ABSTRACT
The nobility, of sword and robe, was the dominant political and social group in ancien regime France. The sword nobility would be called upon to fight on two fronts: against the encroachment of the new robe nobility, with its modernised vision of a strong administrative state, as well as against the related ‘rise of the bourgeoisie’, with its vision of a more commercialised market economy. For the influential, mid-century school of French economic theorists, the physiocrats, an agrarian society was composed of three ‘classes’: the landowning class, the productive class and the unproductive class. The seigneury impacted upon the lives of almost everyone in the countryside and ‘more often than not they encountered it first in the guise of surplus extraction’. The rise of the robe nobility reflected the development of the modern administrative state. The state was also becoming more powerful, increasing its judicial and fiscal power, and protecting many village communities against rapacious seigneurs.
