62 Chapter III
goods, tangible and intangible, than a noble family—except rank. Mme. d’Epinay
had a well- to- do acquaintance who “could not console herself at being nothing but
a financier’s wife.”^34 Rank came to prey upon the mind. Goethe’s great- uncle, J. M.
von Loen, was the rich descendant of a merchant family, who became a writer,
traveler, and kind of German philosophe. He wrote, as already mentioned, a little
tract proposing a merchant nobility. Impressed by the meaninglessness of existing
social classifications (which, however, he had no desire to abolish), he observed:^35
I see at the fair in Frankfurt a fine- looking merchant’s wife sitting in her
shop; she is superbly dressed, and gives orders to her servants like a prin-
cess; she knows how to greet persons of station, ordinary people and the
vulgar each according to worth and condition; she judges reasonably, and
brings up her children well. Her husband sits meanwhile in his office,
makes decisions, disposes of thousands, and often deals with more people
in an hour than others can manage to see in a day.
On the other hand I see honest noble folk in the country that have to
subject themselves to menial tasks, where the lady of the house often goes
into the stable herself, hurries from store- room to kitchen to cellar, brings
in the lambs, pigs, hens, geese, or crops, so that in fact she is carrying on a
small business yet does not derogate from her noble rank in the least. Her
lord meanwhile goes about his fields scattering seed or moving dung, in
the barn or the cellar, with his thrashers and hired men.
Who would really say that, between these two ways of life, the differ-
ence was so great that only the latter would be considered noble, the for-
mer not?Von Loen’s solution was by no means to abolish nobility, but to admit suitable
people to a share in the honors it conveyed.
It may be that the class problem, and in particular the problem of the bourgeois
in an aristocratic society, had become most acute in France. If so (and it is by no
means certain as of the years around 1760) it was because contact between bour-
geois and noble was very common, because the bourgeois class had grown up in
close conjunction with the state and the monarchy, because for generations it had
expected social ascent through the holding of office, and because the French bour-
geois, perhaps more than the German burgher, looked on the noble way of life as
the norm of desirable living. In France the most important of the bourgeoisie were
office- holders and lawyers, but even the merchants, busy, successful, enterprising,
and affluent as they often were at the time, seem to have shared in the idea that
commerce was a somewhat degrading occupation—thus differing from their self-
satisfied counterparts in England or Holland. The French bourgeois “identified”
with the aristocracy. He, too, took pride in his ancestry. For him, too, business was
something to escape from and rise above. Even in the “bourgeois drama,” so popu-
lar about 1760, the speeches on the dignity of trade were usually given by charac-
34 E. Barber, The Bourgeoisie in 18th Century France, 57.
35 Der Kaufmannsadel, Untersucht nach der Gewohnheit der heutigen Welt (1745), quoted in H.
Vo e lc k er, Die Stadt Goethes, 101.