A re-examination of social mobility during the First Empire

This study takes up the age-old question of social mobility during the Empire, since new empirical evidence has shed fresh light on it. As a result of the radical new work of Jacques Dupâquier together with Jerome Bourdieu, Lionel Kesztenbaum, Gilles Postel-Vinay (commentators on Dupâquier’s work), we can now characterise, for imperial society as a whole, the transmission of social status from one generation to the next: a strong minority of young people (30 % or 33 % depending on the nomenclature) occupy, at the time of their marriage, a different position from that of their father. Mobility was therefore substantial, even though there was a great deal of self-recruitment amongst the country poor, and within the bourgeoisie. That being said, more than 90 % of the bourgeoisie stricto sensu comes from the bourgeoisie or the middling types.The situation is however different if one focuses the spotlight only on the elites and notables. A very clear gradation of social recruitment emerges, first among the elites, then between the elites and the notables: unlike the military elite, the civil elite come much more from the “cream” of society (the opposite of the Ancien Regime), and the nobility of Empire was the elite whose recruitment was the most open, close to that of the notables as a whole.