ABSTRACT
Over the last few decades, the study of voluntary associations in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe has focused predominantly on questions of class, gender and politics. In particular, most scholars have argued that associations played a considerable, if not decisive, role in three major and closely related social processes: the making of the middle classes, the construction of the ideology of separate spheres, and the creation of civil society.1 Individual associations and networks of associations, it is often explained, created new social spaces in which people from relatively heterogeneous social backgrounds and different political and religious affiliations, cultivated a set of values and pleasures by which they identified themselves as members of a coherent middle class (and more or less equivalent formations like the French bourgeoisie and the German Bürgertum). Subsequently, historians have studied associations as major vehicles of the specific gender ideology that brought and held these middle classes together: the idea of a difference between a public
1 T. Nipperdey, ‘Verein als soziale Struktur in Deutschland im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Eine Fallstudie zur Modernisierung’, in T. Nipperdey, ed., Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur neueren Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976), pp. 174-205. M. Agulhon, Le cercle dans la France bourgeoise 1810-1848 (Paris: EHESS, 1977). O. Dann, ed., Vereinswesen und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland (München: Oldenbourg, 1984). E. François, ed., Sociabilité et société bourgeoise en France, Allemagne et Suisse, 1750-1850 (Paris: ÉRC, 1986). R.J. Morris, Class, Sect, and Party. The Making of the British Middle Class. Leeds 1820-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). D. Hein, ‘Soziale Konstituierungsformen des Bürgertums’, in L. Gall, ed., Stadt und Bürgertum im Übergang von der traditionalen zur modernen Gesellschaft (München: Oldenbourg, 1993), pp. 151-81. C.E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-century France. Gender, Sociability and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800. The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000).
