The French edition of La noblesse au XVIIIc siècle ended there. That decision seemed justified by the unity I wished to give to an argument which the cahiers of 1789 seemed to round off. To go further would have been to write another book, take another course, and broach new research on the nobility in the Revolution. So the book in a sense stopped short, leaving the reader still hungry and, given what was known of the attitude of the majority of the nobility since the meeting of the Estates-General, took a line which seemed to give the lie to all later developments. So it seems useful, for the English-language reader, to add some explanations which I hope will resolve this apparent contradiction.

The nobility is more or less roundly associated in France with ideas of counter-revolution, emigration and plots. It is no part of my intention, to be sure, to deny the reality of the reaction, or even to attempt to play it down. But what needs to be explained is both the reason for a turnabout which might be found surprising, and the breadth of a conversion that nothing seemed to presage. Since the nobility throughout the eighteenth century had shown itself hostile to absolutism, and expressed in its cahiers a liberalism and a wish to see the regime transform itself into a constitutional monarchy tightly controlled by a national assembly, it can only come as a surprise to see it flying to the help of this same absolutism and fanatically opposing all the decrees of the Constituent Assembly.

Baron d'Andlau decided to pay court to the future Mme de Genlis. Being a man of courtesy, and very attentive, before his visit he sent his best compliments and a little gift: his genealogy. When Monsieur de la Bedoyère married Agathe Sticoti, a showgirl, he was sued by his own family. Mlle de Comminges refused to marry the comte d'Effiat; she thought his family name of Coiffier (hairdresser) too comical. Nor would her sister consider the marquis de Porcelet; the arms of this old-established family showed three wild boars, and made people think of pigs. The marquise de l'Hospital refused the comte de Choiseul, even though he was an eldest son. Of course, she had a sound reason: the count's arms were on a blue field like her own, and red would have gone with them so much better! Maréchal de Richelieu was worried that some might question the length of his ancestry, and so married Mlle de Guise. What he loved were her crosses of Lorraine and her golden eaglets.

Concern for armorial bearings, the search for ennobling wombs, astonishing misalliances. But beyond the anecdotes we can see the outlines of marriage policies. Not all were so eccentric. In the last analysis, those were the exceptions. In a society organised into clans, marriage was as much a matter for families as for the two individuals themselves. Matches were arranged like alliances between two kingdoms.

May 1789. The Estates-General met at Versailles. The three orders processed ceremonially. The second order, the nobility, shone with all the brilliance of gold-embroidered coats and capes, white-plumed hats, and engraved ceremonial swords. Alongside the nobility the third estate was dark and sombre, a sorry sight. Yet: brilliant as it still appeared, still today at the head of the procession, the nobility could already feel the cold wind of defeat.

It had become, by imperceptible stages which had mostly escaped its notice, a marginal minority in French society, under sentence. In 1789 nobles were the kingdom's Jews.

To be sure, the nobility still exercised an irresistible attraction, and for broad areas of opinion it was the only model. Its code of honour, its ritual refined from the politeness born of court ceremonies, its style, behaviour and way of life, were still dominant. Nobility remained the supreme ambition of the unrepentantly elitist middle classes, who saw in ennoblement a way of escaping the confusions which ranked them with the most despised elements of a third estate with which fundamentally they felt so little in common. But, at the same time as it engendered social imitation, the nobility aroused envy and indeed hostility, mingled with feelings of frustration and anxiety in the face of a group ill-understood, perceived as alien, and easily enough as antagonistic. This sharp awareness of difference, no doubt stronger among non-nobles than nobles themselves, could and indeed soon did give rise to delusions which the ‘aristocratic plots’ of the Revolution would bring to the surface.

At this special moment in history, when a Nation discovered and revealed itself; in the year of '89 when, having passed through the fair times of the European Enlightenment, absolutism was collapsing in France in the innocent fires of the first rays of liberty; on this eve of Revolution big with a future in which all the durable regimes to come, even republican ones, aimed at and succeeded in restoring the political old regime by incessantly increasing the scope of the state's dominion, an impersonal power in the hands of professional wielders of power; at this charmed moment when everything seemed possible but common sense suggested the wisdom of limiting change; here let us stop for the moment to take stock.

Nobody in France wanted any more of the absolutist state. The nobility it had created, favoured and pampered, but not satisfied, opened divorce proceedings against it on the basis of an exhaustive range of complaints, resentments and … finding a new partnership. With the Nation, discovered miraculously after long reflection begun under the rod of a champion of reason of state, that ambivalent standard of all despotisms; with the third estate from which they sprang, and whose conflicts and ambitions they tirelessly re-enacted within their own frontiers; with liberty, that hope of peoples who had lived through the fanaticism of their rulers; with the State of their dreams: unburdensome, heedful of the desires of its people, working for them and not for itself, purged of its eternal, frenzied concern for passive obedience, no longer master and tyrant but servant and dependant.

It matters little in itself whether there were 100,000 nobles or 500,000. Like every elite, the old regime nobility defined itself not so much by volume as by weight, by structure rather than by numerical strength. What mattered was its social density. If its influence, its role in the state and its weight in public life had been reduced to the exact level and proportion of its numbers, it would have been nothing in a Nation of 26 millions. But an elite is measured by its dynamism; its existence is linked to the image made of it by the society which secretes and encapsulates it. It is rooted in the magic of social symbolism, as something worth competing for, and/or imitating. Part of its survival depends on the aspiration or the capacity of outsiders to copy and/or challenge it, to admire and/or oppose it, to join and/or supplant it; and part depends on the credibility of its chosen image. This needs to be all the more sound when, as in the case of the old regime nobility, the elite is better defined, its frontiers more rigorous, and the barrier separating it from outsiders institutionalised and juridically defined. In this case it must match a more-or-less imaginary model based on myth.

Thus the nobility's existence was rooted in two concepts both objective and mythic: race and history, twin mirrors in which all nobility was reflected, two poles in which the distinctive worthiness of the elite was invested.

The eighteenth century can be characterised in a number of different ways. Whether it was a great bourgeois century or a great noble one, it was certainly the century of Enlightenment. But what divergent trends had produced this Enlightenment? Viewed as a bourgeois frame of mind, produced by an expansive social class coming up against the resistance of a society too rigid to accommodate its appetite for power, the Enlightenment looks very like the ideology of a frustration complex. Doubtless this is a one sided and socially unbalanced definition, but it does convey the sense of seemingly inbuilt dissatisfaction which scarred the consciousness and fertilised the thought of a century which ended in permanent revolution, and which spoke, felt, reasoned, and fantasised about revolution, in the written word and even in music, before it committed the act which made revolution a reality.

But who were the authors of this overture to both the exultation and the fury of the revolution? Who were the frustrated ones, the leaders, the prophets of the great shining tomorrow that would bring forth a new world? Were they bourgeois? They could not fail to be. In a society which seemed to be gaily burying the old aristotelian categories which stood in its way, how could the bourgeoisie, an elite already competing for power, not play a leading role in planning the changes? We need only mention Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Raynal, Sieyès.

At the end of the old regime divisions according to length of nobility or its degree of dignity, which so obsessed Saint-Simon, were in fact negligible beyond a certain social level. At Court, newcomers mingled with members of the oldest houses and the highest in dignity. The quarrels over precedence which had taken up so much of the time of dukes and peers at the Court of Louis XIV were now only exceptional occurrences. The hierarchy had stopped measuring itself by exclusive reference to divine right.

With the defeat of polysynodie the peerage was forced to give up any ambition to control the state, dukes confined themselves to positions of honour, and the secretaries of state, those ‘petty persons’ or ‘nonentities’ (that is, holders of recent nobility), recovered the power they had wielded at the height of Louis XIV's reign. The Court had lost its heavenly image: the Father in the full splendour of his glory, the princes of the blood-royal standing as the model of the Son, sharing His being, and the peers, the elect, mediators and grateful intermediaries between the Father and his people. This Court, at once medieval and modern, presented a Biblical picture of a King-Father who was lofty and an object of fear, but who was humanised and as it were democratised by the glory he had granted to the peers of his realm, chosen by his will alone from among the most trusty and deserving of his people.

The cahiers de doléances – grievance lists which constitute the last will and testament of the old France – are the widest, most detailed and truest test of opinion ever made in ancien régime France, and we might add that we have no comparable survey for any other period in the country's history.

This picture of the French outlook is exemplary in more ways than one. It covers the whole country, from the remotest villages in the cold lands of the Auvergne and the Pyrenees, down to the fertile plains and urbanised regions. More important still, it gives us the opinion of different groups in the population; not a dubious amalgam in which undifferentiated social levels are mixed up and lose all identity, but a separate picture for each functional group under the traditional division of society into orders. Although at the level which concerns us here, that of the bailliages, this system has the disadvantage for the third estate of overestimating the weight of educated town dwellers as opposed to the rural population, for my purpose its advantage is clear: the nobility alone drew up their own cahiers. So their picture is neither warped nor filtered. It certainly did happen that the third estate and the nobility were sufficiently aware of the closeness and similarity of their demands to draw up their cahiers in common. In practice, this coming together would have happened more frequently if the third and the nobility had been the only ones involved.

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.

All that experience and human intelligence had thought up, discovered and elaborated over three centuries may be found in the cahiers. The various abuses of the old monarchy are there set out, and remedies proposed; all forms of freedom are called for, even press freedom; improvements of all sorts requested for industry, manufactures, trade, roads, the army, taxation, state finances, schools, physical education, etc.

Even today we cannot fail to get this impression that the cahiers at one and the same time pushed back and fixed the limits of political liberation, when the most tolerant regimes are still far from bringing about all the aspirations that 1789 let loose. Complete freedom of the press and habeas corpus are still, two centuries after the meeting of the Estates-General, unmet demands. It is, then, well worthwhile to dwell for a moment on these cahiers which set out, for France and further afield, until now and perhaps still for tomorrow, a social ideal based on the dignity of mankind and respect for the individual, a society in which the state would not be some monstrous and intolerant Leviathan grinding down the citizen the better to enslave him in the name of a dubious efficiency, but a harmonious compromise between necessary authority and reasonable freedoms. How could we not reflect a moment on this plan for society which met some resistance almost everywhere even before its promise came to fulfilment?

The old regime is commonly defined as one in which a hierarchy of orders existed together. So there is a strong temptation to think of the nobility as a homogeneous, structured and unified whole. However, a mere glance at the lack of cultural homogeneity and the bitterness of the antagonisms that seethed within the order leads one to wonder whether, as in the case of the third estate, the term order does not take in – even juridically – circumstances so different as to be irreducible to a single definition. The rights of a lord high justiciar, or those of a great officer of the Crown, should in no case be ranked with the slender and often theoretical privileges of a petty squire. Nor did either side mistake matters: there was no equality between them, and perhaps no sympathy or solidarity either.

It is true that in France there was no popular nobility, and the definition was the same for all. There was nothing like the nobility enjoyed in Poland by every man who had remained free when serfdom was generalised, or like the nobility of the Basque country which was based on the absence of Muslim forebears. However, a petty nobility did exist and they were aware of their individuality and apartness: it would be ludicrous to confuse them with the high nobility which never mingled its blood with theirs. This in fact was a decisive characteristic; different levels of nobility did not mix.