Comment by vdupras
1 day ago
The statistics cited in the article you cite talks about the Nobility/Clergy/Other classification. There is no wealth-related statistic. It's entirely possible that a good fraction of the "Others" category were wealthy bourgeois.
Even in the height of the revolution, the nobility largely retained it's control [0]. And at the end of the day, le Directorate, the Napoleon regime, the Louis Phillips regime, and the Napoleon III regime continued to maintain the power of the bourgeois.
If the bourgeois had been completely purged in the French Revolution, then the crackdown of the 1848 Revolution (and the subsequent exodus of French republicans and socialists), 18 Bumaire, the Bourbon Restoration, and other successful power grabs by the bourgeois following the French Revolution wouldn't have happened.
Heck, much of the Council of 500 were themselves either mid-level aristocrats or the children of ancien regime enforcers as was seen with Talleyrand, Barras, Duke of Parma, Lebrun, and the Bonaparte family, along with members of the Directorate like Carnot, Barras, and Merlin.
There's a reason Marx termed the French Revolution as a "bourgeois revolution", why Max Scheler classes the French Revolution as a revolution driven by ressentiment (the Nietzchean concept that underlies elite overproduction), and how Bourdieu came to his thesis on "cultural capital" (which can also help explain the contemporary rise of left- and right-leaning populism).
In essence, who is more elite - an L6 at Google earning $600K TC who graduated from UC Irvine and whose parents were union employees, a Senior Editor at the NYT earning $130K TC who graduated from Yale and whose parents were lawyers, or a Congressional Chief of Staff who graduated from UChicago and whose parents immigrated from Taiwan on an H1B to work at Intel?
The answer is they are all members of the elite. It was the exact same with the leadership of the French Revolution, and the subsequent regimes.
It's the same reason why Mao's dad was a rural landlord, why Lenin's dad was a State Councillor, why Ho Chi Minh's father was a Confucian scholar, why Pol Pot's father was a rural landlord with ties to nobility, and Che Guevara's father an Argentine engineer who immigrated from Ireland.
[0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023
You're being beside the point. All I'm saying is: don't conflate "nobility" and "bourgeois" in your statistics and analysis. In the context of the French revolution, they're not the same.
Of course the bourgeois weren't purged in the revolution. It's them who took power through that revolution.
> The answer is they are all members of the elite. It was the exact same with the leadership of the French Revolution, and the subsequent regimes.
no. Bourgeois, prior to the revolution, were not part of the elite. It's difficult to imagine, but there was a time where there wasn't such a direct correlation as today between wealth and power.
> don't conflate "nobility" and "bourgeois" in your statistics and analysis
Yet it was mid-level aristocrats that were overrepresented in the Directorate and the Council of 500.
> no. Bourgeois, prior to the revolution, were not part of the elite. It's difficult to imagine, but there was a time where there wasn't such a direct correlation as today between wealth and power
Yes. I know, but the initial conversation is based on correcting the a revisionist meme that the French Revolution was a quasi-communist revolution, when in reality it was just a form of inter-elite fratricide - especially between mid-level aristocrats and the church and a subset of royalists.
All the revolution did was cleave the bourgeois from the third estate, and merge them along with the second and first estates.
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