AN INSULT AMONG THE HUMBLE: "YOUR FATHER WAS A VALET!
-- Voltaire, Le Siècle [Century] de Louis XIV
Psychologists and anthropologists know that every aspect of life reinforces primal societies and cults. The same is true generally: Take Old Regime France.
This page is inspired by Alexis de Toqueville who in L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 1856, says that nobles' superiority was so rooted as to be "invisible."
They...
- Led a hierarchy thought willed by God.
- Could alone claim valor in battle, the quintessential value.
- Held the main positions in the State, the Church and especially the army.
- Were exempt from most taxes.
- Controlled sales taxes and tolls, by inheritance or royal grants.
- Monopolized hunting big animals, fought duels only between themselves, might alone purchase the most luxurious wares (which explains the site of the garment center: Please click).
- Had identifying liveries for servants, a coat of arms, a reserved pew at church and often a name whose prefix "de" indicated nobility (it is still considered a joli nom, "pretty name").
- Were ceremoniously decapitated and buried if condemned of crime, while bodies of ignominiously hanged commoners remained on the gallows until they decomposed.
- Owned gibbets. The gibbets themselves showed rank by the number of beams from which to hang the condemned (two to eight, the king having nine). Corpse of the highest-born (commoner) victims hung from the top.
- Commanded galley rowers from luxurious platforms.
- Might lead popular revolts because of their prestige and because they were trained to fight. Royals legitimized rebellions by heading them.
- Were magnified in the arts by mythology and allegory, as the next page shows.
The French word for "bad" — villain — originally meant "peasant," and we still say "noble" and "ignoble."
Enriched commoners might use their revenues to purchase a title, acquire land to which a title was attached or assured descendants' nobility by marrying their daughters to impoverished lords seeking dowries. Those practices slowed capitalism's rise.
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The valet Figaro's famous question to his noble master,"What have you done for all that wealth?You took the trouble to be born! Whereas I..."shows that at the end of the 18th century
that belief was changing.
-- Le Marriage de Figaro by Pierre Beaumarchais, 1778
So was the economy.
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