A History of Europe
by Henri PirenneUniversity Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
2. The Cities
p220 ...Toward the close of the 11th century... The princes began to realize that they had more to lose than to gain by persisting in their opposition to the movement. For while it undermined their local authority and imperiled certain of their domainal revenues, it more than made up for these drawbacks by the supplementary payments received in the shape of market tolls, and the inestimable advantage of a constant influx of corn and wares of every kind, and of money. [The same advantage capitalism offers today. So many people -- now and then -- curse the "invisible hand" that feeds them.] By the beginning of the 12th century certain princes had frankly [maybe not the best word when talking about Frankish princes] adopted a progressive policy, and were seeking to attract the merchants by the promise of immunities and privileges. In short, whether by agreement or by force, the claims of the bourgeoisie were everywhere triumphant, just as the parliamentary system was everywhere triumphant in the Europe of the 19th century... [Huh? Is he overstating the triumph of parliamentarism in 19th century Europe or attempting to indicate that the "triumph" was nuanced and uneven from place to place?] Just as continental parliamentarism was an adaptation of English and Belgian institutions to the special conditions of each country, so the urban institutions, although they exhibited, from town to town, peculiarities resulting from the nature of the local environment, might none the less be referred, on the whole, to two dominant types:... that of the cities of Northern Italy, and... of the cities of the Low Countries and Northern France. Here, as in respect of the domainal regime, the feudal system, the Cluniac reformation, and chivalry, Germany and the other regions of central Europe merely followed the impulse that reached them from the West. [Just from the Low Countries? Or is he considering Northern Italy part of "the West"?]
p221 ...the towns of the Middle Ages presented everywhere the same essential features... the mediaeval city was a fortified agglomeration inhabited by a free population engaged in trade and industry, possessing a special law, and provided with a more or less highly developed jurisdiction and communal autonomy. The city enjoyed immunities which did not exist in the surrounding country; which amounts to saying that it had a morally privileged personality. It was constituted, indeed, on the basis of privilege. The bourgeois or burgers, like the noble, possessed a special juridical status: bourgeois and noble, in different directions, were equally removed from the villein, the peasant, who until the end of the ancien regime remained, in the majority of European countries, outside political society.
p223 However, the privileged condition of the bourgeois was very different in its nature from that of the noble. The noble was, in reality, the old landowning freeman. His privilege, in some sort negative, arose from the fact that the mass of the people had lapsed into servitude under him. He had not ascended; he merely belonged to a minority which had kept its place amidst a general social decline. [Wasn't this distinction also based on conquest and ethnicity? Especially in France?] The privileges of the bourgeois, on the contrary, were very definitely positive. The bourgeois was a parvenu, who, of necessity, had made for himself a place in society which was finally recognized and guaranteed by the law. The domainal regime, which set the noble over the head of the peasant, at the same time bound them together by so strong a mutual tie that even to this day, after so many centuries, traces of it survive. The bourgeois, on the other hand, was a stranger both to the noble and to the peasant; both distrusted him and regarded him with hostility, and of this also the traces have not entirely disappeared. The bourgeois moved and had his being in a wholly different sphere. The contrast between him and them was the contrast between the agricultural and commercial and industrial life... [There is also a very important difference when it comes to the Environment. People -- peasants and lords both -- tied to the land have an interest in the health of the land. The bourgeois lacks that kind of interest in any particular piece of land. The consequences of which are obvious to see. The bourgeois,] was a mobile and active element; the traffic of the country was in his hands, and he was an agent of transformation. He was not indispensable to human existence; it was possible to live without him. He was essentially an agent of social progress and civilization.
...The nobility and the clergy constituted homogeneous classes, all of whose members participated in the same esprit de corps, and were conscious of their mutual solidarity. The case of the bourgeois was very different. Living in segregated groups in the various cities, in them the spirit of class was replaced by the local spirit, or was at all events subordinated to it. Each city was a little separate world in itself; there were no limits to its exclusivism and its protectionism. Each did its utmost to favor its own trade and industry at the expense of the other cities. Each endeavored to become self-sufficient and to produce all that it needed. Each endeavored to extend its authority over the surrounding countryside, in order to assure itself of sufficient supplies of food. If it occurred to the cities to act in concert, to conclude temporary or permanent leagues. like the London Hansa, and at a later date, the German Hansa, they did so in order to take action against a common enemy, or for the sake of a common utility, but within its own walls each had room only for its own burgesses; the foreigner could trade there only through the medium of his brokers, and was always liable to expulsion. In order to live there he had to acquire burgess rights. And all of this is readily comprehensible. It was merely a question of local mercantilism... Urban exclusivism came to an end only when the towns were united in the superior unity of the State, just as the State will perhaps one day disappear in the unity of human society.
Typical Belgian pro-EU sentiment :-|
San Francisco, in it's early days, provides a surprisingly valuable example of a city developing on its own. Even after it became part of the United States, it was so isolated that all the logic of local mercantilism applied just as much as it had in the Middle Ages. It wasn't the role of the State, but the revolution in transportation that put the city on the dire path advocated by David Ricardo. The completion of the transcontinental railroad was marked by a depression as cheaper goods flowed in replacing local jobs.
Pirenne, above, does a good job of describing what cities, by their economic nature, do. Unless you can create an economic equivalent of the Roman political system -- whereby cities can participate in the success of a dominant city -- cities are engaged in a war of one against all until a Darwinian economic process eventually produces a winner.
I can't tell if he's suggesting that the bourgeois are also responsible for Nationalistic tendencies; at a minimum, they are destructive of the cohesive nature of Catholic Europe that was the norm before the Reformation. I keep wanting to object that the great Houses of Europe were also agents of heterogeneity, but I'm thinking of later centuries. These remain the "Dark" Ages for me. But really, were the Houses disputing Burgundy and other places really less mutually hostile than the burgers?
And here's an interesting thought: These economic revolutions of the 10th-12th centuries can, I think, be seen as setting the stage for the Black Death which followed in the 14th century. Would the plague have been able to enter Europe before the Crusades? Not easily. And didn't the labor shortage following the Black Death strengthen the hand of the bourgeoisie (and capitalism)?
The moral result of this exclusivism was an extraordinary solidarity among the burgesses. Body and soul, they belonged to their little local patrie, and with them there reappeared... a civic sentiment. Each burgess was obliged... to take part in the defense of the city: to take up arms for it, to give his life to it. The knights of Frederick Barbarossa were astounded to find that the shopkeepers and merchants of the Lombard cities were able to hold their own against them. In that campaign there were examples of civic virtue which remind one of ancient Greece. Other burgesses gave their fortunes to their city, commuted the market tolls, or founded hospitals. The wealthy gave without stint or reckoning, and no doubt they were inspired by charity as much as by pride.
For the rich men were the rulers. The burgesses of the cities enjoyed civil equality and liberty, but not social equality. The bourgeoisie, deriving from commerce, remained under the influence and the leadership of the wealthiest. Under the name of "grands" or "patricians," they kept the administration and jurisdiction of the city in their own hands. The urban government was a plutocratic government, and it actually ended, in the 13th century, by becoming oligarchic, the same familiars holding power in perpetuity. Yet nothing could have been more remarkable than these governments. They were responsible for the creation of urban administration: that is, the first civil and secular administration known in Europe. It was their work from the top to bottom. This has not been sufficiently considered: it should be realized that they had no model, and had to invent everything: financial system, systems of book-keeping, schools, commercial and industrial regulations, the first rudiments of a health service, public works, market-places, canals, posts, urban boundaries, water supply -- all this was their work. And it was they too who erected the buildings which even to-day are the glory of so many cities.
p224 Beneath them, the rest of the urban population consisted of artisans, and it was they who formed the majority in every city. As a rule they were foremen or small employers, masters, with one or two journeymen under them, who constituted an active and independent bourgeoisie. While wholesale trade was free, there developed, for the protection of the artisans. a social policy which was a masterpiece no less interesting, in its way, than the Gothic cathedrals; and of which the last traces have only recently disappeared. Its object was the maintenance of all these petty lives which constituted the strength of the city, and to secure its regular revictualling. Each citizen was a producer and a consumer, and regulation intervened in respect of both production and consumption. The municipal authority undertook to protect the consumer. To this end it revived the old municipal regulations [Roman?] of which some traces had perhaps survived in Italy. Nothing could have been more admirable than the precautions taken against "dishonest" products, fraud, and falsification. [This reminds me of the (not un-controversial) measures taken by the Swiss to manage the cheese production there. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Cheese_Union ] The consumer was protected in the twofold interest of the local bourgeoisie and of the city's good repute in the outer world.
As for the producer, he protected himself by the trade corporations or guilds which made their appearance as early as the 12th century. Their essential purpose was to prevent competition, and it was this that rendered them so odious to the liberal economy of the 19th century. [This also applies to the Swiss and cheese.] Every producer had to earn his living; therefore he had to retain his customers. He must accordingly sell his wares at the same price as his comrades, and he must make them in the same way. The trade or handicraft was originally a voluntary association, like our syndicates or trade unions. But it boycotted the "yellow" workers who did not apply for membership, and it was finally recognized by the public authority. Let us note that this organization had nothing in common with the association of workers whose purpose is negotiation with the employer. It was an obligatory syndicate of petty burgesses. It was created... for the benefit of the small independent producer. In most of the cities of the Middle Ages there was no proletariat. The craftsmen worked for the local market and reserved it for themselves. Their numbers were maintained in proportion to the number of their customers. They had complete control of the situation. In this sense, they had solved the social problem. But they had solved it only where the city was a "closed state," a situation that was not so general as one might suppose. For there was one industry at least -- the cloth industry in Flanders and in Florence -- whose products supplied not the local, but the European market. In this industry there could be no limitation of production, nor was it possible for the small employer to acquire his raw material for himself. Here he was in the power of the great merchant, so that in his industry there was a division between capital and labour which we do not find elsewhere... in the cloth industry the "master" was not an independent producer; he worked for wages, so that here we find something closely resembling the "cottage industry" of our own age. Trade organizations existed, but in this case it was far from protecting the artisan efficiently, as it could not affect the conditions of marketing or of capital investment. Hence there were strikes, conflicts of salaried workers, an exodus of weavers from Ghent, and industrial crises. Hence the uneasy, unruly, turbulent, Utopian spirit that characterized the weavers from the 12th century onwards, and made them the adepts of a naive communism which was allied with mystical or heretical ideals...
p226 With the rise of the towns and the constitution of the bourgeoisie the formation of European society was completed; such as it was to remain until the end of the ancien regime. Clergy, noblesse, bourgeoisie -- these made the trinity that ruled human destinies and played its part in political life. The agricultural people, below the privileged classes, were restricted to their function of food producers until the day when civil equality, and to some extent political equality, should become the common possession of all. For one cannot too strongly insist on the fact that the bourgeoisie was an exclusive and privileged class. It was in this respect that the cities of the Middle Ages differed essentially from the cities of the Roman Empire, whose inhabitants, whatever the standard of their social life, were all in enjoyment of the same rights. The Roman world never knew anything analogous to the European bourgeoisie; nor has the New World seen its like. When the American cities were founded the moment had passed when each social profession had its peculiar law; there were merely free human beings. [No comment.] In our days the word bourgeoisie, which we continue to employ, is completely diverted from its original sense. It denotes a social class of heterogeneous origin which has no common quality except that it is the class which possesses wealth. Of the bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages nothing remains, just as nothing remains of the nobility of the Middle Ages.
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