French kings sold noble rank while officially insisting nobility could never be bought
Nobility in old France could not legally be purchased, yet commoners routinely bought offices and landed estates that carried it. Scornful aristocrats nicknamed one purchased route soap for serfs, and Louis XIV, short of money for his wars, even had blank letters of ennoblement sold to provincial squires.
Families fell into two broad kinds. The immemorial nobility had always lived nobly and could show no act of ennoblement, while everyone else had been raised by a royal letter or by holding an office. Genealogists graded the old lines by how far back proof ran: feudal from the 11th century, knightly from the 14th, old extraction from the 15th and plain extraction from the 16th.
Offices were the busiest ladder. Seats in regional parlements and tax boards, usually bought at steep prices, turned a family noble over two generations, or in one for the Parlement of Paris and a few others. Chancery posts, which appeared under Charles VIII at the end of the 15th century, typically ennobled after 20 years of service. Mayors and aldermen of certain towns gained rank too, starting with Poitiers in 1372, though only 14 such communities remained by the Revolution. From the reign of Francis I, letters patent became a revenue tool: owners of noble fiefs paid a year of their income to be elevated.
The crown also policed fakes. In 1666 to 1674 Louis XIV ordered a sweeping verification demanding written proof, such as marriage contracts, of noble rank since 1560; oral family testimony no longer counted, and forged or altered deeds brought fines. Meanwhile the comte de Boulainvilliers spun an unproven 18th-century theory that nobles descended from conquering Franks, a flattering myth for a class growing poorer.
Numbers were small. François Bluche counted 140,000 nobles in 9,000 families in 1789, about 0.5 per cent of 28 million people, although Gordon Wright put the figure at 300,000. Napoléon created fresh titles from 1808, and titles were granted again under later monarchies, but since 4 September 1870 nobility has had no legal status. In 2016 roughly 4,000 families still claimed it.
Source: French nobility
