Abstract
The notion that early modern ministers of state were useful functionaries and thus the very opposite of ridiculously parasitic courtiers is something traditional historians of ancien régime France and Brandenburg-Prussia could have agreed on, even though these states were otherwise assumed to have been polar opposites. Once new research had shown that both groups were in fact part of the same system of power and status in both states, simply reversing the judgement became as tempting as it would be misleading. It is true that both France and Brandenburg-Prussia developed what one may only semi-facetiously call relatively absolutist systems, and that both states set out to do so with an elite clearly divided into an old chivalric and a new judicial nobility. Yet their subsequent trajectories not only provide us with two interesting variations on the theme of elite integration; more importantly, this article argues that a closer look at these processes will disprove the currently dominant interpretations of both cases. In France, co-operation, social mobility and (decreasing) intermarriage between noblesse d’épée and noblesse de robe, far from proving their alleged fusion, were in fact the necessary consequences of what remained a sharp functional differentiation right up to 1789. Instead, it was Prussia which saw an actual fusion of both groups into a social elite that was not only much more court-orientated than hitherto assumed, but also (and somewhat ironically) both less military and less socially open than its French counterpart.
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