Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 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
- Supplementary bibliography
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 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
- Supplementary bibliography
- Index
Summary
At this special moment in history, when a Nation discovered and revealed itself; in the year of '89 when, having passed through the fair times of the European Enlightenment, absolutism was collapsing in France in the innocent fires of the first rays of liberty; on this eve of Revolution big with a future in which all the durable regimes to come, even republican ones, aimed at and succeeded in restoring the political old regime by incessantly increasing the scope of the state's dominion, an impersonal power in the hands of professional wielders of power; at this charmed moment when everything seemed possible but common sense suggested the wisdom of limiting change; here let us stop for the moment to take stock.
Nobody in France wanted any more of the absolutist state. The nobility it had created, favoured and pampered, but not satisfied, opened divorce proceedings against it on the basis of an exhaustive range of complaints, resentments and … finding a new partnership. With the Nation, discovered miraculously after long reflection begun under the rod of a champion of reason of state, that ambivalent standard of all despotisms; with the third estate from which they sprang, and whose conflicts and ambitions they tirelessly re-enacted within their own frontiers; with liberty, that hope of peoples who had lived through the fanaticism of their rulers; with the State of their dreams: unburdensome, heedful of the desires of its people, working for them and not for itself, purged of its eternal, frenzied concern for passive obedience, no longer master and tyrant but servant and dependant.
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- Information
- The French Nobility in the Eighteenth CenturyFrom Feudalism to Enlightenment, pp. 166 - 167Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985