Was reading the pamphlet "What is the Third Estate?" written by Abbé Sieyès in 1789. He states "aristocrats try to repress the People...“by the right of conquest”".
Does he mean to imply French nobles considered themselves descendants of the original conquerors of France?
I couldn't find a great source discussing this question, and wanted to hear an opinion on this (or be directed to a good source).
Best I could find was the following:
Comment from a previous Ask Historians thread.
Discussion of French Nobility on Wikipedia, though there isn't much discussion of the origins of nobility which I'm most interested in.
Thanks for any answers or references!
If you want a book discussing the origins, and development of, concepts of lineage, nobility, and the habitual practice of lordship then an excellent secondary source would be David Crouch's The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900-1300 (Harlow, 2005). A further description is in the booklist. It's unfortunate that Crouch's interest tapers rapidly off in the fourteenth-century but personal idiosyncrasies are unavoidable. You could supplement this with slightly less directly focused texts, such as John Watt's The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300-1500, (Cambridge, 2009) or perhaps the corpus of Malcolm Vale, but tracing the path of development across such a distance to the French Revolution is beyond my own idiosyncratic interest in the topic.