There was a significant difference between the social importance
of towns in eastern and western Europe. In eastern Europe, cities
were generally smaller and had little real autonomy. In western
Europe, they were larger and frequently were accustomed to municipal
self-government and municipal privileges that even so-called absolute
monarchs had to respect, although in many places the latter had
managed to undermine urban governments.
Except in the Dutch Republic, Britain, and parts of Italy, townspeople
were still a distinct minority of the total population. At the
end of the eighteenth century, about one-sixth of the French population
lived in towns of 2,000 or more. The biggest city in Europe was
London with its 1,000,000 inhabitants while Paris numbered between
550,000 and 600,000. Altogether, Europe had at least twenty cities
in twelve countries with populations over 100,000, including Naples,
Lisbon, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome,
and Madrid.
Although urban dwellers were vastly outnumbered by rural inhabitants,
towns played an important role in Western culture. The contrasts
between a large city with its education, culture, and material
consumption and the surrounding, often poverty-stricken countryside
were striking, evident in this British traveler's account of Russia's
St. Petersburg in 1741: "The country about Petersburg has
full as wild and desert a look as any in the Indies; you need
not go above 200 paces out of the town to find yourself in a wild
wood of firs, and such a low, marshy, boggy country that you would
think God when he created the rest of the world for the use of
mankind had created this for an inaccessible retreat for all sorts
of wild beasts." Peasants often resented the prosperity of
towns and their exploitation of the countryside to serve urban
interests. Palermo in Sicily used one-third the island's food
production while paying only one-tenth of the taxes. Towns lived
off the countryside not by buying, but by using tithes, rents,
and dues to acquire peasant produce.
Many cities in western and even central Europe had a long tradition
of patrician oligarchies that continued to control their communities
by dominating town and city councils. In Zurich half of the seats
on the ruling Great Council were controlled by thirteen families
while Venice, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Amsterdam, and
Venice all had closed patrician elites who ran their cities. In
some towns in Spain, France, and parts of Germany and Italy, nobles
with residences in both town and country dominated their urban
societies. Despite their domination, patricians and nobles constituted
only a small minority of the urban population.
Just below the patricians stood an upper crust of the middle classes:
nonnoble officeholders, financiers and bankers, merchants, wealthy
rentiers who lived off their investments, and important professionals,
including lawyers. Another large urban group was the petty bourgeoisie
or lower middle class made up of master artisans, shopkeepers,
and small traders. Below them were the laborers or working classes.
Much urban industry was still done in small guild workshops by
masters, journeyman, and apprentices. Apprentices who acquired
the proper skills became journeymen before entering the ranks
of the masters, but increasingly in the eighteenth century guilds
became closed oligarchies as membership was restricted to the
relatives of masters.
Many skilled artisans were then often forced to become low-paid
workers. Urban communities also had a large group of unskilled
workers who served as servants, maids, and cooks at pitifully
low wages. One study of a pre-industrial French city found that
two married workers with one child received a family income of
380 livres while needing to spend 336 livres on basic necessities,
leaving very little for extra expenses. Despite an end to the
ravages of plague, eighteenth century cities still experienced
high death rates, especially among children, because of unsanitary
living conditions, polluted water, and a lack of sewerage facilities.
One observer compared the stench of Hamburg to an open sewer that
could be smelled for miles around. Overcrowding also exacerbated
urban problems as cities continued to grow from an influx of rural
immigrants. But cities proved no paradise for them as unskilled
workers found few employment opportunities. The result was a serious
problem of poverty in the eighteenth century.
Poverty was a highly visible problem in the eighteenth century
both in cities and the countryside. In Venice licensed beggars
made up 3 to 5 percent of the population while unlicensed beggars
may have constituted as much as 13 to 15 percent. Beggars in Bologna,
Italy were estimated at 25 percent of the population while in
Mainz figures indicate that 30 percent of the people were beggars
or prostitutes. Prostitution was often an alternative to begging.
It has been estimated that in France and Britain by the end of
the century 10 percent of the people were dependent on charity
or begging for food. Earlier in Europe the poor had been viewed
as blessed children of God; the duty of Christians was to assist
them. A change of attitude that had begun in the latter part of
the sixteenth century became even more apparent in the eighteenth
century. Charity to poor beggars, it was argued, simply encouraged
their idleness and led them to vice and crime. A French official
stated: "Beggary is the apprenticeship of crime; it begins
by creating a love of idleness which will always be the greatest
political and moral evil. In this state the beggar does not long
resist the temptation to steal." While private charitable
institutions such as the religious Order of Saint Vincent de Paul
and the Sisters of Charity had been founded to help such people,
they were soon overwhelmed by the increased numbers of indigent
in the eighteenth century. Although some "enlightened"
officials argued that the state needed to become involved in the
problem, mixed feelings prevented concerted action. since the
sixteenth century, vagrancy and begging had been considered crimes.
In the eighteenth century, French authorities attempted to round
up vagrants and beggars and incarcerate them for eighteen months
to act as a deterrent. They accomplished little, however, since
the basic problem was socioeconomic. These people had no work.
In the 1770s the French tried to use public works projects, such
as road building, to give people jobs, bur not enough funds were
available to accomplish much. The problem of poverty remained
as another serious blemish on the quality of eighteenth-century
life.
Everywhere in Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century,
the old order remained strong. Nobles, clerics, towns, provinces
all had privileges, some medieval in origin, others the result
of the attempt of monarchies in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries to gain financial support from their subjects. Everywhere
in the eighteenth century, monarchs sought to enlarge their bureaucracies
to raise taxes to support the new large standing armies that had
originated in the seventeenth century. The existence of these
armies guaranteed wars.
The existence of five great powers, with two of them France and
Britain, in conflict in the Far East and the New World, initiated
a new scale of conflict; the Seven Years' War could legitimately
be viewed as the first world war. while the wars changed little
on the European continent, British victories brought the emergence
of Great Britain as the world's greatest naval and colonial power.
Everywhere in Europe, increased demands for taxes to support these
conflicts led to attacks on the privileged orders and a desire
for change not met by the ruling monarchs. At the same time, sustained
population growth, dramatic changes in finance, trade, and industry,
and the growth of poverty created tensions that undermined the
traditional foundations of the old order.
The inability of that old order to deal meaningfully with these
changes led to a revolutionary outburst at the end of the eighteenth
century that brought the beginning of the end for that old order.