Noble-Bourgeois Elites in an Age of Revolutions, c. 1790–1850

Abstract

This article focuses on the shift toward post-revolutionary politics supported by reform-minded aristocratic clans and their bourgeois allies. Using the example of the Balbo family – one of the leading aristocratic families in Sardinia-Piedmont – I will argue that the quest for stability and pragmatism is crucial to understanding the political, cultural, and ideological reorientations within the noble-bourgeois elites in the first age of global revolutions. Family history is a lens through which it is possible to look afresh at this vital period of social transformations, state expansion, and political modernization. The article explores the Balbos’ family history across generations and genders, not only in the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, but also in the decades after the Congress of Vienna. In doing so, it sheds new light on the course of state-building processes, constitutional reforms, and the formation of a new, composite elite, which would largely dominate European politics until the end of the nineteenth century.