Intersectionality in the British and First French Empires shows how people’s social identities, like class, gender, and age, caused the people to be used and misused by wealthy factory owners in Britain and corrupt officials in the French Empire who imposed unfair taxation on peasant farmers. In both empires, the poor were exploited for cheap or free labor, and sometimes heavy fines and taxation benefited the wealthy and kept the poor in terrible conditions. A combination of factors caused the majority of the population, comprising the poor folk, to be disadvantaged while the wealthier citizens benefited from the unjust system.
Social Class in the British and First French Empires
Sir Edwin Chadwick shows the inhumane working conditions of the poor workers in the British Empire. At this point in the empire, there were plenty of raw materials to be processed from the numerous colonies worldwide. The lower-class citizens worked in factories to run the economy, dependent on these raw materials. Employers, therefore, used cheap labor from poor peasants when labor unions and advocacy groups for low-income workers had not yet started championing workers’ rights.
Due to economic necessity, the empire had many colonies, and often, entire families from the working class had to work long hours in factories. Children and parents had to work late into the night, from three in the morning. During these nineteen hours of labor, there are only two fifteen-minute breaks and a thirty-minute dinner break. This means that the working class worked continuously for eighteen hours daily. This trend affected the entire lower working class, including women and children. Sometimes, parents carried their sleeping children to work and shook them to awaken them in the site. Often, the children had four hours or less of sleep and sometimes slept while eating. The working-class citizens received low wages determined solely by the employers because there were no labor unions or any groups that protected the interests of the working class.
Sir Chadwick documents the poor working conditions of the poor working class of the British Empire. In the effort of employers to ensure maximum output, citizens were overworked and given little amenities to cater to their needs. This caused serious health problems to develop within the working population, causing early deaths and increased numbers of orphaned children. Chadwick documents how the workplaces are crammed to capacity. This shows that the empire actively overworked its lower-class citizens and under-payed them for economic utility.
The French working class was facing another economic burden imposed by the empire. The farming peasants had to pay a tithe, a portion of their farm produce. This happens despite the condition of the farming lands and whether the lands produce enough to cater for economic gain and subsistence. The peasant farmers could not afford to pay for labor on their farms because of the low returns of farming. Besides, some peasant farmers were obliged to give part of their harvests to their respective parishes or priests.
Additionally, the seigneur of some provinces subjected the farmers’ lands to mortmain, which makes the farmers unable to sell their lands even when the economic situation is unbearable and the lands are of little benefit to them. The citizens were further required to free up time on notice to provide labor to the region’s immediate representative of the empire. This could be performed as actual labor or compensated in monetary value. People with oxen were required to pay more, and this rule did not exempt even poor beggars.
The French working class is afflicted by corruption and the harsh tax obligations enforced by the system. Lands continued to be subject to taxation deemed appropriate by the different governing officials. The misuse of communal properties like forests and land further worsened the living conditions of the poor in favor of the empire that benefitted from the taxation and labor exerted on the peasant French farmers. The laws and policies of the empire, like the seigneurial dues and taxes, were manipulated by officials to put further strain on the working citizens.
In seigneurial disputes, judges often left illiterate agents in their stead, and some judges and officers are reported to be ignorant. Justice was, therefore, not administered well in the absence of judges who often held different positions and needed to travel as a necessity of their different positions. The agents left to act on the judge’s behalf could increase fines or manipulate the cases to their liking and, therefore, administer biased justice. The lords in France flourished at the expense of poor peasant workers.
Gender in the British and First French Empires
The work of Olympe De Gouges on the rights of French women shows how the empire utterly disregarded women’s rights. The women of the First French Empire demanded to be included in the national assembly, which had alienated French women. The empire was gender-biased and assigned women roles that did not give them decision-making capabilities. Their lives could, therefore, be controlled by the men and the state without any government provision or policies to protect both genders. In the declarations, women recognize that the only way a man can be socially and fairly distinguished from a woman would be by merit of common utility. This idea rejects the notion of the superiority of the male gender and their use of the perceived superiority to assign roles to women that were fashioned to control them. Olympe De Gouges questions what women have gained from the revolution, noting that their situation has only worsened with more disdain and scorn.
Napoleon’s view of women reflects the position the French empire assigned women. Napoleon sees a successful woman as one with many children, reflecting his childhood in a family with many children. Napoleon’s view shows that the French treated women as just bearers of children. Throughout his life, Napoleon engages in different relationships with different women, and all of these relationships show his perception of women as nothing equal to their male companions. Napoleon has a traditional view of women, whom he calls machines for making babies.
In contrast, low-income women in the British Empire were not bound to domestic chores like the Frenciners had discovered that using children and women increased coal production because their small bodies could fit into small crevices to access coal out of reach of bigger men. Employers were always money-oriented and preferred to hire cheaper child and women labor, ensuring maximum utilization of mines while keeping operation costs minimum. In Wales, for instance, the work assigned to women was similar to that of grown men and boys.
The conditions in the coal mines were terrible, and men, women, and children working in the tunnels barely wore any clothing. Their bodies were all indistinguishably black. Men and women looked alike to outsiders in the coal mines in Wales. The British Empire was the first to industrialize, making coal a critical resource to fuel the emerging heavy industries.
Age
Before industrialization in Britain, children of poor peasants and working-class citizens worked for centuries as apprentices to their parents or doing household errands. The first documentation of children becoming part of Britain’s active labor started when fathers in the Medieval era gave their children the duty of spinning thread for weaving. The children’s duties were auxiliary to their parents’ work and vital to the family economy. The family economy consisted of interdependence of residence and work, house labor requirements, family relationships, and subsidence.
After the rural textile mills were established, child workers in the empire were employed to work in the new factories. The working hours in the factories were long, and strict discipline was enforced to optimize production. The factory system that developed after the Industrial Revolution was criticized for its poor working conditions, the strict discipline it required, harsh punishment, inflexible work programs, and low wages.
The British Empire used the working population to drive its economic machinery. The targeted working-class labor is indiscriminate of age and sex. It was common for children to be seen working with their parents in factories. Sometimes, children worked out of sight of their parents in their designated workstations. The system depersonalized the relationship between employers and employees, causing The importance of child labor to the mills running the empire’s economy during the Industrial Revolution to be related to the changes in child labor and the extent of child employment in factories.
Intersectionality is a tool that identifies the obvious disadvantages faced by certain groups of people or advantages to a particular group that often result from systemic factors. The British Empire industrialized in a period when they had abolished slavery and labor was scarce. Cheap labor was found in employing young children and working them long hours at low pay rates. The children of poor working-class citizens worked in factories with their parents or on their own. The proliferation of industries worsened the condition of child workers, especially when production was increased. The French Empire imposed heavy taxes on the peasant farmers of the empire. The numerous officials across the empire enforced the annexing of the lower class for free labor, taxes, and other tributes to the empire. The two empires used their working classes and different social groups to progress their mandates.
Works Cited
Blaufarb, Rafe. “A Reassessment of the Abolition of Feudalism, 1789-1793.” La Révolution française. Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française 15 (2018).
Burton, June K., and June K. Burton. Napoleon and the Woman Question: discourses of the other sex in French education, medicine, and Medical Law 1799-1815. Texas Tech University Press, 2007.
Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality. John Wiley & Sons, 2020.
De Gouges, Olympe. “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen.” The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (1791): 124- 129.
Hamlin, Christopher. “Could you starve to death in England in 1839? The Chadwick-Farr controversy and the loss of the” social” in public health.” American Journal of Public Health 85.6 (1995): 856-866.
Heuer, Jennifer. “‘No More Fears, No More Tears’?: Gender, Emotion, and the Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in France.” Gender & History 28, no. 2 (2016): 438-460.
Kirby, Peter. “Victorian social investigation and the Children’s Employment Commission, 1840-42.” Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England: Diversity and Agency, 1750–1914. Ashgate Publishing, 2013.
Lewis, C. S. “THE FIRST INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.” How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800 (2020): 27.
