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Social Questions
This chapter contains scenes of economic precarity, ambient anxiety, nutritional crisis and ultraviolence. It hovers over the societies of pre-1848 Europe, focusing on areas of pressure, displacement, blockage and conflict. Social discontent does not ‘cause’ revolutions—if it did, revolutions would be much more common. Nevertheless, the material distress of mid-nineteenth-century Europeans was the indispensable backdrop to the processes of political polarization that made the revolutions possible. It was central to the motivation of many participants in urban tumults. As important as the reality and quantity of suffering were the ways in which this era saw and tabulated social dysfunction. The ‘Social Question’ that preoccupied mid-nineteenth-century Europeans was a constellation of real-world problems, but it was also a way of seeing. The chapter opens with scenes from the lives of the poor and the not-so-poor and reflects on the mechanisms that alienated social groups from each other and pushed them over the boundary between subsistence and crisis. It explores the techniques employed by those who made things with their hands (weavers, in particular) to ameliorate their condition through the focused application of protest and violence. It closes with the political and social convulsion of 1846, when an abortive political uprising in Galicia was engulfed from below by a violent social upheaval—an episode rich in dark lessons for the people of 1848.
The Politics of Description
If you want to know how the poorest of our workers live, go to the rue des Fumiers, which is occupied almost exclusively by this class. Lower your head and enter one of the sewers that open onto the street; step into a subterranean passage where the air is as humid and cold as in a cave. You will feel your feet slipping on the filthy ground, you will fear falling into the mire. On every side as you pass you will find dark, frigid rooms whose walls ooze dirty water, lit only by the feeble light from a tiny window too badly made to be properly fastened. Push open the flimsy door and enter, if the fetid air does not make you recoil. But take care, because the dirty, uneven ground is caked with muck and neither paved nor properly tiled. Here are three or four mouldy, rickety beds, tied together with string and covered in threadbare rags that are seldom washed. And the cupboards? No need. In a home like this one, there is nothing to put in them. A spinning wheel and a loom complete the furnishings.
Thus two doctors, Ange Guépin and Eugène Bonamy, described the poorest street of their city in the year 1836. The setting was not Paris or Lyons, but Nantes, a provincial town on the River Loire in the Upper Brittany region of western France. Nantes was no teeming metropolis: nearly 76,000 people lived there in 1836, together with an overwhelmingly male transient population of around 10,700 itinerant labourers, sailors, travellers and garrison troops, numbers that placed it outside the list of Europe’s forty most populous cities. The city was still struggling to overcome the shock of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. These geopolitical disruptions had ruined the Atlantic Trade (especially in enslaved African people) that had enriched eighteenth-century Nantes, lining some of its best streets with the fine houses of prosperous slavers. Its population had fallen during the wars, and despite a commercial revival after 1815 growth remained sluggish, partly because the French Atlantic seaboard never fully recovered from the impact of the British blockade, partly because the environment for textile production became more competitive and partly because an accumulation of silt in the Loire now prevented larger vessels from reaching the town’s wharves. In 1837, the city’s external trade was still less than it had been in 1790. A statistical survey carried out by the mayor in 1838 revealed an industrial life dominated by quite small enterprises: 25 cotton mills employing 1,327 workers, 12 construction yards employing 565 workers, 38 woollen cloth, fustian and soft-goods factories, 9 copper and iron foundries, 13 small sugar refineries employing 310 workers, 5 conserve plants with 290 workers, and 38 tanneries with 193 workers. Far more numerous were those who worked outside the factories and foundries, taking in piecework, laundering, working on building sites or as servants of various kinds.
Yet this relatively modest town exhibited in microcosm extreme variations in the quality of human life and it was these that drew the attention of Guépin and Bonamy, physicians and public health experts with a keen social conscience. In a vast work of statistical description, the two doctors brought the city of Nantes to life before the eyes of the reader—its streets, quays, factories and squares, its schools, clubs, libraries, fountains, prisons and hospitals. But the most compelling passages of commentary can be found in a chapter towards the end of the book on the ‘Modes of Existence of the Diverse Classes of Nantes Society’. Here the emphasis was on the variety of social destinies. The authors discerned eight ‘classes’ in the city—this was not quite the dialectical triad that would dominate socialism after Marx. The first class consisted simply of ‘the wealthy’. Then came the four ranks of the bourgeoisie: the ‘high bourgeoisie’, the ‘prosperous bourgeoisie’, ‘the distressed bourgeoisie’ and the ‘poor bourgeoisie’. At the bottom of the pyramid were three classes of workers: the ‘well-off’, the ‘poor’ and the ‘miserable’.
The holistic, sociological quality of the observations is striking. The authors move beyond characterizing the economic conditions of each group towards an appraisal of styles, practices, awareness and values. ‘The wealthy’, they find, tend to have few children (the average is two) and to occupy apartments comprising between ten and fifteen rooms lit by between twelve and fifteen tall and wide windows. The life of the occupants is sweetened by ‘a thousand little comforts that one might regard as indispensable, were an enormous part of the population not denied them’.
Immense efforts are expended in support of the seasonal balls that the next stratum, the high bourgeoisie, holds for its daughters. Entire apartments are cleared to make space for the dancers. A daybed is installed in the attic for grandpa. Hairdressers go mad during the ball season; they are besieged like doctors during an epidemic (both Guépin and Bonamy had played a prominent role in fighting the cholera epidemic that ravaged Nantes in 1832, killing 800 residents). Whether the night of revels that followed was really worth all the effort expended was doubtful, at least in the estimation of the authors. For the truth was that a great ball at Nantes was ‘a throng where you sweat endlessly, breathe stale air and assuredly diminish your prospect of longevity’. And on the following morning, if the temperature was cold, one found in the joints of the windows ‘pieces of horribly dirty ice’. ‘The vapour which, in condensing, has formed these chunks of ice was last night the atmosphere where 300 guests breathed.’ Whereas the high bourgeois maintained their own horses and carriages, the members of a ‘comfortably off’ bourgeois household (stratum 3) were content to travel across town on the omnibus. The paterfamilias was a loyal subscriber to his reading club, but he was also forever anxious, because ‘he always knows that frugality and work will be required to cover all his expenses’. The need for economy ruled out the flamboyance exhibited by the two uppermost strata, though the children of this class mixed more easily with their social betters than their parents could.
Particularly deserving of sympathy were the ‘distressed bourgeois’ (bourgeois gênés: stratum 4). These were the employees, the professors, clerks, shopkeepers, ‘the lower order of artists’: together they formed ‘one of the least happy classes’, because their contacts with a wealthier class drew them into expenses beyond their means. These families, the authors wrote, can only sustain themselves by means of the strictest economy. The ‘poor bourgeois’ (stratum 5) occupied a paradoxical place in the social fabric: with about 1,000–1,800 francs per annum to spend, they earned little more than the better-off workers occupying the next class and could afford only two or three rooms, no servants and a patchy education for their children. These were the clerks, cashiers and lesser academics whose lot is ‘survival for the present and anxiety for the future’. But what was poverty for them was abundant wealth for the ‘comfortably off workers’ (stratum 6), who could live ‘without a care for the future’ on a smaller income (their revenues ranged from 600 to 1,000 francs). This was the class of the printers, masons, carpenters and cabinetmakers, ‘the class of good workers, generally honest, devoted to their friends, personable, tidy indoors, raising with solicitude a numerous family’. Their work was long and hard, but they laboured with courage and even joy. They derived a sense of accomplishment from the fact that their families were clothed and fed; when they returned home in the evening, they found ‘fire in the winter, and food sufficient to replenish their strength’. These were the happiest of the city’s inhabitants, because it was among them that means and aspirations were most perfectly aligned.
