The most bourgeois country and the least

From the perspective just proposed modernity appears both as a singular thing, “everywhere the same,” as Hegel said of spirit, and as a plurality of diverse things, markedly different from place to place. Among the most significant differences were the contributions bourgeois people and activities made to the evolving life around them and the ways this larger context shaped bourgeois or middle-class existence. These contrasts were firmly rooted in earlier history.

National feeling in the sense some nineteenth-century people would celebrate (and others decry) was at best embryonic before 1750, but some explicit consciousness of national identity existed in all three of the countries on which I focus here (and in others too), grounded in various mixes of political, economic, or cultural (including religious) relations. To be sure, some of these ties connected people to inhabitants of other countries as well, but this is a point we must leave aside for now. If we were simply to rank the three in terms of the level of consolidation each had achieved by around 1750, there would be good reason to put England at the top, Germany at the bottom, and France between them. But such a quantitative ranking is less informative than a more qualitative comparison, based on the differing modes of integration each territory had developed. An illuminating way to highlight these differences is to note that each one displayed some characteristic paradox, a distinctive, and in some way surprising, set of relations between elements of society and culture; these paradoxes gave a specific tonality to each country’s story and shaped the space occupied by bourgeois or middle class people and activities within it. I will argue in this and the next two chapters that each of these paradoxes was rooted in the kinds of relations with co-nationals at a distance that operated in each instance, and thus in the particular configuration of networks of means through which these connections were established.