The Bourgeoisie and the Common People

We chose to look at the differences between rich and poor in 18th and 19th century France, and how that affected the revolutions in 1789 and 1848. The data provided interesting examples of how the different classes spent their time, which we wanted to explore the details of.

After first translating the texts to English with the help of Google, we searched through the data and grouped the images by activity. We ended up with 40 pictures in total, distributed over the categories ‘Childhood’, ‘Everyday Life’, ‘Work’, ‘Leisure’, and ‘Conflict’. Most of the images are illustrations, as photography was rather rare at the time. One notable observation is that there are no pictures with both the tags ‘Burgeoisie’ and ‘Work’, which may either illustrate the small sample size of this exhibition, or indicate that the upper class didn’t really engage with that sort of pastime. We also discovered how different their everyday lives were from each other in all the other areas as well.

If we were to expand the project, we would try to expand the collection of images, clean up the metadata, and create a clearer, chronological narrative. Getting a larger image databast can make for stronger interpretations, and creating a clearer narrative with less superfluous data can make the information more accessible. Ideally, we would also provide a better historical context, to try to establish a better cause and effect-narrative tied into important events.