Harrison Carol E. The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation

Oxford University Press, 1999. — 280 p.This book analyses the process by which class society developed in post-revolutionary France. Focusing on bourgeois men and on their voluntary associations, the book addresses the construction of class and gender identities. In their gentlemen's clubs, learned societies, musical groups, gardening clubs, and charitable associations, bourgeois Frenchmen defined a social order in which the atomised individuals of revolutionary law could find places for themselves in reconstituted social groups and hierarchies. The practices of sociability reflected a bourgeois view of society as harmonious rather than torn by conflict. The potentially universal virtues of bourgeois masculinity provided a basis for a consensus that could protect social order from the destructive competitiveness of French political life and the industrialising economy. The sociable interaction of male citizens was the crucial bridge between the destruction of France's old regime and the development of a mature industrial class society.