The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches
Sophia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette (Sony) brought eighteenth-century France into the limelight in the same year that this scholarly book was published. One might venture to say that their target audiences overlap, and that people who have bought the DVD might also have bought this book. This collection of essays brings together a variety of scholarly perspectives on the subject of the French nobility. It also surveys historical arguments written in the twentieth century, neatly defining a movement from Marxist to revisionist to post-revisionist histories of eighteenth-century France and the French Revolution.
The book roars to a start with Michael Kwass’s analysis of the clothing to be worn by the members of each estate at the historic sitting of the Estates-General in the spring of 1789. It makes what one could call a political companion piece to Caroline Weber’s Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). In his “Economies of Consumption,” Kwass shows that for the men of France, just as for the women, social distinctions were registered by the “color, fabric, style, and trimming” of clothing (19). Kwass then traces the criticism of excessive luxury in the works of writers like Rousseau and Mirabeau, as a significant element in attacks on the lives of the nobility, and in a parallel way on the court of the King.
Using the theories of Max Weber, Gail Bossenga takes a different approach to the question of status, discussing the effect of the marketplace and the expansion of consumer goods in creating a climate of social mobility, which included the creation and sale of new titles of nobility. Robert M. Schwartz’s essay on “The Noble Profession of Seigneur in Eighteenth-Century Burgundy” continues this line of inquiry in a study of the actual business of a noble seigneur and the management of farms and properties: “For these nobles, a key element of individual and group identity was managing the seigneurie” (106).
John Shovlin draws attention to the surprising fact that members of the nobility wrote one third of the nearly three thousand tracts on the political economy published in the second half of the century, as shown by Jean-Claude Perrot. But, the nobility were given little credit for this knowledge and expertise, and the “attack on aristocracy unleashed in 1789 made little distinction between the thrifty provincial noble living on his estate and the courtly grandee wallowing in luxury” (135). In the next essay, Rafe Blaufarb provides a case study of how taxation and the handling of property undermined the nobility in Provence. Mita Choudhury then considers the role of the abbess, a position usually held by one of noble lineage. Taking a particular legal case from 1769 as her example, she discusses negative characterizations of abbesses, which were based partly on social class differences.
In “Nobles into Aristocrats, or How an Order Became a Conspiracy,” Thomas E. Kaiser reviews the revisionist argument that emphasized the common ground between liberal members of the nobility and those in the Third Estate, and searches for historical reasons that led to the abolition of noble titles in June 1790. He also investigates the connotative meaning of the word “aristocrat,” an issue touched on by other contributors as well. One is reminded of the comment by the British author Helen Maria Williams who observed during her visit to France in 1790 that the term aristocrat had come to stand for “Every thing tiresome or unpleasant” (Letters from France, volume one, letter ten). In the next chapter, a line of inquiry similar to Kaiser’s is pursued by Johnson Kent Wright, who centers his study on the work and influence of Montesquieu and the relationship between the monarch and the nobility.
Near the end of the book, the focus changes to the writing of individual noblemen. Jay M. Smith focuses on the Comte D’Escherny and starts by analyzing Escherny’s repudiation of the decree against the nobles and views this in light of a longstanding sense of the contrast between a good noble and a bad noble, or an aristocrat. Smith cites an interesting passage from the Comte D’Antraigues who views nostalgically a feudal manor that represents all that can be good about a virtuous nobility:
A thousand times more sweet were my sensations on finding, amid abandoned ruins, an old manor in all its gothic beauty . . . When I enter these manors, with their long and dark halls, when I see these massive chimneys that gathered the entire family around a hot fire, I feel as though I’m leaving my century. (267)
These insightful first-hand remarks add great depth and interest to Smith’s essay. A somewhat different tone emerges in Doina Pasca Harsanyi’s discussion of memoirs of the Revolution, and the work of Alexander de Lameth in particular. Lameth is a controversial figure who, hostile to his own privileged class, made the chilling argument that the nobles had only themselves to blame for their walk to the guillotine.
The book concludes with the essay “French Nobles and the Historians, 1820-1960,” in which Jonathan Dewald provides an excellent overview of scholarship in the field. He states from the outset “In this essay I will say little about real-life nobles or about the real functioning of Old Regime Society. Instead, I will address a series of questions about how historians have approached the French nobility” (305). Perhaps most significant is that Dewald’s survey reveals the disproportionate influence of unsympathetic representations of noble life, a type of burden of the past for those writing today.
Indeed, the triumph of Sophia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette rests on her creation of a flesh and blood title character, a very human young queen. This scholarly book has just enough glimpses of real life to allow the voices of the French nobility to be heard amidst the discussions of historians. Both Jonathan Dewald and Jay M. Smith in his introduction look forward to future research and debates, and such scholarship will be indebted to the lucid essays in this collection.
