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. Crowded dwellings and a lack of basic sanitation were the frequent lot of urban  workers, though those newly arrived from the countryside, where the peasant family often shared its quarters with the livestock, probably considered  their  accommodations in the city a distinct improvement, even when they might seem to us to offer few comforts and minimal  privacy. The recent migrant might take up residence in a boarding   house  (maison   garnie),  which rented furnished rooms by the  month, week, or night.  The furnishings often consisted of nothing more  than simple plank  beds, arranged dormitory ­- style in rooms that  might be shared  by a dozen or more workers,  sometimes  assigned two per  bed. Rents consumed what we might see as a modest share -- from 15 to 20 percent-of workers'  monthly earnings. 17 Most workers new to the city  gravitated to one of the  boarding houses frequented by migrants from their own native region, for there they could hope to receive a friendly welcome as well as assistance in their initial orientation.

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.