The French nobility in the eighteenth century : reassessments and new approaches / edited by Jay M. Smith.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Smith, Jay M., 1961- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nobility--France--Historiography.

Nobility.

Nobility--France--History--18th century.

Social classes--France--History--18th century.

Social classes.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (358 p.)

Place of Publication:

University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2006]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Historians have long been fascinated by the nobility in pre-Revolutionary France. What difference did nobles make in French society? What role did they play in the coming of the Revolution? In this book, a group of prominent French historians shows why the nobility remains a vital topic for understanding France’s past. The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century appears some thirty years after the publication of the most sweeping and influential “revisionist” assessment of the French nobility, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret’s La noblesse au dix-huitième siècle. The contributors to this volume incorporate the important lessons of Chaussinand-Nogaret’s revisionism but also reexamine the assumptions on which that revisionism was based. At the same time, they consider what has been gained or lost through the adoption of new methods of inquiry in the intervening years. Where, in other words, should the nobility fit into the twenty-first century’s narrative about eighteenth-century France? The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century will interest not only specialists of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution, and modern European history but also those concerned with the differences in, and the developing tensions between, the methods of social and cultural history. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Rafe Blaufarb, Gail Bossenga, Mita Choudhury, Jonathan Dewald, Doina Pasca Harsanyi, Thomas E. Kaiser, Michael Kwass, Robert M. Schwartz, John Shovlin, and Johnson Kent Wright.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Nobility After Revisionism

I. Nobility and Economy

1. Economies of Consumption: Political Economy and Noble Display in Eighteenth-Century France

2. A Divided Nobility: Status, Markets, and the Patrimonial State in the Old Regime

3. The Noble Profession of Seigneur in Eighteenth-Century Burgundy

4. Political Economy and the French Nobility, 1750 –1789

II. Nobility and Political Culture

5. Noble Tax Exemption and the Long-Term Origins of the French Revolution: The Example of Provence, 1530s to 1789

6. Women, Gender, and the Image of the Eighteenth-Century Aristocracy

7. Nobles into Aristocrats, or How an Order Became a Conspiracy

III. Nobility and "Aristocratic Reaction"

8. A Rhetoric of Aristocratic Reaction? Nobility in De l’Esprit des Lois

9. The Making of an Aristocratic Reactionary: The Comte d’Escherny, Noble Honor, and the Abolition of Nobility

10. The Memoirs of Lameth and the Reconciliation of Nobility and Revolution

IV. Nobility and Modernity

11. French Nobles and the Historians, 1820 –1960

For Further Reading

List of Contributors

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780271049953

0271049952

9780271035871

0271035870

OCLC:

316642775