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inventions and discoveries have been accumulated, will nobility be acquired at all? Yes, in the sense
of an aristocracy having industrial distinction, which is not usually hereditary, but prestigious
nonetheless. Then one will become a gentleman if not a nobleman, through the display of genius in
the maneuvering of large armies, in the direction of battles, in audacious and successful commercial
speculations, in large industrial enterprises, in scientific, artistic, or literary works, or simply the
genius of an enthusiastic dilettante.
In should be noted that in this last period the various types of aristocratic distinctions which are all
individual though incessantly renewed and reproduced, transmitted neither truly nor fictively by
blood but by example aided by social selection—all these distinctions will tend to be concentrated in
the large cities, the capitals. That is why I have elsewhere stated the idea that capitals are destined to
replace the nobility. 4 They are the impersonal aristocracies of democratic times and participate in the
vices and qualities of the nobility, which they both amplify and reflect. There is the same pride
fostered by the same smug admiration (in which a fairly justified recognition of services rendered
plays a part). There is the same imitative dissemination of ideas, needs, styles, of immorality and
superior morality, the same wear and rapid refinement of the race which comes there to be
consummated and consumed.
In short, we have found four sources of nobility: a military source, an economic source, a religious
source, and an aesthetic source. The mistake made by Fustel de Coulanges in his explanation of the
Roman and Greek patriciate was to take account of the religious source alone. The insufficiency of
his interpretation of facts has already been indicated. 5 If Fustel had thought of the plebeians’ debts to
the patricians and of the role that from the very beginning, the relationship of debtor to creditor
played in Roman history, he could not have helped observing that one of the most salient traits of the
patrician was to be rich and, more especially, capitalistic. According to Sumner-Maine, the Brehon
law shows us that the same was true of the Irish nobles: this Celtic nobility was rich in herds, the
capital of its time, and its means of subjugating the lower classes was to lend them cattle according to
a singular cattle lease. The continental feudal land tenure in the Middle Ages marks a more advanced
stage of economic relations between the nobility and the common people. But it is no less true that in
not one country does becoming rich suffice for becoming noble, even though it can sometimes suffice
to be born rich, which is not the same thing. We must add to this a certain degree of respectability
and of hereditary respectability (since that is, strictly speaking, the defining characteristic of
nobility), whose causes are military or religious. (I am leaving aside the aesthetic source as
secondary and rather more urbanizing than ennobling.) Hence, among the Arabs, for example, there
are Marabout families, in which saintliness is hereditary, next to warrior families, in which bravery
is similarly hereditary. 6 Because of the celibacy of Christian priests, the same distinction could not be
established in Europe. Here the ecclesiastical peers and the noble peers did not appear to belong to
the same noble caste except to the extent that the priests were also noble by birth. But the duality in
question appears in other forms: our noblesse de robe is midway between the religious and the
military nobility among the Arabs, and is more like the latter than the former. There is something
priestly about the noblesse de robe and something ambiguous as well. According to the period they
seem to constitute a lay clergy or to imitate the noblesse d’épée. *3