The Transformation of the World (162 page)

2 Aristocracies in (Moderate) Decline

International Scope and National Profiles

The nineteenth century was the last in which the nobility, one of the most ancient social groups, played an important role. In eighteenth-century Europe it still “had no social competitor,”
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but by 1920 it was no longer possible to say anything of the kind. In no European country had the nobility survived as a primary political force, or as the main one setting the cultural agenda. This decline was a result partly of revolutions in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, partly of the reduced value of land as a source of wealth and prestige. Where the revolutions overthrew monarchies, the nobility was deprived of its imperial or royal protector. But even in Great Britain where the old order did not collapse and nobles were able to preserve greater influence than elsewhere, the section of the population endowed with a knighthood or peerage lost its virtual monopoly over top positions in the political executive. From 1908 on, all but three British prime ministers have had a bourgeois family background and only one was heir to a noble title. The fall of the age-old European institution of the nobility took place in the relatively short space of time between 1789 and 1920. Those two years are not, of course, joined by an ever dropping curve. East of the Rhine, the political situation of the nobility did not become critical until the final period of the First World War. On the whole, “the nineteenth century was a good time to be an aristocrat.”
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Nobilities have existed almost everywhere in the world, except in “segmentary” societies. A small minority of the population concentrates in its hands the means to exercise violence, enjoys favorable access to economic resources (land, manpower), belittles manual labor (except for war and hunting), cultivates a high-profile lifestyle with an emphasis on honor and refinement, and passes on its privileges from generation to generation. Nobilities often consolidate themselves into aristocracies. Over and over again in history, such aristocracies have been decimated or even perished as a result of war. In modern times, colonial conquest hit them especially hard: they suffered destruction or drastic politicaleconomic degradation, beginning with the Aztec nobility in sixteenth-century Mexico and continuing around the globe. But it sometimes happened that an aristocracy was incorporated into an empire in a subordinate position and managed to retain its symbolic distinction. Thus, after 1680 the Manchurian Qing Dynasty, already commanding the allegiance of its own nobility, disempowered the Mongol aristocracy and bound it through a set of vassal relations. Indirect rule in the European colonial empires involved a similar technique. Other empires, however, did not allow local aristocracies to survive. The Ottoman Empire suppressed forms of Christian feudal rule in the Balkans and did not give leeway for a new landowning elite to take shape. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Serbia and Bulgaria were without an aristocracy but had a relatively free
peasantry by eastern European standards.
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Where the nobility remained in existence under foreign rule, it was often denied a say in politics—such was the case in pre-unification Italy, for example—and nobles failed to develop a substantial experience of public service.

In eighteenth-century Europe—unlike in the Arab world, for example—the days of knightly chivalry were over. But even without this primal function it was clear in 1800, as it still was in 1900, who did and did not belong to the European nobility. Only in England, with its elastic social attribution, did many people on their way up have to ask themselves whether they had crossed the critical threshold.
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In regions where certain legal privileges survived until the end of the First World War—above all, in the eastern half of the Continent—there could anyway be no mistaking the scale of the phenomenon and its subtle internal hierarchies. Elsewhere the boundaries were defined by titles, additions to names, and other symbolic markers. No other social grouping attached so much value to distinction. The fact that one belonged to the nobility had to be visible and unambiguous.

Apart from tiny transnational elites such as the top of the Catholic hierarchy or Jewish financiers, the nobility was the segment of European societies with the strongest international orientation. Its members knew of one another, could gauge positions in the ranking order, shared a series of behavioral norms and cultural ideals, spoke French when they needed to, and participated in a cross-border marriage market. The higher their rank and wealth, the more they were integrated into such wider networks. On the other hand, close associations with landownership, agriculture, and country life meant that nobles often had strong local roots and were less mobile than certain other sections of society. Between the internationalist and local levels of orientation lay a
national
arena for noble life, where solidarity and a sense of identity were strengthened in the nineteenth century. While the nobility became more international thanks to new communications technologies, it was also increasingly “nationalized.”
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A new conservative nationalism thus appeared on the scene alongside an older liberal nationalism—above all in Prussia and later Germany.

Three Paths in the History of European Nobility:
France, Russia, England

In France, the nobility was stripped of all its titles and privileges during the revolution. Its special rights were generally not restored in later years, especially in the case of émigrés, so that “empty” titles were all that remained behind. Although the importance of landownership should not be underestimated, the French nobility played only a secondary role in a society that was exceptionally “bourgeois.” In addition to those who had survived from the ancien régime, a new nobility emerged under Napoleon (himself a scion of the lower Corsican nobility), which the old aristocracy often regarded with a mixture of disparagement and admiration as a breed of parvenus: mostly military dignitaries
endowed with rights of succession and forming the core of a new hereditary elite.
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The rise of a miller's son to become Duc de Danzig (in 1807), in recognition of his services as an army marshal, would have been unthinkable under the ancien régime. Ennoblement along similar lines, serving as an instrument of state patronage, was then liberally applied almost everywhere in nineteenth-century Europe. Napoleon also created a merit-based Légion d'Honneur, a kind of postfeudal elite corporation without hereditary rights, which was later converted unproblematically into republican forms.

After 1830 in France there was no strong central institution, like the House of Lords in Britain or the royal court in most other countries, around which the nobility could gather. Neither the “bourgeois monarch” Louis Philippe nor the imperial dictator Napoleon III built up extensive court structures or supported the grandeur of their rule on a strong upper nobility. The vestiges of court life then disappeared along with the emperor in 1870. Insofar as there remained an identifiable French nobility during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, it was less of a self-conscious class than its counterparts farther east in Europe. And the impoverished nobleman as a type was encountered far more often in France (and Poland) than elsewhere. Wealthy property owners of diverse origin—local notables, as they were known early on—became the opinion leaders who set the tone for the wider society.
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In the Third Republic this aristocratic-bourgeois composite stratum, typically residing in provincial cities, became more and more marginalized. In no other major European country did the nobility have such a small superiority in power and landownership at the decisive local level.
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At the other end of the spectrum stood the heterogeneous Russian nobility,
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more dependent on the crown than its counterparts in other major European countries and empires. Catherine the Great's “Charter” of 1785 relaxed the state's chokehold, giving nobles full property rights and putting them more or less on a legal par with their fellows in Western Europe. The state and the imperial house remained by far the largest owners of land, however, and tsars since the time of Peter the Great gave out land and “souls” (i.e., serfs) as gifts. Ennoblement, a simple procedure, was widely practiced at the end of the nineteenth century. Some of the largest landowning magnates could trace their wealth and privileges back only a few decades or even years. There was also a large “minor gentry,” consisting of people who in England would not have been considered part of the nobility. The diffuse picture of an upper class based on landownership had greater affinities with an old European conception of
nobilitas
. Moreover, since the abolition of serfdom in 1861 did not dramatically affect the financial status or social position of large landowners, it was not comparable in its effects to the simultaneous ending of slavery in the Southern US states. The reform was incomplete, and the political dominance of the former masters remained intact, so there was limited incentive for landowners to turn themselves into agrocapitalist businessmen.

The English nobility was unique: the richest class of its kind in Europe, enjoying relatively few legal privileges but present in the political and social control
centers. Primogeniture could be relied on to keep large assets in one piece, so that younger sons and their families drifted to the periphery of noble society. But there were few of the trappings of a caste; the only thing to be precisely defined was the right to sit as a peer of the realm in the upper house of Parliament. In 1830 there were 300 family heads belonging to the upper nobility, and in 1900 more than 500.
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As far back as the 1780s, under William Pitt the Younger, the government had increased the rate of ennoblement and made ascent into the lower nobility a fairly simple process. What remains unclear, even today, is the extent to which Victorian nouveaux riches bought land in order to boost their image.
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In any event, a country house was indispensable as a stage for social intercourse. Inversely, even the largest landowners were not averse to participation in “bourgeois” society.

The ideal of the gentleman cultivated by the English nobility had an extraordinary integrative force, generating a lifestyle and culture at home and in the Empire that often lacked the razor-sharp distinctions of continental European elites.
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The gentleman increasingly became an ideal without fixed social moorings; “blue blood” played scarcely any role. Even if the prerequisites were considered innate, male offspring still had to be socialized as gentlemen at elite public schools and at Oxford or Cambridge. A gentleman could be anyone who, whatever the basis of his prosperity, appropriated and practiced the lifestyle, values, conduct, and bodily practices associated with the ideal. An education at Eton, Harrow, or Winchester was not narrow status training in the manner of early modern “knight academies” (
Ritterakademien
) on the Continent, nor did it focus primarily on intellectual development; its main purpose was aristocratic-bourgeois character formation of an integrative kind—with a growing tendency to imperial militarism as the century progressed.
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The principle of achievement was in command. Noblemen might have things easy in English society, but they had to face up to competition. There was a permanent need to forge and sustain alliances beyond their own social stratum. The English aristocrat was not dependent on the Crown; there was no longer a court nobility under Queen Victoria. The nobility assigned themselves leadership tasks and expected gratitude and deference in return. This was not the same as passive obedience but rather an attitude capable of being channeled through the institutions of a political life that was being slowly democratized.
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More plainly than anywhere else, nobility was not so much a precise legal status as a mental disposition: a self-assurance in setting the tone for others.

Survival Strategies

If the European nobility went downhill, it was not for want of trying out survival strategies.
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The most promising of these (at the very time, roughly after 1880, when agricultural yields were declining in large parts of Europe) was to replace the traditional rentier mentality with an opening to the business world, new kinds of investment portfolios, social fusion with the upper bourgeoisie (on its part strongly inclined toward land acquisition and gentry lifestyles), a
marriage policy to protect against the splitting and dispersal of estates, and the adoption of national leadership roles, especially when there were not enough other candidates for them.

Although such a reorientation, practiced in various combinations right across Europe, might achieve its immediate goal in particular cases, the European nobility had lost its leading cultural position by the turn of the century. A marketoriented cultural industry had appeared in place of the aristocratic patronage that had still sustained the European fine arts and music in the age of Haydn and Mozart. Musicians obtained funding from performances in the opera house and the concert hall, painters from public exhibits and the nascent art trade. Noble subjects became less common in literature, still lingering, for example, in Anton Chekhov's melancholy stories and plays about the twilight of the Russian nobility. Only a few prominent—and bourgeois—thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Carlyle, still preached aristocratic ideals, though these were detached from any clear social foundation and referred to nobilities of the spirit rather than the blood.

Were empires a stomping ground for European aristocrats? This can safely be said only of the British Empire. The colonialism of Napoleon III and the Third Republic, by contrast, had a decidedly bourgeois veneer. Top positions in the army and civil service of the British Empire continued to be staffed by members of the nobility, who seemed best suited to bridge the different civilizations and political cultures of colonial society by cultivating a supposed affinity with Asian or African nobilities in the service of higher imperial ends.
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India was the most promising field of application in this respect, while bourgeois specialists were on the advance in Africa and elsewhere. A certain romanticism of decline ensured a minimum of cross-cultural sympathy for non-European subjects of the empire.
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A special kind of aristocratic consciousness was to be found in the Southern US states before the Civil War, where the numerically small planter elite harbored fantasies of itself as a “natural” ruling class in charge of huge slave plantations—veritable lords of the manor in a rerun of the Middle Ages. Personal detachment from manual labor, revulsion from the “materialistic” vulgarity of the industrial North, unfettered lordship over those subjugated to them: all this seemed to permit a flowering of anachronistic chivalry.
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