5 - The Savoyard nobility, 1690–1720

Summary

Effective mobilisation of the resources needed for success in war might necesitate some social restructuring as well as administrative overhaul and development. Not surprisingly, many of those who have seen state formation, particularly when defined as the development of state structures and princely ‘absolutism’ within the state, in the making in the early modern era have regarded the nobility as among its main, even its chief victim(s). Indeed for many historians early modern Europe witnessed a multifaceted crisis of the aristocracy. This was not least because nobles everywhere were, inter alia, apparently losing their traditional (military) role to the state which, together with the economic difficulties experienced by many nobles in the seventeenth century, meant a serious loss of confidence and of real authority, power and influence. More recently, however, historians have begun to reassess the situation of the European nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to recognise that this earlier view is too bleak. William Beik has redefined absolutism in seventeenth-century Languedoc as co-operation between monarch and local elite; and in words which reflect a growing consensus among historians, Jeremy Black declares, ‘absolutism can be defined as a politico-social arrangement, rather than a constitutional system, by which the social elite was persuaded to govern in accordance with the views of the ruler, while these views were defined in accordance with the assumptions of the elite’.