The Court Nobility and the French Revolution: The Example of the Society of Thirty

Abstract

ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE FEATURES of the early years of the French Revolution was the prominence of members of the French nobility among the Revolutionary leadership. Historians wishing to maintain the thesis of the Revolution have either ignored these noble revolutionaries altogether or dismissed their presence as irrelevant to the true nature of the class struggle of 1789. Georges Lefebvre, for example, acknowledged that there were nobles in the forefront of the movement for constitutional reform in 1788-89. they were only minority; otherwise the Revolution would have taken place by common accord. 1 Perhaps so. But Lefebvre and other historians of the French Revolution have failed to address satisfactorily the question: Why did some nobles become revolutionaries while others did not? Was it simply that some nobles had read more of Voltaire and Rousseau than others? Or were noble revolutionaries merely bourgeois in disguise, whose titles of nobility were freshly minted during the final years of the ancien regime ? Each of these two answers has its scholarly adherents. Whether taken separately or together, however, neither answer has proved persuasive to most historians of the French Revolution. This problem of the noble revolutionary is most acute if we restrict our considerations to the nobility of the Sword. Many members of the nobility, after all, may be susceptible to inclusion in Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret's rather generous definition of noble as a bourgeois