Abstract
William Doyle, Aristocracy and its Enemies in the Age of Revolution. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009; viii + 371 pp.; 9780199559855, £38.00 (hbk)
William Doyle describes this as his dream book. Indeed it is – a wonderful evocation of a life’s work on the French aristocracy, elite institutions and social structures. Doyle argues that the Old Regime aristocracy crashed through the circumstances of the Revolution, that almost no one before 1789 had foreseen how profound the crash would be, nor how ironic the recovery or transformation would be either. The douceur de vivre before the Revolution was the envy of continental aristocracies. Europeans eagerly devoured the gossip from the dissolute court at Versailles, always in French, so hegemonic was the language itself. There were critics, of course, but they rarely called into question the principle of noble leadership. Even when they did, wealthy men continued to buy titles and seigneuries. Nobles were a part of the divinely sanctioned order, had always been a part of European history at least since the days of Rome, and nobles served the wider good.
Most criticism came from within the order and most of it was directed at nobles’ failure to live up to high ideals of gentlemanly conduct, military valour, or public-spiritedness. Doyle is very careful not to read the mid-century discussions as presaging the catastrophe to come. Yet the sense of nobles falling short was extensive. Montesquieu, for example, was scathing on the subject of aristocratic ignorance and fecklessness. The well-known debate between the abbé Coyer and the chevalier d’Arc over the noblesse commerçante – very deftly summarized here – reflected concerns about nobles’ failure to contribute to economic growth and their inability to finance their careers. Solutions like that of the Marquis de Mirabeau, who attempted to persuade fellow nobles to return to their true role as landowners, fell on deaf ears. Such concerns about economic vocations in turn reflected the perceived failures of venality of military commissions after the poor performance in mid-century wars.
A generation later, the ideological justification for a separate nobility had collapsed. Mably settled the issue of noble supremacy by arguing that nobles’ role in French history had been almost entirely negative. The Comte de Mirabeau went further in arguing that the natural condition of mankind was equality and that patrician–plebian distinctions were the result of ignorant prejudice. He did a great deal to discredit the Order of the Cinncinatus, a veterans’ group that emerged from the American War of Independence. For Mirabeau and many others, its ideals were too close to hereditary chivalric orders. Mirabeau’s critique used the Cinncinatus to undermine nobility in general. Although other denunciations from Holbach, Beaumarchais and Mercier excited the public, behaviour was considerably different. The price of ennobling offices soared until the last minute while public opinion supported the noble-dominated parlements in the opening phases of the pre-revolution. Noble status still meant something. Even famous denunciations like those of Sieyès, let alone those of lesser authors like Bergasse and Gouvelle had a limited impact.
The crucial point was in 1789. This is where one wishes for a deeper analysis, one that goes further than the book’s strategy of laying out the relevant facts with ongoing commentary. Doyle argues that the sharp deterioration in relations between the nobility and the Third Estate occurred because intemperate remarks and unwise condescension from nobles squandered the goodwill they had earned early in the struggle against ‘despotism’. Instead of seeking an alliance with other property holders, ‘too many of them dreamed of restoring a past, a nobility even, that had never existed’ (202). No doubt, this is a part of the explanation for the nobles’ downfall, but it is not sufficient. The pivotal event, the night of 4 August, has much more intricate components. The peasant insurrection was not the cause but a pretext for the politicians to accomplish things that had been in the lawyers’ cahiers de doléances in the spring. Lawyers, not peasants, had long considered seigneurial jurisdictions to be usurpations. Moreover, the legislation following 4 August abolished things like venal office and provincial privilege that had nothing to do with peasant rebellion.
Despite this caveat, Doyle is brilliant in summarizing the effects of the Revolution on the nobility. It was not all bad. As he observes several times in the recounting of the Revolution and Empire, nobles were not automatic losers in the rearrangement of public and private institutions. With venal office gone, and creations of new nobles increasingly rare after 1815, the surviving nobility’s prestige was higher than ever. Although there were fewer of them, they were probably richer. The abolition of ‘feudalism’ allowed landowners to raise their rents, so they were more than compensated. And, lest we forget, as Doyle reminds us, a ci-devant crowned himself in 1804.