In the process of transformation of Europe into an industrial capitalist society, roughly between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, the social structure and the character of social relations changed, and with it the place of the school in the social system. Throughout Europe, the chasm between "the people" and their social and political superiors became more problematic. Whether referred to as the menu peuple in France, as das Volk in Germany or as any of the many other terms employed in other languages, the common people were distinguished by criteria of occupation, property, culture and power and kept at a distance by barriers of both a material and an ideological sort from the dominant classes who worried over and analyzed them. The popular classes included artisans, peasants, small shopkeepers, landless laborers, streethawkers, domestic servants, beggars as well as the still miniscule factory proletariat - in short, individuals of widely varying conditions. No hard-and-fast distinction such as that which would later distinguish between the buyers and sellers of labor formed the division. Still, everyone understood that the popular classes and their "betters" constituted a social and political division rarely challenged, a barrier rarely crossed even if individuals from both sides of the divide were linked with one another through a dense network of asymmetrical patronage relations. And despite the challenges of the French Revolution and the tumultuous opposition movements so characteristic of the early and mid-nineteenth century, indeed because of them, the need to construe "the people" as "other'' and to create institutions especially for them profoundly marked writing, thought and legislation about popular education in this era. Concern with new ways of securing social barriers and reinforcing the cultural distance between the ruling classes and the popular classes, as well as with reshaping the character of "the people" to meet new political and economic needs, was central to the school reform program.