The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation [1 ed.] 9780198207771

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OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS EDITORS R. R. DAVIES P. LANGFORD H. M. MAYR-HARTING SIR KEITH THOMAS

R. J. W. EVANS H. C. G. MATTHEW A. J. NICHOLLS

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The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation

CAROL E. HARRISON

1

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Carol E. Harrison  The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right of Oxford University Press (maker) First published  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organisation. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data applied for ISBN ---           Typeset in Ehrhardt by Regent Typesetting, London Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd., Midsomer Norton

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For my parents

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

Scholarship is nothing if not a work of emulation, and I am fortunate to have profited from many models of academic excellence and encouragement. Friends and colleagues in England, France, and America have generously offered their time, their critical spirit, and their support to this project. Institutional support is not the least of the debts I have acquired in the production of this book. The Rhodes Trust funded the initial dissertation research out of which this project grew. Auburn University offered me release time in which to finish revisions, and the Tanner Humanities Center of the University of Utah funded a year’s leave in – during which I wrote the bulk of the manuscript. My thanks are also due to archivists, librarians, and latter-day emulators in France. In particular, Henri Hours of the departmental archives of the Jura and Odile Jurbert of the municipal archives in Mulhouse acquainted me with important collections that I might otherwise have overlooked. The emulation societies of Besançon and of Lons le Saunier welcomed me to their meetings. Roger Marlin, Bisontin emulator and long-time secretaire perpétuel of the Academy, first introduced me to learned society life in the twentieth century. Claude-Isabelle Brelot shared with me her knowledge of the emulation society of Lons and of the nineteenth-century Franche Comté. My thoughts on French learned societies received their first audition in the friendly setting of the bicentennial celebration of the emulation society of the Seine-Maritime in Rouen in . Discovering the still-active world of provincial learned societies convinced me that French associative life was indeed a topic worth investigating. In Oxford, Robert Gildea supervised this project as a dissertation and then patiently saw the manuscript through publication. Martin Conway was also an encouraging reader whose thoughts on middle age, in particular, have enriched this book. Colin Jones and Geoff Ellis were model examiners who made me see how a dissertation might be transformed. In the United States, colleagues in the Auburn University history department were as welcoming of me and of my research as any young

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Preface

scholar could hope. Auburn’s coterie of French historians, in particular, Hines Hall, Joy Hall, and Donna Bohanan, have offered their comments on this manuscript in all its developmental stages. In Salt Lake City, Laura Mayhall, Mary Ann Witt, Jim Lehning, Jessica Weiss, and Susie Porter read drafts and shared their thoughts on gender and the writing of history. Dena Goodman, Sarah Maza, and Nina Lerman generously read the entire manuscript at various stages in its production, and their comments have been more valuable than I can say. Flaubert’s Dictionary of Platitudes, which has been a constant companion in my investigation of bourgeois manhood, informs us that ‘gratitude’ ‘need never be expressed’. I hope, of course, that it need not be, and that these people are already aware of the tremendous debt that I owe them. One of the great pleasures of completing a project, however, is the opportunity to assess one’s debts and to acknowledge one’s models. I hope that they will recognize me as their faithful émule in this book. C. E. H.

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

List of Abbreviations

xi

. Emulation: Class, Gender, and Context



. Contesting the Public Sphere: Associations and the Government in Nineteenth-Century France



. The Bourgeois as Scientist and the Sociability of the Learned Society



. Honest Amusements



. Patronage: Emulation for the Working Class



. Charitable Imperatives



. Emulating the Elite: Association and the Petit Bourgeois



. Conclusion: The Limits of Emulation



Bibliography



Index



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  

ACB ACM ADD ADHR ADJ AER AN ASEJ Bib. SIM BMB BSIM GSB MAB MHM MSED TSEJ

Archives communales de Besançon Archives communales de Mulhouse Archives départementales du Doubs Archives départementales du Haut Rhin Archives départementales du Jura Archives de l’église réformée (Besançon) Archives nationales Archives de la Société d’émulation du Jura Bibliothèque de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse Bibliothèque municipale de Besançon Bulletin de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse Grand Séminaire de Besançon Mémoires de l’Académie de Besançon Musée historique de Mulhouse Mémoires de la Société d’émulation du Doubs Travaux de la Société d’émulation du Jura

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 Emulation: Class, Gender, and Context

In  the Emulation Society of the Jura, a learned society in the small town of Lons le Saunier, admitted the local tax collector, one M Bourdeloy, to membership. As his maiden contribution to the society’s scholarly work, Bourdeloy composed a thirteen-page poem apostrophizing emulation. A short excerpt suffices to catch the flavour of the original: Noble emulation, treasure of great souls, You whose vivid flames warm Still-virgin genius, awakening brilliance, Germinating virtue, unfurling talents, You fertilize our human dust, Spreading limitless good and waves of enlightenment. . . . Ah! When to endow your dear patrie, We see you convoke the arts and industry, Uncovering their secrets, provoking competition, Who does not admire the fruits of your labour? Who would not bless its prosperous influence? The present applauds while the future hopes. . . .1

The poem continued in typical learned society fashion, full of gracefully worded flattery and carefully footnoted allusions to the scholarship of other members of the society. An appreciative audience of Lédonien bourgeois accepted the tax collector’s poetic efforts and welcomed him among their ranks and into the local elite. Poems addressing emulation, voluntary associations calling themselves emulation societies, and bourgeois Frenchmen describing themselves as emulators—all suggest that ‘emulation’ bore a significantly heavier burden of meaning for the nineteenth-century bourgeois than for the twentieth-century reader. The effort M Bourdeloy invested in devising thirteen rhymed and metred pages (the meticulous alexandrines are, unfortunately, lost in translation) was not expended in praise of mere 1

‘Sur l’émulation’, TSEJ ().

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Emulation

mimicry. ‘Emulation’ resonated widely in the nineteenth century, and it referred to a relationship far more complex than that of model and copyist. A simple measurement of column inches dedicated to the term in the Larousse Grand Dictionnaire universel confirms the importance of emulation to nineteenth-century thought. To quote only the beginning of the definition, emulation is ‘a sentiment of rivalry that leads us to equal or better our peers; ordinarily with a positive connotation: to excite emulation, to lack emulation. Emulation is the stimulus of virtue.’ Larousse then embarked on an essay which cited uses of ‘emulation’ in the French classics and distinguished ‘emulation’ from those neighbours with which it was on no account to be confused: ‘rivalry’ and ‘jealousy’.2 After citing instances of emulation at work in schools, learned societies, government bureaucracies, and expositions, the dictionary concluded: ‘thus does emulation increasingly stir the entire world, from the summit to the base. May it always engage men in such innocent and fecund rivalries . . . and turn their hearts away from the bloody games of war!’3 When nineteenth-century bourgeois Frenchmen established a voluntary association or embarked on a worthy civic project, they inevitably spoke of their desire to ‘excite an honourable emulation’ or to ‘stimulate a noble emulation’. They rarely clarified exactly what was to be imitated or by whom; rather, they directed their exhortations to emulation both to their peers in the association and to their fellow citizens. In a recent book entitled Emulation, Thomas Crow cites Jacques-Louis David’s exclamation, ‘I have lost my emulation’, upon the death of a young, outstanding pupil. As Crow notes, ‘the English cognate does not adequately convey the sense of the pupil being recognized as peer, and even master.’4 English translation is not, however, the only reason that David’s remark, Bourdeloy’s poem, and Larousse’s definition sound slightly peculiar. The meaning of emulation, which in the nineteenth century included a competitive ambiguity about who copied whom, has since been restricted to describe a simple imitative relationship. Emulation is a lost cliché of nineteenth-century French society for whose members it was a con2 ‘Emulation is a noble sentiment aroused by the merit of others; it is the active desire to imitate or surpass them, although without any wish to deny them their rights. Jealousy is a hateful passion, provoked by the advantages enjoyed by others; it is the desire to take away these advantages, even when one has no right to them oneself. Rivalry is similar to jealousy in that the prize to be conquered, being unique, can only be obtained by depriving another; but this circumstance sometimes appears in emulation; none the less, rivalry differs from emulation in the idea of conflict, of opposition that it presumes. . . .’ Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel (Paris, – ), vii. . 3 Ibid. 4 Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven, ), .

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Emulation



venient term around which a variety of virtues converged. Restoring emulation’s full range of meaning illuminates the social sphere that found it to be a useful shorthand for a complex set of qualities. The rhetoric of emulation arose simultaneously with and in the same milieu as the post-revolutionary French bourgeoisie. Emulation, as a rhetoric of competitive and collaborative achievement, participated in the bourgeois process of self-invention. Particularly as practised in voluntary associations like M Bourdeloy’s learned society, emulation clarified the virtues, hierarchies, and social practices that constituted bourgeois identity. Emulation and association combined a rhetoric of social equality with the practice of a sociability that established lines of inclusion and exclusion: both were critical tools in the construction of the French bourgeoisie. In voluntary associations, Frenchmen discovered a flexible institution in which to improvise social positions and hierarchies. In post-revolutionary France, the rhetoric of emulation and the practice of association successfully welded the disparate, often disputatious men of France’s middling classes into a bourgeoisie. The history of voluntary association in France parallels that of the emergence of class society: association was an essential site for the definition and display of bourgeois status. Frenchmen needed institutions like associations to guide them through the social groups and hierarchies of the postrevolutionary political order and the emerging industrial economy. The Revolution had abolished the old regime society of orders without providing any satisfactory alternatives.5 Too literal an application of revolutionary ideals of equality and fraternity would not have appealed to an emerging elite even if those principles had not been largely discredited by the Terror. With emulation as their standard for entry, associations gave bourgeois Frenchmen an institution with which to imagine a reconfigured society. As an intermediary between a society of orders and an atomized society of isolated individuals, the practice of association drew the boundaries of the new bourgeoisie in early nineteenth-century France. As a rhetorical tool for reconfiguring social order, emulation exemplified a preference for imagining society as an organic unit: as long as men accepted society’s rules, they would achieve their appropriate position and find happiness in it. Sarah Maza has recently argued that this image of society as ‘the harmonious integration of various social groups into a 5 David Garrioch, The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, – (Cambridge, MA, ), pt. , esp. , , emphasizes the fluidity of elite society in the immediate post-revolutionary period.

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Emulation

transcendent whole’ represents a specifically French cultural style—a rejection of the English perception of the social ‘arena in which opposing groups played out their conflicts, balanced interests, and reached compromises’.6 In France, the language of class concealed conflicts of interest and defused competition. The Revolution opened politics and the economy to particular interests and conflicting ambitions. Society, however, retained a more elevated position in the French social imagination as a field of moral consensus. Competition was not, however, entirely absent from the postrevolutionary reconstruction of society or the practice of emulation. Like the world of the market, emulation was a contest. Emulators were, by definition, engaged in a competition that was shorn of all malice. Learned societies like the Emulation Society of the Jura aspired to run the best museum in the province or to publish the greatest volume of scholarly work. David and his pupils strove for commissions, for space in the salon, for the prix de Rome. Schoolboys endeavoured to reach the head of the class, and manufacturers sought medals in recognition of the excellence of their products. For all of these stock characters of emulation, the rewards for success were far more significant than the risks of failure. The penalty for not winning was no more serious than disappointment; even losers profited from the winner’s example of excellence and the desire to do better next time. Bankruptcy, ruin, and despair had no place in emulative rivalries: emulation was a deliberately distorted mirror of the market.7 As emulators, all participants could win; the ‘final result . . . [was] the product of a greater sum of human activity than would have been manifested without its influence.’8 No one suffered humiliating and destructive loss: whereas ‘two emulators could be friends, two rivals were always adversaries’.9 When bourgeois men gathered in an association, the municipality and all of its citizens profited from their emulation that was, in M Bourdeloy’s words, ‘the hope of the poor and the pride of the rich’. Competition in an industrializing economy, by contrast, set bourgeois at loggerheads with one another—made some men poor and others rich in ways that Frenchmen did not fully understand. For every winner who emerged from market rivalries, other men inevitably lost both face and 6 ‘Luxury, Morality, and Social Change in Prerevolutionary France’, Journal of Modern History,  (), –. 7 Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (New York, ) similarly defines emulation as an extra-market force encouraging quality and improvement, specifically in the development of American industrial technology. See esp. –. 8 Larousse, vii. . 9 Ibid.

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fortune. The negative relationship between emulation and the market is significant because historians have traditionally selected the market as the basis for their definitions of class. According to social and economic historians, class is essentially economic, a function of an individual’s relation to the production and distribution of goods. The historian who understands an individual’s economic position can deduce aspects of his political and social behaviour with relative assurance.10 In France, these assumptions about the nature of class inspired a generation of research on the ‘bourgeois fortune’. Beginning with Ernest Labrousse’s  article, ‘New Paths Toward a History of the Western Bourgeoisie’, and continuing through investigations led by Adeline Daumard, French scholars uncovered the details of bourgeois wealth, investment, and economic behaviour.11 A generation of meticulous scholarship revealed the contours of economic life in nineteenth-century France in great detail. Under the historians’ microscopic scrutiny, however, the bourgeoisie fragmented, and fortune increasingly appeared an unstable foundation for class identity. From the perspective of account books and investment portfolios, historians found it extremely difficult to locate a single, coherent bourgeoisie—much less a capitalist one.12 Rather, it became obvious that the bourgeois fortune could be both acquired and spent in a variety of different ways. Frenchmen with disposable funds, whether peasant, bourgeois, or noble, invested heavily in land and avoided risk.13 Savings, rather than investment or speculation, was the principal means by which wealth increased in France.14 Even the bourgeois industrialist preferred conservative strategies involving family financing and land purchases to more hazardous approaches that gambled 10 Patrick Joyce’s ‘Introduction’ to his reader, Class (Oxford, ), – provides a useful synopsis of historical approaches to the problem of class. 11 Ernest Labrousse, ‘Voies nouvelles vers une histoire de la bourgeoisie occidentale’, Relazioni del X congresso internazionale di scienze storiche,  (), – (excerpts reprinted as ‘New Paths Toward a History of the Western Bourgeoisie (–)’, Arthur Goldhammer (trans.), in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (eds.), Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New York, ), –). Adeline Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne de  à  (Paris, ) and Daumard, et al., Les Fortunes françaises au XIXe siècle (Paris, ). See also André-Jean Tudesq, Les Grands Notables en France (–) Etude historique d’une psychologie sociale ( vols.; Paris, ); Pierre Lévêque, La Bourgogne de la Monarchie de Juillet au Second Empire (Lille, ); and Jean-Pierre Chaline, Les Bourgeois de Rouen: une élite urbaine au XIXe siècle (Paris, ). 12 For a summary of the s debate on the role of the French bourgeoisie in industrial capitalism, see Alfred Cobban, ‘The “Middle Class” in France, –’, French Historical Studies,  (), –; and Leonore O’Boyle, ‘The “Middle Class” Reconsidered: A Reply to Professor Cobban’, French Historical Studies,  (), –. 13 Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne, –; Tudesq, i. . 14 Daumard, Les Fortunes françaises, –.

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on higher returns. The logic of capitalist expansion did not always correspond to that of bourgeois status: the bourgeois valued independence, which he was reluctant to compromise by admitting banks or shareholders into his business.16 Often, as in Jean-Pierre Chaline’s bourgeois Rouen—‘so indebted to cotton and yet so anxious to escape from it’— money made in industry quickly fled into solid, if unadventurous, landed investments.17 The search for a French bourgeoisie, readily identifiable by its economic, preferably capitalist, behaviour, uncovered more conflict than consensus. Upon close scrutiny, the economic comportment of those Frenchmen usually identified as bourgeois fell apart into a variety of different, often competing, interests. While all bourgeois consumed, only some produced. Some industrialists aimed at an international market, but others were content with domestic sales. The bourgeoisie included the rentier, the professional, the self-employed, and, increasingly in the latter half of the century, the salaried. Extraordinary situations, such as socialist demands of the summer of , revealed that apparently diverse bourgeois economic interests did, in fact, have points of intersection. Under ordinary circumstances, however, economic interest did not fuse these men into a cohesive unit. As William Reddy has recently argued, nineteenth-century Frenchmen understood ‘interest’ as intrinsically particular, plural, and fragmenting: the man who pursued interest inevitably cut himself off from his fellows.18 If the bourgeoisie failed to behave cohesively with regard to economic matters, its division along political fault lines was even more noticeable. The political commitments of nineteenth-century Frenchmen cannot be deduced in a simple, Marxist extrapolation from their economic status. The s tendency to merge the vocabulary of class with that of political party—producing, roughly speaking, a legitimist nobility, a liberal and Orleanist bourgeoisie, and a Left wing composed of petits bourgeois 15

15 The critique of French entrepreneurship is most closely associated with David Landes. See, for instance, ‘Religion and Enterprise: The Case of the French Textile Industry’, in Edward C. Carter, II, et al. (eds.), Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury France (Baltimore, ), –. Although the thesis of retarded French industrial growth has been largely dismissed, ‘nobody has yet been prepared to assert that exceptionally vigorous entrepreneurship emerged to promote growth.’ Colin Heywood, The Development of the French Economy, – (Cambridge, ), –, . 16 On family financing, see Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne, –, and Michel Hau, L’Industrialisation de l’Alsace (–) (Strasbourg, ), –. 17 Chaline, Les Bourgeois de Rouen, . 18 The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, – (Berkeley, ), p. xi. Reddy contrasts ‘interest’ with ‘honour’—a quality that united men and bore a distinct resemblance to emulation.

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and the proletariat—corresponded only in very broad terms with actual voting behaviour.19 Any individual French town doubtless had its liberal and Orleanist bourgeoisie, but it probably also sheltered bourgeois republican and conservative—even socialist and legitimist—cliques. Moreover, local political configurations altered with changes of regime, and plenty of Frenchmen, bourgeois or not, adjusted their convictions to suit the prevailing climate. Conflicting opinions and shifting allegiances within the bourgeoisie made ignoring politics the safest option for bourgeois cohesion. Politics did not make the French bourgeoisie; rather, the vicissitudes of French political life threatened to destroy all grounds of bourgeois accord. Economic and political competition was a poor foundation upon which to build a stable bourgeoisie. Both forms of rivalry entailed serious consequences for class unity: a bourgeoisie based on political persuasion or economic interest would necessarily exclude many men who exerted significant influence in their local communities. The political and economic categories that historians and sociologists have found convenient involved serious drawbacks in a nineteenth-century context. Individuals attempting to define class for themselves and their contemporaries avoided the pitfalls of these inherently controversial issues. Bourgeois ‘auto-definition’20 sought to base itself in consensus; consequently, the French bourgeois did not explain his class identity primarily in terms of his political affiliation or his economic activity. The first blows to the image of the bourgeoisie as socio-economic category originated with scholars who turned their attention away from the (implicitly male) bourgeois of the market and the ballot box to the bourgeoise. Women of the bourgeoisie obviously possessed a class identity, but it was not, apparently, formed from the same ingredients as that of their husbands and fathers.21 The bourgeoise achieved her status neither through her activity in the marketplace nor in the performance of the duties of a citizen. As feminist historians have pointed out, definitions of class that relied on the individual’s relationship to the market left women in a sort of classless limbo. Gender differences disrupted the allegedly 19 See Jean Lhomme, La Grande Bourgeoisie au pouvoir: – (Paris, ) for the classic equation of the bourgeoisie with Orleanism. For the conflation of party and class, see also Georges Dupeux, Aspects de l’histoire sociale et politique du Loir-et-Cher: – (Paris, ), esp. –; and Philippe Vigier, La Seconde République dans la région alpine, i, Les notables (Paris, ). 20 Maurice Agulhon, La Vie sociale en Provence intérieur au lendemain de la Révolution (Paris, ), –. 21 Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, ), –.

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similar class experiences described by socio-economic categories: the status and experience of the bourgeoise (or of the ouvrière) were not those of her male counterparts. The recovery of women’s experiences demanded a new history of class that intersected with the history of gender roles. The result of the gendering of class has been a series of works that look for class primarily in cultural practices rather than in market situations. Consumer behaviour,22 family structure,23 sexuality,24 and emotion25 have all appeared as cultural markers that created—rather than merely signalled—the French bourgeoisie. Each of these projects treats class as an identity that emerged from experience and required constant maintenance.26 In other words, class was a process and a performance that encompassed all facets of life rather than a fixed, pigeon-hole category determined by economic position. Sociability is a crucial cultural performance whose significance to the construction of class is largely unexplored. The voluntary association, in particular, created both class and gender identities: in their associations, Frenchmen composed the membership lists and the statutes of bourgeois manhood.27 The process of including and excluding individuals from 22 Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, ); Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, Richard Bienvenue (trans.) (Princeton, ); Whitney Walton, France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste and Artisan Manufacture (Berkeley, ); Michael Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, – (Princeton, ). See also the review essay by Richard Holt, ‘Social History and Bourgeois Culture in NineteenthCentury France’, Comparative Studies in Society and History,  (), –. 23 The classic discussion of the bourgeois family is Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, – (London, ), but on France, see also Michèle Perrot (ed.), History of Private Life, iv, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, Arthur Goldhammer (trans.) (Cambridge, MA, ). 24 Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford, ), esp. ch. ; Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after , A. Sheridan (trans.) (Cambridge, MA, ), –, –. 25 Peter Gay’s quartet, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (The Education of the Senses, The Tender Passion, The Cultivation of Hatred, and The Naked Heart) (New York, –) uses emotions as the organizing principle behind class analysis. 26 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, ), was a vital component of the transformation of class into a cultural category based on lived experience. On experience and its adoption by cultural historians, see William H. Sewell, Jr., ‘How Classes are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson’s Theory of WorkingClass Formation’, in E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds.) (Philadelphia, ), –. 27 Research on voluntary associations in France has suffered from Alexis de Tocqueville’s assertion that Frenchmen lacked the qualities necessary to association. See Carol Harrison, ‘Unsociable Frenchmen: Associations and Democracy in Historical Perspective’, The Tocqueville Review,  (), –.

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sociable circles, of setting the limits of the socially acceptable, established the boundaries of class.28 The conjunction of sociable practice and emulative rhetoric produced a specifically male bourgeois identity in postrevolutionary France. Sociability, albeit in different forms, was practised by both men and women. Emulation and the voluntary association, on the other hand, were distinctly male preserves. The ability to learn from and surpass the example of one’s peers without permitting rivalry to create bitterness was a particularly masculine attribute. It is no coincidence that the elements of the Larousse definition of emulation—education, government service, voluntary association, and the deterrence of war—were specifically male areas of endeavour.29 In France, the history of sociability is primarily associated with Maurice Agulhon, whose work, however, places sociability within a political context—the development of the French republican tradition—rather than in a social one. See Agulhon, ‘La Sociabilité est-elle objet d’histoire?’, in Etienne François (ed.), Sociabilité et société bourgeoise en France, en Allemagne et en Suisse, – (Paris, ), –; Le Cercle dans la France bourgeoise (Paris, ); The Republic in the Village: The People of the Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic, Janet Lloyd (trans.) (Cambridge, ); and Pénitants et franc-maçons de l’ancienne Provence (Paris, ). The influence of Agulhon’s scholarship is most apparent in Antoine Prost, ‘Famille, cité, sociabilité’, in Aux Sources de la puissance: sociabilité et parenté, Françoise Thélamon (ed.) (Rouen, ); Etienne François and Rolf Reichardt, ‘Les Formes de sociabilité en France du milieu du XVIIIe au milieu du XIXe siècle’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,  (), –; and Rémy Ponton, ‘Une Histoire des sociabilités politiques’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations,  (), –. 28 The link between association and class creation is clearer in Anglo-American and German scholarship. On association and the creation of an American middle class, see especially John S. Gilkeson, Jr., Middle-Class Providence (Princeton, ); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, – (Cambridge, ); and Stuart M. Blumin, The Urban Threshold: Growth and Change in a NineteenthCentury American Community (Chicago, ). R. J. Morris’s Class, Sect, and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class. Leeds, – (Manchester, ) explores the capacity of voluntary associations to create alliances within a divided middle class. German scholarship emphasizes the role of voluntary association in ‘bourgeois emancipation’ and, later in the century, the creation of working-class culture. On the German bourgeoisie, see Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Vereine als soziale Struktur in Deutschland im späten . und frühen . Jahrhundert: Eine Fallstudie der Modernisierung I’, in Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur neueren Geschichte (Göttingen, ), –; Otto Dann, ‘Die Bürgerliche Vereinsbildung in Deutschland und ihre Erforschung’, in François (ed.), Société et sociabilité bourgeoise, –; and the essays in Dann (ed.), Lesegesellschaften und bürgerliche Emanzipation: Ein europäischen Vergleich (Munich, ). On association and the German working class, see Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (Oxford, ); Gerhard A. Ritter, ‘Workers’ Culture in Imperial Germany: Problems and Points of Departure’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (), –; and Richard J. Evans, ‘The Sociological Interpretation of German Labour History’, in Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of the Third Reich (London, ), –. 29 Although both boys and girls participated in education, only boys learned through emulation. See, for instance, the drawing lessons of Rousseau’s Emile in which he learned

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Recent studies of masculinities recognize that the conceptual tools of gender can uncover historically contingent notions of manhood. History has always been full of men without gender—or, rather, of men denying that their sex is in any way related to their significance as historical actors.30 Contemporary scholars of masculinity agree that ‘patriarchy’ is too often used as an a-historical blunt instrument to describe these invisible privileges of maleness. In fact, patriarchy owes its persistence to its capacity for transformation, its ability to modify gender systems as they pertain to both women and men.31 If manhood were a fixed category, patriarchy would not have enjoyed its exceptional staying power. So far, however, research placing masculinity in the context of historical sexgender systems has focused largely on Anglo-American contexts. These projects present us with nineteenth-century men whose gendered identity was conditioned by public schools, boy scouts, and frontier.32 by observing the example of nature and of other men and working to imitate and surpass them. Oeuvres complètes (Paris, ), iv. –. In contrast, see Sophie’s instruction in religion and housewifery, –. Although Rousseau repudiated rivalry as a tool of education, nineteenth-century French secondary schools, citing his authority, made it the cornerstone of boys’ instruction. The ‘emulation system’ encouraged boys’ achievement by publishing class ranks weekly and offering annual prizes. See Alan Spitzer, The French Generation of  (Princeton, ), – and Paul Seeley, ‘Virile Pursuits: Youth, Religion, and Bourgeois Family Politics in Lyon on the Eve of the French Third Republic’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, ), ch. , esp. . 30 Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, ), –. 31 Michael Roper and John Tosh, ‘Introduction’ in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since  (London, ), –. 32 Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, – (Chicago, ); J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, – (Manchester, ); Martin Green, The Adventurous Male: Chapters in the History of the White Male Mind (University Park, PA, ). On Britain, see especially Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago, ); Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinity (London, ); John Tosh, ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain’, History Workshop,  (), –; Roper and Tosh, Manful Assertions; and J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public Schools (Cambridge, ). On the US, see Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, ); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, – (Chicago, ); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, ); Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York, ); Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (eds.), Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago, ); Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, ); Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America (nd edn.; Baltimore, ), –; and Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck (eds.), The American Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, ).

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These histories of manliness tend to circulate around a fin de siècle ‘crisis’ of masculinity. This crisis emerged from industrialization as men increasingly commuted to work; boys suffered from a lack of close paternal supervision; and women demanded change in their social, political, and familial status.33 Discussions of crisis, however, too often result in a version of masculinity ‘seen principally as a burden rather than a mode of empowerment’.34 In their effort to nuance the concept of patriarchy, scholars of masculinity occasionally lose sight of it altogether. Moreover, the scholarship of ‘crisis’ often appears to be in search of a golden age, usually pre-industrial, when uncomplicated notions of manliness were naturally handed down from father to son.35 Finally, this research tends unreflectingly to juxtapose male crisis with female emancipation—as if nascent feminism automatically rendered men powerless. It is worth considering that few scholars of the fin de siècle’s ‘new woman’ describe her as representing a ‘crisis of femininity’. In examining the historical constructions of masculinity, we must recall that the construction and modification of normative masculinities always involved some formula for dominance. In response to the scholarship of gender crisis, this study of male sociability and voluntary association will focus on the quotidian. In many ways, anthropological literature examining the structures and performance of masculinity is more helpful than historical research because the experience of the ethnographer emphasizes manhood as a daily and routine enterprise.36 As ethnographers have documented, sociability— Literature concerning France is much less abundant. See Nye, Masculinity; Annelise Maugue, L’Identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle, – (Paris, ); and the essays in Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. (eds.), Homosexuality in Modern France (Oxford, ). 33 For an early articulation of the crisis thesis, see Peter Stearns, Be a Man! Males in Modern Society (New York, ). See Rotundo, American Manhood, – on absent fathers and Maugue, L’Identité masculine, for male reactions to emancipated women. 34 James Eli Adams, ‘The Banality of Transgression?: Recent Works on Masculinity’, Victorian Studies,  (), . See similar critiques by Bederman, – and Clyde Griffen, ‘Reconstructing Masculinity from the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis’, in Meanings for Manhood, –. 35 Roper and Tosh, ‘Introduction’, –. For a useful corrective of idealizations of the premodern family, see John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (New York, ), chs.  and . 36 Matthew C. Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City (Berkeley, ); Miguel Vale de Almeida, The Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a Portuguese Town (Providence, ); David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven, ); Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High-Energy Physicists (Cambridge, MA, ); and Michael Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton, ).

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particularly exclusively male sociability—is a crucial site for the mundane performance of manliness.37 The gentleman’s club lacked the drama of the encounters of duellists or empire-builders who feature in many histories of masculinity. Sociable manliness, with its emphasis on the emulative virtues of association and controlled competition, none the less established the nineteenth century’s reservoir of manly practices. Virile heroics, nagging doubts about degeneration, and the lofty confidence of the père de famille all emerged from the patterns of sociable and collaborative manhood established in the first decades of the century.38 Manliness, for the bourgeois joiners of early nineteenth-century France, was cooperative rather than confrontational, and it provoked little explicit soulsearching about what it meant to be a man. Voluntary association helped Frenchmen configure a postrevolutionary gender order just as it contributed to their creation of new regime social hierarchies. The practice of association reflected the gendered opposition between citizen and mother while adapting it to the post-revolutionary world in which citizenship was not equally distributed among all men.39 With their voluntary associations, bourgeois men staked their claim to France’s nineteenth-century public sphere and excluded women from its boundaries. Occupation of the public sphere was critically important to bourgeois manhood in post-revolutionary France. As Jürgen Habermas has described it, this public sphere was a specifically bourgeois space carved out in the eighteenth century by private individuals at the intersection of the state, the market, and the conjugal family.40 Men’s acknowledged ability to participate in all of these domains was crucial to their privileged status, but it was in the public sphere that bourgeois men felt most at home.41 In the public sphere, private persons associated with one another, 37 Although this book focuses on homosocial networks, I would not argue that ‘masculinity is largely a homosocial enactment’ (Kimmel, ) in which women and families play (at most) secondary roles. See also Tosh, ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity?’, . 38 Nye, Masculinity, while essentially concerned with the challenges to masculinity offered by degeneration and the duel, notes the importance of male sociability in creating notions of male honour (see ch. ). 39 Recent German scholarship on masculinities focusing on the Napoleonic wars similarly explores manliness and citizenship and avoids the model of a ‘crisis’ of masculinity. See Thomas Kühne (ed.), Männergeschichte—Geschlechtergeschichte: Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne (Frankfurt, ), esp. essays by Karen Hagemann, Ute Frevert, and Daniel McMillan. 40 Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger (trans.) (Cambridge, MA, ), . 41 Tosh, ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity?’, – makes a similar argument about male power deriving from the power to pass between private and public spheres.

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often in formal, statutory associations, according to egalitarian principles such as common interest, education, or taste (as opposed to birth or estate). Participants in this sociability subscribed to the notion of male equality without, however, any obligation to recognize non-participant men as equals. In nineteenth-century France, this public sphere increasingly became the one facet of life that bourgeois men could most easily control. Neither state, market, nor home offered the bourgeois Frenchman the sense of autonomy that he derived from his sociable associations with his peers. Although Frenchmen were all citizens, the state was by no means a zone that the bourgeois—particularly in the provinces—could call his own. The French state was unstable, potentially revolutionary, occasionally repressive, Parisian, and liable to the intervention of lower-class crowds. Its definition of citizenship frequently excluded the bourgeois, either through the limited suffrage of the Restoration and July Monarchy, or the plebiscitary democracy of the Second Empire. The market was perhaps a more bourgeois domain, but bourgeois Frenchmen hardly felt that they controlled it. Rather, impersonal and impenetrable market forces governed the bourgeois fortune: the bourgeois as economic actor did not derive much satisfaction from his supposed command of the market. Even within the bourgeois family, where the final word theoretically belonged to husband and father, male authority gave way to compromise. Men increasingly had to leave home in order to go to work, and they left domestic order in their wives’ hands. As the bourgeoise concentrated on the production and socialization of children, the home was ever more subject to her influence. Fathers, as John Gillis has recently noted, ‘became the missing presence, literally and figuratively, in a family world that was increasingly organized around the symbolic interaction between women and children’.42 Children in the home were primarily dependent upon maternal authority.43 Domestic consumption—the family’s daily interaction with the market—was similarly a female responsibility. Spendthrift women, like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, possessed the ability to destroy their husbands’ economic status.44 A man’s home might be his castle, but the governance of the kingdom was, in practice, frequently left to women. 42 A World of Their Own Making, . See also Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class and Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes on the feminization of the bourgeois household. 43 Jacques Donzelot’s discussion of the alliance between women and the medical profession depends upon the housewife’s unspoken—and unchallenged—domestic authority. The Policing of Families, Robert Hurley (trans.) (New York, ), ch. . 44 Walton, France at the Crystal Palace, –.

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The public sphere presented the bourgeois man with none of the challenges that state, market, and home posed to his autonomy and authority. In their associations, bourgeois men wrote their own rules and set their own criteria for inclusion. Excluding women, they enjoyed a form of privacy that was neither domestic nor feminized.45 Within the public sphere the bourgeois could associate with his peers—men whom he deemed of influence, who counted for something in local society. Because influence was a question of merit, of one’s ability to master the virtues of emulation, the bourgeois could conceive of his association, and of the public sphere generally, as open and egalitarian. Admission to a circle of friends he had chosen and been chosen by gave the bourgeois man a secure retreat in which he did not have to face the potentially destructive competition of political, economic, or domestic life. In the public sphere of masculine privacy, men were free to reconfigure competition as emulation—as a contest that they would always win. The criteria by which bourgeois associations admitted ‘men of influence’ were essentially local. The bourgeoisie was not a free-floating socio-economic category but a specific and identifiable part of a municipal community.46 Being bourgeois always came with a geographical qualifier—a man could only be bourgeois of a certain town. His status as bourgeois meant that he possessed moral qualities that suited him for local leadership. Hence the bourgeoisie was always locally specific but also flexible: the subjective and performative nature of bourgeois identity meant that the category did not describe a static and fixed group of people. This elusiveness of the bourgeoisie, which has so troubled historians of class, was an advantage rather than a problem for nineteenthcentury bourgeois. The elasticity of the category explains why notions like ‘bourgeois society’ had such explanatory force for nineteenthcentury observers and later historians.47 The cultural practices that constituted bourgeois identity did not lend themselves to the creation of a definitive list describing who was, and was not, bourgeois. They did, however, guide individuals through the post-revolutionary social hierarchies of the communities in which they lived. 45 Anne Vincent-Buffault notes that ‘the existence of spaces reserved for men seemed to guarantee masculine identity in the nineteenth century.’ L’Exercice de l’amitié: pour une histoire des pratiques amicales aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris, ), . 46 Lothar Gall, ‘Die Stadt der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft—das Beispeil Mannheim’, in Forschung zur Stadtgeschichte (Opladen, ), – and John Smail, The Origins of Middle Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire, – (Ithaca, ), – emphasize the local nature of being bourgeois. 47 Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. – (Cambridge, ), ch. .

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Because the process of establishing bourgeois identity was essentially local, this study focuses on the social lives of bourgeois men in three municipal communities of eastern France—Mulhouse, Besançon, and Lons le Saunier. Concentrating on the local brings the fissures that divided the post-revolutionary middle classes into sharp relief. The sociable strategies that men employed to conceal their differences and to create a unified bourgeois elite similarly emerge in clear detail. Both voluntary association and bourgeois identity depended upon local context for their meaning, and different settings produced different versions of the bourgeoisie.48 This book examines three very different bourgeoisies. Because status was inextricably connected with local political, economic, and religious traditions, the label ‘bourgeois’ signalled different qualities and standards in each town. Against often contentious backgrounds, the men of Lons le Saunier, Besançon, and Mulhouse all deployed the voluntary association to establish consensus on the meaning of bourgeois manhood. Besançon, Mulhouse, and Lons le Saunier do not fuse into a typical French town, nor does the sum of their bourgeois citizens add up to a representation of the French bourgeoisie. On the contrary, the advantage of these three towns lies in their diversity; they describe a range of possibilities for bourgeois society and sociability. A bourgeois of Lons could not count on occupying the same social niche should he move to Besançon or Mulhouse. In a new town he would have to initiate a fresh process of establishing social distinction by adapting his personal qualities to the values of local bourgeois society. In re-establishing his social credentials, the transplanted bourgeois could count on the support of voluntary associations. He would, however, have to master the intricacies of local economies, political opinions, and religious traditions—all the sources of the dissent that voluntary associations mediated. Understanding context was crucial for the man who aspired to bourgeois sociability, and it is similarly vital to the scholar who investigates how sociable networks created class. As a border region, eastern France is a site of interaction among languages, religions, manufactures, consumers, and nations.49 The Franche Comté, the province of Besançon and Lons le Saunier, had been annexed to France in the seventeenth century following its conquest by 48 John R. Eidson, ‘German Club Life as a Local Cultural System’, Comparative Studies in Society and History,  (), – similarly argues for the importance of local context in interpreting associative life. 49 Agulhon, Cercle, argues that the French border regions adopted associative models for their sociability sooner than interior provinces (–).

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Louis XIV. Despite its Habsburg past and nineteenth-century erudites’ fondness for referring to its capital, Besançon, as a ville espagnole, the Franche Comté was thoroughly French in its language and customs.50 Mulhouse, on the other hand, was France’s most recent acquisition in the early nineteenth century. Long after the French state had taken possession of the rest of Alsace, Mulhouse remained an independent, Calvinist city-republic. In  the leaders of the republic of Mulhouse, finding their textile manufactures strangled by French tariffs, voted to make a gift of their city to the French Republic. The Mulhousien elite adopted French language and culture enthusiastically, and German dialects quickly became a mark of social inferiority.51 The textile manufactures, especially the cotton calico printing that motivated Mulhouse’s union with France, were also responsible for placing the town at the forefront of French industrialization.52 From the foundation of the first calico printing business in , the local economy enjoyed a cotton-driven boom that lasted through the entire nineteenth century. Cotton spinning and weaving followed printing, and machinebuilding and chemical production eventually joined textiles in the Mulhousien economy. The town experienced extraordinary growth: its population increased from about , at the beginning of the century to , by  and reached , on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War. Among French towns, only the industrial centre of Roubaix matched this rate of growth.53 Besançon and Lons, by contrast, were hardly economic powerhouses. Both towns, chefs-lieux of the Doubs and Jura respectively, depended heavily on administration.54 Chef-lieu of a simple department was a demotion for Besançon, which had been the capital of the old regime province of Franche Comté. The town did, however, manage to retain a 50 On the history of the province, see Roland Fieter (ed.), Histoire de la Franche Comté (Toulouse, ) and Tricentenaire du rattachement de la Franche Comté à la France: Journées d’études, ii, De l’intégration de la province à la création de la Région Franche Comté (Besançon, ). 51 Georges Livet and Raymond Oberlé, Histoire de Mulhouse des origines à nos jours (Strasbourg, ); Geoffrey Ellis, Napoleon’s Continental Blockade: The Case of Alsace (Oxford, ); and Histoire documentaire de l’industrie de Mulhouse et de ses environs au début du XIXe siècle (Enquête centennale) ( vols.; Mulhouse, ). Until  the town was commonly called ‘Mulhausen’, although not usually by the local elite. 52 On the origins of the Mulhousien textile industry, see Hau, L’Industrialisation de l’Alsace. 53 Robert Fox, ‘Science, Industry, and the Social Order in Mulhouse, –’, British Journal of the History of Science,  (), . 54 Mulhouse only became a sub-prefecture in  when the administration was moved from Altkirch.

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university and law courts in addition to its prefecture. Lons le Saunier, on the other hand, was promoted to chef-lieu largely because of its central position in the new department of the Jura. A small town of just , inhabitants in the early nineteenth century, Lons was easily outweighed in economic importance by the larger, but less conveniently located, Dole.56 Economic activity aside from administration in the Franc-comtois towns was nowhere as dynamic as Mulhousien industry. Lons was an agricultural town, particularly important as a distribution centre for the Jurassien vineyards. Besançon’s primary industry was watchmaking, a craft imported into the area by Swiss immigrants during the Revolution.57 Watch production prospered throughout the period, but it remained largely artisanal and small-scale.58 Besançon was not sufficiently important to attract the main railway line from Paris to Switzerland (which ran  kilometres to the south through Dole and Pontarlier). The first train did not leave Besançon (for Dole) until the Dijon–Mulhouse line opened in .59 Positioned along the Swiss and German borders, Alsace and the Franche Comté are traditional regions of religious diversity in France. Although Lons was largely Catholic in the nineteenth century, Besançon and Mulhouse included both Protestant and Jewish communities. Besançon was predominantly Catholic, seat of an archbishopric and of a vocal group of ultramontane believers.60 It was not by chance that Stendhal chose Besançon to represent close-minded Catholicism and the petty world of peasant seminarians in The Red and the Black. Although Besançon was a Catholic town, not all Bisontins were Catholics. Watch55

55 On nineteenth-century Besançon, see Claude Fohlen, Histoire de Besançon, ii, De la conquête à nos jours (Besançon, ), esp. chs. by Fohlen and Roger Marlin. 56 By , Lons still had only , inhabitants. Jean Brelot and Gustave Duhem, Histoire de Lons le Saunier (Lons le Saunier, ), and Société d’Emulation du Jura, Enquête sur le Jura depuis cent ans: Etude sur l’évolution économique et sociale d’un département français de  à  (Lons le Saunier, ). 57 Jean-Luc Mayaud, Besançon horloger, – (Besançon, ). 58 Natalie Petiteau, although not concerned with the Bisontin branch of the industry, discusses the artisanal nature of production. L’Horlogerie des Bourgeois conquérants. Histoire des établissements Bourgeois de Damprichard (Doubs) (–) (Paris, ). Bisontin prosperity was modest, and the population continued to grow, but slowly. France’s eighteenth largest town in , Besançon had slipped to twenty-fifth by . Fohlen, Histoire de Besançon, ii. –. 59 Fohlen, Histoire de Besançon, ii. , –. 60 The appointment of the gallican Césaire Mathieu as archbishop in  succeeded in tempering the noisy ultramontanism of the Comtois clergy. Maurice Rey (ed.), Les Diocèses de Besançon et de Saint-Claude (Paris, ), –; J. Gueber, ‘L’Introduction de la théologie d’Alphonse de Ligouri’, in Tricentenaire du rattachement, ii; and Fohlen, Histoire de Besançon, ii. –.

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making and all of its accompanying prosperity were in the hands of a Protestant minority—the immigrant Swiss craftsmen from the region of Neuchatel. Protestant watchmakers did not integrate easily into the traditional Catholic elites of magistrature and university. In addition, Besançon had a thriving Jewish community that included some of the town’s most prominent bankers and philanthropists. The Moorish-style synagogue, inaugurated in , remains a prominent Bisontin landmark. Religious communities were similarly complicated in Mulhouse, which, as an independent city-republic, had been a Calvinist enclave. As the bourgeois of the old republic (‘bourgeois’ was still a legally defined status in ) became the industrial elite—or fabrantocratie61—of the manufacturing centre, Protestantism and wealth remained closely identified. The old patrician families carefully maintained their Calvinism and their exclusivity. Their sons went to school in Protestant Switzerland, learned manufacturing from the shop floor up, and married daughters of other Mulhousien industrialists.62 The industrial elite, however, was not entirely closed and Mulhousien Jews, in particular, were successful at establishing textile firms.63 The exclusive and endogamous world of the Protestant fabrantocratie increasingly shrank by comparison with the rest of Mulhousien society. Industrial prosperity attracted massive immigration, and the workers who arrived in Mulhouse were overwhelmingly Catholic and German-speaking. By  immigrant labour had established a Catholic majority in Mulhouse, but wealth and influence remained predominantly Protestant throughout the century. Not surprisingly for towns with such different economic and religious histories, bourgeois citizens of Besançon, Mulhouse, and Lons le Saunier adopted every variety of political opinion. Besançon had the widest spectrum of bourgeois politics, ranging from clerical legitimism to republicanism and socialism.64 Republicans and Left-wing bourgeois were certainly in a minority; the town as a whole tended to maintain Besançon’s reputation as centre of one of France’s most conservative regions.65 Ties The expression was coined by F. Kiener, Die elsäßiche Bourgeoisie (Strasbourg, ). André Brandt, ‘Une Famille de fabricants mulhousiens au début du XIXe siècle: Jean Koechlin et ses fils’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations,  (), –. 63 See, for instance, the story of the Dreyfus family, told by Michael Burns, Dreyfus, A Family Affair, – (London, ). Catholics were much less successful at penetrating the industrial elite. The region’s only Catholic-owned textile factory belonged to the Herzogs at le Logelbach, which was closer to Catholic Colmar than Protestant Mulhouse. 64 Claude-Isabelle Brelot, ‘Un Equilibre dans la tension: économie et société franccomtoise traditionelles (–)’, in Fieter (ed.), Histoire de la Franche Comté, . 65 Before the Revolution, the Franche Comté was France’s most feudal province. Mainmort still existed and the parlement of Besançon refused to abrogate it. See Claude61 62

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between the conservatives and the local clergy and the revolutionary origins of the Swiss watchmaking community meant that Bisontins were quick to identify religious and economic causes with political discord. Lons le Saunier lacked Besançon’s extreme Catholic and legitimist sentiment. Lons was part of a vineyard radicalism that stretched chronologically from the sociétés populaires and the  Lédonien Committee of Public Safety to the election of a native son, Jules Grévy, as the first republican president of the Third Republic.66 In the  elections, when all of the seats in the Doubs went to representatives of the Right, Jurassiens elected a full list of republicans and montagnards (including Grévy). In  the Jura was one of the few regions outside the south-east that offered any serious resistance to Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état: armed men assembled in Poligny and dispersed in Planoiseau, just outside of Lons. The state of siege imposed on the Jura lasted until March .67 Even more than in the Jura, political opposition was a crucial aspect of Mulhousien identity. From the Restoration on, Left-wing opposition among the bourgeois elite became a local tradition nearly as strong as cotton manufacturing. After the defeat of Napoleon, Mulhouse was the centre of a confused Bonapartist-republican agitation, united only by the conviction that Mulhousiens had never been Bourbon subjects.68 After the July Revolution, most bourgeois were content on the liberal side of Orleanism, but they welcomed the republic in . Local industrialists reassured themselves (and the rest of France) that the old free city of Mulhouse had demonstrated ‘that the republican regime was not a regime of anarchy and disorder’ and that they ‘would not give the lie to [their] past’.69 Mulhousien bourgeois returned to full-fledged opposition Isabelle Brelot, Besançon révolutionnaire (Paris, ). Under the Second Empire, the Doubs became a stronghold of support for Montalambert. See Jean-Luc Mayaud, Les Secondes Républiques du Doubs (Paris, ). Republicans and anti-clericals did make their presence felt in Besançon, however, as in a charivari lasting several days offered to the Cardinal de Rohan, archbishop of Besançon, in  (he had fled town upon the July Revolution in  and not returned for two years). Rey, . 66 C.-I. Brelot, ‘Un Equilibre’, ; Jean Brelot, ‘L’Evolution politique’, in Le Jura depuis cent ans, . See also A. Desaunais, ‘La Révolution de  dans le département du Jura’, in Société d’Emulation du Jura, Volume du centenaire de la Révolution de  dans le Jura (Lons le Saunier, ), –. 67 Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, –, Janet Lloyd (trans.) (Cambridge, ), –; and Thomas R. Forstenzer, French Provincial Police and the Fall of the Second Republic (Princeton, ), –, –. 68 Paul Leuilliot, L’Alsace au début du XIXe siècle: Essai d’histoire politique, économique et religieuse, – ( vols.; Paris, ). Vol. i (Politique) discusses the republicanism, carbonarism, and Bonapartism of the local elite, particularly of the Koechlin family. 69 L’Industriel alsacien,  Feb. .

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after the coup d’état, although by the late s certain members of the industrial elite proved willing to cooperate with the liberal empire, thus ending the traditional solid opposition of the Mulhousien bourgeoisie. Bearing in mind that bourgeois society depended on these local contexts, the following chapters explore the meanings bound up in the cliché of emulation and its practice in association. They describe the rhetoric and social practices through which bourgeois Frenchmen in three eastern towns conceived of themselves as belonging to a coherent and readily identifiable social group.70 Chapter  analyses efforts to maintain a bourgeois associative sphere in the face of state efforts to repress private association. Chapters  to  focus on that bourgeois public sphere and examine the emulative virtues that defined the bourgeois Frenchman. Chapter , for instance, addresses the importance of education, particularly scientific competence, to the bourgeois man. The learned society (commonly known as an emulation society) presented its members’ grasp of science as evidence of their dedication to and fitness for community leadership. Chapter  considers leisure and argues that emulation and association reconciled the bourgeois work ethic with the conspicuous consumption of spare time. Chapters  and  probe the bourgeois claim to be a universal class, open to all men of appropriate character, by examining bourgeois patronage of workers and the indigent. Paternalism and charity were crucial to the self-image of bourgeois men, but neither actively sought to extend the boundaries of the bourgeoisie. Associations for patronage and philanthropy asserted that bourgeois virtues were available for the emulation of all. They also, however, put workers and the poor firmly in their place as recipients of bourgeois aid and goodwill. The tension between the alleged universality of emulation and the exclusivity of the bourgeoisie leads to the final chapter, which discusses the late nineteenth-century fragmentation of the bourgeois public sphere. Chapter  turns to a new set of associations, those established by the emerging petite bourgeoisie of the s. As industrialization and urbanization accelerated, the single, coherent bourgeoisie of the immediate post-revolutionary decades fractured. The petit-bourgeois imitation of bourgeois sociable norms revealed the limits of bourgeois inclusiveness: petit-bourgeois emulation did not, ultimately, win access to the elite. As 70 On the importance of rhetoric to concepts of class, see Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class. I argue that social practices, as well as rhetoric, constitute class: the combination of discourse and praxis made class both a flexible category for describing society in ideal terms and a stable tool for navigating particular social relationships.

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the industrial economy matured, Frenchmen found it increasingly difficult to imagine society as a harmonious whole, united by the principles and practices of emulation. In the fin de siècle, the single, unified bourgeois citizenry of the early nineteenth century split into rival groups, each pursuing its own goals. The crystallization of the petite bourgeoisie in its own voluntary associations was the first step in that process. These chapters follow the logic and the chronology of emulation. Beginning in the early nineteenth century when the virtues of emulation denoted a cohesive bourgeoisie with the best interests of society at heart, they conclude with the s when unity dissolved and social networks defined themselves as representatives of particular interests within a fragmented society. Emulation and association were not timeless foundations of class society, but they were crucial to France’s transition from the old regime to a modern industrial order. As part of that transition, bourgeois emulators created a moment in the early nineteenth century when a unified and allegedly universal bourgeoisie deployed its sociable practices as a model for harmonious social organization. The project of emulation was the creation of a utilitarian bourgeois category—useful not to social scientists, but to ordinary men, citizens of Mulhouse, Besançon, and Lons le Saunier, as they negotiated the social relationships of their own communities. The rhetoric of emulation and its practice in the associative public sphere established a standard for bourgeois manhood. It was, in theory, an egalitarian standard, which all men of intelligence and good will could reach. As a potentially universal class, the bourgeoisie could represent the whole of French society and displace social conflict. None the less, emulative sociability was a far cry from revolutionary égalité. The rules of sociability and the threshold for admission into the egalitarian public sphere were neither simple nor obvious. Being a successful competitor and mastering the market were not enough: to be bourgeois a man had to master the local practices and values of emulation. Despite its rhetoric of inclusiveness, the bourgeoisie remained a club worth joining because of its exclusivity.

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 Contesting the Public Sphere: Associations and the Government in Nineteenth-Century France

Following the lead of Alexis de Tocqueville, scholars of revolutionary and nineteenth-century France assert that government centralization destroyed those institutions that mediated between the political and the social. The process left nineteenth-century French society an atomized and levelled field on which the bureaucratic state could operate freely. While eighteenth-century historians have explored the contours of a Habermasian public sphere,1 nineteenth-century specialists remain attached to a dialectic of public and private.2 The Enlightenment’s 1 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger (trans.) (Cambridge, MA, ) is the origin of current explorations of the public sphere in the eighteenth century. Among those who have developed the concept of the public sphere in pre-revolutionary France, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, ); Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, – (Princeton, ); Keith Michael Baker, ‘Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun (ed.) (Cambridge, MA, ), –; and Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, ). 2 A History of Private Life (Cambridge, MA, –) offers the clearest example of this historiographical shift between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While volume , From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Roger Chartier (ed.)) presents a world in which institutions of the public sphere structured the relationship between family and state, the nineteenth-century volume (From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, Michèle Perrot (ed.)) concentrates almost exclusively on the family whose relationship to the state is largely unmediated. Critiques of this dichotomy include Daniel Gordon, ‘The Idea of Sociability in Pre-Revolutionary France’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, ), –; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, – (Baltimore, ); and Carole Pateman, ‘Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy’, in The Disorder of Women (Stanford, ), –. On the old regime, see Dena Goodman, ‘Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime’, History and Theory,  (), – and Lawrence Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure’, Eighteenth-Century Studies,  (), –.

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creation and the welfare state’s dismantling of the public sphere have engaged scholarly attention, but its intermediate career has not.3 The fate of the public sphere in nineteenth-century liberal states—the dilemma of an allegedly universal but increasingly bourgeois sphere—has received relatively little scholarly attention.4 Historians and social scientists have been content to accept Tocqueville’s assertion that French society was intrinsically inhospitable to an associative public sphere.5 Despite government’s best efforts, the public sphere did not dissolve into the private world of domesticity in post-revolutionary France. The ‘public of private people making use of their reason’6 re-established itself after the Revolution, although it assumed institutional and sociable forms suited to the new regime. Revolutionary events radically transformed both state and domestic spheres. Citizenship and its limits now defined the political order. The domestic order, on the other hand, became the exclusive preserve of the conjugal family and of motherhood.7 Although ‘citizen’ and ‘mother’ were exclusive and opposite categories, they did not, in practice, lead to the absolute division of society into state and domestic spheres. The public sphere populated by voluntary associations persisted by adapting itself to the domestic and political order of France’s new regime. Systematic regulation and surveillance of associations were the most significant developments in the relationship between state and private association in the nineteenth century. Although the eighteenth-century public sphere had by no means been unregulated, nineteenth-century governments made the process of supervision far more sophisticated than 3 On the rise of the welfare state and the disintegration of the public sphere, see Nancy Fraser, ‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender’, in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, ), –. 4 Habermas’s own focus shifts at this point in his history: from an analysis of the eighteenth-century public sphere’s activity in print and association, he moves to a discussion of nineteenth-century philosophical critiques of the limits of the public sphere. See pp. – (on Hegel and Marx) and – (on Mill and Tocqueville). See also Craig Calhoun, ‘Introduction’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA, ), –. 5 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, George Lawrence (trans.) (New York, ), –. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York, ), –; Albert Meister, Vers une Sociologie des associations (Paris, ), –; Duncan MacRae, Jr., Parliament, Parties, and Society in France, – (New York, ), –; and Arnold M. Rose, ‘Voluntary Associations in France’, in Theory and Method in the Social Sciences (Minneapolis, ), –. As a corrective to Tocquevillian tradition, see Carol Harrison, ‘Unsociable Frenchmen: Associations and Democracy in 6 Historical Perspective’, The Tocqueville Review,  (), –. Habermas, . 7 Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, esp. pt. II, ‘Women and the Bourgeois Public Sphere’.

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anything practised by the ancien régime. In the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, legislators established a legal basis for state intervention in private associations. These laws regulated French associational life until , when the Third Republic recognized freedom of association. The first part of this chapter offers a brief history of French association law and explains the unusual degree of suspicion French governments reserved for voluntary associations. Laws, however, were only half of the story of the relationship between associations and the French state. In practice, laws were subject to negotiation, and bureaucrats recognized that some forms of association were more acceptable than others. Thus the second half of the chapter examines interactions between specific associations and local and national authorities. Although restrictive laws were crucial in shaping voluntary associations, they did not determine the forms of bourgeois participation in the public sphere. L All French regimes of the nineteenth century treated voluntary associations as if they constituted a permanent threat of subversion and a threat to national security. Concerned first with clubs and corporations and, during the Third Republic, with clerical orders, French governments consistently maintained that private association was the legitimate concern of the state. Until freedom of association in  the process of establishing an association required the consultation and approval of state authorities ranging from the local mayor to the minister of the Interior.8 Repressive legislation and its negotiation by associations and authorities shaped the contours of the nineteenth-century public sphere. Regulation of association under the old regime was haphazard and, when enforced, based on the principle that association was a privilege. Institutions like academies and guilds existed by virtue of the privilège du roi, and they were entitled to defend their territory against all would-be usurpers. Just as a silversmiths’ guild could restrict trade in silver, so could an academy declare its monopoly over science and letters.9 None the less, associations increasingly divorced from the patronage of the absolutist state flourished in the final decades of the 8 The following discussion of French association law is drawn from Jean Morange, La Liberté d’association en droit public français (Paris, ); Paul Nourrisson, Histoire de la liberté d’association en France depuis  ( vols.; Paris, ); and Emile Worms, De la Liberté d’association du point de vue du droit public à travers les ages (Paris, ). 9 See, for instance, the disputes between the Academy and the Parisian Société Libre d’Emulation over their respective competencies discussed by Goodman, Republic of Letters, –.

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old regime. Scholars disagree about the nature of the relationship between the Revolution and the emerging public sphere with its proliferation of literary and political associations.11 However, they, like contemporary observers of the end of absolutism, generally agree that the ascending public and the declining monarchy were related phenomena. Association did not enjoy a privileged position in the revolutionary French state. Far from claiming association as their right, citizens suspected it of interfering in their free communication with the republic. Association was not mentioned at all in the  Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was overwhelmingly concerned with establishing the individual as the object of law. Rights adhered to individuals and not to groups: thus freedom of religion was an individual right which did not prevent the persecution of clerical orders. Similarly, freedom of expression, out of which the general will was to arise, did not prevent the suppression of association. Revolutionary lawmakers, adhering to a Rousseauistic vision of democracy, generally agreed with André Chenier that states with ‘different associations, different groups [corps] whose members . . . adopt[ed] . . . different interests from . . . the general interest’ could only be ‘imprudent and unhappy’. France, by contrast, should be a state ‘in which there is no interest but the common good’.12 Associations figured in revolutionary thought as manipulators of private interests, falsifiers of the general will and thus abusive of both individual and public liberty.13 A democratic regime would repress associations, not offer them constitutional protections. 10

10 Goodman, Republic of Letters, ch. ; Ran Halevi, Les Loges maçonniques dans la France d’ancien régime: aux origines de la sociabilité démocratique (Paris, ); Daniel Roche, Le Siècle des lumières en province: Académies et académiciens provinciaux, – ( vols.; Paris, ), esp. i. –; Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, ). 11 See particularly the argument of Robert Darnton, ‘The High Enlightenment and the Low Life of Literature’, in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA, ), – and Goodman’s response in Republic of Letters, –. Colin Jones, ‘The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution’, American Historical Review,  (), – shifts the debate to the economic and commercial foundations of the public sphere. 12 Quoted by Nourrisson, i. . 13 Morange, , –; Mona Ozouf, ‘L’Opinion publique’, in Keith Michael Baker (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford, ), i. –; Baker, ‘Politics and Public Opinion under the Old Regime: Some Reflections’ in Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin (eds.), Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley, ), –; François Furet, ‘Révolution française et tradition jacobine’, in Colin Lucas (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford, ), ii. –; and Norman Hampson, Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the French Revolution (London, ), – discuss aspects of the revolutionary distrust of faction, party, and divided sovereignty.

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Beginning in  the National Assembly dissolved and outlawed old regime corps d’état. The elimination of privilege necessarily entailed the dissolution of existing associations: guilds and chambers of commerce in , associations for worship and charity (both lay and religious) in , and academies and literary societies in . The first of these revolutionary measures, the Le Chapelier law of  June , aimed primarily at guilds by forbidding all associations intent on controlling commerce.14 The Le Chapelier law also addressed the political activities of associations by restricting the right to petition the government to individuals. Political discussion societies (sociétés populaires) that posted their resolutions in public view usurped this individual right and were consequently liable to prosecution. The laws targeting association, whether commercial, religious, cultural, or political, aspired to create a society in which, according to Le Chapelier, ‘there is nothing more than the private interest of each individual and the general interest. It is not permitted to inspire citizens with an intermediate interest, to separate them from the republic [chose publique] by a spirit of corporation’.15 In addition to repressing old regime corps, the Revolution created a new form of association: the political club. Shortly after passage of the Le Chapelier law, ‘association’ took on a new set of meanings linked to clubs, Jacobinism and, eventually, the Terror.16 The Constitution of  was no longer interested in guilds or academies but profoundly concerned with clubs: association’s principal threat was no longer to free trade or individual liberty but to public order. The French experiment in government by the general will had proved to be an exercise in repression and terror. Prominent among those held to blame for the excesses of the Terror were the political clubs. Far from accepting any fundamental right to association, the Constitution of  established grounds upon which associations could be dissolved by the government. Groups could not call themselves sociétés populaires, correspond with other associations, hold 14 Nourrisson, i. –. In the nineteenth century the law served primarily to repress trade union activity. See William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to  (Cambridge, ), –. 15 Quoted by Nourrisson, i. –. 16 On the history of the Jacobin clubs, see Jean Boutier, et al., Atlas de la Révolution française, vi, Les Sociétés politiques (Paris, ) and Boutier and Philippe Boutry, ‘Les Sociétés politiques en France de  à l’an III: une “machine”?’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,  (), – which present a convincing version of Jacobinism closely tied to a history of sociability and widely at variance with Furet’s discussion of Jacobinism in ‘Révolution française’. See also Michael L. Kennedy’s two volumes, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution. The First Years (Princeton, ) and The Middle Years (Princeton, ).

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

public meetings, set admission requirements, or designate any outward sign of membership such as a badge. The day after the passage of the constitution, a new law ( August / fructidor III) dissolved all clubs and sociétés populaires.17 By the Year III association was no longer synonymous with corporation. However, its new connotations—the extremism, factionalism, and violence of the clubs—did nothing to rehabilitate the idea of association. These two understandings of association—as corporation or club— were the basis of those sections of the Napoleonic penal code dealing with association. Promulgation of the Napoleonic code clearly ranged association among the enemies of order in post-revolutionary France. Article  of the  code regulated the conduct of voluntary association until : ‘No association of over twenty people whose aim is to meet every day or on particular days to concern themselves with religious, literary, political, or other aims may be formed without the authorization of the government and under any conditions set by the authorities’. Subsequent articles imposed fines on leaders of associations that lacked government approval or that committed or incited others to commit crimes or misdemeanours. Landlords who rented space to societies in infraction of the law were also liable to penalties.18 Napoleonic law made no distinction among associations: all groups were suspect because they all had the potential to disturb public order. Although its penal code was repressive, the Napoleonic state recognized that associations had their uses. Indeed, the regime encouraged associations that acknowledged direct government control or that owed their existence to government intervention. Corporation in this form was acceptable, and the Napoleonic state reconstituted corps d’état for butchers, bakers, and medical practitioners. Chambers of commerce and the legal profession reorganized, and the Université became a corporation within the state in .19 Even secretive and allegedly dangerous Freemasonry could be tamed by state supervision: in  the Grand Orient of France was re-established, and in  Joseph Bonaparte Nourrisson, i. –; Worms, –. Morange, –; Worms, – quotes articles of the penal code that concern association. 19 Michael D. Sibalis, ‘Corporatism after the Corporations: The Debate on Restoring the Guilds under Napoleon I and the Restoration’, French Historical Studies,  (), –; Michael P. Fitzsimmons, The Parisian Order of Barristers and the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, ), –; Isser Woloch, ‘The Fall and Resurrection of the Civil Bar, –s’, French Historical Studies,  (), –; and Matthew H. Elbow, French Corporative Theory, –: A Chapter in the History of Ideas (New York, ), –. 17 18

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became Grand Master.20 The Empire acknowledged that associations were a powerful tool in the reconstruction of social order, particularly the stabilization of the market. The potential for repression enshrined in the penal code made it possible for the imperial government to deploy association in the construction of France’s new regime. The Napoleonic practice of encouraging some associations while maintaining a strict surveillance over their activities set the tone for all nineteenth-century French regimes. With association as with most other bureaucratic matters, the Bourbon Restoration found that following Napoleonic practice was both the path of least resistance and an effective way to govern. The  penal code remained the Bourbons’ principal weapon against secret society and carbonari activity.21 Although the law was Napoleonic, the Bourbon monarchy was responsible for establishing the administrative procedure necessary to enforce Article . The mechanics of regulating associations—the process of submitting statutes and membership lists to relevant authorities—became increasingly standardized beginning in the s. Calls for increased tolerance of association, which had been heard under the Restoration, became louder following the July Revolution of . Association was gradually shedding its negative connotations of club and corporation. Political thinkers from Utopian socialists to conservative corporatists invoked a ‘spirit of association’ as a corrective to egotistical and atomized modern society.22 A decade or so of bourgeois men had joined gentlemen’s cercles and other politically innocuous groups that adhered to bureaucratic procedure for official authorization. For most Frenchmen, ‘association’ no longer called to mind a corporation or a club, but a group of civic-minded, responsible, and mature men. Association was a staple of political discourse of the far Left and Right, and demands for tolerance, if not liberty, of association became part of a mainstream political position as well.23 20 Jean-André Faucher and Achille Ricker, Histoire de la franc-maçonnerie en France (Paris, ), –. 21 Nourrisson, i. –. Alan Spitzer, arguing that the French carbonari were no worse organized than their more influential Italian or Spanish counterparts, concludes that efficient French policing was the main factor in limiting subversion. Old Hatreds and Young Hopes: The French Carbonari Against the Bourbon Restoration (Cambridge, MA, ). 22 Elbow, –. 23 Indeed, the bourgeois rhetoric of association was not far removed from that of Utopian socialists. See, for instance, the  socialist pamphlet of Wladimir Gagneur, an early Fourierist from the Jura, presented to the eminently bourgeois Emulation Society of the Jura in ASEJ  J . See also Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley, ) who argues that the adult Fourier read little besides newspapers and

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

Among those who called for greater freedom in  was François Guizot, who praised the ‘generous sentiments that lead citizens to meet to communicate sympathetic opinions among themselves’.24 Although in  Guizot promised to modify Article , his government was responsible in  for placing further restrictions on the right of French citizens to associate. In the s republican societies such as the Rights of Man or the Friends of the People took advantage of a loophole in Article  by establishing themselves as networks of cells, each cell having fewer than twenty members and therefore not required to seek authorization. In  this loophole was closed in what Robert Bezucha describes as ‘an act of political hysteria’.25 A series of incidents in the provinces, culminating in general strikes in Lyon in  and , persuaded the government that a nationwide conspiracy was afoot. Convinced that republican networks masterminded this conspiracy, the government responded with a new anti-association law. The law of April  included associations divided into small cells under the jurisdiction of Article , strengthened penalties, and extended them to all members of illegal associations rather than just to leaders.26 Secret society subversion added a new political threat to the list of dangers posed by associations. The  association law was the occasion for a national debate on freedom of association. For the first time prominent politicians, both Left and Right, argued that association was a natural right, and they reminded Guizot of his liberal stance just four years earlier.27 Pierre-Antoine Berryer, the legitimist leader, declared that association was ‘the right that generates social order’, while the radical Alphonse de Lamartine warned that ‘denied rights exist none the less. . . . They take their revenge in disorder when they cannot exist before the law, in the daylight of publicity’.28 As Lamartine threatened, passage of the association law resulted in journals which he ‘combed’ for material to support his theories (pp. –). The bourgeois press was, in fact, full of praise for the spirit of association. 24 Le Moniteur,  Sept. , quoted by Morange, –. 25 Robert Bezucha, The Lyon Uprising of : Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy (Cambridge, MA, ), . 26 Text of the  law quoted by Morange, –. Membership in an unauthorized association could result in a year’s imprisonment and a fine of between  and  francs. 27 See the speech by Salverte, reported in the Moniteur for  Mar. . Raymond Huard, La Naissance du parti politique en France (Paris, ) notes that opponents of the law defended apolitical association only: support for political organization was lukewarm at best (–). 28 Berryer’s speech reported in the Moniteur for  Mar.  and Lamartine’s the next day. Both quoted by Nourrisson, i. –.

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serious disorder, most notably in Lyon, but also in Arbois, a small town  kilometres north of Lons le Saunier, where local republicans declared the installation of a republic.29 These events convinced the government that its suspicions of a radical conspiracy had been correct and that the April  law had been necessary. The Second Republic represented France’s only experiment with freedom of association in the nineteenth century—an experiment of shorter duration than the Republic itself. A proclamation of  April  declared that the ‘Republic needs clubs; citizens have a right to clubs’.30 Although the legal status of clubs was ambivalent—the provisional government endorsed clubs without repealing legal restrictions on them—they multiplied both in Paris and in the provinces. Peter Amman estimates that there were thirty-four Paris clubs with a membership of , to , individuals at the peak of the movement.31 The inclusion of Louis Blanc in the government, the national workshops, and the associative organization of work represented a move towards accommodation with the other particularly distrusted face of association, the corporation.32 While committed to liberty of association, the provisional government was too conscious of its irregular legal status to act on its convictions: Article  and the  law both remained on the books.33 By the time a regularly elected government was installed, clubs had once again become, in the public perception, obnoxious radical institutions of social conflict. Identifying clubs as the cause of the June Days, the Second Republic placed its own limits on the freedom of association. The law of  July  attempted to distinguish between political and non-political and between public and private associations. Public political associations (i.e. clubs) were subject to regular surveillance while other associations continued to enjoy complete freedom. The Second Republic’s attempt to reconcile a commitment to freedom of association with the suppression of clubs led to fruitless debates about what made societies ‘political’ or ‘public’.34 29 Bezucha, –. For the rebellion in Arbois, see the essay by A. Desaunais in the Société d’Emulation du Jura, Volume du centenaire de la révolution de  dans le Jura (Lons le Saunier, ). 30 Quoted by Morange, . 31 Peter Amman, Revolution and Mass Democracy: The Paris Club Movement in  (Princeton, ), –. 32 Sewell, Work and Revolution, –. 33 Amman, –. 34 In June  a new law enabled the government of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to suspend meetings of individual disorderly clubs for up to a year. Prior to the coup, the law was twice extended and applied to electoral committees. The ‘non-political’ or ‘private’

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

The Second Republic’s attempt to distinguish among types of associations ultimately had very little effect on French associational life. Prefects were never eager to give their blessing to political associations, and the provincial bourgeoisie was disinclined to form them. Moreover, Louis Napoleon quickly abandoned the effort to draw distinctions among associations. In March  he restored the authority of Article  and the  law.35 The Second Empire, like the First, found it convenient to treat all associations with the same degree of suspicion. Procedures for seeking authorization from prefects and the minister of the Interior, developed under the Restoration and the July Monarchy and hardly interrupted by the Second Republic, remained in force. The new Napoleonic state, even in its later, liberal phase, saw no reason to alter a fundamentally satisfactory, if notably illiberal, situation. In addition to restoring laws on association, Louis Napoleon used these laws to target specific groups, beginning with his own supporters. Bonapartism in many ways lent itself to the creation of associations of enthusiasts, yet Louis Napoleon never pursued this possibility. Provincial electoral committees, the December Tenth Societies, deserved a great deal of the credit for his success in . Instead of allowing the societies to become a provincial Bonapartist network, however, Louis Napoleon ensured that they did not last beyond election day.36 It was safer, he felt, to entrust Bonapartist propaganda and electioneering to a small group of hand-picked prefects.37 A permanent base of volunteer propagandists and supporters might have served Bonapartism well in opposition under the Third Republic, but Louis Napoleon adhered to the conviction that all political associations, whether in opposition or not, were potentially dangerous. The Second Empire also cracked down on networks of associations that had corresponded freely with one another under the July Monarchy. Freemasons and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul were the principal objects of imperial scrutiny. Following the coup d’état, Louis Napoleon considered eliminating the Grand Orient, thus ridding France at one stroke of its network of Masonic lodges. French Masons, however, prestatus of an association mattered far less than its orderliness as perceived by local authorities. See Nourrisson, ii. – for an extended treatment of the Second Republic’s association policy. 35 The  decree was not instrumental in the repression of protest following the coup: it was promulgated only three days before the lifting of the state of siege. Nourrisson, ii. . 36 W. H. C. Smith, Napoleon III (London, ), –; Huard, La Naissance, –. 37 Theodore Zeldin, The Political System of Napoleon III (London, ), .

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vented their dissolution by appointing the Prince President’s cousin, Lucien Murat, Grand Master of the Order. Preserving the Grand Orient, however, was only achieved at great cost to French Masonry: Murat immediately dissolved over one hundred lodges. Imperial mistrust fell particularly hard on the provincial lodges, over half of which were closed in the first decade of Bonapartist rule.38 Government investigation of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul did not begin until the s, by which time this charitable organization of lay Catholic men had spread all over France. Fearing that its extensive membership and its presence in practically every French town might prove dangerous if the society were to embark on legitimist conspiracy, the government dissolved the central office in Paris.39 The minister of the Interior insisted that the government had the best interest of the society at heart, and offered members a central bureau reconstituted under Napoleonic patronage and with a high Church dignitary as president.40 In a nationwide vote, members of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul overwhelmingly rejected imperial patronage in favour of isolation: each branch of the society would continue to exist, but without maintaining any ties to other branches.41 While not prepared to accept independent nationwide associative networks, Louis Napoleon, like his uncle, was well aware of the potential utility of state-sponsored associations. Imperial adoption of the spirit of association was an important aspect of the Napoleonic appeal to France’s growing working class: mutual aid societies and cooperatives for credit and consumption all received official sanction.42 Intellectual interest in association as a means to social peace, both socialist and social Catholic, continued unabated. Unlimited capacity to repress undesirable associa38 The Prudent Friendship in Lons le Saunier was among the lodges dissolved. On Freemasonry and the coup, see Philip Nord, ‘Republicanism and Utopian Vision: French Freemasonry in the s and s’, Journal of Modern History,  (), –. 39 Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Les Débuts du catholicisme social en France (–) (Paris, ), – and Claude Langlois, ‘Permanance, renouveau, et affrontements (– )’, in F. Lebrun (ed.), Histoire des catholiques en France du XVe siècle à nos jours (Toulouse, ),  find no evidence of organized legitimist subversion in the society, although the membership included prominent legitimists. 40 Circular from the Interior,  Apr. . ADD X . See also the report in the Bisontin Catholic newspaper, L’Union franc-comtoise,  Oct. . 41 Results of the vote discussed in the circular from the Interior,  Apr. . ADJ X . Eighty-eight societies voted to accept imperial patronage;  voted against. 42 Allen Mitchell, ‘The Function and Malfunction of Mutual Aid Societies in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones (eds.), Medicine and Charity Before the Welfare State (London, ), – and Ellen Furlough, Consumer Cooperation in France: The Politics of Consumption, – (Ithaca, ), –.

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

tions once again gave the Napoleonic state sufficient confidence to encourage the desirable ones. Like its predecessors, the Third Republic believed associations of private citizens to be legitimate areas of government action. Legislators of the new Republic debated a freedom of association bill in Bordeaux in March , just two months after outlawing the clubs of the Paris Commune.43 Not surprisingly, the law in its final form fell far short of complete liberty of association. Only associations whose goals were legal enjoyed freedom. In practice, all associations had to submit to government scrutiny to ensure that they did not propose to change the form of government, to hinder the free exchange of labour, or to outrage public morality, family, or property.44 In the first decades of the Third Republic the radical Left and the clerical Right continued to demand free association. By the s, however, the terms of the debate had shifted: centrist republicans increasingly conflated ‘association’ with ‘congregation’ and clung to Article  as the Republic’s main shield against the clerical threat.45 By the time French citizens received the right to associate in , public records counted over , authorized associations in France.46 The vast majority of these groups were composed of respectable citizens who could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be accused of fomenting Jacobin Terror or clerical coup. Rather, members of these associations were citizens intent on preserving a non-domestic arena for male discussion and leisure. The impressive growth of associations, so long overlooked by historians, had taken place in a consistently unfriendly legal atmosphere. Deep suspicion of voluntary associations and of their tendency to foster a critical public remained a constant theme in the tumultuous politics of nineteenth-century France.

43 On the role of associations in the Commune, see Martin Phillip Johnson, The Paradise of Association: Political Culture and Popular Organizations in the Paris Commune of  (Ann Arbor, ). 44 Nourrisson, ii. –. 45 Congregations’ right to associate was closely connected to the debate over primary education: liberté d’enseignement was meaningless without the religious personnel to staff Catholic schools. The  law continued to subject religious congregations to government scrutiny. At the time of its passage, public opinion regarded it as an anti-congregation, as much as a pro-association, measure. Nourrisson, i. ; Morange, . 46 Nourrisson, ii. .

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The success of French voluntary associations in such a repressive legal climate suggests that application of the law was subject to extensive compromise. Although the penal code established an antagonistic relationship between government and private association, France’s nineteenthcentury associative public sphere was in fact negotiated between male citizens and bureaucratic authorities. Assemblies of private citizens were by no means all driven underground or into domestic settings. Nor did the government abdicate its right to surveillance. Extensive paper trails in city halls, prefectures, and at the ministry of the Interior indicate both the vitality of associative life and the state’s sustained interest in its activities. Prefects’ monthly reports included a section on associations: like bread prices, public opinion, and the situation of local industry, associative life was an important category in the characterization of a department.47 Negotiation, rather than government edict, characterized relations between bourgeois joiners and the representatives of public authority. Although French law assumed that associations posed a political threat, bureaucratic practice recognized that they could contribute to making a town more prosperous, orderly, and governable. Administrators had to weigh risks against advantages, while members had to promote their associations in terms of civic usefulness and moral rectitude. The rest of this chapter presents a series of encounters between associations and the government. These accounts of negotiations between bureaucrats and bourgeois associations reveal many of the issues and concerns raised by a public sphere in the nineteenth-century French state. Political guarantees In  twenty-two young Mulhousiens established a society to encourage local industry: the Industrial Society of Mulhouse. In their application to the prefect, each founding member listed his profession as ‘manufacturer’. In fact, the young men were stretching the truth. Only two were directors of firms (and they had only recently been named to their posts); about half of them were associates recently taken into partnership in family firms. Many of them owed their positions, whether as employees or as associates, to their technical competence in textile 47 See the draft reports for the late s concerning Besançon and the other subprefectures of the Doubs in ADD M . Association dossiers, which contain statutes, membership lists, accounts, and correspondence concerning authorization, are in series M of departmental archives.

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production. They probably described themselves as manufacturers in order to give local officials an impression of solidly established businessmen rather than of ambitious young men. That they later became leaders of local industry, many of them with international reputations as chemists or engineers, was in part due to the subsequent success of the Industrial Society.48 In , however, they were young men of little or no reputation seeking to establish an association that, in view of France’s anticorporate legislation, was of questionable legality. The minister of the Interior refused to authorize the new Industrial Society. The possibility that it might attempt illegally to restrict commerce was not, however, the minister’s primary concern. A more serious issue was the young men’s lack of ‘political guarantees’. The Industrial Society’s founding members could offer the government of Restoration France no assurances that their association would not contribute to political unrest in Alsace. The members of the new society were not personally implicated in opposition politics, but their backgrounds did not suggest loyalty to the Bourbon dynasty. Most of the founding members were still in their twenties and early thirties in  when youth was, in itself, a political liability linked to radical discontent and secret society activity. All of the young men were suspect by virtue of their residence in Mulhouse. More importantly, most of the Industrial Society’s founders belonged to the same patrician families whose wellknown opposition to the Bourbons made Mulhouse a hive of carbonari activity.49 Despite his misgivings, the minister of the Interior did not forbid the meetings of the Industrial Society. The new society had the approval of the prefect of the Haut Rhin; with his local knowledge, the prefect was aware that the founders were principally interested in furthering their careers, not in conspiracy.50 Wishing neither to ignore his prefect’s recommendation nor to authorize the society, the minister instructed the prefect merely to ‘tolerate’ the Industrial Society.51 The penal code made no provision for this tolerated status; it was an invention of the minister’s 48 For a more extensive discussion of the origins of the Industrial Society, see Stéphane Jonas, ‘La Révolution industrielle, les questions urbaines et du logement à Mulhouse, –’ (thèse d’état, Strasbourg, ), –. 49 On the political situation in Restoration Alsace, see Paul Leuilliot, L’Alsace au début du XIXe siècle, i, Politique (Paris, ) and Leuilliot, ‘L’Opposition libérale en Alsace à la fin de la Restauration’, in Deux Siècles d’Alsace française, , ,  (Strasbourg, ), –. 50 Letter to the minister of the Interior,  June . AN F. 51  July . AN F.

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that postponed a definitive judgement of the Mulhousien association. As a tolerated association, the Industrial Society could meet openly; the last thing the minister wished to encourage was another secret society in Alsace. However, the refusal of authorization was an additional reminder of Bourbon authority for Mulhouse’s aggressively independent industrial community. The Industrial Society spent its first years in this ambiguous legal position, and it did not receive official approval until after the July Revolution. In its probationary years under the Restoration, the society generally proved itself a good citizen if not a model subject. Members usually confined their activities to the investigation of scientific and industrial questions. When Charles X visited Mulhouse in , the Industrial Society even swallowed its dislike and organized an exposition of local industry. Souvenir programmes and engravings prominently featured both the king and the society’s new headquarters, an imposing building in the centre of the town’s Nouveau Quartier.52 The chance to show off Mulhousien ingenuity and prosperity outweighed local republican tradition. The good behaviour of the society occasionally slipped, however, and ensured that the Restoration monarchy would continue to withhold authorization. In  the Industrial Society illuminated its building in celebration when the king was forced to withdraw his press censorship legislation.53 The success of the  exposition had been such that it was repeated in June , but this time the Industrial Society neglected to invite the prefect to the inaugural banquet. None the less, word reached the prefect that the exposition contained a medal depicting the Emperor Napoleon, Marie Louise, and the King of Rome, struck by André Koechlin, a leading machine builder and member of a carbonaro family. Diners at the banquet also failed to toast the king. The prefect advised the minister of the Interior not to set too much store by this last incident; the banquet was generally orderly and such a toast would, he felt, have been too much to expect of the Mulhousiens.54 None of these slights and snubs caused the prefect to change his essentially favourable opinion of the Industrial Society; he recommended confiscating the medals from André Koechlin but leaving the society in peace. Each incident, however, reminded the minister of the Interior of the untrustworthiness of the Mulhousien elite. 52 Exposition programme in the Bib. SIM. P.-J. Fargès-Mélicourt, Relation du voyage de 53 sa Majesté Charles X en Alsace (Strasbourg, ). Jonas, . 54  June . AN F.

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In its dealings with voluntary associations, the government was usually looking for conspiracy where none existed. There were conspirators in Restoration Mulhouse, but the Industrial Society was not their home. Institutions of the public sphere were generally ill-suited to conspiracy. The Industrial Society, which increasingly came to dominate Mulhouse’s public sphere, was expressly concerned to give the widest possible publicity to its activities and was thus an inappropriate vehicle for political plots. The prefect undoubtedly knew this, just as he knew how to judge the cold shoulders that Mulhousiens routinely turned on local representatives of Bourbon authority. The regime would do itself little good, the prefect recognized, by overreacting to public acts of political defiance. Political activities in general, and not opposition politics specifically, earned voluntary associations official distrust. Ministers of the Interior were not much more likely to look favourably on associations which actively supported the regime. The Industrial Society, for instance, did receive its authorization early in the July Monarchy: not because the society promised to support the government but because the new minister of the Interior believed that its aims were genuinely apolitical.55 The July Monarchy had no desire to see political associations of any persuasion established in France. Shortly after authorizing the Industrial Society, the minister of the Interior warned his prefects of the danger of a newly established National Association. The association’s aim was ‘to ensure the independence of the country and the perpetual exclusion of the recently-fallen dynasty’—a worthy end, the minister acknowledged, but one that private citizens had no business meddling in. The National Association was unquestionably loyal, yet prefects were to be on their guard against it and to warn well-meaning citizens that it constituted ‘an offensive challenge to the public authorities’ and ‘an act of forthright opposition’.56 The July Monarchy differed little from its predecessor in its insistence that the right to comment on public affairs, whether positively or critically, did not reside in associations of private citizens. After its authorization in September , the Industrial Society’s leadership of Mulhousien civic life went unquestioned. Most, although by no means all, members of the Industrial Society continued to range themselves in the opposition, first in the party of movement under the 55  Dec. . ADHR  M . The minister refused a request to make members of the Industrial Society eligible to sit on juries, a privilege accorded members of some learned societies. 56 Circular from the ministry of the Interior,  Mar. . ADJ M .

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July Monarchy and then as republicans under the Second Empire. The society did not hesitate to involve itself in political issues, for instance, by lobbying the government in favour of looser restrictions on textile imports in the s and of child labour laws in the s.57 The Industrial Society, however, restricted its political activities to those issues upon which the membership could reach consensus. The society had one hundred members resident in the Mulhouse area by  and roughly twice that number by the early s. There were few issues that such a large group of bourgeois men agreed upon. When the Industrial Society did achieve consensus, the authorities tacitly acknowledged its expertise and overlooked the illegal petitioning of the government. In the interests of creating bourgeois consensus, voluntary associations censored their own activities and discussions. Dominated by these discreet bourgeois groups, the associative public sphere never threatened the government with strident criticism. The emulative project of bourgeois unity required the displacement of political dissent. Political criticism’s appropriate place was in the periodical press or in the private worlds of individual opinion and secret societies. Given the self-censoring tendencies of most voluntary associations, the search for political guarantees absorbed more official attention than was really necessary. Political discretion was the very foundation of bourgeois association. Secrecy In small towns all over the Franche Comté, urban men routinely went out into the woods carrying axes decorated with blue, red, and black ribbons to perform secret rituals and initiation ceremonies. They called themselves Good Cousins (Bons Cousins) or charcoal burners (charbonniers). New Cousins joined the society in forest meeting places decorated with a large crucifix, rocks, logs, and a skull. They swore to aid their Cousins, to defend them against their enemies, never to dishonour their wives and daughters, and to keep secret the mysteries of the charcoal burners. They received an axe whose coloured ribbons represented smoke, fire and charcoal and a ceremonial bracelet that reminded them of their obligation to chop off their hand sooner than do or write anything contrary to the laws of the charcoal burners. The initiate learned that the Cousins counted princes and kings among their ranks and that ‘our respectable order raises us to their level without lowering them to ours.’ These radical sentiments were moderated by the Cousins’ insistence that initiates be good Catholics and that ‘only in faithfully serving the nation and its King, 57

See below, Ch. , for a more extensive account of the Industrial Society’s politics.

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in respecting laws and observing religion [does one merit] the title of B\ C\ [Bon Cousin]’.58 The origins of the Good Cousins are unclear, and the connection between Italian carbonari and Franc-comtois charbonniers is likewise murky.59 The Cousins themselves claimed to have been established by Saint Thiébaud who wanted to impart ‘good customs and honest habits to the woodcutters’.60 Good Cousins were already meeting in the Franche Comté by the second half of the eighteenth century, and their rituals may have originated in the compagnonnage rites of charcoal burners. By the s, however, the Cousins were urban bourgeois who headed for the woods to enact a ritual of manly work. In most Franc-comtois towns, including Besançon and Lons le Saunier, bourgeois men regularly abandoned their desks and their ledgers, picked up their axes, and took to the woods to test their moral and physical strength.61 Despite their protestations of loyalty, the Good Cousins regularly angered ministers of the Interior. Responding to ministerial requests for information on associative activity, Franc-comtois prefects listed groups of Good Cousins along with the usual complement of learned societies, gentlemen’s cercles, and such. Ministers of the Interior, hastily translating charbonniers into carbonari, sent back irate letters demanding the dissolution of these dangerous groups of so-called Cousins.62 A flurry of correspondence followed as the prefect consulted mayors and sub-prefects about the Good Cousins in their districts. The enquiry inevitably produced reassuring responses: from the early s to the s, every prefect of the Jura defended the good will and orderliness of the Good Cousins each time the question was raised in Paris.63 Unfortunately for the Cousins, their rituals and meetings were incomprehensible to bureaucrats in Paris, who therefore suspected the worst. 58 Undated account of charbonnier ritual in BMB MS . Although their rituals were quite different, the Cousins borrowed Masonic terminology. The prefect of the Saône et Loire offered a similar description of an assembly of Good Cousins in a letter to the prefect of the Jura,  Jan. . ADJ M . 59 Pierre-Arnaud Lambert, La Charbonnerie française, –: Du secret en politique (Lyon, ), –; Albert Mathiez, ‘L’Origine franc-comtoise de la charbonnerie italienne’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française,  (), –; Spitzer, Old Hatreds, . 60 Prefect (Jura) to the Interior,  Aug. . ADJ M . 61 Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, ) explores the similar attraction of archaic labour ceremonies and American Indian lore to urban American men. 62 The Good Cousins also referred to their lodges as ventes, the French equivalent of the Italian vendita, or stand of timber ready for sale. Spitzer, Old Hatreds, . 63 Files on the Good Cousins of the Jura in ADJ M .

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Parisian authorities were incapable of understanding that secrecy might have any purpose other than conspiracy. Anything that went on after dark in the woods and that involved secret handshakes and passwords necessarily posed a threat to public and political order. The Cousins’ organization and apparent network made them seem even more dangerous: charcoal burners gathered all over the Franche Comté; they elected officers, and some groups in the Jura allegedly issued their own paper money.64 Given their suspicion of associations and their limited understanding of the purposes of secrecy, Parisian authorities found it ‘impossible not to regard the Members of this association as carbonari’.65 The Good Cousins presented government officials with many of the same dilemmas they faced in regulating Freemasons. Masonry, however, had the advantage of fitting a pattern easily recognizable in Paris. Bureaucrats did not trust Freemasons, but they did understand that Masonic secrecy might serve social, rather than political, purposes. Peculiar provincial secret societies like the Good Cousins, on the other hand, were utterly unfamiliar to Parisian observers. Local authorities were more receptive to Good Cousins’ requests for authorization. Prefects and mayors did not necessarily understand the attraction of charcoal burners’ ceremonies, but they did recognize that the lure of secret ritual had nothing to do with factional politics. Some local officials regarded the associations as praiseworthy organizations for mutual aid whose principal activity was ‘exhortations in favour of work and good conduct’.66 Viewed in this light, the sinister paper money became simple coupons, backed by members’ dues and distributed as charity.67 Others saw the Good Cousins as harmless leisure associations, too trivial to concern public authority: ‘the real work of the Good Cousins consists of laughing, drinking, and eating’.68 Responding to the prefect’s enquiry about the potential danger of the charcoal burners, one Justice of the Peace could imagine nothing more serious than potential damage to the forest.69 All agreed that the Good Cousins included men of a wide variety of political opinion. An innocent taste for secrecy made little sense to Parisian bureaucrats, Interior to prefect (Jura),  Oct. . ADJ M . Interior to prefect (Jura),  July . ADJ M . 66 Prefect (Jura) to Interior,  Jan. . ADJ M . 67 Prefect (Jura) to prefect (Saône et Loire),  Jan. ; prefect (Jura) to Interior,  Oct. . ADJ M . Many bourgeois charitable associations distributed similar coupons. See below, Ch. . 68 Prefect (Jura) to Interior,  Aug. . ADJ M . 69  May . ADJ M . 64 65

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but it was an important aspect of provincial sociability. Secrecy could be just for fun, for the interest it added to men’s gatherings, and for the increased sense of elite sociability imparted by initiation into mysteries of handshakes and passwords.70 A comparison of an  membership list for the Lédonien Masonic lodge and two early nineteenth-century rosters of Good Cousins indicates that as many as half of the local Freemasons probably joined the charcoal burners as well.71 Joining the Good Cousins was apparently not very different from becoming a Freemason, and many Lédonien men were more attracted by secret society conviviality than by any specific ideology. The charcoal burners celebrated a more rural form of labour than the Freemasons, but the essence of the experience—the creation of fraternal bonds through shared secrets, initiation rituals, and the celebration of manly work—was basically the same. Viewed from Paris, however, the Franc-comtois Cousins were a threat because they looked very different from familiar Freemasons. Despite its best efforts, however, the government never succeeded in eliminating the Good Cousins. In the s, when the Franc-comtois charcoal burners were first brought to the attention of the government, the Cousins attempted to avoid condemnation by drafting statutes as evidence of their good intentions and acceptance of government scrutiny. The statutes submitted from towns and villages all over the Jura were almost identical, and they borrowed heavily from the familiar language and symbolism of Freemasonry. Article  reassuringly declared that ‘the goal of charbonnerie is to make men virtuous by reminding them of the duties toward God, toward the patrie and the sovereign, and toward other men.’72 The prefect, after consulting mayors all over the Jura, concluded that although ‘a spirit of equality reign[ed] among the members’, the Good Cousins were not a political association because a single group might include both liberals and royalists.73 None the less, Paris prevailed and dissolved the charcoal burners’ associations—at least in theory. Good Cousins’ roots in Franc-comtois society were strong: regular dissolution and decades of government discouragement did not eliminate the secret society. In  Bisontin police broke up what they thought was a cell of the republican Society of the Rights of Man, but, finding that the sixteen men arrested wearing special insignia were only Good Cousins, 70 See Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, K. Wolff (ed. and trans.) (London, ), – on the ‘aristocratic motive’ of secret society sociability, and J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London, ), –. 71 Membership lists in ADJ M . 72 Statutes of Jurassien Good Cousins in ADJ M . 73 Prefect (Jura) to Interior,  Aug. . ADJ M .

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the police released them.74 In  the Cousins were again outlawed after some (though by no means all) of the prefects’ reports implicated the charcoal burners in subversion. Fifteen years later, however, a new prefect of the Jura suggested that these accusations had been the product of a prevailing willingness to see conspiracy everywhere.75 The Cousins probably continued to meet quietly, and in  they applied to the prefect in Besançon for authorization. The Bisontin charcoal burners assumed the form of a mutual aid association, an institution that received formal encouragement from the Second Empire. Mutual aid, unlike the secret rituals of charcoal burners, fitted a pattern that bureaucrats could understand; friendly societies with government approval all had the same set of statutes, drawn up by the government to encourage thrift. The prefect accepted mutual aid as an appropriate guise for charbonnerie, but the Good Cousins of Besançon quickly became dissatisfied with its restrictions. Eighteen months after their authorization, the Cousins explained to the prefect that the aim of their society was much broader than that of mutual aid. Most of the Cousins already belonged to other mutual aid societies and wanted to practise their traditional rites. The success of the association, the Cousins argued, was in jeopardy because ‘it takes a certain prestige . . . to capture a man’s attention and . . . without the ceremonies of the old charbonnerie we cannot attract our members to meetings regularly.’76 Local officials never claimed that charcoal burners’ ceremonies posed any threat to public order. But if the Good Cousins could not operate within the framework of the mutual aid society, they could not be allowed to exist at all: in  the prefect once again dissolved the Bisontin association.77 Like any hint of political involvement, secrecy automatically disposed the authorities against an association. None the less, associations like the Good Cousins pursued their secret rituals and occasionally got away with it. The desire to possess a mystery, even if only a secret handshake, that distinguished one group of men from the others outlasted government determination to eliminate it. The secrecy of the Good Cousins was fundamentally different from that of conspiratorial societies, such as the 74 Charles Weiss, Journal, iii, – (Paris, ), . Weiss considered the incident a good joke on the police. 75 Prefect (Jura) to Interior,  June . ADJ  M . In  a court (in Besançon) refused to convict Good Cousins from Dole (Jura) of membership in a secret society. The verdict was later overturned. Minutes of the trial ( Apr. ) in ADJ  M . 76 Undated letter from Bisontin charbonniers to prefect. ADD M . See Carnes, Secret Ritual, on the central role of ritual in the sociability of American fraternal orders. 77  May . ADD M .

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carbonari of the s or Republican Solidarity of the s. These latter associations were quite serious, although not particularly successful, about hiding their activities and their membership: ideally, non-members would not even be aware of the existence of these groups.78 Such total concealment did not suit associations of Good Cousins or Freemasons at all. The ‘aristocratic motive’ of this secret society sociability demanded that the existence of a mystery be publicly known.79 Initiates into the secrets of charcoal burning or Masonry occupied a special place in the public sphere which Parisian bureaucrats never completely understood. Despite official hostility to secret ritual, Freemasons and Good Cousins continued to attract bourgeois men, and the government found itself negotiating with, rather than simply criminalizing, secrecy. Moral disorder The  formation of a Society for Music and Declamation in Besançon provoked several months of heated correspondence between the prefect, the mayor, and the chief of police. The society was not Besançon’s first musical association, and no previous musical group had ever posed any threat to public order. On this occasion, however, the prefect consulted the mayor because the new society proposed to admit women. The mayor, in turn, asked the advice of his chief of police about this extraordinary request for authorization. The chief of police declared himself irrevocably opposed to such an association.80 The prefect, in this case, was not as intransigent as the police. Two months after the statutes of the society had first been submitted to him, the prefect was still considering the issue. He concluded that the musical society was unlikely to give rise to ‘the inconveniences presumed by the police’.81 More important, he added, there were only nine individuals involved in the society; they met in their own homes, and they were participating in family groups. Whatever dangers the chief of police might anticipate, the state had no authority to intervene in this ‘association’ of fewer than twenty people. The Society of Music and Declamation appears to have been nothing more than bourgeois dinner parties, with entertainment afterwards. Once its ‘members’ had called themselves to the attention of the authorities—either through excessive caution or selfimportance—their private amusements were subject to weeks of official 78 79 80 81

On secret societies, see Huard, La Naissance, –. Simmel, . ,  Oct. . ACB R. Letter to mayor (Besançon),  Nov. . ACB R.

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scrutiny. All of the authorities concerned believed that this mixed-gender sociability was potentially dangerous and the chief of police deemed it a serious threat. Grounds for suspicion of voluntary associations obviously did not have to be directly relevant to political issues. A vigilant prefect had to be aware of signs of moral disorder as well. The admission of women clearly indicated a voluntary association that had lost sight of its moral purpose. Other disreputable practices also attracted official scrutiny. Mulhouse’s target-shooting society, for instance, caught the attention of the local subprefect because of the article in its statutes punishing excessive drinking: those guilty of inebriation would ‘have to pay for  to  bottles of good wine, twice that amount in case of a repeated offence’.82 The sub-prefect did not find these stipulations humorous. While he approved of associations that curbed their members’ drunkenness, he felt that ‘the type of fine proposed is more worthy of friends of Momus than of the gravity of a decision of the public administration.’83 The sub-prefect could not possibly recommend the society for approval with its statutes as they stood. Oddly enough, the sub-prefect neglected to mention an even more objectionable article in the shooting society’s statutes. The prefect, who perhaps had a better sense of humour than his subordinate, felt that the society should be allowed to maintain its odd rules for conduct at meetings. He did, however, call attention to Article , which permitted political discussions ‘up to a certain point’.84 His sub-prefect, concerned with the possible consequences of public drunkenness, had overlooked the fact that the shooting society was assuming the right to comment on political affairs. In the prefect’s opinion, the article regulating drinking was in questionable taste, but the article legitimating political discussion was clearly illegal. In neither of these cases of morally suspect associations did the authorities comment on the characters of the individuals in question. Mulhouse’s shooting society included representatives of the most distinguished Calvinist families in town—certainly not men given to public drunkenness. The society had existed before the Reunion with France, had been reconstituted in , and had functioned for fifteen years without disturbance.85 Because the members were so respectable, the Statutes of the Société de Tir,  July . ADHR  M . Letter to prefect (Haut Rhin),  June . ADHR  M . Letter to the Interior,  June . ADHR  M . 85 Mayor (Mulhouse) to prefect (Haut Rhin),  May  and undated memo from Mathieu Mieg (president of the Société de Tir). ADHR  M . The delay in the society’s 82 83 84

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sub-prefect finally permitted the society to ‘inflict whatever libation to Bacchus upon its members it judged appropriate in camera caritatis’ as long as such punishments did not appear in the statutes.86 Similarly, no one questioned the virtue of the women of the Besançon musical society who were mothers and daughters acting with the approval of their husbands and fathers. Although the women themselves were above reproach, they had no business asserting a right to membership in a voluntary association.87 In neither case did the authorities’ concern derive from any of the particular people involved, but rather from a sense that the morals of the private citizens occupying the public sphere required public policing. Voluntary associations’ task, imposed both by members and the police, was to set a good example: jokes about public drunkenness and the inclusion of women appeared to the authorities as an incitement to disorder. Disorderly associations posed much the same kind of threat as the liberal company of the Industrial Society or the secret rites of the Good Cousins. Moral anomaly was likely, in the estimation of most French bureaucrats, to lead to political unrest. The wise prefect would take steps to curb excessive public drinking or unruly company before they led to political discussion. Encouragement Repression was not the only point of negotiation between associations and the French state. Recognizing their potential utility in establishing social and political order, Parisian bureaucrats encouraged certain types of associations with official patronage and gifts. Restoration officials, for instance, attempted to sponsor voluntary associations for the dissemination of modern farming techniques and the improvement of French agriculture. In  the government created a national Agricultural Council and instructed prefects to select men from local agricultural associations to serve as correspondents.88 The initiative appears to have enjoyed little success: in  the national council reorganized and the minister of Agriculture sent prefects a circular complaining that French authorization indicates the lag between penal code legislation and the development of administrative practice. 86  June . ADHR  M . 87 Although Article  and subsequent laws made no reference to gender, administrative practice ignored associations of women. Female charitable societies, confraternities, sewing circles, etc. were never authorized because the authorities assumed that they were domestic groups excluded from the public sphere. 88 Circular,  Feb. . ADJ M .

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agriculture was practised ‘in isolation, practically in solitude’ with ‘no regular communication, and, consequently, no emulation among producers’. Progress in agriculture could no longer rely on ‘correspondences scattered here and there over the immense surface’ of the nation. Rather, the government proposed ‘to give agriculture . . . scientific correspondences, administrative communication, advice, and protection’.89 Just as governments found it difficult to eliminate the associations they disliked, they also found that official patronage could not simply create associations of which they approved. The prefect of the Jura duly responded to the minister’s call by convening an Agricultural Council of the Jura in January . The new association profited from official patronage, which continued under the July Monarchy; government gifts of books and journals permitted the society to establish a small library. The Jurassien society, however, did little but accept gifts: members refused to subscribe to the ministry’s agricultural journal, and they never established the recommended model farm.90 Within two years the Agricultural Council of the Jura had disappeared completely. In  Louis Napoleon’s government attempted once again to centralize and standardize agricultural associations. This time, however, the minister of Agriculture instructed prefects to rely on local initiative as far as possible. The minister recognized that societies which were ‘only an administrative creation promptly dissolved after a somewhat artificial existence’ while stable associations required ‘the spontaneity of founding members’.91 The vision of a uniform system of agricultural association under the direction of the minister of Agriculture held tremendous appeal for Parisian bureaucrats but none at all for bourgeois provincials. Government encouragement could not overcome the fact that the bourgeois men who created France’s growing voluntary sphere were not interested in agricultural societies. These societies were not a good vehicle for bourgeois identification because they were too closely connected to their origins in old regime noble society.92 Although agricultural societies had  Mar. . ADJ M . Prefect’s reports to the minister of Agriculture,  Feb.  and  Jan. . ADJ M . 91 Ministry of Agriculture circular,  Aug. . ADJ M . 92 On the origins of agricultural associations, see Roche, Le Siècle des lumières, i. – and E. Justin, Les Sociétés royales d’agriculture au XVIIIe siècle ( vols.; Saint-Lô, ). Marcel Vigreux, La Société d’agriculture d’Autun (Dijon, ), – indicates the importance of old regime elites in agricultural societies. Pierre Barral, Les Agrariens français de Méline à Pisani (Paris, ),  dates the shift towards centralized agricultural associations to the Third Republic, but notes the obstacle of local societies that were too elitist to be effective in disseminating information. 89 90

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always been urban institutions, neither they nor their members were committed to city life in the same way as the men who formed the core of the associative public sphere. Besançon’s Agricultural Society of the Doubs, re-established in the year VIII, followed the calendar of its mostly aristocratic members, who spent summers dispersed on their estates and returned to town only in the winter.93 More important than government encouragement or mistrust was that associations suit the interests of their bourgeois members. As difficult as it could be to dissolve objectionable associations, the authorities often found themselves equally unable to create desirable ones. Government encouragement was most successful when it answered needs determined by bourgeois associations. The most sought-after form of official patronage was a share in public resources, the ultimate testimony to the utility and public-spiritedness of an association. This encouragement could take the form of a small line in the departmental or municipal budget or rent-free public meeting space. These forms of sponsorship relieved financial stress and conferred importance upon an association. Meeting in the town hall and occasional cash subsidies or gifts did not, however, compromise the independence of an association. Agricultural societies participating in the minister’s schemes for a nationwide organization were nothing more than provincial branches of a Parisian programme—not a prospect that attracted a large audience. Provincial voluntary associations preferred to accept sponsorship that recognized the society’s independence as well as its significance in the local community.94 Many voluntary associations, particularly learned societies, relied on local and national government for substantial portions of their annual budget. The Emulation Society of the Jura, Lons le Saunier’s learned society, depended almost entirely on departmental financial support, which varied between , and , francs per year.95 Besançon’s learned societies also expected departmental subsidies: the Academy ordinarily received  francs each year, and the Emulation Society smarted over the inferior status implied by its annual grant of just  or  francs.96 The Academy’s connections to the corridors of power went 93 See the Mémoirs (–), later titled Bulletin (– ) of the society in BMB. On the seasonal nature of noble society in the Franche Comté, see Claude-Isabelle Brelot, La Noblesse réinventée: nobles de Franche Comté de  à  ( vols.; Paris, ). 94 Catherine Pellissier, Loisirs et sociabilités des notables lyonnais au XIXe siècle (Lyon, ),  notes the reluctance of Lyonnais bourgeois to form branches of Parisian societies. 95 Emulation Society accounts in ADJ T . 96 Records of grants to learned societies in ADD  T  and  T .

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even higher than the department: , francs per year from the ministry of Public Instruction subsidized members’ editing and publication of historic documents through the s.97 Even the proudly independent members of Mulhouse’s Industrial Society could bring themselves to ask for government support for their School of Industrial Design. Mindful of Mulhousien republicanism and suspicious that the Industrial Society school encroached on public primary education, the ministers of Commerce and Public Instruction both refused to offer cash grants. The government did not completely ignore the Industrial Society’s educational efforts, however, and the School of Industrial Design received books and plaster casts of statutes, although no money.98 Official gifts in kind were more common than those in cash: books, works of art, experimental seeds, journals, maps, tools, and bric-a-brac adorned provincial museums, raised money in charitable raffles, stimulated scientific experiment and artistic endeavour. Most importantly, they bore witness to cautious government confidence in the work of local associations. While French law pronounced associations to be inimical to good order, members of associations and representatives of the state did not usually see one another as antagonists. Neither group felt constrained by the letter of the law, both preferring to interpret it in a spirit of generosity towards bourgeois civic participation. Local officials recognized most voluntary associations as valuable additions to a community rather than as rivals for their own authority. While prefects and mayors meticulously verified the political reliability of associations, they also cultivated their bourgeois members, men whose cooperation could help their administrations function more smoothly. As far as association members were concerned, government officials were primarily sources of valuable patronage, not oppressors suspiciously rooting out political conspiracy. Although aware that the process of authorization was fundamentally about surveillance, bourgeois associations could none the less enjoy the official attention. Correspondence with the mayor and eventually with the minister of the Interior implied a connection between bourgeois associations and the corridors of state power which association members relished. Bourgeois joiners and government-appointed administrators ultimately saw themselves as collaborators in the project of civic order and prosperity. 97 Receipts in ADD  T . The Academy published the papers of Cardinal Granvelle, a sixteenth-century Franc-comtois diplomat in Habsburg service. 98 Correspondence concerning support for the School of Industrial Design in ADHR  T .

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 The Bourgeois as Scientist and the Sociability of the Learned Society

In the s the Emulation Society of the Jura, the learned society of Lons le Saunier, received an essay entitled ‘Singular Inflammation of Phosphorous in the Body of a Chicken’.1 The paper, offered by an amateur scientist to an assembly of his peers, recounted a family supper in celebration of Mardi Gras. The author, as père de famille, sat at the head of the table and carved the last chicken before Lent. As he cut into the chicken, he observed smoke, which he took to be steam, albeit of an odd colour. His neighbour at the table saw flames inside the chicken, and all present noted an odd smell. Subsequent events demonstrated the true scientific interest of the case: O great prodigy! With what great astonishment we saw a brilliant phosphorous flame rise from the upper region of the insertion of the neck and spread itself in an instant from one end to another, with a few atoms falling in flames on the table. This sad apparition killed the appetite. . . . Most of the diners refused to eat this infernal dish. Some of the more courageous (myself included) hazarded a taste and finding neither the odour nor the taste of phosphorous, but, on the contrary, a tender and succulent meat, ate with pleasure.

As a scientist, the carver of the infernal chicken could not leave the mystery unexplored. He proceeded to dissect the chicken on the diningroom table and included a detailed account of the results in his paper. He was perplexed by the absence of any internal organic lesions to explain the chicken’s combustion, until he recalled an experiment he had performed a few days earlier. He had heated some phosphorous and, finding the smell and the smoke too strong, had thrown it out of the window. He had explained the phenomenon to his children and warned them to stay away from the phosphorous, but the chickens in the yard must have eaten it. This solution to the mystery did not entirely satisfy the gentleman1

ASEJ  J .

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scientist. He concluded his paper by offering the members of the Emulation Society first a scientific challenge and then a moral lesson. Still waiting for an explanation from his fellow scientists was the absence of lesions in the chicken’s alimentary canal and the fact that the phosphorous had not combined with oxygen to form phosphoric acid, which would have been harmful to the chicken. In short, why had the animal still been healthy when killed for the family’s Mardi Gras supper? Second, he asked members of the Emulation Society to consider the reaction of a man who, instead of consuming his chicken on Mardi Gras, had sinfully eaten it during the Lenten fast: ‘What a surprise for the guilty! What a mark of celestial wrath in the eyes of the trembling witness!’ Believers would be strengthened in their faith and unbelievers would protest that it was a fraud. ‘Only the wise man would suspend his judgement’ until science could provide him with an answer. The dissector of the infernal chicken was more naive about his science than most men who presented papers to provincial learned societies, but he was none the less not atypical. Clearly not a professional scientist, he dabbled in chemistry during his leisure hours. He did not, however, consider his experiments mere play: on the contrary, he was doing science in a serious-minded fashion with results that warranted presentation to his peers. Finally, the gentleman-scientist saw a distinct connection between the performance of science and the acquisition of a certain moral wisdom. The gentleman in question shared these qualities with bourgeois savants all over France. Flaubert’s M Homais, the pedantic pharmacist of Madame Bovary, was by no means alone in adding ‘member of several learned societies’ to his signature. Homais, the Jurassien chicken dissector, and thousands of other French bourgeois eagerly joined learned societies for the collective pursuit of science. The amateur Jurassien scientist’s association between scientific competence and moral fibre was not unique. In  the Revue des deux mondes published a similar argument in a two-part account of French learned societies that praised these institutions that ‘in all epochs represent the right to think freely’. The author, Charles Louandré, asserted that learned societies ‘disciplined individual effort, [and] united diverse classes in the most noble of all aristocracies, that of talent and morality’.2 Louandré deployed this image of aristocracy to describe a bourgeois elite. Bourgeois emulators all over France recognized themselves in Louandré’s appropriation of aristocratic traditions of personal cultivation and 2 ‘De l’Association littéraire et scientifique en France’, Revue des deux mondes,  (), –.

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

ambitious careerism.3 The importance of education, particularly modern, scientific instruction, was an issue around which the diversity of individual interests could be amalgamated into a bourgeois consensus. Members of this ‘aristocracy of talent’ could agree that informal fluency with the subjects of formal schooling merited elite status; class was cultivated rather than bought. Learned societies—in the nineteenth century most commonly known as emulation societies—were a major venue for this cultivation of class. The observation that most members of French learned societies were bourgeois is commonplace.4 More interesting, however, is the assertion that learned societies were bourgeois because the practice of emulation fused the disparate men who made up France’s middling classes into a unified bourgeois elite. The forging of sociable ties, in this case the erudite sociability of the société savante, made members bourgeois. Learned societies were locations where both members and non-members could see who was bourgeois and what bourgeois manliness meant. Although not identical in socio-economic composition, the bourgeoisies of different learned societies all adopted the strategy of avoiding economic, political, and religious interests and of replacing them with a common commitment to science. Libraries, expositions, and museums served as public representations of bourgeois members’ education and their ability to put it to good use—what nineteenth-century Frenchmen referred to as capacité. Through these rituals of learned society sociability, bourgeois Frenchmen established and performed class and gender identities. B A  T Emulation society membership lists reflected the varying socio-economic profiles of bourgeois society in eastern towns. Capacité referred to different patterns of profession and wealth in Mulhouse, Besançon, and Lons le Saunier. Emulators identified scientific ability with a wide range 3 On education and the satisfaction of aristocratic ambition (which were, of course, only limited aspects of noble culture) see Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France – (Berkeley, ); Jay M. Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, – (Ann Arbor, ), and Carolyn C. Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, ). 4 Jean-Pierre Chaline, Sociabilité et érudition: les sociétés savantes en France. XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris, ), – and Gonzague Tierny, Les Sociétés savantes du département de la Somme de  à  (Paris, ), –, – have taken considerable pains to link learned society membership with socio-economic findings on the bourgeois fortune.

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of occupations: depending on local circumstances, the scientist might be a doctor or a lawyer, a merchant, gentleman farmer, or an industrialist. Specific qualifications were less important to provincial savants than an individual’s ability to recognize the value of science to modern society. Thus learned societies’ pursuit of scientific knowledge became a point of convergence around which men of differing socio-economic status could create a common bourgeois culture. Small-town professionals with the support of the prefect established Lons le Saunier’s aristocracy of talent and morality in . A later historian of the Emulation Society commented on the ‘prudent eclecticism’ of the first membership list, which included both representatives of old families and men ‘whose distinction was of more recent date’. The political discretion of the new association was such that it succeeded in uniting in sociable concord priests who had accepted the revolutionary Civil Constitution of the Clergy and those who had refused the oath.5 The society could never afford to be too fussy about its selection of members: Lons was a small town of only seven thousand when its emulators first met. They welcomed all men of learning and goodwill towards science. Contributions from corresponding members in other small towns in the Jura, such as the gentleman with the phosphoric chicken, were vital to maintaining an adequate flow of scholarly papers. As the Emulation Society grew, the nature of its membership list changed. Emulation attracted many bureaucrats who moved to Lons le Saunier as the small market town grew into the prefecture of the new department of the Jura.6 Membership in the Emulation Society helped these administrative immigrants establish a niche in local society. In their turn, Lédoniens appreciated the expertise and the educational qualifications sent from Paris to the Jura. In the s, for instance, the Emulation Society’s claim to mastery of science rested largely on the contributions of the resident engineer. His competent papers on the local salt wells and problems of soil subsidence appeared along with more amateur contributions from a diverse group of men including priests, wine merchants, and a miller.7 Although the Lédonien aristocracy of talent appreciated diplomas and degrees, such qualifications were never necessary for membership. Being an emulator had less to do with specific educational attainments than with a general capacity for local leadership. M. P., ‘Préface’, TSEJ (), p. vi. See the membership profiles in R. Locatelli, et al., La Franche Comté à la recherche de son histoire (–) (Paris, ), . The proportion of private sector businessmen increased even more dramatically. 7 Ferrand, TSEJ ( and –). Membership lists appear in TSEJ. 5 6

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The basic criteria of talent and merit produced very different aristocracies of emulation in different towns. Besançon was larger than Lons and included a university and a more extensive magistrature. Consequently, there was less concern that all men of every variety of talent be included in a single group: Besançon supported several learned societies. The most prestigious of these was the Academy, originally founded in , re-established in , and limited to thirty members.8 Like most restored old regime academies, the Bisontin Academy was both politically and intellectually conservative.9 It clung to eighteenth-century traditions of who constituted the Bisontin elite: in  the Academy included neither bankers nor entrepreneurs; liberal professionals accounted for half the membership, and nobles and clergy for another  per cent.10 The profile closely resembles Daniel Roche’s description of the membership of Enlightenment academies.11 Many of Besançon’s most prominent legitimists were academicians, although membership was by no means limited to royalists. The limited size, advanced age, and stifling conservatism of the Academy encouraged Bisontin savants to establish alternative learned societies. The most important of these, the Emulation Society of the Doubs, embarked in  on a rivalry with the Academy that would last through to the end of the century. The Emulation Society dedicated itself to shaping a modern elite: its membership was large and open to all men interested in science who could afford the annual fee. Emulation in Besançon produced a group of men quite unlike the academicians, but also different from Lons le Saunier’s emulators. No wine merchant was ever elected to membership in any Bisontin learned society. The status enjoyed by wine in the Jura belonged to watches in Besançon, where the commercial section of the Emulation Society was dominated by watch8 Jean Cousin, L’Académie des sciences, belles lettres et arts de Besançon: deux cents ans de vie comtoise (–) essai de synthèse (Besançon, ). 9 Charles-Olivier Carbonell refers to nineteenth-century academies as ‘amiable ossified companies, which preferred flowery rhetoric to original and solid scholarship’. Histoire et historiens: une mutation idéologique des historiens français, – (Paris, ), . On the differences between restored academies and newer learned societies, see also Locatelli, – and Jean-Pierre Chaline, ‘Sociétés savantes et académies de province en France dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle’, in Etienne François (ed.), Sociabilité et société bourgeoise en France, en Allemagne et en Suisse, – (Paris, ), –. 10 Locatelli, . In  Charles Weiss, municipal librarian and a leading academician, threatened to resign over the possible appointment of the Protestant pastor and of a prominent local republican. The pastor was not admitted, but the republican was and Weiss remained with the society. Journal, iii, – (Paris, ), –, . 11 Le Siècle des lumières en province: Académies et académiciens provinciaux, – ( vols.; Paris, ) i. –.

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makers.12 The Swiss Protestant immigrants of Besançon’s watchmaking industry had not integrated easily into the local elite: indeed, academicians actively excluded them and made it clear that they regarded the watchmaking community as a source of indigence, drunkenness, and prostitution.13 As far as the Emulation Society was concerned, however, Protestantism and liberalism were irrelevant because watchmaking brought prosperity to Besançon. Emulators welcomed watchmakers and approved of their economic success and technical competence. In the Emulation Society of the Doubs, science created sociable ties among Protestant businessmen and the Catholic old regime elites of magistrature, university, and priesthood. Besançon, like Lons, was a prefecture, and the Emulation Society similarly welcomed administrative immigrants; in  nearly ten per cent of the resident emulators were government functionaries.14 The presence of a university meant that the Bisontin Emulation Society could boast a particularly competent scientific contingent. Ten of the twenty-four founding members had some formal scientific training, although their proportion decreased as the society grew. The society’s annual journal was commonly filled with highly technical papers that would have been all but unintelligible to most of the subscribers. A man did not have to be able to compose (or even read intelligently) these scientific contributions in order to become an emulator. Recognizing the importance of such erudition and associating oneself with the institutions of scientific culture mattered more than possessing the right diplomas. Occupation of an academic fauteuil in Besançon never lost its prestige, but inclusive membership and the dynamic, public promotion of science meant that the real power to create a leadership class quickly passed to the Emulation Society. In Mulhouse as in its Franc-comtois neighbours, learned society sociability provided an occasion for the redefinition of the urban elite. Local associative life, led by the Industrial Society of Mulhouse, transformed the bourgeoisie. Whereas in  a bourgeois de Mulhouse was invariably Calvinist and bore one of a small handful of distinguished surnames, by  a bourgeois was more likely to be noted for his grasp of scientific and business culture. The Industrial Society—founded in  as the Industrial Emulation Society—led this reorientation of the Locatelli, . Only one watchmaker was admitted to the pre- Academy. Jean-Luc Mayaud, Besançon, horloger, – (Besançon, ), –. On watchmaking as the source of social ills, see I. Druhen, ‘De l’Indigence et de la bienfaisance dans la ville de Besançon’, MAB () and Gaston Coindre, Mon Vieux Besançon (th edn., Besançon, ), –. 14 Membership lists published annually in MSED. 12 13

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local elite. The society meeting room was the first site where Calvinist patricians of the old city-republic mixed with the ambitious technicians and entrepreneurs attracted to Mulhouse by economic opportunity. Although the founding myths of the Industrial Society present it as the creation of an established industrial elite (which it quickly became and remains today), the society was, in fact, the innovative brainchild of a handful of young, relatively unknown technicians and younger sons of industrialists. These young men became the magnates of their generation, and the success of the Industrial Society was an important component of their rise to prominence.15 The ambitious youth of the Industrial Society took Mulhousien industry out of the endogamous world of the bourgeois families of the old city-republic and into the community of men of technical competence. Advantageous marriages and placement of sons continued to characterize Mulhousien industry,16 but the Industrial Society paved the way for the integration of men whose claims were neither familial nor religious.17 Daughters of Mulhousien industrialists who did not marry into other patrician families generally married outsiders of outstanding technical ability, especially engineers; these alliances solidified ties made first in Industrial Society meetings.18 Like other learned societies anxious to attract men of formal qualifications, the Industrial Society waived its hefty entry fees for members of the teaching profession and welcomed their expertise.19 By the s the leadership of the Industrial Society was no longer the dynastic monopoly of its early years; patrician names continued to dominate, but key positions belonged to successful newcomers.20 ‘Talent and morality’ produced very different bourgeois ‘aristocracies’. The miller and the wine merchants among the Lédonien emulators would have been immediately blackballed from—had they dared apply to— 15 See above, Ch.  and Stéphane Jonas, ‘La Révolution industrielle, les questions urbaine et du logement à Mulhouse, –’ (thèse d’état, Strasbourg, ), –. The best example of Industrial Society myth-making at work is Histoire documentaire de l’industrie de Mulhouse et des environs au XIXe siècle (Enquête centennale) ( vols.; Mulhouse, ). 16 André Brandt, ‘Une Famille de fabricants mulhousiens au début du XIXe siècle: Jean Koechlin et ses fils’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations,  (), –; Michel Hau, L’Industrialisation de l’Alsace (–) (Strasbourg, ), –, –. See also the memoirs of Jean Schlumberger, Eveils (Paris, ) on the cohesiveness of Mulhousien industrial families. 17 For examples, see Jonas, –, –, . 18 Hau, –. Auguste Lalance, graduate of the Ecole des Mines of St Etienne who married André Koechlin’s niece, is a good example of this pattern. See his autobiography, Mes Souvenirs, – (Paris, ), –. 19 This was a common practice all over France. Chaline, Sociabilité et érudition, –. 20 Jonas, . See also membership lists published in BSIM.

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learned societies in larger and more sophisticated Besançon or Mulhouse. Bisontin watchmakers, praised in their own city for promoting a moral industry that could be practised in familial workshops rather than factories, would not have been welcomed into the Mulhousien Industrial Society. In Mulhouse, the most valued connection to industry was that of capital or of abstract technological competence. Making watches, even though it required both great precision and artistic ability, qualified in Mulhouse as manual labour.21 Although some occupations, particularly the organized professions, generally merited esteem, the status adhering to different types of work varied even in three neighbouring towns. Selling wine, which was perfectly acceptable for an emulator in Lons le Saunier, was not in Mulhouse, where emulators in trade sold textiles or machinery. Occupational hierarchies were not fixed in early nineteenthcentury France; rather, they worked themselves out at the same chronologically uneven, geographically variable pace as French industrialization. Because the social position bourgeois men maintained was essentially local, regional variations in the value of different professional categories mattered very little. T U  S: D C  D B M Bourgeois Frenchmen preferred to define status collectively by the pursuit of emulation in the realm of science rather than individually by the accumulation of profit in the free market. Dedication to science united men of differing economic interests, and it also concealed bourgeois disagreements in matters of politics and religion. Politics and the market—those spheres typically cited in socio-economic definitions of class—appeared essentially divisive to bourgeois Frenchmen. Science and learning, by contrast, seemed to be neutral values that all bourgeois men accepted. In the early nineteenth century, emulators established science as an impartial standard of bourgeois behaviour. The cultivation of science did not create barriers of wealth, opinion, or faith among bourgeois men. It did, however, distinguish bourgeois men from others who might also claim a capacity for learning, in particular, women and aristocrats. 21 Compare Bisontin watchmaking with the status of Mulhousien industrial engraving, discussed below, Ch. . On abstraction and definitions of skill, see Nina Lerman, ‘“Preparation for the Duties and Practical Business of Life”: Technical Knowledge and Social Structure in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia’, Technology and Culture,  (), –.

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Learned societies avoided organizing themselves as representatives of specific economic interests. Emulation societies included producers and consumers, finance and manufacturing capital, rural and urban investment. In order to attract such a broad range of economic groups, learned societies excluded the possibility of representing any particular interest. Economic interest was inherently fragmenting and particular, quickly revealing itself as self-interest.22 Setting aside personal economic claims was necessary to the forging of a collective bourgeois identity. Mulhouse’s Industrial Society was in many ways an exception to the rule of avoiding the economic because its purpose was to further local manufactures. The society pursued that goal, however, only when all members agreed upon exactly what constituted the best interests of local industry. Thus while the Industrial Society lobbied the government in favour of laws restricting child labour23 or permitting overland imports of raw cotton,24 the s debate between free traders and protectionists took place outside of the society.25 The tariff controversy, which split the manufacturing community and, indeed, many Mulhousien families, generated new societies such as the Association for the Defence of French Labour.26 Industrial Society members who wished to discuss the virtues or evils of free trade took their arguments elsewhere: because tariff policy was off-limits, the Industrial Society survived. The market was not the only sphere of which emulators were wary. Political debate was also an unstable foundation upon which to build bourgeois unity. As the president of the Emulation Society in Besançon explained to the prefect, ‘minds that are today disengaged from political preoccupations feel themselves naturally drawn towards philosophical 22 On the ambiguities attached to the concept of ‘interest’, see William Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, – (Berkeley, ), esp. preface. 23 Correspondence in ADHR  M  and  M . 24  Mar. . ADHR  M . 25 Note its absence from the society’s publications in the index for the first forty volumes of the Bulletin. BSIM,  (), –. 26 Brochures published by the association are in the Bib. SIM. See also Claude Fohlen, L’Industrie textile au temps du Second Empire (Paris, ), –, and Fernand L’Huillier, ‘Une Bataille économique au sein de la bourgeoisie industrielle du Second Empire. L’industrie mulhousienne et la libre échange’, in La Bourgeoisie alsacienne (Strasbourg, ), –. The  legislative election, which was contested by an uncle and nephew (Jean Dollfus and Albert Taschard) on opposing sides of the tariff question, demonstrated the extent to which economic issues became family quarrels in Mulhouse. The tariff issue created odd political alliances: Dollfus, a long-time anti-Bonapartist, became the official imperial candidate by virtue of his free-trade position. See Paul Leuilliot, ‘Il y a Cent Ans: Mulhouse en ’, Bulletin du Musée historique de Mulhouse (), – and ‘Politique et religion, les élections alsaciennes de ’, Revue d’Alsace ().

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study and the practical application of science.’ Free of the partisan demands of politics, associations of bourgeois savants could claim the double merit of ‘the stimulation of an honourable emulation among studious persons and the encouragement of peaceful solutions to problems concerning the well-being and glory of nations’.27 Emulators routinely asserted the incompatibility of science and political passions: emulation required men to set aside partisan loyalties. Although French law forbade political discussion in all authorized associations, the ministry of the Interior was hardly equipped to prevent the discussion of public affairs in assemblies of provincial citizens. French historians of voluntary associations have typically assumed that the ‘no politics’ rule was moot; that voluntary association provided citizens with a natural forum for republicanism.28 Where learned societies were concerned, Parisian officials worried far more about legitimism than Leftwing subversion. Demands for intellectual decentralization and the participation of a handful of noted legitimists made learned societies look like potential centres of royalist agitation.29 The politics of French learned societies, however, cannot simply be assigned to Left or Right. Emulators might occasionally engage with political issues on which they all agreed, but they rigorously avoided the politics of faction. The politics of learned societies, unlike those of the French nation, were based on consensus and agreement. The Besançon Academy’s conservatism exemplifies political accord within a learned society. Because of its small membership, the Academy could maintain a conservative consensus that the authorities respected as long as discussion remained private. The Academy usually complied and kept its politics polite: it did not restrict admission to royalists and offered honorary membership to mayors and prefects of all regimes. The society’s Mémoires never directly criticized the government, but after  they  Mar. . ADD T . See the work of Maurice Agulhon, esp. Pénitants et franc-maçons de l’ancienne Provence (Paris, ), The Republic in the Village: The People of the Var from the French Revolution to the Second Republic, Janet Lloyd (trans.) (Cambridge, ); and The Republican Experiment, –, Janet Lloyd (trans.) (Cambridge, ). Other scholars of French associations have followed Agulhon’s lead: see Philippe Boutry, ‘Des Sociétés populaires de l’an II au “parti républicain”: Réflexions sur l’évolution des formes d’association politique dans la France du premier XIXe siècle’, in Maria Teresa Maiullari (ed.), Storiografia francese ed italiana a confronto sur fenomen associativo durante XVIII e XIX secolo (Turin, ), –. 29 Françoise Bercé, ‘Arcisse de Caumont et les sociétés savantes’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, ii, La Nation (Paris, ), . – and Robert Fox, ‘Learning, Politics and Polite Culture in Provincial France: The Sociétés Savantes in the Nineteenth Century’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques,  (), –. 27 28

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increasingly bemoaned railways, journalists, industry, declining standards in public morals, and French literature—indeed, virtually every modern innovation. Academicians rejected science and retreated into pastoral poetry praising the Franc-comtois landscape. Academic disdain for the modern world elicited satirical coverage in the Left-leaning press, which noted that while ‘most provincial academies continue to behave like good, honest girls . . . one cannot, without injustice, accuse Besançon’s of any such excess of modesty’.30 With the occasional exception of such public snickering, however, academic conservatism generally remained within the closed circle of the Bisontin immortals.31 The prevailing liberalism of the Industrial Society of Mulhouse, like the Academy’s conservatism, represented consensus. Under the Restoration, in particular, progressive politics was not a partisan position but a virtual criterion for membership in the Mulhousien elite. Although its liberal politics delayed the Industrial Society’s authorization, the minister of the Interior could not really prevent Mulhouse’s leading citizens from discussing public affairs. Political censorship originated primarily from within the Industrial Society: as Mulhouse and its Industrial Society grew, elite political consensus broke down, and members avoided certain topics. Tariffs were the major dispute, but opposition to the Second Empire as a whole was by no means general in Mulhouse: by  the legitimacy of the Bonapartist state was a problematic topic of conversation.32 The absence of a prevailing opinion among emulators, and consequent discretion in political discussion, was the most common situation for learned societies. The Emulation Society of Besançon, an association with over one hundred members in a politically divided town, was especially careful. The Revolution of  and the coup d’état passed without receiving the slightest mention in the society’s journal. In  one member presented the society with a paper tantalizingly entitled ‘Project for the creation of an Emulation Society for the working class’, but his contribution was rejected on the grounds that it was ‘too political’.33 With 30  Aug. . See also Le Patriot franc-comtois,  Mar. . Scientific associations like emulation societies were never personified as ‘girls’. 31 See, for instance, Weiss’s account of whistles mingling with applause at the public presentation of a speech on the ‘need for literary societies to oppose anarchic doctrines’. Journal, iii. – ( Jan. ). 32 According to Leuilliot, the local Masonic lodge Perfect Harmony split over the imperial politics of some of its members. ‘L’Essor économique du XIXe siècle et les transformations de la cité (–)’, in Georges Livet and Raymond Oberlé, Histoire de Mulhouse des origines à nos jours (Strasbourg, ), . 33 Minutes of the meeting of  Dec.  in MSED ().

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the example of the Academy before them, Bisontin emulators were particularly reticent about politics. Other societies more inclined to distinguish the social from the political devoted great energy to plans for improving the lot of the inferior classes. The Emulation Society of the Jura promoted obligatory primary education34 and agricultural tariffs35 while the Industrial Society sponsored improved worker housing.36 Secure in the conviction that these issues were not political, and, more importantly, that they would not cause controversy among members, Mulhousien and Lédonien emulators felt free to promote their agendas. Occasionally political debate overwhelmed scholarly labour and confirmed the wisdom of excluding such dissent from learned milieux. Members regularly pointed out that revolutions interrupted the work of emulation. All learned societies cancelled their meetings in times of political crisis and were thankful to return to the ‘temple of the Muses’ after the ‘bloody struggles’ of revolution.37 Temporary hiatus during periods of upheaval was preferable to pursuing the association’s activities at the risk of being caught up in the crisis. Meeting at such a time might encourage members to take sides and permanently endanger the society’s consensus. The Emulation Society of the Jura was unable to survive members’ involvement in the Second Republic’s controversies. The society was already in decline by ; after  publications appeared only irregularly. At the time of the Revolution, however, the society appeared to be recovering: a volume was published for the years  to , another for , and a final volume for -. After , however, the society disbanded until , when the new president told the inaugural meeting that ‘the hardworking hive [had] lost the habit of making honey in common.’38 The president explained the breakdown of the society in terms of the loss of several key members who moved away from Lons.39 The emulators’ activity in the disputatious years of the Second Republic suggests, however, that political dissent played a role in the society’s demise. Lons le Saunier was a centre of republicanism and resistance to the Entries to the society’s essay contest on the subject are in ASEJ  J .  Jan.  letter from P. Perrin on the Emulation Society’s anti-free trade committee. ASEJ  J . 36 See Jonas, – on the origins of the Mulhousien cité ouvrière. 37 C. Viancin, ‘Discours du président’, MAB (), Séances publiques des  janvier,  mai, et  août . 38 Rebours, ‘Discours du président’, TSEJ (). 39 Rebours, ‘Discours’. An anonymous manuscript, ‘Exposé sommaire de la situation actuelle de la Société d’Emulation’ (ASEJ  J ) also indicates this cause of decline. 34 35

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 coup. Against this background of political unrest, the Emulation Society, rather than avoiding divisive issues, embroiled itself in the political questions of the day. After three years in which the society did not meet because ‘political preoccupations weighed on men’s minds’ and left ‘little space for intellectual struggles’,40 emulators listened to an essay on Jurassien patriots driven into exile in  and to a discussion of Jacobin tutoiement and the disrespect for authority it encouraged. The Revolution of  was usually off-limits for learned societies because it was unlikely to produce agreement. Not content with investigating the legacy of the first Revolution, however, emulators proceeded to publish comments on France’s contemporary political difficulties. The last volume the Emulation Society published before disbanding included a pair of satirical fables written by a local lawyer: ‘The Socialist Wasp’ and ‘The Porker and the Hog’. In many ways the fables were typical of emulators’ verse, packed with erudition and requiring extensive footnotes to make their point. These fables parted company with most learned society poems, however, with their deliberately contentious morals: the socialist wasp’s message that ‘one can always avoid misery if one ceases being a good-for-nothing’ was calculated to stir controversy, not eliminate it.41 Political passions turned the Emulation Society’s attempted revival into a disastrous foray into controversy that finished off the society. Clearly, discretion was the key to handling politics among emulators.42 If the learned society were to represent a unified bourgeoisie, then members would have to avoid conflict over inessential, but divisive matters like national politics, in favour of consensus on the more important local issues.43 Emulators maintained this discretion even in the Vice-president de Larue’s speech, TSEJ (–). Perrin, ‘Le frelon socialist’, TSEJ (). The moral of ‘Le porc et le cabiel’ was ‘O soif d’égalité, funeste fantaisie!/ De notre temps déplorable folie, / Qui veut tout niveler, tout avilir, / Apprends-nous donc comment nous pourrions l’assouvir!’ In TSEJ (–) Perrin produced two more political fables. 42 Georg Simmel similarly emphasizes tact as a regulatory agent of sociability. The Sociology of Georg Simmel, K. Wolff (ed. and trans.) (London, ), –. Dominique Lejeune, ‘Les Sociétés de géographie en France dans le mouvement social et intellectuel du XIXe siècle’ (thèse d’état, Paris X, ),  notes a similar treatment of political issues in late nineteenth-century geographical societies. While these societies acted as pro-colonial lobbies—an issue on which all members agreed—they scrupulously avoided other political and religious conflicts of the Third Republic. Catherine Pellissier, Loisirs et sociabilités des notables lyonnais au XIXe siècle (Lyon, ), – asserts that associations in Lyon also voluntarily avoided politics. 43 English associations, operating in a more liberal political climate, voluntarily adopted a ‘no politics’ rule. R. J. Morris, Class, Sect, and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class, Leeds, – (Manchester, ), –. 40 41

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presentation of their own biographies. Perpetuating the eighteenthcentury tradition, learned society members offered funeral orations for their deceased colleagues. Several Franc-comtois emulators had served in the Napoleonic armies, and their military service was noted, but carefully, so that the eulogy would not become an occasion for discussion of the Revolution or the Empire. Thus, campaigning in Italy gave one young Jurassien the opportunity to ‘feel for himself the energy and consistency of the ancient Romans’, while in Spain he witnessed ‘the decadence to which ignorance, superstition and despotism have condemned this country’. During the eastern campaign, he wept for the Poles and investigated Russian farming techniques that might be applicable to his native Jura.44 Such eulogies eliminated controversy by making the imperial wars into an opportunity to expand the education of a young bourgeois—rather like the Grand Tour. The legacy of the Empire was a contentious subject, but everyone could agree that the scientific desire to learn about Russian agriculture was entirely praiseworthy. Science could displace religious as well as political controversy from bourgeois gatherings. Representing the local bourgeoisie involved integrating members of different confessions and men of differing degrees of religious conviction. In the early nineteenth-century world of amateur scholarship, science did not inevitably oppose religion. Rather, emulators could divide the two into completely discrete fields, only one of which— science—their learned societies were competent to judge. At the end of the century when the politics of anticlericalism drove science v. religion controversies to the forefront of public opinion, this strategy of compartmentalization disintegrated.45 In the formative years of emulation societies, however, provincial savants did not have to choose between faith and science.46 The author of the paper on the combustion of phosphorous in a chicken addressed the issue of religion more directly than most gentlemen-scientists, but he placed science in a typically neutral position. By raising the possibility of a chicken bursting into flames on a Lenten 44 Perrin, ‘Notice sur M J.-B. Chevilliard’, TSEJ (–). For other examples, see Gresset’s eulogy of Gerrier, TSEJ (), and C. Weiss’s eulogy of Bailly, MAB (), Séance publique du  janvier . See also Weiss’ dilemma over the eulogy of an exprefect of the Doubs: ‘his status as regicide makes the task difficult.’ Journal, iii.  ( Jan. ). 45 Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, ), –. 46 See François Leplanche, ‘La Notion de “science catholique”, ses origines au début du XIXe siècle’, Revue d’histoire de l’église de France,  (), – on the efforts of Mennaisiens to place science and Catholicism in a common discursive field.

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dinner table, the author explicitly posed the question of a relationship between science and religion. Sceptics and devout believers alike would jump to hasty, although opposite, conclusions. Only the ‘wise man’—a scientist, like himself—would withhold judgement until presented with further evidence. Clearly the head of a practising household preparing to observe Lent, the author as scientist somewhat awkwardly set himself apart from either disbelief or faith. In his estimation, the man of science had to avoid the extremes: he could be neither the dévot of automatic faith nor the unbeliever. His religion was moderate and private: it had no impact on his status as scientist. Faith could be shared only en famille, but the sober judgement of the scientist was suitable for the society of public men. Thus, French learned societies avoided the great issues in which science squared off against religion in the nineteenth century.47 Emulators passionately collected and catalogued rocks, grasses, caterpillars, birds’ eggs—indeed, practically everything except fossils. Fossils that did appear in emulators’ collections were curiosities, but without any special power to explain the world’s secrets. Neither the age of the earth nor the competing theories of evolution or catastrophism appeared in the pages of provincial learned society journals. Emulation societies honoured great scientists without entering into the controversies upon which great scientific careers were made. Bisontin academicians raised money for and participated in the dedication of a statue of Georges Cuvier in his Franccomtois birthplace, Montbéliard. The academicians found it perfectly reasonable that they should honour Cuvier without mentioning, much less taking sides on, the debates that Cuvier’s biology raised.48 With judicious editing, emulators could set science apart as a neutral and autonomous field, its differences of opinion insulated from the interlocking quarrels of other realms of male activity. Learned societies had more pressing reasons for adhering to the minister of the Interior’s ‘no religion, no politics’ rule than fear of official displeasure. In the early nineteenth century science appeared essentially neutral; it did not reveal the fault lines within bourgeois society. Although 47 Contrast the attitudes of the Parisian discipline-specific societies of the late nineteenth century described by Robert Fox, ‘Learning, Politics and Polite Culture’ and ‘The Savant Confronts His Peers: Scientific Societies in France, –’, in Fox and George Weisz (eds.), The Organization of Science and Technology in France, – (Cambridge, ), –. 48 MAB (), Séance publique du  août . The academicians were also willing to overlook Cuvier’s Protestantism. On the controversies associated with Cuvier’s career, see Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science and Authority in Post-revolutionary France (Manchester, ), esp. ch. .

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science could be—and frequently was—invoked to support a variety of arguments, it did not intrinsically take sides on any of the great debates that divided bourgeois France. Science did not endorse specific constitutions; it voted for no party; affirmed no confession; and held no position on free trade. Finally, the practical utility of science, its ability to improve both local economies and individual minds, meant that its value could be generally acknowledged in bourgeois circles. Emulators also found science useful for its positive links to class and gender categories. In the nineteenth century bourgeois men wrested science from aristocratic salons and made it their own. Science became an explicitly bourgeois culture, distinct from the aesthetic classical culture of aristocracy. Moreover, science was a field of masculine endeavour, largely closed to women. A commitment to science affirmed the specificity of male bourgeois identity by simultaneously concealing divisions among bourgeois men and emphasizing differences from aristocratic and female worlds. Science, as both a discursive field and a realm of social practice, was capable of making bourgeois manhood appear a solid, homogeneous unity set in opposition to the more frivolous occupations of women and noblemen. Emulation societies transformed Enlightenment scientific practice and made science a defining mark of nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Eighteenth-century salons assembled a socially mixed elite of both men and women who participated in the performance of science. Science played a crucial role in the project of Enlightenment: it organized both the individual’s search for truth and the sociable interaction of a diverse group of people who could not be easily defined by the old regime’s social categories. Scientific method governed the Enlightenment’s critical analysis of society. Scientific performance delighted salon audiences and reinforced confidence in the transformative capability of the discipline.49 Nineteenth-century learned societies inherited Enlightenment science, particularly its salon tradition, and adapted it to the new world of bourgeois citizenship. Science’s democratic potential brought together nobles and bourgeois in the eighteenth century and members of the middle classes in the nineteenth. Bourgeois emulators, to be sure, were more deeply conscious than their predecessors of science’s possible yield of business profits and pro49 On Enlightenment science, particularly its performative aspects, see Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA, ) and Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder, CO, ).

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fessional careers.50 The bourgeois scientist might be a gentleman amateur, but he might also be an engineer or an industrialist who expected expertise to lead to promotion or increased production. Bourgeois science enjoyed a connection to the market that had been largely absent in Enlightenment salons. For the bourgeois emulator, science was potentially the path to success in the industrializing economy. Science’s money-making potential, however, was less important to bourgeois Frenchmen than its status as ‘rational entertainment’ and a ‘field for democratic endeavour’.51 No one could be born with an innate understanding of the laws of nature, yet all men agreed that such laws existed, and any man could strive to uncover them. Understanding the laws of nature had a significance far beyond possible technological applications: such knowledge was worth acquiring for its own sake as an ‘intellectual ratifier of a new world order’.52 Emulators could thus elevate all science—not merely professionally or technologically useful applications—to the status of premier bourgeois ornamental culture. Mulhousien industrialists, for instance, studied glaciology or entomology as willingly as they experimented with viscosity of dyes: profit was not necessary to make science bourgeois.53 Lédonien and Bisontin emulators displayed a similarly broad taste for all matters scientific. Among the men of all three towns, easy familiarity with science denoted bourgeois status; scientific knowledge elevated its possessor to the ranks of modern, up-todate gentlemen. As befit a subject of such seriousness, science in nineteenth-century learned societies lost many of its spectacular qualities. Emulators valued persistence and hard work in their scientists, not originality or performative flair. Indeed, the minutes and scientific papers of emulation societies suggest that a turgid style of presentation acted as a guarantee of the scientist’s merit. Equations, taxonomies, and laborious descriptions of experimental method filled learned society meetings. The dissector of the phosphoric chicken earnestly recounted his story because rigorous scientific method required that his listeners understand the setting of his 50 My argument in the following paragraphs draws heavily on Arnold Thackray, ‘Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Model’, American Historical Review,  (), –. Thackray does not, however, consider the aristocratic science of the eighteenth century. Robert Fox, ‘Science, Industry, and the Social Order in Mulhouse, –’, British Journal of the History of Science,  (), – applies Thackray’s work to the Mulhousien context. 51 Thackray, –. Thackray also notes that ‘the natural world was safer than the moral 52 one as a field of discourse’, . Ibid. . 53 Hau, – and Fox, ‘Science, Industry and the Social Order’ both discuss the nontechnological component of Mulhousien science.

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experiment; he certainly did not propose to reproduce the exploding chicken for the amusement and instruction of his fellow scientists. Emulators assumed that the bourgeois was already scientifically well informed: the sort of spectacular presentation that might appeal to the uninstructed public was inappropriate in an emulation society. Noble abdication from scientific amateurism simplified the bourgeois appropriation of scientific culture. The association between scientific competence and the industrial economy discouraged aristocratic science in the nineteenth century. Aristocratic gatherings, like the Besançon Academy or the salons that continued to operate among noble families, retreated into classical, Catholic, literary, and artistic culture.54 Individual noblemen continued to pursue scientific interests; indeed, solitary scientific research could be the perfect pursuit for the émigré à l’intérieur, the aristocrat who exiled himself from public service after the fall of the Restoration monarchy. The Enlightenment assemblies of noble amateurs, confident of their ability to use science to perfect the modern world, disappeared in the nineteenth century. The learned society of bourgeois men inherited the Enlightenment tradition of science as the collective pursuit of social improvement. While bourgeois science distinguished itself from what it perceived as useless and backward-looking aristocratic culture, it equally set itself apart from the similarly frivolous world of women. Learned societies of amateurs as well as the professionalization of science increasingly limited the possibilities for scientific enquiry that women had enjoyed in the Enlightenment.55 Exceptional eighteenth-century women claimed that science was as improving a pastime for women as for men, and that assertion did not appear to threaten either the privileged status of science or male domination of scientific knowledge. After the Revolution and female claims to citizenship, however, exceptional women appeared increasingly dangerous.56 Women as practitioners of science might 54 On nineteenth-century salons, see below, Ch.  and Adeline Daumard, ‘La Vie de salon dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle’, in François (ed.), Sociabilité et société bourgeoise, –. 55 Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England,  to  (Baltimore, ); Marina Benjamin, ‘Elbow Room: Women Writers on Science, –’, in Benjamin (ed.), Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry, – (Oxford, ), –; Elisabeth Badinter, Emilie, Emilie: L’ambition féminine au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, ); Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, ); and Sutton, esp. ch.  on the career of Emilie du Châtelet. 56 See Geneviève Fraisse, La Raison des Femmes (Paris, ) on the politics of exceptional women.

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devalue the entire scientific enterprise, dragging it away from universal and public concerns into private and particular domestic settings. Nineteenth-century women with an interest in science might write introductory texts for small children: pedagogy remained the only appropriate intersection between the universal scientific concerns of man and the particular interests of women.57 Learned societies declared themselves firmly on the side of science as a public, comprehensive, and manly enterprise. No scientific domain was outside the competence of emulation societies: even the Mulhousien Industrial Society refused to limit its science to the narrow interests of local manufacturing. Moreover, few epistemological domains were outside the competence of science: emulation societies stretched the category of science in order to include as wide a spectrum of disciplines as possible. Thus history was not excluded, particularly when it focused upon objects (archaeological or documentary) rather than upon narrative or interpretation.58 Philosophical speculation, even literary production, could be included in the totalizing ambitions of emulation societies without damaging the pre-eminent position of science.59 A broad definition of science meant that every educated man possessed adequate scientific knowledge to merit membership. Being an emulator did not require any particular instruction in or comprehension of science; to establish specific criteria would suggest that women who happened to acquire the necessary qualification ought to be admitted. Setting the bar at a comprehensive appreciation of the inclusive and universal applicability of science reinforced the link between emulation, science, and masculinity. The Emulation Society of the Jura did admit a woman to corresponding membership in the society: the exotic Englishwoman, Lady Louise Kerr. Her visit to Lons le Saunier encouraged Desiré Monnier, archaeologist and leading emulator, to compose a biographical sketch to satisfy members’ curiosity.60 Madame Kerr did not live in the Jura, so there was Shteir, ch.  and Benjamin, –. Carbonell, –, – notes the popularity of history in ‘encyclopedist’ societies, its close links with archaeology, and its emphasis on documents. 59 Michèle Cohen’s discussion of the ‘quasi-mystical properties’ attributed by Englishmen to the grammar of dead languages that transformed language from a female art into a masculine science is relevant in this context. Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, ), . 60 ‘Biographie de Madame Kerr’, undated, unsigned MS in ASEJ  J  (a dossier of Monnier’s papers). Kerr appears on the published membership list in TSEJ () but her visit to Lons occurred in . The list of corresponding members published in TSEJ () notes a ‘Mme Magaud, naturaliste de Beaufort, à Paris’, but as she does not appear to have visited Lons, she did not receive the same degree of attention as Lady Kerr. See also 57 58

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no risk that she might regularly attend meetings. Her background, as Monnier presented it, was so unusual as to make her an object of scientific enquiry: born into aristocratic English circles in Bombay, she was a talented musician and poet by the age of . Married to a colonial magistrate in the East Indies, she took up botany and entomology as ‘resources against ennui’ but could not be satisfied by sedentary study. She travelled throughout the Orient and Europe, conversed with the great minds of her day, yet ‘the serenity of her character impressed itself on her physiognomy. . . . Always modest, she retire[d] good-naturedly before the wit and, perhaps, the vanity of others’.61 She was, indeed, an object to provoke wonder, even to inspire poetry, but she was not a colleague.62 Lady Kerr appears to have practised a sort of intellectual tourism, moving from one learned society to the next: she was very likely the same Madame Alexandre Kerr who became the first female correspondent of the Parisian Geographical Society in the early s.63 The aristocratic English bluestocking from the Orient was a phenomenon in and of herself, worthy of male investigation; she was so very exceptional that her presence among the emulators of Lons in no way threatened their control of scientific culture.64 The performance of science, particularly field work described in the mode of heroic conquest, also contributed to the gendering of science as a manly activity.65 The man who wandered the department collecting Robert Fonville, Desiré Monnier (Paris, ), – on the Lédonien reaction to Mme Kerr. 61 ‘Biographie de Madame Kerr.’ 62 Monnier’s verses on Mme Kerr appeared in La Sentinelle du Jura ( Jan. ): ‘Est-ce Diane, est-ce Junon? /Cléopatre ou la belle Hélène? / . . . Guidé par un trait de lumière, / Et sans remonter au règne des Césars, / Moi, je reconnais pour Louise première: / Son empire est celui des arts.’ 63 Lejeune, . 64 On women as objects of scientific enquiry, see Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, ) and Genevieve Lloyd, Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (nd edn.; Minneapolis, ). 65 Bruce Hevly, ‘The Heroic Science of Glacier Motion’ and Naomi Oreskes, ‘Objectivity or Heroism? On the Invisibility of Women in Science’, Osiris,  (), – and – argue that risk and heroism—in Oreskes’s words, ‘the passion rather than the dispassion of science’ (p. )—were as crucial to the male gendering of science as women’s supposed inability to grasp universal and objective principles. Both authors emphasize the heroic rhetoric of field science—the strength of most provincial learned societies. On the ‘romance of field science’, see Roy Porter, ‘Gentlemen and Geology: The Emergence of a Scientific Career, –’, Historical Journal,  (), – and Michael Shortland, ‘Bonneted Mechanic and Narrative Hero: The Self-Modelling of Hugh Miller’, in Shortland (ed.), Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science (Oxford, ), –. Eveleen Richards, ‘Redrawing the Boundaries: Darwinian Science and Victorian

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botanical specimens, who tested well water from regional villages, or who tasted a combustible chicken understood ‘natural phenomena through physical exertion and certif[ied] . . . understanding through risk’.66 He defined scientific perception as an intrinsically male ability, as dependent on muscles and acceptance of danger as on intellect. His science could not be confined to the salon; it required the exertion and the liberty of the field. Finally, competition was a vital aspect of the manly performance of science. Expressed in the familiar rhetoric of emulation, science was both collaborative and competitive. The scientist built on the work of his peers but also outdid them, producing better and more useful science. The true scientist was neither the anonymous laboratory researcher nor the drawing-room performer but the conqueror of the field, the victor in the race to demonstrate the utility of science. E  D Public display and popularization were the foundation of science as a bourgeois and manly endeavour. Private settings, whether salons or laboratories, did not suit the bourgeois emulator. The individual accomplishment of experiments or acquisition of knowledge was only the beginning. Gentlemen amateurs did not cultivate the image of the solitary researcher, dedicating his life to a laboratory.67 Solitary participation in the culture of science was not emulation because it smacked of selfishness and ignored the fruitful results of rivalry. To be emulative, science and its useful applications had to be revealed to an approving audience. The public and performative rhetoric of science was crucial to linking scientific culture with a manly capacity for leadership. Bourgeois savants set science to work in the public interest through a variety of municipal establishments: libraries, expositions, and museums all demonstrated bourgeois grasp of science and dedication to the public interest. Virtually every town had the resources for a library and things were clearly amiss in a town that had none. Eminently educational and (theoretically) used by all social classes, libraries suited emulators’ notions Women Intellectuals’, in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago, ), – discusses the inherent masculine bias of early Darwinism. Barbara Orland, ‘Geschlecht als Kategorie in der Technikhistoriographie’, in Christoph Meinel and Monika Renneberg (eds.), Geschlechterverhältnisse in Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik (Stuttgart, ), – analyses the masculinization of technological capacity. 66 Hevly, . 67 Oreskes, –.

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of public utility. Lons le Saunier had a municipal library before the foundation of the Emulation Society, but members complained bitterly about its collection: ‘Look at our miserable library! What does it contain? Volumes whose obscurity saved them from pillage; volumes of scholastic theology to which worms and dust do full justice’.68 Composed almost entirely of Church property confiscated during the Revolution, the Lédonien library did not suit the taste of its bourgeois critics and patrons. In  the Emulation Society merged its own library with the town’s, both as a gesture of public service and as a means of acquiring free space to house a growing collection. The library of the Emulation Society, however, was not to be confused with the town’s worm-ridden theological tomes; emulators arranged for their books to be housed on separate, specially marked shelves in the town hall. Mulhouse had no municipal library at all at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The library of the old Republic of Mulhouse had been divided, along with all communal property, among the bourgeois of the town at the time of unification.69 Thus in  the town was unprepared for a government gift of the Description of Egypt, a series of volumes begun under Napoleon I and worth , francs that had to be bound and adequately housed.70 The Industrial Society stepped in and offered the town space in the society’s elegant new headquarters, next to its own impressive collection of scientific and technological works. Until  the municipal library remained in the Industrial Society building, and the society appointed the librarian who was responsible for determining whether persons presenting themselves at half past one on Wednesday afternoons possessed sufficient moral guarantees to be allowed to borrow books. Members of the Industrial Society also opened the town’s first subscription library for fictional works71 and were instrumental in opening popular libraries with German-language offerings. Thanks to Industrial Society efforts, Mulhouse was well provided with libraries to suit all tastes and capabilities. Besançon, with its competing learned societies, tended to have rival 68 Chevillard’s review of Pyot’s Tablettes jurassiennes, TSEJ (), Séance publique du  août . 69 André Brandt, ‘Mulhouse, ville française’, in Deux Siècles d’Alsace française, ; ;  (Strasbourg, ), –. 70 T. Wagner, ‘Histoire de la bibliothèque de la ville de Mulhouse depuis ses origines’, extract from BSIM () in Bib. SIM  I. 71 Catalogue in Bib. SIM, A Br . All members of the original committee were drawn from the Industrial Society except a local Protestant pastor whose role was, presumably, to ensure that the collection did not become frivolous.

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libraries as well. Academy and Emulation Society had separate collections, and both groups believed that the municipality should provide space for their libraries. Academicians complained that their books had to be stored in the home of their secretary, a situation that was ‘hardly appropriate to the dignity of a corps that . . . includes among its members all the illustrious men of the province’.73 The Emulation Society, with its greater political acumen, wished to make its books publicly accessible so that they might become the library ‘of all young men animated by the love of science and fine arts’.74 To this end, emulators proposed that the municipality offer a central location to combine the libraries of ‘all the societies which . . . compete for the honour of doing good’. Pointedly ignoring the Academy, the emulators mentioned at least four other societies—medical, horticultural, fine arts, and charitable patronage— whose collections could be ‘united to great advantage in a communal room’.75 Expositions were another highlight of the public activities of the learned bourgeoisie. Expositions combined the public access of a library with a competitive framework. Mulhouse’s Industrial Society held regular expositions from the late s; by , when the Industrial Society claimed credit for the first international exposition, these events attracted manufacturers from Alsace, all over France, and Germany and Switzerland as well. Organizers congratulated themselves that the public display of industrial products ‘create[d] occasions for useful contacts, new comparisons; all the while stimulating a noble emulation among industrialists’.76 The excitement of an exposition could even overwhelm Mulhousiens’ famous dislike of the Bourbon monarchy; at the  exposition, held in honour of Charles X, the monarch graciously admired the products of his prosperous Mulhousien subjects. The Mulhousiens, in return, graciously kept their republican sentiments to themselves. The Mulhousien taste for expositions quickly spread. Besançon’s 72

72 The municipal library, the oldest in the French provinces, tried to avoid learned society disputes, though not always successfully. See, for instance, the  attempt by the Archaeological Commission (a body which included both academicians and emulators united by a common passion for ancient history) to have part of the library collection transferred to the museum. Correspondence in ACB R. Cousin cites a similar debate between Academy and Emulation about borrowing privileges from the s, . 73 Letter to the mayor,  May . ACB R. 74 T. Bruand to the mayor,  Jan. . ACB R. 75 Castan to the mayor,  Feb. . ACB R. 76 Rapport sur l’exposition des produits de l’industrie tenue à Mulhouse le  juin  (Mulhouse, ) brochure in the Bib. SIM  .

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emulators soon recognized that ‘alongside armed struggle there were more profitable conflicts, those of industry, the arts, and the sciences. For some time the word Exposition echoed all around. It was a necessity of the epoch. It was a necessity for the region [pays]’.77 Besançon’s  international exposition highlighted watchmaking, which emulators were anxious to present as a truly ‘national’ (rather than Swiss) industry.78 The exposition was yet another monument to emulators’ ‘solemn patriotic engagement’ and a chance for Besançon to ‘appear before France and foreign nations as a shining beacon of science, industry, and taste’.79 Although they were ultimately disappointed, emulators expected their exposition to be ‘the door through which . . . enter[ed] the railroad from Besançon to Switzerland’ and thus the definitive proof of their dedication to Bisontin public welfare.80 Promoting local industry was the common justification for expositions, but manufacturing was hardly the sole attraction of these events. Mulhouse’s  international exposition included a magnificent display of dyes, designs, and printed cloth and an impressive array of machines used in their production. Also exhibited, however, were clothing made by a ladies’ charitable society, furniture, fine arts, rifles, gilded frames, and artificial eyes. The records of Besançon’s  exposition suggest that no exhibition proposal was turned down.81 The learned culture of the emulator did not restrict itself to the practical or the technological, and no one suggested that expositions might profit from a more judicious selection of objects. Neither Bisontin watches nor Mulhousien calicoes were the real focus of learned society expositions. The laudable emulation of the town and its leading citizens was the true theme of these pageants. The disparate items were all relevant to a town that was a centre of innovation and progress and to a bourgeoisie that was more than usually adept in all branches of science. Naturally, the emulation stimulated by the juxtaposition of the finest industrial products was not to be confused with jealousy or rivalry. As the Bisontins explained, ‘the beating of our hammers no longer sounds a call to war . . . it is the pulsation of vigorous and fecund activity’ and an 77 Alphonse Deis, Barbizier à l’exposition (Besançon, ). Deis’s manuscript, with his illustrations, is in BMB MS . 78 See the report of the jury for the watchmaking section of the exposition, ACB F. 79 A. Delacroix, report to the executive committee of the exposition,  Nov. . ACB F. 80 Ibid. The main line to Switzerland bypassed Besançon in favour of the smaller towns of Dole and Pontarlier. 81 Minutes of executive committee meetings in ACB F.

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invitation to the ‘peaceful challenge’ of the exposition. Most significantly, emulation was not the cut-throat competition of free trade. Expositions deliberately made innovation public; they undercut industrial secrecy.83 Expositions, in true emulative fashion, made free trade more palatable: 82

Free trade, they say, is enough by itself to require each manufacturer to work ceaselessly for the perfection of his products; for him, it is a question of fortune or ruin. . . . [but] The principle of free trade only creates merchants whose sole aim is to sell and to increase their wealth. Expositions inspire more elevated thoughts; they make the manufacturer into an artist who is sensitive to the welldeserved praise of his fellow citizens. . . . In his dreams, glory seats itself in his home next to fortune.84

Even in the Industrial Society, it was not enough for a man to be just a merchant: emulation made the industrialist into more than a moneygrubber. Expositions helped provincial bourgeois to think of themselves as superior to the market, as men sensitive to praise rather than merely attuned to profit. Even small-town emulators, such as those in Lons le Saunier, aspired to the grandeur of expositions. Wistfully describing expositions as a ‘concept worthy of French dignity and of the genius that has endowed her with so much glory and wealth’, a Lédonien emulator had to acknowledge that ‘no magic wand will raise a sumptuous palace to spread out products for the satisfied eyes of Jurassiens.’ Lédonien emulators had to be satisfied with modest alternatives: ‘Instead of the real thing, we will be content with a written table on which will appear all of the progress of the region from  to the present. . . . This table will be both a reward for progress achieved and an encouragement for progress yet to come’.85 Emulators immediately announced the opening of a competition to produce a ‘Table of Jurassien Industry’, the Lédonien alternative to an exposition for displaying science to the public. The presentation of the outstanding features of a department in table Executive committee report, June–Nov., . ACB F. Defusing industrial rivalry was a concern of many learned societies. The Industrial Society, for instance, consistently opposed secrecy within its own ranks. The society sponsored a chemistry laboratory whose results were open to all members and treated research as a collective enterprise. Hau, –. Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (New York, ), – notes American use of ‘emulation’ as an alternative to industrial secrecy. 84 L’Industriel alsacien,  Aug. . 85 Minutes of the meeting of  Feb. . ASEJ  J . The year  was the date of the Emulation Society’s foundation and, hence, a suitable date from which to measure Jurassien progress. 82 83

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format was not merely a consolation prize for small societies unable to do better. Statistical compilations were a favourite technique for demonstrating bourgeois scientific mastery of the local environment. The Statistique du Haut Rhin (), the Industrial Society’s first major project, required five years to compile and involved hiring three data collectors.86 Statistics were a modern way of knowing that the learned bourgeoisie quickly adopted as a means to a scientific, unbiased view of society. Statistics made sense of diversity and created a rational, comprehensible view of the world that appealed to emulators.87 Like an exposition, a statistical table enumerated possessions (the wealth of the department) and imposed order and purpose on them. The Statistique du Haut Rhin began with the climate and geography of Upper Alsace and then explored every feature of the region from the earliest years to its contemporary prosperity. Its chapters offered the reader a simple account of how the complicated phenomenon of industrialization had occurred in Alsace. Similarly, the successful author of the Jurassien statistical table would note all of the products of the Jura ‘from the high arts like painting, sculpture, engraving, gem cutting, to forges, rolling mills . . . from the production of porcelain and luxury furniture, the author must descend to the most ordinary pottery, to the smallest nail shop.’88 From this attention to detail would emerge a coherent picture of a successful department, led by a civic-minded, scientifically competent bourgeoisie. Emulators in Lons le Saunier ultimately managed to transform their statistical description into a visual presentation that could be widely distributed: a large relief map of the department. Every notable feature of the Jura appeared on this map: fertility of the soil, geological strata, administrative boundaries, population centres and activities, rivers, direction of the current, mountains, railways, and types of trees were all inscribed onto the relief. To include this quantity of detail the map covered  86 Industrial Society to the prefect,  Sept.  (request for a subsidy). ADHR  M . Wages alone consumed nearly , francs. Achille Penot, Statistique du Haut Rhin (Mulhouse, ). 87 On the origin of the statistical movement in France, see William Coleman, Death is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France (Madison, ) which explores Louis-René Villermé’s work on public hygiene, much of which was conducted in Mulhouse. See also Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, ‘Race et folklore: l’image officielle de la France en ’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations,  (), –; Hervé LeBras, ‘La Statistique générale de la France’ in Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, ii, La Nation (Paris, ), . –; and Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after , A. Sheridan (trans.) (Cambridge, MA, ), –. On the uses of statistics in England, see M. J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain (New York, ), – and Morris, Class, Sect, and Party, –. 88 Minutes of the meeting of  Feb. . ASEJ  J .

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square metres with cast plaster. The complexity of the Jura—natural and human—could be presented visually in such a way that the truths revealed by the map would strike even the most routine-bound peasant. The map would ‘speak to the eyes of the population and give them suggestions that will be profitable in agriculture for irrigation, drainage, and even for the improvement of roads’. Schoolchildren would also benefit from this visual statistique which could be reproduced in sections at moderate cost. Emulators anticipated that every commune in the Jura would buy part of the map for the local school. At the very least, every schoolboy ought to be able to study his own canton in its impressive detail.90 Lédonien emulators proudly shipped their  square metres of plaster relief to the Universal Exposition of  in Paris, where it earned a bronze medal.91 During his visit to the exposition, the society’s president called on emulators all over France to raise public subscriptions to recreate the Jurassien achievement for their own departments.92 Of all the projects of nineteenth-century learned societies, none aroused greater or more sustained enthusiasm than museums. Museums were emulation’s showpieces: like the relief map of the Jura, they made knowledge visually impressive enough to startle the lower orders out of their routinized existence. Museums were necessary institutions for the education and improvement of the public; they reinforced the abstract lessons of school with concrete examples for the practice of emulation.93 The collection of human knowledge, carefully catalogued and displayed to the public, ordered the world’s diversity and memorialized the men who made it look simple. Larger towns with wealthy learned societies could afford several museums, often divided thematically. Mulhouse’s Industrial Society had separate museums for industry, natural history, fine arts, and local history. Emulators in Besançon organized a natural history museum and an archaeological collection attached to the municipal fine arts museum. A small society, like the Emulation Society of Lons le Saunier, kept its entire collection in the same museum. The size and scope of the museum mattered less than the display of the competence and public-spiritedness 89

Description of the relief map,  May . ASEJ  J . The entire map cost  francs, but individual portions could be purchased for just  francs per square decimetre. E. Dalloz, deputy from the Jura, to Rebours,  Feb.  and Emulation Society to Dalloz,  Mar. . ASEJ  J . 91 Dalloz to Emulation Society,  Mar. . ASEJ  J . 92 Rebours’s speech in ASEJ  J . 93 Dominique Poulot, ‘L’Invention de la bonne volonté culturelle: L’image du musée au XIXe siècle’, Le Mouvement social,  (), –, –. 89 90

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of bourgeois emulators. Coherence derived from the unity of the emulative project, not from any consistency in the choice of objects on display. Nineteenth-century museums housed a jumble of curiosities, hobbies, travel souvenirs, and gadgets. Lédonien bourgeois, whose modest society revenues restricted their collection to one museum, were particularly proud of such items as a Celtic bronze razor (described as ‘genuinely English’ in form), a boa constrictor and some arrowheads from Bogotá, Roman coins dug up in the neighbourhood, bits of bone of indeterminate age, and an oak branch that had mysteriously grown around a hazelnut.94 The year  was particularly good for the Lédonien emulators: in that year the museum acquired and had stuffed two monstrous calves both born in the department of the Jura. The first had two heads and one body; the second had two bodies but only one head. Taxidermy, construction of display cases, and engravings of these curiosities for publication in the bulletin consumed most of the society’s budget for that year.95 Making the most of their limited resources, emulators in Lons assembled everything from fine arts to soil samples for the instruction of the public. The beautiful, the exotic, the curious, and the monstrous all contributed to the enlightenment of the Jura’s citizens. Collections organized around a theme were only marginally more coherent. The Mulhousien Industrial Society’s natural history museum, for instance, acquired in  alone such treasures as a stuffed jaguar, a squirrel from India, mineral samples from the Auvergne, a butterfly collection, a duck with four feet, an example of wheat grown on the island of Elba, and a box of petrified objects claiming to date from the Jurassic period. The geological collection of Joseph Koechlin, a noted specialist in the field, found its way into the museum, as did the birds’ nests, with eggs, that Dr Thierry contributed each year.96 The natural history collection reflected the tastes, eccentricities, hobbies, and travels of Industrial Society members. As in Lons le Saunier, the criteria for inclusion appear infinite, and the grounds on which an object might have been excluded are, at best, obscure. The industrial museum’s catalogue was less whimsical and adhered to a more obvious standard of coherence. The collection included machines 94 ASEJ  J  (archaeology) and  J  (natural history) contain correspondence concerning the museum and its cataloguing. 95 Report on autopsies and engravings were published in TSEJ (), Séance publique du  décembre . 96 ‘Liste des dons’, Bib. SIM MS .

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for weaving, spinning, and printing cotton cloth and an extensive record of calico designs assembled from Mulhousien firms beginning in the eighteenth century. The industrial museum was without question a valuable resource for local textile firms. The library of design samples, in particular, promoted what was already one of the strengths of local industry: the tasteful designs and colours for which Mulhousien calicoes were famous. The design samples commemorated the early success of Mulhousien textiles and ensured that the next generation of designers would profit from the taste and ability of its predecessors. Significantly, the industrial museum is the only one of the Industrial Society’s nineteenth-century museums that has survived to the present: its fabric samples, designs, and machines possess a coherence that appeals to museum-goers today.97 Nineteenth-century evidence, however, suggests that the apparent unity of the industrial museum was less attractive to nineteenth-century bourgeois than the eclectic, bargain-basement atmosphere of the natural history museum. Although Industrial Society members agreed that the industrial museum was the most important of their works, it never attracted the degree of interest that the natural history collection enjoyed. The Industrial Society’s Bulletin regularly suggested that members turn their attention from the already-full natural history museum to the more significant industrial one. Museums had a more valuable function than simply ‘satisfy[ing] the curiosity of visitors who are indifferent to the big questions that are debated . . . within the Industrial Society’. The industrial museum was necessary to enlighten the working class and even members of the society, ‘if we wish not to degenerate and to let ourselves be overtaken by our rivals’.98 Industrial societies elsewhere in France were emulating the Mulhousiens and creating their own industrial museums; Mulhouse should take care not to let its own collection stagnate.99 True 97 The Musée d’impression sur étoffes is located today in the Industrial Society’s nineteenth-century headquarters. 98 A. Klenck, report on the industrial museum in BSIM (), . An earlier report in the same issue indicated that the Industrial Society was having similar difficulties with scholarly papers. The journal editors still received a flood of scientific papers, but fewer concerned local industry. 99 Among the Industrial Society’s imitators was the Bisontin Emulation Society which, in , proposed the establishment of a watchmaking museum. (Report to the prefect,  July . ADD T .) Like the Mulhousien textile manufacturers, however, the Bisontin watchmakers were more interested in museum preservation of their scientific hobbies than of their manufacturing achievements. The watch collection apparently never amounted to much and Besançon’s present Musée du Temps does not trace its holdings back to this initial effort.

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emulation required that the museum collection remain on the cutting edge of modern technology. However, the industrial museum never did succeed in putting the natural history curiosities in what everyone agreed to be their place. Science as the rational leisure pursuit of the modern gentleman had taken too firm a hold of bourgeois society. The Emulation Society of Besançon likewise believed that its collections ‘not only assigned it an elevated rank in the esteem of the inhabitants of the Franche Comté, but had also earned it an honourable place among the learned societies which . . . unite in the wish to support . . . legitimate efforts of hard work and intelligence’.100 Although Bisontin emulators collected the same jumble of vaguely scientific objects as their counterparts in Lons and Mulhouse, their primary claim to local esteem was archaeological. Gentlemen amateurs dug up construction sites, made plaster casts of bas reliefs, and discovered traces, both archaeological and philological, of Arab and Saracen presence in the Franche Comté.101 Although emulators let no chance at archaeological discovery pass them by, their main interest was a century-long campaign to have Alaise, a Franc-comtois village, recognized as the site of the battle of Alésia, Vercingétorix’s last stand against the Romans.102 Feverish digging around Alaise made the Bisontin museum a centre for the study of Celtic antiquities; in  the prefect was able to brag that local collections, which had been created ‘almost entirely by private gifts’ were ‘known and appreciated by French and foreign archaeologists’.103 Alesia and the Gauls’ last stand proposed fascinating intersections between the local and the national for Franc-comtois emulators. Vercingétorix was indisputably a French hero, but his true heirs and rediscoverers were Franc-comtois: provincial pride preserved the national heritage.104 These amateur archaeologists explicitly claimed to be descendants of Vercingétorix’s Sequani warriors. Bisontin writers in the s routinely exchanged ‘Sequani’ for ‘Franc-comtois’, for example in 100 C. Grenier to the municipal council,  Mar. . ACB R2. See also A. Castan to the prefect,  June  in ACB R2; Castan to the prefect,  Aug.  and Emulation Society to the prefect,  June , both in ADD T . 101 ADD  T  contains reports on the archaeological activities of Bisontin learned societies. The discussion of Saracen presence is in a report from the commission in charge of the Amancey dig to the Emulation Society,  Dec. . 102 Cousin, historian of the Besançon Academy, counted  titles in the bibliography of the debate in . His is the best account of the controversy, –. 103 Prefect to ministry of Fine Arts,  Dec. . ADD  T . 104 See Edouard Pommier, ‘Naissances des musées de province’, in Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, ii, La Nation, . – on the early adoption of the notion of patrimony in the provinces.

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a tourist guide to Besançon and its environs which sang the praises of local livestock: Sequani sheep and cows beyond all comparison with their merely French counterparts.105 Franc-comtois claims to the Sequani heritage took on new importance in the s when the imperial government announced its intention to build a monument to Vercingétorix either in Alaise or the Burgundian contender, Alise Ste. Reine. The local newspaper, which rarely took learned societies as seriously as they took themselves, suggested that ‘civil war’ be averted by erecting statues in both villages, because the nation could not have too many monuments to its heroes.106 The passion for commemorating local history, however, made emulators want exclusive possession of such figures as Vercingétorix, even in defeat, to add to their museums. Historians have generally dismissed nineteenth-century learned society museums as monuments to ‘bourgeois acquisitiveness’.107 Some scholars ignore learned societies altogether as they trace a teleological movement away from the cabinet of curiosities towards the ‘disciplinary museum’ in which items are arranged according to rational, scientific principles.108 Certainly visitors to learned society museums would have left with very little systematic knowledge of archaeology or natural history. In fact, learned societies in general contributed very little to the progress of science or letters in nineteenth-century France.109 None of the societies appears, however, to have felt any sense of failure in this regard: indeed, Academy, Emulation Societies, and Industrial Society continue as active participants in the cultural life of eastern towns today. The persistent relevance of these associations to bourgeois society suggests that learned societies aspired to something besides scientific discovery and that they succeeded on their own terms. Rather than dismissing their science as shallow, their learning as derivative, and their museums as incoherent, we should turn our attention to understanding learned societies in their own context. These museums did reveal their founders to be men who valued ownership, but it would be foolish to suggest that bourgeois men were not discriminating 105 Alphonse Delacroix and Auguste Castan, Guide de l’étranger à Besançon et en Franche Comté accompagné d’une carte du siège d’Alésia (Besançon, ), . The Sequani were the Celtic tribe that occupied eastern France in the Gallo-Roman era. 106 L’Union franc-comtoise,  Sept. . 107 Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, – (Cambridge, ), . 108 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London, ), esp. –. 109 Chaline, Sociabilité et érudition, – goes to considerable trouble to demonstrate this point.

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about their property. We ought to consider what value bourgeois collectors saw in the jumble of curiosities with which they filled their museums. They sought objects that would represent the whole of nature and man-made culture. Their museums attempted to demonstrate the regularity of natural laws, best represented by the commonplace, by objects in series. However, the impulse of curiosity in which, according to Krzysztof Pomian, ‘rare things alone are seen to be capable of representing nature properly’ survived throughout the nineteenth century.110 There was more than chronic bourgeois acquisitiveness behind the combination of statistical regularity and exotic curiosity in learned society museums. Most learned societies avoided art. By the early nineteenth century art objects were generally understood to be suitable for placement in a museum. Of the three towns, only Besançon had an art museum, but local emulators showed no interest in contributing to the fine arts collection.111 Lédonien emulators accepted works of art into their collection, but very much in the spirit in which they accepted anything else. Paintings and soil samples occupied the same museum space in Lons, and no one suggested that one was more valuable than the other. In Mulhouse, the Industrial Society had a Beaux Arts Committee, but the best kind of art, in the minds of many members of the society, made agreeable designs on cotton cloth or wallpaper. Committee members were far more interested in chromolithography, photography, and the Industrial Design School than in traditional fine arts like painting.112 In a town with museums for industry, natural history, and local history, no one suggested that Mulhouse could derive any profit from an art museum. Thus the chronic acquisitiveness of the bourgeois did not encourage him to acquire the one collection object of obvious and intrinsic worth.113 110 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, –, Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (trans.) (Cambridge, ), –,  describes a brief ‘age of curiosity’ which enjoyed ‘an interim rule between . . . theology and science’ (). 111 A Society of the Friends of the Arts existed in Besançon in , then sporadically in the late s and s. It held expositions intended to create ‘a salutary emulation’ among artists, but did not concern itself with museums. Rather, paintings acquired by the society were raffled off after the exposition. Bulletin de la Société des amis des arts,  Jan. , pamphlet in ADD T . BMB MS  contains minutes of meetings and other documents concerning the society in the s. 112 Julliard-Weiss, Résumé du travail sur l’activité du comité des Beaux-Arts (Mulhouse, ) pamphlet in the Bib. SIM. The committee’s activities from  to  could be summarized in just under eight pages. 113 Fine art collecting was a private pursuit of some great industrialists. See Albert Boime, ‘Entrepreneurial Patronage in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Edward C. Carter II, et al. (eds.), Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore, ), –.

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These shrewd men of property preferred to chase after pot shards, birds’ nests, and biological curiosities: they confined their collecting to objects for which there was no market. All over France, bourgeois men invested time, effort, and money into collections of little or no economic value. Had these bourgeois Frenchmen assembled their wealth in the same manner that they assembled their collections, they would all have been bankrupt. The bourgeois men of the learned societies were acquisitive, but their acquisitiveness ought not to be dismissed as a simple manifestation of the bourgeois philistine’s worship of property. The acquisitiveness of learned society collections was not principally what made them bourgeois. Emulators collected items not because of their market value but precisely because most of these objects had no relationship to the market. Emulators usually did not buy their museum artefacts, and collectors avoided the feminine connotations of shopping.114 Men preferred to wrest desirable objects from nature or from history: bourgeois scientists caught their own butterflies, found their own sea shells, and dug up their own ancient remains. If emulators did not seize museum artefacts themselves, they accepted items as gifts from adventurous travellers and explorers who had. Male collecting was conducted in an altogether more heroic mode than female consumerism. Scientific collection objects were deliberately non-commercial; they derived their worth from their ability to represent and disseminate scientific knowledge, not from their market value. The eclectic and vaguely scientific museum collections with which emulation societies endowed their fellow citizens offered considerable scope for the representation of the local elite. Museums represented their creators through the accumulation of artefacts: the juxtaposition of the commonplace and the extraordinary reflected the expertise and the civicmindedness of the bourgeois elite.115 Art objects were less malleable in this respect than natural history or archaeological collections. The artistic canon and standards for appreciation of art had already been established by the early nineteenth century.116 Associations of bourgeois men in 114 Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, ), – describes male collecting in similar terms, although she focuses on auctions as the site of acquisition. The middle class of Leeds that Morris examines (Class, Sect, and Party, ) carefully excluded from their collections any items related to their own economic success. 115 See Pomian, ch. , on private donations to public collections. 116 James J. Sheehan, ‘From Princely Collection to Public Museum: Toward a History of the German Art Museum’, in Michael Roth (ed.), Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics and the Psyche (Stanford, ), –; Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, ), ch. ; and Pomian, ch. .

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provincial French towns could add very little to the pronouncements of the emerging art historical profession. In the realm of art, emulators could be little more than copyists; they preferred, therefore, collections in which they could determine value and establish themselves as models.117 Historians of museums have already noted the democratic appeal of natural history collections, which were much slower than fine art to acquire rigid standards for inclusion and exclusion.118 Emulators’ museums appear to bear this contention out: no peasant could have been more fascinated by the monstrous double-headed calf of the Jura than the bourgeois of Lons. In the pre-professional early nineteenth century, this absence of a canon and openness to individual interpretation was true of science in general; such absence of boundaries made it possible for a bourgeois gentleman to define a burning chicken on his dinner table as a valuable piece of science. Learned societies were free to establish their own standards of scientific experimentation and their own criteria for building scientific museum collections. Unconstrained by professional exigencies, their investigations and choice of artefacts were free to represent the interests of the local elite. Science’s democratic impulse, however, ended with the shared desire to gawk at nature’s curiosities. Bourgeois scientists did more than stare, or rather, they defined their staring as rigorous scientific observation. Emulators preserved monstrous beasts in glass cases and had likenesses engraved so that other scientists could appreciate the phenomenon and so that local gawkers might achieve some appreciation of the culture of science. Latin names and scientific analysis placed even quotidian items— caterpillars, bone fragments, chicken dinners—in the bourgeois realm of science. In the case of the monstrous calves, learned medical discussion and a glass case equally distinguished bourgeois science from peasant curiosity. Dissection, observation, and analysis similarly transformed the mysterious flaming chicken into a scientific object. The rhetoric and apparatus of science drew a sharp distinction between bourgeois investigation and uninformed curiosity. The deployment of science excluded the lower classes as effectively as the aesthetic and aristocratic canons of fine art excluded the bourgeois. Those bourgeois emulators who had 117 Bourgeois reluctance to collect art appears to have diminished towards the end of the nineteenth century. Raymonde Moulin, ‘Les Bourgeois amis des arts. Les expositions des beaux-arts en province, –’, Revue française de sociologie,  (), – notes a steady growth in societies of friends of the arts from  to . 118 Pomian, ; Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought (London, ), .

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access to the scientific appreciation of museum objects hardly constituted a democratic community. The incoherence that the twentieth century sees in the nineteenthcentury museum must be dismissed as anachronistic in order to see these collections as representations of bourgeois elites.119 For nineteenthcentury museum-goers, these collections were not incoherent. Visitors to these museums learned about taxonomy; that every object in the world could be identified, named, and classed. Collectors took great pains to ensure that no item was left uncategorized; everything had a place in the museum that reflected its place in the wider world. Indeed, the goal of the provincial museum was to have one of everything there was and thus to provide citizens of provincial towns with a catalogue of the world. Sometimes this aim was made explicit, as in the catalogue of mineral samples in the Lons museum which, not content with describing the origin of several thousand samples, left blank spaces for all those the museum had yet to acquire.120 An  report of Besançon’s Emulation Society noted that the museum’s sea-shell collection included all living types of molluscs except six, some of which were really just sub-generas. Many of the collection’s items were extremely rare and some, the report noted cryptically, even unique.121 In the classificatory schemes of bourgeois emulators, sea shells could be representative of their genera and unique at the same time. Science and emulation could find order equally in repetitive and unique objects. Obsession with taxonomy demonstrated the emulators’ ability to impose order on the natural and human world and the seriousness of learned society scholarship. All learned societies embarked on ambitious classificatory projects: the poisonous plants of the Jura,122 the heraldic emblems of the Franche Comté,123 or the caterpillars of the 119 Eugenio Donato, ‘The Museum’s Furnace: Notes Toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet’, in Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism (Ithaca, ),  notes that a museum’s accumulation of objects acquires meaning only through ‘the fiction . . . that a repeated metonymic displacement of fragment for totality . . . can still produce a representation which is somehow adequate’. Donato does not consider, however, that Bouvard and Pécuchet, like other bourgeois emulators, attempted to represent their own capabilities and identities through an accumulation 120 of natural objects. ASEJ  J . 121 Minutes of the Emulation Society,  Feb. . ADD  T . 122 ‘Notice par M Demerson sur les plantes vénéneuses du Jura’, TSEJ (), Séance publique du  septembre . 123 The list reached ,. At the same time, the Academy made reproductions of all medieval Franc-comtois seals. Cousin, –. Cousin’s own history, which contains numerous lists (of papers presented, of gifts to the Academy, etc.), fits into this taxonomic tradition.

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Doubs, each catalogue describing hundreds, even thousands of items. Scientific meetings could not ‘provide listeners with as much pleasure as literary assemblies’, but emulators knew that ‘utility must take precedence’.125 Members were probably bored, but they could comfort themselves with the knowledge that taxonomy served the cause of science. Items deserved placement in learned society museums not only because of their taxonomic position but also because of their connections to local notables. Museum collections emphasized the civic-mindedness of emulators as well as their connections to the wider world. The Colombian arrowheads in the Lédonien museum were fascinatingly exotic, and they represented the South American continent for Jurassien visitors. Equally important, however, was their connection to a well-travelled, knowledgeable Jurassien who had not forgotten his home town. The Russian icon on display in the same museum was catalogued with a note describing, not its artistic merits, but its provenance. The icon represented Russian art, but also, and more importantly, the young recruit from Lons le Saunier who had participated in the battle of Sebastopol and donated his trophies to his fellow citizens. Lédonien emulators were always proud to cite the names of ‘generous compatriots so zealous in expanding the domain of science in favour of their native region’.126 Similarly, textile machinery represented the technical acumen and financial success of its donors. Paintings on the walls of provincial museums marked ‘gift of His Majesty the Emperor’ implied connections between local bourgeois worthies and imperial power, although to Napoleon III, provincial museums were essentially storage space for his extensive art patronage.127 Visitors to these museums might not learn very much about Russian art or textile production, but they would be well aware that within their town lived public-spirited men who had mastered such subjects. More important than understanding the infinite possibilities of classification was knowing who was behind the rigorous taxonomy of provincial museums. Although some museums in larger towns were more sophisticated and ‘disciplined’, their visitors would still emerge with a clearer image of the local elite than of any particular branch of science. 124

124 Instalments of Dr Bruand’s catalogue, which ultimately passed , species, dominate MSED (–). In  Bruand donated his collection—over , caterpillars—to the natural history museum. 125 ‘Notice par M Demerson.’ 126 ‘Compte rendu’  (account of natural history collection). ASEJ  J . 127 The ministry of Fine Arts occasionally sent paintings to provincial museums that did not exist. Daniel J. Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA, ), –.

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Industrial museums showcased the productive talents of the bourgeoisie, while natural history and archaeological collections represented their scientific leisure pursuits. Both aspects of science—for capitalist profit and for personal cultivation—contributed to bourgeois identities and were models for the emulation of others. Sea shells and textile machinery, butterflies and Celtic antiquities could all demonstrate bourgeois grasp of science, local history, and local affairs. By understanding the significance and function of each item in their collections, emulators demonstrated their capacity for leadership. The most remarkable and ambitious among the museums of eastern France was the Mulhouse zoo. Charles Thierry-Mieg first proposed that Mulhouse should have a zoo in an  speech to the Industrial Society called ‘Reflections on the improvement of the working classes’.128 Thierry-Mieg had studied the zoos of London and Brussels and concluded that Mulhouse and its citizens would reap considerable benefits from a similar institution. The idea of a zoo thus had a respectable pedigree, but in the context of eastern France could be innovative and representative of local bourgeois good will. The zoo opened in  with an imposing municipal ceremony featuring leaders of the Industrial Society and performances by local musical and gymnastic societies. In his opening speech, the president of the Industrial Society congratulated his colleagues on their contribution to civic life: ‘for the education and uplifting of the working class’, he asserted, ‘we have no further reason to envy the English’.129 The connection between exotic animals and the uplifting of the working class remained unexplored in contemporary discussions of the zoo; it was apparently so obvious as to require no elaboration. Mulhouse was notoriously crowded and polluted, and workers certainly benefited from the clean air and open spaces of the zoo. The exotic animals’ purpose was less clear. A suggestion that workers’ diets could be supplemented by the animals’ milk sold at cost dropped without further discussion. Members of the Industrial Society were concerned with working-class leisure, more particularly with rendering it as ‘useful’ as their own.130 Gawking at exotic animals—as long as they had been rigorously selected and classified in a zoological garden—was instructive and scientific and hence a worthy pastime. None of the bourgeois BSIM (). ‘Jardin zoologique de Mulhouse: compte rendu des opérations de la première année’, and P. Gutknecht, ‘Histoire du jardin zoologique’ undated MS in the Bib. SIM A Br . 130 See Ch. . 128 129

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sponsors of the zoo, however, really believed that workers needed a profound understanding of zoology. The zoo, like other provincial museums, was a monument to those local savants who did know about zoology, whose broad range of experience encompassed animals from the four corners of the globe, but who none the less felt a strong responsibility to their fellow citizens of Mulhouse. Museum collections did not collapse into ‘irreducible heterogeneity’131 because notions of bourgeois scientific competence assured their coherence as representations of the local elite. Finding objects that could metonymically stand in for the whole of the natural and man-made world was certainly too great a task. Collecting items that could represent bourgeois grasp of the laws of nature and artifice, however, was not impossible. Museum artefacts, as well as statistics, libraries, and manufacturing expositions all demonstrated bourgeois mastery of science. The bourgeois man’s scientific knowledge and public spirit rendered the commonplace and the extraordinary comprehensible within scientific norms and made them available for the admiration and improvement of local citizens. Just as the project of emulation gave coherence to the heterogeneous objects of a museum or an exposition, so too emulation unified men of diverse private interests. In learned societies, the emulative desire to display superior knowledge and civic generosity displaced the destructive rivalries of politics and the market. Although the men who joined learned societies did not abandon their particular and diverse interests, they agreed that participation in the culture of learning—particularly scientific learning—set the bourgeois apart from the ordinary citizen. Commitment to education and an emphasis on competence—rather than income or birth—created grounds of accord between the varying groups of men who made up the middle classes. Education and capacité conferred droit de bourgeoisie more effectively than income. Learned societies transformed formal education into capacité by giving bourgeois Frenchmen the opportunity to translate their learning into public monuments such as libraries and museums. The real wisdom of the provincial savant lay less in his understanding of zoology or archaeology than in his ability to manipulate emulation’s rhetoric of competition towards the creation of consensus. 131

Donato, .

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Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Platitudes, a compilation of nineteenthcentury bourgeois clichés, naturally encompassed the phenomenon of association. Sandwiched between censure and certificat we find cercle, the most common appellation for a gentlemen’s club, and Flaubert assures us that ‘one must always belong to one’.1 Not everyone belonged, of course, but the Dictionary’s ironic sting lies in its collapsing all distinctions between ‘bourgeois men’ and ‘everyone’. Everyone who mattered—the generators of Flaubert’s clichés, the bourgeois of provincial France— recognized cercle membership as an important mark of status. The conflation of bourgeois and mankind that Habermas identified in the foundation of the public sphere still operated in the early nineteenth century, although sharp observers like Flaubert perceived its shortcomings and found humour in them. Frequenting a cercle was a common point of access for men—bourgeois men—to the public sphere. Cercle membership proclaimed a man to be leisured, respectable, cultivated, and publicspirited: leisure and its sociable ties united men in bourgeois identity. Leisure was a problem in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, one might identify a ‘leisure question’ in the interstices of more familiar nineteenth-century questions about the organization of society and the position of women. The issue of leisure circulated around the poles of gender and class. If masculinity were defined in terms of work, how could it be maintained in repose? How could bourgeois men distinguish their own, well-deserved rest from feminine or aristocratic idleness? How could masculinity and bourgeois status be invested simultaneously in a work ethic and in the conspicuous consumption of leisure?2 Not to 1 Ouevres complètes ( vols.; Paris, ), ii. . Because ‘club’ had such specific political connotations in nineteenth-century France, I will use ‘cercle’ to refer to sociable bourgeois associations. 2 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (nd edn.; London, ). See also Joffre Dumazedier, Toward a Society of Leisure, S. McClure (trans.) (New York, ), –, –, and Peter Bailey, ‘“A Mingled Mass of Perfectly Legitimate Pleasures”: The Victorian Middle Class and the Problem of Leisure’,

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possess ample free time was to be less than bourgeois. But leisure was also a pitfall: it was colonized by cafés and populated by individuals of unknown and uncertain morals. Leisure was potentially the slippery slope out of bourgeois respectability. Availability of free time was the sign of a successful bourgeois: a prosperous man able to retire or a man whose affairs ran like clockwork under his distant supervision. Having completed his work so successfully, however, what was the bourgeois to do with his idle hands? Emulation and association provided the solution to the bourgeois leisure dilemma. The rhetoric of emulation and the practice of association clarified the class and gender ambiguities of free time. Voluntary association made leisure into an honest bourgeois citizen. When practised by men in association, a wide variety of leisure pastimes could be defined as masculine, as respectable, and as socially responsible. Just as a learned society could associate zoology and the collection of exotic animals with male bourgeois competence, other leisure groups could make similar claims for horticulture or target-shooting. The collaborative and emulative nature of the cercle spread the mantle of bourgeois respectability even over such pastimes as gaming and drinking. Cercles and other leisure associations reconciled the serious endeavour of creating a bourgeois masculinity with the enjoyment of well-earned recreation. Indulgence in leisure was crucial to bourgeois status not only because it denoted economic success. Leisure signified disposable income, but, equally important, it represented bourgeois emancipation from the demands corporate society placed on an individual’s time. The bourgeois man’s leisure was truly free time because he owed it neither to church, guild, town, or to any other corps.3 He and his peers were at liberty to dedicate their leisure to the exploration of personal tastes and preferences. Victorian Studies,  (), –. Although the latter two authors discuss the class ambiguities of leisure, neither considers the links between idleness and women. See Alain Corbin, ‘Du Loisir cultivé à la classe de loisir’, in Corbin (ed.), L’Avènement des loisirs: – (Paris, ), –. David Robbins rightly notes that although leisure has been widely studied as an element of bourgeois control over workers, less attention has been paid to leisure as a cultural sphere within which bourgeois conflicts were resolved. ‘Sport, Hegemony, and the Middle Class: The Victorian Mountaineers’, Theory, Culture, and Society,  (), –, . 3 On pre-modern leisure practices, see Anne Vincent-Buffault, L’Exercice de l’amitié: pour une histoire des pratiques amicales aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris, ), –; Keith Thomas, ‘Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society’, Past and Present,  (), –; the discussion of that article in ibid.  (), –; E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, WorkDiscipline and Industrial Capitalism’, ibid.  (), –; Michael R. Marrus, ‘Introduction’, in Marrus (ed.), The Emergence of Leisure (New York, ), –; and Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (London, ), –.

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

Associations for music, sport, gardening, and gaming all enabled bourgeois men to pursue particular interests while simultaneously participating in the establishment of a group identity. The framework of association shaped the diversity of pastimes into a single component of being bourgeois. Leisure associations, however, could reflect bourgeois dissent as well as accord. Where erudite sociability was concerned, a single learned society usually set the tone for the entire town in early nineteenth-century France. Even small towns like Lons le Saunier, however, boasted a variety of leisure associations catering to different tastes. Although these societies ordinarily operated as equals, distinctions among them occasionally emerged. Some of these distinctions, such as generational divisions between groups of older and younger men, did not pose any fundamental challenge to bourgeois consensus. Other distinctions, however, such as the persistent refusal of some associations to admit men of certain professions or religious groups, called into question the coherence of the bourgeoisie. As a set of activities that could make or unmake class and gender identities, leisure was a serious business, and bourgeois Frenchmen treated it as such. T G’ C ERCLE As Flaubert noted, the gentlemen’s cercle was the most important organization catering to the leisure of the provincial bourgeois man. When the minister of the Interior surveyed associations in , he discovered , cercles with a total membership of , men.4 Cercles were overwhelmingly a provincial phenomenon; the first Parisian cercle was not founded until , and the associations remained rare in the capital.5 Parisian bourgeois could look to a wide variety of commercial establishments in their leisure hours, in particular to cafés catering to an exclusively bourgeois clientele.6 Provincial bourgeois, however, could not count on the market to provide them with a suitably distinguished leisure. Among the French provinces, frontier regions and areas with significant Protestant populations were fertile territory for the cercle.7 The greater heterogeneity of populations in these regions made class affiliation more difficult to establish. The sociable ties that united the bourgeoisie 4 The survey results are the basis of Maurice Agulhon’s Le Cercle dans la France bourgeoise (Paris, ), . 5 Adeline Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne de  à  (Paris, ), –. 6 Agulhon, Cercle, . 7 Ibid. .

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were particularly important in regions where religious and national loyalties cut across class lines. Eastern France, a region of both frontiers and Protestants, quickly adopted the conviviality of the cercle, or, as it was sometimes known locally, the casino. Mulhouse’s first cercle appeared in , Besançon’s in , and Lons’s by . In  the ministry survey noted two cercles in Mulhouse with  members,8 three in Besançon with  members,9 and three in Lons le Saunier with  members.10 The bourgeois of provincial towns established cercles in order to ‘procure amusements similar to those one finds in public cafés, without the disadvantages that result from the pernicious habits that one can contract there as a result of exposure to individuals met by chance whose morals, in consequence, are unknown’.11 By the s and s, commentators on the social question had linked the café to working-class life, radical politics, and the destruction of families.12 Voluntary association made it possible for the bourgeois to redeem gaming, drinking, and other café pastimes and to associate them with order, civic duty, and stable family life. Cercles combined café pleasures with elite company and public utility with exclusive private sociability. The arrangement of cercles emphasized bourgeois commitment to a morally and politically reliable leisure. Cercles usually occupied the upper floors of cafés where bourgeois men would not need to rub shoulders with questionable company. Statutes of early nineteenth-century cercles often took the form of contracts between members and café owners. For an agreed rental, the cafetier heated, lit, and furnished the cercle room or rooms. Furniture usually included a billiard table as well as other games such as draughts and dominoes and a regular supply of fresh decks of cards.13 The cafetier also provided a specified number of newspaper subscriptions, the titles chosen by members. At the Casino in Lons le Saunier, the contract specified that the café owner was free to dispose of newspapers, probably by subletting them to his regular café clients, two 8 Statutes and membership lists in ADHR  M . All of these figures should be understood as minimum estimates. Small societies that did not bring themselves to the attention of the authorities were often overlooked. Moreover, membership figures usually referred to founding members and did not reflect a successful cercle’s growth. 9 List enclosed in letter from prefect to mayor,  Feb. . ACB I. 10 Police commissioner to prefect,  Mar. . ADJ M . 11 Statutes of the Cercle de l’Union Commerciale de Besançon (), ACB I. 12 W. Scott Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Sociability Among the French Working Class, – (Baltimore, ), –. 13 Statutes of the Société de Casino, , ADJ M . The same dossier contains a similar contract between a café owner and the Casino at Orgelet, dated .

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days after their arrival. Finally, the café owner contracted to provide refreshments at the same price as in the café proper. In some cases, the cafetier furnished the cercle with its own waiter as well. The establishment of a cercle was a mutually beneficial arrangement: contracts assured café owners of regular patronage and cercle members of private and superior status among the customers of the establishment. As cercles grew in size and wealth, they further distanced themselves from the world of the café. At its most elaborate, the cercle became a palatial establishment bearing little resemblance to a simple café. In  Mulhouse’s Social Cercle, the oldest such association in town, began construction of a new building expressly designed to house the association. The new cercle spread out over two floors connected by a grand staircase and included a reading room, a conversation room, small and large game rooms, and a billiard room. The Social Cercle took bids from cafetiers, many of whom were anxious to win this lucrative contract and to occupy the Cercle’s kitchens, caves and to work in the comfort of central heat and gaslight. The new building eventually paid for itself because its ground floor was occupied by rental shops.15 Finally, the establishment included a ballroom, which was occasionally used for municipal or Industrial Society functions. The number of balls was strictly limited, however, to two each year ‘so as not to disturb the members of the Cercle too often’ with an invasion of female frivolity.16 The administrative committee of the Social Cercle congratulated itself on ‘endowing our town, while also contributing to its beautification, with an establishment worthy of her’.17 Members felt it entirely appropriate that their new quarters should be noted among the ‘services rendered by Cercle meetings to Sociability’ and to Mulhouse itself.18 Although the Social Cercle’s luxurious lodgings represented an ideal, most cercles fell far short of this. Unable to present their towns with imposing architectural monuments, they had to focus their claims to public recognition on the good order that reigned among their members. The decorum of a cercle was its most important asset. Statutes elaborated on members’ conduct at length: no member was to enter a cercle expecting that café standards of behaviour applied. The policing of the cercle 14

14 Statutes of the Société de Casino, , ADJ M . On the practice of subletting newspapers, see Marcel Vogne, La Presse périodique en Franche Comté des origines à  ( vols.; Besançon, ), i. –. 15 Minutes for meeting of  Feb. . MHM  TT  e . 16 Minutes of  Sept. . See also  Oct. . MHM  TT  e . 17 Minutes of  Feb. . MHM  TT  e . 18 Minutes of  Apr. . MHM  TT  e .

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was the main function of its administrative bureau, composed of officers elected annually. The reputation of the cercle as an assembly of worthy and responsible men depended on their ensuring that the manners and morals of the society never descended into the café. The most important of the bureau’s duties was to supervise the presentation of candidates for membership. Typically, men wishing to join had to find sponsors within the cercle. Sponsors presented their protégés to the bureau, which arranged for the candidates’ names to be posted in the cercle. Members had adequate time to consider candidates before voting on them with black and white balls. Successful candidates had to receive a majority, sometimes of two-thirds or even three-quarters. Members might bring out-of-town visitors as guests to the cercle, but non-member locals were strictly excluded. Cercles clearly did not admit men indiscriminately, but they rarely had recourse to blackballing. The minutes of Mulhouse’s Social Cercle indicate that from  to the s members approved almost all candidates unanimously, with very few exceptions.19 The real policing of membership was not in the actual voting but in the sociable norms that ensured that only the right sort of men applied. Cercles admitted only those men whose behaviour adhered to standards specified in the statutes. Rules banned any intrusion that might compromise good order: members’ dogs, for instance, or food brought in from outside that would cut into the cafetier’s profits.20 Smoking and gaming were the two activities that required the most regulation. Wealthy cercles often set rooms aside for smoking and explicitly forbade tobacco in reading rooms. Some, like Besançon’s Notables’ Cercle, banished smoking from all rooms and the garden as well.21 In general, however, all-male company was a licence to smoke freely—a considerable attraction for most cercles. The link between tobacco and cercles was so strong that bureaucrats occasionally assumed that the associations existed merely so that men could smoke.22 Gaming also required considerable attention from a cercle’s bureau. Members expected equipment such as billiard tables to be in good order. Playing cards received hard use in a gentlemen’s cercle: the two hundred members of Mulhouse’s Social Cercle spent just over , francs on MHM  TT  e  and . For a discussion of those exceptions, see below, –. Statutes of the Cercle des Notables (Besançon) dated  July . ACB I. Ibid. 22 Sub-prefect (Altkirch) to prefect (Haut Rhin),  Dec. , refers to a Mulhousien cercle as a ‘tabagie’. ADHR  M . 19 20 21

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

playing cards each year in the s. Similarly, billiard tables required reupholstering and cues needed occasional replacing. To cover expenses, games were subject to small fees, which added up to a major source of income for most cercles. The  centimes members of the Casino in Lons paid per game of billiards was typical. A statute specifying that players should limit themselves to four games when others waited to use the table maintained harmony among the cercle’s many billiards aficionados.24 Cercle administrators ensured that gaming proceeded smoothly and quietly: bourgeois men wished to play cards, but they did not want to draw too much attention to this morally dubious aspect of cercle conviviality. All cercles took pains to ensure that competitiveness did not get out of hand because an assembly in which men squabbled over games would forfeit all claim to dignity and public respect. The correspondence resulting from an  change in the gaming fees at Mulhouse’s Social Cercle suggests the importance of gaming in bourgeois leisure. Members complained of the unfairness of paying for games when they could read the newspapers, which were far more costly, for free.25 Others asserted that the price of card games ought to decrease as the deck aged,26 or that fees ought to be levied only on those games that contributed to ‘abuse, luxury, and passions’ and not on ‘simple recreations’ such as dominoes.27 Some of the complaints offer a glimpse into the role of the cercle in members’ lives. One gentleman complained that the cheapest possible game, dominoes, still cost  centimes per player. A daily game of dominoes added  per cent to the initial expense of subscription, and a taste for billiards or other card games would quickly double the price of membership.28 That a member should appear daily in the games room of the Social Cercle seemed entirely reasonable; that he should play only a single game of dominoes, however, did not. Disgruntled members reminded the administrators that ‘the purpose of the cercle was not to provide enjoyment for the rich only.’29 The new rules seemed intent on ‘mak[ing] us grands seigneurs’ who could splash out money in a fashion inappropriate ‘to a cercle in a small town like ours’.30 23

Accounts in MHM  TT  c. Statutes of the Société de Casino, . ADJ M . 25 Correspondence concerning the new rules is in MHM  TT  c. Several members noted the expense of newspapers. 26 Undated petition with signatures removed, MHM  TT  c. 27 Hartmann to Jean Zuber,  Jan. . MHM  TT  c. 28  Jan.  letter to Jean Zuber (signature removed), MHM  TT  c. 29 Ibid. 30 David Koenig to Jean Zuber, undated, MHM  TT  c. 23 24

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Although statutes never mentioned it, the fee paid to the cercle was not the only money that changed hands when men played. Gambling also occurred in cercles, although it usually appears in police complaints rather than in the cercle’s own correspondence. Prefects insisted that statutes forbid ‘games of chance’, and cercles were perfectly willing to comply. Throwing away money on the turn of a card was, after all, a decadent and aristocratic pastime; bourgeois men had greater respect for the secure investment.31 None the less, the authorities’ most common complaint against cercles concerned high stakes gambling. Young men losing large sums of money in their cercle ‘raised the complaints of pères de famille’ according to the mayor of Lons le Saunier.32 Older men, with greater discretion and no fathers to complain, doubtless managed minor indulgence in gambling without calling attention to themselves. Gambling was not one of the bourgeois’ respectable amusements, and discussing it contributed little to the cercle’s self-presentation as a moral institution. The ability to conceal inappropriate pleasures behind the exclusivity of a private association was a significant attraction of the cercle. With their smoking and gaming, cercles institutionalized masculine leisure pursuits and effectively broke with France’s tradition of mixedgender forms of sociability, particularly the salon. The cercle was an English import, more akin to English coffee-house gatherings than to French salon society.33 Many observers regretted the deleterious effects of modern sociability on traditional French salon culture.34 In  a member of the Emulation Society of the Jura published a paper on tobacco use that called upon Frenchwomen to ‘form an offensive and defensive league against . . . desertion and asphyxia in the empire of grace and beauty’. Smoking, this gentleman saw clearly, ‘isolate[d] the two 31 On the origins of bourgeois distaste for gambling, see Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, ), –, –. Although generally condemned, gambling continued to play an ambiguous role in bourgeois society, as attested to by the interweaving of the vocabularies of gambling and capitalism. See Reuven Brenner, ‘Gambling, speculation, insurance—Why they were confused and condemned’, in Gambling and Speculation: A Theory, a History, and a Future of Some Human Decisions (Cambridge, ), –. 32 Prefect to mayor,  Jan. . See also the prefect’s letter to the mayor of  Feb. . ADJ M . 33 Agulhon, Cercle, . Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, ) contains a more extensive discussion of nation, gender, and sociability. 34 Benoit Lecoq, ‘Les Cercles parisiens au début de la Troisième République: de l’apogée au déclin’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,  (), – and Anne MartinFugier, La Vie élégante ou la formation du Tout-Paris (Paris, ), .

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sexes, encouraged them to invent egotistical pastimes for themselves that are as dangerous for morals as for the state of our sociability’.35 When men shut themselves away in smoke-filled rooms, they threatened ‘to denature the national character, to replace that amiable French gaiety . . . with germanic phlegm, with the morose solemnity of the Oriental, with the taciturnity of the English speculator, and sometimes perhaps even with spleen’.36 Occasional complaints that gentlemen’s cercles threatened French national character, however, went largely unheeded. Regardless of the sociable practices of the old regime, the bourgeois Frenchman of the post-revolutionary period socialized with his fellow citizens. In his analysis of cercles, Maurice Agulhon similarly uses the salon as a norm against which to trace the development of nineteenth-century sociability. Agulhon argues that cercles were a bourgeois, egalitarian form of the aristocratic salon. Keeping a salon was prohibitively expensive as well as too time-consuming for most members of the bourgeoisie. The expense of arranging salon sociability, however, could be divided among members, and its inconvenience eliminated by removing it from an individual home to a rented location. Cercles, according to Agulhon, thus worked on the same principle as omnibuses or restaurants: the bourgeois could ride in a carriage, eat haute cuisine, and enjoy elite sociability without bearing the sole expense for these luxuries.37 This typically bourgeois solution to an essentially economic problem involved allowing the market to distribute aristocratic pleasures among a wider audience. The cercle, however, was more than a salon of the marketplace. By moving out of the home and excluding women, the cercle, like other voluntary associations, broke definitively and deliberately with salon tradition. The absence of women from the sociable world of the nineteenth-century bourgeois was not merely incidental, a simple consequence of market influence or tobacco addiction. Rather, the exclusion of women was fundamental to male sociability and its aim of creating a bourgeois identity based on male rationality and citizenship. Dena Goodman has traced the abandonment of the salon to the decade immediately preceding the French Revolution. In the s young men chafing at the limits of the salon—limits of both size and of salonnière-imposed politesse—looked to male voluntary associations to provide them with a voice in the public sphere.38 These new associations, premised upon the Ducret, ‘Esquisse des moeurs’, TSEJ (), Séance publique du  décembre . Ibid. Agulhon, Cercle, . 38 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, ), ch. . 35 36 37

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irreducible difference of men and women, were easily able to transform themselves into the institutions of revolutionary sociability through which men exerted their rights of citizenship. Their nineteenth-century descendants, voluntary associations shorn of overt political demands, remained appropriate institutions for the creation and expression of male status. Although the salon tradition survived into the nineteenth century, it no longer functioned as a privileged point of access to the public sphere. Salon sociability was generally understood to be either aristocratic or artistic—and in both cases symptomatic of a withdrawal from bourgeois public life.39 The salon was an amusement for men who, like the salonnière, had no better employment. Noble withdrawal from politics after the July Revolution and an aristocratic calendar of winters in town and summers in the country were particularly typical of provincial salons.40 Cercles and other voluntary associations, by contrast, were the preserve of men whose concerns and loyalties were distinctly urban. They arranged their sociability so as to accommodate, even emphasize, the modern dichotomy between work and leisure which governed bourgeois lives.41 Cercles were sites of engagement with, not retirement from, public life. The sociability of civic involvement in the nineteenth century definitively moved out of the home, and out of the reach of women. Conversation in a cercle was not the creative and collective enterprise to which Enlightenment salons aspired. Newspapers and local affairs directed conversation, and members of literary salons looked down upon the cercle’s second-hand, journalistic culture.42 Although many cercles called themselves ‘literary’, the title generally referred to little more than an assortment of periodical subscriptions.43 Echoing the division between 39 See Martin-Fugier, La Vie élégante, ch. ; Adeline Daumard, ‘La Vie de salon dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle’ in Etienne François (ed.), Sociabilité et société bourgeoise en France, en Allemagne, et en Suisse, – (Paris, ), . See also her ‘L’Oisiveté aristocratique et bourgeoise en France au XIXe siècle: privilège ou maladiction?’ in Daumard (ed.), Oisiveté et loisirs dans les sociétés occidentales au XIXe siècle (Abbeville, ), –. Bourgeois republicans revived the salon in the last years of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic as a means of demonstrating the existence of a ‘bonne société républicaine’. See Sylvie Aprile, ‘La République au salon: vie et mort d’une forme de sociabilité politique (–)’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,  (), –, . 40 Claude-Isabelle Brelot, La Noblesse réinventée: nobles de Franche Comté de  à  ( vols.; Paris, ), ii. –. 41 Daumard, ‘La Vie de salon’, – notes the constraints that regular work schedules placed on salon sociability. See also Dena Goodman, ‘Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions’, Eighteenth-Century Studies,  (), 42 – on work and leisure in the eighteenth-century salon. Agulhon, Cercle, –. 43 Ibid. .

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work and leisure, bourgeois men saved their serious scholarship for learned societies and reserved their cercles for lighter pursuits. Although less creative than its salon counterpart, cercle discussion was more spontaneous because there was no salonnière to select topics and direct the flow of debate. As members rather than guests, participants in cercle conversations were all equally entitled to introduce subjects or to refrain from discussion completely. Solitary reading or smoking did not constitute bad manners in cercle company. Cercles shared in the nonbinding, non-ceremonial sociability that Hans-Erich Bödeker identified as typical of eighteenth-century cafés.44 Cercle and café conversation both offered an attractive unpredictability that was foreign to the salon: chance, not design, brought together participants, topic, and outcome. In the cercle, however, the range of possibilities was not as extensive as in a café. Hazard might join in conversation any two among dozens of men, but each man could be certain that the other had received the approbation of majority vote. The cercle thus provided some of the spontaneity of café life, but eliminated its undesirable promiscuity by ensuring that, as in a salon, all participants were acceptable to one another. The initial vetting of all participants in the free exchange of ideas was absolutely necessary to the cercle’s success. Although men of the s had abandoned salons in search of greater conversational freedom away from female governance, by the first decades of the nineteenth century men recognized the tensions between sociability and liberty. Nineteenthcentury bourgeois no longer believed in the possibility of democratic sociability that men of the late Enlightenment thought they had discovered.45 Cercles were no longer engaged in the invention of a public sphere in an absolutist state. This creative Enlightenment project had given way to an obsession with protecting the bourgeois nature of that public sphere. Sociability required restraint and a system to ensure that only the right sort of people were admitted. Any association that wished to ‘expand the spirit of sociability that animates our century’ would necessarily establish ‘a location where not just anyone is admitted’.46 A cercle that transformed itself into an arena for democratic debate had little chance of survival. Uninhibited political discussion would immediately attract the attention of the authorities and result in the cercle’s 44 ‘Le Café allemand au XVIIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,  (), –. 45 Ran Halévi, Les Loges maçonniques dans la France d’ancien régime: aux origines de la sociabilité démocratique (Paris, ). 46 Casino de l’Union (Mulhouse), letter to the prefect,  Oct. , and statutes,  Oct. . ADHR  M .

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closure. More important, however, free expression of political opinions would cause any cercle to collapse from within. The cercle combination of men, drink, and newspapers not surprisingly disturbed the authorities, who kept a careful watch on their activities. When prefects thought about cercles, Jacobin clubs always lurked at the back of their minds. Although the English gentleman’s club served as the model for the French cercle, the word ‘club’ was off-limits because it referred to the preferred institution of radical politics. The club was, according to Flaubert, a ‘subject of exasperation for conservatives’,47 and it did not shed its connotations of revolution and Terror until the fin de siècle. Even the famous Jockey Club, founded in Paris in  with the goal of uniting political factions in elite society, retained its official name, the Cercle of the Society for the Encouragement of Improvement of Breeds of Horses, until .48 Throughout most of the nineteenth century, Frenchmen spoke of a ‘spirit of clubs’ which implied conspiracy, violence, and demagogy: all contrary to the ‘spirit of association’ with its connotations of cooperation and class harmony. Bourgeois cercles avoided the title ‘club’ not only because they knew it would bring instant prefectoral action down upon them, but also because they genuinely abhorred the disorderliness and factionalism it implied. As closely as the authorities looked, they rarely (indeed never in Lons, Besançon, or Mulhouse) found political subversion in the bourgeois cercle. Police reports usually failed to uncover any evidence of political accord, much less conspiracy, among members. In Besançon in  the police commissioner assured the prefect that although there were distinct republican and legitimist sects in town, the local cercles were ‘only frequented by people of good Company, although, sometimes, of different opinion’. Membership of local associations and of political sects did not correspond, so the prefect could be assured that ‘everything proceeds there [in the cercle] with decency and cordiality: they are true Salons of relaxation.’49 Cercles likewise preserved good order in Alsace. While admitting that his department was a hive of opposition politics, the prefect of the Haut Rhin none the less argued that cercles were ‘an evil very difficult to avoid, because politics has become a staple food for men of this epoch and if there were no political societies then secret societies would form, which would be still worse’.50 The cercles of Restoration 47 48 49 50

Dictionnaire des idées reçues in Oeuvres complètes, ii. . Joseph-Antoine Roy, Histoire du Jockey Club de Paris (Paris, ), . Police commissioner to the prefect,  July . ADD M . Letter to the minister of the Interior,  Feb. . AN F.

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Mulhouse were united in their anti-Bourbon politics, but as long as they remained dedicated to sociability and relatively transparent to the authorities, they were better than anything else that could be expected of bourgeois Mulhousiens. Just as cercles attracted members of differing political opinion, they also subscribed to a wide range of journals and newspapers. Police authorities, who monitored the reading material of local cercles, could reassure themselves that bourgeois men apparently wanted to remain abreast of all of the major papers. Access to the entire spectrum of opinion in the press contributed to stimulating conversations among readers. Membership in a cercle also made it possible for bourgeois men to glance through an opposition newspaper without having to commit to a subscription. Subscription lists for suspect papers always found their way into the prefect’s hands, but in his cercle the bourgeois man could consult the opposition press without being labelled—or necessarily considering himself—a member of the opposition.51 As long as sociable manners and tact remained in place, men could read and discuss public affairs with relative freedom. For mayors and prefects, diversity of political opinion was a guarantee of a cercle’s impotence; for members it was a source of stimulating company.52 A man did not join a cercle in order to agree with everyone he might meet there. On the contrary, disagreement made cercle conversation lively. Billiards and dominoes were not the only competitive pursuits of the cercle: political argument was one of the café pleasures that cercles made respectable. Debate and combative forms of conversation for which secondary education trained bourgeois boys were an important aspect of adult male sociability.53 In cercles, bourgeois men could separate political debate from charges of demagoguery. True to the project of emulation, competition, whether in games or in debate, reinforced the fundamental accord of the cercle’s members. The ‘harmony and good order’ of a cercle were achievements worth noting because the members did not agree on On the surveillance of the press, see Vogne, La Presse périodique, i. . In the context of the debate over Enlightenment ideas and revolutionary outcomes, Marlies Stützel-Prüsener similarly establishes that diversity of opinion—rather than the uniformity necessary to a conspiracy—was the attraction of associative sociability in Germany. ‘Die deutschen Lesegesellschaften im Zeitalter der Aufklärung’, in Otto Dann (ed.) Lesegesellschaften und bürgerliche Emanzipation: Ein europäischen Vergleich (Munich, ), –. 53 See William Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, – (Berkeley, ), ch.  for a discussion of the combative style to which bourgeois youth was educated. 51 52

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every issue. Concord among bourgeois gentlemen could not be taken for granted; it represented a victory for the cercle. M, M,  G Billiards and smoking were not the only leisure pursuits that could bring bourgeois men together in sociable concord. Gentlemanly leisure developed many forms in nineteenth-century France, all of them characterized by emulative rivalry and a desire to remove male amusements from female and domestic influence. Some activities, like Masonic ritual, encountered as much official suspicion as cercle gatherings.54 Other pastimes, such as gardening, music, or target-shooting, were less morally and politically problematic. The approval of the authorities did not, however, automatically make these pursuits suitable for bourgeois association. Music and horticulture, for instance, readily presented themselves as morally valuable, but their connection to bourgeois masculinity was less obvious. Association and the rhetoric of emulation served to align these leisure activities with class and gender norms. Target-shooting was an eminently male activity, but the combination of men and guns raised many of the same political questions as cercles. Collective marksmanship practice in Alsace and the Franche Comté claimed origins in the old regime and survived in Besançon until the late eighteenth century and in Mulhouse until its union with the French Republic.55 The corps of early modern village youth that Natalie Davis has described gave way in the nineteenth century to bourgeois voluntary associations.56 The link between modern association and old regime corps, however, raised suspicions among post-revolutionary officials. Targetshooting’s old regime origins attracted nineteenth-century bourgeois who appreciated the symbolic status of armed defenders of the local interest. They preferred the urban and bourgeois connotations of companies of marksmen to the aristocratic implications of hunting. Thus shooting societies generally opted for the precision and abstraction of aiming at targets on an urban shooting range and left field sports to their noble neighbours.57 On secret society sociability, see above, Ch. . For Besançon, see Gaston Coindre, Mon Vieux Besançon (th edn.; Besançon, ), . For Mulhouse, see the historical preface to the  bound volume of minutes, ‘Protocol Gesellschaft der Feuer-Schutzen von Mulhausen’. MHM  TT . 56 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Reasons of Misrule’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, ), –. 57 See Holt, Sport and Society, – on the class distinctions of field sports. Holt also 54 55

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By  Mulhousien marksmen had begun pressuring the French government for their reinstatement, but the prefect refused to authorize any old regime corporations. He did, however, recognize that ‘target practice . . . is an honest amusement, suitable for distancing young men from the pernicious habits of cafés . . . and that, in frontier Departments, this exercise can be of even greater utility’.58 The prefect established a complicated set of rules enabling Alsatian gentlemen to shoot at targets without endangering the social order. Shooting competitions were only permitted on prearranged days when arms could be inspected by a member of the National Guard who ensured that no guns remained loaded at the end of the day. The mayor led participants to the shooting range and verified that no banner or insignia of old regime corps appeared in the procession.59 Target practice in which individuals participated under the direction of the mayor was not what Mulhousien bourgeois had in mind. In  the marksmen once again petitioned the prefect to authorize an independent voluntary association, assuring him that ‘the government [would] have nothing to fear from an assembly composed mostly of former Bourgeois of Mulhausen who [have] always distinguished themselves by a strict observation of the law.’60 Although professions of loyalty from the bourgeois of the city-republic to the Bourbon government rang hollow, the prefect did authorize the Shooting Society. He continued, however, to refuse permission to use the society’s old corporate flag even though the members went so far as to add a Bourbon fleur-de-lis to the emblem of the city of Mulhouse.61 Target-shooting societies, like the Mulhousien group and similar associations established in Besançon and Lons le Saunier in the s, balanced pleasure with public utility. The Lédonien Shooting Society, for instance, claimed to represent ‘the soul of our population’. The society gave Lons ‘an animation that did not exist before its formation’ and served ‘as a hyphen between . . . all of the classes of society’. Membership in the Lédonien Shooting Society was ‘a certificate of esteem and public consideration’.62 The actual magnitude of a shooting society’s contribution to notes the existence of a few bourgeois hunting societies which had to put up with aristocratic sneers about unsporting bourgeois desires to maximize the bag. The title-page of the ‘Protocol’ has a picture of an urban shooting range (MHM  TT ). 58 Prefectoral decree,  Apr. . ADHR  M . 59 Ibid. These rules applied to all collective target-shooting in the Haut Rhin. 60  May  letter copied in ‘Protocol’ MHM  TT . 61 Drawing of the flag and correspondence concerning its use in ‘Protocol’ MHM  TT 62 . Le Courrier du Jura,  May .

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local prosperity appears relatively meagre when contrasted with its rhetorical claims. Marksmen explained their utility with vague arguments about national preparedness. No one questioned the marksmen’s good faith, however, and in August  the Lédonien Shooting Society did, in fact, call upon its members to form the core of a Jurassien corps-franc in defence of France.63 Shooting societies’ most common, concrete contribution to local well-being, however, lay in offering the public healthy outdoor entertainment. Target competitions in Lons, for instance, often involved performances by the local musical society and attracted sizable crowds of Lédoniens looking for weekend diversion.64 Like gentlemen’s cercles, target-shooting groups served as a respectable façade for slightly disreputable activities. The statutes of Mulhouse’s society, for instance, scrupulously forbade ‘impure talk’, ‘singing indecent couplets’, and fighting at dinner. Drunkenness was also forbidden, but the penalty for this offence was to offer a dozen bottles of wine to the company.65 The society’s rules of conduct suggested that marksmen’s conviviality could easily get out of hand: plentiful drink, risqué conversation, and heated debate had to be carefully policed so that they did not degenerate into indecency and hostility. While forbidding the worst excesses, the Shooting Society clearly dedicated a significant amount of its energy to convivial banqueting: target practice was never just the solemn, patriotic discipline that official correspondence claimed. The combination of conviviality and discipline typical of targetshooting also characterized bourgeois music. After cercles, musical societies were the most common bourgeois leisure associations of the early nineteenth century. Because musical societies were not politically suspect like cercles, prefects struggling to interpret laws on association often failed to note the presence of early musical groups. Besançon had an active musical life by the s, although neither mayor nor prefect thought such associations worth surveillance or authorization. Performances and activities of Besançon’s Musical Cercle and Saint Cecilia Association warranted reports in the local press, but not dossiers in the mayor’s office.66 Lons le Saunier saw the foundation of many short-lived associations beginning in the s, none of which sought authorization. Their lack of success prompted local journalists to wonder how Lédoniens could observe the musical associations of other towns ‘without experiencing a Le Courrier du Jura,  Aug. . See accounts in La Sentinelle du Jura,  Oct. ; Le Courrier du Jura,  June and  Aug. . 65  statutes in ‘Protocol’ MHM  TT  and in ADHR  M . 66 See, for instance, L’Impartial,  Apr. ,  Nov. ,  Aug. ,  Aug. . 63 64

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noble and serious emulation’. Similarly, none of the authorities in Mulhouse saw any need to authorize or monitor the Musical Society active in the s or the Philharmonic Society of the early s.68 The mayor was certainly aware of both societies and of their contribution to municipal life: on at least one occasion the Musical Society billed the town  francs for its performance of a Te Deum in local churches.69 Interpreting association laws as only applicable to potentially dangerous groups, local authorities in the early part of the century allowed musical associations to operate unregulated. Musical societies escaped prefectoral control because they made a stronger and more obvious case for their moral value than gentlemen’s cercles. The state did not need to worry about the man ‘whom Music has preserved from fatal passions’ because ‘a natural inclination . . . leads him into the society of those who think like he does . . . the purity of his conscience will be . . . an inexhaustible source of consolation, and shameful passion and the unhappiness of mankind will rage furiously far from him.’70 Many early associations emphasized sacred music, which further linked leisure with moral fibre; performances of choral masses elevated both the singers and their audience, thus improving the moral tone of the entire town. Besançon’s Saint Cecilia Association was one such highminded society which combined sacred music with the exercise of patronage and charity. Members’ subscriptions paid for the musical instruction of six children: four in vocal music, two in instrumental.71 The department of the Doubs duly recompensed Saint Cecilia’s service to Besançon with a substantial contribution to the society’s work: , francs in .72 Music, charity, and Catholicism combined to make the Saint Cecilia Association worthy of government encouragement. Unlike smoking or billiards, music was not by definition a masculine pursuit. Indeed, music was a recommended pastime for the bourgeois 67

La Sentinelle du Jura,  July . Prospectus, statutes, correspondence, and minutes of meetings of the Société musicale in MHM  TT . The Société philharmonique was mentioned in the  report on associations with the notation that it had been founded in  and never authorized. The mayor’s report of  Apr.  noted that it had disappeared. ADHR  M . 69  Nov. . MHM  TT . 70 Undated Société musicale prospectus, MHM  TT . 71 L’Impartial,  Nov.  and  Feb. . The Saint Cecilia was one location where nobles and bourgeois notables mingled. See C.-I. Brelot, La Noblesse réinventée, ii. . A similar association, known as the ‘orphéon religieux’ performed in Lons in the early s. La Sentinelle du Jura,  Apr. . 72 L’Impartial,  Feb. . Subscriptions of  members brought in just under , francs. See also Charles Weiss, Journal, ii, – (Paris, ), – ( Jan. ) and  ( Oct. ). 67 68

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lady, an ornamental means of occupying feminine idleness.73 Association became a strategy by which bourgeois men took possession of music and transformed it into a manly activity. Women presided over domestic and salon music-making, but the musical association was for men alone.74 Music itself could remain feminine, represented by Saint Cecilia, its patron saint.75 Male devotees of Saint Cecilia could celebrate her, compete for her favours, offer banquets in her honour and, ultimately, master her. Musical devotion to Saint Cecilia thus came to exemplify manly performance. In music, men declared that they found ‘a companion a hundred times more faithful than any that earth can offer’ and ‘enjoy[ed] a limitless happiness’.76 There was no need to deny music’s femininity because honouring, protecting, and possessing music was an assertion of manliness.77 The music of a gentlemen’s association could not have been confused with feminine, domestic performance. Most societies of the first half of the century stressed instrumental music, and while many young women learned to play the piano, other instruments were reserved for male performers.78 Musical associations generally disdained simple piano accompaniment: they aspired to perform symphonies or opera scores.79 Besançon’s Musical Cercle, which included choral and instrumental sections, specialized in scenes from popular operas, and the Musical Society of Mulhouse set aside Tuesdays for military music and Saturdays for symphonies. Provincial musicians were usually more serious than their Parisian counterparts studied by Marie-Véronique Gauthier who devoted themselves primarily to risqué songs, warm jokes, and the celebration of epicurianism, all of which served to give their music an emphatically male tone.80 Neither in Paris nor in the provinces would 73 Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History (New York, ), –, –. 74 William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris, and Vienna (New York, ), –. 75 Or addressed as the ‘daughter of Heaven’ in Protestant Mulhouse. Prospectus of the Société musicale, MHM  TT . 76 Ibid., MHM  TT . 77 On the feminization of music, see Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991), ch. 1. Compare the feminization of aspects of the game of boules described by Jean-Luc Marais in Les Sociétés d’hommes: Histoire d’une sociabilité du e siècle à nos jours, Anjou, Maine, Touraine (Vauchrétien, ), –. 78 Weber, Music and the Middle Class, . 79 James H. Johnson notes that instrumental music in the early nineteenth century carried connotations of seriousness that would have appealed to bourgeois amateurs. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, ), –. 80 Chanson, sociabilité et grivoiserie au XIXe siècle (Paris, ), –. Members of

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male music-making fit in a bourgeois drawing-room; men’s musical ambitions were on a larger, more public, scale than those of female accomplishment. Women’s role was that of audience; they provided the male association with an admiring public. Although women’s music might find a domestic audience, approval was not necessary to female accomplishment—music was a discipline with which women improved their characters. Musical associations, however, improved not only their members but also the public at large: emulators required an approving audience. The exclusion of women from musical associations limited repertoires, particularly with regard to opera. Occasionally societies invited women to sing at private entertainments or subscription concerts. Besançon’s liberal newspaper even encouraged women to present their talents in the local musical association’s concerts. Because the members of the musical society were ‘well brought up people with good manners’, the newspaper was confident that young ladies, accompanied by their mothers, might rehearse with the orchestra.81 Not all Bisontins were as anxious to see local bourgeoises perform, however. One local reader denounced the newspaper’s suggestion as ‘immorality in action’.82 Despite the newspaper’s shamelessness, the reader was convinced that ‘the gravity of our domestic customs’ would keep women off public stages. He acknowledged that entry to the concert was by subscription card only, but he none the less insisted that a concert ‘where  persons come together, many of whom have no relationship to one another’ was too public for female performance. The concert audience was not as atomized as the outraged reader suggested; the ties that linked the spectators, however, were those of associative sociability. Association defined men’s position in society, but only family ties could appropriately situate women.83 Most musical associations wanted neither female performers nor the moral controversies their presence provoked. Musical societies opted for male camaraderie over an expanded repertoire including female voices. Henri Juillard, who joined Mulhouse’s Concordia at the age of  in , later recalled singing female roles in the society’s operas.84 Such genderGauthier’s association spoke of themselves as a family, in which the society itself was feminized as mother (–). 81 L’Impartial,  Dec. . See also the  Jan.  issue. 82 Letter to the editor signed Z. L’Impartial,  Jan. . 83 Johnson, Listening in Paris,  notes a Parisian association’s plan to provide a venue for the performance of amateur women musicians. These concerts were to be for family members only, however. 84 Philippe Mieg, ‘La Vie sociale à Mulhouse durant les années  à  vue à travers

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ambiguous performance was probably rare and certainly suitable only for the very young. More commonly, societies preferred to make music unequivocally men’s work by excerpting male choruses or performing orchestral pieces. The execution of the entire operatic canon or the expansion of their musical capabilities was less important to bourgeois associations than the creation of masculine conviviality. The musical sentiments that most interested their performers were those of male solidarity. Other, more delicate, sentiments could be left to women performing in parlours: manly music was ‘a powerful means of creating the union among men that is so necessary to the social state. . . . The action of music is entirely beneficent and fraternal’.85 Horticulture, like music, was not, on the face of it, an activity that distinguished men from women. Nor was it by its nature a pastime that seemed to call for association or competition. None the less, bourgeois men in Mulhouse and Besançon established horticultural societies in  and  respectively, and quickly organized contests for outstanding fruits and vegetables. Opinion in Lons le Saunier was, once again, conscious that the smaller town lagged behind its more cosmopolitan neighbours. The horticultural societies of the mid-nineteenth century recalled the agricultural societies of the eighteenth century, some of which, including one in Besançon, still functioned. Horticulture, however, attracted a more urban and bourgeois following. Horticultural associations were clearly interested in capturing some of agriculture’s prestige and public utility. As they laid claim to the noble pursuit of cultivation, however, they reshaped it according to bourgeois norms. The Bisontin Horticultural Society kept its distance from the aristocratic Agricultural Society of the Doubs. The prefect’s  report made it clear that although the Agricultural Society had all of the prestige of seniority and aristocracy, its forty-eight members were less active than the one hundred and eighty three subscribers to the Horticultural Society.86 Mulhousien horticulturists also insisted that their association be distinguished from the Agricultural Society of the Haut Rhin. The prefect, perhaps thinking horticulture an unusual leisure pursuit for Mulhousien industrialists, asked the mayor whether the new association would be content to merge les souvenirs inédits de M Henri Juillard-Weiss’, Bulletin de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse,  (), . 85 L’Impartial,  July . For further exploration of the cliché of musical and social harmony, see Johnson, Listening in Paris, –. 86 Undated response to  circular. ADD M .

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with the departmental Agricultural Society, located in Colmar. The mayor’s response described the Mulhousiens’ ‘general repulsion’ to the prefect’s proposal: the new society was to be ‘an entirely local creation’ whose subscribers joined ‘in order to attest their confidence in . . . the honourable persons who have taken the lead in endowing the town with a new institution’.87 The mayor, Joseph Koechlin-Schlumberger, descendant of the old Mulhousien bourgeoisie, was a founding member of the society and doubtless as appalled by the prefect’s suggestion as his fellow horticulturists. Nothing could be less suitable than lumping Mulhousien bourgeois together with Alsatian aristocrats. Men like Koechlin-Schlumberger and his colleagues permitted no confusion between their useful leisure earned by hard work and the intermittent utility with which aristocrats relieved their idleness. Horticulture was not simply aristocratic agriculture reduced to the size of urban bourgeois gardens. Nor was horticulture merely a frivolous, decorative—and feminine—pursuit. Bourgeois associations claimed that horticulture was as vital to the public good as agriculture and hence that their activities were as useful as those of agricultural societies. Both Bisontin and Mulhousien societies ran experimental gardens where the latest techniques could be scientifically tested. The Bisontin association paid for a ‘professor of horticulture’ to tour the department giving lectures on ‘rational methods’ to replace ‘old routines’.88 The society also expanded its activities in the s to include viniculture—a major source of wealth in the Franche Comté with which the Agricultural Society was traditionally concerned. In addition to sponsoring lectures, the Mulhousien society assembled a horticultural library and a collection of wax fruit that established a standard of perfection for all gardeners.89 A focus on utility supported horticulture’s claim to be as useful as agriculture and also distinguished rational masculine activity in the garden from sentimental female flower culture. Scientific language, which bourgeois horticulturists deployed with relish, emphasized that men viewed plants as utilitarian objects of rational enquiry, not as poetic or allegorical reflections of feeling.90 None the less, horticulture societies  May . ADHR  M . Sub-prefect (Baume-les-Dames) to prefect (Doubs), reports on the lectures of the society’s professor,  Mar. . ADD M . 89 Minutes of the Société d’horticulture,  Sept.  and letter from WeissSchlumberger, president, to the prefect,  Jan. . ADHR  M . 90 See Ann B. Shteir’s analysis of the divergence of the ‘language of flowers’ from the ‘language of science’. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England,  to  (Baltimore, ), –. 87 88

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offered women greater access to their activities than most bourgeois associations. Both societies actually admitted women as members, albeit as ‘lady patronesses’.91 At best women played a marginal role in horticultural societies; they strolled along the garden promenades and occasionally exhibited flowers or jam. The real purpose of a serious society, however, did not lie in flowers but in vegetables. Floriculture was an agreeable distraction for ladies, but men who grew vegetables were ‘contributing to the improvement of gardens for . . . the well-being of the population, and thus providing yet another assurance of the maintenance of the good order and prosperity of France’.92 Utility in horticulture involved a ‘mixing of classes’ that both associations were eager to point out. Bourgeois societies admitted local market gardeners to lectures and libraries free of charge. The Horticultural Society of Mulhouse sponsored special evening classes for gardeners in which they could learn ‘vegetable and botanical physiology’ during the winter.93 Market-gardeners were welcome to exhibit in horticultural society shows, although for purposes of prize-giving the judges maintained separate categories for amateurs and professionals. Special awards recognized long service in a single household and exceptional age and morality among hired gardeners.94 The Mulhousien society congratulated itself that this ‘emulation created among the amateurs and the gardeners’ had dramatically improved the quality of vegetables available in local markets. Before the establishment of the society, horticulture had been in ‘a state of deplorable inferiority’, in which Mulhousien consumers could find ‘only coarse vegetables and the most common fruits’.95 The inhabitants of Mulhouse had the Horticultural Society to thank for improvements in their diets. Although horticultural societies expended considerable energy on patronizing market gardeners, the much-vaunted mixing of classes was usually limited to encounters among different elements of the bourgeoisie. The greatest attraction of Mulhouse’s Horticultural Society—the real reason it attracted  founding members96—was 91 Mulhousien statutes and membership list in ADHR  M . Société d’horticulture et d’arboriculture du Doubs, – (). 92 Huart’s speech, reported in Société d’horticulture et d’arboriculture du Doubs,  (), . 93 Weiss-Schlumberger to the prefect,  Jan. . ADHR  M . 94 Programme for the  Exposition of the Horticultural Society of Mulhouse in ADHR  M . Programme for the  Franc-comtois Exposition of Horticulture and Arboriculture in ADD M . 95 Weiss-Schlumberger to the prefect,  Jan. . ADHR  M . 96 Membership list dated  Apr.  in ADHR  M .

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neither its lectures, its library, nor its attempts to diversify the offerings of local markets. Mulhousiens flocked to join the Horticultural Society because membership conferred access to its garden. In the society garden, horticultural experiments took second place to a pleasant and fashionable promenade in a notoriously dingy and polluted town. Entry into the garden was strictly policed, and members who frequented it only rarely were warned to carry their membership card because the gatekeeper might not recognize them. Similarly in Besançon, horticulture was a means of uniting bourgeois elites rather than of creating occasions for contact across classes. Although the Horticultural Society insisted that the purpose of its peripatetic lectures was to enlighten routine-bound peasants, reports praising the lectures clearly indicated that the audience was primarily bourgeois. The ‘honourable persons’ listening to one lecture even expressed the desire to ‘belong to such a useful association’.97 Besançon’s professor of horticulture inspired his bourgeois audiences to emulate the Bisontin model and bring horticultural improvements to their own towns. Although patronage played an important role, the true purpose of emulation was to reproduce itself within the limits of the bourgeoisie. H  P Cercles, marksmanship, music, and horticulture all occupied a theoretically level bourgeois playing field. Participants in this network of leisure associations assumed that a man who joined one society would be welcome in any other: sociable relations presumed equality among bourgeois men. Non-hierarchical elements such as friendship or taste structured a man’s choice of memberships. In other words, a man’s decision to join a Saint Cecilia society rather than a marksmen’s association reflected his love of music, the prior affiliations of his friends, inaptitude for target-shooting—but not his position within a bourgeois hierarchy.98 The leisure pursuits of bourgeois men were of equal value although they attracted men of different tastes. The emergence of modern leisure in the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie depended on this ability to arrange free time according to individual taste. Social roles and corporate identities determined the 97 Sub-prefect (Baume-les-Dames) report on horticultural lecture,  Jan. . ADD M . 98 See Edmond Goblot, La Barrière et le niveau: étude sociologique sur la bourgeoisie française moderne (nd edn., Paris, ), – for a fuller exposition of the notion of class as existing on an egalitarian plateau.

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spare-time pursuits of old regime France; time belonged to the community rather than to the individual. The abandonment of these community norms and the ability to use leisure as an expression of individual taste was a powerful indicator of bourgeois status. The free play of personal inclination, whim, and fashion among a wide variety of possible choices was what elevated spare time to the status of bourgeois leisure. The bourgeois set aside his own leisure time and filled it according to personal preference. Bourgeois associative networks did not privilege one leisure activity over another—giving, say, greater status to musical societies than to cercles—because the ability to choose freely among them was vital to the construction of bourgeois identities. The allegedly egalitarian bourgeois social space for leisure was never as immune to hierarchy and intra-bourgeois distinctions as the rhetoric of emulation asserted. Taste and friendship were never the only issues determining the circles in which an individual moved. Social hierarchies within the bourgeoisie frequently influenced a gentleman’s choice of cercle or his decision between music and gardening societies. As Daniel Gordon, elaborating on the German sociologist Georg Simmel, remarks, the egalitarianism of the social group is essentially theatrical; participants agree that they will treat one another as if they were, in fact, equals.99 Because the parity among participants in sociable exchange is conventional rather than natural, it is also easily upset. Within networks of leisure associations, debates over determination of status within the bourgeoisie always threatened to diminish bourgeois assertions of consensus and local leadership. While claiming to be a privileged site of bourgeois unity, leisure none the less threatened to reveal the limits of emulation. Politics was not usually the fault line along which bourgeois leisure pursuits fractured. The tactful accommodation of diverse opinion typical of cercles generally held sway in other leisure associations as well. Members and local authorities alike expected political dissent to cause problems, but the real difficulties in bourgeois associations in fact arose elsewhere. Such factors as age, profession, and religion played a far greater role than politics in fracturing the egalitarian bourgeois social space. Some of these divisions, such as the fact that young men preferred to socialize among others of their age cohort, were relatively innocuous because they did not call the coherence of male bourgeois identity into 99 Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, – (Princeton, ), –, –, and Georg Simmel, ‘Sociability’, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, K. Wolff (ed. and trans.) (London, ), –.

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question. Other issues, however, like persistent exclusion of religious minorities from some associations, raised serious questions about the boundaries of bourgeois culture. Generational differences created the most obvious gulfs between bourgeois associations. Despite regular invitations to join their fathers’ societies, young bourgeois men persisted in forming their own groups.100 Keeping young men out of trouble was an important part of leisure associations’ claim to moral stature. Almost every association explained its public utility in terms of its ability to provide men with rational amusement at the very point in their lives when they were most vulnerable to temptation. The young man who emulated his elders by seeking diversion in an association protected himself from the equally ruinous possibilities of lower-class café company and of aristocratic high living. As part of this effort to preserve bourgeois youth, members of associations focused on their own sons. Cercles, in particular, sought to create sociable interaction between the generations. Strengthening father–son ties would resolve many of the moral ambiguities of such male pursuits as gaming and smoking: once again, association would distinguish café society, which destroyed families, from cercles, which reinforced familial affection. Many cercles exempted sons of members from some of the stages of candidature or allowed them to apply for membership at a younger age than others. With these special provisions, fathers could teach their sons how respectable men smoked, drank, and played cards. In  the New Cercle in Besançon, for instance, undertook this paternal mission, revising its statutes so as to privilege members’ sons. A member might sponsor his son’s membership at the age of , a time when his education was done and he was establishing himself in the adult world of men. Membership in an elite association like the New Cercle would facilitate his entry into adulthood by offering him connections with local notables and the example of their responsible use of leisure. Young men with no such family connections could not apply for membership until they reached : with no father to vouch for them, they had to show signs of successful male independence before the New Cercle would consider admitting them.101 Despite the rhetoric of father–son togetherness, young men were not particularly eager to join their fathers’ cercles. The creation of a cercle—or indeed, of any leisure association—was usually the work of the young: 100 Catherine Pellissier, Loisirs et sociabilités des notables lyonnais au XIXe siècle (Lyon, ), – notes that Lyonnais associations also reflected generational stratification. 101 Revised statutes in ACB I.

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prefects and mayors routinely reported that a new society was the creation of ‘the young men of the town’. The New Cercle followed the same pattern: although it had several distinguished older subscribers, most members were ‘young men belonging to the best families of Besançon’.102 The fathers of these young men of good family undoubtedly belonged to their own cercles, perhaps to the Notables’ Casino, founded in . Typically, the Notables encouraged their sons to join the Casino by offering them early admission.103 Despite the Notables’ and the New Cercle’s attempts to attract their sons, young Bisontins found other options more appealing. Sons of New Cercle members looking to join an association in  might, for instance, have considered the new Medical Students’ Cercle. Although medical students formed the core of this new cercle, it admitted any student who received a majority vote. The company of the students who proposed to ‘spend their short moments of leisure together’104 was almost certainly livelier than that of the concerned fathers in the older cercles. Article , forbidding all singing after eleven in the evening, suggests some of the new cercle’s youthful allure.105 New cercles ordinarily emerged every ten to fifteen years as new cohorts of young bourgeois entered local society. Besançon was not the only town in France where youth preferred its own company. Lons le Saunier’s first cercle was the gathering point of local young men who, in , first came to the attention of the authorities because of a card-sharping incident. In his account of the affair, the prosecutor explained that when the cheater was caught the others called him a freebooter; this title appealed to them. . . . The members of this group seem to have no other purpose than drinking and amusing themselves; they publicly call one another freebooters. . . . When they were gaming, they used the motto: honour to freebootery, honour to the patrie, honour to the King, honour to me.106

The public prosecutor was obviously mystified by local youths’ desire to be known as card-sharping freebooters in public, but he correctly ascribed it to high spirits rather than to any darker, conspiratorial motives. Certainly this first Lédonien cercle did not practice inter-generational Prefect to Interior,  Jan. . AN F. Original statutes of the Casino de notables, dated  July , in ACB I. The Casino was still in existence in , when its statutes appear in AN F. 104 Prefect to Interior,  Mar. . AN F. 105 Statutes,  Mar. , in AN F. 106  Dec. . ADJ M. ‘Honneur à la flibusterie, honneur à la patrie, honneur au Roi, honneur à moi.’ 102 103

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sociability. Other sociable associations in the area similarly divided men by age cohort; local lodges of Good Cousins, for instance, acknowledged that secret charcoal burners’ rituals were a young man’s game. Solid, middle-aged citizens of Lons reassured suspicious authorities that the lodges were not subversive because they had at one time been Cousins themselves, resigning only because of ‘their age and new habits’.107 Members of Mulhouse’s Social Cercle appear to have been unusually successful in attracting their sons to their own association. Directors of the Social Cercle encouraged young men ‘who, instead of avoiding the Society of their fathers and employers’ sought to join them in amicable leisure activities.108 In December  the Social Cercle decided to admit members’ sons as well as thirty unconnected young men (aged –) at a reduced subscription rate.109 Within two years, thirty-one young men, most of them sons of members, took advantage of this special offer to join the elite Social Cercle.110 The size of the Social Cercle—over  members occupying an entire building—may have made it possible for groups of young men to gather within the larger association. Other Mulhousien associations followed the familiar pattern of young men seeking the company of their peers. Jewish associations, discussed at greater length below, most clearly arranged themselves in generational strata, with a new society of young men emerging every decade or so. The successful association attracted young men and remained a focus of male sociability even as its members aged. Founding a cercle represented bourgeois youths’ last ties to schoolboy camaraderie as well as their first links to the world of adult men—continuity between youthful aspiration and middle-aged satisfaction. Paul Seeley’s discussion of the bourgeois youth of Lyon suggests that leaving school often meant a temporary, but unsettling, return to the governance of women who inflicted dancing lessons and polished manners on their sons, now future bridegrooms.111 In a voluntary association, young men surrounded by mothers and potential brides could assert their loyalty to the world of schoolmates and men. In his cercle, a young man re-created the familiar camaraderie and competitiveness of his secondary education, but directed 107 Prefect to Interior,  Aug. . ADJ M . On the Good Cousins, see above, Ch. . 108 Minutes for  Dec. . MHM  TT  e . 109 Young men could join for an annual subscription of , rather than  francs. Ibid. 110 Records of admissions in the cercle minutes. MHM  TT  e  and . Even before the special offer, many candidates for membership were sponsored by their fathers, a fact always noted in the minutes. 111 ‘Virile Pursuits: Youth, Religion, and Bourgeois Family Politics in Lyon on the Eve of the French Third Republic’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, ), –.

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these energies towards a secure position in the adult male public sphere.112 The high-spirited competitiveness of bachelor youth blended imperceptibly into the emulation of the mature père de famille. Young men escaped from their mothers, mature men from their wives; and both sought refuge in the male conviviality of the public sphere. Bourgeois sons and fathers did not have to join the same cercle for the principle of association to unite youth and maturity. Well-established cercles—the Notables’ Casino in Besançon, the Social Cercle in Mulhouse—exemplified the transition from youth to maturity that men made in the company of their peers. The Notables’ Casino, established by young Bisontins in , was originally known simply as ‘the Cercle’. Thirty years later, however, its members had become the leading citizens of Besançon, and the designation of their association as the ‘Notables’ Casino’ distinguished it from newer cercles. Young men just entering adult bourgeois society might play for inflated sums or sing into the wee hours, but they abandoned these riotous pastimes as they reached middle age. From beginnings similar to the Lédonien freebooters or Bisontin medical students, successful cercles matured and developed into sedate assemblies of middle-aged bourgeois. For its members, the cercle remained a stable focus of male camaraderie while careers progressed and marriage and children transformed domestic life. Local notables were not merely a bourgeois and masculine elite; they were also middle-aged. The true bourgeois—the bourgeois of Flaubert’s dictionary of clichés—was a man in middle age. Male success culminated in middle age: the greying but still vigorous man who had demonstrated his ability in the marketplace, his duty in the maintenance of a family, and his capacity for civic participation. The bourgeois notable had reliable financial provisions for retirement, a limited number of children appropriately set on educational, marital, and professional paths, and a respected position in his community.113 The nineteenth-century bourgeois man carved out this region of middle age and declared it to be the 112 On the combination of friendship and rivalry in secondary education, see Alan Spitzer, The French Generation of  (Princeton,  ), –; Jean-Claude Caron, ‘Young People in School: Middle and High School Students in France and Europe’, in Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt (eds.), A History of Young People in the West, ii, Stormy Evolution to Modern Times, Carol Volk (trans.) (Cambridge, MA, ), –; and Seeley, ‘Virile Pursuits’, . On friendships and male adolescence, see Vincent-Buffault, L’Exercice de l’amitié, ch. . 113 On retirement and the demographic structures associated with middle age, see JeanPierre Bois, Les Vieux de Montaigne aux premières retraites (Paris, ), esp. ch. ; and Peter Laslett, A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age (nd edn.; Cambridge, MA, ).

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prime of his life. The measurement of bourgeois status in French towns thus employed generational criteria: it was a state to which the young had to aspire. Generational divisions did not fundamentally disturb the premise of bourgeois equality within the sociable space of associations. Age cohort marked a cursus for bourgeois youth, but did not definitively eliminate any possibilities for future memberships. That young men should choose to emulate their elders in separate associations, rather than seeking membership in their fathers’ societies, did not eliminate the role of emulation in the production of adult bourgeois men. Nor did it create new gradations of bourgeois status. Nothing prevented the young bourgeois and his circle of friends from becoming mature, successful, and middle-aged notables. Indeed, their membership in an association, even a slightly rowdy one, was a promising step towards middle age and the pinnacle of bourgeois achievement. Distinctions between young and old, being entirely natural, did not undermine sociability’s basic assumption that all bourgeois were equal. More troubling than the stratification of bourgeois sociability by age cohort was the intrusion of economic interests into the activities of voluntary associations. Provincial cercles, in particular, balanced the need to avoid economic disputes while simultaneously serving as locations where men talked business. Some cercles chose to make greater accommodations for the market: towns all over France, including Besançon and Mulhouse, included a commercial cercle in their network of associations.115 These associations maintained that men of commerce could combine business with sociability. Thus the founding members of the Bisontin Commercial Cercle () explained that because Besançon lacked an exchange, they needed to ‘gather together the merchants of this town and to facilitate their agreement on the means of improving the commerce of the area’.116 Conducting business in a gentlemen’s cercle required members to accept limits on competition, at least within the sociable space. They had to agree on what constituted the best interests of local commerce, a fact that the minister of the Interior no doubt noted when, suspecting a corporation, he denied the Commercial Cercle 114

114 Middle age clearly had different implications for women. Bois, chs.  and  and the essays in Peter Stearns (ed.), Old Age in Preindustrial Society (New York, ) suggest gendered inflections of the aging process. 115 Agulhon speculates that the ubiquitous cafés du commerce of French towns preserve the memory of these businessmen’s associations. Cercle, . 116 Statutes of the Cercle commercial ,  Nov. . AN F.

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authorization. Mixing business and sociability was only possible where businessmen agreed to treat one another like colleagues instead of competitors. Most cercles preferred to admit men of all professions rather than to represent a single economic interest. In small towns like Lons le Saunier, this inclusive approach was the only way to maintain an active associative life; few occupational groups were large enough to constitute an attractive association. A cercle composed only of Lédonien merchants would quickly lose all spontaneity and become a dull venue for talking shop. In Mulhouse, the town’s oldest society, the Social Cercle, resisted linking itself too closely with commerce. Members made a point of admitting men from outside the world of industry, particularly teachers and ministers of all of the local religious faiths, as honorary members. The participation of such men created a more interesting membership list and enhanced the association’s claim to respectability.118 In  the cercle again demonstrated that it preferred an inclusively bourgeois, rather than a narrowly commercial, membership. Members debated and eventually rejected a proposal to open the cercle to all businessmen on Wednesdays (the day of the local exchange) for a modest fifty centimes entry fee.119 Although many members would have found it convenient to transact business in the Social Cercle, they were not prepared to turn their association into an annexe to the exchange where any man might enter solely by virtue of his money. The Social Cercle could easily have limited its membership to the wealthy industrialists and businessmen of Mulhouse, but only at the risk of ignoring important sections of the bourgeoisie. The fault lines in the Bisontin bourgeoisie which segregated men of business into their own cercles were made even more serious by their religious component. Commerce in Besançon had never enjoyed the status of the liberal professions that were so vital to the town’s administrative and legal functions. Merchants’ cercles in Besançon simultaneously declared that the local business community considered itself bourgeois and also that not all strata of good society accepted it as such. The grounds of that exclusion were not, however, purely economic, because business in Besançon quickly led to the Swiss Protestant watchmaking community. Swiss immigrants and their descendants constituted only a portion of the business world. Watchmaking was, however, Besançon’s 117

,  Dec. . AN F. ‘Lettres sur Mulhouse’, L’Industriel alsacien,  Apr. . Minutes of  and  Jan. . MHM  TT  e . Compare Marais, Les Sociétés d’hommes, , who notes that Angevin associations forbade or restricted discussion of business. 117 118 119

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best-known industry, and the Swiss community was its most identifiable representative. Conservative elements of local society demonstrated themselves reluctant to admit the Swiss into the circles of the bonne bourgeoisie bisontine. The Swiss community maintained its own institutions of sociability throughout the nineteenth century. Not all bourgeois doors were closed to Swiss Protestants; they were prominent in the Emulation Society and admitted to several local cercles, particularly those for businessmen. Continuing immigration from Switzerland and a high rate of endogamous marriage, however, ensured that the Swiss would remain a highly visible minority in Besançon.120 Enough social barriers remained so that watchmakers maintained their own associative communities throughout the century. The first Swiss Cercle applied for authorization in  in order to ‘discuss objects relating to their profession, or anything else that might interest them, as is the custom in Switzerland’. The prefect recommended their authorization, but also noted that the Swiss, while ‘quite insignificant’, were generally liberal in their politics ‘like almost all foreigners of this class’.121 Although the prefect preferred Swiss liberalism to be concentrated in an association and easily monitored, the minister of the Interior refused to authorize the society. The Swiss, however, maintained their associative practices quietly, primarily through the Protestant Church, whose associations apparently never registered or sought authorization.122 Secular Swiss sociability reappeared in the official record in , the year the Helvetic Society of Besançon was authorized with the aim of ‘recalling the absent patrie with its private and public virtues’.123 Neither the Swiss Cercle nor the Helvetic Society cited their members’ exclusion from Bisontin society as justification for their formation. None the less, the persistence of a separate Swiss sociability called attention to—rather than concealing—one of the most profound divisions within Besançon’s bourgeoisie. Bourgeois sociability in Besançon was not entirely arranged according to friendship, taste, and convenience among men who considered themselves equals. Confession, nationality, and economic status created hierarchies—unbridgeable gaps between individuals—rather than simple distinctions among equals. 120 Jean-Luc Mayaud, Besançon horloger, – (Besançon, ), –. Mayaud notes that two-thirds of marriages within the Swiss community from  to  were endogamous. By mid-century, however two-thirds of the marriages were mixed (). 121 Prefect to Interior,  Nov.  and  Jan. . AN F. 122 On Protestant associations, see below, Ch. . 123 Statutes and dossier in ADD M .

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Similar acrimonious disputes between bourgeois unity and bourgeois hierarchies divided Mulhousien associations. In Mulhouse, fractures within the bourgeoisie occasionally developed along lines of economic interest: although everyone agreed that the future depended on textiles, men did dispute which industrial policy would produce the greatest prosperity. Religious affiliation, a more serious and permanent division, also overrode taste and friendship in the arrangement of Mulhouse’s leisure associations. In a town where bourgeois and Calvinist had been literally and legally synonymous until , members of minority confessions found religion to be an additional, often unspoken, barrier to networks of bourgeois sociability. Bourgeois Mulhousien Catholics found themselves in an anomalous position by the mid-nineteenth century. Although they now belonged to the majority religious community, their majority was overwhelmingly working class and German-speaking. French-speaking bourgeois Catholics still occupied a distinctly marginal position. Henri Juillard, who joined the Concordia as a teenager, noted the musical society’s attempt to bridge its internal confessional gap. Although dominated by members of the Protestant elite, the Concordia performed sacred music in the local Catholic church as well as offering secular concerts in local halls and gardens. Juillard recalled that the parish priest often provided the society with beer and joined in their singing. After the death of this tolerant and music-loving priest, however, his successor refused to have anything to do with an association whose president was a Protestant. Many decades later as an old man composing his memoirs, Juillard recalled that the new priest had prevented the Concordia from singing for the marriage of one of its members.124 The Concordia’s effort to create a religiously mixed sociability was genuine, and the obstacles placed in its way were external. Not all Mulhousien associations were as willing to ignore private matters of faith in the selection of members: the exclusion of Jews, in particular, was a persistent trait of associative life. Jews often found it difficult to gain access to elite associations, and they responded by forming groups of their own. By Alsatian standards, which, in the nineteenth century, were set by rural pogroms,125 Mulhouse was a haven of tolerance. Jews enjoyed success in the Calvinist world of local industry; indeed, their industrial 124 Mieg, ‘La Vie sociale à Mulhouse’, . Juillard also noted that some Mulhousien salons were known as centres of Catholic sociability. 125 Paula Hyman, Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, ).

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success was greater than that of Catholics. The Industrial Society, which generally set precedents for the Mulhousien bourgeoisie, admitted Jewish textile magnates. None the less, even in Mulhouse there were cercles which admitted Jews only with great reluctance or not at all. In the face of such a large and successful Jewish minority, Mulhousien antiSemitism created an extremely obvious gulf in the theoretically unified world of bourgeois society. Mulhouse’s first Jewish cercle, the Union Casino, received authorization from the minister of the Interior in , but members quickly abandoned the project. The sub-prefect explained that the association had concluded that it would be hindering the cause of Jewish assimilation in Mulhouse ‘because well-brought-up Israelites are admitted in all other assemblies’.127 Despite the sub-prefect’s optimism, Mulhousien Jews continued to see some purpose in separate sociable associations. The casino re-formed in  with members mostly drawn from a Jewish charitable group known as the Beneficent Society of Young Israelite Men.128 Jewish sociable groups followed the same generational patterns as other cercles, and in  older Jewish men established their own Commercial Cercle. Members of the Commercial Cercle were better established in commerce and industry than the youth of the casino; two members of the cercle, Lazare Lantz and Jules Kullmann, joined the Industrial Society a few years later. Although the men of the Commercial Cercle were irreproachable, the mayor none the less complained that they had chosen a ‘pompous’ title for their group because ‘all of the members except one are Israelites, and . . . it is probable that the society will be exclusively Israelite, and, in my opinion, it ought not pretend to constitute, by itself, the Commercial Cercle’.129 Despite his reservations, the Commercial Cercle received authorization and was followed, in , by the Progress Cercle, a new association of local Jewish youth.130 Throughout the s and s, Jewish associations occupied a prominent position in Mulhouse’s bourgeois sociability. The vitality of Mulhouse’s Jewish cercles testified not only to a strong sense of confessional identity within a largely assimilated minority, but also to a persistent reluctance to accept Jews in Christian bourgeois 126

126 On the implantation of Jewish business in Mulhouse, see Michael Burns, Dreyfus, A Family Affair, – (London, ), –. 127  Oct. . ADHR  M . 128 Dossier in ADHR  M . 129 Letter to sub-prefect,  Apr. . ADHR  M . 130 All of the members of the Progrès were in their early twenties. Statutes and membership list,  Dec. . ADHR  M .

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milieux. Private records from the Social Cercle, a group that did admit Jews, suggest that not all members considered this a good policy. Almost all candidates proposed for membership were accepted by a unanimous vote with the exception of Jews, who invariably received at least a few black balls and were occasionally rejected.131 The Social Cercle’s consensus, which usually ensured that only the acceptable applied, faltered on the question of admitting Jews. Nor was the Social Cercle the only association in town that found the question of Jewish membership troubling. The foundation of the  Commercial Cercle, for instance, was almost certainly provoked by the Exchange Casino’s blackballing of Jules Kullmann, secretary of the new cercle. In Kullmann’s case, the usual gentlemen’s agreement that only the right sort of man applied broke down completely. Kullmann and his sponsor, one J. Nicolas, went public with their complaints, circulating a flyer accusing the Exchange Casino’s directors of bigotry.132 Nicolas claimed that the blackballing was the work of the casino’s directors, that Kullmann would have been admitted if his candidature had passed before the general assembly, and that even in the bureau’s closed meeting Kullmann was rejected by only one vote. Kullmann, while praising the generosity and liberality of Nicolas and of most members of the casino, noted that his blackballing called into question ‘the widespread reputation for genius and liberalism’ of which Mulhouse and its bourgeois were so proud. The scandal of the Exchange Casino’s anti-Semitism reached the Mulhousien press. Claiming to have discovered Nostradamus’s prophesies for the future of the casino, the Industriel alsacien’s columnist joked about the casino’s failure to live up to the spirit of association. According to the sage’s prophesies, the casino was destined to become a sort of Pantheon of all cults, and Arianism, Manicheism, every schism, all heresies dead or yet to be born, will be represented there. And yet, O miraculous inconsequence! Never the least trace of dissent in a republic formed from such opposite elements! Far from it, there will reign, until the end of time, such concord, such ardent fraternal charity, that the very stones of the temple will melt in the warmth of this love.133

The journalist claimed that the Exchange Casino would be given the opportunity to redeem its ‘love for the principles of ’ by admitting a list of candidates to include ‘Catholics, Protestants of all varieties, Israelites, 131 132 133

MHM  TT  e  and . ‘A Messieurs les membres du Casino de la Bourse.’ ADHR  M . ‘Lettres sur Mulhouse’, L’Industriel alsacien,  Apr. .

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even two Mahommedans, a pagan, and a philosophe’. The newspaper’s parody of the ideals of association made it clear that the Exchange Casino had abandoned the inclusive principles of emulation in favour of exclusion and faction. Its members had jettisoned bourgeois values for sectarian interests, and their reward was public mockery. By revealing the obstacles to bourgeois consensus in Mulhouse, the Exchange Casino forfeited the dignity that association was supposed to confer on bourgeois leisure. Incidents like the blackballing of Jules Kullmann or the persistent refusal to accept Swiss Protestants into Bisontin society marked the limits of emulation. Groups excluded from or marginalized within the bourgeoisie often formed their own sociable circles. These associations were a means of claiming bourgeois status, but they also drew attention to points of contention within bourgeois society. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, such religious and economic cleavages led to the fracturing of the bourgeoisie. This process, in which the monolithic bourgeoisie split into distinct and competing groups—particularly a new petite bourgeoisie—will be the subject of Chapter . By  emulation was no longer an adequate basis for the construction of a single, united bourgeoisie, but the limits of emulation revealed themselves even in the early part of the century. Exclusion was not a facet of associative activity that societies wished to publicize: the rhetoric of emulation focused on inclusion and on the potential universality of emulative virtues. The exclusive class basis upon which networks of associations rested remained unspoken. Associations’ claims to represent the community as a whole combined with their quiet but pervasive elitism made membership doubly attractive. In general, this silence functioned perfectly adequately: unsuitable candidates knew better than to apply, so negative votes were rarely necessary. Blackballing and public debate ensued only on those occasions when the selfregulation of associative sociability broke down and when ‘suitability’ was widely called into question within the bourgeoisie itself. The problem with Kullmann or with the Swiss watchmakers was that some bourgeois men considered them peers while others did not. Their exclusion publicly revealed that bourgeois identity was contingent and negotiable. Such disagreements demonstrated that bourgeois Frenchmen established internal hierarchies—systems of valuation that emulation did not account for. Most of the time, bourgeois Frenchmen conceived of leisure in terms of a variety of different pursuits each of equivalent status. Choices between these activities were functions of individual preferences

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and convenience: a cercle near one’s home; an aptitude for musical performance, or a taste for the company of one group over another of (equally worthy) bourgeois men. None of these choices implied or created hierarchy, and the networks of associations they established allowed bourgeois Frenchmen to recognize one another. Occasionally, however, this recognition broke down, and bourgeois consensus dissolved at the boundaries of class identity. The rhetorical egalitarianism of the bourgeois social space concealed hierarchies that periodically surfaced and threatened to reveal the fissures within bourgeois society.

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 Patronage: Emulation for the Working Class

In  the newspaper of Lons le Saunier published a local emulator’s account of a Scientific Congress during which representatives of learned societies from all over France assembled in Lyon to display their erudition and its uses. The author attributed his description of the event to a Lyonnais worker in his Sunday suit, talking to his small son: In a town like ours, which owes everything to its genius and which can only prosper through progress, we cannot but glorify the sciences and the arts, nor can we sufficiently honour those who cultivate them. These gentlemen have come here . . . to show us how to encourage work, how to perfect the arts, and how to improve the fate of unhappy workers in their old age.1

Probably few, if any, Lyonnais workers thought of the bourgeois scientific assembly in such glowing terms. The description does, however, demonstrate the degree of regard that bourgeois emulators thought they deserved. They expected such esteem, moreover, not only from their peers but also from local workers. The example they set of moral probity and disinterestedness was, after all, directed at the working class. Reform of the working class—improving the fate of the unhappy worker—functioned as a point of consensus for the reinforcement of male bourgeois solidarity.2 Emulation was the key to reform: workers should adopt bourgeois values and practise them in the setting of a voluntary association. As emulators, workers would validate bourgeois selfdefinition by demonstrating that the bourgeois example was indeed socially useful and potentially universal in scope. Just as the practice of La Sentinelle du Jura,  Sept. . In contrast with the Anglo-American world, where reform movements of the early nineteenth century were associated with female influence on the state, reform in France was perceived as an affair among men. See, e.g., Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, ); Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, ). 1 2

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emulation overcame deep and complicated fractures within the bourgeoisie, it could, presumably, erase bitterness and jealousy between worker and bourgeois. Bourgeois Frenchmen were convinced that, as one amateur investigator of the social question wrote, ‘the principal of association . . . is our last anchor of salvation.’3 The proponents of worker association in nineteenth-century France were not necessarily Utopian socialists or even men of the Left.4 Bourgeois Frenchmen took a proprietary interest in association as a social formulation that they had created and that was eminently suitable for working-class adoption. They were, however, aware of the potential dangers of worker association. They recognized that associations could be potent weapons of economic and political conflict, yet they remained confident that ‘the spirit of association, regulated and perfected under the direction of civil and religious law, [could] render important services to humanity and cease to be an instrument of trouble.’5 Regulation—the constant presence of a generous bourgeois patron with ample experience of emulation—was the key to this system of worker association. With the bourgeois in charge, association would avoid the path of class conflict and would offer the worker ‘a new family in which he . . . would receive a second education which would serve as a guarantee of probity and good conduct towards society and the state’.6 Bourgeois patronage of worker association focused on imparting a limited set of bourgeois values and associative practices. Mutual aid was the first form of worker association to engage bourgeois interests. Organizations in which workers made regular contributions to a mutual aid fund that provided indemnities in case of illness appeared to be an ideal initiation into the bourgeois habit of thrift. Mutual aid was the main focus of bourgeois patronage in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the s, bourgeois Frenchmen interested in the social question expanded their activities to include education. Adult education classes 3 Epigram to a prize-winning essay on the organization of industry, quoted in L’Industriel alsacien,  June  (the competition was set by a provincial emulation society). 4 French historians tend automatically to assume that any reference to association leads directly to socialism. See, e.g., Roger Magraw, A History of the French Working Class, i, The Age of Artisan Revolution (London, ), –, Yves Lequin, Les Ouvriers de la région lyonnaise ii, Les Intérêts de classe et la république (Lyon, ), –. By contrast, see Lynn Hunt and George Sheridan, ‘Corporatism, Association, and the Language of Labor’, Journal of Modern History,  (), –, who recognize that association ‘expressed both middle class assertiveness and class reconciliation’ (p. ). 5 J. B. Ducret, excerpts from a paper on the means at the disposal of the wealthy to aid the indigent classes, TSEJ (), Séance publique du  décembre . 6 Ibid.

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and popular libraries offered workers the opportunity to emulate bourgeois regard for instruction. Finally, in the late s, a few bourgeois innovators turned their attention to worker leisure. Mulhousien reformers created an association in which workers could adopt bourgeois leisure pastimes. In all of these projects, bourgeois patrons invited workers to become emulators and to accept thrift, education, and responsibility as components of a classless ideal of association. When bourgeois Frenchmen spoke of emulation in the context of the working class, they stripped the term of its usual creative interplay between model and copyist. The bourgeois patron wanted the worker to imitate—to produce a copy of certain bourgeois virtues such as thrift and sobriety. Working-class interpretations of mutual aid or leisure were of no interest to the bourgeois; they were simply affronts to bourgeois leadership. Workers, not surprisingly, resisted their assigned role of mimic. Willing to use the institutions of mutual aid and popular education, they integrated these opportunities into their own conceptions of class and gender. The French working class developed independent notions of associative practice, and the relationship between bourgeois patrons and worker members, if rarely hostile, was always uneasy. M UTUALITÉ The mutual aid society was the most important form of worker association in nineteenth-century France. Workers contributing a few pennies a week could count on receiving a meagre daily allowance in the event of illness and a decent funeral in case of death.7 Dues-paying workers also received the comradeship of their fellow members who visited the sick and followed the cortege of the deceased. Bourgeois citizens’ views of these associations varied widely throughout the nineteenth century. Bourgeois men hoped to discover in mutual aid a working-class version of 7 Although by far the largest worker movement of the nineteenth century, mutualité has attracted fewer historians than syndicalism. See Lori Robin Weintrob, ‘From Fraternity to Solidarity: Mutual Aid, Popular Sociability and Social Reform in France, –’ (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, ); Allen Mitchell, ‘The Function and Malfunction of Mutual Aid Societies in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones (eds.), Medicine and Charity Before the Welfare State (London, ), –; Michael D. Sibalis, ‘The Mutual Aid Societies of Paris, –’, French History,  (), –; George J. Sheridan, Jr., ‘Internal Life and Tradition in the Mutual Aid Societies of Lyon, –’, in John Sweets (ed.), Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History (Lawrence, KS, ), –; and William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labour from the Old Regime to  (Cambridge, ). Compare the English example described by P. H. J. H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England, – (Manchester, ).

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their own spirit of association. Their inclination to support mutual aid was always tempered, however, by suspicions that worker association did not embody the class harmony and peaceful competition of bourgeois emulation. Mutual aid associations developed in the first decades of the nineteenth century from the remnants of old regime corporate religious practices and compagnonnage.8 Master artisans within a single trade established the first societies, which were subject to intense scrutiny from the authorities who suspected a revival of corporations. In the s and s, French industrialists, notably in Mulhouse, began experimenting with paternalist methods of bringing mutual aid under management control. The Second Republic encouraged the development of independent worker associations but also provoked bourgeois fear that workers would use association to their own combative ends. Although many mutual aid associations dissolved in the wake of the coup, they quickly revived under the Second Empire. Louis Napoleon, noting that resistance to his seizure of power had been rural rather than urban, proclaimed his confidence in worker association. His regime actively encouraged mutual aid as a strategy to win working-class support.9 The French bourgeoisie found itself torn by the question of mutual aid. Mutualité might create a working class that recognized the source of pauperism in its midst and took action, in emulation of the bourgeoisie, to eliminate it. Bourgeois Frenchmen applauded working-class thrift and prévoyance whole-heartedly. They also, however, worried that the comradeship forged by mutual aid might be a potential source of class conflict. Mutual aid society meetings might encourage members in thrift and the virtues of association, or they might conceal trade unions and a threat to the free exchange of labour. The society chest might teach workers to save for a rainy day, or it might be a strike fund in disguise. Although generally eager to promote the solutions of association and emulation, bourgeois Frenchmen recognized that class resentment and animosity could corrupt the spirit of association. The development of mutual aid organizations which bourgeois men actively directed was the preferred solution to the dilemma of worker association. Such patronage projects fulfilled emulative rhetoric about the union of classes in a satisfyingly literal manner. Bourgeois Frenchmen 8 Sewell, Work and Revolution, Cynthia M. Truant, ‘Solidarity and Symbolism among Journeymen Artisans: The Case of Compagnonnage’, Comparative Studies in Society and History,  (), –, and Weintrob, –, –. 9 David I. Kulstein, Napoleon III and the Working Class: A Study of Government Propaganda under the Second Empire (Los Angeles, ), –.

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created two institutional structures that allowed them to act as supervisors and patrons of mutual aid. The first, particularly common in Mulhouse, was the in-house factory association—actually a payroll deduction plan rather than a genuine voluntary association. The second was the General Association of Mutual Aid Societies, a bourgeoissponsored umbrella organization that coordinated the activities of independent mutual aid groups. Both of these templates for worker association encountered significant resistance from autonomous traditions of working-class sociability. In-house factory mutual aid particularly appealed to Mulhousien bourgeois. The factory was, after all, the location where and the means by which they ordinarily controlled their workers, so it was a natural point at which to teach them thrift. The Koechlinslade, established by André Koechlin et Cie, a machine-building firm, was typical of these in-house societies. Workers joined automatically upon entering the factory; their pay was regularly docked, and company bookkeepers handled the accounts. Dues varied with the pay scale: a worker who earned  centimes per day lost  centimes a month to the society chest, while a worker with a daily wage of  francs lost  francs  centimes each month. A sick worker received the sum of his monthly dues each day for six months. When a member died the society paid his family  francs for burial expenses. Company accountants performed all of the bookkeeping, and management donated all fines incurred by negligent workers to the society. The worker-members met once a year to hear management’s explanation of the status of the fund.10 In-house establishments like the Koechlinslade offered tremendous advantages to employers. Members of these in-house societies did not need to meet regularly, so their association was less likely to take the path of class conflict. When they did meet it was on the factory floor, under supervision. Mulhousien patrons prided themselves on making mutual aid available to men who did not have access to membership in independent societies, which were restricted to skilled craftsmen. The factory workers were really no worse off than members of most independent trade societies. Master craftsmen, like factory owners, formed mutual aid funds by docking journeyman pay.11 Involuntary association was the rule for mutual aid in the s and s.12 10 Statutes of the Koechlinslade in ACM QV Ca . Most of Koechlin’s employees would have been German-speakers, hence the name of the society. See also Denise Herrenschmidt, ‘Les Caisses de secours entre ouvriers à Mulhouse de  à ’, Bulletin du Musée 11 historique de Mulhouse,  (), –. Weintrob, . 12 Of Mulhouse’s  mutual aid societies listed in an  survey,  were in-house

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The municipality fully approved of involuntary association for workers, whether sponsored by factory owners or by master craftsmen. In either case, the directors of the society had every interest in maintaining good order among ‘members’. These associations, the mayor of Mulhouse was confident, would prove ‘a moral institution that, although imperceptibly, must necessarily influence the mores of the workers and make them contract better habits’.13 The mayor’s encouragement of mutual aid could be heavy-handed: in  he warned landlords that workers who were not members of mutual aid societies would not be admitted to hospital unless someone guaranteed payment for their care. Landlords who rented to workers who carelessly neglected to join a mutual aid society risked the burden of a sick lodger.14 The spirit of association, at least when it was applied to workers, clearly did not have to be voluntary to be beneficial. To many of the workers involved, these in-house or trade-based mutual aid associations looked suspiciously like an employers’ cartel to depress wages, and they occasionally protested their obligatory membership. In , when master bakers decided to form a mutual aid association, their apprentices met to discuss the proposal. By the end of the evening the apprentices had ripped up the society’s statutes and used them to light their pipes. The ‘affair’ came before the police who required the apprentices to pay the printing costs of the statutes they had destroyed.15 Workers in factory societies complained about the negligence of company doctors and sought to wrest direction of the societies from factory management.16 In the Alsatian strikes of –, the right to independent mutual aid societies was prominent among worker demands.17 In general, however, subversion and strike-mongering within mutual aid associations were rare. Tipsy bakers’ apprentices defying their masters was the most serious incident that suspicious prefects and mayors were able to document in any of the three towns. Not even the Second Republic produced any serious evidence of mutual aid associations acting as cover for syndicalist activity. Authorities factory associations and most of the others were run by masters for the benefit of employees. Table in ACM QV Ca . 13 Mayor to prefect,  Mar. . ADHR  X . 14  Jan. . ACM QV Aa . 15 Mayor to sub-prefect,  Feb. . ACM QV Aa . See also the incident in which the prefect dissolved the textile printers’ society as soon he had authorized it because the printers had carried a banner (in the prefect’s mind, clearly a sign of a corporation) in their celebration of the new association. Herrenschmidt, . 16 Mayor to unknown,  Dec. . ACM QV Cc . 17 Fernand L’Huillier, La Lutte ouvrière à la fin du Second Empire (Paris, ), –.

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in both Mulhouse and Lons le Saunier shut down independent mutual aid societies in , but in neither case were they able to muster convincing evidence against them.18 The role of mutual aid in the history of French worker organization is a matter of contention among historians,19 but in eastern France it appears that mutualistes were primarily interested in the right to control their own funds. The bourgeois panic of the Second Republic was temporary, and no worker association in eastern France succeeded in turning the local bourgeoisies permanently against mutual aid. Bourgeois men continued to regard mutual aid with a mixture of alarm and approval and to believe that their social position required them to encourage the spirit of association among workers. Under the Second Empire, local bourgeois citizens were no longer the only source of patronage for mutual aid; Louis Napoleon adopted a policy of sponsoring worker association on his own terms. An imperial decree of  March  removed mutual aid societies from the jurisdiction of Article  of the penal code. Workers could form an association merely by informing the authorities; no authorization was required to establish a ‘tolerated’ society. The imperial government flooded provincial prefectures with model statutes and actuarial tables for calculating appropriate dues and benefits.20 Associations that adopted government recommendations were eligible for officially ‘approved’ status, and because they adhered to actuarial tables rather than making optimistic promises about benefits, they were more likely to be financially secure. ‘Approved’ societies received an assortment of benefits from Louis 18 The Lédonien association—the town’s first and, in , only mutual aid society—was the Association des travailleurs, founded with the cooperation of bourgeois republicans. (Statutes and correspondence in ADJ M .) The dissolved Alsatian society was an association of textile printers and engravers that included workers from Mulhouse and surrounding towns—a geographic reach that made it automatically suspect. See the prefect’s account,  Feb. , ACM QV Aa . The procureur général reversed the prefect’s decision to dissolve the society, but a presidential decree of  July  supported the prefect. See Herrenschmidt, –, – and Marie-Madeleine Kahan-Rabecq, ‘L’Importance de la classe ouvrière en ’, in Deux Siècles d’Alsace française, ; ;  (Strasbourg, ), –. Arthur Borghese challenges interpretations of Mulhouse’s working class as largely passive until  in ‘Industrialist Paternalism and Lower-Class Agitation: The Case of Mulhouse, –’, Histoire sociale/Social History,  (), –. None of the agitation Borghese documents, however, originated in mutual aid societies. 19 See Sewell, Work and Revolution, who treats mutual aid as a bridge between old regime protest and modern syndicalism, and Hunt and Sheridan, ‘Corporatism, Association, and the Language of Labor’, who assert that mutual aid societies were largely non-militant institutions of worker organization. 20 See, for instance, V. Robert, Guide pour l’organisation et l’administration des sociétés de secours mutuels, pamphlet in ADJ Y .

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Napoleon’s administration. Their presidents enjoyed imperial appointments, and the societies participated in generous cash grants.21 Napoleonic policy on mutual aid also offered workers some protection from the forms of involuntary association that employers preferred. Government defence of worker liberties occasionally conflicted with management-run associations, particularly in Mulhouse. Mulhousien employers mistrusted the Emperor, his betrayal of the Republic, and his pro-Catholic policies. Moreover, they were firmly committed to local solutions to the social question.22 Mutual aid was the field on which the Mulhousien elite and the imperial state competed for the loyalties of the working class. Tension reached its height with the organization of the Society for the Encouragement of Savings in . The society was the joint project of eleven Mulhousien firms whose owners were closely connected to the Industrial Society. The project called for owners and workers to associate in order to provide retirement benefits for factory hands. Both management and labour paid dues to the society’s fund: workers contributed  per cent of their wages, and management contributed  per cent of the total wage bill. In addition, factory owners raised a subscription among Mulhousien bourgeois to build a retirement home for old workers.23 The Society for the Encouragement of Savings was exactly the sort of emulative project of which bourgeois Frenchmen approved. It offered memberworkers a supervised setting in which to mimic the associative practices of their betters: they paid their dues, and they could see the growth of the pension fund and of the building where they would spend their wellearned retirement. The sponsors of the society intended to make participation obligatory among their workers. Because of the seasonal nature of textile demand, Mulhouse’s factories experienced periods of intense production and of labour shortage. When labour was at a premium, those factories whose owners required worker participation in a mutual aid fund were at a disadvantage in recruiting. Mulhousien industrialists had concluded that a 21 Herrenschmidt, –. The Emperor distributed cash to approved mutual aid associations in  (the wealth of the Orleans family), in  (to celebrate the birth of the Prince Imperial), and in the s (when economic crisis threatened mutual aid society funds). See records of subsidies to Alsatian societies in ADHR  X . 22 Sandrine Kott, ‘Enjeux et significations d’une politique sociale: la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse (–)’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,  (), – argues that Mulhousien manufacturers’ famed paternalism was motivated largely by a desire to remain one step ahead of Parisian intervention. 23 Prefect to mayor,  May , and statutes of the society,  July . ADHR  X .

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centralized arrangement, in which all workers in all factories participated in mutual aid, was the best way to promote thrift. The prefect, however, acting in accordance with imperial policy, declared himself unable to authorize such a coercive arrangement that would merely discredit the concept of mutual aid among workers. As a genuinely voluntary association which workers might choose to join or not, the Society for the Encouragement of Savings was never a very successful venture. The proposed retirement home was duly constructed: its completion depended solely on bourgeois goodwill, which was rarely lacking when it came to the construction of municipal monuments to bourgeois governance.24 The pension fund, however, relied on workers’ willingness to have their wages reduced which was, to say the least, less than their employers had hoped. Employers’ contributions far outstripped worker payments to the fund. Only  per cent of eligible workers chose to accept present pay cuts for the promise of an old-age pension.25 The sub-prefect suggested that even this limited recruitment was due to management pressure and that ‘quite a few workers left the factories which tried to withhold contributions from their pay.’26 The founders of the society bemoaned their workers’ failure to recognize ‘that everyone here on earth must be his own principal benefactor and that savings and economy are the indispensable conditions of all well being’.27 Not even discreet employer coercion, however, could turn the Society for the Encouragement of Savings into a successful partnership between bourgeois and worker. The society directors’ attempt to cut their losses resulted in a direct confrontation with the imperial authorities. In  the administration of the society changed the formula for contributions to the pension fund. Participating workers would continue to forgo  per cent of their wages, but management would only contribute  per cent of total wages and an extra  per cent of the wages of participating workers. The proposed change would reduce management costs by more than half, and it would shift the burden of encouraging participation to the workers themselves. The more shop-floor colleagues a participating factory hand could enlist, the more secure his own pension fund became. Although the prefect approved of the changes to the statutes of the 24 The retirement home received its first inhabitants in . Speech by A. Penot, ‘Compte rendu de ’ from the supplement to the Industriel alsacien, clipping in ADHR  X . 25 Annual reports in ADHR  X . 26 Letter to the prefect,  Sept. . ADHR  X . 27 Compte rendu,  Feb. . ADHR  X .

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Society for the Encouragement of Savings, the minister of Agriculture and Commerce, under whose authority mutual aid societies fell, refused to condone the proposal.28 The minister treated the society as a contract between management and labour which remained in effect until the retirement of the latter. A battle of wills ensued, with Mulhousien industrialists defying the government by dissolving their society and instituting a new association with the modified formula for management contributions.29 An irate minister of Commerce accused the society’s sponsors of violating the spirit of Louis Napoleon’s  decree and, more seriously, of illegally and secretly appropriating the funds of the old association for the treasury of the new one.30 The issue was ultimately resolved by a compromise in which Mulhousien industrialists won their lighter burden of contribution and the dissolution of the original society was tacitly agreed never to have taken place.31 The Empire, however, was the final victor in its confrontation with Mulhouse’s fabrantocratie. Universal suffrage in Mulhouse, which in  had produced the only urban no vote in France, shifted by  to produce a strong yes in favour of the Emperor.32 Working-class Bonapartism, which was ‘more calculated than instinctive’, developed in tandem with worker mobilization: vive l’empereur became one of the mottoes of striking workers in .33 Despite the advantage of subsidies, workers resisted Napoleonic patronage as well as management-sponsored involuntary association. In  the prefect of the Haut Rhin reported to the minister of the Interior that Alsatian workers were becoming more aware of the Emperor’s generosity towards mutual aid societies. Since , he noted, the number of approved societies had increased from twenty-five to twentyeight, while the number that were merely tolerated had decreased from eighty to seventy-eight.34 The prefect’s enthusiasm was a feeble cover for the discouraging figures he had to offer: Alsatian workers clearly cared little for government grants or for the prestige of having their president appointed by the Emperor. The situation in Besançon was similar: of the Minister of Agriculture to prefect,  June  and  Sept. . ADHR  X . Minutes of the administrative council,  Nov.  (dissolution of the old society). Mayor to prefect,  Feb.  (reconstitution of a new society). ADHR  X . 30 Minister to prefect,  May . ADHR  X . 31 Minister to prefect,  Jan. . Sub-prefect to prefect,  Feb. . ADHR  X . 32 M. Spisser, ‘Les Elections et l’opinion publique en Alsace de  à ’ (DES, Strasbourg, ), – and Paul Hugonnot, Le Second Empire dans le Haut Rhin: ses adversaires confessionels, politiques et économiques (Paris, ), –. 33 L’Huillier, La Lutte ouvrière, . 34 Prefect’s report, . ADHR  X . 28 29

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town’s seven societies, only one, the General Association (a bourgeoisrun organization) had sought approval.35 Thanks to the possibility of operating as a tolerated society without authorization, the total number of mutual aid societies grew dramatically. Few, however, were willing to trade independence for any form of sponsorship, whether from the government in Paris or from local employers. Bourgeois response to the persistence of independent worker organization and to Napoleonic patronage, which allowed a tolerated mutual aid society to meet as freely as a bourgeois association, was to create local umbrella organizations to coordinate the activities of independent societies. A General Association for Mutual Aid began functioning in Mulhouse in , in Besançon in , and in Lons in . These associations had bourgeois boards of directors that included the most prominent citizens in town, and their rolls were open to bourgeois honorary members and worker participants alike. General Associations offered economies of scale to counteract the unfortunate tendency of mutual aid societies to remain unreasonably small. Workers enrolled in the General Association scheme could change employers without losing benefits.36 For all mutualistes, municipal centralization and honest bourgeois governance promised security to the worker and his modest weekly deposits. General Associations, however, were no more successful than previous efforts at elite patronage: winning anything more than nominal cooperation from mutualistes was always a struggle. General Associations for Mutual Aid enrolled long lists of bourgeois honorary members—in some cases, more bourgeois patrons than working-class participants.37 Because they paid inflated dues without expecting benefits, honorary members were useful to new societies establishing start-up funds. Most importantly, the presence of bourgeois notables in the ranks of mutual aid associations emphasized their function in creating class harmony. Mutual aid worked because ‘mutualité is in the 35 Efforts by the prefect of the Jura to encourage mutual aid similarly failed. The prefect, determined to make his department a model of Napoleonic mutualité, created nearly  approved village mutual aid societies by . An  survey indicated that most had only survived for a year or two. ADJ X . 36 Statutes of the Caisse générale de secours, ACM QV Cc . 37 See, for instance, the General Association in Lons, which, in its first months, raised , francs from  honorary members while  participating members paid in  centimes per month. Initial subscription list in ADJ X . In Besançon, half of the  workers enrolled in the General Association required aid in the first year. The patronage of the  honorary members kept the association solvent. Annual report for  in ADD . In Mulhouse, Dollfus-Mieg et Cie. patronage helped guarantee the fund’s stability. Report on the Caisse générale,  Oct. . ACM QV Cc .

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heart of all men; it is born within us, although it perhaps exists in different degrees according to the position occupied in society.’38 Since the bourgeois man possessed the greatest inherent talent for mutual aid, how could a society succeed while excluding him? Paul Franceschi, art teacher and secretary of Besançon’s General Association, explicitly criticized mutual aid societies that admitted only workers: ‘Show me the man who is not a worker’, he proclaimed, ‘—only the lazy man is unworthy of that noble title!’39 Mutual aid necessarily recognized class boundaries: no one in the assembly Franceschi addressed would have failed to distinguish bourgeois patrons from working-class participants. Yet while drawing clear lines of demarcation between classes, General Associations denied that class boundaries represented lines of conflict. Franceschi’s disingenuous use of the language of labour recalls the ambiguity bourgeois men attached to work and leisure. Just as bourgeois men ritualized manual labour in the performances of Freemasons or Good Cousins, in mutual aid they invoked its inherent nobility and its ability to unite men across class boundaries. The praise of work linked bourgeois and manual labourers in a common manliness. In the pursuit of class harmony, bourgeois men adopted workers’ corporate traditions, such as funeral attendance. Rhetorically, at least, General Associations ensured that ‘the modest cortege of the poor [was] piously followed by the rich man; . . .[and] the cortege that accompanie[d] the rich man enlarged by the presence of the unhappy poor.’40 Bourgeois patrons of mutual aid did not, however, collapse all distinctions between manual skills and abstract expertise into a simple celebration of work. The activities of the General Association privileged bourgeois forms of work. Sponsors were not interested in issues like the valuation of skill or the protection of craft that concerned independent mutual aid associations. Rather, bourgeois proponents of mutualité declared that provision for a family was work’s most elevated form. If the ultimate end of work were the maintenance of family well-being (defined, of course, in terms of leisured women and educated children), then bourgeois work was obviously the model for the emulation of others rather than a derivation from a manual ideal. General Associations relieved bourgeois anxieties about the manliness of paper-pushing desk work by positioning such work as superior, not 38 President Vialet’s speech in Association générale des sociétés de secours mutuels. Compte rendu de  (Besançon, ) (hereafter Association générale). The complete run of the General Association’s annual reports is in BMB. 39 Association générale . . . Compte rendu de . 40 Secretary’s report, Association générale . . . Comte rendu de .

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simply because of its greater remuneration, but because of its capacity to support and protect women and children.41 Although bourgeois men celebrated the virile manual labourer in their lodges of Masons or Good Cousins, when faced with the real thing they reminded themselves of the superiority of abstract, intellectual work. Bourgeois work required fewer muscles, but it was the only guarantee of security for women and children.42 The admission to General Associations of working-class women and, in Mulhouse, of children over the age of , acted as a further reminder of the failure of manual labour to support a bourgeois ideal of manliness. These women and children looked to bourgeois patrons for support because of the inadequacy of their working-class husbands and fathers. The juxtaposition of bourgeois patronage and proletarian need reminded bourgeois breadwinners that manual skills and physical dexterity—qualities commemorated in secret ceremonies of charcoalburners or Masons—fell short of fitting a man for the vital task of heading a household. Most independent mutual aid associations resisted amalgamation by General Associations as decisively as they rejected Napoleonic patronage. By  the twelve societies participating in Mulhouse’s General Mutual Aid Fund were all in-house factory associations in which the decision to join lay with management, not labour.43 Most of Mulhouse’s mutual aid associations—including most of the in-house factory ones—stayed outside the General Fund. In Besançon, bourgeois patrons argued that because virtue knew no profession, the practice of mutual aid ought not to perpetuate distinctions of craft, and that all mutualistes ought to join the General Association. The appeal fell on deaf ears, and the General Association eventually changed both its tactics and its tune. By  its president was arguing that small craft-based societies (under the umbrella of the General Association) were preferable because ‘the members know one another . . . remind each other of their duty and their 41 Compare Paul Seeley’s discussion of the confrontation of working-class and bourgeois masculinity in ‘Catholics and Apprentices: An Example of Men’s Philanthropy in Late Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of Social History,  (), . Most research on bourgeois anxieties about the potentially unmanly nature of sedentary work is AngloAmerican. See Michael Grossberg, ‘Institutionalizing Masculinity: The Law as a Masculine Profession’, in Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffin (eds.), Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Manhood in Victorian America (Chicago, ), – and Norma Clarke, ‘Strenuous Idleness: Thomas Carlyle and the Man of Letters as Hero’, in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds.), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since  (London, ), –. 42 Oaths assuring the protection of women played a prominent role in Good Cousin ritual. See above, Ch. . 43 List of member societies for  in ACM QV Cc .

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obligations’ and because a small society was more efficient at tracking down late payments. Small societies could also raise dues in the form of payroll deduction (‘happy are the members of this society!’) and publish lists of late-payers.44 Besançon’s independent societies ultimately agreed to participate in the General Association’s annual fête de la mutualité, but they stubbornly refused to hand their purse strings over to the bourgeois administration of the General Association. Independent mutual aid associations had good reason to avoid the scrutiny of either imperial sponsorship or local bourgeois patronage. Although they were not spending their money on strike funds or radical organization, they were often not using it in an efficient manner to provide for the illness or retirement of members. Rather, mutual aid associations directed their energies and a large percentage of their funds to the cause of sociability. Workers did not join associations strictly for purposes of militancy or of social insurance. In exchange for their dues, workers wanted companionship, convivial company, and an acknowledged position within local society: working-class men looked for many of the same qualities in their mutual aid society as the bourgeois did in his cercle. Research on mutual aid societies generally underestimates the importance of sociability in the function of mutualité.45 Recognizing the importance of conviviality at the origin of mutual aid explains many decisions that, from a purely economic perspective, appear unreasonable, including the tendency to fragment into small societies.46 Nine out of seventeen independent societies in Mulhouse had fewer than fifty members in . The smallest, the rope-makers’ association (founded ), had only five members.47 Even if every one of the five rope-makers scrupulously paid his monthly dues of  centimes, the society could hardly hope to provide members with a comprehensive safety net.48 Secretary’s report, Association générale . . . Compte rendu de . Gosden, – makes a strong case for the appeal of small mutual aid societies being in their conviviality rather than in their provision of health insurance. See also Henri Hatzfeld, Du Paupérisme à la sécurité sociale: essai sur les origines de la sécurité sociale en France, – (Paris, ), –. 46 Herrenschmidt,  agrees with the Industrial Society that small societies were mutual aid’s greatest weakness in Mulhouse. 47 By contrast, none of the in-house factory associations had fewer than  members.  Mar.  survey in ADHR  X . 48 Independent associations in Besançon were similarly small. Surveys in ADD M  and M  indicate that independent societies had between  and  members: the exceptions were the watchmakers (over  members) and the Good Cousins ( members). I find no evidence in eastern mutual aid associations of the practice that Sewell identifies in Marseille of concealing the true size of membership in order to allay suspicion. Work and 44 45

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Moreover, mutual aid associations tended to group workers by age cohort.49 With no younger recruits to maintain the level of contributions, members of a society would bankrupt the treasury as they approached old age together; in economic terms, the strategy made no sense whatsoever. Bourgeois observers deplored the irrationality of associations that jeopardized their financial futures by limiting their membership both in size and in age. Bourgeois critics also cited mutual aid associations’ foolhardy expenditures as evidence that independent associations lacked true understanding of thrift. Societies that submitted annual accounts to the prefect routinely recorded spending large sums on ‘miscellany’. Besançon’s shoemakers of the Saint Crépin Society are a good example of this practice, because in the early s they were naive and honest enough to submit accurate accounts. The Saint Crépin always spent more on printing costs and party expenses than on indemnities to the sick.50 The shoemakers held an annual ball in honour of their patron saint for which, in , they spent  francs for lighting and  for music. The mass accompanying the ball cost  francs, plus  francs for consecrated bread. Festival expenses thus consumed  francs in a year when payments to the sick added up to only  francs.51 In many ways, the Saint Crépin was a model mutual aid society, except that its success could not be wholly attributed to members’ thrift. The Saint Crépin managed its finances extremely well: it stayed out of debt, fulfilled obligations to the sick, and even set aside money in the pension fund. In the early s, however, collections raised at the annual banquet brought in as much or more than members’ dues.52 Relying on the good will generated by a big party to empty members’ pockets was, to say the least, an eccentric idea of how prévoyance was supposed to work. For the members of the Saint Crépin, however, regular dues paying was connected to the annual banquet; the promise of a good party on Saint Crépin’s feast day encouraged members to keep their payments up to Revolution, –. Neither Sibalis, ‘The Mutual Aid Societies’ nor Sheridan, ‘Internal Life’ finds evidence of such deception in mutual aid in Paris or Lyon. 49 Herrenschmidt, . 50 Annual accounts of all Besançon’s mutual aid societies for the s and s are in ADD M  and M . 51 M Babey, of the Saint Crépin, to the mayor,  May , ACB Q. 52 The large entries under ‘miscellany’ disappeared from Saint Crépin accounts after , possibly in connection with the removal of the society’s president for unspecified immoral behaviour. The annual balls probably continued; the only change was that the members learned how best to present their accounts to the authorities. Prefect to mayor,  Mar. . ACB Q.

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date. Bourgeois observers, however, saw only ideals of thrift perverted by the spendthrift habits and intemperance of working-class mutualistes. The Saint Crépin’s emphasis on conviviality was typical of independent mutual aid associations. Most societies met in cafés, centres of male working-class sociability, where members were welcome as long as they bought drinks.53 These meetings were a source of constant anxiety to bourgeois observers who found it impossible to imagine the virtues of mutual aid being practiced in the vicious setting of the tavern.54 For the workers in question, however, membership in a café mutual aid society brought a certain status and offered the assurance of meeting a select and congenial group of peers. Mutual aid societies were a fixture in many cafés, and in Mulhouse at least, no two associations shared the same ‘local’.55 Some associations owned furniture and many kept the society chest, fitted with an elaborate lock requiring multiple keys to open, in the café.56 The chest and its keys, entrusted to the various officers of the society, were powerful symbols of a group identity which set members apart from ordinary café patrons. Once again, however, the chests suggest that the association’s economic viability was not the members’ primary concern: if their dues were in the chest, then the funds were not in the municipal savings bank earning interest. Although decisions taken by mutual aid societies did not always make economic sense, they accorded perfectly with the logic of sociability. Mutual aid among fifty or fewer individuals might not be ideally efficient, but it offered greater potential for good company. A man could feel at home among a few dozen of his colleagues, all elected to membership by a majority vote. A larger society might appear more dependable on paper: its bank account would certainly be heftier and members could be confident of receiving their centimes in case of illness. But it is not altogether surprising that working men preferred to depend on their friends rather than on the impersonal bureaucracies of large associations. Admitting younger men, putting money in the bank, and abolishing festive celebrations would have made for a healthier bottom line, but would also have compromised the conviviality that workers sought in 53 W. Scott Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, – (Baltimore, ), –. 54 See Mulhousien attempts to regulate mutual aid society meetings: prefect’s instructions concerning the Fraternelle,  Feb. ; and mayor’s letter to prefect,  Apr. . ADHR  X . 55 List of mutual aid societies for  July . ADHR  X . 56 See, for instance, the complaint from members of the Fraternelle,  June . ADHR  X .

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their associations. Intimacy and friendship were not among the benefits of mutual aid weighed by bourgeois critics. It did not occur to the bourgeois that mutualistes’ banquets and café conversations were as faithful a mirror of bourgeois behaviour as pension funds. Patrons understood mutualité as emulating bourgeois work, while leisure was only for those who had earned it, specifically for men whose families enjoyed absolute security. Bourgeois elites concluded that mutual aid’s tendency to abandon itself to conviviality and pleasure required the corrective of close bourgeois guidance. In imperial France, however, mutual aid associations enjoyed state support in their resistance to centralizing and moralizing bourgeois patronage. As long as they exerted their pressure discreetly, large employers could force their workers to practise a form of mutual aid untouched by any frivolous sociability. Such involuntary association, however, only touched the lowest strata of the working class—unskilled factory hands who could not afford to contemplate a change of job. To reach the working-class elite and enlist them as emulators of bourgeois values, reformers turned their attention to areas such as adult education, which the state had not yet claimed. T P  W E Bourgeois men knew exactly where to place the blame for workers who refused to accept solidarity and the deferential comradeship offered in mutual aid societies. Frédéric Engel-Dollfus, a prominent Mulhousien industrialist, explained that the ‘spirit of thrift’ required ‘solid foundations which correspond to a level of culture and reason which the more educated and wealthy classes have hardly achieved’.57 Where education was lacking, one could hardly expect to find workers living up to bourgeois standards of thrift and probity. The answer, of course, was to link mutual aid and education. Paul Franceschi of Besançon’s General Association saw mutualité and instruction as jointly reinforcing and located the association’s future in primary schools. He asked his fellow members to imagine a mutual aid society of children, each paying  or  centimes per month, an exercise which would not be a pointless game because . . . they will have learned the science of doing good. . . . the secretary’s report would become a double lesson in the French 57 Quoted by Stéphane Jonas, ‘La Révolution industrielle, les questions urbaine et du logement à Mulhouse, –’ (thèse d’état, Strasbourg, ), .

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language and the love of one’s neighbour; . . . and the treasurer, next to his bookkeeping, would learn . . . the miraculous arithmetic of the heart that gives such prodigiously compounded interest!58

Bourgeois values were inconceivable without education. Instruction in reading and writing would teach workers how to separate mutual aid from the dubious pleasures of café society and how to give work and leisure their proper value. Popular education programmes were generally more satisfying than mutual aid to their bourgeois sponsors. Workers in evening classes were much more likely to behave as passive consumers of bourgeois wisdom than workers organized in mutual aid societies. Educational programmes involved none of the conflict between thrift, sociability, and militancy that was always present in mutual aid projects. Moreover, popular instruction usually brought in the ambitious working-class elite, men untouched by the coercion of employers’ in-house mutual aid funds. In evening classes teaching everything from basic literacy and numeracy to modern languages and accounting, workers and bourgeois united in a tacit recognition of the superiority of abstract, intellectual labour—the kind of work that bourgeois men did and that the worker-pupils aspired to. Bourgeois promotion of worker education followed a path that was largely disconnected from the national debate on primary education. The fears that delayed primary education legislation in France—the imbalance of clerical or secular influence, the weakening of paternal authority, and lower class demands on the public purse—held relatively little sway on the local level, at least in Mulhouse and Lons le Saunier.59 In Besançon, where clerical and legitimist influence created particularly deep fissures in the local elite, bourgeois associations sponsored relatively few popular education programmes. Such educational initiatives would have sparked unbecoming battles over the role of the archdiocese and would rapidly have revealed the tenuous nature of bourgeois consensus.60 In Lons and Mulhouse, however, bourgeois citizens agreed that their supervision of educational programmes ensured that primary instruction would not lead to political conflict. Secretary’s report, Association générale . . . Compte rendu de . On the debates surrounding primary education in France, see Antoine Prost, Histoire de l’enseignement en France, – (Paris, ). 60 Popular education initiatives did not appear in Besançon until the Third Republic, and they were typically sectarian. The first popular library was funded in  by a bequest from a Jewish philanthropist. By the time that library opened in  a Catholic popular library had begun in . By  Protestants had opened their own popular library. ADD  T . 58 59

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The model for the evening classes started in Mulhouse and Lons le Saunier was a programme initiated by the industrialist Jean-Jacques Bourcart of Guebwiller (Haut Rhin).61 Bourcart’s popular education programme was not officially a school. Rather, he explained, ‘the men form an association with one another in order to engage a professor and to take private lessons.’ From the point of view of bourgeois sponsors, this worker association meant that the programme was not subject to laws on schools. More important, however, Bourcart believed that ‘if you want to make a popular school for men and youths succeed, it is vitally important to leave the initiative to the students themselves, or at least to make them think that this is the case.’62 The fiction, if not the reality, of men helping themselves had to be maintained in education as in mutual aid. If the classroom preserved the semblance of independence, adult men did not hesitate to attend because ‘the older pupils feel that they do not lose any of their personal value by going to a school that they established and that they direct themselves.’63 Workers in Bourcart’s programme chose their own associates, selecting classmates with whom they felt at ease and whose presence in lessons was not shaming. Adult male workers avoided offensive tutelage, and bourgeois subscribers could rest secure in the knowledge that, controlling the purse strings, they had the final say in the school: ‘The result . . . is that instruction is made accessible to all regardless of position, age, or degree of instruction, without anyone being prevented from working to earn his living while waiting for education to improve his position’.64 Based on Bourcart’s recommendations, Industrial Society members founded the Society for Popular Instruction, which opened its classrooms in October . The Emulation Society of the Jura, after some difficulties concerning authorization, began teaching local workers in the same year. The Lédonien programme, which promised to ‘strip science of all pedantry . . . and from within its vast domain to choose the most essential concepts for daily life and occupations’, included law, the geology of the Jura applied to agriculture, elements of trigonometry applied to stone-cutting, modern French history and literature, scientific 61 Like many sons of the Protestant elite, Bourcart attended a Pestalozzi-influenced Swiss school, where he met Robert Owen’s two sons. After graduation, Bourcart visited New Lanark then returned to Alsace where he became a leader of the Industrial Society’s social agenda. Philippe Mieg, ‘L’Influence pédagogique de Jean-Henri Pestalozzi à Mulhouse’, Bulletin du Musée historique de Mulhouse (), –. 62 J.-J. Bourcart to the Emulation Society of the Jura,  Jan. . ASEJ  J . 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid.

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inventions, and an introduction to the metric system.65 Classes offered to Mulhousien workers included reading, writing, elementary mathematics, French, English, applied mathematics, and drafting.66 The Industrial Society expressed great satisfaction that a proposed German class had to be cancelled because of insufficient enrolment. By opting for French—the language of assimilation, social advancement, and bourgeois society— workers of the Society for Popular Instruction demonstrated their grasp of the tools of emulation.67 In both Mulhouse and Lons le Saunier, the provision of adult education classes was a collaborative effort of the local bourgeoisie and municipal authorities. Mayors in both towns provided meeting space and covered heat, light, and other incidental expenses. In Lons le Saunier, members of the Emulation Society donated their services as lecturers; with both rent and teaching offered gratis, the remaining costs of the popular education programme were trivial. The Mulhousien Society for Popular Instruction had heavier expenses because it paid teachers a small salary. The society began its work by raising a subscription among the inhabitants of Mulhouse that reached , francs within a few days. After a strong start in Mulhouse, the programme quickly expanded to the industrial suburb of Dornach, where Dollfus-Mieg et Cie paid all costs.68 Mulhousien bourgeois fully applied Bourcart’s principle of making adult education classes function as individual voluntary associations—or at least appear to. In their interactions with the Society for Popular Instruction, worker-pupils learned the virtues of association as well as reading and writing. Because adult education was not charity and because men valued what they paid for, the Mulhousien society charged fees ranging from a nominal  centimes per month for the most elementary classes to  centimes for more advanced subjects such as drafting or English. Although the teacher was the final authority, pupils were responsible for their own discipline and for the collection of tuition fees. Each class set its own fines for offences, such as tardiness, in order to maintain classroom order. Pupils elected representatives who assumed responsibility for funds and acted as liaisons with the Society for Popular Programmes for cours publics in ASEJ   J. The statutes for the Société d’instruction populaire are in ADHR  T . Correspondence concerning the society and its initial programme are in ADHR  T . See also Raymond Oberlé, L’Enseignement à Mulhouse de  à  (Paris, ), –. 67 A. Penot’s report on the cours populaires in the minutes for July, BSIM,  (), –. 68 Sub-prefect to prefect,  Feb. . ADHR  T . 65 66

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Instruction. Although fees and fines were far from covering all of the expenses of the class, they were an important part of the programme of instruction. They reinforced the connection of education to thrift: workers whose disposable income went on drink would find the classrooms closed to them. The exchange of money also made the classroom look more like an autonomous voluntary association. Paying dues, regulating conduct, and electing officers were all elements of bourgeois association, and they all contributed to making the popular education classroom appear to be a free assembly of responsible adult men. In the estimation of their bourgeois sponsors, the adult education classes were tremendously successful. With the addition of fifty-six pupils in the Dornach classes, the Society for Popular Instruction enrolled a total of over  workers, of whom about  attended assiduously.70 Enrolment rose to  in the programme’s second year and five new teachers were taken on to handle subjects such as Italian, chemistry, spinning, and descriptive geometry.71 Although the initial enthusiasm of Lons’ working class cooled slightly in the second year, the Emulation Society was still satisfied with an attendance of between twenty and eighty for each lecture.72 The bourgeois of both towns received official recognition of their public-spirited initiatives from Victor Duruy, minister of Public Instruction.73 Even more satisfying to provincial bourgeois than ministerial congratulations was local acknowledgement of their contribution to municipal life. In his report to the Industrial Society, Achille Penot cited the emulative behaviour of the worker-pupils as the ultimate success of the Society for Popular Instruction. The pupils of one class, finding that the fees they had collected exceeded the expenses of their course by  francs, decided to donate the money to the society rather than redistributing it among themselves. This ‘happy result’ of adult education ‘honoured these men who could not find a more touching way to demonstrate their gratitude towards the Industrial Society and the generous citizens who cooperated to offer popular instruction’.74 In addition to French and the principles of accounting, the society taught its pupils that the men of the Industrial Society were models of bourgeois rectitude and that workers could do no better than to emulate such civic responsibility. 69

69 70 71 72 73 74

Statutes of the Société d’instruction populaire, ADHR  T . Sub-prefect to prefect,  Feb. . ADHR  T . Sub-prefect to prefect,  Sept., ,  Nov., and  Dec. . ADHR  T . Rebours to minister for Public Instruction,  Feb. . ASEJ  J .  Dec.  in ADHR  T .  May  in ASEJ  J . BSIM,  (), .

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In bourgeois patronage schemes, emulation was the sincerest form of flattery as well as a noble goal in itself. Adult education required reinforcement if it were to make any lasting impact on the working class. Passive listening to lectures was only the first step away from the ‘fatal pleasures into which idleness plung[ed] the worker’.75 The ambitious worker would progress to regular reading, reflecting the habit of self-improvement and necessary practice of skills learned in evening classes. To give workers access to the right sort of reading material, bourgeois enthusiasts incorporated libraries into their popular education programmes. The popular libraries movement originated in eastern France and rapidly became a national campaign. The national, however, never overwhelmed the local: even as they came to see themselves as participating in a national effort, bourgeois supporters of primary education and popular libraries maintained that duty and efficacy demanded a focus on one’s own town. The structures of bourgeois association mandated that the nationwide promotion of learning among the French working class advance according to local logic and through local patronage. Most notable among the eastern bourgeois promoters of libraries was Jean Macé, a primary school teacher in Beblenheim, a village not far from Colmar in the Haut Rhin. Although neither a Mulhousien, an industrialist, or even a Protestant, Macé’s commitment to and talent for educational reform won him access to elite society in Mulhouse.76 In  he joined Mulhouse’s Perfect Harmony Masonic lodge in a ceremony attended by representatives of lodges from all over eastern France. Macé spoke eloquently, departing from the initiate’s prescribed responses, as he explained that he aspired to become a Mason because ‘he wished for greater authority in the interior of France to promote his cause of popular libraries . . . as a Mason he would find it easier to make contacts. . . . in a word, his place was with [the Perfect Harmony].’77 In , Macé’s admission to the Industrial Society as a corresponding member cemented the identification between his cause and the bourgeois of Mulhouse. Macé’s intimate understanding of the bourgeois culture of voluntary association was crucial to the successful enlistment of provincial elites Rebours to prefect, undated letter on popular education. ASEJ  J . For further biographical information on Macé see Katherine Auspitz, The Radical Bourgeoisie: The Ligue de l’Enseignement and the Origins of the Third Republic (Cambridge, ), –. 77 Minutes of the meeting of  June . ACM J II Kb . Normally, Macé would have joined a lodge in Colmar, which was closer to Beblenheim. His choice of the Perfect Harmony clearly reflected Mulhousien sympathy for the cause of universal primary education. 75 76

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in his national campaigns. His activity in Mulhouse began with his collaboration with the mayor, Jean Dollfus, a leading proponent of social reform.78 Dollfus was personally responsible for several of the ten popular libraries that existed in Mulhousien factories or in private patronage associations by .79 Dollfus’s prestige and his reputation as a social reformer encouraged his Mulhousien colleagues to support Macé’s programme. In  the mayor Dollfus and the schoolmaster Macé founded the Society for Communal Libraries, the aim of which was to provide every commune, urban or rural, with a library. By December of that year the society was in full swing with over  adherents whose dues ( francs annually) would fund local libraries.80 The Society for Communal Libraries teetered on the edge of the imperial government’s tolerance for associations. The Emperor had little confidence in Mulhousiens, and education, which imperial policy recognized as a field of legitimate Catholic action, was a particularly sore point in the relationship between Paris and Mulhouse.81 The society’s proposal to establish a network of popular library committees in outlying villages clearly bordered on the illegal. The prefect recognized that Dollfus’s and Macé’s ambitions were broader than Mulhouse or even the Haut Rhin and that they merited careful scrutiny. Macé and Dollfus, both familiar with the politics of association, did their best not to antagonize the authorities. In particular, the prefect noted approvingly that although most of the leaders of the new association were Protestants, the society made a point of being non-sectarian and invited the prefect to serve as its patron. In the prefect’s opinion, it would be best to authorize the association and monitor it carefully to ensure that it did not ‘degenerate . . . into a propaganda society’.82 The minister of the Interior agreed and further instructed the prefect that each individual library opened by the society would require separate authorization.83 The Society for Communal Libraries did, as the prefect anticipated, 78 Dollfus was best known for his creation of model worker housing, the cité ouvrière. See Jonas, ‘La Révolution industrielle’, . 79 A. Penot, ‘Rapport sur un projet de Société d’instruction populaire’,  Mar. . ADHR  T . J.-P. Kintz, ‘Instruction et lectures populaires à la fin du Second Empire’, in Fernand L’Huillier (ed.), L’Alsace en – (Strasbourg, ), –. 80 Statutes of the Sociétés des bibliothèques communales of the Haut Rhin and all correspondence concerning its authorization are in ADHR  M . Auspitz, –. 81 One Second Empire sub-prefect noted that Mulhouse would remain in opposition until ‘the Pope gave up Rome and France had obligatory education.’ Quoted by Georges Livet and Raymond Oberlé, Histoire de Mulhouse des origines à nos jours (Strasbourg, ), . 82 Prefect to Interior,  Dec. . ADHR  M . 83 Interior to prefect,  Dec. . ADHR  M .

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stir up religious antagonisms in the Haut Rhin. In March  the prefect reported the establishment of a new group in Colmar, the Alsatian Society for the Improvement and the Propagation of French and German Popular Publications.84 The new association was effectively a Catholic rival to the Mulhousien group. The prefect was pleased with this manifestation of traditional rivalries and with the new society’s intention to ‘counterbalance the Protestant influence in the region’.85 Macé, adhering resolutely to the language of emulation, welcomed the Alsatian Society, which he refused to recognize as a rival. Competing associations could only result in the foundation of more libraries. Macé maintained that he had no wish to dictate to any association that had the cause of popular education at heart. This respect for the autonomy of local associations was the hallmark of Macé’s campaigns for popular instruction; he always insisted that associations promoting education should be ‘devoted exclusively to questions that unite us, . . . ignoring those which divide’.86 Mulhouse’s popular library was a great success and it catapulted Macé to the foremost ranks of Mulhouse’s social reformers. In its first two months, the library lent , volumes ( in French,  in German) to  enrolled readers. The Industrial Society, in a letter to the prefect, emphasized that many books found their way into homes where they were read aloud and that ‘this intellectual satisfaction possesses sufficient attraction to keep many workers at home in the evening when they used to spend several hours away from the house after supper.’87 In the great contest between bourgeois virtue and the café, books were proving a powerful weapon against vice. The Communal Library Society’s ambitions were too large, however, to measure their achievement in the lending record of one library alone. The extension of the Mulhousien model and the encouragement of emulation in other towns were the true measures of the society’s success. Lons le Saunier was one of the first towns to adopt Macé’s scheme for a communal library. J. A. Davin, a primary school teacher in Mulhouse and member of the Society for Communal Libraries, was largely responsible for inspiring the emulative spirit in the Jura. Davin left Mulhouse in , just as the popular library movement was gaining momentum, to take up a post as municipal librarian in Dole,  kilometres north of Lons. In December  Davin published an open letter 84 85 86 87

Statutes, membership list, and correspondence in ADHR  M . Prefect to Interior,  Mar. . ADHR  M . Macé, Les Origines de la Ligue de l’enseignement, quoted by Auspitz, .  Oct. , ADHR  T .

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to the Emulation Society of the Jura in which he challenged Lédonien emulators to form a popular library. He turned to the Emulation Society because, as he explained, ‘the name of your association brings obligations with it, because it is a synonym of progress.’88 The Emulation Society was, moreover, the only institution in the Jura which had networks of correspondence among men of ability and goodwill who could unite ‘energetic but scattered forces, enrolling in the association . . . all the isolated dedication’ to be found in the department.89 By March  Lédonien bourgeois had accepted Davin’s challenge to create a popular library association. The new statutes called upon members to ‘arouse individual initiative and the spirit of association . . . [and] spread instruction among all classes of society’.90 The library opened in May, and members of the Emulation Society ensured that regular newspaper reports kept the public up to date on this new source of progress and civic welfare. Their most notable success story featured a local farmer who had invented an agricultural tool that had won a prize at an exposition. The award-winning farmer credited his invention to a manual on elementary physics he had borrowed from the popular library.91 Through the efforts of the learned Lédonien bourgeoisie, peasants of the Jura were transformed into emulators, conscious of the value of self-reliance and the worth of education. The Emulation Society of Lons saw its library as its own creation, not merely as reproduction of the Alsatian template. The autonomy of each local branch of the movement was crucial to transforming a Mulhousien effort into a nationwide campaign. Davin faithfully followed Jean Macé in insisting that each local society set its own agenda. Although he offered Mulhousien statutes as a model, he suggested that bourgeois of the Jura ‘conserv[e] their autonomy, maintaining their own initiative’, ‘without servile copying of . . . the Haut Rhin’.92 When Lédoniens provided startup funds for a library in a rural Jurassien commune, they left its management to local notables. Davin regularly reminded his fellow association members that their goal was to create libraries, not to administer them. ‘Once the Jurassien society has achieved the creation of a library in the commune’, Davin wrote, ‘its role has ended’.93 Emulators in Lons offered advice, encouragement, and, whenever possible, money, but they never 88 89 90 91 92 93

La Sentinelle du Jura,  Dec. . Ibid. Statutes published by ibid.,  Apr. . Ibid.,  Oct. . See also articles for ,  May, and  Dec. . Ibid.,  Dec. . Ibid.,  Mar. . See also the article in the  Apr.  issue.

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gave orders. Local notables knew the needs and capabilities of their fellow citizens better than any outsider. The Jurassien debate over whether popular libraries should be free or require borrowers to pay fees demonstrated the autonomy of local associations. The bourgeois of Dole prided themselves on their fee-paying membership: library clients subscribed  centimes per month to eliminate all hint of charity from the operation. Organizers of the Dolois library wanted borrowers to experience a small measure of bourgeois pride in ownership: ‘Drop subscription fees as far as possible, . . . distribute free subscription cards to the needy, but leave the praiseworthy self-respect of members . . . the right to speak of our library’.94 Lédonien bourgeois were equally proud that their library was open to all, without restriction. In an exchange of newspaper articles between sponsors of libraries in Dole and Lons, Lédoniens ridiculed the idea that lending books constituted charity.95 Jean Macé believed that popular libraries in towns should charge fees in order to develop a sense of property in workers, but that they should be free in the countryside where pride in ownership was overdeveloped in the peasant.96 Macé’s views, however, played no role at all in the Jurassien debate. Macé, his Mulhousien colleagues, and Jurassien supporters agreed that local bourgeois knew best how to encourage emulation in their communities and that they required no tutelage from a central office. The popular libraries movement was merely the preface to Macé’s subsequent, and better-known creation, the Education League (Ligue de l’enseignement). The league owed its successful intervention in Third Republic education debates to its network of autonomous bourgeois associations committed to universal primary education. With his experience of provincial bourgeois culture, Macé understood how the spirit of association worked. Each affiliate of the league was primarily concerned with the promotion of education within the local community, and the national organization did not dictate to grass-roots organizers. In an  letter to a Jurassien newspaper, Macé sought to reassure potential members that the league respected the independence of its constituents. Local members were at liberty even to choose the name of the association: ‘it is about forming a league, an , if you prefer. The name counts for nothing; it is the substance that matters’.97 94 95 96 97

Davin, in ibid.,  Apr. . E. Figurey, in ibid.,  Apr. . Auspitz, –. Letter reprinted in La Sentinelle du Jura,  Dec. .

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The Mulhousien branch of the league, founded in , exemplified the bourgeois taste for patronage and improvement that Macé was able to harness to a national movement. The Mulhousiens chose to call their association the Society of Friends of Popular Instruction (Mulhousien Cercle of the Education League). All the leaders of local industry, Protestant and Jewish, as well as prominent functionaries and teachers, many of them Catholic, attended the first meeting and declared themselves in favour of ‘lay and scientific’ primary education.98 The administrative committee reflected the composition of the new Mulhousien bourgeoisie. Its members included Auguste Dollfus, president of the Industrial Society and member of a patrician family; Lazare Lantz, a textile manufacturer and member of the Jewish consistory; and Auguste Michel, a primary school teacher who taught adult evening classes and had made a reputation as editor of a short-lived German-language republican newspaper in .99 The Mulhousien bourgeois who joined the new Friends of Popular Instruction were united by a concern for the fact that on maps of France indicating literacy ‘the department of the Haut Rhin . . . is tinted a darker colour than those surrounding it’—a dismal performance entirely attributable to the Mulhousien industrial region.100 The Friends of Popular Instruction were conscious of their roles as leaders of a national crusade. Mulhousien bourgeois were proud of the fact that ‘the rallying cry that founded the League and all its local branches’ had issued from the Haut Rhin. They also understood their responsibility to be ‘first to reach the goal . . . that we all strive after’.101 The movement to bring universal literacy and primary education to France was a competition, and the Mulhousiens treated it as such, systematically seeking out all opportunities to evaluate and improve the education of Mulhouse’s citizens. The Friends of Popular Instruction established card files on local children and hunted down adult illiteracy in prisons and among conscripts. They divided the town into districts and assigned members to monitor each district and ensure that no child escaped unschooled. Transforming Mulhouse into a city that demanded the emulation of the rest of France was the best fulfilment of the obligations of national leadership. Statutes and membership list of the society, ADHR  T . Oberlé, L’Enseignement, . 100 A. Dollfus, speech to May  meeting, in Cercle mulhousien de la Ligue de l’enseignement, premier bulletin (Mulhouse, ), in the Bibliothèque municipale de Mulhouse. 101 Ibid. 98 99

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Macé’s popular education project quickly outgrew its Alsatian origins. His Mulhousien colleagues appreciated the national attention but reminded themselves that ‘the independence of [their] society [was] in no way either threatened or lessened’ but, on the contrary, ‘completely assured . . . in the eyes of those who truly wish for . . . the progress of the popular classes’.102 Although they had become leaders of a national cause, they remained, first and foremost, bourgeois de Mulhouse. Their programmes to create an educated citizenry served the cause of universal manhood suffrage in France without losing sight of local purposes: the creation of bourgeois consensus and of a local solidarity between bourgeois and worker.103 Macé recognized that his fellow bourgeois valued local utility and independence as the basis of civic virtue. The Education League owed its success to its appeal to provincial bourgeois notables, who were attracted more by the prospect of making a mark on their own communities than of becoming a cog in a national political movement. T M C ERCLE Both mutual aid and popular education schemes saw themselves as elements in a larger project of worker improvement, a goal that combined ‘moralization and instruction of the classes least favoured by birth’.104 In the late s the Industrial Society embarked on a programme to make all aspects of bourgeois emulation available to workers in a single location. The project, known as the Mulhousien Cercle, integrated mutualité and education and combined them with the notions of useful leisure that originated in the bourgeois cercle. Giving workers their own cercle would assure ‘the vulgarization of moral and material well-being through association in all its possible applications’.105 In  Jules Siegfried, a textile entrepreneur from Le Havre with Alsatian family connections, challenged his colleagues in the Industrial Society to reform the working class by improving the moral tone of their leisure pursuits. He backed up his challenge with a gift of , A. Klenck, reporting for the committee on prisons, in ibid. Michael Burns emphasizes the importance of concepts of solidarity and solidarism as organizing principles of Mulhousien industrialists’ social policy long before such ideas were adopted by the Third Republic. Dreyfus: A Family Affair, – (London, ), –. See also J. E. S. Hayward, ‘The Official Social Policy of the French Third Republic: Léon Bourgeois and Solidarism’, International Review of Social History,  (), – and Judith Stone, The Search for Social Peace: Reform Legislation in France, – (Albany, ). 104 E. D., ‘Les Cercles d’ouvriers’, in La Salle de réunion et le cercle ouvrier de Dornach, . 105 Brochure in the Bib. SIM. Ibid. . 102 103

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francs. The members of the Industrial Society seized the opportunity to replace workers’ café socializing with honest bourgeois leisure pursuits. The basis of the Mulhousien Cercle was the progressive assumption that, given the opportunity and the appropriate guidance, workers could behave as morally and rationally in their spare time as their bourgeois employers. The attraction of the café, Siegfried argued, did not lie in any moral failing intrinsic to the working class. Rather, the conditions of proletarian work and home life drove the labourer towards the tavern, the only institution that offered him ‘a little rest and above all some amusement’: 106

Many young men spend their evenings in the café because they have no other home than their tiny bedroom. Many others, after a hard day’s work, stay on the street corners or on the steps, even in bad weather, rather than go into the café. Many married men, who often have a large family lodged in only one or two rooms, have no way to enjoy those relationships between friends and acquaintances so much appreciated by the superior classes, except by going to the café where the benefits of sociability are paid for in drink.107

The Mulhousien Cercle was to test workers’ capacity for emulation by giving them opportunity and encouragement to behave like men of the bourgeoisie. In making his donation, Siegfried had in mind the model of English Working Men’s Clubs. When Siegfried first visited England in the s, these clubs existed in most manufacturing centres. From their beginnings as bourgeois-directed projects for moral and educational improvement, the most successful of the clubs had recognized that too much preaching and teaching drove workers away. Clubs discovered that they could best maintain their following by focusing on ‘rational entertainment’. Teetotalling excursions to the seashore or decorous soirées for workers and their wives coupled with adult education classes fulfilled the clubs’ moral mission without alienating the membership. Along with a greater emphasis on leisure pursuits came more worker involvement in management of the clubs.108 By the second half of the century, the most successful Working Men’s Clubs were institutions of the upwardly 106 On Siegfried’s career, see André Siegfried, Mes Souvenirs de la Troisième République. Mon père et son temps. Jules Siegfried, – (Paris, ). 107 J. Siegfried, ‘Des Cercles d’ouvriers à propos des Working Men’s Clubs d’Angleterre’, BSIM (), . 108 Richard N. Price, ‘The Working Men’s Club Movement and Victorian Social Reform Ideology’, Victorian Studies,  (), –. R. J. Morris, Class, Sect, Party: The Making of the British Middle Class. Leeds, – (Manchester, ), –.

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mobile working class who preferred to forgo patronizing bourgeois sponsorship. Jules Siegfried was convinced that the English working class was superior to its French counterpart because English workers understood association. Working Men’s Clubs imbued their members with the true spirit of association; that is, they learned the value of cooperation and recognized the futility of class conflict. Siegfried was probably not fully aware that Working Men’s Clubs prospered most when bourgeois patronage was least intrusive. In Siegfried’s vision of worker association, the presence of bourgeois sponsors was crucial to ensure smooth administration and establish the model for workers’ emulation. In the last decades of the nineteenth century Siegfried used his wealth and his position as a member of the Chamber of Deputies to promote the formation of cercles populaires in France. The grant made to the Industrial Society was his first effort to turn talk about the spirit of association into action that would reach the working class. The cercle, he insisted, was ‘a social work and a means of individual action at the same time as an occasion to bring together men with a sense of solidarity towards each other’.109 The Industrial Society took advantage of Siegfried’s gift to build another grand public edifice for Mulhouse. The Mulhousien Cercle occupied a plot of land donated by a member of the Industrial Society, so all of Siegfried’s money could be used for construction costs.110 The imposing building contained multi-purpose meeting rooms, a library, gymnastic facilities, games rooms with billiards, and a cafeteria. The garden was arranged for outdoor sports, including a pond for winter ice skating. Siegfried and the Industrial Society planned the building with a careful eye to detail and, especially, to comfort. Small tables were preferable to large in smoking rooms because they were more conducive to conversation. Organizers rejected benches in favour of padded chairs because ‘above all, the worker must be more at home in his club than in the café.’111 Not coincidentally, all of these attractions, from the armchairs to the billiard tables, were those of a well-run bourgeois cercle. The Industrial Society offered the facilities of the Mulhousien Cercle not to individual workers but to associations. The cercle took care of the costlier aspects of bourgeois sociability such as rent, heating and lighting, reading material, and sports equipment so that worker associations might 109 Exposition universelle internationale de . Congrès international des cercles populaires (Paris, ), . Pamphlet in the Bib. SIM. 110 Memo dated  Apr. . Bib. SIM . 111 J. Siegfried, ‘Des Cercles d’ouvriers’, .

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have access to such improving pastimes. The cercle populaire was not supposed to be a place where individual workers dropped by for an hour’s solitary diversion after work. Such anti-social leisure was an improvement over the café, but none the less failed to inculcate the crucial virtues of association. Moreover, the cercle was not supposed to be simply for entertainment. Organizers were confident that honest leisure would lead workers naturally to thrift and education and that the Mulhousien Cercle would eventually become a ‘centre of association, the natural starting point for mutual aid societies, for associations for the construction of lowpriced housing, for consumer or producer cooperatives’.112 In this hope, bourgeois patrons were disappointed: most of the societies affiliated with the Mulhousien Cercle were dedicated to amusements such as music or gymnastics.113 The rules of the Mulhousien Cercle encouraged worker mimicry of bourgeois practices. First, the cercle established a space for exclusively male sociability and leisure. By contrast to the café, in which women and children had their place, the Mulhousien Cercle was a male retreat from domestic life.114 Families of worker members made occasional appearances in the cercle on festive days when the musical and gymnastic associations performed.115 As in bourgeois associations, wives entered the male sociable space only by invitation, and then merely to serve as an appreciative audience. Although members of the Industrial Society were preoccupied with what they perceived as the decline of the working-class family, a family-oriented sociability never presented itself to them as a solution. Certainly the Mulhousien bourgeois wanted to tempt their workers away from the café, that notorious breaker of families. They saw nothing inappropriate, however, in more virtuous leisure activities that removed male workers from the family hearth just as effectively. As their own experience demonstrated, a strong family required the moral presence of the father, which could be all the more imposing in his physical absence.116 J. Siegfried in Exposition universelle, . In  the cercle had only nine affiliate associations. Exposition universelle, . 114 On the expansion of family life into the café, see Haine, –. 115 A. Penot, ‘Rapport sur le Cercle mulhousien présenté au nom du comité d’utilité publique’,  Feb. . Reprinted as a pamphlet, in the Bib. SIM. 116 On the powerful absence of fathers, see Michèle Perrot, ‘The Father Figure’ in A History of Private Life, iv, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, Arthur Goldhammer (trans.) (Cambridge, ), . See also Michèle Ménard, ‘Le Miroir brisé’, in Jean Delumeau and Daniel Roche (eds.), Histoire des pères et de la paternité (Paris, ), – for a discussion of the nineteenth-century iconography of the ‘return of the father’. Female workers and their leisure received no consideration at all. 112 113

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The Mulhousien Cercle also followed bourgeois practice in dividing its members by age group. Worker associations affiliated with the cercle were free to admit men whose common age promoted camaraderie. The cercle, however, set its own rules to encourage generationally stratified sociability. Seventeen was the minimum age for membership; if the cercle were to compete with café society, members had to be admitted young, before they acquired bad habits. Within the cercle, however, there were to be separate meeting and games rooms for young men from  to  and for adults over . According to Siegfried, the admission of youths was a major cause of failure for English Working Men’s Clubs. Finding their clubs overrun by rowdy boys, older men simply returned to their pubs for some peace and quiet.117 In some activities such as evening classes or musical societies, age cohorts would be mixed so that young men would not be cut off from their elders’ example. Smoking, conversation, and billiards, however, all gave older men an opportunity to enjoy the company of their peers in peace. As in bourgeois cercles, men in the Mulhousien Cercle could initiate their sons into manly forms of leisure but also withdraw into a comfortably adult world without children. Naturally the Mulhousien Cercle excluded politics from the list of activities open to workers. Workers needed to learn how to recognize the limitations of politics and the damage caused by faction. Industrial Society reformers believed that discordant class politics were all too available to French workers whose only contact with their employers was adversarial. Sociability, in the form of the cercle populaire, would create opportunities for a constructive mingling of classes and teach workers that tactfully ignoring political and economic difference was more beneficial than cultivating it. Supporters of Jules Siegfried’s movement to create worker cercles were particularly critical of similar efforts of the nascent Social Catholic movement. Encouraging workers to see themselves as part of a faction—whether religious, political, or both—was no way to instil the spirit of emulation. In the Mulhousien Cercle, by contrast, wise employers would not ‘isolate the working class and . . . leave it exposed, in its credulity, to become the easy prey of bad newspapers that sow discord between classes and of unscrupulous politicians’. Rubbing shoulders with bourgeois men in a cercle populaire, the worker ‘recogniz[ed] that his advantage [lay] in remaining the collaborator, the friend of his boss, rather than setting up as his adversary, . . . as if the happiness of the subordinate could only derive from the diminishment of his 117

J. Siegfried, ‘Des Cercles d’ouvriers’, –.

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employer’.118 When workers practised bourgeois leisure pursuits, investment in the Mulhousien Cercle would produce high dividends in social harmony: ‘How many strikes and difficulties between employers and workers could have been avoided if there had been . . . by means of the conversations and discussions that take place naturally in a club, a greater understanding of the ideas and needs of both sides’.119 The Mulhousien Cercle was a tantalizing experiment whose results are impossible to assess. The completion of the building coincided with the Franco-Prussian War, and it immediately became an ambulance station. It reopened after the war as a cercle populaire but was dissolved in  by the German authorities. At this point it becomes impossible to tell what Mulhousiens really thought about their cercle because any Alsatian institution attacked by the Germans was above criticism. When it closed, the cercle had nine constituent associations and over , members. These men emulated bourgeois associative leisure under the close supervision of the Industrial Society.120 There is no way to know how—or if— these men resolved the tension between the bourgeois model of an autonomous sociability of adult men and the patronage and surveillance of the Mulhousien Cercle. The patterns of behaviour that bourgeois Frenchmen recommended for worker emulation were premised upon the ability of the bourgeois man to regulate his own conduct. Because the bourgeois man was instinctively emulative, he recognized the value of education, the need for thrift, and the proper forms of leisure without being prompted. Personal probity and concern for the public good naturally informed his activities, so that bourgeois leisure required no supervision. Bourgeois patronage of worker association, however, was based on very different assumptions. Sponsors of popular associations expected workers to assume every bourgeois value except independence. This last quality they supposed to be either undesirable or beyond worker capabilities. Bourgeois assumptions about the inherent dependence of labouring men ran into direct conflict with notions of masculine autonomy within the working class. As scholars of working-class masculinity have demonstrated, independence was a fundamental element of proletarian manliness. Working-class independence, however, relied on skill, strength, craft, and a family wage rather than on expertise, self-employment, G. Favre in Exposition universelle, . J. Siegfried, ‘Des Cercles d’ouvriers’, . 120 See the description of cercle administration in Penot, ‘Rapport sur le Cercle mulhousien’. 118 119

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science, and financial provision for the future.121 Working-class men were no more willing to accommodate tutelage and surveillance in their sociability than their bourgeois counterparts. They refused to abandon sociability in their mutual aid associations and they opted for entertainment over improvement in the Mulhousien Cercle. The relation between worker participants and bourgeois patrons in educational projects was more harmonious than in mutual aid societies because, at least on the surface, both groups pursued the same ends: instruction and social mobility. Their ideas of mobility, however, differed dramatically. For all of their rhetoric of inclusiveness, bourgeois patrons did not see adult education classes as centres of recruitment to the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois schemes to improve the working classes abandoned emulation’s wealth of meanings and reduced emulation to simple mimicry. Bourgeois patrons did not ask workers to observe, evaluate, and improve upon bourgeois associative practices. At most, the worker merely imitated bourgeois models. Alternatively, the worker could be passively shaped according to bourgeois moulds. The fundamental assumption of patronage was ‘that if it is good to transform material with steam power, it is better still to form man through the power of education’.122 Bourgeois men could invent themselves through the practice of emulation, but labouring men needed to be shaped by patronage and the regular imitation of a bourgeois model. 121 Research on working-class masculinities is primarily Anglo-American. See essays by Ava Baron, Mary H. Blewett, and Nancy A. Hewitt in Baron (ed.), Engendering Work: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, ); Baron, ‘Questions of Gender: Deskilling and Demasculinization in the U.S. Printing Industry, –’, Gender and History,  (), –; Keith McClelland, ‘Masculinity and the Representative Artisan in Britain’, in Roper and Tosh (eds.), Manful Assertions, –; and Wally Seccombe, ‘Patriarchy Stabilized: the Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Social History,  (), –. 122 C. Thierry-Mieg, article on zoos in L’Industriel alsacien,  Dec. .

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Not even the most optimistic emulator could convince himself that all of his fellow citizens were ready to adopt the spirit of association. In bourgeois dealings with the poor, some form of charity had to precede emulation. Charity, however, proved to be even more problematic than the patronage of worker association. Charitable men discovered that the poor were no more amenable than workers to accepting bourgeois notions of work and family. More seriously, charity proved to contain a complex set of issues with the potential to shake bourgeois unity. Bourgeois Frenchmen agreed that their roles as community leaders obligated them to act as patrons of the poor. The purpose of bourgeois charity—whether municipal improvement, personal salvation, or moralization of the poor— remained in debate, however. Male charitable associations never achieved a class-based consensus on the aims of benevolence. Bourgeois Frenchmen could not afford simply to write the poor out of their emulative projects. Publicly visible misery and begging were symptoms of an ill-managed town and of a bourgeoisie with no sense of civic duty. If emulation were to live up to its promise of bourgeois hegemony, bourgeois example and influence had to extend into the lives of the poorest citizens. Moreover, bourgeois contact with the indigent had to remain in the realm of private initiative—of charity. State-sponsored welfare, particularly if it originated in Paris, would not serve bourgeois interests at all. If the state could provide for the provincial poor more adequately than local notables, assertions of a uniquely bourgeois capability for leadership would ring hollow.1 1 Paul Weindling, ‘The Modernization of Charity in Nineteenth-Century France and Germany’, in Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones (eds.), Medicine and Charity Before the Welfare State (London, ), – observes that private charitable initiatives multiplied simultaneously with the development of state welfare programmes. The nineteenth-century French state was notably reluctant to challenge private charitable provision with any centralized welfare system. The possibility of public welfare had, however, been raised, albeit to little effect, during the Revolution. See Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, –s (New York, ), –.

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General acknowledgement that charity was a bourgeois responsibility did not lead to agreement about how or why the bourgeois citizen ought to be beneficent. Bourgeois charity fractured into two main schools of thought. The first proposed to raise charity to the status of science, while the second sought to maintain charity as an element of a religious community. Associations for the practice of ‘scientific charity’ attempted to centralize all municipal poor relief in the interests of efficiency and, ultimately, of eliminating all future need for charity.2 Scientific charity was a class-based project: it assumed that charity was an exchange between the bourgeois, who represented the municipal interest, and poor individuals, who had no collective identity. Not all bourgeois Frenchmen, however, accepted the secular logic of scientific charity. Many Frenchmen continued to view charity as a religious imperative, as an exchange that cemented bonds of faith between donor and recipient. Associations practising religious charity saw themselves as representing communities of the faithful rather than class or municipal interests. The feminine connotations that charity acquired in the nineteenth century complicated its incorporation into the masculine ideals of emulation. The practice of charity was a recommended female activity; indeed, scholarly investigations of Frenchwomen identify charity as a crucial element in the creation of a sense of female agency and extra-familial responsibility.3 The mother-and-child couple, blameless victims of a corrupt society, emerged as the most suitable objects of charity.4 Elite women simultaneously featured as the most natural donors of charity, 2 Private secular poor relief originated in the Enlightenment, organizing itself around the concept of bienfaisance (rather than the religious associations of charité). See Catherine Duprat, ‘Pour l’amour de l’humanité’ Le temps des philanthropes. La philanthropie parisienne des Lumières à la monarchie de Juillet, i (Paris, ), and Colin Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region, – (Cambridge, ), –. 3 Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, ), Hazel Mills, ‘Negotiating the Divide: Women, Philanthropy, and the “Public Sphere” in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Frank Tallet and Nicholas Atkin (eds.), Religion, Society, and Politics in France since  (London, ), – and Mills, ‘Saintes soeurs and femmes fortes: Alternative accounts of the route to womanly civic virtue and the history of French feminism’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and France, – (Manchester, ), –. Charity and female agency have been linked in other contexts as well. On England, see F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, ) and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, – (London, ), –. On the US, see Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the NineteenthCentury United States (New Haven, ). 4 Stuart J. Woolf, ‘The Société de charité maternelle, –’, in Barry and Jones (eds.), Medicine and Charity, –.

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particularly as the French Catholic Church developed ‘a language by which the non-virginal, yet virtuous woman could be described’.5 Inherent female beneficence was an important component of that language. Bourgeois Frenchwomen and the Church collaborated in the creation of charitable confraternities in which women could transmit domestic virtue and Catholic piety to the homes of the poor.6 Recent scholarship on religion in modern France has seized on gender dichotomy and projected it on to religious and charitable practice. Thus female and male correspond to pious and secular as well as to charitable and hard-hearted. While men expected their secular worlds of state and market to function in rational ways, women continued to govern their domestic sphere according to the dictates of faith and in the expectation of the supernatural.7 Because women were the pious sex, they were also the charitable sex. Consequently, historians find the charity of bourgeois men automatically suspect, its agenda assumed to be that of social control, enforcing deference, teaching docility.8 When men practised charity, historians assert, they did so in a liberal and individualistic spirit, ‘as dissociated from other men’s efforts as factory enterprise itself’.9 The moral universe of the French bourgeois was, in fact, more complicated than such simple dichotomies suggest. The religious conflict that increasingly defined modern French society did not draw its lines in purely gendered terms: both men and women participated on each side.10 Both tendencies within male bourgeois charity—scientific and Mills, ‘Negotiating the Divide’, . Ibid. –; Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class, –. 7 Ibid. –. The classic statement of the ‘feminization of religion’ in nineteenthcentury France is Claude Langlois, Le Catholicisme au féminin. Les congrégations française à supérieure générale au XIXe siècle (Paris, ). 8 See, for instance, Stuart J. Woolf, The Poor in Western Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London, ), – and Roger Price, ‘Poor Relief and Social Crisis in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France’, European Studies Review,  (), –. Catherine Duprat, ‘Le Temps des philanthropes: la philanthropie parisienne des Lumières à la monarchie de Juillet’ (thèse d’état, Paris I, ), pt. , esp. – cautions that bourgeois charity was not exclusively concerned with disciplinary strategies. For a useful critique of arguments that reduce bourgeois activity to social control, see Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Class Expression versus Social Control? A Critique of Recent Trends in the Social History of “Leisure”’, History Workshop,  (), –. 9 Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class, . 10 The ‘feminization of religion’ often appears in historical scholarship as an epiphenomenon of deChristianization—feminizing piety as a means of accounting for lingering religiosity in the post-Enlightenment world. Gérard Cholvy, ‘Sociologists, Historians and the Religious Evolution of France from the th Century to the Present’, Modern and Contemporary France,  (), – criticizes the portrayal of deChristianization as ‘a continuous, linear and irreversible process’ (). James F. McMillan, ‘Religion and Gender in Modern France: Some Reflections’, in Tallet and Atkin (eds.), Religion, Society, and 5 6

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religious—sought to establish beneficence as a manly quality. Bourgeois men did indeed practice charity because it contributed to their consolidation of class identity and to their claims to local leadership. Such calculations were not, however, the only motivations for benevolence. An integral part of bourgeois identity was a moral code, often with explicitly religious origins, that required men to provide for the less fortunate. Men’s charity originating in the public sphere, whether religious or secular in inspiration, had to distinguish itself from feminine charity, with its claim that the home was the only source of moral purity. Both scientific and religious charitable activities used the voluntary association—the standard institution of male cooperation—as a means of ‘masculinizing’ charity. Scientific rhetoric and practice, especially the compilation of social welfare statistics, emphasized ties between charity and male competence in secular associations.11 Men who joined religious charitable associations limited the participation of members of the clergy who usually directed women’s charity. The charity of autonomous, believing men thus distinguished itself from the female charity of obedience to religious dogma and authority.12 Ultimately, charity created more confusion than bourgeois consensus. With the practice of charity, religious differences crept into the public sphere. Charitable bourgeois could neither ignore religious belief nor relegate it to the private world of conscience. Even among those men who agreed to displace sectarian differences from their charity, disputes arose over exactly what constituted ‘science’ in poor relief. The rhetoric of efficiency could not conceal that the aims of scientific charity were not exclusively rational. The charitable imperative that all bourgeois Frenchmen recognized in fact pulled them in a variety of different directions.

Politics, – is an excellent critique of the conflation of men with secularization. Paul Seeley investigates the meanings of nineteenth-century Catholic manhood in ‘Catholics and Apprentices: An Example of Men’s Philanthropy in Late Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of Social History,  (), – and ‘Virile Pursuits: Youth, Religion, and Bourgeois Family Politics in Lyon on the Eve of the French Third Republic’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, ). Martine Segalen, Les Confréries dans la France contemporaine (Paris, ) offers evidence of the continuing vitality of Catholic piety among rural notables. 11 See Duprat, ‘Le Temps des philanthropes’, –. 12 On female charity as an act of self-sacrificing obedience, see Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class, .

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S C In towns all over France, bourgeois citizens established centralized organizations, usually known as General Associations for Aid and Patronage, to direct charitable distributions. These associations, in which members of different religious communities met on equal terms to coordinate a bourgeois project of aid to the poor, adhered closely to the rhetoric of emulation. Organizers of Besançon’s General Association boasted that among all countries, France distinguishes itself by its tender solicitude for the unhappy. . . . Public commotions have several times appeared to extinguish this sacred flame; but it survived beneath the ashes, and, as soon as better days put an end to egotism . . . sentiment in favour of the needs of the poor reanimated, . . . dissolved associations [were succeeded] by equally dedicated associations . . . and in the generous conjunction [concours] of hearts working towards a single goal, every misery finds the aid best suited to its needs.13

Charity, like other realms of bourgeois endeavour, suffered when egotism put political considerations ahead of municipal interest. Emulation—the collaboration and competition both implied by concours—represented the best guarantee both of bourgeois interests and of the well-being of their fellow citizens. General Associations for Aid and Patronage, founded in Besançon in  and in Lons le Saunier in 14 represented a conception of charity that was essentially, although never explicitly, secular. Local centralization, a commitment to ‘efficient’ charitable giving, and the inclusion of representatives of all religious faiths characterized the General Associations. Theirs was an essentially secular goal that had nothing to do with faith or salvation. General Associations were not, however, solely dedicated to rational economic measures to eliminate poverty. Their charitable aid sought to rearrange the local poor according to the model of the affectionate and autonomous bourgeois family. The ultimate aim was to improve the municipal community by eliminating the most visible forms of poverty through the moralization of the poor. 13 Secretary’s report, Association générale de secours et patronage (hereafter Secours et patronage), compte rendu de  décembre . BMB has the complete run of annual reports, which constitute the major source of information on membership and finances of the Bisontin organization. 14 La Sentinelle du Jura, ,  Jan. . The Lédonien association modelled its statutes upon those of the Bisontin society. The Sentinelle published the annual report of the General Association every January.

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Mulhousiens never developed a General Association: private charity in Mulhouse retained sectarian ties. The religious transformation of nineteenth-century Mulhouse, which began with the admission of Catholics and Jews and culminated with the establishment of a Catholic majority, made religion a particularly contested feature of local life. Although Mulhousien notables crossed religious boundaries in other associative contexts, they accepted that charity would remain within religious communities. The goal of municipal improvement resonated in Mulhousien charitable activities, but always in a sectarian framework. The fundamental premise of General Associations was that private citizens acting with government encouragement could provide poor relief more effectively than state programmes. The best defence of the public interest, they maintained, lay in private bourgeois associations. In both Besançon and Lons, General Associations responded to what they perceived as the failures of the municipally operated bureaux de bienfaisance.15 Condemning bureaucratic charity, bourgeois notables invited all of their neighbours to join a charity of citizenship. General Associations set no minimum subscription, welcoming all those wishing to participate in the ‘progressive improvement of our beautiful city’.16 Most contributions were made in the annual door-to-door collection, which was the General Associations’ main fund-raising activity. Individuals subscribed to the associations during these annual drives, and in Besançon their names appeared in the published subscription lists. These lists included women as well as men, and the generous donation of the rich as well as the widow’s mite. The practice of subscription, the publication of lists, and the distribution of annual reports all gave the General Association the appearance of a voluntary association. Contributors to the work of the General Associations, however, were hardly active participants. ‘Membership’ was essentially fictional, a device whereby all of the inhabitants of a town could associate themselves with a bourgeois project. The nucleus of the General Association was a board of directors of bourgeois men who, with the symbolic and financial support of all classes of their fellow citizens, distributed aid and patronage. The notables who ran the association invited a variety of local officials to serve in an honorary capacity on the boards: direction of the association was supposed to reflect all local sources of authority and all religious denominations. In Besançon, the archbishop, the six parish priests, the 15 In Besançon, see the president’s speech in Secours et patronage, compte rendu de . In Lons, see report in La Sentinelle du Jura,  Jan. and  Feb. . 16 Secretary’s report, Secours et patronage, compte rendu de .

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pastor, and a Jewish notable were all ex-officio board members. The association in Lons, which had no significant minority religious communities, included local priests and balanced Catholic influence with that of secular authorities. The presence of the prefect, the mayor, and other municipal authorities in both towns linked the work of the association to the public interest. Elite boards of directors combined with long membership lists reaching deep into local society identified General Associations with the public good, and tied this centralized form of bourgeois charity to the secular cause of municipal improvement. To their secular motives for charitable giving, General Associations added scientific means. These organizations believed that they were pioneering a new method of poor relief, which they described as ‘scientific charity’. Just as the rhetoric of science could transform ambiguous leisure activities into manly, bourgeois pursuits, it could also wrest charity from its sectarian and feminine associations. Making poor relief into a science effectively declared that the charity of bourgeois men was different from, and superior to, alms-giving practices of past generations and of women. Alone among their fellow citizens, bourgeois men recognized that poverty in the nineteenth century was no longer what it had once been: in place of transitory need, these men saw chronic pauperism. New and modern types of poverty necessitated new forms of charity.17 Scientific charity, whose hallmarks were efficiency and rationality, joined the ranks of responsible, manly, and emulative pursuits. The first principle of scientific charity was that the multiplication of aid served only to increase need: pauperism fed on inefficient and dispersed charitable provision. Leaders of General Associations never ceased to point out that ‘with such numerous means of assistance, pauperism ought to be completely banished from the city, and yet there are justified complaints . . . about the growing number of beggars of all ages, of all countries, of doubtful morality, who lay siege to shops and the inside of homes.’18 The charitable individual who created a new association or, worst of all, spontaneously offered alms to beggars was merely deluding himself (or, more likely, herself). Such actions might satisfy the individual conscience, but ultimately they did a grave disservice to the citizenry as a whole by encouraging the invasion of beggars. Poor relief, bourgeois men argued, required rational consideration of consequences, 17 Henri Hatzfeld, Du Paupérisme à la sécurité sociale: essai sur les origines de la sécurité sociale en France, – (Paris, ), –. 18 Secretary’s report, Secours et patronage, compte rendu du  décembre .

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not merely a generous and overflowing heart. The charitable impulse needed discipline. If multiple sources of aid caused poverty to expand, then centralization was the obvious response. General Associations aimed at being the vehicles of this municipal efficiency either by subsuming smaller associations or by coordinating their efforts. Naturally, centralization was not to proceed beyond the municipal level, but within a single town, directors of General Associations perceived consolidation to be in the best interests both of the poor and of bourgeois leadership. Ideally, a single general association would answer all charitable needs within one town. Smaller societies, especially church-identified groups, were, however, unwilling to abandon their role in provision for the poor. Thus General Association organizers treated rival associations as emulative collaborators in the grand project of municipal improvement: ‘Charitable competition can only be advantageous: rivalry is sometimes destructive in the works of men, but in the works of God, it is a principle of fecundity’.19 The General Association could attack individual charity—the alms-giver’s thoughtless encouragement of begging—without hesitation. Charity that selfishly pandered to the donor’s feelings without considering the best interest of the municipality or the long-term moral welfare of the recipient had no place in bourgeois projects. The first activity of both Bisontin and Lédonien General Associations was the compilation of a list of all local recipients of charity.20 The list, regularly updated, included careful accounts of what each individual had received from which source as well as remarks on moral character. In Besançon the list was kept at the prefecture so that charity volunteers could verify a family’s status as ‘deserving’ as well as how much aid a family received from other associations. Smaller charitable societies, anxious to avoid the accusation of contributing to pauperism, collaborated in maintaining the lists. A centralized list minimized the deception that disorganized charity encouraged: unscrupulous shysters could no longer take advantage of bourgeois goodwill by drawing aid from multiple sources. Consulting the municipal list before granting aid, charitable societies and individuals would discipline their naturally generous sentiments and place reason before emotion. As a consequence, their charity, although dispersed among a variety of associations, would none the less come to resemble a ‘science of the heart’.21 19 20 21

Secours et patronage, compte rendu de . The first such Bisontin list, dated  Mar. , is in ACB Q . Secretary’s report, Secours et patronage, compte rendu du  novembre .

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Poor relief lists were not merely a punitive device aimed at shameless tricksters. By compiling a list—a sort of statistique of local misery— bourgeois donors also ensured that they overlooked no one in genuine need. Nothing could be more damaging, bourgeois men asserted, than ‘aid distributed by chance and to the toughest’.22 Addressing every variety of need—at least among the deserving—best served the causes of efficiency and the promotion of bourgeois competence. Indeed, the toughest among the poor, who would come out ahead in any unsystematic provision of relief, were most likely those whose need arose from laziness. Individuals who would be trampled in the free-for-all of anarchic charity—children, the elderly, and the pauvres honteux, those individuals shamed by their poverty—were more likely to be deserving. These meritorious cases, especially children, were crucial to the General Associations’ project of eliminating all need for charity in the next generation. Aid to children was charity at its most scientific because such programmes were the cornerstone of long-term strategies to rid towns of disfiguring misery. Patronage programmes set children on the morally correct and financially remunerative path—much as bourgeois men did for their own children.23 General Associations placed the youngest children in salles d’asile and provided hot soup and bread coupons. School-age children received decent clothing to allow them to attend class without shame. Parents who preferred to send their children to work rather than to school found themselves classed among the undeserving and hence cut off from charitable aid.24 Older children learned a trade, apprenticed either to individual craftsmen or to bourgeois-sponsored charitable workshops. General Associations supported these youths, sometimes with their families, for the duration of their apprenticeships.25 Poor children received training in morals as well as in a craft: good conduct and marketable skills were equally important in the formation of future productive citizens. Sunday gatherings, which divided apprentices by denomination for religious instruction, were as important as their weekday lessons in economic independence. For poor Bisontin boys, Sunday gatherings were also an occasion to meet their patrons. Each boy Secours et patronage, compte rendu du  décembre . On the significance of patronage, see Duprat, ‘Le Temps des philanthropes’, pt. , ch.  and Lee Shai Weissbach, ‘“Oeuvre industrielle, oeuvre morale”: The Sociétés de Patronage of Nineteenth-Century France’, French Historical Studies,  (), –. 24 Poor Lédonien parents also had to send their children to catechism. La Sentinelle du Jura,  Jan. . 25 Ibid.  Jan. . 22 23

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was assigned to a member of the General Association so that the emulative relationship between the poor child and the bourgeois adult was personal and direct. Patrons of apprentice boys whose conduct was particularly good offered their protégés savings accounts with small deposits in order to ‘stimulate the emulation of these young men’.26 Directors of the Lédonien General Association suggested that bourgeois patrons amplify the effects of emulation by bringing their own sons to see poor boys at work.27 After children, the elderly were General Associations’ favourite recipients of charity because they did not provoke bourgeois worries about contributing to the laziness of the able-bodied. In offering aid to the elderly, bourgeois men rejected institutional or indoor relief: the aim of charity was to keep grandparents at home, cared for by their families. Bourgeois donors were far more willing to supply aid to households that supported their elders than to younger and healthier nuclear families. The image of families in which the generations met and cared for one another, while not realized in bourgeois households, was none the less one that bourgeois men liked to evoke in their charity.28 Only the infirm who had no family to care for them belonged in hospices or convents. Such institutional care often posed the disadvantage of housing the innocent elderly with convicts.29 Separating the elderly indigent from the criminal was a major achievement of bourgeois associations in Mulhouse and Besançon.30 In this charity reserved for the destitute but deserving elderly, bourgeois citizens could sentimentalize the terrifying combination of age and misery. By providing for ‘workers . . . whose hair has whitened in our factories’, bourgeois citizens could assure themselves that families in the modern world remained both safe and sacred.31 Children and grandparents were the non-problematic members of the 26 Secours et patronage, compte rendu du  janvier . Well-behaved Lédonien apprentices received a new suit of clothes for their first communion. 27 La Sentinelle du Jura,  Jan.  and  Jan. . 28 On the idealization of the multi-generational family, see John R. Gillis, A World of their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (New York, ). 29 The two categories overlapped, however, because most bourgeois agreed that incarceration of the able-bodied destitute was appropriate. Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance, –. 30 The Bisontin General Association housed the elderly in a refuge operated by the Sisters of the Poor. Secours et patronage, comptes rendus de , du  janvier . On the Mulhousien retirement hospice constructed by the Society for the Encouragement of Savings, see above, Ch. . 31 Jan.  report on the Society for the Encouragement of Savings. ADHR  X . See Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, Robert Hurley (trans.) (New York, ),  on the tendency to evaluate family life as a measure of general social health.

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indigent population, easily assimilated into bourgeois notions of family and charity. The dependence of the very young and the very old was the foundation of bourgeois notions of family life: that they should depend on bourgeois charity rather than on the breadwinning capacity of fathers and sons was touching and pitiful but not a real threat to social order. However, by preserving families and maintaining poor children and grandparents at home, General Associations were inevitably supporting some healthy adults as well. This middle generation of mature adults posed a genuine dilemma for General Associations. Giving charity to men who ought to have been their families’ providers, bourgeois donors felt that they were, at best, upsetting familial order and, at worst, being duped. Keeping families together—‘children with their mothers and old folk with their children’—was both a matter of considerable pride and an issue of great concern.32 Scientific charity aspired to support the poor family without destroying the independence of the breadwinner and the housewife. First, General Associations eliminated money from the charitable exchange. Few bourgeois groups gave money directly to the poor; cash was too easily misused, and charity was to be rigorously distinguished from wages. Charity was always conducted in kind and in coupons. General Associations printed their own coupons and ran an elaborate commercial operation: charitable bourgeois citizens exchanged cash for coupons, which they distributed either in the course of charitable visits or spontaneously to street beggars.33 Coupons in hand, the generous bourgeois(e) could follow his or her compassionate instincts without rewarding beggars with easily abused cash. The poor returned the coupons to the General Association and exchanged them for firewood, food, clothing, and medicine. Coupons were also redeemable in soup kitchens although in Besançon the kitchen offered only a take-away service—more conducive, local bourgeois believed, to a satisfactory home life.34 The charitable economy in French towns mimicked the market, with goods available only for exchange and never for free. Poor men and women who collected coupons, did their shopping, and brought home provisions imitated the actions of gainfully employed breadwinners and housewives. Charity was the means by which the poor could be refashioned in the image of the bourgeois family. Prefect’s speech, Secours et patronage, compte rendu du  janvier . See, for instance, the discussion of coupons in La Sentinelle du Jura,  Jan. . 34 Secours et patronage, compte rendu du  novembre . Fritz Redlich, ‘Science and Charity: Count Rumford and his Followers’, International Review of Social History,  (), – discusses the ‘science’ of composing economic soups, which combined maximum nutrition with minimum expense. 32 33

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The most important aspect of the market that General Associations hoped to inject into the lives of the poor was work. Scientific charity aspired to transform aid into something resembling an honest wage. Sewing and knitting, either at home or in charity workshops, were the preferred tasks for poor women. Textile work performed in homes or in workshops that distantly resembled bourgeois sewing circles made women into self-respecting workers without destroying their identities as housewives. Men who were incapable of providing for their families in any other way might also be set to these traditionally female tasks. Leading charitable donors in all three towns lobbied the prefect and other authorities to buy clothing and linens for prisons and hospitals from charitable workshops. In all three towns, shirts, sheets, and petticoats stacked up for want of a buyer, and their sale never covered the cost of labour and materials. Justifying programme deficits was a constant concern of General Association organizers. In economic terms, sewing programmes were a heavy drain on charitable resources. Distributing materials, supervising production, policing the workers, collecting and disposing of finished goods were far more time-consuming—and only marginally cheaper— than simply contracting with a local religious order to provide free food.35 Sewing programmes brought little tangible reward but, as members reminded themselves, ‘we must not reason here like speculators.’36 Charity was not a business, and wages for labour encouraged self-respect, which was more important than profit. General Associations were torn between a desire for scientific, rational, and profitable management and a sense that charity ought to obey a logic different from that of the market. Domestic work programmes always struggled with deficits that made no business sense at all but that reminded organizers that their endeavour was, after all, charitable. In  the General Association in Besançon hit upon a work scheme that both paid for itself and emphasized the importance of the association to the proper functioning of the town. The association recruited the ablebodied poor, mostly men, to sweep streets and clear away snow. Street cleaning provided poor men with manly labour and rescued them from the humiliating gender ambiguities of textile work. The programme began with a municipal contract to keep the streets in front of public buildings clear and in its second year was extended to private subscribers 35 See, for instance, the secretary’s report in Secours et patronage, compte rendu de , which details the effort of administering and policing a putting-out system. 36 Ibid. Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance, .

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as well. Every annual meeting of the General Association listened to a meticulous statistical accounting of bodies put to work, wages paid, and streets cleared: charitable progress carefully measured in centimes and square metres.37 The street-sweeping programme never made much profit for the General Association, but it was not supposed to be lucrative. Street sweeping was sufficiently prosperous for the association to contract out its management, and this extra expense usually pushed the programme about  francs into the red each year (sewing programmes, by comparison, ran deficits of several thousand francs). Such a financial arrangement suited Bisontin philanthropists perfectly: contract management ran the program and made few demands upon the time of bourgeois sponsors. Street sweeping made no profit and was therefore not a business: no one could doubt that the association’s motives were charitable rather than speculative. The deficit, however, remained small enough not to outrage the business acumen and common sense of its patrons. Street sweeping lost enough to be charitable, but not so much that it became a pit into which the impulsively soft-hearted might throw their money. Most importantly, the association mobilized paupers to provide an important municipal service: government offices and an increasing number of private citizens relied on the General Association to keep their front steps tidy. Besançon was a visibly finer city—with cleaner streets and fewer beggars—because of the association’s dedication. The last and most intractable group among the needy—beggars—were an obsession of General Associations. The suspicion that able-bodied individuals might irrationally prefer mendicity to work nagged at the practitioners of scientific charity.38 The ‘extirpation of mendicity’ was the first priority of the Bisontin association.39 Before the close of its first year, the association convinced local authorities to criminalize public begging.40 In  directors of the association lobbied the municipal council to erect signs announcing the repression of begging at all entries to Besançon.41 These signs served both as a warning to beggars and as a monument to bourgeois resolve. Because the General Association ‘had embraced human life in each of its stages, in all its vicissitudes’, no Bisontin had any Secours et patronage, compte rendu du  décembre . Woloch, The New Regime, –; Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance, –; and Redlich, –. 39 Secours et patronage, compte rendu de . 40 Prefect to mayor,  Dec. . ACB Q . In  the prefect of the Doubs outlawed begging in the entire department. Secours et patronage, compte rendu de . 41  May . ACB Q . 37 38

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excuse to beg. Scientific charity’s compulsive interest in beggars derived from the belief that begging was ‘less . . . the expression of a social need, than the perpetuation of an abuse that results from the progressive weakening of the moral sense of the masses’.43 Mendicity was a moral, rather than an economic, problem. Its practitioners rejected the solutions of work and family that bourgeois philanthropists offered to the ills of pauperism. The bourgeois of Besançon were by no means unique in their enthusiasm for eliminating all forms of public begging. Lons and Mulhouse also criminalized begging by . In both cases, bourgeois philanthropists argued that anti-mendicity measures caused no hardship because local charity responded to all forms of need with scientific thoroughness. Mulhouse, where the poorer class of society was overwhelmingly of immigrant origin, removed the beggar’s last excuse in  by opening a hostel for destitute travellers.44 Begging remained legal in Lons le Saunier until , when the municipality opened a dépôt de mendicité for the incarceration of unrepentant beggars. With the dépôt, Lédonien bourgeois entered the world of scientific charity: leaving behind the Middle Ages which ‘honoured begging and thus contributed to its multiplication’, Lons progressed to ‘modern society, [which] on the contrary, unceasingly makes the most praiseworthy attempts, not to extinguish it, which is impossible, but to restrain it’.45 The language of bourgeois charitable efforts was often harsh, uncompromising, and, to the contemporary reader, distinctly uncharitable. Not all organizers of municipal charities agreed that restraint of begging was the best they could hope for. Begging, viewed as a general phenomenon, might be impossible to eliminate, but bourgeois men were confident that, in the restricted field of their own towns, they could destroy it completely. ‘Extirpation’ and ‘repression’ were the goals of these bourgeois men; ‘incarceration’ a means that they did not hesitate to employ. They spoke of ‘purging’ the streets of beggars and of ‘surveillance’ executed by a ‘superintendent of the poor’. Efficiency, centralization, and economies of scale were the major concerns of General Associations. The poor 42

Secours et patronage, compte rendu de . Ibid., compte rendu du  janvier . 44 Histoire documentaire de l’industrie de Mulhouse et de ses environs au XIXe siècle. (Enquête centennale) ( vols.; Mulhouse, ), ii. . Poor travellers received one night’s lodging and a coupon for food before being sent on their way. Repression of begging in Mulhouse was primarily the concern of the town’s largest association, the Institut des Pauvres, which maintained ties to the Protestant consistory. 45 La Sentinelle du Jura,  Apr. . 42 43

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appeared principally as figures in a balance sheet, notable only for the metres of street they swept, the stockings they knitted, or the number of times they appeared before the magistrate for begging. For the bourgeois who identified the interests of the town with their own, beggars were a blot on the landscape. Because General Associations served the municipal community, they gave priority to dealing with beggars who exacted ‘a shameful tax on public credulity’.46 Beggars imposed on the citizens that General Associations represented, and they publicly rejected the values of hard work and thrift that bourgeois associations impressed upon the community. Poor people working as street sweepers or deferentially accepting charity offered no such affront to the bourgeois representatives of the municipal interest. Recipients of charitable patronage or inhabitants of institutions were implicated, however unwillingly, in bourgeois conceptions of the local order. Beggars, however, rejected bourgeois control of poverty and refused to emulate bourgeois norms by participating in the General Associations’ charitable economy. The campaign against begging and the impersonal treatment of the poor do indeed appear to lend support to arguments about the essentially self-interested motives of bourgeois men’s charity. In the practice of scientific charity, poor men and women featured principally as components of a bourgeois statistique, with the particular circumstances of their need reduced to fit a simple pattern.47 Enforcing deference and controlling the poor were never the only purposes of General Associations’ charity, however. Invoking science imposed rational bourgeois order on urban poverty in order to defuse its threat of social unrest. Equally important, science clarified the gender ambiguities of charity and returned poor relief to the direction of bourgeois men. C   F For all its importance, science never enjoyed a monopoly as an organizing principle of male charity in the nineteenth century. Scientific charity has attracted historians’ attention because it represented innovation and a Secours et patronage, compte rendu du  janvier . Considering charity from the recipients’ point of view, Peter Mandler notes that the poor had ‘to fit themselves into the positions required by the donors’ and that these positions had more to do with the donor’s ideology than with the recipient’s need. ‘Poverty and Charity in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis: An Introduction’, in Mandler (ed.), The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia, ), . 46 47

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modern solution to the dilemma of pauperism. None the less, a more traditional rhetoric of charity whose reference points were salvation and the community of the faithful persisted. Voluntary association was also the form that bourgeois men adopted for the practice of customary religious models of charitable giving. Sceptical of scientific charity’s claims that citizen action could eliminate poverty, these men fully expected the poor to remain always among them. They practised charity because they recognized the destitute as fellow members of their religious communities, and because charity represented a step on the road to their own salvation. Although sectarian charities and General Associations overlapped both in their activities and their personnel, their purposes were fundamentally different. For the bourgeois of religious societies, charity was a personal and spiritual endeavour, not a programme for municipal improvement. Minority religious communities were particularly reluctant to submerge their charitable work into that of the centralizing municipal groups. They cooperated with General Associations, contributing, for example, to poor relief lists, but without abandoning their separate existence. Giving and receiving charity was a powerful means of maintaining confessional identities and community ties—a particular concern of religious minorities. Moreover, as the persistent, if unpredictable, exclusion of religious minorities from some elements of bourgeois sociability demonstrated, members of these communities could not necessarily rely on solidarities created by class and locality. When respectable Protestant Bisontins or Jewish Mulhousiens could be rejected by bourgeois associations, their poor co-religionists might well find themselves neglected by bourgeois charity. Jewish charity maintained a separate associative existence in Besançon and, especially, in Mulhouse.48 Mulhousien Jewish charitable initiative was closely connected to the local synagogue, and to its influential rabbi, Samuel Dreyfus. Like most of his followers, Dreyfus sympathized with the cause of Jewish assimilation, and he encouraged bourgeois charitable initiatives that integrated Jews further into Mulhousien society.49 48 Since , when the former free city of Mulhouse admitted Jews as residents, the Jewish community had grown by  to constitute  per cent of the population (about , individuals). On the integration of Jews in Mulhouse and Alsace more generally, see Paula Hyman, The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, ), ; Michael Burns, Dreyfus, A Family Affair, – (London, ), –; A. Neher, ‘La Bourgeoisie juive d’Alsace’, in La Bourgeoisie alsacienne (Strasbourg, ), –. 49 Hyman, .

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Although Dreyfus played a significant role in Jewish charitable efforts, he did not dominate them. The prosperous commercial and industrial men of Mulhouse’s Jewish community were no more inclined than their Calvinist counterparts to cede direction of their affairs to a religious leader. They recognized Dreyfus’s expertise in charitable matters, but by no means considered themselves incompetent. As employers and leading citizens of Mulhouse, they too could claim an understanding of poverty. Familiar with the bourgeois spirit of association, Dreyfus acted as one among equals, and he and his peers of the Jewish community pursued assimilation while maintaining the principle that a religious community must look after its own. These twin goals—assimilation and the maintenance of community— defined the impressive institutional forms of Jewish charity in Mulhouse. The Israelite School for the Arts and Crafts (opened in ) and the Israelite Hospital () represented these aims. The school, in particular, was outspokenly assimilationist; it proposed to train poor Jewish boys in ‘productive’ professions so as to encourage them to abandon traditional moneylending.50 Graduates of the school would be the mechanics and colourists whose talents would make possible their assimilation to the industrial elite. The Israelite School was not filling an empty niche; Mulhouse had other schools to train managers and technicians, many of which offered scholarships to needy pupils. Although these schools had been founded by the mostly Protestant industrial elite, they were resolutely lay and included Jewish boys among their pupils.51 Like the school, the Israelite Hospital represented duplication of effort in Mulhouse. At the end of productive, assimilated lives, elderly Mulhousien Jews could turn to the religious community for medical care and support.52 That Mulhouse’s Jewish community both provided for its own and sought integration with the larger communities of industry or municipality was not at all contradictory. As bourgeois citizens, Jews in both Mulhouse and Besançon participated in municipal poor relief efforts. As members of the Jewish faith, they simultaneously created a charitable Ibid. . See, for instance, the membership list of the alumni association of the Ecole des sciences appliquées (ADHR D /) which includes young men from the Bernheim, Dreyfus, and Wallach families. Alfred Dreyfus, later of the Affair, was a pupil at the Professional School in the s. See the membership list of the Société de gimnastique [sic] des élèves cadets in MHM  TT . 52 Inauguration of the hospice reported in pamphlets in the Bib. SIM, A  . ‘Etablissements de bienfaisance’ table dated  Jan. . The hospice had a budget of , francs, all from private sources, and it housed sixty patients. ADHR  X . 50 51

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safety-net for their co-religionists.53 In their religious charity, they reproduced the norms of bourgeois association, in particular by establishing separate associations for men and women.54 Jewish donors were as attracted to displaying their charitable impulse through imposing public buildings as any other bourgeois association. In creating a system of charitable exchange within the religious community, Jews reinforced a sense of their autonomy within the larger society. By adopting bourgeois norms in their charity, however, Jews also laid claim to a bourgeois status that was, at least theoretically, blind to religious difference. Behaving like charitable bourgeois within their community of faith, Jews demonstrated their suitability for inclusion in the local bourgeoisie. The status of Protestant minorities produced slightly different forms of confessional charity in Besançon and Mulhouse. In Besançon, relations between Protestants and the Catholic authorities were often overtly hostile, the result of a mixture of resentments most of which stemmed from the arrival of Swiss Protestant watchmakers in , although some local Catholics did not hesitate to trace them back to the Reformation.55 Mulhousien Protestants, once accustomed to running their town as a Calvinist republic, found themselves outnumbered by Catholics by the mid-nineteenth century. They none the less remained the dominant confession in terms of their wealth and influence, if not their numbers. Bourgeois members of both Protestant minorities, like their Jewish counterparts, felt an obligation to ensure their poorer co-religionists’ sustenance within the faith. The charity of Protestant men in both Mulhouse and Besançon overlapped with religious proselytism. Beginning in the s, notables joined Protestant Biblical Societies whose goal was to distribute Scripture as widely as possible. Although they were part of a Protestant network directed by the Parisian Biblical Society (founded ), each provincial group was autonomous and in no way dependent on consistory officials.56 53 A. Veil-Picard, Besançon’s leading Jewish philanthropist, made well-publicized annual donations of white bread which he specified were to feed the Christian poor; he made similar donations to the Jewish poor through confessional associations. L’Union franccomtoise,  Feb. . 54 See also Alexandre Estignard, Notice sur les établissements de charité et de bienfaisance de la ville de Besançon (Besançon, ), – who lists male and female Jewish (as well as Protestant and Catholic) charitable societies. 55 See, for instance, references to Protestantism in the statutes of the Confrérie des Saints Ferréol et Ferjeux () and the abbé Busson’s notes on its foundation, in GSB  R  and  R . 56 The French movement patterned itself after the British and Foreign Bible Society. See the brief history of the Bibelgesellschaft in Sigismond Billing’s speech to the Mulhouse society, reprinted in its  statutes, ADHR  M .

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According to Besançon’s pastor, the new society would ‘receive joyfully persons of every age, sex, and rank’, but minutes of meetings suggest that the society was run by the male Protestant elite.57 Emphasizing that membership was a spiritual call, directors of the Biblical Society rejected door-to-door collections because they did not want subscriptions made in order to save face in the neighbourhood.58 In spite of this reticence the Bisontin society attracted roughly  subscribers annually. The Mulhousien society, founded in , had a membership of over  according to its president’s  report.59 Although the Biblical Societies adhered to bourgeois norms in some ways, they frequently departed from the usual comprehension of the spirit of association. All-male membership and autonomous branch societies were typical of bourgeois association. The Mulhousien society’s ‘Bible museum’—a collection of Bibles with beautiful bindings or in exotic languages—was similarly in line with bourgeois interest in collecting and objects of scientific study.60 On the other hand, the Mulhousien Biblical Society chose to conduct its business in German.61 Most of the recipients of Biblical Society charity would have been German-speaking, but Mulhousien notables frequently pursued patronage programmes for the lower classes without abandoning French as the language of bourgeois management. Their Biblical Society, a denominational and only incidentally bourgeois organization, adopted the language of Protestantism rather than the language of Mulhouse’s bourgeois public sphere.62 Most seriously, the missionary impulse, in any language, was difficult to 57  Feb.  speech by Pastor Miroglio. AER  J . The dossier contains regular minutes from the society’s foundation in  through to . 58 Annual report,  Aug. . AER  J . 59 Jean Zuber to the mayor,  May . ADHR  M . 60 My thanks to Odile Jurbert, municipal archivist of Mulhouse, for information about the Bible museum. 61 See the statutes of the Bibelgesellschaft in ADHR  M  and the membership certificate ( Mar. ) in MHM  TT . Other Protestant associations also chose German; see the annual report of the Gesellschaft für die protestantische Sou-Collekte in Mulhaüsen (Mulhouse, ), pamphlet in the Alsatique collection of the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire in Strasbourg. 62 Gérard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, i, – (Toulouse, ), – note that Protestant Churches’ post-revolutionary dependence on pastors recruited from German-speaking regions strengthened the associations between Protestantism and German. Bisontin Protestants appear to have conceived of their society similarly as private and of no interest to the state. They agreed, for instance, that because they were a private and confessional association, Article  did not apply to them. Fortunately, since Article  contained no such exceptions, they decided to play it safe by asking the prefect for authorization.  Jan. . AER  J .

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reconcile with the goal of bourgeois consensus. Although the Biblical Societies gave scripture primarily to the Protestant poor, evangelical zeal left open the possibility that they might seek out converts within their own class. The minister of the Interior, concerned about religious ‘propaganda’, required the Mulhousiens to renounce all proselytizing.63 Religious sentiment had to avoid the public sphere. Active proselytism threatened the self-image of the male bourgeois for whom religion, restricted to the realms of home and conscience, did not impose on relationships with peers. Bibles were not the only aid distributed by charitable Protestants. Protestant associations also disbursed traditional forms of poor relief to members of the confessional community. Even when bestowing similar material aid, however, religious societies followed a different charitable logic from centralizing General Associations. According to Besançon’s pastor, the truly charitable man was not satisfied with being ‘able to tally up the figures representing the sum of alms distributed’ unless he was certain of ‘doing as much good as possible’ with those resources.64 The Bisontin Protestant Aid Society made the most of its funds by carefully directing charity to the specific needs of individuals. Poor congregants, particularly widows, received cash grants to enable them to return to Swiss home towns, and children received money to buy suitable clothing for confirmation or tools for watchmaking apprenticeships. Usually acting on the pastor’s knowledge of the needs and the moral probity of his flock, members of the Protestant Aid Society did not hesitate to offer loans and aid in cash to members of their community. Cash grants frequently outweighed sums spent in the distribution of bread and potatoes in the society’s budget.65 Besançon’s charitable Protestants did not aspire to statistical regularity or efficiency through scale. The practice of Catholic charity varied widely in eastern France because of structural differences among Catholic communities. In Lons, Catholics were the only significant religious group; in Besançon they were dominant; and in Mulhouse an influx of poor workers made Catholicism 63 Prefect to sub-prefect,  Oct., ; J. Mantz, president of the Biblical Society, to sub-prefect,  Jan. ; and prefect to sub-prefect,  Mar. . ADHR  Z . The authorities’ concern was not lessened by the Biblical Society’s forty-year record of unobtrusive activity. 64 ‘Rapport de la commission nommée par la consistoire de Besançon pour l’étude d’un projet de Diaconat’,  Feb. . AER  J . 65 Accounts for the society for the s and s in ‘Caisse de secours, registre des délibérations’, AER  J  and for the s and s in ‘Registre des délibérations de la société de secours protestant’, AER  J .

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the majority religion by , but wealth and influence remained Protestant. Across France, Catholic men’s charity enjoyed a minor nineteenth-century revival after the disruptions of the Revolution.66 In all three eastern towns, Catholic bourgeois participated in scientific charity like their peers of other faiths. They also created specifically Catholic charities in which the spiritual health of the donor was as much at stake as the material well-being of the recipient. Like Protestant or Jewish societies, these associations emphasized that piety was not an unmanly quality. They also maintained that lay men had an important and independent role to play in Catholic communities—a controversial position in the nineteenth-century French Church. The phenomenal success of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul suggests that the minds of European Catholic men were far from wholly secular.67 The first conférence of Saint Vincent de Paul was founded in Paris in  by Frédéric Ozanam and several young male friends, all students. Recognizing that religious faith had been deeply wounded by the Revolution, these young men proposed ministering to the poor as a means of rebuilding the faith of bourgeois youth like themselves. Ozanam’s idea resonated widely, and Saint Vincent de Paul Societies quickly emerged throughout Catholic Europe. By  there were five hundred chapters in France, and Saint Vincent de Paul had become an international organization.68 The deeply Catholic Franche Comté quickly adopted Ozanam’s example: Lons le Saunier’s society, founded by a young doctor, was active by . In  a Bisontin lawyer who had participated in the Parisian movement during his student days founded a branch in Besançon. By  there were four separate conférences in Besançon with a total membership of well over one hundred men. In typical bourgeois fashion, the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in Besançon reflected generational divisions: the Catholic collège had its own conférence where youthful Catholics emulated the example of more 66 The case for taking male Catholic piety seriously is best made by McMillan, ‘Religion and Gender in Modern France’. See also Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism (London, ), ; Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire religieuse, i. –, –; Seeley, ‘Virile Pursuits’; and Martin Lyons, ‘Fires of Expiation: Book-Burning and Catholic Missions in Restoration France’, French History,  (), –. 67 The classic description of European (male) deChristianization is Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, ). 68 Frédéric Ozanam, ‘Discours à la conférence de Florence’ ( Jan. ), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris, ), viii. –. See also Gérard Cholvy, ‘De l’Homme d’oeuvre au militant: une évolution dans la conception du laïcat catholique depuis le XIXe siècle’, Miscellanaea Historiae Ecclesiasticae,  (),  n. ; and Steven D. Kale, Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, – (Baton Rouge, LA, ), –.

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mature members of the faith.69 Even Mulhouse had a Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, founded in  and led by Catholic bureaucrats.70 The emphasis of Saint Vincent de Paul charity was, from the beginning, on the donor. Men joined the society, Ozanam explained, not to solve the social question but to buttress their own faith: ‘Our principle goal was not to come to the aid of the poor, no, this was for us only a means to an end. Our goal was to maintain the strength of our Catholic faith and to spread it among others by means of charity’.71 Practising charity as a means rather than as an end in itself, Ozanam argued, in no way diminished its virtue. Members of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul knew that they would profit more than the poor man who received their charity ‘because the spectacle of his misery will serve to make us better. We will feel such a sentiment of gratitude towards these unfortunates that we will not be able to stop ourselves from loving them’. The love thus created was the real ‘prodigy of Christian charity’.72 The explicitly Catholic aims of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul were not supposed to dissociate Catholic men from the rest of bourgeois society. Catholicism and bourgeois association could be integrated, and Ozanam referred to his work as a society of ‘mutual encouragement’.73 Association—among bourgeois men and between them and the destitute—strengthened faith more effectively than solitary effort. Ozanam linked the work of his society to that of other bourgeois associations and suggested that charitable bourgeois would also encourage the creation of evening classes, popular libraries, military drill groups, and emulation societies.74 In the Ere nouvelle, the journal of the movement, Ozanam reminded his followers that bourgeois men ‘would rust, would slacken if they did not have their competitions, their congresses, their professional societies’. The same could be said of workers and of the poor who, he argued, should be incorporated into a system of associations which ‘would 69 René de Pommerol, La Société de Saint Vincent de Paul en Franche Comté (Besançon, ). Pamphlet in GSB  R . Nationally, the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul aged during the nineteenth century, so that by the s its conférences were composed of staid older men. Young Catholics joined newer, more dynamic, organizations like the Sillon. See Cholvy, ‘De l’Homme d’oeuvre au militant’, , –. 70 Statutes and membership list in ADHR V . 71 ‘Discours à la conférence de Florence’, . 72 Ibid. –. 73 On Ozanam’s early career, see Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Les Débuts du catholicisme social en France (–) (Paris, ), –. 74 Ozanam, ‘Extraits de l’Ere nouvelle’ in Oeuvres complètes, vii. . Anne Martin-Fugier notes that the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul emerged out of Parisian associative networks, particularly student organizations. ‘La Formation des élites: les conférences sous la Restauration et la monarchie de Juillet’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,  (), –.

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submit [them] to a fraternal surveillance [police], which would surround [them] with examples as well as enlightenment and would assure [them] of that life-long education, so necessary to weak and tempted man!’75 Lay Catholics who joined in the work of Saint Vincent de Paul were supposed to be actively involved in bourgeois society, not isolated in a world bounded by Catholic piety. Although members of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul participated in associative networks, they were not uncritical of their bourgeois colleagues’ activities, particularly with regard to charity. Ozanam and his followers explicitly condemned charity that measured its success in the scientific terms of effective poor relief. Charity that fed and clothed the poor without strengthening the faith of all involved—charity that aspired to the efficient management of pauperism—was fundamentally flawed. ‘One sees money changing hands’, said Ozanam, ‘but without feeling the beat of the heart’.76 Members of Saint Vincent de Paul reminded one another that their mission was not ‘to enquire into the cause of pauperism’ but to ‘fly to the aid of those who suffer’.77 Efficiency and the statistical measurement of charitable success were foreign to the work of Saint Vincent de Paul’s followers. The link between material aid to the poor and spiritual aid to the rich was forged in the regular visits to poor families that the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul required of its members. The society exhorted Catholic men not to force the needy to ‘come to our doors to humiliate themselves with their hands outstretched’ but to visit the poor man ‘in his home, at the centre of his poverty and suffering . . . to offer him . . . a sign of . . . Christian equality’.78 Each week the lay Catholic men of the society visited the poor in their homes and used the distribution of charity to establish a personal relationship with victims of indigence. Weekly prayer and business meetings of the society similarly linked the organization of poor relief with personal spiritual development. Members of the society did not aspire to reach every poor Catholic in their midst, much less to eliminate poverty altogether. The volume of aid granted was less important than the quality of the donor’s religious experience. ‘Extraits de l’Ere nouvelle’, –. ‘Discours à la conférence de Florence’, . 77 President’s speech, annual report of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (Mulhouse),  Mar. . ADHR V . Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire religieuse, i. – note that the charity of Saint Vincent de Paul appeared innovative and progressive (rather than staid and traditional) in the context of the ‘charité technicienne’ of many towns. 78 Statutes of the Besançon chapter of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (). GSB  R . 75 76

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The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul owed its success to its integration of traditional charitable expressions of Catholic piety and modern associative practices. Although members understood themselves to be participating in a charitable endeavour of international importance, they also recognized that each conférence functioned independently. When the Second Empire attempted to regulate the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, affiliated chapters voted overwhelmingly to abandon any central authority sooner than accept a government-sponsored leadership.79 Branch societies were egalitarian assemblies of men who dedicated themselves to the larger cause of Catholic charity, but who needed—and accepted—no tutelage. Saint Vincent de Paul was ‘a great family . . . of Christian confraternity’ in which no member and no conférence could claim precedence because all were ‘free, yet united in that great and fecund unity that the Son of God brought to earth’.80 The ideals of the society explicitly excluded hierarchy in favour of an egalitarian gathering of charitable men. In their insistence that a society of charitable bourgeois was an association of equals who required no external leadership, members of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul were not unique. Protestant and Jewish associations similarly valued the autonomy of male association. Although most of these societies solicited the expertise of pastor or rabbi in charitable matters, they ran their affairs according to the parliamentary procedure familiar from other bourgeois associations. The confessional charity of bourgeois men highlighted the autonomy and importance of the laity. Final decisions concerning who was to receive aid were taken by vote, and the vote of priest, pastor, or rabbi counted for no more than any other. The relationship between clerical authority and bourgeois initiative was particularly difficult where Catholic associations were concerned. Nineteenth-century French Catholicism emphasized the necessity of clerical direction, both spiritual and organizational, in all lay Catholic works.81 The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, however, insisted on lay leadership. The society flourished even in the absence of official ecclesiastical recognition: papal blessing, with its attendant indulgences, did not See above, Ch. . Statutes of the Besançon chapter. GSB  R . 81 Gibson, –. Jean-Marie Mayeur, ‘La Place des laïcs au XIXe siècle’, Recherches et débats,  (), – states the position of the Church hierarchy on clerical control of lay activity, but underestimates the persistence of laymen, whom he sees as caught up in the ‘grand siècle of individualism, which ignored and mistrusted association’ (). For a useful corrective, see Cholvy, ‘De l’Homme d’oeuvre au militant’. 79 80

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reach the society until .82 Once available, indulgences generated very little interest on the part of members.83 Although conférences associated themselves with a parish and the parish priest usually attended meetings, he was not necessary to the regular functioning of the association. Charitable grants depended not on the recommendation of a priest but on the visit of a member and a favourable vote of the society. Chapters elected their administration, and priests did not usually hold office. Most crucially for the autonomy of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, the sacraments were not the focus of chapter meetings.84 The weekly assemblies of members were lay prayer meetings combined with a discussion of the business of collection and distribution of aid: the presence of a priest was not obligatory.85 The sacramental power of ordination being unnecessary in the context of Saint Vincent de Paul, the priest was left in the uncomfortable position of operating in an egalitarian bourgeois social space. T U  C Although there were broad differences between secular, centralizing associations and smaller, confessional societies, their charity did frequently overlap. Men who practised charity as a component of faith or a search for salvation also concerned themselves with efficiency and with fraudulent misuse of aid. Men who espoused scientific method in their charitable giving never completely adhered to the rational logic of economic efficiency. Even at its most scientific, charity had symbolic uses that did not appear in the balance sheets of General Associations. Practitioners of both scientific and religious charity were engaged in the 82 ‘Les bienfaits de l’église envers la Société de Saint Vincent de Paul’, speech by the president of the general council of the Besançon chapters,  July . GSB  R . 83 Published proceedings of the Besançon society (GSB  R  and ) almost never mention the availability of indulgences. 84 See the minutes of the Besançon chapter, cited above, and the undated response to the minister of the Interior’s July  survey in ADHR V . 85 By contrast, parish priests closely supervised confraternities which were primarily concerned with mass and indulgences. Following late eighteenth-century conflicts between male confrères and Church authorities, bourgeois men in the nineteenth century abandoned the confraternity for other forms of association. On tensions between clergy and confrères, see Maurice Agulhon, La Sociabilité méridionale: Confréries et associations dans la vie collective en Provence orientale à la fin du e siècle ( vols.; Aix en Provence, ), i. –, –. Mills, ‘Negotiating the Divide’, – discusses the feminization of confraternities, and Segalen, Les Confréries, – traces their abandonment by urban men. See also Thomas A. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton, ),  who argues that confraternities increasingly became ‘paper organizations’ without a ‘real collective life’.

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subjective exercise of representing ideal communities. Neither economic rationality nor reliance on sectarian dogma was equal to the task of conceptualizing a harmonious social order. Where questions of charity were concerned, nineteenth-century France saw a great deal of bourgeois activity, but relatively little bourgeois consensus.86 Efficiency, the elimination of pauperism, and vigilance against deceit were not absent from religious charitable associations. Devout men practised charity primarily out of a concern for their own spiritual health, but they did not believe that being duped contributed to salvation. Thus in Mulhouse, members of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul conflated pious weekly visits to the homes of the unfortunate with the surveillance of the potentially crafty poor. Sounding like an exponent of scientific charity, the president reminded members to ‘distinguish the good poor from the bad’ and not to ‘offer encouragement to laziness, to debauchery, or to intemperance’. The dedicated member of the society should persist in his visits because sometimes an entire year of weekly calls might not be enough ‘to learn the spirit and the habits that prevail in a family’.87 Avoiding the Mulhousien confusion of the weekly visit’s spiritual and surveillance functions, Bisontin chapters of the society established a separate ‘information committee’ to verify the deserving status of poor families.88 Religious charity often spoke the same scientific and capitalist language of the General Associations. Pious charitable men did not separate the charitable exchange from the market, and they promoted programmes that encouraged future self-sufficiency among recipients. To develop virtue and independence among adults, the Bisontin Saint Vincent de Paul chapter sponsored a rent fund in which families deposited their savings, withdrawing them, with interest, at the end of the month. Bisontin Catholics proudly declared that their association had ‘its exchange and its speculators too, but there, contrary to what happens in the business world, profit is always assured. The values traded there . . . are known as order, economy, and thrift’.89 Members of the Society of 86 Compare Frances Gouda, Poverty and Political Culture: The Rhetoric of Social Welfare in the Netherlands and France, – (Lanham, MD, ), – and Timothy B. Smith, ‘Public Assistance and Labor Supply in Nineteenth-Century Lyon’, Journal of Modern History,  (), – who argue that French notables developed a consensus about the purposes of charity based on an essentially economic logic. 87 Annual report of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul of Mulhouse,  May . ADHR V . 88 Rapport présenté à l’assemblée générale tenue à l’Archévêché le  fevrier , GSB  R . 89 Société de Saint Vincent de Paul: année  (Besançon, ), . GSB  R .

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

Saint Vincent de Paul did not perceive charity as a purely religious exchange, opposed to the secular domain of the market. Receiving charity was a gentle integration into the modern economy. Just as members of confessional charitable associations found aspects of the rhetoric of science persuasive, practitioners of scientific charity, despite their rhetoric of efficiency, were as interested in the symbolic uses of charity as any religious association.90 The scientific goals of eliminating pauperism and training young workers at minimum expense frequently disappeared amid other, less quantifiable, priorities such as morality, family, and the promotion of bourgeois leadership. Even when its language was at its most capitalist and scientific, bourgeois charity undermined its own stated goals, sacrificing efficiency to symbolism. Bourgeois men never succeeded in making charity serve their economic interest. If, as some historians assert, the manipulation of working populations into dependence and docility was the purpose of male bourgeois charity, then the men who pursued this aim did so in markedly ineffective ways. Apprenticeship programmes, in particular, exemplify the extent to which bourgeois idealizations of the social order could conflict with the logic of the market. Apprenticeship remained a standard form of bourgeois charity, both scientific and religious, long past its abandonment by the market.91 The transmission of skill in a familial setting appealed to bourgeois men who were disturbed by the factory’s upheaval of family order. French charitable and patronage programmes were characterized less by rational thinking about local economic needs and effective preparation for future workers than by concern for the ‘crisis’ in apprenticeship. Resisting the logic of industrial capitalism, charitable bourgeois routinely placed poor boys as apprentices in situations of dubious economic worth. Apprentices learnt artisanal traditions of independent manliness and family responsibility even if they did not emerge from their apprenticeships with job skills for an industrial economy. The desire to revive old regime forms of artisanal training led to cooperation of religious and secular charitable associations in Lons and 90 Seeley, ‘Catholics and Apprentices’ makes a persuasive case for the intersection of scientific rhetoric with non-rational goals in his analysis of Lyonnais charity. 91 Michèle Perrot, ‘Worker Youth: From the Workshop to the Factory’, in Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt (eds.), A History of Young People in the West, ii, Stormy Evolution to Modern Times, Carol Volk (trans.) (Cambridge, MA, ), – analyses concern with an ‘apprenticeship crisis’ in nineteenth-century France. On the importance of apprenticeship as a charitable practice, see Seeley, ‘Catholics and Apprentices’ and Weissbach, ‘“Oeuvre industrielle”’, –.

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Besançon. In both towns, poor children who came under the care of the General Associations were placed as apprentices, either with individual tradesmen (with whom the associations negotiated reduced fees) or, more commonly, in charitable workshops run by religious orders. Bourgeois patrons congratulated themselves on giving these children useful skills and a stable place in the social order. The utility of their training, however, is open to question. In Lons, for instance, notables established the Jura’s first silk workshop as a charitable venture and optimistically predicted that their product would sell in Lyon, the centre of French silk production. Poor girls, in particular, served apprenticeships as silk weavers.93 Endowing the department with a new industry was a powerful symbol of a responsible and innovative bourgeoisie. Symbolism, however, outweighed logic in this case: no one ever questioned how youths trained in the department’s only silk manufacture would ever be able to support themselves as weavers. Lédonien charitable apprenticeships, although of relatively little use to poor children, did at least stimulate bourgeois consensus and pride in economic innovation. In Besançon, however, bourgeois accord foundered on the conflicting demands of economy, confession, and municipal loyalty that emerged from the Saint-Joseph apprenticeship programme. The Saint-Joseph workshop opened in  under the supervision of a confessionally mixed group of notables.94 In the workshop, a Catholic priest, the abbé Faivre, taught poor boys watchmaking so that as adults they would be independent citizens and contributors to the local economy. The Saint-Joseph shared many of the charitable goals of the General Association, which proposed to send the poor boys in its care to the watchmaking workshop. For all the apparent harmony of its creation, debates over the purpose of the charitable project soon impeded the lessons of the Saint-Joseph workshop. 92

92 Mulhousiens preferred the promotion of modern technical education to apprenticeship. Scientific charity in Mulhouse, however, found reason overwhelmed by conflicting ideas of morality, family, and community. See, for instance, the Association des femmes en couches, established to provide for pregnant factory workers, lower infant mortality, and maintain stable workforces. Participating factory owners were unable to agree on whether or not unmarried women should be allowed to participate: obligations to morality, contract, and the spirit of charity conflicted and destroyed the programme. See articles in BSIM by J. Dollfus (), A. Penot (), and E. Burnat (). 93 La Sentinelle du Jura,  Jan. . 94 Among the directors were César Convers, Besançon’s leading republican, Edouard Clerc, president of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, Adolphe Veil-Picard, a Jewish banker and philanthropist, and members of prominent Protestant families. ‘Saint-Joseph, Ecole charitable d’horlogerie’ (Besançon, ), pamphlet in GSB.

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As their cooperation with the General Association suggests, the SaintJoseph directors were extremely mindful of economic rationality in their decisions. After a public subscription to cover start-up costs, the workshops were supposed to be self-maintaining. They accepted both feepaying and charity apprentices: watchmaking was a remunerative trade that parents would willingly pay to have their sons learn. In the third and final year of their course of study, pupils learnt the finer points of watchmaking and produced sophisticated and highly decorated watches that could be sold to finance the workshops. Tuition fees and proceeds from sales would make the charitable workshop self-reliant, just as the skills the boys learnt would make them independent craftsmen. Ultimately, the apprentices would contribute to Besançon’s renown as the watchmaking capital of France, thus increasing the prosperity of the entire municipal community. Profit was not the only motivation for setting poor boys to making watches. Founding members agreed that watchmaking was an ideal profession. The apprentices were at-risk boys, but thanks to the skills they learnt at the Saint-Joseph, they would never become beggars. Watchmaking was clean work, available year-round, and it accommodated bourgeois notions of what the working-class family should be.95 Watchmakers worked at home rather than in the morally problematic environment of the factory. Possessing a ‘lucrative and moral profession’,96 the watchmaker could adequately support a family—his sons could stay at home to learn the trade from their father rather than being forced to make their own premature way in the world. The symbolic links between watchmaking and a stable family life were as important as economic calculation in the formation of the Saint-Joseph workshop. Besançon and its bourgeois citizens congratulated themselves on the future prosperity of a town with fewer paupers and more watchmakers. Despite auspicious beginnings—workshops filled with pupils and a long waiting list—the Saint-Joseph workshop was not a success. The project was not able to support itself and, in , requested a large loan from the departmental council.97 The authorities refused to subsidize the venture, and in  the workshop closed. In  the municipality opened a new watchmaking school for fee-paying pupils only. The organizers of the Saint-Joseph treated the new school as an official 95 96 97

Oeuvre de Saint-Joseph, report for –. ADD M . Undated promotional flyer for the Saint-Joseph. ADD M . Undated letter from the abbé Faivre to the prefect. ADD M .

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betrayal of private charitable goodwill: a little support for the charity workshop, they suggested, and Besançon would have had a well-trained population of watchmakers a decade earlier and for half the final cost.98 According to its administration, much of the blame for the SaintJoseph’s failure lay with the apprentices themselves. Pupils refused to stay for the entire three-year course, preferring to leave as soon as they had acquired rudimentary skills. The organizers had envisioned a corps of quality craftsmen, but the apprentices were satisfied with the mass production of cheap, simple watches. Parents occasionally encouraged their sons’ misbehaviour in order to have the boys expelled from the programme. The boys’ choice of mass production over loving craftsmanship was both a moral failure and a financial blow to the Saint-Joseph, since the workshop could not count on the income of third-year students. The closure of the Saint-Joseph workshop reflected bourgeois patrons’ refusal to make concessions to the market forces that pushed apprentices into the workforce as soon as they had learnt the basics of the trade. The charitable bourgeois who supported Saint-Joseph accepted insolvency and failure sooner than compromise the ideal of the independent, highly skilled, house-holding watchmaker that they offered their protégés.99 If the pupils’ and parents’ immoral behaviour made them guilty of the destruction of the charitable workshop, municipal and departmental authorities bore even greater responsibility. Excuses that might have been made for poor and orphaned boys could not apply to Besançon’s leaders. Local authorities, however, were not merely stubborn or lacking in foresight in their refusal to subsidize the project. The Saint-Joseph, with its Catholic director and its allegedly municipal goals had alienated too many local notables for municipal leaders to come to its rescue. First among the offended was the Protestant watchmaking community. The Bisontin Chamber of Commerce, in which watchmakers played an important role, publicly deployed economic arguments against subsidizing the workshop—suggesting, in particular, that training too many watchmakers would oversupply the market and lead to a decline in wages.100 In a private letter to the prefect, the chamber questioned the quality of Saint-Joseph training and noted that one of the (Protestant) watchmakers on the board was not regularly involved in instruction but ‘Saint-Joseph, Ecole charitable’. Nineteenth-century charitable enterprises that failed because the recipients did not live up to the moral standards of the donors were common. See Seeley, ‘Catholics and Apprentices’ and Mandler, ‘Poverty and Charity’, . 100 Chamber of Commerce report,  Feb. . 98 99

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merely looked in at the workshop occasionally.101 According to the Chamber of Commerce, impulsive charitable goodwill had overcome the economic good sense of the workshop’s supporters. The Chamber of Commerce did not limit its objections to inferior instruction or declining salaries. Opponents of the Saint-Joseph deplored ‘certain expressions used by the abbé Faivre’. They reminded their fellow Bisontins that watchmakers were naturalized citizens who had originally come ‘at the request of local commerce and even government . . . to bring us the enlightenment of their experience and the support of their talent in this branch of industry’.102 The chamber clearly saw the Saint-Joseph as an attempted Catholic takeover of the livelihoods of Bisontin Protestants, a bid to transform Besançon’s leading industry into a stronghold of Catholicism. An  history of the Saint-Joseph, written by an early supporter, bears out the chamber’s interpretation with its overt antiProtestantism.103 The charge that well-meaning bourgeois had allowed their charitable instincts to lead them astray into inefficiency was familiar and also forgivable. That bourgeois men had participated in, or allowed themselves to be duped by, a scheme that proposed to use charity as a mask for nefarious sectarian plots was a different matter. Rarely did conflicts between economic, confessional, and municipal interests reveal themselves as clearly as in the Saint-Joseph incident. None the less, bourgeois men’s confusion over exactly what charity was supposed to accomplish made these tensions possible. In a town where religious and economic interests tended to assemble in hostile camps, the Saint-Joseph had attempted to conflate the well-being of the municipality with that of its Catholic community. Although the Saint-Joseph workshop appeared to represent a friendly encounter between classes—charitable bourgeois men sponsoring poor boys—it quickly became a skirmish between Besançon’s Catholic and Protestant bourgeois. Bourgeois Frenchmen of all faiths agreed that they ought to be charitable. Charity appeared to be a natural arena for the practice of emulation: bourgeois men would offer their example and their resources to the needy in their midst. Those poor men and women who adopted the bourgeois model and learnt to imitate bourgeois virtues could expect their reward in mobility out of poverty. Charity, however, too often refused to fit the  Apr. . ADD M . Ibid. 103 ‘Saint-Joseph, Ecole charitable’. Gaston Coindre, Mon Vieux Besançon (th edn.; Besançon, ),  recalls the Saint-Joseph in similar sectarian terms. 101 102

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model of emulation; it became entangled in the interests of religion and market forces rather than concealing these divergences within bourgeois opinion and experience. Despite their best efforts, bourgeois Frenchmen never managed to create a charity of emulation. Scientific charity promoted a doctrine of efficiency that suggested the possibility of plotting the trajectories of potential beggars against bourgeois philanthropy—a graph with a line steadily ascending out of pauperism. Men of faith, on the other hand, were less optimistic about the eradication of pauperism and understood the purposes of charity as being more personal and less municipal. Dividing the town vertically into confessional communities rather than horizontally into classes, they asserted, was a more appropriate way to ensure that the needs of the poor were met. The measure of charitable efficiency, according to these men, had to include the spiritual condition of donors and recipients. Competition among these divergent views of charity constantly threatened to abandon the ‘innocent rivalry’ of emulation in favour of unbridled competition to control poor relief.

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 Emulating the Elite: Association and the Petit Bourgeois

In  a group of Mulhousien men established a Literary Conference to ‘teach reading and public speaking by means of literary, historical and philosophical study and discussion’.1 Meetings occurred on Saturday evenings so as not to interfere with work schedules. Each member prepared one presentation (verbal or written) per term, the best of which were submitted to the assembly. A critical analysis of each presentation followed at the next meeting. Members debated the issue and voted on the initial author’s conclusions. Statutes promised that the reading of original prose or verse compositions might occasionally enliven the solemnity of the regular debates. The atmosphere of the new Literary Conference was determinedly learned. The conference, however, represented a distinctly new twist on the learned society model: no one in Mulhouse was likely to confuse the Literary Conference with the Industrial Society. The didactic aim of the Literary Conference set it apart from more established learned associations like emulation societies. With its carefully regulated format of assigned topics, deadlines for presentations, rebuttals and votes, the atmosphere of the Literary Conference resembled a classroom more than the relaxed scholarly exchange of a learned society. Members of the conference who played truant from meetings even incurred a fine. The schoolroom discipline of the Literary Conference was a far cry from the easy, erudite sociability of the learned society. Men of the Industrial Society assumed that they had mastered the skills that the Literary Conference proposed to teach. No membership list of the Literary Conference survives, so we can only speculate about the men who participated in the earnest Saturday night debates. They apparently recognized the utility of formal education and felt insecure about their own. Their conference, however, was no 1

Statutes of the Conférence littéraire, Bib. SIM – I.

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charitably supported adult education class: its membership dues covered all expenses.2 Members worked regular hours, possibly long ones, and their free time was set by someone else’s clock. Leisure, for these men, happened on Saturday nights. In all probability, the men of the Literary Conference were the employees of the members of the Industrial Society. They belonged to Mulhouse’s new petit-bourgeois sector of white-collar employees, technicians, clerks, and salesmen. The progress of industrialization and the increasing complexity of France’s middle classes transformed the landscape of social class and associative practice in the late nineteenth century. A fragmented bourgeois public, composed of men of different and distinctly unequal ranks, replaced the early nineteenth-century’s single, cohesive bourgeoisie. The emergence of a petite bourgeoisie with its own social expectations and sociable practices was the first indication that emulation no longer functioned as a means of cementing diverse individuals into a single bourgeois citizenry. By the s, recognizably different social groups, each claiming bourgeois status, contested the public sphere. The fragmentation of the bourgeois public sphere revealed itself most clearly in rapidly industrializing Mulhouse. In the immediate postrevolutionary decades, a network of associations whose membership overlapped created an egalitarian bourgeois social space. In  roughly  per cent of the adult male population belonged to one of six associations, and many men belonged to more than one.3 Admission to one association implied access to the others: there were no barriers between the Industrial Society, the Social Cercle, and the Shooting Society. In following decades, the total number of associations and of members grew dramatically, but the level playing field of association disappeared. Fifteen per cent of Mulhouse’s adult men still belonged to an association in , but multiple memberships had become uncommon.4 Participants preferred to devote themselves to a single association, or they lacked the resources (time as well as money) to join more than one group. Most important, membership in one association no longer implied eligibility for all of the 2 Members paid a  franc entry fee and  franc per term. The statutes’ presence in the collections of the Industrial Society (and not in the prefect’s files) may indicate that the Industrial Society encouraged the group, but the conference was self-funding. 3 These figures are based on a compilation of membership lists, primarily from ADHR  M , , , , and . Mulhousien lists are more complete than their counterparts in Besançon and Lons, but the pattern appears generally valid in all three towns. 4 Jean-Luc Marais, Les Sociétés d’hommes: Histoire d’une sociabilité du e siècle à nos jours (Vauchrétien, ),  notes that late nineteenth-century associations in Anjou often forbade multiple memberships. Eastern associations achieved the same result without regulation.

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others. The Literary Conference did not lead to the Industrial Society or the Social Cercle. The egalitarian bourgeois public sphere of the early nineteenth century had split into separate and competing publics.5 The distinction between independence and employment was one of the main fault lines along which the bourgeois public sphere fractured. Financial independence was a quality prized by the French bourgeois, and it was the one crucial qualification for bourgeois status that the growing ranks of accountants and technicians were unlikely ever to meet.6 Men of the bourgeois elite did not mix socially with their bookkeepers any more than with their household staff; employment was employment, whether the wage earner was white collar or domestic. The division between the independent man of property and the man whose means depended on the vagaries of the market or the whim of his employer was fundamental to bourgeois identity. As the industrial economy matured, however, independence became increasingly difficult to achieve, and a growing number of men asserted that bourgeois status was not incompatible with a steady salary. The practice of association was the means by which employees sought recognition as bourgeois citizens. Adopting the inclusive rhetoric of emulation, men on the lower margin of the bourgeoisie established associations to valorize two aspects of bourgeois culture to which they had access: education and leisure. The Literary Conference and a series of other associations of the s, many based on the expertise of emerging professions, emphasized the importance of education in the lives of petitbourgeois men. These societies demonstrated the same regard for education and scientific culture displayed in learned societies. A second set of petit-bourgeois associations dedicated to music and sport replicated elite regard for responsible leisure. In choral and gymnastic societies, petitbourgeois men declared that they too possessed free time, which they knew how to use in constructive and socially elevating ways. With these educational and leisure associations, white-collar employees took up the challenge of identifying themselves collectively with the emulative formula of rivalry, collaboration, and public service. They maintained the absolute privacy of their homes by removing their leisure and their relationships with other men from it. The rhetoric of emulation declared 5 On the notion of ‘competing publics’ see also Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (New Haven, ), . 6 On the importance of economic independence to bourgeois status, see Jean-Pierre Chaline, Les Bourgeois de Rouen: une élite urbaine au XIXe siècle (Paris, ), , – and William Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, – (Berkeley, ), –.

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that none of these elements of bourgeois masculinity was dependent upon level or source of fortune: character, not wealth, made the man. Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of ‘cultural goodwill’ offers historians of class a useful way of looking at the educational and leisure associations of the petite bourgeoisie and at their aspirations for social mobility. ‘Rising classes’, Bourdieu argues, replace the ‘real guarantees [of] money, culture or connections’ with ‘moral guarantees’. The petite bourgeoisie can ‘only “justify its pretensions”, and get the chance to realize them, by paying in sacrifices, privations, renunciations, good will, recognition, in short, virtue’.7 Acknowledgement of elite social and cultural norms is a vital aspect of this petit-bourgeois virtue. Acknowledgement, however, is inevitably and recognizably distinct from knowledge. According to Bourdieu, the socially ambitious respect cultural practices to which they lack genuine access. ‘Cultural goodwill’ refers to the acknowledgement and respect for elite culture that characterize rising classes. In nineteenth-century France, the world of petit-bourgeois associations distinguished itself by an effort to find a moral guarantee that could replace the financial independence that assured bourgeois status. The petits bourgeois of eastern France acknowledged the importance of associative sociability to bourgeois success through the sincerest form of flattery: imitation. Petit-bourgeois associations illustrated the gap that Bourdieu posits between knowledge and acknowledgement of bourgeois norms. The petit bourgeois of the nineteenth century acknowledged bourgeois veneration for educated culture without fully comprehending the role that culture played in class formation. Similarly, bourgeois leisure proved to be more difficult to emulate than the rhetoric of association suggested. Men whose free time was rationed by an employer could never have the same relation to leisure as men who set their own schedules. The crystallization of petit-bourgeois sociability from the larger spirit of association can best be traced in Mulhouse and, to a lesser extent, Besançon. In small towns like Lons le Saunier bourgeois society remained relatively united and preserved the pattern of overlapping associations typical of the early nineteenth century.8 Particularly in Mulhouse, accelerated economic development and immigration complicated class relationships: emulation simply could not cope with assimilating so many 7 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Richard Nice (trans.) (Cambridge, MA, ), –, . 8 Alain Corbin, Archaïsmes et modernité en Limousin au XIXe siècle ( vols.; Paris, ), i. – confirms this pattern. He notes that society in small towns retained greater cohesiveness even in the face of differences in political opinion.

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different people in such a short period. Voluntary association and the notion of a bourgeoisie united by a shared set of values worked for the early part of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, however, pressures of industrialization and population growth created fractures within the middle classes that were impossible to ignore. The bourgeoisie of Besançon began to show similar strains, although on a smaller scale, at roughly the same time. The experience of the Mulhousien and Bisontin middle classes in the s demonstrated that, despite its rhetoric, the bourgeoisie was not monolithic. Large numbers of aspiring bourgeois men found that the promise of emulation ultimately relegated them to separate and inferior networks of petit-bourgeois sociability. By  the ‘principle of universal access’9 at the basis of the bourgeois public sphere was manifestly fictional. The liberal assumption that men had equal access to citizenship and the market—what Habermas identifies as the conflation between bourgeois and homme—was no longer defensible.10 For employees with bourgeois educations and bourgeois tastes in leisure, emulation did not lead to social mobility but to a distinctive petitbourgeois set of sociable and cultural practices.11

9 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger (trans.) (Cambridge, MA, ), . 10 Habermas discusses the dissolution of the bourgeois public sphere primarily in terms of the political thought of Marx, who denounced the public sphere as the representative of exploitative bourgeois interest, and Tocqueville and Mill, who attempted to resolve the contradictions of an allegedly universal public sphere in such a manner as to preserve a genuinely bourgeois public sphere in which bourgeois men could continue to represent the public interest. Habermas is less concerned, however, with exploring how the recognition of these contradictions played out in the social and cultural practices of the public sphere. Habermas, – (on Hegel and Marx) and – (on Mill and Tocqueville). 11 This chapter follows recent scholarship, most notably Geoffrey Crossick and HeinzGerhard Haupt, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe, –: Enterprise, Family, and Independence (London, ) in seeking to establish the origins and the distinctiveness of petit-bourgeois culture independent of the Right-wing and fascist politics of some twentieth-century petits bourgeois. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, ) and Blackbourn, ‘The Mittelstand in German Society and Politics, –’, Social History,  (), – are the original critics of the teleological view of the petite bourgeoisie. On France, see Steven M. Zdatny, The Politics of Survival: Artisans in Twentieth-Century France (New York, ). On the petite bourgeoisie as a breeding ground for the Right, see Arno J. Mayer, ‘The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem’, Journal of Modern History,  (), –; Rudy Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics and Nazism: Marburg, – (Chapel Hill, ); and Philip G. Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton, ).

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Foremost among the forms of cultural goodwill of the new petit bourgeois was formal schooling. Expanding educational opportunities meant that more Frenchmen had access to an education that set them apart from their worker or peasant origins. At the same time, developing towns generated more jobs requiring school-taught skills. Clerks and bookkeepers often enjoyed a very different social status from that of their parents and family; consequently, their social position was especially precarious. They owed their jobs and their social status to education: school certificates were the most important advantage these men had in establishing a position for themselves. Making the most of these educational marks of distinction—for instance, by joining a group such as the Literary Conference—was of vital interest to these employees. In their effort to translate school certificates into enhanced social status, these white-collar employees had two models: the learned society and the professional association. They pursued both with varying degrees of success. The learned society was the example adopted by the Literary Conference among others. Men, united primarily by their commitment to education, joined in the collective pursuit of the sciences and the arts. Professional societies, on the other hand, took expertise in a specific field, rather than a general love of learning, as their basis for association. Although in France, as more generally on the Continent, the state played a role in establishing professional standards, there was none the less room for the participation of voluntary associations.12 In the later nineteenth century, groups excluded from earlier professions (veterinarians and pharmacists, for instance) as well as new occupations (engineers) mobilized the voluntary association in order to achieve the enhanced status that professionalization promised. Whether the association was professional or more generally ‘learned’, the collective aim was none the less to translate members’ educations into improved social status. Joining an existing learned society was out of the question for the rank 12 Michael Burrage, ‘Introduction: The Professions in Sociology and History’, in Burrage and Rolf Torstendahl (eds.), Professions in Theory and History: Rethinking the Study of the Professions (London, ), – offers a survey of the literature on professionalization, comparing the Anglo-American with the Continental experience. On professionalization in early nineteenth-century France, see David Pinkney, Decisive Years in France (Princeton, ), ch. ; Isser Woloch, ‘The Fall and Resurrection of the Civil Bar, –s’, French Historical Studies,  (), –; and Matthew Ramsey, ‘The Politics of Professional Monopoly in Nineteenth-Century Medicine: The French Model and its Rivals’, in Gerald L. Geison (ed.), Professions and the French State, – (Philadelphia, ), –.

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and file of the Literary Conference. In Mulhouse, the milieux of the Literary Conference and the Industrial Society did not mix for a variety of reasons not limited to disparities of income or relations between employer and employee. As the conference statutes suggest, the men of the two associations had dramatically different relationships to educated culture. For the petit bourgeois, culture was something one acquired in school, in an adult education class, or in the structured debates of the Literary Conference. Industrial Society members, on the other hand, felt free to proclaim that culture was what they made of it. They declared science to be a form of knowledge at the very least equal to classical learning, and they proceeded to make their own science, confidently publishing the results of their experiments. Like their twentieth-century counterparts of Bourdieu’s surveys, the members of the Literary Conference mistook bourgeois culture for something that could be acquired. Intent on accumulating education, members of these associations did not realize that bourgeois status was invested in an individual’s relation to culture rather than in the quantity he possessed.13 Societies of the not-quite-so-learned—like the Literary Conference— flourished in the s and s. The most common means of associating oneself with the world of books and learning was by establishing a private library. For men whose means did not permit the possession of an extensive personal library, a private collection of books, open only to members, was the next best thing. Indeed, membership in a reading society was better than a personal library in the home. Because male status was made in public, books in the home where no one could see them were of relatively little use. Moreover, petit-bourgeois homes, often bachelor rooms or houses in which wives did the work of unaffordable servants, did little to contribute to elevated male status.14 Membership in a literary association was a more cost-effective investment because it made a wider range of books available in such a way as to publicize the reader’s attachment to literature.15 Access to a private association library meant that members could avoid patronizing both the public libraries and, especially, the popular libraries for the working class established through Bourdieu, –. See Jean Borie, Le Célibataire français (Paris, ) for a discussion of the demeaning and ridiculous associations of bachelorhood in bourgeois France. 15 Scholars have identified similar motivations behind the foundation of eighteenthcentury cabinets de lecture—except then it was the rising bourgeoisie that hoped to have its ‘moral guarantees’ recognized as social status. See Otto Dann’s introduction to his edited volume Lesegesellschaften und bürgerliche Emanzipation: Ein europaischen Vergleich (Munich, ), –. 13 14

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elite patronage. Subscribers to the new private libraries might depend upon members of the local elite for their salaries, but they could at least reject their condescension in literary matters. Many associations whose initial purpose had not been literary began collecting books and journals in the s. Choral and gymnastic societies often expanded their activities into literature. They rented permanent meeting rooms to be used as a cercle for the men of the society and furnished them with reading material. The first of these cercles in Mulhouse was known as the Union because it combined the membership of a gymnastic and a choral society. To achieve its aim of ‘a solid and amicable union between the members of the various societies’ the group ‘opened a meeting place in which newspapers and industrial and literary publications [were] constantly available’.16 The proposed collection was large enough to justify the election of a librarian. Within a few years the Union broke down because the gymnasts found the members of the singing society ‘too aristocratic’.17 The singers quickly established their own cercle where members could socialize every day from nine in the morning to nearly midnight.18 Statutes of the new cercle promised members literary as well as musical soirées. Bisontin enthusiasts for music and sport also established their own libraries. The Nautical Society, an umbrella organization for gymnastics, music, lifesaving, and canoeing, occupied an impressive headquarters in the centre of town, which included a well-stocked library.19 The Popular Libraries Association protested this tendency to multiply private libraries. The bourgeois elite of the association asserted that the spirit of emulation required singers and gymnasts to avoid the ‘dead past’ and the particularism of ‘caste and corporation’ exemplified by private libraries. Instead, they should donate their books to the local popular library, ‘of which [they] should be the first readers’.20 Petit-bourgeois men, however, understood emulation differently. They preferred to owe their culture to no man and to select their books from their own association library. Rubbing elbows with factory workers and apprentices in a popular library did not suit their aspirations for upward mobility. Members of the Industrial Society and the Social Cercle borrowed their Statutes of the Cercle de l’Union,  July . ADHR  M . Philippe Mieg, ‘La Vie sociale à Mulhouse durant les années  à  vue à travers les souvenirs inédits de M Henri Juillard-Weiss’, BSIM,  (), . 18 Statutes of the Cercle de la Concordia,  May . ADHR  M . 19 Members of the Nautical Society elected both a librarian and his assistant. Statutes of the Société nautique bisontine, ADD M . 20 J. A. Davin in La Sentinelle du Jura,  Feb. . 16 17

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books from their own libraries, and gymnasts and choristers would do no less. Furnishing an association library or a literary society was not the only way for petits bourgeois to assert that their characters had been formed by prolonged exposure to education. Men who established professional associations demanded recognition of the expertise they had acquired through formal education and training. Men who initiated the process of professionalization in the s could see precedents for the realization of their social ambitions. Doctors and lawyers, of course, had reaped significant social rewards from their status as professionals. At the lower end of the income scale, educators too were seeing their social position improve as a result of professionalization. The reorganization of the Université under the Napoleonic Empire established public and statesponsored recognition for teaching expertise. In provincial France, educators reinforced their position as members of the Université by becoming pillars of local learned societies where their knowledge was vital to local bourgeois claims to master science and the arts. Even primary schoolmasters used association to achieve recognition of their expertise and their importance to society.21 By the s, petit-bourgeois Frenchmen had ample demonstration of the rewards of professionalization. In Mulhouse the most prominent form of proto-professional organization was the alumni association. Beginning in the s, Mulhousiens established a series of alumni groups connected with the various secondary schools in town. The schools represented by these associations were the result of industrialists’ need for competent managers, mechanics, salesmen, and technicians. Typically, Mulhousiens did not rely on the national education system to staff their firms; instead, the Industrial Society founded schools of its own. As local industry developed new requirements, Mulhousiens established a course in Applied Chemistry in  (which later became the School of Applied Sciences), a Design School (), the Professional School (), the Mechanical Weaving School (), the Spinning School (), and the Advanced Com21 In the Jura, primary teachers began collecting books and holding lectures on pedagogy in the early s. See La Sentinelle du Jura,  Feb. ,  Mar.,  Apr. . Teachers in both the Jura and the Haut Rhin established professional mutual aid associations. Statutes of the Unterstußungs-Verein der öffentlichen Lehrer und Lehrerinnen des Ober-Elsaß ( version of original  statutes) are in Bib. SIM, – I. Mutual aid among teachers in the Jura was more complicated because the department was so rural. The prefect assisted the profession, arranging to have dues paid to tax collectors. Statutes and correspondence of the Société de secours mutuels des instituteurs du Jura in ADJ T ,  and . Men such as J. A. Davin and Jean Macé exemplified the social possibilities open to primary teachers.

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mercial School (). Levels of instruction in these schools varied: some courses were at university level, while more basic classes required only a primary education.23 The schools served as institutions of social mobility in Mulhouse: all offered scholarship places, and some, like the Design School, abandoned fees altogether. Enrolment in the technical schools was something of a melting pot. Patrician names of the old city-republic appeared along with those of rising industrial families. Other pupils lacked notable names, but were well aware that the technical capabilities they acquired at school were the best way to move in the same circles as the fabrantocratie. Graduates of the schools worked in industrial firms throughout Mulhouse and Alsace, and many moved on to opportunities in other French industrial regions and abroad. While some did achieve financial independence, most were destined to remain as salaried employees. Establishing hierarchies of employment mattered to these men because simplistic distinctions between independence and employment put highly qualified technicians and managers in the same category as factory hands. From the whitecollar point of view, such simplistic definitions obviously would not do. Technical competence and educational qualification had to bear the load of these men’s claim to bourgeois status, and alumni associations drew attention to these attainments. Moreover, these associations emphasized that members’ capabilities had been acquired in school and not on the job.24 Graduates of the School for Applied Sciences began the trend in , followed by their counterparts of the Professional School, an association grouping graduates of the Spinning and Weaving Schools and the Chemistry Laboratory, and finally an association of former students of the collège.25 The purpose of these associations was educational; their statutes spoke of the ‘interesting and useful presentations’ they would sponsor. Alumni associations encouraged education and research and 22

Raymond Oberlé, L’Enseignement à Mulhouse de  à  (Paris, ), –. Designation of the schools as ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’ had as much to do with contests for authority between local and national education authorities as with the content of instruction. The Professional School, for instance, which had been a secondary school under the control of a special committee presided over by the mayor, became, in , a primary school under the control of the prefect and his primary schools inspector. The Professional School protested and pointed out that its faculty included men with advanced degrees, but to no avail. See the correspondence in ADHR  T . 24 Georges Ribbeill, ‘Inventer au XIXe siècle: Ingénieurs et ouvriers inventeurs au XIXe siècle’, Culture technique,  (), –. 25 Statutes for the Applied Sciences ( July ) in ADHR  M ; for the Professional School ( July ), Spinning and Weaving ( Nov. ), and the collège ( May ) in ADHR  M . 22 23

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helped members forge professional connections. Founding members emphasized that, as pleasant as it would be to see old friends and revisit ‘the gay and noisy scenes that the walls of our dear . . . School still enclose and that remind us of our lost youthful insouciance’, such nostalgia was not the sole reason for their meetings. In order not to be accused of ‘selfishness’ members would aid one another in their present and future situations and always be ready to ‘extend a hand to one who was as a brother in our childhood’.27 The educational publications and presentations that the graduates’ associations envisioned were quickly subordinated to professional goals. The associations were far more attentive to members’ career moves than to new developments in industry and technology. Members cooperated to promote their colleagues’ careers; the association was a formal network of contacts on which any member could call in his search for promotion. In the association bulletin, members could keep up with the achievements of their schoolmates and remain abreast of professional developments.28 Employees lacked the kinds of connections that family or Industrial Society membership created for the elite, but the technical school graduates were confident that they too could deploy the spirit of association to their professional advantage. With memberships stretching all over France and beyond, alumni associations offered their subscribers a formidable range of contacts. The graduates’ associations also intended to act as patrons of the technical schools and their pupils. Alumni raised subscriptions to award scholarships and prizes to deserving students at their old school. New graduates looking for their first jobs could lay claim to the benefits of the associations’ organized string pulling. Patronage was an important part of the associative model the graduates were emulating: Industrial Society patronage had created the schools, the laboratories, and the scholarships to which members owed their positions in society. The experience of most nineteenth-century associations demonstrated that the ability to patronize someone else was socially elevating. Graduates of the technical schools had learnt this lesson, and they transformed themselves into 26

26 See Charles R. Day, Education for the Industrial World: The Ecoles d’Arts et Métiers and the Rise of French Industrial Engineering (Cambridge, MA, ) and Terry Shinn, ‘Des Corps d’état au secteur industriel: genèse de la profession d’ingénieur, –’, Revue française de sociologie,  (), – for similar professionalizing activities centred in Paris. 27 President A. Zahn’s speech to the general assembly of the Association of Graduates of the Professional School,  Oct. . ADHR  T . 28 See, for instance, the Professional School Association bulletin, ADHR D /. The avis divers section particularly requested members to notify the society of vacant positions.

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patrons by rewarding pupils for hard work and by caring for the widows and orphans of deceased members. Themselves recipients of Industrial Society patronage, the alumni understood that the bourgeois emulator was both model and copyist. They thus established their own behaviour as a model for future technical school graduates to emulate. More common outside of Mulhouse than associations based on the old school tie were societies that organized members of a single profession on a local or regional level. Like France’s medical associations, many of these proto-professional societies used the model of the mutual aid society. By adopting an institution so vigorously recommended to the working class yet also embraced by such impeccably bourgeois men as doctors, members could both ensure their families’ security and set a valuable example of thrift for the emulation of their inferiors. While some members of these professionalizing groups might genuinely need aid in case of illness, the practice of mutual aid was also symbolic: a visible confirmation of the high moral standards of the profession. Members’ diligent practice of thrift supported their professional claims to local influence. Veterinarians and pharmacists, groups excluded by medical professionalization, formed their own mutual aid associations in the s. Although both groups acquired national coordinating committees, the original initiative was local, and branch societies retained considerable autonomy.29 Having been the victims of medical professionalization, these groups were particularly aware of the effects of articulating professional standards: as the status of doctors had risen in the nineteenth century, that of pharmacists and veterinarians had, at best, remained stagnant. Pharmacists in Besançon began organizing in  in response to government plans to regulate the pharmaceutical industry. Professionalization of pharmacy was underway not only in the east but on a national level; annual Pharmaceutical Congresses had been held since the late s, and the Bisontin pharmacists were in regular correspondence with an association of their Alsatian colleagues. Bisontin pharmacists’ original plan had been to create a purely scientific society in which pharmacists from all over the Franche Comté could present and discuss the latest in pharmaceutical research. The prefect, mindful of imperial encouragement of mutual aid associations, insisted that pharmacists follow the mutual aid model. He also refused to accept responsibility for an associa29 The experience of the proto-professional associations discussed in this Chapter suggests that the state was not the sole promoter of professionalization, which did occur in a voluntaristic, English style. See Burrage, ‘Introduction’.

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tion that crossed departmental boundaries and insisted that pharmacists outside the Doubs could only be corresponding members.30 A departmental mutual aid society was not as satisfactory as a purely scientific society in which members came from far and wide with no thought of personal gain. The pharmacists accepted their new statutes, however, and they proceeded to run their society as they pleased, with very little attention to mutual aid activities. Their accounts reveal that the society paid no sickness indemnities and that almost all expenses went towards publications.31 The treasury was never sufficiently funded to survive a serious bout of sickness among members, but the society’s penury never interfered with its scientific aims. The principal concern of the Bisontin pharmacists was to make their meetings as scientific as possible in order to demonstrate that ‘Pharmacy in France is not just a commercial profession, [and] to reveal its true and fine liberal and scientific aspect’.32 Denunciations of money-grubbing pharmacists, especially those in Paris who wanted a completely deregulated industry, were common. Pharmacists agreed that their profession ‘ought to occupy an honourable place on the social ladder’ which it did not always achieve ‘because mercantilism too often has the upper hand and dominates the scientific part of our art’.33 The pharmacists were full of ideas for enhancing the image of the profession. Instead of worrying about establishing a pension fund,34 Franc-comtois pharmacists presented scholarly papers on the efficacy of various drugs. They offered their services as lecturers on physics, chemistry, or natural history ‘to the workers, the farmers and the small manufacturers of the department’.35 Their essay contests stimulated the emulation of pharmacy pupils. They discussed the woeful state of dispensaries for the poor, discreetly suggested that nuns ought not to prescribe drugs, and offered their services to the local authorities at prices that promised to undercut the Sisters of Charity. In the name of science, pharmacists, like doctors before them, 30 Bulletin de la Société des pharmaciens du département du Doubs, , in BMB (hereafter Bulletin) and prefect to mayor,  Aug. . ACB Q . 31 Because the pharmacists’ society regularly submitted its accounts to the prefecture (ADD M  and ) the authorities were aware that the pharmacists were not actually running a mutual aid society. 32 President’s speech, reported in the Bulletin, . 33 Letter from the president of the Cercle pharmaceutique du Haut Rhin, quoted in the Bulletin, . 34 Pension fund proposal discussed in Bourgeau’s report on the Strasbourg Pharmaceutical Congress meeting in the Bulletin, . 35 Bulletin, .

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defended their professional territory. The mutual aid project foundered because insurance for individual members was of less concern than defending the expertise of the profession as a whole. Their critique of nuns was muted, but their attack on charlatans and quacks was vociferous. They demanded that pharmacists be licensed to practise and lobbied the government to reject free trade in drugs. Franc-comtois pharmacists preferred to see the creation of a single class of pharmacists, but acknowledged that a second class of less-qualified men might be necessary to serve rural areas. They crusaded against false advertising and promoted full disclosure of ingredients in all mixtures, arguing that the age of secret formulas and alchemy was past. Defining themselves with reference to their training, expertise, and dedication to the public— the ‘liberal and scientific aspect’ of pharmacy—Bisontin pharmacists demanded professional respect and a role in supervising community health. The pharmacists’ rhetoric of public service accompanied a deep mistrust of competition typical of many bourgeois associations. Suspicion of the market led to overt attempts to restrict local trade in drugs. The pharmacists’ society was eager to root out illegal and unethical practitioners, but it was also interested in controlling the practices of its own members. In  the members of the society worked out a price list and congratulated themselves that price-fixing would ‘silence jealous rivalries forever’ by ensuring that bargain drugs would be offered only by those who ‘wish to constitute the enemies of our society, and who will sell their conscience and their drugs for what they are worth’.36 Even with a pricefixing agreement in place, competition continued to be a problem, especially where workers’ mutual aid society business was concerned. The pharmacists tried to ensure that mutual aid associations did business with the Pharmaceutical Society rather than with individual pharmacists who might be tempted to offer bargains in order to attract such important clients.37 In at least one case the pharmacists’ society intervened in a dispute between a doctor and a pharmacist dispensing medicines in the same neighbourhood. Attempts to encroach on the expertise of a pharmacist were ‘unworthy of a man who bears the title of doctor’, and the society convinced the doctor, whose practice was the more recent, to move on.38 Market competition threatened pharmacists’ status as members of a Bulletin, . The Bulletin for  contains a polite reminder that members had agreed not to do business directly with mutual aid societies. 38 Bulletin, . 36 37

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unified professional elite, and they acted without hesitation to limit its effects. Even more emphatically than pharmacists, veterinarians had been excluded from the professionalization of medicine. In the early s the Veterinary Society of Alsace began its own process of professionalization. Mulhouse’s sole veterinarian, Auguste Zundel, was a founding member of the association and served as secretary-archivist. The Veterinary Society statutes emphasized members’ possession of diplomas at every opportunity. If the society were to ‘contribute to the progress of veterinary science and win for its profession the consideration it deserve[d]’,39 then unlicensed animal healers had to be rigorously excluded. Although a diploma was a necessary qualification, it was not sufficient. Before reception into the society, candidates had to present a scientific paper which, the statutes specified, would be written in French and in the candidate’s own hand. The project of professionalization required that members not only speak the language of science, but also that that language be French—the language of bourgeois status in Alsace. Following the lead of the pharmacists, architects in Besançon established a professional society, which the prefect permitted to cover the entire department and to dispense with the formalities of mutual aid. The society promised its members that it would pursue every means available to ‘make the profession of architect honoured and respected’.40 Primarily, this project entailed presenting the architect as a scientist rather than as a man with a simple craftsman’s knack. The architects chose to emphasize the relationship between their profession and polite culture of the kind practised in local learned societies. Their statutes spoke of presentations and research that would link architecture to art and archaeology, subjects of considerable interest in Bisontin learned societies.41 If the architect could make his expertise indispensable to the scholarly hobbies of the local elite, his social standing would inevitably rise. Mulhousien textile designers were another group whose occupation fell between craft and profession. Designers were vital to the success of Mulhousien textiles: Alsatian calicoes were always more expensive than Statutes of the Société Vétérinaire d’Alsace in ADHR  M . The mayor’s list of associations (undated) includes details concerning the Société des architects du Doubs, founded . ACB I. 41 Lead crusader in the Emulation Society’s effort to have Alaise recognized as the site of Vercingétorix’s last stand was Auguste Delacroix, a local architect. Although no membership list of the Architects’ Society survives, it seems safe to assume that Delacroix, a man of extensive civic interests, was involved. 39 40

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their English competitors’, but with higher-quality designs and colours. In the mid-nineteenth century, successful Mulhousien designers ceased being employees in the pay of large textile firms to become independent managers of studios who worked on commission for Mulhousien and foreign calico printers.42 The Society for Industrial Design, founded in , built on designers’ achievements by uniting independent designers and their employees. The society promised to publicize ‘progress realized in the printing and weaving of cloth, with regard to taste, style, fashion, [and] new techniques’.43 By establishing a library that contained books, journals, and design samples, the society claimed an educational function. Although textile design had once been a matter of ‘simple imitation’, the society asserted that the modern designer had to ‘undertake serious study’ because ‘the art of industrial design has practically become a science today.’44 Founding members were to encourage their apprentices and their sons to frequent the library in order to perfect their professional training.45 The Society for Industrial Design also implicitly assumed a public service role: designers’ associative spirit assured the continued excellence of calico design and hence the future prosperity of Mulhouse. Neither independent designers nor their employees were povertystricken; the former paid  francs to join the association, while the latter paid only . Entry fees to the Industrial Society were comparable (only  francs), yet none of the industrial designers belonged to the Industrial Society. Although textile design was a lucrative occupation and its leading figures were independent entrepreneurs, designers generally did not penetrate the circles of Mulhouse’s elite. Rather, the Industrial Society acted as the new association’s patron: Emile Dollfus, president of the Industrial Society, wrote to the prefect to praise the Industrial Design Society’s response to ‘a keenly-felt need in the region’.46 The new association was probably glad to have Industrial Society approval; Dollfus’s recommendation doubtless sped the authorization paperwork through layers of bureaucracy. None the less, the Industrial Society’s ability to patronize the Design Society speaks volumes for the relative status of the two groups of men. No matter how keenly felt the need to address textile design was, the 42 See Stéphane Jonas, ‘La Révolution industrielle, les questions urbaines et du logement à Mulhouse, –’ (thèse d’état, Strasbourg, ), – on the professionalization of designers. 43  flyer printed by the Société du dessin industriel. ADHR  M . 44 L’Industriel alsacien,  Dec. . 45 Statutes ( Dec. ) in ADHR  M . 46  Dec. . ADHR  M .

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Industrial Society had not created a committee devoted to that issue. In the Mulhousien bourgeois’ hierarchy of occupations, design came precariously close to manual labour. Textile design lacked the abstract precision of engineering design. It was also closely associated with the engraving process, in which the bourgeois tools of paper and pencil gave way to distinctly artisanal wood and metal.47 The Industrial Society’s committees concerned themselves with chemistry, engineering, social policy—all aspects of industry learnt in school rather than merely picked up with practise. By emphasizing that aspiring designers acquired their skills in a library as well as in a workshop, textile designers endeavoured to link their occupation with the formal education and abstraction valued by the bourgeois elite. Asserting that textile design required a highly specific expertise, members of the association moved their occupation away from craft towards profession. Even more closely tied to the taint of manual labour were building contractors, who pursued professionalization at roughly the same time as architects and textile designers. In  Mulhousien building contractors established an association intended to ‘study and propose all possible improvements in the art of construction, to spread the use of the best tools and raw materials . . . [and] when required, to offer opinions on questions of construction’.48 In their letter requesting authorization the contractors asserted that members would learn, not only through contact with ‘the most enlightened among them’, but also ‘from the study of books, especially dedicated to the laws of buildings and the rules of the art of construction’.49 Those books, along with tools, drawings, and sample materials would be collected in a society library: building, like architecture, was declared to be a profession requiring expertise rather than simply the craftsman’s touch. As befit a bourgeois professional society, the contractors’ association had a patronage function: its members proposed to offer a series of prizes for improvements in construction techniques and so stimulate emulation in all of the building trades. The builders divided their association into sub-councils for all aspects 47 Contrast the status of design with that of chemistry, the other half of the team producing high-quality calicoes. Early nineteenth-century ‘colourists’, whose work was generally perceived as being more science than craft, quickly became ‘chemists’, welcome in the Industrial Society. The creation of international scientific correspondences among chemists contributed to their status. See Anthony S. Travis, ‘From Manchester to Massachusetts via Mulhouse: The Transatlantic Voyage of Analine Black’, Technology and Culture,  (), –. 48 Statutes of the Chambre syndicale des entrepreneurs de travaux de batiments de la ville de Mulhouse, ADHR  M . 49 Building contractors to the sub-prefect, Mar. . ADHR  M .

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of the trade: masonry, carpentry, lock- and tin-smithing. Including all sectors of the construction industry into the association made the entrepreneurs’ case for professionalization stronger: no part of putting up a building could be safely left in unqualified, unprofessional hands. Inclusiveness also made it easier for the builders to set limits on competition. In explaining the purposes of their society to the sub-prefect, the association founders were quite explicit about their plan to work with local architects to establish a price list for the main types of buildings. The prefect did not comment on the builders’ price-fixing plans, saying only that he thought the association would be good for the town.50 Although the proposed price list did not appear in the statutes sent to the minister of the Interior, there is no reason to assume that the builders did not, at least informally, enforce their agreement. Even clerks, men whose livelihoods were completely at the mercy of employer good will, could find some measure of professional pride in association membership. Mulhouse’s Commercial Employees’ Association, founded in , was a mutual aid society which collected dues ( francs on admission and  francs per month), visited the sick, and paid indemnities ( francs per day plus the services of the society’s doctors and pharmacists).51 The association did not claim to make its members better employees; it could not define qualifications for employment; and it certainly could not limit competition among members. Job qualifications, like competition, were entirely in the hands of the employers when it came to the bookkeepers’ and clerks’ positions these men held. None the less, by organizing as employees, members declared that there was some honour in their working lives. It was not the prestige that came with owning a company or with setting prices and professional standards. Nor was it the dignity of manual work and progression from apprentice to master in an artisanal trade. None the less, through the practice of mutual aid, the commercial employees declared their jobs to be respectable ways of earning a living and supporting a family. By joining the Commercial Employees’ Association, men proclaimed their dependent status, but they also demonstrated that employees as well as employers could possess the moral qualities of bourgeois manhood. Full membership was only open to men between the ages of  and . Financial risk to the society was one reason to avoid taking on too many 50 Because there was no precedent for such an association, however, the prefect decided to tolerate, rather than authorize, it. Prefect to sub-prefect,  Aug. . ADHR  M . 51 Statutes of the Association des employés de commerce et de l’industrie in ADHR  X .

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old members, but the age limits served symbolic as well as economic purposes. The emphasis on men in their prime contributed to the association’s image of a new kind of professional employee: a dignified adult man rather than a youth acquiring experience before breaking out on his own. The Commercial Employees’ Association did not overlook the fact that most clerks took their first post before they turned . From  to , young employees who met the stringent conditions of good health and moral character could participate in the sickness fund. At the end of this probationary period, the young men became voting members of the association. The commercial employees thus demonstrated that they too could act as patrons, as models for the emulation of others, even if only for their younger colleagues.52 Although representing widely different occupations, all of the protoprofessional associations of the s shared a common understanding of the uses of association. Their members agreed that the purposes of association were essentially local. They did not ignore contacts outside the region: the existence of a national community of experts was crucial to the idea of professional qualification. Much like members of elite learned societies, professionals appreciated Parisian qualifications and the status implications of a wide network of scientific correspondents. However, while they recognized that occupational interests linked them to other men all over France, they were primarily interested in creating a professional corps on a departmental or provincial scale. Bisontin pharmacists, for instance, voted against the creation of a nationwide pharmacists’ association because they feared that ‘the truly professional interests of French pharmacy would be absorbed to the profit of Parisian pharmacy.’53 The restraint of competition, in particular, was a local matter. As the Bisontin pharmacists disingenuously argued, the pricefixing that was desirable locally would, on a national level, represent a serious affront to the liberty of commerce. Most important, the improved social status that professionalization promised was essentially a local matter. Because bourgeois status defined itself in local terms, professionalization similarly focused on the local. These proto-professional associations were full of cultural goodwill; indeed, their recognition of bourgeois culture was impeccable. All of the professional and graduates’ associations of the s emphasized their 52 The fact that young men were limited to the mutual aid functions of the association suggests that its activities included more than the mere payment of sickness indemnities that its statutes proposed. 53 Bulletin, –.

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members’ attachment to science and education. However, their attempts to display their regard for the virtues of education ultimately demonstrated the difference between petit-bourgeois acknowledgement and bourgeois knowledge of culture. The newly educated declared their possession of the right diplomas, but the learned societies’ comfortable relationship to scientific culture did not require official certification. The building contractors’ earnest insistence that one could learn about building from books was a far cry from emulators’ easy conversance with the world of literature. Where bourgeois savants surveyed the full range of arts and sciences, petit-bourgeois associations rarely departed from their own areas of expertise. Despite pharmacists’ insistence that their lectures would be of great interest to farmers and watchmakers, no one appears to have accepted their offer of ‘technological consultations’. The Emulation Society was well able to handle all requests for patronage and popular education in Besançon. Next to established learned societies’ fluency with educated culture, the efforts of building contractors or graduates of technical schools to proclaim their expertise appeared stilted and constrained. None of the proto-professional associations published accounts of their educational or learned activities. Several of them produced bulletins or newsletters for their members, but only the Bisontin pharmacists ever included texts of scientific papers or accounts of scholarly debates. Even in the pharmacists’ bulletin, professional news took precedence over scholarship. None of these associations’ annual reports had the same value as learned society journals, which were widely traded in France and abroad. No learned society would have exchanged its journal for the newsletters of pharmacists or technical school graduates. Members of new professional and educational associations simply did not believe that their erudition and research would be of interest to a wider community. Confidence was as much at issue here as objective measures of quality scholarship. Learned society journals contained plenty of uninformed speculation, arcane experimentation, and third-rate verse: accountants, veterinarians, and technicians were perfectly capable of producing work of similar quality. The petit-bourgeois attitude towards culture was more reverential than proprietorial, however, and their cultural hesitancy separated them from the grand bourgeois elite.54 Although their perceptions of culture and education differed from those of the learned society elite, the petit-bourgeois emulator understood the virtues of association as well as his models. The members of these new associations of educated men recognized that status was a collective 54

See Bourdieu,  on ‘the ideology of natural taste’.

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project. They identified selfishness and unrestrained rivalry as the enemy of both their profession and of the spirit of association. Their associations turned the rhetoric and the structures of association towards the goal of mitigating competition. That neither prefects nor mayors protested the freely acknowledged price-control activities of these associations suggests that members were not primarily intent on inflating prices and cheating consumers. Rather, aspiring professionals were attempting to preserve the status and solidarity of the occupational community against maverick members who might try to drive others out of business by cutting prices. Free competition was incompatible with the professional decorum that distinguished bourgeois society. Like doctors and lawyers before them, these pharmacists, technicians, and builders believed that an emulative relationship among professional colleagues was preferable to cut-throat market competition. Petit-bourgeois cultural goodwill in the s was clearly inadequate for access to the circles of the elite. Paths from the technical school alumni associations to the Industrial Society were few, and they were reserved for the man of exceptional talent, not for the ordinary hardworking, would-be bourgeois. Lacking both financial independence and fluency with bourgeois cultural capital, the emerging petite bourgeoisie was left to rely on more strictly moral qualities. Clerks and technicians would ultimately stake their claims to bourgeois status on their constructive use of leisure and the assumption of manly virtue. L Along with his education, the employee of the second half of the nineteenth century valued his free time. He worked regular hours, left the office with sufficient energy to embark on ambitious leisure projects, and he lived in an increasingly sophisticated market that provided him with options for his spare time. Leisure, like education, was a mark of upward mobility. It linked the accountant or the supervisor to his employer and distinguished him from socially inferior categories such as workers or peasants.55 Conspicuous consumption of leisure was one way in which clerks and managers could call attention to the similarities between their lives and those of their employers. The possession of leisure was an asset 55 On the democratization of leisure, see essays by Dumazedier and Latouche and by deGrazia in Michael R. Marrus (ed.), The Emergence of Leisure (New York, ); Rearick, ch. ; and, on England, James Walvin, Leisure and Society, – (London,). See also Ch. , above.

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to be capitalized on, and, like their employers, petit-bourgeois men opted for the association as the organizing principle for free time. Salaried workers did not, however, have the same kind of infinitely flexible free time or the early retirement options of their employers. Their leisure was both qualitatively and quantitatively different from that of the elite. The difference between the world of the white-collar employee and of the grand bourgeois was, as Jacques Rancière has said of working-class lives, that of ‘two worlds that [did] not run on the same time’.56 Although their associations drew public attention to their consumption of leisure, petit-bourgeois free time was never as free as that of their employers. Elite leisure associations of the early nineteenth century defied work schedules: cercles remained open all day and until midnight, and learned societies held their meetings in mid-afternoon.57 Petit-bourgeois leisure associations, however, necessarily accommodated themselves to the employer’s clock. Emulation and voluntary association had successfully reconciled the bourgeois work ethic and the conspicuous consumption of leisure. Petitbourgeois men similarly adopted the voluntary association as an institution of responsible leisure, but, as with efforts at emulating learned sociability, the result was recognizably different from the elite model. No one could have mistaken the activities of Besançon’s elite Granvelle Cercle for those of the petit-bourgeois Nautical Society. The Industrial Society and the Association of Professional School Graduates both ran cercles in which textile business was the main topic of conversation, but the two organizations effectively separated ownership from employment. The gulf that developed between structurally similar associations expressing different versions of bourgeois culture made the limits of emulation absolutely clear. Choral singing and sports—particularly gymnastics—became the principal activities of petit-bourgeois associations. Mulhouse’s first massed male choirs appeared on the scene in the s: the Liederkranz (later the Choral Union) and the Caecelien Verein (later the Saint Cecilia).58 That 56 Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Worker’s Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, John Drury (trans.) (Philadelphia, ), . 57 Richard Holt tells the story of a newly posted provincial tax collector who refused an invitation to join a shooting society on the grounds that he expected to be too busy with work to have adequate time for such diversions—an excuse that was met with hilarity by the members of the society. Sport and Society in Modern France (London, ), . If provincial bureaucrats enjoyed even a fraction of the free time of their Parisian colleagues, they were well provided with leisure. See Reddy, The Invisible Code, –, –. 58 Statutes and membership lists in ADHR  M . See also Union Chorale Sainte Cécile de Mulhouse, –: Historique (Mulhouse, ), in Bib. SIM.

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both associations originally used German titles is significant: men who socialized with the Industrial Society or the Social Cercle would never have used German to describe an emulative project. Petit-bourgeois choirmen, however, often wrote their requests for admission to the society in halting and uncertain French, or simply gave up and used German.59 These two associations were joined in the s by the Harmony and the Concordia60 and in the s by the Orpheon and the Echo of Mulhouse.61 Alsace had a particularly lively choral scene in the late nineteenth century—hardly surprising given that choral singing was popularly believed to be a German import.62 Musical societies were also popular in the Franche Comté, and by  Besançon had three rival associations: the Choral Union, the Children of the Doubs, and the musical section of the Nautical Society.63 All of these musical societies of the s emphasized choral music. Some had brass fanfares, but none aimed at producing the same kind of music as the philharmonic societies of the s. Choral music required less training of its members, and the petit-bourgeois choristers of the s almost certainly had less formal musical education than the members of philharmonic societies. Although men’s choirs often performed selections from operas, they put most of their time and effort into anthems specially written for the choral society movement.64 At their most basic, choral societies required so little training and expense that they were essentially accessible to all.65 Although the most elaborate societies maintained their own cercles and sponsored elaborate annual balls, the simplest eliminated all overhead costs by meeting in a local schoolroom, often with the schoolmaster as director. Choral anthems and brass fanfares served the additional purpose of 59 Choral Union correspondence in MS , dossier  in the Bibliothèque municipale de Mulhouse. 60 Statutes in ADHR  M . 61 ADHR  M  and  respectively. 62 On this belief, see the article in the Bisontin newspaper L’Impartial,  July . The geography of French choral societies did not reflect this belief in German origins: choral societies were most numerous in Marseille and the Nord-Pas de Calais region. Paul Gerbod, ‘L’Institution orphéonique en France du XIXe au XXe siècle’, Ethnologie française,  (), –. 63 Dossiers in ACB R and R. 64 Cinquantième anniversaire de la Concordia de Mulhouse, – (Mulhouse, ) in the Bib. SIM contains a full account of all pieces performed by the society. 65 Choral singing was an important aspect of the German working-class movement. Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labour in Imperial Germany (Oxford, ), – and Dieter Dowe, ‘The Workingmen’s Choral Movement in Germany before the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History,  (), –.

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emphasizing the masculinity of the performers. Choral society productions focused on booming male voices singing rousing anthems, often suitable for outdoor performance. Occasionally societies included women in their presentations, thus enlarging their musical repertoire. Mixed performances, however, were restricted to agreeable soirées at which members’ wives appeared principally as guests and secondarily as musicians. The serious work of a choral association—its public and competitive performances—emphasized the male chorus. Instrumental music, which was never as significant as choral, was also distinctly male. The choral society brass section was as far removed from gentle, feminized piano playing as possible. Women’s music—polite, restrained, and individual—could hardly be confused with the men’s choral society—loud, assertive, and associative as it was. Like elite leisure societies, choral associations instilled discipline in young men. Choral singing had the power to strengthen male moral fibre when it was at its weakest, in the years of youth when cafés held the greatest temptation. Joining a musical association ‘encourage[d] young men to find their amusement in the pleasures of music rather than looking for it in taverns to the detriment of their wallets and their health’.66 In addition to keeping young men out of cafés, choral singing instilled orderliness and self-control. Societies held regular rehearsals, often twice a week, and statutes called for fines for members who failed to attend or who allowed their minds to wander from the music ( centimes for the latter fault for the Children of the Doubs). As a preface to its statutes, the Concordia of Mulhouse quoted Laurent de Rillé, composer of popular anthems for male choirs: A choral society that wishes to produce durable results must focus its attention on two principal points: interior discipline, which establishes material order; and musical studies, which prepare one for public performance. The true goal of choral societies is to give their members habits of order by making them accept and practise the principle of voluntary solidarity. . . .67

Membership in choral societies was deliberately time-consuming, both in the interests of musical proficiency and of individual morality. Although conviviality, banqueting, and banner-waving parades all featured in the life of musical associations, discipline was none the less a prominent, and necessary, element of petit-bourgeois leisure. The rhetoric of emulation replacing hostile rivalry suited the choral 66 67

Sainte Cécile de Mulhouse to the prefect,  Dec. . ADHR  M . ADHR  M .

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movement, which, like so much bourgeois sociability, was competitive. In the s societies began to organize regional federations and to hold elaborate festivals in which choristers arrived by train to take over a town for a weekend of contests. The Association of Alsatian Choral Societies, formed in  by the union of federations from the Bas and Haut Rhin, existed to ‘propagate and popularize choral singing’ by sponsoring ‘solemn musical events and competitions’.68 The association’s competitions, which rotated among the major towns of Alsace, attracted singers from all over France, Germany, and Switzerland. The  competition, held in Mulhouse, mobilized the entire town: thirteen different committees, each identified with a separate armband, arranged lodging for the competitors in garland-decorated local homes, a ball for all participants, extended opening hours at local museums, reduced train fares, and a host of other benefits.69 Organizers projected that the festival budget would run at just over , francs.70 Not all festival sites were as well equipped as Mulhouse: in  Bisontin choral societies competed in Dole, a small town in the Jura, where over eight thousand visitors nearly doubled the population of the town. The local arrangements committee pitched tents for the competitors on the local ‘champ de Mars’.71 In accord with the spirit of emulation, competition among choristers never produced the least rancour, and societies lost no opportunity to conflate social and musical harmony. Auguste Klenck, a professor, member of the Industrial Society, and honorary member of the Saint Cecilia, accordingly described music as the ‘popular art, the national art, . . . the brilliant lyre on which the people sing their love and their glory’. In this toast to choral singing at the  banquet of the Choral Union, Klenck praised music’s ability to ease social tensions: choristers came ‘from the town and the hamlet, from palaces and cottages, to take part in the peaceful struggles of competitions. . . . attentive, trembling under the direction of the beloved master, they sound a hymn of concord and union.’72 In fact, no association brought together palace and cottage, and the assembled choirmen belonged to neither milieu. Under other circum68 Statutes in ADHR  M . The association is an excellent example of the Empire’s tolerance of associative activity. An association formed of a network of individual branches could easily have been construed as illegal under provisions of the  law. 69 Dossiers MHM  TT  a and b contain the festival programme and all of the correspondence from the organizing committees. The event also attracted Parisian press coverage: see L’Illustration, ‘Chronique musicale’,  July . 70 L’Industriel alsacien,  May . 71 Le Courrier du Jura, , ,  June . 72 L’Industriel alsacien,  Feb. .

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stances, members of the Choral Union might have resented the suggestion that they could comfortably mix with France’s popular classes. In the context of a lavish society banquet—a symbol of success so unequivocal that one could even invite Industrial Society representatives—men of the Choral Union instead welcomed the implication that they represented the true spirit of France. The flags and medals that accompanied choral society contests lent themselves to the metaphor of musical competition as a peaceful battlefield. The leader of a Colmar society deployed such military images in a toast to his Mulhousien hosts that recalled past festivals in which the groups had sung: This union . . . that binds our two societies is perfectly natural: have we not been together on the same battlefields . . .? Remember Schlestadt, your first success as well as ours. Metz, where your director offered us encouragement and participated in our triumph. . . . Then came Guebwiller, that glorious day for our banners. . . . Remember Strasbourg, which saw us compete on the same terrain, Strasbourg, where the jury could hardly determine the first prize, thanks to the enthusiasm of the societies. We all emerged from the struggle crowned. . . . Instead of jealousy, the ordinary result of these competitions, . . . a reciprocal esteem was born.73

Choirmen returned home to hang their medals on their society banners, ‘the vanquished without shame and without envy: the conquerors, rarely forgetting that modesty is the best accessory to triumph’. All could be content to have participated in a ‘day that Fraternity will count in its annals as a new triumph’.74 Sporting associations shared choral societies’ preoccupation with competition, discipline, and masculinity. Although organized sport did not really take off until the s, eastern France in the s was already beginning to adopt the sporting life, especially gymnastics and shooting.75 The history of sport in France has often been associated with defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the desire to stem the tide of degeneration that threatened the French nation.76 Scholars like Richard Holt, however, point out that national regeneration and revanche were not sport’s only L’Industriel alsacien,  Jan. . A. Klenck, quoted in ibid.,  Feb. . 75 Holt, Sport and Society; J. M. Silvain and M. Gauquelin, ‘Jeux traditionels et sports: le cas de Roubaix’, in Adeline Daumard (ed.), Oisiveté et loisirs dans les sociétés occidentales au XIXe siècle (Abbeville, ), –; and Theodore Zeldin, France, – ( vols.; Oxford, –), ii. –. 76 See, for instance, the essays collected in Pierre Arnaud (ed.), Les Athlètes de la République: Gymnastique, sport, et idéologie républicaine, – (Toulouse, ). 73 74

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attractions. Even before the trauma of defeat led Frenchmen to question the relative vitality of the French and German nations, sport served a purpose in French society. Like song, sport was an attractively safe channel for competition because defeat carried no serious consequences.78 Sportsmen were both competitive and fraternal, and their activities were unquestionably masculine. Adopting the rhetoric of emulation, sport became a means by which young petit-bourgeois men could assert their position in local society. Gymnastics, a German import that did not reach eastern France until the s, quickly became the most popular mass sport in France.79 Mulhouse’s first gymnastic association was founded in  and eventually became known as the Old Society when it was followed by the Cadets in , the Progress in , societies in the Illzach and Dornach suburbs in  and , and, shortly before the outbreak of war, a society of Cadet Pupils.80 In  an Association of Alsatian Gymnasts, modelled on the choral federation, took over arrangements for regional competitions. In Besançon, the Society for Gymnastics and Military Instruction began its exercises in . Also in the s the Bisontin Nautical Society, which was primarily dedicated to boating and lifesaving, added a gymnastic section.81 Target-shooting associations never achieved quite the same level of popularity, in part because drill with guns or their substitutes was a regular feature of gymnastic exercise. None the less, associations of marksmen appeared in Besançon in  and in Lons in .82 Gymnastic societies, like other voluntary associations, claimed that they instilled in young men a discipline necessary to every orderly community. Like any leisure society, they kept young men usefully employed and out of cafés. According to gymnasts, however, simply avoiding dissolute company was not enough to turn a young man into a good citizen. 77

Holt, Sport and Society, –. Norbert Elias, ‘Introduction’, in Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford, ), –. 79 Holt, Sport and Society, –. Eugen Weber, ‘Gymnastics and Sports in Fin de Siècle France: Opium of the Classes?’, American Historical Review,  (), –. Jacques Defrance, ‘Esquisse d’une histoire sociale de la gymnastique (–)’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales,  (), –. For a useful survey of German gymnastics, see J. G. Dixon, ‘Prussia, Politics and Physical Education’, in P. C. McIntosh, et al. (eds.), Landmarks in the History of Physical Education (rd edn.; London, ), –. 80 Dossiers for the first four societies are in ADHR  M , , and . Dossier for the Elèves Cadets is in MHM  TT . 81 Dossiers for both societies in ADD M . 82 Dossier of the Société de tir of Besançon in ADD M  and announcement of the foundation of the Société de tir of Lons in Le Courrier du Jura,  May . 77 78

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Physical strength and a willingness to use it in a good cause were vital components of citizenship. Gymnasts were scornful of the typical contemporary youth, ‘leaving school so weak that he wears a glass in his eye, a glove on his hand, and leans on a cane, flattering himself about the debility of his organs’.83 Well before defeat at the hands of the Prussians, gymnasts argued that France needed ‘a race of robust, agile men, accustomed to fatigue, always ready to fly to the aid of anyone whose life or property is threatened by fire, flood, or any other peril’.84 The goal of a gymnastic society was ‘to form good citizens and, if needed, good soldiers’.85 The inculcation of discipline and the creation of good citizens were collective projects: gymnasts were not solo performers. Their associations deployed the language of military camaraderie and drill to describe their collaborative effort.86 Although some statutes specified times at which members could use the gymnastic apparatus by themselves, the private pursuit of personal fitness was not gymnastics’ aim. Gymnasts trained and performed in perfect unison, an impression reinforced by members’ uniforms.87 Discipline in a gymnastic society ensured that members did not forget their serious and collective purpose in favour of individual brilliance. Gymnastics was dangerously close to the street-performance tradition of the saltimbanque, and promoters of the sport took care to note that the gymnast was involved in a serious association of citizens. The self-aggrandizement of the street-performer was foreign to the dedicated gymnast, who placed the good of his comrades and of his nation ahead of his personal interest. According to one Mulhousien gymnastics fan, ‘by exercising one’s physical strength to the exclusion of one’s moral and intellectual strength, one might become an excellent saltimbanque, but never a gymnast.’88 Despite the solemn rhetoric of military preparedness and civic duty, Richard Holt notes that the appeal of gymnastics none the less derived in large measure from the traditions of popular entertainment from which it Report on the Société de gymnastique in L’Industriel alsacien,  Oct. .  statutes of the Société de gymnastique de Mulhouse, ADHR  M . 85 Ibid. 86 William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA, ), – makes some suggestive points about the psychological creation of group solidarities through collective gymnastics although he underestimates their impact on French society. 87 Marcel Spivak, ‘Le Développement de l’éducation physique et du sport français de  à ’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,  (), –. 88 Account of the gymnastic festival in Guebwiller in L’Industriel alsacien,  May . 83 84

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sought to distance itself. Membership in a gymnastic association was a young man’s chance to appear to great advantage in public, wearing a dashing uniform and performing deeds requiring great physical strength and skill. For young office workers, such occasions were rare. Competition was also a major attraction despite the fact that gymnastic ideologues rejected contests because they believed that the gymnast ought to be motivated by civic duty rather than by the desire for medals and glory.90 Conviviality also drew members; in practice, gymnastic societies were not exclusively concerned with the grim business of inculcating military discipline. An  newspaper account of a society banquet noted gymnastics’ typical blend of high purpose and high spirits. The young men of the society listened appreciatively to several speeches celebrating physical culture and denigrating ‘those already-old young men who think that walking quickly . . . and no longer greeting old school friends makes a man serious’. The gymnasts then sang comic songs and practised their exercises on the dining-room chairs, performing ‘tricks that would be prodigious in a circus’.91 Vaulting over the dining-room furniture was excusable, even desirable, because it emphasized the gymnasts’ youth and manly vitality. Although they often admitted older men as honorary members, gymnasts were even less interested in intergenerational sociability than most male associations. Minimum age for membership in most Mulhousien gymnastic associations was just  or , a figure that some young men considered too high. The Cadets’ Society was established by men who were too young to join other societies; average age of founding members was just barely .92 At , youths of the grande bourgeoisie would still have been adolescent, in school, and dependent on their parents.93 Although there were some students among the Cadets, most noted gainful occupation on the membership list. A few years after establishing their own association, the Cadets created a new society of Cadet Pupils for boys aged  to .94 The 89

Holt, Sport and Society, , –. Ibid. ; Dixon, –. French and German gymnastic ideologues both associated competitiveness with English sports and insisted that gymnasts should avoid it. See also Silvain and Gauquelin who claim that the real shift between traditional and modern sport is the introduction of ‘universal rules and the quest for performance’ (). 91 L’Industriel alsacien,  Mar. . 92 Statutes and membership list of the Société des Cadets, dated  Sept. , in ADHR  M . Mulhousien gymnasts often noted their age on membership lists, probably to call attention to their youth. 93 John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, –present (New York, ), –. 94 Statutes in MHM  TT . 89 90

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young men of the Cadets’ Society, now about twenty, established themselves as patrons of their juniors and taught the boys gymnastics and the practice of good citizenship. Along with the emphasis on youth came the celebration of the physical strength of the gymnast’s body.95 A strong body was the gymnast’s best claim to morally upstanding manliness. Petit-bourgeois boys did not define their entry into manhood in terms of financial independence and founding a family in the same way their elite counterparts did.96 Members of gymnastic societies were usually economically dependent on salaried employment and likely to remain so. They would probably continue as bachelors for several years during which they would possess neither the home nor the dependants that symbolized the manhood of the grand bourgeois.97 Lacking the social signifiers of bourgeois manhood—ownership, marriage, and fatherhood—petit-bourgeois gymnasts focused instead on physical evidence of adulthood. Gymnasts belonged to a tradition originating with Rousseau and transmitted through the German gymnastics of Turnvater Jahn which maintained that a healthy body signified strong moral character.98 Physical strength and a muscular body guaranteed the ethical behaviour of the petit bourgeois. In gymnastics as in choral music, the physical attributes of manliness—deep voices and strong muscles—were crucial to establishing the social status of association members. In addition to their adult male bodies, gymnasts and choristers of the s drew attention to their citizenship. The Revolution of  had definitively uncoupled bourgeois status and citizenship in France: economic dependence no longer excluded men from participation in the nation’s affairs. France recognized its office clerks and technicians as autonomous men, worthy of full civic participation, and petit-bourgeois associations accordingly deployed citizenship as an indicator of their status. Most musical and sporting societies of the s were characterized by a hyper-patriotism that was quite distinct from the provincialism of earlier associations.99 The military rhetoric of the gymnastic societies, 95 On the development of a nineteenth-century ideal of manly beauty, see George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford, ), esp. ch. . 96 Gillis, Youth and History,  notes that sports contributed to redefining fraternity in physical, rather than spiritual, terms. See also , –. 97 See Borie, – on the ‘sexual ghetto’ of bachelorhood. 98 Mosse, Image of Man, –, –. 99 Contrast the situation in Germany, where associations consolidated a national culture before the creation of the nation-state. See Dieter Düding, ‘The Nineteenth-Century German Nationalist Movement as a Movement of Societies’, in Hagen Schulze (ed.), Nation-Building in Central Europe (Leamington Spa, ), – and Jean Quéniart, ‘Les

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which claimed to create a volunteer force of citizens ready to defend the nation, speaks for itself. The lyrics of many choral anthems similarly asserted members’ devotion to the patrie. The Choral Union of Mulhouse’s popular anthem, ‘France! France!’ was typical of the genre: choristers celebrated the merging of provincial identities and presented themselves as true Frenchmen: ‘trembling arms, proud souls, we swing our swords and empty our glasses!’100 Some anthem lyrics were more overtly aggressive, calling on men to ‘defend the patrie beneath the banner of honour’ and to ‘conquer or perish’.101 The serious themes of choral society music aimed at eliminating ‘bawdy songs and risqué ditties’ from members’ leisure activities. Patriotism was foremost among the ‘great moralizing forces’ which choral singing instilled in its members.102 Uniforms heightened the military allusions of petit-bourgeois gymnastic drill and choral lyrics. Quasi-military costume emphasized both the manhood and the citizenship of petit-bourgeois singers and sportsmen. Fancy uniforms also displayed well in public and made the consumption of leisure even more conspicuous. Gymnasts arrayed themselves in tight trousers and short jackets, with caps bearing ribbons and the name of the association. Bisontin sharpshooters appeared in white trousers (brown in winter), gaiters, waistcoat, a brown coat, a white cap with a green ribbon, and a cartridge case on their belt. Finishing off the costume was a moiré silk ribbon in red, yellow, and black (the colours of Besançon) with a silver fringe and silver lettering announcing the name of the society.103 Choral singers were less likely than sportsmen to wear uniforms, but they usually had some cap or insignia that made their parades through town behind their banners more impressive. Statutes occasionally warned members that uniforms were to be worn only when the society appeared as a whole. Members caught wearing society insignia for their own gratification, rather than as part of a collective effort, would be fined.104 Just as sport and song were winning mass followings among the petits Formes de sociabilité musicale en France et en Allemagne (–)’, in François (ed.), Société et sociabilité bourgeoise, –. 100 Account of Alsatian choral societies’ festival,  Apr. . ADHR  M . 101 ‘Debout!’ in pamphlet of song lyrics performed at the  choral festival in Mulhouse. ADHR  M . Nationalism was not the only theme of choral music, and provincialism did make the occasional appearance, especially in Alsace where societies frequently sang in German. 102 Report on the banquet of the Saint Cecilia, L’Industriel alsacien,  Dec. . 103 Statutes of the Franc-tireurs comtois, ADD M . 104 In the s and s, German gymnasts were similarly tempted to appear in public in gymnastic uniform (which occasionally replaced evening dress), as a sign of liberal and nationalist views. Dixon, –.

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bourgeois of eastern France, they were losing their attraction to bourgeois elites. By the s, the philharmonic societies that had provided winter concerts and liturgical music had disappeared. Public musical performance became the affair of professionals or of massed choirs of petitbourgeois men supported by brass fanfares. In the s and s musical association had been the retreat of highly educated men whose leisure was entirely at their own disposal. By the s these elite men no longer took part in musical performances of the public sphere. In their place were ambitious young clerks and technicians whose adoption of the spirit of association demonstrated that they understood the need for sober and responsible leisure pursuits. In addition to music, bourgeois elites also abandoned associative sport in the s. Mulhouse’s shooting society, that reminder of the old regime city-republic that had been so important to local bourgeois in the s and s, fell on hard times in later decades. In  young men of the industrial elite attempted to revive collective marksmanship with the creation of a Riflemen’s Society, but there is no evidence that the group survived into the s.105 Among men of the bourgeois elite, music and sport became individual and private activities. Petit-bourgeois enthusiasm for these pursuits devalued them106 so that they increasingly characterized, not a bourgeoisie united in its project of emulation, but an ambitious—and isolated—petite bourgeoisie. By  the lower margins of the bourgeoisie in Mulhouse and Besançon had managed to approximate the associative sociability of their employers. They arranged their spare time in bourgeois fashion, joining associations of their peers in a public sphere in which male civic duty left no room for women and domestic concerns. Full of cultural goodwill, they emphasized their dedication to the education to which they owed their jobs and their social position. They enjoyed a reasonable amount of leisure, which they conducted in a responsible fashion that would not leave them open to accusations of indolence. They spoke the language of emulation, welcoming competition while denying its potentially damaging and divisive effects. Despite their efforts, however, the sum of their associative activity and cultural goodwill failed to add up to genuine access to the bourgeois elite. In the petit-bourgeois failure to win full admission to the bourgeois public sphere, money, or rather the lack of it, certainly played a role. Rapid industrialization had created new social gulfs—and new ambi105 106

Statutes and membership list of the Société des carabiniers in ADHR  Z . Bourdieu, –.

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tions—that voluntary association could not integrate into elite culture. In the context of the new social complexities of towns like Mulhouse and Besançon, money was an easy barrier. It required much less effort and scrutiny to exclude a man based on his inability to pay than it would to include him because of his suitability for bourgeois emulation. Much of the gatekeeping function of bourgeois voluntary associations devolved upon personal wealth. Economic criteria did not, however, completely replace emulation. The petit-bourgeois associations of the s were not simply poorer copies of the elite societies of the s. Willingness to adopt the ideals of emulation did not conceal the fact that petit-bourgeois sociability had its own norms. Petit-bourgeois relations to educated culture and leisure, in particular, were not the same as those of their bourgeois employers. In true emulative fashion, petit-bourgeois imitators of elite society created an original sociability based on the values of steady employment, patriotism, and the cultivation of physical strength. Ultimately, petit-bourgeois sociability was not merely imitative, but creative. From petit-bourgeois education, leisure, domestic life, and work developed the culture of France’s couches nouvelles. By the s these new strata of society had almost completely co-opted the voluntary association, which came to be virtually synonymous with the petite bourgeoisie.107 The s demonstrated that the allegedly universal public sphere was, in fact, an exclusive club. The socially ambitious men who had heeded the bourgeois call to emulation discovered that the spirit of association excluded as well as included. The emerging petite bourgeoisie probed the limits of emulation’s inclusiveness and discovered that the consolidation of bourgeois elites took place at their expense. Despite a rhetoric ‘inviting everyone . . . to join, providing, of course, they obeyed the rules and paid their subscriptions’,108 exclusivity remained the hallmark of the bourgeoisie. No amount of cultural goodwill could erase the differences between petit-bourgeois and elite sociability. By  bourgeois claims to be a potentially universal class rang distinctly hollow. 107 Crossick and Haupt, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe; Benoit Lecoq, ‘Les Cercles parisiens au début de la Troisième République: de l’apogée au déclin’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,  (), –; and Patricia R. Turner, ‘Class, Community and Culture in Nineteenth-Century France: The Growth of Voluntary Associations in Roanne, –’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, ). 108 R. J. Morris, Class, Sect, and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class, Leeds, – (Manchester, ), .

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By the end of the revolutionary period, France’s old regime had disintegrated, but a new, stable social order had yet to take its place. In the immediate post-revolutionary decades, the practice of association served as a crucial strategy for reordering society as the atomized individuals defined by revolutionary law reconstituted social groups and hierarchies. Voluntary associations marked the perimeters of these groups and mapped out the boundaries of class society. As one of a company of targetshooters, savants, horticulturists, or charitable donors, a Frenchman knew his place in the bourgeois social order. His bourgeois status denoted personal achievement: a reward for individual probity and success. It also represented his acknowledgement of the limits of individualism: the French bourgeois was not simply the self-made man because he owed his position to the associative civic spirit of his fellows. For much of the nineteenth century, Frenchmen understood bourgeois status as competitive, but they did not assume that it fuelled class conflict. Rather, bourgeois men reconfigured society as emulative—as composed of differing groups united in harmonious rivalry to contribute to general prosperity. Bourgeois men who, in working hours, faced the uncertainties of the industrializing economy, dedicated their leisure to less destructive rivalries. In seeking to outdo their fellow citizens with the excellence of their verse, the size of their vegetables, the skill of their musical performance, or the depth of their civic commitment, bourgeois Frenchmen asserted that competition, and, indeed, early industrial capitalism, did not have to be selfish or destructive. Bourgeois sociability could organize competition—much as early French socialists wanted to organize labour —so that harmony and association might govern modern society. Establishing the bourgeois society of voluntary associations and civic involvement was men’s work. The emulative sociability of the association removed itself from the home and, with its formal parliamentary procedure, established its norms in direct opposition to those of domestic social practice. Early nineteenth-century voluntary associations were at pains to

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demonstrate that the world of men had its own sociable rules that derived from the practice of citizenship rather than from the conjugal family. Statutes, votes, and public debate governed male bourgeois sociability, while affection, deference, and paternal authority reigned in the home. The manliness of the bourgeois public sphere and of the activities bourgeois men pursued within it were mutually supporting. Associations’ masculine rhetoric of citizenship and science plainly excluded women from their midst. Potentially feminine practices such as charity or music and their less aggressive discourses of harmony acquired impeccable manly credentials when performed publicly and in association. Nineteenth-century sociable circles simultaneously constructed class status and gender difference as part of the same project of emulation. Even when women did establish their own associations, wrote their own statutes, and elected their own officers, their organizations found themselves excluded from recognition in the public sphere. Although French law made no distinction between male and female associations, administrative practice ignored women in groups. It never occurred to most mayors and prefects that the letter of the law required them to take the same precautions with associations of women as with those of men. With their meticulous surveillance of male associations and their refusal to regulate their female counterparts, the authorities imposed notions of sexual difference on sociable practice. Female sociability was domestic while male association was civic. Women could mimic the practices of citizenship, but their performance did not fool those men who were the natural occupants of the public sphere. Revisionist scholars of the French Revolution have persuaded us that nineteenth-century bourgeois society did not emerge fully formed from revolutionary events. Creating class society was the gradual, peaceful, and sociable work of the post-revolutionary decades, not the dramatic outcome of the destruction of the old regime. None the less, many of the crucial elements of the new social order had revolutionary origins. Revolutionary notions of égalité among male citizens and of the incommensurability of men and women did not find their complete expression in the structures of French society until the first decades of the nineteenth century. Bourgeois society adapted these revolutionary assertions to the calmer nineteenth-century climate. In their voluntary associations, for instance, bourgeois men could practise a form of egalitarianism that was not incompatible with hierarchy: egalitarian companies of bourgeois members acted as patrons for less responsible men. Frenchmen in their associations could define citizenship as inherently male not merely by

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denying women the vote, but also by systematically refusing to recognize female activity as civic. The voluntary associations of the bourgeois public sphere recapitulated the male bourgeoisie itself: the criteria for membership in both the class and the cercle were allegedly universal but in practice highly exclusionary. The virtues of emulation presented themselves as the generally acceptable and accessible standards of adult male behaviour. All men, according to the egalitarian rhetoric of emulation, concerned themselves with education, with the appropriate use of leisure, with the organization of work, and with the charitable management of poverty. Civic duty—another concern common to responsible men—demanded that they occupy themselves with these issues not merely in a personal or familial context. Because emulation was not an individual or a private virtue, it could best be practised in association with one’s peers. The logic of membership, either in the bourgeoisie or in one of its associations, claimed to apply equally to all men. Sociability, however, is not an egalitarian or a democratic practice. It inescapably concerns itself as much with exclusion as with inclusion, and clubs that just anyone can join are rarely worth the trouble. Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the bourgeoisie and of its associations, membership remained closed to the majority of men. Every bourgeois man who prided himself on his grasp of science or on his ability to use his leisure constructively had necessarily to compare himself to other men who failed to live up to these standards. Bourgeois men who hoped to engage in patronage and charity had to find their objects among men who were not their equals. Bourgeois sociability in nineteenth-century France combined a rhetoric of equality with the practice of distinction. This combination was the means by which bourgeois society reconciled the revolutionary legacy of civic equality with the desire for social order fixed in hierarchy. Emulation made it possible for bourgeois Frenchmen to imagine a meritocratic society in the midst of the emerging industrial economy. Citizens remained equal, but not all men could achieve full citizenship: the public sphere of active male citizens remained closed to the undeserving. Civic-spirited bourgeois men justified this exclusion by claiming to represent the best interests of the entire community, including those of men who had not proved capable of representing themselves. This reconciliation of civic equality and bourgeois superiority functioned as long as all participants in the public sphere agreed about the limits of the bourgeoisie. The nineteenth-century bourgeois could

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imagine class as a level plateau only if everyone knew where the edges lay: the system worked while the gulfs between bourgeois and others, established by gentlemen’s agreement, remained agreeable to all.1 In the early nineteenth century, the practice of association usually reflected just such consensus. Networks of associations with overlapping memberships described an egalitarian social space in which bourgeois men could move freely. A member of one association could assume that his candidacy would be acceptable to any other association, and that certainty left him truly free to arrange his leisure according to his own tastes, aptitudes, and friendships. Occasionally, however, the gentlemen’s agreement broke down. Contested membership proposals revealed that the bourgeoisie was not, in fact, a level playing field; it had its own hierarchies and ranks. Blackballed candidates were a clear indication that the bourgeoisie was not monolithic. Moreover, rejected candidacies generally hinged on issues that were supposed to be external to the criteria of emulation. In particular, associations that black-balled men because of their religion demonstrated that faith was not strictly a private matter of conscience with no bearing on public status. The persistence of male sectarian associations further indicated that bourgeois men continued to link their confessional identities with their civic activism. Although the legal definition of citizenship in post-revolutionary France no longer recognized differences of faith, bourgeois citizens continued to see religion as a fundamental aspect of civic life. Bourgeois associations did their best to keep quiet about those embarrassing incidents when members disagreed about the suitability of candidates. The persistent anti-Semitism of some members of Mulhouse’s Social Cercle, for instance, only appears in the secretary’s minutes; that Jewish candidates were not as warmly welcomed as others never appeared in the local press. The existence of confessional associations, including leisure as well as charitable societies, was a constant reminder, however, that it was possible to be not-quite-bourgeois. At its edges, the level playing field of bourgeois society shaded off into an ambiguity in which an individual might count as bourgeois in some circles but not in others. Admission into one association did not necessarily open doors to all of the others, and hierarchies emerged within the world of bourgeois sociability. These inequalities within the bourgeoisie became increasingly 1 The image of plateau comes from Edmond Goblot, La Barrière et le niveau: étude sociologique sur la bourgeoisie française moderne (nd edn.; Paris, ).

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apparent as the nineteenth century proceeded. As industrialization and urbanization accelerated, the social landscapes of provincial French towns became progressively more complex. The early nineteenth-century model of a united bourgeois citizenry defined by its sociable occupation of the public sphere was no longer an adequate description of French society. Influence in local affairs in the last decades of the century was no longer monopolized by interlocking bourgeois associations which could reasonably claim to act in the interests of the municipality as a whole. Voluntary associations mirrored the growing intricacy of French society and the increasing division of labour within the industrial economy. Total numbers of associations and of members increased dramatically, but earlier patterns of overlapping and egalitarian membership disappeared. New petit-bourgeois associations, even when their statutes and aims imitated those of their predecessors, clearly occupied an inferior social plane. By the s the public sphere of provincial French towns could no longer claim to be an egalitarian social space within which members moved freely. The emerging petite bourgeoisie carved out a position for itself within the public sphere, but it was a recognizably separate and inferior rank. Instead of joining the circles of bourgeois emulators, France’s new petits bourgeois succeeded in revealing the limits of emulation: the bourgeois public sphere fragmented as new social elements challenged its claims to universality. In the final decades of the century, class society in France definitively left emulation behind. Male bourgeois consensus, as forged by the rhetoric and practice of emulation, faltered as Frenchmen found it increasingly difficult to imagine class as a component of a unified and harmonious society. Under the Third Republic, voluntary associations reflected rather than concealed class conflict and political difference. The petit-bourgeois member of a gymnastic society did not expect to join prestigious learned societies or elite cercles. Nor did he expect the members of these elite associations to recognize him as their equal—as a bourgeois citizen whose ability to represent the best interests of the community matched their own. The gulf separating both the white-collar gymnast and the grand-bourgeois erudite from the working-class mutualiste widened. Increasingly, associations represented particular class interests rather than universal social virtues. As the contradictions of the allegedly universal bourgeois public sphere became more apparent, it fractured into a variety of bourgeois and other publics.2 Voluntary associations increasingly aligned themselves along 2

On the fragmentation of the public sphere in the fin de siècle, see Charles Rearick,

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the fault lines that divided French society. Catholics and anticlericals, republicans and their opponents, labour and management, producers and consumers all used association to define their disputes. Sport, music, patronage, charity, and the organization of work all became sites on which the Third Republic’s battles were fought. Sociability became the locus for explicit and unapologetic political and social antagonism. Associative networks rearranged themselves so as to represent society as a field of competing interests, a vision of social order that early nineteenth-century France had resolutely rejected.3 In eastern towns, as in the rest of France, the elements of bourgeois self-definition and the practice of association diverged. The FrancoPrussian War, defeat, occupation, and annexation contributed to the transformation of associative life in Mulhouse, Besançon, and Lons le Saunier. Existing social networks dissolved as societies disbanded for the duration of the war and sometimes never recovered from the loss of key members.4 As in the rest of France, associations multiplied in the eastern departments after the war, undeterred by the new Republic’s suspicion of group activities. Increasingly, associations ignored strictures against political and religious discussion, prohibitions against networks of federated groups, and even Article ’s requirement that associations seek authorization.5 The purpose of these new associations was no longer to map out an egalitarian, potentially universal bourgeois public sphere. Instead, new groups reflected the divisions in eastern society along lines of political conflict. The new regime’s bureaucrats, abandoning the principle that even loyal political associations were dangerous, aided Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (New Haven, ), . 3 On the use of voluntary association as representative of particular interests, see Antoine Prost, In the Wake of War: ‘Les Anciens Combattants’ and French Society, – H. McPhail (trans.) (New York, ); Steven D. Kale, Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, – (Baton Rouge, LA, ), –; Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe, –: Enterprise, Family and Independence (London, ), –; Catherine Pellissier, Loisirs et sociabilités des notables lyonnais au XIXe siècle (Lyon, ), ; and Patricia R. Turner, ‘Class, Community and Culture in Nineteenth-Century France: The Growth of Voluntary Associations in Roanne, –’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, ). Although Turner argues that associative practice created a common civic culture, it was clearly based on negotiation among associations representing different interest groups. 4 See, for instance, the  dossier on associations in the Jura which notes those associations which ceased to meet after the  mobilization of the National Guard. ADJ M . 5 Pierre Arnaud, ‘La Sociabilité sportive: Jalons pour une histoire du mouvement sportif’, in Arnaud (ed.), Les Athlètes de la République: Gymnastique, sport et idéologie républicaine, – (Toulouse, ),  similarly notes that associations in Lyon increasingly dispensed with authorization, simply ignoring Article  of the penal code.

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these associations in their politicization.6 Prefects approvingly noted the republican sentiments of members and authorized associations with such titles as the ‘Democratic Republican Cercle of Besançon’.7 Mulhousien associations suffered the additional blow of the emigration of many members after the annexation of Alsace by the German Empire. Many associations in German Mulhouse enthusiastically threw themselves into the controversies of the occupation period by proclaiming their persistent loyalty to their French past.8 By the end of the century, the claims of bourgeois men to embody common interests had come under fire, both from men of other classes who refused to accept bourgeois representation and from women who rejected arguments about their intrinsic inability to represent themselves.9 Under the Third Republic, bourgeois men developed new rhetorical expressions of class, manhood, and of their capacity for leadership.10 Their understanding of bourgeois status and of the role of class in the construction of society shifted. The bourgeoisie of the fin de siècle represented a particular interest in opposition to the interests of other classes rather than a pinnacle of moral achievement whose values structured all of society. Emulation’s exhortations to friendly rivalry in civic responsibility and self-improvement no longer adequately described Third Republic society. Among the associations and the classes of fin de siècle France, competition was real, and its destructive consequences were genuine. Although emulation served as an organizing principle for less than a 6 Benoit Lecoq, ‘Les Cercles parisiens au début de la Troisième République: de l’apogée au déclin’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,  (), –. 7 Authorized in , the cercle members pointed out that Besançon was embarrassingly late in acquiring a republican organization. ADD M . 8 See, for instance, the anniversary publications of Mulhousien associations such as G. Schlumberger, Cercle Social de Mulhouse: Aperçu historique à l’occasion du centenaire de la fondation du Cercle Social de Mulhouse (Mulhouse, ); Cinquantième Anniversaire de la Concordia de Mulhouse, – (Mulhouse, ), (both pamphlets in Bib. SIM); Histoire documentaire de l’industrie de Mulhouse et de ses environs au XIXe siècle (Enquête centennale) ( vols.; Mulhouse, ); and the dossier pertaining to the anniversary banquet of the Industrial Society, Bib. SIM  BA/, A . The production of biographies of industrialists and genealogies of patrician families also flourished. Genealogy often had a practical purpose—that of unearthing old lettres de bourgeoisie from the Mulhousien cityrepublic that would prove Swiss citizenship and avoid the choice between French and German nationality. See R. Redslob, ‘La Bourgeoisie alsacienne sous le régime allemand’ in La Bourgeoisie alsacienne (Strasbourg, ), –. Both genres, however, were largely commemorative of l’Alsace française. 9 See Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA, ), esp. ch.  on Hubertine Auclert’s attempt to establish a ‘women’s interest’ that could be both particular and construed as participating in the common good. 10 Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford, ).

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century, it was none the less crucial to France’s transition from an old regime society of orders to an industrial class society. Voluntary association was an effective tool for representing and navigating class and gender in the decades immediately following the upheaval of the French Revolution. Association retained certain vital achievements of the Revolution—notably the exclusion of women from public affairs and the concept of meritocratic advancement. Networks of associations preserved these revolutionary principles and forced them to accommodate social groups and hierarchies. Egalité and the revolutionary society of legally atomized individuals gave way to an orderly arrangement of levels based on allegedly universal virtues and talents. Emulation and association helped bourgeois Frenchmen construct the political and economic order of early industrial France. Only later did emulative harmony give way to the competitive assumptions of the Third Republic. Deploying their associations as representatives of civic manhood and its virtues, bourgeois Frenchmen lay sole claim to the nineteenthcentury public sphere. They barred women from their associations and retreated from their own homes. They jealously protected the bourgeois exclusivity of public discussion while asserting the potential universality of participation in the public. They equated an active civic life with full citizenship even though the two did not always coincide in nineteenthcentury France. The structure of the voluntary association and the rhetoric of emulation took a wide variety of pastimes, from archaeology to target-shooting, charity to horticulture, and declared them exemplary of bourgeois manhood and its aptitude for local leadership. It was at the mundane level of the weekly musical rehearsal, the daily cercle newspaper, and the annual charitable collection that bourgeois manhood was made. Emulation taught bourgeois men how to compete and win in postrevolutionary France, whether the contest was billiards, political discussion, horticultural exposition, or civic leadership. The sociable norms of emulation also ensured that victory created mutual admiration, but no animosity. For decades, the same rules that governed their sociability suited bourgeois Frenchmen for the task of establishing social ascendancy without abandoning the notion of society as an egalitarian and harmonious unit. By the time this vision of social concord broke down, Frenchmen had successfully navigated the transition from the old regime to a modern class society.

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  Doubs Archives communales de Besançon Principally series F (agriculture), I (public opinion, festivities), Q (public assistance), and R (public instruction). Archives de l’église réformée Deposited at the Archives départementales du Doubs. Archives départementales du Doubs, Besançon Principally dossiers from series M (administration and police), T (public instruction), and X (public assistance). Bibliothèque municipale de Besançon Manuscript collections including papers of some associations and of prominent Bisontins involved in associative life. Grand Séminaire de Besançon Confraternity papers and bulletins of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. Haut Rhin Archives communales de Mulhouse Principally series J (public opinion, festivities, and Freemasonry), Q (public assistance), and R (public instruction). Archives départementales du Haut Rhin, Colmar Dossiers as above for the Doubs. Bibliothèque de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse Pamphlets and some manuscript sources. Bibliothèque municipale de Mulhouse Alsatiques collection. Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Strasbourg Alsatiques collection. Musée historique de Mulhouse Manuscript collections deposited at the Archives communales. Papers of associations and of prominent Mulhousiens involved in associative life. Jura Archives de la Société d’Emulation du Jura Deposited at the Archives départementales du Jura.

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Archives départementales du Jura, Lons le Saunier Dossiers as above for the Doubs. Paris Archives nationales F, , , and . Results of surveys of associations in the Doubs, Jura, and Haut Rhin. Bibliothèque nationale Fonds maçonnique.   Newspapers (i) Besançon Le Franc-comtois (–). L’Impartial (–, –, –). Le Patriote franc-comtois (–). L’Union franc-comtoise (–). (ii) Lons le Saunier Le Courrier du Jura (–). La Sentinelle du Jura (–). (iii) Mulhouse L’Industriel alsacien (–). Other periodicals (i) Besançon Annuaire du Doubs Association générale de secours et patronage. Compte rendu (–). Association générale de secours mutuels. Compte rendu (–). Bulletin périodique publié par la Société d’Agriculture et par la Société d’horticulture du Doubs (–). Bulletin de la Société de medecine de Besançon (–, –). Bulletin de la Société des pharmaciens du département du Doubs (–). Mémoires de l’Académie de Besançon (–). Mémoires de la Société d’agriculture, sciences naturelles et arts du Doubs (–). Mémoires de la Société d’Emulation du Doubs (–). Revue médicale de Besançon et de la Franche Comté (–). Société d’horticulture et d’arboriculture du Doubs (–). Société de Saint Vincent de Paul: Rapport présenté à l’assemblée générale (–). (ii) Lons le Saunier Annuaire du Jura Travaux de la Société d’Emulation du Jura (–).

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

academies  old regime  Academy of Besançon: conservatism of , –,  finances – foundation of  library of  agricultural association – contrasted with horticultural association – in the Jura  Agulhon, Maurice  Alésia, battle of – Alsace – cercles in  choral music in ,  German annexation of  mutual aid societies in  old regime marksmen’s groups  opposition to the Restoration – pogroms in  veterinarians in  alumni associations , – Amman, Peter  anti-clericalism , ,  anti-Semitism –,  apprenticeship –, – charitable –, – ‘crisis of’  persistance of – silk workshops (Lons)  watchmaking (Besançon) – Arbois  archaeology ,  architects ,  art, see fine arts

Article  see association: Napoleonic Code association: as alternative to the salon – assumptions of equality among , – and bourgeois status –, –, , ,  bourgeois views on worker association , –, – and Catholic laymen –, – for charitable purposes , –, –,  as components of Mulhousien Cercle – and elimination of class conflict , , – and French republican tradition  and the French Revolution – generational stratification of –,  gendering of , , , –, , – involuntary, for workers –, –,  Jean Macé’s understanding of –, ,  law of   and the ‘leisure question’ –, ,  liberty of () , ,  membership patterns –,  moral expectations of  and the Napoleonic Code –, , , , ,  need for local initiative 

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Index

association (cont.): negotiation with state authorities ,  and patronage – political discussion in  and the petite bourgeoisie –, , –, , –, – and post-revolutionary social order –, – reflecting fissures within the bourgeoisie –, –, – Second Empire policy towards – Second Republic policy towards – and scientific practice  state encouragement of – surveillance under Restoration  Third Republic policy towards  under old regime – see also learned societies, cercles, mutual aid Association for the Defence of French Labour  bachelors ,  begging –, – Besançon: agricultural association in  Catholic charity in , , – cercles in , , , –, ,  choral associations in –,  development of petite bourgeoisie in –, ,  exposition of   General Association for Aid and Patronage –, , – Good Cousins in ,  history of – Horticultural Society of –

Jewish charity in – lack of popular education  learned society membership –, , – libraries in – museums in , , ,  musical association in , , , , – mutual aid in , –, –, – professional association in –, ,  Protestant charity in – religious composition of ,  repression of begging – separation of indigent from criminal in  soup kitchens in  sport in , , ,  Swiss sociability in –,  Third Republic in  see also Academy of Besançon, Emulation Society of the Doubs Berryer, Pierre-Antoine  Bezucha, Robert  Biblical Societies (Besançon, Mulhouse, Paris) – Blanc, Louis  Bödeker, Hans-Erich  Bonapartism  working-class  Bonaparte, Joseph  Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, see Napoleon III Bonaparte, Napoleon, see Napoleon I Bourbons, see Restoration Bourcart, Jean-Jacques ,  Bourdeloy, M , , ,  Bourdieu, Pierre ,  bourgeoisie: abandonment of musical and sporting association  and civic duty , 

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Index and charity –, , –, ,  and collecting – critiques of working-class morality –, , ; see also café domestic life  economic behaviour of –, , , – egalitarianism of –, , , –, ,  and financial independence  fractures within , –, –, –, – and leisure –, – individualism of  localism of –, , ,  and post-revolutionary social order  political opinions –, ,  religious divisions within –, ,  represented by museum collections – and scientific culture , –, ,  solidarity through patronage of workers –, ,  and the public sphere ,  uncertainty about mutual aid – as ‘universal class’ –, , , ,  women of –,  see also petite bourgeoisie building contractors –,  cafés: bourgeois condemnation of –, , , – compared to cercles –, , ,  and mutual aid associations  Parisian  and working-class sociability ,



,  capacité ,  carbonari  and Good Cousins –,  in Mulhouse – Catholicism: in Alsace  and aristocratic culture  in Besançon , ,  and charity – education policy and Second Empire  ‘feminization’ of  and the Good Cousins  in Mulhouse , –,  and musical association  role of lay men , – and sectarian tensions in Besançon , – social Catholicism ,  see also Saint Vincent de Paul cercles , –,  avoidance of political discussion – blackballing , , ,  and café sociability –, , ,  cercles populaires, see Mulhousien Cercle and commercial interests –, – exclusion of women from – games and gambling in –,  intergenerational sociability in – Jewish – newspapers in , ,  petit-bourgeois , ,  in provincial society – rejection of salon tradition – rules of – Social Cercle (Mulhouse) , , , , , , 

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Index

cercles (cont.): Swiss  Chaline, Jean-Pierre  charity , ,  apprenticeships –, – autonomy of male associations – Catholic – for children – competition in  confusion over goals of , –, , – and coupons ,  dissolution of old regime societies  for the elderly ,  female practice of –, ,  Jewish –,  and masculinity –,  and the poor family – Protestant –,  and religion , , , –,  repression of begging – and the Saint Cecilia Association (Besançon)  ‘scientific’ , , –, –, , , – soup kitchens  work programs –,  see also Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint-Joseph workshops, General Associations for Aid and Patronage Charles X ,  Chenier, André  child labour ,  citizenship – and associative practice  and capacité  and charity ,  and the exclusion of women , , –, –

as exclusively bourgeois  petit-bourgeois –, – and religious difference  Civil Constitution of the Clergy  class: cultural definitions  mobility  as a ‘plateau’  and sociability – socio-economic definitions – and women’s status  see also bourgeoisie, petite bourgeoisie clerks , –,  clubs (political): fear of , ,  and the French Revolution , –, and the Second Republic  see also cercles collections, see museums compagnonnage ,  competition: in bourgeois secondary education  in charitable work , ,  and choral associations – economic ,  and emulation , , , , , ,  in expositions  and gymnastic associations  horticultural ,  and price-fixing , , ,  to promote primary education  and science  under Third Republic  Concordia (Mulhouse) , ,  corporations: dissolution of (French Revolution)  in nineteenth-century thought 

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Index old regime , , –,– persistance of corporate traditions in mutual aid ,  revival under Napoleon I – and the Second Republic  cotton, see textiles Crow, Thomas  Cuvier, Georges  Daumard, Adeline  David, Jacques-Louis ,  Davin, J. A. – December Tenth Societies  Declaration of the Rights of Man  Dole (Jura) , ,  Dollfus, Auguste  Dollfus, Emile  Dollfus, Jean  Dollfus Mieg et Cie.  domesticity  and petit-bourgeois homes , ,  see also family Dornach , ,  drinking –, , , ,  Dreyfus, Samuel – Duruy, Victor  education  and bourgeois status ,  campaigns for primary  combative style of bourgeois secondary schools  Jewish  and petit-bourgeois status , , –, ,  technical and professional –,  see also science, libraries, Education League education, adult –,  autonomous classes for workers –



in the Mulhousien Cercle ,  and reform of workers – reinforced by libraries  Society for Popular Instruction (Mulhouse) – success of  Education League (Ligue de l’enseignement) – emulation: and agriculture  between fathers and sons  between poor boys and bourgeois sponsors  and bourgeois identity ,  and charity , , , – decline of , – definitions of –,  displacement of competition , , ,  and elimination of class conflict , , ,  exclusion of some groups from – and leisure  and market competition –, ,  masculinity of , , ,  as natural quality of the bourgeois  petit-bourgeois , , , – and post-revolutionary social order , –, ,  and professional training , ,  and reform of the working class –, – and science , ,  as universal standard of behaviour  for the working class  and worker education –, , 

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 Emulation Society of the Doubs (Besançon): economic neutrality  finances  foundation of  library of  membership patterns – museums of ,  political neutrality of , – Emulation Society of the Jura (Lons) ,  and adult education –,  exploding chicken paper – finances  foundation of  and Lady Louise Kerr – library of  membership patterns  museum of , , ,  paper on tobacco use  political debate and collapse of – relief map of the Jura  ‘Table of Jurassien Industry’  Engel-Dollfus, Frédéric  Enlightenment  salon culture – scientific practice –,  eulogies  expositions , –, ,  fabrantocratie ,  Faivre, abbé ,  family: and apprenticeships ,  bourgeois, as model for the poor , – bourgeois provision for – cafés and the destruction of  and definitions of class  and domesticity  exclusion from male sociability 

Index and female identity  joining associations  and Mulhousien industry –, ,  and religious practice  and the public sphere – sentimentalization of  and working-class leisure , – young men and – see also fatherhood, youth family wage  fatherhood , ,  absent fathers  in charitable emulation  petit-bourgeois  and training of sons  fine arts –,  Flaubert, Gustave , , , , ,  Franceschi, Paul ,  Franche Comté –, ,  choral music in  and Good Cousin tradition – old regime marksmen’s groups  Pharmaceutical Congress  Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in  viniculture in  Franco-Prussian War , , ,  Freemasonry: and Good Cousins –,  and Jean Macé  and manual labour – reorganization under Napoleon I  and Second Empire policy – French language , , ,  and science  and social status in Mulhouse , ,  French Revolution , 

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Index égalité , ,  emergence of the bourgeoisie  and end of salon tradition  and female citizenship  in learned society discussions – and the public sphere  rejection of associations – Terror , , ,  games and gambling: in bourgeois cercles , –, ,  card-sharping  in Mulhousien Cercle ,  Gauthier, Marie-Véronique  gender: and charity –, ,  and class – and collecting  and horticulture – and leisure –,  and manual labour  and music –, ,  and the public sphere  and science , , – and sociability ,  in transition from salon to cercle – see also masculinity, women German language: and popular libraries ,  and Protestantism  and social status in Mulhouse , , ,  and worker education ,  Gillis, John  Good Cousins (Bons Cousins charbonniers): appeal of secrecy – authorities’ mistrust of –, – and manual labour – rituals of – youth of 



Goodman, Dena  Gordon, Daniel  Grèvy, Jules  guild, see corporations Guizot, François  gymnastics, see sport Habermas, Jürgen , , ,  Holt, Richard ,  horticulture , – industrialization –, and changing social status ,  and development of petite bourgeoisie , –, – and literacy in Mulhouse  and religion – and statistics  see also textiles Industrial Society of Mulhouse: admission of Jews  and adult education , ,  authorization of  Beaux Arts Committee  and child labour ,  expositions – foundation of – and Jean Macé  liberalism in  library of  and local maunfactures  membership fees  membership patterns – and the Mulhousien Cercle , , ,  museums of – and mutual aid  opposition to Restoration – relationship to petit-bourgeois associations –, , – request for state funds  sponsorhip of technical schools , 

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

Index

Industrial Society of Mulhouse: (cont.): and the Social Cercle  Statistique du Haut Rhin  and textile imports  and the zoo  Industriel alsacien  Israelite School for the Arts and Crafts (Mulhouse)  Israelite Hospital (Mulhouse)  Jacobinism , ,  Jahn, Turnvater  Jockey Club  Judaism: in Besançon  and charity –,  in Mulhouse , , –,  see also anti-Semitism Juillard-Weiss, Henri ,  July Monarchy ,  association policy ,  authorization of Industrial Society – effects on noble society  June Days  Jura, relief map of the – Kerr, Lady Louise – Klenck, Auguste  Koechlin, André ,  Koechlin-Schlumberger, Joseph  Kullmann, Jules – Labrousse, Ernest  Lantz, Lazare ,  Lamartine, Alphonse de  Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel , ,  learned societies –, , , ,  admission of women – ‘aristocracy of talent’ –, – avoidance of economic disputes 

avoidance of political debate –, – and bourgeois identity  cooperation with state  as models for petit-bourgeois association , , –, – and religious conflict – Scientific Congress  see also Academy of Besançon, Emulation Society (Doubs, Jura), expositions, Industrial Society, libraries, museums, science LeChapelier Law ()  legitimism: in Besançon , , ,  and the Good Cousins  and learned societies  and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul  leisure: and bourgeois identity , –, – conspicious consumption of – contrast with work , , – gender and class ambiguities of – as indicator of petit-bourgeois status –, , , –, – limited by petit-bourgeois work schedules ,  and masculinity  modernization of –, – role of taste in , – scientific hobbies ,  working-class  see also cercles, horticulture, music, sport, Mulhousien Cercle libraries –,  horticultural  petit-bourgeois –, ,  popular –, , –

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Index Literary Conference (Mulhouse) –, ,  Lons le Saunier: absence of petit-bourgeois sociability  cercles in , , , , –,  charitable apprenticeships in  General Association for Aid and Patronage –, , ,  Good Cousins in  history of – learned society membership in , , ,  library of  museum in –, , ,  musical association in – mutual aid in ,  popular library in – religious composition of  repression of begging in  Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in  target-shooting in  worker education in –,  see also Emulation Society of the Jura Louandré, Charles  Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte see Napoleon III Lyon , ,  s uprisings in ,  Macé, Jean –, , – masculinity: bourgeois –, – and charity –, , ,  and collecting  ‘crisis of’  and desk work – historiography of, – and horticulture – and leisure –, , –



and manual labour  and music –,  petit-bourgeois  and science , – and sport –, – working-class – Maza, Sarah  medical profession  Medical Students’ Cercle (Besançon)  reorganization under Napoleon I  Michel, Auguste  middle age – Mulhouse: absence of secular charity in  Biblical Society in – end of political consensus in ,  cercles in –, , – choral associations in , ,  Education League – foundation of the Industrial Society  fragmentation of public sphere in –,  German annexation of,   history of – Horticultural Society of – Jewish charity in – Mulhousien Cercle – musical association in , , ,  mutual aid and conflict with Napoleon III – mutual aid associations in , –, , , , ,  opposition to the Restoration – petite bourgeoisie in –, , , –,  popular libraries in – position of Jews in –,  religious composition of , , ,  repression of begging in 

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Mulhouse (cont.): role of Industrial Society in – scientific hobbies in , – Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in ,  sporting associations in –, –, –,  technical schools in , – worker education in – see also Industrial Society of Mulhouse Mulhousien Cercle – museums: avoidance of art – Bible  and ‘bourgeois acquisitiveness’ – collecting and shopping for  content of – local history and – Mulhouse zoo  representation of the bourgeoisie –,  taxonomy – music , ,  associations for – in Besançon  bourgeois abandonment of  gender and –,  moral value of  petit-bourgeois choral association , –, – and social harmony – mutual aid , –, , ,  children and , – craft-based associations –, – General Associations , –,  Good Cousins and  in-house factory associations –, ,  Napoleon III’s support for ,

–,  and petit-bourgeois professions –, ,  Saint Crépin Society (Besançon) – under the Second Republic  small size of societies – sociability and , – Society for the Encouragement of Savings (Mulhouse) – women as members  Napoleon I: and association law – Description de l’Egypte  medal of  Napoleon III  art patronage  and association law – encouragement of agricultural association  Mulhousien opposition to  and mutual aid associations , –, – National Association  Nautical Society (Besançon) , ,  nobility: and agriculture –, – and field sports  and salons – and science – see also legitimism old regime: association under , ,  society of orders , , ,  see also corporations, Enlightenment, nobility Orleanism –,  Ozanam, Frédéric – Paris Commune 

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Index patronage (bourgeois): and bourgeois charity , , ,  Industrial Society as patron of petit-bourgeois association – petit-bourgeois associations acting as patrons –, , ,  and worker education –,  of workers, by the bourgeoisie , –, , –, –, , –, – see also mutual aid, education, charity, Mulhousien Cercle pauperism , , , , , –,  penal code Article , see association: Napoleonic Code Penot, Achille  petite bourgeoisie –, , ,  and citizenship – and ‘cultural goodwill’ , –, –, – educational associations – emulation of bourgeois sociability –, , – exclusion from bourgeois public sphere –,  importance of education to –, ,  and leisure –, – and music – professional associations – and sport – pharmacists , –, , ,  phosphorous –, ,  poetry (in learned societies) , ,  professionalization , , – and architects  and building contractors – and clerks – French and continental models 



and pharmacists – and technical school graduates – and textile designers – and veterinarians  Protestantism: Biblical Societies – Mulhousien Calvinists , , , –, , –,  and Mulhousien charity , – and sectarian tensions in Besançon –, , , – Swiss community in Besançon –,  and tendency to form associations  public sphere: and bourgeois manhood – and bourgeois society – and charity ,  at the end of the old regime –, ,  fragmentation of –, , –, – gender of , –,  historiography of – nineteenth-century , , , – religion and  railroads , ,  Rancière, Jacques  Reddy, William  republicanism ,  association as element in  in Besançon  in Lons  in Mulhouse –, ,  secret societies  Restoration , ,  and agricultural association  opposition to , , –, –, 

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Index

Revolution of  , , –, –,  Revue des deux mondes  Roche, Daniel  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  Saint Cecilia , , , , ,  Saint Crépin Society (Besançon) – Saint Vincent de Paul, Society of: bourgeois association and –, – foundation of – rejection of scientific charity  relationship to the Church , – rent fund – and Second Empire crackdown –,  visits to poor families , ,  Saint-Joseph workshops (Besançon) – salons  Enlightenment  old regime model –,  persistance in nineteenth century  science: Academy’s rejection of  in adult education  as bourgeois culture , –, , , , ,  democratic potential of –,  Enlightenment – field work  and French language  and horticulture  masculinity of ,  and nobility ,  political neutrality of –,  popularization of 

as privilege of old regime academies  and professionalization , , ,  professional qualifications , –,  and religion , – and risk , – spectacular presentation of – and taxonomy – and women – see also charity: scientific Second Empire , ,  encouragement of mutual aid ,  political opinion in Mulhouse  and the working class ,  Second Republic , ,  policy towards associations – and worker association , – secrecy , – see also Good Cousins, Carbonari, Freemasonry Seeley, Paul  Siegfried, Jules –,  Simmel, Georg  smoking, see tobacco snow removal – sociability: and the bourgeois public sphere , ,  bourgeois, as model for the working class – of cercles ,  and competition  and definitions of class – ‘democratic’ ,  exclusion of religious minorities from  gendering of –, ,  of learned societies ,  and manliness –,  mixed-gender –, 

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Index patterns of leisure  petit-bourgeois , –, – revolutionary  and secrecy – tact as regulating agent  working-class – social Catholicism, see Catholicism: social and Saint Vincent de Paul Social Cercle (Mulhouse) –, , , , ,  social question , ,  Society for Communal Libraries (Mulhouse) – Society for Popular Instruction (Mulhouse) – Society for the Encouragement of Savings (Mulhouse) – socialism , ,  Utopian ,  sociétés populaires see clubs Society for Music and Declamation (Besançon)  sport: bourgeois abandonment of  gymnastics , , , – target-shooting , –, , ,  statistics – charitable , ,  Stendhal, The Red and the Black  strikes (Alsace, –)  Switzerland  immigration to Besançon –, , , –, , , ,  tariffs ,  target-shooting, see sport textiles ,  cotton imports  fabric design –, Industrial Museum (Mulhouse) –, –



status of, in Mulhouse  seasonal demand  tariff debates  Thierry-Mieg, Charles  Third Republic  Bonapartism under  educational debates  policy towards associations , , – tobacco , –, , , ,  Tocqueville, Alexis de ,  uniforms ,  Université ,  Utopian socialism ,  Vercingétorix – veterinarians , ,  watchmaking –, , ,  charitable apprenticeships – and the Emulation Society of the Doubs –,  in the Exposition of   sociable networks – welfare state  women: in associations –, , – bourgeoises –,  bourgeois provision for – as charitable donors –, , , , ,  demands for representation  exclusion from cercles – exclusion from petit-bourgeois sociability  and horticulture ,  and music –,  and mutual aid  as recipients of charity –, – in salons – and science , –

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women (cont.): and shopping  and working-class sociability  work, bourgeois v. manual forms of – working class, bourgeois critiques of  see also education, adult, mutual aid Working Men’s Clubs –,  youth: and clerks  and gambling 

generational stratification and sociability , – and gymnastics – as Industrial Society founders  in Mulhousien Cercle  and opposition to the Restoration  in the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul  value of association for  Zoo (Mulhouse) ,  Zundel, Auguste 