2y ago

Found this while looking into USA history schoolbooks on Revolutionary France

"How would you react if the nobility stole your hard-earned money you get from the Atlantic Slave Trade? You know that there are poor people somewhere."

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Unfortunately, a lot of the non-French western perception on the French Revolution is formed by European monarchist propaganda, such as Les Miserables.
Worth noting that Victor Hugo did not live through the revolution. He was born around 20 years later, and grew up under the restored monarchy (restored by the other European monarchs). He became a pro-monarchist politician, and his works reflect his political leanings.
- Not that I want to rescue him or anything, he remains a deeply bourgeois author, but he wrote Les Miserables when he quit monarchism to adopt liberal republican self-proclaimed "socialist" stance. Saying Les Miserables is royalist propaganda is inaccurate, it's more of a virtue signaling liberal wank
  
  I didn't know he switched camps. Good to know!
Lol hinting that the revolutionary bourgeois cared about the peasantry when all they did was killing them and destroying their regional languages
Not saying they were not counter-revolutionary though, but contrary to MLs the bourgeois had no plan to make their lives better and only viewed them with disdain
Were all merchants in pre revolution France slave traders? That could just be like, owning a shop in a port town.
- My comment was meant to be about how the USA has this obsession with equating the elusive "Middle Class" with both the richest and the poorest, and that transcends time and space. So the French merchant (who is your sanctioned POV) who lives well is at the same time thinking about the poorest of poor peasants they're fleecing and out-pricing, but also the most heavily impacted by Capetian taxes. And that somehow this "nobility that pays no taxes" isn't basically the number 1 client of merchants. I guess it made more sense in the context of the schoolbook in my head.
  But you are correct that most merchants in Capetian France were ordinary merchants only in Europe and did not personally own slaves. However, the rise of the pre-industrial mercantile class was in large part fuelled by the slave trade, in particular the Triangular Trade scheme, and producing, selling and reselling cash-crops and their produces, like sugar (also used for alcohol), tobacco, cotton. Those things had very little use to the rural peasants, who composed the vast majority of the population of continental France at the time. In fact, I have not narrowed down the origin of the claim yet, but I have seen it thrown around that all those slave-grown goods flooding in actually caused significant issues for the lower level of the French economy, as peasants and urban labourers had to compete with all these cheap and bloody products. Meanwhile a small number of merchants and bankers got rich off of selling useless luxury crap and reckless financial speculation.

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