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

Industrial Work and Workers 559

Foundling homes were overcrowded and notoriously unhealthy. In four
towns in one Russian province, more than 90 percent of all of the children
taken in by orphanages died within a few years.
Great Britain was the first state to have a national policy of poor relief.
Against the background of the French Revolution, the Speenhamland sys­
tem established in 1795 supplemented the wages of laborers with funds
generated from property taxes (“poor rates”). Doles were based on the price
of bread and the number of dependents for whom each head of a poor fam­
ily had to provide. But this arrangement had the drawback of encouraging
landowners to pay lower wages, while assuring them of an inexhaustible
supply of cheap field hands. It also may have encouraged poor families to
have more children, as payments were adjusted to family size.
The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 ended the Speenhamland system.
It established workhouses in which poor people without jobs would be incar­
cerated. Workhouses were organized like prisons, their occupants exposed to
harsh discipline in the hope that they would find any kind of possible work in
order to avoid being sent back. Towns enforced laws against begging in order
to force the unemployed poor into workhouses. When families were taken
in, husbands were separated from their wives, children from their parents,
and all were herded into dormitories. Inmates were forced to work at simple
tasks and were given used clothes and dreadful food. The stigma of being
poor was such that one influential official even tried to stop the ringing of
church bells at pauper funerals. In 1841, despite organized opposition and
although application of the law varied greatly, more than 200,000 people
were workhouse inmates in Britain.

Class Consciousness

During the first half of the nineteenth century, many workers began to con­

sider themselves members of the working class, with interests that were dif­

ferent from those of their employers and the middle class. They began to

have a sense of community based on a belief in the dignity of labor. This

class consciousness did not spring up overnight, and it is difficult to fix a

certain point in time when it did develop. Moreover, certainly not all work­

ers became conscious of themselves as a class apart. Great differences in

skills and work experience remained among workers in different countries

and even among workers in the same region, or city, and between male and

female workers. Other identities continued to be important to workers,

such as those of family and motherhood, cultural identity (Flemish,

Venetian, Welsh, etc.), religious adherence, and village and neighborhood

solidarity.

Urban artisans were the first workers to begin to express class conscious­

ness, sharing the frustrations and goals of other workers. This process began

early in the nineteenth century in England, although it was not until the

early 1830s that one can speak of a cohesive class identity; it began in the