“The Church, sensing that the middle class was slipping out of its grasp, certainly tried to create patterns of living which would enable the bourgeois to remain a bourgeois as well as a Christian; that is, to carry out his economic and social functions while preserving the features of a son of the Church. But it never succeeded in hallowing the aspirations of the new middle class by giving them a religious basis.”

— Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 48

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Bernard Groethuysen 20

French literary historian, translator and writer 1880–1946

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