Abstract

The article argues that before the French Revolution the word “aristocracy” did not describe a social class, but a specific political regime. From the 16th to the end of the 18th century, aristocracy stood for a polyarchic form of government in which sovereignty was possessed and exercised by limited sociopolitical elites: “a republic governed by the nobility” (Lemon, The English Etymology, 1783). Contemporary observers analyzed commonwealths without a monarchic sovereign such as Venice, Genoa, or the patrician Cantons of the Swiss Confederation through these criteria. The article takes the example of the Republic of Berne to point out some key elements of early modern aristocratic republicanism. In order to preserve the aristocratic constitution, the Sovereign Council of Berne was anxious to combine the principle of equality within the ruling class with legal and symbolic distinction from the rest of the population. In the course of the 18th century, these principles led to reforms such as the formal nobilitation of all patrician families. At the same time, however, aristocracy had already become a distinctively negative key concept in French political language. In the context of the late Ancien Régime, the term was used by the crown to delegitimize noble and parliamentarian opposition which was accused of trying to erect an aristocratic republic. In 1788 and 1789, this argument was readopted by representatives of the Third Estate to combat all “feudal” prerogatives of the privileged classes. In the course of the events, “aristocrat” became synonymous with an enemy of the revolution, and “aristocracy” could stand for the whole body of the privileged groups of the ancient regime, the nobility. The modern use of the term thus reflects these semantic changes, while, at the same time, it obscures the reference to early modern political language. The article shows that further research is needed to shed a different light on key problems of early modern republicanism and nobility by reconstructing the political discourses in and around aristocratic republics.