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Comment by t-3 | Hacker News Reader

The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. The poor are often indifferent to politics because they're focused on survival. The middle classes, who own things they don't want to lose and have free time to aspire for more, are the ones who start revolutions. The poor only came in after being whipped up by the interested parties, and don't necessarily join the revolutionary side.

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> The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes.

I don't know about the american revolution, but that's wrong for the french revolution. I'll link to french wikipédia pages since they are far better on the subject. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_... Here we can see the first National Assembly was half nobility and clergy. The third estate was the other half.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiers_%C3%A9tat > Par ailleurs, les députés du tiers état aux états généraux représentaient essentiellement la bourgeoisie[2].

Which indicate that the majority of the third estate representative were bourgeois.

> Which indicate that the majority of the third estate representative were bourgeois.

The bourgeois are the middle class.

Were the middle class, but what people think of middle class today, doesn't apply to what it was back then.

> The bourgeoisie 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 the peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted with the proletariat by their wealth, political power, and education, as well as their access to and control of cultural, social, and financial capital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie

Today the meaning of bourgeoisie, still applies to "business owners, merchants and wealthy people", but is now seen as upper class.

Yes, the proletariat has been brainwashed and convinced that they're the middle class, while the middle classes have become the new aristocracy. The disappearance of hereditary nobility and rise of liberalism (which brings along separation of church and state, which removes the power of the clergy) made the old distinctions less useful, so we have the modern lower (proletariat), middle (skilled workers), and upper (bourgeois) classes.

Three critical differences the American Revolution had: (1) the middle class had some extremely well educated people, (2) the communication technology among the colonies was pretty fast whereas the comms between the colonies and the British rule across the Atlantic was slow, and (3) the empire tried to clamp down on the colonies ability to export to any market other than the mother country, killing lots of profit which previously made those markets strong.

(4) the British navy was busy raiding the carribean for prize money and abandoned the army in america.

I recommend the book "The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire"

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