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Prologue aristocratic redoubt Prologue In the last decade historians have once again turned to the study of the aristocracy in modern Europe. Long banished by Marxist dialectic to the losing side in history’s struggles, the pre-industrial elites were said to have suffered their inevitable defeat at the hands of the triumphant bourgeoisie during the French Revolution. To study the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury remnants of the nobility of the ancien régime therefore appeared at best a waste of valuable time, since we already knew the story, and at worst a snobbish attention to matters more suited to the antiquarian and the genealogist. Even after Marxism ceased to provide the primary theoretical framework for social history, the stridently egalitarian tastes of our age have made struggling workers and oppressed minorities far more sympathetic objects of scholarly attention than lordly grandees, whose allegedly idle lives were supported by the sweat of the laboring classes. And for historians in general, narratives of decay and decline, coupled with the apparent lack of any progressive associations, have rarely held any allure. Even today, despite the almost universal contempt heaped on Whiggish history, the agendas underlying much academic work often create connections between past and present at least as simplistic and perhaps more invidious than those for which Lord Macaulay and G. M. Trevelyan have been attacked. Ironically, then, the revival of interest in aristocracy owes a debt of gratitude to the work of Arno Mayer, a Marxist scholar who in 1981 offered a new interpretation of the role of pre-industrial elites in European affairs down to World War I.1 Mayer presented a wide-ranging interpretive essay that ambitiously sought to depict the experiences of nobles in England, France, Germany, the Habsburg Monarchy, Italy, and Russia roughly from the French Revolution to 1914. He advanced the novel thesis that the aristocracy, rather than passively awaiting its 1 preordained fate, proved remarkably tenacious in clinging to the levers of power during the “bourgeois century.” That historians had previously failed to perceive this phenomenon Mayer ascribed partly to our ignorance of this neglected sector of the population, but also to our exaggeration of the effects of the industrial and political revolutions on European life, even in the decades immediately preceding World War I. In broad strokes, he suggested that the enduring primacy of agriculture, the durability of monarchical government, and the spineless deference of the nascent middle classes furnished the old nobility with the means not merely to survive, but to dominate nineteenth-century European political , social, economic, and cultural developments. While Mayer’s book kindled new interest in aristocracy, the very breadth of his argument has left him open to continuous assault. And in the last several years, the contributions of many scholars have not only sharpened our understanding of individual facets of aristocratic experience , but have also led to the revision of Mayer’s broader thesis altogether .2 His monolithic depiction has now given way to one much more nuanced by the many variables that in¶uenced the evolution of European elites. In other words, the nobility manifested itself in remarkably diverse ways depending upon historical circumstance. Rates of change rarely corresponded from one country to another. Whereas the remnants of feudalism were abolished in 1789 in France, serfdom did not disappear until 1861 in Russia. The introduction of universal suffrage in 1848 in France was matched by a longer reform process across the Channel that began in 1832. Great Britain industrialized very early in comparison to central and eastern Europe. Historical factors, in some cases predating the nineteenth century, like legal and constitutional positions and privileges, dictated how the aristocracy would meet the challenges. While the new historiography has thus deepened our knowledge, it has also discredited the idea posited by Mayer that the aristocracy maintained a virtually unchallenged ascendancy down to 1914. Rather, the picture that has emerged is much more complex and actually lends itself more to the notion of decline, albeit gradual and hardly inexorable. The modern world presented obstacles that could not be overcome. The doctrines of the Enlightenment undermined the ideological foundations of the society of estates, while the process of urbanization removed large numbers of people from the authority of the local landlord. On the other hand, some developments that were heretofore seen as detrimental to the survival of the aristocracy actually brought new advantages, at least in the short term and for some segments of the nobility. The introduction of 2 • aristocratic redoubt [3...

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