Norbert Elias and The Court Society: from Gallapagos to Versailles via Quai des Orfèvres

Dennis Smith An invited paper prepared for presentation to The Society for Court Studies in their meeting at the Château of Versailles: ‘Les cours en Europe: bilan historiographique. Colloque international,’ Centre de recherché du château de Versailles, Chateau de Versailles (France) 24-26 September 2009.

[A revised and abbreviated version of this paper appeared as ‘Norbert Elias and The Court Society’ in Marcello Fantoni (ed), Europa delle Corti/The Court in Europe, Bulzoni Editore (2012) 415-35.]

Norbert Elias and Darwin’s finches Norbert Elias’s The Court Society is commonly regarded as one of the books that gave a strong impulse to the historical study of royal courts. It was also the book that launched Norbert Elias, following seven decades of relative obscurity, into a position of international celebrity, at least amongst the serious book-reading and newspaper-reading public: first in France, then in Europe, now world-wide.

But there is a mystery about the book. Elias found the original typescript hidden amongst his papers during the mid 1960s and secured a German publisher. He then found the time to write a new introductory chapter on history and sociology, an additional chapter on aristocratic romanticism, and two appendices, one on the economic ethos of the court aristocracy, the other on structural conflicts within the Nazi state.1 But why did Elias not bring its historical sources more up to date?2 To make sense of this we should be aware of three things.

                                                                                                                     

1, There are also occasional cross references in the text to Elias’s work since 1933 eg Elias 1983, 92, 96, 116, 139. Stephen Mennell suggests that chapter 9 on the French Revolution might also come from the 1960s (Mennell 2006, xiii). 2 Elias relies on French texts of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including some twenty citations of Saint-Simon’s memoirs; classic French historians from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries including Taine, Lavisse, and Lemonnier supplemented by Ranke; and near-contemporary sociologists such as Weber, Sombart and Veblen. See Chartier 1988a.

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One factor, well known, is that the book was initially written in 1933. The second is that

during the 1940s and 1950s Elias was in recovery from the trauma he had experienced

following his intense personal involvement in the maelstrom caused by the upheavals in

Germany between the wars.3 In those years he published very little although he continued to

write and teach. This leads to the third factor, which is that The Court Society4 was the first major publication in

which Elias announced his entry as an active and assertive player in the international academic

arena. During the 1920s and 1930s he had become deeply disillusioned, first with philosophy

and later with the disciplines of sociology and history as practiced by his contemporaries.5

Three decades later, as he reached and passed retirement age, he had finally committed himself

to a professional identity as a sociologist. However, Elias believed that sociology had to be

transformed and put on the right road. In his ‘return to the scene’ in the late 1960s, he very

deliberately presented himself as an intellectual innovator whose task was to correct and reform

the discipline of sociology, enabling it to overcome outmoded ways of thinking.

The chapter in The Court Society entitled ‘sociology and history’, added in 1969, is part of a larger outpouring of publications on how to do sociology properly (so to speak) that flowed from Elias at about this time. These included

· a paper on sociology and psychiatry (Elias 1969), · another on processes of state formation and nation building (Elias 1970), · his book entitled What is Sociology (Elias 1978), which was initially published in

German in 1970, · his article providing new perspectives on the sociology of knowledge (Elias 1971), · his chapter on the ‘theory of communities’ (Elias 1974),

and then, after a pause for breath6,

· a paper on ‘human beings and their emotions’ (Elias 1987a) · one on the ‘retreat of sociologists into the present’ (Elias 1987b) · a book entitled Involvement and Detachment (Elias 1987c) and · a collection of called The Society of Individuals, (Elias 1987d).

How do we explain the fact that although Elias made substantial additions to the text of The Court Society in the late 1960s he left his historical documentation more or less untouched? For an answer we may begin with section nine of the introductory chapter where Elias makes a distinction between three related layers in the processes of changes that affect humankind.

___________________________ 3 See Elias’s use of the Edgar Allen Poe’s story of the two sailors whose boat was trapped in a maelstrom and  

being sucked underneath the surface of the water. One sailor panicked and drowned. The other kept his head, remained detached, and survived. Elias 1987c; Smith 1999a 4 Note that The Civilizing Process, (Elias 1994a) was republished in the same year, also in German. 5 Elias 1994b, 88-9; Elias 1994a, 484. 6 A pause brought to an end by the publication of The Loneliness of the Dying (Elias 1985; in German 1982).

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These are: biological evolution, where change is slowest: social development, the intermediate layer, where change occurs more quickly but is still so slow that it may be imperceptible in a single human lifetime; and the much faster moving layer of historical events, which Elias defines as the ‘individual works and deeds of people’ (Elias 1983, 15). 7

Elias is presenting himself as the pioneer sociologist who will accept the mission of laying bare the structures, processers, mechanisms and dynamics of the intermediate layer, the layer of social development: of figurations slowly undergoing transformation, of long-term social processes, and of habituses transmitted down the generations. The Civilizing Process (Elias 1994a) was republished in German in the same year that The Court Society saw the light of day (see table 1). These two works, one looking at a particular figuration (as he came to call it), the other examining social development processes, were his first major attempt in this direction. He spent the rest of his life seeking to build upon that work.

Table One: Key Works by Norbert Elias

Title

The Court Society The Civilizing Process The Society of Individuals The Germans Mozart

We can see that Norbert Elias was as intellectually ambitious in the arena of social development as was Charles Darwin in the sphere of biological evolution. This does not imply that he wished to produce a sociological version of Darwin’s theory. But he certainly admired Darwin and hoped that the approach he was developing would have an impact on our understanding and analysis of human societies as profound as that made by Darwin on the natural sciences.8

 In the late 1930s, in The Civilizing Process, Elias discusses the way figurations and habituses (as he later called them) undergo change and comments on ‘the compelling force with which a particular social structure, a particular form of social intertwining, veers through its tensions to a specific change, and so through to other forms of intertwining’, a process which, along with the accompanying changes in ‘human mentality...can be observed again and again in human history from earliest times to the present’. In an accompanying note he refers to Darwin and notes that attempts to identify recurrent processes of social, as opposed to biological, evolution have been undermined by a concern for what should be rather than what is (Elias 1994a, 445, 537). Elias admired Darwin’s rigorous concentration on fact not value. Half a century later we find him writing: ‘One

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Date of Composition 1933

Mid/late 1930s

1939, 1940s/50s, 1987

1960s-1980s

1970s, 1980s

First Publication in German 1969

1936-9, 1969

1987

1989

1991

First Publication in French 1974

1973/1975

1987

1991

First Publication in English 1983

1978/82

1991

1996

1993

                                                                                                                     7 There is here something of the spirit of Fernand Braudel’s distinction between historical events, conjunctures and structures. The difference is that Elias makes biological evolution rather than the geographical environment his deepest layer. See Braudel 1972, 20-23; Smith 1991, 109-10.    8  

The comparison is worth pursuing for a little longer. Elias’s intense and difficult life during and after the First World War were his equivalent of Darwin’s journey on the Beagle: often dangerous but also exhilarating, producing a rapid inrush of new experiences and perceptions that would take decades to sort out and put in order.

Seen in this way, the French court is Elias’s Galapagos Islands. It is where he gathers data which start the trains of thought that will eventually lead him to give the world his theory of social development, or civilizing processes. Like Darwin, Elias was working in a difficult environment towards the end of a challenging and exhausting period. Errors crept in. Darwin, we know, neglected to label his bird specimens from the Galapagos accurately. Earlier in the expedition he had mistaken one of his most precious finds, a Patagonian rhea, for a small ostrich and allowed it to be cooked for his supper. Fortunately, a large part of the outer carcase remained and the rhea was later reconstructed and put on show in the museum of the Zoological Society.9 Like Darwin, Elias may have made some minor mistakes when initially gathering his data. It is possible, for example, that he relied a little too much on the testimony of Saint-Simon.10 Or that like Darwin’s finches, Elias’s bourgeois specimens were not always classified with sufficient clarity at first.11

Like Darwin, Elias worked for decades while withholding many of his conclusions from publication: Darwin was not sure the public was ready for his thoughts; Elias was not sure his thoughts were ready for the public. When Elias overcame his reservations and recovered his confidence in the late 1960s he was a man in his early seventies, not sure how much time he had left. He evidently decided to concentrate his energies on presenting new arguments that explained his own maturing approach rather than going over old ground in Versailles. That, surely, is why he left so much of his historical documentation more or less untouched.

Maybe sociology’s Darwin, but certainly sociology’s Maigret Whether or not Elias is sociology’s ‘Darwin,’ ‘Freud’ or ‘Copernicus’ is a matter on which opinions are divided, as they long were over Darwin, Freud and Copernicus. In the meantime, Elias should be neither deified nor dismissed. Instead, he should be read. The least satisfactory position would be to reject Elias’s whole approach to the formulation of historical and sociological questions because he did not use the latest scholarship in 1969. Furthermore, even for scholars who focus their attention specifically on historical aspects of courts, aristocracies and royalty, it is very useful to read not just The Court Society but also Elias’s other work, such as, for example, The Germans (Elias 1996; published the year before he died), The Established and the Outsiders (Elias 2008) and his short book on Mozart (Elias                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          might think of Darwin’s approach to the problem of biological evolution. He was not concerned with the problem as to whether amphibians were better than fish, mammals better than reptiles or humans happier than apes.; he was simply concerned with the problem as to how and why species had become what they were and with explaining why species which appeared later in the evolutionary process had functional advantages over earlier types. The problem of the development of societies in general....requires a similar approach’ (Elias 1992, 93). According to one adherent of Elias’s approach, ‘Norbert Elias may be seen to have delivered the fourth blow to human narcissism, beyond Copernicus, Darwin and Freud’ (Kilminster 2007, 154). See also Freud 1986, 273 9 Brown 1995, 269, 359.    10  See Le Roy Ladurie 2001.    11  For a critique, see Duindam 1994.    

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1993). This is because the best history needs the best sociology, and vice versa, even if adherents of these sister disciplines are sometimes like boxers in a clinch, to coin a phrase.12

In fact, we can already say, at the very least, that Elias has very great strengths which fully justify his place in the canon. One is his ability to analyze the connections between two things: the ‘workings’ of human beings, their drives, inhibitions and perceptions; and the dynamics of the social bonds in which they are embedded.

Another of Elias’s strengths is his insight into the relationships between changing patterns of interdependence and shifting power balances between individuals and groups. Elias’s understanding of these connections is the basis

· of his concept of figurations, including court society, · for his visualization of relations between established groups and outsiders, · for his characterization of the balance between involvement and detachment, and also · for his distinction between ‘subject-adequate’ and ‘object-adequate’ knowledge.

To explain this last point, what Elias called ‘subject-adequate’ perceptions were those which expressed an individual’s own wishes or fears, not the true characteristics of the object being observed. You see what you want to see, so to speak. By contrast, ‘object-adequate’ perceptions are produced by more detached observations that are not distorted by your wishes or fears. 13

Elias’s first degree was in both medicine and philosophy. He had great respect for the hard sciences. To oversimplify, he believed that the harder, longer, more carefully and more dispassionately you look at something, gathering evidence about it, the more likely you are to be able to describe it accurately and to understand it more fully.

For Elias, ‘looking hard’ at individuals and their social bonds meant looking intelligently and imaginatively, like a brilliant detective. It meant trying to ‘see’ the figurations in which they were embedded. It meant looking for the mechanisms and processes sustaining and reshaping those figurations.

Elias was not like his one-time teacher Edward Husserl, who tried to strip away and bracket out the social context on the grounds that they obscured ‘pure’ perception of say, a person or a group. Elias did the opposite and deliberately put back into the picture the dynamic social bonds that, in fact, as he saw it, constituted that person or group as it enacted its existence through time and space. There is even more to it than that because that Elias also peered below the surface of people in the spirit of a Sigmund Freud who, as we know, investigated the personal histories of neurotic individuals. Elias also adopted a ‘historical’ approach to the dynamics of people’s behaviour but he operated on a much bigger scale. He looked at changes in the forms of behaviour and types of personality that were regarded as normal in successive historical periods from the

 For my own approach see Smith 1991. It is hardly necessary to add that Elias is obviously not the only guide

in such matters. For example, Marc Bloch and Barrington Moore spring immediately to my mind, at least.    13 See Elias 1971

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medieval period to the present. For example, in The Civilizing Process Elias came to the conclusion that as the bonds of interdependence tighten within social groups, their susceptibility to feelings of repugnance and shame increases, and the rules that constrain and guide their behaviour become more strict and specific.14 This apparatus of concepts and propositions was developed by Elias while pursuing the project that preoccupied him throughout his life. Specifically, he wanted to understand what was distinctive about the way his beloved Germany had developed. To do this he looked at Germany’s European neighbours, especially France but also Britain and, to a lesser extent Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. Only when he had done this and learned all he could from these cases did he did he return to his home base. Like Michel Foucault, who spent much of his final decade working on the history of sexuality, Elias saved his most precious subject of study, The Germans, till the end of his career.15 Elias was indeed a brilliant detective, one with stamina, prepared to keep his most elusive case open and on the files for over seventy years. He wanted to know why his own life as a German Jew had been so profoundly disrupted between 1914 and 1940. Whether or not he turns out to be sociology’s equivalent of Darwin, he is certainly sociology’s Inspector Maigret. In that respect the journey from the Gallapagos Islands to Versailles takes us, figuratively speaking, via the Quai des Orfèvres, headquarters of the renowned Police Judiciaire de Paris. To understand why Elias found court society so interesting and how the French court related to what Georges Simenon might have called ‘the strange case of Germany’, we have to know something of Elias’s life.

A life in four acts I. Elias was born in 1897 in Breslau, the son of prosperous textile manufacturer (see figure 1). The German Empire was dominated politically by the aristocracy but the growth of industrial cities was gradually transforming power balances. Elias was in an excellent position to observe this since Breslau was not only a thriving manufacturing city but also housed a provincial royal palace and was surrounded by aristocratic estates. Elias himself was secure in a warmly supportive household, and absorbed his parents’ pride in being both German and bourgeois (see figure 1). Later, as an undergraduate student at Breslau University immediately after the war, he became an officer within a student duelling society for Jews. Before the war he had been active in the Zionist association Blau Weiss.16

 Freud’s book Civilization and its Discontents was published in 1930 (Freud 1930).    

15  See Smith 2001, 93-113.    16  See Hackeschmidt 1995; Hackeschmidt 1997; Kilminster 2007, 11-13; Mosse 1967; Gordon 2002. It is worth noting that Richard Hönigswald, Elias’s doctoral supervisor in philosophy at Breslau after the war, was ‘a Protestant of Jewish descent...and, despite his apostasy, the spiritual leader behind the young Breslau Zionists in the early 1920s’ (van Rahden 2008, 69 citing Hackeschmidt 1997, 138-48). Elias has not emphasized this aspect of his youth. Arguably, his ‘Germanness’ meant at least as much to him as his ‘Jewishness.’ It is interesting that in The Germans (Elias 1996), he mentions the Jews, National Socialism and Hitler on fewer than fifty pages in a book nearly five hundred pages long. The ‘tragic hero’ of this text is the Germans , not the Jews. Elias wants to understand how the Germans, as distinct from other nations, could have been brought to the condition of de-civilization that made the Holocaust possible. See Smith 2001, 70.    

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Figure One: The four phases of Elias’s life*

I 1897-1914

In Breslau: a strong bourgeoisie, a well- established Jewish community, an industrial city with a courtly society sustained by the neighbouring Silesian aristocracy.

Elias in Breslau is in a protective cocoon, the only child at centre of a supportive family: Bourgeois (educated in Kultur), German (an enthusiast for dueling), Jewish (a member of Blau Weiss)

III 1940-65

In UK, initially in London (Group Analysis) and then (from 1954) at Leicester University Sociology Department: a kind of ‘court society’ with a ‘salon’ sub-culture. Elias in Leicester is once more in a protective cocoon, the ‘father/godfather’ of a small supportive disciplinary sub-group. He is teaching and writing but rarely publishing.

*Compare I (1897- 1914) with III (1940-65), and II (1914-40) with IV (1965-90)

The point is that in these early years Elias found it relatively easy to combine being German, bourgeois and Jewish. His family’s prosperity helped, as did the strength of the local Jewish community, not least on the Breslau town council. Elias readily absorbed the ideals of the German academic tradition of Kultur with its emphasis on deep learning rather than the supposedly inferior virtues of ‘civilization’, that shallow mix of superficial etiquette and low worldly aspirations exhibited by politicos and business folk. He wanted to be a German university professor and must have been encouraged by the fact that in 1897, the year of his birth, Breslau had given the freedom of the city to Ferdinand Cohn, a Jewish oil dealer’s son who had specialised in the study of botany and become a full professor at Breslau university in 1872 (van Rahden 2008, 225).

II. After 1914, the horror of the First World War and the violent politics of the Weimar Republic meant that Elias lost his faith in German Kultur. It was the ideology of a bourgeois class that failed to protect the Jews and allowed them to be turned them into complete outsiders. However, Elias did not stop thinking of himself as German or caring about the fate

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II 1914-40

First World War, defeat of Germany, weakening of German courtly establishment. Inflation undermines the bourgeoisie. Political violence and repression.

Elias leaves his safe Breslau base, experiences increasing displacement; loses confidence in Kultur, searches for an alternative, discovers ‘court society’ and ‘the civilizing process’ as intellectual themes.

IV 1965-90

Vietnam War, defeat of United States, weakening of American hegemony, political reawakening of Western Europe. Recognition of Elias is part of this restoration of European confidence.

Elias leaves his safe Leicester base, publishes prolifically, and experiences increasing acceptance within the ‘canon.’ Develops his theory/model/approach as a sociologist of ‘processes’, ‘figurations’ and ‘habitus.’

of Germany. On the contrary he wanted to understand why his nation had taken its disastrous path and what alternative routes were available. This problem took shape in his mind as he began his career as a student of philosophy (in Breslau), then rejected philosophy, along with Kantianism, and turned towards sociology (in Heidelberg and Frankfurt) between the two world wars. 17

Elias must at this point have been aware of an ironical fact. The poets he had admired as a youth such as Goethe and Schiller thought that the soulful values underlying German Kultur would be weakened if they did not resist the materialistic spirit and superficial worldliness of urban-industrial civilization.18 Where was this pernicious ’civilization’ most strongly developed? Apparently it was amongst the Jews and also in France, the United States, and Britain. However, these societies had been strong enough to defeat Germany in the First World War. Also, they remained much more peaceful and orderly than Germany after 1918.

It seemed that France, for example, had indeed developed in a different way from Germany, but the differences were apparently not the ones that the German critics of civilization had predicted. Those critics seemed to be wrong. So what was the true situation? In these circumstances, a comparison between Germany and France made perfect sense to Elias, even if it took a lifetime to carry out, as it did.

He turned to the French case in his two books The Court Society and The Civilizing Process. The first book was produced as Elias’s habilitationsschrift19 but since Elias was a Jew it could not be published in 1933, the year of Hitler election as German Chancellor. A few years later, The Civilizing Process was published in great haste in Switzerland, with the help of his father who got permissions from the German authorities at the cost of great anxiety and some personal risk. By that time, Elias was outside Germany, although his parents did not consider leaving. Within a few months his father had died at Breslau. Elias heard of this in a letter from his mother en route to Auschwitz where she, also died.

III. Ironically and tragically, in the late 1930s and early 1940s Elias found his intellectual path at the same time as he lost both his country and his parents. It took Elias at least a decade and a half to recover, during which time he hardly published a word. 20

By the late 1930s neither sociology nor indeed history as then practised satisfied his standards and demands. In the later pages of The Civilizing Process Elias was identifying himself with ‘a science that does not yet exist, ...a historical social psychology’ (Elias 1994a, 484). Indeed, in 1952 he was a founding member of the Group Analytic Society based at the Tavistock Institute in London.

 The influence of Karl Mannheim on Elias (and vice versa) and his association with Alfred Weber are

discussed in Kilminster 2007. See also Elias 1994b.    18  See Smith 2001, 28-31.    19  

 Although in 1950 he published a paper comparing the English and Spanish navies in the sixteenth century. This appeared in the British Journal of Sociology and explored differences between aristocratic/courtly and bourgeois/professional approaches to naval warfare. See Elias 1950 and also The Genesis of the Naval Profession (Elias 2007) , based on the 1950 paper and a number of unpublished manuscripts.    

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 A second doctorate making it possible to obtain employment as a university teacher.    

                                                                                                                     17  

20  

In 1954 Elias acquired a new secure base and became, once more, a sociologist, this time with the prospect of constructing a sociology that suited him. His new home was at Leicester University where the recently-established Sociology Department was run as a kind of duchy by Professor Ilya Neustadt, the departmental head. Neustadt, a charming and subtle man, shaped the academic culture, along with Elias, emphasizing long-term patterns of social change or ‘development.’ There was little internal democracy. In the present writer’s experience, Neustadt’s approach was to keep his lines of communication as open as he could with each member of the department while neglecting to call departmental business meetings.

In the midst of this academic ‘court’ there was the ‘salon’. Not just the department’s weekly seminar but also the informal gatherings around a coffee table - usually the same coffee table - that occurred in the staff common room at mid-morning at least one or two days every week. This was at its best when Neustadt and Elias were there together, playing intellectual table tennis with each day’s political news or the latest scandal.21

The Leicester department provided Elias with another warm cocoon, something he had lacked since his childhood in Breslau. Within this cocoon he had the chance to restore himself. It was a kind of second beginning, this time not as a child but filling a quasi-parental or avuncular role in relation to at least some of his colleagues.22

IV. Elias returned to the arena of book publication in 1965 with The Established and the Outsiders (Elias and Scotson 1965), the study of a community on the outskirts of Leicester. By 1969 Elias was making regular visits to the University of Amsterdam. The Court Society and The Civilizing Process were both published in that year, initially in German (see table 1). Their author soon acquired a large international audience. By the early 1970s Elias was ready to leave his Leicester nest for good. The dam had broken and a flood of books followed.23 Three issues As this narrative shows, by the time he was in his thirties, Elias had experienced illusory security, deceptive idealism, unsettling violence, painful exclusion and brutal repression. In the light of these events, Elias spent the rest of his life puzzling over three issues: how did societies hold together and become transformed over time? how had this happened historically, over several centuries, in the countries about which he cared most, including France and Germany? and how had these processes affected his own life, the life of Norbert Elias?

                                                            22 During his time in Leicester, Elias worked closely with Eric Dunning, one of his most committed adherents in

Leicester, to develop a ‘processual’ approach to the sociology of sport. This has made a major impact in this field. See, for example, Elias and Dunning 1986.    23  They included What is Sociology? (Elias 1978), The Loneliness of the Dying (Elias 1985), Involvement and Detachment (Elias 1987), The Society of Individuals (Elias 1991a), The Symbol Theory (Elias 1991b) , Time. An Essay (Elias 1992), Mozart. Portrait of a Genius (Elias 1993) and The Germans (Elias 1996).    

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 21The present writer joined the Department in 1969 and remained until 1980.    

We have already noticed the contribution Elias has made on the first of those three issues. His approach to figurations, processes and habitus helps us to ask useful sociological questions in a systematic way.24

In view of his own life experience, Elias had his own list of useful sociological questions. He asked himself:

· How did societies progress towards a more pacified existence, moving beyond a condition of violent struggles between people for survival or local supremacy, driven

by aggression and fear, with only intermittent and unstable controls? · What part had feudal and, later, royal courts played in this process, historically? · What were the patterns of development of court society both in the sense of social life

within the court and the ways the court was articulated with the rest of society? · How did the interplay between the ruler, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie develop

in these societies? · What was the part played by culture in these relationships? · How had these developments affected the capacity of people to see themselves and

the world clearly, think rationally about their behaviour, and control themselves and their societies in a peaceful and humane manner?

· What was the legacy of the court figuration’s particular pattern of rise and decline for the subsequent development of the modern urban-industrial society?

This leads towards the third and most specific issue: how to make sense of Elias’s own troubled situation between the two world wars. Two questions in particular presented themselves to Elias:

· Why did it become impossible for him to live peacefully in the country he loved, Germany, following the vocation he enjoyed, as a university-based intellectual?

· What factors explained the lack of protection and support given by the class to which he belonged, the bourgeoisie, to the group of which he was a member, the Jews?

Looked at in this way, it begins to be understandable why Elias, a member of one of Europe’s classic ‘outsider’ groups entering its period of utmost peril thought that the most important way to spend his time and energy at that dangerous time was to analyze Europe’s classic ‘insider’ group, its most renowned historical establishment, the French royal court at Versailles. There are three reasons:

· It was part of the programme of historical and comparative inquiry mentioned in the second set of questions listed above.

                                                                                                                     24 Among others, one scholar who acknowledged this was Pierre Bourdieu. See, for example Bourdieu 1996, 111-12, 129

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· It was based on Elias’s perception that French society had developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a way that was more rational, peaceful and humane than German society.

· It also offered the opportunity to explore the more general issues relating to the working of figurations, the production of habitus and the processes of structural change.

The impact of The Court Society The Court Society made a tremendous impact, especially in France, when it finally appeared after a delay of over three decades.25 Why was that?

One reason, to state the obvious, is that the book is a very ‘good read’ and can be absorbed at many different levels. For example, surely what has attracted many readers to this text, including those who bought Flammarion’s new 2008 paperback edition, are Elias’s highly readable vignettes of court life. These give us vivid access to specific people, places and situations. We are taken on an exciting journey. For example, early on we make an exhilarating guided tour of a typical early eighteenth-century noble residence, walking through the bustling basse-cours, passing through the kitchen, meeting the maître d’hotel, noticing the Swiss Guards (some of whom act as royal spies), then on to the antechamber where the liveried servants stand ready, into the appartements privés (one for the master, one for his wife), then finally to the reception rooms, including the large circular salon.

Later, we arrive at Versailles itself with its grand Marble Court and massive wings and, on the first floor of the main building, the King’s bedroom. Before long we are transported into the middle of the levée, observing the different entrées, by the king’s family, his servants and officers, the bodyguard, the favoured friends of the Gentleman of the Bedchamber ; watching the king arise, take off his nightshirt with the help of the maître de la garderobe and his leading assistant, one on each sleeve, and so on, all with the most precise ceremonial, till fully dressed when, after a brief prayer, the king leaves the bedroom to be greeted by the whole court.

It is quite rare to go for more than a few pages without some intriguing contemporary comment or detail: the story of the French prince who insists on serving the English king in person to cast shame on his negligent Spanish companions (101-2); Madame de Staal being snooty about Voltaire (106); Louis XIV insisting on the importance of etiquette (117-8), expressing his ‘love of gloire’ (135), and joining in a colourful tournament as the leaders of the Romans (140) but then slipping away when he got the chance to his country château at Marly for a bit of peace and quiet (138); the great Prince de Condé clashing with Richelieu (173-5); Henry IV struggling between his wish to be a feudal liege lord and his need to be a sovereign monarch (182-3); Frederick II of Prussia saying that if he were the French king he would immediately appoint a substitute to spend all day saluting the idle courtiers (188);

                 

                                                                                                     25  Daniel Gordon provided many examples of the warm approval given to Elias and his books in his paper on the ‘canonization’ of Norbert Elias in France. See Gordon 2002, 68-9. Over two decades later the interest had not decreased but grown.

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Montmorency being beheaded in the courtyard of the town hall at Toulouse (195); minor nobles romantically lamenting their lost rural happiness while writing pastoral novels and composing songs for shepherdesses (229); and everywhere extracts from the memoirs of the almost perpetually discontented Duc de Saint-Simon, telling his story of how Le Roi Soleil ensured that all his courtiers were under minute observation, keeping everyone guessing about his own intentions, setting rivals against each other, raising up one individual or faction, pushing down another, sometimes just by the twitch of an eyebrow.

There is a touch of the young Orson Welles in the way Elias produces this text. We get long, wide panning shots then we zoom in on particular characters. The time frame is not straightforward. We move forward and backward in time, from Henry IV to Louis XIV then back to Francis I and so on, sometimes tracing in detail incidents that lasted half an hour, sometimes sketching three centuries in a paragraph. These authorial devices are interspersed with monologues by the narrator about the nature of history, sociology, charisma, social bonding and so forth.

However, there is much more to it than that. A second reason for Elias’s success was that The Court Society and The Civilizing Process were part of a wave of agenda-setting ‘big books’ during the 1960s in the field of history and historical sociology, books such as Edward Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963), Le Roy Ladurie’s The Peasants of Languedoc (1966), and Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) with its opening chapters on England and France.26

These books had something important in common, apart from originality and scholarship. Together, they rescued from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ (to quote Edward Thompson)27, not just artisans and peasants but also their aristocratic and wealthy masters. These authors allowed their readers to see how, from 1500 onwards, the rich as well as the poor had interpreted and confronted the challenges presented to them by growing towns, increasing trade, bigger populations, new technologies, more assertive and organised monarchies, and the intense passions roused by religion.

It was not just intellectually satisfying but also psychologically uplifting for Europeans to be reminded how a large a part their early modern predecessors had played in shaping our contemporary world, indirectly at least. In the 1960s Europe was beginning the experiment of constructing what would become the European Union with its own court society in Brussels.28 In that same decade, through these books and others, Europe’s historical past was put back onto our agenda in a way Europeans could be proud of: its rich and complex ‘deep

                                                                                                                     26 Thompson 1969; Le Roy Ladurie 1977; Moore 1969. For commentary, see also Smith 1983 (on Moore); Smith 1984 (on Elias); Smith 1988 (on the Annales school); and Smith 1991, 41-68 (on Elias, Moore and Thompson and 104-20 (on Braudel). 27 Thompson 1969, 12.    28  See Smith and Wright 1999.

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past’ of the preceding half-millennium not just the miserable and disreputable story of the preceding half-century. 29

This European self-discovery followed an immediate post war period when the perspectives and priorities of Washington had ruled virtually unchallenged in the West. During the late 1940s and 1950s Europe’s governments had been disciplined from above and told to put a stop to their warlike behaviour. This was true in the West as well as the East, although the style was different.

In the words of Michel Jobert, during the decades immediately after 1945 Western Europe was ‘Lined up in one camp, under strict US control, taking orders and reporting for duty’.30 Jobert was France’s foreign minister in 1973-4 so his words tell us something of the political atmosphere at the time when The Court Society was translated into French in 1974. At that time the US had suffered enormous loss of prestige following the Vietnam War and getting ready to devalue the dollar. Western Europe saw both the opportunity and the need to reassert itself economically and politically. This was exactly the right time for a book whose main characters were noble figures that had been cut down to size and forced to learn a new diplomatic game which they secretly resented. In other words, Elias’s narrative of the disciplining of France’s feudal warrior elite by the victor in a bloody war must have evoked a familiar scenario, with western European governments playing the role filled in the seventeenth century by French aristocrats.31

There is a third reason for the book’s impact: its bold thesis. Elias told his readers:

· that the apparently useless idleness of the royal court was in fact a rational power game played by deadly serious players (eg Elias 1983, 92-3, 110-14);

· that the arrogant lords who paraded at Versailles sometimes felt like virtual prisoners, unable to escape their constraining situation without paying a heavy price eg 194-201;

262-7); · that these exotic and apparently alien creatures, the bewigged courtiers, were in fact

human beings who bonded together and competed in ways similar to ourselves (eg 75-7; 210-11);32

                                                                                                                     29 For more recent depictions of barbarism and war on Europe’s ‘dark continent’, see Mazower 1998; Wasserstein 2007; Ferguson 2007. 30 Le Monde 10 August 1991; cited in Smith 1999, 246. Jobert could use this military analogy with some credibility since he had a distinguished war record including being awarded the croix de guerre. The Guardian,, Tuesday 28 May 2002 31 It may not be too fanciful to characterize the Suez adventure of 1956b as a kind of fronde. 32 Elias writes that ‘Despite their formal organizational framework based on written contracts and documents, which was developed only in rudimentary form in the state of Louis XIV, there are in many organizations of our time, even industrial and commercial ones, rivalries for status, fluctuations in the balance between groups, exploitation of internal rivalries by superiors, and other phenomena that have emerged in the study of court    society. But in the main regulation of human relationships in large organizations is formalized in a highly impersonal manner, such phenomena usually have a more or less unofficial and informal character today. In court society we therefore find quite openly and on a large scale many phenomena that exist below the surface of highly bureaucratized organizations’ (Elias 1983 140). See also Mastenbroek 2002a, Mastenbroek 2002b, Newton and Smith 2002, Smith 2001b, Smith 2002, Soeters and van Iterson 2002, Srinivas 2002. For suggestive insights into ‘modern’ courtly behaviour see Lapham 1993, Lapham 1999, I am grateful to Nidhi Srinivas for mentioning these to me. There are some parallels between the early modern court and the contemporary

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· that the constraining pressures upon courtiers from all sides, and from above and below, shaped their personalities and their approach to others and themselves, inculcating strict self-control, an ingrained habit of detailed observation, and a disposition to deceive where necessary (eg 107-10; 239-41); and

· that this courtly ‘figuration’ was a vital link in the historical chain stretching from the feudal age to modern society (eg 39-40; 146-52; 186-8; 203-13; 268-75)

Culture, cabals and contestation More specifically, as is well known, Elias argued that the royal victory over the aristocratic rebellion during the Fronde was reinforced by the effects of commercialization which increased the relative power of the royal tax collector and the urban rentier, and by changes in military technology that made traditional forms of feudal warfare obsolete. Against this background, attendance at court with all the expense and inconvenience involved was a very useful, even necessary exercise, especially for those who wanted to rise in the world, for those who wished to avoid falling, and for those who having fallen wished to rise again.

By the late seventeenth century, wrote Elias, ‘aristocratic culture...became centred in one place, Paris, and on one social organ, the royal court’ (148). This aristocratic culture encompassed the monarchy, who played a central role within it, the courtiers in and around Versailles, and many socially aspiring bourgeois families some of whom participated in, and indeed hosted, salons in Paris.

Elias writes about ‘the court society’ rather than ‘the court’. That term includes the dynamics of social life not only within the royal court but also within its urban and rural hinterland. Court society included ‘high society’ in Paris. In many instances, the courtier was also a commuter, travelling between Versailles and Paris, and back again.33

This picture of an extended court society is reinforced by more recent research, which shows, for example, that in the early eighteenth century the court cabal of Madame de Maintenon, the so-called ‘cabal des seigneurs,’ not only had great influence within the Parlement of Paris but also ran a spy network that received reports not only from the Swiss guards at Versailles, through the governor Blouin, one of Maintenon’s allies, but also from the Paris police which fell within the government department headed by another of her allies, the younger Pontchartrain. (Le Roy Ladurie 2001, 134).34

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         diplomatic game at Brussels which ‘induces a process of socialization, habituating players to each other, forcing them to think through other points of view and subsequently live with them’. Indeed, argues Keith Middlemas, ‘this Euro-civilizing aspect may come to be seen, looking back from early in the next [ie twenty-first – DS] century, as informal politics’ largest contribution to the European Union’ Middlemas 1995, 684). 33 ‘A significant part of [the courtiers]...had lodgings in the king’s house , in the Château of Versailles, and a residence, ie an hôtel, in the city of Paris...Certainly the court people are town dwellers, and to a certain extent town life sets its stamp on them. But their bond to the town is less strong than that of the professional citizens. Their society is always the same, but the locality changes. Now they live in Paris, now they move with the king to Versailles, to Marly, now they make their home at one of their own country houses or live as guests at the estate of one of their friends’ (Elias 1983, 43, 45).      34  See Le Roy Ladurie 2001, 134, 142-3

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The cultural lives of Versailles and Paris were closely intertwined, with influences flowing in both directions: for example, Elias writes that ‘the nobles’ and financiers’ salon of the eighteenth century is a descendant of the royal salon of the second half of the seventeenth.’ (Elias 1983, 79). A more recent scholar notes that ‘Paris was a necessary complement to the entertainment offered even in Versailles’ glorious first decades’ (Duindam 2003, 156). Daniel Gordon has explored the salon culture of Paris haunted by savants who increasingly found fault with the excesses of the court at Versailles and lauded instead the virtues of free exchange in an amicable spirit among high-minded people.35 This was part of a gradual transmutation of taste and ethos described by Elias who argued that ‘shift of the centre of gravity of good society from the royal palace to those of the princes, and from them to the hotels of the high nobility and – and at some distance- the rich bourgeoisie of the estates, .... found expression in the style of good society. The transitions from Classicism to Rococo, from Rococo to the Louis XV style, correspond fairly exactly to the shift in the centre of gravity of court society’ (Elias 1983, 79).

Over time, argues Elias, the bourgeois elements ‘gradually discarded aristocratic culture as its model’ until during the French Revolution the bourgeoisie ‘overran the nobility from outside as the bearer of its own non-aristocratic convictions’ (148). This sentence goes to the heart of Elias’s concerns. He had been brought up in a German city where financiers, traders, manufacturers and professional men without a noble lineage were completely excluded from ‘good society.’ The Silesian aristocracy on their estates and their relations in town treated bourgeois outsiders with enormous contempt.36 In response, the most creative and liberal element within the German bourgeoisie developed a dislike of high society and high politics and turned inward, cultivating both their domestic comforts and their aesthetic sensitivities.37

In France also there was certainly an abundance of contempt for Versailles among bourgeois circles in Paris by the early eighteenth century, as Bellegarde’s popular tract on ridicule shows.38 But the difference was this. The lower reaches of court society in Paris were much less tightly policed by the aristocracy and ‘good society’ than were the little local courts of provincial Germany. What excited Elias about French court society was not just that it overcame political fragmentation and chronic violence and developed pacified and restrained forms of conduct. It was also the fact that it was possible for people with non-noble                                                                                                                      35 Gordon 1994.    36  

 

 See Elias 1994a, 3-41.      Bellegarde 1707, originally published in 1696. This work was, for example, cited by Henry Fielding in his

preface to Joseph Andrews.  

15    

 Elias reminds us in his book on Mozart that, historically, ‘Particularly at the smaller and poorer courts of the German empire it was customary to make social inferiors emphatically aware of their subordinate position, and something of this attitude has perhaps passed into the German tradition’ (Elias 1993, 95). In The Germans he quotes a novel by Walter Bloem set in Marburg in the late nineteenth century where ‘citizens were divided into two castes: society, and those who did not belong to society.’ Some wealthy merchants might scramble upwards into society but once inside they immediately encountered further rungs that were ‘very wide apart.’ The most successful bourgeois families could achieve some recognition but they would be constantly made to feel their inferiority in relation to the militaristic aristocracy whose traditions were perpetuated through student duelling societies. Indeed, ‘nouveaux riches merchants and industrialists who had not undergone the bloody rites of passage demanded of students and the military were looked down upon by the ‘good society’ of the Kaiserzeit as bearing the indelible stigma of lowly origins, of being social climbers and parvenus’ (Elias 46-7; Bloem 1906, 73f)    37  

38  

backgrounds to infiltrate the court. In turn, it became possible for the prejudices, styles and habitus of the court to infiltrate Parisian society where they were not only assimilated but also challenged.

The main point, as far as Elias is concerned, is that in the French case, unlike Germany, contempt between aristocrats and bourgeois did not lead to political disengagement by the latter. On the contrary, it was often difficult to disentangle the two, so intertwined were trade, finance, the law, government office and nobility. Through regular involvement with court society the French bourgeoisie gradually gained the confidence and experience it needed to push court society aside and take its place.

However, before all that happened, at the height of Louis XIV’s power and influence the court at Versailles was the centre of both government and fashionable society. The monarch exploited the intersection between these two spheres, those of power and display. He played a leading part in the elaboration of etiquette, ceremony and ritual at Versailles, acting as the star of the show, watching over, and sometimes intervening in, the constant rivalry between courtiers seeking to improve their own ranking in the hierarchy of prestige, and looking for lucrative and influential positions in His Majesty’s service.

The lavish consumption and rich display at Versailles did not just glorify the monarch. It also magnified the aristocracy as a whole. Monarchy and nobility supported and needed each other. However, the relationship was ambivalent and power balances were constantly shifting within and around the bustling social network of the court society. According to Elias, this happened along at least three axes of contestation. One axis was between different individuals within the court nobility, competing for royal favour. Another was between the monarch, the kingdom’s foremost peer, and his main rivals, the leading noble families who built up their own networks of influence.39 These rivals did their best to put their own stamp on the tone and bias of court society. In fact, Elias notes that by the time of Louis XVI court etiquette had become a set of rigid rituals. These rituals were the jealously guarded, and highly disputed, property of the courtiers themselves.

There was, argued Elias, a third axis of contestation. He refers to it as a conflict between the nobility and the bourgeoisie but in fact he seems to mean something rather narrower, a conflict between the nobility of the sword and the nobility of the robe, the latter more clearly identified with professional (or in Elias’s terms, ‘bourgeois’) arenas such as the law.40 Elias states that by the time of Louis XVI competition between these ‘two privileged hierarchies’ (as he put it) had resulted in a stalemate. These rivals for power and privilege within the ancien regime were like ‘boxers in a clinch’ (274), unwilling to consider any reform that might threaten their relative position. These same phrases might, of course, describe many a long-lasting marriage. Perhaps there is not so much difference between a boxers’ clinch and a lovers’ clinch, especially after the years and long familiarity with each other have taken their                                                                                                                      39  

 Elias does not make a strong distinction between the terms ‘bourgeois’ and ‘professional. In his eyes, both imply disciplined work in a skilled and/or specialised occupation combined with prudent economic management balancing expenditure with income. See his appendix in The Court Society on the intendant in the estate management of the court aristocracy (Elias 1983, 94).    See also Mennell 2006, xiv.  

16    

 For a detailed recent analysis, see Le Roy Ladurie 2001, eg 121-59 .    40  

toll. Seen from this perspective, there is much merit in Jeroen Duindam’s nuanced account which points out: that the distinction between the noblesse d’epee and the noblesse de robe was not at all clear cut or absolute; that the two forms of nobility tended to merge into a unified elite during the eighteenth century; and that over time the power and exclusiveness of the court nobility were enhanced at the expense of both the monarchy and would-be bourgeois entrants to its ranks.41

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie nicely illustrates the sharp tensions that persisted within this more consolidated and exclusive establishment in his amusing account of the ‘Affaire du Bonnet’ in the early eighteenth century which set the dukes against the president of the Parlement of Paris who refused to remove his hat when addressing them.42 These recent detailed analyses strengthen one of Elias’s main arguments which is that court society was both increasingly preoccupied with irresolvable internal tensions and increasingly insulated from external political voices – and it paid the price in 1789.

Concluding case notes The French case provides a historical narrative with a conclusion that Elias finds reasonably satisfactory: the development of a stable, relatively orderly society in which the bourgeoisie has a secure and honoured place. If this paper were pursuing the theme of Elias as a kind of Darwin we would now turn to The Civilizing Process to see how persuasively his analysis of The Court Society feeds into a longer global narrative. However, we are, instead, tracing Elias’s career as a kind of Maigret investigating the strange case of Germany. We can wrap the matter up, Maigret-like, by sifting through two related files that have a bearing on the case. In both instances Elias is tracking the fate of bourgeois people working in professional occupations who suffer belittlement at the hands of court society.

The first case takes us to Vienna where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was caught between the standards of the bourgeois strata to which he belonged as a professional musician and the dominant values of the court society which provided him with an income. He tried to build an independent career as a freelance artist but the influence of court society pursued him into the                                                                                                                      41 Duindam also adds the following points: that the royal monopoly over the developing apparatus of government turned into a monarchic-aristocratic oligopoly; that court attendance, and the expense that went with it, was for the most part a voluntary exercise, a means to advance one’s career, and that only for the monarch himself was display absolutely mandatory; that even if the feudal warrior elite had passed away, individual nobles were not defunctionalised since they had many potential posts to fill and tasks to perform, not least in the royal service, which included commanding military forces; that government and administration in France were complex and multilayered, both centrally and locally, growing by accretion while letting older forms vegetate quietly; and that inculcation of self-control and rational behaviour at court had to be considered alongside similar processes occurring both in the city (not least in the salon and counting house) and in the religious sphere. See Duindam 1994. Elias, who had studied in Heidelberg, participated in Marianne Weber’s salon and been taught by Max Weber’s brother clearly realised that religion and urban life were also important contexts in which rationalization developed. In The Court Society, he also recognises that the monarch was constrained in many ways and, during the eighteenth century, increasingly so. The points listed here seem to be perfectly compatible with Elias’s model of a tension-ridden court figuration in which power balances were gradually shifting.    42 Le Roy Ladurie 2001, 274-5

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open market, guiding the taste and preferences of his potential audience. Mozart was not able to survive as an independent professional under these conditions. A few decades later, when the ruling figurations had begun to change, Beethoven could make his own way in the world. However, to paraphrase Elias, Mozart had the misfortune to be a genius before the age of geniuses had truly arrived. When he died he thought he was a failure.43

Finally, and inevitably, we come to The Germans (1996). It is a great and subtle book with many complex insights but only the central argument can be extracted here.44 In this case the tragic failure is not an individual. It is a class: the German bourgeoisie, completely excluded from court society in the early nineteenth century but dreaming of a noble future within a united nation. Ironically, this bourgeois dream of national unity was brought about at the bloody hands of the very aristocracy that despised them. When this happened, the bourgeoisie split. The liberal minority retained their loyalty to Kant and Goethe. The majority aped the aristocracy, from whose social circles they were largely excluded. Student dueling societies cultivated a social code that stressed toughness, discipline and cruelty. Everyone looked upwards for guidance, ultimately to the Kaiser and the aristocratic establishment. Elias concluded that the German personality structure required direction from an external authority. As he saw it, when the German empire was defeated and the Kaiser abdicated, life became meaningless for that part of the bourgeoisie whose life had been defined by the values of their dueling societies. Some took refuge in street violence, which became endemic. More generally, the German people felt humiliated and dwelt in sorrow. Hitler arrived on the scene in the guise of a saviour. He was able to manipulate the national habitus, its need for leadership and domination, its desire for restoration to greatness, and its wish to be relieved from the sorrow brought by national decline and defeat.

To conclude, the figure of Hitler is, arguably, the direct link between the two books, The Court Society and The Germans. Who else was Elias thinking of in 1933 when in his chapter on ‘The bonding of kings through etiquette and status chances’ he spent six pages contrasting the dull steadiness of a Louis XIV with the daring deeds of the charismatic leader?45 During his rise to power the charismatic leader’s task was that of ‘holding together a limited number of people within a generally disintegrating and unbalanced society in such a way that their combined pressure acts outwards on the wider dominion’ (Elias 1983, 122). Having achieved power he does not become a master of ceremonies locked into the daily grind of court etiquette. The charismatic ruler has to ‘leap in the dark’, ride ‘on thin ice,’ and operate without the security of ‘stabilized groups that can hold each other in equilibrium over long

                                 

 

                 

                                                                   43  Elias  1993.    44  For a longer discussion comparing Elias’s analysis in The Germans with Arendt’s approach in The Origins of Totalitarianism, see Smith 2001, 43-70. Talking to Helmut Kuzmics, I became more aware than before that Elias does not explore in detail differences between the various cultural regions of Germany, eg Prussia, Bavaria and so on.

                                                                     45 Elias 1983, 121-6

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periods’ (Elias 1983, 125). It was those leaps in the dark and those perilous rides across thin ice that ruined the careers and lives of many people in a similar position to Norbert Elias. Hitler had been an anonymous figure in Elias’s text of 1933. Six decades later he emerges from the shadows of Elias’s consciousness into full light. It would be far too easy just to say that Maigret finally got his man. More accurate to say that, like a sociological Maigret, Elias wanted to know why and how the crime became possible, and that meant understanding the dynamics of the figuration that produced the criminal and his accomplices. It is a tribute to the grandeur of Elias’s sociological imagination that he able to conclude that the victims of the crime included not just himself, but German society.46

_________________________ 46 Further reflections on many aspects of this paper’s argument may be found in my book entitled Norbert Elias and Modern Social Theory (Smith 2001) which includes comparisons between Norbert Elias and, respectively, Michel Foucault, Talcott Parsons, Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, as well as a discussion of the applicability of the model of ‘the court society’ to the early development of the European Union.

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