The Nobility in State and Society: Administrative and Public Ways of Defining and Conceptualising the Nobility in the Late Habsburg Empire (1849–1914)

Abstract

This study deals with the definition of the aristocracy in the late Habsburg Monarchy (1848-1916). It attempts to grasp this phenomenon in the “bourgeois age” from two perspectives: firstly, it is assumed that the state - with the establishment of a centralised administration—also ‘bureaucratised’ membership of the nobility in the nineteenth century. In the Habsburg administrative apparatus, there were therefore structures that regulated entry and advancement in this social class and established categories that defined and standardised the nobility from a state perspective. Social mobility was made primarily dependent on the achievements of the applicants. On the other hand, the social implications of the institutional decisions of the nobility and the policy of ennoblement are analysed. This form of honour was, as it were, worthless—for the applicant as well as for the state—if it did not receive public attention and recognition. It is therefore also necessary to ask from the opposite side how the public identified and defined the nobility and how those wishing to be ennobled tried to assert their claims with the help of official and informal channels.