The Noble as Landlord in the Region of Toulouse at the End of the Old Regime

Abstract

Unlike the English country squire and the Prussian Junker, the French gentilhomme campagnard has been stereotyped by literature and history as idle, dull, and poor. Without rejecting Molière's picture of the court fop or La Bruyère's caricature of the proud but impoverished hobereau, attention must be turned toward the more typical provincial nobleman of the Old Regime. Here is a social type that was neither congenitally frivolous nor hopelessly rustic. Historical research, especially in local and private archives, is uncovering the existence of an active, shrewd, and prosperous landholding nobility who were not, as Arthur Young too often suggests, a thoroughly urbanized class of absentee proprietors leasing their domains at fixed money rents to bourgeois tenants. On the contrary, personal estate management not only was the best way of assuring a gentilhomme campagnard a good income but it was also recognized as his profession, and, in contrast to retail trade and purely. commercial speculation, a perfectly respectable noble enterprise.