ABSTRACT

Although the owners of small enterprise were the section of the'middle classes with whom working-class men and women came into the most regular contact, it is important to remember that the most enduring relationship between the petite bourgeoisie and the working class was that of family. There were the wage-earning occupations of members of many petits-bourgeois families - husband or wife where multiple occupations were needed, children where the maintenance of the next generation in small enterprise was not always possible or desirable, parents where the owner of the enterprise had come from working-class origins, as well as the occupations of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts. For many petits bourgeois there was their own career, as they shifted between wage-earning and independence. Here were the ineluctable links that tied so many petits bourgeois to the working class. Jules Caylarde, the republican mayor of the French company town of Decazeville during the 1880s, explained the reluctance of the town's workers to use the company retail store. 'One can hardly separate the worker from the shopkeeper,' he claimed, 'because a large number [of the workers] have a son, a brother, an uncle or a cousin who is a businessman in the town.'l Only the upper levels of Europe's shopkeepers and master artisans could feel themselves firmly apart, and fashion more precise and distant relationships with their town's workers. If the historical analysis of class has in recent decades shown us that class identity derives from more than structural position alone, but also from dense patterns of social relations and discourses, then we need to shift attention from those forces that brought many petits bourgeois and workers close together, and explore those relationships which created distance and tension.