Material life of the French nobility, between the ‘Great Century’ and the age of Enlightenment: a reading of social differentiations in the noble estate

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodology for a reading of social differences of the material culture of the nobility. It relies on the inventories post-mortem, as well as on treaties on the subject of luxury and literary sources. As a first step, we attempt to assess the transformation of the concept of luxury between the end of the 17th Century and 18th Century when there was an increase of pieces and the proliferation of small and very expensive objects. The pomp was overshadowed in favour of a luxury, which, from the Court, was broadcast on all the social elites. The study of these upheavals in provincial consumer habits offers a reading grid to analyze the noble social unrest and allow better understand the conflicting interests, detect at the time of the ‘Asambleas de la Nobleza’ in the spring of 1789.