The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century

The Revolution is often interpreted broadly as the victory of progressive forces over the dead weight of the past. The latter was made up of political conservatism, a retrograde force standing in the way of economic expansion, the rise of the productive classes and the freeing of capital and enterprise from juridical and social constraints linked to a ‘feudal’ structure of society, production and exchange. This interpretation sets up a dichotomy both suggestive and yet unreal between the opposed nobility and bourgeoisie, a ‘feudal’ economy and a ‘bourgeois’ one.

This analysis is particularly persuasive in that it has the appearance of logic on its side and fits in with intellectual patterns that have come down from the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic. To challenge it is therefore to call in question a doctrine that is not the monopoly of one school or party, but which has affected and dominated the whole of modern historical thinking. The result is well known. It gives the French Revolution its meaning and its legitimation. The bourgeoisie, embodying all the productive forces of the future but held back by the constraints of monarchical tradition and blocked by the resistance of a socio-economic system with a vested interest in the maintenance of pre-capitalist structures, was called by an irresistible logic to destroy the type of society whose existence was tied to the maintenance of forms of production passed down from the feudal system.