Initiatives for preservation and tourism

This chapter examines the interactions between nobles and various public bodies for the preservation of art, archives, and architectural heritage from the 1950s to the 2000s. It documents nobles’ communication with museum curators and archivists about the lending of items for exhibitions and about the donation or deposition of private archives for the State’s collections. Analysis of this correspondence sheds light on evolutions in twentieth-century attitudes toward patrimony, including the reasons that some items have been kept while others have been deliberately destroyed. The chapter shows how efforts to attract tourists to châteaux received increased stimulus and government support after the Second World War. Nobles in the twenty-first century remain closely involved in initiatives for heritage preservation via family networks and civic associations.

Incapacity and debt

This chapter begins with the efforts to find a solution when an heir proved incapable of exercising responsibility for property affairs owing to a long-term illness or disability. Failure to address incapacity in an heir could jeopardise not only the individual’s patrimony but also the maintenance of the family’s economic, cultural, and social capital. Tutelle and curatelle were legal mechanisms for managing such situations and the chapter documents family decision-making in archival case studies. The second issue explored is the nature of aristocratic behaviour when financial debts strained or exhausted nobles’ control of economic capital. Causes of financial difficulties are analysed as well as the effects on health, moral attitudes surrounding borrowing, and the implications of chronic indebtedness for succession and family dynamics in modern France.

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.

Conclusion

This history opened with a record of the inhabitants of La Malène who in November 1793 looked around at the smouldering remains of their homes. Perhaps a few of those rural people speculated about the fate of the local noble family, the Brun de Montesquiou, when they saw the château de La Malène ablaze. It was impossible to know then whether noble landowners in Gévaudan or any other province might receive compensation for losses or recover property that had been confiscated owing to revolutionary reforms. War and economic problems rumbled on, but there were signs by 1800 that ‘after ten years of revolution, after its official suppression, the nobility still had another future’. Michel Figeac cautions against imposing chronological limits when viewing the evolution of the Second Estate. Reflecting on the ...

Residences and gardens

The upkeep of aristocratic residences required constant interaction between nobles, stewards, servants and labourers, as well as professional architects and designers. From coastal manor houses to riverside châteaux and alpine villas, these properties regularly needed repair and beautification. Owners dictated when modern conveniences like electric lighting and plumbing were introduced to their homes, how furnishing and art should be selected and arranged, and what kinds of features would characterise the exterior, such as arboreta, fountains, and garden beds. This chapter explains the evolution of French legislation for protecting private residences and gardens showing how nobles responded to an increasingly interventionist State from the founding of the Monuments historiques to key laws passed under the Third Republic.

Landed estates in operation

In historical scholarship the economics of elite landowning in modern France remained for a long time ‘an almost virgin field’. As Theodore Zeldin observed, ‘historians have been interested far more in the history of peasant ownership’. Understanding peasant experiences is crucial for rural history that scholars such as Lefebvre, Le Roy Ladurie, and others placed at the very heart of French history, especially as it was practised within France. This chapter explains the economic operations of landed estates and the tripartite relations between owners, managers, and labourers. The analysis draws on Bourdieu’s writings about gift exchange and reproduction of social capital, and it uses correspondence, accounts, contracts and other archival evidence to document rural social relationships in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Adoption for transmission

In families where there was no male child to whom an aristocratic title could be transmitted nobles could pursue the adoption of another male to become the heir. Prior to the French Revolution the legal mechanism that nobles had relied upon was called substitution, which allowed for titles and other property to pass to collateral members of kin. In nineteenth-century France an act of adoption served in a similar way as a solution for the transfer of aristocratic patrimony. To understand the nobility’s recourse to this strategy the chapter examines revolutionary laws concerning family relationships in the areas of adoption and illegitimacy. It provides archival case studies of the application of the law with particular attention to the emotional ramifications in families where adoption occurred.

Introduction

Neither the frost nor the autumn rain brought damp into the houses that day. Beneath the jutting cliff that peered over the river Tarn the smell of smoke, so familiar to the villagers of La Malène, began to arouse fear. Armed men who had crossed into the department of Lozère from neighbouring Ardèche had drunk all of the wine in the village and slaughtered all of the pigs. Now this ‘band of assassins, known as the revolutionary army’ set out to destroy what remained. ‘They tied up our inconsolable women and subjected them to constant terror and mortal threat in front of the horrible spectacle of flames engulfing their homes.’ La Malène, inhabited by some eighty people, was razed on 4 November 1793. Those who survived the calamity described how ‘nothing was spared, neither our belongings, nor our livelihoods. Everything was reduced to ash.’...

Holding the fort in the world wars

To what extent did the world wars change the nature of class relations on and around landed estates? How were gender relations and gender roles in aristocratic households affected by the absence and return of men? Were nobles able to afford to repair the damage to property resulting from military operations or wartime neglect? Drawing on Bourdieu’s writings about conversions and reconversions of capital, this chapter details noblewomen’s endeavours to maintain properties during men’s wartime absence and through the financial difficulties of the interwar decades. It documents the interactions between nobles, local authorities and representatives of the Monuments historiques, as well as liaison between heritage associations and state officials during and after the Vichy regime.

Divisions of inheritance

The Assembly abolished primogeniture on 15 March 1790 and introduced the law on partible inheritance on 8 April 1791. Under the ancien régime nobles had benefited from more flexible arrangements with a welter of possibilities for allocating inheritance. The legal systems varied across the country with written law operating in most of the south and local customary systems in the north. Decision-making was also influenced by social status. This chapter focuses on the apportioning of patrimony, especially nobles’ responses to the notion of equality among siblings that underpinned revolutionary reforms in legislation. It engages with debates conducted among scholars of the Middle Ages and early modern era about law, gender, and emotion, and presents new findings from analysis of nobles’ wills, marriage contracts, and letters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.