Les Noblesses en France. Du XVIe au milieu du XIXe siecle

One of France’s leading authorities on nobles and nobilities, Michel Figeac offers a long-term overview of the changing structures, fortunes, and values of nobility in France from the late middle ages until the July Monarchy. His title is indicative of one of the book’s main themes: that there was never a unitary nobility at any time over this period, and that the overall character of this fragmented millefeuille (as he engagingly calls it) changed almost beyond recognition, not only though the trauma of the Revolution, but also in ways just as significant over the three centuries preceding that great upheaval. Figeac’s synthesis builds on the work of several recent generations of scholars in every phase of the long period it covers, and, in a way at last becoming normal in France, he take extensive account of researches published in English as well as French. He made his name writing about the eighteenth-century nobility, building on doctoral work in and about the Bordeaux region. Bordelais examples abound throughout the new survey, both from the author’s own findings and those of his students and local colleagues. But he also draws widely on studies of other localities, all of which serve to underline yet further the diversity of French nobles, not just over time, but geographically. Some of his most lively pages are actually not on his own period but on the very different circumstances of the sixteenth century. While not fully endorsing the arguments of the late Ellery Schalk on changing conceptions of what it meant to be noble, he finds that it was very easy to win acceptance at the time of the Italian Wars, given simply the means to mount and equip oneself and perform deeds of valour beyond the Alps for the king. Money carefully spent on acquiring land and fiefs could also confer, over time, what Figeac calls noblesse taisible, nobility silently assumed or, as later generations would say, usurped. The wars of religion, inconceivable without noble leadership on all sides, offered further unprecedented opportunities for rising rapidly, even if they forced many nobles to reappraise where their cultural loyalties lay. And meanwhile, below the ideological level, a practice was spreading which would bring many of the ambiguities of Valois times to an end: ennoblement by venal office. The reign of the first Bourbon brought the edict on the taille (1600), defining from above, more clearly than ever before, what a noble was; the first use of the term noblesse de robe (1602); and (though Figeac does not mention it) the institution of the Paulette (1604) which allowed venally acquired nobility to be transmitted unhampered down the generations. All this signalled a royal determination to take control of nobility and what it meant, which culminated in the great searches for false nobles under Louis XIV. Now there was no nobility without proofs, and royal officials, not nobles themselves, decided on their validity.

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