The Career Open to Talent: from The Age of Revolutions 1789-1848

Chapter 10 from Eric Hobsbawm’s now legendary The Age of Revolutions: 1789-1848.

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 had never seen so badly built a town in my life. He listened patiently and at the corner of the street at which we parted company, he remarked: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, Sir!’ — Freidrich Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England¹

L’habitude prévalut parmi les nouveaux financiers de faire publier dans les journaux le menu des diners et les noms des convives. — Jean-Baptiste Capefigue²

I

The formal institutions overthrown or founded by a revolution are easily discernible, but they do not measure its effects. The chief result of the Revolution in France was to put an end to aristocratic society. Not to ‘aristocracy’ in the sense of hierarchy of social status distinguished by titles or other visible marks of exclusiveness, and often modelling itself on the prototype of such hierarchies, nobility ‘of blood’. Societies built on individual careerism welcome such visible and established marks of success. Napoleon even recreated a formal nobility of sorts, which joined the surviving old aristocrats after 1815. Nor did the end of aristocratic society mean the end of aristocratic influence. Rising classes naturally tend to see the symbols of their wealth and power in terms of what their former superior groups have established as the standards of comfort, luxury or pomp. The wives of enriched Cheshire drapers would become ‘ladies’, instructed by the numerous books of etiquette and gracious living which multiplied for this purpose from the 1840s, for the same reason as Napoleonic war-profiteers appreciated a baron’s title, or that bourgeois salons were filled with ‘velvet, gold, mirrors, some poor imitations of Louis XV chairs and other furniture … English styles for the servants and horses, but without the aristocratic spirit’. What could be prouder than the boast of some banker, sprung from who knows where, that ‘When I appear in my box at the theatre, all lorgnettes are turned on me, and I receive an almost royal ovation?’³

Moreover, a culture as profoundly formed by court and aristocracy as the French would not lose the imprint. Thus the marked preoccupation of French prose literature with subtle psychological analyses of personal relationships (which can be traced back to the seventeenth-century aristocratic writers), or the formalized eighteenth-century pattern of sexual campaigning and advertised lovers or mistresses, became an integral part of ‘Parisian’ bourgeois civilization. Formerly kings had official mistresses; now successful stock-jobbers joined them. Courtesans granted their well-paid favours to advertise the success of bankers, who could pay for them as well as of young bloods who ruined their estates by them. Indeed in many ways the Revolution preserved aristocratic characteristics of French culture in an exceptionally pure form, for the same reason as the Russian Revolution has preserved classical ballet and the typical nineteenth-century bourgeois attitude to ‘good literature’ with exceptional fidelity. They were taken over by it, assimilated to it, as a desirable heritage from the past, and henceforth protected against the normal evolutionary erosion by it.

And yet the old régime was dead, even though the fishermen of Brest in 1832 regarded the cholera as a punishment by God for the deposition of the legitimate king. Formal republicanism among the peasantry was slow to spread beyond the Jacobin Midi and some long dechristianized areas, but in the first genuine universal election, that of May 1848, legitimism was already confined to the West and the poorer central departments. The political geography of modern rural France was already substantially recognizable. Higher up the social scale, the Bourbon Restoration did not restore the old régime; or, rather, when Charles X tried to do so he was thrown out. Restoration society was that of Balzac’s capitalists and careerists, of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, rather than that of the returned emigré dukes. A geological epoch separates it from the ‘sweetness of life’ of the 1780s to which Talleyrand looked back. Balzac’s Rastignac is far nearer to Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, the typical figure of the 1880s, or even to Sammy Glick, the typical one of Hollywood in the 1940s, than to Figaro, the non-aristocratic success of the 1780s.

In a word the society of post-revolutionary France was bourgeois in its structure and values. It was the society of the parvenu, i.e. the self-made man, though this was not completely obvious except when the country was itself governed by parvenus, i.e. when it was republican or bonapartist. It may not seem excessively revolutionary to us, that half the French peerage in 1840 belonged to families of the old nobility, but to contemporary French bourgeois the fact that half had been commoners in 1789 was very much more striking; especially when they looked at the exclusive social hierarchies of the rest of continental Europe. The phrase ‘when good Americans die, they go to Paris’ expresses what Paris became in the nineteenth century, though it did not fully become the parvenu’s paradise until the Second Empire. London, or even more Vienna, St Petersburg or Berlin, were capitals in which money could not yet buy everything, at any rate in the first generation. In Paris, there was very little worth buying that was beyond its reach.

This domination of the new society was not peculiar to France; but if we except the democratic USA it was in certain superficial respects both more obvious and more official in France, though not in fact more profound than in Britain or the Low Countries. In Britain the great chefs were still those who worked for noblemen, like Carême for the Duke of Wellington (he had previously served Talleyrand), or for the oligarchic clubs, like Alexis Soyer of the Reform Club. In France the expensive public restaurant, started by cooks of the nobility who lost their jobs during the Revolution, was already established. A change of world is implied in the title-page of the manual of classical French cookery which read ‘by A. Beauvilliers, ancien officier de MONSIEUR, Comte de Provence … et actuellement Restaurateur, rue de Richelieu no. 26, la Grande Taverne de Londres’.⁴ The gourmand—a species invented during the Restoration and propagated by Brillat-Savarin’s Almanach des Gourmands from 1817—already went to the Café Anglais or the Café de Paris to eat dinners not presided over by hostesses. In Britain the press was still a vehicle of instruction, invective and political pressure. It was in France that Emile Girardin (1836) founded the modern newspaper—La Presse—political but cheap, aimed at the accumulation of advertising revenue, and made attractive to its readers by gossip, serial novels, and various other stunts. (French pioneering in these dubious fields is still recalled by the very words ‘journalism’ and ‘publicity’ in English, ‘Reklame’ and ‘Annonce’ in German.) Fashion, the department store, the public shop-window which Balzac hymned were French inventions, the product of the 1820s. The Revolution brought that obvious career open to talents, the theatre, into ‘good society’ at a time when its social status in aristocratic Britain remained analogous to that of boxers and jockeys: at Maisons-Lafitte (named after a banker who made the suburb fashionable), Lablache, Talma and other theatrical people established themselves by the side of the Prince de la Moskowa’s splendid house.

The effect of the Industrial Revolution on the structure of bourgeois society was superficially less drastic, but in fact far more profound. For it created new blocs of bourgeois which coexisted with the official society, too large to be absorbed by it except by a little assimilation at the very top, and too self-confident and dynamic to wish for absorption except on their own terms. In 1820 these great armies of solid businessmen were as yet hardly visible from Westminster, where peers and their relatives still dominated the unreformed Parliament or from Hyde Park, where wholly unpuritan ladies like Harriete Wilson (unpuritan even in her refusal to pretend to being a broken blossom) drove their phaetons surrounded by dashing admirers from the armed forces, diplomacy and the peerage, not excluding the Iron and unbourgeois Duke of Wellington himself. The merchants, bankers and even the industrialists of the eighteenth century had been few enough to be assimilated into official society; indeed the first generation of cotton-millionaires, headed by Sir Robert Peel the elder, whose son was being trained for premiership, were fairly solidly Tory, though of a moderate kind. However, the iron plough of industrialization multiplied its hardfaced crops of businessmen under the rainy clouds of the North. Manchester no longer came to terms with London. Under the battle-cry ‘What Manchester thinks today London will think tomorrow’ it prepared to impose terms on the capital.

The new men from the provinces were a formidable army, all the more so as they became increasingly conscious of themselves as a class rather than a ‘middle rank’ bridging the gap between the upper and lower orders. (The actual term ‘middle class’ first appears around 1812.) By 1834 John Stuart Mill could already complain that social commentators ‘revolved in their eternal circle of landlords, capitalists and labourers, until they seemed to think of the distinction of society into these three classes as though it were one of God’s ordinances’.⁵ Moreover, they were not merely a class, but a class army of combat, organized at first in conjunction with the ‘labouring poor’ (who must, they assumed, follow their lead) against the aristocratic society, and later against both proletariat and landlords, most notably in that most class-conscious body the Anti-Corn-Law League. They were self-made men, or at least men of modest origins who owed little to birth, family or formal higher education. (Like Mr Bounderby in Dickens’ Hard Times, they were not reluctant to advertise the fact.) They were rich and getting richer by the year. They were above all imbued with the ferocious and dynamic self-confidence of those whose own careers prove to them that divine providence, science and history have combined to present the earth to them on a platter.

‘Political economy’, translated into a few simple dogmatic propositions by self-made journalist-publishers who hymned the virtues of capitalism—Edward Baines of the Leeds Mercury (1774–1848), John Edward Taylor of the Manchester Guardian (1791–1844), Archibald Prentice of the Manchester Times (1792–1857), Samuel Smiles (1812–1904)—gave them intellectual certainty. Protestant dissent of the hard Independent, Unitarian, Baptist and Quaker rather than the emotional Methodist type gave them spiritual certainty and a contempt for useless aristocrats. Neither fear, anger, nor even pity moved the employer who told his workers:

‘The God of Nature has established a just and equitable law which man has no right to disturb; when he ventures to do so it is always certain that he, sooner or later, meets with corresponding punishment … Thus when masters audaciously combine that by an union of power they may more effectually oppress their servants; by such an act, they insult the majesty of Heaven, and bring down the curse of God upon themselves, while on the other hand, when servants unite to extort from their employers that share of the profit which of right belongs to the master, they equally violate the laws of equity.’⁶

There was an order in the universe, but it was no longer the order of the past. There was only one God, whose name was steam and spoke in the voice of Malthus, McCulloch, and anyone who employed machinery.

The fringe of agnostic eighteenth-century intellectuals and self-made scholars and writers who spoke for them should not obscure the fact that most of them were far too busy making money to bother about anything unconnected with this pursuit. They appreciated their intellectuals, even when, like Richard Cobden (1804–1865) they were not particularly successful businessmen, so long as they avoided unpractical and excessively sophisticated ideas, for they were practical men whose own lack of education made them suspect anything that went much beyond empiricism. Charles Babbage the scientist (1792–1871) proposed his scientific methods to them in vain. Sir Henry Cole, the pioneer of industrial design, technical education and transport rationalization, gave them (with the inestimable help of the German Prince Consort) the most brilliant monument of their endeavours, the Great Exhibition of 1851. But he was forced out of public life nevertheless as a meddling busybody with a taste for bureaucracy, which, like all government interference, they detested, when it did not directly assist their profits. George Stephenson, the self-made colliery mechanic, dominated the new railways, imposing the gauge of the old horse and cart on them—he had never thought of anything else—rather than the imaginative, sophisticated and daring engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who has no monument in the pantheon of engineers constructed by Samuel Smiles, except the damning phrase: ‘measured by practical and profitable results the Stephensons were unquestionably the safer men to follow’.⁷ The philosophic radicals did their best to construct a network of ‘Mechanics’ Institutes’—purged of the politically disastrous errors which the operatives insisted, against nature, on hearing in such places—in order to train the technicians of the new and scientifically based industries. By 1848 most of them were moribund, for want of any general recognition that such technological education could teach the Englishman (as distinct from the German or Frenchman) anything useful. There were intelligent, experimentally minded, and even cultured manufacturers in plenty, thronging to the meetings of the new British Association for the Advancement of Science; but it would be an error to suppose that they represented the norm of their class.

A generation of such men grew up in the years between Trafalgar and the Great Exhibition. Their predecessors, brought up in the social framework of cultured and rationalist provincial merchants and dissenting ministers and the intellectual framework of the whig century, were perhaps a less barbarous lot: Josiah Wedgwood the potter (1730–1795) was an FRS, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and a member of the Lunar Society with Matthew Boulton, his partner James Watt and the chemist and revolutionary Priestley. (His son Thomas experimented with photography, published scientific papers and subsidized the poet Coleridge.) The manufacturer of the eighteenth century naturally built his factories to the design of Georgian builders’ books. Their successors, if not more cultured, were at least more prodigal, for by the 1840s they had made enough money to spend freely on pseudo-baronial residences, pseudo-gothic and pseudo-renaissance town-halls, and to rebuild their modest and utilitarian or classic chapels ‘in the perpendicular style. But between the Georgian and the Victorian era there came what has been rightly called the bleak age of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working classes, whose lineaments Charles Dickens has forever caught in his Hard Times.

A pietistic protestantism, rigid, self-righteous, unintellectual, obsessed with puritan morality to the point where hypocrisy was its automatic companion, dominated this desolate epoch. ‘Virtue’, as G. M. Young said, ‘advanced on a broad invincible front’; and it trod the unvirtuous, the weak, the sinful (i.e. those who neither made money nor controlled their emotional or financial expenditures) into the mud where they so plainly belonged, deserving at best only of their betters’ charity. There was some capitalist economic sense in this. Small entrepreneurs had to plough back much of their profits into the business if they were to become big entrepreneurs. The masses of new proletarians had to be broken into the industrial rhythm of labour by the most draconic labour discipline, or left to rot if they would not accept it. And yet even today the heart contracts at the sight of the landscape constructed by that generation:⁸

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this only in highly ornamented examples) a bell in a bird-cage on the top of it… All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial… Everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not and never should be, world without end, Amen.

This gaunt devotion to bourgeois utilitarianism, which the evangelicals and puritans shared with the agnostic eighteenth-century ‘philosophic radicals’ who put it into logical words for them, produced its own functional beauty in railway lines, bridges and warehouses, and its romantic horror in the smoke-drenched endless grey-black or reddish files of small houses overlooked by the fortresses of the mills. Outside it the new bourgeoisie lived (if it had accumulated enough money to move), dispensing command, moral education and assistance to missionary endeavour among the black heathen abroad. Its men personified the money which proved their right to rule the world; its women, deprived by their husbands’ money even of the satisfaction of actually doing household work, personified the virtue of their class: stupid (‘be good sweet maid, and let who will be clever’), uneducated, impractical, theoretically unsexual, propertyless and protected. They were the only luxury which the age of thrift and self-help allowed itself.

The British manufacturing bourgeoisie was the most extreme example of its class, but all over the continent there were smaller groups of the same kind: Catholic in the textile districts of the French North or Catalonia, Calvinist in Alsace, Lutheran pietist in the Rhineland, Jewish all over central and eastern Europe. They were rarely quite as hard as in Britain, for they were rarely quite as divorced from older traditions of urban life and paternalism. Léon Faucher was painfully struck, in spite of his doctrinaire liberalism, by the sight of Manchester in the 1840s, as which continental observer was not?10 But they shared with the English the confidence which came from steady enrichment—between 1830 and 1856 the marriage portions of the Dansette family in Lille increased from 15,000 to 50,000 francs⁹—the absolute faith in economic liberalism, and the rejection of non-economic activities. The spinners’ dynasties of Lille maintained their total contempt for the career of arms until the first world war. The Dollfus of Mulhouse dissuaded their young Fredéric Engel from entering the famous Polytechnique, because they feared it might lead him into a military rather than a business career. Aristocracy and its pedigrees did not to begin with tempt them excessively: like Napoleon’s marshals they were themselves ancestors.

II

The crucial achievement of the two revolutions was thus that they opened careers to talent, or at any rate to energy, shrewdness, hard work and greed. Not all careers, and not to the top rungs of the ladder, except perhaps in the USA. And yet, how extraordinary were the opportunities, how remote from the nineteenth century the static hierarchical ideal of the past! Kabinettsrat von Schele of the Kingdom of Hanover, who refused the application of a poor young lawyer for a government post on the grounds that his father was a bookbinder, and he ought to have stuck to that trade, now appeared both vicious and ridiculous.¹⁰ Yet he was doing no more than repeat the age-old proverbial wisdom of the stable pre-capitalist society, and in 1750 the son of a bookbinder would, in all probability, have stuck to his father’s trade. Now he no longer had to. Four roads to the stars opened before him: business, education (which in turn led to the three goals of government service, politics and the free professions), the arts and war. The last, important enough in France during the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, ceased to be of much significance during the long generations of peace which succeeded, and perhaps for this reason also ceased to be very attractive. The third was new only insofar as the public rewards of an exceptional capacity to entertain or move the public were now much greater than ever before, as is shown by the rising social status of the stage, which was eventually to produce, in Edwardian Britain, the linked phenomena of the knighted actor and the nobleman marrying the chorus-girl. Even in the post-Napoleonic period they already produced the characteristic phenomena of the idolized singer (e.g. Jenny Lind, the ‘Swedish Nightingale’) or dancer (e.g. Fanny Elssler) and the deified concert artist (e.g. Paganini and Franz Liszt).

Neither business nor education were high roads open to everybody even among those who were sufficiently emancipated from the grip of custom and tradition to believe that ‘people like us’ would be admitted to them, to know how to operate in an individualist society, or to accept the desirability of ‘bettering themselves’. A toll had to be paid by intending travellers: without some initial resources, however minimal, it was difficult to get started on the highway to success. This admission toll was unquestionably higher for those entering upon the education road than upon the business road, for even in the countries which had acquired a public educational system primary education was in general grossly neglected; and, even where it existed, was confined for political reasons to a minimum of literacy, arithmetic and moral obedience. However, at first sight paradoxically, the educational highway seemed more attractive than the business highway.

This was no doubt because it required a much smaller revolution in men’s habits and ways of life. Learning, if only in the form of clerical learning, had its accepted and socially valued place in the traditional society; indeed a more eminent place than in the fully bourgeois society. To have a priest, minister or rabbi in the family was perhaps the greatest honour to which poor men could aspire, and well worth making titanic sacrifices for. This social admiration could be readily transferred, once such careers were open, to the secular intellectual, the official or teacher or, in the most marvellous cases, the lawyer and doctor. Moreover, learning was not anti-social as business so clearly seemed to be. The educated man did not automatically turn and rend his like as the shameless and selfish trader or employer would. Often indeed, especially as a teacher, he plainly helped to raise his fellows out of that ignorance and darkness which seemed responsible for their miseries. A general thirst for education was much easier to create than a general thirst for individual business success, and schooling more easily acquired than the strange arts of money-making. Communities almost wholly composed of small peasants, small traders and proletarians, like Wales, could simultaneously develop a hunger to push their sons into teaching and the ministry and a bitter social resentment against wealth and business as such.

Nevertheless in a sense education represented individualist competition, the ‘career open to talent’ and the triumph of merit over birth and connection quite as effectively as business, and this through the device of the competitive examination. As usual, the French Revolution produced its most logical expression, the parallel hierarchies of examinations which still progressively select from among the national body of scholarship winners the intellectual élite that administers and instructs the French people. Scholarship and competitive examination were also the ideal of the most self-consciously bourgeois school of British thinkers, the Benthamite philosophic radicals, who eventually—but not before the end of our period—imposed it in an extremely pure form on the higher British Home and Indian Civil Service, against the bitter resistance of aristocracy. Selection by merit, as determined in examination or other educational tests, became the generally accepted ideal of all except the most archaic European public services (such as the Papal or the British Foreign), or the most democratic, which tended—as in the USA—to prefer election to examination as a criterion of fitness for public posts. For, like other forms of individualist competition, examination-passing was a liberal, but not a democratic or egalitarian device.

The chief social result of opening education to talent was thus paradoxical. It produced not the ‘open society’ of free business competition but the ‘closed society’ of bureaucracy; but both, in their various ways, were characteristic institutions of the bourgeois-liberal era. The ethos of the nineteenth-century higher civil services was fundamentally that of the eighteenth-century enlightenment: Masonic and ‘Josephinian’ in Central and Eastern Europe, Napoleonic in France, liberal and anti-clerical in the other Latin countries, Benthamite in Britain. Admittedly competition was transformed into automatic promotion once the man of merit had actually won his place in the service; though how fast and how far a man was promoted would still depend (in theory) on his merits, unless corporate egalitarianism imposed pure promotion by seniority. At first sight therefore bureaucracy looked very unlike the ideal of the liberal society. And yet, the public services were bound together by the consciousness of being selected by merit, by a prevailing atmosphere of incorruptibility, practical efficiency, and education, and by non-aristocratic origins. Even the rigid insistence on automatic promotion (which reached absurd length in that very middle-class organization, the British Navy) had at least the advantage of excluding the typically aristocratic or monarchical habit of favouritism . In societies where economic development lagged, the public service therefore provided an alternative focus for the rising middle classes.v It is no accident that in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, 68 per cent of all deputies were civil servants or other officials (as against only 12 per cent of the ‘free professions’ and 2·5 per cent of businessmen).¹¹

It was thus fortunate for the intending careerist that the post-Napoleonic period was almost everywhere one of marked expansion in the apparatus and activity of governments, though hardly large enough to absorb the growing supply of literate citizens. Between 1830 and 1850 public expenditure per capita increased by 25 per cent in Spain, by 40 per cent in France, by 44 per cent in Russia, by 50 per cent in Belgium, by 70 per cent in Austria, 75 per cent in the USA and by over 90 per cent in the Netherlands. (Only in Britain, the British colonies, Scandinavia and a few backward states did government expenditure per head of the population remain stable or fall during this period, the heyday of economic liberalism.)¹² This was due not only to the obvious consumer of taxes, the armed forces, which remained much larger after the Napoleonic Wars than before, in spite of the absence of any major international wars: of the major states only Britain and France in 1851 had an army which was very much smaller than at the height of Napoleon’s power in 1810 and several—e.g. Russia, various German and Italian states and Spain—were actually larger. It was due also to the development of old and the acquisition of new functions by states. For it is an elementary error (and one not shared by those logical protagonists of capitalism, the Benthamite ‘philosophic radicals’) to believe that liberalism was hostile to bureaucracy. It was merely hostile to inefficient bureaucracy, to public interference in matters better left to private enterprise and to excessive taxation. The vulgar-liberal slogan of a state reduced to the vestigial functions of the nightwatchman obscures the fact that the state shorn of its inefficient and interfering functions was a much more powerful and ambitious state than before. For instance, by 1848 it was a state which had acquired modern, often national, police-forces: in France from 1798, in Ireland from 1823, in England from 1829, and in Spain (the Guardia Civil) from 1844. Outside Britain it was normally a state which had a public educational system; outside Britain and the USA one which had or was about to have a public railway service; everywhere, one which had an increasingly large postal service to supply the rapidly expanding needs of business and private communication. The growth of population obliged it to maintain a larger judicial system; the growth of cities and urban social problems a larger system of municipal administration. Whether the government functions were old or new, they were increasingly conducted by a single national civil service of fulltime career officials, the higher echelons of whom were freely transferred and promoted by central authority throughout each state. However, while an efficient service of this kind might well reduce the number of officials and the unit cost of administration by eliminating corruption and part-time service, it created a much more formidable government machine. The most elementary functions of the liberal state, such as the efficient assessment and collection of taxes by a body of salaried officials or the maintenance of a regular nationally organized rural constabulary, would have seemed beyond the wildest dreams of most pre-revolutionary absolutisms. So would the level of taxation, now actually sometimes a graduated income tax, which the subject of the liberal state tolerated: in 1840 government expenditure in liberal Britain was four times as high as in autocratic Russia.

Few of these new bureaucratic posts were really the equivalent of the officer’s epaulette which the proverbial Napoleonic soldier carried in his knapsack as a first instalment towards his eventual marshal’s baton. Of the 130,000 civil servants estimated for France in 1839¹³ the great bulk were postmen, teachers, lesser tax-collecting arid legal officials and the like; and even the 450 officials of the Ministry of the Interior, the 350 of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, consisted mainly of clerks; a brand of humanity which, as the literature from Dickens to Gogol makes only too clear, was hardly to be envied except perhaps for the privilege of public service, the security which allowed them to starve at an even rhythm all their lives. Officials who were really the social equivalent of a good middle-class career—financially no honest official could ever hope for more than decent comfort—were few. Even today the ‘administrative class’ of the entire British civil service, which was devised by the mid-nineteenth-century reformers as the equivalent of the middle classes in the bureaucratic hierarchy, consists of no more than 3,500 persons in all.

Yet, modest though the situation of the petty official or whitecollar worker was, it was a mountain-range above the labouring poor. He did no physical work. Clean hands and the white collar put him, however symbolically, on the side of the rich. He normally carried with him the magic of public authority. Before him men and women had to queue for the documents which registered their lives; he waved them on or held them back; he told them what they could not do. In the more backward countries (as well as in the democratic USA) through him cousins and nephews might conceivably find jobs; in many not so backward countries he had to be bribed. For innumerable peasant or labouring families, for whom all other prospects of social ascent were dim, petty bureaucracy, teaching and the priesthood were at least theoretically within reach, Himalayas which their sons might conceivably climb.

The free professions were hardly within their purview; for to become a doctor, a lawyer, a professor (which on the continent meant a secondary schoolmaster as well as a university teacher) or an ‘other educated person following miscellaneous pursuits’¹⁴ required long years of education or exceptional talent and opportunity. Britain in 1851 contained some 16,000 lawyers (not counting judges) and a mere 1700 law students; some 17,000 physicians and surgeons and 3,500 medical students and assistants, less than 3,000 architects, about 1,300 ‘editors and writers’. (The French term Journalist had not yet entered official cognisance.) Law and medicine were two of the great traditional professions. The third, the clergy, provided less of an opening than might have been expected if only because (except for the preachers of protestant sects) it was probably expanding rather more slowly than population. Indeed, thanks to the anti-clerical zeal of governments—Joseph II suppressed 359 abbeys and convents, the Spaniards in their liberal intervals did their best to suppress them all—certain parts of the profession were contracting rather than expanding.

Only one real opening existed: elementary school teaching by laymen and religious. The numbers of the teaching profession, which was in the main recruited from the sons of peasants, artisans, and other modest families, were by no means negligible in western states: in Britain some 76,000 men and women in 1851 described themselves as schoolmasters/ mistresses or general teachers, not to mention the 20,000 or so governesses, the well-known last resource of penniless educated girls unable or unwilling to earn their living in less respectable ways. Moreover, teaching was not merely a large but an expanding profession. It was poorly paid; but outside the most philistine countries such as Britain and the USA, the elementary school teacher was a rightly popular figure. For if anyone represented the ideal of an age when for the first time common men and women looked above their heads and saw that ignorance could be dissipated, it was surely the man or the woman whose life and calling was to give children the opportunities which their parents had never had; to open the world to them; to imbue them with truth and morality.

Business, of course, was the most obvious career open to talent, and in a rapidly expanding economy business opportunities were naturally great. The small-scale nature of much enterprise, the prevalence of sub-contract, of modest buying and selling, made them relatively easy to take. Yet neither the material nor the social and cultural conditions were propitious for the poor. In the first place—a fact frequently overlooked by the successful—the evolution of the industrial economy depended on creating wage-labourers faster than employers or the self-employed. For every man who moved up into the business classes, a greater number necessarily moved down. In the second place economic independence required technical qualifications, attitudes of mind, or financial resources (however modest) which were simply not in the possession of most men and women. Those who were lucky enough to possess them—for instance, members of religious minorities and sects, whose aptitude for such activities is well-known to the sociologist—might do well: the majority of those serfs of Ivanovo—the ‘Russian Manchester’—who became textile manufacturers, belonged to the sect of the ‘Old Believers’.¹⁵ But it would have been entirely unrealistic to expect those who did not possess these advantages—for instance the majority of Russian peasants—to do the same, or even at this stage to think of emulating them.

III

No groups of the population welcomed the opening of the career to talent to whatever kind more passionately than those minorities who had hitherto been debarred from eminence not merely because they were not well-born, but because they suffered official and collective discrimination. The enthusiasm with which French protestants threw themselves into public life in and after the Revolution was exceeded only by the volcanic eruption of talent among the western Jews. Before the emancipation which eighteenth-century rationalism prepared and the French Revolution brought, only two roads to eminence were available to a Jew, commerce or finance and the interpretation of the sacred law; and both confined him to his own narrowly segregated ghetto community, from which only a handful of ‘court Jews’ or other men of wealth half-emerged, careful—even in Britain and Holland—not to step too far into the dangerous and unpopular light of celebrity. Nor was such emergence unpopular only among the brutal and drunken unbelievers who, on the whole, signally failed to welcome Jewish emancipation. Centuries of social compression had closed the ghetto in upon itself, rejecting any step outside its tight orthodoxies as unbelief and treason. The eighteenth-century pioneers of Jewish liberalization in Germany and Austria, notably Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), were reviled as deserters and atheists.

The great bulk of Judaism, which inhabited the rapidly growing ghettoes in the eastern part of the old kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, continued to live their self-contained and suspicious lives among the hostile peasantry, divided only in their allegiance between the learned intellectualist rabbis of the Lithuanian orthodoxy and the ecstatic and poverty-striken Chassidim. It is characteristic that of forty-six Galician revolutionaries arrested by the Austrian authorities in 1834 only one was a Jew.18 But in the smaller communities of the west the Jews seized their new opportunities with both hands, even when the price they had to pay for them was a nominal baptism, as in semi-emancipated countries it often still was, at any rate for official posts. The businessman did not even require this. The Rothschilds, kings of international Jewry, were not only rich. This they could also have been earlier, though the political and military changes of the period provided unprecedented opportunities for international finance. They could also now be seen to be rich, occupy a social position roughly commensurate to their wealth, and even aspire to the nobility which European princes actually began to grant them in 1816. (They became hereditary Habsburg barons in 1823.)

More striking than Jewish wealth was the flowering of Jewish talent in the secular arts, sciences and professions. By twentieth century standards it was as yet modest, though by 1848 the greatest Jewish mind of the nineteenth century and the most successful Jewish politician had both reached maturity: Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881). There were no major Jewish scientists and only a few Jewish mathematicians of high but not supreme eminence. Meyerbeer (1791–1864) and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1847) are not composers of the highest contemporary class, though among poets Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) survives rather better. There was as yet no Jewish painters of importance, no great Jewish executant musicians or conductors, and only one major theatrical figure, the actress Rachel (1821-1858). But in fact the production of genius is not the criterion of a people’s emancipation, which is measured rather by the sudden abundance of less eminent Jewish participants in West European culture and public life, especially in France and above all in the German states, which provided the language and ideology that gradually bridged the gap between medievalism and the nineteenth century for the immigrant Jews from the hinterland.

The dual revolution had given the Jews the nearest thing to equality they had ever enjoyed under Christianity. Those who seized their opportunity wished for nothing better than to ‘assimilate’ to the new society, and their sympathies were, for obvious reasons, overwhelmingly liberal. Yet the situation of the Jews was uncertain and uneasy, even though the endemic anti-semitism of the exploited masses, which could now often readily identify Jew and ‘bourgeois’, was not seriously exploited by demagogic politicians. In France and Western Germany (but not yet elsewhere), some young Jews found themselves dreaming of an even more perfect society: there was a marked Jewish element in French Saint-Simonianism (Olinde Rodrigues, the brothers Pereire, Léon Halévy, d’Eichthal) and to a lesser extent in German communism (Moses Hess, the poet Heine, and of course Marx who, however, showed a total indifference to his Jewish origins and connections).

The situation of the Jews made them exceptionally ready to assimilate to bourgeois society. They were a minority. They were already overwhelmingly urban, to the point of being largely immunized against the diseases of urbanization. In the cities their lower mortality and morbidity was already noted by the statisticians. They were overwhelmingly literate and outside agriculture. A very large proportion of them were already in commerce or the professions. Their very position constantly obliged them to consider new situations and ideas, if only to detect the latent threat which they held. The great mass of the world’s peoples, on the other hand, found it much harder to adjust to the new society.

This was partly because the rock-ribbed armour of custom made it almost impossible for them to understand what they were expected to do in it; like the young Algerian gentlemen, transported to Paris to gain a European education in the 1840s, who were shocked at the discovery that they had been invited to the royal capital for anything but the social commerce with king and nobility, which they knew to be their due. Moreover, the new society did not make adjustment easy. Those who accepted the evident blessings of middle class civilization and middle class manners could enjoy its benefits freely; those who refused or were unable to, simply did not count. There was more than mere political bias in the insistence on a property franchise which characterized the moderate liberal governments of 1830; the man who had not shown the ability to accumulate property was not a full man, and could therefore hardly be a full citizen. The extremes of this attitude occurred where the European middle class came into contact with the unbelieving heathen, seeking to convert him through intellectually unsophisticated missionaries to the truths of Christianity, commerce and the wearing of trousers (between which no sharp distinctions were drawn), or imposing on him the truths of liberal legislation. If he accepted these, liberalism (at all events among the revolutionary French) was perfectly prepared to grant him full citizenship with all its rights, or the hope of being one day almost as good as an Englishman, as among the British. The attitude is perfectly reflected in the senatus-consulte of Napoleon III which, a few years after the end of our period but well within its spirit, opened citizenship to the native Algerian: ‘Il peut, sur sa demande, être admis à jouir des droits de citoyen français; dans ce cas il est régi par les lois civiles et politiques de la France.’¹⁶ All he had to give up, in effect, was Islam; if he did not want to do so—and few did—then he remained a subject and not a citizen.

The massive contempt of the ‘civilized’ for the ‘barbarians’ (who included the bulk of labouring poor at home)¹⁷ rested on this feeling of demonstrated superiority. The middle-class world was freely open to all. Those who failed to enter its gates therefore demonstrated a lack of personal intelligence, moral force or energy which automatically condemned them; or at best a historic or racial heritage which must permanently cripple them, or else they would already have made use of their opportunities. The period which culminated about the middle of the century was therefore one of unexampled callousness, not merely because the poverty which surrounded middle class respectability was so shocking that the native rich learned not to see it, leaving its horrors to make their full impact only on visiting foreigners (as the horrors of Indian slums today do), but because the poor, like the outer barbarians, were talked of as though they were not properly human at all. If their fate was to become industrial labourers, they were merely a mass to be forced into the proper disciplinary mould by sheer coercion, the draconic factory discipline being supplemented by the aid of the state. (It is characteristic that contemporary middle class opinion saw no incompatibility between the principle of equality before the law and the deliberately discriminatory labour codes, which, as in the British Master and Servant code of 1823, punished the workers by prison for breaches of contract and the employers merely by modest fines, if at all.)¹⁸ They ought to be constantly on the verge of starvation, because otherwise they would not work, being inaccessible to ‘human’ motives. ‘It is to the interest of the worker himself,’ Villermé was told in the late 1830s by employers ‘that he should be constantly harassed by need, for then he will not set his children a bad example, and his poverty will be a guarantee of good behaviour.’¹⁹ There were nevertheless too many poor for their own good, but it was to be hoped that the operations of Malthus’ law would starve off enough of them to establish a viable maximum; unless of course per absurdum the poor established their own rational checks on population by refraining from an excessive indulgence in procreation.

It was but a small step from such an attitude to the formal recognition of inequality which, as Henri Baudrillart argued in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1853, was one of the three pillars of human society, the other two being property and inheritance.²⁰ The hierarchical society was thus reconstructed on the foundations of formal equality. It had merely lost what made it tolerable in the old days, the general social conviction that men had duties and rights, that virtue was not simply the equivalent of money, and that the lower order, though low, had a right to their modest lives in the station to which God had called them.

References