In The Peasants (1844), Balzac presents a peasant community through the eyes of educated outsiders who see it as something alien and violent. ‘They are [Fenimore] Cooper’s Redskins,’ reflects a Parisian journalist, Blondet, ‘you don’t have to go to America to see savages.’ He juxtaposes the château, owned by a count, one of Napoleon’s generals, and the tavern, a ‘viper’s nest’ where drunkenness and greed fuel ‘the hatred of the proletarian and peasant against the master and the rich man’. The curé, sent like a missionary among the infidel, argues that the French Revolution was a jacquerie in revenge for 1,200 years of feudal oppression. At the end of the novel the general is driven out and the peasants divide his estate into a thousand lots which they share between themselves.1
This account suggests a tremendous land hunger among the French peasantry which drove them to revolt and savagery. They had a passion to become independent smallholders rather than remain the farmers or labourers of great landlords. There was a common belief in the nineteenth century that before the Revolution the peasantry had been the virtually landless serfs of feudal lords and abbots, and had become landholders as a result of the division and sale of church and noble land at the Revolution. Before 1789, in fact, peasants owned between 22 and 70 per cent of French land, more in the uplands or bocage regions of the west, less around large towns where the bourgeoisie bought land.2 About 10 per cent of all land changed hands at the Revolution, mainly as a result of the sale of church lands, confiscated by the National Assembly as biens nationaux in order to solve the state debt crisis, and the sale of lands of nobles who opposed the Revolution and emigrated. At this point it is true that the peasantry gained more land, but not as much as the bourgeoisie and even petite bourgeoisie of traders and artisans, who were better placed to make a killing. In the Nord department, for example, the clergy lost the 20 per cent of the land they held, and the nobility declined from 22 to 13 per cent. The peasantry increased its stake from 30 to 42 per cent, both as smallholders owning less than 10 hectares and as a ‘rural bourgeoisie’ owning between 10 and 40 or even 100 hectares, but the share of the urban bourgeoisie rose from 17 to 29 per cent, especially around large towns such as Lille.3 In the Amboise area on the Loire, where 15 per cent of the land changed hands, the peasantry acquired 32 per cent of the land sold, with winegrowers and larger peasant farmers doing particularly well, and artisans and traders such as coopers, innkeepers, butchers and bakers secured 23 per cent; but again the urban bourgeoisie did best with 35 per cent of the land sold.4 In the Beauce around Chartres, finally, 47 per cent of the buyers were peasants, but they secured only 27 per cent of the land sold, while artisans and traders who were 17 per cent of the buyers obtained 26 per cent of the land, and bourgeois property-owners, liberal professions and civil servants, who also made up 17 per cent of the buyers, obtained 40 per cent of the land.5
Even more profound than the land market was the impact of the Revolution on patterns of inheritance. In 1793 the Convention established the equal right of all children to their parents’ estate, but this democratic right threatened to break up family farms to a degree that made them unviable, so in 1800 the Consulate allowed parents to dispose freely of part of the estate, while dividing the rest up equally among the heirs. This permitted the family farm to be passed down more or less intact to one main heir, while endowing the other children with dowries or some business capital.6 While awaiting their inheritance younger sons and daughters generally worked outside the family farms as day-labourers or artisans. Agricol Perdiguier, whose father was a carpenter and winegrower near Avignon, had two elder brothers who wanted to become farmers, one of whom had done eleven years in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, so Agricol was apprenticed at the age of thirteen or fourteen, outside the family, to a carpenter.7 Marcel Bourgeois, the second son and one of five children of a mountain farmer in Franche-Comté, saw the farm go to his elder brother and was obliged to become a clockmaker in the next commune. As it turned out he married a tradeswoman, his business did well, and in 1847 he was able to buy out the share of his brother in the farm.8 The heir due to inherit the farm might marry and live and work in the parental household in what was known as a ‘pot and hearth’ community, but the question of when the inheritance would materialize could become pressing. Arnaud Bouzeran, a ploughman who married Marie Sanson, who was due to inherit the family farm near Montauban, lived with his in-laws under such an arrangement for ten years. He came into the farm but on condition that he pay a pension to Étienne Sanson, his father-in-law, a payment that cancelled out his profits. When in 1827 he fell behind with his payments and Sanson threatened to take him to court, Bouzeran killed him with an axe.9 This was violence of Balzacian proportions, but it was rare.
The size of a farm was central to whether it could maintain a family. As a general rule 10 hectares of farmland were required for a family to be self-sufficient, but 4 hectares might be enough if they were under vines. In 1862 some 85 per cent of farmers had holdings of less than 10 hectares, and a third of smallholders supplemented what little they owned by renting plots from bourgeois or noble landowners. At the bottom of the pile in 1851 were 900,000 day-labourers and two million domestiques or live-in farmhands, some of whom had a future claim on a family farm or inheritance while others made up the rural poor. Louis-François Pinagot, a carter’s son of the Perche (Orne), became a clogmaker working in a hut in the forest for a dealer who paid 1 franc a day in 1855, 2 francs in 1867. He escaped military service, which was decided by drawing lots, and married a hemp spinner who was paid only 25 centimes a day. They remained on the margins of the core community of farmers and though they had eight children only one of his sons, who started as a farmhand, came into property.10
Small farms could make a living where the soil was rich, but others, in poor soils and upland areas, obliged farming families to supplement their income by industrial work, either at home or by temporary migration out of the region. Cottage industry operated under a system by which entrepreneurs ‘put out’ textile work to peasant families in their villages and hamlets, affording cheap labour without overheads for the entrepreneur and the means to remain on the land by access to a little cash income for the peasants. Generally a gendered division of labour applied, with the men continuing in the fields or with their trade and the women spinning or weaving. In the Pays de Caux, the chalk plateau north of Rouen, Rouen merchants put out cotton for spinning until factory spinning killed it off in the 1830s, then they put out spun yarn for handloom weaving. Three-quarters of the 110,000 weavers in the surrounding Seine-Inférieure in 1848 were women, paid at the miserable rate of between 75 centimes and 1.25 francs per day.11 In the Forez village of Marlhes (Loire), near Saint-Étienne, where 70 per cent of peasants had less than 10 hectares, the local cottage industry was silk ribbon-weaving, and 88 per cent of the weavers were women, 55 per cent of them being single, 38 per cent married and 7 per cent widows in 1851.12 To the south, in the Velay, lacemaking in silk and linen employed 130,000 country women in 1855, a luxury product marketed by the merchants of Le Puy as far as Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain.13 To the south-east, in the Ardèche, the peasant populations grew the ‘golden tree’ or mulberry which fed silkworms, producing either raw silk to be sold to merchants at the markets of Aubenas and Joyeuse or spun in workshops along the Ardèche river, fifty-six of them employing 3,360 workers, almost all women, in 1860.14 Further west, in the Rouergue (Aveyron) even the mines of Decazeville, developed by the Duc de Decazes and his associates, were worked by peasant miners who owned plots of land and came to the mine only when there was nothing to do in the fields.15
Elsewhere, industry did not come to peasant women but rather men from peasant communities had to go in search of work, migrating seasonally or temporarily. Many if not most industrial workers originated in peasant communities, primarily because 52 per cent of the working population in 1856 was agricultural and only 23 per cent was in mining, manufacturing or building, whereas in Great Britain at the same time only 22 per cent of the working population was agricultural, while 48 per cent was industrial.16 From the Rouergue, in the south-west of the Massif Central, sawyers went to work during the winter in the forests of the Pyrenees and Catalonia, travelling in teams from the same villages, returning in the spring in time for the harvest and with cash enough to pay taxes or buy land.17 From the Limousin, on the north-west of the Massif Central, especially the Creuse department, where most peasants had less than a hectare and the soil was too poor even to grow rye, men left in work-teams from the same villages every spring, going to Paris to hire themselves out as masons, returning around St Andrew’s Day, 30 November. Leaving from the age of thirteen or fourteen, 34,000 strong in 1846, they were earners of hard currency for the extended family, returning home every third winter, marrying young because they were earning but then leaving their wives in Limousin when spring came round again.18 Thus Martin Nadaud, schooled as far as his first communion aged thirteen, was equipped with a heavy woollen coat, strong shoes and a top hat, and set out aged fourteen in March 1830 with his father and other comrades from the Bourganeuf area for Paris. Early in 1839, having escaped military service, he married a local girl who provided a dowry of 3,000 francs but he also had to contribute to the 1,200-franc dowry required by his sister, so he went back to Paris after only seventeen days of marriage, returning at the end of 1842 with three bags of a thousand francs each, to repay most of the family debt.19 Seasonal or temporary migration was not confined to men. Girls also left their homes in the country for a period of work in the city, either in domestic service or in the textile mills. This was generally to save enough money for a dowry and a trousseau in order to marry someone with the prospect of inheriting land, for there was no such thing as a free marriage.20
Over time agricultural and industrial populations did draw further apart; the peasantry and the working class became more sharply defined. The development of large-scale, powered and mechanized industry undercut cottage industry, so that first rural spinning and then rural weaving disappeared. Rural populations became less mixed and more predominantly agricultural. In the 1860s, for example, ribbon-weaving in the Loire department shifted to water-powered factories in Saint-Étienne which employed unmarried women only, so that the farmers’ wives of upland villages like Marlhes switched to dairy farming, producing milk and cheese for another market.21 Similarly, rural workers who began by migrating temporarily to the town or city might end up staying permanently, either because they were making a good living in the city or because the prospects of coming into an inheritance at home dwindled. There also emerged the first generation of ‘born proletarians’ such as Jean-Baptiste Dumay, born in Le Creusot in 1841 to a foreman who died in a mining accident six months before his birth and a seamstress who came from a family of clogmakers in the Nièvre. He was briefly educated in the company school before starting as an apprentice turner making nuts and bolts in the Le Creusot workshops, aged twelve, in 1854.22
The formation of a working class also presupposed the development of a working-class solidarity, overcoming differences between different regions or indeed localities. Building workers, especially carpenters, often went as journeymen on a Tour de France lasting several years to learn their trade. It was sustained by a system of compagnonnage or brotherhood which gave material and even familial support to the itinerant workers, with a ‘Mother’ in each town. Although this might have created a sense of solidarity among building workers, in fact it pointed up their differences. Agricol Perdiguier, who went on a Tour de France between 1824 and 1828, was immediately struck by the variety of patois of workers from different towns, starting with those between his native Avignon and those in nearby Marseille and Nîmes, who were not easy to understand. Moreover, compagnonnage, rather like freemasonry, was divided between different affiliations allegedly going back to the masters who built the Temple of Solomon. Perdiguier, for example, was a Companion of Liberty or Gavot. These were the sworn enemies of the Companions of Duty or Dévorants, who might rival each other to do the best work but might also resort to violence when they met. Finally, the network of hospitality for itinerant workers was virtually absent in Paris, whose workers, reflected Perdiguier, ‘although very skilled and clever, learning every day, have little sympathy for each other, and few ties attaching them to others’.23 Martin Nadaud, as a mason, was not a compagnon and did not go on the Tour de France, but was equally divided as an immigrant worker from the more established Paris workers. The masons lived in boarding houses in their favoured neighbourhood near the place de la Grève, looked down on by Parisians as ‘chestnut-eaters’, coming from a poor region where chestnut flour was used to make bread. That said, they also fought among themselves, masons from the north of the Creuse called Brulas and those from the south of the department called Bigaros, and woe betide the employer who tried to hire a mixture of them.24
Workers were sharply divided not only by place of origin but by level of skill and therefore earning power. Those trained in a trade or craft were much better off than the unskilled who had received no apprenticeship. In the first there was continuity, interrupted only by economic slump or injury, while the second were often in and out of work on a regular basis. Skilled workers had the possibility of progressing in the trade, becoming a master or even entrepreneur, while unskilled workers changed jobs frequently in the hope of finding a better situation, without really getting anywhere.
A comparison of the careers of two workers, Martin Nadaud and Norbert Truquin, will illuminate these differences. Taken by his father, a mason, to Paris in 1830, Nadaud became an apprentice in the trade, earning two francs a day. Two years later he was promoted to limousinier, the category which laid the foundations and built the basic walls for three francs a day, before becoming a mason companion proper, paid over four francs a day. Now he headed his own gang and negotiated directly with entrepreneurs such as Georges Duphot, who had started as a mason from the Creuse and became a big property developer. Nadaud was paid 150 francs per month to build a school in 1844 and 180 francs per month to build the town hall of the 5th arrondissement, place du Panthéon, in 1847.25 One of the crowd who invaded the Hôtel de Ville in February 1848 and heard the Republic proclaimed, he was elected deputy for the Creuse to the Legislative Assembly in 1849.
Norbert Truquin, whose brutal and drunken father was briefly the manager of an Amiens woollen mill, received no education and was sent to work at the age of seven in 1840 for a wool-carder for 2 francs 40 a day, removing impurities from the wool with his teeth. After his employer died he took to petty theft, ran errands for prostitutes and joined a pedlar selling haberdashery in Champagne, before grape-picking for a franc a day. Back in his home village, his father sent him to work in a brickyard, then in a knacker’s yard. Truquin then went to work in a wool-spinning mill in Amiens, sharing lodgings with mill girls paid 80 centimes to 1 franc 10 a day, but was then laid off and went to Paris where his father was running a wine warehouse, finding work in a woollen-cloth factory. Unemployed during the 1848 Revolution he enrolled in the national workshops and after the June Days tried to make a new start as a settler in Algeria. Unable to make a living there he returned to dig railway tunnels near Lyon before becoming a canut or silkweaver in the Croix-Rousse district of Lyon. Often laid off for lack of work he tried to become independent, marrying another silkweaver with 200 francs in savings, borrowing some more and renting lodgings that could hold two looms. Unpaid debts and recession in 1867 forced him to go back as a wage worker, and having become involved with the Revolution of 1871 in Lyon he decided to emigrate to South America, where he was joined by his wife and son. He worked as a charcoal-burner in Argentina to build up his savings and then they moved to Paraguay where he bought a plot of land.26
A key factor in the development of a working class was organization, but organization was precisely what government and employers wished to prevent. The Le Chapelier law of 1791 prohibited the association of members of any trade or occupation with a view to collective bargaining, on the grounds that ‘there is nothing but the particular interest of each individual and the general interest.’ In 1801 Bonaparte introduced the livret which every worker was obliged to carry as a record of his employment and to ensure that he repaid all debts to his employer before moving on. Articles 415 and 416 of the Penal Code of 1810 outlawed all ‘coalitions’ with an intent to raise the price of work by means of strike action as a kind of conspiracy or sedition, and imposed a two- to five-year prison term for leaders of any violation. All this was in the name of the free market, but workers who participated in the July Revolution of 1830 did not take long to prise open the contradiction between the rhetoric of liberty and the reality of exploitation and oppression. The Paris printers, the closure of whose presses had triggered the Revolution, launched their own paper, The Artisan: Journal of the Working Class, in September 1830, proclaiming that the working class was ‘the most numerous and most useful of society’, by the sweat of whose brow other classes made fortunes, but was now discovering a strength in ‘association, a means to remedy the misery of the working classes’.27
As an organization of the working classes compagnonnage was not a good starter at this point. In one sense a charitable organization providing hospitality for young journeymen undertaking the Tour de France, in another it was a monopoly of accredited workers which was dedicated to ensuring that employers paid them a decent wage. A group of compagnons were accused of forming a coalition to push up wages and were sent for trial at Saintes (Charente Maritime) in 1812. Although acquitted, the threat of legal procedures continued to haunt them. More serious, the division of the compagnons into a number of factions ritually pitted against each other made this an unlikely weapon of the working classes.28
More fruitful in the long run as workers’ organizations were the friendly or mutual aid societies that developed after the Restoration. Ostensibly dedicated to the health and welfare of their members, and using such names as the Philanthropic Society of Tailors to avoid legal proceedings for coalition, they were in fact nascent trade unions prepared to take on the might of the employers and the state ranged behind them.29 The first great confrontation of the July Monarchy came in 1831 in Lyon, when the canuts or silkworkers, their rates driven down by international competition, organized into a master-weavers’ Society of Mutual Duty and a journeymen’s Society of Ferrandiers and tried to negotiate a minimum tariff with the silk merchants. Though the prefect chaired a meeting of merchants’ and workers’ representatives in October 1831 to agree a tariff, the merchants refused to recognize it, going over the head of the prefect to prime minister Casimir Périer for support. Proclaiming that ‘the July sun shone for everybody,’ the silkworkers went on strike on 21 November, descending from the Croix-Rousse and other suburbs, clashing with the National Guard (who were essentially the armed bourgeoisie), and briefly seizing control of the Hôtel de Ville. The first round was lost by the workers but mutual-aid societies reformed, including the Society of Mutual Duty of young master-weavers, which organized a successful strike against a pay cut imposed by merchants in February 1834. The government immediately replied with an Associations Law which banned these clandestine unions and sent the strike organizers to trial for illegal coalition. This provoked a demonstration, then an insurrection in Lyon, the silkworkers backed by other trades such as cobblers, tailors and building-workers which had also been trying to form associations. However, the insurrection was put down and the ringleaders sent to Paris, arraigned in the notorious case of the 121, many of them being sentenced to prison and deportation.30
Although this kind of conflict with the bourgeoisie and behind them the state helped to shape the consciousness of workers as members of a working class, other factors worked against that class consciousness. The rising of 1834 in Paris, parallel to that in Lyon, had been led by republicans who considered the workers to be an integral part of ‘the people’, composed of everyone apart from the elite. The Republic proclaimed in 1848 was not particularly committed to workers: only one member of the provisional government and 34 of the 900 members of the National Assembly were workers.31 The ‘organization of labour’ was the order of the day and trade associations flourished, but the experiment of national workshops for the unemployed ended in disaster, and the June Days of 1848 witnessed a martyrization of the Paris working class. Norbert Truquin, who saw action on the barricades, spoke of ‘a legal massacre of workers’.32 Workers had a more positive attitude towards the Second Empire, generally enjoying rising wages, with particular enthusiasm among the ironworkers of Lorraine and the miners of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais. The government cultivated the working class in order to wean it away from the republican leaderships.33 In particular it modified the harsh sanctions of the Penal Code against coalition in a law of 25 May 1864, sponsored by republican deputy Émile Ollivier. While still outlawing picketing in the name of the right to work the law now authorized trade unions which legitimately tried to improve the lot of their members.34 The government also sponsored an engineering worker, Tolain, to visit the International Exhibition of 1862 in London. He ran as a labour candidate in a Paris by-election of 1863, urging workers not to vote for bourgeois republican politicians. The alliance of Empire and workers was however imperfect. Tolain was inspired by anarchism and led a delegation of French workers to a congress of the International Workers’ Association in Geneva in 1866. Some sectors, such as the Lyon textile workers, were never converted to the Empire, and the final years of the regime saw an upsurge of strike action. Although the steel town of Le Creusot was dominated by Eugène Schneider, Jean-Baptiste Dumay, whose career as an ironworker had been interrupted by military service between 1861 and 1867, returned there as a blast-furnace puddler and early in 1870 was involved in an ironworkers’ strike over the company’s bid to control the benefit fund that was deducted from their wages. The strike spread to the miners employed by the company, and twenty-seven of the ringleaders were sent for trial in April, receiving sentences raging from three months to three years. It seemed that little had changed since 1834, except that the Le Creusot strike became a cause célèbre, and militants of the International Workers Association came to Le Creusot to set up a branch there. Dumay proclaimed: ‘We were proud that our cause provoked universal sympathy and when the time comes we will also practise working-class solidarity. In the meantime we loudly proclaim our membership of the great International Association of Workers, that sublime freemasonry of all the workers of the world.’35
One of the characters in Balzac’s Cousin Pons (1847) is an Auvergnat, Rémonencq, who came to Paris in 1831 and rented a former café to set up as a scrap-metal dealer. He builds up his business to include porcelain and pictures, so that it becomes more like a museum than a junk shop, and exchanges his rough jacket for a redingote, guarding his treasure like a dragon. All that he now requires is a wife, and he fastens on Madame Gibot, the tailor’s wife, with her ‘virile beauty, vivacity and market acumen’, although to win her he must slowly poison her husband.
Balzac’s Rémonencq is only a caricatured version of the rise of a trader from rural origins to substantial wealth. While the Limousin produced masons and in some cases developers, the Auvergne produced scrap-metal dealers, coal and wine merchants, and by extension café-owners. The presence of an Auvergnat colony in Paris, concentrated around the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, provided the initial contacts, advice and loans for countrymen coming to Paris to make their fortune. The problem of finding a wife who would also be a business partner was generally solved by marrying a girl from home, using her dowry or a mortgage raised on her prospects of inheriting land to expand the family firm, and putting her at the front of the shop to deal with the clientele. Jean-Joseph Lavaissière, who came to Paris from the Cantal, set himself up as a metal dealer, married a local girl whose father had been killed by highwaymen in 1795 and left her a good fortune, bought a house in Versailles and in 1811 started calling himself a négociant (merchant). His sons, Jean-François and Guillaume, did even better, marrying outside the Auvergnat milieu into other trading families, and jointly buying a château at Auteil in the 1830s. Jean-François became a colonel in Louis-Philippe’s National Guard while Guillaume was awarded the Legion of Honour and a medal at the 1855 Exhibition.36
Naturally the streets were not paved with gold for all Auvergnats. Many Auvergnats who came to Paris did no better than to find work as coachmen, working for firms such as the Compagnie Générale des Voitures, and to marry servants.37 Moreover many shopkeepers rose from a peasant or working-class origin only to return there after a generation or two. Among shopkeepers in the 4th arrondissement of Paris between 1835 and 1845 whose fathers had also had their own businesses, only 38 per cent managed to keep their business going for most of their lives. They were more likely to succeed if their grandfathers had also had their own businesses, less likely if those grandparents had been servants or labourers. Similarly their chances of marrying into a small business family were increased if they came from one themselves.38 That said, there were some extraordinary success stories highlighting the emergence of the department store. Aristide Boucicaut, whose father was a hatter in the Orne, the area that the clogmaker Pinagot never left, came to Paris in 1835 to work as a salesman in one of the new fashion stores, the Petit Saint-Thomas. With his wife Marguerie Guérin, a laundress, he managed to find 50,000 francs to acquire the Bon Marché, which then had twelve employees and a turnover of 450,000 francs. The year Aristide died, in 1877, the store had 1,788 employees and a turnover of 73 million francs, and in 1887, when Marguerite died, the store reopened in the iron and glass palace built by Gustave Eiffel that still stands.39 Meanwhile Félix Potin, from a farming family in the Paris basin and destined to become a solicitor, abandoned his studies at sixteen to work for a Paris grocer. He founded his own cut-price grocery business in 1844, moving to Haussmann’s new boulevard Sébastopol in 1859, which he supplied with groceries from his own food-processing factory in the suburb of Pantin and with wine from a vineyard he acquired in Tunisia. His final coup during the siege of Paris in 1870, when the population was starving, was to purchase one of the two elephants in the Jardin des Plantes and sell that.
The petite bourgeoisie was composed not only of small employers and shopkeepers but also of black-coated workers who made the best use of their elementary education to return to it as instituteurs. Under the Guizot law of 1833 every commune in France was required to found an elementary school and provide a teacher’s stipend, while each department was to found an École Normale d’Instituteurs or teacher-training college. Most children of rural families attended school, at least in the winter when there was no work in the fields, until they took their first communion at the age of eleven; in the towns the use of child labour made popular education similarly rudimentary. The expansion of the elementary education system created opportunities for the brightest boys from the popular classes. Among trainees at the École Normale d’Instituteurs of Nîmes between 1842 and 1879, for example, 53 per cent were drawn from peasants’ families, 23 per cent from workers’ or artisans’ families and 7 per cent from shopkeeping.40 Their mission was without brilliance but it was an honourable one, as Guizot explained in his 1833 letter to instituteurs. ‘Each family’, he wrote, ‘requires you to give it back a decent man and the country a good citizen. The sentiments you must develop are faith in Providence, the sanctity of duty, submission to paternal authority, respect due to the law, the king and the rights of others.’41
The reality of the instituteurs’ career was rarely as exalted. The minimum stipend a commune had to pay was 200 francs per year, and this often became a maximum. Families who sent their children to school were expected to pay school fees, but families deemed indigent by the commune did not have to pay and communes were as generous in this respect as they were mean towards instituteurs. In 1842 schoolteachers received under 350 francs per year or a franc a day in four departments, between 350 and 700 francs a year or 2 francs a day in sixty-six departments, and over 700 francs in only six departments, including Paris. This was much less than an industrial worker, and on a par with a labourer or domestic servant.42 The main advantage of the job was exemption from military service, provided that the instituteur committed to teach for ten years. It was also a valuable sedentary job for young men who were crippled or otherwise unfit for physical toil. That said, the mayor often required the teacher to undertake a second job, that of secretary to himself and the commune, while the parish priest might insist that he work as choirmaster, sexton or gravedigger. This may have increased his income a little, but the teacher enjoyed no more than genteel poverty and far from being an apostle of civilization in the benighted countryside he was constantly the butt of mayors, priests, parents and the notables who served on the local education committee. A man of the people, the instituteur never escaped from serving the people; to go any higher required a secondary education.
What marked out the elite of French society was both education and property. The peasantry had a little property, the working class none, and rarely did they have an education past the elementary level. The petite bourgeoisie of small employers had more property and maybe spent a few years in secondary education, but seldom beyond the age of sixteen. The education that led to the elite was secondary education in lycées (one in each department) and colleges (usually one in each arrondissement, without a sixth form), for boys only, expensive except for the minority of scholars, based on the classics, leading to the baccalauréat at about the age of eighteen which was the passport to the liberal professions. In the Nord department in 1855, sons of landowners, public officials, liberal professions and industrialists made up 83 per cent of the clientele of the prestigious Lycée of Douai in 1855 and 34 per cent of that of the small nearby college of Saint-Amand, where 17 per cent of pupils were sons of shopkeepers, 18 per cent sons of artisans, 24 per cent sons of peasants and 7 per cent sons of workers.43 At the fictional college of Sarlande, modelled on that of Alès where he was a pion or supervisor in 1857, Alphone Daudet described a cohort of ‘fifty-odd rascals, chubby mountain-people of twelve to fourteen years old, sons of enriched métayers [share-croppers] whose parents had sent them to college to have them made into petits bourgeois for 120 francs a term’.44 These would never reach the baccalauréat and would doubtless return to follow their fathers. The secondary school population was only 50,000–60,000 between 1810 and 1840, after which it expanded to 150,000 in 1880, but it still accounted for no more than one boy in forty-five in 1842, one in twenty-one in 1876. Higher education existed in the form of law and medical faculties which dispensed professional degrees – about 1,000 law degrees and 400 medical doctorates around 1860 – arts and sciences faculties which simply awarded degrees but offered no teaching, and specialized grandes écoles to train the military, administrative, engineering and academic cadres of the state.45
Education, however, was never enough to access the elite. Success in a chosen profession or the public service required not only qualification but independent resources, usually acquired by a ‘good’ marriage, together with connections and patronage. In Balzac’s Père Goriot (1835) the worldly Vautrin advises the ambitious young law student Rastignac:
If you have no patronage you will rot in a provincial court. At thirty you will be a magistrate on 1,200 francs a year… at forty you will marry some miller’s daughter with about 6,000 livres in rent. Thank you. If you have a patron you will become a procureur du roi at thirty, with 1,000 écus [3,000 livres] salary and you will marry the mayor’s daughter. If you make one or two political gestures… you might be a procureur général at forty, and a deputy. But I should inform you that there are only twenty procureurs généraux in France and 20,000 competitors for the post.46
Balzac’s analysis, although dramatized, certainly reflects contemporary anxiety about competition for place. A legal training was not an end in itself; it was a passport to public office which offered security and status. Alexandre Dumas, the son of a republican general who fell out of favour with Napoleon and died when he was four, received an education from the Church and was lucky to enjoy the patronage of General Foy in order to obtain a post in the secretariat of the Duc d’Orléans, the future Louis-Philippe.47 Georges Haussmann, who had a law degree, saw his father’s career in the war administration interrupted in 1815 because of his loyalty to Napoleon, and his career in the prefectoral corps interrupted by the death of his patron, the Duc d’Orléans, Louis-Philippe’s son, in 1842. Though he married the daughter of a rich Bordeaux businessman he vegetated for nearly twenty years in subprefectures before landing the prefecture of Bordeaux in 1851 and that of the Seine in 1853.48 Léon Gambetta, on the other hand, the grandson of a Genoese sailor and son of a grocer of Cahors, educated at the seminary, then at the Lycée of Cahors, went to Paris in 1857 to study law, qualifying in 1861. Though he never married he enjoyed the patronage of leading barrister Adolphe Crémieux, by origin a Sephardic Jew from Avignon, deputy for Chinon in the 1840s and minister of justice in 1848, who gave him his big chance of a political trial, defending Delescluze in 1868.49 Regime change was a job-creation scheme on a large scale and it was the return of the Republic in 1870 that catapulted Gambetta, along with other republican lawyers, into government office.
For the cream of those qualified in the law the fastest route to a top career in the administration was to become an auditeur in the Conseil d’État, which drafted legislation. These énarques of their day had the best connections. Among the seventy-eight auditeurs in 1840, around 20 per cent were related to peers or deputies and 42 per cent were sons of high civil servants, including magistrates and army officers.50 Under the Second Empire the proportion of the administrative elite, defined as conseillers d’État, permanent secretaries in government ministries and prefects, who were the sons of high civil servants rose to nearly 60 per cent, the rest drawn from the liberal professions and large landowners.51 Thus while venal office had been abolished by the Revolution a hereditary administrative elite, recalling the noblesse de robe, still existed. A good marriage was also required for career success. High civil servants were more likely to marry into the landowning and business classes, with their superior resources, than the daughters of professionals or civil servants. Charles de Franqueville recalled that the income of his father, a technical civil servant at Soissons, was only 12,000–14,000 francs, but that his marriage in the 1840s brought him 6,500 francs a year from government bonds and 10,000 in land revenues, more than doubling his income, so that in 1859 taxes accounted for 12 per cent of his outgoings but 24 per cent went on the house and 6 per cent on carriages.52
In the armed forces the officer corps before the Revolution was confined to those of noble blood while the Revolution opened it to talent, qualified by survival on the battlefield. Napoleon claimed that there was a marshal’s baton in every soldier’s knapsack, and promotion from the ranks was always an option, but the École Militaire Spéciale he set up in 1802, which moved to Saint-Cyr in 1808, was costly, exclusive and calculated to attract former noblesse d’épée back into his service. Louis XVIII hoped to restore noble privilege in the army in full but the Charter of 1814 ruled that ‘the French are equally admissible to civil and military employments’. Such endorsements for meritocracy did not make family background and connection redundant, and in 1825 Legitimist nobles were awarded 24 per cent of sublieutenancies. This proportion fell in 1835 to 7 per cent, with 3 per cent going to families ennobled by the emperor, but increasingly what counted for advancement was a military background. Charles du Barail was unable to compete for Saint-Cyr because his Legitimist noble father briefly refused to serve the July Monarchy before resuming his career in Algeria in 1833, obliging his son to interrupt his secondary education. He joined the army in Algeria as a common soldier, hoping to join the cavalry but finding it ‘overcrowded with sons of noble families’ therefore joined a less glamorous arm, the spahis. This complaint was disingenuous from a noble who also described himself as ‘scion of a race of soldiers’. Rising through the ranks, he took advantage of the fact that Algeria was the only theatre to see fighting in the July Monarchy, and was promoted captain in 1848 and colonel in 1857.53
Saint-Cyr and the École Polytechnique were highly competitive schools which provided a specialist training and fast track to military service. The École Polytechnique did not just train for the military; it gave a mathematical and scientific education that led on to further specialist schools such as the École des Mines and the École des Ponts et Chaussées, training state engineers and technical civil servants. Michel Chevalier, born in Limoges the son of a tax official, graduated from the Polytechnique and in 1829 from the École des Mines and became a mining engineer at Valenciennes. Caught up in the 1830 Revolution, he became involved in the utopian socialist and feminist Saint-Simonian movement alongside Pierre Leroux, whose father was a café-owner and who had studied at the Lycée Charlemagne but was unable to accept an offer from the Polytechnique because of the poverty of his family. Although Chevalier spent eight months in prison in 1832–3 following the government clampdown on the Saint-Simonian movement as immoral, he then secured the patronage of Thiers who sent him on a mission to the United States to study its railway system and in 1840 appointed him professor of political economy at the Collège de France. His marriage to the daughter of a rich cloth merchant of Lodève in 1845 gave him the wherewithal to be elected deputy for the Tarn. Meanwhile Leroux, without the benefit of a Polytechnique training, became a socialist thinker and propagandist. He published a Revue Sociale at Boussac in the Limousin from 1845 with moral and financial support from George Sand, who was also interested in radical ideas, and was elected to the National Assembly in 1848. Whereas, however, Chevalier rose to become senator of the Second Empire and negotiated a free-trade treaty with Great Britain in 1860, Leroux opposed the coup d’état of 1851 and went into exile in London and Jersey.54
A humble background was usually, but not always, a bar to a brilliant career, and teaching and the Church were the most open to scholarship boys. Victor Cousin was a clockmaker’s son whose education at the Lycée Charlemagne, it is said, was paid for by the mother of a young lycéen whom Cousin had protected from bullying. Winning all the prizes at the Lycée Charlemagne he entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1810, himself becoming a lecturer in philosophy there in 1813 and at the Sorbonne after 1815, although between 1820 and 1828 government repression silenced him. Under the July Monarchy he represented the educational establishment and became Thiers’ education minister in 1840. More importantly, he was the patron of all normaliens, receiving his ‘regiment’ twice a year to hear their requests and placing them in colleges in Paris and the provinces, all of whose headmasters he knew. Thus Jules Simon, who came from the College of Vannes in Brittany to the École Normale, was placed by Cousin in the College of Caen in 1836, on a salary of 2,900 francs a year, at a time when a third of secondary school masters were paid 1,200–2,000 francs. In 1840, meanwhile, Simon deputized for Cousin as professor at the École Normale for a princely 6,000 francs.55
For the bright boy with no resources at all, the obvious avenue was the seminary. This was the only form of Catholic education permitted by the state before 1850, and supplied a need that was far broader than the training of priests. The father of Ernest Renan was a sea-captain who perished when the boy was five, and his mother’s grocery business did not long survive. He attended the College of Tréguier, run by secular priests, and envisaged a career in the priesthood that might have finished as grand vicar of Saint-Brieuc. By the good offices of his elder sister Henriette, who was teaching in Paris, in 1839 he was offered a scholarship to the seminary of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet in Paris, run by the Abbé Dupanloup, who was reputed to be the illegitimate son of an aristocrat and had just won fame by persuading Talleyrand to repent on his death-bed. Renan went on to the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in 1841 to study theology, took minor orders but then lost his faith, threw himself into the study of oriental languages and eventually was appointed to the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France. He would never have reached such academic excellence had it not been for the Church’s system of education; ironically, he then broke with it, becoming an influential critic on scholarly grounds of much of its teaching.
Balzac’s Monsieur Grandet, born in 1749, was a cooper in the small town of Saumur, on the Loire, who married the daughter of a timber merchant and acquired his first vineyards during the Revolution, church lands sold as biens nationaux. He bought meadows with the profits of white wine sold to the armies of the Republic and became mayor until, under the Empire, he was seen as too ‘red’. In 1806, nevertheless, he inherited more vineyards when his wife’s parents died, acquired notable status as the biggest taxpayer in the arrondissement and was awarded the Legion of Honour. He made a fortune in the bad harvest of 1811, speculating on other people’s hardship, bought a château from a marquis forced to sell up and then converted most of his assets into government stock at 20 per cent. When he died in 1827 he left an estimated 17 million francs to his daughter, Eugénie.56 Jean-Joachim Goriot, born in 1750, was a pasta-maker in Paris whose master’s business fell into his hands in the first riot of the Revolution. Essentially a grain merchant, he made a fortune earlier than Grandet by hoarding supplies when others were starving, while protecting himself from mob vengeance by becoming president of his local section, La Halle-aux-Blés. After his wife died he lived in self-imposed poverty, dedicating his fortune to furthering his daughters. Delphine, who loved money, married a banker of Jewish origin, Baron Nucingen, who himself had made a fortune in 1815 selling Grandet’s wine to the Allies, while Anastasie, who had ‘aristocratic leanings’, married the Comte de Restaud. Having married off his daughters, however, Goriot could only see them in secret; as a ‘man of 1793’ he was persona non grata in the society in which they lived. Moreover, as Delphine discovered, money bought entry into the society of financiers and businessmen centred on the Chaussée d’Antin district of Paris; it did not open the world of the old nobility, which centred on the Faubourg Saint-Germain.57
‘At the present moment, more than at any other time,’ reflected Balzac, ‘money rules laws, politics and morals.’58 His reading of French society in the early nineteenth century as dominated by money is painted in vivid strokes, and regrets a world of honour and piety that has passed away. Yet he points out, with much reason, that even in this material world money could not buy everything and that the social hierarchy was also determined by ancestry and connection. Huge fortunes were indeed made in the early part of the century. International trade was greatly disrupted by war before 1815, then by customs barriers, but governments fighting long wars were desperate both for credit and for supplies, so that anyone with capital or goods stood to make great profits. War also stimulated some industries, such as textiles for uniform and iron for armaments, and after peace broke out this ongoing ‘industrial revolution’ supplied growing urban markets and underpinned the communications revolution which reached a high point with the railway boom of the 1840s.
Some individuals and some families were able to exploit these opportunities to the full. To do well, a number of strategies were required: a family strategy to mesh personnel and capital; an economic strategy which balanced specialization in sectors where expertise was available with diversification to spread risk and guard against slump in any particular sector; and a political strategy to ensure friends in high places and legislation which broadly favoured the capitalist interest. What could not be legislated for, however, was acceptance of the new capitalist class into the social elite, so that while the Revolution, as Balzac showed, promoted the interests of a rising bourgeoisie in many ways, its association with the Terror permitted its enemies to use it to shut out those who had benefited firstly from politics and then, when that was no longer possible, from polite society.
The capitalist interest was of course not a bloc. There were, first of all, industrial families of local origin who did not expand their investments or political influence outside their home region. The Dollfus family of Mulhouse, headed by Jean Dollfus, who revolutionized the cotton industry, sent their sons to learn the trade and establish contacts in Great Britain and Belgium but married into other textile families on either side of the Rhine, such as Mieg, Koechlin and Schlumberger, and were not involved in politics beyond the town, Jean Dollfus being mayor of Mulhouse 1863–9.59 Augustin Pouyer-Quertier, son of a Rouen entrepreneur who put out cotton to rural weavers, married the daughter of a Rouen merchant with a dowry of 58,000 francs, established mechanized and water-powered cotton mills in the Rouen area and was elected deputy for Seine-Inférieure as an ‘official candidate’ in 1857. He then used his political influence to defend the cause of protectionism after the Empire’s free-trade treaty with Britain in 1860, became Thiers’ minister of finance in 1871 and married his daughters Hélène and Marguerite to a marquis and count respectively.60 Another industrialist cultivated by the Empire to counterbalance the influence of loquacious lawyers was Eugène Schneider. A Lorrainer, he began as manager of a woollen mill in Reims but then became involved in iron. He became manager of the Bazeilles ironworks near Sedan, and married the daughter of its owner who was a baron of the Empire and mayor of Sedan. He went into partnership with his elder brother Adolphe, who had married the daughter of the iron master of Fourchambault, Louis Boigues, bringing a dowry of 100,000 francs and an annual income of 60,000, and with a Parisian cloth manufacturer and banker Alexandre Seillière, in order to buy the ironworks of Le Creusot, way outside his native area, in 1836. Adolphe died in 1845, leaving Eugène as sole boss of what became a company town, building arms, ships and locomotives. Eugène became the first president of the Comité des Forges, representing the iron and steel industry, and co-founder of the Société Générale bank in 1864, director of a number of railway companies, ‘official’ deputy for Le Creusot in 1852 and president of the Legislative Body in 1867.61
The richest individuals and families drew their wealth less from industry than from finance and land. Casimir Périer was the fourth son of an entrepreneur involved in the put-out trade in the Dauphiné, who moved into printed cotton goods and banking, lending to Bonaparte’s new government in 1800 and becoming one of the founders and first regents (directors) of the Banque de France. Casimir was one of his ten children, who each inherited 580,000 francs on his death in 1801. He set up the Périer Frères bank with his elder brother Scipion, who died in 1821, investing in insurance, sugar-refining, canal-building, the Anzin coal mines near Valenciennes and above all in real estate, buying up the plaine des Sablons outside Paris and selling it in small lots to build out-of-town villas in what became the suburb of Neuilly. He married Pauline Loyer, the heiress of a Lyon magistrate who had been guillotined in the Terror, was elected deputy of the Seine in 1821 and became prime minister in 1831, dealing harshly with the silkworkers’ revolt in Lyon, before dying of cholera in the epidemic of 1832, leaving a fortune of 14 million francs.62
Other bankers felt that political influence rather than political power suited them better, but they disagreed about investment strategy and risk. Even in the banking world there were aristocrats who proceeded with caution for the greater good of the family and parvenus ambitious to make money fast who sometimes came to grief. James de Rothschild, one of the six sons of Frankfurt banker Meyer Amschel Rothshild, bought gold smuggled out of Britain during the Napoleonic wars which he then resold in Paris and effectively financed the Restoration by arranging loans to the government which had to pay off a war indemnity of 700 million francs. The Rothschild dynasty made a fortune of 109 million by 1828 using the relatively safe strategy of lending to governments and becoming renowned as the bankers of the Holy Alliance. They invested little in real estate, and avoided industry, which was seen as extremely risky. James was challenged by a new species of investment banker, notably the brothers Émile and Isaac Péreire, from a family of Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux whose father lost his fortune when war disrupted international trade and died while they were boys. Moving to Paris and using contacts in the banking world such as Benedict Fould, they foresaw the possibility of fortunes to be made from the nascent railway industry. They persuaded James de Rothschild, rather against his will, to buy shares in the Paris–Saint-Germain railway of 1837 and in the Chemin de Fer du Nord in 1845. They then left him behind with their experiments in conjuring up capital through the Crédit Mobilier of 1852 and the Crédit Immobilier of 1854. There followed a bonanza of investment in railway companies such as the Compagnie du Midi and the Grand Central, a transatlantic shipping company and dockyards at Saint-Nazaire, the rebuilding of Paris and the development of the seaside resort of Arcachon. Isaac was elected to the Corps Législatif as official candidate for Perpignan in 1863. However, Rothschild squeezed out the Péreires from the Chemin de Fer du Nord in 1855, and kept them out of the Paris– Lyon–Marseille railway and from railway concessions in Austria. Then a downturn in the market which drastically cut back their returns forced them to resign from the direction of the Crédit Mobilier and the Crédit Immobilier in 1867, as the Banque de France stepped in. The visit of Napoleon III to Rothschild’s Château de Ferrières in 1862 demonstrated that even among Jewish bankers there were kings and there were knaves.63
For Balzac all this would be evidence of the rule of money and the decline of the old nobility, whose fortune was based on land. In fact the impact of the Revolution on the landed nobility was limited in material terms: of about 200,000 nobles 1,158 or 0.6 per cent were executed, while 16,500 or 8 per cent emigrated, although this affected perhaps a quarter of noble families, and half of all noble families (12,500 out of 25,000) lost some land. Many families were able to recover land they had lost, or received some indemnification under a law of Charles X in 1825, despite the incumbrance of debt.64 Landownership still represented a safe investment when war and economic crisis were disrupting markets and the sale of biens nationaux confiscated from the Church increased land’s attractiveness for non-noble families. Nobles were invariably at the top of the landowning hierarchy. The port of Bordeaux was dominated by a Protestant merchant, Jacques-Henri Wustemberg, but in 1831 he was only the ninth largest taxpayer in the Gironde department, and overall noble landowners were richer than merchants. The richest man was the Marquis de Lamoignan, a robe noble who had emigrated to the London region before returning to his vast estates near Balye, where he was mayor and conseiller-général, and was made a peer in 1832. The Duc de Decazes, something of a parvenu, made a peer by Louis XVIII, but of bourgeois origins and founder of a mining company in the Aveyron as a speculative toy in 1826, came in at eighteenth.65
The rivalry at the end of the Ancien Régime between old nobles and anoblis was sharpened after 1808 with the creation of the im perial nobility. The imperial nobility was the newest version of a nobility of service, a meritocracy of those who worked for the revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes as soldiers or civil administrators. ‘Since the soldier of 1793 has become a general and peer of France,’ wrote Pierre de Pelleport, ‘I have several times been asked by members of an illustrious military family to trace a link between their ancestors and mine. But there is nothing doing: I date only from myself.’66 Some of the imperial nobility made vast fortunes. Alexandre Berthier, whose father was an anobli of Louis XV, became one of Napoleon’s marshals, Prince de Neuchâtel and Prince de Wagram. As grand huntsman and vice-constable in the emperor’s household he drew an annual income of 400,000 francs, he spent 250,000 a year acquiring landed estates, and he drew another million francs a year revenue from fiefs allotted to him in Germany and Poland; he married the daughter of the Duke of Bavaria.67
The fortunes of the imperial nobility were, however, vulnerable to political change, and they were never accepted as equals by the old Bourbon nobility, 80 per cent of whom refused to serve Napoleon and sulked in the Faubourg Saint-Germain or on their country estates, making up for glamour by cultivating honour and ancient lineage. Most of the imperial nobility rallied to Louis XVIII when he was restored in 1814, but the return of the emperor in 1815 faced them with a terrible dilemma: should they rejoin the man who had made them, though Europe was ranged against him, or should they stay with the legitimate monarchy? Berthier dithered, took refuge in Bavaria and died in mysterious circumstances. Ney rallied to the emperor, fought at Waterloo, was captured and tried when the monarchy was restored, and was then shot. Imperial nobles were systematically purged from the army and administration. The loss of their fiefs and offices in an Empire that was no more destroyed their financial position. They made a come-back under Louis-Philippe, whose regime combined monarchy and the revolutionary tradition. Marshal Soult headed the 1832 ministry which also included Victor de Broglie and Guizot, who had begun their careers under Napoleon. A quarter of prefects and 46 per cent of the Chamber of Peers in 1831 were imperial nobles and the return of Napoleon’s body to lie in the Invalides in 1840 was in some sense a tribute to their influence.68
This political success of the imperial nobility, however, was not echoed by social success in relationship to the old nobility. Between 1789 and 1830 over 75 per cent of marriages of old noble families which had rejected the blandishments of the Empire were with families of the same caste. Noble families who had been at court before 1789 such as the Duc and Duchesse de Duras increasingly sought out provincial families like the La Rochejacqueleins, whose royalist credentials in the Vendean risings upgraded their noble cachet.69 A similar hesitancy to admit new blood was evident in the salons of Paris which structured the social life of the capital. Some salons allowed an intermingling of different clienteles, such as that of the Comte d’Haussonville, himself a hybrid who had served in Condé’s army and been chamberlain to Napoleon, denounced as a ‘remade count’ by the old nobility, or that of the Comtesse de Flahaut, the daughter of an English admiral who married one of Napoleon’s aide-de-camps and whose guests included Casimir Périer, Laffitte, Walewski and Morny.70 Others, particularly those of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, presided over by the Duchesse de Duras, the Princesse de la Tremoïlle or the Marquise de Montcalm, who ran the salon of her brother, the Duc de Richelieu, were highly restrictive, and used their social exclusivity deliberately to quash the pretensions of mere wealth or exclude those who had any association with the Revolution or Napoleon. ‘Conversation there is often and deliberately literary,’ said Alfred de Vigny of the time of his election to the Académie Française in 1845. ‘It had a religious tone, rendered a little mystical and elegiac by the memory of the ruins of the Revolution of 1789, the pain of exile, the violence of the Terror and the oppression of the Empire.’71
French society in this period was clearly in motion, as individuals took advantage of the opportunities offered by economic change and the expansion of the state, to which was geared a developing system of education. Legally, too, careers were open to the talents and could not be confined to any particular caste or corporation. And yet, in many ways, society was becoming more divided. Agricultural populations became more distinct from industrial workers, and though some peasants acquired more land and joined the rural bourgeoisie, the rural hierarchy remained fairly rigid. Industrial progress advantaged urban, factory-based industry over rural industry, which went into decline. Some workers set themselves up as masters or shopkeepers but many workers became locked in class conflict with employers backed by a state that on the grounds of free enterprise refused to allow trade unions to restore any of the restrictive practices of Ancien Régime corporations. In 1831, 1834 and 1848 the state resorted to violence to quell workers’ rebellions. The division in the education system between elementary and secondary both reflected and reinforced the division between elite and masses in French society, and though the scholarship system served to promote some individual talent, to acquire a firm position in the administrative, military or judicial elite generally required the right family background and social connections. Within the French elite the landed class was challenged for influence by financiers and industrialists, and the old nobility was challenged by the new imperial nobility. But parvenus generally succeeded best when they aped the manners of the nobility and social divisions were often intensified by political quarrels that went back to the Revolution and the Empire, and became entrenched in marriage patterns and social intercourse.