Petit Bourgeois Quotes

I am not interested in deconsecrating: this is a fashion I hate, it is petit-bourgeois. I want to reconsecrate things as much as possible, I want to re-mythicize them.

The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.

moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeois strikes me I like it

From the brutal racism of the least privileged, through the proverbial mean resentment of the petit bourgeois to the paranoid secrecy of the very powerful, we are all haunted by the possibility of slipping from our perch.

This book has two determinants: on the one hand, an ideological critique of the language of so-called mass culture; on the other, an initial semiological dismantling of that language: I had just read Saussure and emerged with the conviction that by treating “collective representations” as sign systems one might hope to transcend pious denunciation and instead account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit bourgeois culture into a universal nature.

As we all know, poodles are a type of curly-haired dog preferred by petit bourgeois retirees, ladies very much on their own who transfer their affection upon their pet, or residential concierges ensconced in their gloomy loges. Poodles come in black or apricot. The apricot ones tend to be crabbier than the black ones, who on the other hand do not smell as nice. Though all poodles bark snappily at the slightest provocation, they are particularly inclined to do so when nothing at all is happening. They follow their master by trotting on their stiff little legs without moving the rest of their sausage-shaped trunk. Above all they have venomous little black eyes set deep in their insignificant eye-sockets. Poodles are ugly and stupid, submissive and boastful. They are poodles, after all

It became clear to me at the beginning of the sixties that these two writers, whom I had looked up to in the fifties as the two great female authors of my youth, were merely a couple of petit bourgeois women intent upon dressing up their mendacious inanities in literary guise

Revolutionary Marxism sees in fascism a militant self-defense movement for the structure and interests of the capitalist system, directing the movements of the petit-bourgeois masses with pseudo-ideologies formed for the purpose of its own preservation.

Communists talked to the masses and urged violence, if necessary, to encompass their ends; the Socialists appealed to their own kind—to the intelligentsia, the petit bourgeois, the freethinking middle-class citizen, or the intellectually emancipated aristocrat—for adherents to their schemes.

Vieux bureaucrate, mon camarade ici présent, nul jamais ne t'a fait évader et tu n'en es point responsable. Tu as construit ta paix à force d'aveugler de ciment, comme le font les termites, toutes les échappées vers la lumière. Tu t'es roulé en boule dans ta sécurité bourgeoise, tes routines, les rites étouffants de ta vie provinciale, tu as élevé cet humble rempart contre les vents et les marées et les étoiles. Tu ne veux point t'inquiéter des grands problèmes, tu as eu bien assez de mal à oublier ta condition d'homme. Tu n'es point l'habitant d'une planète errante, tu ne te poses point de questions sans réponse : tu es un petit bourgeois de Toulouse. Nul ne t'a saisi par les épaules quand il était temps encore. Maintenant, la glaise dont tu es formé a séché, et s'est durcie, et nul en toi ne saurait désormais réveiller le musicien endormi ou le poète, ou l'astronome qui peut-être t'habitait d'abord.

I've thought of myself a girl on several occasions because I like to polish shoes and find household tasks amusing. There was once even a time when I insisted on mending a torn suit with my own hands. And in winter I always light the heating stoves myself, as though this were the natural course of things. But of course I'm not a real girl. Please give me a moment to consider all this would entail. The first thing that comes to mind is the question of whether I might possibly be a girl has never, never, not for a single moment, troubled me, rattled my bourgeois composure or made me unhappy. An absolutely by no means unhappy person stands before you, I'd like to put quite special emphasis on this, for I have never experienced sexual torment or distress, for I was never at a loss for quite simple methods of freeing myself from pressures. A rather curious, that is to say, important discovery for me was that it filled me with the most delightful gaiety to imagine myself someone's servant.... My nature, then, merely inclines me to treat people well, to be helpful and so forth. Not long ago I carried with flabbergasting zeal a shopping bag full of new potatoes for a petit bourgeoise. She's have been perfectly able to tote it herself. Now my situation is this: my particular nature also sometimes seeks, I've discovered, a mother, a teacher, that is, to express myself better, an unapproachable entity, a sort of goddess. At times I find the goddess in an instant, whereas at others it takes time before I'm able to imagine her, that is, find her bright, bountiful figure and sense her power. And to achieve a moment of human happiness, I must always first think up a story containing an encounter between myself and another person, whereby I am always the subordinate, obedient, sacrificing, scrutinized, and chaperoned party. There's more to it, of course, quite a lot, but this still sheds light on a few things. Many conclude it must be terribly easy to carry out a course of treatment, as it were, upon my person, but they're all gravely mistaken. For, the moment anyone seems ready to start lording and lecturing it over me, something within me begins to laugh, to jeer, and then, of course, respect is out of the question, and within the apparently worthless individual arises a superior one whom I never expel when he appears in me....

The petit-bourgeois temperament prefers the cosy picture of a slow, uninterrupted and endless progress. In both cases, the material growth of the party becomes the sole criterion by which to measure the good and the bad of all things. It is exactly as if the party were a head of cattle to be fattened, and as if the universe was created for its fattening

Tout petit prince a des ambassadeurs, Tout marquis veut avoir des pages.

Britta wanted to try to turn a guard. Tamara thought it was idiotic. “What are you going to do? Buy him beer and tell him about Kropotkin?” I envisioned the conversation: Vanguard: Wage Slave, are you aware that you are but a wire nail in the toolbox of capitalism? Wage Slave: I thought I was a chisel. Vanguard: No, the petit bourgeois are the chisels. Wage Slave: What about a washer set? Can I be a washer set? Vanguard: No, my ferret, run free! For I have unlocked your collar with knowledge! Wage Slave: I want to be a chisel. Vanguard pushes screaming ferret through hole in fence cut by the clippers of noblesse oblige. “Well, maybe we could bribe him,” said Britta. Tamara laughed. “With what? Health insurance?

Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.

It is the Left that secrets and desperately reproduces power, because it wants power, and therefore the Left believes in it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it. The system puts an end one by one to all its axioms, to all its institutions, and realizes one by one all the objectives of all the historical and revolutionary Left that sees itself constrained to revive the wheels of capital in order to lay siege to them one day: from private property to small business, from the army to national grandeur, from puritan morality to petit bourgeois culture, justice at the university—everything that is disappearing, that the system, in its atrocity, certainly, but also in its irreversible impulse, has liquidated, must be conserved.

Her mother, an unshapely, chubby-cheeked creature from the rural gentry of Styria, permanently lost her hair at the age of forty after being treated for influenza by her husband, and prematurely withdrew from society. She and her husband were able to live in the Gentzgasse thanks to her mother's fortune, which derived from the family estates in Styria and then devolved upon her. She provided for everything, since her husband earned nothing as a doctor. He was a socialite, what is known as a beau, who went to all the big Viennese balls during the carnival season and throughout his life was able to conceal his stupidity behind a pleasingly slim exterior. Throughout her life Auersberger's mother-in-law had a raw deal from her husband, but was content to accept her modest social station, not that of a member of the nobility, but one that was thoroughly petit bourgeois. Her son-in-law, as I suddenly recalled, sitting in the wing chair, made a point of hiding her wig from time to time--whenever the mood took him--both in the Gentzgasse and at the Maria Zaal in Styria, so that the poor woman was unable to leave the house. It used to amuse him, after he had hidden her wig, to drive his mother-in-law up the wall, as they say. Even when he was going on forty he used to hide her wigs--by that time she has provided herself with several--which was a symptom of his sickness and infantility. I often witnessed this game of hide-and-seek at Maria Zaal and in the Gentzgasse, and I honestly have to say that I was amused by it and did not feel in the least bit ashamed of myself. His mother-in-law would be forced to stay at home because her son-in-law had hidden her wigs, and this was especially likely to happen on public holidays. In the end he would throw the wig in her face. He needed his mother-in-law's humiliation, I reflected, sitting in the wing chair and observing him in the background of the music room, just as he needed the triumph that this diabolical behavior brought him.

Au milieu de mon abattement, je me sentis brutalement soulevé par un besoin de révolte; je me mis alors à feulleter livre après livre avec la frénésie d'un joueur enragé acculé à la dernière extrémité. Mais ce fût au sein d'une phrase ou d'une illustration, tous, comme par un fait exprès, cachaient un poignard plus ou moins acéré. Tous...—même quand je saisis Madame Bovary que j'avais lu et relu, je me sentis confronté à mon propre protrait: je n'étais finalement rien d'autre qu'un Monsieur Bovary, un petit-bourgeois...

These are real people, and their suffering is real, and the distance I feel from it, the abstract quality it assumes from my vantage–quite as aristocratic, or perhaps even petit bourgeois as you might say–says a great deal about my vantage but nothing at all about the condition of that class of which your friend Engels writes so convincingly. I began, in other words, to realize that your feelings about the working class were rather like mine toward slavery after reading Mr Darwin's account of his voyage: that I had never actually seen a slave made no difference, nor should it have.

A commune of library employees in Moscow created an "extreme" commune in which all clothing - including undergarments - was collectivized. According to Mehnert, if a communard preferred to wear his or her own underclothes "it would be characterized as a backslide into darkest capitalism; as prejudice originating in a petit-bourgeois ideology".

The goal of the cobbler, Jughashvili continued, without mentioning his father, Beso, by name, was to accumulate capital and reopen his own business. But eventually, the “petit-bourgeois” cobbler realized he would never accumulate the capital and was in fact a proletarian. “A change in the consciousness of the cobbler,” Jughashvili concluded, “followed a change in his material circumstances.

But in the Petit Palais, which Daphne had not visited in thirty years, Roland had what she liked to call ‘a moment’. He retired early from the paintings and waited in the main hall. After she had joined him and they were walking away he let rip. He said that if he ever had to look at one more Madonna and Child, Crucifixion, Assumption, Annunciation and all the rest he would ‘throw up’. Historically, he announced, Christianity had been the cold dead hand on the European imagination. What a gift, that its tyranny had expired. What looked like piety was enforced conformity within a totalitarian mind-state. To question or defy it in the sixteenth century would have been to take your life in your hands. Like protesting against Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry. It buried the open-minded philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down irrelevant rabbit holes of pettifogging theology. It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death. Gentle Jesus, ha! Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oils and gilt frames. Even as he spoke he was amazed by the strength of his feelings and the pleasure of release. He was talking – exploding – about something else. What a relief it was, he said as he began to cool down, to see a representation of a bourgeois interior, of a loaf of bread on a board beside a knife, of a couple skating on a frozen canal hand in hand, trying to seize a moment of fun ‘while the fucking priest wasn’t looking. Thank God for the Dutch!

Later on in Culture and Society, Williams scores a few points by reprinting some absolutist sentences that, taken on their own, represent exaggerations or generalisations. It was a strength and weakness of Orwell’s polemical journalism that he would begin an essay with a bold and bald statement designed to arrest attention—a tactic that, as Williams rightly notices, he borrowed in part from GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. No regular writer can re-read his own output of ephemera without encountering a few wince-making moments of this kind; Williams admits to ‘isolating’ them but has some fun all the same. The flat sentence ‘a humanitarian is always a hypocrite’ may contain a particle of truth—does in fact contain such a particle—but will not quite do on its own. Other passages of Orwell’s, on the failure of the Western socialist movement, read more convincingly now than they did when Williams was mocking them, but are somewhat sweeping for all that. And there are the famous outbursts of ill-temper against cranks and vegetarians and homosexuals, which do indeed disfigure the prose and (even though we still admire Pope and Swift for the heroic unfairness of their invective) probably deserve rebuke. However, Williams betrays his hidden bias even when addressing these relatively easy targets. He upbraids Orwell for the repeated use of the diminutive word ‘little’ as an insult (‘The typical Socialist ... a prim little man,’ ‘the typical little bowlerhatted sneak,’ etc.). Now, it is probable that we all overuse the term ‘little’ and its analogues. Williams does at one point—rather ‘loftily’ perhaps—reproach his New Left colleagues for being too ready to dismiss Orwell as ‘petit-bourgeois.’ But what about (I draw the example at random) Orwell’s disgust at the behaviour of the English crowd in the First World War, when ‘wretched little German bakers and hairdressers had their shops sacked by the mob’?

On ne peut pas dire que le petit bourgeois n'a rien lu. Il a tout lu, tout dévoré au contraire. Seulement son cerveau fonctionne à la manière de certains appareils digestifs de type élémentaire. Il filtre. Et le filtre ne laisse passer que ce qui peut alimenter la couenne de la bonne conscience bourgeoise. Les Vietnamiens, avant l'arrivée des Français dans leur pays, étaient gens de culture vieille, exquise et raffinée. Ce rappel indispose la Banque d'Indochine. Faites fonctionner l'oublioir ! Ces Malgaches, que l'on torture aujourd'hui, étaient, il y a moins d'un siècle, des poètes, des artistes, des administrateurs ? Chut ! Bouche cousue ! Et le silence se fait profond comme un coffre-fort ! Heureusement qu'il reste les nègres. Ah ! les nègres ! parlons-en des nègres ! Eh bien, oui, parlons-en. Des empires soudanais ? Des bronzes du Bénin ? De la sculpture Shongo ? Je veux bien ; ça nous changera de tant de sensationnels navets qui adornent tant de capitales européennes. De la musique africaine. Pourquoi pas? Et de ce qu'ont dit, de ce qu'ont vu les premiers explorateurs... Pas de ceux qui mangent aux râteliers des Compagnies ! Mais des d'Elbée, des Marchais, des Pigafetta ! Et puis de Frobénius ! Hein, vous savez qui c'est, Frobénius ? Et nous lisons ensemble : « Civilisés jusqu'à la moelle des os ! L'idée du nègre barbare est une invention européenne. » Le petit bourgeois ne veut plus rien entendre. D'un battement d'oreilles, il chasse l'idée. L'idée, la mouche importune.

Where were you yesterday?" "Yesterday? Where was I-let me see...." "I thought you took a powder." "Me? How could that be?" "You mean, you wouldn't run out on me?" Run out on fragrant, sexual, high-minded Ramona? Never in a million years. Ramona had passed through the hell of profligacy and attained the seriousness of pleasure. For when will we civilized beings become really serious? said Kierkegaard. Only when we have known hell through and through. Without this, hedonism and frivolity will diffuse hell through all our days. Ramona, however, does not believe in any sin but the sin against the body, for her the true and only temple of the spirit. "But you did leave town yesterday," said Ramona. "How do you know-are you having me tailed by a private eye?" "Miss Schwartz saw you in Grand Central with a valise in your hand." "Who? Ramona said, "Perhaps some lovely woman scared you on the train, and you turned back to your Ramona." "Oh..." said Herzog. Her theme was her power to make him happy. Thinking of Ramona with her intoxicating eyes and robust breasts, her short but gentle legs, her Carmen airs, thievishly seductive, her skill in the sack (defeating invisible rivals), he felt she did not exaggerate. The facts supported her claim. "Well, were you running away?" she said. "Why should I? You're a marvelous woman, Ramona." "In that case you're being very odd, Moses." "Well, I suppose I am one of the odder beasts." "But I know better than to be proud and demanding.” “Life has taught me to be humble." Moses shut his eyes and raised his brows. Here we go. "Perhaps you feel a natural superiority because of your education." "Education! But I don't know anything..." "Your accomplishments. You're in Who's Who. I'm only a merchant-a petit-bourgeois type." "You don't really believe this. Ramona." "Then why do you keep aloof, and make me chase you? I realize you want to play the field. After great disappointments, I've done it myself, for ego-reinforcement." "A high-minded intellectual ninny, square ..." "Who?" "Myself, I mean." She went on. "But as one recovers self-confidence, one learns the simple strength of simple desires.” “Please, Ramona, Moses wanted to say-you're lovely, fragrant, sexual, good to touch-everything. Ramona paused, and Herzog said, "It's true-I have a lot to learn.” Excerpt From: Bellow, Saul. “Herzog.” iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

La pression des nationaux-socialistes commençait peu à peu à délabrer les nerfs des milieux cléricaux et bourgeois ; ils sentaient de plus en plus l’insistance subversive de l’impatiente Allemagne, qui leur serrait aussi la vis dans le domaine de l’économie. Le gouvernement Dollfuss, qui voulait conserver une Autriche indépendante et la préserver de Hitler, cherchait de plus en plus désespérément un dernier appui. La France et l’Angleterre étaient trop éloignées et au fond trop indifférentes, la Tchécoslovaquie était encore pleine de sa vieille rancune et de sa rivalité à l’égard de Vienne, si bien qu’il ne restait que l’Italie, qui s’efforçait alors d’étendre sur l’Autriche son protectorat économique et politique, afin de s’assurer les passages des Alpes et Trieste. Pour cette protection, Mussolini réclamait toutefois un très haut prix. L’Autriche devait s’adapter aux tendances fascistes, le Parlement, et par là même la démocratie devaient être liquidés. Cela n’était possible que si l’on écartait ou privait de ses droits le parti social-démocrate, le plus fort et le mieux organisé d’Autriche. Pour le briser, il n’y avait point d’autre moyen que la force brutale. En vue de cette action terroriste, le prédécesseur de Dollfuss, Ignaz Seipel, avait déjà créé une organisation, la Heimwehr69. Vue du dehors, elle offrait à peu près la plus pitoyable des apparences, elle était formée de petits avocats de province, d’officiers licenciés, d’ingénieurs sans travail, de toutes les médiocrités déçues, qui se haïssaient furieusement

banquet oifert à un député par ses électeurs reconnaissants. La cheminée est ornée d’une pendule d’un goût atrocement troubadour, représentant le templier Bois-Guilbert enlevant une Rébecca dorée sur un cheval argenté. A droite et à gauche de cette odieuse horloge sont placés deux flambeaux de plaqué sous un globe. Ces magnificences sont l’objet de la secrète envie de plus d’une ménagère de Pont-de-Arche, et la servante elle-même ne les essuie qu’en tremblant. Je ne parle pas de quelques caniches en verre filé, d’un petit saint Jean en pâte de sucre, d’un Napoléon en chocolat, d’un cabaret chargé de porcelaines communes et pompeusement installé sur une table ronde, de gravures représentant les Adieux de Fontainebleau, Souvenirs et regrets, la Famille du marin, les Petits Braconniers et autres vulgarités du même genre. — Concevez-vous rien de pareil ? Je n’ai jamais su comprendre, pour ma part, cet amour du commun et du laid. Je conçois que tout le monde n’ait pas pour logement des Alhambras, des Louvres ou des Parthénons ; mais il est toujours si facile de ne pas avoir de pendule ! de laisser les murailles nues, et de se priver de lithographies de Maurin ou d’aquatintes de Jazet ! Les gens qui remplissaient ce salon me semblaient, à force de vulgarité, les plus étranges du monde ; ils avaient des façons de parler incroyables, et s’exprimaient en style fleuri, comme feu Prudhomme, élève de Brard et Saint-Omer. Leurs têtes, épanouies sur leurs cravates blanches, et leurs cols de chemise gigantesques faisaient penser à certains produits de la famille des cucurbitacés. Quelques hommes ressemblent à des animaux, au lion, au cheval, à l’âne ; ceux-ci, tout bien considéré, avaient l’air encore plus végétal que bestial. Des femmes, je n’en dirai rien, m’étant promis de ne jamais tourner en ridicule ce sexe charmant. Au milieu de ces légumes humains, Louise faisait l’effet d’une rose dans un carré de choux. Elle portait une simple robe blanche serrée à la taille par un ruban bleu ; ses cheveux, séparés en bandeaux, encadraient harmonieusement son front pur. Une grosse natte se tordait derrière sa nuque, couverte de cheveux follets et d’un duvet de pêche. Une quakeresse n’aurait rien trouvé à redire à cette mise, qui faisait paraître d’un grotesque et d’un ridicule achevés les harnais et les plumets de corbillard. des autres femmes ; il était impossible d’être de meilleur goût. J’avais peur que mon infante ne profitât de la circonstance pour déployer quelque toilette excessive et prétentieuse, achetée d’occasion. Cette pauvre robe de mousseline qui n’a jamais vu l’Inde, et qu’elle a probablement faite elle-même, m’a touché et séduit ; je ne tiens pas à la parure. J’ai eu pour maîtresse une gitana grenadine qui n’avait pour tout vêtement que des pantoufles bleues et un collier de grains d’ambre ; mais rien ne me contrarie comme un fourreau mal taillé et d’une couleur hostile. Les dandies bourgeois préférant de

II L'Association bretonne. Il est une institution qui distingue la Bretagne des autres provinces et où se réflète son génie, l'Association bretonne. Dans ce pays couvert encore de landes et de terres incultes, et où il reste tant de ruines des anciens âges, des hommes intelligents ont compris que ces deux intérêts ne devaient pas être séparés, les progrès de l'agriculture et l'étude des monuments de l'histoire locale. Les comices agricoles ne s'occupent que des travaux d'agriculture, les sociétés savantes que de l'esprit; l'Association bretonne les a réunis: elle est à la fois une association agricole et une association littéraire. Aux expériences de l'agriculture, aux recherches archéologiques, elle donne de la suite et de l'unité; les efforts ne sont plus isolés, ils se font avec ensemble; l'Association bretonne continue, au XIXe siècle, l'oeuvre des moines des premiers temps du christianisme dans la Gaule, qui défrichaient le sol et éclairaient les âmes. Un appel a été fait dans les cinq départements de la Bretagne à tous ceux qui avaient à coeur les intérêts de leur patrie, aux écrivains et aux propriétaires, aux gentilshommes et aux simples paysans, et les adhésions sont arrivées de toutes parts. L'Association a deux moyens d'action: un bulletin mensuel, et un congrès annuel. Le bulletin rend compte des travaux des associés, des expériences, des essais, des découvertes scientifiques; le congrès ouvre des concours, tient des séances publiques, distribue des prix et des récompenses. Afin de faciliter les réunions et d'en faire profiter tout le pays, le congrès se tient alternativement dans chaque département; une année à Rennes, une autre à Saint-Brieuc, une autre fois à Vitré ou à Redon; en 1858, il s'est réuni à Quimper. A chaque congrès, des questions nouvelles sont agitées, discutées, éclaircies[1]: ces savants modestes qui consacrent leurs veilles à des recherches longues et pénibles, sont assurés que leurs travaux ne seront pas ignorés; tant d'intelligences vives et distinguées, qui demeureraient oisives dans le calme des petites villes, voient devant elles un but à leurs efforts; la publicité en est assurée, ils seront connus et appréciés. D'un bout de la province à l'autre, de Rennes à Brest, de Nantes à Saint-Malo, on se communique ses oeuvres et ses plans; tel antiquaire, à Saint-Brieuc, s'occupe des mêmes recherches qu'un autre à Quimper: il est un jour dans l'année où ils se retrouvent, où se resserrent les liens d'études et d'amitié. [Note 1: Voir l'Appendice.] Le congrès est un centre moral et intellectuel, bien plus, un centre national: ces congrès sont de véritables assises bretonnes; ils remplacent les anciens États: on y voit réunis, comme aux États, les trois ordres, le clergé, la noblesse et le tiers-état, le tiers-état plus nombreux qu'avant la Révolution, et de plus, mêlés aux nobles et aux bourgeois, les paysans. La Bretagne est une des provinces de France où les propriétaires vivent le plus sur leurs terres; beaucoup y passent l'année tout entière. De là une communauté d'habitudes, un échange de services, des relations plus familières et plus intimes, qui n'ôtent rien au respect d'une part, à la dignité de l'autre. Propriétaires et fermiers, réunis au congrès, sont soumis aux mêmes conditions et jugés par les mêmes lois; souvent le propriétaire concourt avec son fermier. Dans ces mêlées animées, où l'on se communique ses procédés, où l'on s'aide de ses conseils, où l'on distribue des prix et des encouragements, les riches propriétaires et les nobles traitent les paysans sur le pied de l'égalité; ici, la supériorité est au plus habile: c'est un paysan, Guévenoux, qui, en 1857, eut les honneurs du congrès de Redon. Voici quatorze ans que l'Association bretonne existe; l'ardeur a toujours été en croissant; les congrès sont devenus des solennités: on y vient de tous les points

J'aime les bourgeois. J'espère bien être des leurs, quoique je n'en sois pas tout à fait sûre - mais il est vrai que je ne me plais qu'en leur compagnie. Le Bourgeois, c'est tout le monde, tout le monde qui peut l'être. Personne, en fait, hormis les héros et les saints, n'aspire à autre chose qu'à vivre avec confort et dignité. (…) Tous les écrivains que nous aimons sont fils de parents, de grands, moyens ou petits bourgeois, qui leur ont donné le moyen de faire des études, parfois de longues études. Lequel d'entre eux a été mis en apprentissage à quatorze ans? Lequel a senti peser sur lui une existence dans loisirs? Quand je pense qu'il y a des gens qui désirent la prolétarisation des bourgeois, au lieu de désirer l'embourgeoisement des prolétaires, ce qui serait tellement plus simple et plus gentil!

Dans notre société, quelles sont les classes qui aiment le travail pour le travail ? Les paysans propriétaires, les petits bourgeois, qui les uns courbés sur leurs terres, les autres acoquinés dans leurs boutiques, se remuent comme la taupe dans sa galerie souterraine, et jamais ne se redressent pour regarder à loisir la nature.

I have been back among fairy tales,” she says. “I do not quite understand, Alesha. Those gallant little boys! They are youth, and youth is always full of strangeness. Mr. Heritage! He is youth, too, and poetry, perhaps, and a soldier’s tradition. I think I know him... But what about Dickson? He is the petit bourgeois, the épicier, the class which the world ridicules. He is unbelievable. “No,” is the answer. “You will not find him in Russia. He is what they call the middle-class, which we who were foolish used to laugh at. But he is the stuff which aboveall others makes a great people. He will endure when aristocracies crack and proletariats crumble. In our own land we have never known him, but till we create him our land will not be a nation.

We have known for a long time that the petit-bourgeois reformer finds "good" and "bad" sides in everything.

Granted, up to now I've been able to live materialistically, free of inconveniences, thanks to Father. But if I look at this through Myong-ju's eyes, I owe it all to the blood and sweat of the workers. That's probably true. It's like America's wealth, which was obtained through the exploitation of blacks. Behind prosperity there are clearly some victims. But as long as I'm living like a petit-bourgeois thanks to Father's Yudo Trading Company, I'm afraid to look how the workers live in the factory dorms. I'd like to put this problem aside for the time being. Even thinking about it gives me a headache. (Kang 1989: 66)

member parties were ordered to organize along Leninist lines to combat “petit-bourgeois deviation,

Chaque fois qu'un spectacle semble immotivé, le bon sens fait donner la grosse cavalerie du symbole, admis au ciel petit-bourgeois dans la mesure où, en dépit de son versant abstrait il unit le visible et l'invisible sous les espèces d'une égalité quantitative (ceci vaut cela) : le calcul est sauvé, le monde tient encore.

In opposition to liberalism, on the communist side, we have the Machiavellian realism of Chairman Mao’s Yenan Way, best explained by Mao himself in a conversation with the Peruvian Marxist, Eudocio Ravines: Oh dear friend [said Mao] how deluded you are with respect to the political thinking of common people. You have a romantic idea of the revolution and of its politics. You think that workers and peasants and petit bourgeois are full of noble intentions and faithfully respect mores and principles. What an error! It’s not like that, my friend. The immense mass of our friends and enemies is made up of opportunists. You must get that through your head – complete opportunists. Eudocio Ravines, The Yenan Way (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), p. 156.

He could put up with his meaningless office-life, because he never for an instant thought of it as permanent. God knew how or when, he was going to break free of it. After all, there was always his “writing.” Some day, perhaps, he might be able to make a living of sorts by “writing;” and you’d feel you were free of the money-stink if you were a “writer,” would you not? The types he saw all around him, especially the older men, made him squirm. That is what it meant to worship the money-god! To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an aspidistra! To turn into the typical bowler-hatted sneak – Strube’s “little man” – the little docile cit who slips home by the six-fifteen to a supper of cottage pie and stewed tinned pears, half an hour’s listening-in to the BBC Symphony Concert, and then perhaps a spot of licit sexual intercourse if his wife “feels in the mood!” What a fate! No, it isn’t like that that one was meant to live. One’s got to get right out of it, out of the money stink.

Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanised, go-getting type – the type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside of a swill-bucket.

They also learned that the term ‘bootleg’ referred to the habit of drinkers of sliding thin bottles of booze down their high cowboy boots, to hide from the authorities.

She’s being a mom and you’re being her kid. Which, by the way, you will still be when you are fifty and she is in her seventies. So you’d better get used to it. There are some things in life you can’t change. And mothers are one of those.

And remember that it’s perfectly okay to be perfectly okay alone. Being alone and being lonely are two very different things.

the necessary conditions for the growth of a significant fascist movement involved strong influence from the cultural crisis of the fin de siècle in a situation of perceived mounting cultural disorientation; the background of some form of organized nationalism before World War I; an international situation of perceived defeat, status humiliation, or lack of dignity; a state system comparatively new that was entering or had just entered a framework of liberal democracy; a situation of increasing political fragmentation; large sectors of workers, farmers, or petit bourgeois that were either not represented or had lost confidence in the existing parties; and an economic crisis perceived to stem in large measure from foreign defeat or exploitation.

Le général Mannerheim, le plus héroïque des généraux, parce qu'il a su, en une seule guerre, gagner et la Croix de Saint Georges russe et la Croix de fer allemande, est-ii déshonoré pour avoir fusillé 50 mille ouvriers? Pas plus que Uritzky et Lénine. Ces « déshonneurs historiques » sont du nombre des mensonges conventionnels de l'humanité, et tous les hommes politiques le savent très bien : que de petits Robespierre, que de petits Napoléon (bourgeois et socialistes) n'ai-je pas vus au cours de notre guerre civile qui se vantaient ouvertement d'avoir commis des exploits à la Saint-Jean d'Acre (ils y ajoutaient quelquefois, par fanfaronnade de « force »).

Karl Marx wrote...'The plains of Hindustan are strewn with the bleached bones of the weavers of Bengal" (sic). And so it is with our poor down-trodden Russulas. Just listen to how so called "mushroom lovers" malign this proletarian genus. Casting their broken bodies aside we mutter phrases like 'garbage mushroom' with disgust. It sounds almost like 'untouchable', or 'outcast'. Are not Russulas truly abundant even in drier months when the petit bourgeois genera are safely underground? Are they not toiling in mycorrhizal labors while capitalist [that is, parasitic] genera such as Honey Caps and Sulfur Shelf sponge off our forests? And are they not more colorful than the aristocratic Morchella of spring? Yes, yes, and yes. Perhaps their inscrutability, their resistance to macroscopic identification are what give rise to such unprovoked antagonism.

The dogma of the group is promoted as scientifically incontestable—in fact, truer than anything any human being has ever experienced. Resistance is not just immoral; it is illogical and unscientific. In order to support this notion, language is constricted by what Lifton calls the “thought-terminating cliché.” “The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed,” he writes. “These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” For instance, the Chinese Communists dismissed the quest for individual expression and the exploration of alternative ideas as examples of “bourgeois mentality.” In Scientology, terms such as “Suppressive Person” and “Potential Trouble Source” play a similar role of declaring allegiance to the group and pushing discussion off the table. The Chinese Communists divided the world into the “people” (the peasantry, the petite bourgeoisie) and the “reactionaries” or “lackeys of imperialism” (landlords and capitalists), who were essentially non-people. In a similar manner, Hubbard distinguished between Scientologists and “wogs.” The word is a derogatory artifact of British imperialism, when it was used to describe dark-skinned peoples, especially South Asians. Hubbard appropriated the slur, which he said stood for “worthy Oriental gentleman.” To him, a wog represented “a common, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety humanoid”—an individual who is not present as a spirit. Those who are within the group are made to strive for a condition of perfection that is unattainable—the ideal Communist state, for instance, or the clearing of the planet by Scientology.

Il faut découvrir le visage de cette bourgeoisie française dont Le Jour et Gringoire ont été, pendant la crise, les porte-paroles. Il ne s'agit plus, avec elle, de soumission inconsciente. Très lucidement, bien qu'ils se couvrent encore de formes bienséantes, ils admirent. Bourgeois, ils admirent la puissance et le succès. Décadents, ils frémissent sous les manières brutales. Petits-bourgeois par le coeur, ils s'extasient sur les alignements, la pompe, la parade, sur ce comédien mystique qui devant cent mille hommes, quand les dieux le saisissent, pousse un bouton pour faire converger sur lui une batterie de propriétaires en alarmes, ils voient dans ces masses compactes, dans cette police insinuée jusqu'aux ramures de la vie privée, dans cet ordre de fer, la garde prétorienne qu'ils n'osent demander aux démocraties contre les menaces "du communisme". Toute leur pensée internationale s'est épuisée à creuser une ligne Maginot en marge des dynamismes européens. Toute leur pensée politique se réduit à préparer, avec un béton humain, une ligne Maginot inviolable contre les dynamismes révolutionnaires. Ils se trompent sans doute radicalement sur le sens des fascismes, qui n'utilisent la force bourgeoise que comme une plaque tournante. Mais ils pensent avec celui d'entre eux qui disait il y a 50 ans se sentir plus près d'un hobereau prussien que d'un ouvrier français. On ne comprendra rien au comportement de cette fraction de la bourgeoisie française si on ne l'entend murmurer à mi-voix : « Plutôt Hitler que Blum ». Une bourgeoisie aux abois ; une politique sans foi ni loi ; un peuple usé de déceptions et de divertissements, voilà les responsables de la démission de la France. Puisque ce n'est pas la première fois que nous prenons position sur le problème qui lui a offert l'occasion, il nous faut maintenant montrer où elle a pu s'inscrire.

that the haut bourgeois should detest the petit, and the cultivated the lowbrow; for the barber-surgeon from Yonville, the famous doctor’s son could summon arrogant pity, but not sympathetic compassion.

To recall the extent to which Hitchcock was marked by his petit bourgeois interpellation may not radically change the way we read his films. It should, however, remind us that his British films in particular come out of a highly class-structured and class-conscious social formation and are likely to bear the traces of this, even if only in their interstices.