Showing France, 1815-1914: The Bourgeois Century by Roger Magraw

Nineteenth-century France witnessed the protracted struggle of the victorious post-revolutionary bourgeoisie to consolidate and defend the gains made in 1789. In this lively and stimulating volume Roger Macgraw examines the attemps of the bourgeoisie to remould France in its own image, and discusses the bourgois strategy for overcoming the resistence which this met. The old aristocratic and clerical elites remained unreconciled to the revolution, and the popular classes sustained a prolonged rearguard defence of their threatened peasant culture and communities, artisanal skills and crafts. The author incorporates research on religion and anticlericalism, the development of the economy, the role of women in society (particularly in the labour force), and the education system, through which the bourgeoisie came to present itself as progressive, now offering a brave new world of upward mobility and opportunity in a classless society.