The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century

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-huitieme siecle. 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.

ISBN 027102898X   Pages 328 ISBN13 9780271028989 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Pennsylvania State University Press   Weight (grammes) 649 Imprint Pennsylvania State University Press   Published in Pennsylvania Format Hardback   Height (mm) 229 Publication date 15 Nov 2006   Width (mm) 152 Library of Congress 2006007769   Spine width (mm) 29 DEWEY 305.522094409033   Academic level Undergraduate DEWEY edition DC22

		Introduction : nobility after revisionism		1
1		Economies of consumption : political economy and noble display in eighteenth- century France by Michael Kwass		19
2		A divided nobility : status, markets, and the patrimonial state in the old regime by Gail Bossenga		43
3		The noble profession of Seigneur in eighteenth-century Burgundy by Robert M. Schwartz		77
4		Political economy and the French nobility, 1750-1789 by John Shovlin		111
5		Noble tax exemption and the long-term origins of the French Revolution : the example of Provence, 1530s to 1789 by Rafe Blaufarb		141
6		Women, gender, and the image of the eighteenth-century aristocracy by Mita Choudhury		167
7		Nobles into aristocrats, or how an order became a conspiracy by Thomas E. Kaiser		189
8		A rhetoric of aristocratic reaction? : nobility in De l'Esprit des Lois by Johnson Kent Wright		227
9		The making of an aristocratic reactionary : the Comte d'Escherny, noble honor, and the abolition of nobility by Jay M. Smith		253
10		The memoirs of Lameth and the reconciliation of nobility and revolution by Doina Pasca Harsanyi		279
11		French nobles and the historians, 1820-1960 by Jonathan Dewald		305

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