| This study argues that cultural history provides the most fruitful way to define the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie. Treating social class as a process of education, it explores how eighteenth-century Paris helped to instill those habits and attitudes that came to be identified as bourgeois. From an examination of four middle-class "careers," bourgeois life emerges as a form of cultural self-defense: a weapon with which to ward off threats from those above and below in the social hierarchy.;The Journal of the Parisian lawyer Edmond Barbier shows how the bourgeoisie inhabited a distinctive, if quiet, place in the city's landscape. Barbier's observations are amplified by the journal of the Parisian bookseller Simeon-Prosper Hardy. Living through the last half of the eighteenth century, Hardy was an alert observer of Parisian politics. The bon ordre of the household, the city, and the kingdom were of special concern to him. Hardy reveals how individuals of modest means could feel threatened by urban violence. For Hardy, the bourgeois way of life provided an oasis of calm in a dangerous world.;During the eighteenth century, booksellers, engravers, authors and painters came to view the bon bourgeois as a promising market or public. The cultural goods designed to tap this market aided the men and women of the middle bourgeoisie in their attempts to give value and meaning to their lives. The career of the painter Jean-Simeon Chardin holds a two-fold significance for this topic. Chardin's contemporaries identified him as a bon bourgeois and linked his art to a middle-class public. In the 1750's, the author Gabriel-Francois Coyer wrote a series of satires in which he lampooned the French nobility as idle and dangerous. Alongside his attack on the nobility, Coyer extolled middle-class habits. Contemporary critics identified Coyer as the philosophe of the bourgeoisie. Both Chardin and Coyer demanded respect for a way of life that traditional culture was unprepared to give. |
PDF Full Text Request