Answer

The Flemish Movement was supported by the (Flemish) petty bourgeoisie. This hardly changed in the 1850s and 1860s. The ideas of Vuylsteke and other contemporaries who represented the progressive-democratic opposition movement, bore the stamp of the (petty) bourgeosie. They located the cause of the Flemish masses´ relative social deprivation in their poor intellectual standards. The whole thing boiled down to gradually eliminating intellectual backwardness by means of language legislation, education and – according to anticlerical Flamingants – secularization. There was hardly any mention of social policies which aimed to reform the existing social structures, in an attempt to deal with the roots of social inequalities.

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