| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Sarah Maza. The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary 1750–1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 255. $39.95.

Sarah Maza has written what is sure to be a controversial book on the nature of the French bourgeoisie. Or rather, as she states bluntly, "The central thesis of this book is that the French bourgeoisie did not exist" (p. 5). Despite historians' claims that a self-conscious bourgeoisie developed a taste for power in the eighteenth century and became the key social, economic, and political actor in the nineteenth century, Maza asserts that "no group calling itself bourgeois ever emerged in France to make claims to cultural or political centrality and power: bourgeois was almost invariably what someone else was" (p. 5). The category of bourgeoisie functioned as an unsavory "other," a negative model that most French rejected, an "other" that, as she argues in her conclusion, bears a striking resemblance to the American and the Jew in French society, groups all marked by "unearned privilege and cultural deficiency" (p. 195). Thus, while historians of the French Revolution have long debated the existence of a revolutionary bourgeoisie, Maza's scope is more far reaching. She takes on not only the Marxian class analysis but also more diffuse cultural and political definitions. She sees these as definitions created to categorize a social group that the putative bourgeoisie itself would not have recognized. Her thesis of "bourgeois nonexistence" derives from her belief that class status is inseparable from class awareness and the ability to articulate a coherent identity (p. 6). The French bourgeoisie is for Maza a myth, and this book is also about "the ways in which the myth of the bourgeoisie functioned for the French in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: why such a group came to be perceived as central to society and systematically vilified, and how rejection of the category 'bourgeoisie' became such an important element in the construction of French national identity" (p. 12).

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