Population And Social Structure

Abstract

Abstract The social structure of early modern Europe, in all its variety and complexity, was a consequence of a mixture of factors: history, prevailing social attitudes and the extent of economic development. ‘Structure’ is a more helpful term than the term ‘class’, which tends to imply anachronistic nineteenth-century definitions arising from a market-economy-based interpretation of the period, where the production of material goods and the creation of wealth were dominant. Many older studies, it is true, stressed the decisive role of the middle class in bringing about change in the early modern period, blaming or praising it for such diverse phenomena as the Reformation, the growth of representative institutions and economic expansion. Marxist historical determinism still depicts the revolt of the Netherlands, the English civil war and the French Revolution as ‘bourgeois revolutions’. But such concepts are too rigid. Discontented nobles as well as an emergent bourgeoisie played a decisive part in political upheaval, both in the Dutch revolt and the French wars of religion. In most European countries there is little evidence of any consciousness of a dynamic and self-confident middle class, sure of its role and its destiny in society, as was arguably the case with the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. The noble ethos, not the values of the middle class, prevailed in early modern Europe. The ambition of the successful entrepreneur was to become a nobleman, not to remain simply a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie. Only in the more advanced economies such as the Dutch Republic and England did so-called ‘bourgeois’ values prevail in some measure.