To protest against nobility on the grounds of exclusion was to beat against an open door. Which is why the historian seeks in vain for some putative revolutionary class-let us call them the bourgeoisie-thwarted in upward social mobility, and bent on the destruction of the privileged orders. In 1789 there would indeed be such a group but their most significant and powerful members would come not from outside but from the inside of the nobility and the clergy. And they were not the product of an “aristocratic reaction” but its exact opposite: an aristocratic modernization.
Carnet intime