Modernity Perverted: The Urbanization and Industrialization of Western Europe

Few historical developments in Western Europe brought the same profound changes as widespread urbanization. The move from an agrarian society in the eighteenth century to the urbanized, mechanized, and industrialized society of the nineteenth is one wrought with social upheaval and political transformation. This expansion in urban populations resulted in a plethora of effects, both positive and negative; rising crime levels, pollution, increased prostitution, Marxism, and the emergence of the bourgeois middle class can all trace their origins back to urbanization. Of course this process was also intricately tied to that of industrialization, and, as a result, the two are often hard to disassociate from one another. Industrialization was definitely a crucial factor in speeding up urbanization, though it could never have happened had that development not already been under way. Regardless, urbanization proved to be the engine of modernity in Western Europe. It laid the groundwork for what we know today as the "modern world", and it changed the face of the European landscape in profound and unalterable ways.

For the majority of medieval Europe, society was characterized by the divide between serf and master, the landed aristocracy and the rural peasantry, king and subjects. In addition, the continent was largely rural; even up until 1600 the great cities of the West, like Paris, roughly had only 180,000 occupants (Coffin 562). For the medieval common man life was short, harsh, and isolated. Most people were illiterate and uneducated, despite the discoveries global exploration afforded. However, by the eighteenth century, Europe was a very different place; literacy rates were on the rise, proto-industrialization was underway, and the Enlightenment spread new liberal ideas about political and social rights (Coffin 627). It was in this new climate that true urbanization began to take place. Between 1600 and 1800 urbanization was concentrated in Western and Northern Europe (Coffin 562). The so-called "administrative capitals of Europe" (i.e. Paris and London) experienced spectacular growth during this period, and the process was largely influenced by patterns of trade and commerce (Coffin 562). Later in the century manufacturing cities, aided by the exponential growth of industrialization in England, began to spring up and expand.

This move from an agrarian to an industrialized society did not happen overnight, and in some places the transformation was still ongoing well into the twentieth century. England, though, was ahead of the rest of Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century; industrialization and immense urbanization really began on the British Isles, and factory cities were quickly established throughout the country. This monumental change in everyday life, as farmers and rural peasants became urban factory workers, produced a number of social and political side-effects. More obviously, pollution and overcrowding in cities like Manchester and Liverpool came to stand as a powerful image of the negative consequences of the new capitalist industrial society. German philosopher Friedrich Engels, while touring England, wrote an extensive essay on his observations of life in Manchester entitled The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. In it he describes the horrid living environments that many working class laborers had to endure, noting that "each house is packed close behind it's neighbor... all black, smoky, crumbling, ancient, with broken panes and window frames" (Engels 439). He goes on to refer to the homes as "cattle-sheds for human beings" (Engels 440). The River Irk, which ran through the city, was clogged with the refuse and waste from the various factories and mills, while the "stench alone would make it impossible for a human being in any degree civilized to live in such a district" (Engles 440). Written about a half a century after the first stages of industrialization, it is clear just how quickly the optimism over technological progress and innovation turned into an urban wasteland of grime, soot, and smoke.

The worsening condition of the urban poor was not lost on the middle and upper classes. The Enlightenment period of the late-eighteenth century spread the importance of empiricism and reason, and these concepts led to divisions on how to deal with the widespread poverty and disease common in the lower classes. In 1826 economist and minister Thomas Malthus wrote in An Essay on on the Principle of Population that the "difficulty of acquiring food... must fall somewhere, and must necessarily be severely felt in some or other of the various forms of misery... by a large portion of mankind" (Malthus 431). His unpopular claim that poverty for the masses was inevitable and natural stood in stark contrast with the growing interest in charity organizations and reform groups. Malthus saw the misfortune of the poor health of the lower working class as way to check population growth so that it could "never actually increase beyond the lowest nourishment capable of supporting it" (Malthus 431).

Samuel Smiles, a Scottish reformer writing towards the end of the century, had a slightly different stance on poverty. He noted the widening gap between the "have and have-nots" (Smiles 514) of urban Britain and wrote that the riches of the upper classes "rest[ed] upon a dark background of wretchedness" (Smiles 513). While he laid blame to the rich for exploiting the masses, he was no Marxist; he saw the lower classes as equally responsible for their fate. They "debase themselves by the vices which accompany civilization, but make no use whatever of its benefits and advantages" (Smiles 514) and it is the combination of their idleness, self-indulgence, ignorance, and intemperance that has made them poor and disadvantaged (Smiles 514-515). Smiles, much like the earlier Malthus, stood in opposition with other progressives of his time. Governments were besieged with the pleas of reform groups for change and, desperate to avoid widespread revolutionary action by the masses, began to pass legislation in the areas of poverty relief, public health, and education (Coffin 695). Smiles directly opposed such legislation, saying that the reforms produced little in the way of actual improvement for the working classes and that only the steady spreading of education would help (Smiles 514-515).

Urbanization also produced several important political effects. The French Revolution was a defining moment in modern European history that would not have been possible without it and the new forms of social interaction it yielded. Coffeehouses and salon culture were products of the new Enlightenment, and "served as centers of social networks and hubs of opinion" (Coffin 627) while providing an outlet for political debate and discussion. Literacy rates in urban centers were on the rise as well, and cities became the perfect place for Enlightenment philosophers and political scientists to distribute their latest works (Coffin 627). As a result, places like Paris became hotbeds for new political ideas like democracy and individual freedom. This unstable climate eventually gave way to the various radical happenings that historians put under the umbrella of the "French Revolution", which left an indelible mark on the European world. Though taken from an account on coffeehouse culture in the late sixteenth-century, Coffee House Society can still give one a good idea on the diverse atmosphere of such places just prior to the French Revolution: "often you may see a silly fop and a worshipful justice, a griping rook and a grave citizen, a worthy lawyer and an errant pickpocket... all blended together to compose an oglio [medley] of impertinence" (Coffee 234). The report also goes on to describe the coffeehouse as "the sanctuary of health... and academy of civility, and free-school of ingenuity" (Coffee 235). From these descriptions it becomes easy to visualize a bustling urban shop filled with a wide-range of people discussing everything from local gossip to political ideology, and to see how such a place could be a breeding ground for revolutionary discourse when radical Enlightenment ideals are brought into the fold.

The French Revolution also gave birth to the concepts of mass culture and mass politics, both of which were taken to extremes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The idea of the human as consumer was in full force by the eve of the twentieth century, when capitalism and the new art of advertising ruled the day. Advances in media and transportation also prompted the creation of this new mass culture, which often went beyond national boundaries (Coffin 825). Besides the widespread use of new mediums like radio and, much later television, as tools of marketing to consumers, new entities like large-scale department stores began cropping up in major urban centers throughout Western Europe. These meccas of consumerism appealed mainly to the growing bourgeois middle classes, offering them a wide range of luxury and practical products. They also stood as a "mark of the times - of urbanization, economic expansion, and the new importance attached to merchandising" (Coffin 827). Influential French author Emile Zola described the mania over consumerism and the new department store in his novel Ladies' Paradise. He goes into great detail on how department store owners manipulated his middle-class female customers into buying more goods, saying that "woman was powerless against advertising" (Zola 611). The main character, Mouret, is determined to "conquer woman" (Zola 610) by spending exorbitant amounts on advertising (three hundred thousand francs a year) and by meticulously arranging the store floors in order to greater appeal to the customer and her desires. It is an almost clinical and scientific worldview, one that reduces people to statistics and patterned behavior, and sees them not as human beings but as money distributors. Encapsulated in this work are the two main consequences, positive and negative, of the new capitalist system: an increase in goods and prosperity, accompanied by cynicism and a kind of dehumanization of the consumer.

Mass politics was a different beast; it grew directly out of the new political attitudes of the French Revolution, which spread across the continent and took hold in various forms all over Europe. The old forms of government began to be contested by the masses, despite the best efforts of Metternich and the Congress of Vienna to reverse the outcome of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. Towards the end of the century, "trade unions, socialists, and feminists all challenged Europe's governing classes by demanding that political participation be open to all" (Coffin 837), and the balance between monarchial rule and newer constitutional freedoms was threatened by the surge in influence of mass politics. Labor unions transformed into highly centralized, nationwide organizations, and class warfare broke out between the working class government of the Paris Commune and the national French government at Versailles in 1871 (Coffin 837).

All of these developments rested upon the ideas of Marxist socialism, a theory popularized by Karl Marx and Engels that recast history as an ongoing struggle between classes. The modern-day concept of "class" was largely influenced by urbanization and industrialization, and subsequently their work became extremely popular with the impoverished working classes of European cities, particularly in France and Germany. Germany itself was particularly well-tailored to embrace Marxist social democracy; it's industrialization process started later than England, but moved faster, and it already had a large urban working class as well as a traditionally anti-labor government (Coffin 833). Ernest Williams wrote in his book Made in Germany that "up to a couple of decades ago, Germany was an agricultural state... Now she has changed all that" (Williams 621). He also describes how large factory towns began to develop, and how, as in England, they employed thousands of children from the surrounding countryside (Williams 621).

Drawing upon this changing atmosphere, Marx and Engels were able to galvanize an entire population of oppressed workers with a single revolutionary sentence: "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Marx 450). And though a full-out revolution based on Marxist ideals wasn't accomplished until well over fifty years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, their words still inspired millions of people to form and join Communist parties across Europe, many of which became powerful representatives in national government.

Writing at the turn of the century, leading German Marxist Eduard Bernstein wrote in his Evolutionary Socialism that "social reaction has set in against the exploiting tendencies of capital" (Bernstein 624). According to Bernstein the capitalists were also beginning to bend to social democratic and Marxist organizations like the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany)(Bernstein 624). His book, which called for the need to revise certain Marxist principles in the face of changing capitalist policies, highlights the growing success that socialists were having a mere fifty years after the introduction of Marxism itself. The fact that a movement so young posed the greatest threat to both the new ways of capitalism and the old autocratic governments is significant, and points to the severe oppression and poverty of the urban working class brought about by industrialization and urbanization. These themes and ideas persisted well into the twentieth century, as is evidenced by the Parisian Student Revolts of 1968; these protests wanted to "wipe out segregation between workers and management" (French 809), and drew upon Marxist revolutionary language and principles by invoking class struggle and the divisions of workers and the bourgeoisie.

Urbanization in Western Europe, which accompanied and precipitated industrialization, was a harbinger of social and political change. The consequences of the change from a rural to an urban society were well-documented by writers and philosophers throughout the nineteenth-century, many of whom focused on the tandem effects of industrialization and urbanization on the poor working classes. The growing European cities brought together the upper and lower classes in ways they had never been before, exposing the rich to the immense poverty and sufferings of the urban laborers. This increase in class consciousness was, in turn, at least partly responsible for the development of Marxism as well as the growth of mass politics and the birth of the reform movement. Urbanization also brought important cultural changes to society, such as the increasing influence of the bourgeois middle class and the establishment of mass culture and consumerism. Our contemporary concept of modernity is intricately tied to this urbanization of the Western world, though we usually only see it through rose-colored glasses; it is important not to forget that this change over time brought both good and bad to European peoples.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Eduard. Evolutionary Socialism from Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. Print.

Coffee House Society from Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. Print.

Coffin, Judith G. and Robert C. Stacey. Western Civilizations, 16th ed., 2 vol. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008. Print.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 from Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. Print.

French Students and Workers Unite in Protest from Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. Print.

Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population from Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. Print.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto from Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. Print.

Smiles, Samuel. Thrift from Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. Print.

Williams, Ernest Edwin. Made in Germany from Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. Print.

Zola, Emile. Ladies' Paradise from Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. Print.