Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880 by Christopher H. Johnson (review)

It is difficult to imagine a term that is more fraught with meaning and conflict than the word bourgeois. Ever since Karl Marx depicted the bourgeoisie as the class that tore asunder the feudal order and came to dominate the capitalist phase of history, social scientists have been debating its significance, most of them focusing on the economic and political realms. Johnson takes a different approach in his impressive new book by exploring how family life and kinship networks contributed to the “rise” of the bourgeoisie. A work of microhistory, Johnson’s study focuses on one family, the Galles, throughout several generations, relying mainly on letters to gain access to their private lives and kinship strategies. In 1670, the Galles were recently arrived Welsh immigrants to the Breton city of Vannes, where they ran a print shop. By 1888, the men of the family had held a wide variety of high-level governmental and military positions. Based upon decades of research in the private papers of the Galles family and their allies, as well as broader quantitative research about bourgeois kinship practices, the book offers a wealth of valuable new insights into modern European notions of class, gender norms, and kinship practices; it thus makes important contributions to a variety of historiographical areas.

One of the methodological questions raised at the beginning of the book relates to the use of letters as sources of information about emotions, practices, and experiences. Exploring private correspondence has become increasingly common among French historians, despite the continued reluctance of families to deposit their papers in archives. The authors of an influential book published in France twenty years ago warned against the pitfalls of taking letters literally. They argued that such correspondence does not permit direct access to the emotional lives of families since these collections always come to us after family members have purged them. In addition, letter writers were so imbued with rules of form that the contents of their letters can serve as evidence only of a ritualized bonding system for family members, never true expressions of feeling.¹ Johnson, however, insists on the value of his source base for understanding the emergence of class and gender identities. In addition, he found that the letters in his source base frequently expressed intense emotions. He explains that his method is to allow the letters to speak for themselves as much as possible in the hope that the book reads like an eighteenth-century epistolary novel. Quoting a personal communication with Joan Scott (5), Johnson explains that in letters people represent themselves as they wish to be seen: “Letters construct a persona as much as they express one” (5). Johnson’s book thus analyzes his subjects’ self-representations, including their emotions, and how they understood and built relations with others.

According to Johnson, bourgeois identity formation was a long-term process that is best understood in terms of practices and lifestyles. To construct this argument, he relies upon a number of interdisciplinary approaches, most visibly Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus as a set dispositions and “structuring structures” and Sahlins’ theory of the “performative.”² He also refers to Barthes’ view of the bourgeoisie as a class that never names itself, which inspired Maza to define the French bourgeoisie as a mythical construction.³ Johnson disagrees with Maza and her reading of Barthes, insisting that the Galles’ story demonstrates the existence of a self-conscious bourgeoisie whose values and practices became national norms in the nineteenth century (248). Kinship practices, most notably the prevalence of consanguineous marriage between “sibling-cousins,” allowed the Galles family, and others like them, to pool their resources and evolve from locally known artisans into a nationally prominent and unquestionably “bourgeois” family.

In addition to questions of class identity, Johnson’s study contributes to debates about gender in the nineteenth century. For example, he found that women often played a prominent...