The bourgeoisie may have reigned over the Third Republic, but bourgeois hardly predominated in French society, where they constituted, by any definition, only a tiny minority of the population. Nor did the working class incorporate the majority of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, despite the Parti Ouvrier's assiduously fostered illusion of universal proletarianisation. Most of the fin-desiècle French retained an affiliation, however tenuous, with independent enterprise and small-scale property-ownership: a massive petite bourgeoisie of shopkeepers and self-employed artisans in the towns and a yet more massive small-holding peasantry in the countryside dominated France, in number, if not in economic power. At their most schematic and dogmatic, French Marxists sometimes ignored these petits bourgeois and peasants altogether, a feat of perceptual legerdemain accomplished only by withdrawal from the social reality accepted by most of the Guesdists' contemporaries. More often, however, the Parti Ouvrier wrestled resolutely with the dilemma posed for socialists by small property-ownership, a dilemma whose solution was crucial to the successful deployment of Guesdist polemic.