prologue to property societies
We have just studied the unequal evolution within the owners' society
which flourished in France in the century following the Revolution of 1789 and until the
First World War. As revealing and interesting as it is, and whatever
the importance of its influence on neighboring countries, the French case does not remain
less specific in European and world history. If one
take a step back and look at the multiplicity of national trajectories
within the European area, there is a great diversity of processes leading to
the transformation of trifunctional companies into owners' companies, which he
we must now analyze.
I will begin by presenting some general elements of comparison
before examining in more detail two particular cases
significant: the United Kingdom and Sweden. The case of the United Kingdom is characterized by
an extremely gradual transition between ternary and proprietary logic, which
in some ways may seem to the exact opposite of the French trajectory. We
we will see, however, that breaks also play a vital role, which
illustrates again the importance of moments of crisis and of bifurcations in the
process of social transformation, as well as the deep interweaving between
ownership and political regime in the history of unequal regimes. Sweden
offers the astonishing example of early constitutionalization of the
society in four orders followed by an exacerbated proprietary transition, with
voting rights proportional to wealth. The Swedish case illustrates to perfection
the importance of collective mobilizations and socio-political processes in the
transformation of unequal regimes, since, having been the most
owned companies, Sweden has become without a shot the most egalitarian
social democratic societies. More generally, the confrontation of these
experiences is all the more interesting as these different countries (France, United Kingdom,
Kingdom, Sweden) played a key role in the global history of unequal regimes,
first at the ternary age and proprietarist, then at the colonial and social-democratic age.
Clergy and nobility numbers:
the diversity of Europe
A first way of proceeding to analyze the variety of trajectories
is to compare the numbers and resources of clerical classes
and nobiliaries and their evolution in different countries. The approach has its limits,
especially as the available materials are imperfectly comparable. She
Nevertheless, it is possible to identify major patterns and differences within
European companies.
Let's start with the clergy. As a first approximation, we see
relatively long-term developments in the different countries
European. If one examines for example the case of Spain, France and
United Kingdom (see Figure 5.1), we observe in these three countries that the share of
clergy reached very high levels in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of the order of 3% -
3.5% of the adult male population, or one in every thirty adult men (or nearly
5% in Spain around 1700, ie one adult man in twenty). The clergy
then fell steadily in all three countries, and was around
0.5% (barely one in every two hundred adult men) in the nineteenth and early
XXth century. The estimates available are far from perfect, but the orders of
magnitude are extremely clear. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the clerical class
represents less than 0.1% of the population (less than one person in a thousand) in
all these countries, including all religions. We will also see in the sequel
of this book that the fall of religious practice and the progression of the population is
describing "without religion" have taken on considerable proportions (between a third and
half) in the different European countries at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century1.
If the very long-term developments are relatively close, with a quasi-disappearance
of the religious class and a collapse of practices, the chronologies
However, the precise differences vary greatly according to the country, which makes it possible to draw
as many singular and specific stories, reflecting in particular the evolution within
of each society power relations and politico-ideological clashes
between state and religious institutions, monarchical and ecclesiastical. In the
case of France, we saw in the previous chapter that the numbers of the
clerical class already declined sharply from the last third to the seventeenth century and
during the eighteenth century, before being severely affected by the expropriations of the
French Revolution, and continue their decline in the nineteenth century.
In the UK, the process starts significantly earlier. A massive fall of
the share of clerics in the population occurred in fact from the sixteenth century,
consequence in particular of the dissolution of the monasteries decided and put in place
by Henry VIII in the 1530s.
politico-theological motivations, in the context of the conflict between the monarchy
Britain and the Roman Papacy, a conflict that eventually gave birth to
Anglicanism. The papal refusal of the divorce and remarriage of King Henry VIII was
certainly one of the elements of a heavy litigation between the two powers, but it
was none the less significant. It was about knowing, within the order
trifunctional force in European Christian societies, until which
the monarchical institution and the noble class had to submit to the
inseparably moral and family norms, spiritual and political, enacted by
the papal institution and the clerical class. The reasons for the breakup were
equally and inextricably financial, in a difficult budgetary context
for the Crown: the dissolution-expropriation of monasteries, followed by the
gradual auction of the corresponding areas, contributed resources
significant and lasting to the monarchy, while undermining the patrimonial autonomy and
clerical class policy2.
Still, the dissolution of the monasteries, decided at a time when the
English monks alone accounted for around 2% of the male population,
led to a massive and early weakening of the ecclesiastical class
the United Kingdom, both in terms of numbers and properties, and at a
strengthening of the Crown and the noble class, which redeemed a good deal
of these properties and was thus able to strengthen its hold on the land capital of the
Kingdom. According to available estimates, the clergy's share had fallen to
less than 1% of the British adult male population at the end of the 17th century,
a moment when this proportion was still above 3% in France (see
graph 5.1). This early ecclesiastical decline in the United Kingdom went hand in hand with
the development of an original and exacerbated proprietarism.
Conversely, in Spain, clerical decline was much later than
United Kingdom and France. The ecclesiastical institution, on which
supported the monarchy and the noble class during the centuries of the Reconquista,
even its workforce grew between 1590 and 1700. They were still superior to
3% of the adult male population at the time of the French Revolution, and
We must wait until the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century for the weight of the clergy and its
properties collapses. Throughout the nineteenth century, the many laws on the
desamortización have gradually dispossessed the Church of part of her property,
both financial and land-based, with forced sales to the benefit of the State of
houses and ecclesiastical domains, in a context where the Spanish State was trying to
to modernize and strengthen the country's civil and public institutions. The
process continued in the early twentieth century, not without provoking violent
opposition and strong social and political tensions. In 1911, then again in
1932, the tax exemptions enjoyed by private donations to
religious institutions were questioned
hundreds of hectares
owner and by municipality, with thresholds depending on the types of culture. of the
significant compensation was provided, with a scale that depended on both
the size of the parcels and the incomes of the holder, with the exception of the
high nobility of the Grandes de Espana, which beyond a certain threshold of detention
had to be expropriated without compensation, taking into account the State privileges
individuals they had benefited from in the past. The agrarian reform served
however a rallying point against Republican governments, both of
made the objective threat it hovered over the remainder of large properties
ecclesiastics and especially nobiliaries who had not yet been redistributed, and
by the fears she aroused among the less important owners, frightened
by the wild occupations of parcels of 1932-1933 and the anticipation of their
possible recrudescence with the return to power of the left parties in
February 19364. The measures taken by the Republicans in favor of secular schools
and against religious schools also played an important role in the
mobilization of the Catholic camp. The coup d'etat of August 1936, the civil war and the
forty years of Franco dictatorship that ensued attest to the violence of the
Transformation paths of trifunctional companies into companies
proprietors then social democrats, and lasting traces that these processes
conflictual have left.
War nobility, nobility owners
If we now examine the case of the number of nobility in the different countries
Europeans, there is also a great diversity of situations, even more
marked only for the clergy. As we saw in the chapters
with the case of France, these spatial and temporal comparisons
should be conducted with caution because the state of nobility was most often
defined at the local level, and took extremely varied forms depending on the regions
and contexts. In particular, the sources do not make it possible to compare
the chronologies and trajectories followed by the different countries.
The available materials are, however, precise enough to clearly distinguish
two types of polar configurations within the European continent: on the one hand,
country where the nobility's numbers in the 17th and 18th centuries were relatively
low (usually between 1% and 2% of the population, or even less than 1%); and
on the other hand, countries with numbers at the same time
significantly higher levels (typically between 5% and 8% of the
population). There were undoubtedly many intermediate situations between these
two groups, but it is difficult to distinguish them precisely in the state of the sources.
The first group, characterized by low numbers of nobiliaries, includes
France, the United Kingdom and Sweden (see Figure 5.2). Within
these countries, the reduced numbers of the nobility were further diminished between
17th and 18th century. In the case of the United Kingdom, the numbers we have
indicated (1.4% of the population in 1690 and 1.1% around 1800)
also correspond to a relatively broad definition of nobility, including
the whole gentry. If we stick to the small fraction of the nobility
political privileges, their share in the population would be much higher
still low (less than 0.1%). In the case of Sweden, the numbers indicated (either
0.5% of the population in 1750 and 0.3% in 1850) come from
censuses organized very officially by the kingdom to count the
different orders and organize its political assemblies. They therefore express
well-defined reality at the centralized level. I will come back to these two cases later. AT
At this stage, let us simply note that this first group corresponds to countries where the
centralized state formation process was already extremely advanced in the seventeenth and
18th century.
Chart 5.2
The weight of the nobility in Europe, 1660-1880
Reading: the nobility represents less than 2% of the population in France, the United Kingdom and France.
Sweden in the seventeenth-nineteenth
centuries (with a downward trend), and between 5% and 8% of the population in
Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Croatia.
Sources and series: see piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideologie.
The second group, characterized by high numbers of nobility (between 5% and
8% of the population), including countries such as Spain, Portugal,
Poland, Hungary and Croatia (see Figure 5.2). For these last two
countries, the numbers are relatively well known, thanks to censuses by
organized in the late eighteenth century as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The
Estimated estimates for other countries are less precise. For all the orders
of magnitude can be considered significant. In particular, the differences
with the numbers estimated for the countries of the first group are perfectly clear.
How does one interpret the fact that the noble class can be from five to
ten times larger in some countries compared to others? It is well
first of all, that such differences reflect human and economic realities
and very different policies as to the state of nobility. A noble class very
mechanically implies that a significant portion of the nobles do not possess
big estate and that it does hold, in fact, often not much outside
of its title, prestige linked to its former feats of arms, more or less recognized next
times and societies considered, and possibly some advantages
statutory. On the other hand, a fine aristocratic class, as in the United Kingdom,
Sweden or France, corresponds to a situation where the nobility arrived at
constitute a thin elite of owners, with positions of power
important, both in terms of heritage, economics and politics.
The explanation for these considerable differences between countries must be sought in
inseparably territorial, political, ideological, military and fiscal history
specific to each European state building, and in the compromises made to
different times by the social groups present. In Spain and Portugal,
over the centuries of the Reconquista, the finishing procedures were
example closely related to the evolution of the territory controlled by Christian kings and
from the border with the Muslim kingdoms. In practice, the incorporation of
new territories often involved the ennoblement of entire villages, decreed
by the king and sometimes by the villagers themselves, in exchange for their loyalty and
future tax privileges. This is how the Spanish nobility quickly became
plethoric, with within it immense inequalities between the elite of the Grandes, at the
head of vast estates, and the mass of hidalgos, rather poor for the most part. The
Spanish monarchy will encounter the worst difficulties to make them pay for
over the following centuries, and will often find themselves having to owe them
to pay meager rents, the mass of which will burden the budget of the Spanish monarchy
and will not facilitate its modernization.
There are similar processes and similar inequalities within
Polish, Hungarian and Croatian nobilities, particularly in the context of the
territorial and reincorporation of fiefs within the polonolucanian monarchy
in the 15th and 16th centuries5. In Portugal, from the 13th-14th centuries, while
Reconquista is still in progress, the Livros of linhagens multiply,
allowing the noble nobility to count its many lineages and to tell
military exploits and acts of bravery so that the generations and
future monarchs do not forget them. This type of document is particularly
interesting, because it reminds to what extent the destinies of different nobilities
depend not only on state and monarchical strategies, but also
cognitive and political devices developed by nobles - big and small -
to count and defend their rights and status.
A satisfactory study of these multiple trajectories, from the constitution to the
disappearance of these different forms of nobility, would require many volumes, and
would go far beyond this book and my skills. More
modestly, I will now provide further details on the case
United Kingdom and Sweden, which are both well documented and
particularly relevant for the rest of our investigation.
which flourished in France in the century following the Revolution of 1789 and until the
First World War. As revealing and interesting as it is, and whatever
the importance of its influence on neighboring countries, the French case does not remain
less specific in European and world history. If one
take a step back and look at the multiplicity of national trajectories
within the European area, there is a great diversity of processes leading to
the transformation of trifunctional companies into owners' companies, which he
we must now analyze.
I will begin by presenting some general elements of comparison
before examining in more detail two particular cases
significant: the United Kingdom and Sweden. The case of the United Kingdom is characterized by
an extremely gradual transition between ternary and proprietary logic, which
in some ways may seem to the exact opposite of the French trajectory. We
we will see, however, that breaks also play a vital role, which
illustrates again the importance of moments of crisis and of bifurcations in the
process of social transformation, as well as the deep interweaving between
ownership and political regime in the history of unequal regimes. Sweden
offers the astonishing example of early constitutionalization of the
society in four orders followed by an exacerbated proprietary transition, with
voting rights proportional to wealth. The Swedish case illustrates to perfection
the importance of collective mobilizations and socio-political processes in the
transformation of unequal regimes, since, having been the most
owned companies, Sweden has become without a shot the most egalitarian
social democratic societies. More generally, the confrontation of these
experiences is all the more interesting as these different countries (France, United Kingdom,
Kingdom, Sweden) played a key role in the global history of unequal regimes,
first at the ternary age and proprietarist, then at the colonial and social-democratic age.
Clergy and nobility numbers:
the diversity of Europe
A first way of proceeding to analyze the variety of trajectories
is to compare the numbers and resources of clerical classes
and nobiliaries and their evolution in different countries. The approach has its limits,
especially as the available materials are imperfectly comparable. She
Nevertheless, it is possible to identify major patterns and differences within
European companies.
Let's start with the clergy. As a first approximation, we see
relatively long-term developments in the different countries
European. If one examines for example the case of Spain, France and
United Kingdom (see Figure 5.1), we observe in these three countries that the share of
clergy reached very high levels in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of the order of 3% -
3.5% of the adult male population, or one in every thirty adult men (or nearly
5% in Spain around 1700, ie one adult man in twenty). The clergy
then fell steadily in all three countries, and was around
0.5% (barely one in every two hundred adult men) in the nineteenth and early
XXth century. The estimates available are far from perfect, but the orders of
magnitude are extremely clear. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the clerical class
represents less than 0.1% of the population (less than one person in a thousand) in
all these countries, including all religions. We will also see in the sequel
of this book that the fall of religious practice and the progression of the population is
describing "without religion" have taken on considerable proportions (between a third and
half) in the different European countries at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century1.
If the very long-term developments are relatively close, with a quasi-disappearance
of the religious class and a collapse of practices, the chronologies
However, the precise differences vary greatly according to the country, which makes it possible to draw
as many singular and specific stories, reflecting in particular the evolution within
of each society power relations and politico-ideological clashes
between state and religious institutions, monarchical and ecclesiastical. In the
case of France, we saw in the previous chapter that the numbers of the
clerical class already declined sharply from the last third to the seventeenth century and
during the eighteenth century, before being severely affected by the expropriations of the
French Revolution, and continue their decline in the nineteenth century.
In the UK, the process starts significantly earlier. A massive fall of
the share of clerics in the population occurred in fact from the sixteenth century,
consequence in particular of the dissolution of the monasteries decided and put in place
by Henry VIII in the 1530s.
politico-theological motivations, in the context of the conflict between the monarchy
Britain and the Roman Papacy, a conflict that eventually gave birth to
Anglicanism. The papal refusal of the divorce and remarriage of King Henry VIII was
certainly one of the elements of a heavy litigation between the two powers, but it
was none the less significant. It was about knowing, within the order
trifunctional force in European Christian societies, until which
the monarchical institution and the noble class had to submit to the
inseparably moral and family norms, spiritual and political, enacted by
the papal institution and the clerical class. The reasons for the breakup were
equally and inextricably financial, in a difficult budgetary context
for the Crown: the dissolution-expropriation of monasteries, followed by the
gradual auction of the corresponding areas, contributed resources
significant and lasting to the monarchy, while undermining the patrimonial autonomy and
clerical class policy2.
Still, the dissolution of the monasteries, decided at a time when the
English monks alone accounted for around 2% of the male population,
led to a massive and early weakening of the ecclesiastical class
the United Kingdom, both in terms of numbers and properties, and at a
strengthening of the Crown and the noble class, which redeemed a good deal
of these properties and was thus able to strengthen its hold on the land capital of the
Kingdom. According to available estimates, the clergy's share had fallen to
less than 1% of the British adult male population at the end of the 17th century,
a moment when this proportion was still above 3% in France (see
graph 5.1). This early ecclesiastical decline in the United Kingdom went hand in hand with
the development of an original and exacerbated proprietarism.
Conversely, in Spain, clerical decline was much later than
United Kingdom and France. The ecclesiastical institution, on which
supported the monarchy and the noble class during the centuries of the Reconquista,
even its workforce grew between 1590 and 1700. They were still superior to
3% of the adult male population at the time of the French Revolution, and
We must wait until the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century for the weight of the clergy and its
properties collapses. Throughout the nineteenth century, the many laws on the
desamortización have gradually dispossessed the Church of part of her property,
both financial and land-based, with forced sales to the benefit of the State of
houses and ecclesiastical domains, in a context where the Spanish State was trying to
to modernize and strengthen the country's civil and public institutions. The
process continued in the early twentieth century, not without provoking violent
opposition and strong social and political tensions. In 1911, then again in
1932, the tax exemptions enjoyed by private donations to
religious institutions were questioned
hundreds of hectares
owner and by municipality, with thresholds depending on the types of culture. of the
significant compensation was provided, with a scale that depended on both
the size of the parcels and the incomes of the holder, with the exception of the
high nobility of the Grandes de Espana, which beyond a certain threshold of detention
had to be expropriated without compensation, taking into account the State privileges
individuals they had benefited from in the past. The agrarian reform served
however a rallying point against Republican governments, both of
made the objective threat it hovered over the remainder of large properties
ecclesiastics and especially nobiliaries who had not yet been redistributed, and
by the fears she aroused among the less important owners, frightened
by the wild occupations of parcels of 1932-1933 and the anticipation of their
possible recrudescence with the return to power of the left parties in
February 19364. The measures taken by the Republicans in favor of secular schools
and against religious schools also played an important role in the
mobilization of the Catholic camp. The coup d'etat of August 1936, the civil war and the
forty years of Franco dictatorship that ensued attest to the violence of the
Transformation paths of trifunctional companies into companies
proprietors then social democrats, and lasting traces that these processes
conflictual have left.
War nobility, nobility owners
If we now examine the case of the number of nobility in the different countries
Europeans, there is also a great diversity of situations, even more
marked only for the clergy. As we saw in the chapters
with the case of France, these spatial and temporal comparisons
should be conducted with caution because the state of nobility was most often
defined at the local level, and took extremely varied forms depending on the regions
and contexts. In particular, the sources do not make it possible to compare
the chronologies and trajectories followed by the different countries.
The available materials are, however, precise enough to clearly distinguish
two types of polar configurations within the European continent: on the one hand,
country where the nobility's numbers in the 17th and 18th centuries were relatively
low (usually between 1% and 2% of the population, or even less than 1%); and
on the other hand, countries with numbers at the same time
significantly higher levels (typically between 5% and 8% of the
population). There were undoubtedly many intermediate situations between these
two groups, but it is difficult to distinguish them precisely in the state of the sources.
The first group, characterized by low numbers of nobiliaries, includes
France, the United Kingdom and Sweden (see Figure 5.2). Within
these countries, the reduced numbers of the nobility were further diminished between
17th and 18th century. In the case of the United Kingdom, the numbers we have
indicated (1.4% of the population in 1690 and 1.1% around 1800)
also correspond to a relatively broad definition of nobility, including
the whole gentry. If we stick to the small fraction of the nobility
political privileges, their share in the population would be much higher
still low (less than 0.1%). In the case of Sweden, the numbers indicated (either
0.5% of the population in 1750 and 0.3% in 1850) come from
censuses organized very officially by the kingdom to count the
different orders and organize its political assemblies. They therefore express
well-defined reality at the centralized level. I will come back to these two cases later. AT
At this stage, let us simply note that this first group corresponds to countries where the
centralized state formation process was already extremely advanced in the seventeenth and
18th century.
Chart 5.2
The weight of the nobility in Europe, 1660-1880
Reading: the nobility represents less than 2% of the population in France, the United Kingdom and France.
Sweden in the seventeenth-nineteenth
centuries (with a downward trend), and between 5% and 8% of the population in
Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Croatia.
Sources and series: see piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideologie.
The second group, characterized by high numbers of nobility (between 5% and
8% of the population), including countries such as Spain, Portugal,
Poland, Hungary and Croatia (see Figure 5.2). For these last two
countries, the numbers are relatively well known, thanks to censuses by
organized in the late eighteenth century as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The
Estimated estimates for other countries are less precise. For all the orders
of magnitude can be considered significant. In particular, the differences
with the numbers estimated for the countries of the first group are perfectly clear.
How does one interpret the fact that the noble class can be from five to
ten times larger in some countries compared to others? It is well
first of all, that such differences reflect human and economic realities
and very different policies as to the state of nobility. A noble class very
mechanically implies that a significant portion of the nobles do not possess
big estate and that it does hold, in fact, often not much outside
of its title, prestige linked to its former feats of arms, more or less recognized next
times and societies considered, and possibly some advantages
statutory. On the other hand, a fine aristocratic class, as in the United Kingdom,
Sweden or France, corresponds to a situation where the nobility arrived at
constitute a thin elite of owners, with positions of power
important, both in terms of heritage, economics and politics.
The explanation for these considerable differences between countries must be sought in
inseparably territorial, political, ideological, military and fiscal history
specific to each European state building, and in the compromises made to
different times by the social groups present. In Spain and Portugal,
over the centuries of the Reconquista, the finishing procedures were
example closely related to the evolution of the territory controlled by Christian kings and
from the border with the Muslim kingdoms. In practice, the incorporation of
new territories often involved the ennoblement of entire villages, decreed
by the king and sometimes by the villagers themselves, in exchange for their loyalty and
future tax privileges. This is how the Spanish nobility quickly became
plethoric, with within it immense inequalities between the elite of the Grandes, at the
head of vast estates, and the mass of hidalgos, rather poor for the most part. The
Spanish monarchy will encounter the worst difficulties to make them pay for
over the following centuries, and will often find themselves having to owe them
to pay meager rents, the mass of which will burden the budget of the Spanish monarchy
and will not facilitate its modernization.
There are similar processes and similar inequalities within
Polish, Hungarian and Croatian nobilities, particularly in the context of the
territorial and reincorporation of fiefs within the polonolucanian monarchy
in the 15th and 16th centuries5. In Portugal, from the 13th-14th centuries, while
Reconquista is still in progress, the Livros of linhagens multiply,
allowing the noble nobility to count its many lineages and to tell
military exploits and acts of bravery so that the generations and
future monarchs do not forget them. This type of document is particularly
interesting, because it reminds to what extent the destinies of different nobilities
depend not only on state and monarchical strategies, but also
cognitive and political devices developed by nobles - big and small -
to count and defend their rights and status.
A satisfactory study of these multiple trajectories, from the constitution to the
disappearance of these different forms of nobility, would require many volumes, and
would go far beyond this book and my skills. More
modestly, I will now provide further details on the case
United Kingdom and Sweden, which are both well documented and
particularly relevant for the rest of our investigation.
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