CHAPTER 19

RAPID

INDUSTRIALIZATION

AND ITS CHALLENGES,

1870-1914

Jeanne Bouvier was a peasant girl born in 1865 in southeastern

France. Her father earned his living by tilling the fields and as a barrel

maker, an occupation closely tied to wine production. But in 1876, disease

began to destroy the vineyards of the Rhone River Valley. Jeanne’s family

was forced to sell its land and possessions and travel to find work, pushed

along by poverty and unemployment. From age eleven to fourteen, Jeanne

worked thirteen hours a day in a silk mill. Four other jobs in various towns

and villages in her region followed until Jeanne’s mother took her to Paris,

where the first job she found lasted only a week. Like so many other single,

female migrants to city life, she then worked as a domestic servant. A

cousin showed her how to do hat-trimming work. When that trade col­

lapsed because of changes in style and the economic depression, she

became a skilled dressmaker in a Parisian workshop and then developed

her own clientele. Jeanne Bouvier became a Parisian. When she returned

home to her native village, Jeanne spoke French, and not the patois in

which her old friends conversed. She had become an urban woman.

In 1900, the French Catholic writer Charles Peguy expressed the opin­

ion that Europe had changed more in the previous thirty years than it had

since the time of Jesus Christ. The period 1870-1914 was indeed one of

rapid economic and social change in much of Europe. Rail networks

extended their reach into the countryside, carrying manufactured goods and

returning with meat, vegetables, fresh milk, and fruit for burgeoning cities.

The speed and capacity of steamships brought American cereal grains, cat­

tle, and meat to Western European ports, reducing their prices.

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