Aristocracy: Theory and Practice 57
There were reformers in the French government who saw this possibility. In
1750 the government created a noblesse militaire. There were then about 4,000
bourgeois officers in the army, and the decree specified that all of them after thirty
years’ service should receive quasi- noble tax- exemptions, or nobility itself if theirs
was the third generation of military service. The tendency of the government, that
is, was still assimilationist rather than segregationist. But the tendency of the no-
bles, the “real” nobles, was more segregationist than assimilationist. The nobles by
birth were often impecunious, and for economic as well as other reasons disliked
bourgeois competition for military appointments. They obtained for themselves,
in 1751, a new école militaire, in which poor boys of four generations of inherited
nobility could receive education at public expense; and in 1781, just as the thirty-
year period specified in the edict of 1750 came to an end, aristocratic pressure
forced the government to issue the famous ordinance of that year, by which army
commissions were in effect limited to men with four quarterings of nobility, that
is, men whose noble status was duly inherited. Even at this late date, on the eve of
the Revolution there appear to have been a number of generals in the French
army who were not of noble birth, but these were older men who had entered the
service many years before. The trend was toward aristocratic self- segregationism in
the army.
If the true nobles, with their esteem for martial virtues, would not share their
status with middle- class army officers there was little chance that the élites of civil-
ian life could receive any such honors. The government did, at times, favor the
ennoblement of businessmen. It projected a noblesse commerçante to correspond to
the noblesse militaire, hoping to get nobles and their capital into business pursuits,
and to make it possible for businessmen to become noble without abandoning
business. A decree of 1767 allowed nobles to go into commerce without deroga-
tion. It set up procedures by which some of the negociants, the most well- to- do
wholesale merchants, might receive certain honorific distinctions which, however,
fell just short of nobility. The result was that the negociants were antagonized,
being told in effect that they were not quite worthy of the desired rank. Such vac-
illation in the assimilating of businessmen to the nobility was due to many causes,
to the resistance of older nobles, to the jealousy of marchands for negociants, to the
difficulties of a financially hard- pressed government in granting a status that car-
ried tax exemption, and, more generally, to the incongruousness between forms of
prestige derived ultimately from land, war, or feudalism and forms of achievement
arising from trade and the handling of money. The professions fared no better
than business. Quite a few doctors and a few artists were ennobled, but in general
no men of science, no writers and no lawyers, and only a few professional govern-
ment workers. It may be pointed out that the deputies of the Third Estate who
brought about the National Assembly in 1789 were almost all of them lawyers or
government career men, and that they abolished nobility fairly early in the Revo-
lution, in 1790.
erne et contemporaine, III ( Jan.−Mar. 1956), 5–37; L. Tuetey, Les officiers sous l ’ancien régime (Paris,
1908); E. Barber, The Bourgeoisie in 18th Century France, 60–62.