A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France (review)

A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France. By Christine Adams (University Park, Penn State University Press, 2000) 292 pp. $65.00 cloth $19.95 paper.

The title of this well-crafted book summarizes its argument. Adams has joined Forster and Jones in insisting upon the existence of a middle-class identity and consciousness in eighteenth-century France.¹ She argues that, well before the Revolution, a provincial professional family, the Lamothes of Bordeaux, had many of the values of the nineteenth- century bourgeoisie, including a comfortable, family-centered lifestyle, professional status based on merit and public service, and cultural activities reflecting their education, social standing, and concern for the public good.

The parents and seven Lamothe children surviving into adulthood were a patriarchal family unit. Their father managed substantial real estate holdings in the interests of the family as a whole, and the women created a comfortable home environment for the men. They all lived together under one roof, and their lives were tightly intertwined physically, financially, and emotionally. Only the oldest son married at the age of forty-seven. The four younger brothers and two sisters never married, probably because dowries and separate establishments would have seriously reduced the family's material resources. Domestic comfort was important, and they all enjoyed fashionable clothes, pleasant surroundings, good food, and the order and cleanliness provided by servants. Three of the boys became lawyers like their father; the other two became, respectively, a doctor and a priest. The Lamothes had a bourgeois work ethic combined with a sense of public service; they believed in the importance of a professional reputation based on merit and hard work. Such a reputation was essential to their bourgeois identity, providing status and social standing. Family members valued education, respectability, and polite behavior. They read voraciously, attended meetings of the Bordeaux academies, and participated in salon society. Their sociability and cultural interests were essential to their identity.

In arguing that the Lamothes' bourgeois identity was based on their family ties, professional life, and cultural activities, Adams challenges the conclusions of Garrioch and Maza. Garrioch denies that there was a Parisian bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, arguing that such a class was produced by political behavior during the Revolution; Maza denies the existence of a middle-class consciousness because of its absence in the public discourse of established writers.² Adams notes that the quintessential bourgeoisie described by Honoré de Balzac, Emile Zola, and Gustave Flaubert lived in the provinces, not in Paris, and that the social and cultural behavior of the Lamothes, rather than their political behavior, determined their bourgeois identity. Her evidence is more than 300 private family letters written over a twenty-five-year period, not the public discourse of published writers. Her well-written, carefully structured, and thoroughly researched book is wholly convincing and a pleasure to read.

Sharon Kettering
Montgomery College in Maryland

Notes

1. Robert Forster, Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates: The Depont Family in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1980); Colin Jones, "Bourgeois Revolution Revived: 1789 and Social Change," in Colin Lucas (ed.), Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford, 1991), 69-118; idem, "The Great Chain of Buying," American Historical Review, CI (1996), 13-40.

2. David Garrioch, The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690-1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); Sarah Maza, "Luxury, Morality, and Social Change: Why There Was No Middle-Class Consciousness in Prerevolutionary France," Journal of Modern History, LXIX (1997), 199-229.

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