Aristocratic hegemony has often been more precarious and less self-assured than it liked to appear. Aristocratic behavior has been a good deal less pure and unsullied than the lofty principles supposedly guiding it. The history of aristocracies, in fact, is littered with self-serving myths which outsiders have been surprisingly willing to accept uncritically.
It was a form of government “in which more than one, but not many, rule … and it is so called, either because the rulers are the best men, or because they have at heart the best interests of the state and its citizens’. It was thus the rule of a virtuous few; but was easily perverted into mere oligarchy “when it has in view the interests only of the wealthy.” In extreme oligarchy, the governing class “keep offices in their own hands, and the law ordains that the son shall succeed the father.”
The final breakthrough occurred only in 1748, when Montesquieu formally abandoned the Aristotelian taxonomy of states. For him, the 3 basic types were republic, monarchies, and despotism. An aristocracy was merely one type of republic, where the few governed rather than the many. He identified these ruling minorities as nobles, but the true destiny of nobles for Montesquieu lay in monarchies. There they played an essential role as an intermediary power between monarch and subjects, upholding the laws and preventing the state’s degeneration into despotism. His fundamental maxim was “no monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch.”
More usually, the status might be lost if its holder engaged in activities deemed incompatible with nobility. In France, this incurred if a nobleman undertook manual labor or retail trade. The hand that held the sword, the maxim ran, could not also hold a purse. “The proper course for nobility is to live on one’s rents, or at least not to sell one’s efforts or one’s labor.”
From outside, aristocracies can appear uniform and monolithic in their exclusivity. There is nothing equal about their internal arrangements.
The essence of aristocracy is inequality. It rests on the presumption that some people are naturally better than most others. But if nobles are better than commoners, nobles are profoundly differentiated among themselves. Nor is the disdain of any noble for ancestry more recent than his or her own simply a matter of family pride, without material consequences.
The presumed warrior vocation of nobles served as justification for exemption from direct taxation. Nobles paid the “blood tax” and therefore felt entitled to pay no other. One of the long-running themes of early modern history is the constant effort of kings to subject nobles, generally the richest category of their subjects, to taxation. Sooner or later, ways were usually found to tap their wealth indirectly. Direct taxation, however, was fiercely resisted, not only because of the claims it made on noble wealth, but because tax-exemption was the acid test of nobility itself. “No noble is taxable.”
Privileges originated in many different ways. Some, like political representation or tax-exemption, were integral to the concept of nobility. Others were granted by kings to gain support or in capitulation to concerted opposition. Still others were simply sold — a less painful way for rulers to tap wealth than trying to enforce taxes when their coercive power was limited.
Privileges were rights. They were enshrined in law and protected by the courts. Nobles never hesitated to undertake litigation to uphold them, for they were essential appurtenances of aristocratic claims to social superiority. By contrast, the prescribed duties of nobles were minimal and altogether vaguer.
Aristocrats have never taken kindly to compulsion. They have seen themselves as born to command others rather than accept the dictates of superiors. The duty of higher authority in their eyes has been to confirm and uphold their pretensions. Even acceptance of royal supremacy has seldom been more than conditional.
We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign, provided that you observe all our liberties and laws, but if not, not.
Aristocracies believe they have existed since time immemorial. They see themselves as manifestations and beneficiaries of a natural human tendency to accept the leadership of elites of proven superiority.
The scanty and often ambiguous chronicles of these times gave plenty of scope for the invention of embroidery of heroic ancestors.
Nothing compares in noble ideas of distinction to an unbroken line of male descent. But nothing is rarer. In demographic terms, the likelihood that any family will produce surviving male heirs much beyond 3 successive generations is extremely small. Aristocratic priorities have a tendency to diminish it yet further: family sizes have often been deliberately limited in order to protect property from the claims of too many heirs, and the warrior vocation of noblemen exposes them to increased risks.
Few aristocrats have cared to concede that wealth is any sort of qualification for joining their ranks.
In practice, nothing has been more important.
For most of its history, directly or indirectly, entry to nobility has been bought, and in social terms, one of aristocracy’s main historic functions has been to make new money respectable.
Noblemen anxious to refurbish their fortunes have seldom hesitated to seek out and marry the daughters of moneyed commoners offering substantial dowries. It was called “regilding the arms” or, less politely, “restoring the fields with muck,” but it kept replenished not only noble wealth but also the aristocratic gene pool. In any case, being noble is expensive. Nobody without substantial wealth could dream of sustaining the status, and rulers were normally careful to ennoble nobody too poor to keep it up.
Over time humble origins could be blurred and hopefully forgotten. Qualities painstakingly learned could now be taken as innate.
The supreme private duty of a firstborn nobleman is to perpetuate the line, and thereby enhance in the future a family lustre inherited from the past. But maintaining the glory of a family credibly depends on conserving adequate material resources, and much in aristocratic circumstances made this difficult.
Worst placed of all in families of modest means were sisters. Without adequate dowries, they were unmarriageable. Even nunneries often demanded dowries for entry. Accordingly, daughters were commonly regarded in aristocratic families at any level of wealth as a misfortune — a drain on family finances whether they married or not, and either way doing nothing to perpetuate the family name.
The vast majority of nobles preferred to live off agriculture indirectly through rents or the dues and services of serfs. And even where they were not formally prohibited from trading by laws of derogation, nobles were reluctant to soil their hands with commerce.
The poorer the noble, in fact, the more likely he was to despise and avoid the commercial stigma, disdaining the only avenue leading out of genteel penury.
Even the knightly pastime of jousting, supremely violent and dangerous, only died out long after it had lost all military value.
Nobles attracted no shame in refusing the challenge of commoners, and would not dream of issuing one to such lesser beings. But a challenge from a fellow nobleman could not be honorably declined, even when dueling was forbidden by law and a victor who killed his opponent could be prosecuted for murder.
“Our lives and our goods are the king’s. Our souls are God’s, and honor is ours. For over my honor, my king is powerless.”
Honor, in fact, was a license to defy the king and to flout his laws in circumstances of which the nobleman himself was the sole judge.
Virtue normally implies some sort of selflessness, whereas honor was all about self-glorification.
A nobleman himself, Napoleon increasingly sought officers among the “great names” of the old nobility whose family traditions had bred the habit of command.
The irony was that nobles had always enjoyed a reputation for idleness. This was natural enough given their determination not to soil their hands with manual toil, their disdain for industrious or commercial activity, and their preference for ostentatious leisure. But nobles were generally eager for lives of honorable activity.
Aristocracies are essentially pre-industrial elites. Historically, their power has been based on controlling or dominating the main economic resource of almost all societies before the 19th century: land. Even in city republics created and enriched by trade, such as Venice and Genoa, members of the ruling castes were eventually expected to use their wealth to acquire landed estates.
The predominant noble ideal was landed holdings extensive enough to be cultivated by tenants or serfs, paying rents, dues, or labor services to their lord or his agent at a castle or manor house impressive enough to reflect the wealth of ownership and the prestige of lordship. Rich men everywhere with ambitions to achieve ennoblement knew that, sooner or later, they must invest their wealth in land and the lifestyle that went with it.
But the political importance of greater lords dictated that they should spend much of their time in courts and capitals, however grand the country houses they built or embellished to flaunt their authority in the countryside which provided their basic income.
Effortless achievement, or at least the appearance of it, was a treasured aspect of noble display. Superiority ought to be self-evident.
The confidence of kings was the key to power, and they gave it only to men they knew. Great nobles, in turn, felt entitled to that confidence, but to earn it, they needed access to the ruler, to be seen in his company, share his pleasures and diversions, win his attention.
The true qualification for being at court was being able to afford it. A constant round of fashion, lavish entertainments, polite gambling, not to mention the need to follow the monarch on progresses, was ruinously expensive. Most courtier families also felt the need to keep separate town houses in capital cities, places with expensive and fashionable attractions of their own. Even the greatest incomes were strained by such demands, and one of the constant preoccupations of courtiers was to supplement them by handouts to which only they had access — pensions, offices, and well-paid sinecures from the king’s revenues. At this level, the less they could afford to be at court, the more they needed to be there.
The inequality fundamental to any idea of nobility did as much to divide nobles from one another as from the majority of the population.
Even the oldest, most elevated, not to say opulent, families would swallow their pride at the prospect of heiresses of inferior status but richer than themselves.
Nobles themselves were not deceived. They could recognize their own when they saw them, however different.
Nobles would not hesitate to punish lack of respect with violence.
The outbreak of an anti-aristocratic revolution spelled economic disaster for the manufacturers and tradesmen of France’s first and second cities. One of the many motives of Napoleon in setting up a glittering court of titled dignitaries was to restore the prosperity of the luxury trades. On the other hand, the grand French tradition of fine dining takes its origin from restaurants established by the unemployed cooks of great families brought low by revolutionary persecution.
There was also the influence of example. When the richest, most powerful, and most eye-catching members of society made a point of despising trade and industry as demeaning, nobody with dreams of social advancement was likely to embrace them with any enthusiasm, or to keep on with them a moment longer than they need.
Many were also bought with borrowed money that might otherwise have been invested more adventurously. It is true that aristocratic dominion did not prevent the commercial and industrial breakthroughs that made Great Britain the first modern economy. But what might well have kept more capital than elsewhere in the hands and enterprises of commoners was the difficulty of acquiring land in a market immobilized by rising rents, primogeniture, and entail. When they could, however — even when Great Britain was the “workshop of the world” — successful British industrialists showed themselves as eager as ever to buy country estates, build or extend mansions, adopt the leisured lifestyle, and send their sons to public schools to learn to be true gentlemen and bury their commercial origins.
Maximizing rental for minimal outlay was the consistent aim of most landlords, and they were seldom prepared to forgo immediate revenue by reinvesting for long-term gains.
There was extensive noble investment in British and French slavery, while the more prosperous slave traders and Caribbean planters often used their profits to used their profits to buy into landed estates and the aristocratic lifestyle back in Europe.
Aristocrats were always quick to claim that merit was inseparable from their true nature. What they meant by merit, however, was not some objective quality, but success in behaving as aristocrats should. Merit in commoners meant doing the same. Advancement under the rule of aristocracy, however, depended not on ability but influence, contacts, patronage, “protection,” or what in Great Britain was called “interest.” The aristocratic way was nepotism, a preference for promoting and doing business with people like themselves, and best of all their own kin.
So long as aristocrats ruled, those in power felt no incentive to find objective ways of identifying ability and aptitude. Their every instinct, after all, inclined them to believe that these qualities were most likely to be hereditary.
The warrior origins of aristocratic power, and the primacy always accorded in aristocratic ideology to martial courage and achievements, gave nobles a vested interest in warfare. In the Middle Ages, great magnates were invariably warlords, supporting their pretensions with private armies of retainers. Kings offended them at their peril, and during minorities or when rulers themselves lacked warlike qualities, baronial rivalries could plunge whole realms into civil war.
For officers, a state of war meant full employment rather than half-pay. It meant activity and excitement rather than the boredom of garrison life. It also brought the only chance of accelerated promotion, and the opportunity to accumulate unexpected fortunes. And for the magnates who normally monopolized high command, war was the opportunity to immortalize themselves and add lustre to the annals of their families.
Nobilities therefore constituted a relentless, steady source of pressure pushing states towards resolving their differences on the battlefield. Noble pacifists have always been a relative rarity, and monarchs or ministers seeking to resolve differences peaceably, objects of contempt. When the French revolutionaries bade defiance to the whole of Europe, nobles everywhere clamored to teach the upstarts a lesson.
Although nobles have always expected deference and acceptance of the social hierarchy of which they were the summit, they have usually been much more ambivalent about supreme political authority. The dictates of honor acknowledge no higher law; and in medieval times kings were seen as little more than first among equals, scarcely more than the most successful among competing warlords. Aristocratic obedience to them was therefore seldom more than conditional. Baronial rebellion defied kings who claimed too much authority. Sometimes it culminated in their overthrow and replacement by a less assertive scion of the royal house. More often, a defeated monarch surrendered by accepting formal constraints on his power.
But everywhere monarchs at their coronations customarily swore to observe certain fundamental laws, and nobles were the only people powerful enough to hold them to their word.
Nobles all over the Continent came to realize that representative bodies (particularly if they represented people like themselves) were more likely to be effective in restraining kings than sporadic rebellion, and rulers for their part recognized that to secure consent for their demands was better than facing down rebellions.
Organized religion endorsed and legitimized hierarchy and subordination, promising rewards hereafter for injustices and pains patiently endured in life. Or, as Napoleon put it with characteristic bluntness, the mystery of religion was the mystery of the social order.
Nobles were the main ultimate beneficiaries of the massive plunder of ecclesiastical wealth and dissolution of monasteries which occurred in realms which turned Protestant. It was as if they were repossessing wealth alienated to a church they no longer acknowledged. Once they had done so, they had a strong material interest in perpetuating the new order in religion.
At the theater, and in that supreme entertainment designed to delight courtiers, opera, the leading characters were almost all noble.
No quality as important as ancestry could go visually unrecorded, and artists found that portraiture was incomparably the best paid and most reliable form of painting. For a non-noble to commission a portrait was a sure sign of social ambition.
Even rebels who slaughtered nobles scarcely glimpsed the possibility of a world without lords. What enraged them was not lordship as such, but abuse of it; nobles who did not behave as they should, who charged exorbitant rents, who changed the nature of their exactions, who made new and uncustomary demands, who entrusted their authority to profiteering middlemen, who neglected a duty of care to their tenants, vassals, or serfs.
Benjamin Franklin, American minister in Paris, had always declared that claims to hereditary distinction were “a mere joke.” He produced calculations to show that little of any ancestor’s blood flowed in anybody’s veins after only a few generations.
The revolutionaries proclaimed equality before the law, equality before the taxman, and equality of opportunity.
In England, meanwhile, country house building was largely abandoned, and owners began to sell land and other assets such as libraries of works of art, putting whatever profits they made in a depressed market into the sort of liquid assets that most of their ancestors would have shunned.
The classes that represent civilization have a right to require securities to protect them from being overwhelmed by hordes who have neither knowledge to guide them nor stake in the commonwealth to control them.
As changes in transport technology pulverized traditional forms of wealth, men made rich my finance, trade, and industry were now, for the first time in history, richer than even the greatest landlords. Noble families whom chance had endowed with coal or mineral deposits, or estates in the path of expanding cities, might continue to amass fabulous fortunes, but the rest were increasingly outshone by men of business. And if the latter still acquired country houses, they did not maintain them by the profits of agriculture.
Most historians have found this thesis more stimulating than convincing.
Across the water, as death duties on land were raised during and after the war to punitive levels, demoralized landowners offloaded more acres between 1918 and 1922 than had changed hands int ha comparable period since the 1530s. Great houses were increasingly seen as costly white elephants, and large number were sold, demolished, or offered to the National Trust in return for continued family tenancy.