Chapter 24

 Since the Middle Ages, European cities had been centers of government, culture, and large-scale commerce.  Cities were also crowded, dirty, and unhealthy.  The challenge of urban growth was felt first and most acutely in Britain.  In the 1820s and 1830s, people in France and Britain began to worry about the condition of their cities.  Rapid urbanization without any public transportation worsened already poor living conditions in cities in the nineteenth century.  Government was slow to improve sanitation and building codes.  Ignorance and the legacy of rural housing conditions played a key role in shaping urban living conditions.

 Advances in public health, urban planning, and urban transport ameliorated these conditions by  Edwin Chadwick in England advocated improved sewage systems.  The miasmatic theory of disease held that people contract disease through exposure to the bad odors of decay and putrification.  Louis Pasteur in France discovered that bacteria caused disease (1860s).  Building on the germ theory of disease, Joseph Lister developed new methods for fighting infections among surgical patients.

 In Paris and other European cities, urban planners demolished buildings and medieval walls to create wide boulevards and public parks.  Baron Haussmann (1809–1884) played a lead role in the reshaping of Paris.  Mass public transport, including electric streetcars, enabled city dwellers to live further from the city center, relieving overcrowding.

Social Structure  Real wages rose sharply over the course of the nineteenth century.  Wealth was distributed very unevenly throughout Europe.  Only 20 percent of the population was middle class or wealthy.  The gap between rich and poor endured, in part, because industrial and urban development made society more diverse and less unified. The Middle Classes  The urban middle class was diverse.  The upper middle class included the most successful industrialists, bankers, and merchants. Increasingly, it merged with the aristocracy.  Middle ranks included doctors, lawyers, and moderately successful bankers and industrialists.  The lower middle class included small business owners, salespeople, store managers, clerks, and other white-collar employees.

 Skilled workers lived very different lives from the semiskilled and unskilled.  The top 15 percent of the working class became a labor aristocracy.  Skilled workers’ income approached that of the lower middle classes.  Skilled workers tended to embrace the middle-class moral code.  Semiskilled and unskilled workers included many different occupations, from carpenters and bricklayers to longshoremen, street vendors, and domestic servants.  Domestic servants were one of the largest components of the unskilled labor force.  Domestic service served as a transition to urban life for many rural women. Working-Class Leisure and Religion  Working-class leisure included drinking in taverns; watching sports, especially racing and soccer; and attending music hall performances.  Working-class church attendance declined in the nineteenth century.