Preface

This study began from an essentially bibliographical curiosity. In the late 1970s I became interested in the mass of memoirs that the French nobility produced during the seventeenth century. I had turned to these accounts in the course of other researches, hoping to find in them descriptions of nobles' private experiences and emotions. Like other readers, I at first found the memorialists vexingly reticent about their inner lives. Yet I remained impressed at the flowering of this literature within an aristocratic milieu, and I became increasingly aware of the personal elements that it did contain. These texts seemed an important effort by both men and women (important partly because it involved both men and women) to see their lives as in some sense personal creations, full of surprising turns, inexplicable in terms of mere origins. Selfhood in the seventeenth century had apparently come to require narration and reflection, and there apparently existed an audience as well as authors for such stories; contemporaries avidly read and discussed the memorialists' self-depictions.

I was thus drawn to exploring the history of individuality, to asking why both authors and audiences should have been so interested in viewing selfhood as a construct rather than a given. Exploring this view of the self led to further questions, for it suggested fundamental contradictions within the cultural order of the seventeenth century. After all, an essential principle of aristocratic society is assurance about identity, to which both biological inheritance and carefully contrived upbringing are thought to contribute. Certainly French nobles often spoke in these terms, claiming that no bourgeois could acquire the traits that birth and breeding gave all nobles. Yet their autobiographical practice suggested other ideas, and other practices too suggested contradictory worldviews. Political ideas proved especially unsettled, because of the mix of admiration and dislike that the seventeenth-century state evoked from the nobility, its most privileged subjects. But I was also impressed by the intensity of other contradictions, in attitudes toward money, Christian morality, social change,

even writing itself. About all of these topics the nobles expressed ideas that fitted poorly with aristocratic ideological schemas and with the belief that tradition could govern current life.

Here, then, are the twin themes in what follows. Seventeenth-century nobles became preoccupied with the nature of selfhood, this book argues, and they came at the same time to doubt many of the moral underpinnings of their society. They came, in other words, to see the isolated self as real, important, and complicated, and they correspondingly doubted the value, even the reality, of the social conventions that surrounded it. This combination of sensibilities seems to me distinctively modern, at least in the limited sense that we today imply by speaking of ourselves as post-modern; and I intend this book to contribute to our understanding of the circumstances that brought this modernity into being. I do not claim that these were the only groups and circumstances that brought about modern culture thus understood. But I believe that relations between traditional and modern cultures were more complex than historians have usually thought, and that we need to explore these relations if we are to understand modernity itself. For this reason the development of modern values within so tradition-minded a group as the French nobility seems to me to deserve particular attention.

Numerous institutions and individuals have helped me in this project. Fellowships from the University of California, Irvine, and the Guggenheim Foundation allowed for periods of research and writing; the Stanford Humanities Center and the University of Rochester provided stimulating temporary academic homes. For many years I benefited from the intellectual excitement and generosity of the department of history of the University of California, Irvine, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge its influence on this book. Lloyd Moote, Orest Ranum, Charles Stinger, and Timothy Tackett read the entire manuscript and offered suggestions and support. Liana Vardi also read the manuscript, and the project probably could not have been completed without her encouragement, sustained over several years. Groups of scholars at Irvine; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, San Diego; Emory University; Syracuse University; Tulane University; Boston University; SUNY at Buffalo; and Brown University considered individual chapters. I have profited both from their specific advice and from the encouragement they offered.