The noble context of the term race: a social history (France, 16th century)

This article tests the relevance of a radical historicization of the term race based on a social history of its uses applied to the French nobility of the sixteenth century. The link between race and nobility, which was practically absent at the beginning of the 16th century, was above all a means of emphasizing a patrilineal conception of noble family groups. This was increasingly true as the use of the term spread from the 1560s. This patrilineal connotation was essentializing and emphasized descent rather than the material foundations (such as the possession of a seigneury) of belonging to the nobility. Moreover, the term “race” was later linked to the term “house” which had a strong hierarchical connotation. The whole concept of nobility was oriented towards thinking in terms of a category to which people belonged, and not in terms of qualities attributed to people. In a context where some nobles were claiming the closure of the second order, where royal politics was taking up and developing the denunciation of usurpations, where more and more importance was attributed to seniority as a criterion of nobility distinction, the notion of race became part of a vocabulary that structured the debates around the idea of “true nobility”, in opposition to types of ennoblements, especially taisibles, that were henceforth described as usurpations.