The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe 1780-1914

Geoffrey Crossick, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317239543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

First published in 1995. Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt provide a major overview of the social, economic, cultural and political development of the petite bourgeoisie in eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. Through comparative analysis the authors examine issues such as the centrality of small enterprise to industrial change, the importance of family and locality to the petit-bourgeois world, the search for stability and status, and the associated political move to the right. This title will be of interest to students of history.

1

INTRODUCTION

The master artisans and shopkeepers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe have not always been looked upon kindly by their contemporaries. They have often found themselves identified with unfavourable characteristics, such as meanness, narrowness of spirit, xenophobia, an anxiety for respectability, and an excessive concern for order and propriety. Unflattering portraits of petits bourgeois have been presented by some of the period’s major writers, from Honoré de Balzac to Emile Zola, H.G. Wells and Bertolt Brecht. These images were not entirely divorced from historical reality, for such images rarely are, but in their very distortion they are doubly interesting to the historian. In the first place, they allow the historian of the petite bourgeoisie to explore the political and social motives behind these severe pictures. To what extent can we see in them the fear of established bourgeois that they might be confused with those trying to imitate them, so that the differences were exaggerated and caricatured as a defence mechanism? A good number of these critics came from petit-bourgeois origins, ridiculing the class they believed that they had left as they closed the door behind them. Alternatively, such images might be seen as part of an attempt by a section of the bourgeoisie to impose upon workers, along with the middling groups of small business owners and clerks, cultural and social standards which they could rarely hope to achieve. This literary condescension has received too little attention for those questions to be answered, but the similarity of the images across Europe is indeed striking. They could even be found amongst the Social Catholics who tried to defend the petite bourgeoisie from the end of the nineteenth century. The very individualism which the petite bourgeoisie was supposed to correct appeared even to its defenders to be more deeply rooted amongst them than amongst any other social class. ‘Its qualities of order and frugality are not always the most attractive’, a meeting of Lyon Social Catholics was told in 1909, ‘and its egoism and narrowness of spirit are faults which are far too common’.¹

Texts denigrating the petite bourgeoisie have a second interest for the historian, for they could provoke reactions amongst shopkeepers and master artisans themselves, of the kind which Jacques Rancière has shown amongst workers in mid-nineteenth-century France, who reacted against their negative image in contemporary discourse with a vigorous defence of their own honour.² The concern of better-established masters and more stable shopkeepers to stress the differences that separated them from the more fragile margins of small enterprise is evidence of an analogous strategy. In debates on the electoral system to be established for the Retailers’ Chamber in Bremen, for example, shopkeepers as well as bourgeois deputies agreed that fishmongers certainly had no place in such a Chamber.³

The leading schools of European thought have generally offered a no more flattering picture of the petite bourgeoisie which could be used as the basis for analysis. Karl Marx’s reflections on French history presented an insistently negative image of the petite bourgeoisie though, of the two classic texts, Class Struggles in France contains a much finer perception of the ambiguities of petit-bourgeois politics than the more acerbic denunciations in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.⁴ Marx’s belief that the situation in 1848 had been ripe for revolution made him judge severely and in moralistic terms the decisions of the démo-socs, whom he identified essentially with the petite bourgeoisie. This negative image became integrated in his analysis of the logic of capitalism, which would progressively eliminate middling social groups. Marx’s successors drew the conclusion that only social classes inserted within the process of capitalist evolution could properly understand their social position and their political interests, which meant that the petite bourgeoisie was condemned perpetually to deceive itself and to attach its political flag to the cause of one or other of the main classes. Marx may have rejected, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, the proposition of the German Social Democrats that all classes other than the proletariat were inherently reactionary, but a polarised image of the class structure nonetheless continued in the SPD which, in its Erfurt Programme of 1891, could find little of significance in a small business sector that was simply waiting to disappear.⁵ This catastrophic vision may have come into question at the end of the century,⁶ but few Marxists sought to advance beyond the negative picture of the petite bourgeoisie that had dominated Marx’s own analysis.

Liberal writers in many countries believed during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century that small masters and shopkeepers could be integrated within a larger middle class that would oppose both aristocracy and populace. In German liberalism’s most representative text, the Rotteck-Welckersches Staatslexikon of 1838, liberals found in the artisanat,

the source of a secure, independent and contented condition; for their families the possibility of a good education and a positive future; and finally for the state the solid base of an independent desire for legal freedom, combined with an instinctive hostility to violent transformation, and even to risky and precocious attempts at change.⁷

In the last third of the century, however, artisans and shopkeepers in various European countries distanced themselves from liberal values and turned towards social and economic protectionism. The advance of industrial and urban concentration thus shattered the unity of property owners. Some German, and indeed French, liberals saw in this evidence that petits bourgeois had dangerous anti-liberal leanings which would push them into the camp of the friends not of progress but of order. The following century saw this readily adapted into an explanation for fascism.

However, as far as conservative social thought was concerned, the petite bourgeoisie stood alongside aristocrats and peasants as the positive foundations of social stability, and it is through conservative idealisations of small enterprise that its most favourable characterisation emerged. Its disappearance, or even its substantial weakening, would remove the middle of society, and with it, the rampart against class division. A terminology of the middle came to be used for this group – classes moyennes and Mittelstand – which signified the social role that conservative thought attached to it. As early as the middle of the century Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl had claimed that ‘amongst the citizens of a town the artisan is the conservative par excellence. But he will not remain a conservative if he is pauperised or allowed to degenerate.’⁸ It became a powerful refrain amongst conservatives, especially Catholic conservatives, from the late nineteenth century. Hector Lambrechts, the Belgian lawyer and civil servant who from the 1890s was an indefatigable presence formulating policy on behalf of the petite bourgeoisie, stressed that ‘the classes moyennes … are dying, and their disappearance will prove fatal to the social order, for their existence is a condition of both progress and peace’.⁹ Here was a recurrent Aristotelian vision which identified an influential middle as the basis for social equilibrium.

Each of these different perspectives drew upon real aspects of the situation of petits bourgeois within European societies. Each started from the threat hanging over the world of small enterprise, though proceeding to draw very different conclusions from that threat. They remain relevant to the analyses which follow, for they were part of the framework within which petits bourgeois came to define their place in society, but they lack the analytical force to guide a historical study. For that it is necessary to turn to the theory of social class which has been such a powerful influence on the analysis of industrial society. However, class identification of the petite bourgeoisie is by no means straightforward. Composed of master artisans and shopkeepers who generally owned their own tools of work or of production, but who at the same time contributed their own personal labour power, the petite bourgeoisie cannot be readily incorporated within an approach to class which centres on the social relations of production. In that Marxist perspective its specific character derives precisely from the fact that it straddles the class of those who own the means of production and those who are separated from them, those who extract surplus-value and those who produce it. The approach of Max Weber seems more helpful, stressing that the non-monopolistic position of small producers and small retailers in the market place constituted the essence of their social position. Unlike wage-earners, they enter the market to sell a product rather than to sell their labour power. On the other hand, their lack of monopolistic control means that they find themselves pitted in an unequal struggle with large-scale enterprise. It is Weber’s emphasis on the market rather than production that is particularly valuable, for it directs attention to the economic ambiguities in the position of small enterprise, as well as to the significance of the market in defining both the situation and the demands of artisans and shopkeepers in nineteenth-century Europe. Weber’s conception of social class stressed the role of such social ties as marriage, occupational inheritance and social proximity in unifying diverse social categories. Although no social class is wholly united or homogeneous, the examination of proximity and distance amongst different occupations makes the question of class coherence a central one. This is particularly relevant to the petite bourgeoisie, whose diversity of circumstances might tempt the historian rapidly to conclude that little could unify shopkeepers and master artisans.¹⁰

The petite bourgeoisie has rarely engaged the interest of those concerned with the theory of social class in twentieth-century Europe. The major exception has been the experience of German fascism, which stimulated a sociological reconsideration of the place and character of the petite bourgeoisie. Nazism was rapidly diagnosed as a movement based on the owners of small enterprise and salaried employees, shaping itself around their fears and ambitions. The concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit had already become prominent in discussions of the petite bourgeoisie towards the end of the Weimar Republic, indicating a disjuncture or time-lag at the root of petit-bourgeois disquiet, confronting modernity from the perspective of a past from which they found it hard to adjust. Authors as different as Theodor Geiger and Ernst Bloch laid emphasis on the way in which the world of the workshop and the shop, while participating and living in the twentieth century, remained attached to a pre-industrial and guild-based set of values through which they interpreted society and their own problems. That disjuncture supposedly produced irrational solutions to the problems of the present, solutions ultimately expressed in petit-bourgeois support for fascism.¹¹

Sociological writings about the petite bourgeoisie thus draw heavily on the social and ideological atmosphere of the time in which they were produced. They were in this respect no different from work on any other social class, but the relative paucity of attention to the world of small business has made that relationship a more acute one. Sociologists have more recently given only intermittent attention to the petite bourgeoisie, and it is interesting that it has come especially into focus for those whose goals were primarily concerned with resolving theoretical problems of class analysis, such as Nicos Poulantzas or Erik Olin Wright.¹² Sociological attention to the petite bourgeoisie has rarely assumed a serious historical dimension, beyond the rather formulaic attachment of the small enterprise petite bourgeoisie to an older (and hence historically situated) mode of production, which for the French sociologist Christian Baudelot and his colleagues had to be distinguished from managers and white-collar employees in private and state employment.¹³

Most sociological attention has understandably been directed at the latter groups, those who have been variously termed the ‘new middle class’ or the ‘new petite bourgeoisie’, the range of educated and salaried occupations whose emergence is certainly the most striking difference between the nineteenth-century social structure and that which has developed during the twentieth century, and most rapidly since the 1960s. The debates concerning the enlarging of the social middle were not unknown during the period covered by this book, for the broadening of the concept of the classes moyennes or petite bourgeoisie to incorporate such groups as white-collar employees, managers, schoolteachers, and civil servants was an attractive option for writers anxious to identify the middle as a force to be won for the existing order, but having little confidence in the viability or even the advisability of saving small enterprise. Even if their main period of growth came later, the new occupations were expanding in the period before 1914 as more advanced economies, scientific management, and bureaucratised states provided the basis for their growth. It is therefore not surprising that sociologists have addressed themselves more to the new than to the old petite bourgeoisie. Erik Olin Wright’s efforts to define the ambiguities of an increasingly complex class structure through focusing on the middle represents one of the most intellectually ambitious engagements, but his interest amongst the middling groups is not focused on the independent petite bourgeoisie. By placing the ambiguities of class position at the centre of his analysis Wright has touched on what are central historical concerns of this book, but his focus is resolutely that of the later twentieth century, and in its concern for the new salaried occupations he echoes the interests of other sociologists.¹⁴

The notable exception to this generalisation, both in their focus and in their sensitive historical perspective, is the work of Frank Bechhofer, Brian Elliott and their colleagues, whose work combined general discussions of the significance of the petite bourgeoisie in contemporary Britain with empirical studies of small shopkeepers. At an early stage of their project they noted ‘the stubborn, almost incomprehensible persistence of the stratum in all industrial capitalist societies (and some socialist ones too)’.¹⁵ Its persistence during the present century has derived above all from its flexibility and from its positive relationship to capitalism for, they argue, ‘the secret of its survival is that it adjusts to its habitat – to capitalism in all its phases’.¹⁶ For Bechhofer and Elliott its varied politics and its social values embodied an essential defence for capitalist societies, expressing not only ‘sentiments supportive of capitalism and the institutions of liberal democracy’,¹⁷ but also distinctive moral values bound up with such ideas as individualism, the family, hard work, thrift and personal aspiration. The petite bourgeoisie may have become more economically marginal in the course of the twentieth century, but its social and ideological role in sustaining and reproducing the values of a capitalist society remains fundamental.¹⁸ In their distinctive approach linking empirical analysis to sociological theory, Bechhofer and Elliott have firmly resisted the temptation to place the petite bourgeoisie within a larger social grouping, insisting that it was different not only from workers and capitalists, but also from the so-called ‘new middle class’.

Neither diverse sociological approaches nor the historical record suggest that it would be fruitful to begin an analysis of the petite bourgeoisie in classic terms of class analysis, to follow some process of class formation through the period under study here. The petite bourgeoisie, we argue, has a place in the social formation which makes it very much a part of industrial capitalist society, and as such it emerges alongside the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation that were central to the construction of class societies in Europe. Nevertheless, it would be inappropriate to seek it in terms of fundamental economic relations, relative homogeneity of economic situation or social relations, a class culture, and organisation in political parties. The danger of freezing social experiences, and losing sight of the ambivalent and dynamic nature of those experiences over time, is one that applies to the historical analysis of any class, but it is an especial danger with a social group which was particularly and necessarily ambiguous in relation to classic ideas of class.

How far do the master artisans and shopkeepers who are the subject of this book constitute a single social group, even a single social class? Enough has been said already to indicate the difficulties in giving a rapid affirmative answer to those questions. If by social class we imply a group which can be distinguished from others by its specific productive relations, close social and institutional contacts, distinctive social characteristics, demographic continuities and sense of class identity, then it must be concluded that the economic heterogeneity, ambiguity of productive relations, social instability and lack of political unity of master artisans and small shopkeepers combine to complicate the notion of the petite bourgeoisie as a social class. Not only were artisans primarily concerned with production whereas shopkeepers earned their living from the distribution of goods and services, but the relation of each to the development of industrial capitalism differed during the period under study here. The artisanat was caught up earlier and more intensively in the process of capitalist industrialisation, with sectors producing for consumer markets finding by the 1830s and 1840s that merchants were reconstructing relations in their industry in a way that exposed them to increasingly vigorous competition and the challenge to artisanal methods of production. During these years individual shopkeepers suffered the pressures common to all small enterprises, but retailing as a whole expanded with industrial and urban change, and the small independent shopkeeper was at the heart of the expansion. It was not until the late nineteenth century that independent shopkeepers were faced with the entry of large-scale capital into retailing. It is therefore hardly surprising that when European petits bourgeois began to organise extensively towards the end of the nineteenth century it was shopkeepers who were at the heart of the movements, everywhere except in Germany where the timing of industrialisation, the strength of corporate expectations and the attention of political elites combined to give artisans a significant role.

A profound social heterogeneity within the world of small enterprise complicates matters further. At one extreme stood the well-established traders and master craftsmen of a town with several employees, and where businesses often passed to the next generation...