A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

The Middle Classes 535

wise and the most virtuous part of the community.” Mill’s 1820 Essay on
Government denounced nobles for selfish attention to their landed inter­

ests: ‘They grow richer as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or
economizing. What claim have they, on the general principle of social jus­
tice, to this accession of riches?” In Spain, the middle class—bankers, man­
ufacturers, and merchants in the prosperous port of Barcelona, and lawyers
and civil servants in Madrid—considered themselves “the useful classes,”
in contrast to noble “idleness.” Many middle-class families in England, the
Netherlands, and some of the German states were influenced by evangeli­
cal Protestantism, which stressed the redeeming nature of hard work. In
1847, a Parisian newspaper defined what it meant to be bourgeois: “The
bourgeoisie is not a class, it is a position; one acquires that position and one
loses it. Work, thrift, and ability confer it; vice, dissipation, and idleness
mean it is lost.”
The notion of “respectability” gradually changed in Europe. Even in Prus­
sia, schoolbooks that had early in the nineteenth century emphasized
immutable social hierarchy and the necessity of obedience gradually shifted
to discussions of the virtues of hard work, self-discipline, and thrift. Middle­
class families viewed the expansion of their fortunes as the best assurance of
respectability. Bankruptcy seemed a fate worse than death.
The ideal of the self-made man was bom. Yet rapid social ascension
remained difficult and fairly rare. There were, to be sure, spectacular suc­
cess stories. The son of an ironmonger and saddler, the Welshman Robert
Owen (1771-1858) began his career as a clerk and then sold cloth. Borrow­
ing money to start up his own textile business, he became part owner of the
large and prosperous New Lanark Mills in Scotland. Robert Peel (1788—
1850), a British prime minister, is another case in point. His family had
owned some land, his grandfather sold goods door to door, and his father
became one of the most successful entrepreneurs in Lancashire. By 1790,
Peel sat in Parliament as Sir Robert Peel, one of England’s wealthiest men.
To be sure, some degree of social mobility was also possible from the ranks
of relatively prosperous master artisans. Yet hard times could cause petty
bourgeois to tumble into the working class. The possibility of being afflicted
by economic crises or personal disasters haunted such families.

Rising Professions

Urban growth swelled the ranks of lawyers, doctors, and notaries. For the

most part, however, the aspirations of those in these professions remained

higher than their incomes and prestige. In the novels of Honore de Balzac

(1799-1850), young middle-class men “kill each other, like spiders in ajar.”

Lawyers had less than sterling reputations even as their numbers increased.

In the 1830s and 1840s, the French caricaturist Honore Daumier (1 SOS­

1879) depicted lawyers as arrogant, self-satisfied, insensitive men far more

interested in extracting fees than serving justice. However, in Britain—and