bourgeoisie

Bourgeoisie comes from bourgeois, from Old French burgeis (citizen of a town), from burg (fortified town), from the same Germanic root as burgher. A bourgeois was simply a town-dweller — not a peasant, not a noble, but a member of the urban commercial class. The word was neutral in medieval French, designating a legal and economic status. A bourgeois had rights within the town: to trade, to own property, to participate in town governance.

By the eighteenth century, bourgeois had acquired a social connotation. The bourgeoisie was the propertied middle class — merchants, professionals, financiers — who were wealthy but not noble. They aspired to noble manners while being excluded from noble privileges. The French Revolution was, in one reading, the bourgeoisie's triumph: the class that had the money finally got the power. The Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) was a bourgeois document. Property was among the rights declared.

Marx transformed the word from a social description into a political accusation. In Marxist theory, the bourgeoisie is the class that owns the means of production (factories, land, capital) and exploits the labor of the proletariat. The Communist Manifesto (1848) declares: 'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles... bourgeoisie and proletariat.' The town-dweller's self-description became the revolutionary's indictment.

The word split into political and cultural meanings that sometimes conflict. In Marxist usage, bourgeois means capitalist and exploitative. In cultural criticism, bourgeois means conventional, materialistic, and risk-averse. A bourgeois person cares about property values, school catchment areas, and dinner party etiquette. The political and cultural critiques overlap but are not identical. You can be culturally bourgeois without being a factory owner. The word attacks from two directions.