Introduction

Historians have followed Leon Gambetta's lead and interpreted the politics of the 1870s in France as a struggle between notables and a resurgent republican movement. The Nationalist, like the socialist movement, experimented in new forms of political organization. The extraparliamentary league, long a mainstay of the radical left's organizational arsenal, was borrowed by the new right and adapted to a novel purpose, to the contestation of republican institutions through mass mobilization for street action. The political import of lower middle-class mobilization has proven more difficult to pin down. The political significance of lower middle-class protest, no less than the question of its origins, has divided historians and theorists. The overriding tendency is to view the petit bourgeois as predisposed to an authoritarian, politics. A few of the theorists discussed have recognized that such an assumption obscures the role played by politics in channeling a mobilized petite bourgeoisie toward political reaction.