Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy

Download or read book Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy written by Harold A. Ellis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suspicious of the French monarchy, and scornful of the new elites that served it, Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722) has been considered one of the Old Regime's paradigmatic aristocratic reactionaries, a founder of modern racist theory. Some scholars, however, have admired his "constitutionalism" and judged him a progenitor of an enlightened aristocratic liberalism now commonly held to have been a major force in shaping the ideology of the French Revolution. In a close contextual study of the writings of this enigmatic, pivotal thinker, Harold A. Ellis persuasively rethinks both images of Boulainvilliers, finding him a controversialist who interpreted French history as a self-consciously political writer seeking to address an emergent political public.