The Myth Of The French Bourgeoisie

by Maza, Sarah

• ISBN13: 9780674017696
• ISBN10: 0674017692
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-03-15
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

Who, exactly, were the French bourgeoisie? Unlike the Anglo-Americans, who widely embraced middle-class ideals and values, the French--even the most affluent and conservative--have always rejected and maligned bourgeois values and identity.In this new approach to the old question of the bourgeoisie, Sarah Maza focuses on the crucial period before, during, and after the French Revolution, and offers a provocative answer: the French bourgeoisie has never existed. Despite the large numbers of respectable middling town-dwellers, no group identified themselves as bourgeois. Drawing on political and economic theory and history, personal and polemical writings, and works of fiction, Maza argues that the bourgeoisie was never the social norm. In fact, it functioned as a critical counter-norm, an imagined and threatening embodiment of materialism, self-interest, commercialism, and mass culture, which defined all that the French rejected.A challenge to conventional wisdom about modern French history, this book poses broader questions about the role of anti-bourgeois sentiment in French culture, by suggesting parallels between the figures of the bourgeois, the Jew, and the American in the French social imaginary. It is a brilliant and timely foray into our beliefs and fantasies about the social world and our definition of a social class.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Is There a Class in This Text?	1	(13)
1 The Social Imaginary in Prerevolutionary France	14	(27)
God-Given Order
Bourgeois Gentlemen
Rethinking Nobility
The Good Earth
2 Commerce, Luxury, and Family Love	41	(28)
Wealth, Circulation, and the New World of Objects
Luxury and "Les Moeurs"
Love, Tears, and Social Fusion
3 Revolutionary Brotherhood and the War against Aristocracy	69	(33)
What Was the Third Estate?
Popular Violence and Propertied Citizens
Brothers in Arms
Defining the Enemy
4 The Social World after Thermidor	102	(29)
A Social Revolution?
In the Wake of the Terror
Historical Change and the New Aristocracy
Honor and the State
5 The Political Birth of the Bourgeoisie, 1815-1830	131	(30)
Industry without Bourgeoisie
The Politics of the Present
The Politics of the Past
Politics and Class
6 The Failure of "Bourgeois Monarchy"	161	(32)
How Bourgeois was the Bourgeois Monarchy?
The Dangerous Middle Ground
Antibourgeois Universalism
Balzac's World
Conclusion: The Bourgeois, the Jew, and the American	193	(14)
Notes	207	(38)
Index	245