The French Nobility in the Renaissance

Abstract

The relationship between the nobility and the crown, in an Ancien Regime society still largely dominated by landed wealth, has naturally played a part in attempts to explain the construction of Absolutism. Augustin Thierry argued in 1850 that the alliance of the crown and the bourgeoisie from the thirteenth century onwards created the modern state and started the destruction of the ‘powers and privileges of the feudal order … to the profit of the king and the people’. For Maulde-la-Clavière, the years around 1500 saw the disappearance of an ‘aristocracy’ and its replacement by a ‘nobility’ endowed with anachronistic privileges, to act as the crown’s satellite and people its antechambers.¹ The idea that the history of France can be explained in simple terms of class alliances or deliberate subordination is no longer easily sustainable.² Allied to such arguments is the view that the upheavals of the later sixteenth century were a noble reaction to indebtedness incurred during the period of the Renaissance.³ This is a view certainly expressed at the time both by Venetian ambassadors in trying to explain the troubles and by military memoirist La Noue. To some extent it underlies the description of the later sixteenth century as a ‘crisis’ of the nobility, in terms both of wealth and of self-esteem, which generated a substantial literature on the theme of what it was to be noble.⁴