The cultural identity of the Belgian nobility

Historical Social Research, 2008

Elite Formation in the Other Europe . This special issue of Historical Social Research offers a selection of the papers presented at the international conference on "Elite Formation, Modernization and Nation Building", which took place on 4-6 May 2007 in Budapest. The venue was in the Central European University (CEU) and the gathering was cosponsored by the European Science Foundation (Strasbourg) and Pasts Inc., Center for Historical Research at the History Department of the CEU, the author of these lines having served as the convener. Recent research in various European countries has completely reshaped and renewed our views of the conditions and the scope of trends of social mobility towards elite positions and the reproduction of social elites observable in the period following the collapse of feudal regimes in Europe. The reasons are of three sorts. On the one hand new theoretical reflections on social stratification and social reproduction due to scholars like Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas and others have remodelled earlier perceptions of the 'circulation of elites' -due initially to such classical authors as Pareto or Mosca. On the other hand, and most importantly, new survey methodologies have been introduced and generalized in historical scholarship concerning elite groups thanks to advanced computer technologies. Lastly, the democratic transition in Eastern Europe have done away with Marxist dogmatism and stereotypes in the study of ruling classes and allowed the implementation of contemporary socio-historical insights and methods in this field, leading to the radical revision of hitherto consensually accepted and often 'romantic' or enchantedly nationalist representations of the nation building process in the Eastern and Central European periphery. Indeed, a difference must be made here between Western Europe, including the Scandinavian and several Mediterranean countries and the new democracies, most of which (notably the Baltic and the Balkan states, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Slovakia) have been historically late coming nation states with new 'national' elites emerging after the collapse of feudalism or imperial-federal bondage either some time in the late 19th century or even only after World War I. The workshop was an attempt to bring together scholars from both parts of Europe, the West and the East (in the broad sense of both designations), to discuss problem areas, methodological schemes and research results in concrete terms related to post feudal elites, their social, ethnic, denominational and

The Economic History Review, 1954

they might be no more than yeomen or rich peasants. 3 In France, gentilhomme was matched by noble or chevalier or seigneur. In Germany, Adel, nobility, subdivided into Herr (lord), Ritter (knight) or Junker^the last largely applied to nobles of moderate means. In Poland, all nobles, szlachta, were panowie, a word which can be equally unsatisfactorily translated as 'gentlemen', 'rulers' or 'lords'; not unlike the German Herren, the term is so wide that it can be applied to territorial magnates or nearbeggars who could carry o¡ an appropriate front. 'Aristocracy' did not, strictly speaking, refer to a particular social group: it meant, literally, government by 'the best'. That indefatigable traveller and historian Archdeacon William Coxe could describe the Commonwealth of Poland^Lithuania as 'a state of perfect aristocracy' not because of its numerous nobility, but because of the near-untrammelled domination of that state by some two dozen great families. But he also spoke of the 'aristocratic licentiousness' that was destroying that state: aristocracy as a system was shading into a social grouping. For much of the eighteenth century, however, 'the best' meant the great landed nobility, who did indeed govern, and who would, at the very least, have been much put out to be informed that they were not 'the best'. The transformation was more than completed with the French Revolution, at least within France itself. Late in 1788, 'aristocrat' and 'aristocracy' established themselves as terms of opprobrium; and then, at the height of the Revolution, they could be used of all its enemies (real, imagined and contrived), not necessarily just nobles. 4 Imprecision had long been to the fore in the concept of the three 'orders' or 'estates' of society^those who prayed, those who fought, those who laboured. If this notion of oratores, bellatores et laboratores was indeed ¢rst expounded by Aelfric of Eynsham in the tenth century, then it was an echo of an ancient formulation which reached back at least to Plato and Socrates in ancient Greece. But whether invoked by Athenian philosophers, medieval churchmen or French jurists, such taxonomy no more accurately described their societies than the convenient shorthand of 'lower', 'middle' or 'upper' class and similar designations in the nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-¢rst centuries. The attempt by some Frenchmen during the Estates-General in 1789 to shoehorn reality into this ancient paradigm ended in spectacular disaster. No matter how much a hierarchical vision appealed to those who would rule, European society was too complex and too dynamic to be constrained by some predetermined mould. This has probably always been true. And in the eighteenth century, it was truer than ever before. 2 The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century 'cabbage noble', gives some idea of the standing of those at the bottom of the heap in the territories of northern Germany and the Baltic lands of Estonia, Livonia and Courland. In Hungary and Poland, as in Spain and Portugal, in Russia and in much of Germany, thousands of families could genuinely call themselves noble, yet their economic circumstances were such as to leave them no better o¡, or even considerably worse o¡, than the local peasantry. Most European nobles were poor. Truly wealthy nobles formed only a tiny minority. In late eighteenthcentury England, 400 or so great landowning families, including the bulk of the 220 peers, enjoyed annual incomes of at least »5000. These were the 'poorest'. Around a dozen enjoyed incomes of between »40,000 and »50,000. Further down, incomes decreased inversely with numbers: around 700 families drew incomes of between »3000 and »4000 yearly, but between 3000 and 4000 lesser gentry made do with merely comfortable incomes of »1000^»3000; perhaps ¢ve times that number of families could still consider themselves gentry on less: those with incomes of between »300 and »700 shaded o¡ into the better-o¡ freeholdersŝ ome 25,000 of them, perhaps? In 1702, 32,000 land tax commissioners were appointed in England. Few, if any, would have been regarded as less than 'gentlemen'. 6 In the unusually prosperous Welsh county of Glamorgan, impoverished descendants of once substantial dynasties, clutching at rentals of »50 a year or so, might insist on styling themselves 'gentlemen', but contemporaries might equally regard them as yeomen, if that. The same individual might be described by both terms. 7 A curious schizophrenia accompanied these di¡erentials. At a theoretical level, most nobles in most countries a¡ected to regard each other as, if not equals, then at least as good as one another. Few went as far as the Poles in openly proclaiming in law the equality of all nobles, but then, that legal equality was a practical ¢ction. Louis XVI of France and Gustavus III of Sweden regarded themselves as 'the ¢rst gentlemen' of 4 The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century

2015

The non-existent Austrian nobility: a short introduction 'Phenomena should be shown to exist or to occur before one explains why they exist or how they come to be'. 1 We take this claim seriously and therefore we would like to start with some historical remarks before elaborating on the phenomenon which is our main interest here, the nobility in twentyfirst-century Austria. Apparently, Austrian nobility does not exist, if we assume that every current social object must have substantially similar predecessors. Nevertheless, two kinds of origins can be traced. Firstly, families which were ennobled during the time of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Empire which comprised, among other regions, what we call today Austria,

Social History, 2011

Nobility in Europe during the 20th Century. Reconversion Strategies, Memory Culture, and Elite Formation, 2015

2011

Nobility is one of the very few elements of a longue duree perspective on European history from the Middle Ages to the present.' In almost all European societies there existed a group-more or less homogeneous, more or less internally stratified, more or less permeable from below and outside, more or less strictly defined through explicit legal norms-called `noble, `nobility, or `aristocracy. It formed an elite in almost all respects: politically, economically, in matters of culture, behaviour and habitus. Although there were always alternative, rival elites from different social backgrounds-university-trained administrative and legal functionaries, the clergy, or intellectuals and artists-these groups usually claimed a leading role only in one specific area, whereas noblemen considered themselves to be a sort of `total' elite whose field of action and whose pre-eminence was not restricted to any certain segment of life. Rather, its distinctiveness was based on a dual acknowledgment: externally by others and internally by the different groups that regarded themselves as `noble'. 2 In premodern contexts the acceptance of noble persons and the nobility as such usually implied a more general belief in the rightfulness of a hereditary ruling class; it implied nobility as a social norm. In modern contexts, however, the acknowledgement of nobles and nobility has become mostly one of an individual fact-not of a social ideal. The question remains 1 The best known protagonist of the longue duree perspective on the European nobility from the early Middle Ages onwards is probably Otto Brunner, who, in his influential study Adliges Landleben and europäischer Geist, described `nobility' as a primarily intellectual phenomenon rooted in classical Greek thought. For Brunner, though, the world of Alteuropaand, consequently, that of the traditional European nobility-ended with the emergence of capitalism and the modern state in the eighteenth century. More or less similar conceptions of nobility lie at the heart of the following contributions on the medieval and early modern aristocracies of Europe:

Social History 36, 2011