ABSTRACT
Shopkeepers, artisans, disaffected petits bourgeois of every description have been accused of antimodernism, of a dogged and regressive hostility to the values and institutions inevitable in an urban, industrialized world. The Ligue syndicale was emphatically republican, devoted to the principles of '89 and ever ready to invoke the nation's revolutionary heritage. Shopkeepers interpreted republican values from a selfcentered, self-serving perspective. The shopkeeper occupied a strategic position in the moral life of the community. His enterprise and authority assured the continued existence of quartier, workshop and family. Shopkeeper hostility to the new city was clothed in the language of republicanism; the program of local reforms advanced by militants, smacked peculiarly of municipal socialism. A similar ambiguity, a similar melange of reaction, republicanism and social reformism, characterized shopkeeper reaction to the end-ofcentury depression. To shopkeepers, no less than to more highbrow contemporaries, the department store appeared as a corrupter of public taste.
