Sample book review
The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690-1830
David Garrioch
Harvard U.P. 1996
Review by Alan Baumler. 1

In this book Garrioch examines the evolution of a "true" bourgeoisie class in the parish Saint Medard in Paris in the years just before and after the French Revolution. First, what is the bourgeois class? Although the book is implicitly Marxist, since he is looking at class formation, Garrioch draws a distinction between himself from both the vulgar Marxists who see class formation as entirely driven by economic and social change and from scholars like Doyle who either dismiss the concept of the bourgeois class entirely, or see the term bourgeois as a strictly ideological tag which had no connection to social or economic circumstances. Although Garrioch's definition is mostly political, the bourgeoisie were those who held local office and ran local society in Paris, he realizes that there were important economic and social factors that made officeholding possible.2 Both the powers of local officeholders and the economic and social positions of the people who held them changed considerably during this time, and these changes caused a gradual transformation of the Parisian bourgeoisie. In 1690 the term bourgeois simply meant someone who was a free citizen of the city and enjoyed the limited political rights that came with that title. These ranged from very rich merchants down to small shopkeepers, but they had no city-wide identity, program, or institutions to promote a program if they had one. Real power in 1690 was local. The bourgeoisie were those who dominated the religious, social, and political institutions of individual districts. By 1830 these local units had disintegrated, and Paris was a single city, with city-wide institutions run by a new, unitary bourgeoisie who did business together, intermarried, and had a common set of goals that they worked together to achieve. 3
Like many monographs this one is best read backwards. Garrioch's conclusion lays out the major changes responsible for this transformation thematically, whereas the body of the book is chronological and narrative and thus harder to follow, although it is more interesting and more concrete. He begins with the story of a dispute between the churchwardens of Saint Medard and a series of new priests that the central authorities attempted to impose on them between 1730 and 1759. He then unpacks the story to reveal the nature of the local elite in this period. 4
The position of churchwarden was one of some power and considerable prestige, and the churchwardens were the leaders of local society before the Revolution. Garrioch emphasizes that they were a very clannish and inward-looking group, with strong ties to the locality and their extended families that lived in the area. All were people of property, but Garrioch emphasizes their strong family networks over mere wealth as a source of their position. He gives many examples of these family ties, the persistence of certain given names in families, the emphasis placed on keeping family property in the family, entailments to keep sons from wasting the family patrimony, marriage strategies that emphasized creating alliances useful to the family, and even occasionally imprisoning a drunken clan member who threatened to ruin the family's good name.
Although the crown had been systematically stripping these people of really important rights like organizing the local militia or collecting taxes, they still served as churchwardens, heads of confraternities and other minor offices, which gave them a certain amount of power and even more importantly, prestige. These positions were usually monopolized by a few leading families, who regarded the church as the center of their community, and saw it as their creation. As they pointed out, "Almost all the foundation masses were created by the grandfathers of the churchwardens living today," and these ancestors were buried under the floor of the church.
By the eve of the Revolution this situation had changed a great deal. 5 The most important family of the earlier period, the Bouillerot, had all but disappeared from Saint Medard, and the local offices they had once held were either held by relative newcomers or were not held by anyone, as many of the confraternities and other church-related groups had folded for lack of interest. The Bouillerot family still existed, but as they had grown richer they had started to move in different circles, as part of a larger Parisian elite, and they, like bourgeois all over Paris, were no longer as interested in local affairs. Garrioch gives a number of possible explanations for this change. In 1776 the government had re-organized the Paris guild system, abolishing many of the small, local guilds to set up city-wide ones. This was only one of several changes that encouraged local elites to look to a larger scale in planning their activities. Growing markets encouraged larger-scale economic activities, which required economic, social, and political contracts all over the city. Rising in these new circles required money and professional success, but family connections became less important. Individuals quit investing as much effort in maintaining ties with extended family members, and the model of the bourgeois family became the modern nuclear family rather than the extended family all clustered in the same neighborhood. This family would serve as the base from which the man would commute into the central city to make a name in the anonymous world of city-wide business and politics. 6 These changes even filtered down to the parish Saint Medard. By the 1780's relative newcomers were becoming churchwardens. They had few local connections and had not lived in the area for long, which before would have made rising to a position like churchwarden impossible. They were wealthy, successful, and acted bourgeois, however, and that was enough.
The Revolution itself sped up the change towards a city-wide bourgeois class by giving more and more power to bourgeois institutions, and by erasing the importance of one's family or past. During the revolution it became easier than ever for hardworking and talented individuals to rise to the top, and during the Directory and the Empire these new positions began to be institutionalized by the government, which kept the bourgeoisie under even tighter control than the kings had, but like the royal government gave them positions and prestige in return for service. As time went by local politics relied less and less on local connections. Some local notables were university professors who merely lived in the district and had no other connection to it. As the elite became less local it was easier for the talented to rise to the top, but at the same time qualifications for elite status became more standardized. Attending the right schools, for example was crucial, and this kept many out. Most notable here are women, who could occasionally rise to positions of local power before the Revolution. This was now impossible. The meritocratic, homogeneous middle class that would dominate Paris in the Nineteenth century was born. 7
The book generally starts better than it finishes. Garrioch is at his best describing the world of the churchwardens of Saint Medard in 1730. This is in part because the dispute over the acceptance of the new priest was connected to the national debate over Jansenism and thus got a lot of official attention, leaving lots of sources for later historians. After this period the sources and the narrative get sketchier. Garrioch can occasionally come up with some data relevant to the bourgeois of the parish, but more often he is forced to speculate. He is not able, for instance, to prove that economic activity between parishes increased or that bourgeois began to move in new social circles. He does show that family size was shrinking, but his discussion of the rise of new ideas about the family is not really based on any data. This is common problem for Garrioch whenever he deals with ideas, which are obviously crucial in dealing with the changing self-identity of the bourgeois. He points out that he has been able to find no sources where the people he is talking about speak directly about their own ideas of their position. This is not to say that he is entirely in the dark. A lot of work has been done on the bourgeois in Paris and elsewhere, and Garrioch draws on this literature to fill in the gaps in his own sources. The results are impressive, as he is able to both provide a broad picture of changes in the Parisian bourgeoisie and, sometimes, to give a detailed account of how it actually happened. Still, some parts of the story are much stronger than others. 8
The book would also be stronger if Garrioch looked beyond the bourgeois to their relationships with those above and below them. He defines the class clearly as local officeholders, but does not explain this group's relationship with other social groups in the city or how it changed over time. As a result his bourgeois tends to float in space, unconnected to the changes around them. This is particularly evident in the chapter on the Revolution. It was obviously the relationship between the bourgeoisie and other classes were most crucial at this point, but Garrioch goes on describing the procedures for choosing local notables as if little had changed. 9
Garrioch's book would probably fit somewhere in the middle of current work on the Revolution. He obviously does not see the Revolution as the creation of a bourgeois class, quite the opposite. He is far less interested in ideas and discourse than in social and economic reality, however, so he cannot be lumped in with Furet and Hunt and the current group of theorists. 10