Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture explores a crucial moment in the history of European selfhood. During the seventeenth century, French nobles began to understand their lives in terms of personal histories and inner qualities, rather than as the products of tradition and inheritance. This preoccupation with the self accompanied a critical view of society, monarchy, and Christian teachings. It also shaped a new understanding of political realities and personal relations. Drawing from a combination of memoirs, literary works, and archival sources, Jonathan Dewald offers a new understanding of aristocratic sensibilities. In detailed fashion, he explores the nobles' experience of war, career, money, family, love, and friendship. In all of these areas, nobles felt a gap between social expectations and personal needs; in the seventeenth century this tension became increasingly oppressive. Modern French culture, Dewald argues, emerged from this conflict between tradition and the individual's inner life. "No other work covers the subject that Dewald presents. . . . A learned tour de force."—Orest Ranum, Johns Hopkins University "No other work covers the subject that Dewald presents. . . . A learned tour de force."―Orest Ranum, Johns Hopkins University Jonathan Dewald is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He is the author of Pont-St-Pierre, 1398-1789: Lordship, Community, and Capitalism in Early Modern France (California, 1987). Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570-1715 By Jonathan Dewald University of California Press Copyright © 1993 Jonathan Dewald All right reserved. ISBN: 0520078373 Introduction This book explores ways in which men and women of the French nobility thought about their world and themselves during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It asks how nobles responded to a series of recurrent problems in their lives: problems of personal worth, ambition, and the unfolding of an individual's career; problems of money, friendship, sexuality, and civic order; problems of time and communication. Each of these is a distinct topic, which I initially selected because of its frequency in aristocratic correspondence and literature of the period. But these topics can also be understood as aspects of a single larger problem. Each represents one form of connection between the individual and her or his society. What follows, then, is an extended essay on how aristocratic men and women understood their bonds to the society around them at a decisive moment in the evolution of early modern society. To ask such questions about the nobility, of course, is to consider only a small group within French society, perhaps 1 percent of its total population. Because much of what follows rests on literary sources, the group considered here is in fact still more restricted. It includes mainly the wealthiest and most articulate nobles, those most closely attached to Paris and the royal court, those most intent on giving written form to their experiences and concerns. This limited group nonetheless deserves close study, partly because, like any ruling class, the high French aristocracy exercised an influence on the rest of society out of proportion to its numbers, and partly because the group's culture seems to me still poorly understood, despite a recent revival of historians' interest in the nobility. More important than these considerations, however, the nobility embody in acute form a problem that many participants in early modern culture shared. The French nobles illustrate the emergence of an essentially modern culture, one still familiar to us, within a deeply traditional social order. For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century nobles, that traditional order rested on ideas about inheritance and familial continuity. Property and political rights descended from the past, and so too did personal qualities, a dual inheritance from the individual family and the larger aristocratic order. Most nobles simply assumed these values, and their use in ideological debate persisted into the eighteenth century. Such persistence is not surprising, for these ideas implied a powerful coherence between the realm of nature and that of the social order. Nobles could view their behavior and their political powers as reflections of the world's natural order; they could view individual qualities and choices as reflections of the family's qualities and needs. To see links between the biological and the social inspired intellectual and moral assurance.1 Yet the French nobles (as we shall see in more detail below) also participated enthusiastically in many of the most innovative currents in early modern culture. They followed and helped to shape cultural movements toward individualism, skepticism about established social arrangements, and belief in the primacy of change in human affairs. They adopted modes of thought an