The culture of merit in Old Regime France: Royal service and the old nobility, 1600-1789.

An effect of the rise of the middle class in the early modern period, many think, was the emergence of the idea that men should be distinguished by merit. The idea is set in contrast to an earlier principle of distinction that was based on birth and hereditary status. By examining the nature of royal service in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, however, this dissertation shows that it is misleading to think of birth and merit as opposing analytical categories. Because private life and political experience in premodern society were separated by a thin line, merit traditionally signified the moral qualities valued in interpersonal relations--qualities that were associated with high birth. In the culture of royal service in the seventeenth century, merit and birth were often near synonyms. To find how the modern notion of merit finally emerged, this study explores the mentality of the old nobility (or noblesse d'epee). Through close analysis of the language used in a wide range of published and archival sources written by or for this traditional nobility (including memoirs, grievance lists, educational treatises, family histories, and plans for institutional reform), it is possible to link the nobles' discourse on birth and merit to the evolution of royal service in the age of statebuilding. By the middle eighteenth century, it seems, it was indeed possible to define merit in terms that spanned distinctions of social status. But this development had very little to do with the increasing influence of one class and the declining influence of another (namely, the nobility). Instead, the key to the transformation of the culture of merit was the changed character of the monarchy itself. Service to the king, once largely private and governed by a personal idiom, had become a strictly public and impersonal affair. The moral qualities thought to be reflected in high birth were thus overshadowed by the need for functional utility. Talent--a specific and always useful quality--was merit's new synonym.PhDEuropean historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128597/2/9034518.pd