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The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850. By Sarah Maza. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. x + 255 pp. Notes, index. Cloth, $39.95. ISBN 0-674-01046-9.
Historians of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century French business doubtless will be surprised to learn that the people they write about did not exist. That is the implication of Sarah Maza's brilliant but exasperating book. Taking as her starting point the long-accepted revisionist position that the French Revolution was not, as Marxist orthodoxy maintained, the work of a rising bourgeoisie eager to free the French economy for capitalism and industrialization, Maza contends not only that such a bourgeoisie did not make the Revolution but also that as a class-a self-conscious group actively promoting policies to further its own interests-it did not exist before, during, or even after the Revolution. She argues that the bourgeoisie did not become a political force until the 18205, only to disappear from French politics with the advent of Louis Philippe's misnamed "bourgeois" monarchy in 1830. Instead of the bourgeoisie, Maza argues that the main political force in pre- and postrevolutionary France was a mixed noble and nonnoble elite of officeholders, lawyers, professionals, and intellectuals, who longed for a transcendent national community and promoted self-sacrificing service to the state rather than a capitalist pursuit of self-interest. They, she contends, made the Revolution and dominated French politics in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the bourgeoisie did play an important role in French history, not as a political force but as what Maza calls a "social imaginary," a...