELA PILBEAM
While there is thus a progressive diminution in the number of capitalist magnates. . . there occurs a corresponding increase in the mass of poverty, oppression, enslavement, degeneration and exploitation; but at the same time there is a steady intensification of the wrath of the working class — a class which grows ever more numerous, and is disciplined, unified, and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist method of production.
Marx writing thus in Das Kapital echoed the view of many of his contemporaries, of all political persuasions, that industrialization brought social conflict. Unlike most, he welcomed it as a necessary prerequisite for a future socialist revolution. The demise of Soviet communism in the later twentieth century, and the current emphasis on gender, colour, and nationality as determinants of social relationships, make Marx’s prediction of class war seem simplistic to us.
What was important to his contemporaries? Working people worried about the influx of foreigners or the departure of their loved ones overseas to find work. They were terrified of the prospects of sickness, old age, or the possibility that technical innovations or short-term crises would put them on the scrap heap. The better off deplored expanding and unhealthy cities, baby abandonment, prostitution, the erosion of family values — all rolled up as the ‘social question’ for journalists, novelists, and politicians. They tended to write in the language of class, or even in an older vocabulary of orders. These terms were used quite loosely, but their lack of specificity does not mean that we can dismiss them.
The Numbers Game
Before the first censuses in 1801, population statistics were guesswork. The estimate for pre-census France has recently jumped from 26 to 28 million. There was a totally unprecedented population explosion in nineteenth-century Europe from around 193 million to about 423 million, but with considerable variations between countries and regions. Another 45 million left for overseas, of whom perhaps 10 million returned. In 1800 the French population was the biggest in Europe after Russia. It was still the largest at mid-century with around 36 million, but in the 1850s it levelled out at around 39 million and hovered there until the 1930s. The British population was the first to rise quickly, standing at 16 million in 1800, 31 million in 1870, and then slowing down to reach 44 million in 1900. In 1800 the total population of the German states was 24 million, reaching 40 million at unification in 1871 and soaring to be the largest in Europe, after Russia, with 60 million by 1900. The growth in the Russian population was the most dramatic, though the least well documented. Apparently around 70 million in the 1870s it had leapt to 170 million in 1914, of whom all but 30 million lived in European Russia.
The Europe-wide increase in numbers appears to have been closely related to a falling death rate (precise figures are scanty for the years before 1850), and in Britain to a reduction in the age of marriage from around 30 to about 22, which would have led to a telescoping of generations, and possibly healthier stock. Apparently couples continued to produce at least nine children at roughly twenty-month intervals throughout most of their reproductive life. What made the difference was that from the 1730s more infants survived birth, the vulnerable first year, and the years between 1 and 5. We do not know the full story of why the infant death rate fell. The most significant factor seems to have been a reduction in the pandemics which had eliminated whole communities in past centuries. Can this be attributable to a greater awareness of hygiene and health care? More soap was used and cotton clothing worn, but by whom? More hospitals offered free care to the poor. But until the introduction of anaesthesia in the 1840s and antiseptics in the 1860s, mortality rates after surgery remained high. Hospitals were rightly thought of as merely places of death for the poor. Public health actually deteriorated badly with the increasing size and insanitary conditions of industrial towns and the municipal clean-up operation did not begin until around 1880.
Smallpox vaccination reached nearly 80 per cent of children in France by the mid-nineteenth century and was made compulsory in England in 1852. By then smallpox mortality rates in England had tumbled from 16.5 per cent of all deaths to 1-2 per cent. Vaccination against diphtheria, introduced in France in 1894, was another instant, and to the uneducated, magical cure. These successes were exceptional, but they had a huge psychological impact, giving bourgeois medicine a new status in comparison with the much cheaper treatment available from popular healers, who only charged if the patient recovered. Although the cause of infections was not properly understood until towards the end of the century, the growing practice of isolation, and the accompanying increased attention to cleanliness, had a marked, though unquantified, effect on death rates from TB and other ailments. Unfortunately for our investigations, such improvements came after the period of most rapid population increase.
There were epidemics at intervals during the nineteenth century, spectacularly cholera, which arrived in Europe for the first time in 1816-17, reached France and Britain in the early 1830s, and did not begin to diminish until after the Hamburg epidemic of 1892. Contemporaries were inclined to ascribe cholera to the moral as well as the sanitary evils of the new industrial society. The disease was terrifying. Its cause and treatment were unfathomed; death was rapid and indiscriminate, in contrast to earlier killer diseases. Healthy prosperous adults were as likely to be affected as the obviously vulnerable young and elderly. However, cholera did not reduce numbers on the scale of earlier plagues.
How far were improved chances of survival related to better nourishment? We know that food production rose during the eighteenth century, but harvest failures and ineffective transport systems led to serious shortages until the 1860s. Food adulteration continued throughout the nineteenth century and until pasteurization was developed an increased availability of cows’ milk would not have contributed to the decline in infant mortality. However, it would seem perverse to see no connection between more food and more babies surviving. Recent research on the birth weight of children born in a number of hospitals (therefore to poor mothers) in different European countries shows a modest increase in birth weight, although there was a downturn in the later years of the nineteenth century.
The increase in live births and surviving babies must, in part, be due to social factors, especially parental care. The way in which children were represented in paintings might be said to indicate that childhood and individual children were more valued. Enlightened theoreticians like Rousseau in Emile urged mothers to breast-feed their own children. Wet-nursing was well established among all social classes in some countries, especially France. Church-run hospitals and parish priests often acted as wet-nursing agencies and provided moral sanction for a practice which was little more than infanticide. Even in 1869 only 59 per cent of babies were nursed by their own mothers and concern that this was in part responsible for an excess of deaths over births led to legislation which put wet-nurses under the supervision of the local doctor, an arrangement which neither enjoyed. However, wet-nursing had a limited geographical appeal. Most English mothers, particularly the less well off, apparently had always fed their own children.
Since the early eighteenth century French noble families had practised birth control. The fuss made by the Church of England in the eighteenth century and the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century in condemning coitus interruptus indicates that such primitive methods of contraception quickly reached poorer families. Popular medicine put faith in a variety of herbs and primitive douches. Barrier and interventionist methods of birth control were little developed until the 1880s and remained the playthings of the better off until 1914.
Contemporaries tended to assume that population growth was a consequence of industrialization. However, numbers grew fastest in poorer rural areas such as southern Italy, southern Germany, and Russia. Some, like Malthus, predicted uncontrolled growth and starvation. Did war decimate European populations less than at other times? The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792-1815) killed 1.5 million Frenchmen, the same number as in the First World War. Some French observers, including Zola in his hair-raising tale of family murder, Earth, were inclined to believe that the Napoleonic Civil Code was a potent contraception, because it replaced primogeniture with equal subdivision among heirs. But equal subdivision was the norm in southern Germany.
The Lure of New Worlds
Young adults migrated to towns in search of jobs. Novels such as Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton deplored the living conditions they endured in Lancashire cotton towns. In 1842 Edwin Chadwick, in a seminal report, revealed that in Manchester the average age at death of mechanics was 17 compared with 38 in rural Rutland. Urbanization was relatively slow. Although by 1850 more than half the population of Britain lived in towns, it was not until the mid-i93os that the same was true in France. Migration was not new. Traditionally, men from poor areas such as the Limousin worked part of the year in Lyons or Paris in the building trades and returned to their families during the cold months when there was no work. Whole districts in London and Paris still bear the imprint in cafe, shop, and street names of such movements. What made the nineteenth century different was that migration grew in scale and became permanent. By 1907 50 per cent of Germans lived a substantial distance from their birthplace. Middle-class observers were alarmed at the rootlessness, alienation, and godlessness of migrant towns. Their answer was to build cavernous churches.
Many left their own country, some for Europe, especially for France, but more frequently for North, later for South, America and Australasia. In the 1850s over 1 million Germans left for the Prairies, a quarter of a million in one year alone. A nucleus, ‘pushed’ by economic and/or political desperation, tended to encourage neighbours and family to join them later. Overseas migration was probably the biggest single factor controlling European population growth. France, in contrast, kept her numbers steady with over 3 million resident foreigners by 1914. Belgians worked in mines and mills in the north-east, Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese worked on southern farms, deserted by the younger generations.
Social Effects of Industrial Growth
There was a decline in the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture over the century in almost all European countries, but the actual numbers involved and the activities themselves generally continued to increase until around 1914. In England in the 1850s agriculture was the largest single employer (1.8 million), followed by domestic service (i million). During the first half of the century, the most significant change in industry everywhere was the expansion of the rural sector. Cotton-weaving was put-out from the new spinning factories until large-scale weaving machines were developed. In England at mid-century the cotton industry employed 800,000, but one-third were still working in small workshops or in their own home.
Merchants encouraged the growth of rural production in traditionally organized craft industries such as silk to undercut urban prices and controls, until technical innovations like the Jacquard loom allowed merchants to control the urban craftsman more directly by loaning him the cost of his equipment. A Jacquard loom cost i,000 francs, a very considerable outlay for a master weaver whose daily earnings might be less than 3 francs, from which he had to pay assistants. At the beginning of the century, agrarian and industrial activities were often interdependent. Iron foundries were set up within the extensive forests of large landowners because charcoal was used for smelting. An increasing proportion of country dwellers sustained life by a mixture of craft industry and agriculture. For many rural communities the century was one of diversified growth and opportunity, followed by shrinkage, migration, and depopulation.
The Myth of Orders—and Classes
Did nineteenth-century industrial change transform independent craftsmen into dependent proletarians? Socialists were convinced it did; conservatives were scared that it had or would, while liberals hoped that the social corrosion of poverty would eventually disappear. In other words, the language of class helped to define political polemic.
Eighteenth-century Europeans imagined themselves part of a society of orders or estates. For practical purposes the concept was anachronistic, intersected with more dominant ideas of class, and was soon to be romanticized by novelists such as Sir Walter Scott. Whereas class distinctions were and still are, at least in part, based on the type and scale of economic activity, the concept of orders rested initially on social duty. Class divides society into mutually dependent, but competing, elements. The notion of orders rested on a belief in a static society. The first order was the clergy because they kept the devil at bay. The second order, the nobility, were responsible for organizing the defence of the community from more visible enemies. The third order, which included everyone else, provided for the bodily needs of society. During the medieval and early modern periods the wealthier members within each order acquired privileges, the most desirable of which were fiscal. By the eighteenth century the tail wagged the dog. Privilege, limited to a small, wealthy subsection of each order, came to be a definition of the order itself, while their original duties were performed by the poorer elements of each group. Financial standing and perceived status, the basis of a modern notion of class, emerged within the vertical subsections of the society of orders.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, writers, most memorably British economists such as Adam Smith, used class terms as subdivisions of orders. Some wrote with fear and nostalgia, some with hope, not just of a Europe in which monetary values had replaced a sense of duty and of a society polarized between rich and poor, familiar themes at all times, but of a change in the nature of wealth and of a new emerging entrepreneurial element.
The events of the French Revolution contributed to the hardening and politicization of the notion of class. In his influential pamphlet ‘What is the Third Estate?’, published on the eve of the calling of the Estates-General in France in 1789, the abbe Sieyes appeared to speak on behalf of the Third Estate, which he defined in the traditional way as the vast majority and described as the true nation. But for the practical purpose of the election to the assembly, he addressed the wealthy bourgeois educated elite only; in other words, he was speaking a language of class with an old-fashioned accent.
Key episodes contributing to concepts of class were the cascading abolition of all privileged institutions on the night of 4 August 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen later that month. The remnants of the spectre of privileged orders were legislated away in France with the abolition of feudal rights, clerical privilege, particularly the right to collect the tithe, and the elimination of all privileged corporations of all kinds within the state, from the parlements, or courts of appeal, to the guilds.
Resistance to the dismantling of privilege helped to fuel a counter-revolution and, with it, not only class definition, but also class conflict. The noisy and belligerent emigration of opponents of the Revolution quickly transformed liberal definitions of citizenship into intolerant exclusions based on rough-and-ready class-type distinctions. The Revolution became anti-‘aristo’, even, for a time, anti-bourgeois. Ultimately, however, it was the traditional professional, official, and landowning bourgeoisie who gained most.
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, 1792-1814/15, ensured that the social conflicts experienced in France reverberated in conquered territories. As in France, the purchase of land and office by members of the old Third Estate, as well as gradual economic change, contributed to social stratification. In much of western Europe, professional, official, and landowning and entrepreneurial bourgeois groups advanced their claims during the Revolutionary years, aided by French territorial ambitions. Ironically, in the Russian empire the Romanovs were struggling to strengthen an aristocratic warrior element, midway between an order and a class, to reinforce their own power over an enormous and growing state.
What did it mean to be part of a society of classes? In France the Church was dismantled as the first order by the sale of its land. For a time in the 1790s it was denied the right to celebrate ceremonies to register births, marriages, and deaths. Its role in administering hospitals and schools was halted, although in the latter area only temporarily. In Spain, Portugal, and Italy (until the 1860s) the Catholic Church remained a major landowner as well as a powerful political, social, and spiritual force, although leading noble families were decreasingly interested in bishoprics for younger sons. In Protestant and Orthodox countries the Church owned no land, but senior clergy were drawn from leading families and exercised a strong moral influence. In Britain the bishops of the Established Church of England were automatically members of the House of Lords.
The second order, the nobility or aristocracy, was regarded as the leading element in the upper class. It included very rich aristocrats, who had a powerful national voice, and less wealthy gentry, whose influence was more local. The base of their power and influence was land, but they habitually had many other varied financial and economic interests, especially the top families. They formed a tight network, intermarrying carefully to preserve their economic position.
Next in the hierarchy of classes was the top slice of the old Third Estate, the bourgeoisie or middle classes. The term meant little, beyond the assumption of a certain prosperity, freedom from manual labour, and the possibility that, while the husband enjoyed good health, the wife and daughters would not have to work outside the home. Observers often added upper, middle or middling, and lower to their definitions in a search for precision. The middle classes included members of the professions, state servants, and men with financial, commercial, or industrial interests. Many were landowners and the richer elements intermarried with complaisant, usually impecunious, noble families. The most wealthy would certainly have included themselves within the upper class, but acceptance was limited. While the number of noble families remained fairly stable in the nineteenth century, apart from a sprinkling of invented titles, there was an astronomic growth in the numbers of those who called themselves middle class. Contemporary observers were most aware of the expansion of the entrepreneurial element, but there was a dramatic growth in the professions and especially in state service.
Finally, the largest element in any society remained those with the least economic security, who survived by the labour of their hands. Middle-class contemporary observers, at their most complimentary, would have referred to the ‘lower orders’, using old terms sloppily, or a ‘lower’ class or classes. Such terms defined little more than the ignorance and sense of superiority of the observer. Definition necessitates further subdivisions, sometimes based on levels of taxation, sometimes on lifestyle, often on geography. The rural community included everyone from small farmers, who might own or rent land, to landless labourers. They ranged from the formally free in Britain and France, where feudal institutions, run merely as commercial operations, were abolished in the 1790s, to Russia, where a form of serfdom survived until the 1860s. Outside Britain the term peasant is often used for this, the numerically most substantial element in most European societies, but the word does not tell us much. Contemporaries would always subdivide the rural population according to the amount of land they farmed, frequently judged by land tax payments, since one family would habitually own or rent several scattered parcels of land. France had the highest proportion of country people owning some land, about 6 million; Russia, until the 1860s, the least. It must also be remembered that many country dwellers combined rural and artisan activities.
The largest group of urban workers, particularly among the 30 per cent females in the labour force, were often those in ‘service’, usually living in; their numbers did not begin to decline until about 1900. Urban industrial workers might be artisans who owned and ran their own workshops, ran a workshop wholly or partly financed by a merchant, or one which was part of a putting-out operation. They could be journeymen or apprentices within any of these. They might be highly skilled factory workers, the ‘labour aristocracy’ as they have been called by historians of Britain, less skilled and lower-paid factory workers, or unskilled labourers. In town and country this worker element lost some economic independence during the century, although there was a distinct tendency to exaggerate lost freedom. The industrial sector became both larger and more urban, particularly towards the end of the century, but tidy, continent-wide statistics should be regarded with scepticism. An 1848 report on Parisian industry, intent on proving that unemployment had fallen, tried the ageless but unconvincing trick of calling unemployed journeymen self-employed or small employers. People grasped what work they could, where they could. What is absolutely certain is that working people did not think of themselves as a single united class in the sense used by Marx.
World History
