The name given to the social body formed by the oppressed classes of bourgeois society when it is effectively led by the petty bourgeoisie.
Origins of the "people"
The new possessing classes of the end of the feudal regime, which accumulate economic power based on private property and not on the monopoly of political force, organize themselves as a political body opposed to the absolutist power of the Ancien Régime. In England they will form "Civil Society" in the 17th century under the leadership of the embourgeoised landowning nobility, and in France - inspired by the English model - the "Third Estate" in the 18th, directly under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. They constitute themselves as a nation and as such claim power over the state from the clergy and the nobility. The nation shifts from recognizing the Sovereign to demanding "sovereignty" for itself.
In the development of the national and democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution, frictions and conflicts will soon arise between the bourgeoisie proper - given to agreeing on smooth transitions with the hitherto ruling classes - and the petty bourgeoisie. The latter, frightened by the consequences of accumulation for its own situation - the prospect of proletarianization - will denounce the bourgeoisie as a new "aristocracy of money", reviving the utopia of the egalitarianism of "civil society", the undifferentiated magma of the "oppressed classes", at a time when artisans are still the largest segment of the proletariat.
The "people" is then born, as the supposed subject of political life within the bourgeois system and the materialization of the bourgeois program, not in opposition to it but, as could not be otherwise, as a radicalization of the program actually carried out by the bourgeoisie. That is why the people will become, almost immediately, the point of development of nationalism: a reinforcement of the bourgeois state and market which at the same time claims an impossible leading role in a "sovereignty" that would shelter the intermediate classes from the advance of capitalist accumulation.
In this eagerness to develop its own organizational spaces in the bourgeois state, the petty bourgeoisie will find common ground with the proletariat in the first bourgeois revolutions, precisely because the proletariat is conscious that the clearer and more radical the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the feudal classes, the sooner the moment of its own open confrontation with the bourgeoisie will come.
In Germany the decisive struggle between the bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy is still to come. But since the Communists cannot count on a decisive struggle with the bourgeoisie before the latter comes to power, it is in the interest of the Communists to help it win its rule as soon as possible, in order to overthrow it, in turn, as soon as possible.
Therefore, in the struggle of the liberal bourgeoisie against the [absolutist] governments, the Communists must always be on the side of the former, while guarding against the self-deception into which the bourgeoisie falls and not trusting its seductive assurances about the beneficial consequences that, according to it, the victory of the bourgeoisie will bring to the proletariat.
The only advantages that the victory of the bourgeoisie will offer the Communists will be: 1) various concessions that will make it easier for the Communists to defend, discuss and spread their principles and, therefore, will facilitate the unification of the proletariat into an organized, closely united class ready for struggle, and 2) the certainty that on the day the absolutist governments fall, the hour of the struggle between bourgeois and proletarians will come. From that day on, the policy of the Communist party here will be the same as in the countries where the bourgeoisie already rules.
Frederick Engels. Principles of Communism, 1847