ABSTRACT
The master artisans and shopkeepers of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe have not always been looked upon kindly by their contemporaries. They have often found themselves identified with unfavourable characteristics, such as meanness, narrowness of spirit, xenophobia, an anxiety for respectability, and an excessive concern for order and propriety. Unflattering portraits of petits bourgeois have been presented by some of the period's major writers, from Honore de Balzac to Emile Zola, H.G. Wells and Bertolt Brecht. These images were not entirely divorced from historical reality, for such images rarely are, but in their very distortion they are doubly interesting to the historian. In the first place, they allow the historian of the petite bourgeoisie to explore the political and social motives behind these severe pictures. To what extent can we see in them the fear of established bourgeois that they might be confused with those trying to imitate them, so that the differences were exaggerated and caricatured as a defence mechanism? A good number of these critics came from petit-bourgeois origins, ridiculing the class they believed that they had left as they closed the door behind them. Alternatively, such images might be seen as part of an attempt by a section of the bourgeoisie to impose upon workers, along with the middling groups of small business owners and clerks, cultural and social standards which they could rarely hope to achieve. This literary condescension has received too little attention for those questions to be answered, but the similarity of the images across Europe is indeed striking. They could even be found amongst the Social Catholics who tried to defend the petite bourgeoisie from the end of the nineteenth century. The very individualism which the petite bourgeoisie was supposed to correct appeared even to its defenders to be more deeply rooted amongst them than amongst any other social class. 'Its qualities of order and frugality are not always the most attractive', a meeting of Lyon Social Catholics was told in 1909, 'and its egoism and narrowness of spirit are faults which are far too common'.!
