The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France
Author: Carol E. Harrison
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 1999-07-01
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 0191542938
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France analyses the process by which class society developed in post-revolutionary France. Focusing on bourgeois men and on their voluntary associations, Carol E. Harrison addresses the construction of class and gender identities. In their gentlemen's clubs, learned societies, musical groups, gardening clubs, and charitable associations, bourgeois Frenchmen defined a social order in which the atomized individuals of revolutionarly law could find places for themselves in reconstituted social groups and hierarchies. The practices of sociability reflected a bourgeois view of society as harmonious rather than torn by conflict. The potentially universal virtues of bourgeois masculinity provided a basis for a consensus that could protect social order from the destructive competitiveness of French political life and the industrializing economy. The sociable interaction of male citizens was the crucial bridge between the destruction of Frances's old regime and the development of a mature industrial class society.