Bourgeois revolution
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Bourgeois revolution, in historical materialism, is a type of social revolution in which the superstructure of a feudal state is replaced by bourgeois society, and the conditions laid for the eventual dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. While the applicability of the concept has been debated, there is evidence to suggest that Marx counted at least four bourgeois revolutions before and during his lifetime: the Dutch Revolt, the English Revolution, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. Marx saw these as sharing crucial elements: all four occurred in the period after the discovery of the Americas and the rounding of the Cape, direct catalysts for the rise of the European bourgeoisie; each was followed by a golden age in the history of their respective countries; each instituted, or attempted to institute, a republican form of government, as well as cementing legal rights imicable to the rule of the bourgeoisie; and each was fought by a mass movement of people of the lower classes, such as yeomen, journeymen, and wage workers, united by grievances against the ruling class.[1][2] Following the language used by the French revolutionaries[3] as well as other bourgeois authors[4], Marx used the term 'feudal' to describe the relations of the regimes overthrown by the bourgeoisie.
Role of the lower classes
The “have-nothing” masses of Paris, during the Reign of Terror, were able for a moment to gain the mastery, and thus to lead the bourgeois revolution to victory in spite of the bourgeoisie themselves. But, in doing so, they only proved how impossible it was for their domination to last under the conditions then obtaining. The proletariat, which then for the first time evolved itself from these “have-nothing” masses as the nucleus of a new class, as yet quite incapable of independent political action, appeared as an oppressed, suffering order, to whom, in its incapacity to help itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without or down from above.
— Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific