Abstract EN:

Analysing the contents both of many varied collections of private papers and of the public sources known to quantitative historians of society, this work studies a group of 574 provincial families including the mobility of the ancien regime as well as those whose titles were created under the first empire and the restoration, the July monarchy and the second empire, and those pretending nobility. Thys defined, the nobility in Franche-Comté is representative of the French nobility as a whole: it comprises some belonging to the international aristocratic scene as well as impoverished gentry. Rather than the mere anachronistic residue of a caste threatened with natural extinction, it is somewhat like a galaxy with blurred edges, expanding throughout the 19th century. The renewal of the group, through the arrival of the news nobilities, led to fusion of elites by assimilation within this galaxy rather than outside it. The persistence of the mobility is less striking than the capacity for adaptation, a capacity which has been under-estimated by historians. The nobility in Franche-Comté, which was not a dominant class which was often constrained by economic necessity, adopted a new set of values. Such acceptance of a new culture does not mean that the nobility became part of the bourgeoisie: it maintained its belief in the vertical solidarities of the second order of the ancient regime. Its instinctive quest