1850 photo by Charles Negre of young chimney sweeps walking along the Seine River
Published: November 27, 2011
In France, times are hard and getting harder: unemployment continues to climb, especially among the young, and the French government, with Moody's on its back, has run out of money and ideas to get the economy back on track.
As for the middle class, as their salaries stagnate, all around them prices rise. To give just a few examples, in the past decade, the price of that French staple, the baguette, has risen by 85 percent, whereas gas prices are up 65 percent and the price of a liter of milk, 182 percent.
The United States, with its $14.3 trillion national debt and unemployment hovering around 9 percent, has its own share of problems. Some Americans believe things would naturally get better if only the government would get off their backs. The French, deeply attached to their national health insurance and retirement plans, would certainly disagree.
As for me, I thought it might be interesting to wander back into the past, to those days when governments mingled very little in citizens' lives, to see what life was like back then. It just so happens, an exhibit at the Musee Carnavalet, the Museum of the History of Paris, gave me the perfect opportunity.
Located in the neighborhood of Paris known as the Marais, in what was once the home of Madame de Sevigne, a French aristocrat and important writer of the 17th century, the Musee Carnavalet is presenting until Feb. 26, 2012, an exhibit devoted to "the people of Paris in the 19th century."
At mid-century, "the people" in the sense of "the masses" or the working class and not "we the people," the citizens of a state, made up a third of the population of Paris. They were the workers of the city, cleaning it, building it, taking care of its children and working in its new industries.
The exhibit looks at how they lived, how they dressed, what they ate and what they did for a good time. In doing so, it shows us people who knew love and joy, but whose lives, from birth to death, were characterized by a lack of stability. The only security nets that existed were charity and the family, for those lucky enough to have one nearby.
The people of 19th century Paris were, for the most part, from somewhere else, from the French provinces or from bordering countries. Certain regions had their specialties. For example, young boys from the Alps came to the city to work as chimney sweeps, crawling up and down chimneys, experiencing burns, often losing their hair, in order to get the job done. This was a job a boy could begin when he was 5 or 6 years old. By the time he reached adolescence, an age when he became too big for his craft, his body was often too deformed for him to find other work.
Young girls worked as domestics, laundresses or seamstresses, and those who suddenly lost their jobs often fell into prostitution. Robust women from the countryside hired themselves out as wet nurses, some boarding in special institutions where they ate and slept better than they could ever dream of in their country homes. Men worked in the building trade or as porters, capable of carrying up to 400 pounds. Men and women both worked in factories in and around Paris as the region industrialized.
There were also the water carriers, a pole slung over their shoulders with a bucket attached at each end, who brought water from the Seine River to people's homes (running water began to arrive in Paris apartments at the beginning of the 20th century). Others served hot coffee or soup on street corners, some delivered hot meals to families who, at a time when lodging was scarce, lived in one room, often without a fireplace. Many families worked in their lodgings, sewing or handcrafting objects such as funeral wreaths. Even the smallest children began to participate as soon as they could learn the craft.
At a time when there was no official "day of rest," the workday depended on the seasons and the hours of natural light. Many workers were laid off during the winter months and in summer, they worked as long as it was light. Free time was scarce, money even scarcer, and most of the family budget was reserved for food. When there was time for a outing, it often consisted in a walk along the Seine, a picnic on the outskirts of the city or an evening in a guinguette, an open-air cafe where there was dancing and cheap wine. There was also street theater, with clowns, acrobats and mimes.
But overnight, life could change. An accident or illness put a worker out of a job, and without money to pay the rent, an entire family found themselves in the street. Begging was against the law and beggars were sent to the poor house. Those with a few pennies could enter a flop house for the night. The poorest of the poor became rag pickers, setting up shop on street corners, recycling and reselling everything they found.
By now, I think readers have got the picture. For the people, life in 19th century Paris was hard, and only toward the century's end, did things begin to improve when laws were passed to permit trade unions and protect workers. In 1892, a law made it illegal for children under age 13 to work while limiting the workday to 10 hours for those between the ages of 13 and 16. A woman's workday was limited to 11 hours, that of a man to 12.
At about the same time, in 1885 it became illegal in Pennsylvania to employ boys under 14 in the mines, and those under 12 on the surface. In 1903, those limits were raised to 16 and 14. Surely, life in a 19th-century mining patch or coal town was just as hard or harder. There, too, boys as young as 6 began work as mule drivers or breaker boys. In the breakers, perched over chutes of coal, in thick clouds of black dust, old men joined them at a time when men and women alike worked until they simply keeled over and died.
I recently had the opportunity to see one of those young workers in another exhibit in Paris devoted to the American photographer Lewis Hine, who spent more than 30 years photographing Americans at work. In the exhibit, there was a photo of Angelo Rossi, a breaker boy in Pittston, in 1911. He looks to be about 10 years old.
Much of the 20th century was good to the working and the middle classes, but the 21st is teaching us that past gains can be lost. Let's hope that in France and in the USA, "we the people" can learn to work together in a spirit of shared responsibility.
For photos of Pennsylvania mine workers by Lewis Hine see http://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/hine.php. There are also hundreds of photos of miners taken by Pottsville photographer George Bretz at http://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/bretz.php.
For details on a report by the IRS and the U.S. Census Bureau on the gains of the rich and the losses of the middle class in the past 30 years, visit www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/us/politics/top-earners-doubled-share-of-nations-income-cbo-says.html?_r=2.
(Honicker can be reached
at honicker.republicanherald @gmail.com)
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