Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570-1715 (A Centennial Book)

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. Drawing upon memoirs, literary works and archival sources, this study pinpoints the emergence in the 17th century of a new understanding in French aristocratic sensibility. It explores the nobles' changing attitudes towards war, careers, money, love, families and relationships. France, 1570–1715 1 Jonathan Dewald 1 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS 1 Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford 1 © 1993 The Regents of the University of California 1