Defining the Aristocrat: From Geneva to Revolutionary France

Abstract

In the political and social language of the early modern period, aristocracy did not denote a social class, but a form of state or government. At the dawn of the revolutionary age, however, the concept of aristocracy suddenly moved to the centre of disputes over the new political and social order in European states—and with it the previously unknown figure of the aristocrat. This article traces the conceptual history of aristocracy and aristocrats between about 1760 and 1789. It argues that the rise of these revolutionary battle terms was largely rooted in the constitutional struggles of the small Geneva Republic, which were widely observed and commented throughout Europe. Protagonists such as the Geneva opposition leaders and writers François d’Ivernois and Étienne Clavière, and the French philosophers and politicians Jacques-Pierre Brissot and Honoré Gabriel de Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, were involved in translating these concepts from the political language of republicanism into the context of the French monarchy, where members of the nobility were now denounced as aristocrats in the run-up to the Estates General. The outbreak of the French Revolution and its perception throughout Europe ultimately shaped the meanings of the concepts of aristocracy and aristocrat in the modern world.