Bourgeoisie - Etymology

Etymology

The Modern French word bourgeois derived from the Old French burgeis (walled city), which derived from bourg (market town), from the Old Frankish burg (town); in other European languages, the etymologic derivations are the Middle English burgeis, the Middle Dutch burgher, the German Bürger (burgess), and the Polish burżuazja, which occasionally is synonymous with the intelligentsia. In English, “bourgeoisie” (a French citizen-class) identified a social class oriented to economic materialism and hedonism, and to upholding the extreme political and economic interests of the capitalist ruling class. In the 18th century, before the French Revolution (1789–99), in the French feudal order, the masculine and feminine terms bourgeois and bourgeoise identified the rich men and women who were members of the urban and rural Third Estate — the common people of the French realm, who violently deposed the absolute monarchy of the Bourbon King Louis XVI (r. 1774–91), his clergy, and his aristocrats. Hence, since the 19th century, the term "bourgeoisie" usually is politically and sociologically synonymous with the ruling upper class of a capitalist society.

Historically, the mediæval French word bourgeois denoted the inhabitants of the bourgs (walled market-towns), the craftsmen, artisans, merchants, and others, who constituted "the bourgeoisie", they were the socio-economic class between the peasants and the landlords, between the workers and the owners of the means of production. Resultantly, as the economic managers of the (raw) materials, the goods, and the services, and thus the capital (money) produced by the feudal economy, the term "bourgeoisie" evolved to also denote the middle class — the businessmen and businesswomen who accumulated, administered, and controlled the capital that made possible the development of the bourgs into cities.

Contemporarily, the terms "bourgeoisie" and "bourgeois" identify the ruling class in capitalist societies, as a social stratum; while "bourgeois" describes the Weltanschauung (worldview) of men and women whose way of thinking is socially and culturally determined by their economic materialism and philistinism, a social identity catalogued and described in drame bourgeois (bourgeois drama), which satirizes buying the trappings of a noble-birth identity as the means climbing the social ladder. (See: Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 1670)