The document summarizes key aspects of the bourgeois century in Europe following the Congress of Vienna in 1815. It discusses the goals of restoring monarchical rule and maintaining the status quo. Territories were reshaped and buffer zones created around France. The Congress also established the German Confederation. The document examines the divisions within the bourgeois class and caricatures of the middle class. It provides examples of bourgeois domesticity and debates around the dangers of novels for middle class women.

1. Week 3
The Bourgeois Century

2. The “base pageant”: Congress of Vienna,
1815

3. Major Goals
• Contain France and restore monarchical
territories
• Create a “balance of power” to ensure against
European-wide conflict
• Suppress any threats to status quo; stifle liberal
and nationalist demands

4. Restoration Europe

5. Territorial changes
• Growth of Russia, Prussia, and Austria
• “Congress” Poland
• France pushed back to its pre-1790 borders
• Disappearance of republics of Genoa and Venice
• Buffer zones around France: Prussian Westphalia,
Swiss Confederation, Piedmont-Sardinia
• Creation of German Confederation and
Bundestag

6. Prince Klemens von
Metternich (1821)

7. Middle class or middle classes?
“The bourgeoisie is not a class, it is a position;
one acquires that position and one loses it. Work,
thrift, and ability confer it; vice, dissipation, and
idless mean that it is lost.”
—Journal des Debats, 1847
Big bankers,
wholesale
merchants,
high officials
Smaller bankers and financiers,
industrialists, merchants
Lawyers, notaries, doctors
Shopkeepers, teachers, café owners, small merchants, minor
officials, master artisans and craftsmen
High Bourgeoisie
Middling
Bourgeoisie
Petty
Bourgeoisie

8. Caricaturist of middle classes: Honoré
Daumier (1808–1879)

9. Verticality of class: typical apartment in 19th
century Paris

12. Bourgeois domesticity: the private sphere

13. Christmas, a celebration of middle class
domesticity

14. Bourgeoisie and books: self-cultivation or
dangerous escapism?

15. Do you know what your wife needs? said Madame Bovary senior. She needs some hard
work, some manual labor. If she were like nearly everyone else, forced to earn a living,
she wouldn’t have these vapours of hers, which all come from stuffing her head with
nonsense and leading a life of idleness.
–But she is always busy, said Charles.
–Ah! Busy indeed! And with what? Busy reading novels, wicked books, things written
against religion, where priests are made a mockery with speeches taken from Voltaire.
It all leads to no good, my poor boy, and anyone with no religion always comes to a
bad end.
Therefore, it was decided to prevent Emma from reading novels. This was by no means
an easy matter. The old lady took it upon herself: on her way through Rouen she was to
call in person at the lending library and notify them that Emma was cancelling her
subscription. Would they not have the right to tell the police, if the librarian still
persisted in his poisonous trade?”
—Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856)