The Europeans

A Note on Money

I have given monetary figures in their original currencies but have added in parentheses a French-franc equivalent where this may be useful for comparison. The French franc was the currency most widely used in Europe in the nineteenth century, and it was in francs that the people at the centre of this book mostly handled their affairs.

The exchange rates between Europe’s major currencies remained relatively stable for most of the nineteenth century. They depended on the metal content of the coins. The key stabilizing factor was the British pound, which was on the gold standard. Other currencies established stable exchange rates with the British pound by moving to the silver standard (as did most of the German and Scandinavian states) or the bimetallic (gold and silver) standard (as did France and Russia). From the 1870s there was a general European move towards parity with gold.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century 100 French francs were worth roughly

4

British pounds

25

Russian silver roubles*

90

Milanese (Austrian) lire

19

Roman scudi

23

Neapolitan ducats

38

Austrian gulden

27

Prussian thaler

100

Belgian francs

20

US dollars

As an indicator of value the simple conversion of currencies can be misleading because it fails to take into account differences in purchasing power. The cost of living in Britain was generally higher than on the Continent, although some items (such as cotton) were cheaper because of the benefits of industrialization and empire. Higher costs were reflected in higher wages in Britain too. The British professional classes were paid significantly more than their confrères on the Continent. In 1851, the salary of a British judge in the Court of Appeal was £6,000 (around 150,000 francs), twice the annual income of his French equivalent. The fellow of an Oxford college had a basic income of £600 per year (around 15,000 francs), more than a professor at the Sorbonne earned (around 12,000 francs a year). Lower down the social scale the differential was less significant. A ‘middling’ British family would generally have an annual income of around £200 (5,000 francs) in the 1850s, an income at least equalled by the vast majority of bourgeois families in France, where dowries continued to supplement the household income more substantially than in Britain. A French mechanic or junior engineer earned anything between 3,000 and 7,000 francs a year. A skilled urban labourer or clerk had an annual salary of anything between 800 francs and 1,500 francs. At this end of the social scale British salaries were similar.

In the arts incomes were extremely variable. In monetary terms the writers, artists and musicians featured in this book were located on the scale described above anywhere between the best-paid judge and the worst-paid mechanic. A few examples must suffice to illustrate the variations in income. At the peak of his career, in the 1850s, the painter Ary Scheffer earned between 45,000 and 160,000 francs per year; but many artists, such as Scheffer’s protégé, Théodore Rousseau, meanwhile made less than 5,000 francs a year. Before 1854, the writer Victor Hugo received from his writings, on average, 20,000 francs per year. George Sand and Ivan Turgenev earned about the same amount – the latter getting as much money again from his estates in Russia. Between 1849 and 1853 the composer Robert Schumann earned, on average, around 1,600 Prussian thalers (6,000 francs) from his compositions every year, an income supplemented by his salary as music director in Düsseldorf, which paid 750 thalers (approximately 2,800 francs) per year.

It is almost impossible to translate these figures into today’s terms. The cost of goods and services was very different in the nineteenth century. Labour was a lot cheaper (and in Russia free for landowners owning serfs); rent was far less costly too; but food was relatively expensive in the cities. To help readers get a general sense of monetary values in the mid-nineteenth century: a million francs was a large fortune, purchasing goods and services worth around £5,000,000 ($6,500,000) in today’s terms; 100,000 francs was enough to buy a château with extensive land (such as the one at Courtavenel purchased by the Viardots); while 10,000 francs, worth approximately £50,000 ($65,000) today, was the price the Viardots paid for an organ made by the famous organ-builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1848.

* There were two types of rouble in circulation until 1843: the silver rouble (worth then about four French francs), used for foreign payments, and the assignat or paper rouble, which could be exchanged for the silver rouble at a rate of 3.5 to 1. In 1843, the paper rouble was replaced by State credit notes.