Protecting property during revolution

This chapter presents a wealth of new archival evidence on nobles’ actions and attitudes during the French Revolution. Various forms of property and evidence of ownership were destroyed or removed from nobles’ possession, which threatened nobles’ capacity to transmit economic, cultural, and symbolic capital to the next generation. Letters, wills, receipts, account books, certificates, passports, and petitions reveal how the effects of multiple decrees played out in personal and familial histories. For the nobility the rapid evolution of legislation meant that the consequences of any one revolutionary law became entangled with the consequences of another. Documentation of noblewomen’s experiences brings fresh insights and understanding to issues often over-looked in historical writing weighted toward aristocratic male military and political involvement.