Analysis On The Reason Why French Nobles Lost Privileges In 1789

Aristocratic privilege is advantage and interest based on noble identity, which can be understood from the aspects of material values and symbolic meanings. In human history, the French Revolution firstly destroyed completely the complex system of aristocratic privileges including economic privileges composed of fiscal privileges and seigniorial dues, political privileges, honorary privileges and so on. The essay surveys the structural conflicts between nobility and royalty, bourgeois and peasants as well as the constraints on these conflicts. It reveals the path-dependent characteristic of aristocratic privilege and then digs deeply into the reason why French nobles lost their privileges on the horizon of both long-term and short-term.In the long run, the transition of French power structure and social structure under the old regime shook profoundly the intrinsic bases of aristocratic privileges. On one hand, the expansion of kingship abolished feudal suzerain power belonged to the nobility and the latter lost their duty and social function of local governance. On the other hand, the rise of bourgeois and their equality trends with nobility led to the relative decline of noble superiority. The legitimacy and rationality of aristocratic privileges had been reduced.Meanwhile, their privileges still existed because of the fundamental shelter from kingship, the ambivalent privilege views of bourgeois and peasants. The main reason of king’s asylum was his dependency on aristocratic bureaucrats; the bourgeois had been assimilated into the privilegers’ group via the officer donation system. However, the inner tension of these supporting factors did exist. There was a hidden danger in aristocratic privileges’ dependency upon the kingship. The potential conflict between the social mobility mechanism and hierarchical social structure also bred negative concepts towards aristocratic privileges.In this context, the 1787 financial crisis and subsequent events promoted the adjustment of power pattern and conceptive structure in succession. The kinship, bourgeois and peasants respectively challenged different types of aristocratic privileges. Specifically, due to noble anti autocratic struggle, the government reform aiming at noble exemption failed and the Estates-General had to be convened. The neutral position of kingship during its’ preparatory period and the council itself caused the supreme power vacuum, aristocratic privilege losing its’ essential guarantee and opposing sides losing their effective restriction. The relatively conservative bourgeois originally shared many consensuses on reforms with nobles, but procedural dispute intensified the conflict rooted in identity difference and the notion of bourgeois became increasingly radical. Furthermore, the intersection between economic crisis and political situation made the peasants blame seigniorial privileges for their suffering. Finally, the nobles’ representatives gave up all their privileges.Accordingly, the loss of aristocratic privileges is a product of the interaction between structure and agency. It is noteworthy that as nobles translate into part of a new hierarchy, aristocratic privilege is indeed replaced by another new kind of privilege.