With the assistance of Gustave Eiffel, Le Bon Marché boasted the first metal roof structure in the world, making it a monument of architectural innovation.

New industries in the late 19th century helped expand the market for consumer goods, which brought the economy out of stagnation by the end of the century. Overseas imperialism also opened new markets for European consumer goods. New forms of retailing and marketing appeared—department stores, chain stores, packaging techniques, mail-order catalogs, and advertising—which simultaneously stimulated and fed consumer demand.

A new way in which goods were being consumed was through the development and construction of department stores in the mid-19^th century.  Department stores, such as Le Bon Marché in Paris (apparently the first department store ever) sold a wide selections of consumer goods under one roof. These modern stores increased the economic pressure on small traditional merchants who specialized in selling only one kind of product. In a traditional shop, the retailer (who was also the producer) offered a single product—gloves, for example—in limited quantity at a fairly high price. Oftentimes, this price was not set and the customer would haggle with the shopkeeper until a price was agreed upon. “Browsing” was virtually unheard of— an individual who entered a shop was expected to make a purchase.

Department stores, however, made profits from a quick turnover of a very large volume of goods set at low prices. In order to stimulate sales, department stores sought to make shopping a very pleasant experience by offering well-lit expanses filled with alluring items, well-trained and friendly clerks, in-store reading rooms, and restaurants.

Middle-class women especially were encouraged to patronize these stores even though critics had charged that these stores turned sober housewives into irrational shoppers, who were wasteful of family resources and let their consumer fantasies run wild in a store like Le Bon Marché. Indeed, women were the ones who primarily participated in the vast expansion of consumerism and domestic comfort that marked the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century. Women filled their homes with manufactured items such as clothing, china, furniture, carpets, drapery, wallpaper, and prints. In these decades, women’s pursuit of fashion in their home furnishings seemed to lean towards imperial motifs as Empire began to increasingly invade the domestic spaces of the bourgeois household: Persian-inspired designs were seen on textiles, oriental carpets were laid across floors, wicker furniture was placed in drawing rooms, and Chinese porcelain was used at mealtimes. 

Chinese tea gained popularity in Europe in the same period as coffee rose to dominance; the expanding importation of tea to Europe was fostered by the mercantile relationship with China. Over the course of the 18^th century, the Chinese had a monopoly on the production of tea and, gradually, tea became from being an occasional drink of the bourgeoisie to a mass commodity consumed in both Europe and North America.

The cultural aspects of the introduction of tea to Europe contrasted with those of chocolate and, especially, coffee. Tea gardens and tea houses became popular in the 18^th century and were open to both men and women. The particular popularity of tea in Europe was associated with “civilizing” tendencies, and with the feminine. Tea gardens were associated with domesticity and the family, as opposed to the male, and very public, character of coffee and coffee houses.

The tea ceremony—afternoon tea—became strongly associated with elite femininity in northern Europe, and by the 1740s tea was an important meal in England, the Netherlands, British North America. The tea ceremony began to increasingly reflect the respectability of the bourgeois household.

Jud Süß (1940), directed by Veit Harlan: Full film streaming above with English subtitles.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, believed in producing high-quality products. In order for propaganda to be effective, it had to be well-made, subtle in its messaging, and—most importantly—entertaining so that it could appeal to the widest audience possible. Under his auspices, this stylish costume drama, based very loosely on the life of an 18th-century court Jew, Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (1698-1738), was seen by over 20 million Germans when it debuted in 1940.

The film is an anti-Semitic historical fantasy about the rise and fall of Oppenheimer at the court of Duke Karl Alexander. On his way to becoming one of the Duke’s most trusted advisers, Oppenheimer convinced the Duke to let the poor and filthy-looking Jews leave their ghettos and come settle in the town of Württemberg, let the Duke spend extravagantly in order to gain his influence and trust, implemented exorbitant taxes on the ordinary citizens of the town, slept with German women at court, and finally— in an act that reveals the depths of Oppenheimer’s depravity—raped the heroine Dorothea Sturm (played by the model for ‘Aryan’ beauty, the director’s wife Kristina Soderbaum), who happened to be the daughter of an influential merchant and town elder. Driven by shame, she then drowned herself in a river.

The anti-Semitic message is clear: If you let the ‘Aryan’ Germans and the Jews mix, you are essentially contributing to the breakdown of the social order: The virtue of German women will be compromised, ordinary townspeople will be exploited, and the parasitic Jews—whose only fealty is to money and other Jews—will run roughshod over the German people for profit and sexual gratification, if we let them!

Much has been written about Jud Süß as a piece of propaganda, but I think the best way to look at it is as a Bourgeois Family Tragedy.

Linda Schulte-Sasse says

Jud Süß borrows the basic scenario of the bourgeois tragedy; its plot likewise revolves around the disruption of social harmony and the invasion of familial bliss by figures initiating courtly intrigue. Here, too, the family, in which the viewer quickly develops an emotional investment, represents a microcosm for the State; the violation against the Sturms stands for that against Wurttemberg. Yet Jud Süß departs from the bourgeois tragedy in an essential way; namely, the film displaces the source of evil usually ascribed to the aristocracy to the Jew.

But what, according to the worldview espoused by the film, are the bourgeois family values that are being threatened by the Jews?

The following scheme summarizes the class coding of the bourgeois tragedy: love, fidelity, honesty; dedication to community; humanity, sympathy, conscience; ‘virtue’ above the material; tenderness, love; women domestic, virtuous; straightforward language; kindness; forgiveness, trust.

The values of the aristocracy (but in this film attributed to the Jews) are:

intrigue; politics; ambition (power, personal glory); materialism; sexual pleasure (amusement); women as objects; use of French terms; gallantry, politesse; revenge.

Isn’t it interesting that these aristocratic, ‘shallow’ values were then ascribed to the bourgeoisie much later on with the waning of aristocratic power and the rise of industrial capitalism?

antisocial-socialist:

“This illustration was done in 1953 by a well-known Soviet painter and illustrator, Valerian V. Shcheglov. The drawing depicts Soviet school children celebrating Lenin’s heritage and the tradition of the Russian Revolution.”

This is a really interesting drawing because it places Lenin in such a bourgeois, domestic setting— the father of the revolution is also the father figure of Soviet children everywhere. Drawn at the center of this ‘family’ portrait, Lenin is a fatherly specter watching over this fairly domestic scene of children singing traditional songs—maybe caroling?—in front of a Christmas tree. Doesn’t it make Lenin seem much more cuddly than his successor, Stalin?

In fact, Lenin as the leader and father figure of all children seems to have been a popular motif in soviet art.

The description for this font, called bourgeois, “echoes letterforms from the early 20th century drawn in a contemporary style.”

Amazingly enough, this bourgeois font is also supposed to conjure up the very specific image of the bourgeois family and their cultural values:

The Bourgeois family live a very normal life. The Bourgeois family believe in the environment as long as it doesn’t inconvenience their lifestyle. The Bourgeois family believe in people’s right to protest the but disapprove of violence in an utterly conventional way. The Bourgeois family can’t see why sexism is an issue because it isn’t to them. The Bourgeois family would like to help the world’s big problems, trouble is they only know how to discuss small ones. The Bourgeois family would like to work in jobs that directly help people but they just cant afford the salary drop. The Bourgeois family don’t see racism as a problem as they don’t meet many black people in their daily lives. The Bourgeois family believe in rebellion against the previous generation, but rigidly follow the conventions of their own peer group. The Bourgeois family want ‘freedom’ but they don’t realise what that means, they just use it as a rhetorical statement. The Bourgeois family is a font from Virus available in 32 different variations.

Is this what it meant to be bourgeois in the twentieth century? Or is this a description of the Baby Boomer generation?

One of my favorite photographs of all time. A beautifully-preserved photograph of a black ‘Rosie the Riveter’ working with a hand drill on a “Vengeance” dive bomber in 1943. The white, muscular, and beautifully strong ‘Rosie the Riveter’ of World War II propaganda was not so much a heroine of the American working class so much as a symbol of bourgeois family values. Rosie’s labor, and her vital contributions to wartime industries, helped support the husbands, fathers, and brothers who were fighting abroad—all without posing a threat to conceptions of American masculinity or to the social order. In fact, it was expected that working women such as ‘Rosie’ would return home to settle back into comfortable bourgeois domesticity as housewives and mothers. Similarly, it was expected that the men would resume their traditional roles as husbands, fathers, and heads of households once they returned from the War.

The black Rosie reminds us that the contributions of women and men of color in World War II can often be marginalized in favor of a master narrative that favors American national unity during the War. The African-American experience of World War II, and especially the postwar era, was different in many respects to that of the white American experience, not least because African-Americans had to deal with institutionalized racism that limited both their social and economic mobility.

This picture is from Mortimer Chamber’s The Western Experience, a pretty generic “Western Civ”-type textbook for college students. The painting (“Many Happy Returns of the Day”) is by one William P. Frith, and is supposed to communicate middle class/bourgeois domesticity in 19th century England. Frith apparently painted a lot of upstanding family scenes with moralistic overtones. He was married to Isabelle and had twelve children. At the very same time, down the road, he and his mistress, the sweet Mary Alford (his former ward), sired seven more children. Was this a first sign of bourgeois decadence? Discuss.