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Abstract The great aristocracy has traditionally been accorded a secondary, and essentially negative, role in studies of Richelieu’s ministry. As one historian pointed out in a recent article, the nobles in seventeenth-century France have been the victims of a crude historicism which sees the rise of royal absolutism as inevitable, and even praiseworthy, so that resistance by the nobility appears as mere short-sighted and futile obstructionism. The great aristocratic families have largely been depicted as a group acted upon by ‘new’ historical forces, rather than political actors in their own right. Allocated an over-simplified social structure and an apparently shared and undisputed set of political objectives, the grands can be wrapped up in convenient assumptions about feudal anachronism and group selfishness. Thus packaged, they are pushed to one side of the historical stage, in good time to be unveiled a few decades later, safely locked up in the ‘gilded prison’ of Versailles.
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