56 Chapter III
who bought rural acreage often did so only to have a place of residence in the
country, or meet the legal qualifications for election to Parliament; they did not
become country gentry—the two classes remained distinct. “Gentlemen’s sons
were less commonly apprenticed in towns. By 1760 the stratification was not like a
system of caste, but it roughly blocked out the division of functions between dif-
ferent groups of the community.”^24 The justices of the peace, formerly appointed by
the crown, were now appointed by the lord lieutenants of the counties, who were
usually peers. “Hence by the end of the century we get a social exclusiveness
amongst the justices which led them to object to anyone engaged in trade or
manufacture.”^25 At the highest level, that of the peerage, there was a certain open-
ing of the gates after the Whig oligarchy lost control. The House of Lords in-
creased in size by about fifty per cent during the two administrations of the
Younger Pitt. Pitt, however, used elevation to the peerage as a reward for eminent
military or diplomatic service, or to gain the support of those who controlled par-
liamentary boroughs. Such new peers originated in the landed class, and their el-
evation signified promotion within the aristocracy rather than entrance of new
peers into it. The idea that elevation of businessmen to the peerage began with Pitt
seems to be a groundless historical cliche, for only one of Pitt’s creations was a
banker and City of London man.^26 The social distance between landed and com-
mercial classes had perhaps never been greater in England than in the days of Jane
Austen and the eve of the First Reform Bill.
In France the noblesse, comprising tens of thousands of families, corresponded
socially to what would be called gentility in England. The difference was that En-
glish gentility was a vague standing recognized by society, while French noblesse was
a status recognized by law and defined or created by the royal power. The French
noble also possessed tangible privileges such as tax advantages, which the English
gentleman did not enjoy, at least not simply on any legal ground of being a gentle-
man. Nobility in France, however, was common enough to be the accepted symbol
of prestige. Not to be noble, or nearly noble, might be almost as embarrassing in
France as not to be considered of the gentlefolk in England. Many bourgeois re-
spelled their names with a genteel or noble flourish: Robespierre as de Robe spierre,
Danton as d’Anton, Brissot as Brissot de Warville, Roland as Roland de la Platière.
Carnot vainly tried to prove himself noble to impress the family of the girl he
hoped vainly to marry.
Since the King could create nobles it was theoretically possible, in France, for
the royal government to bestow the accepted prestige- symbol on successful men in
all walks of life. The élites, as the French say, might have been assimilated to the
noblesse, or nobility itself might have been transformed into a kind of legion of
honor for men of notable achievement. Had this happened, there might have been
riots and peasant uprisings, but no French Revolution.^27
24 G. N. Clark, Wealth of England to 1760 (London, 1946), 161.
25 W. S. Holdsworth, “The House of Lords 1689–1783,” in Law Quarterly Review, XLV (1929),
438.
26 Tu r b e r v i l l e , op. cit.
27 M. Reinhard, “Elite et noblesse dans la seconde moitié du 18e siècle,” in Revue d ’ histoire mod-