Elite versus Popular Mentality in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Elite versus Popular Mentality in the Eighteenth Century HARRYC. PAYNE In most places at most times the elites of European history have nurtured a sense of distance between themselves and their “inferiors.” In the eighteenth century this general, unfocused, largely implicit sense of distance became a pervasive, explicit sense of polarity be­ tween the nature of the nonelite—“the people”—and that of the elite.1 To be sure, the masses had evoked sympathy, concern, anger, and frustration from the intellectual and social elite in earlier times; no observer in republican Rome or Reformation Germany could en­ tirely ignore the nature of the mass of men. But the people as a clear and distinct social category—defined by its economic function and precursor to what the nineteenth century would call the “working class”—entered systematically into perceptions of high culture only with the age of the Enlightenment. In France the word peuple itself underwent a distinct evolution, first noted by the moralist Abbe Coyer in his Dissertation sur la nature du peuple (1755). At one time, Coyer observed, the peuple included “the most useful, the most virtuous, and consequently the most respectable part of the nation,” including farmers, artisans, merchants, financiers, lawyers, and philosophers. Rising social pretensions among robe nobilFrom Historical Reflections / Reflections historiques, 2 (Winter, 1975-76), no. 2, 183-208. 3 4 / HARRYC. PAYNE ity, men of letters, financiers, and the like had gradually robbed the word of that meaning; even the status of artisans of luxury goods had come into doubt, since their hands “no longer resembled those of the peuple. ”2 Though Coyer emphasized only what he considered a regret­ table rise in pretension, he recorded an important fact in social think­ ing: the word peuple had evolved from a juristic category with no semblance of economic realism to a rough denotation of a socioec­ onomic class. Peuple had come to be used most of the time as Vol­ taire chose to use it—as those “who have only their hands to live by.” Coyer’s analysis struck a responsive chord and was often quoted.3 Nowhere else in Europe did language record such a striking change, though the German word Pobel did mirror some of the French conno­ tations, and the English words mob, multitude, and vulgar do appear with much greater regularity. Still, everywhere in Europe there was a marked increase in talk about the nature and condition of those who had little else but their labor. This talk may have betrayed a growth in pretentiousness, as Coyer insisted, but this masked a substantial growth in the realism of social analysis. Between 1650 and 1780 the focus of social analysis shifted from juristic concerns of honor and privilege to the sociological concerns of the economic relations among men, from the aristocratic, legal categories of Loyseau to the adminis­ trative, economic categories of Turgot.4 The world of elite culture debated the nature and future of the dependent majority of men over a range of issues and sentiments unprecedented in European history. The concerns were many and often peculiar to the world of the eighteenth century: Can the elite and the people share the same religion, or must there continue to be a “double truth”—one for the elite, one for the masses—in all civilized societies? Is it useful to deceive the people, even for its own good, or must one speak to it truthfully at all times? Should the people be educated, or will popular education rob society of its laborers? Can the popular mind apprehend the same truths as the enlightened mind, or must it be taught in a special way? Does the people have the moral sensibility to serve fairly on juries, even if, as many thought, the peasant valued his wife and child less than his cow? Why does the people gather at hangings— because of its “natural” cruelty, its having been hardened by its bur­ Elite versus Popular Mentality I 5 dens, or its understandable, indeed admirable sensitivity to the lot of one of its own? Can the people at any place or any time be trusted with political responsibility, or will it always be the unwitting tool of...