>>481488They referred not just to the monarchy as a form, but what the monarchy was there for - the consolidation of state power. At that time in France, the monarchist ideology was absolutism, where the king took more power for himself at the expense of vassals. The "bourgeois cartels" were already part of the monarchical system, as they were in England.
In my (probably not approved) model - and we should not put too much credit in models - the left/right distinction was between technology and the authority of institutions and property and the right of state authority. The left represented the interest of a growing technological interest, and one result of that was industrialism and the normalization of corporate government and the corporate person. The right to this day trades in the projection of personal authority, but "personal authority" of the sort they imply ceased to exist many decades ago. The last vestiges of it were blown to bits repeatedly during the last half of the 20th century.
A curious thing happened where the "left" rebranded around all of the traditional prerogatives of the right - consolidation of state authority, limited access of technology because of fear of popular revolt - and the "right" feigned populism and claimed they represented the personal rights and interest of "good people". This reversal was only possible with tacit approval of the leaders of both "factions", who saw it as a complete joke. The original contention was settled, because oligarchy won. The left's aim with mass politics was to bring the masses into the technological interest that they controlled, and once that was accomplished, they shunned the very idea of mass politics at its heart.
We today inherit the results of that struggle, because we are made to relitigate it in our personal lives if we want to live. It is a struggle within the institutions for the office-holders, who long ago abandoned any vision other than power itself. Government by crisis and coup became the only idea that could rule in their mind, and so that is what we do - lurching from one crisis to the next, always manipulated by some power that we're not allowed to acknowledge.
For most of humanity, there are no material interests that you can represent in a political arena. If you want to do politics, there is only the institutions. Within the institutions, the left/right distinction in its original sense is still alive, but it purely concerns those who have business in the institutions. They are united in purpose of commanding the commons and suppressing the lower orders, so that history never changes.
For what it's worth, "leftist" and "rightist" never had mass appeal, nor do people vote for ideology. Behind the stories and narratives of public relations, there were men who represented certain interests in the society - "special interests" if you will. Most of politics is about schmoozing and knowing what your core constituents want, so you can keep getting rich and get what you really want - all of the kickbacks of political office. Electoral politics is always going to produce that, rather than this idea that through abstractions and stories, the people as a whole are somehow served by this. The very act of elections is alien to the people having what they want, down to the process itself being a charade that can easily be rigged if needed. Still, if you asked what people voted for, they voted for the guy who they believed would make their life a little better. Voters do not believe in self-abasement, and exhorting them to do so is a sign of the politicians' contempt for groups who have no one to fight for them, sectioned off from the rest of society. That process continued generation after generation until "democracy" only existed for a favored group who would be told they must march in lockstep and make "the ultimate sacrifice" to continue having their privileges - and this required them to declare a war against those outside of society, for the sake of society. That is where we are today.