The high nobility's ambiguous relationship with money

After the First World War, many aristocratic houses were forced to join forces with members of the upper middle classes in order to survive. Their relationship to money underwent a profound change. Many of them are now successful businessmen.

In his Mémoires d'outre-tombe, François-René de Chateaubriand notes that «the aristocracy has three successive ages: the age of superiorities, the age of privileges and the age of vanities». By the end of the Great War, Europe's high nobility had entered the age of vanities. Indeed, it had lost the ascendancy it had long enjoyed thanks to its financial power. Only the perpetuation of its narrow, exclusive codes could fascinate and attract members of the new bourgeois ruling class. Numerous aristocratic families thus ensured