In this book, a group of prominent French historians shows why the nobility remains a vital topic for understanding France's past. The contributors to this volu

Contrary to their traditional image as a caste of intransigent reactionaries and parasites, this analysis maintains that pre-revolutionary nobility actually wer

The image of the debauched French aristocrat of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one that still has power over the international public imagination,

Smith argues that the attempt to redefine and restore French nobility brought forth competing visions of patriotism with correlating models of the social and po