E. J.

Hobsbawm

TH E A G E O F CA PITA L
1848-1875

fABAOJSj
 First published in Great Britain by
Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd 1975
First published by Abacus 1977
Reprinted 1980,1984, 1985, 1988,1989,
1991,1992,1995 (twice)

Copyright © E. J. Hobsbawm 1975

All rights reserved.

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Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

ISBN 0 349 10480 8

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 Contents

Illustrations 7
Preface 9
Introduction 13

part on e : revolutionary prelude

1 T h e Springtime o f Peoples’ 21

part t w o : developments
2 The G reat Boom 43
3 The W orld Unified 64
4 Conflicts and W ar 88
5 Building N ations 103
6 The Forces o f D em ocracy . 122
7 Losers 143
8 W inners 164
9 Changing Society 187

part three : results

10 The Land 205
11 M en M oving 228
12 City, Industry, the W orking Class 245
13 The Bourgeois W orld 270
14 Science, Religion, Ideology 294
15 The Arts 324
16 Conclusion 354
Tables 360
M aps 366
N otes 373
F urther Reading 388
Index 396
 Chapter Thirteen

The Bourgeois World

You know that we belong to a century when men are only valued fo r
what is in them. Every day some master, insufficiently energetic or
serious, is forced to descend from the ranks in society which seemed to
be permanently his, and some intelligent and plucky clerk takes his
place.
Mme Motte-Bossut to her son, 18561

Behold his little ones around him, they bask in the warmth o f his smile.
And infant innocence and joy lighten their happy faces.
He is holy and they honour him, he is loving, and they love him,
He is consistent and they esteem him, he is firm and they fear him
His friends are the excellent among men
He goeth to the well-ordered home.
Martin Tupper, 18762

We m ust now look at that bourgeois society. The m ost superficial

phenom ena are sometimes the m ost profound. Let us begin our
analysis o f that society, which reached its apogee at this period, with
the appearance o f the clothes its members wore, the interiors which
surrounded them. ‘Clothes make m an’ said the G erm an proverb, and
no age was more aw are o f it than one in which social mobility could
actually place num erous people into the historically novel situation
o f playing new (and superior) social roles and therefore having to
w ear the appropriate costumes. It was n o t long since the A ustrian
N estroy had w ritten his entertaining and em bittered farce The Talis­
man (1840), in which the fortunes o f a poor red-haired m an are
dram atically changed by the acquisition, and subsequent loss, o f a
black wig. The home was the quintessential bourgeois world, for in
it, and only in it, could the problem s and contradictions o f his society
be forgotten or artificially eliminated. H ere and here alone the bour­
geois and even m ore the petty bourgeois family could m aintain
the illusion o f a harm onious, hierarchic happiness, surrounded by the
 m aterial artefacts which dem onstrated it and m ade it possible, the
dream-life which found its culm inating expression in the dom estic
ritual systematically developed for this purpose, the celebration o f
Christm as. The C hristm as dinner (celebrated by Dickens), the
Christm as tree (invented in G erm any, but rapidly acclim atised
through royal patronage in England), the Christm as song - best
known through the G erm anic Stiile Nacht - symbolised at one and
the same time the cold o f the outside w orld, the w arm th o f the fam ily
circle within, and the contrast between the two.
The m ost im m ediate im pression o f the bourgeois interior o f the
m id-century is overcrowding and concealm ent, a mass o f objects,
m ore often than not disguised by drapes, cushions, cloths and wall­
papers, and always, w hatever their n atu re; elaborated. N o picture
w ithout a gilded, a fretted, a chased, even a velvet-covered fram e, no
seat w ithout upholstery o r cover, no piece o f textile w ithout tassel, no
piece of wood w ithout some touch o f the lathe, no surface w ithout
some cloth o r object on it. This was no doubt a sign o f w ealth and
statu s: the beautiful austerity o f Biedermayer interiors had reflected
the straitness o f G erm anic provincial bourgeois finances m ore than
their innate taste, and the furnishings o f servants’ room s in the bo u r­
geois houses were bleak enough. Objects express their cost and, at a
time when m ost dom estic ones were still produced largely by m anual
crafts, elaboration was largely an index o f cost together with expen­
sive materials. Cost also bought com fort, which was therefore visible
as well as experienced. Yet objects were m ore than merely utilitarian
o r symbols o f status and achievement. They had value in themselves
as expressions o f personality, as both the program m e and the reality
o f bourgeois life, even as transformers o f m an. In the hom e all these
were expressed and concentrated. Hence its internal accum ulations.
Its objects, like the houses which contained them, were solid, a
term used, characteristically, as the highest praise for a business
enterprise. They were m ade to last, and they did. A t the same tim e
they must express the higher and spiritual aspirations o f life through
their beauty, unless they represented these aspirations by their very
existence, as did books and musical instrum ents, which rem ained
surprisingly functional in design, ap art from fairly m inor surface
flourishes, or unless they belonged to the realm o f pure utility such as
kitchenw are and luggage. Beauty m eant decoration, since the m ere
 construction o f the houses o f the bourgeoisie o r th e objects w hich
furnished them was seldom sufficiently grandiose to offer spiritual
and m oral sustenance in itself, as the great railways and steam ships
did. Their outsides rem ained functional; it was only their insides, in
so far as they belonged to the bourgeois w orld like the newly devised
Pullm an sleeping-cars (1865) and the first-class steam er saloons and
state-room s, which had decor. Beauty therefore m eant decoration,
som ething applied to the surface o f objects.
T his duality betw een solidity and beauty thus expressed a sharp
division between the m aterial and the ideal, the bodily and the spiri­
tual, highly typical o f the bourgeois w orld; yet spirit and ideal in it
depended on m atter, and could be expressed only th ro u g h m atter, o r
a t least through the m oney which could buy it. N othing was m ore
spiritual than music, bu t the characteristic form in which it entered
the bourgeois hom e was the piano, an exceedingly large, elaborate
and expensive ap p aratu s, even when reduced, for the benefit o f a
m ore m odest stratum aspiring to true bourgeois values, to the m ore
m anageable dim ensions o f the upright {pianino). N o bourgeois in­
terior was com plete w ithout it; no bourgeois daughter, b u t was
obliged to practise endless scales up o n it.
T he link between m orality, spirituality and poverty, so obvious to
non-bourgeois societies, was no t entirely snapped. It was recognised
th a t the exclusive pursuit o f higher things was very likely to be un­
rem unerative except in certain o f the m ore saleable arts, an d even
then prosperity w ould com e only in m ature years: the p o o r student
o r young artist, as private tu to r o r guest a t the Sunday dinner-table,
was a recognised subaltern p art o f the bourgeois family, a t any rate
in those parts o f the world in which culture was highly respected. But
the conclusion draw n was not th a t there was a certain contradiction
between the pursuit o f m aterial and m ental achievem ent, but th a t one
was the necessary basis for the other. As the novelist E. M . F o rster
was to p u t it in the Indian sum m er o f the bourgeoisie: ‘In cam e th e
dividends, up w ent the lofty th o u g h ts.’ T he m ost suitable fate fo r a
philosopher was to be born the son o f a banker, like G eorge Lukacs.
T he glory o f G erm an learning, the Privatgelehrter (or private scholar)
rested on the private income. It was right th a t the p o o r Jew ish
scholar should m arry the daughter o f the richest local m erchant,
because it was unthinkable th a t a com m unity w hich respected
r7 India from below: Madras famine, 1876-8
18 M en m oving: em igrants arriving at Cork for the voyage to A m erica, 1 8 5 1

19 Pioneers: settlers'cabin
11 D eriT t G ate Bridge during the construction o f the U nion Pacific Railroad
23 Henry MfirtOn Stanley arrives in an African village i from his ow n sk etch )
*5 Paris C om m u n e 1 8 7 1 ; attack on the barricade at the com er o f rue dc la H u ch eite
Jn the Latm Quarter
 28 The w orld o f capital - the m achine: &
ten -feeder printing m achine
T e l e g r a p h 's

27 Industrial relations: em blem

of [he Amalgamated Society of
Engineers
19 T h e reality o f war: T h e A m erican C ivil War from one o f the first on -th e-sp o t
t ar photographers

Jo Seventh Cavalry attacking Indian village: print from Harper's Weekly,

3r Coda; cartoon from Punch, 1 8 5 9
learning should reward its luminaries with nothing more tangible
than praise.
This duality of matter and spirit implied a hypocrisy which un­
sympathetic observers considered to be not merely all-pervasive but a
fundamental characteristic of the bourgeois world. Nowhere was this
more obvious, in the literal sense of being visible, than in the matter
of sex. This is not to imply that the mid-nineteenth-century (male)
bourgeois (or those who aspired to be like him) was merely dishonest,
preaching one morality while deliberately practising another, though
patently the conscious hypocrite is more often to be found where the
gap between official morality and the demands of human nature is
unbridgeable, as in this period it often was. Plainly Henry Ward
Beecher, the great New York preacher of puritanism, should either
have avoided having tumultuous extra-marital love-affairs or chosen
a career which did not require him to be quite such a prominent
advocate of sexual restraint; though one cannot entirely fail to sym­
pathise with the bad luck which linked him in the mid- 1870s with the
beautiful feminist and advocate of free love, Victoria Woodhull, a
lady whose convictions made privacy difficult.* But it is pure ana­
chronism to suppose, as several recent writers on ‘The Other Vic­
torians* have done, that the official sexual morality of the age was
mere window-dressing.
In the first place, its hypocrisy was not simply a lie, except perhaps
among those whose sexual tastes were as powerful as they were pub­
licly inadmissible, e.g. prominent politicians depending on puritan
voters or respectable homosexual businessmen in provincial cities. It
was hardly hypocritical at all in the countries (e.g. most Roman
Catholic ones) in which a frankly dual standard was accepted: chas­
tity for unmarried bourgeois women and fidelity for married ones,
the free pursuit of all women (except perhaps marriageable daughters
of the middle and upper classes) by all young bourgeois men, and a
tolerated infidelity for the married ones. Here the rules of the game
were perfectly understood, including the need for a certain discretion
* This splendid woman, one of two equally attractive and emancipated sisters,
caused Marx some moments of irritation because of her efforts to convert the
American section of the International into an organ for the propagation of free
love and spiritualism. The two sisters did very well out of their relations with
Commodore Vanderbilt, who looked after their financial interests. Eventually she
married well and died in the odour of respectability in England, in Brcdon's
Norton, Worcestershire.3
in cases where the stability o f the bourgeois family or property would
otherw ise have been threaten ed: passion, as every Italian of the middle
class still knows, is one thing, ‘the m other o f my children’ quite
another. Hypocrisy entered this pattern o f behaviour only in so far
as the bourgeois women were supposed to rem ain entirely outside the
gam e, and therefore in ignorance o f w hat the men, and women other
than themselves, were up to. In P rotestant countries the m orality o f
sexual restraint and fidelity was supposed to be binding on both
sexes, b u t the very fact th a t it was felt to be so even by those who
broke it, led them no t so much into hypocrisy as into personal
torm ent. It is quite illegitimate to treat a person in such a situation as
a mere swindler.
M oreover, to a very great extent bourgeois m orality was actually
ap p lied ; indeed it may have becom e increasingly effective as the
masses o f the ‘respectable’ w orking classes adopted the values of the
hegem onic culture, and the lower m iddle classes, which followed it by
definition, grew in numbers. Such m atters resisted even the intense
interest o f the bourgeois world in ‘m oral statistics’, as a late-nine-
teenth-century reference book sadly adm itted, dismissing all the
attem pts to m easure the extent o f prostitution as failures. The only
com prehensive attem pt to measure venereal infection, which plainly
had a strong connection with some kinds o f extra-m arital sex, re­
vealed little except th a t in Prussia, no t unexpectedly, it was much
higher in the megalopolis Berlin than in any other province (tending
norm ally to diminish with the size o f cities and villages), and that it
reached its m axim um in towns with ports, garrisons and institutes o f
higher education, i.e. with heavy concentrations o f unm arried young
men away from their homes.* There is no reason to suppose that the
average V ictorian mem ber o f the middle class, lower middle class or
‘respectable’ working class in, say, V ictorian England and the U nited
States failed to live up to his or her standards o f sexual m orality. The
young Am erican girls who surprised cynical m en-about-tow n in the
Paris o f N apoleon hi by the freedom with which they were allowed by
their parents to go about alone and in the com pany o f young Ameri­
can men are as strong evidence about sexual m orals as journalistic

* The doctors of Prussia were asked to give the numbers o f all venereal patients
treated in April 1900. There is no reason to believe that the relative figures would
have been very different thirty years earlier,4
 exposes o f haunts o f vice in m id-Victorian L ondon: probably
stronger.5 It is entirely illegitimate to read post-Freudian standards
into a pre-Freudian world or to assume th a t sexual behaviour then
m ust have been like ours. By m odern standards those lay m onasteries,
the Oxford and Cam bridge colleges, look like case books o f sexual
pathology. W hat would we think today o f a Lewis C arroll whose
passion was to photograph little girls naked ? By V ictorian standards
their w orst vices were alm ost certainly gluttony rather than lust, and
the sentimental taste o f so many dons for young men - alm ost cer­
tainly (the very term is revealing) ‘platonic’ - am ong the n atu ral
crotchets o f inveterate bachelors. It is our age which has turned the
phrase ‘to make love’ (in the English language) into a simple synonym
for sexual intercourse. The bourgeois world was haunted by sex, b u t
n o t necessarily sexual prom iscuity: the characteristic nemesis o f the
bourgeois folk-myth, as the novelist T hom as M ann saw so clearly,
followed a single fall from grace, like the tertiary syphilis o f the
com poser A drian Leverkuehn in D r Faustus. The very extremism o f
its fears reflects a prevailing naivety, or innocence.*
This very innocence, however, allows us to see the powerful sexual
elem ent in the bourgeois world very clearly in its costume, an extra­
ordinary com bination o f tem ptation and prohibition. The mid-Vic­
torian bourgeois was swathed in garm ents, leaving little publicly
visible except the face, even in the tropics. In extreme cases (as in the
U nited States) even objects reminiscent o f the body (the legs o f
tables) might be hidden away. A t the same time, and never m ore so
than in the 1860s and 1870s, every secondary sexual characteristic
was grotesquely overem phasised: men’s h a ir and beards, w om en’s
hair, breasts, hips and buttocks, swelled to enorm ous size by m eans
o f false chignons, culs-de-Paris, etc.f T he shock effect o f M an et’s
fam ous Dejeuner sur VHerbe (1863) derives precisely from the con­
trast between the u tter respectability o f the dress o f the m en and the

* The strength of prevailing moral standards in Protestant countries has been

revealed in the behaviour o f North American slave-owners towards their female
slaves. Contrary to what might have been expected, and to the prevalent ethos in
Catholic-Mediterranean countries - ‘there is no such thing as a sweet tamarind or
a mulatto virgin’ went a Cuban proverb - it seems that the amount of miscege­
nation, or indeed illegitimacy, in the rural slave South was rather small.6
t The fashion for the crinoline, which totally obscured the lower parts while
over-emphasising the waist’s contrast with the vaguely suggested hips, was a
transitional phase of the 1850s.
nakedness o f the wom an. The very shrillness with which bourgeois
civilisation insisted th at wom an was essentially a spiritual being im­
plied both th at men were not, and th at the obvious physical attraction
between the sexes could not be fitted into the system o f values.
Achievement was incom patible with enjoym ent, as the folklore of
cham pionship sport still assumes by sentencing sportsm en to tem po­
rary celibacy before the big m atch o r fight. M ore generally, civilisa­
tion rested on the repression o f instinctive urges. The greatest of
bourgeois psychologists, Sigmund Freud, made this proposition the
cornerstone o f his theories, though later generations read into him a
call for the abolition o f repression.
B ut why was an in itself not im plausible view held with a passion­
ate, indeed a pathological, extremism which contrasted so notably (as
B ernard Shaw was to observe with his usual wit) with the ideal of
m oderation and the juste milieu which had traditionally defined
middle-class social am bitions and roles?7 On the lower rungs o f the
ladder o f middle-class aspiration, the answer is easy. H eroic efforts
alone could lift a p o o r man and w om an, o r even their children, o u t o f
th e slough o f dem oralisation on to the firm plateau o f respectability
and, above all, define his position there. As for the m em ber o f Alco­
holics A nonym ous, there could be no com prom ise solution: it was
either to tal abstinence o r total relapse. Indeed, the movement for total
abstinence from alcohol, which also flourished a t this time in
P rotestant and puritan countries, illustrates this clearly. It was not
effectively designed as a m ovem ent to abolish, still less to limit, mass
alcoholism , b u t to define and set ap art the class o f those individuals
w ho had dem onstrated by their personal force o f character th a t they
were distinct from the unrespectable poor. Sexual puritanism fulfilled
the same function. But this was a ‘bourgeois’ phenom enon only in so
fa r as it reflected the hegemony o f bourgeois respectability. Like the
reading o f Samuel Smiles o r the practice o f other form s o f ‘self-help’
and ‘self-im provem ent’ it replaced bourgeois success m ore often than
it prepared fo r it. A t the level o f the ‘respectable* artisan o r clerk,
abstinence had often to be its own rew ard. In m aterial terms it gave
only m odest returns.
T he problem o f bourgeois sexual puritanism is m ore complex. The
belief th at m id-nineteenth-century bourgeois were unusually full-
blooded and therefore obliged to build unusually im penetrable
defences against physical tem ptation is unconvincing: w hat m ade the
tem ptations so great was precisely the extremism o f the accepted
m oral standards, which also m ade the fall correspondingly m ore
dram atic, as in the case o f the C atholic-puritan C ount M uffat in
Emile Z ola’s Nana, the novel o f prostitution in the Paris o f the 1860s.
O f course the problem was to some extent economic, as we shall see.
T he ‘family’ was no t merely the basic social unit o f bourgeois society
b u t its basic unit o f property and business enterprise, linked with
other such units through a system o f exchanges o f women-plus-
property (the ‘m arriage p ortion’) in which the women were by strict
convention deriving from pre-bourgeois tradition virgines intactae.
A nything which weakened this family unit was im permissible, and
nothing more obviously weakened it than uncontrolled physical
passion, which introduced ‘unsuitable’ (i.e. economically undesirable)
suitors and brides, split husbands from wives, and wasted com m on
resources.
But the tensions were m ore than econom ic. They were particularly
great during our period, when the m orality o f abstinence, m oderation
and restraint conflicted dram atically with the realities o f bourgeois
success. The bourgeois no longer lived either in a family econom y o f
scarcity o r in a rank o f society rem ote from the tem ptations o f high
society. Their problem was spending rather than saving. N o t only
did the non-w orking bourgeois become increasingly frequent - in
Cologne the num ber o f rentiers paying incom e tax grew from 162 in
1854 to alm ost 600 in 1874s - b u t how else except by spending was
the successful bourgeois, w hether o r no t he held political pow er as a
class, to dem onstrate his conquest ? The w ord parvenu (newly-rich)
autom atically becam e a synonym o f the lavish spender. W hether
these bourgeois tried to ape the life style o f the aristocracy or, like
class-conscious K ru p p and his fellow-magnates o f the R uhr, built
themselves castles and industrial-feudal em pires parallel to and m ore
impressive than those o f the Junkers whose titles they refused, they
had to spend, and in a m anner which inevitably brought their life
style closer to th at o f the unpuritan aristocracy, and th a t o f their
womenfolk even m ore so. Before the 1850s this had been a problem
o f a relatively few families; in some countries, such as G erm any, o f
hardly any. N ow it becam e the problem o f a class.
The bourgeoisie as a class found enorm ous difficulty in com bining
getting and spending in a morally satisfactory m anner, ju st as it failed
to solve the equivalent m aterial problem , how to secure a succession
o f equally dynam ic and capable businessm en within the same family,
a fact which increased the role o f daughters, who could introduce
new blood into the business complex. O f the four sons of the banker
Friedrich W ichelhaus in W uppertal (1810-86) only R obert (b. 1836)
rem ained a banker. T he other three (b. 1831,1842 and 1846) ended as
landow ners and an academ ic, bu t both daughters (b. 1829 and 1838)
m arried industrialists, including a m em ber o f the Engels family.9 The
very thing for which the bourgeoisie strove, profit, ceased to be an
adequate m otivation once it had brought sufficient wealth. Tow ards
the end o f the century the bourgeoisie discovered at least a tem porary
form ula for com bining getting and spending, cushioned by the
acquisitions o f the past. These final decades before the catastrophe
o f 1914 were to be the ‘Indian sum m er’, the belle dpoque o f bourgeois
life, retrospectively lam ented by its survivors. But in the third quarter
o f the nineteenth century the contradictions were perhaps a t their
m ost acute: effort and enjoym ent coexisted, bu t clashed. A nd
sexuality was one o f the victims o f the conflict, hypocrisy the victor. I

II

Buttressed by clothes, walls and objects, there was the bourgeois

family, the m ost m ysterious institution o f the age. F or, if it is easy to
discover or to devise connections between puritanism and capitalism ,
as a large literature bears witness, those between nineteenth-century
fam ily structure and bourgeois society rem ain obscure. Indeed the
apparent conflict between the two has rarely even been noticed. W hy
should a society dedicated to an econom y o f profit-m aking com peti­
tive enterprise, to the efforts o f the isolated individual, to equality o f
rights and opportunities and freedom, rest on an institution which so
totally denied all o f these?
Its basic unit, the one-family household, was both a patriarchal
autocracy and a microcosm o f the sort o f society which the bour­
geoisie as a class (or its theoretical spokesmen) denounced and
destroyed: a hierarchy o f personal dependence.
There in firm wisdom ruleth well the father, husband, master.
Heaping it with prosperities, as guardian, guide and judge.’10
Below him - to continue quoting the Proverbial Philosopher M artin
Tupper, there flitted ‘the good angel o f the house, the m other, wife
and mistress’11 whose work, according to the great Ruskin, w as:
‘i T o please people
ii T o feed them in dainty ways
hi T o clothe them
iv T o keep them orderly
v To teach them ,’12
a task for which, curiously, she was required to show, o r to possess,
neither intelligence n o r knowledge (‘Be good sweet maid and let who
will be clever’, as Charles Kingsley put it). This was not merely be­
cause the new function o f the bourgeois wife, to show off the capacity
o f the bourgeois husband to keep her in leisure and luxury, conflicted
with the old functions o f actually running a household, b u t also
because her inferiority to the m an must be dem onstrable:
‘Hath she wisdom? It is precious, but beware that thou exceed:
For woman must be subject and the true mastery is of the mind.’13

However, this pretty, ignorant and idiotic slave was also required
to exercise m astery; not so much over the children, whose lord was
once again the pater fam ilias* as over the servants, whose presence
distinguished the bourgeois from his social inferiors. A ‘lady’ was
definable as someone who did no work, hence who ordered som eone
else to do it,15 her superiority being established by this relationship.
Sociologically the difference between w orking and middle classes was
th a t between servant-keepers and potential servants, and was so used
in Seebohm R ow ntree’s pioneer social survey o f Y ork at the end of
the century. The servants themselves were increasingly and over­
whelmingly women - between 1841 and 1881 the percentage o f men
in domestic offices and personal services in Britain fell from ab o u t 20
to about 12 - so th at the ideal bourgeois household consisted o f a
male lord dom inating a num ber o f hierarchically graded females, all
the more so as male children tended to leave the home as they grew
up, or even - am ong the British upper classes - as soon as they
reached the age o f boarding school.
* ‘The children again did all they could to make their dear adored father happy;
they drew, worked, recited, wrote compositions, played the piano.* This to cele­
brate the birthday of Albert, Prince Consort of Queen Victoria.14
 B ut the servant, though receiving wages, and therefore a domestic
analogue to the w orker whose em ploym ent defined the male bour­
geois in the economy, was essentially quite different, since her (or
m ore rarely his) main link with the em ployer was not the cash nexus,
b u t personal, and indeed for practical purposes total, dependence.
Everything about her life was strictly prescribed, and, because she
lived in some meagrely furnished attic o f the household, controllable.
F rom the apron o r uniform she wore to the testim onial o f good
behaviour o r ‘character’, w ithout which she becam e unem ployable,
everything about her symbolised a relation o f power and subjection.
This did not exclude close if unequal personal relations anym ore than
it did in slave societies. Indeed it probably encouraged them , though
it m ust never be forgotten that for every nursem aid o r gardener who
lived out their lives in the service o f one family there were a hundred
country girls who passed briefly through the household to pregnancy,
m arriage or another jo b , being treated merely as yet another instance
o f th a t ‘servant problem ’ which filled the conversations o f their
mistresses. The crucial point is th a t the structure o f the bourgeois
family flatly contradicted th a t o f bourgeois society. W ithin it free­
dom , opportunity, the cash nexus and the pursuit o f individual profit
did not rule.
It could be argued th a t this was so because the individualist Hobbe-
sian anarchism which form ed the theoretical model o f the bourgeois
econom y provided no basis for any form o f social organisation, in­
cluding th a t o f the family. And indeed, in one respect, it was a de­
liberate contrast to the outside world, an oasis o f peace in a world o f
battle, le repos du guerrier.

‘You know [wrote a French industrialist’s wife to her sons in 1856] that we live
in a century when men have value only by their own efforts. Every day the
brave and clever assistant takes over from the master, whose slackness and
lack of seriousness demotes him from the rank which seemed to be permanently
his.’

‘W hat a battle,’ wrote her husband, locked in com petition with

British textile m anufacturers. ‘M any will die in the struggle, even
m ore will be cruelly w ounded.’16 The m etaphor o f war came as
naturally to the lips o f men who discussed their ‘struggle for exis­
tence’ or the ‘survival o f the fittest’, as the m etaphor o f peace came to
them when they described the hom e: ‘the dwelling place o f jo y ’, the
place where ‘the satisfied am bition o f the heart rejoiced’, as it could
never rejoice outside, since it could never be satisfied, or afford to
adm it itself satisfied.17
But it may also be th a t in the bourgeois family the essential in­
egalitarianism on which capitalism rested found a necessary
expression. Precisely because it was not based on collective, insti­
tutionalised, traditional inequalities, dependence had to be an indi­
vidual relationship. Because superiority was so uncertain for the
individual, it had to have one form th at was perm anent and secure.
Because its essential expression was money, which merely expresses
the relationship o f exchange, other form s o f expression which
dem onstrated the dom ination o f persons over persons had to supple­
m ent it. There was o f course nothing new in a patriarchal fam ily
structure based on the subordination of women and children. But
where we might have expected a bourgeois society logically to break
it up o r transform it - as indeed it was to be disintegrated later - the
classic phase o f bourgeois society reinforced and exaggerated it.
How far this ‘ideal’ bourgeois patriarchy actually represented
reality is quite another m atter. An observer summed up the typical
bourgeois o f Lille as a m an who ‘fears G od, but above all his wife,
and reads the Echo du N o rd \18 and this is at least as likely a reading
o f the facts of bourgeois family life as the m ale-form ulated theory o f
female helplessness and dependence, sometimes pathologically exag­
gerated into the masculine dream , and occasional practice, o f the
child-wife selected and form ed by the future husband. Still, the exis­
tence and even reinforcem ent o f the ideal-type bourgeois family in
this period is significant. It is sufficient to explain the beginnings o f a
systematic feminist m ovem ent am ong middle-class women in this
period, at all events in the A nglo-Saxon o r P rotestant countries.
The bourgeois household, however, was merely the nucleus o f the
larger family connection within which the individual o p erated : ‘the
R othschilds’, ‘the K rupps’, or for th at m atter ‘the Forsytes’, who
m ake so much o f nineteenth-century social and econom ic history an
essentially dynastic affair. But though an enorm ous am ount of
m aterial about such families has been accum ulated over the past
century, neither the social anthropologists nor the com pilers o f
genealogical handbooks (an aristocratic occupation) have taken
sufficient interest in them to m ake it easy to generalise w ith any
confidence about such family groups.
H ow far were they newly prom oted from the lower social ran k s?
N o t to any substantial extent, it would seem, though in theory noth­
ing prevented social ascent. O ut o f the British steelmasters in 1865,89
p er cent came from middle-class families, 7 per cent from the lower
m iddle class (including small shopkeepers, independent artisans, etc.)
and a mere 4 per cent from workers, skilled or - m ore im probably -
unskilled.19 The bulk o f the textile m anufacturers in northern F rance
a t the same period were similarly children of w hat could already be
considered the middle strata; the bulk o f the m id-nineteenth-century
N ottingham hosiery m anufacturers had sim ilar origins, tw o-thirds o f
them actually com ing from the hosiery trade. The founding fathers o f
capitalist enterprise in south-western G erm any were n o t always rich,
b ut the num ber o f those with long family experience in business, and
often in the industries they were to develop, is significant: Swiss-
A lsatian P rotestants like the K oechlin, Geigy or Sarrasin, Jews
grown up in the finance o f small princelings, rather than technically
innovating craftsm en-entrepreneurs. Educated men - notably sons o f
P rotestant pastors o r civil servants - modified but did n o t change
their middle-class status by capitalist enterprise.20 The careers o f the
bourgeois world were indeed open to talent, bu t the family w ith a
m odest am ount o f education, property and social connections am ong
others o f the middle rank undoubtedly started with a relatively enor­
m ous advantage; n o t least the capacity to interm arry with others o f
the same social status, in the same line o f business o r with resources
which could be com bined with their own.
The econom ic advantages o f a large family o r an interlocking con­
nection o f families were o f course still substantial. W ithin the business
it guaranteed capital, perhaps useful business contacts, and above all
reliable m anagers. The Lefebvres o f Lille in 1851 financed the wool-
com bing enterprise o f a brother-in-law , AmedSe Prouvost. Siemens
and H alske, the fam ous electrical firm set up in 1847, got its first
capital from a cousin; a brother was the first salaried employee and
nothing was m ore natural than th a t the three brothers W erner, Carl
and W illiam should take charge respectively o f the Berlin, St Peters­
burg and L ondon branches. The fam ous P rotestant clans ofM ulhouse
relied on one another: Andr6 Koechlin, son-in-law o f the D ollfus
who founded Dollfus-M ieg (both he and his father had m arried
into the Miegs), took over the firm until his four brothers-in-law
were old enough to m anage it, while his uncle N icholas ran the
Koechlin family firm ‘with which he associated exclusively his
brothers and brothers-in-law as well as his old father’.21 M eanwhile
another Dollfus, great-grandson o f the founder, entered another
local family firm, Schlum berger et Cie. The business history o f the
nineteenth century is full o f such family alliances and interpenetra­
tions. They required a large num ber of available sons and daughters,
bu t there was no shortage o f these, and hence - unlike am ong the
French peasantry which required one and only one heir to take over
the family holding - no strong incentive to birth control, except
am ong the poor and struggling lower middle class.
But how were such clans organised ? How did they operate ? A t
w hat point did they cease to represent family groups and turn into a
coherent social group, a local bourgeoisie, o r even (as perhaps in the
case o f Protestant and Jewish bankers) a m ore widespread netw ork,
o f which family alliances form merely one aspect ? We cannot answer
such questions as yet.

in
W hat, in other words, do we m ean by the ‘bourgeoisie’ as a class in
this period? Its economic, political and social definitions differed
som ewhat, but were still sufficiently close to each other to cause
relatively little difficulty.
Thus, economically, the quintessential bourgeois was a ‘capitalist’
(i.e. either the possessor o f capital, or the receiver o f an incom e de­
rived from such a source, o r a profit-m aking entrepreneur, o r all o f
these things). A nd, in fact, the characteristic ‘bourgeois’ or m em ber
of the middle class in our period included few people who did no t fit
into one or other o f these pigeon-holes. The top 150 families o f
Bordeaux in 1848 included ninety businessmen (m erchants, bankers,
shopowners, etc., though in this town as yet few industrialists), forty-
five owners o f property and rentiers and fifteen members o f the
liberal professions, which were, o f course, in those days, varieties o f
private enterprise. There was am ong them a total absence o f the
higher and (at least nom inally) salaried business executive who
form ed the largest single group in the to p 450 Bordeaux families in
I960.22 W e m ight add that, though proprety from land or, m ore
com m only, from urban real-estate, rem ained an im portant source o f
bourgeois income, especially am ong the middle and lower bourgeoisie
in areas o f lagging industrialisation, it was already diminishing some­
w hat in im portance. Even in non-industrial Bordeaux (1873) it
form ed only 40 per cent o f the wealth left at death in 1873 (23 per
cent o f the biggest fortunes), while in industrial Lille at the same time
it form ed only 31 per cent.23
The personnel of bourgeois politics was naturally som ew hat differ­
ent, if only because politics is a specialised and time-consuming
activity which does not attract all equally, or for which not all are
equally fitted. Nevertheless during this period the extent to which
bourgeois politics was actually conducted by practising (or retired)
bourgeois was quite striking. T hus in the second half o f the nine­
teenth century between 25 and 40 per cent o f the members o f the
Swiss Federal Council consisted o f entrepreneurs and rentiers (20-30
per cent o f the Council members being the ‘federal barons’ who ran
the banks, railways and industries), a rather larger percentage than in
the tw entieth century. A nother 15-25 per cent consisted o f practising
m em bers o f the liberal professions, i.e. lawyers - though 50 per cent
o f all members had law degrees, this being the standard educational
qualification fo r public life and adm inistration in m ost countries.
A nother 20-30 per cent consisted o f professional ‘public figures’
(prefects, rural judges, and other so-called M agistrates).24 The
Liberal group in the Belgian C ham ber at m id-century had an 83 per
cent bourgeois mem bership: 16 p er cent o f its m embers were business­
men, 16 per cent proprietaires, 15 per cent rentiers, 18 per cent
professional adm inistrators and 42 per cent liberal professions, i.e.
lawyers and a few medical men.25 This was equally, and perhaps more,
m arked in local politics in the cities, dom inated as these naturally
were by the bourgeois (i.e. norm ally Liberal) notables o f the place. If
the upper echelons o f power were largely occupied by older groups,
traditionally established there, from 1830 (in France), from 1848 (in
G erm any) the bourgeoisie ‘assaulted and conquered the lower levels
o f political pow er’, such as m unicipal councils, m ayoralties, district
councils, etc., and kept them under control until the rise of mass
politics in the last decades o f the century. F rom 1830 Lille was run by
m ayors who were prom inent businessm en.26 In Britain the big cities
were notoriously in the hands o f the oligarchy o f local businessmen.
Socially the definitions were not so clear, though the ‘m iddle class’
obviously included all the above groups, provided they were wealthy
and established enough: businessmen, property-ow ners, liberal p ro ­
fessions and the upper echelons o f adm inistration, which were, o f
course, numerically quite a small group outside the capital cities. The
difficulty lay both in defining the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ limits o f the
stratum within the hierarchy o f social status, and in allowing for the
m arked heterogeneity o f its m em bership within those lim its: there
was always, at least, an accepted internal stratification into grande
moyenne and petite bourgeoisie, the latter shading off into strata
which would be de facto outside the class.
A t the top end the bourgeoisie was m ore or less distinct from the
aristocracy (high or low), depending partly on the legal and social
exclusiveness o f that group o r on its own class-consciousness. N o
bourgeois could becom e a real aristocrat in, say, Russia or Prussia,
and even where patents o f low nobility were freely distributed, as in
the H absburg Em pire, no C ount C hotek or Auersperg, however
ready to join the board o f directors o f a business enterprise, would
consider a Baron von W ertheim stein as anything except a middle-
class banker and a Jew. Britain was alm ost alone in systematically,
though at this period still modestly, absorbing businessmen into the
aristocracy - bankers and financiers rather than industrialists.
On the other hand, until 1870, and even thereafter, there were still
G erm an industrialists who refused to allow their nephews to become
reserve-officers, as being unsuitable for young men of their class, or
whose sons insisted on doing their military service in the infantry or
engineers rather than the socially m ore exclusive cavalry. But it m ust
be added th at as the profits rolled in - and they were very substantial
in our period - the tem ptation o f decorations, titles, interm arriage
with the nobility and in general an aristocratic life style was no t often
resisted by the rich. English non-conform ist m anufacturers would
transfer to the C hurch o f England, and in the north o f France the
‘barely concealed V oltaireanism ’ o f before 1850 turned into increas­
ingly fervent Catholicism after 1870,27
A t the bottom the dividing-line was much m ore clearly economic,
though businessmen - at least in Britain - m ight draw a sharp qualita-
tive line between themselves and those social outcasts who actually
sold goods directly to the public, such as shopkeepers; at least until
retail trade had shown th at it could also m ake millions for its prac­
titioners. The independent artisan and small shopkeeper clearly be­
longed to a lower m iddle class or M itteIsland which had little in
com m on with the bourgeoisie except aspiration to its social status.
The rich peasant was not a bourgeois, and neither was the white-
collar employee. Nevertheless, there was in the m id-nineteenth
century a sufficiently large reservoir o f the older type o f economically
independent petty com m odity producer o r seller, and even o f the
skilled w orker and forem an (who still often took the place o f the
m odern technological cadre), for the dividing-line to be hazy: some
would prosper and, at least in their localities, become accepted
bourgeois.
F o r the m ain characteristic o f the bourgeoisie as a class was th a t it
was a body o f persons o f power and influence, independent o f the
pow er and influence o f traditional birth and status. To belong to it a
m an had to be ‘som eone’; a person who counted as an individual,
because o f his wealth, his capacity to com m and other men, o r other­
wise to influence them . Hence the classical form o f bourgeois politics
was, as we have seen, entirely different from the mass politics o f those
below them, including the petty-bourgeoisie. The classical recourse
o f the bourgeois in trouble or with cause for com plaint was to exer­
cise or ask for personal influence: to have a w ord with the m ayor, the
deputy, the minister, the old school or college com rade, the kinsm an
o r business contact. Bourgeois Europe was or grew full o f m ore or
less inform al systems for protection or m utual advancem ent, old-boy
netw orks, or mafias (‘friends o f friends’), am ong which those arising
from com mon attendance at the same educational institutions were
naturally very im portant, especially the institutions o f higher learn­
ing, which produced national rather than merely local linkages.* One
am ong these types o f network, freem asonry, served an even m ore
im portant purpose in certain countries, notably Rom an Catholic
L atin ones, for it could actually serve as the ideological cem ent for
the liberal bourgeoisie in its political dim ension, or indeed, as in
* In Britain, however, the so-called ‘public schools’, which developed rapidly
in this period, brought the sons o f the bourgeoisie from different parts of the
country together at an even earlier age. In France some of the great iycees in
Paris may have served a similar purpose, at all events for intellectuals.
Italy, as virtually the only perm anent and national organisation o f
the class.28 The individual bourgeois who felt called upon to com m ent
on public m atters knew that a letter to The Times or the Neue Freie
Fresse would not merely reach a large p art o f his class and the
decision makers, but, w hat was m ore im portant, th a t it would be
printed on the strength o f his standing as an individual. The bo u r­
geoisie as a class did not organise mass movements but pressure
groups. Its model in politics was no t C hartism but the A nti-C orn-
Law League.
O f course the degree to which the bourgeois was a ‘notable’ varied
enorm ously, from the grande bourgeoisie whose range o f action was
national or even international, to the m ore m odest figures who were
persons o f im portance in Aussig (Usti nad Labem) or G roningen.
K ru p p expected and received m ore consideration than T heodor
Boeninger o f D uisburg, whom the regional adm inistration merely
recom m ended for the title o f Com m ercial Counsellor (Kommerzienrat)
because he was wealthy, a capable industrialist, active in public and
church life and had supported the governm ent in elections and on
b o th municipal and district councils. Yet b o th in their various ways
were people ‘who counted’. I f arm our-plates o f internal snobbishness
divided millionaires from the rich, and these in turn from the merely
com fortable, which was natural enough in a class whose very essence
was to climb higher by individual effort, it did not destroy th at sense
o f group consciousness which turned the ‘m iddle rank’ o f society
into the ‘middle class’ or ‘bourgeoisie’.
It rested on com m on assum ptions, com m on beliefs, com m on form s
o f action. The bourgeoisie o f the third quarter o f the nineteenth
century was overwhelmingly ‘liberal’, not necessarily in a party sense
(though as we have seen Liberal parties were prevalent), as in an
ideological sense. They believed in capitalism , in competitive private
enterprise, technology, science and reason. They believed in progress,
in a certain am ount o f representative governm ent, a certain am ount
o f civil rights and liberties, so long as these were com patible with the
rule o f law and with the kind o f order which kept the poor in their
place. They believed in culture in addition to; and sometimes as an
alternative to religion, in extreme cases substituting the ritual atten­
dance at opera, theatre o r concert for th a t a t church. They believed
in the career open to enterprise and talent, and th at their ow n lives
proved its merits. As we have seen, by this tim e the traditional and
often puritan belief in the virtues o f abstem iousness and m oderation
was finding it hard to resist the reality o f achievement, but they were
still regretted. I f ever G erm an society was to collapse, argued a
writer in 1855, it would be because the middle classes had begun to
pursue appearance and luxury ‘w ithout seeking to counterbalance it
w ith the simple and hard-w orking (com petent) sense o f the bourgeois
[Buergersinn], with respect for the spiritual forces o f life, with the
effort to identify science, ideas and talent with the progressive
developm ent o f the T hird Estate’.29 Perhaps th at pervasive sense o f a
struggle for existence, a natural selection in which, after all, victory
o r even survival proved both fitness and the essentially m oral quali­
ties which could alone achieve fitness, reflects an adaptation o f the
old bourgeois ethic to the new situation. D arwinism , social or other­
wise, was no t merely science b u t ideology, even before it was form u­
lated as such. To be a bourgeois was no t merely to be superior, but
also to have dem onstrated m oral qualities equivalent to the old
puritan ones.
B ut m ore than anything else, it m eant superiority. The bourgeois
was not merely independent, a m an to w hom no one (save the state
o r G od) gave orders, but one who gave orders himself. H e was not
merely an employer, entrepreneur or capitalist but socially a ‘m aster’,
a ‘lord’ (Fabrikherr), a 'patron' or 'chef'. T he m onopoly o f com m and
- in his house, in his business, in his factory - was crucial to his self­
definition, and its form al assertion, w hether nom inal or real, is an
essential element in all industrial disputes o f the perio d : ‘But I am
also the D irector o f the Mines, th a t is to say the head [chef] o f a large
population o f workers . . . I represent the principle o f authority and
am bound to m ake it respected in my p erso n : such has always been
the conscious object o f my relations with the w orking class.’30 Only
the m em ber o f the liberal professions, or the artist and intellectual
who was not essentially an em ployer o r som eone with subordinates,
was not prim arily a ‘m aster’. Even here the ‘principle o f authority’
was far from absent, whether from the com portm ent of the traditional
continental university professor, the autocratic medical m an, the
orchestral conductor o r the capricious painter. If K rupp com m anded
his armies o f workers, Richard W agner expected total subservience
from his audience.
 D om inance implies inferiority. But the m id-nineteenth-century
bourgeoisie was divided on the nature o f th at inferiority o f the lower
classes about which there was no substantial disagreement, though
attem pts had to be m ade to distinguish, within the subaltern mass,
between those who m ight be expected to rise into, at least, the respect­
able lower middle class and those who were beyond redem ption.
Since success was due to personal merit, failure was clearly due to
personal lack o f m erit. The traditional bourgeois ethic, p uritan or
secular, had ascribed this to m oral or spiritual feebleness rath er than
to lack o f intellect, for it was evident th a t not m uch in the way o f
brains was needed fo r success in business, and conversely th at mere
brains did not guarantee wealth and still less ‘sound’ views. This did
not necessarily imply anti-intellectualism, though in Britain and the
U nited States it was pervasive, because the trium phs o f business
were pre-eminently those o f poorly educated men using em piricism
and com m on sense. Even R uskin reflected the com m on view when he
argued th at ‘busy metaphysicians are always entangling good and
active people, and weaving cobwebs am ong the finest wheels o f the
w orld’s business’. Samuel Smiles p u t the m atter m ore simply:

T h e experience to be gathered from books, though often valuable, is but o f the

nature o f learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is of the
nature o f wisdom; and a small store o f the latter is worth vastly more than a
stock o f the former.*31

But a simple classification into the m orally superior and inferior,

though adequate to distinguish the ‘respectable’ from the drunken
and licentious labouring mass, was plainly no longer adequate, except
for the striving lower middle class, if only because the ancient virtues
were no longer visibly applicable to the successful and wealthy bour­
geoisie. The ethic o f abstinence and effort could hardly be applied to
the success o f the Am erican millionaires o f the 1860s and 1870s, or
even to the wealthy m anufacturer, retired to a life o f country-house
leisure, still less to his rentier relatives; to those whose ideal was, in
R uskin’s w ords:

‘that [life] should be passed in a pleasant undulating world with iron and coal
everywhere beneath it. On each pleasant bank o f this world is to be a beautiful
mansion . . . a moderately sized park; a large garden and hothouses; and
pleasant carriage drives through the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live. . .
 the English gentleman with his gracious wife and his beautiful fam ily \ he always
able to have the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful ball
dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the sons, and a shooting in the
Highlands for himself.’32

Hence the growing im portance o f the alternative theories o f bio­

logical class superiority, which pervade so m uch o f the nineteenth-
century bourgeois Weltanschauung. Superiority was the result of
n atu ral selection, genetically transm itted (see chapter 14 below). The
bourgeois was, if not a different species, then at least the m em ber o f a
superior race, a higher stage in hum an evolution, distinct from the
lower orders who remained in the historical o r cultural equivalent o f
childhood or at m ost adolescence.
F rom m aster to master-race was thus only a short step. Y et the
right to dom inate, the unquestioned superiority o f the bourgeois as a
species, implied no t only inferiority but ideally an accepted, willing
inferiority, as in the relation between m an and w om an (which once
again symbolises much about the bourgeois world view). The wor­
kers, like women, ought to be loyal and contented. I f they were not,
it m ust be due to th at crucial figure in the social universe o f the
bourgeoisie, the ‘outside agitator’. T hough nothing was m ore obvious
to the naked eye than th at the members o f craft unions were likely to
be the best, the m ost intelligent, the m ost skilled workers, the m yth
o f the work-shy outsider exploiting simple-minded but basically
sturdy operatives was indestructible. ‘The conduct o f the workers is
deplorable,’ wrote a French m ining m anager in 1869, in the process
o f ferociously repressing the sort o f strike o f which Z ola’s Germinal
has given us a vivid picture, ‘but one m ust recognise th a t they have
been merely the savage instrum ents o f agitators’.33 T o be m ore pre­
cise: the active working-class m ilitant o r potential leader must be by
definition an ‘agitator’, since he could not be fitted into the stereotype
o f obedience, dullness and stupidity. W hen in 1859 nine o f the most
upright miners from Seaton D elaval - ‘every m an a teetotaller, six o f
them Prim itive M ethodists, and two o f the six local preachers’ - were
sent to jail for two m onths after a strike which they had opposed, the
m ine m anager was quite clear on this point. ‘I know they are respec­
table men, and th a t is why I p u t them in prison. It is no use sending
to jail those who cannot feel.’34
Such an attitude reflected the determ ination to decapitate the lower
classes, in so far as they did not shed their potential leaders spon­
taneously by absorption into the lower middle class. But it also re­
flected a considerable degree of confidence. We are a long way from
those factory-owners of the 1830s, living in constant fear o f som e­
thing like slave insurrections (see The Age o f Revolution, epigraph to
chapter 11). W hen m aster-m anufacturers talked o f the danger o f
com m unism which lurked behind any lim itation o f the absolute right
o f employers to hire and fire at will, they m eant not social revolution
bu t merely th at the right o f property and the right o f dom ination
were indistinguishable, and a bourgeois society m ust go to the dogs
once interference w ith property rights was perm itted.35 Hence the
reaction o f fear and hatred was all the m ore hysterical when the
spectre o f social revolution once again irrupted into a confident
capitalist world. The massacres o f the Paris C om m unards (see
chapter 9 above) testify to its force.

IV

A class of m asters: yes. A ruling class ? The answer is m ore complex.

The bourgeoisie was evidently not a ruling class in the sense in which
the old-style landow ner was, whose position gave him, de jure or de
facto, the effective state power over the inhabitants o f his territory.
H e norm ally operated within a functioning fram ework o f state pow er
and adm inistration which was not his own, at least outside the actual
buildings he occupied (‘my hom e is my castle’). Only in areas rem ote
from this authority, as in isolated mining settlements, or where the
state was itself weak, as in the United States, could bourgeois m asters
exercise th at sort of direct rule, whether by com m and over the local
forces o f public authority, by private armies of Pinkerton men, or by
banding together in arm ed groups o f ‘vigilantes’ to m aintain ‘o rd er’.
M oreover, in our period the case o f states in which the bourgeoisie
had won form al political control, or did not have to share it with
older political elites, was still quite exceptional. In m ost countries the
bourgeoisie, however defined, plainly did not control or exercise
political power, except perhaps at the subaltern or m unicipal level.
W hat it did exercise was hegemony, and w hat it increasingly deter­
mined was policy. There was no alternative to capitalism as a m ethod
o f economic development, and at this period this implied both the
realisation o f the econom ic and institutional program m e of the liberal
bourgeoisie (with local variations), and the crucial position in the
state o f that bourgeoisie itself. Even for the socialists the road to
proletarian trium ph ran through a fully developed capitalism. Before
1848 it had seemed for a mom ent that its crisis o f transition (see The
Age o f Revolution, p. 304) might also prove to be its final crisis, at
least in England, bu t in the 1850s it became clear th at its m ajor
period of grow th was only just beginning. It was unshakable in its
m ain bastion, Britain, and elsewhere the prospects o f social revolu­
tion paradoxically seemed to depend m ore than ever on the prospect
o f the bourgeoisie, dom estic or foreign, creating th at trium phant
capitalism which would make possible its own overthrow. In a sense
both M arx, who hailed the British conquest o f India and the A m eri­
can conquest o f half Mexico as historically progressive at this time,
and the progressive elements in Mexico or India, who looked to
alliance with the U nited States or the British Raj against their own
traditionalists (see chapter 7 above), were recognising the same global
situation. As for the rulers o f conservative, anti-bourgeois and anti­
liberal regimes in Europe, whether in Vienna, Berlin or St Petersburg,
they recognised, however reluctantly, th at the alternative to capitalist
econom ic developm ent was backwardness, and consequent weakness.
T heir problem was how to foster capitalism and with it the bour­
geoisie w ithout also acquiring bourgeois-liberal political regimes.
The simple rejection o f bourgeois society and its ideas was no longer
viable. The only organisation which frankly undertook to resist it
w ithout qualification, the Catholic C hurch, merely isolated itself.
The Syllabus o f Errors o f 1864 (see p. 131 above) and the Vatican
Council dem onstrated, by the very extremism of their rejection o f
everything that characterised the m id-nineteenth century, th a t they
were entirely on the defensive.
F rom the 1870s on this virtual m onopoly o f the bourgeois pro­
gram m e (in its ‘liberal’ forms) began to crum ble. But, by and large,
in the third quarter o f the nineteenth century it was pretty well un­
challengeable. In economic affairs even the absolutist rulers o f central
and eastern Europe found themselves abolishing serfdom and dis­
m antling the traditional apparatus o f econom ic state controls and
corporate privileges. In political affairs they found themselves calling
upon, or at least com ing to terms with, bourgeois liberals o f the m ore
m oderate sort and, however nominally, their kind o f representative
institutions. Culturally it was the bourgeois life style which prevailed
over the aristocratic, if only by a fairly general withdrawal o f the old
aristocracy from the world o f culture (as th a t word was now under­
stood) : they became, in so far as they were not already, the ‘bar­
barians’ o f M atthew A rnold (1822-88). A fter 1850 it is difficult to
think o f any kings who were great patrons o f the arts, except m ad ones
like Ludwig 11 o f Bavaria (1864-86), any noble m agnates who were
great collectors o f art, except eccentrics.* Before 1848 the certainties
o f the bourgeoisie had still been qualified by the fear o f social revo­
lution. A fter 1870 they were once again to be underm ined, not least
by the fear o f the growing movements o f the working classes. B ut in
the intervening period their trium ph seemed beyond d o u b t o r chal­
lenge. The age, judged Bismarck, who had no sympathy for a bo u r­
geois society, was one o f ‘m aterial interests’. Economic interests were
an ‘elementary force*. ‘I believe th at the advance o f economic ques­
tions in domestic developm ent is progressing and cannot be halted.’36
But w hat represented that elementary force at this period, if not
capitalism and the world m ade by and for the bourgeoisie?

* The imperial Russian ballet is perhaps an exception; but the relationships

between members of ruling houses and their dancers traditionally went beyond
the purely cultural.
W estern Culture in. 1847-1875 : O pera
33 Rudolf Braun, S o z ia le r u n d k u ltu re lle r W a n d el in ein em lan dlich en
In d u strieg eh iet im 19. u. 20. J a h rh u n d ert (Erlenbach-Zurich and Stutt­
gart 1965), p. 139, uses this term specifically for the period. His in­
valuable books (see also In d u stria lisieru n g u n d V olksleben [I960])
cannot be recommended too highly.
34 In d u stria l R em u n era tio n C o n feren ce (London 1885), P* 27.
35 In d u stria l R em u n era tio n C o n feren ce, pp. 89-90.
36 Beatrice Webb, M y A p p re n tic e sh ip (Harmondsworth 1938), pp. 189
and 195.
37 In d u stria l R em u n era tio n C on feren ce, pp. 27 and 30.

CHAPTER 13: THE BOURGEOIS W ORLD

1 Cited in L. Trdnard, *Un Industriel roubaisien du xix si&cle’, R e v u e d u

N o r d , 50 (1968), p. 38.
2 Martin Tupper, P r o v e r b ia l P h ilo so p h y (1876).
3 See Emanie Sachs, T he T errib le S iren (New York 1928), especially pp.
174-5.
4 G. von Mayr, S ta tis tik u n d G ese llsc h a tsleh re I I I S o z ia ls ta tis tik , Erste
Lieferung (Tubingen 1909), pp. 43-5. For the unreliability of statistics
on prostitution, ib id . (5. Lieferung), p. 988. For the strong relationship
of prostitution and venereal infection, Gunilla Johansson, ‘Prosti­
tution in Stockholm in the latter part of the 19th century* (mimeo)
(1974). For estimates of the prevalence and mortality from syphilis in
France, see T. Zeldin, F ran ce 1 8 4 8 -1 9 4 5 (Oxford 1974), i, pp. 304-6.
5 The freedom of visiting American girls is noted in the relevant section
of the chapter on foreigners in Paris in the superb P a ris G u ide 1 8 6 7 (2
vols).
6 For Cuba, Verena Martinez Alier, ‘Elopement and seduction in 19th
century Cuba’, P a s t a n d P r e s e n t, 55 (May 1972); for the American
South E. Genovese, R o ll J o rd a n R o ll (New York 1974), pp. 4 13-30
and R. W. Fogel and Stanley Engermann, op. c it.
7 From the ‘ Maxims for Revolutionists’ in M a n a n d S u p e r m a n ’. ‘A
moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate
drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle
class unit’ .
8 Zunkel, o p . c it., p. 320.
9 Zunkel, o p . c it., p. 526 n. 59.
10 Tupper, op. c it . : ‘Of Home’ , p. 361.
11 Tupper, loc. c it., p. 362.
12 John Ruskin, *Fors Clavigera’, in E. T. Cook and A. Wedderbum
(eds.), C ollected W orks (London and New York 1903-12), vol. 27,
letter 34.
13 Tapper, op. c it. : ‘Of Marriage’ , p. 118.
14 H. Bolitho (ed.), Further L etters o f Queen Victoria (London 1938), p„
49.
15 ‘ My opinion is that if a woman is obliged to work, at once (although
she may be a Christian and well bred) she loses the peculiar position
which the word lady conventionally designates’ (Letter to the English­
woman's Journal, vm (1866), p. 59).
16 Trdnard, op. cit., pp. 38 and 42.
17 Tupper, op. c i t. : ‘Of Joy’, p. 133.
18 J. Lambert-Dansette, ‘Le Patronat du Nord. Sa p6riode triomphante’ ,
in Bulletin de la S ociete d'histoire moderne e t contemporaire, 14, Serie
18 (1971), p. 12.
19 Charlotte Erickson, British Industrialists: S tee l and H osiery, 1850­
1950 (Cambridge 1959).
20 H. Kellenbenz, ‘Unternehmertum in SUdwestdeutschland’, Tradition,
10, 4 (August 1965), pp. 183 ff.
21 N ouvelle Biographie Generate (1861); articles: Koechlin, p. 954.
22 C. Pucheu, ‘Les Grands notables de I’Agglomeration Bordelaise du
milieu du XIXe si&cle a nos jours’, Revue d'histoire et sociale, 45
(1967), p. 493.
23 P. Guillaume, *La Fortune Bordelaise au milieu du X IX si&cle’,
Revue d histoire economique e t sociale, 43 (1965), pp. 331, 332,
and 351.
24 E. Gruner, ‘Quelques reflexions sur Telite politique dans la Con­
federation* Helvetique depuis 1848’, Revue d'histoire Economique et
sociale, 44 (1966), pp. 145 ff.
25 B. Verhaegen, ‘Le groupe Liberal a la Chambre Beige (1847-1852)’,
Revue Beige de Philologie et d'histoire, 47 (1969), 3-4, pp. 1176 ff.
26 Lambert-Dansette, op. cit., p. 9.
27 Lambert-Dansette, op. cit., p. 8; V. E. Chancellor (ed.), M a ster and
A rtisan in Victorian England (London 1969), p. 7.
28 Serge Hutin, L es Francs-M asons (Paris 1960), pp. 103 ff. and 114 ff.;
P. Chevallier, H istoire de la Francmagonnerie francaise, n (Paris 1974).
For the Iberian world, the judgment: ‘The Freemasonry of that
period was nothing but the universal conspiracy of the revolutionary
middle class against feudal, monarchical and divine tyranny. It was
the International of that class’, cited in Iris M. Zavala, M asones,
Comuneros y Carbonarios (Madrid 1971), p. 192.
29 T. Mundt, D ie neuen Bestrebungen zu einer wirtschaftlichen R eform
der unteren Volksklassen (1855), cited in Zunkel, op. tit., p. 327.
30 Rolande Trempe, ‘Contribution a 1’etude de la psychologie patronale:
!e comportement des administrateurs de la Society des Mines de
Carmaux (1856-1914)*, M ouvem ent S ocial , 43 (1963), p. 66.
31 John Ruskin, M odern P ainters , cited in W. E. Houghton, The Vic­
torian Frame o f M in d (Newhaven 1957), p. 116. Samuel Smiles, S e lf
H elp (1859), chapter 11, pp. 359-60.
32 John Ruskin, ‘Traffic’, The Crown o f W ild O lives , (1866) W orks 18,
p. 453.
33 Trempd, op. c it ,, p. 73.
34 W. L. Burn, The A ge o f Equipoise (London 1964), p. 244 n.
35 H. Ashworth in 1953-4, cited in Burn, op. cit.t p. 243.
36 H. U. Wehler, Bism arck und der Im p e ria lism s (Cologne-Berlin 1969),
p. 431.

CHAPTER 14: SCIENCE, RELIGION, IDEOLOGY

1 Francis Darwin and A. Seward (eds.), M o re L etters o f Charles D arwin

(New York 1903), ii, p. 34.
2 Cited in Engelsing, op. cit.t p. 361.
3 Anthropological R eview , IV (1866), p. 115.
4 P. Benaerts et. ah, N ationality e t N ationalism e (Paris 1968), p. 623.
5 Karl Marx, C apital , i, postscript to second edition.
6 In the Electrom agnetic Theory of Julius Stratton of the MIT. Dr S.
Zienau, to whom my references to physical sciences are enormously
indebted, tells me that this came at a fortunate moment for the Anglo-
Saxon war-effort in the field of radar.
7 J. D. Bernal, Science in H isto ry (London 1969), i i , p . 568.
8 Bernal, op. cit.
8 a Lewis Feuer has lately suggested that it was not Marx but Edward
Aveling who approached Darwin, but this does not affect the argu­
ment.
9 Marx to Engels (19 December I860) (W erk e, xxx, p. 131).
10 H. Steinthal and M. Lazarus, Z eitsch rift fu r Volkerpsychologie und
Sprachwissenschaft.
11 F. Mehring, K a rl M a rx , The S to ry o f his L ife (London 1936), p. 383
12 E. B. Tylor, ‘The Religion of Savages’, Fortnightly R eview vi (1866),
p. 83.
13 Anthropological R eview iv (1866), p. 120.