Though the stories of impoverished British aristos marrying American heiresses are more famous, the French stories are probably more interesting. Except maybe the one about Jennie Jerome. The Lady got around. And she had a couple kids.
The author of this article, Caroline Weber, is a white woman living in the U.S.A. in the 3rd decade of the 21st century, a Professor at Barnard College (Columbia University partner institution and what Grandmother used to call one of the Seven Sisters) and holds outside Fellowships (including a Guggenheim) and appointments. She received her B.A. (literature) from Harvard, and her PhD from Yale. She is married to NYU Professor Paul Romer who, despite his Nobel Prize, is possibly the lesser light of the duo.
Ms Weber understands privilege and because of all of the above is herself one of the 1/10th of 1% most privileged human beings who have ever lived. Because she is brilliant she is granted great leeway in her choices of academic pursuits and interests.
From Literary Hub:
To talk about privilege is to make assumptions, stated or otherwise, about what advantages that word denotes. In contemporary discussions, its meanings are many and ever expanding. Whiteness. Maleness. Equality under the law. Freedom from harassment. A vote that counts. A life that matters.
I have spent much of my career writing about “privileged” people in French history, from statesmen to socialites and famous authors to infamous queens; and I have been struck by both the complexity and the mutability that term has evinced over time. Currently I am working on a social history of the Parisian nobility during the Belle Époque (1889-1914).
This period saw intense social change in France and America alike, as old elites who derived their authority from hidebound notions of pedigree and decorum came under siege by an emergent group lacking those benefits but armed with a potent alternative: unprecedented wealth.
In the first part of this essay, I would like to look at these rival contingents and at the curious social phenomenon—that of the transatlantic “dollar princess” marriage—to which the tensions between them gave rise. In the second part, I will tell the story of an American heiress and a French prince who defied social convention to assert still another form of privilege, one arguably more compelling than either title or treasure alone: fulfillment.
On February 12th, 1892, the New York Times gave a new name to an old social stratum: “Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred.” This designation referred to the ladies and gentlemen whom New York’s reigning grande dame, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, had deemed worthy to dance in her ballroom. A follow-up piece on February 16th listed the elect by name, scions for the most part of the city’s old-line Knickerbocker families or similarly blue-blooded clans in Newport, Boston, and Virginia.
Conspicuously absent from the list were the so-called robber barons, typically natives of hardscrabble regions far from the genteel East Coast who since the end of the Civil War had reaped millions from ventures thought too grubby for gentlemen: railroads, manufacturing, lumber, oil. To Mrs. Astor, these upstarts lacked the polished manners and ingrained respect for tradition that only generations of superior breeding could produce.
As for the upstarts, the Times reports merely confirmed something many of them had already discovered on their own: the American social establishment did not welcome their nouveau fortunes and families.
Surely not all the tycoons barred from Mrs. Astor’s ballroom subscribed to her belief in the supremacy of Mayflower over Midwestern bloodlines, or of old money over new. Yet a number of them actually did. Toward their anointed betters, these men and their families bore much the same blend of reluctant admiration, simmering status envy, and desperate yearning to belong that the fictional Jay Gatsby (né Jimmy Gatz of North Dakota) would come to typify a few decades later.
In this sense, they unknowingly replicated a dynamic from the old court aristocracies of Europe. When a sovereign “elevated” a nobleman or woman to a given place in the royal retinue, his or her standing at court rose appreciably. The work such appointments entailed was ceremonial and often menial. Nonetheless, the nobility prized them because the monarch who defined the social hierarchy had cast them as signal honors. (At Louis XIV’s Versailles, noblemen vied bitterly for the right to take off the king’s riding boots each day, even though his hygiene regimen involved only one bath a year.)
The admiration, envy, and longing a plum assignment generated among courtiers less favored imbued it with a palpable social reality, obscuring the flimsy reasoning at its root: the post was desirable because His or Her Majesty said so. The prestige of Mrs. Astor’s invitations was founded on the same spurious logic....
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