426 Chapter 22summer, as the poet laureate Robert Southey did, might
not escape deplorable conditions. The air in Edinburgh
was so bad, Southey claimed, that “you might smoke
bacon by hanging it out of the window.” Much of
nineteenth-century urban history thus became the story
of urban renewal. Paris became a much more pleasant
city with the construction of the comprehensive sewer
system that Victor Hugo described as a central setting
of Les Misérables.In 1800 Paris had a total of twenty
kilometers of sewers; by the late nineteenth century,
more than two thousand kilometers. Paris was also a
model of urban renewal above ground. In the 1850s
and 1860s a government plan devised by Baron
Georges Haussmann tore down many of the dark
buildings and narrow streets surviving from medieval
Paris and replaced them with the broad boulevards and
graceful residences of a “city of light.”Changing Class Structures
The beginning of the industrial age changed the social
order of the city as much as its physical appearance. In-
dustrialization created a new elite, of wealth. This was a
wealth based on capital, not land; a wealth of mer-
chants, manufacturers, industrialists, and financiers. The
British social critic Thomas Carlyle called them “Cap-
tains of Industry”; others referred to “Lords of the
Loom,” “Railroad Kings,” and a dozen similar titles.
Heavily industrialized regions, such as Alsace, created a
wealthy new aristocracy. The Koechlin family of Mul-
house went from the comfortable life provided by asuccessful weaver in a cottage industry to the immense
wealth of factory owners within a single generation.
The leading families of this industrial bourgeoisie
formed an elite different from the landed aristocracy.
During the nineteenth century, this small social group,
together with older elites of middle-class wealth (such
as mercantile and banking wealth) and members of the
educated professions (such as physicians, lawyers,
teachers, and journalists) would challenge the political
dominance of the Old Regime alliance of monarchy,
aristocracy, and established churches. For the members
of the prosperous middle class, the age of industrializa-
tion was an exciting and comfortable epoch (see illus-
tration 22.3).
The new bourgeoisie may have been the most in-
fluential class in the changing society of the industrial
age, but it was relatively small. A larger change in the
social structure was the rapid growth of a class of urban
workers who operated the steam engines, power forges,
spinning mules, power looms, and trains. These men
and women of the working class—or the proletariat, as
this social class was frequently called—often formed
the majority of a town’s population. A study of the so-
cial structure in Belgium textile towns found that ap-
proximately half of the population was employed as
spinners or weavers in the new factories. But a textile
town might still have a quarter of its population em-
ployed in agriculture, including both farmers who lived
in the town and agricultural laborers, or a quarter en-
gaged in the traditional artisanal trades and crafts of the
guilds. The educated professions, the industrial middle
class, and the traditional upper classes of wealth re-
mained small—less than 5 percent of the population.Illustration 22.3
Middle-Class Comfort.Views of
European life during industrialization
vary sharply depending upon the social
class perspective of the observer. The
middle class grew significantly in size
and prosperity during the nineteenth
century, and middle-class views such as
this sentimental English print of a holi-
day dinner recall that progress. The life
of the servants (the largest form of em-
ployment for women) depicted here was
not so rosy, but it was markedly more
comfortable than industrial work.