Aristocracy of Money, or Aristocracy of Blood?

by Revilo P. Oliver

DECADENCE SEEMS always to occur when money supplants birth and culture as the determinant of social status, a change that always occurs when a society is infiltrated by Jews. Whether the vulgarization of society would occur without them is a question that cannot be answered definitely, for want of a well-documented example of a society that became prosperous and did not attract swarms of Jews.

One could, of course, consider Roman society in the time of Catiline, when the Jews had attained great financial power in the Republic, and the decadence of the old Roman families was shown by their willingness to compromise and coexist with the Catilinarians. But the example that comes first to my mind is the decadence of the French aristocracy in the 18th century, when money became the social criterion, despite some lip-service to heredity. As our children are not told in the boob-hatcheries, the “aristocracy” that is customarily blamed for the bloody orgy called the Revolution was not an hereditary aristocracy. The greater part of it was composed of parvenus who had bought their titles or inherited them from fathers who had bought nobility. As every reader of the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon well knows, it was Louis XIV who began the process of deliberately subordinating the old families to upstart bureaucrats and others, to whom he sold titles.

The Marquis de Bouille estimated that in 1789 there were eighty thousand noble families in France, of which the vast majority had bought their titles during the preceding seventy or eighty years. Of the eighty thousand families, only one thousand were really old, and of these two-thirds had become impoverished and had disappeared from the society known to the court. No one seems to know how many of the recently manufactured nobles were Jews. Louis XIV was so grateful to a Jewish banker, Samuel Bernard, for lending him money at usurious rates that he ennobled him. Sammy’s son became the Comte de Coubert, an officer of the Queen’s household, and the perpetrator of a famous swindle. The grandson purchased the title of an old noble family and became the Marquis de Boulainvillers, whose wife was one of the leading conspirators in the famous theft of the diamond necklace.

Whether or not Louis XIV intended it, he began the demoralization of France by making money the effective social standard. One can only speculate about what would have happened if, as might have still been possible in the simpler economy of the 18th century, the real aristocracy, instead of yielding to the corruption and dwindling almost to extinction, had combined to preserve themselves and the standards of honor and courage they had inherited.

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Source: Instauration magazine, September 1979