Early eighteenth-century society, as mirrored by Saint Simon and Lord Harvey, by the family papers of the Russells or the Wyndhams, by the correspondence of the duke of Berwick or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, seemed predominantly aristocratic and French. This impression is supported by castles in Sweden and palaces in and around Vienna, by portraits and libraries and famous collections of porcelain in England and in Russia. However, the impression is rather different if one considers Fleet Street, Liverpool and Bristol rather than St James's, Welbeck and Woburn; Rennes and Marseilles rather than Versailles; or Hamburg and Frankfurt-am-Main rather than Potsdam, Karlsruhe and Mannheim. It then appears that, even in the first half of the eighteenth century, economic forces were already in operation which tended to make the urban middle class increasingly numerous and powerful, and that French ideas and fashions were already being challenged from England, the German cities and even from the non-European world.

The social prestige of the aristocrats in the early eighteenth century was, however, undoubtedly very great. In most countries high office in the army, at court and in the diplomatic service was filled almost exclusively by members of that order. In most of Europe the aristocrats were marked off from the third estate by the right to display armorial bearings, as for example on the panels of their carriages, or, as in Spain, carved conspicuously over the main entrance to a town house. In most countries, though here the practice in England was peculiar, all descendants of aristocrats were still further differentiated from other people by the hereditary use of a title.