The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment

Description

One of the most lively of France's younger historians, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret argues in this pioneering essay that the traditional picture of the pre-revolutionary French nobility as a caste of intransigent reactionaries and parasites is a fabrication of revolutionary propaganda. Using a whole range of new research and calculations, he argues that the nobility represented all that was most vigorous and forward-looking in eighteenth-century French society. Constantly renewing itself by recruiting the richest members of the middle classes or marrying their daughters, the nobility was in the forefront of French economic and intellectual life, and until 1789 was at the head of the movement for reform of the old regime state. In an afterword specially written for the English edition, the author explains how the revolutionaries came to turn against a group that had done more than any other to bring about the Revolution Introduction: the gilded ghetto of royal nobility 1. The Enlightenment and noble ideology 2. The nobility between myth and history 3. Plutocrats and paupers 4. The fundamental divide: culture 5. The nobility and capitalism 6. Rites and strategies: the marriage market 7. The nobility against the Old Regime 8. A plan for society Conclusion Afterword to the English edition Notes Bibliography Index.