Absolutism and Class at the End of the Old Regime: The Case of Languedoc‪.‬

This article is about nobles' opposition to royal absolutism at the end of the Old Regime. Discussion of this issue dates back to the late 1930s, when Georges Lefebvre showed that nobles exacerbated the crown's financial difficulties and brought about the revolutionary crisis of 1789. He argued that conflict between the king and nobility was as old as the monarchy. Louis XIV compelled nobles to submit to his authority, but his successors allowed them to regroup and stage a political comeback during the eighteenth century. Social and economic forces, what Lefebvre saw as a "feudal reaction", sustained the nobility's political resurgence. He showed that lords levied dues on peasant communities with a new rigor to take advantage of rising prices during the second half of the eighteenthcentury. (1) A host of historians have disputed Lefebvre's thesis. Their most potent criticism has been the absence of material interests underlying political positions taken by the nobility. Alfred Cobban argued that property righ ts to antiquated dues and services, whether they belonged to nobles or bourgeois, bore slight resemblance to the social organization that prevailed in the Middle Ages. George Taylor maintained that noble wealth was "proprietary" rather than feudal and that this type of wealth was common to bourgeois as well. Denis Richet and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret disputed Lefebvre's portrayal of noble political designs as a "feudal reaction". They argued that nobles acquired genuinely liberal convictions during the Enlightenment and were the primary opponents of arbitrary rule in the last years of the Old Regime. (2) In recent years, several outstanding monographs have shifted debate away from social and economic issues. Historians have used theoretical insights of Alexis de Tocqueville and Jurgen Habermas to show that cultural trends were responsible for the emergence of a revolutionary conception of sovereignty. They have shown that attitudes and sensibilities of nobles and bourgeois, their assumptions about politics and society, changed in the second half of the eighteenth century. Magistrates, lawyers and pamphleteers wrote innumerable appeals to the public against abuses of power. Public opinion replaced the royal will as the legitimate source of political authority, and Frenchmen were prepared to put the sovereignty of an elected assembly in place of the king's will. While this literature has advanced our knowledge of the political culture of the eighteenth century, it has not provided much research about the upper classes' relationship to the absolutist state. Tocqueville and Habermas argued that nobles and bourgeo is interacted on an equal footing in a social space independent of the crown. Whether we accept Tocqueville's view that royal authority rendered corporate bodies and intermediate strata powerless, or Habermas's view that it was separate from and antagonistic to the dictates of public opinion, we are left with the idea that the king was a power unto himself. This conception of the monarchy is also implicit in Lefebvre's thesis that the king and nobility fought one another throughout the early modern period. Neither Lefebvre's classic interpretation nor recent scholarship on political culture has examined the social content of the absolutist state. (3)