The European bourgeoisie presents faces so different that common traits can be discerned only at the simplest level: the possession of property with the desire and means to increase it, emancipation from past precepts about investment, a readiness to work for a living, and a sense of being superior to town workers or peasants. With their social values—sobriety, discretion, and economy—went a tendency to imitate the style of their social superiors. In France the expectations of the bourgeoisie were roused by education and relative affluence to the point at which they could be a revolutionary force once the breakdown of royal government and its recourse to a representative assembly had given them the voice they had lacked. Everywhere the Enlightenment was creating a tendency to be critical of established institutions (notably, in Roman Catholic countries, the church), together with a hunger for knowledge as a tool of progress.
Such dynamic characteristics, conducive to social mobility, should not obscure the essential feature of bourgeois life: conservativism within a corporate frame. In 1600 a town of more than 100,000 would have been thought enormous: only London, Paris, Naples, Sevilla (Seville), Venice, Rome, and Constantinople came into that class. Half in Asia but enmeshed in the European economic system, Constantinople was unique: it was a megalopolis, a gigantic consumer of the produce of subject lands. London’s growth was more significant for the future: it was a seaport and capital, but with a solid base in manufacturing, trade, and finance. Like Naples, it was a magnet for the unemployed and restless. In 1700 there were only 48 towns in Europe with a population of more than 40,000; all were regarded as important places. Even a smaller city might have influence in the country, offering a range of services and amenities; such was Amiens, with 30,000 inhabitants and 36 guilds, including bleachers, dyers, and finishers of the cloth that was woven in nearby villages but sent far afield. Most towns had fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, and a fair number only about 1,000; most towns remained static or declined. Some grew, however: between 1600 and 1750 the proportion of the population living in towns of more than 20,000 doubled from 4 to 8 percent, representing about half the total urban population.
A universal phenomenon was the growth of capital cities, which benefited from the expansion of government, particularly if, as was usual, the court was within the city. Growth could acquire its own momentum, irrespective of the condition of the country: besides clients and servants of all kinds, artisans, shopkeepers, and other providers of services swelled the ranks. Warsaw’s size doubled during Poland’s century of distress to stand at 120,000 by 1772. St. Petersburg, in 1700 a swamp, acquired 218,000 inhabitants by 1800. Berlin, the simple electoral capital of some 6,000 inhabitants in 1648, rose with the success of the Hohenzollerns to a population of 150,000 by 1786. By then the population of Vienna—home of the imperial court, a growing professional class, a renowned university and other schools, and hospitals—had reached 220,000. The population of Turin, capital of relatively small Savoy, also doubled in the 18th century. Rome did not suffer too obviously from the retreat of the popes from a leading political role, but the Holy City (140,000 inhabitants in 1700) was top-heavy, with little in the way of manufacturing. All these cities owed their growth to their strategic place in the government rather than to their economic importance.
Other cities grew around specialized industries or from opportunities for a wider trade than was possible where markets were limited by the range of horse and mule. Growth was likely to be slow where, as in Lyon, Rouen, and Dresden, production continued to be along traditional lines or, in ports such as Danzig, Königsberg, or Hamburg, where trading patterns remained essentially the same. Enterprise, by contrast, brought remarkable growth in Britain, where Manchester and Birmingham both moved up from modest beginnings to the 100,000-population mark during the 18th century. Atlantic ports thrived during the same period with the increase in colonial trade: into this category fall Bordeaux, Nantes, Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Marseille recovered quickly from the plague of 1720 and grew on the grain import trade; more typical of Mediterranean cities were stagnant Genoa, Venice, and Palermo, where Austrian policy in the 18th century, favoring Milan, was an adverse factor.
A typical urban experience, where there was no special factor at work, was therefore one of stability. The burgher of 1600 would have felt at home in the town of his descendant five generations later. There might have been calamities along the way: at worst, siege or assault, plague, a particularly serious recession, or a fire, such as destroyed Rennes in 1720. Some building or refacing of houses would have occurred, mainly within the walls. In more fortunate cities, where there was continuing economic stability or strong corporate identity—as in the siege victims La Rochelle (1628) or Magdeburg (1631)—recovery even from the worst of war experiences could be rapid. The professions, notably the church and law, were tough, having large interests in the town and in the property in and around it. Guild discipline, inhibiting in fair years, was a strength in foul ones. Not all towns were so resilient, however. Some Polish towns never recovered from the effects of the Great Northern War; others throughout northern and eastern Europe were victims of the rise of the self-sufficient estate, which supplied needs such as brewing that the town had previously offered. Some Italian and Spanish towns, such as Cremona, Toledo, and Burgos, were affected by the decline of manufacturing and the shift of trade to the Atlantic economies.
It was possible for a town that had a special importance in the sphere of church or law (Angers, Salzburg, or Trier, for example) to enjoy a quiet prosperity, but there was a special kind of deadness about towns that had no other raison d’être than to be host to numerous clergy. Valladolid contained 53 religious houses “made up principally of consumers” according to a report of 1683. Most numerous were the quiet places that had never grown from their basic function of providing a market. England’s archaic electoral system provided graphic evidence of such decay, leaving its residue of “rotten boroughs.”
Between these extremes lay the mass of towns of middling size, each supervised by a mayor and corporation, dignified by one large church and probably several others serving ward or parish (and, if Catholic, by a religious house of some kind), and including a law court, guildhall, school, and, of course, market. With its bourgeois crust of clerics, lawyers, officials, merchants, and shopkeepers and master craftsmen catering for special needs—fine fabrics, clothing, hats, wigs, gloves, eyeglasses, engravings if not paintings, china, silver, glassware, locks, and clocks—the city was a world apart from the peasant. The contrast was emphasized by the walls, the gates that closed at night, the cobbles or setts of the roads, the different speech and intonation, the well-fed look of some citizens, and above all the fine houses, suggesting as much an ordered way of life as the wealth that supported it. The differences were blurred, however, by the pursuits of the urban landowners; by ubiquitous animals, whether bound for market or belonging to the citizens; by the familiar poverty and filth of the streets and the reek of the tannery and the shambles.
It is easier to recreate the physical frame than the mentalities of townspeople. Letters, journals, government reports and statistics, wills, and contracts reveal salient features. The preference for safe kinds of investment could be exploited by governments for revenue, as notably by the French: in 1661 Colbert found that, of 46,000 offices of justice and finance, 40,000 were unnecessary. There was an inclination to buy land for status and security. Around cities like Dijon, most of the surrounding land was owned by the bourgeois or the recently ennobled. Custom and ceremony were informed by a keen sense of hierarchy, as in minutely ordered processions. The instinct to regulate was stiffened by the need to restrain servants and journeymen and to ensure that apprentices waited for the reward of their training. Religion maintained its hold more firmly in the smaller towns, while the law was respected as the mainstay of social order and the road to office in courts or administration even where, as in Italy, it was palpably corruptible. There were certain communal dreads, military requisitioning and billeting high among them. There was generally a resolve to ward off beggars, to maintain grain stores, to close the gates to the famished when crops failed, and to enforce quarantine.
Within towns, popular forms of government were abandoned as power was monopolized by groups of wealthy men. This process can be studied in the Dutch towns in the years after 1648 when regents gained control. Everywhere elites were composed of those who had no business role. Among other labels for this period, when a profession seemed to be more desirable than trade, “a time of lawyers” might be appropriate. Trained to contend, responsive to new ideas, at least dipping into the waters of the Enlightenment, those lawyers who were cheated, by sheer numbers, of the opportunity to rise might become a dissident element, especially in countries where political avenues were blocked and the economy was growing too slowly to sustain them. Sometimes the state moved in to control municipal affairs, as in France where intendants were given wide powers toward the end of Louis XIV’s reign. In Spain, towns came into the hands of local magnates.
A more serious threat to the old urban regime lay in another area where discontents bred radicalism: the guilds. Not until the French Revolution and the radical actions of Joseph II of Austria were guilds anywhere abolished. They had long displayed a tendency to oligarchic control by hereditary masters. They became more restrictive in the face of competition and growing numbers of would-be members and so drove industries, particularly those suited to dispersed production, back to the countryside. For this reason, such cities as Leiden, Rouen, Cologne, and Nürnberg actually lost population in the 18th century. To compensate for falling production, masters tended to put pressure on the relatively unskilled level, where there were always more workers than work. Journeymen’s associations sought to improve their situation, sometimes through strikes. The building trade was notorious for its secret societies. The decline of the guilds was only one symptom of the rise in population. Another was the rise in urban poverty, as pressure on resources led to price increases that outstripped wages. In late 18th-century Berlin, which was solidly based on bureaucracy, garrison, and numerous crafts, a third of the population still lacked regular work. The plight of the poor was emphasized by the affluence of increasing numbers of fellow citizens. However class conflict is interpreted, it is clear that its basic elements were by that time present and active.
The peasantry
In 1700 only 15 percent of Europe’s population lived in towns, but that figure concealed wide variations: at the two extremes by 1800 were Britain with 40 percent and Russia with 4 percent. Most Europeans were peasants, dependent on agriculture. The majority of them lived in nucleated settlements and within recognized boundaries, those of parish or manor, but some, in the way characteristic of the hill farmer, lived in single farms or hamlets. The type of settlement reflected its origins: pioneers who had cleared forests or drained swamps, Germans who had pressed eastward into Slav lands, Russians who had replaced conquered Mongols, Spaniards who had expelled the Moors. Each brought distinctive characteristics. Discounting the nomad fringe, there remains a fundamental difference between serfs and those who had more freedom, whether as owners or tenants paying some form of rent but both liable to seigneurial dues. There were about one million serfs in eastern France and some free peasants in Russia, so the pattern is untidy; but broadly it represents the difference between eastern and western Europe.
The Russian was less attached to a particular site than his western counterparts living in more densely populated countries and had to be held down by a government determined to secure taxes and soldiers. The imposition of serfdom was outlined in the Ulozhenie, the legal code of 1649, which included barschina (forced labor). One consequence was the decline of the mir, the village community, with its fellowship and practical services; another was the tightening of the ties of mutual interest that bound tsar and landowner. Poles, Germans (mainly those of the east and north), Bohemians, and Hungarians were subject to a serfdom less extreme only in that they were treated as part of the estate and could not be sold separately; the Russian serf, who could, was more akin to a slave. Russian state peasants, an increasingly numerous class in the 18th century, were not necessarily secure; they were sent out to farm new lands. Catherine the Great transferred 800,000 serfs to private ownership. The serf could not marry, move, or take up a trade without his lord’s leave. He owed labor (robot) in the Habsburg lands for at least three days a week and dues that could amount to 20 percent of his produce. The Thirty Years’ War hastened the process of subjection, already fed by the west’s demand for grain; peasants returning to ruined homesteads found that their rights had vanished. The process was resisted by some rulers, notably those of Saxony and Brunswick: independent peasants were a source of revenue. Denmark saw an increase in German-style serfdom in the 18th century, but most Swedish peasants were free—their enemies were climate and hunger, rather than the landowner. Uniquely, they had representation in their own Estate in the Riksdag.
Through much of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal there was some form of rent or sharecropping. Feudalism survived in varying degrees of rigor, with an array of dues and services representing seigneurial rights. It was a regime that about half of Europe’s inhabitants had known since the Middle Ages. In England all but a few insignificant forms had gone, though feudal spirit lingered in deference to the squire. Enclosures were reducing the yeoman to the condition of a tenant farmer or, for most, a dependent, landless laborer. Although alodial tenures (absolute ownership) ensured freedom from dues in some southern provinces, France provides the best model for understanding the relationship of lord and peasant. The seigneur was generally, but not invariably, noble: a seigneury could be bought by a commoner. It had two parts. The domaine was the house with its grounds: there were usually a church and a mill, but not necessarily fields and woods, for those might have been sold. The censives, lands subject to the seigneur, still owed dues even if no longer owned by him. The cens, paid annually, was significant because it represented the obligations of the peasant: free to buy and sell land, he still endured burdens that varied from the trivial or merely vexatious to those detrimental to good husbandry. They were likely to include banalités, monopoly rights over the mill, wine press, or oven; saisine and lods et ventes, respectively a levy on the assets of a censitaire on death and a purchase tax on property sold; champart, a seigneurial tithe, payable in kind; monopolies of hunting, shooting, river use, and pigeon rearing; the privilege of the first harvest, for example, droit de banvin, by which the seigneur could gather his grapes and sell his wine first; and the corvées, obligatory labor services. Seigneurial rule had benevolent aspects, and justice in the seigneurial court could be even-handed; seigneurs could be protectors of the community against the state’s taxes and troops. But the regime was damaging, as much to the practice of farming as to the life of the peasants, who were harassed and schooled in resistance and concealment. To identify an 18th-century feudal reaction—as some historians have called the tendency to apply business principles to the management of dues—is not to obscure the fact that for many seigneurs the system was becoming unprofitable. By 1789 in most provinces there was little hesitation: the National Assembly abolished feudal dues by decree at one sitting because the peasants had already taken the law into their own hands. Some rights were won back, but there could be no wholesale restoration.
Besides priest or minister, the principal authority in most peasants’ lives was that of the lord. The collective will of the community also counted for much, as in arrangements for plowing, sowing, and reaping, and even in some places the allocation of land. The range of the peasant’s world was that of a day’s travel on foot or, more likely, by donkey, mule, or pony. He would have little sense of a community larger than he could see or visit. His struggle against nature or the demands of his superiors was waged in countless little pockets. When peasants came together in insurgent bands, as in Valencia in 1693, there was likely to be some agitation or leadership from outside the peasant community—in that case from José Navarro, a surgeon. There needed to be some exceptional provocation, like the new tax that roused Brittany in 1675. After the revolt had been suppressed, the parlement of Rennes was exiled to a smaller town for 14 years: clearly government understood the danger of bourgeois complicity. Rumor was always potent, especially when tinged with fantasy, as in Stenka Razin’s rising in southern Russia, which evolved between 1667 and 1671 from banditry into a vast protest against serfdom. Generally, cooperation between villages was less common than feuding, the product of centuries of uneasy proximity and conflict over disputed lands.
The peasant’s life was conditioned by mundane factors: soil, water supplies, communications, and above all the site itself in relation to river, sea, frontier, or strategic route. The community could be virtually self-sufficient. Its environment was formed by what could be bred, fed, sown, gathered, and worked within the bounds of the parish. Fields and beasts provided food and clothing; wood came from the fringe of wasteland. Except in districts where stone was available and easy to work, houses were usually made of wood or a cob of clay and straw. Intended to provide shelter from the elements, they can be envisaged as a refinement of the barn, with certain amenities for their human occupants: hearth, table, and benches with mats and rushes strewn on a floor of beaten earth or rough stone. Generally there would be a single story, with a raised space for beds and an attic for grain. For his own warmth and their security the peasant slept close to his animals, under the same roof. Cooking required an iron pot, sometimes the only utensil named in peasant inventories. Meals were eaten off wood or earthenware. Fuel was normally wood, which was becoming scarce in some intensively cultivated parts of northern Europe, particularly Holland, where much of the land was reclaimed from sea or marsh. Peat and dried dung also were used, but rarely coal. Corn was ground at the village mill, a place of potential conflict: only one man had the necessary expertise, and his clients were poorly placed to bargain. Women and girls spun and wove for the itinerant merchants who supplied the wool or simply for the household, for breeches, shirts, tunics, smocks, and gowns. Clothes served elemental needs: they were usually thick for protection against damp and cold and loose-fitting for ease of movement. Shoes were likely to be wooden clogs, as leather was needed for harnesses. Farm implements—plows (except for the share), carts, harrows, and many of the craftsman’s tools—were made of wood, seasoned, split or rough-hewn. Few possessed saws; in Russia they were unknown before 1700. Iron was little used and was likely to be of poor quality. Though it might be less true of eastern Europe where, as in Bohemia, villages tended to be smaller, the community would usually have craftsmen—a smith or a carpenter, for example—to satisfy most needs. More intricate skills were provided by traveling tinkers.
The isolated villager might hear of the outside world from such men. Those living around the main routes would fare better and gather news, at least indirectly, from merchants, students, pilgrims, and government officials or, less reputably, from beggars, gypsies, or deserters (a numerous class in most states). He might buy broadsheets, almanacs, and romances, produced by enterprising printers at centers such as Troyes, to be hawked around wherever there were a few who could read. So were kept alive what became a later generation’s fairy tales, along with the magic and astrology that they were not reluctant to believe. Inn and church provided the setting for business, gossip, and rumor. Official reports and requirements were posted and village affairs were conducted in the church. The innkeeper might benefit from the cash of wayfarers but like others who provided a service, he relied chiefly on the produce of his own land. Thus, the rural economy consisted of innumerable self-sufficient units incapable of generating adequate demand for the development of large-scale manufactures. Each cluster of communities was isolated within its own market economy, proud, and suspicious of outsiders. Even where circumstances fostered liberty, peasants were pitifully inadequate in finding original solutions to age-old problems but were well-versed in strategies of survival, for they could draw on stores of empirical wisdom. They feared change just as they feared the night for its unknown terrors. Their customs and attitudes were those of people who lived on the brink: more babies might be born but there would be no increase in the food supply.
In the subsistence economy there was much payment and exchange in kind; money was hoarded for the occasional purchase, to the frustration of tax collectors and the detriment of economic growth. Demand was limited by the slow or nonexistent improvement in methods of farming. There was no lack of variety in the agricultural landscape. Between the temporary cultivation of parts of Russia and Scandinavia, where slash-and-burn was encouraged by the extent of forest land, and the rotation of cereal and fodder crops of Flanders and eastern England, 11 different methods of tillage have been identified. Most common was some version of the three-course rotation that Arthur Young denounced when he traveled in France in 1788. He observed the subdivision and wide dispersal of holdings that provided a further obstacle to the diversification of crops and selective breeding. The loss of land by enclosure pauperized many English laborers. But the development in lowland England of the enclosed, compact economic unit—the central feature of the agrarian revolution—enabled large landowners to prosper and invest and small farmers to survive. They were not trapped, like many Continental peasants, between the need to cultivate more land and the declining yields of their crops, which followed from the loss of pasture and of fertilizing manure. Without capital accumulation and with persisting low demand for goods, economic growth was inhibited. The work force was therefore tied to agriculture in numbers that depressed wage rates, discouraged innovation, and tempted landowners to compensate by some form of exploitation of labor, rights, and dues. Eighteenth-century reformers condemned serfdom and other forms of feudalism, but they were as much the consequence as the cause of the agricultural malaise.
