342 Chapter XIV
ters in office from 1718 to 1789 only three were not nobly born; of these, Dubois
was a cardinal, Sartine a nonentity, and Necker a foreigner. Half these ministers
were of six or more generations of noble blood. Noble also, in the time of Louis
XVI, were all the intendants, who might have beencalled provincial governors
were that term not reserved for an honorary office even more aristocratic. Failure
had followed the attempts of royal officials to use noble status as a kind of legion
of honor for meritorious persons in business and the professions. The attempt to
confer noble status on bourgeois army officers had also been blocked by spokes-
men for true or hereditary nobility.^14
The army ordinance of 1781 has remained famous as a symbol of this aristo-
cratic resurgence. It prescribed that officer candidates, in the future (with a signifi-
cant exception for men rising directly from the ranks) must have no less than four
generations of noble descent. The young man on joining a regiment had to submit
to his colonel a certificate obtained from the royal genealogist, and to obtain this
certificate he had to assemble a huge dossier of papers, including the marriage
contracts of his grandfather and great- grandfather, old deeds, wills, extracts from
tax rolls and much else. This absurd perversion of bureaucracy occurred in a war
office that was in many respects already highly modernized, and in an army where
a fifth of the officers, including a number of generals, were not nobly born.^15
It must be remembered that in France at the time, as in some other countries
since, positions in the army, the church, and the government were of the greater
significance, since the private professions were undeveloped, and important sala-
ried employments outside the government were very rare.
Since the death of Louis XIV, and never more effectively than under Louis
XVI, the parlements had enlarged their political role, and had upheld, in public
and private, noble ideas of good government and society. The successes of the As-
sembly of Notables against Calonne marked another bid by the nobility for a posi-
tive voice in the determination of policy. The way in which Calonne’s provincial
assemblies worked out showed the same trend. He had intended them to be class-
less, in the sense then relevant; but Brienne had yielded to noble objections, and
the assemblies which actually met in 1787 represented the three orders, and each
had to have a member of the clergy or the nobility as its presiding official.
14 See Chapter III above.
15 Estimates of the number of non- noble officers, as repeated by recent writers, seem to go back to
L. Hartmann, Les officiers de l ’armée royale et la Révolution (Paris, 1910). Hartmann probably exagger-
ated the number of non- noble officers in the 1780’s, since he assumed that among officers receiving
commissions before the ordinance of 1781 the proportion of non- nobles remained the same as during
wartime conditions of the Seven Years’ War. If, however, we disregard the thousands of honorary of-
ficers, and those of the royal bodyguard (whose officers were all noble); if we consider only the 9,578
officers assigned to troops in 1789 (infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineers); if we include as officers
the 1,100 officiers de fortune, commissioned from the ranks and used mainly for routine duties at the
company level; if we assume that all officiers de fortune were of non- noble birth; and if we reduce by as
much as one- half Hartmann’s estimate of the number of non- noble officers other than officiers de for-
tune; then it still seems likely that about 2,000 of the 9,578 officers assigned to troops in 1789 were not
of noble birth. That a few officers of non- noble origin were still being promoted to the rank of general
in the 1780’s is apparent from the chapter on general officers in L. Tuetey, Les officiers sous l ’ancien ré-
gime: nobles et roturiers (Paris, 1908). Tuetey concluded that it was harder for a roturier to get into the
officer corps at the bottom than to be promoted once he was in it.