Of the modern political labels that emerged and spread in the early-nineteenth-century “Age of Revolutions,” none is more difficult to pin down than “liberal.” Conservatism, socialism, and nationalism all take manifold forms, but liberalism is the most protean of all. Liberals have been royalists and republicans, anti-clericals and Catholics, individualists and communitarians, opponents and supporters of government action in society and the economy. There have been liberal advocates of universal suffrage and of restricted voting rights, liberal defenders of capitalism and liberal critics of it, liberal imperialists and liberal foes of empire. Do the terms liberal and liberalism point to one thing or many? Is there a solid core to being liberal that gives substance to all its variations, or does it owe its diffusion to some fickle fluidity that allows it to take on the shapes people and circumstances impose on it? These questions point to yet another, especially critical for historians: Just who should count as a liberal? Self-declared anti-liberals have sought to tar each other with the label, while some among those who claim it for themselves contest the right of others to bear it.

Spontaneity and structure

Marx and the avant-garde figures we have just considered were not wrong to see radical fluidity as a distinguishing feature of modernity. The dizzying pace of change that confronts twenty-first century people in so many realms fits the formula “all that is solid melts into air” very well. But what fuels the accelerating speed with which even newly created practices and expectations are left behind or cast aside is not any overall weakening in the structures within which individuals and groups act – markets, states, webs of communication – but on the contrary their increasing strength and power. We might expect that larger and denser structures would impose a slower rhythm and inhibit the spontaneous actions of the individuals who act within them, and so they do sometimes. But structure and spontaneity may also coexist in a more positive relationship, each feeding off the other. The accounts I have given at various earlier moments point to some reasons why this is so, by providing particular instances of a phenomenon that it is now time to describe in general terms, since it helps to clarify and highlight some central elements of the picture I have been seeking to elaborate here.

As networks of means expand and thicken, they furnish those who have access to them with new resources, opening up opportunities to pursue individual goals and aims for which only various kinds of inherited assets provided sufficient support before. One reason these possibilities can arise is that the networks through which they develop are networks of means, that they link people together by way of tools and implements which are themselves vehicles of action. Their thickening extends opportunities to act in ways that have an impact beyond some immediate context to people from a wider range of geographical and social locations. The replacement of inherited resources with ones to which people gain access through distant and mediated connections has taken place in many regions of modern existence, stretching from the economy and politics to culture and morality. Recalling some of the specific instances of this general phenomenon now will allow us both to bring together and flesh out some central points of this book, and to suggest ways in which the lines of historical evolution we have sought to trace have continued into the present.

Few features of classic bourgeois life have been more remarked on and bewailed than its morality, often derided as rigid, puritanical, and hypocritical, especially in regard to sex. Nineteenth-century moralists made large demands on speech and behavior in the name of decency and decorum, often in strikingly inconsistent ways. Men were allowed satisfactions considered unthinkable for women; representations of unclothed bodies were taken for granted so long as they could be assigned to some distant or mythical realm, but moralistic viewers were shocked by Manet’s ironic and playful contemporary nudes (in contrast to Mauclair’s celebration of them), and even by the suggestion of a falling gown-strap on the bare shoulder of an elegant woman in a portrait by John Singer Sargent. We can defend bourgeois morality on the grounds that many human societies have imposed narrow and inflexible standards of propriety on dress, demeanor, and public expression, especially for women, and that hypocrisy has reared its head wherever ordinary flesh-and-blood humans have sought to exhibit strict moral and religious principles in their daily lives. Bourgeois themselves were the first to call attention to hypocrisy in their midst, condemning it in the name of transparency and truth. In addition, Peter Gay’s detailed and colorful studies have shown that many nineteenth-century middle-class women and men lived far more open and varied moral lives than has commonly been supposed, often regarding sensual and erotic satisfactions as a highly desirable part of respectable existence. Even his account leaves many features of the traditional picture intact, however, and with them the need to make sense of the perplexing contours of modern bourgeois moral belief and behavior.

Preface

In my second semester of graduate school, the professor who soon became my main advisor – a deeply serious man with a broad streak of playful irony – assigned me the boggling task of regaling the following week’s seminar with ten minutes of reflection on the question: “What is the bourgeoisie?” How I sought to meet his challenge is not worth recalling, but in many ways I have been trying to face up to it ever since. Among the disparate subjects I have attempted to teach and write about over the years, a number turn out to have been linked together by a not-always-evident effort to chisel out bits and pieces of an answer: Karl Marx, French bohemianism, the history of modern thinking about the self, even the career of Marcel Duchamp. Except that I have come to think that we do better to recast the question, replacing its traditional nominative formulation with ones that are more adjectival and historical: why does the modifier “bourgeois” bear a range of meanings that often apply to people, things, actions, and ideas outside the social group it is supposed to designate? What does this array of meanings tell us about the link often posited between bourgeois life and modernity? How does this relationship between the things we call bourgeois and those we call modern alter as both of its components change over time? These questions are not always explicitly addressed in Modernity and Bourgeois Life – the Introduction sets out the ones that are – but they outline the historical and analytical space the book attempts to explore.

In French history one theme has often dominated discussions of both the structure of national life and the coming of modernity, namely the centralizing role of the state. The state’s importance in creating a unified territory and nation cannot be gainsaid; it occupies a major part in the account developed in Chapter 3 and it will continue to do so here. But recent writers have made it clear that one reason why centralization has so often taken center stage in France, both in actual life and in the way historians have portrayed it, is that regional and local contrasts and the independence to which they testify have persisted too, providing the continuing material on which centralizing efforts have worked. François Guizot, as we saw above, justified the role he assigned to the state in creating national unity in part on grounds that the new monarchy still faced many of the internal divisions confronted by the old one, and a number of recent historians have emphasized the enduring power of local differences in French history; a short list would have to include Eugen Weber, Pierre Rosanvallon, Stéphane Gerson, Susan Carol Rogers, and Gérard Noiriel. Here we draw on their work in order to sharpen our focus on the ways people whose lives were often dominated by their local situations came to be drawn into the expanding and thickening networks that opened the way to new forms of modernity and of bourgeois life during the nineteenth century.

Among the aspects of modernity whose relationship to bourgeois life have often been debated, none are more significant than the linked topics of relations between men and women, and the moral codes and attitudes that regulate them. In this chapter and the next I will try to show that the evolution of gender relations and the historical place of what is often called “Victorian” morality evolved in parallel between the middle of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth: each began by entering a phase that gave a sharper and more defined quality or shape to attitudes and relationships that existed previously but that had been treated more informally and flexibly, and each ended by exhibiting a marked relaxation of the rigidities introduced in that initial moment. A major reason for this parallel was that both were similarly affected by the expansion and thickening of networks of means, and the two stages correspond, if somewhat imprecisely, to the successive moments in the development of modernity we have sought to distinguish in previous chapters. One reason the correspondence was imperfect was that impulses which only began to find significant realization in the second phase were already at work in the first, their push toward gender equality and moral flexibility having been introduced alongside forces that pressed in the opposite direction. This makes the story we try to tell in these two chapters complex; it is also necessarily incomplete, because the depth of the moral alteration whose prospects began to emerge toward the end of the nineteenth century only became widely visible after the middle of the twentieth, at which point it would prove far deeper than most people before 1914 were in any position to expect. But certain main lines of its later unfolding were becoming visible before the War. Tying the subject of this chapter to the one considered in the next is the institution that serves as the hinge at once between private and public life, and between male–female relations and morality, namely the family.

The transformation of culture: an outline

The nineteenth century brought a heightened attention to “culture,” both as a particular sphere of life and as a word with varied and disputed meanings. The term now began to take on its two chief modern senses, one referring to the domain of literature and the arts (originally in their “high” rather than “popular” modes, a distinction much weakened today), and the other to the anthropological sense of culture as a “way of life,” what the English Victorian sociologist Edward Tylor called the “complex whole” of values and habits characteristic of some people or group in a given time and place. Many reasons can be cited to account for culture’s new prominence. In a justly celebrated book Raymond Williams showed that “culture” became a point of reference for conservative critics of market society and modern industry in England, who portrayed them as reducing all human relations to what Thomas Carlyle called the “cash nexus,” in contrast to an older, more organic form of life based on humane sentiments and a respect for higher values. The notion of culture also served to distinguish more developed societies from those regarded as closer to nature, and thus to justify the superiority Europeans asserted over peoples in other parts of the world. Tylor used the term in this way, locating particular peoples on a scale of historical development according to how far they had progressed in casting off their original barbarism. Expressed earlier by eighteenth-century writers, this evolutionary view had been challenged by Johann Gottfied Herder, who saw different peoples as possessing a particular spirit that infused all the dimensions of their lives, and argued against claims to hierarchical superiority. But views closer to Tylor’s remained dominant, and Herder’s alternative would only become widespread in anthropological circles after Bronsilaw Malinowski and Franz Boas gave it prominence in the twentieth century.

Fragmentation, consolidation, and the Bürgertum

No less paradoxical than the status of England as both the most bourgeois country and the least, or the case of France as at once the homeland of modern revolution and the country whose transformation during the nineteenth century was most gradual and the least complete, is the case of Germany. By many measures the country of the three where bourgeois groups retained their pre-modern features for the longest time, and where middle-class influence over the direction of government policy was weakest, it was nonetheless the place where the characterization of modern society and politics as “bourgeois” first found clear expression.

In its fully fledged form the notion only emerged during the 1840s, in the writings of Marx and Engels, and soon after, rather differently, in their contemporary W. H. Riehl (whom we will meet later in this chapter). But all of them relied greatly on Hegel’s theorization of bürgerliche Gesellschaft in his Philosophy of Right of 1821. In Hegel as in his German predecessors, bürgerliche Gesellschaft had a meaning best rendered in English as “civil society” rather than “bourgeois society” (Bürger also means a citizen in German), and their use of the term owed much to earlier discussions about it in other countries, notably eighteenth-century Scotland. But Hegel’s theorization differed from these others in a way that revealed its peculiarly German lineage. As will be seen when we consider his analysis in a bit more detail later on, he made a clearer distinction between civil society and the state than earlier thinkers did. The general notion of civil society as an organized form of social life governed by laws made it seem natural to consider political authority as part of it; but rulers and administrators in Germany sowed the seeds of their separation by taking bürgerliche Gesellschaft as an object of state action and policy, focusing on social relations and private behavior as targets of their efforts to improve and develop their territories. Hegel’s clear distinction between society and the state gave more explicit theoretical form to this division. In doing so he provided the starting point from which Marx, in a dialectical reversal of a kind he first learned from Hegel, would turn the notion of bourgeois society as a formation whose development and elaboration served the aims of state policy into the idea that state power had to be subservient to the needs of society’s dominant forces.

Culture high and low

From the beginning the forms of cultural activity that found expression in the more public settings emerging at the end of the eighteenth century exhibited a characteristic set of tensions. Like cultural practices in practically every time and place, they aspired to broad, even universal, validity, treating the content they presented as capable of enhancing human life in general. It became apparent quickly that these assumptions would be undermined or frustrated by the social distinctions they sometimes sought to ignore. In the case of visual art the tension was already implicit in the ways public exhibits were set up during the late eighteenth century, but it became more salient and troubling when the Revolutionary Louvre opened in 1793.

Eighteenth-century public art spaces seldom offered unrestricted entry, and when they did the results often led the organizers to think again. The British Museum admitted only small groups and for a brief time, save for students and critics who were given privileged access on certain days. The Luxembourg gallery in the 1750s was in theory open to anyone, but publicity about it was directed to the higher ranks of society, those one writer described as “men of good sense … and good faith” who possessed “sensibility and quality of mind.” After Joseph II offered free access to his collection in the Upper Belvedere in 1770 he was met with sharp criticism from both artists and his own curators, who complained that a rowdy crowd interfered with giving serious attention to the works. When a Society of Arts set up the first public show of contemporary painting in London in 1760 the art dealers who ran it offered free and open admission, but the next year they decided to impose a fee, explaining that without one the room was “crowded and incommoded by the intrusion of great numbers whose stations and education made them no proper judges of statuary or painting and who were made idle and tumultuous by the opportunity of a show.”

By the last decades of the nineteenth century the three countries on which we are focusing, England, France, and Germany, all possessed more tightly integrated national spaces, linking together regions and their components – towns, cities, countrysides, people, resources – through networks structured in remarkably similar ways. Everywhere railroads and telegraphs were creating conditions for the rapid spread of modern industry, and a new species of nationally organized parties gave a changed character to politics. Sharing common institutions and frames of action (in culture too, as will be seen later on), all three places seemed in many ways to be traversing a shared path to modernity. Yet the diverse earlier patterns of development generated by the differing configuration of networks we have sought to describe still made themselves felt, giving a distinct quality to life in each place, and in particular to the relations between bourgeois or middle-class people and those with other social identities. In this and the next two chapters we consider the particular path each country followed as it achieved this tighter mode of integration, the distinct kinds of industrial modernity and party politics each evolved, and the forms and limits of bourgeois power that ensued.

Industrial growth and the limits of precocious integration

The two-sided story in which England appears at once as the pioneer industrial nation and the model for others from late in the eighteenth century, and as following a rhythm more like that of France and Germany than has often been recognized, achieving a modern industrial economy only from around 1870, is well exemplified in the crucial topic of railroad building. Railroads were a key element of modern industry because of their importance first as a means for improving the speed and reducing the cost of transport for both people and goods, and second as a powerful stimulus to metal production and manufacturing more generally. Britain embarked on building railroads markedly earlier than any other country, and by 1850 the United Kingdom had almost 10,000 kilometers of track, nearly twice the German number and three times that of France at the same date – especially remarkable given her smaller size.

Fluidity, energy, and the promise of transformation

The opposition between cultural innovation and the bourgeoisie has become so ingrained in accounts of modernity and its history that the argument of this chapter may well surprise some readers. It is that beneath all the declarations of mutual hostility between artists and writers on the one hand and bourgeois life on the other, there lay a series of deep and revealing interconnections, and that the substance of these ties provided much of the ground on which the modernist avant-garde would mount its challenges to established forms of life and culture in the years before and just after World War I. The energies on which vanguard movements and figures sought to draw were ones generated by society at large, particularly in the selfsame commercial spheres from which aesthetic rebels sometimes felt most distant, and the pattern by which successive innovations in culture rose up to push aside their predecessors was intricately interwoven with what Joseph Schumpeter called the “creative destruction” that characterized typical bourgeois activities.

Although he did not live to encounter the figures and movements who constituted the avant-garde in the fin-de-siècle, Marx was well aware of these connections. In The Communist Manifesto he and Engels credited the bourgeoisie with revealing that humanity possessed previously unrecognized powers. “The bourgeoisie has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.” The economy was the sphere in which these forces were rooted, but the impact of their unleashing was felt in every corner of life, most notably in the realm of consciousness and culture. In order to survive and carry on in the world it was creating, the bourgeoisie had constantly to be “revolutionizing the means of production”; these repeated upheavals deprived things as they were of the stability that hitherto veiled the human capacity to alter them, revealing the true nature of social relations and their future.

Time and money form a dyad often invoked in connection with both bourgeois life and modernity. To be sure, neither belongs exclusively to any social formation or historical moment, taking on different forms and playing different roles in particular periods and places. We will see in this chapter that ways of measuring time and the forms taken on by money both developed in tandem with other topics being considered there, taking a marked and significant turn after the middle of the nineteenth century as a consequence of the deepening impact of distant relations in practically every realm of life. In order to make the importance of this turning still clearer the current chapter looks at parallels between money’s history and that of banking and finance, and concludes by considering the historical trajectory that has been attributed to one particular form of money, the one Marx sought to analyze in Capital.

Widening webs and the ordering of time

Whether it merits being called “natural” or not, the way of measuring time in Europe before the later Middle Ages (and in most other parts of the world) was less abstract than the one we know today, since it allowed the length of hours to fluctuate in accord with the longer or shorter period of daylight between sunrise and sunset. On sundials, for instance, each hour represented a given proportion of the total (a tenth or twelfth in most cases) regardless of the season. By contrast, modern “clock time” establishes days and hours of constant length, all divided into standard minutes and seconds, maintaining these regularities regardless of variations in daylight. Until fairly recently a number of historians attributed the turn to the more modern way of reckoning hours to merchants, concerned to use their own time and that of their employees in a disciplined and efficient way, in contrast to rural people whose lives were regulated by seasonal changes, and the Church, whose schedule of prayers and rituals made reference to the rhythms of the solar day. But closer attention, notably by the German historian Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, has revealed a different pattern.