• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Nobility of the Sword

France under the Old Regime distinguished between a political nobility, in which all nobility resulted from the Crown, and a natural nobility, transmitted by blood, and whose ancient origins - lost in the mists of time - guaranteed its superiority. Italian legal experts had long constructed theories concerning the idea of a political nobility, whose existence would be inconceivable outside of service to the prince, the nature of this service was not necessarily war. This division is commonly repeated in historiography in order to distinguish between two social categories, the nobility of the robe and the nobility of the sword [« Noblesse de robe » et « noblesse d’épée »].

The Nobility of the Sword consisted of the nobles of the court and of the nobles of the provinces. The former were few in number, perhaps a thousand, but they shone with peculiar brilliancy, for they were the ones who lived in Versailles, danced attendance upon the king, vied with each other in an eager competition for appointments in the army and navy and diplomatic service, for pensions and largesses from the royal bounty. These they needed, as they lived in a luxurious splendor that taxed their incomes and overtaxed them. Residing at court, they allowed their estates to be administered by bailiffs or stewards, who exacted all that they could get from the peasantry who cultivated them. Everybody was jealous of the nobles of this class, for they were the favored few, who practically monopolized all the pleasant places in the sun.

The contrast was striking between them and the hundred thousand provincial nobles who for various reasons did not live at court, were not known to the king, received no favors, and who yet were conscious that in purity of blood, in honorableness of descent and tradition, they were the equals or superiors of those who crowded about the monarch's person. Many of them had small incomes, some pitifully small. They could cut no figure in the world of society, they had few chances to increase their prosperity, which, in fact, tended steadily to decrease.

Their sons were trained for the army, the only noble profession, but could never hope to rise very high because all the major appointments went to the assiduous suitors of the clique at court. They resided among the peasants and in some cases were hardly distinguishable from them, except that they insisted upon maintaining the tradition of their class, their badge of superiority, a life of leisure. To work was to lose caste. This obliged many of them to insist rigorously upon the payment of the various feudal dues owed them by the peasantry, some of which were burdensome, most of which were irritating. In some parts of France, however, as in the Vendee and in Brittany, they were sympathetic and helpful in their relations with the peasants and were in turn treated with respect by them.

But it was only with the reign of Louis XIV that the idea of a nobility divided into two orders of service came to make up part of the legal definition of the Second Estate. Commissioners of the investigations launched by Colbert were entrusted with seeking out usurpers of nobility, by demanding that nobles show proof of their rank going back to the year 1560. The degree of ancientness grew over time, to the point that, from 1760 on, obtaining the honors of court presumed proof of a noble lineage going back to 1400 at least.

The question of nobility in the reign of Louis XIV was ideologically structured, expressed in the division between two sorts of nobility. On one hand there was a recent nobility, so-called “bourgeois,” meaning a social origin in the burgesses of the cities (a legal status and not a social class). On the other hand, there were the court nobles, whose ancient origin was supposed to be radically different and who were assimilated to the military function (the sword.)

These terms did not cover the whole assembly of the elites of the monarchy of the Old Regime, nor did they account for the empirical complexity of social careers. The notions of robe and sword made only a late appearance, during the seventeenth century. In the sixteenth century, what was most often distinguished were “gens de robe courte” (men of the short robe) and the “gens de robe longue” (men of the long robe). The first term designated provosts, marshals, and criminal lieutenants, and sometimes bailiffs and seneschals, who all exercised functions with the law and the police, and who judged with a sword at their side. Some were noble. The expression “long robe,” it referred to the magistrates and lawyers of the courts of royal justice. Not all offices of the long robe conferred nobility.

The evolution of royal policy concerning the venality of offices led to the assimilation of the long robe with Magistrates of the high courts of justice, offices that the monarchy had rendered ennobling. The nobility was personal to the bearer, and an inheritable nobility was conferred if the office was held for two successive generations. In 1604 the paulette tax was imposed, which sanctioned a process that had been underway for a century, establishing a specific manner of living nobly, through service to the King by way of the law. This is when the notion of “nobility of the robe” appears.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, “men-at-arms” was generally used in opposition to men of the robe, lawyers, and also referred specifically to military nobles. The appearance of the word “sword” was used to designate all nobles not of the robe. The expression “nobility of the sword” did not appear prior to the greater part of the seventeenth century.