Emulating the Elite: Association and the Petit Bourgeois

Abstract

This chapter discusses the late nineteenth-century fragmentation of the bourgeois public sphere. It looks into the tension between the alleged universality of emulation and the exclusivity of the bourgeoisie. The chapter turns to a new set of associations, those established by the emerging petite bourgeoisie of the 1860s. As industrialisation and urbanisation accelerated, the single, coherent bourgeoisie of the immediate post-revolutionary decades fractured. The petit-bourgeois imitation of bourgeois sociable norms revealed the limits of bourgeois inclusiveness: petit-bourgeois emulation did not, ultimately, win access to the elite. As the industrial economy matured, Frenchmen found it increasingly difficult to imagine society as a harmonious whole, united by the principles and practices of emulation. By 1870 bourgeois claims to be a potentially universal class rang distinctly hollow.