The Birth of a New Social Order

The late 19th century witnessed a profound social transformation across Europe as industrialization and local governance movements gave rise to new professional classes. Under the guidance of statesmen like Sergei Witte, Russia’s rapid industrialization created a growing cadre of technical specialists and professionals, gradually forming a middle class modeled after Western European patterns. However, this emerging social stratum faced significant challenges in organizing itself within the autocratic structures of imperial Russia.

Professional associations remained strictly controlled by the tsarist regime. While medical professionals gained permission to hold congresses starting in 1885—deemed necessary for combating epidemics—other professions faced severe restrictions. Lawyers managed only a single congress in 1872 before being banned from further gatherings, while engineers never received permission at all. This forced professionals to develop alternative networks through specialized publications, alumni associations, scientific conferences, and informal connections. The autocratic government viewed self-governing professional organizations as political threats, particularly in a society where government officials controlled most positions and contracts, making the establishment of professional ethical codes—a cornerstone of Western professionalism—nearly impossible.

The Uneven Development of Professional Classes

Across Europe, the demand for technical and professional knowledge grew exponentially, creating a stratified professional world with vast disparities in social standing and income. At the top stood university professors and elite secondary school teachers, many holding prestigious doctorates from renowned institutions. At the bottom existed provincial primary school teachers and rural educators who often needed secondary employment to survive—a group that barely qualified as bourgeois.

Government-employed educators faced particular political pressures. The 1820s saw liberal professors like François Guizot and Victor Cousin dismissed for their views. The infamous 1837 dismissal of seven Göttingen professors demonstrated this pattern continuing decades later. Even in the 1890s, physicist Leo Arons faced career obstacles and eventual dismissal from Berlin University for supporting socialist causes. Russia maintained even stricter political controls over its intelligentsia.

Defining Bourgeois Identity

By the turn of the century, bourgeois identity had crystallized around specific markers: employing domestic servants, complete separation from manual labor, educational credentials, and participation in civic organizations. London’s Hampstead suburb exemplified this lifestyle, with 737 servants per 1,000 residents in 1911. Middle-class status required sufficient income for suburban homes or comfortable apartments, participation in charitable activities, and the cultivation of respectability through personal achievement rather than hereditary privilege.

The bourgeois household became a carefully managed economic and social unit. While upper-middle-class women didn’t work for wages, they actively managed households, supervised servants, and organized family consumption—far from passive status symbols. This domestic sphere formed the core of bourgeois identity and values.

The Crisis of Bourgeois Confidence

As the new century dawned, many sensed the passing of the bourgeoisie’s golden age. Thomas Mann’s 1901 novel Buddenbrooks captured this anxiety, tracing a merchant family’s decline through generations of decaying values and physical degeneration symbolized by progressively worsening dental problems. Real-life parallels appeared in Russia’s Morozov dynasty: from the serf-turned-industrialist founder Savva Vasilyevich to his Cambridge-educated grandson Savva Timofeyevich, whose socialist sympathies and worker profit-sharing schemes led to exile and probable suicide.

Literary depictions of bourgeois decline multiplied across Europe. Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series (1871-1893) explored hereditary degeneration, while Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat (1905) exposed bourgeois hypocrisy. Though remaining society’s backbone, the bourgeoisie increasingly felt compelled to share power with lower social orders.

The Petty Bourgeoisie: A Supposedly Doomed Class

Marxist theory dismissed the petty bourgeoisie as a transitional class destined to split between capitalists and proletarians. Yet this diverse group—small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers—not only survived but expanded during late 19th-century social upheavals. Educational reforms created opportunities for struggling teachers, while clerical work mushroomed: England and Wales saw white-collar workers increase from 129,000 in 1871 to 461,000 by 1901.

Charles Dickens vividly portrayed these clerks’ grim existence—cramped offices, meager salaries (often under £100 annually), and dead-end careers. While some clerks rose socially, others like The Diary of a Nobody’s Charles Pooter remained trapped in suburban mediocrity, uncomfortably straddling the working and middle classes.

The Retail Revolution

Urbanization sparked a retail transformation as traditional markets gave way to specialized shops. In northern England, the shop-to-resident ratio improved from 1:136 in 1801 to 1:57 by mid-century. Innovations like W.H. Smith’s railway station bookstalls (1848), cooperatives, and Pryce Pryce-Jones’s mail-order catalogues (1861) revolutionized distribution.

The most dramatic innovation came with department stores—multi-level emporiums offering fixed prices (a novelty when haggling dominated). Paris’s Le Bon Marché (founded 1849) and Newcastle’s Bainbridge’s (1838) pioneered this model, immortalized in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883). By the 1890s, these “cathedrals of consumption” like London’s Harrods offered shopping as leisure, employing armies of (mostly female) clerks working 13-hour days. Budapest’s Paris Department Store occupied six floors with art-adorned galleries, while Paris’s Magasins Réunis (1910) boasted steam heating, pneumatic tubes, and electric awnings.

Despite their glamour, department stores accounted for just 15% of retail. Small shops—butchers, bakers, greengrocers—continued proliferating to serve growing populations. Madrid had 8,851 shopkeepers employing nearly 25,000 workers circa 1900. Germany’s shop numbers grew 42% between 1905-1907 while population increased just 8%. Yet small businesses remained precarious—one-third of Bremen shops failed within six years, half of Ghent grocers within five.

Artisans and Small Producers

Small workshops faced similar instability, with one-third of Edinburgh’s failing between 1890-1895. Petty bourgeois groups formed defensive associations like Lyon’s Carpenters’ Friendship Society (1867) or Brussels’ Pastry Chefs’ Society (1887). German organizations like the Central Association of German Traders (1899) promoted members’ interests while distinguishing themselves from both workers and elites.

Facing competition from large firms and socialist cooperatives, these groups often turned politically rightward, with some developing antisemitic tendencies. The populist German National Association of Commercial Employees (1896) combined antisemitism with anti-feminism, blaming Jewish conspiracies for threatening German families—though with limited effect.

Women in the Petty Bourgeoisie

Technological changes created new female-dominated occupations: post offices, telephone exchanges, department stores, and typing pools (after Rasmus Malling-Hansen’s 1870 typewriter). Unlike upper-middle-class women, petty bourgeois wives and daughters often worked—54% of German commercial workers in 1907 were family members. Widows commonly inherited businesses, though social aspirations made many ashamed of working-class associations. As Italian-Greek writer Matilde Serao captured, many shopkeepers’ wives longed to be “ladies rather than shopkeepers’ women.”

The Industrial Proletariat: Chains and Transformations

By the early 20th century, industrial workers formed Europe’s largest class: 16 million in Britain (1868), 4 million in France (1914), nearly two-thirds of Germany’s population. Stark inequalities separated classes—London’s military academy cadres stood 23cm taller than charity school pupils in 1840, reflecting nutritional disparities. Life expectancy gaps were equally dramatic: 50 years in Hampstead versus 36 in working-class Southwark (1900), with infant mortality rates of 4% versus 67%.

Urban workers faced horrific living conditions. Industrial areas like the Ruhr saw tuberculosis rates double agricultural regions (4.5‰ vs 2‰). Hamburg’s slums had 25.1‰ infant mortality versus 11.4‰ in wealthy districts. Cholera and other diseases disproportionately affected the poor—1892 mortality rates ranged from 62‰ for workers earning 800-1,000 marks annually to just 5‰ for those over 50,000 marks.

Food Insecurity and Urban Poverty

Urban expansion strained food supplies. Without refrigeration (home units cost $1,000 in 1911—double a car’s price), the poor consumed spoiled goods: cracked eggs, moldy bread, bruised fruit, offal, and tainted meat. Bread, potatoes, and starches dominated diets—a Bochum worker’s 1875 daily food budget allocated 60 pfennig to bread, just 15 to vegetables.

Widespread food adulteration compounded problems. An 1878 German report found flour mixed with gypsum, “egg noodles” dyed with urine, and 60% of Hamburg butter adulterated with margarine. British doctor Arthur Hill Hassell discovered alum in bread, lead in coffee, and watered-down milk. Effective regulation came slowly—Britain’s 1860 Adulteration Act proved toothless until 1872, while France only banned adulteration in 1905.

Precarious Employment

Job insecurity reflected both economic fragility and workers’ lingering rural ties. France’s Carmaux mines dismissed workers unpaid for 56 days in 1886 during slumps. “Saint Monday” absenteeism was common, with Asturian miners skipping work after religious holidays. Ports hired dockers ship-by-ship, leaving winter unemployment. Ghent’s Voortman mill paid by piece, stretching workdays to 13 hours in 1858 while secretly altering piece rates.

Industrial accidents were epidemic—22,771 reported in Britain (1899) including 871 deaths. Russia’s metallurgical plants saw fatalities rise from 245 (1890) to 556 (1904), with 66,680 serious injuries. Matchgirls suffered “phossy jaw” from white phosphorus until its 1908 ban. Women dominated hazardous textile work, with few factories providing childcare—just 7 of 5,000 Budapest factories had nurseries (1910).

Rural Industrial Workers

Agricultural workers transitioning to industry faced brutal conditions. Pomeranian Franz Rehbein’s memoir describes steam-threshing crews working 18-hour days amid deafening noise and lung-clogging dust for 15 pfennig hourly. After losing an arm in 1895, he wrote: “Man and machine became inseparable. He became the machine’s slave, part of the machine itself.”

The “flight from the land” (Landflucht) saw rural youth migrate for better wages—1913 incomes ranged from 480 marks in rural West Prussia to 1,313 in Hamburg. Yet urban workers remained stratified—London artisans disdained laborers, Germans scorned Italian and Polish migrants. While glassblowers earned 10 francs daily, textile workers made just 1.65 francs, though all paled beside bourgeois incomes.

The Lumpenproletariat: Urban Underclass

Conservatives feared cities bred crime and disorder. Karl Marx’s 1832 description of the “lumpenproletariat” as “the scum of the decaying elements of all classes” reflected elite anxieties. After the 1871 Paris Commune, officers blamed “dangerous classes” of “haggard, ragged men and filthy women.”

Investigative journalists like Henry Mayhew (London Labour and the London Poor, 1851-61) documented this underworld—mudlarks scavenging Thames coal, body-snatchers like Dickens’ Lizzie Hexam. Eugène François Vidocq’s memoirs and Friedrich Avé-Lallemant’s criminal lexicons codified underworld slang, though the idea of a separate criminal class was largely myth—most alternated between legal and illegal work.

Workers often saw pilfering as legitimate—miners took coal, dockworkers “gained weight” handling coffee. Professional criminals like London’s Arthur Harding (leader of the “Brick Lane Mob”) did emerge, with protection rackets and armed robberies. Port cities saw organized looting during disturbances, like Hamburg’s 1906 jewelry store raids during political protests.

Rural Crime and Vigilantism

Contrary to conservative idylls, rural areas witnessed significant violence. While 85% of Russian murders (1874-1913) occurred in villages, property crimes were evenly split. Wood theft sparked particular conflict after forest privatization—Prussian convictions soared from 120,000 (1836) to 373,000 (1865), prompting armed clashes between guards and peasants viewing forests as communal.

Communal justice persisted through rituals like French charivari or German Haberfeldtreiben—humiliating offenders with effigy burnings, cacophonous processions, or manure-cart displays. Russia’s vozbdenie paraded thieves through villages amid pounding pots, while Montenegro and Albania maintained blood feuds governed by codes like the Kanun Leke (“blood for blood”).

State suppression gradually reduced these practices—Britain banned “rough music” in 1882, Germany arrested last Haberfeldtreiben participants in 1894. Yet where state authority remained weak (Sicily, Corsica, Albania), clan violence evolved into mafia protection rackets and gang wars.

Paradoxes of Crime Statistics

Contrary to expectations, industrialization correlated with declining crime. German violent offenses fell from 369 annually (1882-85) to 346 (1914). Wales’ criminal ratio improved from 1:845 (1851) to 1:2,994 (1899). British Home Secretary William Harcourt credited “religion, temperance, education” for this “bright light on our social horizon.”

Legal reforms and sensational trials fed public fascination with crime—from Dr. Crippen’s 1910 transatlantic capture to August Sternickel’s 1913 murder case. Detective fiction boomed, though Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes found fewer Continental counterparts where confessions outweighed circumstantial evidence. While dangerous urban pockets remained, the feared crime wave never materialized—instead, Europe grew more orderly as it industrialized.

This social transformation—from emerging professional classes to urbanizing workers—reshaped European society fundamentally, creating both new opportunities and profound tensions that would define the coming century. The complex interplay between these groups, their competing aspirations, and their evolving relationships with state power formed the crucible of modern European history.