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

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vdupras 21 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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alephnerd 21 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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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vdupras 21 hours ago | parent [-]

> meme that the French Revolution was a quasi-communist revolution

It's not a meme. There's clearly a collectivist movement within the revolution, it's just that this force failed to take power. The "révolution de Février", in 1848 was precisely this: Paris going full collectivist, abolishing property and all, then small land owner from the provinces freaking out and all come to Paris to whoop them.

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alephnerd 20 hours ago | parent [-]

> There's clearly a collectivist movement within the revolution, it's just that this force failed to take power

And there was a much more powerful core of leaders who were the children of the various types of elites within the ancien regime.

Almost the entire history of France the century after the revolution was authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian rule with the collaboration of intellectual, economic, and religious elites.

And this is why Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, and other flavors of Communists take a dim view of the French Revolution.

If a revolution between the cultural elite and the capital elite just led to the pre-eminence of the capital elite and their co-opting of the cultural elite, that means the revolution basically had no positive impact for the overwhelming majority of the French subaltern of the 19th century.

And don't get me or my extended family started about French colonialism.

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vdupras 20 hours ago | parent [-]

It's weird, I feel like we're arguing over saying the same thing. Sure, I agree, but please don't say it's a meme.

Sure, it didn't take power, sure, the bourgeois were stronger, but they still managed to overthrow the forces of Louis-Phillipe. Internet wasn't invented yet, memes couldn't depose kings.

	▲	alephnerd 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> It's weird, I feel like we're arguing over saying the same thing Yea, I think from the looks of it there's a bit of mutual confusion over terminology being used, but we are largely aligned > Internet wasn't invented yet, memes couldn't depose kings I'm using the Rene Girard definition of a "meme" before it got co-opted into internet speak.