ABSTRACT
The cultural meanings attached to property in specific social settings are essential to an effective understanding of property ownership. The process of transferring and recording property after death may transform it into money equivalents, though even the act of will-making represented an effort to maintain the relational aspects of property post mortem, 1 but for the historian similarly to treat property primarily in terms of its total financial valuation is to neglect some of the most socially significant of its influences. The aggregate value of property is of major importance, but a simple ranking in wealth hierarchies can distract attention from the distinct meanings attached to property in different parts of the social system, and in different geographical locations. The problem should not be conceptualised in terms of two antithetical approaches, one focusing on consumption and artefacts, and rooted in cultural history, the other on the act of owning and bequeathing wealth, and based on quantitative analysis. Whilst the former makes little sense without an understanding of the material dimensions of what people owned, the latter needs to be understood through the meanings which people attached to those possessions and to the act of acquiring them. The ownership of property, the definition of what constitutes property, the cultural and political meanings attached to property of different kinds, are all issues which have until recently been neglected by social historians of modem Europe/ excessively attached as they have been to the study of those without property or to an often schematic
approach to those with it. This is evident in the attempts to use wealth hierarchies to partition social space; indeed, to identify social groups. 3
The petite bourgeoisie of small shopkeepers, small manufacturers and master artisans in nineteenth-century Europe are the focus of this essay, with special emphasis being laid on evidence from Britain and France.4 The petite bourgeoisie provides a good case study of the meanings of property, for it was the social group most clearly defined by its attachment to property in a very specific sense. As has been observed of contemporary Britain, 'at the centre of the social world of the petit-bourgeois lies petty property'. 5 Unlike the working class it generally owned real property, whether for business use or investment, whilst unlike more substantial bourgeois this property tended to be relatively concrete and immobile, tied to specific forms and places long after flexibility had come to characterise the holdings of the wealthy. The ability of petitbourgeois property to generate resources was also closely linked to the labour of owners and their families, again in contrast to larger bourgeois. In the words of a Belgian social catholic observer in 1914, 'the classe moyenne both labours and owns at one and the same time'. 6
Ownership and investment
What did these petits bourgeois own? Studies of property and investment suggest a distinctive pattern which drew upon the cultural and social imperatives of the world of small enterprise. As Chaline observes in his study of the bourgeois of nineteenth-century Rouen, in the property that people accumulate 'there is a choice of investments and sources of income that is heavy with social implications and which is often extremely revealing about deeply-rooted mentalities'. 7 The theme is particularly revealing of the world of small enterprise. The characteristic binding together of family and enterprise might be expressed through the specific property of the shop or workshop,
though the ownership of the site of the business was not the normal expectation. Oldham shopkeepers in the 1830s and 1840s did not generally own their business premises,8 whilst artisans and shopkeepers in mid-century Amsterdam were much less likely to have capital tied up in their own business premises than were merchants and industrialists, in spite of a greater attraction to real property in general.9 Nonetheless, surpluses for investment tended to be disproportionately placed in real property - land and especially housing - rather than personal property - stocks, shares, loans and so on. Although there was some trend amongst petits bourgeois towards investment in the latter, it was not universal and was far less marked than amongst other wealth-holding groups. In maintaining through the nineteenth century its broad preference for investment in real property, the petite bourgeoisie resisted what Pierre Leon called 'the triumph of mobile capital' 10 - a striking cultural as much as economic feature of this group.
