ABSTRACT
The prevailing image of the cultural practices of the European petite bourgeoisie is unambiguous. As we turn from contemporary novels and cartoons to the image in historical writings, we find the petite bourgeoisie presented as an essentially imitative social group. The Marxist literary critic Christopher Caudwell felt that the petite bourgeoisie 'has no traditions of its own and it does not adopt those of the workers, which it hates, but those of the bourgeois, which are without virtue for it did not help to create them'. 1 In the more recent words of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, 'with his petty cares and petty needs, the petit bourgeois is indeed a bourgeois "writ small" ... a man who has to make himself small to pass through the strait gate which leads to the bourgeoisie'.2 It is a powerful image, with small businessmen, minor civil servants and office-workers driven by a combination of anxiety and aspirations to imitate a bourgeois culture whose substance they could rarely grasp, and that is why petit-bourgeois lifestyle has been the subject of so many humorous novels and cartoons. The literary image is nonetheless more difficult to sustain once we explore the realities of petitbourgeois life.
