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1. Le Pays: Nobles, Taste, Fashion, and Politics
- Louisiana State University Press
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7 Le Pays N O B L E S , TA S T E , FA S H I O N , A N D P O L I T I C S I n the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the nobility of Dauphiné, a province located at the periphery of the realm, and one traditionally sheltered from the grasping fiscal reach of central government , became deeply embroiled in a great conflict over taxation and aristocratic privilege. Dauphiné was a pays d’états, a semiautonomous provv v ince where the issues of provincial rights and privileges defined much of its institutional and political history. Here the crown’s efforts to increase taxation ignited the procès des tailles, a prolonged contest between the nobility and the crown on one the hand and the nobility and the Third Estate on the other: a struggle that revealed deep divisions between the estates. In protecting its interests, the Third Estate challenged traditional aristocratic privileges to such an extent that the fundamental rationale for the existence of nobility came under attack. As it developed, the conflict in Dauphiné brought into focus the growing horizontal and classlike divisions in provincial society.1 Changes in the Nobility At the same time that the Dauphinois nobility came under assault by the Third Estate, nobles throughout France were experiencing a kind of cultural and social metamorphosis that ultimately changed the very meaning Fashion beyond Versailles 8 of the term nobility. This change provided a vital social and cultural context for the great provincial conflict over taxation. As part of this prolonged and divisive episode, the local nobility’s acquisition of goods assumed greater meaning—an attempt at self-reconstruction as a response, perhaps an unconscious one, to class conflict and the policies of central government. The late sixteenth century, a time at which the tax controversy reached fevered pitch, was an overall period of crisis and criticism for the traditional nobility of France. Numerical decline (at least temporarily), economic hardship, dilution by intermarriage with the bourgeoisie, erosion of political power, and the emergence of criticism that questioned the real need for the existence of the nobility combined to bring about a profound transformation within the noble ranks.2 No challenge faced was more threatening to the nobility’s raison d’être than the Military Revolution. From the time of the Hundred Years’ War the advantages provided by gunpowder and contemporary infantry tactics as decisive factors in war had been clear. Time had supplanted the dominant mounted warrior noble with the firearmed common foot soldier. With this change the military rationale for a fighting nobility—and, by extension, its claim to a privileged place in European society—came to an end. The new reality of warfare, exacerbated by frequently unacceptable conduct and excesses during the Wars of Religion, focused social attention to question the traditionally professed ideal of nobility in the late sixteenth century. Nobility, its defenders argued, wasvirtue,demonstratedbyone’sexemplary conduct.Yetoldnoblefamilies had run amok during the wars, belying this ideal with behavior far from virtuous . They had disgraced themselves and in the process were revealed ignoble and no better than anyone else. These events and attitudes accelerated changes, as the events of the Wars of Religion provoked a great moral debate about the fundamental concepts of nobility. Critics wrote of nobles’ ignorance and anti-intellectualism, and their perceived backwardness was the subjectofnumerouspamphletsandtreatises.Atthistime many lost political power and offices to better-educatedmembers of the middle class, and apologists offered a program for rehabilitation of the nobility, proposing educational reform as the primary means to restore its virtue and to retain power.3 One important outcome of this discourse was the emergence of a redefined idea of nobility that better accommodated social reality. Ellery Schalk [44.206.227.65] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:05 GMT) 9 Le Pays: Nobles, Taste, Fashion, and Politics has described how attitudes toward the nobility changed substantially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, how perceptions of nobles evolved from the medieval warrior to the modern aristocrat—educated, sophisticated, and cultivated.4 By the end of the sixteenth century a new paradigm of virtue also emerged, no longer redolent solely of the warrior image but defined more inclusively, in a way that justified a place for the robe families, the newly ennobled families within the privileged rank. The Wars of Religion had engendered new antagonisms between elites and the common people, and elites closed ranks in a common defense based on race to...