Title: France in the mid-1700s
Headings: France in the mid-1700s:
antecedents to revolution

France in the mid-1700s:
antecedents to revolution
The Monarchy and Madame de Pompadour
French Society
The Catholic Church
Sources

Content: Often, France's upper nobility sent a son into the upper clergy. Often they sent a son as an officer into the military, with the higher ranking officer positions preserved for the upper nobility. And members of the upper nobility had positions reserved for them in the king's civil service. High government officials were almost a closed cast and not necessarily bright. Promotion in the civil service often depended more on acquaintance at court than on merit. middle-class men of talent in government were frustrated and resented the system that left them out. The nobility considered pursuit of commercial activity as demeaning. They looked with contempt upon concern with money, and they described concern over debts as living like a bourgeois. Nobles also tended to see marriage for affection as a bourgeois attitude, but some young noblemen married women from bourgeois families, happy to acquire the wealth that came with their wives. Young men from bourgeois families who married women from noble families were often ridiculed for having married someone of pedigree but no money, and those daughters of the nobility that no one married were usually destined for a nunnery.