End of Aristocracy

In a TLS (August 14) review of William Doyle’s recent Aristocracy and Its Enemies in the Age of Revolution , David Armitage made some intriguing comments about the sea change in the fortunes of aristocracy that took place in the 18th century.

For the French, he points out, nobility was not just a class, but a race question: “Many French nobles, supported by their ideological allies among historians, had long argued that they were literally a race apart from other Frenchmen, decendants of the conquering Franks, not of defeated Gauls. To strip them of fiscal privileges was one thing; to extinguish heredity in the name of equality was, ‘in noble eyes . . . nothing less than an attempt to change biology.’”

Thus, the story of the “end” of aristocracy is not just about aristocracy:

“On the eve of the French Revolution, most of the Western world recognized three major biologically transmissible relations of power: aristocracy, monarchy and slavery. In the French case, they fell and rose together,” falling in a brief period from 1790-1794, and rising again between 1802 and 1814. Few historians have treated these issues as manifestations of the same thing, but the “most thoroughgoing egalitarians of the Age of Revolution, like Lafayette and Thomas Paine” did: “nobles, kings and slaves [were] equal affronts to human dignity because their existence derived from the same irrational exclusionary princple: heredity.”

Armitage also summarizes the short-lived American Society of Cincinnati, “created in May 1783 as a league for the veterans of the American War. Membership was to descend perpetually in the male line and would be distinguished by a blue ribbon and a bald-eagle medal.” Benjamin Franklin sounded the alarm, calling it “an Order of hereditary knights, in direct Opposition to the solemnly declared sense of their Country.”

Different as France and America were, the example of America was key for French revolutionaries, since the US (in Doyle’s words) “showed the European world beyond America that a society without nobles was possible, and could work.” American opposition to nobility is enshrined in the Constitution (Article 1, sections 9-10). For all the “conservatism” of the American revolutionaries, Armitage’s review neatly captures just how radical the American experiment was. To European conservatives, the US – with its rejection of throne, throne and altar, and nobility – must have appeared to be an effort to change the operating system of human society.