or ‘influence’, much closer to Benveniste’s idea of language as ‘the instrument by which the world and society are adjusted ’39 than to Koselleck’s ‘tension’. It is hardly an accident, I think, that so many of my keywords have turned out to be adjectives: less central than nouns (let alone concepts) to a culture’s semantic system, adjectives are unsystematic and indeed ‘adjustable’; or, as Humpty Dumpty would scornfully say, ‘adjectives, you can do anything with’.40
Prose, and keywords: two parallel threads that will resurface throughout the argument, at the different scales of paragraphs, sentences, and individual words. Through them, the peculiarities of bourgeois culture will emerge from the implicit, and even buried dimension of language: a ‘mentality’ made of unconscious grammatical patterns and semantic associations, more than clear and distinct ideas. This was not the original plan of the book, and there are moments when I’m still taken aback by the fact that the pages on Victorian adjectives may be the conceptual centre of The Bourgeois. But if the ideas of the bourgeois have received plenty of attention, his mentality—aside from a few isolated attempts, like Groethuysen’s study almost a century ago—remains still largely unexplored; and then, the minutiae of language reveal secrets that great ideas often mask: the friction between new aspirations and old habits, the false starts, the hesitations, the compromises; in one word, the slowness of cultural history. For a book that sees bourgeois culture as an incomplete project, it felt like the right methodological choice.
7. ‘THE BOURGEOIS IS LOST . . .’
On 14 April 1912, Benjamin Guggenheim, Solomon’s younger brother, found himself on board the Titanic, and, as the ship started sinking, he was one of those who helped women and children onto the lifeboats, withstanding the frenzy, and at times the brutality, of other male passengers. Then, when his steward was ordered to man one of the boats, Guggenheim took his leave, and asked him to tell his wife that ‘no woman was left on board because Ben Guggenheim was a coward’. And that was it.41 His words may have been a little less resonant, but it really doesn’t matter; he did the right, very difficult thing to do. And so, when a researcher for Cameron’s 1997 Titanic unearthed the anecdote, he immediately brought it to the scriptwriters’ attention: what a scene. But he was flatly turned down: too unrealistic. The rich don’t die for abstract principles like cowardice and the like. And indeed, the film’s vaguely Guggenheim-like figure tries to force his way onto a lifeboat with a gun.
‘The bourgeois is lost’, wrote Thomas Mann in his 1932 essay on ‘Goethe as a Representative of the Bourgeois Age’, and these two Titanic moments—placed at the opposite ends of the twentieth century—agree with him. Lost, not because capitalism is: to the contrary, capitalism is stronger than ever (if, Golem-like, mostly in destruction). What has evaporated is the sense of bourgeois legitimacy: the idea of a ruling class that doesn’t just rule, but deserves to do so. It was this conviction that animated Guggenheim’s words on the Titanic; at stake, was his class’s ‘prestige (and hence trust)’, to use one of Gramsci’s passages on the concept of hegemony.42 Giving it up, meant losing the right to rule.
Power, justified by values. But just as bourgeois political rule was finally on the agenda,43 three major novelties, emerging in quick succession, altered the picture forever. First came political collapse. As the belle époque came to its tawdry end, like the operette in which it liked to mirror itself, the bourgeoisie joined forces with the old elite in precipitating Europe into the carnage of war; afterwards, it shielded its class interests behind black and brown shirts, paving the way for worse massacres. As the old regime was ending, the new men proved incapable of acting like a true ruling class: when, in 1942, Schumpeter wrote with cold contempt that ‘the bourgeois class . . . needs a master’,44 he had no need to explain what he meant.
The second transformation, nearly opposite in nature, emerged after the Second World War, with the widespread establishment of democratic regimes. ‘The peculiarity of the historical consent won from the masses within modern capitalist social formations’, writes Perry Anderson, is
the belief by the masses that they exercise an ultimate self-determination within the existing social order . . . a credence in the democratic equality of all citizens in the government of the nation—in other words, disbelief in the existence of any ruling class.45
Having concealed itself behind rows of uniforms, the European bourgeoisie now absconded behind a political myth that demanded its self-effacement as a class; an act of camouflage made that much easier by the pervasive discourse of the ‘middle class’. And then, the final touch; as capitalism brought a relative well-being to the lives of large working masses in the West, commodities became the new principle of legitimation: consensus was built on things, not men—let alone principles. It was the dawn of today: capitalism triumphant, and bourgeois culture dead.
Many things are missing from this book. Some I had discussed elsewhere, and felt I had nothing new to say about: it’s the case of Balzac’s parvenus, or Dickens’s middle class, that had played a large role in The Way of the World and Atlas of the European Novel. Late-nineteenth-century American authors—Norris, Howells, Dreiser—seemed for their part to add little to the general picture; besides, The Bourgeois is a partisan essay, with no encyclopaedic ambitions. That said, there is one topic that I would have really liked to include, had it not threatened to become a book all by itself: a parallel between Victorian Britain and the post-1945 United States, highlighting the paradox of these two hegemonic capitalist cultures—the only ones that have existed so far—resting largely on anti-bourgeois values.46 I am thinking, of course, of the omnipresence of religious sentiment in public discourse; a presence that is in fact growing, in a sharp reversal of earlier trends towards secularization. Similarly for the great technological advances of the nineteenth and late twentieth century: instead of encouraging a rationalistic mentality, the industrial and then the digital ‘revolutions’ have produced a mix of scientific illiteracy and religious superstition—these, too, worse now than then—that defy belief. In this, the United States of today radicalizes the central thesis of the Victorian chapter: the defeat of Weberian Entzauberung at the core of the capitalist system, and its replacement by a sentimental re-enchantment of social relations. In both cases, a key ingredient has been the drastic infantilization of the national culture: from the pious idea of ‘family reading’ that launched the Bowdlerization of Victorian literature, to the syrupy replica—the family, smiling at its TV—that has put American entertainment to sleep.47 And the parallel can be extended in just about every direction, from the anti-intellectualism of ‘useful’ knowledge, and of much educational policy—beginning with its addiction to sports—to the ubiquity of words like ‘earnest’ (then) and ‘fun’ (now), with their thinly disguised contempt for intellectual and emotional seriousness.
The ‘American way of life’ as the Victorianism of today: tempting as the idea was, I was too aware of my ignorance of contemporary matters, and decided against it. It was the right decision—but difficult, because it meant admitting that The Bourgeois was an exclusively historical study, with no true link to the present. History professors, muses Dr Cornelius in ‘Disorder and Early Sorrow’, ‘do not love history because it is something that comes to pass, but only because it is something that has come to pass . . . their hearts belong to the coherent, disciplined, historic past . . . The past is immortalized; that is to say, it is dead.’48 Like Cornelius, I too am a history professor; but I like to think that disciplined lifelessness may not be all I will be capable of. In this sense, inscribing The Bourgeois to Perry Anderson and Paolo Flores d’Arcais signals more than my friendship and admiration towards them; it expresses the hope that, one day, I will learn from them to use the intelligence of the past for the critique of the present. This book does not live up to that hope.
