o the far reaches of the continent, yet his assumption of the title "emperor" in the latter half of his career kept alive the monarchies and feudally-derived aristocratic class systems that republicanism ostensibly opposed. This dichotomy, at least in Europe, has never really been fully reconciled, but into the void of confusion at least one class - the class of transition - emerged as increasingly important: the bourgeoisie. In crude terms, "bourgeois" means the merchant class of shopkeepers and minor civil servants that have always existed in urban European population centers. In the 19th Century, however, given the republican impetus inspired by Napoleon and the Americans, the bourgeois class began to expand in importance, as commerce - not class - provided for the well-being of the industrializing nations of western Europe. Even such an arch-conservative as the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck recognized that fact, and he accepted the reality of its social emergence as a necessary buffer between the aristocracy and the proletariat/peasan
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