Construire et déconstruire la bourgeoisie: Discours politique et imaginaire social au début du XIX^e siècle

This article explores the problematic status of "the bourgeoisie" in the social imaginary of post-revolutionary France. It begins by positing that the bourgeoisie was not a major discursive category either under the old regime or the revolution : no major group identified itself as such, and the revolutionaries associated bourgeois with aristocracy. "The bourgeoisie" as a major conceptual category was born of the political circumstances of the 1815 Bourbon restoration and especially the ultra reaction of the 1820s. Ultimately, the article poses the question as to whether "the bourgeoisie" as a unified and self-conscious group really existed in the early nineteenth century beyond the denunciations and satires of its self-appointed enemies.