The ‘bourgeois’, one of heroes in the French social history, appeared on the chart dated 1007 for the first time. At the beginning of the second millenium when the Western Europe was revived they were born as the ‘new men’ whose life had nothing to do with the culture of land. These people, defined as the habitants of a ‘town’, made their ‘fief’ the island of liberties and privileges. Since then the ‘bourgeois’ became a legal status. They were the subjects of rights and obligations which varied according to towns. From the second half of the thirteenth century when urban societies began to be polarized, however, the ‘communes’, or the ‘bourgeois republics’ based on horizontal solidarity and fraternity were transformed into the stage of social struggles. The ‘bourgeois’ tended to be identified with an elite group of urban societies and, therefore, was seen as a category far apart from common ‘habitants et manants’. Faced by the social hatred and popular violences, they saw the patron of their vested rights in ever-growing royal power. Furthermore, as the central power dwarfed the urban autonomy, their vision went beyond the urban level and they turned to the capital city of the kingdom, particularly to the royal court where the chances of wealth, power and honor were concentrated. Many of them succeeded in being ennobled by serving the kings and acquiring domains. Thus the ‘bourgeois’ was associated with a rentier living comfortably in retirement, or a person “living a noble life”, and was occasionally considered a category distinct from the merchant. In a nutshell, the bourgeois who had been born as a ‘new man’ in feudal France in AD 1000 or so, became a ‘new nobleman’ in the Ancien Régime after his successive transformations. A history like this was also that of the continuous self-negation and that of the so-called “treason of French bourgeoisie.”