roturier

plural roturiers

1. A commoner or plebeian; a person of low rank; especially, in pre-Revolutionary France, a member of the social class comprising all who were not nobles or clergy.First known use 16th c.

   He cannot forgive Socrates for his humble origin; he calls him a "roturier," and accuses him of corrupting the noble Athenian youth with a democratic moral bias.

   1945, Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

   2 more examples

   ‘This fellow has imbibed all the insolent consequence of those among whom he had lived; and, though roturier himself, conceives, that he derives from the honour of being the idle valet to a nobleman, a right to despise and trample on the honest man who draws his subsistence from the ground by independent industry.’

   1792, Charlotte Smith, Desmond, Broadview, published 2001, page 128

   This fact shows our British independence and honest feeling—our higher orders are not such mere haughty aristocrats as the ignorant represent them: on the contrary, if a man have money they will hold out their hands to him, eat his dinners, dance at his balls, marry his daughters, or give their own lovely girls to his sons, as affably as your commonest roturier would do.

   1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 38, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC