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La sortie du bourgeois, painted by Jean Béraud (1889). The bourgeoisie (/ ˌ b ʊər ʒ w ɑː ˈ z iː / ⓘ BOOR-zhwah-ZEE, French: ⓘ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between peasantry and aristocracy.
Regulations favouring sergeants and the flight of the nobility created an officer corps who under Napoleon contained a large majority of former sergeants. The Grande Armée was an army officered by the bourgeoisie, and over half of the officers came from the higher bourgeoisie, a third from the petty bourgeoisie and a sixth from the peasantry ...
Following industrialization and the French Revolution altered the social structure of France and the bourgeoisie became the new ruling class. The feudal nobility was on the decline with agricultural and land yields decreasing, and arranged marriages between noble and bourgeois family became increasingly common, fusing the two social classes together during the 19th century.
Pierre d'Hozier (1592–1660), genealogist and juge d'armes of France, employed to verify the French nobility. The French nobility (French: la noblesse française) was an aristocratic social class in France from the Middle Ages until its abolition on 23 June 1790 during the French Revolution.
The Nobility is divided into titled nobility (counts and barons) and lower nobility. Until the 18th century, the lower nobility was in turn divided into Knights and Esquires such that each of the three classes would first vote internally, giving one vote per class in the assembly. This resulted in great political influence for the higher nobility.
Institutional innovations like standing professional armies, centralized bureaucracies, streamlined taxation, mercantilist economic policies, and formal diplomacy allowed the nobility to adapt their traditional dominance while accommodating the rising bourgeois classes to a limited degree. The absolutist regimes drew legitimacy from revived ...
Portrait of a Burgher (c. 1660) by Lucas Franchoys the Younger. Burgher was a rank or title of a privileged citizen of a medieval to early modern European town. Burghers formed the pool from which city officials could be drawn, [citation needed] and their immediate families that formed the social class of the medieval bourgeoisie.
Nobility in its most general and strict sense is an acknowledged preeminence that is hereditary: legitimate descendants (or all male descendants, in some societies) of nobles are nobles, unless explicitly stripped of the privilege. The terms aristocrat and aristocracy are a less formal means to refer to persons belonging to this social milieu.