ABSTRACT
Shopkeeper politics in late nineteenth-century Germany have been characterized as the "politics of economic despair." The characterization is of course an adaptation of Fritz Stern's phrase the "politics of cultural despair," coined to describe the cultural pessimism of German critics whose careers spanned the years 1850-1930. In France, the politics of economic and cultural despair converged at the time of the Alfred Dreyfus Affair. The Dreyfus Affair brought to the surface the shopkeeper movement's alignment with the radical right. Nationalist candidates campaigned with greatest success in "areas of moderate income, where there were large numbers of small shopkeepers and businessmen and white-collar workers." Leadership of the shopkeeper movement passed from the Ligue syndicale to a new body, the Parti commercial et industriel. Plebeian Nationalism was perfectly suited to a shopkeeper constituency, and center-city petits commecants responded with a vote of confidence.
