A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State
368
A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State
368eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Horne explains how Musée founders believed—and convinced others to believe—that the Third Republic would carry out the social mission of the French Revolution and create a new social contract for modern France, one based on the rights of citizenship and that assumed collective responsibility for the victims of social change. Challenging the persistent notion of the Third Republic as the stagnant backwater of European social reform, Horne instead depicts the intellectually sophisticated and progressive political culture of a generation that laid the groundwork for the rise of a hybrid welfare system, characterized by a partnership between private agencies and government. With a focus on the cultural origins of turn-of-the-century thought—including religion, republicanism, liberalism, solidarism, and early sociology—A Social Laboratory for Modern France demonstrates how French reformers grappled with social problems that are still of the utmost relevance today and how they initiated a process that gave the welfare state the task of achieving social cohesion within an industrializing republic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822383246 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Janet R. Horne is Associate Professor of French at the University of Virginia.
Read an Excerpt
A Social Laboratory for Modern France
THE MUSÉE SOCIAL & THE RISE OF THE WELFARE STATEBy Janet R. Horne
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2002 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2792-9
Chapter One
The Modern Sphinx: Debating the Social Question in Nineteenth-Century France
* * *
The modern sphinx asks our civilization: how can we grant the impoverished classes more civilization, more happiness, more security; how can we diminish the frightening gap that separates the so-called superior classes from the people?-LOUIS VARLEZ, 1894
This waning century will go down in history as "the century of social questions," not because it has resolved them, but because it was the first to ask them and to understand their importance.-ÉMILE CHEYSSON, 1894
Paris was gearing up for the show of the century. The 1889 Universal Exhibition, a world's fair like no other, would celebrate jointly the centennial of the Revolution, the apparent triumph of French democracy in the Third Republic, and the fruits of the new industrial order. Although France was poised for the festivities, all was not well. Eiffel's tower daily reached higher into the sky, but it also cast a long shadow over a country in the throes of deep political and economic change. Democratic institutions were fragile, threats totheir stability abounded, and not everyone cheered the memory of what had been, by all accounts, an extremely violent revolution that scarred French society while catapulting it into the modern era. The Dreyfus Affair soon laid bare the painfully deep fractures that still divided the body politic. Compounded by a serious downturn in industrial growth during the 1880s, France's first great depression, vicious labor confrontations were becoming a regular feature of the industrial landscape. Yet in 1889, under the determined and hopeful leadership of liberal republicans for whom this new day of the French Republic was merely dawning, the Exhibition's show would go on.
From the wings of this world stage under construction, the engineer Émile Cheysson, the former businessman and mayor of Le Havre Jules Siegfried, and a group of their reform-minded friends strategized about mounting their own show at the Exhibition, a "social museum" that would showcase not only the myriad achievements of the industrial age but also its problems. These men were not socialist critics of the regime or malcontents seeking a platform to sell their particular brand of polemic. Instead, Cheysson and his friends were liberal republicans cut from the same conservative cloth as those who currently wielded political power in France. They did have an agenda of their own, a social agenda that added a rhetorical twist to the planned fanfare to the industrial reign of iron. Beneath the electric glow of Eiffel's shrine to industrial achievement, they proposed a controversial idea: that the French Republic offer the world a glimpse of the underbelly of the industrial beast by alluding to the social costs of industrialization and by praising those who had tried to do something about them. Their social museum would do just that. It would not pretend that all was well in paradise, but-fueled in no small measure by social fear-it would focus instead on finding solutions to the dangers and upheavals caused by industrialization. What could be a more fitting centennial tribute to the Revolution's legacy to the Third Republic? With all eyes on Paris as the city preened and polished for the great event, the stage was also being set for French elites to face the republican challenge of a renewed social contract in the age of industry.
From different walks of life and political persuasions, the enthusiasts who rallied in support of Cheysson's social museum shared at least one conviction: social reform had become an urgent priority in fin de siècle France. Avid supporters of industrial growth, they nonetheless shuddered at the evidence of its excesses. Amassed in the margins of a budding new world of factories, trains, cities, and leisure travel for the wealthy were outcast, impoverished workers and their families, victims of overwork, disease, urban squalor, and rural poverty. The social ravages of economic upheaval tarnished the newly minted republican project and threatened to explode the industrial dream. Engineers and professors, publicists and actuaries, doctors and architects, lawyers and students-those who answered Cheysson's call were not among the country's most visible political leaders or well-known intellectuals. They were members of a burgeoning middle class, a faceless crowd in the historical record, often with professional qualifications but lacking secure social or class identities. Ambitious, self-proclaimed experts with pretentions to elite status, they forged and wielded a scientistic language borrowed from their professional fields of endeavor and applied to the analysis of contemporary society.
Equally important, the men and women whose names populate these pages saw themselves as social reformers. An international blossoming of similar reform efforts was underway in each industrializing nation. Networks of exchange, both informal and highly organized, characterized this reform movement, infusing it with a fluidity that echoed results back and forth across the European Continent and the Atlantic Ocean. Though indebted to this international exchange, French reformers also drew upon a wealth of national experience, writing, and debate left to them by their eighteenth-and nineteenth-century predecessors-philanthropists, doctors, social commentators, legislators, and enlightened industrialists-who argued and speculated over the merits and dangers of the industrial era. Well versed in these early debates, late-nineteenth-century reformers continued them. They joined a transgenerational dialogue on the nature of liberal society, on the benefits and drawbacks of public assistance versus private charity, and on the legitimate role of the state in relation to society. They participated in the construction of a public language of social welfare, slowly fashioned in France since the revolutionary era. To understand the sources of this language and to reveal the deeper cultural roots of social reform efforts in France, one must contemplate a new the multifaceted nature of nineteenth-century debate on the "social question."
The Modern Sphinx: Interpreting the Social Question
Omnipresent throughout nineteenth-century public discourse, the social question became a catch-all phrase referring to an amalgam of responses to social and economic change in postrevolutionary France. It captured a strong element of bourgeois fear, both of change itself and of the possibility of not being able to understand or harness change; it also embodied fear of workers and of labor militancy. But the social question referred as well to a new form of poverty linked to the advent of the industrial age. It implied far-reaching concerns about social responsibility, the function of a modern elite, citizenship in the Republic, the bonds of civic community, class relations, gender differences, and national identity. As will be seen in this chapter, the rise of social awareness of the lives and working conditions of industrial workers was also at the origin of a "science of moeurs," a cataloging of workers' mores, behaviors, and attitudes-characterized by the studies of early sociologist and metallurgical engineer Frédéric Le Play and his disciples-that constituted a first step in nineteenth-century France toward the constitution of a science of society. This rather amorphous term-the social question-would disappear gradually only with the rise of a science of society that offered empirical tools of analysis and intervention. As Léon Gambetta asserted so presciently in 1872, "There is no social remedy because there is no social question." Instead, he saw "a series of problems" that would "be resolved one by one and not by a single formula." Indeed, by the century's end, when reformers possessed a sharper assessment of France's social ills, the amalgamated notion of a social question was gradually discarded and was replaced in reform parlance by discrete "social questions," the social issues and problems to which we still commonly allude today. But when the social question first emerged in nineteenth-century France, it referred primarily to a new experience of life and labor among the working classes. Confronted with the demands of industrialization and urban growth, an increasing number of French workers encountered irregular employment made problematic by alarming levels of poverty. "The industrial era has begun; pauperism is born." Thus, in 1865, did the liberal economist Émile Laurent acknowledge that industrialization had brought in its wake profound changes in the notion and experience of poverty. The general increase in wealth and happiness promised by a generation of political economists and the free pursuit of property, liberty, and industry had given rise instead to a troubling army of indigents, vagabonds, and poverty-stricken workers. These were "the dangerous classes," or "the new poor," a substratum of society where poverty, criminality, and disease were intermingled. Born of industrial wage labor and commonly referred to by the English euphemism "pauperism," this was a different, more permanent form of poverty. Expanding markets, a growing factory system, and a thriving tradition of rural manufacturing not only restructured work but also spawned new forms of fatigue, exploitation, and misery. The face of labor, too, was changing as women and children flooded into the workforce. This human side of the ferment caused by economic growth constituted the social question. Not confined within elite academies or sociétés savantes, the human dimension of the social question was visible to all. Pauperism haunted the public imagination, urban thoroughfares, and factory neighborhoods; it preoccupied citizens from various walks of life, from those who witnessed it through their work in private charities to the industrialists and doctors who took note of the physical and social symptoms that resulted from the new industrial environment. Unprecedented forms of social conflict, such as the Canut silk-worker revolts of the 1830s, erupted in tandem with this new form of poverty, revealing the first stirrings of a new working-class consciousness linked to the condition of proletarianization. The question of how to eradicate pauperism and how to respond to labor unrest only intensified the tenor of public debate on the social question throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century.
As the impact of industrialization and urban growth on workers' lives became more visible to a fraction of French elites, the social question also entered the realm of public debate. It became a Janus-faced phenomenon, rooted in the actual experience of workers but also spawning distinct discourses about poverty and the working poor created by contemporary bourgeois observers as they vied with one another for renown in the arenas of public opinion. "The individual is responsible for his impoverishment!"-"Poverty is a moral question, not a social question!"-"The collectivity has a responsibility to investigate and alleviate the material conditions of poverty!" Such conflicting pronouncements about poverty seemed to take on a life of their own as, for generation to generation (indeed, from nineteenth-century Europe to twenty-first-century America), platitudes exchanged about the true nature of poverty seemed to deflect attention away from the actual problems at hand, often contributing to stasis and merely comforting those who benefited from the status quo. For the reformers of late-nineteenth-century France, after a century of such debate, the question persisted: How could the social question be solved? This quandary, as if posed by a modern Sphinx, left an enduring riddle. Unresolved, yet omnipresent, the social question brought to the fore a critical debate on the nature of industrial society in France, one that would be pursued far beyond the threshold of the nineteenth century.
The Emergence of the Social Question
The nature of the social question-in both its socioeconomic and discursive dimensions-was tied to the specific patterns of industrialization in nineteenth-century France. French industry did not experience a decisive takeoff as was previously believed; instead, it evolved according to a complex, multirhythmed process of growth, following both regional and industry-specific patterns. A mixed or dual economy best describes what has become known as the French model of industrialization. Based on a concentrated industrial sector (particularly in mining, metallurgy, and the railroads), this model is also characterized by a very gradual shift to an urban economy; a relatively even geographic distribution of the population; and, particularly, the dynamic persistence of dispersed rural industry in combination with subsistence agriculture. The early phases of concentrated manufacturing and large-scale industry in France relied heavily on this mixed economy and a seasonal workforce that could supplement its income through farming or other manufacturing-related activities. The coexistence of old and new forms of work led to the persistence in France of an atomized and craft-oriented working class, marked by small production units and often by workers' ownership of the tools of production, throughout the nineteenth century and even beyond. The familiar contours of a modern working class characterized by the industrial laborer, and of a massive rural exodus toward the cities were late-nineteenth-century phenomena in France.
A Nation Uprooted
These characteristics of French economic development had a profound impact on how the social question was first formulated in the early nineteenth century and subsequently reformulated in the 1880s when industrial capitalism emerged fully. Literature on the social question mirrored this uneven process of industrialization and molded the subsequent language of social reform. One recurrent theme of this literature in France, whether in essays, novels, or political tracts, was the fear of déracinement: the uprooting of the peasantry from the countryside, the abandonment of agricultural labor for work in the mechanized factories. Until well into the twentieth century, reformers from across the political spectrum decried this uprooting from the land as a destabilizing factor for the French nation and lauded instead the multiple benefits that would ensue if workers remained close to the land. The deep cultural resonance of this theme-later exploited by the Vichy regime and the French agricultural lobby-is evident throughout the reform literature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France.
Émile Cheysson's mentor, the early social scientist Frédéric Le Play, for instance, exhorted male workers not to rely exclusively on an industrial wage for their livelihood, encouraging them instead to continue cultivating the land in order to ensure their family's sustenance during the sporadic economic crises of early industrialization. In addition to giving the family a margin of autonomy, Le Play believed that property ownership was essential to establishing the material and moral foundations of paternal authority. A man's secure tie to the land, he argued, would create a sense of continuity between generations and order within the family. Dispossession from the land, however, would undercut the domestic power of the father, causing the family, and thereby society at large, to collapse.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Social Laboratory for Modern France by Janet R. Horne Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
Part One. Rhetoric of Reform
1. The Modern Sphinx: Debating the Social Question in Nineteenth-
Century France
2. Inventing a Social Museum
Part Two. Networking for Reform
3. A Genealogy of Republican Reform
4. A Laboratory for Social Reform
Part Three. Implementing Reform
5. Voluntary Associations and the Republican Ideal
6. The Modernity of Hygiene: Interventions in the City
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index