See also Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, Châteaux et châtelains: les siècles passent, le symbole demeure (Paris: Anne Carrière, 2005).56 56. Vincent Eblé, Rapport d’information sur les dépenses fiscales relatives à la préservation du patrimoine historique bâti, French Senate, recorded October 7, 2015; see www.senat.fr/rap/r15-018/r15-018_mono.html.
57 57. Ibid., p. 36.
58 58. As attested by the case of Alain du Plessis de Pouzilhac, cited in Saint Martin, L’espace de la noblesse, p. 97.
59 59. Ibid., p. 99.
60 60. Ibid., p. 100. In Dominique Schnapper’s first book, devoted to the lifestyle of the elites of Bologna, the author makes similar remarks: “In the salons of the old aristocracy, the paintings remain hung in several rows, in the old style, rather than highlighted for display, because their presence is not due to the personal taste of a collector or of an amateur wanting to show off his wealth. The poor state of preservation of works that have been passed down through inheritance over many generations and their awkward presentation signifies the hereditary character of the objects owned”; see Dominique Schnapper, L’Italie rouge et noire: les modèles de la vie quotidienne à Bologne (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 103–4.
61 61. Saint Martin, L’espace de la noblesse, pp. 105–7.
62 62. Ibid., p. 111.
63 63. See the site of the French Ministry of Culture, under the heading “European Heritage Days”: http://traduction.culture.gouv.fr/url/Result.aspx?to=en&url=https%3A%2F%2Fjourneesdupatrimoine.culture.gouv.fr%2F.
64 64. Saint Martin, L’espace de la noblesse, p. 110.
65 65. See Marie-Odile Mergnac, La généalogie: une passion française (Paris: Autrement, 2003), and Jean-Louis Beaucarnot, La généalogie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).
66 66. See Robert Brenner, The Economic Capital of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn (London: Verso, 2006).
67 67. Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 105–12.
68 68. We are borrowing the notion of “central capitalism” from Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, who have developed an analysis of the dynamic of capitalism in terms of competition for differential accumulation – that is, in terms of relative power. In this logic, the dynamic of capitalism is linked to shifts that, on the one hand, extend commodification and, on the other, come back to “sabotage” the industrial capacities of the competitors; see Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (New York: Routledge, 2009). Nitzan and Bichler (pp. 219–27) align themselves with the analyses of Thorstein Veblen, who was the first to develop the notion of industrial “sabotage.” He stressed the tension between industrial interests, governed by the requirement to produce things, and those of “business,” governed by the prices of things: “In the business world the price of things is a more substantial fact than the things themselves” (Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprises in Recent Times: The Case of America (Boston: Beacon Press, [1923] 1967), p. 89; cited in Nitzan and Bichler, p. 221). For Veblen, prices are a matter of property and power, and they play a central role in the dynamics of capitalism (Nitzan and Bichler, pp. 217–27).
69 69. For a precise and perceptive analysis of these processes, see Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, [2013] 2014), esp. chapter 1, “From Legitimation Crisis to Fiscal Crisis,” pp. 1–46.
70 70. Giovanni Arrighi, whose approach is inspired by the work of Fernand Braudel, decomposes the evolution of capitalism into a series of cycles of accumulation, each of which occupies a specific period (roughly a century) and is centered around a geographic profit center (Genoa, the Netherlands, England, the United States). One of his arguments is that, in each of these cycles, a financial phase follows a manufacturing and commercial phase and that the financial phase precedes and announces the decline of this cycle to the benefit of a new cycle centered on a different geographic pole; see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (new edn, London: Verso, 2010). This is why, if Arrighi agrees with David Harvey (The New Imperialism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003]) in recognizing the importance of the financial turn operated by capitalism since the 1980s, he takes a different path by interpreting this turn as a sign of crisis and decline. One of his arguments consists in comparing the phase of financialization and optimism of the Reagan–Thatcher period and the financialization that followed the depression of 1873–96, followed by a phase of improvement (what he calls the Edwardian “belle époque”) foreshadowing, as he sees it, the crisis of 1929, which marked the end of the cycle of accumulation centered on England, to the benefit of the United States.
71 71. For a synthesis, see Thomas W. Volscho and Nathan J. Kelly, “The Rise of the Super-Rich: Power Resources, Taxes, Financial Markets, and the Dynamics of the Top 1 Percent, 1949 to 2008,” American Sociological Review, 77/5 (2012): 679–99.
72 72. It is hard to find precise information on the way the wealthy use and preserve their money, and on the share of their fortunes that is stored in objects of value rather than in stocks or bonds, as these types of goods are generally conflated under the heading of “household patrimony.” In addition, the real price negotiated for exceptional goods is often highly undervalued for tax purposes.
73 73. The French title of this section is borrowed from a celebrated book by the poet Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses (1942). The English translation is adapted from a recent English-language version of Ponge’s book Partisan of Things, translated by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau (Chicago: Kenning, 2016).
74 74. Bruno Cousin and Sébastien Chauvin, “L’entre-soi élitaire à Saint-Barthélémy,” Ethnologie française, 42/2 (2012): 335–45.
75 75. We are thinking here of Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot’s very informative work, especially Les ghettos du gotha: au coeur de la grande bourgeoisie (Paris: Seuil, 2010) and Sociologie de la bourgeoisie (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).
76 76. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1979] 1986).
77 77. See Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso, 2013).
78 78. The distinction between patrimony and capital is supported in the analyses of Joseph Schumpeter, even though that theorist envisaged it mainly with respect to industrial production. For Schumpeter, the goods one owns, including monetary goods, constitute capital properly speaking only on condition that they are put to work – that is, put into circulation. “Capital is nothing but the lever by which the entrepreneur subjects to his control the concrete goods which he needs, nothing but a means of diverting the factors of production to new uses, of dictating a new direction to production”; Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle, trans. Redvers Opie (New York: Oxford University Press, [1911, 1926] 1961), p. 116.
79 79. The number of business schools in France grew from 76 in 1980 to around 250 in 2017.
80 80. On the notion of hipster, see Mark Greif, “What Was the Hipster?,” in Against Everything (New York: Pantheon Books,
