Originally published in 1960. This is a regional study of the nobility of Toulouse in the eighteenth century. The complex notion of class and the peculiarities of each region in France during the Ancien Régime make it difficult for historians to render a general portrait of the provincial French aristocracy. This study describes the economic interests and investments of noblemen in Toulouse. Some of their activities follow the classic pattern of "seigniorial reaction" and thus illustrate ideas posed by Marc Bloch. Others suggest that the Toulousian gentlemen were conscientious landlords. The Toulousian noble was essentially a gentilhomme campagnard, a country gentleman, in regard to his source of revenue, his outlook, and his mode of living. This book should make clear the full meaning of this expression.

Historians have long been fascinated by the nobility in pre-Revolutionary France. What difference did nobles make in French society? What role did they play in the coming of the Revolution? In this book, a group of prominent French historians shows why the nobility remains a vital topic for understanding France’s past. The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century appears some thirty years after the publication of the most sweeping and influential “revisionist” assessment of the French nobility, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret’s La noblesse au dix-huitième siècle. The contributors to this volume incorporate the important lessons of Chaussinand-Nogaret’s revisionism but also reexamine the assumptions on which that revisionism was based. At the same time, they consider what has been gained or lost through the adoption of new methods of inquiry in the intervening years. Where, in other words, should the nobility fit into the twenty-first century’s narrative about eighteenth-century France? The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century will interest not only specialists of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution, and modern European history but also those concerned with the differences in, and the developing tensions between, the methods of social and cultural history. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Rafe Blaufarb, Gail Bossenga, Mita Choudhury, Jonathan Dewald, Doina Pasca Harsanyi, Thomas E. Kaiser, Michael Kwass, Robert M. Schwartz, John Shovlin, and Johnson Kent Wright.

First published in 2006. This book is based on research into estate records and studies around the three broad categories of landowners: peers, gentry, and freeholders. Landed property was the foundation of eighteenth-century society. The soil itself yielded the nation its sustenance and most of its raw materials, and provided the population with its most extensive means of employment; and the owners of the soil derived from its consequence and wealth the right to govern.

This analysis of the provincial reality of absolutism argues that the relationship between the regional aristocracy and the crown was a key factor in influencing the traditional social system of seventeenth century France.

A study of the paradoxical position of French nobility just before the French Revolution