After decades of research, the premise that before 1933 the Weimar Republic lost legitimacy in the eyes of its small- and middle-scale entrepreneurs remains a cornerstone of the historiography on modern Germany. Focusing on both the achievements and, above all, the problems that have been raised,this article evaluates the scholarship on this social group, in order to identify an area of research that has been explored to relatively lesser degree in a French context. The article thus proposes making use of a specific path opened up by comparative historical methodology: the transfer of strategies optimally suited for orienting research towards those problems understood as crucial. After defining the functional equivalents and discussing the question of each society’s context (the first step in any comparative approach), the author puts forward and explores the thesis of parallel structures on both sides of the Rhine. In the last third of the nineteenth century, a socio-political synthesis was established in both France and Germany between certain groups — including the entrepreneurial middle class — on the one hand, and the state, on the other hand; and this was based on similar motives. This development offers an explanation for the loyalty displayed by these groups to two regimes marked, to be sure, by profound differences. Following the observation that in the 1930s each synthesis was showing occasional signs of crumbling, the article suggests that research concerned with the French side of the process can profit from an analysis of the German side proceeding along three main historiographical tracks: first, the mobilization of the social groups “from below”; second, their institutional representation “from above”;and third, the distance demarcated between them and adjacent groups through a profound social chasm.