Peasant and Urban Working-Class Housing. The great preoccupation of pre-industrial Europeans was avoiding hunger. During the second half of the eighteenth century, subsistence continued to be a problem for the poor and a potential source of rebellion. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, concerns about housing had shifted to the fore—a change that was probably less an indication of an improved diet for the poor than a symptom of the growing bourgeois preoccupation with domestic accommodations. For the middle class, residential dwellings had implications for morality, gender relations, authority, social status, and wealth. To such observers, peasant huts in France, for example, seemed barely habitable for humans, "dug in the ground and deprived of every comfort" and "destined rather as a retreat for wild beasts." In fact, peasants frequently shared their homes with livestock...