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Gail Bossenga, The Nobility’s Demise: Institutions, Status, and the Role of the State, The American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 3, June 2019, Pages 942–949, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz314
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Abstract
Drawing on institutional studies of the nobility, this comment argues that understanding status as a type of social power is critical to exploring the abrupt fall of the nobility in 1789. The Bourbon state’s manipulation of status both supported and weakened the nobility in important ways. On the one hand, the sale of ennobling offices, the favored position of nobles at the royal court, and the nobility’s ties to high finance created powerful ties between the state and certain segments of the nobility. On the other hand, this situation also enhanced the state’s control over the nobility’s legal status, engendered acrimonious rifts within the nobility, and provoked charges that the nobility’s honor was being degraded. When war and financial crisis revealed that noble privileges could no longer be sustained by the state, a revolutionary situation arose that led to a transfer of sovereignty and then allowed disaffected members of the National Assembly to abolish privileges and eventually the nobility’s legal status itself.