Description

In recent decades, scholarship on the Old Regime nobility has emphasized the group’s enduring power and its successful adaptation to changing circumstances. This interpretive orientation (which perhaps owes something to our contemporary experiences of ruling class tenacity) has had a significant impact on interpretations of modernity’s founding event, the French Revolution of 1789. In particular, it has encouraged viewing the Revolution as fundamentally the product of ideas and values, rather than of changes in French society.

This paper presents an alternative perspective, exploring indicators of the nobility’s decay over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The analysis starts with the nobility’s numbers, which declined sharply after 1650, then moves to questions of family organization, the economics of state service, and the returns on the nobility’s most important resource, land. The French nobility, the paper suggests, had owed many of its successes to specific political circumstances; as these changed, it changed also.