MOST RESPECTED WRITERS AGREE that in 1848 the bourgeois revolutionary ceased to exist. The term became, as “bourgeois gentleman” had once been, a ludicrous oxymoron. Confronted with the violent literalism of the poor, bourgeois radicals abandoned fraternity for repression and enlightened criticism for pious cant. The heirs of 1789, men of the commercial and industrial classes, free professionals, and peasant proprietors, found that talk of liberty and equality threatened their privileged positions; and so, it is argued, they relied upon authoritarian devices – the central administration, the church, and a Bonaparte – to keep order on their behalf. This, of course, was Marx's analysis of the collapse of the Second Republic. Tocqueville, similarly contemptuous, saw republicans as poseurs playing at revolution rather than continuing it; Flaubert's Sentimental Education told, unforgettably, the story of their disenchantment and capitulation and of the convergence in the “party of order” of the established and those who aspired to be established. Jules Michelet, describing the bourgeois as “liberal in principle, egoist in application,” had even earlier anticipated the caricatured Radical of the Third Republic – with his heart on the left and his wallet on the right.