The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century : From Feudalism to Enlightenment - Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret

The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century

From Feudalism to Enlightenment

By: Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, William Doyle (Translator)

Paperback | 15 July 1985

At a Glance

Paperback


$82.95

or 4 interest-free payments of $20.74 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 7 to 10 business days

One of the most lively of France's younger historians, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret argues in this pioneering essay that the traditional picture of the pre-revolutionary French nobility as a caste of intransigent reactionaries and parasites is a fabrication of revolutionary propaganda. Using a whole range of new research and calculations, he argues that the nobility represented all that was most vigorous and forward-looking in eighteenth-century French society. Constantly renewing itself by recruiting the richest members of the middle classes or marrying their daughters, the nobility was in the forefront of French economic and intellectual life, and until 1789 was at the head of the movement for reform of the old regime state. In an afterword specially written for the English edition, the author explains how the revolutionaries came to turn against a group that had done more than any other to bring about the Revolution.
Industry Reviews
'From its appearance in 1976, Chaussinand-Nogaret's book was immediately recognized as making a major contribution to the revaluation of eighteenth-century France and to the origins of the French Revolution. Its appearance in English is long overdue, but the author has been lucky in his translator. Professor Doyle brings to his work a thorough command of French, the ability to write clear and attractive English and a command of the subject that allows him not merely to appreciate the nuances of the text but to present its ideas in terms that an English-speaking audience can immediately recognize and assimilate. The result, in the form of a short and pithy book, at a reasonable price, deserves an enthusiastic welcome from everyone teaching the subject to sixthformers or undergraduates unable to cope with the French text.' Norman Hampson, History

More in European History

The Shortest History of France - Colin Jones

RRP $27.99

$23.75

15%
OFF
Sword : D-Day - Trial by Battle - Max Hastings

RRP $39.99

$31.75

21%
OFF
The Nazi Mind : Twelve Warnings From History - Laurence Rees

RRP $55.00

$42.25

23%
OFF
Abandoned Women : Scottish Convicts Exiled Beyond the Seas - Lucy Frost
The Catalpa Rescue - Peter FitzSimons

RRP $36.99

$29.75

20%
OFF
The War on the West : How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason - Douglas Murray
The Gulag Archipelago : 1918-56 - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

RRP $37.99

$30.50

20%
OFF
Night : Penguin Modern Classics - Elie Wiesel

RRP $22.99

$17.75

23%
OFF
The Strange Death of Europe : Immigration, Identity, Islam - Douglas Murray
Normal Women : 900 Years Of Making History - Philippa Gregory

RRP $29.99

$24.90

17%
OFF
Say Nothing : True Story Of Murder and Memory In Northern Ireland - Patrick Radden Keefe
The Journals of Captain Cook : Penguin Classics - James Cook

RRP $27.99

$23.75

15%
OFF
Colonialism : A Moral Reckoning - Nigel Biggar

RRP $34.99

$28.35

19%
OFF
A Divine Fury : A Cesare Aldo Book 4 - D. V. Bishop

RRP $22.99

$21.25

The CIA Book Club : The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War - Charlie English
The Wretched of the Earth : Penguin Modern Classics - Frantz Fanon
Discourses and Selected Writings : Penguin Classics - Epictetus
Looking At Women, Looking At War - Victoria Amelina

RRP $34.99

$28.50

19%
OFF
Friends in Youth : Choosing Sides in the English Civil War - Minoo Dinshaw
The Hiding Place : How one courageous family triumphed over hate - Corrie Ten Boom