The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France analyses the process by which class society developed in post-revolutionary France. Focusing on bourgeois men and on their voluntary associations, Carol E. Harrison addresses the construction of class and gender identities. In theirgentlemen's clubs, learned societies, musical groups, gardening clubs, and charitable associations, bourgeois Frenchmen defined a social order in which the atomized individuals of revolutionarly law could find places for themselves in reconstituted social groups and hierarchies. The practices ofsociability 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 theindustrializing economy. The sociable interaction of male citizens was the crucial bridge between the destruction of Frances's old regime and the development of a mature industrial class society. | The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France by Carol E. Harrison, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters