When France and the US reinvented themselves at the end of the 18th century, they shared a deep hostility to aristocratic power. But France never quite got rid of its old order. The US president lives in a white house; his French counterpart lives in a palace.
The supreme manifestation of the French elite, the Bottin Mondain, is celebrating its centenary this year. Not as exclusive as Debrett's Peerage, nor as vulgar as Who's Who, this is the catalogue of the gratin, France's aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie: 43,000 entries this year, half of them from noble families.
Being in the Bottin Mondain has nothing to do with money or merit-some of the richest (Messier, Lagard?e) are not in it, nor are the likes of Depardieu, Deneuve or Zidane. Nor, for that matter, is the present prime minister or his two predecessors. It is for the great families. Biographical exploits are not given, merely addresses, decorations and children. New candidates are scrutinised by committee; few, unless their family is already there, are admitted.
In Britain, you are ennobled when given a title; in France, nobility is not something you acquire so easily. There are 3,500 truly noble families; 2,678 pre-date the revolution and many of them don't have titles. Noble prerequisites include a certain bearing, innate good taste, even in poverty, a respect for religion and adherence to the culte des anc?res. The latter is especially important because to be considered noble you have to be able to prove a direct link back to an ancestor who did something noble. Going on a crusade is rated highly, not coming back rated even higher. A title has nothing to do with it: many of those using titles are considered parvenus by the true nobility, since for 90 years after the revolution the king or emperor continued to grant titles to thousands of Frenchmen without necessarily conferring nobility. There are 800 families clinging to false titles, some for six generations. The editor of the Bottin Mondain tries to weed them out.
Before the revolution, there were two categories of nobility: those of the sword-descended from the warlords who invaded France between the fifth and tenth centuries-and those of the robe, ennobled by the king much later. Perched above a house I lived in when I first moved to France are the ruins of the stronghold of one of the former, a warrior dynasty called the Roquefeuils. Some of them fled to America after 1789, where people gave up trying to get their tongues round "Roquefeuil," and called them "those Rockerfellers..."
By the revolution, only a third of the nobility was "of the sword" and many lived in poverty. Such a family were the Du Sert: Percy of that name was ennobled under the walls of Antioch, and his descendent Pierre is a neighbour and friend of mine. He and his family have a talent for looking elegant in whatever clothes come to hand (I have rarely seen anyone as eye-provokingly beautiful as Pierre's wife Sophie emerging for a soir?. Unfailingly polite, Pierre will not shake the hand of a woman, but raises it gracefully to his lips, a custom his son Fran?s acquired from the age of two. Deeply religious (a Blue Penitent who processes through southern cities), imbued with a deep sense of history, he assures me "the French nobility is not as frivolous, nor as eccentric, as yours."
Once, after a charity concert given in his courtyard, Pierre suggested dinner for those who wished to stay. At midnight, as about 75 of us sat down in the 17th-century dining room to eat a four-course meal improvised by Sophie, Pierre begged us to forgive him for providing only forks and spoons to eat with: "knives are the very devil to wash up."
There may be 43,000 entries in this year's Bottin, but there are nothing like that many families, since each adult in a family can have an individual entry. The La Rochefoucauld family has 49 separate entries, representing 200 individuals in 73 addresses (including 11 ch?eaux): London, Paris, Geneva, New York, Chamonix, Madagascar. It is this close network, interconnected through marriage and business, which makes the French gratin, at the other end of the scale from Pierre, still powerful. Power, they realised, is found in cities. Nobility needs to dominate, and you don't dominate convincingly in green wellies.
After a good marriage, education is the priority and, as a class, both the nobility and the haute bourgeoisie are well represented in the select graduate schools. From there, the new generation can slip discreetly into private companies, banks, the diplomatic corps, the army and government. Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin is a career diplomat (two postings to Washington) who was given the foreign affairs ministry without going near the Assembl?Nationale. He is also a self-published poet (poetry and diplomacy, he says, both rely on the "alchemy of paradox") and author of a bestselling, 600-page study of Napoleon's brief return to power between escaping from Elba and the battle of Waterloo. In a lyrical essay published last year, de Villepin set out his Gaullist (and Napoleonic) vision of a world with France at its centre. Another minister with no experience of parliament is the philosopher Luc Ferry, who went straight from academia to the ministry of education. Being married to Marie-Caroline Becq de Fouqui?es perhaps gave him an edge. Chirac himself got a leg-up by marrying into the ancient Chodron de Courcel family (two barons, 21 entries in the BM).
