Surplus Elites and Revolution
When a society produces more highly educated, ambitious people than it has elite positions to hold, a frustrated class of credentialed aspirants emerges who have the training to critique the existing order and the motive to overthrow it.
Revolutions are rarely led by the poorest. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was a lawyer born in an affluent family, part of Russia’s elite, and a graduate with a first-class degree. The French Revolution is predominantly associated with the poorest peasants and urban workers, the sans-culottes, rising up against the snobbish and out-of-touch elitists. Yet the core leaders of the uprising were intellectual professionals belonging to the Bourgeoisie, a term Karl Marx later used in The Communist Manifesto to describe the wealthy, privileged social class. In fact, out of the 600 delegates elected to represent the commoners (the Third Estate) in 1789, roughly half were lawyers or legal officials; even the infamous leader of the Reign of Terror, Maximilien Robespierre, was a university-educated lawyer who won a prestigious scholarship to the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. (Estates General of 1789, 2024)
Yes, they were not part of the hereditary aristocracy; however, their origins can be traced to families of merchants, doctors, local officials, and landowners. This provided them with the “Bourgeoisie Advantage”, as they possessed the disposable income required to spend months in Paris debating politics without needing to perform manual labour.
Therefore, it is rather ironic that Robespierre achieved his peak political influence by executing King Louis XVI for high treason in 1793, when just 23 years before that, he delivered a welcome address in Latin to the very man he condemned to death, whilst wearing powdered wigs, silk stockings, tailored waistcoats, and silver-buckled shoes, the immaculate style of the upper classes. Hence, we can conclude that Robespierre was undoubtedly financially and socially much closer to the aristocrats he executed than to the peasants he claimed to represent.
