ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the ‘rise of the bourgeoisie’, beginning with a résumé of the significant economic changes that promoted the gradual shift from a predominantly rural and seigneurial socio-economic system to the more urban, commercial and consumerist society of the later eighteenth century. An ‘ancien regime bourgeoisie’ suggests an amalgam of diverse, ‘bourgeois’ groups – landowners, lawyers, rentiers, doctors, merchants and master craftsmen, the heirs of a medieval social and economic system. The ‘rise of the bourgeoisie’, then, appears to be a statistical fact, even if sociological definitions tend to be rather vague. Research on protoindustrial systems of production has helped to relegate the idea that capitalism was the exclusive concern of the urban bourgeoisie to the historical dustbin. Pierre Badaud de la Chaussade, the son of a Protestant family, had become a Catholic and noble ironmaster, secrétaire du roi au Grand Collège.
