Peter Gay - Pleasure War
Part of Bourgeois identification, then, was a negative one. The very financial and emotional insecurity of the nouvelles couches worked to underscore the image of a single recognizable bourgeois self-image. It was precisely because most of them clustered around the lower edges of the pyramid that they were all the more intent on upholding middle- class morality and middle-class styles of living, even though their showy alliance with more prosperous bourgeois was often subverted by sharp conflicts of interest. They could be more ostentatiously respectable than their betters, more severe with their family about table manners, just as calculating and manipulative to keep their children from marring inappropriate suitors. Shabby gentility was a harsh taskmaster.
