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In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more

than half of the population, it was natural that writers who

sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use,

in their criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the

peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these

intermediate classes should take up the cudgels for the working

class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the

head of this school, not only in France but also in England.