The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century

This fine volume of essays on the nobility in the later eighteenth century is a most welcome addition to the existing literature. It comprises eleven essays by American historians whose research engages with the concept of nobility. The collection issues from a conference in 2004 and reflects the cultural turn in historiography that has such sway, particularly in America. There is a stimulating introduction by Jay Smith, whose excellent recent study of the discourse of patriotism with regard to the nobility is in a closely related field. [1] Nine of the eleven essays here could be said to deal with representations of the nobility, and all of them are written with an eye to explaining the relationship of the nobility to the coming Revolution. Overall, the focus is on how the nobility became increasingly open to criticisms that tended to empower other groups in society and deprive the nobility of some of its legitimacy. The approach reflects current North American work, and is quite distinct from that of current French work. The latter tends to focus in a far more archival way upon social, economic and cultural practices to the detriment of discursive constructions, and stresses that the noblesse is best viewed as a set of relationships that reflect numerous national and localised groups whose boundaries are often unclear and whose differences are often as great as their similarities. [2] Eighteenth-century royal genealogists like Bernard Chérin (1718–1785), and Antoine Maugard (1739-1817), were keenly aware of how fragmented the nobility was and fretted over the impossibility of arriving at perfectly sound criteria to define noble status. [3] There is also a substantial revival of the political and social history of the parlements taking place in France. [4] The upshot is that everywhere revisionism has been shown to be based upon insufficiently deep research and has long been in need of considerable revision itself, in the sense of introducing much greater refinement and complexity.