That the public ethos and code of honour of the nobility remained predominant in early modern French society is now hardly open to challenge, though the implications for regional and national power structures are still being worked out. The nobility was a vast social order accommodating enormous differences of wealth, property, ability and interest; only a small proportion played a leading political role, though military activity continued to provide a function and some income for many more. The relationships which bound together this heterogeneous social group were partly expressed in terms of kinship, partly of the much-discussed notion of clientèle or patronage. Kristen Neuschel, in her study of Condé's circle in Picardy during the 1560s and her subsequent analysis of noble culture based on it, has argued, rightly, against simplistic notions of patronage. Individuals certainly inherited ties of loyalty to great magnates like the Bourbons or Guises, but such ties were not unconditional and, in a province like Picardy with many small fiefs held directly of the crown, feudal ties could be complex and contradictory.

Neuschel, however, in viewing the nobility, like Arlette Jouanna, from the perspective of the intensely chaotic period of the Wars of Religion, has tended to exaggerate its independence and self-sufficiency as well as its own sense of an autonomous legitimacy outside the scope of the crown and of public power. The interdependence of the crown and the French nobility remained indissoluble until the end of the ancien régime.