The analysis here focuses on mobilization and identity among a significant section of the Milanese petite bourgeoisie, rather than on the formation of a single identity that encompassed all the members of the city's lower middle classes. One has to recognize that these intermediate strata possess many different and, at times, conflicting interests. Most recent historians prefer to use the term petite bourgeoisie to indicate individuals who control their own capital, as opposed to the “new” lower middle classes of salaried employees (Bechhofer 1976: 76–79; Crossick 1984: 6–10). Yet even this more strictly denned grouping of shopkeepers and master artisans embraces both the self-employed and small employers, manufacturers and retailers, and “skilled” and “unskilled” trades. One cannot portray these strata as a class in itself, let alone for itself.

The premise here is that there existed a specific moment in the history of France —and, one might speculate, of other European societies—when a popular insurrection in the capital was capable of bringing down the national government, virtually overnight and irrespective of public sentiment in the provinces. In the face of such sudden outbursts, not even those regimes that appeared most firmly entrenched proved to be secure. The most striking instances, and the ones that will be the exclusive focus of attention here, occurred in Paris during the early years of the French Revolution of 1789 as in 1830 and 1848, when the urban crowd was able, if only for a time, to impose new institutions and policies upon the nation. In general, the rural population proved acquiescent, but the will of the capital initially held sway even when the numerical majority living in the countryside seemed resistant to the change.

In recent years Italian social historians have devoted increasing attention to the nature and morphology of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Traditional historiography viewed the bourgeoisie as key par excellence to the political change played out between 1859 and 1871. It was seen, on the one hand, as integral to the formation of a liberal political regime based on a limited suffrage, and, on the other, as critical to the outcome of the peninsula's national unification of a dozen small states, most of which were previously governed by absolutist regimes.

At the very end of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard the priests come and remove the relics preserved and protected by the Prince of Salina's aged daughters, virtually the last survivors of the family. Nothing is left of the fabled world of the Sicilian aristocrats. Even the material and symbolic artifacts of their eminence—the religious relics they guarded and the palace over which they presided—have turned into rubble or taken on the musty air of decay. The world of the Prince of Salina, a world of inherited wealth and power stretching back to the Norman conquests of the eleventh century, of aristocratic balls, of shimmering palaces in Palermo and vast estates in the interior—that world has come to an end.