ABSTRACT
A good number of social observers and sociologists had little doubt that the petite bourgeoisie could indeed be seen as a class at the end of that period. Max Weber identified four social classes in the German Empire, each uniting those with similar relations to the market and with real social connections, and the petite bourgeoisie was one of them. Master artisans and shopkeepers across Western Europe – Eastern Europe has largely remained outside the scope of this analysis for reasons that relate both to the linguistic skills of the authors and to the state of research on the petite bourgeoisie in those countries – lived through the transition from anden regime societies. In the absence of adequate resources with which to control this uncertainty a majority, though not all, petits bourgeois were closer to working-class experience than to bourgeois prosperity.
