This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.
No matter what profession they are in, the French have a passion for making their fortunes. In her study of the portrayal of domestic servants in the French comedies of the eighteenth century, Maria Demers points out the increasing tendency, as the century wore on, to picture servants, especially men servants, as ambitious and eager to get ahead.
And it fostered in them some of the most modern attitudes: a passion for social mobility, a devotion to making money, and a willingness to take risks to make their fortunes. All of these were different from the attitudes of the typical peasant or artisan of the Old Regime. They were different from the attitudes of earlier generations of servants as well. To be sure, domestic service had always been a pathway of social mobility for a certain type of servant: the well-born but penniless young man who entered the household of a great lord in expectation of protection and advancement.
One thinks of the career of Guilio Mazarin, or on a lesser level, that of M. Their labor was no longer a duty they owed to their masters; instead it was a commodity to be exchanged for cash, a resource of their own to be sold to the highest bidder. MacPherson argued in his classic exposition of the value system of a market economy, this new view of labor fostered an individualistic outlook, a sense of pride and ambition, a determination to make the best possible bargain with life.
At any rate, in the last decades of the Old Regime servants seem to have become more ambitious and independent of their masters. They changed jobs more frequently than formerly. They were less apt to look on their service as a temporary occupation that would enable them eventually to return home to their native villages, and more apt to become permanent settlers in the towns to which they had migrated. And they made much more ambitious marriages.
