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Jonathan Dewald, Rethinking the 1 Percent: A Response, The American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 3, June 2019, Pages 950–954, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz575
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Extract
As its title suggests, my essay seeks to situate France’s Old Regime nobility within a broader history of ruling groups’ successes and failures. With so many advantages and powers at their disposal, so many weapons with which to repel challenges, such groups often seem invulnerable to pressures from within their own societies, and indeed many have been dislodged only as a consequence of exogenous and violent events. In the Revolution, however, the French nobility failed in a different way. It lost control of French society without catastrophic pressures from outside, and my essay explores some of the preconditions of that loss. The nobility’s failure, I argue, derived in important ways from long-term changes in its material circumstances: its numbers and incomes, the opportunities open to it, and the demands that it faced. I don’t argue that those changes sufficed to cause revolution, or that they diminish the need for historians to explore the angers and disaffection that led other groups to push so effectively for change. Rather, I seek to illuminate the fact of defensive failure itself, and to understand why the nobles’ social powers didn’t serve them better when challenges came.
