Link to Chronology
Capitalism transforms society again
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Nine
The Renaissance and the Reformation
Chapter I
The Transformation of Social Life From the Middle of the Fifteenth Century
2. The Renaissance in the Rest of Europe
Continued...
p525 The great wars of the beginning of the 16th century gave a fresh impetus to the spirit of capitalism. Charles V especially... was an extraordinary client for the financiers. Without the development of capitalism it may be said that his reign, which set so many armies on the march and launched so many fleets, would have been impossible... the profits of the bankers were fully comparable to the services which they rendered him. The prosperity of the Low Countries was largely responsible for maintaining the Emperor's credit, enabling him to reimburse his creditors, despite the fact he had to pay from 12 to 50 per cent interest. The Fuggers owed a great part of their fortune to the advances which they made to him... The bankruptcies of Philip II in 1575 and 1596 put an end to the alliance of private capitalism and monarchical policy.
p526 At this moment, however, another source of gain offered itself to the insatiable financiers. About 1550 the silver mines of Peru and Mexico began to furnish Spain with ingots which presently found their way all over Europe in the form of silver coins. This inundation of precious metals reduced the purchasing power of the currency, the result being a general rise of prices. Trade, and especially industry, received a powerful stimulus, and had yet one more motive for enfranchising themselves from the insupportable control of the guilds and corporations. Manufacture -- that is, the form of production in which the artisan worked under his own roof, and was paid and given orders by a contractor -- became, from the middle of the 16th century, the typical form of industrial organization; and so it remained until the appearance of the modern factory, of which... some precocious examples might already be found here and there.
Remarkable as the development of capitalism may have been, we must not exaggerate its scope. It was superimposed on the old economic organization of the privileged cities, but it did not abolish this organization. The petite bourgeoisie continued to live in the shelter of the trade corporations and to supply the local market. Bakers, butchers, cabinetmakers, shoemakers, etc., remained faithful, until the end of the ancien regime, to the protectionism which reserved for them the exploitation of the municipal clientele. In no case did the governments think it wise or prudent to make them amenable to the common law... their fear of democracy persuaded them to tolerate these defects as the best means of keeping the "compagnons" in a docile mood... they... [did begin] to abolish the political privileges of the guilds, and to keep a tight hand, or at least of close watch, over the urban administrations... The cities could have retained their political and economic autonomy intact only be retaining their military strength. But what could their guilds and corporations do against regular armies, and what could their ancient walls avail against artillery? Only where the State was powerless, as in Germany, did they hold their own... The few attempts at resistance, such as that of the Liegois [people of Liege? I believe so.] against the Dukes of Burgundy, the people of Gand against Charles V and the people of La Rochelle against Francis I, showed that their claims were inspired only by a past which was indeed the past. The democratic policy which the petite bourgeoise had so ardently supported in the 14th century was henceforth a lost cause. Just as capitalism was supreme in the domain of wholesale trade, so the State was supreme in the domain of politics.
p527 Under the influence of the new conditions which were transforming social life the conception of the bourgeoisie was transformed in its turn. The political and juridical characteristics which had given it its special position in the society of the Middle Ages, beside the clergy and the noblesse, were gradually becoming less marked. From the beginning of the 16th century the bourgeoisie had become essentially a class of men living by exploitation or by the revenues of their wealth. The mere manual worker, according to current ideas, had ceased to belong to the bourgeoisie. It now rejected the artisans in whom its strength had formerly resided. It began to affect definitely plutocratic manners, which distinguished it from the petite bourgoisie and brought it nearer the noblesse. In each country... it developed its special features... It is enough to say that henceforth wealth was everywhere [the Low Countries, France, England] the sign par excellence of the bourgeoisie. The bourgoisie of the Middle Ages was privileged by law; the modern bourgeois is privileged by virtue of his economic situation... In the Middle Ages the bourgeois depended on his city for his livelihood, and existed for his city; the commune of which he was a member was the indispensable guarantee of his person and his interests; his mode of life and his ideas alike were dominated by the municipal group to which he belonged. But after the Middle Ages these conditions disappeared. For the modern bourgeois the city is merely a place of residence and a business center; it is no longer the center of his affections, his ideas and his interests. The sources of his wealth are widely dispersed... If he is a manufacturer his factories may be in the country; if he is a merchant his correspondents and his merchandise are distributed over distant ports and markets; if he lives on his dividends his money may be invested in distant countries, in loans, or in commercial or industrial enterprises of every kind. His livelihood is now... implicated in the existence of the nation as a whole, and its relations to foreign nations. He has to know what is happening in all parts of the world. Hence the development of the post, and presently, of the Press, whose object, in the beginning, was merely to bring within reach of all the news which until then had been translated only by private correspondence.
I can't help thinking of Voltaire here. He not only abandoned the city, he was all but indistinguishable from a nobleman -- though Proust's Baron would not have agreed, I'm sure. But this is a trend Pirenne has already mentioned a number of times.
p528 Economic liberty... immediately imposed its consequences upon the world of workers... The regulations of the guilds determined the worker's rights, safeguarded his wages, and guaranteed him against too glaring abuses; they often granted him aid in case of sickness or old age... But there was no trace of all this in the new system of manufacture. Here, in conformity with the "common law," the employer and employee entered into contracts directly... The one sold his labor, the other bought it, and the price depended on their "free will."... Completely unorganized... the workers in the new industries had to submit to the law of the capitalist... from the beginning of the 16th century there is abundant evidence of the wretchedness of... [the worker's] conditions, and of their discontent. The rise of prices in the middle of the century exasperated them still further, and contributed largely to the success of the semi-social, semi-religions propaganda of the Anabaptists. As for the government, it did nothing for them, ignoring them as long as they did not trouble the public peace.
p529 Here again we have striking evidence of the degree in which social changes had weakened the influence of the Church... as the ascetic spirit declined, the halo of sanctity which surrounded the mendicant faded. People began to regard him as a vagabond, dangerous to the public peace, a professional loafer... [various factors] so multiplied the numbers of wandering men who had no other resources than alms, that towards the beginning of the 15th century they had become a veritable social plague. The authorities therefore began to persecute them mercilessly, in the hope of compelling at least the able-bodied among them to work. The first administrative regulations directed against mendicity authorized it only in the case of children, the aged, and the infirm, and sought to prevent the others from begging by the threat of corporal punishment... It was well understood, from the beginning of the 16th century, that it would be necessary to attack the root of the evil and abolish mendicity by removing its cause... the reforms introduced at Ypres in 1525, under the influence of Vives... by concentrating the resources of all the charitable establishments of the city, appointing visitors to the poor, and sending children in receipt of charity to school, or apprenticing them to a trade, sought to abolish pauperism by enabling the poor man to earn a living... It is interesting to note that... [these attempts] were especially numerous and effective where the development of capitalism and manufactures enabled the charitable societies to find situations for their charges. The example of Holland, and above all of England, is particularly significant in this respect. The English laws of 1551 and 1562 relating to the employment of the poor were the precursors of the famous Act for the relief of the poor of 1601, which was so admirably adopted to the needs of modern industry that in its essential features it has survived to this day.
I have to say, this section could not be more relevant today. The main differences being that the problem now is the reduction in the number of jobs for the unskilled (or even the skilled) and possibly the degree to which mental illness or diminished mental capacity is involved.
p530 ...Society contented itself with compelling the poor man to work; it did not attempt, as the cities of the Middle Ages would have done, to regulate the work itself. Until the 19th century it subjected labor to no restrictions, and this fact is eloquent of the capitalistic character which was henceforth the essential feature of the economic world.
It would be interesting to know how, back then, the successful capitalist justified to himself the exploitation of the workers. Was this perhaps where Calvinism played a role? Or were attitudes the same among Catholics?
p531 It is... not surprising that from the second half of the 15th century, contemporaneously with free industry, and increasing with its expansion, a proletariat made its appearance whose history has yet to be written. It is true that there existed, in the Middle Ages... a class of wage-earners whose condition was very nearly that of the proletariat.... the modern proletarian was completely at the mercy of his employer... Moreover, they were too wretched and too uneducated to organize themselves... during the three centuries that began about 1450... manufacture, even in those countries in which it was most advanced, still played only a limited part in the activities of the nation... It was far less important than commerce, and above all, than agriculture, which everywhere remained the essential branch of production.
God, this is a long, but interesting, chapter.
p532 ... Here too [in agriculture] the advance of capitalism was profoundly felt. In some counties it had the effect of enfranchising the peasant, while in others it forced him back into a state of servitude far completer, and... much harsher than that of the Middle Ages... In those counties which were economically the most advanced, like Italy and the Low Countries, the landowners... were inclined systematically to favor free labor.
...as early as the beginning of the 15th century we see that in Italy what was left of the ancient servitude was replaced by personal liberty. As early as 1415 a Florentine statute decreed the obligatory suppression of serfdom... In the Low Counties, from 1515 onwards, the prince issued a number of edicts whose purpose was to enfranchise both the man and the soil... The enfranchisement of the peasants was in reality the enfranchisement of the landowner, who, having henceforth to deal only with free men who were not attached to his land, could dispose of the latter by means of simple revocable contracts...
p533 Further, as serfdom disappeared... the technical methods of agriculture were improved and modernized. In the 15th century the cultivation of rice was introduced in the Lombard plain; the rearing of silkworms became general in the Midi in the reign of Louis XI. In Flanders... Fallow land was sown with clover, so that it no longer lay idle... Spain and England sacrificed the cultivation of cereals to sheep-farming... It was the flocks of sheep that gradually made Castile the stony, treeless desert which it has become, and it was owing to sheep-farming that pastures began to cover a larger and larger area of the English soil, where the sheep replaced the peasant and his plough. From the reign of Henry VI onwards Parliament was continually passing Enclosure Acts, which authorized the conversion of arable soil into pasturage, driving evicted tenants into the ranks of the proletariat, from which the manufacturers recruited their workers.
I guess the Highland Clearances are later in time, though the same idea. Actually they run together. The Clearances start in the first decades of the 18th century and are mostly complete by the middle of the 19th century while the first Inclosure Act is 1773 and the last not until near the end of the 19th century. Wiki says "Between 1604 and 1914" for the Inclosure Acts. Which is a century after Henry VII (1457-1509). This may be where Pirenne's inability to consult his books lead him a bit astray. At least in Britain, this effect of capitalism and modern methods seems to have occurred a century or more later than the period he's discussing.
p534 While in Western Europe the evolution of capitalism tended to make the peasant a farmer or a worker for wages, in Germany it created a new form of serfdom. The essential cause of this phenomenon... must be sought in the omnipotence and brutality of the nobles, whom the territorial princes did not dare to oppose... the nobles took advantage of the distress caused by the excess of population in order to oppress the rural class. If agriculture had been further advanced, or if industry had been more extensively developed, the peasant might have discovered new resources on the spot. But the feeble economic development of Germany delivered him, defenseless, into the hands of his seigneurs... beyond the... [Elbe], in Brandenburg, Prussia, Silesia, Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary, the most merciless advantage was taken of... [the situation.] The descendants of the free colonists of the 13th century were systematically deprived of their land and reduced to the condition of personal serfs (Leibeigene). The wholesale exploitation of estates absorbed their holdings and reduced them to a servile condition which so closely approximated to that of slavery that it was permissible to sell the person of the serf independent of the soil. From the middle of the 16th century the whole of the region to the east of the Elbe and the Sudenten mountains became covered with Ritterguter exploited by Junkers, who may be compared, as regards the degree of humanity displayed in their treatment of their white slaves, with the planters of the West Indies. The negro in the New World, and the German peasant in the Old World, were the most typical victims of modern capitalism, and they both had to wait until the 19th century for their enfranchisement. [The Junkers represent "modern capitalism"?]... There were still periods of dearth, but there were no more famines... [Check the climate data.] there may have been something like forty inhabitants per square kilometer in the two regions that were then most densely populated: Italy and the Low Countries. France, about 1550, seems to have had a population of something like 18,000,000. At the same date the commercial metropolis of the West, Antwerp... did not contain more than 100,000 inhabitants.
p535 ...The total amount of wealth had increased, but this increase was distributed in a very unequal manner. Practically no one profited by it excepting the great landowners, the nobles, the Church, the wholesale merchants, and the manufacturers. That middle class which was composed of small independent producers, which was so widely distributed in the 13th century... was visibly declining... If the noblesse of the modern era seems in many respects to have been even prouder and more arrogant that [than?] that of the Middle Ages, that is because it felt the need of maintaining the social distinction, in respect of the "nouveaux riches," which the similarity of fortune, education, and interests might easily have led the latter to overlook. However, nothing could have been easier than for the new men to obtain letters patent which would enable them to enter the ranks of the noblesse, and share in the prestige which it owed to tradition, but which was maintained by its wealth. Aristocracy and plutocracy -- these, in the last resort, are perhaps the two words which best characterize the social transformation which was accomplished at the time of the Renaissance.
Haven't we seen the same thing going back to the Carolingian period? How is this any different? I appreciate the importance of the upper class always being permeable to new people of wealth, but if you are going to keep talking about it you either have to make clear how this differs from period to period or how it is identical.
I'm now caught up again, and I'm reading a new book club book. There will be another break before I return to Pirenne.
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