True, there is no necessary identification; but then, that is hardly the point. ‘The origin of the bourgeois class and of its peculiarities’, wrote Weber in The Protestant Ethic, is a process ‘closely connected with that of the origin of the capitalistic organization of labour, though not quite the same thing.’4 Closely connected, though not quite the same; this is the idea behind The Bourgeois: looking at the bourgeois and at his culture—for most of history, the bourgeois has definitely been a ‘he’—as parts of a power structure with which they don’t, however, simply coincide. But speaking of ‘the’ bourgeois, in the singular, is itself questionable. ‘The big bourgeoisie could not formally separate itself from its inferiors’, writes Hobsbawm in The Age of Empire: ‘its structure had to be kept open to new entrants—that was the nature of its being’.5 This permeability, adds Perry Anderson, sets the bourgeoisie apart
from the nobility before it and the working class after it. For all the important differences within each of these contrasting classes, their homogeneity is structurally greater: the aristocracy was typically defined by a legal status combining civil titles and juridical privileges, while the working class is massively demarcated by the condition of manual labour. The bourgeoisie possesses no comparable internal unity as a social group.6
Porous borders, and weak internal cohesion: do these traits invalidate the very idea of the bourgeoisie as a class? For its greatest living historian, Jürgen Kocka, this is not necessarily so, provided we distinguish between what we could call the core of this concept and its external periphery. The latter has indeed been extremely variable, socially as well as historically; up to the late eighteenth century, it consisted mostly of ‘the self-employed small businesspeople (artisans, retail merchants, innkeepers, and small proprietors)’ of early urban Europe; a hundred years later, of a completely different population made of ‘middle- and lower-ranking white collar employees and civil servants’.7 But in the meantime, in the course of the nineteenth century, the syncretic figure of the ‘propertied and educated bourgeoisie’ had emerged across western Europe, providing a centre of gravity for the class as a whole, and strengthening its features as a possible new ruling class: a convergence that found expression in the German conceptual pair of Besitzs- and Bildungsbürgertum—bourgeoisie of property, and bourgeoisie of culture—or, more prosaically, in the British tax system placing profits (from capital) and fees (from professional services) impartially ‘under the same heading’.8
The encounter of property and culture: Kocka’s ideal-type will be mine, too, but with one significant difference. As a literary historian, I will focus less on the actual relationships between specific social groups—bankers and high civil servants, industrialists and doctors, and so on—than on the ‘fit’ between cultural forms and the new class realities: how a word like ‘comfort’ outlines the contours of legitimate bourgeois consumption, for instance; or how the tempo of story-telling adjusts itself to the new regularity of existence. The bourgeois, refracted through the prism of literature: such is the subject of The Bourgeois.
Bourgeois culture. One culture? ‘Multicolored— bunt— . . . may serve for the class I have had under my microscope’, writes Peter Gay in bringing to a close his five volumes on The Bourgeois Experience.9 ‘Economic self-interest, religious agendas, intellectual convictions, social competition, the proper place of women became political issues where bourgeois battled bourgeois’, he adds in a later retrospective; divisions so acute ‘that it is tempting to doubt that the bourgeoisie was a definable entity at all’.10 For Gay, all these ‘striking variations’11 are the result of the nineteenth-century acceleration of social change, and are thus typical of the Victorian phase of bourgeois history.12 But a much longer perspective is also possible on the antinomies of bourgeois culture. In an essay on the Sassetti chapel in Santa Trinita, which takes its cue from Machiavelli’s portrait of Lorenzo in the Istorie Fiorentine—‘if you compared his light and his grave side [la vita leggera e la grave], two distinct personalities could be identified within him, seemingly impossible to reconcile [quasi con impossibile congiunzione congiunte]’—Aby Warburg observed that
the citizen of Medicean Florence united the wholly dissimilar characters of the idealist—whether medievally Christian, or romantically chivalrous, or classically neoplatonic—and the worldly, practical, pagan Etruscan merchant. Elemental yet harmonious in his vitality, this enigmatic creature joyfully accepted every psychic impulse as an extension of his mental range, to be developed and exploited at leisure.13
An enigmatic creature, idealistic and worldly. Writing of another bourgeois golden age, halfway between the Medici and the Victorians, Simon Schama muses on the ‘peculiar coexistence’ that allowed
lay and clerical governors to live with what otherwise would have been an intolerably contradictory value system, a perennial combat between acquisitiveness and asceticism . . . The incorrigible habits of material self-indulgence, and the spur of risky venture that were ingrained into the Dutch commercial economy themselves prompted all those warning clucks and solemn judgments from the appointed guardians of the old orthodoxy . . . The peculiar coexistence of apparently opposite value systems . . . gave them room to maneuver between the sacred and profane as wants or conscience commanded, without risking a brutal choice between poverty or perdition.14
Material self-indulgence, and the old orthodoxy: Jan Steen’s ‘Burgher of Delft’, who looks at us from the cover of Schama’s book (Figure 1): a heavy man, seated, in black, with his daughter’s silver-and-gold finery on one side, and a beggar’s discoloured clothes on the other. From Florence to Amsterdam, the frank vitality of those visages in Santa Trinita has been dimmed; the burgher is cheerlessly pinned to his chair, as if dispirited by the ‘moral pulling and pushing’ (Schama again) of his predicament: spatially close to his daughter, yet not looking at her; turned in the general direction of the woman, without actually addressing her; eyes downcast, unfocused. What is to be done?
Machiavelli’s ‘impossible conjunction’, Warburg’s ‘enigmatic creature’, Schama’s ‘perennial combat’: compared to these earlier contradictions of bourgeois culture, the Victorian age appears for what it really was: a time of compromise, much more than contrast. Compromise is not uniformity, of course, and one may still see the Victorians as somewhat ‘multicoloured’; but the colours are leftovers from the past, and are losing their brilliancy. Grey, not bunt, is the flag that flies over the bourgeois century.
‘I find it hard to understand why the bourgeois dislikes to be called by his name’, writes Groethuysen in his great study, Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France: ‘kings have been called kings, priests priests, and knights knights; but the bourgeois likes to keep his incognito’.15 Garder l’incognito; and one thinks, inevitably, of that ubiquitous and elusive label: ‘middle class’. Every concept ‘establishes a particular horizon for potential experience and conceivable theory’, writes Reinhart Koselleck,16 and by choosing ‘middle class’ over ‘bourgeois’ the English language has certainly created a very distinctive horizon for social perception. But why? The bourgeois came into being somewhere ‘in the middle’, yes—he ‘was not a peasant or serf, but he was also not a noble’, as Wallerstein puts it17—but that middlingness was precisely what he wished to overcome: born in ‘the middle state’ of early modern England, Robinson Crusoe rejects his father’s idea that it is ‘the best state in the world’, and devotes his entire life to going beyond it. Why then settle on a designation that returns this class to its indifferent beginnings, rather than acknowledge its successes? What was at stake, in the choice of ‘middle class’ over ‘bourgeois’?