Living Conditions for the French Working Class Mark Traugott, The French Worker: Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp.17-21. The conditions in which nineteenth-century workers were housed and
fed contrast sharply with those of our own era. Established workers and their families were more likely to live in an apartment, consisting of one or perhaps two rooms. This too might be shared by more than one family or more than one generation of the same family and, as circumstances required, might serve as a place of work as well as living space. The large stone buildings that were common in that era were poorly lighted and ventilated, and it was exceptional for workers to live in apartments equipped with a fireplace (much less any form of central heating) to blunt the winter's cold.18 In rural areas, indoor plumbing was almost surely lacking, whereas a well-equipped city dwelling might offer shared water and toilet facilities either on each landing or in the courtyard. The need to carry water was quite literally a special burden for members of the working class, who usually lived on the top stories of their buildings. At street level, retail shops and small businesses faced outward to pedestrian traffic, while accommodations which opened onto the building's inner courtyard were likely to be occupied by workshops. The ability of middle-class tenants to pay premium rents allocated to them the choice apartments on the second and third floors. Members of the working class or domestics employed in the apartments of the bourgeois below were forced to make the long climb, sometimes to the sixth or seventh floor, in search of cheaper rents. This inverse relationship between class position and the height above the street at which one lived was among the most consistent patterns of physical and social stratification in the city. As a result, although predominantly working class quarters existed, there was more mixing of the different socioeconomic strata within neighborhoods than there is in most contemporary American cities. The worker's diet provides an even more stark contrast between that era and our own. A workday of twelve hours or more of grueling physical labor was frequently sustained on a meager caloric intake which we would today find lacking in both variety and allure. 19 The rich foods in which our present diet abounds, sometimes to the peril of our health, were virtually unknown to many members of the nineteenth-century working class. Only those fresh fruits, like apples, when they were briefly in season in the immediately surrounding area, or vegetables that stored well, like potatoes and cabbage, were likely to be within the means of ordinary people. Without the complex system of worldwide transport and distribution we know today, a food as exotic as an orange might be a once-in-a-lifetime treat for many French workers, while one as perishable as a banana was altogether unknown. A cup of hot chocolate each Sunday was the height of luxury for Bouvier when she was a young textile worker. A very few widely cultivated staples constituted the great bulk of the food eaten, day in and day out. Primarily for reasons of diet, the average Frenchman was some four inches shorter than his counterpart today.20 In general, the daily fare consumed by the working and middle classes respectively was more distinct than it is now, and food represented a much larger share of the typical working-class family's budget, more than one-half of its total yearly expenditures. . . . In most regions of France, a family's largest single expenditure was for bread. 22 Even in the best of times, the worker struggled to maintain a tenuous financial equilibrium. At least through the midcentury, the agricultural sector proved susceptible to periodic crises that might drive the price of the common one-pound loaf up by as much as 50 percent. When this happened, a greater share of the average family budget had to be used to buy basic foodstuffs, and less could be allocated tothe purchase of manufactured goods This reduction in the demand for the products of the industrial economy soon resulted in widespread unemployment in the cities. Agriculturally driven crises of this kind, common under the Old Regime [the era before the French Revolution began in 1789], persisted through the first half of the nineteenth century and recurred in particularly acute form between 1846 and 1848, when the Parisian working class, squeezed between the rising cost of living and the declining prospects of earning even a subsistence wage, rose in revolt Except when crises threatened, workers ate three meals a day. Breakfast, taken after two or more hours of work, was likely to consist of little more than plain bread accompanied by tea or coffee. (Though part of the working-class diet, sugar and coffee remained minor luxuries, with levels of consumption varying widely according to economic fortunes until late in the century.) Workers ate a second meal in the early afternoon, returning to their place of residence if convenient, purchasing food and drink in a nearby cafe or wine merchant's shop if this fell within their means, or bringing along simple provisions that they could consume on the spot at work. The principal meal of the day might be eaten either at midday or, more often, in the late evening after work was done. It might take the form of a thin soup or broth in which vegetables and a small quantity of meat had been cooked, and which was usually poured over stale bread to give it bulk and substance. The menu for the other daily meal was likely to be as simple as bread, cooked vegetables, and wine, supplemented by a bit of meat or cheese as circumstances permitted. Meat thus constituted a modest and at times irregular part of workers' diets. 23 Though deficiencies of diet were one major factor, they were by no means the sole contributor to workers' increased risk of illness. Outbreaks of cholera, a disease spread by a waterborne microbe, were concentrated in (though not limited to) urban areas, where facilities for the purification of drinking water were inadequate. Techniques of sewage disposal remained quite primitive, and raw human waste often coursed in the open gutters of city streets. The reader may be appalled to learn, . . . how rare might be the opportunity for members of the working class to sleep in clean sheets, to bathe, or just to wash their hands and face. All this is a reminder of how recent and how unusual are the standards of hygiene and public health observed in late twentieth-century America. For many manual workers, the chance of injuries or accidents on the job was a source of genuine anxiety. The risks incurred by Parisian chair turners while performing tasks like storing wood, for which they were not even being paid, figured among the complaints that motivated JacquesEtienne Bede and his fellow workers to mount in 1820 what was undoubtedly the first major "strike" to be chronicled by an actual participant since the passage of the law against coalitions. 24 . . . The high incidence of industrial accidents did gradually give rise to governmental regulations, but even those which applied to women and children remained poorly enforced. Because most workers lived close to the margin, even slight injury to one of the family's breadwinners represented a major reverse, and any lingering disability could condemn the family to slow starvation. No form of governmental assistance or public insurance against such risks was available to the working class. In a few cases, large employers might provide a limited plan of protection . .. The only recourse for the great majority of workers not covered by such an arrangement was membership in the voluntary mutual aid societies set up in certain trades, though these were usually intended only to meet one-time or short-term costs like funeral expenses or loss of wages due to temporary illness.
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