Do you ask in what this transformation consisted?

In the legal position of the nobility there had been no change.  Legally the nobility and the clergy had remained the two ruling classes, and the middle class the class universally kept down and oppressed.  But although there had legally been no change, yet actually the reversal of conditions had been all the more tremendous.

By the production and accumulation of capital and of personal property, in contrast to real estate, in the hands of the middle class, the nobility had dwindled into complete insignificance—­even into actual dependence upon the enriched middle class.  If the nobles wished to maintain their place beside the middle class, they must renounce all class traditions and begin to adopt the same methods of industrial acquisition to which the middle class owed their wealth and in consequence their de facto power.  The comedies of Moliere, who lived at the time of Louis XIV., show us, as an extremely interesting phenomenon, the nobles of the times despising the rich middle class and at the same time playing the parasite at its tables.  Louis XIV. himself, this proudest of monarchs, takes off his hat in his palace at Versailles and humbles himself before the Jew, Samuel Bernard, the Rothschild of the times, in order to influence him in favor of a loan.

When Law, the famous Scotch financier, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, formed in France his trading companies—­a stock corporation which was formed for the exploitation of the Mississippi region, the East Indies, etc., the Regent of France himself was on its directorate—­a member of a merchant company!  The Regent found himself in fact compelled in August, 1717, to issue edicts in virtue of which the nobles might, without loss of dignity, enter into the naval and military service of these trading companies!  To that point, then, the warlike and proud feudal aristocracy of France had fallen—­to be the armed employees of the industrial and commercial enterprises of the middle class, whose relations extended through all continents.

Corresponding to this radical change, there had already developed a materialism and an eager, grasping struggle for money and property which could overcome all moral ideas and (what I regret to say was generally still more significant for the privileged classes) even all privileges of rank.  Under this same Regent of France, Count Horn, one of the highest of the aristocracy and connected with the first families of France, even with the Regent himself, was broken on the wheel as a common robber and murderer; and the Duchess of Orleans, a German princess, writes in a letter of November 29, 1719, that six ladies of the highest rank waylaid in the court of a building the above-mentioned Law, who was at that time the most courted and the busiest man in France and therefore very hard to interview, in order to induce him to dispose of some of the shares founded by him, for which at that time all France was competing and which brought on the Exchange six and eight times the nominal price at which Law had issued them.