The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History

Darnton continues to work up the French class system, from peasant to artisan and now to bourgeois. Before moving forward, the author must grapple with the term “bourgeois” itself, which he argues is aggravatingly imprecise yet unavoidable in any discussion of 18th-century France.

During France’s Old Regime era, society was stratified into three classes known as Estates. The First Estate was made up of the entire clergy, while the Second Estate was comprised of nobility and royalty, notwithstanding the king, who stood alone above all. These first two groups were imbued with a significant about of political power and were subject to different tax laws than the rest of the realm. The remaining 90% of France’s population belonged to the Third Estate. Within the Third Estate, the top socioeconomic group was the bourgeoisie. A bourgeois was often a wealthy merchant or a professional like a lawyer or doctor, and he almost always lived in a city. Most commonly, Darnton states, a bourgeois was a rentier, a landowner who lived off rent payments and did little work. In fact, Darnton rejects Karl Marx’s characterization of the bourgeoisie as a dynamic class of manufacturers. While manufacturers belonged to this class, Darnton suggests they made up a small fraction of it.