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Journal articles
"Y être, c’est (encore) en être" : déclassement social et aspirations nobiliaires parmi les familles maintenues en noblesse en France sous la Restauration
Abstract : During the French Restoration, 111 families which were on the edge of the “Second
State” at the end of the Ancien Regime succeeded in having their nobility officially
confirmed, whereas 34 lineages were anoblished after asking for letters of confirmation
of nobility. However, some twenty of these applicants were already engaged
in a process of social decline which sometimes took roots in the last decades of the
18th century. This article focuses on the mechanism, forms and stakes of the socioeconomic
downgrading of these peripheral members of the nobiliary world, who did
not hesitate to spotlight their fragile situation as a consequence of their loyalty to
the Bourbon dynasty and to use it as an argument to ask the royal administration
for financial assistance, positions and honours as compensations for what they had
endured during and since the French Revolution. It also stresses on the persistence
of a strong desire for aristocracy among the French post-revolutionary elites: even
if being noble was then a symbolic distinction above all, the applicants for such letter
patents and their descendants still hoped that they could get more or less longterm
profits if they legally reintegrated the nobility – whereas it obviously depended
mostly on their ability to seize the financial, matrimonial, professional, public and
mundane opportunities which were (unequally) presented to them in the 19th-century
society.
https://hal.univ-reims.fr/hal-02964709
Contributor : Bertrand Goujon <>
Submitted on : Monday, October 12, 2020 - 4:18:13 PM
Last modification on : Monday, February 8, 2021 - 2:08:03 PM
Contributor : Bertrand Goujon <>
Submitted on : Monday, October 12, 2020 - 4:18:13 PM
Last modification on : Monday, February 8, 2021 - 2:08:03 PM