Macknight’s first book about nobles in modern France, Aristocratic Families in Republican France, 1870–1940 (Manchester, 2012), confined itself to the Third Republic, but this one takes the analysis back to the traumas suffered by nobles in the French Revolution and forward to the challenges faced by surviving noble families in the later twentieth century. It does not seek to trace the vicissitudes of the nobility and its status over these two centuries but to analyze how nobles’ persistent sense of identity was molded by a diverse range of possessions and traditions that no hostile legislation could expunge.
Avoiding the statistical reductionism that animates much social history, Macknight approaches the topic from two directions. One comes from the theoretical insights of twentieth-century French sociologists, such as Halbwachs and Bourdieu, about social hierarchies, from which she draws at regular intervals throughout the text.1 The other derives from reliance on the qualitative...