The Peasant Wedding is a 1567 genre painting by the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painter and printmaker Pieter Bruegel the Elder, one of his many depicting peasant life. It is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Pieter Bruegel the Elder enjoyed painting peasants and different aspects of their lives in so many of his paintings that he has been called Peasant-Bruegel, but he was an intellectual, and many of his paintings have a symbolic meaning as well as a moral aspect.
Petite bourgeoisie (French pronunciation: [pətit(ə) buʁʒwazi], lit. 'small bourgeoisie'; also anglicised as petty bourgeoisie) is a social class composed of small business owners, shopkeepers, small-scale merchants, semi-autonomous peasants, and artisans. They are named as such because their politico-economic ideological stance in times of stability is reflective of the proper haute bourgeoisie (high bourgeoisie or upper class). In ordinary times, the petite bourgeoisie seek to identify themselves with the haute bourgeoisie, whose bourgeois morality, conduct and lifestyle they aspire and strive to imitate.
The term, which goes as far back as the Revolutionary period in France, if not earlier, is politico-economic and addresses historical materialism. It originally denoted a sub-stratum of the middle classes in the 18th and early-19th centuries of western Europe. In the mid-19th century, the German economist Karl Marx and other Marxist theorists used the term petite bourgeoisie to academically identify the socio-economic stratum of the bourgeoisie that consists of small shopkeepers and self-employed artisans.