BOURGEOISIE.

The long existence of the term bourgeoisie in the various European languages and the multiplicity of meanings it took on over time, beginning in the Middle Ages and in different historical and geographic contexts, make a comparative study of this group throughout Europe in the twentieth century particularly problematic. For ease of translation from country to country, we here limit ourselves to a minimalist definition that identifies this group with the upper, nonaristocratic strata of society possessing wealth, income, and/or educational levels that are clearly above average. According to Jürgen Kocka, the bourgeoisie would then represent, depending on the country, from 5 to 15 percent of the population at the beginning of the twentieth century, depending on whether or not we include the petty bourgeoisie and the middle classes. Beyond a definition of the term, three main historiographic debates still remain unresolved.

First, there is the classic debate over the internal unity or diversity of this group: in light of geographic divisions (rural/urban bourgeoisie, capital cities/provinces, etc.), or divisions in terms of education, religion, wealth, and power, can we still speak of a unified class, as in the Marxist vulgate that dominated the social discourse on this topic for a large part of the period? In fact, if one includes in this group, alongside the most important business leaders, the upper echelons of the liberal professions, high-level state employees, and rural notables, the answer becomes dubious at best, given the divergences in lifestyle and standard of living, as well as cultural values and ideological choices, that become increasingly pronounced as one moves southward and eastward into Europe, where these educated bourgeois groups have a strong foothold and sometimes play an essential political role and enjoy higher prestige than members of the economic bourgeoisie.

The second debate concerns the persistence and relevance of the use of such a definition, a legacy of the nineteenth century, throughout the twentieth century, when the structures of the economy, governments, educational systems, relations between the sexes and family life, political boundaries, ideologies, wars, and political upheavals have radically changed the social situation in Europe by comparison with the eve of World War I. This is why many social historians or specialists in the social sciences have preferred, since 1930–1950, to coin new terms that are more abstract or closer to the specific traditions of each nation, rather than reuse vocabulary that is strongly marked by the legacy of the controversies and representations of the nineteenth century: elites, dominant class, establishment, managers, technocrats, senior management or chief executives, upper middle classes, and high-income groups (or, more banally, the "rich," "nouveaux riches," etc.) are among the many notions proposed as more flexible or less connoted alternatives to the terminology inherited from the previous century.

The third debate is even more political. Because most European countries went through horrendous experiences in the twentieth century, many works of social or political history have been tempted to "bring to trial" and assign responsibility to the privileged groups within the societies involved—and therefore to the most important of these groups, the bourgeoisie, the source of the main elites in power—in connection with the failures, errors, or complicities with the extremist regimes that have left a permanent mark on some European states. This "history-as-trial" is no doubt especially prevalent for the first half of the twentieth century, owing to the magnitude of the catastrophes and the influence of Marxism on a part of European historiography. But it is also present for the second half of the century, when it assumes more sophisticated forms with the emergence of new forms of critical sociology, focused on new forms of domination and on the development of new types of inequality, as a result of the calling into question of the welfare state, globalization, and the neoliberal policies of the last twenty years of the twentieth century, which revived the values and discourse of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie of free enterprise.

Many of the issues cited above are far from being resolved and will require from historians, especially for the second half of the twentieth century, many more comparative studies to move beyond polemics and simplifications. With such highly charged and recent topics, the social historian cannot completely cut himself off from the world of which he is a part; the interpretation he proposes can thus be only provisional and imperfect.

THE SITUATION ON THE EVE OF 1914

The conventional image of the European bourgeoisie just before World War I goes hand in hand with the retrospectively constructed myth of the Belle Epoque. It is the apogee of this class that is presumed to have gradually gained ascendancy over other privileged groups (in particular the remains of the aristocracy) and imbued societies with its cultural values and ideological goals (liberalism, the national and patriotic ideal, a preoccupation with accumulating wealth, the spirit of enterprise, individual success, the passing on of a family legacy, the ascetic morality of accumulating wealth, etc.). This classic reading, which corresponds primarily to the societies of France and England, northern Italy, northern Europe, and the western part of Germany, was strongly contested by Arno Mayer (1981) in an essay that was controversial but nonetheless provided the impetus for a good deal of research, with its emphasis on "the persistence of the Old Regime" and on the substantial weight that the aristocracy and groups and values associated with it still carries in central and Eastern Europe (and even in England and southern Europe). In these more traditional areas of Europe, such factors influenced even the modern bourgeoisie, which was restricted to the margins of the political domain. We cannot completely concur with all of the analyses and consequences of Arno Mayer's interpretation, but his provocative hypothesis was beneficial in that it forced historians, in particular in Germany and central Europe, to conceptualize the particularities of the bourgeoisies of this region in terms other than those of the model postulated as being "normal" and "universal" by Marxists and by liberals from the French and English bourgeoisie.

In Germany and Austria-Hungary especially, bourgeois groups remained strongly imbued with the preeminence of hierarchies defined by the monarchical state and by a prestige scale in which service to the state, especially the army, strongly linked to aristocratic values (the code of honor, dueling), remained more influential than the cult of material profit. Even the industrialists, financiers, and members of the liberal professions who in France, England, the Netherlands, and elsewhere were the transmitters of liberal and individualistic values were caught up in this system of older representations. This did not prevent the emergence of a very dynamic economic grand bourgeoisie in the German Empire and in part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its wealth (cf. the Krupp, Thyssen, and Siemens families, the German and Austrian branches of the Rothschilds, the Wittgenstein family, etc.) and successes were on a par with those of its western counterparts, but its specific characteristics explain the particular difficulties of the bourgeoisies of eastern and southern Europe in adapting to the upheavals produced by World War I and the interwar period.

EFFECTS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE INTERWAR PERIOD

The effects of the First World War and the interwar years on the bourgeoisies of Europe were eminently contradictory. On the one hand, in those countries where the bourgeoisie was subordinate to nobles who remained influential in political, social, and cultural life, the defeats of monarchies and empires forever ruined the old ruling classes on every level—political, symbolic, economic, and social. This was the case in the Weimar Republic and in the Austrian, Czech, and Hungarian republics. On the other hand, the wartime economy had supported the birth and rapid expansion of new commercial and industrial businesses and had promoted or considerably enriched new bourgeois strata that had profited from government commissions or the new interventionist economic conditions. The topic of the "nouveaux riches" and war profiteers was almost ubiquitous and led to the denunciation of a new plutocracy and to increasingly virulent anti-Semitism with the arrival of the economic crisis of the 1930s (in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and France, for example).

In the defeated countries, the new ruling elites came in part from the recent bourgeoisie, but sometimes, whether in the short or long term, they also came from socialist, communist, or populist parties with antiaristocratic or even antibourgeois ideologies that used the suffering of the people, the errors of former leaders, or the multiple economic and financial disruptions caused by the war and the interwar period to contest the old social order and promote egalitarian measures. Such measures affected not just the former elites but also some bourgeois strata. Even in the victorious countries, where the liberal bourgeoisie was already dominant in every realm (France, Great Britain, and Italy), the economic, monetary, and financial disorder undermined the former certainties of this group. It split into a traditionalist wing, which sought to restore the liberal, pre-1914 situation, and a modernist wing (instead composed of high-level state employees, engineers, technocrats, or managers) that advocated a new approach to managing the economy, government, and social relations, and which sometimes drew its inspiration from the American model. Major social movements (strikes in Great Britain in the 1920s, activism by worker councils and rural strikes in Italy from 1918 to 1920, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary unrest in Germany from 1918 to 1923, mass strikes in France from 1919 to 1920 and then in May–June 1936) challenged the authority of business elites and even the political and social order. An entire pessimistic discourse and a negative or critical image of the bourgeoisie spread throughout Europe; this explains the reactions of fear among the bourgeoisie that led some fractions, including degreed professionals, to form alliances with the fascist extreme Right.

This contrasting picture should not mask the fact that overall, the various bourgeois strata, although they had had to make concessions to challenging forces, had essentially maintained their pre-1914 privileges. New taxes (income tax in France, legislated in 1914; heavier income and estate taxes in England); new social relations in businesses, imposed by collective negotiations instituted by the state (e.g., in France and Germany) or by the power of labor unions (Great Britain); the emergence of the welfare state (social insurance, unemployment compensation); and educational or political reforms (wider access to secondary and university education for the new social classes, the extension of suffrage to women and to social groups previously excluded in some countries) were adopted very gradually and very unevenly. In some cases (the United Kingdom after 1930, Germany after 1931, fascist Italy, Austria under the authoritarian corporatist regime from 1934, and France after the end of the Popular Front in 1938), swings of the political pendulum in the other direction, abetted by the division of the parties of the left and international tensions, allowed these concessions to be called into question or even completely abolished and restored the power of business elites by reining in or suppressing the labor unions. At the same time, the development of new, mass-consumption or high-technology industries and the expansion of the service sector opened the way for new entrepreneurs, managers, or engineers who had become executive-level managers or high-level state employees in the new economic and social administrations to enter the bourgeoisie or the grand bourgeoisie.

Statistical data demonstrate the narrowing of some economic gaps (in income and, to a lesser extent, wealth) by comparison with the prewar period, owing mostly to inflationary phenomena, the collapse of some investments made by prewar investors (Russian loans, war loans, etc.), or the forced liquidation of the legacies of some families affected by wartime losses. Some aspects of the former bourgeois lifestyle were therefore permanently changed: fewer households employed domestic help and fewer people lived off private income; some women and girls from bourgeois families were forced to seek employment; and families became concerned with providing even heirs with training and university degrees, for fear of a loss of social position. The feminization of some professions (teaching, medicine, qualified administrative jobs) aroused antifeminist reactions and even, during the crisis years, discriminatory measures, both in authoritarian or fascist countries and in liberal democracies, where "women's liberation" was identified with the decay of the bourgeois family and blamed for falling birthrates and unemployment among young university graduates.

Other statistics relating to social mobility, the recruitment of various elites, and practices of marital alliances, however, attest to the relative permanence of the old patterns of class reproduction that privileged the various categories from bourgeois backgrounds for access to the higher professions and social positions.

The ascendancy to power of anti-Semitic or Nazi-ideology–inspired regimes did, however, profoundly affect a specific fraction of the bourgeoisie and middle classes that had experienced a spectacular ascent in Europe in the nineteenth century—those of the Jewish faith or tradition. Even before the putting into effect of the "final solution," anarchic or legal "Aryanization" measures allowed for the expropriation of property and businesses held by Jewish businessmen, to the benefit not only of the new leaders or supporters of Nazi or fascist regimes, but also of members of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes affiliated with the dominant religions. The latter cynically used the persecution of Jews to exact social revenge against competitors, often more prosperous than they, whose success in banking, business, commerce, and the liberal professions created all the more resentment during a period of acute economic difficulties, especially in Germany, Austria, and Hungary, and slightly later in France under the Vichy regime and during the anti-Semitic phase of the fascist regime in Italy. Even those members of the Jewish bourgeoisie who, by paying significant sums to the anti-Semitic states, had been able to escape the worst by emigrating, were rarely or only very belatedly able to recover their property or social standing after 1945.

TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE
BOURGEOISIES, 1945–1975

To all appearances, the period after 1945 had certain analogies with the period after 1918 for the bourgeoisies of Europe. The liberal economy and the social categories defending it were even more destabilized than after World War I. More than half the Continent came under Soviet control, and state-run economies replaced liberal capitalism in these areas. Communist Party cadres, often from humble backgrounds, held the leadership positions in all sectors (business, administration, and political and intellectual life). The bourgeoisies in these countries lost their fortunes, their businesses, and sometimes their lives (in purges), and they were forced into exile or had to make do with low-level jobs while their children faced discrimination in gaining access to higher education. In Western Europe, where coalitions on the left, sometimes allied with the Communists, were in power at the end of the 1940s, major structural reforms and postwar shortages gave the state a growing role in the economy while fiscal legislation and social security systems sought to reduce inequalities in income between the bourgeoisie and other groups. Through nationalizations in key sectors, especially in France, Italy, Austria, and the United Kingdom, the former bourgeois dynasties or founding heads of companies were replaced by technocrats and engineers from business or from the administrative and political elites. In the countries affected by fascism, Nazism, and collaboration, some important business leaders with links to the fallen regimes were brought to trial, and some of them were subjected to heavy sanctions: in Germany, Alfried Krupp, the executives of IG Farben, and the financier Friedrich Flick; in France, Louis Renault, Marius Berliet, and so forth.

This antibourgeois and anticapitalist climate was fairly short-lived, however: by 1947–1950 American influence via the Cold War and the Marshall Plan, the return to power of markedly more conservative political coalitions, and the rise of consumerism after years of shortages restored to the foreground a new, American-inspired social model that reached its apogee in the 1960s: the society of mass consumption and free enterprise. Since it coincided with a break in social and sexual mores from patterns inherited from the nineteenth century, many observers have interpreted this juncture as the birth of a new society based on credit instead of savings; a constant rise in the standard of living; the obliteration of the old classes in favor of a vast middle class bounded by a small group of the very wealthy and a small margin of the poor; and the emancipation of women, who were gaining access to new bourgeois professions. In this view, the old bourgeoisie, committed to accruing wealth and to frugality, thus gave way to new groups, mainly salaried workers, oriented toward consumption and short-term enjoyment of their growing incomes, gaining access to high-level positions in big businesses whose individual owners were no longer identifiable due to the dilution of the pool of shareholders. At the same time, mass access to and the standardization of higher education in most European countries beginning in the 1960s seemingly obliterated another of the old bourgeoisie's privileges of cultural standing and opened high-level public- and private-sector jobs to the middle classes.

Of course, the prosperity of the period of full employment did not eliminate wage inequalities (although it tended to reduce them), nor did it eliminate all forms of frustration among workers (as attested to by major labor strikes in the 1960s and 1970s in France, Italy, and England) or in other categories (for example, the student movements that mainly emerged from the middle classes, or the recurring discontent of farmers and small merchants in the face of state intervention). But the new welfare states, increasingly generous thanks to prosperity or because of social pressures, and low unemployment created the illusion that the once very large inequalities between the bourgeoisie and other groups would eventually disappear for good, especially in the countries of northern Europe, which implemented the strongest measures of wealth redistribution and the heaviest tax rates.

In the dominant discourse of the time, merit and competence were the only acknowledged justifications for status, power, or income: a bourgeoisie composed of owners and business executives was succeeded by a group of career managers, selected from within big businesses, or technocrats from the administration or nationalized businesses, depending on how large a role the state played in a given economy (Germany and England vs. France and Italy). At the same time, development of the service sector and urbanization multiplied the number of high-level, qualified, and well-paying jobs seen as the guarantee of social promotion for the middle classes or of the possibility of starting new small and midsize businesses without a large amount of capital.

This optimistic and modernist sociology was very quickly challenged by more critical analyses from the end of the 1960s. They emphasized the persistence of older phenomena and indeed a renaissance of new groups that were more similar to the old forms of the bourgeoisie than to more recent ones. Even in those countries most affected by state control, like France, England, and Italy, some old industrial and financial dynasties were able to survive the upheavals or to redirect their wealth into dynamic new sectors. Out of the one hundred largest Italian businesses from 1950 to 1970, almost half remained under family control. Members of the de Wendel family, after the collapse and subsequent nationalization of the major steel-producing groups in France, pooled their indemnities to establish a holding company that invested in several different sectors. Its main representative, Ernest-Antoine Seillière, even became president of the most important French employers' association in 1997.

At the same time, consumer society encouraged the rise of new sectors and new family firms that grew very large and even expanded internationally: for example, the supermarket chain Carrefour, founded by the Defforey and Fournier families at the end of the 1950s, or clothing businesses in central and northeastern Italy, such as the Benetton firm, founded in the 1960s by four brothers and a sister. In Germany in the 1970s, despite the reconstitution of some giant businesses, small and midsize family-type businesses still employed more than 70 percent of salaried workers. Even if consideration is limited to the largest businesses, family control, which recalls the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, endured to a significant degree: 17 percent of the one hundred largest companies in Germany, 46 percent of the largest businesses in the Netherlands, 33 percent of the one hundred largest Swiss companies, and, in France, 50 percent of the two hundred largest companies during the 1970s were family-controlled.

Moreover, the opening of higher education to new, more modest social strata did not erase more subtle class hierarchies between academic tracks (law, commercial studies, engineering training, or medicine vs. letters, sciences, or short vocational-technical courses) where more of the heirs of bourgeois families tended to be concentrated. Such tracks ensured income and markedly more remunerative careers after graduation. In some countries, private schooling, more expensive and socially or culturally elitist, shielded boys and girls from bourgeois families, beginning in adolescence, from the mixed social milieu of standard secondary education (for example, the public schools in England, posh private and/or Catholic schools in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain). Studies of the elites show that virtually everywhere, one-third of their members come from the upper classes (old bourgeoisie), more than one-third from the middle classes (recent bourgeoisie), and less than one-third from more modest backgrounds.

THE CRISIS OF THE WELFARE STATE

The seeds of new, subtler inequalities and these early signs of a new breed of "bourgeois conquerors" were further confirmed and accentuated during the 1980s and 1990s. Because of the lasting high rates of unemployment that took hold in most European countries after the two "oil crises," with the opening up of economic exchanges (via European unification and free-trade agreements), and the collapse of some old sectors (textiles, steel, shipbuilding, and mining), power relations between wage-earners and management, between salaried executives and shareholders, and between nationalized states and multinational corporations, were inverted. Neoliberal ideology, inspired by Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992), and the monetarism of the Chicago School, which saw the stagflation of the 1970s as an illustration of their theories on the harmful influence of the state's economic role and of Keynesian policies, gradually gained ascendancy in public discourse. They inspired some governments—in the United Kingdom (the Margaret Thatcher government from 1979), the United States (the administration of Ronald Reagan), and then, increasingly, in continental Europe, with the return of majorities of the right or the influence of the European Commission's directives on free trade: in the Netherlands, Italy, during certain periods in France (1986–1988, 1993–1997), Germany (the Helmut Kohl government from 1982), Spain (the JoséMaría Aznar government), and even the countries of central Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union.

This discourse and politics marked a striking return to the values, behaviors, and discourses of the liberal bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century: glorification of enterprise, risk, bosses, and the laws of the market; stigmatization of the weak and those on public assistance; rehabilitation of profit and wealth as signs of social success and renewed emphasis on the efficiency and value of managers. Privatizations, the suppression of state monopolies, cuts in income taxes and taxes on businesses, access to property (housing, secondary residences, financial stocks) for the majority of the middle and upper classes, and the opening of borders were supposed to re-create a market freed from previous constraints and foster a new, enterprise-based bourgeoisie, freed from state control, that employed "flexible" salaried workers as in the nineteenth century.

Socially, this new trend was expressed in the emergence of new, very quickly made fortunes in finance, computers, new technologies, mass distribution, and the media; in increasing inequalities in income, first in the United Kingdom and then on the Continent; in the return of shareholders' interests to the foreground (often, British and U.S. pension funds required very high returns on the capital); and in the loss of prestige associated with political power and the national state. The collusion of this new, financial or industrial bourgeoisie with the highest levels of administration or politics was nonetheless increasingly visible, in the form of lobbies to the European Commission, the co-opting of former high-level state employees onto boards of directors, and appropriation of the mainstream media. To illustrate the latter, one may cite the paradigmatic case of Silvio Berlusconi, in Italy, who built his fortune in real estate and then the media before rising to the height of political power, or that of the Bouygues family in France, which, thanks in part to political backing from the highest levels of government, moved from public works into the media and telecommunications. Increasingly, the careers of the bourgeois elites combined public and private sectors, politics and business, following a norm similar to that of the United States.

The historian of contemporary society, however, must be wary of the illusion of perpetual newness produced by the partial images promulgated by newspapers and the media that influence his view of the most recent period, as well as the illusions created by studies in the social sciences, which always lag behind the current reality because there is no real way to investigate these circles that preserve or have the means to create a manipulated public image of themselves. The most general statistics make it possible to document, although with variations depending on the date of the implementation of neoliberal policies, increases in income gaps and, especially, inheritances over the last twenty years: the phenomenon is more pronounced in the United Kingdom than in the Scandinavian countries, with France, Italy, and Germany in an intermediate position but becoming more similar to the English pattern at the end of the 1990s. Moreover, the figures probably significantly underestimate the realities because it has become increasingly difficult to monitor such statistics with the liberalization and internationalization of financial flows and the proliferation of tax havens.

Measuring the proportion of heirs or monied newcomers (or parvenus) in the contemporary bourgeoisie is also very difficult since, by definition, the process is always ongoing and everything depends on the definitions adopted of the groups under consideration. The list of the largest fortunes that many European papers have taken to publishing, following the American model, give an exaggerated impression of instability and renewal of the topmost levels of the grand bourgeoisie. When one broadens the scale of analysis, the dazzling successes of some (which may not last more than one generation, or even less, as demonstrated by the resounding fall of men and women presented as models of success a short time earlier) are found in the midst of a far greater number of less visible, but more enduring, family or dynastic fortunes. Like the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, which appropriated the status symbols of the old aristocracy, the new grand bourgeoisie of the end of the twentieth century, despite the modernist discourse surrounding it, adopted strategies of distinction and conspicuous consumption quite similar to those of its predecessors from the "leisure class": opulent country houses, hunting, yachts, racing stables, charitable or artistic foundations, luxurious vacations away from the crowds of the ordinary middle classes, rapid and costly means of transportation (private jets and helicopters in the place of the luxury train or top-of-the-line automobile of 1900). Similarly, the desire to pass wealth on to heirs and to provide them with a private and/or elite education, often in an international setting, is a mark of continuity with the old bourgeoisie.

Of course, there are cultural nuances, depending on the country, sector of activity, the oldness of the family, public lifestyle, and religious tradition. The grand bourgeoisie in early-twenty-first-century Germany is markedly less visible and ostentatious than the parvenus and new money in Italy, the United Kingdom, or France, where the influence of the aristocratic model is apparent in marriages and lifestyles. In centralized countries, the concentration of the different types of high-profile elites and bourgeoisies in the capital cities facilitates social mixing and exchanges and media coverage, and thus promotes visibility of the rich and nouveaux riches. The influence of the American model also comes into play to varying degrees, depending on how old the autochthonous bourgeois culture is.

A final problem remains: beyond this highest strata of the bourgeoisie, whose similarities to the grand bourgeoisie of the beginning of the twentieth century (with the addition of internationalization and the increasingly active role of women) outweigh differences between them, is the term bourgeoisie still valid to encompass the middle classes with elevated income, educational levels, or jobs, whose importance in the working population obviously has no equivalent in earlier periods because of changes in the structure of jobs and businesses and because of mass access to standardized higher education? Contrary to simplistic theories on middle-class societies, the most recent research shows persistent national characteristics within intermediate groups and increasing internal differentiation within them according to type of capital (economic, cultural, social, or symbolic) or job status (salaried employee, independent contractor, or member of the liberal professions). These differences are also linked to the history of social representations and the social classifications of each country, and to divides across these groups, depending on whether individuals are more closely linked to the state or to the private sector; on whether their current position depends more on their personal trajectory (and their academic or professional success) or on economic and social family heritage; on their religious or political affiliation; or sex or national origin. In phases marked by prosperity and the success of neoliberal policies, the upper middle classes have supported such policies because they seemed to promise increased wealth for all (via stock purchases, individualized benefits packages offered by employers) or new, well-paid jobs in the emerging sectors of the "new economy," services, and finance. However, as soon as a recession or the bursting of a speculative bubble, bankruptcies, or embezzlement exposed the social limits of the advantages to be derived from them or cast doubts on the abilities of managers, these categories learned through experience what separated them from the ruling groups. The latter retained real power over the capital, which produced very high returns and sheltered them, in contrast to the ordinary middle classes, from the risks of unemployment because, thanks to stock options or departure bonuses, they could quickly amass a fortune to be passed down to their heirs. For the majority of high-level salaried employees, membership in privileged circles was only partial and only valid during their own lifetime; it guaranteed neither the perpetuity of their status nor the family's future, owing to the intensity of each new generation's race for qualifications and the opening up of international competition for jobs.

From this point of view, neoliberalism reinstated in the representations of the upper socioeconomic groups the same incentives and anxieties that had characterized them before World War I: on the one hand, the idea that opportunities are available to all and that the current bourgeois groups remain open, as demonstrated by the highly publicized successes of entrepreneurs, executives, high-level state employees, stars, and so forth, who "started from nothing"; on the other hand, these ascents, even to very high levels, remain precarious without family or political networks, as indicated by some sensational cases in which captains of industry who yesterday were heaped with praise find themselves financially ruined or charged with wrongdoing. At the same time, because of increased life expectancies, both in the upper middle classes and the grand bourgeoisie of inherited wealth, this return of the "bourgeois conquerors" as a societal ideal goes hand in hand with the development of a sort of new ideal of hedonism and living off private income that rivals that of the Belle Epoque. Insofar as the main stockholders of very large companies are often pension funds that require very large returns on their capital, the new capitalism at the start of the twenty-first century has the paradoxical aim of ensuring a certain standard of living or comfortable retirement for a growing fraction not only of holders of revenues from capital, but above all, individuals entitled to full retirement, drawn mainly from the upper middle classes, who are members of these funds. Indirectly, then, pressure from the oldest, most financially secure generations is exerted on ordinary wage-earners and young workers, who are hard hit by the new, increasingly rigid management rules for the businesses (social or fiscal "dumping," flexibility, the intensification of work, globalization, etc.) whose performance provides livelihood, via pension funds, for the growing ranks of those living off interest income.

See alsoAristocracy; Capitalism; Consumption; Economic Miracle; Working Class.

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Christophe Charle