Charles Péguy on Bourgeoisie

“Towards this fine honor of a trade converged all the finest, all the most noble sentiments—dignity, pride. Never ask anything of anyone, they used to say. … In those days a workman did not know what it was to solicit. It is the bourgeoisie who, turning the workmen into bourgeois, have taught them to solicit.”

“The economic strangulation of today, that scientific, cold, rectangular, clean, clearcut, seamless, implacable, wise, common, constant, convenient-as-a-virtue strangulation; that strangulation where there is nothing to be said and where the strangled one is so obviously in the wrong, did not exist. … The people of those days would have blushed for our best tone of today, which is the bourgeois tone. And today, everyone is bourgeois.”