The Culture of Social Order

Artists and writers of the mid-nineteenth century had complex reactions to the state’s expanding reach and the economic growth that sustained it. They saw daily life as filled with commercial values and organized by mindless officials. Ordinary people no longer appeared heroic, as they had during the revolutionary years. “How tired I am of the ignoble workman, the inept bourgeois, the stupid peasant, and the odious priest,” wrote the French novelist Gustave Flaubert. Rejecting romanticism, he described ordinary people in a harsh new style called realism. Intellectuals of the time proposed scientific theories that also took a cold, hard look at human life in society and challenged both idealism and fervent religious belief. Theirs was a detached point of view similar to that applied by statesmen to politics.