How should one analyze the descendants of the nobility in France? This ancient group has been invented and re-invented many times along its history. The Constitution suppressed it, then later on it was quite visibly rehabilitated, and it is always becoming disaggregated, in France as well as in other countries. How should one approach both this group's extreme diversity and its relative unity, which also have to be questioned as to their fictitiousness? Maybe the dense relationships and exchanges of all sorts between the descendants of the nobility contribute to the maintenance of some form of cohesion more than the symbolic resources they have in common. But this cohesion is becoming ever more difficult. At the present moment of the research, it seems that the descendants of the nobility cannot be analyzed neither as a body nor as a relative group even though these interpretations deserve attention but rather as a space, as long as the dynamism and the processes that crosscut it are analyzed as well.
Nobility; France; Social Space