Distributing Status: The Evolution of State Honours in Western Europe by Samuel Clark (review)

This impressive book makes a persuasive case for the importance of state honors in dealing with several modern issues—the growth and increasing complexity of the state and the need for innovative methods to win public support, the changing relations between artistocracy and middle class, and the effort to accommodate growing individualism in motivating political and social initiatives. Clark also assesses the relationship between the evolution of honors and changes in the nature and extent of military activity in the three nations involved. The results of this meticulous study will interest not only historians but also political scientists and sociologists, from whose disciplines the author draws widely.

Alhough Clark is a sociologist, and uses terms like modernization more fluently than many historians would, the study is deeply historical and informed by wide scholarship in the field. The first section explores various facets of causation in modern societies to explain why state honors changed and expanded from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward. The rise of the bourgeoisie, and particularly the overlap between a modern and an aristocratically dominated political order, figure strongly in this section, but Clark also gives attention to changing definitions of merit. Moreover, all of this discussion arises from a carefully constructed background of earlier systems of honors that provide a baseline for assessing subsequent change.

The second main section addresses change from the standpoint of, not society in general, but the state officials who awarded honors, seeing expansion and change resulting from the need to legitimate state actions (including military actions) and communicate more clearly as populations soared and social complexity increased. This section also introduces more comparative distinctions between the three regions under examination, within a common framework, focusing primarily on specific honors categories, like the French Legion of Honor, and an array of medals and badges.

The ensuing chapters deal with the role that honors assumed as societies moved from corporate to more individualistic structures and thus required new methods of reward and discipline. Section 4 follows the transition from aristocratic to bourgeois social prominence more specifically, along with the growing competition for status, and examines how changing patterns of state honors linked to this complex and gradual process. A final section explores the consequences of honors, both for individual recipients and for society at large—a key part of the overall argument.

Although the book is organized in terms of large themes, a host of individual details enlivens and supports the presentation. Thus we learn why, rarely, individuals were ejected from consideration, how the tastes of particular monarchs affected the distribution of honors, or how religious minorities (and on rare occasions, even working-class concerns) factored into the process. Quantitative analysis also features strongly, illustrating larger patterns and the tendency both to expand and diversify.

Given Clark’s primary interest in grand trends, distinctions among regional cases receive less attention than might be desired, though the final chapter lays out future comparative possibilities on a more global scale. Overall, the book offers a challenging approach both to the uses of honors themselves and to broader patterns of political and social change in the emergence of modern Europe.