In this beautifully written and provocative study, William Doyle explores the range of meanings of aristocracy in the Atlantic World – both for those who defended it and sought to assert its claims to power and pre-eminence and for those who hated it and sought to bring it down. Doyle argues that, in the Age of Revolution, aristocracy as a social and political force was more aggressive than ever before and that this aggressiveness provoked a counterblast, first in literature and political argument and then in political action, that nearly destroyed aristocracy in the Old and New Worlds alike.

Best known as a historian of Old Regime France and the French Revolution, Doyle is superbly qualified to undertake this project. The historical problems posed by aristocracy and its consequences for society, politics, and government are focal points of some of his most influential and well-received books, such as The Oxford history of the French Revolution (2nd edition; Oxford, 2002) and his monograph Venality: the sale of offices in eighteenth-century France (Oxford, 1996). Venality investigated one way that ambitious Frenchmen could buy entry into the ranks of the aristocracy, though without establishing their claims to nobility. Here, Doyle extends his previous work, providing an enlightening, sometimes amusing, and sometimes infuriating account of the full spectrum of ways that aristocracy and those who would be aristocrats exerted their influence and power. Doyle offers clear dissections of the defining aspects of aristocracy and of the related but distinct concept of nobility. In particular, his anatomization of the laws and administrative regulations governing the classification of individuals or families as noble substantiates his point that, whereas one might become an aristocrat by royal preferment or even by purchase, true nobility in the eyes of the monarchy and the old aristocrats was a quality that never could be acquired.

Doyle juxtaposes with the French experience the history of a relatively new society and political order – the revolutionary United States. The pivotal American episode was the creation in 1783 of the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization for those who had served as officers in the Continental Army and for their descendants (first-born sons). This provision in the Society's membership rules sparked vigorous, bitter criticism at home and across the Atlantic; critics charged that the Cincinnati were bent on founding an American aristocracy and taking control of American politics. In America, the campaign against aristocracy succeeded with no shedding of blood, in great measure because the Society's first President-General, George Washington, took a public stand against such aristocratic aspirations. Thus, the Society of the Cincinnati never acquired the influence on American public life that some of its organizers may have hoped to win. The reverberations of that controversy across the Atlantic had more sanguinary consequences than in America.

Doyle focuses on France, with the American controversy over the Cincinnati as counterpoint. He is particularly good at tracing the ways that aristocracy and its values permeated France's Old Regime, and the sudden, abrupt emergence of the anti-aristocratic measures of the National Assembly in 1789, culminating in the abolition of hereditary aristocracy itself. He moves smoothly between the history of ideas and political history, elucidating the difficult and murky relationship between the writings against aristocracy by Rousseau, the Abbé Mably, and the Comte de Mirabeau and their contemporaries and the sweeping campaign against aristocracy and its trappings in the Revolution's opening months. Doyle concludes that, although the many writings and publications against aristocracy may have prepared the ground for major change, it was the combination of France's political instability and the turbulent forces let loose by that instability that brought doom for hereditary aristocracy. Though Napoleon and the restored monarchy may have revived aristocratic ranks and institutions, they never again wielded the power and influence that were theirs before 1789.

Throughout this fine book, Doyle keeps in view the problem of aristocracy, which John Adams traced to the thirst for distinction that, he believed, animated all human beings. That passion would give rise to aristocracy, with its attendant dangers, in every human society, no matter how constituted and governed. The inescapable presence of aristocracy, Doyle shows, was no less frustrating to Adams's contemporaries. Doyle's book is worth careful study for any historian of Europe and America in the Age of Revolution; it belongs on that select shelf of books worthy to stand with the late R. R. Palmer's still-valuable The age of the democratic revolution (2 vols.; Princeton, 1959 and 1964).