bourgeois

The French word bourgeois derives from bourg, the word for a market town or walled settlement, from the Frankish *burg (fortified place, stronghold), from the Proto-Germanic *burgaz (fortified place, high place, refuge), from the Proto-Indo-European root *bʰerǵʰ- (high, high place). This root also gives English 'borough,' 'burg,' 'burgess,' 'burglar' (one who breaks into a burg), 'burgher,' 'Edinburgh,' 'Freiburg,' 'Salzburg,' and the German Burg (castle, fortified town). A bourgeois was literally a person of the bourg — someone who lived inside the walls of a market town rather than in the countryside (the peasant) or the castle (the noble). In medieval French legal vocabulary, bourgeois was a precise status category: a free inhabitant of a commune, a town-dweller with civic rights, neither serf nor lord. The bourgeois paid town taxes, could own property within the town walls, had access to the town's courts, and was protected by the town's legal charter.

The bourgeois was the product of the commercial revolution that transformed medieval Europe from the eleventh century onward. As towns grew — fueled by trade, by the revival of long-distance commerce, by the growth of craft guilds — a new social category emerged between the aristocracy and the peasantry: people who lived by commerce, manufacturing, banking, and the professions rather than by the ownership of land or the labor of the fields. This class — the burgesses, the bourgeoisie — created the infrastructure of European commercial modernity: the banking houses, the insurance markets, the trading companies, the legal professions, the printing industry. The bourgeoisie of the great medieval and Renaissance cities — Florence, Bruges, Lyon, Augsburg — were the financiers of kings, the patrons of artists, and the inventors of modern commercial instruments: the bill of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, marine insurance. The bourgeois was the person whose world was organized around money rather than land.

The word's political charge derives from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the bourgeoisie became the social class whose economic interests conflicted most directly with the aristocratic order of the Ancien Régime. The French Revolution of 1789 was, in one important sense, the political triumph of the bourgeoisie: the destruction of aristocratic privilege, the affirmation of property rights against hereditary status, and the establishment of legal equality before courts that protected commerce as much as birth. But the word's most consequential modern resonance came from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who in The Communist Manifesto (1848) made 'bourgeois' and 'proletarian' the defining categories of modern political history. For Marx, the bourgeoisie were the owners of the means of production — the class whose historical role was the revolutionary destruction of feudal society and the creation of capitalism — and the class whose overthrow by the proletariat was the next stage of history. This usage made 'bourgeois' one of the most politically charged words in any modern European language.

In French and English cultural usage since the nineteenth century, 'bourgeois' has carried a second, aesthetic-social meaning that is related to but distinct from the Marxist political meaning: the bourgeois is the person of conventional tastes, narrow moral horizons, materialistic values, and smug self-satisfaction — Flaubert's M. Homais, Ibsen's pillars of society, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. This aesthetic-moral use of bourgeois — as a term of cultural condemnation — was developed by the Romantic and bohemian literary traditions of the nineteenth century, which positioned the artist and the intellectual as the natural enemies of bourgeois respectability. The 'épater le bourgeois' (shock the bourgeois) imperative of Baudelaire and his successors made the bourgeois not a class enemy (as in Marx) but an aesthetic one — the figure of conformity, timidity, and lack of imagination against which artistic self-understanding defined itself.