The rural bourgeoisie of the southern Massif‐Central: A contribution to the study of the social structure ofancien régimeFrance

Abstract

The debate on the origins of the French Revolution encouraged much retrospective analysis of the social structure of ancien regime France.' Researchers were urged, in particular, to place the pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie under the microscope in an attempt to determine its internal structure and distinguishing characteristics. Although a number of highly satisfying individual studies were completed, the results were generally disappointing: lines of social demarcation remained blurred. The bourgeois' entity'could not be brought into focus or at least not in accordance with the economic and professional criteria suggested by the original sponsors. Some historians doubted the validity of the whole exercise and perceived in it a desire to graft on to the ancien regime the ideological terminology and categories of the revolution. Alfred Cobban was one of the sceptics and in a series of attacks he criticized the orthodoxies of revolutionary historiography and proposed his own interpretation instead. The concept of a 'rural bourgeoisie' attracted particular suspicion and taking Georges Lefebvre as his text, Cobban denied that the term had any descriptive value.2 Worse, the collection of grands fermiers, laboureurs, rentiers, merchants, notaries, doctors, officers of local courts, etc., whom Lefebvre and others lumped together as a 'rural bourgeoisie', contained mutually hostile elements and to aggregate them thus was to raise a barrier to realistic social analysis. Whilst not seeking to defend Lefebvre's definition to the letter, this article will endeavour to show that in certain regions at least the term 'rural bourgeoisie' accurately