Regimenting Revelry: Rhenish Carnival in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Oneconsequence of the lively debates in the 1970s and 1980s centering on the concept of a peculiar German path (Sonderweg) to the twentieth century has been a reexamination of the nineteenth-centuryBürgertum, the closest Central European counterpart to the French bourgeoisie and the English and American middle and upper middle classes. The study of the educated and propertied urban dwellers who became the core constituents and leading spokesmen of theBürgertumhas flourished, as historians have attempted to identify the consequences for German national development of bourgeois successes and failures.1Neither an estate (as determined by legal privileges) nor an economic class (as defined by common market position), the nineteenth-centuryBürgertumshared at least modest economic security along with overlapping clusters of values, attitudes, and goals and a sense—highly mutable and often ill-defined, to be sure—of who they were. Using moral and behavioral as much as social and economic criteria, a mélange of career and property-owning-groups set itself apart from the aristocracy, the peasantry, urban laborers, and—more belatedly and less clearly—from artisans, tradesmen, and other elements of theMittelstandand claimed in the process an enhanced social and political role as advocates of a transformed society based upon individual achievement.2

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