Introduction

This book explores ways in which men and women of the French nobility thought about their world and themselves during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It asks how nobles responded to a series of recurrent problems in their lives: problems of personal worth, ambition, and the unfolding of an individual's career; problems of money, friendship, sexuality, and civic order; problems of time and communication. Each of these is a distinct topic, which I initially selected because of its frequency in aristocratic correspondence and literature of the period. But these topics can also be understood as aspects of a single larger problem. Each represents one form of connection between the individual and her or his society. What follows, then, is an extended essay on how aristocratic men and women understood their bonds to the society around them at a decisive moment in the evolution of early modern society.

To ask such questions about the nobility, of course, is to consider only a small group within French society, perhaps 1 percent of its total population. Because much of what follows rests on literary sources, the group considered here is in fact still more restricted. It includes mainly the wealthiest and most articulate nobles, those most closely attached to Paris and the royal court, those most intent on giving written form to their experiences and concerns.

This limited group nonetheless deserves close study, partly because, like any ruling class, the high French aristocracy exercised an influence on the rest of society out of proportion to its numbers, and partly because the group's culture seems to me still poorly understood, despite a recent revival of historians' interest in the nobility. More important than these considerations, however, the nobility embody in acute form a problem that many participants in early modern culture shared. The French nobles illustrate the emergence of an essentially modern culture, one still familiar to us, within a deeply traditional social order. For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century nobles,

that traditional order rested on ideas about inheritance and familial continuity. Property and political rights descended from the past, and so too did personal qualities, a dual inheritance from the individual family and the larger aristocratic order. Most nobles simply assumed these values, and their use in ideological debate persisted into the eighteenth century. Such persistence is not surprising, for these ideas implied a powerful coherence between the realm of nature and that of the social order. Nobles could view their behavior and their political powers as reflections of the world's natural order; they could view individual qualities and choices as reflections of the family's qualities and needs. To see links between the biological and the social inspired intellectual and moral assurance.^[1]

Yet the French nobles (as we shall see in more detail below) also participated enthusiastically in many of the most innovative currents in early modern culture. They followed and helped to shape cultural movements toward individualism, skepticism about established social arrangements, and belief in the primacy of change in human affairs. They adopted modes of thought and languages that had first developed in the city-states of Renaissance Italy, and in many ways these contradicted long-standing assumptions about how nature and the moral order intersected. This tension emerges even in the nobles' most public forms of self-expression, those ideological defenses of the aristocracy that have mainly interested historians. Tension was still more evident when the nobles spoke privately, in memoirs, letters, fiction. In these explorations of daily experience the nobles expressed assumptions and fears that had little to do with the confident ideology of dynastic continuity; rather, they used language that emphasized particularity and the problematic relationship of individual to polity. Describing this language and understanding how it could coexist with an

[1] See Roberto Mungabeira Unger, Law in Modern Society: Toward a Criticism of Social Theory (New York, 1976), esp. 38. For an emphatic description of the role of race in sixteenth-century thought, see Arlette Jouanna, Ordre social: Mythes et hiérarchies dans la France du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1977). Throughout this study I use the term "society of orders" to describe this idealized vision of a society organized according to birth and sharply delineated social roles; for a discussion of the term, its sources, and its limitations, see Armand Arriaza, "Mousnier and Barber: The Theoretical Underpinning of the "Society of Orders' in Early Modern Europe," Past and Present 89 (November 1980): 39–57. As will become clear below, this concept seems to me misleading as a description of much early modern behavior and feeling; it is helpful, however, in describing an important group of early modern ideals.

aristocratic ideology are the central tasks of this essay. This is an effort to understand how an individualistic, skeptical, and in many ways anxious culture emerged within a "society of orders."^[2]

Alexis de Tocqueville analyzed the cultural implications of an aristocratic social order as follows: "Take the case of an aristocratic people interested in literature," he wrote, as he thought about the democratic culture he had encountered in the United States: "When a small, unchanging group of men are concerned at the same time with the same subject, they easily get together and agree on certain guiding principles to direct their efforts. If it is literature with which they are concerned, strict canons will soon prescribe rules that may not be broken. If these men occupy a hereditary position in their country they will naturally be inclined not only to invent rules for themselves but to follow those laid down by their ancestors. Their code will be both strict and traditional. . . . Such men, beginning and ending their lives in comfortable circumstances, naturally conceive a taste for choice pleasures, full of refinement and delicacy. Moreover, the long and peaceful enjoyment of so much wealth will have induced a certain softness of thought and feeling, and even in their enjoyments they will avoid anything too unexpected or too lively. They would rather be amused than deeply moved; they want to be interested but not carried away."^[3]

Tocqueville saw classicism and class fitting neatly together. Because of the assured social position that members of the nobility enjoyed, few basic issues found a place in their writings; because the very principle of aristocracy was adherence to tradition, their writings followed inherited models and were judged in terms of elegance rather than originality. Regularity and assurance in both writing and behavior were primary values, values that arose naturally from experience of society itself.

Such ideas continue to shape historians' understanding of aristocratic culture during the Old Regime, with the difference that what Tocqueville attributed to the social system as a whole, more recent

[2] Cf. William Bouwsma, "Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture," in William Bouwsma, A Visible Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley, 1990).

[3] Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.-P. Mayer (New York, 1969), 472.

scholars have tended to attribute to divergent class experiences. In its broadest terms, thus, the contrast between aristocratic and bourgeois cultures appears in Ian Watt's argument that the modern novel is an essentially bourgeois creation, fundamentally cut off from earlier, aristocratic narrative forms.^[4] From a narrower focus on the Old Regime, historians have likewise tied culture to class. They have interpreted hierarchical thought as the ideological stance of the older nobility, the warrior nobility of birth, and they have situated more liberal impulses in specifically urban social groups: the lawyers and judges who made up the world of the robe, and, more broadly, the bourgeoisie. Having reviewed "the intellectual leaders" of the seventeenth century, for instance, Erich Auerbach concludes that "we may disregard the handful of nobles. The vast majority of the others were descended from the various categories of robe ."^[5] Erica Harth writes that "[t]he cultural history of seventeenth-century France is one of progressive obsolescence: the progressive forces of a forming bourgeoisie undermined an increasingly outworn representational mold," and that "[t]he bourgeois challenge to authority and tradition" propelled what was most novel in seventeenth-century culture.^[6] From very different theoretical suppositions, William Bouwsma has interpreted cultural innovation in terms of the specific professional demands of legal practice and in terms of the uncertainties of urban life.^[7] Stephen Greenblatt has offered a similar view of sixteenth-century England. Interest there in "the construction of identity," he argues, arose among writers who "all embody, in one form or another, a profound mobility," who "are all displaced in significant ways from a stable, inherited social world."^[8]

Conversely, for Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "[t]he hierarchical principle in various forms . . . informs not only the ranks of the Court, but the various analyses that intelligent contemporaries give of its dis-

[4] The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley, 1962), esp. 58–59, 94–95. See also tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, 1979), for a view of Elective Affinities as a bourgeois novel, when its characters are retired courtiers and soldiers.

[5] " 'La Cour et la Ville,' " repr. in Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis, 1984), 168, 171.

[6] Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1983), 18, 20.

[7] "Lawyers and Early Modern Culture," in A Usable Past; "Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture."

[8] Renaissance Self-Fashioning, from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), 7, 8.

sensions. The Court forms chronologically the last phase of the society of ranks, before the wave of egalitarianism that will begin in the age of Enlightenment. With Saint-Simon, Madame, and a few others, the Court arrives at a clear awareness or at least a perfect expression of its ideology, focussed on the limited space of a great palace."^[9] In this view, seventeenth-century aristocratic writers offered an elaborate but still recognizable version of ideas that had dominated Western thought over the previous millennium. Paul Bénichou's brilliant analysis of the seventeenth-century moralistes assigns them a very different historical place but rests on similar assumptions about the progress of ideas. For Bénichou, a new realism in the seventeenth century allowed writers to incorporate a steadily more complete, richer view of human life into their writings.^[10]

Like Tocqueville, these historians seek to connect specific cultural expressions both to experience and to the ideology of inheritance that undergirded the aristocracy's existence during the Old Regime. Several immediate difficulties, however, deserve attention. First, such an interpretation as Le Roy Ladurie's requires that we detach the eighteenth century from its seventeenth-century antecedents and that we see a "wave of egalitarianism"—coming apparently from outside the existing cultural system—only in the Enlightenment. Such a view seems systematically to undervalue intellectual innovation in the seventeenth century, for instance by attaching Madame de Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves to the merely ideological defense of social hierarchy. That view seems also to do violence to our intuitive sense of connectedness to the best-known seventeenth-century aristocratic writers, our sense of a shared sensibility with Madame de Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld, and Retz, to say nothing of Pascal. Le Roy Ladurie's view seems also to violate the more technical awareness developed by historians of philosophy, that the seventeenth century's assumptions about human understanding continued to dominate philosophy well into the twentieth century. At the core of much seventeenth-century writing, as Suzanne Langer and others have shown, stood a conviction of the individual's separation from the world around her/him;

[9] "Auprès du roi, la cour," Annales ESC 38, 1 January-February 1983): 21–41 (emphasis in original).

[10] Morales du grand siècle (Paris, 1948), passim; see, for instance, Bénichou's view that the seventeenth century represented an achievement of naturalism, an end to "le dégoôt de l'homme pour sa nature " (372).

this individualism had obvious affinities with the assumptions of liberal political culture.^[11]

Second, the association of intellectual leadership with social mobility encounters empirical problems. For instance, seventeenth-century interest in what Greenblatt calls "the construction of identity" might more reasonably be attributed to aristocratic autobiographers and novelists than to lawyers or bourgeois. At the least we need to account for the very large number of written self-depictions by members of the seventeenth-century French aristocracy. Clearly there were pressures within settled, aristocratic society that led to self-exploration and self-depiction—and that led to unsettling depictions of what the self was like. Further, all of these sociological interpretations of cultural differences fit awkwardly with our growing knowledge of how upper-class society actually functioned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Implying as they do sharp separation between the situations of different classes, these interpretations leave little room for evidence showing the permeability of these social boundaries and the importance of interchange between robe and sword.^[12]

But even if sociological interpretation could give us an adequate view of the processes of literary creation, there would remain the problem of audience, the fact that ideas were not only produced but were followed and enthusiastically supported by a wide range of social groups. Rousseau suggested the complex relations that might prevail between plebeian author and aristocratic audience when he described the reception of his Nouvelle Héloïse . The novel, he wrote, "requires a delicacy of understanding that can only be acquired in the school of the world to detect the niceties of feeling, if I may so describe them, with which [the novel] is full. I am not afraid to compare the Fourth Part with the Princesse de Clèves (Mme de Lafayette's novel), and I assert that if these two works had only been read in the provinces their full value would never have been known. It is not surprising

[11] Suzanne Langer defined the seventeenth century's intellectual stance in terms of "a mighty and revolutionary generative idea: the dichotomy of all reality into inner experience and outer world, subject and object, private reality and public truth" (Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art [Cambridge, Mass., 1942], 12). Langer's formulation presents seventeenth-century thought in terms of a deeply felt, thorough individualism.

[12] See Jonathan Dewald, The Formation of a Provincial Nobility: The Magistrates of the Parlement of Rouen, 1499–1610 (Princeton, 1980); Ellery Schalk, From Valor to Pedigree: Ideas of Nobility in France in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Princeton, 1986), 159–62, 210–11.

that the book's greatest success was at Court."^[13] Despite his own background, Rousseau set both the novel's appeal and the literary tradition from which it arose within a context of aristocratic experiences. He saw his sensibility as in some measure inherited from that of the aristocratic seventeenth-century novelist, and he saw few tensions between aristocratic social position and appreciation of his outlook; for him there was a natural progression from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, rather than a sharp break between them.

Many of these interpretive problems reflect, I believe, the fact that social interpretation of early modern culture has tended to treat aristocratic culture as essentially ideological, that is, as a univocal expression and justification of the group's experiences, situations, and interests. Such an approach has obvious value but important limitations: it implies a fundamental unity in culture, and thus shields from our view its points of uncertainty or contradiction; it often implies a functionalist view of how ideas and values form, and this seems inadequate to the complexities both of the ideas themselves and of the processes by which they developed; above all, an ideological approach to aristocratic culture treats culture as only a reflection of deeper realities, a secondary level of reality, a superstructure. To treat culture as a utilitarian mechanism by which interests are justified or concealed allows little room for the causal force of culture itself.^[14]

In contrast, cultural tensions and contradictions play a central role in the account that follows. Nobles (this book argues) found their lives being shaped by a series of forces whose weight increased as the seventeenth century advanced. Lineage gained increasing importance in public life, as social status became more clearly a matter of birth and as venal office-holding created castes within the military and the civil service; in consequence, families increasingly organized themselves along dynastic lines, celebrating paternal authority and subordinating individual desires to dynastic needs. Standards of personal behavior rose, a process encouraged both by a reinvigorated Catholicism and by courtly libertinism; each demanded that men and women more tightly control their impulses and fit their behavior to elaborate standards.

[13] In The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (London, 1953), 504–5.

[14] For criticism of "the idea that human cultures are formulated out of practical activity and, behind that, utilitarian interest," see Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976).

Above all, the state heightened its demands. The state too required conformity, the rigid subordination of individual impulse to collective orderings. The state also intervened throughout society, making clear that property, local law, and distinctions of birth might all be undercut by the complex play of political influences. Though at points I will discuss these processes in some detail, for the most part they remain in the background of this study, not because I think them unimportant, but because they have been so clearly established by recent scholarship.

Rather, I am mainly concerned here with individuals' responses to these pressures. One response, of course, was celebration. Seventeenth-century nobles produced elaborate defenses of their order's superiority to the rest of society and emphasized the value of noble birth. Despite moments of hesitation and resistance, ultimately they celebrated the monarchy as well, both in the person of Louis XIV and in a larger vision of their society. In this vision, kingship and nobility allied in a single social order, founded on bloodlines, ancient rights, and traditional expectations. The increasing weight of patriarchal authority might lead to elaborate expressions of patriarchal ideology.

But it also led to other, contradictory responses, for important aspects of aristocratic life directly undercut respect for tradition and inheritance. Enthusiasm for courtly manners involved a startlingly explicit rejection of the past as a guide; and this rejection recurred in other domains, as nobles stressed the superiority of their own culture to that of the past. Similarly, the conditions of seventeenth-century warfare required sophisticated political and numerical calculations and encouraged familiarity with classical writers, who acquired renewed relevance in an age dominated by carefully organized masses of infantry. Seventeenth-century political careers demanded similar thought and focused attention on individual ambition rather than dynastic continuity as a key to understanding social arrangements. By selling high positions and by intervening so often in matters of property, the state itself disrupted belief in a stable social order and forced nobles to think carefully about money; in such circumstances, nobles came to view their society as in some sense an artificial creation rather than an organic hierarchy. In these and a variety of other specific ways, seventeenth-century conditions undermined patriarchal ideas and forced nobles into more individualistic modes of thought.

But I also argue here for a more fundamental contradiction within patriarchal thought and feeling. The seventeenth century's demands for personal subordination produced inner rebellions as well as celebration. Hence one of the central paradoxes of the age: as family, state, and ethical ideals increasingly demanded renunciation of individual desires, men and women became increasingly absorbed in understanding themselves as individuals, and indeed in understanding personal desire itself. They explored their inner lives in autobiographies^[15] and novels, and they presented their lives in terms of personal achievement. They became increasingly preoccupied with emotion, which attached them to friends and lovers—in other words, to chosen objects of affection. Such deepening concern with the personal offered one response to the oppressiveness of seventeenth-century expectations.

Exploration of other kinds of social arrangement provided another such response. Thus nobles played surprisingly readily with social forms in which anonymity disguised distinctions of birth—in which nobility itself vanished. The rejection was explicit in the case of the Académie Française, which admitted men without reference to rank. It was implicit in such events as the masked ball, the gambling party, and the decision (taken with growing frequency in the seventeenth century) to write or appear in published literary works, works that exposed author and subject to the judgment of any book-buyer. All of these choices presented momentary, experimental departures from aristocratic society itself. Like the exploration of the personal, they expressed nobles' ambivalence about their social order. Nobles fully accepted the ordering that dynastic ideology proposed and that accorded them such a privileged place. But they also felt acutely the weight of that order.

This book argues, then, for seeing a complex relationship between modern cultural forms and the cultural assumptions of the seventeenth-

[15] This study thus dissents from the position, taken by Philippe Le Jeune and followed by Madeleine Foisil, that seventeenth-century memoirs should be sharply differentiated from the autobiographical literature that followed Rousseau (Le Jeune, L'autobiographie en France [Paris, 1973], and Foisil, "The Literature of Intimacy," in Roger Chartier, ed., A History of Private Life , vol. 3, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Cambridge, Mass., 1989], 327-61, esp. 329). Though aristocratic memoirs often stay at the surface of events, they display a view of the self as contingent in its history, undergoing processes of creation over time.

century nobles: for seeing the connectedness of individualistic, liberal assumptions and the apparently more ancient, atavistic warrior culture that liberalism ultimately overthrew. In this respect my argument fits among those recent studies of the French nobility that have emphasized the order's modernity, its involvement in the processes of change within early modern French society. These studies have argued persuasively for the nobility's economic vitality during the Old Regime, and reevaluation of the order's political role is now well along. Nobles' political choices can no longer be treated as simply a matter of reaction or the pursuit of pure self-interest; Richelieu and the other architects of absolutism no longer seem so clearly superior to their opponents, or even so different from them.

I intend, however, that this study point in a rather different direction. Much in recent writing on the nobility, I believe, unduly simplifies the cultural tensions the nobles experienced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholarship has long tended to place the nobles on one side or the other of a series of dichotomies, opposing tradition with economic rationality, oral culture with written, dynasticism with individualism. Recent scholarship in several domains has changed the nobles' place in this pattern of oppositions but has continued situating the nobles somewhere within the polarity between tradition and modernity. I hope to show here the inadequacy of this model of culture. Many French nobles combined qualities that we might suppose incompatible; often, as I hope will become apparent, apparently contradictory ideas were in fact closely linked. Nobles explored alternatives to patriarchal ideology not because it was weakening in the seventeenth century but because its hold over them was so very strong.

Some choices of method run through this study and may require defense at the outset. First, because this book seeks to explicate the cultural tools that nobles had available for understanding their lives, I have quoted from them extensively; their language of self-perception is a central problem here, and it needs to be heard at length. Second, I have sought throughout to combine literary and archival sources. I make no claim that the literary sources I have used accurately mirrored daily life, though I believe that they often do show us what contemporaries believed to be the possible and the plausible in daily life. Nor do I claim that the archival sources used here present a typical picture of the seventeenth-century aristocracy. Rather than accuracy

or typicality, the combination of literary and archival sources offers an understanding of norms and expectations. These sources can help us to understand what seventeenth-century nobles expected to see when they looked at their world and how they expected to deal with it. To some extent, the combination of archival and literary sources can also clarify the interplay between cultural norms and daily practice.

Because of this concern to trace cultural norms, I have drawn my examples widely, from a loosely defined group that includes great aristocrats, high magistrates, parvenus like the financier Gourville, and even such marginals as the classical dramatists and such bourgeois observers as Tallemant des Réaux—in short, from all the groups that made up Parisian high society. Such a choice pays relatively little attention to the real differences that divided these groups, though such differences will have a central place in the discussion of some issues. Yet however complex their interaction, the groups constituting seventeenth-century high society knew one another well and shared many values. This was a small world. It mingled occasionally, as at Ninon de L'Enclos's late-seventeenth-century salon; when Elisabeth de La Trémoille died in 1640, the family received and copied into a single book condolences from a cross-section of this world, nobles of robe and sword, Protestants and Catholics, professional writers, friends and opponents of Richelieu. Secrets from the high aristocracy spread quickly, so that even bourgeois like Tallemant knew intimate details about nobles' lives. Professional writers spoke to an aristocratic audience, and typically the process of composition involved comments and contributions from that audience.^[16]

Finally, this study gives relatively little attention to change over the seventeenth century and emphasizes instead the coherence of aristocratic culture between the late sixteenth century and the early eighteenth. Important changes both in the nobles' own situation and in the society around them certainly took place during these years. Royal government became stronger and less tolerant of dissent; nobles relinquished duelling, armed rebellion, and many other forms of public and private violence; landed incomes first boomed, then declined after about 1660. Most important for this study, the weight of dynastic belief and practice grew, both within families' private arrangements and

[16] For a strong statement of the view that Parisian upper-class society was essentially homogeneous during the seventeenth century, see Françoise Bayard, Le monde des financiers au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1988), 421-49.

within the state as a whole. However, discussions of early modern culture seem to me typically to have overstated these changes and to have overstated the novelty of cultural responses to them. Historians of literature in particular, I believe, have given excessive weight to nobles' discouragement in the face of Louis XIV's absolutism.^[17] Discouragement there certainly was, but recent studies have emphasized the benefits that nobles drew from absolutism and the order's fundamental prosperity throughout the seventeenth century. As important (so I argue here), such discouragement as nobles felt expressed itself within well-worn cultural traditions, which had made failure and exile predictable elements in an aristocratic career. These themes dominated aristocratic language long before Versailles became the focus of national life. Rather than see a decisive turning point in the midseventeenth century, I would prefer to see early modern aristocratic culture as a single set of traditions, a repertoire of perceptions and responses. Like any such set of traditions, that of the French nobles evolved, and from the outset it contained numerous unresolved tensions and points of uncertainty; changing circumstances brought some of these to the fore at specific moments, converting implicit and untroubling contradictions into serious moral problems. Despite changes and uncertainties, however, nobles drew much of their thought from a stable set of ideas.

I have not attempted here to explore the fate of these cultural traditions in the eighteenth century. This essay does, however, suggest ways of viewing the transition from the seventeenth century to the Enlightenment. In certain respects, this transition represented a triumph of values that had little place in seventeenth-century aristocratic thinking. Seventeenth-century writers treated estate management, for in-stance, as morally neutral or even negative, distractions from the engagements of citizenship; the eighteenth century made economic life an aspect of citizenship. In other ways, however, the eighteenth century appears to represent not so much revision of seventeenth-century values as choice among them. Seventeenth-century aristocratic culture, so runs a central argument of this essay, placed contradictory demands on its participants, between, for instance, ideals of inheritance and of individual ambition. By the early eighteenth century, the

[17] For a recent example, see Elizabeth Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 1988).

weight of these contradictions had for many nobles become intolerable. The more egalitarian ideologies of the eighteenth century, it may be suggested, offered resolution of contradictions that had become burdensome beyond endurance. From this vantage point, Louis XIV's rise to power seems less a turning point than does his death.