ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question of an aristocratic economy leads to the question of the size of the aristocratic families' wealth. The aristocracy that was involved in trade formed a heterogeneous group. The main was made up of merchants who had been recently ennobled, or were of foreign nobility, such as in Nantes, where there existed a large community of Irish noblemen who took refuge in France after 1689, or in Bordeaux, where merchants from Hamburg and Dutchmen played a large part in this trade. The aristocracy's economic power was based on being a powerful force in landowning, their integration in, or utilization of, the monarchical governmental apparatus, as well as on their varied participation in industrial, trade and financial activities. In the seventeenth century the Condes knew how to take advantage of their privileged relationship with the king and Richelieu in order to regain their power as great landowners, a position that had been threatened in the sixteenth century.
