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European Societies of Orders: Power and Property

In this chapter we will begin the study of ternary societies and their transformation by looking at European societies of orders, especially France. The goal will be to gain a better understanding of the nature of power and property relations among the three classes that constituted these tripartite societies. We will first examine how the trifunctional order was generally justified in the Middle Ages. What we will find is that ternary inequality discourse promoted a specific idea of political and social equilibrium between two a priori plausible forms of legitimacy: that of the intellectual and religious elite on the one hand and of the warrior and military elite on the other. Both were seen as indispensable to the perpetuation of the social order and of society as such.

Then we will study how the size and resources of the noble and ecclesiastical classes evolved in the Ancien Régime, and how trifunctional ideology was embodied in sophisticated modes of property relations and economic regulation. In particular, we will look at the role of the Catholic Church as a property-owning organization and author of economic, financial, familial, and educational norms. These lessons will prove useful in subsequent chapters, when we come to study the conditions under which ternary societies were transformed into ownership societies.

Societies of Orders: A Balance of Powers?

Many medieval European texts, the earliest of which date back to the year 1000, describe and theorize the division of society into three orders. For example, in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, Archbishop Wolfsan of York (in northern England) and Bishop Adalbéron of Laon (in northern France) explained that Christian society was divided into three groups: oratores (those who pray, that is, the clergy), bellatores (those who fight, the nobility), and laboratores (those who work, usually by tilling the soil—the third estate).

To properly understand the alternative discourses these authors were challenging, one needs to be aware of Christian society’s need in this period for stability and, especially, its fear of rebellion. The primary goal was to justify existing social hierarchies so that the laboratores would accept their lot and understand that, as good Christians here below, they were obliged to respect the ternary order and therefore the authority of the clergy and nobility. Many sources allude to the harshness of the life of toil, but this harshness was deemed necessary for the survival of the other two orders and of society itself. The sources also contain vivid descriptions of the corporal punishments meted out to rebels. Take, for instance, the monk Guillaume de Jumièges’s mid-eleventh-century account of a revolt that broke out in Normandy: “Without waiting for orders, Count Raoul immediately took all the peasants into custody, had their hands and feet cut off, and returned them, powerless, to their families. From then on their relatives refrained from such acts, and the fear of enduring an even worse fate gave them still greater pause.… The peasants, educated by the experience, abandoned their assemblies and hastily returned to their plows.”1

Peasants were not the only audience; the ternary discourse was also addressed to elites. Bishop Adalbéron of Laon sought to persuade kings and nobles to govern wisely and prudently, which meant heeding the counsel of clerics (that is, members of the secular or regular clergy, who in addition to their strictly religious functions also served princes in numerous other essential capacities as men of letters, scribes, ambassadors, accountants, physicians, and so on).² In one of his texts, Adalbéron described a strange procession in which the world was stood on its head: peasants wearing crowns led the way, followed by king, warriors, monks, and bishops walking naked behind a plow. The point was to show what might happen if the king were to allow his warriors free rein, thereby upsetting the equilibrium of the three orders on which social stability depended.³

Interestingly, Adalbéron also explicitly addressed members of his own order, the clergy, and in particular Cluniac monks, who were tempted in the early eleventh century to take up arms and assert their military might against lay warriors. Stopping clerics from bearing arms was a recurrent theme in medieval texts; members of the monastic orders were particularly rambunctious. In short, ternary discourse was more complex and subtle than it might seem: it sought both to pacify the elites and to unify the people. The goal was not simply to persuade the dominated class to accept its lot; it was also to persuade the elites to accept their division into two distinct groups, the clerical and intellectual class on one side and the warrior and noble class on the other, with each group sticking strictly to its assigned role. Warriors were enjoined to behave like good Christians and heed the wise counsel of the clerics, who in turn were admonished not to take themselves for warriors. The aim was a balance of power, with the prerogatives of each group self-limited; in practice this could not be taken for granted.

Recent historiography has stressed the importance of the trifunctional ideology in the slow process of unifying all workers in a single status. To provide a theory of the society of orders meant more than simply justifying the authority of the first two orders over the third. The theory also affirmed the equal dignity of all workers belonging to the third order, which made it necessary to challenge slavery and serfdom, at least up to a point. For the historian Mathieu Arnoux, the trifunctional schema thus began the process of ending forced labor and uniting all workers in a single order, which in turn paved the way for the impressive demographic growth of the period 1000–1350. The laborers who tilled the soil and cleared the land worked harder and became more productive, Arnoux argues, when they were at last honored and celebrated as free laborers rather than despised as an inferior and partly servile class.⁴ From literary and ecclesiastical texts we know that slavery was still quite prevalent in Western Europe in the year 1000. At the end of the eleventh century, slaves and serfs still accounted for a significant part of the population of England and France.⁵ By 1350, however, only a residue of slavery remained in Western Europe, and serfdom seems to have virtually disappeared, at least in its harshest forms.⁶ Between 1000 and 1350, as the discourse celebrating the three orders spread, there gradually emerged a clearer recognition of the legal personhood of workers, including civil and personal rights as well as the right to own property and move about.

For Arnoux, the promotion of free labor was thus well under way before the Great Plague of 1347–1352 and the demographic slowdown of 1350–1450. This chronological point is important, because scarcity of labor after the Great Plague is often cited as the reason why serfdom ended in Western Europe (and sometimes, notwithstanding the inconsistency, to explain its persistence in the east as well).⁷ Arnoux instead emphasizes political and ideological factors, especially the trifunctional schema. He also points to specific institutions that encouraged productive cooperation (such as fallowing, tithes, markets, and mills). Cooperation was made possible by new alliances among the three classes of ternary society, alliances that involved workers (the true silent artisans of this labor revolution), ecclesiastical organizations (the tithe paid to the clergy financed communal grain storage, the first schools, and assistance to the needy), and lords (who played a part in the development and regulation of water mills and the expansion of agriculture). Crises notwithstanding, these mutually reinforcing processes may have contributed to a significant increase of agricultural output and population in Western Europe in the period 1000–1500. Progress in this period left an indelible imprint on the landscape, as forests were cut down to make way for new plantings. All of this coincided with the gradual end of servile labor.⁸

Trifunctional Order, the Promotion of Free Labor, and the Fate of Europe

Other medieval historians had already underscored the historic role of trifunctional ideology in the unification of worker statuses. For instance, Jacques Le Goff has argued that if the trifunctional schema was no longer convincing in the eighteenth century, it was because it had fallen victim to its own success. From 1000 to 1789 the theory of the three orders promoted the value of labor. With its historical task accomplished, the ternary ideology could disappear to make room for more ambitious egalitarian ideologies.9 Arnoux takes this argument even further. He sees the trifunctional ideology and the European labor unification process as the main reasons why Latin Christendom, which in 1000 had seemed to be under attack on all sides (by the Vikings, Saracens, and Hungarians) and weaker than other political-religious entities (such as the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim Arab world), had by 1450–1500 revived to the point where it stood on the brink of world conquest, with a large, young, and dynamic population and an agriculture productive enough to sustain both the early stages of urbanization and the military and maritime adventures to come.¹⁰

Unfortunately, the quality of the available data is not sufficient to resolve the issue, and some of these hypotheses may well be based on a rather too rosy vision of the mutually beneficial cooperation that the ternary ideology supposedly made possible in medieval Europe. Many other factors contributed to the specificity of the European trajectory. Nevertheless, the cited works deserve full credit for insisting on the complexity of the issues surrounding the trifunctional schema and for clarifying the variety of political and ideological positions with which it was associated over its lengthy history.

Take, for example, Abbé Sieyès, a member of the clergy who was nevertheless elected as a representative of the third estate in the Estates General and who became well known for the pamphlet he published in January 1789, which began with these famous words: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been in the political order to date? Nothing. What does it want? To become something.” After an introductory blast denouncing the wrongs of the French nobility, which he compared “to the castes of the Greater Indies and ancient Egypt” (although Sieyès does not elaborate on the comparison, he clearly did not intend it as a compliment), he set forth his principal demand: that the three orders which King Louis XVI had just convoked to a meeting in Versailles in April 1789 be allowed to sit together, with as many votes for the third estate as for the two other orders combined (in other words, the third estate would get 50 percent of the votes). This was a revolutionary demand, since the normal practice was for each of the three orders to meet and vote separately, which guaranteed that the privileged orders would have two votes against one for the third estate in case of disagreement. For Sieyès it was unacceptable for the privileged orders to enjoy a guaranteed majority, given that according to his estimates, the third estate represented 98–99 percent of the total population of France. Note, however, that he was willing to settle, for the time being, at any rate, for just 50 percent of the votes. Ultimately, in the heat of events, it was at his behest that the representatives of the third estate proposed in June 1789 that the two other orders join them to form a “National Assembly.” A few representatives of the clergy and nobility accepted this proposition, and it was this assembly, consisting primarily of representatives of the third estate, that seized control of the Revolution and voted on the night of August 4, 1789, to abolish the “privileges” of the other two orders.

A few months later, however, Sieyès expressed deep disagreement with the way this historic vote had been applied in practice. In particular, he protested the nationalization of clerical property and the abolition of the ecclesiastical tithe (dîme). In Ancien Régime France, the tithe was a tax on agricultural production and animals, whose rate varied according to the crop and local custom; generally it amounted to 8–10 percent of the value of the harvest and was usually paid in kind. The tithe applied to all land, including in theory noble land (unlike the taille, a royal tax from which nobles were exempt), and its proceeds went directly to ecclesiastical organizations, with complex rules governing the precise allocation to parishes, bishoprics, and monasteries. The origins of the tithe were very old: it gradually supplanted voluntary contributions that Christians used to make to the Church as far back as the early Middle Ages. With support from the Carolingian monarchy, these voluntary contributions were transformed in the eighth century into a legally obligatory tax. Subsequent dynasties reaffirmed support for the tax, thus sealing the compact between church and crown and cementing a firm alliance between clergy and nobility.¹¹ Along with the income generated by church property, the tithe was the main source of financing for ecclesiastical institutions and clerical emoluments. It was above all the tithe that transformed the Church into a de facto state with the means to regulate social relations and fulfill leadership functions that were at once spiritual, social, educational, and moral.

For Sieyès (with whom Arnoux tends to agree on this point), the abolition of the tithe would not only prevent the Church from fulfilling its role but also transfer tens of millions of livres tournois* to wealthy private landowners (both bourgeois and noble). One might object that the educational and social benefits procured by French Catholic institutions in the eighteenth century seem quite modest in comparison with those that would later be provided by state and local institutions. One might also note that the tithe financed the lifestyle of bishops, curates, and monks, whose first concern may not have been the welfare of the poor. Indeed, the tithe often weighed heavily on the standard of living of society’s humblest members and not just wealthy landowners. The tithe provided no mechanism for extracting larger contributions from the rich: it was a proportional tax, not a progressive one, and at no time did the clergy propose that it should be any other way.¹²

The point here is not to settle this debate, however, nor is it to rehash the controversy between Abbé Sieyès (who would have preferred protecting the clergy and demanding more of the nobility) and the anticlerical Marquis de Mirabeau (who distinguished himself with speeches demanding the end of the tithe and the nationalization of church property but was a good deal less aggressive when it came to expropriating the nobility). It is rather to illustrate the complexity of the relations of exchange and domination that exist in ternary society—a complexity that at different times gave rise to contradictory yet plausible discourses. Sieyès clearly believed that it was possible and desirable to put an end to the most exorbitant privileges of both dominant orders while maintaining an important social role (and therefore appropriate financial support) for the Catholic Church, particularly in education. In many modern societies debate continues about the role of different religious and educational institutions and how to finance them, even in countries like France, which have opted for supposed republican and secular regimes, as well as in countries that preserve aspects of monarchy or grant official recognition to certain religions, such as the United Kingdom and Germany. I will say more about this later. At this stage, note simply that these debates have ancient roots, stemming from the trifunctional organization of social inequality.

The Size and Resources of the Clergy and Nobility: The Case of France

Unfortunately, very little is known about the long-term evolution of the size and resources of the clergy, nobility, and other social groups in ternary societies. There are deep reasons for this: at their inception ternary societies consisted of a web of powers that derived their political and economic legitimacy from their local roots. This localist logic ran directly counter to the logic of the centralized modern state, part of whose mission is to collect data and impose uniformity on its component parts. Ternary societies did not define clear social, political, and economic categories that could be applied in a standard way across a broad swath of territory. They did not conduct administrative surveys or systematic censuses. Or, rather, when they did do so, and categories and group boundaries began to emerge, it usually meant that centralized state formation was already well advanced and that ternary society was nearing its end or close to a fundamental transformation or radical reformulation. Traditional ternary societies lived in the shadows. By the time the lights came on, they were already no longer fully themselves.

In this respect the case of the French monarchy is particularly interesting because the three orders were early on granted official political recognition by the centralized state. From 1302 on, the so-called Estates General of the Kingdom, which included representatives of the clergy, nobility, and third estate, were convoked from time to time to consider issues of particular importance to the entire country; generally these were fiscal, judicial, or religious in nature. Institutionally, the Estates General were themselves an emblematic incarnation of trifunctional ideology, or perhaps better, a provisional and ultimately fruitless attempt to provide a formal trifunctional underpinning for the emerging centralized monarchical state, ternary society having functioned perfectly well at the local level for centuries without the slightest role for the Estates General. In practice, the estates were a fragile institution, which met quite irregularly and lacked a firm legal foundation. In 1789, the convocation of the Estates General was in fact a last resort, a desperate attempt to revamp the fiscal system to deal with a financial and moral crisis that would ultimately prove fatal to the Ancien Régime. The most recent convocation of the estates prior to that had taken place in 1614.

One problem was that there was no centralized electoral list or standard procedure for choosing the representatives of the three orders. Everything was left to local customs and laws. In practice, it was mainly the urban bourgeoisie and the wealthiest commoners who chose the representatives of the third estate. There were also recurrent conflicts about the definition of nobility, especially between the old noblesse d’épée (the warrior elite of “nobles of the sword”) and the new noblesse de robe (consisting of jurists and magistrates of the courts known as Parlements, the “nobles of pen and ink”). The former always sought to relegate the latter to the third estate, usually successfully, as only a small minority of “hauts robins” (senior justices) were generally recognized as full members of the noble group.13

When the Estates General were convoked in 1614, moreover, separate elections were organized within the third estate to choose, on the one hand, representatives of the noblesse de robe and, on the other hand, representatives of the rest of the third estate (bourgeois, merchants, and so on), so that in some respects one could say that there were four orders rather than three. The jurist Charles Loyseau, who in 1610 wrote an influential Traité sur les ordres et les seigneuries (Treatise on Orders and Seigneuries), came close to urging that the nobility of pen and ink, the administrative and legal backbone of the emerging monarchical state, should become the true first order of the realm in place of the clergy (even going so far as to note that, among the Gauls, the Druids were the first magistrates). He never quite took the final step, however, because that would have required a radical redefinition of the whole political and religious order. Still, Loyseau was quite harshly critical of the nobility of the sword, which he accused of having taken advantage of weak monarchs in centuries past to transform privileges stemming from past military service—privileges that Loyseau believed should have been limited and temporary—into permanent, exorbitant, and hereditary rights. In this, Loyseau showed himself to be an unbending advocate of the centralized state, sapping the very underpinnings of the trifunctional order and laying the groundwork for 1789. There was also sharp conflict between the nobles of the sword and royal officeholders, who were accused of having taken advantage of the crown’s need for cash to appropriate for themselves certain privileges and public revenues, and in some cases, even noble titles by availing themselves of their financial resources, usually deemed to have derived from sordid mercantile activities beneath the dignity of the nobility.¹⁴

Accordingly, there are no centralized voter lists that one might use to gauge the size of the different classes: all the procedures for choosing representatives of the three orders took place at the local level, with much variation from region to region. The only surviving records are quite disparate and rely on classifications that varied with time and place. Bear in mind, too, that the first real French census did not take place until the nineteenth century. It seems obvious that without census data there can be no real social or demographic understanding. How can a state function without such information (for example, to determine how much funding should be allocated to different towns or what number of seats should be ascribed to each voting district)? But collecting such information requires, beyond a desire to know, measure, and administer, organizational capacity and suitable means of transportation. These requirements were not always met; everything depended on specific political and ideological processes.

Under the Ancien Régime, one sometimes counted the number of “hearths” (that is, family groups living under one roof) but never individuals, and this was done only in certain provinces and never with standardized definitions of orders, occupations, statuses, or classes. The first truly national census was not conducted until 1801, and even that was little more than a rudimentary headcount. Not until 1851 do we find the first census lists of named individuals with information about the age, sex, and occupation of each. As the modern census evolved, population statistics and socio-professional classifications constantly improved.

Under the Ancien Régime, there was much debate about the population of each order, especially in the eighteenth century, but no official estimates existed. It took ingenuity to extrapolate from local data about the number of parishes, nobles, and hearths to national estimates. As Sieyès himself noted in his famous pamphlet: “With respect to population, the third order is known to be immensely larger than the first two. Like everyone else, I have no idea what the true ratio is, but like everyone else I will allow myself to make my own calculation.” What followed was a relatively low estimate of the size of the nobility, based on a very rough calculation of the number of noble families in Brittany multiplied by a very low estimate of the size of each family. Sieyès’s method betrayed his desire to call attention to the small size of the nobility compared with its scandalously exaggerated political influence.

Broadly speaking, while the sources more or less agree on the number of noble families (in the sense of lineages), things are much more complicated when it comes to estimating the total number of individuals. The first uncertainty has to do with the average number of individuals associated with each “hearth” or household (which requires hypotheses about the number of children, surviving spouses, and intergenerational cohabitations). The second, even knottier problem is the number of distinct hearths and family groups to assign to each noble lineage (and the uncertainty is compounded by the fact that it is not always obvious whether a younger branch should still be counted as nobility).

For the seventeenth century and later, one can turn to the vast surveys of the nobility and clergy conducted in the 1660s under Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert as well as to data stemming from the capitation, a tax established in 1695 to which the nobility was subject (unlike the taille). Marshal Vauban, well known for the celebrated fortifications he built in the four corners of France as well as for his efforts to estimate the country’s landed wealth and for his projects of tax reform, drew up a plan for future censuses in 1710, but it was never acted on. For the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, a number of historians have made use of locally compiled lists of nobles available for combat if required (the so-called ban and arrière-ban). Despite the serious shortcomings of these sources, they are good enough to estimate orders of magnitude and trends, especially for the period from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth.

The farther back in time one goes, the more one finds that nobility was above all a matter of recognition by one’s peers at the local level, hence the less sense it makes to think in terms of national estimates. In the Middle Ages, a noble was anyone “who lives nobly,” that is, with sword in hand, without being obliged to engage in degrading (meaning commercial) activities to maintain his status. In theory, a merchant who purchased a noble fief could not be considered a noble and was deleted from the lists of taxpayers subject to the taille until several generations had passed—that is, until his son and grandson succeeded in showing that they, too, lived nobly, sword in hand, “without engaging in commerce.” In practice, everything depended on being recognized by other noble families living in the same area, especially when it came to marriage: would nobles of ancient local lineages agree to allow their children to marry the newcomers (a central issue to which we will return when we look at high castes in India).

The Shrinking Nobility and Clergy in the Late Ancien Régime

Despite these many uncertainties, it will be useful to look at the information we have about the evolution of the noble and clerical populations in France under the Ancien Régime. The estimates we will analyze were established by combining work done on the capitation data, the ban and arrière-ban lists, and the surveys of nobility and clergy from the period 1660–1670. They are good mainly for deriving orders of magnitude as well as for making a few tentative geographical and historical comparisons. Two points appear to be well established. First, the clerical and noble populations in France in the final centuries of the monarchy were relatively small. According to the best available estimates, the two privileged orders represented 3–4 percent of the total population from the late fourteenth to the late seventeenth centuries: roughly 1.5 percent for the clergy and 2 percent for the nobility.15

Second, the numbers begin to decrease significantly starting in the final third of the seventeenth century under Louis XIV, continuing throughout the eighteenth century under Louis XV and XVI. Overall, the size of the first two orders as a percentage of the total population seems to have decreased by more than half between 1660 and 1780. On the eve of the French Revolution it stood at about 1.5 percent of the population: roughly 0.7 percent for the clergy and 0.8 percent for the nobility (Fig. 2.1).

Several points call for clarification. First, although uncertainties about levels remain, the trend is relatively clear. On the one hand, it is impossible to be certain that nobles accounted for exactly 0.8 percent of the population of France on the eve of the Revolution. Depending on what sources and methods one uses, one can obtain significantly lower or higher estimates.¹⁶ On the other hand, for a given source and method of estimation, we consistently note a very sharp decrease in the size of the first two orders and especially in the nobility in the final century of the Ancien Régime.¹⁷ By contrast, no clear tendency is apparent for earlier centuries.¹⁸

FIG. 2.1.  Population shares in French ternary society, 1380–1780 (as percentage of total population)

Interpretation: In 1780, the nobility and clergy accounted respectively for 0.8 and 0.7 percent of the total French population, or 1.5 percent for the first two orders and 98.5 percent for the third estate; in 1660, the nobility and clergy accounted respectively for 2.0 and 1.4 percent of the total population, or 3.4 percent for the first two orders and 96.6 percent for the third estate. These proportions remained fairly stable from 1380 to 1660, followed by a sharp drop from 1660 to 1780. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.

How should we interpret the relatively small size and shrinking proportion of the first two orders in the final century of the French monarchy? Before looking at the context of these changes, I should note that the population of France increased significantly during this period, from a little over 11 million in 1380 to nearly 22 million in 1700 and around 28 million in 1780, according to available estimates. By comparison, the population of England was less than 8 million in 1780; the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, around 13 million; and the newly independent United States of America, barely 3 million (including slaves). Once again, do not be misled by the precision of the numbers. Nevertheless, the orders of magnitude are clear. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Kingdom of France was by far the most populous country in the West, which no doubt explains the international importance of the French language in the era of the Enlightenment as well as the considerable influence of the French Revolution on neighboring countries and on European history. If the most powerful monarchy in Europe could collapse, did this not signify that the whole trifunctional world order was also on the verge of going under? What is more, France’s demographic exuberance was no doubt partly responsible for setting off the Revolution: all signs are that strong demographic growth contributed to wage stagnation in agriculture and skyrocketing ground rents in the final decades before the explosion of 1789. Although this rising inequality was not the only cause of the French Revolution, it clearly exacerbated the unpopularity of the nobility and political regime.19

The sharp increase of population also means that the relative stability of the size of the clergy and nobility as a proportion of the population from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries actually masks a significant increase in the number of clerics and nobles, who in absolute terms were never as numerous as in the 1660s. From that point on, however, the absolute size of the first two orders decreased, slightly at first, then more sharply between 1700 and 1780, especially for the nobility, whose population seems to have decreased more than 30 percent over the course of the eighteenth century. In a context of rapid demographic growth, the nobility’s share of the population fell by more than half in less than a century (Table 2.1).

TABLE 2.1
Clergy and nobility in France, 1380–1780 (as percent of total population)
		1380		1470		1560		1660		1700		1780
Clergy		1.4		1.3		1.4		1.4		1.1		0.7
Nobility		2.0		1.8		1.9		2.0		1.6		0.8
Total clergy + nobility		3.4		3.1		3.3		3.4		2.7		1.5
Third estate		96.6		96.9		96.7		96.6		97.3		98.5
Total population (millions)		11		14		17		19		22		28
Clergy (thousands)		160		190		240		260		230		200
Nobility (thousands)		220		250		320		360		340		210
Interpretation: In 1780 the clergy and nobility accounted respectively for about 0.7 and 0.8 percent of the total population, or about 1.5 percent for the first two orders (roughly 410,000 out of 28 million people). Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.

As for the clergy, it is useful to express its share as a percentage of the adult male population. In the Catholic Church, priests are not allowed to have wives or children, which systematically decreases the size of the clergy compared with countries and religions where priests have families equivalent in size (or in some cases slightly larger than) the families of other classes—for example, the Protestant and Orthodox clergy, the Shi’ite clergy in Iran, and the Brahmins in India, which we will study in subsequent chapters. In comparing different civilizations, therefore, it might make sense to consider each social group’s size as a share of the adult male population (there are good reasons for both choices, and they offer complementary perspectives useful for comparing different social structures).

In the French case, surveys conducted in the 1660s put the clerical population at about 260,000, 100,000 of whom were secular clergy (bishops, curates, canons, deacons, and vicars, hence all men) and 160,000 regular clergy (members of religious orders living under monastic rules). The latter group consisted of two roughly equal parts: 80,000 monks and 80,000 nuns. Men thus represented about 70 percent of the clergy (180,000 out of 260,000). Using this estimate, in the seventeenth century the male clergy represented 3.3 percent of the adult male population, or one adult male in thirty, which is a lot. In the eighteenth century this fell to a little below 2 percent, which still accounts for nearly one adult male in fifty (Table 2.2). Compare this with France today, where one adult male in a thousand is a member of the clergy (all religions combined). Over the past three centuries, the religious class has completely disappeared.²⁰ Of course, there is still an intellectual class in France as in all other Western societies (where holders of doctoral degrees now account for nearly 2 percent of the electorate, one voter in every fifty, compared with less than one per 1,000 a century ago), and it even plays an important role in shaping political conflict and the inequality regime, but in very different ways from those observed in the trifunctional era.²¹

TABLE 2.2
Clergy and nobility in France, 1380–1780 (as percent of total adult male population)
		1380		1470		1560		1660		1700		1780
Clergy		3.3		3.2		3.3		3.3		2.5		1.7
Nobility		1.8		1.6		1.8		1.8		1.5		0.7
Total clergy + nobility		5.1		4.8		5.1		5.1		4.0		2.4
Third estate		94.9		95.2		94.9		94.9		96.0		97.6
Adult male population (millions)		3.4		4.2		5.1		5.6		6.5		8.3
Clergy (thousands)		110		130		160		180		160		140
Nobility (thousands)		60		60		90		100		90		60
Interpretation: In 1780, the clergy and nobility accounted respectively for 1.7 and 0.7 percent of the adult male population, for a total of 2.4 percent (about 200,000 adult males out of 8.3 million). Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.

If we combine the first two orders, we find that between the fourteenth and the late seventeenth centuries, the clergy and nobility together represented about 5 percent of the adult male population (compared with 3.5 percent of the total population); this fell to a little above 2 percent on the eve of the Revolution (compared with 1.5 percent of the total population; Tables 2.1 and 2.2).²²

How to Explain the Decline in the Number of Nobles?

Why did the relative size of the clergy and even more of the nobility decline in France during the last century of the Ancien Régime? To be candid, the available sources do not allow a perfectly precise and convincing answer to this question. There is no shortage of possible explanations, however. One is that the decline was a consequence of a long-term process linked to the formation of the centralized state and the gradual delegitimation of clerical and noble functions. Political and ideological factors specific to each era also played a part, and we will find analogous phenomena in other European countries, especially the United Kingdom and Sweden, but with interesting variations in chronology and modality. In France, it is likely that the sharp decline that began in the middle of the seventeenth century was at least partly a consequence of a deliberate policy pursued by an absolute monarchy in a phase of rapid growth and increasing self-confidence. Indeed, the purpose of the surveys of the nobility and clergy conducted in the 1660s under Louis XIV and Colbert was precisely to allow the emerging central state to take the measure of the privileged orders and in some ways to exert control over them. Once the state knew who was who and how many people there were in each category, it could redraw the boundaries between classes and negotiate the prerogatives of both clergy and nobility. The crown also sought to tighten the rules defining nobility: for instance, a royal declaration of 1664 demanded “authentic proof” of any claim to nobility predating 1560, arousing considerable controversy over what kind of proof could count as “authentic.”23

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, moreover, the French monarchy multiplied its efforts to limit the size of the nobility. Its motives were both political (to show that the emerging centralized state had no need of a bloated, idle nobility) and budgetary, since reducing the number of nobles also reduced the number of people exempt from taxation. The capitation, created in 1695, did finally require the nobility to contribute to the finances of the state, but nobles as a class remained exempt from many royal taxes, especially the taille, until 1789. The only way to increase royal revenue was therefore to tighten the definition of nobility. This goal was never fully achieved, since the monarchy had only limited influence on the local institutions and administrative procedures that determined noble status and therefore exemption from taxation. In any case, it could not and would not run the risk of alienating the nobility, so the question was never really resolved before the Revolution. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the process of paring back the nobility, as difficult as it was, had been set in motion long before.

At the same time, the monarchy hesitantly sought to diminish the distance between the old warrior nobility and the new commercial and financial elite, in part by selling charges and offices (sometimes accompanied by titles of nobility) to people with financial resources and in part by allowing nobles to engage in new activities without derogation. In 1627, for example, the king decreed that maritime commerce would no longer stain the honor of a gentleman; in 1767, this dispensation was extended to banking and manufacturing.²⁴ This gradual process of unification and monetization of the elites, which would culminate in the nineteenth century with the introduction of property qualifications for voting, was already well under way in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even as the size of the traditional noble class began to decrease.

It is nevertheless difficult to attribute all of the decrease in size of the nobility to the deliberate action of the centralized state and the people who controlled it. In view of the sharp decline that occurred between 1660 and 1780, it seems likely that other factors (beginning with the strategies of nobles themselves) played an important if not preponderant role. Many scholars have shown, for example, that the noble class began to take a more and more “Malthusian” attitude to reproduction in the eighteenth century: not only did couples have fewer children, but celibacy also increased among daughters and younger sons. In France and elsewhere in Europe, primogeniture also became more common in this period, so that most family property was passed on to just the eldest son, as had long been the case among the English nobility. In France and elsewhere on the continent, inheritance practices had always been more varied.²⁵ Along with growing celibacy among younger sons and concentration of estates on the eldest went an increasing interest in high clerical posts: in the eighteenth century more than 95 percent of bishops came from the nobility, compared with 63 percent at the start of the seventeenth century and 78 percent at the end.²⁶

It is also tempting to analyze these changes as a (witting or unwitting) offensive choice, not to say an assertion of power by noble families on the English model. Once the centralized state guaranteed that property rights would be broadly respected, it ceased to be necessary for noble heads of household to fortify themselves with large numbers of sons prepared to take up arms to defend their fief and rank; hence they may have decided to avoid repeated subdivision and fragmentation of their estates and to concentrate power instead in a shrinking elite. A bloated elite ceases to be an elite. Yet such Malthusian family strategies can also be interpreted as a defensive choice, intended to prevent a loss of status. In a time of rapid demographic growth, economic expansion, and diversification of the elite (as nobles and clerics were joined by robins, merchants, financiers, and other bourgeois), it may have seemed that limiting the number of progeny and bequeathing estates to eldest sons was the only way for the nobility to maintain its relative rank vis-à-vis the newcomers.

The available sources are insufficient to allow us to assign precise weights to these various factors, interpretations, and motives. It is nevertheless striking to see that conflicts over protocol, rank, and precedence did not disappear toward the end of the Ancien Régime; on the contrary, they seem to have intensified.²⁷ In a period marked by the growing centralization of the modern state and by changes to an inegalitarian, hierarchical regime that threatened the status of many individuals, it would be wrong to think that by the grace of universal monetary equivalence, economic rationality, and the desire to concentrate property in the fewest possible number of hands, all elites came together in a single, universal communion. On the occasion of a royal entry into Paris in 1660, the usual disputes between nobles of the sword and robe were compounded by numerous conflicts within the Grande Chancellerie (an institution that played a dual role as ministry of justice and central administration of the monarchy). For instance, the gardes des rôles, or keepers of the rolls, who maintained various fiscal and administrative registers and lists, demanded rank and costumes equivalent to those of the maîtres des comptes and grands audienciers and above those of the huissiers, whom they deemed inferior.

In this period people began codifying not only the order of processions but also the size of the cloaks and hats that different ranks were allowed to wear, as well as the stools they were permitted to sit on during ceremonies, the color of their shoes, and so on. Conflicts over dress, protocol, processions, and ranks also colored relations between members of different guilds and corporations. In the eighteenth century these delicate questions demanded close attention: one had to deal, for example, with where princes and princesses of the royal blood (as well as royal bastards, for whom kings had recently won recognition, though not without a fight) stood relative to the high nobility (especially dukes and peers). Memoirists of course regularly lamented the disappearance of the old protocol of the battlefield—the feudal warrior order symbolized by the banquet in the Song of Roland, in which twelve peers flanked the king and no one challenged the hierarchical rules governing the order of access to meats and other dishes. In any case, these disputes over court rank under the absolute monarchy remind us that the society of orders was still alive and well at the end of the Ancien Régime. Its characteristically complex symbolic hierarchies had by no means dissolved into a one-dimensional ranking based on money and property. Only after the Revolution were social hierarchies radically transformed.

The Nobility: A Propertied Class Between the Revolution and the Restoration

If we want to understand how the clergy and nobility maintained their dominance over the rest of Ancien Régime society, it is obviously not enough to look simply at the relative size of the classes. We must also analyze the inextricably symbolic, patrimonial, and political resources at the disposal of the two privileged orders. As noted, the clergy and nobility represented only a few percent of the population, and that share decreased in the century prior to the Revolution. One key fact remains, however: no matter how sweeping the transformations under way, the two dominant classes continued to hold a significant share of France’s material wealth and economic power on the eve of the Revolution of 1789.

Although the sources are imperfect, the orders of magnitude are relatively clear, at least regarding property in land. By 1780 the nobility and clergy represented roughly 1.5 percent of the total population but owned nearly half the land: 40–45 percent according to available estimates, with 25–30 percent belonging to the nobility and 15 percent to the clergy and with considerable variation from province to province (in some regions the clergy owned barely 5 percent, in others more than 20 percent). The two privileged orders’ share of land ownership rises to 55–60 percent if one capitalizes the revenue from the tithe, which was not property, strictly speaking, but procured similar advantages, since it allowed the Church to claim in perpetuity a substantial share of the country’s agricultural output. The share of the privileged orders would be higher still if one counted income from judicial and other seigneurial and regalian rights linked to property rights; I have not tried to do this here.

The Revolution would radically upset this equilibrium, particularly regarding the clergy. Ecclesiastical ownership was reduced to virtually nothing after church properties were confiscated and the tithe was eliminated. For comparison, the nobility’s land holdings were cut approximately in half, and some of the losses were later restored, so that the break was less dramatic than in the case of the clergy. In the Nord département, for example, the share of land held by the two privileged orders decreased from 42 percent in 1788 (22 percent for the nobility, 20 percent for the clergy) to a little less than 12 percent in 1802 (11 percent for the nobility, less than 1 percent for the clergy). Available estimates for other départements confirm these orders of magnitude.28

All in all, we can say that the nobility owned from a quarter to a third of France’s land on the eve of the Revolution and that its share decreased to between a tenth and fifth in the early decades of the nineteenth century—which is still a lot. Note, moreover, that these estimates understate the nobility’s share of the largest fortunes, which was much greater than its share of total wealth—despite the drop from a very high share at the end of the Ancien Régime to a still quite significant share during the Restoration.

Inheritance records allow us to estimate that nobles accounted for roughly 50 percent of the largest 0.1 percent of Parisian bequests on the eve of the Revolution, falling to 25–30 percent between 1800 and 1810 and then rising again to 40–45 percent between 1830 and 1850 under the so-called monarchie censitaire, which imposed a property qualification (le cens) on voting. Then, during the second half of the nineteenth century, it gradually fell to roughly 10 percent in the period 1900–1910 (Fig. 2.2).

FIG. 2.2.  Share of nobility in Paris inheritances, 1780–1910

Interpretation: The share of noble names among the largest 0.1 percent of inheritances fell from 50 percent to 25 percent between 1780 and 1810 before climbing to about 40–45 percent during the censitary* monarchies (1815–1848), then falling to 10 percent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By comparison, noble names accounted for fewer than 2 percent of all deaths in the period 1780–1910. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.

This evolution calls for comment on several points. First, these results show that a very small group (noble names accounted for barely 1–2 percent of the Paris population throughout the period 1780–1910) accounted for a considerable share of the largest fortunes and therefore of economic and financial power. These estimates are based on the digitization of several hundred thousand inheritance records from the Paris archives, work I did in collaboration with Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal. This source is not without shortcomings: in particular, we were obliged to use family names to classify the deceased as nobles, a method with many drawbacks whose results must be viewed as approximate.29 Nevertheless, the observed trends are quite clear, both for the rise between 1810 and 1850 and the fall between 1850 and 1910. Note, moreover, that the data come from a system of inheritance records established by the Revolution—a system that was surprisingly comprehensive for its time and that has no equivalent in other countries, since it concerns all forms of property (land, buildings, professional tools, financial assets, and so on), regardless of value or status of the owner (noble or common). This system remained in place throughout the nineteenth century and down to the present, with very low tax rates from the Revolution to World War I (1–2 percent on direct bequests from parents to children). There is no comparable source anywhere else in the world for analyzing the long-term history of property, and we will come back to it when we study the evolution of the concentration of wealth in the ownership society that developed in France over the course of the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth. At this stage, note simply that it allows us to quantify the evolution of the nobility’s share of large fortunes.³⁰

Finally, the graphs in Fig. 2.2 show the importance of political and ideological (as well as military and geopolitical) factors in the transformation of ternary societies. To be sure, the size of the nobility was already shrinking in the eighteenth century, and this can be explained as the result of a slow socioeconomic process of elite renewal and state formation (combined with the Malthusian strategies that nobles adopted in response). Similarly, the decrease in the nobility’s share of the largest fortunes between 1850 and 1910 was partly a consequence of socioeconomic factors, especially the growth of industrial and financial sectors in which the old noble elite often took a back seat to the new bourgeois and commercial elites. Nevertheless, a purely socioeconomic approach would have a hard time explaining the abrupt decline of the noble share between 1780 and 1810, followed by a sharp increase through 1850. The fall was a result of redistribution achieved under the Revolution (although the extent of this should not be exaggerated, as we will see in the next chapter when we study the new property regime put in place by revolutionary lawmakers) and, above all, of the temporary exile of part of the nobility. By contrast, the rise can be explained by the return of the nobility at the time of the Restoration (1814–1815), largely thanks to the defeat of Napoleon’s armies by a coalition of European monarchies, together with the favors the nobility enjoyed in the period 1815–1848.

Think, for example, of the famous “émigré billion,” a symbolic measure debated in the early years of the Restoration and ultimately adopted in 1825, the purpose of which was to compensate former émigré nobles for land and rent lost during the Revolution; the large sums needed, amounting to nearly 15 percent of national income, were financed entirely by taxpayers and public borrowing. The governments of Louis XVIII and Charles X (both brothers of Louis XVI, guillotined in 1793), led by Joseph, comte de Villèle, also imposed on Haiti a penalty of 150 million francs (more than three years of the country’s national income at the time) to compensate former slaveowners, many of whom were aristocrats, for the property they lost when Haiti became independent.³¹ Broadly speaking, the entire judicial system and state bureaucracy took a clear pro-noble stance between 1815 and 1848, especially regarding the many lawsuits stemming from the redistribution of property during the Revolution. The political chronology shows that the transformation of the trifunctional society into an ownership society was not a smooth process in France or, for that matter, anywhere else in Europe. The rupture of 1789, as significant as it was, did not preclude any number of subsequent trajectories.

The Christian Church as a Property-Owning Organization

Return now to the question of the share of property owned by the clerical class and ecclesiastical organizations in ternary societies. The available sources suggest that the Catholic Church owned about 15 percent of French land in the 1780s. If we add the capitalized value of the tithe, the Church’s share rises to about 25 percent.

Available estimates for other European countries suggest comparable orders of magnitude. To be sure, there are many uncertainties in these estimates, first because the very idea of property rights took on a specific meaning in trifunctional society (which included judicial and regalian rights not taken into account here) and, second, because of deficiencies in the sources themselves.

For Spain, however, we have the famous Cadastre of the Ansedana, compiled in the 1750s, from which we learn that the Church owned 24 percent of the agricultural land.32 One should add to this the Spanish equivalent of the French tithe, but this is not easy to do. From the time of the Reconquista, relations between the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church were complicated; a constantly renegotiated share of the Church’s revenues was regularly transferred to royal coffers. The initial justification for these transfers was that they were necessary to finance the “reconquest” of Spain from the Muslim infidels in the period 718–1492. Subsequently, payments continued in a variety of forms.³³ The negotiations that took place in Spain between royal and ecclesiastical authorities show the extent to which questions of property in ternary societies were intimately related to broader political questions, beginning with the key question of the legitimacy of different elites and their respective contributions—martial and religious—to the community.

We know little about property other than agricultural land. The latter accounted for most—half to two-thirds—of all property (including land, buildings, tools, and financial assets, net of debt) in France, Spain, and the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century. But other property should not be neglected, especially residences, warehouses and factories, and financial assets. Very little is known about the Church’s share of these other types of property. For instance, recent work has shown that the Spanish Church’s share of mortgage lending (that is, lending that used land and buildings as collateral) was considerable, ranging from 45 percent in the seventeenth century to 70 percent by the mid-eighteenth century. By combining data from several sources, one can estimate that the Church held 30 percent or more of all property in Spain in 1750.³⁴

Uncertainties notwithstanding, the key point here is that the Church owned a very large share of all property in European ternary societies, typically around 25–35 percent. We find similar orders of magnitude for ecclesiastical institutions in very different contexts: for example, the Ethiopian Church owned about 30 percent of Ethiopian land in 1700.³⁵ This is a very large amount: when an organization owns a quarter to a third of all there is to own in a country, its power to structure and control that society is enormous, especially through its remuneration of large numbers of clerics and its provision of services of many kinds, including in the areas of education and health.

Of course, enormous influence is not the same thing as hegemony, such as one finds in the communist bloc during the Soviet era. Although this is an extreme case, the comparison is nevertheless useful. As we will see, under communism the state owned nearly everything there was to own, typically 70–90 percent. As trifunctional ideology makes clear, the Christian Church was an important actor in a pluralist political system but not a hegemonic actor. Still, the Church was the largest property owner in all Christian monarchies: no individual noble owned as much, not even the king. This gave it a capacity for action often greater than that of the state itself.

For the sake of comparison, it may be useful to note that nonprofit organizations today own a much smaller share of all property: 1 percent in France, 3 percent in Japan, and not quite 6 percent in the United States, where the foundation sector is especially large (Fig. 2.3). Note that these estimates, based on official national accounts, include all nonprofit institutions, counting not only property owned by religious organizations (of all faiths) but also that owned by nonreligious nonprofit foundations and institutions, including universities, museums, hospitals, and charitable organizations. In some cases the figures may include foundations that theoretically operate in the public interest but in practice serve mainly the interests of a single family, which for one reason or another has donated part of its wealth to the foundation, sometimes for tax purposes, other times for internal family reasons. The officials responsible for compiling national accounts data are not always sure how to classify such institutions. In theory, assets held by “family trusts” and other foundations serving private individuals should be included in the household sector and not counted as nonprofit institutions, but the dividing line is not always clear, any more than it is easy to know whether ecclesiastical property in the Ancien Régime served the interests of the clergy or the mass of the faithful. National accounts (and in particular the attempts to estimate national capital and income that originated in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in the United Kingdom and France and that still play a significant part in contemporary debate) are social and historical constructs that reflect the priorities of an era and of their inventors. They are seldom much concerned with issues of inequality or natural capital; I will have more to say about this later.

FIG. 2.3.  The Church as property-owning organization, 1750–1780

Interpretation: In the period 1750–1780 the Church owned 25–30 percent of all property in Spain and nearly 25 percent in France (including land, buildings, financial assets, etc., as well as the capitalized value of the tithe). By comparison, in 2010, all nonprofit organizations (including religious organizations of all faiths, universities, museums, foundations, etc.) held less than 1 percent of all property in France, 6 percent in the United States, and 3 percent in Japan. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.

In any case, the important point is that even when one includes such disparate entities, one ends up with today’s nonprofits owning a relatively small share of all property, between 1 and 6 percent. This shows how powerful the Church was in Ancien Régime Europe, when it owned 20–35 percent of all property. However uncertain the data and no matter how the sources were constructed, the differences in order of magnitude are clear.

The specificity of this structure of ownership, which is fundamentally different from the structure of ownership in the other types of society we will study, is one of the defining characteristics of trifunctional society. In trifunctional societies, the two legitimate dominant classes, the clergy and the nobility, each playing a distinct organizational role, control significant shares of all goods and resources (roughly a quarter to a third of all property for each group, or half to two-thirds for both combined, and even more in some countries, such as the United Kingdom). With such vast resources they are able to fulfill their dominant social and political roles. Like all inegalitarian ideologies, the ternary ideology finds embodiment in a regime that is at once a political regime and an ownership regime, and this determines its specific human, social, and material form.

Note, too, that the roughly 30 percent of all property that the Church owned in the Ancien Régime is similar to the share of national capital that the Chinese government, which is controlled in practice by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), owns today.36 Clearly the CCP and the Catholic Church of the Ancien Régime are organizations of very different types whose legitimacy derives from very different sources. Yet both are associated with ambitious projects of economic development and social control, which would be inconceivable without a solid basis of substantial wealth.

The Wealthy Church versus Wealthy Families and Inheritance Practices

Interestingly, the Church began accumulating property very early in the history of Christianity. As church ownership increased, Christian doctrine evolved to deal with questions of property, family inheritance, and economic rights. This paralleled the development of trifunctional ideology and the unification of labor statuses.

At the very beginning of the Christian era, Jesus taught his disciples that it was “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” But once wealthy Roman families embraced the new faith and began to take over bishoprics and other important positions in the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries, Christian doctrine was obliged to confront the question of wealth and make pragmatic accommodations. Society had become almost entirely Christian, something that had been unthinkable only a short time earlier, and the Church had begun to accumulate vast wealth, so it quickly became necessary to think about what forms of ownership were just and what kind of economy might be compatible with the new faith.

To simplify, wealth could be accepted as a positive feature of Christian society provided that two conditions were met. First, a portion of the goods accumulated by the faithful would have to be passed on to the Church, which would thereby acquire the means to carry out its mission of shaping the political, religious, and educational structure of society. Second, certain economic and financial rules would have to be respected. The role of ecclesiastical wealth was different from that of private wealth, and its legitimacy rested on different grounds. Historians of late Antiquity such as Peter Brown have studied the transformation of Christian doctrine concerning wealth in the fourth and fifth centuries, a transformation that coincided with a series of spectacular donations to the Church by wealthy individuals.37

Some anthropologists have gone so far as to argue that the only distinctive feature of European family structures as compared with family structures elsewhere in the vast expanses of Eurasia was the specificity of the Catholic Church’s position on wealth, especially its firm desire to acquire and hold property. According to Jack Goody, this is what led ecclesiastical authorities to develop a series of norms aimed at maximizing gifts to the Church (notably by stigmatizing remarriage of widows and adoptions, thereby reversing Roman rules, which encouraged remarriage and adoption in order to promote circulation of wealth). More generally, the Church sought to limit the ability of family groups to concentrate control over property (for instance, by forbidding marriages between cousins, albeit with limited success, since cousin marriage has always been a convenient matrimonial and patrimonial strategy for wealthy families in all civilizations—yet another sign of the radicalism of the Catholic Church’s political project). In each instance the goal was to consolidate the position of the Church vis-à-vis family dynasties whose wealth and political influence it saw as a challenge to its authority.

Whatever the exact roles of these new rules may have been, the church’s patrimonial strategy proved immensely successful. For more than a millennium, from the fifth or sixth century to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, the church owned a significant share of all property, and especially land, throughout Western Christendom—typically a quarter to a third, thanks to gifts from the faithful (and not just widows, reputed to be particularly generous) and sound economic and legal management.³⁸ With this wealth it was able to sustain a large clerical class during this entire period and also, in theory if not in practice, to finance various social services, such as schools and hospitals.

Recent research also shows that the church’s role as a property-owning organization would not have been possible without the development in the Middle Ages of a specific body of law dealing with economic and financial matters. These laws dealt with very concrete issues of estate management, usury (whether open or disguised), innovative debt instruments, and restoration of church property lost as a result of deceptive contracts (which the clergy often blamed on Jews and infidels, who were said to lack respect for Christian property). Giacomo Todeschini has studied the evolution of Christian doctrine from the eleventh to the fifteenth century in very great detail. Throughout this period trade was intensifying and more complex forms of ownership were emerging as new land was cleared, Christian kingdoms expanded, and populations and cities grew. Todeschini analyzes the role of Christian scholars in developing new economic, financial, and legal concepts, which he believes formed the basis of modern capitalism.³⁹ These legal concepts helped to protect church property from both temporal powers and private parties; new institutions emerged to provide adequate legal protections. Todeschini also touches on the development of new methods of financial accounting, which made it possible when necessary to circumvent the supposed ban on usury.

Ecclesiastical Property—The Basis of Economic Law and Capitalism?

In fact, contrary to what is sometimes argued, the problem for medieval Christian doctrine was clearly not that capital yields revenue without labor: this basic reality was the very essence of ecclesiastical property, which allowed priests to pray and attend to social needs without being obliged to till the soil. Indeed, this was the essence of property in general. The problem, to which the Church adopted an increasingly pragmatic approach, was rather to regulate acceptable forms of investment and ownership and to establish adequate social and political controls to ensure that capital would serve the social and political purposes set forth in Christian doctrine. Specifically, the fact that land yielded rent to its owner (or a tithe to the Church on lands it did not own directly) never really posed a moral or conceptual problem. The real issue was what kinds of investments in property other than land should be authorized; more specifically, the difficulty lay with commercial and financial investments and what kinds of remuneration were acceptable.

One sees this doctrinal flexibility in a text written by Pope Innocent IV, himself a canon lawyer, in the thirteenth century. In it he explained that the problem was not usury as such; if usury yielded too much interest with too much certainty, however, the wealthy might be induced “by avidity for profit, or to guarantee the security of their money,” to invest “in usury rather than in less secure businesses.” The pontiff went on to cite as examples of “less secure businesses” investments “in livestock and agricultural implements,” goods that “the poor do not own” yet which are indispensable for increasing true wealth. He concluded his discussion by saying that the rate of interest should not exceed a certain limit.40 A central banker determined to stimulate investment in the real economy today might well offer a similar justification for reducing the discount rate to nearly zero (despite limited prospects of success, but that is another discussion).

The same period witnessed the development of new financial technologies in defiance of old rules: for instance, the sale of rents and various forms of debt-financed purchases, which were no longer considered usurious as long as Christian doctrine identified them as useful for putting property to better use. Todeschini also emphasizes the growing influence of arguments justifying the expropriation of Jews and other infidels. These texts pointed to such people’s “inability to understand the meaning and proper use of wealth” (as well as the threat that this posed to Church property) at a time when Christians were beginning to avail themselves of new forms of credit (and more specifically, in the late fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth century, new forms of public debt). Other authors point out that the Anglo-Saxon “trust,” a form of ownership that allowed for the beneficial owner of a property to be someone other than its manager (the trustee), thereby offering better protection of assets, originated with modes of ownership developed as early as the thirteenth century by Franciscan monks, who could not or would not be seen as direct owners.⁴¹

Ultimately, the underlying thesis is that modern property law (in its emancipatory as well as its inegalitarian and exclusionary aspects) does not date from 1688, when both noble and bourgeois English property owners sought to protect themselves from the king, or from 1789, when the French Revolution sought to distinguish between legitimate ownership of rights over goods and illegitimate ownership of rights over persons. It originated instead with Christian doctrine, which sought over many centuries to secure the property rights of the Church as both a religious and a property-owning organization.

Indeed, the Church’s efforts to conceptualize and formalize economic and financial laws were especially necessary in ternary Christian societies because the clerical class existed not as a hereditary class but only as an abstract perpetual organization (somewhat like modern foundations, capitalist corporations, and state administrations). In Hinduism and Islam there was certainly no shortage of temples and pious foundations, but these were controlled by powerful hereditary clerical classes. Power over ecclesiastical property thus depended more on personal and family networks than in Christian society, so that there was less need to codify and formalize economic and financial relationships. Some authors suggest that the tightening of celibacy rules after the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century (prior to which concubinage was still common and tolerated among the Western Catholic clergy) was a way to avoid a turn toward more dynastic and hereditary practice and to reinforce the role of the Church as an ownership organization.⁴²

I do not mean to imply that the fate of Europe depended entirely on the celibacy of priests, Christian sexual morality, and the power of the Church as a property-owning organization. Subsequent processes and switch points reveal various other specificities of the European trajectory, and no doubt these were far more decisive. In particular, competition among European states led to military and financial innovations that had a direct impact on colonial conquests, capitalist and industrial development, and the structure of modern inequality both within and between countries. I will have much more to say about this in what follows.

The key point I want to stress here is simply that the many variants of trifunctional society have also left traces in modern societies that merit our full attention. Specifically, trifunctional society developed sophisticated political and ideological constructs whose purpose was to define the conditions of a just inequality, consistent with a certain idea of the general interest, along with the institutions needed to bring those conditions about. To do this in any society requires resolving a series of practical questions bearing on the organization of property relations, family relations, and access to education. Ternary societies are no exception. They developed a range of imaginative responses to the relevant practical questions—responses based on the general trifunctional schema. Those responses had their flaws and for the most part have not withstood the test of time. Yet their history is replete with lessons for what came after them.

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1.     1.  Text translated and quoted in M. Arnoux, Le temps des laboureurs (Albin Michel, 2012), p. 116.

2.     2.  The secular clergy—those who lived “in the world” among the laity, to whom they administered or assisted in administering the sacraments—included priests, curates, canons, vicars, and so on. The regular clergy lived according to a “rule” in a religious community or monastic order (including monasteries, abbeys, convents, priories, and so on). Members of the regular clergy might or might not be ordained priests (ordination was required to administer the sacraments). Unless otherwise specified, I use the terms “clergy” and “clerics” in the broadest possible sense, including both the secular and regular clergy.

3.     3.  See G. Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. A. Goldhammer (University of Chicago Press, 1980); and J. Le Goff, “Les trois fonctions indo-européennes, l’historien et l’Europe féodale,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations, 1979, p. 1199.

4.     4.  M. Arnoux, Le temps des laboureurs. Travail, ordre social et croissance en Europe (11^e–14^e siècle) (Albin Michel, 2012).

5.     5.  The servile population (slaves and serfs combined) represented 10–25 percent of the population of English counties in 1086 according to the Domesday Book, an inventory of English property established at the end of the reign of William the Conqueror. See Arnoux, Le temps des laboureurs, pp. 67–68. See also S. Victor, Les Fils de Canaan. L’esclavage au Moyen-Age (Vendemiaire, 2019).

6.     6.  In practice, there was a continuum of forms of labor ranging from slavery and serfdom to free labor; precise numbers are therefore impossible. I will return to the question of definitions in Chapter 6, which is devoted to slave society.

7.     7.  See, for example, R. Brenner, “Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe,” Past and Present, 1976; T. Aston and C. Philpin, The Brenner Debate (Cambridge University Press, 1985). In 1959 the Polish historian Marian Malowist suggested that the apparent intensification of serfdom in the east (especially in the Baltic countries) after the Great Plague could be explained by an increase in grain exports to the west. For an overview of this debate, see M. Cerman, Villagers and Lords in Eastern Europe 1300–1800 (Palgrave, 2012). See also T. Raster, Serfs and the Market: Second Serfdom and the East-West Goods Exchange, 1579–1857 (Paris School of Economics, 2019). Recent work has also shown that serfdom intensified in Western Europe in the fourteenth century, for example, on estates belonging to the abbey of Saint-Claude (a large ecclesiastical seigneurie in the Jura). See V. Carriol, Les serfs de Saint-Claude. Etude sur la condition servile au Moyen-âge (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009).

8.     8.  Available estimates suggest that the population of Western Europe more than doubled between 1000 and 1500, from around 20 million to nearly 50 million. The population of what is today’s France rose from 6 million to 15 million; of today’s United Kingdom from 2 million to 4.5 million; of today’s Germany from 4 million to 12 million; and of today’s Italy from 5 million to 11 million. This marked a sharp break with the previous centuries: the population of Western Europe appears to have all but stagnated from the year 0 to 1000 at around 20 million. Most of the increase between 1000 and 1500 seems to have occurred between 1000 and 1350. The Great Plague of 1347–1352 reduced the population by about a third, and it took nearly a century (1350–1450) to overcome that loss and return to a clear upward trend in the period 1450–1500. See the online appendix.

9.     9.  Le Goff, “Les trois fonctions indo-européennes, l’historien et l’Europe féodale.”

10.   10.  Arnoux, Le temps des laboureurs, pp. 9–13.

11.   11.  In 585 the Council of Macon declared that anyone who refused to voluntarily pay the church a portion of the fruits of the earth was a “thief and robber of God’s property.” The church had recommended such voluntary payments from its earliest days, but its recommendation was not always heeded. Not until the Capitularies of Pepin the Short and Charlemagne in 765 and 779 did the council’s decision receive royal sanction, giving the tithe the force of law. For a classic history of the tithe, see H. Marion, La dîme ecclésiastique en France au 18^e siècle et sa suppression (Cadoret, 1913).

12.   12.  Furthermore, the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were in many ways social and fiscal struggles sparked by refusal to pay the tithe to Catholic institutions. The royal government took advantage of public fatigue with the disturbances to shore up its own power. See Noiriel, Une histoire populaire de la France (Agone, 2018), pp. 62–99.

13.   13.  The function of the provincial parlements under the Ancien Régime was primarily to approve and register royal edicts and ensure their compatibility with local law and custom. Beyond technicalities, this allowed the parlements in practice to set conditions, demand amendments, and thus politically counterbalance the powers of the King’s Council (and of the great feudal lords who sat on it). Of course, the king could always reclaim any jurisdictional or legislative powers he granted to the parlements by holding what was called a “lit de justice” to require a parlement to register any edict. He could not, however, avail himself of this theoretical power too often without running the risk of undermining the equilibrium of the system. In many provinces the parlements also served as courts of appeal for the local seigneurial courts, with much variation from region to region in both the juridical and fiscal domains. For a classic study, see R. Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, trans. A. Goldhammer (University of Chicago Press, 1984). On justice in the Ancien Régime, see also J. P. Royer, Histoire de la justice en France (Presses Universitaires de France, 1995).

14.   14.  Royal offices usually involved administrative and regalian functions (tax collection, financial oversight, registration of official acts and documents, licensing associated with the growth of markets and trace, and so on). Some of these positions were newly created while others had previously been held by nobles before being put up for sale by the monarch in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, largely to compensate for falling fiscal revenues. On these conflicts, see R. Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation. The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 22–23, about which I will have more to say in the next chapter. See also Le Goff, “Les trois fonctions indo-européennes, l’historien et l’Europe féodale.”

15.   15.  It is possible that these populations were larger in earlier periods, particularly that of the nobility in the Carolingian era (eighth to tenth centuries) and the Crusades (eleventh to thirteenth centuries), when it may have been as high as 5–10 percent of the population (to judge by the example of other European countries; see Chap. 5). No source provides precise quantitative data, however.

16.   16.  Here I have chosen a middle-of-the-road estimate of the size of the nobility in the 1780s: roughly 0.8 percent of the total population, whereas the lowest estimates are about 0.4 percent and the highest around 1.2 percent.

17.   17.  The trends indicated here were estimated from the work of M. Nassiet and P. Contamine, who rely on data from the capitation (for the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and the ban and arrière-ban (for the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries). For bibliographic and methodological details, see the online appendix.

18.   18.  Do not be misled, however, by the apparent stability of the size of the nobility and clergy as a percentage of the total population between the fourteenth and late seventeenth centuries. It reflects the fact that the available sources do not allow us to detect any robust trend over this long period, whether upward or downward. It is nevertheless perfectly possible that more accurate sources would show significant variations over these three centuries.

19.   19.  On the fall in agricultural wages (relative to prices and rents), see the classic study by E. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au 18^e siècle (Librairie Dalloz, 1933).

20.   20.  If we include all members of the Catholic clergy (regular and secular) as well as all individuals classified as exercising religious functions (in any religion) in the French censuses for 1990, 1999, and 2014, in each case we find fewer than 20,000 (out of a total population of 65 million in 2014, or barely 0.03 percent), compared with 260,000 for the Catholic clergy alone in 1660 (out of a total population of 19 million, or nearly 1.5 percent). The religious class as a proportion of the population has thus shrunk today to less than a fiftieth of what it was at the end of the seventeenth century.

21.   21.  On the evolution of educational levels in various countries and the role of educational cleavages in structuring modern political conflict, see Parts Three and Four.

22.   22.  Both methods give virtually the same result for the nobility, because the average size of a noble family was similar to that of a common family (to a first approximation). For the clergy, the share is a little more than twice as great as a percentage of the adult male population compared with the total population. See Tables 2.1 and 2.2 and, in the online appendix, Fig. S2.1.

23.   23.  See esp. Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, and Les hiérarchies sociales de 1450 à nos jours (Presses universitaires de France, 1969), pp. 61–69.

24.   24.  See J. Lukowski, The European Nobility in the 18th Century (Palgrave, 2003), pp. 84–90.

25.   25.  Lukowski, The European Nobility in the 18th Century, pp. 118–120.

26.   26.  See the online appendix.

27.   27.  On these issues see the enlightening book by F. Cosandey, Le rang. Préséances et hiérarchies dans la France d’Ancien Régime (Gallimard, 2016).

28.   28.  See the online appendix.

29.   29.  It is nevertheless hard to imagine a better method, since there was no longer any legal definition of nobility in France after the abolition of privileges in 1789 (if one excepts both the tiny group of Peers of France that existed from 1815 to 1848 and the so-called noblesse d’empire). Indeed, the legal definition of nobility was also quite ambiguous before 1789.

30.   30.  The inheritance records in the Archives de l’Enregistrement are well preserved from 1800 onward. The estimate given for 1780 is based on available data concerning the decrease in the share of noble property from 1789 to 1800. We also had access to Paris inheritance records through 1960, which allowed us to determine that the decrease in the share of noble names continued after 1900 (noble names figured in fewer than 5 percent of the largest 0.1 percent of estates in the 1950s). See the online appendix.

31.   31.  I will have more to say about the magnitude of these property transfers, especially the Haitian indemnity paid to former slaveowners, in Chapter 6.

32.   32.  More precisely, the Church owned 15 percent of the agricultural surface area, but thanks to the high quality of its lands, it captured 24 percent of agricultural revenue (which is a better index of the Church’s share). See the online appendix.

33.   33.  The Church generally transferred a tenth to a quarter of its revenues to the Crown, but at times the figure rose to as much as a half. See S. Perrone, Charles V and the Castillian Assembly of the Clergy: Negotiations for the Ecclesiastical Subsidy (Brill, 2008).

34.   34.  On mortgage lending in Spain, see C. Milhaud, Sacré Crédit! The Rise and Fall of Ecclesiastical Credit in Early Modern Spain, doctoral thesis, EHESS, 2018, pp. 17–19.

35.   35.  See N. Guebreyesus, Les transferts fonciers dans un domaine ecclésiastique à Gondär (Ethiopie) au 18^e siècle (doctoral thesis, EHESS, 2017), pp. 264–265.

36.   36.  See Chap. 12.

37.   37.  See esp. P. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton University Press, 2013).

38.   38.  According to some sources, the process of wealth accumulation moved quite rapidly. In Gaul, for instance, the Church is said to have acquired around a third of all arable land between the fifth and eighth centuries. See J. Goody, The European Family (Blackwell, 2000), p. 36.

39.   39.  G. Todeschini, Les Marchands et le Temple. La société chrétienne et le cercle vertueux de la richesse du Moyen-Âge à l’Epoque moderne (Albin Michel, 2017).

40.   40.  Todeschini, Les Marchands et le Temple, p. 96.

41.   41.  K. Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 49–50.

42.   42.  J. Goody, The European Family (Blackwell, 2000), p. 39.