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’?
Figure 1
‘Bourgeois’ first appeared in eleventh-century French, as burgeis, to indicate those residents of medieval towns (bourgs) who enjoyed the legal right of being ‘free and exempt from feudal jurisdiction’ (Robert). The juridical sense of the term—from which arose the typically bourgeois idea of liberty as ‘freedom from’—was then joined, near the end of the seventeenth century, by an economic meaning that referred, with the familiar string of negations, to ‘someone who belonged neither to the clergy nor to the nobility, did not work with his hands, and possessed independent means’ (Robert again). From that moment on, though chronology and semantics vary from country to country,18 the word surfaces in all western European languages, from the Italian borghese to the Spanish burgués, Portuguese burguês, German Bürger and Dutch burger. In this group, the English ‘bourgeois’ stands out as the only case in which, instead of being assimilated by the morphology of the national language, the term has remained an unmistakable import from the French. And, indeed, ‘a (French) citizen or freeman’ is the OED’s first definition of ‘bourgeois’ as a noun; ‘of, or pertaining to the French middle class’ is that of the adjective, promptly buttressed by a series of quotations referring to France, Italy and Germany. The female noun ‘bourgeoise’ is ‘a Frenchwoman of the middle class’, while ‘bourgeoisie’—the first three entries mentioning France, continental Europe and Germany—is, consistently with the rest, ‘the body of freemen of a French town; the French middle class; also extended to that of other countries’.
‘Bourgeois’, marked as un-English. In Dinah Craik’s best-seller John Halifax, Gentleman (1856)—the fictional biography of a textile industrialist—the word appears only three times, always italicized as a sign of foreignness, and only used to belittle the idea (‘I mean the lower orders, the bourgeoisie’), or express contempt (‘What! A bourgeois—a tradesman?’). As for the other novelists of Craik’s time, perfect silence; in the Chadwyck-Healey database—whose 250 novels add up to a somewhat expanded version of the nineteenth-century canon—‘bourgeois’ occurs exactly once between 1850 and 1860, whereas ‘rich’ occurs 4,600 times, ‘wealthy’ 613, and ‘prosperous’ 449. And if we broaden the investigation to the entire century—addressing it from the slightly different angle of the term’s range of application, rather than its frequency—the 3,500 novels of the Stanford Literary Lab give the following results: the adjective ‘rich’ is applied to 1,060 different nouns; ‘wealthy’, to 215; ‘prosperous’, to 156; and ‘bourgeois’, to 8: family, doctor, virtues, air, virtue, affectation, playhouse, and, bizarrely, escutcheon.
Why this reluctance? In general, writes Kocka, bourgeois groups
set themselves off from the old authorities, the privileged hereditary nobility, and absolute monarchy . . . From this line of thought the converse follows: To the extent that these frontlines were missing or faded, talk of a Bürgertum that is at once comprehensive and delimited loses its substance in reality. This explains international differences: where the tradition of nobility was weak or absent (as in Switzerland and the United States), where a country’s early de-feudalization and commercialization of agriculture gradually wore down the noble–bourgeois distinction and even urban–rural differences (as in England and Sweden), we find powerful factors counteracting the formation of a distinctive Bürgertum and discourse on Bürgertum.19
The lack of a clear ‘frontline’ for the discourse on Bürgertum: this is what made the English language so indifferent to the word ‘bourgeois’. Conversely, pressure was building behind ‘middle class’ for the simple reason that many observers of early industrial Britain wanted a class in the middle. Manufacturing districts, wrote James Mill in the Essay on Government (1824), were ‘peculiarly unhappy from a very great deficiency of middle rank, as there the population almost wholly consists of rich manufacturers and poor workmen’.20 Rich and poor: ‘there is no town in the world’, observed Canon Parkinson in his famous description of Manchester, echoed by many of his contemporaries, ‘where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great, or the barrier between them so difficult to be crossed’.21 As industrial growth was polarizing English society—‘the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers’, as the Communist Manifesto would starkly put it—the need for mediation became more acute, and a class in the middle seemed the only one that could ‘sympathize’ with the ‘afflictions of poor workmen’ (Mill again), while also ‘guiding’ them ‘by their advice’, and providing ‘a good example to admire’.22 They were ‘the link which connects the upper and the lower orders’, added Lord Brougham, who also described them—in a speech on the Reform Bill entitled ‘Intelligence of the Middle Classes’—as ‘the genuine depositaries of sober, rational, intelligent, and honest English feeling’.23
If the economy created the broad historical need for a class in the middle, politics added the decisive tactical twist. In the Google Books corpus, ‘middle class’, ‘middle classes’ and ‘bourgeois’ appear to have been more or less equally frequent between 1800 and 1825; but in the years immediately preceding the 1832 Reform Bill—when the relationship between social structure and political representation moves to the centre of public life—‘middle class’ and ‘middle classes’ become suddenly two or three times more frequent than ‘bourgeois’. Possibly, because ‘middle class’ was a way to dismiss the bourgeoisie as an independent group, and instead look at it from above, entrusting it with a task of political containment.24 Then, once the baptism had occurred, and the new term had solidified, all sorts of consequences (and reversals) followed: though ‘middle class’ and ‘bourgeois’ indicated exactly the same social reality, for instance, they created around it very different associations: once placed ‘in the middle’, the bourgeoisie could appear as a group that was itself partly subaltern, and couldn’t really be held responsible for the way of the world. And then, ‘low’, ‘middle’ and ‘upper’ formed a continuum where mobility was much easier to imagine than among incommensurable categories—‘classes’—like peasantry, proletariat, bourgeoisie, or nobility. And so, in the long run, the symbolic horizon created by ‘middle class’ worked extremely well for the English (and American) bourgeoisie: the initial defeat of 1832, which had made an ‘independent bourgeois representation’25 impossible, later shielded it from direct criticism, promoting a euphemistic version of social hierarchy. Groethuysen was right: incognito worked.
4. BETWEEN HISTORY AND LITERATURE
The bourgeois between history and literature. But in this book I limit myself to only a handful of the possible examples. I begin with the bourgeois before his prise de pouvoir (‘A Working Master’): a dialogue between Defoe and Weber around a man alone on an island, dis-embedded from the rest of mankind; but a man who is beginning to see a pattern in his existence, and to find the right words to express it. In ‘Serious Century’, the island has become a half continent: the bourgeois has multiplied across western Europe, and extended
