Social Classes
- Royalty – House of Bourbon, After the Empire was established.
- Nobility (noblesse) – Those with explicit noble title. These are traditionally divided into
- "noblesse d'épée" ("nobility of the sword")
- and "noblesse de robe" ("nobility of the gown"), the magisterial class that administered royal justice and civil government, often referring to those who bought a title of nobility (rich merchants).
- Ci-devant nobility – Literally "from before": nobility of the ancien régime (the Bourbon kingdom) after it had lost its titles and privileges.
- Bourgeoisie – Roughly, the non-noble wealthy, typically merchants, investors, and professionals such as lawyers.
- Active and passive citizens – During the period of the Legislative Assembly, approximately half of the men of France were disfranchised as "passive citizens". Only "active citizens", a category based on taxes paid, could vote; they also formed the basis of the National Guard.
- Sans-culottes – literally "those without breeches", the masses of Paris.
- Peasants, who represent 90 percent of the French nation's population.
Read more about this topic: Glossary Of The French Revolution
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or classes:
“The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Is a man too strong and fierce for society, and by temper and position a bad citizen,—a morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him;Mnature sends him a troop of pretty sons and daughters, who are getting along in the dame’s classes at the village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and the feldspar, takes the boar out and puts the lamb in, and keeps her balance true.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)