Prof: You know why I am
dressed up? When I do this course and when
I do the first half of the French course I do a lecture on
the bourgeoisie, the middle classes.
Middle class was a form of
self-identity that was constructed in the way being a
worker was constructed, or being a noble.
One day I was about to go out
among you all and talk about Daumier,
and show you some Daumier slides about the bourgeoisie,
and my wife said to me, "You can't go talk about
the bourgeoisie looking like you usually do.
You've got to look like you
mean it, like you have a vague sense of knowing it."
So, as a result, look at this.
I wear this about once a year.
Unfortunately,
I wear it to funerals. The last time I wore it was
something Bill Clinton had, some mutual friends.
I only have one tie that I
share with my son. We had to find him another tie
underneath his soccer shoes. Then we got into New York and
went to this party, and we're all dolled up and all
that. Then we went out to a
restaurant and I lost my one tie.
The last time I bought a tie,
ties cost fifteen dollars. In Ann Arbor I bought a tie.
This is a seventy-five dollar
tie. This is my only tie.
That's a long way of answering
your question about why I look like this today.
But I hope to make some sense
of that in the lecture. So, thank you very much.
I didn't set that question up,
did I? I didn't ask you,
"Please ask that question."
When you're looking at me
dressed, it's not Halloween. That's the first thing I
thought. When you look at me dressed
like this, please try to think,
knowing me a little bit as you do,
why it was that it meant a lot to dress like this in the
nineteenth century. The middle classes started
dressing like this in the nineteenth century,
dark with a little bit of color.
When you see Daumier or you see
Delacroix's famous, which I forgot the slide,
Liberty Leading the People,
and you see the bourgeois, there with his top hat,
he's dressed in a bourgeois uniform like this.
That emerges out of the
bourgeois century. While last time we talked about
the construction of class identity for ordinary people,
for working people, the bourgeoisie had as strong a
sense of self-identity as any social class you could imagine.
It was, as I'll make the point
in a minute, difficult to get into that class if you weren't
born into it. The fear of falling out of it
was something that helps motivate lots of political
things in the nineteenth century.
The nineteenth century,
in terms of being the bourgeois century--one of the things you
see in countries, particularly in Western Europe
and Great Britain, in France and in Germany,
and in Italy, is you see the middle classes
wanting the political power commensurate with their economic
status. If, in the eighteenth
century--this is one of those truisms that happens to be true
and can be exaggerated--the aristocracy,
you were born into the aristocracy.
If you hit the big time and you
get lucky, you can buy your way in, thanks to the broke French
monarchy. But the ideal aristocrat,
and this is how an aristocrat would have talked about him or
herself, was born into the aristocracy
through blood, through family.
It was an ascribed status.
In the nineteenth century one
of the things that happens with the French Revolution and with
Napoleon is that the middle-class person and
middle-class values seem to be something to be emulated.
Once we've got an increase in
the wealth of the middle classes and the diversity and complexity
that I'll talk about in a minute,
then you wanted the political power.
You wanted the right to vote.
You wanted access to
information through the press and print culture.
All of these things are closely
tied to the middle classes. That's what I'm going to talk
about today. Most of it is about bourgeois
culture. That's why I'm dressed like
this. I assure you that the minute
this lecture is over, I will go back and like--I
could never compare myself to Clark Kent--but I will find my
phone booth and change back into normal duds.
Let's talk a little bit about
the middle class in the bourgeois century.
The middle classes or the
bourgeoisie are terms that we conveniently use.
Marx talked about the
bourgeoisie as being this extremely homogenous class.
In fact, the word
"bourgeois" has really more cultural
connotations, maybe,
than objective or social categorization,
living in a bourgeois manner. We'll see some aspects of that
in terms of access to private space, middle-class concepts of
childhood, and that sort of thing.
Middle classes is probably a
better term. Bourgeois is equivalent of
burgher, but middle classes is probably, for our point of view,
a better term. It seems rather odd to be
talking about the English bourgeoisie of Leeds,
about which there is an excellent book,
because bourgeois, after all, started out as a French word.
In using and indeed insisting
on the term "middle classes,"
what I'm suggesting is the enormous complexity of the
middle class. There wasn't just one middle
class. Yet the middle classes shared
some cultural values and symbols in common and when challenged by
ordinary people could snap back in an extremely cohesive
class-based manner. Marx had some of that quite
correctly. In a Parisian newspaper called
the Journal des Débats in 1847,
someone actually did a pretty damn good job of describing the
bourgeoisie. "The bourgeoisie is not a
class," the person argued. "It is a position.
One acquires that position and
one loses it. Work, thrift,
and ability confer it," he argued, referring to
himself, of course. "Vice dissipation and
idleness mean that it can be lost."
And, so, that old kind of
aristocratic ethos of not working, of being idle,
although it can be exaggerated, as we've seen in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
nonetheless there was something to it.
An eighteenth century noble let
his fingernails grow long, sort of just hung out showing
his good taste by living in an idle, aristocratic manner.
The bourgeoisie did anything
but that. Work was part of how they
believed to get ahead, and getting ahead is what they
wanted to do. The French Revolution,
and here's an important point, I guess,
opened the way by removing legal blocks in very many places
to the career open to talents. Napoleon used to say tediously
that in each soldier's backpack there was a marshal's
baton, or staff that you could get
promoted with good work, hard work,
if you didn't get your head blown off in one of these
battles. But certainly one of the things
that comes out of his insistence on service to the state is
creating a whole series of rewards that recompensed
virtuous action and hard work. That's what the
Légion d'honneur, the Legion of Honor was all
about. Making money was part of it.
Of course, it was always in the
nineteenth century sort of classic to poke fun at bourgeois
culture, and in some cases the lack of
it, and to ascribe to the middle
classes philistine habits in which making money was really
the only thing that counted. Certainly, Friedrich Engels,
Marx's socialist partner--obsessed,
as well he should have been, with the slums of the satanic
mills of Manchester--he once wrote the following.
He says, "One day I walked
with one of these middle class gentlemen into Manchester.
I spoke to him about the
disgraceful, unhealthy slums and drew his
attention to the disgusting condition of that part of town
in which the factory workers lived.
I declared that I'd never seen
so badly built a town in my life.
He listened patiently and at
the end of the corner of a street at which we parted,
he remarked, ‘And yet,
there is a good deal of money to be made here.
Good morning, sir.
And he walked away."
One employer wrote in the 1830s
that, relative to his workers--is
that the worker, I couldn't invent this,
"should be constantly harassed by need,
for then he will not set his children a bad example and his
poverty will be the guarantee of good behavior."
Of course, this is a caricature
of middle class self-absorption, of narcissism,
of this inveterate cruelty to the classes below them.
On the other hand,
the more we study the middle classes--and in the 1960s people
really didn't study the middle classes because they didn't like
them very much. They studied workers.
But there's been an awful lot
of good work done on the middle classes.
Among them my dear friend Peter
Gay, his five volumes of the
Bourgeois Century, take on the idea that the
middle class lived without passion,
and were philistines, and that sort of thing.
The more we look at the middle
class now, we see certainly that no matter
where you look one of the things the middle class people did was
form voluntary associations. Aristocrats didn't form
voluntary associations. They didn't need to.
The middle class formed
voluntary associations, and many of these were for
extremely charitable purposes, particularly in Britain.
Again, the study that I
referred to by somebody called Morris--I think it's Morris--on
Leeds shows the kind of richness and depth to these voluntary
associations in which people try to do an awful lot for ordinary
people. It has a sense of moralizing.
There's always this sort of
top-down look about moralizing them,
and trying to get the workers to drink less,
trying to get them to go to church,
trying to get them, when it was possible,
for their children to become educated and stay in school.
There's always this tension
between families who needed children's income,
however small that was. Across the nineteenth century,
over a very long period, laws finally by the end of the
century in most places made at least primary education
obligatory, and in most cases free.
Here's a ridiculous example.
It's not a ridiculous example
if you love animals. I'm a cat person,
as I already said. The Society for the Protection
of Cruelty to Animals, these sorts of organizations
really are one of the classic examples of bourgeois voluntary
associations doing good things. They also get together to hang
out with each other and sort of try to gauge who has more money
than the other, and they get together for
social reasons in the coffeehouses of England,
and in the clubs, circles you call them in
France, and their equivalents in
Germany, and Italy, and Spain.
One of the more ludicrous kind
of mottos, we call it a devise,
a motto, of the Society for the
Protection of Cruelty to Animals was in one of the organizations
in France, which said, "One must love animals,
but not fraternize with animals."
I don't know what that means,
but the main thing is that they wanted to save animals from
being beaten, almost beaten to death in many
cases of horses. You can see how,
in places in which bullfighting over the long run in the
nineteenth and twentieth century,
such as the very south of France and in Spain--there were
always movements to try to protect the bulls,
which seems like a reasonable thing to do.
For all the bad press that the
middle class has had, and you can read some of this
bad press in what you're reading,
there is also this good side that should be evoked as well.
That's a period.
Certainly, in terms of
organized religion, the middle class goes to church
more than ordinary people, than workers,
for sure. In the case of peasants it
depends on where. As I said before,
in many parts of France, the example that's well
studied, you still had this de-Christianization.
But certainly religion was a
fundamental part of the British middle class's view of itself.
The percentage of people who
went to church could be exaggerated.
There was a study in all of
England. I don't think it was in Wales
and Scotland, but at least it was in England,
maybe in Wales, too, probably in Wales as well.
I think it was in 1851 where
they decided to look at every single church in England and
Wales, let's say, and to see how many people went
to church. They found to their horror that
it was less than they thought. They also discovered that if
everybody who had wanted to go to church had gone to various
churches, Methodist for more ordinary
people, Anglican, Catholic for the Irish and for
a certain minority of British citizens,
or Jews going to synagogue in the east end of London,
that they couldn't have accommodated all these people.
So there's a massive kind of
church building campaign that has its counterpart in almost
every country as well. Certainly in France after the
Paris Commune of 1871 they start building churches in the working
class districts perched on the edge of cities.
More about that in another
lecture. One could go on and on about
this. Religion for the middle classes
has a greater role in their lives than in working class
cities. In the case of the peasants,
there weren't any peasants left in England.
I'll talk about that and it
will be fun to talk about in one of these lectures.
Anyway, there we go.
How many people would have
considered themselves middle-class?
Again, self-identity,
how people thought of themselves is one of those
aspects that we want to discuss. How do we know?
How would you know who is
middle-class? When they first started doing
censuses--and censuses are really a nineteenth-century
phenomenon, and subsequent centuries, as I said before.
The first census was in
Copenhagen, I think, in the eighteenth century.
The first real censuses do not
come until the nineteenth century almost everywhere.
They didn't ask people--they
asked you your name and where you lived.
In some cases they asked you
your profession. But they did not say,
"Are you middle class?"
or "Are you not middle
class?" There was a whole lot of work
done in the 1970s on what they used to call the new urban
history, which is counting people up and
deciding who might well have considered themselves
middle-class. There are a lot of
dissertations written on that kind of thing.
There was one in the case of
Paris. Inevitably I have to talk some
about Paris because the work is so rich there.
A woman called Adeline Daumard
wrote a dissertation that was subsequently published called
Les Bourgeois de Paris, or The Bourgeois of
Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.
What she did is she looked at
wills. The middle-class people had
enough money to leave wills, therefore, their inventories
after death. That's what you call them.
That's one of the reasons we
know about the explosion of print culture,
because they inventoried the books that people read.
I mentioned this in the context
of Enlightenment, too, because you do have that,
too. Taking the kinds of ways that
she looked at social class, she determined that somewhere
between seventeen and nineteen percent of the Parisian
population in the first half of the nineteenth century would
have been considered bourgeois, and would have considered
themselves bourgeois, that is,
in the middle classes. In Britain the percentage is
higher. It probably approaches
twenty-five percent. I can't remember the exact
figures. That percent will continue to
increase in the nineteenth century.
You can already very well
anticipate, from what you already know,
where other parts of Europe that have large important middle
classes. The old Hanseatic port cities
of German, the German free cities that
would become part of unified Germany in 1871--northern German
cities in general, like Bremen,
and Lübeck, and Hamburg above all.
Hamburg's a huge port city.
It's got a very enormous
bourgeoisie. If you went to Madrid,
you'd find a sizeable middle class, but it would be nothing
that you would have if you compared Madrid to Barcelona.
Barcelona is a really natural
economy based upon important economic relations between its
hinterland and Barcelona, and between Barcelona and the
world, because it's a major port.
So, you've got this big teaming
middle class there as well. In the case of France,
obviously places that have lots of industry and small businesses
have middle-class people in large numbers,
though not as large numbers as workers.
Lyon would be a good example.
Lyon has the most tightly
closed middle class that you can imagine and still is.
Lyon is very Lyon.
What can one say?
Again, northern Italy you find
a huge vibrant middle class, but not in southern Italy.
Naples is one of the biggest
cities in Europe right through the early-modern period.
You've got a large middle
class, but most of Italy is extremely rural and what you had
in Rome is you had clergy. It's a city,
so you've got an important middle class.
The further east you get,
the smaller the middle class gets.
In Russia, the estimates are
about two percent of the population were middle class.
Two percent,
which isn't very much at all. And, of course,
they are clustered in Moscow and in St.
Petersburg, and in Kiev,
now Ukraine, always Ukraine but then part of
Russia, in the large cities. In Poland, Warsaw had a
large--I was just at a history museum, a fascinating one at
Warsaw Museum a couple months ago.
Warsaw, as Krakow,
had a big middle class. Gdańsk, obviously,
because it's a port city--but much of Poland was rural and
wouldn't have that kind of middle class.
Belgrade would have been the
only city in the Balkans, outside of Istanbul,
but Istanbul isn't in the Balkans, but with an important
middle class. This is all perfectly obvious.
Anyway, who are these folks and
what do they want? They're not all--how am I going
to do this? I'm going to do it like this.
You have to imagine the middle
class like this, that it's a pyramid.
It's a pyramid with a small top
and a big bottom. I'll show you a lithograph that
really represents, two of these,
in very interesting ways, I think compelling ways at the
beginning. At the very top--think of
Zurich. Think of any city you want.
Zurich has a big middle class.
So does Geneva for obvious
reasons. But at the very top there are
the great bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie.
These are people who are big
financiers. The nineteenth century bankers
will become much more important for perfectly obvious reasons.
These are big wholesale
merchants who are making bundles shipping things from here to
there. You won't yet find lawyers and
people like that. What also makes them the high
bourgeoisie or the big bourgeoisie,
a small percentage, it doesn't really matter where
this line goes, is that they have access to
political power. Even if they're in Prussia,
a place that's dominated by the nobles who are called the
Junkers, as most of you know,
they will still have access by virtue of their wealth to
political power, which is exactly the way they
want it. There's a revolution in France
in 1830, yet another one that you can read about.
Arguably--Marx says this and in
a way it's sort of true--what it does is it brings to power in
France the big bourgeoisie, and they have the ear of the
king, Louis-Philippe, who calls himself the Citizen
King. He would rule from 1830 to 1848.
In the portraits of him,
the paintings that he had done to represent who he was are very
different than those of the Bourbon kings.
The Bourbon kings are all
looking like, even the pathetic successors of
Louis XIV, they're looking like big people
in chateaus who are kings of all that they see,
which of course was more or less the case.
Louis-Philippe's view of
himself was that he was the Citizen King.
That's what he calls himself.
He's still the king.
He was noble.
He was not any bourgeois.
But in the official paintings
of him you see people dressed like me who are coming into the
throne room. They're dressed like me in dark
suits. They have power.
He wants them in the painting
with him. That's terribly revealing.
It's terribly interesting.
So, these are people,
these are big bankers, high financiers at the top.
Then you've got other layers of
bourgeoisie. You can kind of fill in the gap.
Here we have smaller bankers,
not in size but in money, industrialists,
merchants, these kinds of people,
and Daumier's, the great caricaturist's,
least favorite people--;lawyers. Lawyers rise up rapidly in
popular esteem and usefulness. The middle class likes to see
themselves as useful. You find lawyers reaching in
there and, slowly, doctors.
Remember doctors had very low
social status. They were sort of a cut above
the bad pun I make in what you read,
ordinary field surgeons during Napoleonic battles,
some of whom were butchers or people that knew how to wield a
knife. Doctors increase a
self-identity and become more important in the nineteenth
century. You also find notaries no
matter what country you're in. Notaries have a much bigger
role in Europe than they do here.
Notaries know where all the
goodies are. When you buy property in
France, by the way, if you have a mortgage you pay
twelve percent right off the top goes to the notary just for
holding in his office your deed. If you don't have a mortgage,
you pay seven percent right off the top.
So, notaries know all of the
secrets of people with money. Notaries are important in all
these countries, et cetera, et cetera.
You can kind of fill in the
occupation, but they share things together.
Then at the bottom you have the
petty bourgeoisie, and everybody's making fun of
the petty bourgeoisie, but they too had a
self-identity. I found one day in the stacks
of the library at the University of Michigan a pamphlet that was
actually the report on what surely must have been the last,
but in any case was the first World Congress of the Petty
Bourgeoisie. They met, appropriately enough,
in Brussels. Can you imagine going to a
professional history conference where they all had their little
nametags? All they do is they start up
your body and look at your nametags, and see if it's worth
looking at your face. It's really pathetic.
Can you imagine going to a
conference like the World Congress of the Petty
Bourgeoisie? "Hi, my name is
Albert." But they had a self-identity.
Who are in the petty
bourgeoisie? Lots of these classically new
nineteenth-century professions--schoolteachers.
Schoolteachers were a way of
social mobility for peasant families,
whether they were in Italy, Germany, Austria,
Hungary, Switzerland, no matter where they were.
Out of the working class or out
of the peasantry female schoolteachers become
increasingly more important. They always were in Catholic
schools because they were nuns with the big hats and all that,
and doing a very good job, even though often they were
undereducated and it was kind of hard for them to do that.
But schoolteachers you'd find
here, and also café or tavern owners,
weinstube owners. I'm just giving you a couple
examples. These are the petty bourgeoisie.
Also, very importantly,
what do you do with artisans and craftsmen?
Master artisans own the tools
that their journeymen work with. They rent or own their shops.
When things are going pretty
well they do pretty well themselves.
But when things aren't going
well, they don't do well. That's why they're on the
barricades all these times, as you know,
in the French Revolution--;the French revolutions,
and in the revolutions of 1848, as you shall discover in Vienna
and Berlin, and other places.
They're always there.
These folks are here, too.
This is your basic petty
bourgeoisie. People are always dumping all
over them needlessly. I will give you some example.
If you've ever read the great
French novelist--;he was paid by the word,
as you can see when he has descriptions of single sofas
that go on for about two pages, but Balzac.
Balzac is really the novelist
of the bourgeoisie. When he describes Paris and the
seventeen to nineteen percent of the population who are
increasingly living in the western part of Paris,
more about that another time, he describes it as a jungle.
You count your money in the
morning and then you count your money when you come home.
By the way, your wife,
who would in the census be listed as not working.
If you were a shopkeeper,
your wife was the one who kept care of the accounts.
Your wife was the one who stood
behind the counter when you were working, when you were an
artisan. He describes this as a jungle.
In order to really give an
image of what it was like, I've got to find this thing
someplace, but he's got this one
magnificent print called the "Street of the Four
Winds." That's a street in Paris,
rue des quatre vents, near the Odéon.
It doesn't matter.
But here's a guy dressed like
me. There's a theme in this.
He's dressed like me and he's
wearing his bourgeois hat. I don't have one of those.
My only hat has an M for
Michigan on it. His one suit isn't going to
blow off his body. But the wind is taking his hat,
which is a symbol of who he is. The wind is carrying it away
from his hand. In several hundred
brushstrokes, Daumier captures the look of
panic on his face because he's going to go home without his
hat, and his wife's going to say,
"Where's your hat?" He'll say, "The wind blew
it away," and he's got to buy one,
and they've got to put the money together so he is not
going to fall off the ladder in this jungle.
Then you have to imagine this
as a ladder, like this. Social mobility is the goal.
You want to have enough money
to leave to your 2.2 children. Then to really make this go
you'd have to have vines up here like the jungle.
Then you'd have to grease this
pole through bad economic times. Let's say in Europe
1816-17--don't write this down, if you do,
you're compulsive--I'm compulsive--but 1826-27,1840-41,
really bad one, 1846-47,1855, those are the really bad years.
At that point,
if you don't get credit, that's what's going on now,
here. If you can't get credit because
people withdraw the credit, same thing, then here you go.
Look out below.
You slide down this pole.
What happens down below here?
Holy cow!
That's the big sea.
I saw this wretched movie
called the Poseidon Adventure once.
It had an image where the water
is kind of coming up below and it's going to finally get to the
top and there's no more room to breathe.
This is how the people on the
bottom part of this ladder viewed the demands of the
working class. They want to vote, too.
What if they vote and somebody
wants to raise your taxes or something like that?
Boy, that's scary.
But what's down here?
This is ordinary people.
This is the other,
what would it be in the case of Paris, eighty-three percent of
the population. You're going to fall into the
ranks of the proletariat if you're on the bottom rungs here.
This is your jungle and you're
trying to make it up there to the big time.
The chances are that in these
bad years you're going to fall down.
But yet lots of people get up
and the ranks of the middle class increases everywhere in
the nineteenth century, in Russia, too,
everywhere. That's simply the case.
Now, if I could just bring this
down and show you how this works,
and talk about some accoutrements of middle class
culture that you will recognize, many of you.
This is the guy at the top.
This is Daumier.
Daumier is the greatest
caricaturist in the nineteenth century and arguably ever,
to make an extreme assertion, but it really is pretty true.
This is what he captures,
the prevailing mood in much of Europe in that money,
more than blood if you were going to exclude places like
Hungary, Poland, Spain, and Prussia,
money talks more than blood. What is the man doing?
He's counting his money.
Remember I said that you
counted your money in the morning and then you came home
at night, and counted your money again to see how you've done.
This is great.
Remember I said the variations
within the bourgeoisie? You can see this.
Some of these images,
this is really not very interesting art,
but that's not the point. Look what this shows.
The guy at the left here is a
clerk. That's a very
nineteenth-century profession, as it is for every subject.
By the way, this is before the
1860s, because that's when real fountain pens are invented.
He's got your basic quill pen
there. Now look at the coats.
They both have coats like mine,
but there's a huge difference in them.
This guy, if you have
extraordinary eyes and can read upside down,
you will be able to see that he is reading a newspaper on the
price of colonial goods, imports.
He is a wholesale merchant.
He's one of these people that's
at the very top of my triangle there.
Look, this guy's got his coat,
too. This is early in the century.
You can tell.
This is either the son-in-law
or the would-be son-in-law. The bourgeoisie didn't kiss and
hug a lot. But he's got his hand draped
rather daintily on the old guy's arm here.
He's not about to embrace him
and give him a big kiss on each cheek.
One day all of this stuff will
be his, if he plays his cards right.
They still had arranged
marriages. Love could count for something,
but marriages were still essentially,
less so for the middle classes than for ordinary people,
but economic relationships. That's what they were.
They were economic
relationships, wrangling over the dowry and
that kind of thing. Look at our guy on the left.
He's working very hard there.
This pole that is put up there
has a real sense of dividing these.
It's like the barriers on my
quite arbitrary, and not terribly well designed,
triangle there. Do these people have something
in common? Yes, they will in 1830 and they
will in 1848, but the rest of the time they
don't. He's dreaming about being this
guy. He'll work very hard and he's
educated. He had probably not secondary
education. Most people didn't go to high
school, secondary, lycée in France
or gymnasium in Germany, et cetera, et cetera.
It represents this world.
By the way, we also know that
this takes place in the center of Paris,
right behind a big department store,
subsequently the Hotel de Ville,
but right near the town hall. Anyway, there we go.
I've got to get my watch so I
can keep track of things here. This is very common.
You see this in the book you're
reading, I think. These things can be represented
spatially very easily. One of the themes of the long
run is the emergence of increased development of
prosperous western Paris, prosperous western London,
prosperous center Vienna and other places,
and increasingly impoverished east and the periphery.
That's another theme.
Still, through much of the
period, and to a lesser extent still today, where you live in a
building reflected how much money you had.
The ground floor,
in French the rez-de-chauss ée--this is the
concierge there. The concierge will be somebody
of very modest means. You'd probably place them in
the petty bourgeoisie there. Then the big apartment on the
first floor, high ceilings, big party, lots of people
dressed like me there, a piano, more about pianos in a
minute. So, this is my triangle upside
down, isn't it? The more you go up there,
you're still within the middle class.
The guy above has these little
Napoleonic beds there. I hope he's not closing his
ears against his own baby there--but no,
obviously this is a different house.
He's a musician.
This is all rather banal but
nonetheless telling. You've got an artist up here
with not much money, but he still has a little bit
of furniture, not much, his nosey neighbor
looking at his painting. Then on the top you've got the
poorest of them all, besides the cat who's on the
roof up there, you've got a seamstress.
Anyone looking at this very
popular lithograph would immediately see that she has
some dignity left. Why?
Because she has not yet pawned
her mattress. In Zola's great novel,
L'Assommoir, Gervaise dies like a dog on a
bed of straw, because there was no more
mattress. She must be at the very top.
Now these rooms then became in
the twentieth century student rooms and then were transformed
into enormously expensive lofts. But this is a way of
visualizing the special concomitance of what I'm talking
about. People were aware of what these
symbols meant. This is your classic Hamburg
financier's apartment. We don't need to go on and on
about the kind of material culture of wealth,
but there it is. Let's go on and on about it in
another one that's easier to pick up for your eyes there.
Here again, we know we're on
one of the lower floors. Why?
Because you see the trees
outside the window. You've got a domesticated
animal. Ordinary people didn't have as
many domesticated--dogs had a real purpose.
They bring the sheep down the
mountain. My wife just came down the
mountain two weeks ago bringing the sheep down from friends of
ours in the village. All these dogs are useful
things to keep the sheep in line and all of that.
This is all obvious stuff.
You've got slippers.
Ordinary people did not wear
slippers. You've got a domestic servant.
Domestic servants cost almost
nothing. It was considered to be a way
of moving up the ladder to say that you had four domestic
servants instead of three. You've got brass or copper here
on the heater. That's a good sign.
You've got very fancy chairs.
Look, these are very good
chairs, sort of Louis-Philippe chairs.
You've got print culture,
a big old porcelain plate above there, and you've got that
bourgeois accoutrement, the piano.
The piano replaces the
harpsichord. Leon Plantinga,
who is in J.E. College, who's a retired professor of
music, has got great stuff on this,
the role of the piano and the emergence,
along with William Weber, who taught at Long Beach,
the emergence of the public concert,
as opposed to the chateau concert or the church concert,
the public concert. Along with that comes the piano.
Pianos were expensive,
but the middle class has pianos.
Working people don't have
pianos. Middle-class people have pianos.
You also see something else
that's important here. There's more than one room.
You'll see in a minute there's
even more than two rooms. There are lots of rooms.
What the middle class wants,
all those people in that triangle, they want privacy.
They want privacy.
They want their own rooms.
She's playing the piano.
It's all obvious stuff.
There's the kitchen.
This is not the wife.
This is the domestic with her
children, who are part of the team who has been hired to help
run this household. There again you see the trees.
We're in the same apartment
there. You have real, real copper pots.
Back before the Bush dollar,
people would buy, bring back from Paris and from
Europe these enormously heavy copper pots.
I've carried so many of them
back. It's just incredible.
Ordinary people did not cook
with things like that. There we go.
These are the kinds of symbols
of all of this. The middle class wants privacy
and they also developed something else.
This is almost trite to say,
because so many people have said it and it can be
exaggerated, but the middle class arguably
helps create the notion of childhood.
In many early-modern paintings
children are portrayed as sort of little squished up adults and
that sort of thing. Children come into their own in
the nineteenth century. Ordinary peasants' children,
everybody slept with the animals often along with the
adults. Most ordinary people--and some
of the worst tenements in Europe were in Edinburgh,
and in Glasgow, and in Lille in France,
but also in Berlin and lots of places.
There were no secrets.
Everybody slept in the same
room. There were no secrets at all.
What the middle class wants,
besides social mobility and access to political power,
is they want space. The notion of childhood,
childhood didn't exist for ordinary people.
You started working,
helping out when you were five or six years old.
You started tending the animals
in the little courtyard as they would call it,
taking care of chickens and rabbits, and things like that.
Working people,
their children went to work right away, as soon as they
could make anything. If they were poor and didn't
have jobs, then they were sent out to beg.
Childhood became a middle class
phenomenon. To be sure, nobles had
children, but it was a different way of bringing up your
children. Nobles did not send their
children to public schools or even to private schools.
They were educated,
to some extent at least, by private tutors.
Even the notion of the
children's hour, the children's room,
the idea of a children's room, of having your own room or a
room shared with a sibling, was something that was just
inconceivable for the majority of Europeans,
the vast, vast majority of Europeans.
The children's hour--I can even
remember the horror show of being summoned for the
children's hour, when you're supposed to come
out when there were guests and run through your extraordinarily
modest bag of tricks for the guests.
Then you would be sent sort of
packing. Since I couldn't play a note on
the piano, I had been expelled from piano
after two weeks and sent back to the playing fields by a nun in
Portland, Oregon, I didn't have many tricks to
show. But the children's hour,
all of this stuff comes out of the middle class.
How about birth control?
How about not having ten or
eleven children? We have friends,
one of whom unfortunately just died, very older friends who
were born in the early 1930s in the south of France.
One had thirteen brothers and
sisters, and the other eleven. They grew up in absolute misery.
They were a very,
very Catholic family in the center of France.
The middle class,
particularly the French middle class, start reducing their
number of children. France is a particular case
because they get rid of--you could get around it by
primogeniture. The plot of land has to be
divided up into two, or three, or four,
or five, or twelve. What if you own no land?
Not so good.
So, they begin having 2.2
children or something like that. Birth control--in some parts of
Europe people think that birth control really started with
peasants and then moves up to the upper classes,
but basically, particularly in the case of
France where it's been, like most things,
studied to death, birth control really begins
with the middle classes. They are limiting their
children so that their children can be the son of,
and inherit the business and hopefully be left with enough
money to make it go. A print culture.
That was just an example.
The whole salon,
the idea of going to see art shows.
It really starts in the
eighteenth century. The middle class wants to be
seen rather like the Dutch middle class that we talked
about in the seventeenth century.
They want to be seen having
paintings. They wait in line to go to
theatres. This is all Daumier.
This is the morceau,
the piece that you're obliged to swallow after dinner.
Here's the little girl being
trotted out to play a few notes for the quite bored people who
are sitting there and waiting. Even the idea of "It's
your birthday, papa."
You didn't take time out to
celebrate a birthday if you were an ordinary person having to get
to the fields at 4:00 in the morning in the summer,
or going to work during the day. The culture of childhood is
really all there. Also, there's a whole notion,
and here again this would probably fit rather awkwardly
into the birth control description,
but there's this whole sense of being prepared that emerges with
the middle class. One of those sort of
accoutrements--I once, when I gave the equivalent of
this lecture, I had an old battered umbrella.
I was trying to explain how
people on the top rung were trying to beat down people at
the bottom. I ended up smashing this
umbrella, sort of the imaginary of somebody smashing their
guitar onstage. But the point is that the
umbrellas come with the middle class.
They are black umbrellas.
They're not these big colored
things you have now. It was the idea of protecting
that one suit. I'm from Oregon.
We didn't carry umbrellas,
because it rained all the time anyway and I'd just lose it.
Umbrellas are middle-class
accoutrements along with the piano and along with the
children's room, and along with the children's
hour, and along with the idea of not
having too many children, and along with the top hat,
and with the idea of wanting access to information through
the newspapers, wanting the right to vote,
probably not wanting those people down below you on the
ladder to vote, but demanding that you have the
right to vote. They all shared these things in
common. Lastly--gazing at his watch--in
the last one minute thirty-five seconds that remains to me,
the bourgeoisie, the middle classes,
and this is particularly true of Germany and France,
and of England, too,
and of other places--they want the right to bear arms.
They want to be in the national
guard. The national guard might
hypothetically be there in case there was an invasion of France
or Germany by, I don't know,
some distant place, the Fins or something most
unlikely. But the main reason they wanted
to join the national guard--and you had to own property to be in
the national guard. You had to be defined as a
property-owning citizen to have the right to vote.
In all of these countries the
right to vote was defined, until you have universal male
suffrage, by how much taxes you paid and
how much property you own. You can measure where you are
on this ladder by how much taxes you paid.
They didn't want to pay a lot
of taxes, but property reflects one's belief in one's own social
worth. That's the way they looked at
it. No longer was it the worth of
blood. So, they formed these national
guards, particularly after revolutions and after 1848,
or after 1830. For a while they go march
around. But these are mainly there to
protect them against the workers.
Should one day all of these
people try to rise up, climb up this ladder,
you'll be down there to stomp on their fingers or to shoot
them down. It doesn't last very long.
Pretty soon, this guy's tired.
This isn't Daumier.
I don't know who it is.
It doesn't matter.
It's not very good.
He's had it.
He's freezing.
His wife is kind of looking at
him like, "I don't know why you're doing this stuff,
marching around in the middle of the night.
No one's going to rise up
anyway." This won't last.
His old blunderbuss there on
the let will be put back in the closet, or taken out to slay
deer, or some damn thing. That will be the end of it and
they'll turn it over to more professional repressive forces
such as armies. Daumier's light lines,
and this is the last one, disappear in this painting,
which is called the Rue Transnonain,
April 15, 1934-don't write it down,
in Paris. It's a street that no longer
exists. It disappeared when Haussmann
built the boulevards in the 1850s and 1860s.
It was selected to disappear
because it recalled an event in the early 1830s when these
bourgeois panicked and start going into a house full of very
ordinary people and simply shooting them all.
The light lines disappear with
Daumier. He did another one of these
after a massacre in 1848 in Rouen and it's been lost.
We don't have it.
Rue Transnonain.
H.D. Daumier at the bottom
left. The middle classes,
for all of their insistence that they have access to
information, at least in the case of France
they cheered on a press law in 1835 that kept Daumier from
touching political scenes such as this which were deemed too
sensitive. The rue Transnonain,
where this happened in the center of Paris,
simply disappeared. It didn't quite disappear from
the collective memory of people thinking about Parisian things.
In conclusion,
the middle classes extremely vary.
They share much.
They have a common material
culture. They share a belief in achieved
status, as measured by the amount of property that you had.
They want to vote.
They want a collective voice in
decisions. For all the variety within the
middle classes, so beautifully depicted by
Daumier and other people, they still,
when push came to shove, shared an awful lot in the
bourgeois century, that of the nineteenth century.
Have a good weekend.
See you on Monday.
