Abstract
Reviewed by: Tom Stammers, Durham University, UK
This ambitious and wide-ranging study sets out to produce a ‘radical reversal of nobles’ disappearance from modern French thought’. Building on the author’s previous study of the social and emotional complexion of the aristocracy under the French Third Republic, this book reclaims the nobility as central actors in the making of modern France. This is an unfashionable and beneficial intervention, since it reinstates a dimension of social history which has long been obscured by the one-sided focus on voices from below. Opening with an image of the nobility in disarray after 1789 – as the Brun de Montesquiou family grappled with the pillaging of their residences, the invalidation of their titles, and the slashing of their revenues – the study closes with a vignette from 1946, in which the Association d’entraide de la noblesse française at their annual general meeting scrutinized the documents and genealogy of applicants for membership, applying the same protocols of verification familiar from the Ancien Régime. Through such book-ends, Macknight insists on the ruin but also the reinvention of the French nobility across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the old elites succeeded in not simply preserving their position but implanting their values and symbols within French public life.
This is a fascinating story, lent coherence by the central concept of patrimony. Macknight stresses that this contentious term has both a distinct, legal meaning for nobles – related to the transmission of tangible and intangible goods within the Civil Code – but also a more elastic meaning, tied to the preservation of local and national heritage. The central place of patrimony in nobles’ thinking distinguishes them from the broad grouping of ‘notables’, with whom they have often been indiscriminately lumped together: for instance, concern for patrimony fed into nobles’ concern to protect their archives, bypass the effects of revolutionary law and secure their property against unforeseen vicissitudes, whether through the majorat system of primogeniture (created by Napoleon in 1808), the strategic use of adoption to create new heirs, or the régime dotal (designed to protect a wife’s pre-marital property). Moving beyond these distinct tactics for conserving noble estates, Macknight highlights the central role played by nobles in heritage organizations like La Demeure historique (1924), La Sauvegarde de l’art français (1921) and Vieilles maisons françaises (1958), designed to valorize their ancestral châteaux as a national asset. In moving between the familial and the cultural-political level of analysis, Macknight makes extensive use of the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Monique de Saint Martin on the ‘re-conversion’ of symbolic capital, as well as the writings of Maurice Halbwachs on the function of collective memory.
The great strength of the book is its grounding in archival research from across France. Macknight pleads for and exemplifies the value of engaging with fonds privés housed across provincial France, and her project is constituted from a mosaic of distinct, often obscure, actors and snatches of correspondence. Whilst this can at times feel a little fragmented, the wider analysis is grounded in both a transnational framing – the French nobility is continually compared with its cousins elsewhere in Europe – and scholarly perspectives derived from the longue durée. As a result, Macknight can situate the priorities of the modern French nobility – whether in their dealings with the stewards of their estates (régisseurs), in sourcing discrete channels of credit, or in maintaining ancestral forenames (prénoms) – within a far longer chronological perspective. The weight of cultural memory comes out powerfully in the story of the Comnène family, whose descent from the ruling house of Byzantium was at the root of their claims in the 1830s to the throne of modern Greece. Incidents and genealogies which might seem distant and digressive instead reflect the endurance of familial traditions.
The politics of the nobility over this period proves more elusive, and Macknight rightly stresses that it resists easy generalization. Considering politics primarily as a domain of social and gender relations, the author nonetheless notes the frequent divergence between nobles’ allegiance to the French nation, and their suspicion of the Republic. From a methodological viewpoint, the rich archival findings of the book – aimed at seeing the world sensitively through the protagonists’ eyes – exist in productive tension with a conceptual framework derived from sociology, and which studies the nobility to understand the production of inequality and symbolic domination. This is an exciting and ambitious work, which necessarily rushes over some topics to cover so much ground, but which has thrown up a wealth of stimulating observations and archival leads for future scholars to explore (and which are helpfully identified in the bibliography). Macknight’s study complements the growing stream of revisionist work on the nobilities of modern Europe and builds on important preceding studies by David Higgs and Eric Mension-Rigau. It raises issues of great interest and relevance, re-casting the nobility as not simply vestigial but dynamic actors within post-revolutionary France. By analysing how the symbols of the second estate became brands for modern tourists and consumers, Macknight re-centres the socio-cultural terrain and incisively interrogates the supposedly ‘bourgeois’ character of modernity.