Aristocracy

views updated

ARISTOCRACY

definition
challenges confronting aristocracy
the special case of the british
bibliography

In 1914, at the end of the long nineteenth century, the European aristocracy was in a weaker position than had been the case on the eve of the French Revolution. In regard to political power, social status, and cultural influence, the traditional ruling and landowning class faced more powerful competition than had existed in the 1780s. Nevertheless, in most of Europe the aristocracy still remained a very powerful force in government, politics, and society. One hundred and twenty years after the French Revolution had challenged the old European order, what may in fact be most surprising was just how much power and status parts of the aristocracy had retained.

It is important to stress the word parts, however. While many of the greatest aristocratic families had become the core of an evolving plutocratic elite, the wealth of most of the traditional landowning class had declined sharply in comparison to non-landed fortunes in the half-century before 1914. Meanwhile in some European states the political power of the aristocracy had declined steeply, whereas in others the power of the traditional ruling class had remained very great or even in certain respects had grown between 1789 and 1914.

definition

Before going into these issues in more detail, it is useful to define briefly what aristocracy means in the nineteenth-century European context. In almost every European state in 1789 there existed a group called the nobility whose membership was defined in law and that enjoyed a range of privileges. The term nobility had vastly different meanings from one European society to another, however. In England, at one end of the European spectrum, it meant the peerage, a group numbered in the low hundreds. At the other end of the spectrum lay Poland and Hungary, where nobles constituted 5 percent of the population or more. Between lay France, where roughly 1.5 percent of the population enjoyed noble status in 1789. Clearly all European nobles were not aristocrats.

It was much more nearly the case that all titled nobles (from barons up to dukes and princes) were aristocrats, but even this was actually an illusion. Again England was the extreme case in which not only titles but all landed property were inherited exclusively by eldest sons. In almost all cases throughout the nineteenth century one could assume that an English (though not necessarily an Irish) peer was a wealthy man with high status in his society. Elsewhere in Europe, where titles and property were often inherited by all sons, the automatic English correlation of title, wealth, and status did not apply. Russia, where all children—both sons and daughters—inherited titles and only a minority of the greatest aristocratic families passed their main estates to eldest sons (save in the Baltic provinces where this custom was more widespread), provides the counterpoint to England. It was the case in

nineteenth-century Europe that the great majority of the richest and most prestigious aristocratic families were titled, but there were exceptions, even in Britain and in Russia. Throughout the period 1700 to 1914, for example, the Naryshkins were one of the richest, most powerful, and most respected aristocratic families in Russia and were indeed closely related to the Romanovs. They never, however, had titles. Nor in late-nineteenth-century Britain did the statesman Arthur Balfour, whose wealth, connections, and values made him an unequivocal aristocrat.

Aristocracy ultimately can be defined only in relatively loose sociological terms, rather than in more tight legal ones. Aristocrats were members of the traditional ruling class. They inherited wealth, status, and power from their ancestors. In the over-whelming majority of cases in 1789 the core of their wealth lay in land. The precise nature of their political power differed from one European country to another. In 1789 the English and Scottish aristocracy dominated Parliament, which itself wholly controlled government. The British aristocracy was a ruling class in the fullest meaning of the word. Matters were a little more equivocal in most of continental Europe where supposedly absolute monarchs ruled through various species of bureaucracy. Even in Russia, however, where monarchical absolutism was most extreme, the emperor could not rule without the landowning elite. Without the landowners' cooperation the tiny bureaucracy even in 1825 had no hope of governing (i.e., taxing and conscripting) the peasant masses, on whose fiscal and military exploitation the whole tsarist state rested. Moreover, the aristocracy totally dominated the court, the guards regiments, and the top ranks of government in St. Petersburg. Monarchs who alienated this aristocratic elite between 1725 and 1825 risked their lives.

The best definition of European aristocracy in 1789 therefore is "traditional ruling and landowning elite." It makes sense to reserve the term aristocracy proper for the top echelon of this elite, usually very wealthy, usually titled, and dominating the top positions in metropolitan government. The lesser, usually nontitled, landowners who dominated provincial society and who possessed the means to live the lives of leisured gentlemen are best defined as gentry. Herein, however, the word aristocracy is used to cover both groups, save where an attempt is being made to distinguish between them.

challenges confronting aristocracy

Two overall challenges confronted aristocracy in the long nineteenth century. The first were the egalitarian values and ideologies that sprang from the eighteenth-century radical Enlightenment and were embodied in the French Revolution. The second were a number of interrelated changes in society that can broadly be defined as modernization. These included industrialization and urbanization; mass literacy; the vast growth in industrial, commercial, and financial wealth; and the increasing complexity of both society and government, which gave birth to a vast swathe of professional and technical experts without whose skills a modern community could not flourish.

Enlightenment and French Revolution

The radical Enlightenment and the French Revolution rejected corporate privilege and inherited inequality in the name of rationality, efficiency, and individual merit. They asserted that the individual rather than the family or the corporation was the building block of society, and they assumed a fundamental equality between individuals, at least in regard to the rights possessed by all of a community's citizens. These ideas had great appeal to many Europeans in the nineteenth century. The French Revolution turned these ideas into political reality and provided a model to which subsequent generations of European radicals looked with admiration.

The impact of the Revolution was equivocal, however. In the first place, though the French Revolution was hostile to legal inequality and inherited privilege, it was far less egalitarian in socioeconomic terms and did not reject private property. Indeed some of the reforms pushed through in Europe in the Napoleonic era actually strengthened private property by, for example, handing church and common land over to wealthy individuals. Though the aristocracy were not in most countries the major beneficiary of these changes, they were nevertheless very great property owners and could often turn to their own advantage the new era of absolute property rights. A striking example of this were the great profits that many nineteenth-century aristocrats made from their forests, whose use was previously very often shared with the peasantry, but which now became the unrestricted possession of noble landowners. In a century in which wood prices grew enormously, this could be a crucial factor in the survival of large sections of the traditional rural elite.

Though the 1790s inflicted a very heavy blow to the French aristocracy from which the latter never fully recovered, the damage was not mortal. Napoleon I went out of his way to reconcile the aristocracy to his regime and to draw them back into court, civil, and military service. He was partly successful in this endeavor. To some extent one can see the evolution of the French aristocracy from 1789 to 1815 as a sudden and very brutal example of a change that overtook much of the European aristocracy in the nineteenth century. Losing part though not most of its land, the French aristocracy turned in the direction of becoming a government service elite. In this sense it moved closer to the pattern of the Russian, Prussian, and even lesser Austrian aristocracies of the late eighteenth century. Like them but in the face of much stiffer non-noble competition, it had to sustain its status by military and civil service to the growing bureaucratic state. Over the long nineteenth century one was to see a variant on this theme even in Britain. Financial pressures, changing aristocratic values, and the need to sustain aristocratic legitimacy by public service all pushed in this direction throughout Europe, albeit to differing degrees.

It is also important to remember that if the memory of the French Revolution attracted some Europeans, it appalled others—including very many nonaristocrats. If the French aristocracy as a group had been the single largest victim of the Terror, most of those who died under the guillotine were not aristocrats. What had seemed initially a movement for moderate and rational constitutional reform had spiraled quickly into a terrifying dictatorship that had consumed innocent bystanders and its own children alike. Particularly in Brittany, the civil war unleashed by the Revolution had been waged with near-genocidal frenzy by the republic. The army that had emerged from the Revolution as the dominant force in French politics had created a military despotism in France and subjected Europe to twenty-two years of warfare and conquest. Relative to its population, Europe suffered more casualties in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars than in World War I.

Not surprisingly, the lesson many Europeans drew from this was that even moderate reform could easily spiral out of control and that the traditional pillars of political order (monarchy, church, aristocracy) were crucial bulwarks against anarchy and terror. The history of the unicameral French National Assembly was used to justify conservative upper houses in much of nineteenth-century Europe. Most of the newly created upper houses gave many seats to aristocrats. This was just one reflection of a broader result of the French Revolution, namely the coming together of those old rivals monarchy, aristocracy, and church against the common revolutionary enemy.

This new unity was not total or immediate in the nineteenth century. The 1848 revolutions in Hungary and Italy had much of the old court versus country flavor. Because monarchical absolutism survived longest in Russia, so too did traditional aristocratic resentment of dynastic regimes that denied political representation or guaranteed civil rights even to aristocrats. The last fling of traditional European court versus country aristocratic liberalism was the Russian gentry's participation in the run-up to the Revolution of 1905. But the events of 1905 provided graphic evidence why in the modern age monarchs and aristocrats could no longer afford to fight. Having weakened the tsarist regime by its opposition in the decade before the revolution, the Russian nobles saw their estates overrun by peasant rioters in 1905 and then threatened with wholesale expropriation by the parliament that the regime had been forced to concede. As a result of this experience regime and aristocracy drew back together in the period from 1906 to 1914, not least in united support for policies that made private property in land secure. In so doing, the Russians conformed to a European conservative norm.

Modernization

Radical ideologies were dangerous because they were underpinned by the social changes inherent in modernization. Industrialization, urbanization, and mass literacy had the potential to transform the consciousness of the masses and their capacity for political organization, while making them much less susceptible to control by the landowning elite. As democracy spread in the last quarter of the

nineteenth century the aristocracy usually lost control over the urban mass electorate, though this was not universally and immediately true. The English Conservatives had many working-class supporters in the late nineteenth century, not least in Lancashire, where the earls of Derby were able to tap not just local deference but also the Protestant mass electorate's dislike of Catholic Irish immigration. In Germany the Catholic Centre Party, in whose leadership aristocrats were still important in the early twentieth century, had mass electoral support even from many urban workers. Nevertheless in time it was the case that mass urban politics everywhere ultimately undermined the power of traditional rural elites.

A number of factors determined whether the aristocracy could effectively mobilize rural society as a conservative bulwark against urban radicalism. In England the Conservative Party succeeded in doing this to a great extent by the 1880s but by that time the degree of urbanization in England, added to rural radicalism in the Gaelic fringe of the United Kingdom, made this of limited use. In the two 1910 general elections, fought in large part over the role and power of Europe's most aristocratic and most powerful upper house, the Conservatives actually won by a narrow margin in England, only for that victory to be reversed by the votes of the Scots, Welsh, and Irish. More successful was the German aristocracy, who provided the core leadership for the Bund der Landwirte, Europe's most formidable agrarian lobby group in the early twentieth century. Not merely, however, did this force the aristocratic leaders to accept the overriding logic of rural populist politics (e.g., the ruthless pursuit of agrarian sectional interests and a demagogic anti-Semitism that did not sit easily with the claim to provide responsible national leadership), it also was a weakening asset as Germany became Europe's increasingly urbanized industrial powerhouse.

Meanwhile in Europe's "second-world" western, eastern, and southern periphery—an arc that stretched from Ireland through Iberia and Italy to Hungary and Russia—where the population was still overwhelmingly rural, it was also usually radical and often very hostile to the aristocracy. In these countries mass politics by 1900 often entailed the risk of social revolution and the expropriation of aristocratic landholding. Huge differences in wealth and culture between rural elite and mass, combined with the masses' growing political consciousness and organization, made this a real threat in much of Europe's second-world periphery at the turn of the twentieth century. The threat might become reality through peasant revolution and jacqueries (peasant revolts) or, in those countries where democracy was spreading, through the ballot box. Because by 1905 even Russia had acquired a parliament elected by near universal (though not equal) male suffrage, the challenge of managing democracy was becoming a matter of life and death for much of the aristocracy of peripheral Europe.

Social revolution was somewhat less likely in rural societies where the Catholic Church was strongly rooted and where the aristocracy had powerful potential allies in a substantial peasant farmer class owning its own land and employing a handful of laborers, who might or might not be family members. The perfect example of such a conservative society was the Spanish province of Navarre, home of Carlism, a mass Catholic and royalist movement that opposed the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and all other aspects of modernity. But though equivalent areas did exist in other parts of rural and peripheral Europe in 1900 they were exceptional. At the other end of the spectrum, rural radicalism was enhanced if the local aristocracy was alien to the rural masses not just in wealth and culture but also in ethnicity and religion. Facing this reality in Ireland as the era of democratic politics dawned, the British government bought out the landed elite on generous terms, thereby disarming social (though not national) revolution. But this policy reflected not just British wisdom but also the unique wealth of Britain's state and society. Nowhere else in the European periphery was such a policy either politically or financially conceivable, and almost everywhere the landowners were the most vulnerable element within the property-owning and relatively wealthy minority.

In the wealthy "first-world" core of Europe where by 1900 a big middle class existed and property was much more secure, the aristocracy could find powerful allies in both urban and rural society against emerging working-class socialist parties, let alone social revolution. To somewhat varying degrees and with many local nuances the aristocracy increasingly allied itself politically with the representatives of commercial, industrial, and financial wealth. In many countries parts of the rapidly growing professional middle class might also be potential recruits for the conservative alliance, especially where professional elites were traditionally linked to the gentry (e.g., English lawyers) or in countries where the expanding state bureaucracy was recruited very often from the sons (often younger sons) of aristocratic or more often gentry families. Hungary, after the creation in 1867 of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, was probably the perfect example of the latter phenomenon, and its administrators for that reason retained an unusually clear gentry ethos and style. But in relatively unbureaucratic England the Indian and colonial services provided a similar outlet for the sons of the gentry, and the British public schools created common elite values and lifestyles that served to integrate the sons of aristocracy, gentry, high finance, big business, and the professions into a single expanded ruling class. Just as Britain's immense wealth, power, and prestige helped to legitimize this elite in the nineteenth century, so a similar process could be seen in Germany in the period between 1871 and 1914, though in the German case religious differences and very recent unification made this process more fraught.

Every European aristocracy came to its own compromise with newly emerging, modern business, financial, and professional elites. Some of these compromises were more successful than others, but each case inevitably embodied the specific national context to which an aristocracy brought its own values (e.g., militarist or civilian, authoritarian or parliamentary), as did the often very heterogeneous elements of the new "bourgeois" elite.

For example, the very wealthy British aristocracy with its old and close links to the London financial world found it relatively easy to embrace (very often literally via marriage) the enormous fortunes made by nineteenth-century financiers and to consolidate a united plutocratic ruling class by the Edwardian era (1901–1910). In Prussia/Germany, Europe's other financial-industrial superpower, the process was bound to be much more difficult. The traditional Prussian core elite was not a true aristocracy but the relatively poor and somewhat puritanical gentry of the eastern provinces. By tradition this group had minimal contact with the world of high finance and shared neither its wealth nor its values. Indeed most of the key families in the Prusso-German financial world originated not in old Prussia but in Frankfurt, which had been very unwillingly (on both sides) absorbed into the Hohenzollern state in 1815. The fact that so much of this new financial wealth by 1900 was Jewish greatly complicated the consolidation of a united Prusso-German plutocratic elite on British Edwardian lines. But the very different natures of the British and Prussian aristocratic and gentry elites goes a long way to explaining why the British aristocracy found it easier to live alongside the (also very often Jewish) vast wealth of the London financial elite in the early twentieth century.

Even the most successful aristocratic compromise with the new business, financial, and professional classes entailed some dilution of aristocratic power and some change in aristocratic values. Thus Otto von Bismarck, probably the most important aristocratic politician of the nineteenth century, succeeded brilliantly in legitimizing the Hohenzollern dynastic-aristocratic elite by annexing and controlling the energies of German nationalism. But as his conservative critics pointed out, he did so by twisting many of the traditional religious and political values of the Prussian aristocracy. The next generation of aristocratic politicians, ever deeper enmeshed in the logic of agrarian and nationalist populism, strayed even further from the Pietist and dynastic loyalties of their grandfathers. Equally the English plutocratic grandee of the Edwardian era was already halfway to being a member of a rentier, leisured elite rather than of a true ruling class in the sense of the English aristocracy of 1800.

Coming to terms with the industrial-era European economy was far easier for some sections of the European aristocracy than for others. For that reason, although gradations of wealth within the aristocracy were already considerable in 1800, they were far more extreme by 1914. A large gap had opened between a plutocratic-aristocratic elite that had made huge fortunes from the growth of the urban and industrial economy, and the bulk of the aristocracy and almost all the provincial gentry. Inevitably this was most true in the more advanced economies, but all European landowners were hit by the decline of agricultural prices in the last decades of the nineteenth century. No one whose core income depended on agriculture could hope to even remotely match the wealth of those who had a stake in the new urban and industrial economy, and the financial and commercial worlds that sustained it.

A minority of aristocrats did have a huge stake in this world. Unlike in previous centuries, few of these aristocrats were themselves industrialists in the sense of owning and running big industrial enterprises. By 1900 even most of the great Silesian landowners, the most successful aristocratic entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, were retreating from this role. Running big enterprises required great effort, huge capital, and entrepreneurial talent. For rich men usually deeply conscious of their responsibility to pass on a family's wealth and status to their heirs, the risks of industrial entrepreneurship were often unacceptable. Even the duke of Devonshire was embarrassed by the sums he poured into the new town and shipbuilding industry he created at Barrow-in-Furness on one of his estates. The collapse in 1909 of the business interests of Prince Christian-Kraft von Hohenlohe-Ohringen, the Duke of Ujest, caused great scandal in Wilhelmine Germany.

By 1900, however, it was possible to tap the wealth of the Industrial Revolution through shareholding without taking the risks or bearing the burdens of unlimited liability, ownership, and management of industrial enterprises. By then many aristocrats had invested large sums in government, railway, and corporate bonds and shares. Though most great aristocrats in 1914 still owned big rural estates, almost everywhere they had diversified their assets and bought significant amounts of government and private paper. The Russian aristocracy and gentry are a case in point. After the emancipation of the serfs many estates in infertile, central Great Russia became uneconomical as agricultural enterprises, nor did the aristocracy have the capital to develop them. With the onset of the agricultural depression in the 1870s, matters worsened. Meanwhile relations with the local peasantry were often conflict-ridden, and rural life was less attractive than the cities. With the growth in population leading to ever-rising land prices, the logic for the individual aristocrat of selling out and becoming an urban rentier was often clear, even if this logic undermined the aristocracy's dominant position in rural society. Very similar though less pronounced shifts occurred in Piedmont: if the overall pressures were the same, noble–peasant relations were on the whole not as strained as in Russia and rural life was not so isolated.

For much of the gentry financial pressures might mean withdrawal from the countryside and absorption into the urban professional and rentier world. For wealthy aristocrats such stark choices were unnecessary, however. At the very top of the German aristocratic world, for example, Prince von Thurn und Taxis still owned 1.3 million hectares (3.2 million acres) in 1895, but the family had also received massive financial compensation from a number of German states for lost seignorial and other inherited rights in the nineteenth century. Even by the late 1850s when the process remained uncompleted, recorded compensation exceeded £800,000—a vast sum in the mid-nineteenth century and one that allowed large-scale and diverse investments in stocks, bonds, and shares.

Though all the great aristocratic families had far more chance than the gentry to diversify their assets and enrich themselves by tapping the urban and industrial economy, the greatest fortunes were usually made by families who owned urban property or coal mines. In 1914 probably the richest aristocrat in Europe was the duke of Westminster, with an income of roughly £1 million per year. Though the Grosvenors had never played a very prominent role in British political or military affairs, they were the happy beneficiaries of a seventeenth-century marriage that brought them a large slice of what later turned into London's fashionable West End. The other richest aristocrats in Britain at that time were also either great urban landlords or owners of extensive coal mines or both. In Germany the history of the Holy Roman Empire meant that very few aristocrats were big urban landlords, but Prussia's richest aristocrats in 1914 usually derived a huge slice of their incomes from Silesian or Ruhr mines. The vagaries of Italian history meant that some regional aristocracies were far likelier to own urban property than others. Meanwhile Russian aristocratic incomes from urban property and mines in 1914 were usually less enormous than British or German for the simple reason that the urban-industrial economy was less developed, but in a few cases they topped £200,000 per year. With urbanization and industrialization taking off in Russia before 1914 there was every reason to expect that the fortunate minority of aristocrats who owned extensive urban property or mines would in time match the very richest German and British plutocrats.

The most accurate generalization about aristocracy's fate in the long European nineteenth century would therefore emphasize the very powerful trans-Continental challenges to which all aristocrats were subject, the common fundamental strategies that they used to meet those challenges, but at the same time the way in which the aristocracies of some countries and regions, and above all certain sections of the aristocracy, were much better placed to cope with these challenges than others.

the special case of the british

Throughout the long nineteenth century the British aristocracy was the most admired and emulated in Europe. To some extent this was but one aspect of widespread admiration and emulation of the world's richest, most powerful, but also in many ways most liberal, society and polity. There were also, however, very specific aristocratic reasons for admiring Britain. At a time when Continental aristocracy was coming under increasing challenge, there was comfort to be had from the fact that Britain was both Europe's most successful country and the one in which the aristocracy was uniquely powerful.

As already mentioned, of all European aristocracies in 1815 the British came closest to meeting every definition of a ruling class. In terms of power and wealth, the British monarch was at best primus inter pares (first among equals) with regard to the aristocratic elite. No absolute monarch could infringe the civil rights or deny the freedoms of the British aristocracy, nor indeed challenge their role as hereditary legislators or rulers of the polity. Nevertheless, Britain remained a monarchy down to 1914 and this was important for aristocrats in Britain as elsewhere in Europe. The monarch and his court accentuated, legitimized, and put a stamp of public approval on the social hierarchy.

Even in 1914 royal patronage and traditions still mattered a great deal in the core institutions of the old regime, meaning the armed forces and diplomacy. Despite the continuing role of French aristocrats in the army, diplomatic service, and (especially) navy of the Third Republic, there was a big difference in the overall origins and ethos of British and French top soldiers and diplomats.

It was not just the power, wealth, and freedom of British aristocracy that were envied and emulated by many of its European peers. So too was the English cool aristocratic hauteur, the public face of Victorian aristocratic respectability and service, and the gentlemanly lifestyle. If French remained the lingua franca of European high society in 1914, the English nanny was making a growing impact on upper-class European values and mentalities. British bloodstock, horse racing, and fox hunting were widely admired. As is always the case with high society's fashions there was much that was silly and superficial in this emulation of England. But there was also a more serious and political aspect to the admiration of English aristocratic public rectitude and political skill, not to mention English rural sports and county lifestyle. Faced with the challenge of the urban and industrial world an aristocracy needed to justify its position as a ruling class under the gaze of middle-class newspapers and public opinion.

It needed also to consolidate its leadership of rural society. It was a commonplace among nineteenth-century aristocratic publicists that the royalist counterrevolution in the Vendée and other areas of western France in the 1790s owed its strength in part to local loyalty to a resident and paternalist rural nobility. It was therefore seen as important for other European aristocrats to spend more time on their estates, providing patronage, example, and leadership to their rural neighbors. Because traditionally much of the European high aristocracy had devoted its life to royal courts, military service, or metropolitan society and politics, this required a considerable change in lifestyles and mentalities. What better model than the English aristocrat, whose manic pursuit of foxes kept him deeply attached to county society, in whose life the aristocratic household remained a great source of patronage and leadership throughout the nineteenth century.

By 1914, however, the British aristocracy's political power was clearly slipping. The aristocracy no longer dominated the Liberal Party, a mass socialist party was emerging, and the House of Lords had been stripped of much of its power. The logic of democratic politics with a mass electorate had persuaded even the Conservative Party to buy out the Anglo-Irish landlords and reject agricultural protection. As a result the British gentry had suffered much more severely than reforms than was the its Prusso-German counterpart from the collapse of agricultural prices in the late nineteenth century. After three election defeats and facing the threat of Irish Home Rule, many Conservative British aristocrats were beginning to harbor very serious doubts about the virtues of democracy in 1914. Not at all surprisingly, in the rest of Europe, where democracy might prove far more dangerous to aristocracy than was the case in Britain, doubts about democracy went much deeper in aristocratic circles, and the British political model was losing some of its charm.

Nevertheless as the European aristocracy approached 1914, its political position was by no means everywhere weak. In Germany, the Austrian empire, and by 1905 Russia the monarchical regimes' creation of aristocratic upper houses and lower houses with restricted franchises had actually given the aristocracy much more freedom to articulate its interests, choose its own leaders, and block reforms than was the case in the heyday of absolutism. In that sense constitutionalist and semidemocratic politics had actually enhanced the leverage of a traditional social elite that had most to lose from democracy. Everywhere in Europe by 1914 aristocracy felt itself under increased challenge, but in 1914 most European aristocracies were by no means powerless or resigned to extinction.