ABSTRACT

This chapter attempts to identify the electoral clientele of the Parisian nationalists in the era of the Dreyfus Affair. Such an endeavour quickly leads to a reexamination of the politics of the petite bourgeoisie. Behind the likes of Déroulède and Drumont was the army of the lower middle class. Its prise de conscience at the end of the nineteenth century heralded, in no uncertain terms, the arrival of mass society. What historians actually know about the lower middle class is a great deal less than is often assumed or acknowledged.1 Two models guide research and writing, but their mutual inconsistencies are not generally examined. The first-classically Marxian-posits a petite bourgeoisie doomed to polarization in a twoclass society as a result of proletarianization. As commercial bureaucracies grew, employees supposedly lost their prospects for independence and control over their work. Jobs were downgraded through subdivision and routinization. Employees began to define themselves as victims of capitalism and to identify with the rhetoric of the organized working class. Small property-owners, on the other hand, reacted forcefully against the emergence of collectivism and aligned with big capital and finance.