Bourgeois Deeds: How Capitalism Made Modernity 1700-1848

The Genealogy of the Western European

and World Bourgeoisie

Roman commercial law to 476 C.E.

Byzantine and Muslim trade Viking commerce 500-900

Revival of European town life 800-1100 Jewish, Lombard, Frisian commerce

Venice, Genoa, Barcelona c. 1300
Florence c. 1500 Hanseatic towns c. 1500

The Northern Lowlands 1585-1689

English, Scottish, American 18^th century

Japanese parallels

The Rhineland, northern France, Belgium c. 1820

Political triumph of liberal and bourgeois values

in Europe
[theoretical reaction: 19^th century]
[political reaction: 20^th century]

Japan, Latin America, Asia late 20^th century:

spread to world

Chapter 10:

The Dutch Bourgeoisie Preached

Virtue

What made such talk conceivable was the “rise” of the bourgeoisie in northwestern Europe. But the rise was more a matter of numbers: it was a rise in prestige, accompanied by education. The rise happened, in the Netherlands especially, and the Netherlands was the model for the rest.

“Holland is a country where. . . profit [is] more in request than honor” was how in 1673 Sir William Temple concluded Chapter Five of his Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The “honor” that Temple had in mind was that of a proud aristocracy. Yet the profit more in request, shamefully in the view of English aristocrats, was not achieved at the cost of the Dutch bourgeoisie’s soul.

The Dutch gave up aristocratic or peasant images of themselves a century before the English and Scots or the American English colonists did, and two centuries before the French. What made the project of ethics in commerce conceivable was the economic and political rise of the middle class around the North Sea, merchant communities hurrying about their busy-ness with ships packed with herring, salt, lumber, wheat, and later with colonial products, the “rich trades” of spices and porcelain. The league of Hansa towns from Bergen to Novgorod, and south to Deventer in the Netherlands, never took national form, though it had fleets to put down pirates and was more powerful than most states at the time. In the 8^th century a “Frisian” was a synonym for “trader”—and for “Dutchman,” since the languages now called Frisian and Dutch had not yet diverged (and they had just barely diverged from English), and Frisia was not as it is now confined to the northern Netherlands.²⁰² The Jews, the “Italians,” and the Frisians were the great traders of the Carolingian Empire. The Dutch were henceforth the tutors of the Northerners in trade and navigation. They taught the English how to say skipper, cruise, schooner, lighter, yacht, yawl, sloop, tackle, hoy, boom, jib, bow, bowsprit, luff, reef, belay, avast, hoist, gangway, pump, buoy, dock, freight, smuggle, and keelhaul. In the last decade of the 16^th century the busy Dutch invented a broad-bottomed ship ideal for commerce, the fluyt, or fly-boat, and the “German Ocean” became a new Mediterranean, a watery forum of the Germanic speakers—of the English, Scots, Norse, Danish, Low German, Frisian, Flemish, and above all the Dutch—who showed the world how to be bourgeois.

The shores of the German Ocean seemed in, say, 98 C.E. an unlikely place for town life and the bourgeois virtues to flourish. Tacitus at least thought so. The storms through which a skipper would cruise in his schooner were rougher than the Mediterranean of a navicularius, and were rough more of the year. Tacitus claimed that the Germani, and certainly the wild Batavii, used cattle rather than gold and silver as money, “whether as a sign of divine favor or of divine wrath, I cannot say”(he was criticizing civilized greed).²⁰³ “The peoples of Germany never live in cities and will not even have their houses adjoin one another.”²⁰⁴ And he claimed it was precisely those whom Dutch people later looked on as their ancestors, the Batavians, who were the first among the Germani in martial virtue (virtute praecipui).²⁰⁵ The modern Dutch therefore dote on Tacitus.

But it is doting, not a racial history, because the Dutch have been since the 15^th century at the latest the first large, Northern European, bourgeois nation. It was at first a “nation” in a loose and ethnic sense, and nothing like as nationalistic as England or even France. The modern master of Dutch history, Johan Huizinga—his name is in fact Frisian—believed that Holland’s prosperity came not from the warlike spirit of the Batavians of old, or in early modern times from the Protestant ethic or the spirit of capitalism, or from modern nationalism, but from medieval liberties—an accidental free trade consequent on the worthless character of its mud flats before its techniques of water management were invented, and the resulting competition among free cities after the breakup of Carolingian centralization.²⁰⁶ “We [Dutch] are essentially unheroic,” Huizinga wrote. “Our character lacks the wildness and fierceness that we usually associate with Spain from Cervantes to Calderòn, with the France of the Three Musketeers and the England of Cavaliers and Roundheads. . . . A state formed by prosperous burgers living in fairly large cities and by fairly satisfied farmers and peasants is not the soil in which flourishes what goes by the name of heroism. . . . Whether we fly high or low, we Dutchmen are all bourgeois—lawyer and poet, baron and laborer alike.”²⁰⁷

In the late 16^th century the course of the Revolt against Spain stripped away the aristocracy, which in parts of the northern Netherlands had been pretty thin on the ground to begin with. Many aristocratic families simply died out. After the northern Dutch had made good their defiance of the Spanish, by 1585—though it was not official until 1648, and bizarrely the Dutch national anthem down to the present declares loyalty to the King of Spain—they lacked a king, and so the aristocracy could not be refreshed. It is an instance of the importance of marginality in theorizing the liberal evolutions of the 17^th and 18^th century that North Holland was far from the courts of Burgundy or even of Brussels that attempted to rule it, and very far indeed in miles and in spirit from its nominal ruler from 1555 to 1648, Madrid. City-by-city it was quite able to govern itself. It lay behind, or rather above, the Great Rivers, as the Dutch call them, protected the same way the German army of occupation was protected in 1944 by a bridge too far. What was left to rule was the haute bourgeoisie, the big merchants and bankers, very haute in such a compacted, urbanized place at the mouth of two of Europe’s larger rivers. Yet such regenten, regents, for all their pride in humanistic learning and their hard-eyed rule over the mere “residents” (inwoners) without political rights, were not aristocrats literally or in their own or in the public eye.

The mud flats became rich cities without, so to speak, anybody noticing, and by the time Philip II and the Duke of Alva and others sprang to attention it was too late. Mediterranean Europe, true, was still the place of great cities. In 1500 three out of the (merely) four cities in Europe larger than present-day Cedar Rapids, Iowa (viz., 100,000 check) were Mediterranean ports, two of them Italian: Venice and Naples, with Constantinople. Of the twelve in 1600 half were still Italian (Palermo and Messina, for instance, had become giants of honorable city life).²⁰⁸ Yet it is indicative of stirrings in the German Ocean that Antwerp in the mid 16^th century temporarily and London by 1600 and Amsterdam by 1650 permanently broke into the over-100,000 ranks.

By the early 17^th century the tiny United Provinces contained one-and-a-half million people, as against about six million in Britain and over eighteen million in France. There may have been check?? more people in Paris and London, each, than in the whole of the Dutch Republic. Yet more Dutch people (360,000 or so) lived in towns of over 10,000 in 1700 than did English people then out of a much larger population. This makes no sense at all: get the numbers straight! The United Provinces were bourgeois, all right.
* * * *

The question is whether Holland was the worse in spirit for being so very bourgeois. In the town-hating, trade-disdaining rhetoric of some Christianity and all aristocracy and nowadays uniformly the clerisy of artists and intellectuals, Holland would be corrupted utterly by riches earned from gin, herring, government bonds, and spices. It would therefore be “bourgeois” in the worst modern sense. Was such a town-ridden place less ethical than its medieval self, or than contemporary and still aristocratic societies like England or France?

Not in its declarations. I could rest the case by pointing to Simon Schama’s brilliant Embarrassment of Riches: NNN date, which discusses . . . . brief summary of Schama, not repeating what’s said in The Bourgeois Virtues

The Dutch art historian R. H. Fuchs notes that Golden Age painting was infused with ethics. After the 16^th century (the first age of printing) the Calvinist and bourgeois Netherlanders eagerly bought “emblems”—paintings and especially etchings illustrating ethical proverbs. Fuchs shows an example from 1624 of a mother wiping her baby’s bottom: Dit lijf, wat ist, als stanck en mist? “This life, what is it, but stench and shit?” Such stuff is especially prevalent early in the 17^th century, it would seem, when Dutch painting had not yet (as Svtelana Alpers has argued vigorously, against such “iconological” readings) separated itself from written texts.

A painting such as Bosschaert’s Vase of Flowers (1620) looks to a modern eye merely a bouquet that an Impressionist, say, might paint from life, though with much more attention to surface detail than the Impressionists thought worthwhile. But under instruction one notices (as the bourgeois buyer would have noticed without instruction, since behind his canal house he cultivated his own garden) that the various flowers bloom at different times of year. Therefore the bouquet is impossible (Fuchs date, p. 8). Something else is going on. The iconologists among art historians favor a theological interpretation: “For every thing there is a season, a time to be born and a time to die, saith the Preacher.” “That in principle,” writes Fuchs, “is the meaning of every [Dutch] still-life painted in the seventeenth or the first part of the eighteenth century.”²⁰⁹ I said that Fuchs’ view (and the view of many other students of the matter, such as E. de Jongh, whose work is seminal) has opponents who argue against it. Eric Sluijter, for example, joins Alpers in skepticism. He notes a 1637 poem by the Dutch politician and popular poet Jacob Cats (1577-1660) which portrays painters as profit-making and practical. He analyzes in detail one of the few contemporary writings on the matter, in 1642 by one Philips Angel lecturing to the painters of Leiden. The conclusion Sluijter draws is that “it is difficult to find anything in texts on the art of painting from this period that would indicate that didacticism was an important aim.”²¹⁰

The argument of the skeptics, in other words, is that secret meanings, if no contemporary saw them, might not in fact be there. Fair point. The purpose of paintings would not be, as the iconological critics think, tot lering en vermaak, “to teach and delight,” reflected in museum guidebooks nowadays—this from the humanism tracing to classical rhetoric and Cicero, two of the offices of rhetoric being docere et delectare; and the other being movere, to move to political or ethical action.²¹¹ At least it would not be ethical teaching, delighting, moving. Perhaps, as Alpers argues, it was essentially scientific, showing people how to see.

But even Alpers and Sluijter would not deny that a still-life of a loaded table with the conch, book, half-peeled lemon, half-used candle, vase lying on its side, and (in the more explicit versions) a skull signifying all the works that are done under the sun, such as Steenwijck’s painting of c. 1640, entitled simply Vanitas, was a known genre, to be read like a proverb. Pieter Clauszoon’s [?]still life of 1625/30 in the Art Institute of Chicago is filled with symbols of Holland’s overseas trade—olives, linens, sugar, lemons—to the same end. All is vanity and vexation of spirit, saith the preacher. It does not matter much if the Dutch painters knew they were making moral tales, as long as their audience experienced them that way. The point is similar to that of the “new” criticism of the 1940s and 1950s: a poem or painting can have a moral, or any other artistic effect, without it being consciously inserted by the poet or painter.

We ignoramuses in art history are liable to view “realism” as a simple matter of whether the people in the picture appear to have “real” bodies (though rendered on a flat canvas with paint: hmm), or instead have half-bodies of fishes or horses, or wings attached for flying about (‘fantasy”); or whether you can make out actual objects apparently from this world (again admittedly on that flatness), or not (“abstraction”). Fuchs observes on the contrary that what he calls “metaphorical realism” was the usual mode of early Golden Age painting showing (barely) possible figures or scenery which nonetheless insist on referring to another realm, especially a proverbial realm, always with ethical purpose. The same is true of much of French and British realism of the early-to-mid 19^th century, such as Ford Maddox Brown’s “Work” [1852-63; in two versions] or in France what the slightly mad painter, Gustave Courbet, called “real allegories.” Richard Brettell notes that Courbet and then the more accomplished Manet put aside the Academic conventions of mythology in favor of apparently contemporary scenes but make pictures nonetheless “ripe with pictorial, moral, religious, and political significance.”²¹²

Two centuries earlier the Dutch pioneers of metaphorical realism, or “real” allegories, would depict merry scenes of disordered home life, such as Steen’s painting of c. 1663 “In Luxury Beware” (itself a proverbial expression: In weelde siet toe), with ethical purpose. Such a scene became proverbial in Dutch. A “Jan-Steen household” now means a household out of control.²¹³ “In Luxury Beware” is littered with realistic metaphors. Even an untrained eye can spot them: while the mother-in-charge sleeps, a monkey stops the clock, a child smokes a pipe, a dog is feasting on a pie, a half-peeled lemon and a pot on its side signal the vanitas of human life, a woman in the middle of the picture looking brazenly out at us holds her full wine glass at the crotch of a man being scolded by a Quaker and a nun, and a pig has stolen the spigot of a wine barrel (another literal proverb, Fuchs explains, for letting a household get out of control).

The Golden Age of Holland, in other words, if thoroughly bourgeois, was ethically haunted. (Similar art is produced under similar social conditions, I just noted, during the much later triumph of the bourgeoisie in England and especially in a France still not quite comfortable with such an event.) Even in Holland the age was still one of faith. After all, in the rest of Europe, and just recently in the Netherlands itself, the varied Christians had carried out crusades against one another. The transcendent therefore keeps bursting into Dutch art, as in Rembrandt. One thinks of parallels in 17^th-century English poetry, especially from priests like John Donne and George Herbert or Puritans like John Milton. The literary English and the painterly Dutch reaching for God seems to come to a climax of earnestness around the middle of the 17^th century. Poetry and painting in the age of faith was not just entertainment (delectare); it had work to do (docere et movere), justifying God’s ways to man, to be sure, but also as Trevor-Roper observed Doing Politics (regere). A. T. van Deursen instances Cats, who began as a poet of emblem engravings and who “wanted to instruct his readers through moral lessons. . . . Those who desired something more erotically tinted would have to learn Italian”—or buy a painting.²¹⁴ Nothing means in the early-17^th century notion merely what it seems. Every thing in the poem or painting points a moral.

An urbane reaction followed, in Dryden, for example, and in late Golden Age Dutch painters. A century later the keys to this system of early-17^th-century moralizing symbols in both poetry and painting had been entirely mislaid. Romantic critics had no idea what Milton was on about, since they had set aside the religious attitudes that animate his poetry. The two pillars that van Deursen spoke about, Christianity and pagan literature, had been pushed apart by early Enlightened and then Romantic Samsons, and the ethical building had collapsed. Even so spiritual a reader as Blake gets Milton wrong. And in looking at painting even the Dutch critics of the late 18^th century had misplaced the emblematic keys to their own national art (admitting that Alpers and Sluijter think there was no key to be lost in the first place). Foreigners had no chance at all. Gerard Terborch had painted around 1654-55 a scene in a brothel in which a young man bids with a coin for a woman (whose back is to the viewer) dressed in lovingly rendered satin. The procuress goes about her business. And the table shows a vanitas arrangement. The scene was conventional—Vermeer did one, for example; two if you include Officer and Laughing Girl around 1657 in a different arrangement, similar to a painting of 1625 by van Honthorst named explicitly The Procuress (in which a lute is offered: luit in Dutch, Fuchs explains, can mean either the musical instrument or a vagina). Yet by 1809 [Elective Affinity] Goethe was interpreting the Terborch painting as a scene of a father [i.e. the john] admonishing his daughter [i.e. the whore] while the mother [i.e. the procuress] averts her eyes modestly.²¹⁵ Goethe is not to be blamed: an 18^th-century engraver had retitled the work “Paternal Admonition,” and appears to have deleted the coin from the client’s hand. On the other hand, Goethe likewise misunderstood Milton's Satan as a Romantic hero, and Hamlet as one, too. And so we have here a change in sensibility.

The painters themselves as much as the critics forgot, too. Fuchs shows the metaphoric realism of the Golden Age giving way in the mid-19^th century to a pictorial realism, that is, a realism not of the soul—remember the flowers blooming and dying at different times of year—but of the eye. Or of the mechanized eye. The camera obscura, we have only recently discovered, played a role in painting from the Renaissance on. When photography comes, the artists follow suit. The subjects just happen to be in the frame of the picture, as in Gustave Caillebotte’s masterpiece in the Art Institute of Chicago (1877). The bourgeois walkers at a rainy Paris intersection in the newly built quarters are glimpsed just at that moment, which will in an instant dissolve meaninglessly into another moment. A different level of reality is not breaking in from above—though one might argue that impressions such as this carried their own vanitas message. But the ethical transcendent is rejected at last in the Industrial Age, as it was embraced in the early Golden Age.

The first large bourgeois nation of the North was ethical, that is, and very far from blasé about the good and bad of trade.
* * * *
Nor was Holland especially corrupt in its political declarations. Rather the contrary. The word “corruption” means essentially “unjust, unloving, unfaithful behavior in aid of prudence, that is, profit.” It’s a fancy word for bad behavior. In its politics Holland declared for goodness. The Northern, literate Protestant nations on the North Sea were cradles of democracy, of course, at least of a highly limited “democracy” among the full citizens of the towns, and here too Holland led. The Dutch Republic was an insult to the monarchies surrounding it, more so even than the older and inimitable islands of non-monarchy in Switzerland, Venice, and Genoa. The Republic’s federal form (in which each province had a veto in the generality and each city in the seven provinces) was an inspiration later to the Americans. Though I repeat it was nothing like a full-franchise democracy of the modern type—the big property owners, as in the early American republic, were firmly in charge—it was always a contrast in theory to the divine right of kings being articulated just then by Philip and Charles and Louis.

Protestantism had something to do with all this good talk about the rights of man (and in Holland the reality of the rights of women). The priesthood of all believers, and behind it the individualism of the Abrahamic religions generally, was central to the growth of the bizarre notion that a plowman has in right as much to say on public matters as a prince. Church governance, which allowed at least a saintly plowman a position, was practice for a democratic theory long a-borning. Yet on the Catholic side, as again the school of Quentin Skinner has taught us, the theory of natural rights justified a right even of revolution. Skinner argues that French, Dutch, and English theorists of politics in the early 17^th century owed a good deal to a scholastic tradition.

The English in their impetuous, aristocratic, pre-bourgeois way went a lot further at the time than the Dutch did. At the Putney debates of the New Model Army in 1647 Colonel Rainsborough declared, “I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under.”²¹⁶ He was a gentleman, a Puritan colonel. Charles I himself coined the word “leveller” to describe the notion that seemed insane in 1647, as one of his supporters put it scornfully, that “every Jack shall vie with a gentleman and every gentleman be made a Jack.”²¹⁷ ( Mercurius Pragmaticus, 9-16 Nov. 1647) Such shocking views did not at the time prevail against the position more usual until the 19^th century—that, as General Ireton replied to Rainsborough, “no person has a right to this [voice] that has not a permanent fixed interest [namely, land] in this kingdom.” But the position was taken, and became a specter haunting European politics for centuries. Charles I, two years after Putney, asserted the counter-position succinctly, before the headman's block: “A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.”

Whatever their debt to the scholastics, the Protestants, imagining early Church history as their model, had challenged the monarchies and aristocracies of popes and bishops. When priests were literally rulers, when cardinals marshaled armies and abbots and bishops collected a fifth or more of the rents in England, in Holland, and in other lands, religion was politics. It was a small step in logic, if not in practice, to the citizenship of all believers. Arthur Herman notes that the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland was from the time of John Knox “the single most democratic system of church government in Europe.”²¹⁸ Herman may not be remembering that in the same 1560s and 1570s the Dutch were creating the same sort of church government, by contrast to the less radical Lutherans and Anglicans elsewhere around the German Ocean: no bishops, said the Dutch; pastors chosen by the lay elders, that is, from the Greek, “presbyters.”

The northern Dutch like the northern Britons cast off their bishops in the 16^th century but then took the further step of casting off their monarch too. "Religion, in fact,," observed Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1940, "was also an aspect of politics—the outward symbol, the shibboleth, by which parties were known. . . . Religion was not merely a set of personal beliefs about the economy of Heaven, but the outward sign of a social and political theory."²¹⁹ What seems to us absurd excess in Archbishop Laud or Oliver Cromwell, he argues, is no more or less absurd than would be invading Poland in the name of Lebensraum or defending South Vietnam in the name of anti-Communism or invading Iraq in the name of suppressing world terrorism.

Bourgeois Holland, and its rhetoric of rights against kings and aristocrats, led. They put on show what is supposed in anti-capitalist rhetoric to be impossible: the virtuous bourgeois.