Friendship and Clientage in Early Modern France

Complex webs of personal relationships surrounded early modern French nobles. Norbert Elias has noted that webs of personal interdependence, which he calls figurations, need historical study, and that there is a lack of models for such study. A figuration, in Roger Chartier's understanding of Elias, is a social form of variable extent in which the individuals involved are linked by reciprocal dependence. Networks of reciprocal dependence were of central importance in early modern society.' This article looks at the rights and obligations of friendship and clientage as mutual assistance relationships creating interdependent chains of nobles, and proposes a model of their characteristics. Case studies of relationships involving both women and men have been used as evidence.