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vdupraslast Saturday at 7:42 PM1 replyview on HN

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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alephnerdlast Saturday at 7:49 PM

> 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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