Aristocracy: Theory and Practice 61
tain moneys asked by Maria Theresa of the diet of Hungary, and which the diet
refused, could easily have been paid from the incomes of a few bishops and mag-
nates.^33 No European state except Great Britain could develop its full strength
under the taxation system then in use, and even the British government until about
1780 borrowed heavily from private Dutch sources. The inflexibility of the taxation
system was due mainly to institutions associated with aristocracy. It might be due
also in some cases to historic regional liberties, as in Brittany, Hungary, or the
American colonies of Great Britain; but in Europe, if not in America, such provin-
cial liberties gave more fiscal protection to the upper than to the lower classes.
A heightened class consciousness, with accompanying social and psychological
tensions, may be listed as the last of the evils created by an increasingly aristocratic
social system. It is not that the bourgeois, or persons next below the noble or patri-
cian classes, were conscious of resentment or hostility to the aristocracy as such,
though they might on occasion have unpleasant experiences with individuals. Ap-
athy toward public affairs was very great in 1760 and even later; so far as middle-
class people had no desire to participate in high position they could not resent the
measures that debarred them. The most class- conscious class, or the class most
sensitive to threats from other classes, real or imagined, seems to have been the
aristocracy itself, with its everlasting striving for family perpetuation, its rules and
ordinances requiring four quarters of nobility or a century of patrician status, its
doctrine on the value of hereditary nobility for preservation of political freedom,
or, in France, its theory that the older nobles were racially different, being of
Frankish and Germanic origin, from the mass of the population. The bourgeois
and lower classes accepted the class structure more passively as in the nature of
things. Perhaps in England, among Dissenters, a sense of difference handed down
from the days of the Puritan revolution kept alive a positive middle- class feeling
against the Anglican and landowning aristocracy. Perhaps there was everywhere a
feeling that some were born to govern, and some were not (which would corre-
spond to the facts of the day); as long as there was acceptance of this situation we
may speak of class consciousness, but not of class conflict. Bourgeois feeling was
tepid on such matters. The bourgeois Voltaire had no objection to the nobility.
Bourgeois radicalism, where it existed, turned rather against the church, or “minis-
terial despotism,” or the inefficiencies or absurdities or chicaneries of government,
or the ignorance and superstition believed to be inherited from the past. Such
measures as were taken to cope with the essential class problem, to reduce the fi-
nancial or other privileges of the nobility, or to draw middle- class people into gov-
ernment service or the army, were taken on the initiative of governments them-
selves, in the great monarchies, without bourgeois agitation and even without
much bourgeois support.
The problem of the bourgeois was felt rather as a personal one. It had to do with
private and family life, and with the satisfactions of prestige or recognition. The
highest and most wealthy aristocracy aside, there was often little of importance,
except rank itself, to distinguish two families of bourgeois and of noble status. Or,
indeed, in particular cases, a bourgeois family might have more of all the world’s
33 A. Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresas (10 vols., Vienna, 1863–1876), VII, 112–13, 123.