system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: In Marxist theory, where did the term 'Bourgeoisie' come from and why is it still used in English?

^
gpt
Bourgeois is French for Bürger (vice-versa) and in both German and French, the word designated people who lived in the protection of the city walls (Burg is the German word that designates a castle that also has a surrounding protected area), as opposed to peasants outside those walls. Due to how trade guilds developed and the increased importance of merchants during the late middle ages/Renaissance/Reformation Era, being classified as Bourgeois meant you had some more socio-politcal weight to throw around due to controlling some aspect of how money moved within the city where your lord, earl, duke, archbishop, etc. lived; even though you didn't have a fancy aristocratic title (like the German "von" used to mean) or necessarily own land. Fast forward to the mid-1800s and Marx is looking at this established class of people who have beat out the Aristocrats in America and in France for a little while, and who continue to grief the "Germans" and Austrians up to WWI. This group owns all the stores, farmland, and factories (what he calls means of production). But just like how these new people are wrestling more and more political power from the previous people in charge, he theorized that the next political struggle would come from the people underneath the Bourgeois; the proletariat.

Why does English use the word Bourgeoisie? The same reason we tell people to RSVP (repônde s'il vous plait) to parties, call giant bread sticks baguettes, and sometimes label appetizers hors d'oeuvre. English had/has a hard-on for stealing words from other languages, and whom better to steal from than those people that you were constantly fighting/fucking for hundreds of years.