In places like France, Germany, and Austria, which now do not recognize any rights of nobility, but but whose populations still contain small percentages of people who are descended from nobility, and in many cases incorporate their family titles into their last names, e.g. Louis Prince de Broglie or Otto Graf Lammsdorf.
My question now is, does this class of people still tend to have above average resouces? If you go to the most desirable districts of Paris or Vienna, do you find a higher concentration of these people than elsewhere, just as you find a higher concentration of rich celebrities in areas like Beverly Hills, Brentwood, or Malibu?
I don’t have an answer for you but my MIL is from England and gets these English glamour and wealth magazines. They often feature these estates in England with their owner. It will say something like “Lady Irrelevant” maintains her ancestral home and extensive gardens. Now, these “ancestral homes” are often basically castles that are hundreds of years old with gigantic estates and gardens. No normal person, even the U.S. equivalent of a multi-millionaire could afford to keep those things up so I don’t know how it works.
My in-laws once visited such a family in England with their gigantic ancestral home that again, is basically a castle. They said that the family basically closed the vast majority of it down and lived in a house sized portion with the standard of living of a lower middle class family in the U.S. They were even pretty trashy. Their kitchen had a row of appliances like stoves from oldest (very old) to the current functional ones.
I would love to hear from our European dopers about how people keep gigantic ancestral homes in the family for hundreds of years when the maintenance must be outrageous by any standard.
I am American, and the only nobility I’m personally acquainted with is the dispossesed Russian kind that is a dime a dozen, however my understanding of English nobility is–
Most of them lost much of their wealth in the two world wars. Assets (such as estates) were seized for national use, and returned not at all or severely damaged.
It was, and probably still is, considered very genteel to hang on to the family estates. Most of a family’s income may go towards maintaining the estates. “Maintaining” doesn’t always mean keeping up the gardens and having guests; often it’s just keeping the pipes from freezing in the winter, and replacing the roof when necessary. The phrase “impoverished aristocracy” refers to these people.
A few, either clever or lucky, managed to hold on to the money and to invest it wisely enough that it kept up with inflation… or sold peripheral estates in order to better maintain one house.
The Sunday Times Rich List paints a rather more egalitarian picture of Britain. There are a few Lords on the list, but most of them seem to be “life peers” (relatively ordinary Joes rewarded for funding political parties their contribution to society) or descendents of relatively recent hereditary peers, rather than true “old money”.
When you look at those persons who are at least somewhat comparable to British peers their wealth is definitely above average. However the appearance can be misleading. At lot of their wealth is bound in ways that make little economic sense. For example castles are a huge financial liability. Collections of art or books etc. can’t be sold without huge outcry. Owning forests and farm land gives you a certain status in rural areas but it’s hardly the most profitable sector. In additions to that some families continue to support traditional charities.
So, compared to the average citizen many are certainly very wealthy but being “practicing” nobility is also a very expensive thing and not all of them make enough money to afford it.
My impression from reading the business and political pages is that the German nobility may be slightly overrepresented (but still a small minority) in upper management and senior civil service posts - probably because of the networking value of their family connections.
Many of them also gave their estates to organisations such as the National Trust or English Heritage, who allow the owner to carry on living in (part of) the property in return for opening it the the general public.
The ‘landed gentry’, as the name suggests, generally traditionally maintained their wealth by owning vast estates of farmed land. As parts of these estates have slowly been sold off over the years, so the income has dwindled dramatically. A few old aristos still maintain vast wealth through land ownership - a prime example being The Duke of Westminter who by a huge lump of luck owns most of the land that the wealthiest bit of central London is built on - but these sort are a dieing bread.
Life Peers are almost always celebrities after a fashion, either actually world famous artists, or very highly placed businesspeople, and as such are almost always rich as well. Arguably one would expect to find more Life Peers in the Rich List than hereditary ones.
My question was more along this line: if the average Munchner or Frankfurter, let’s say, happens to learn that a “Firstname von Lastname” lives in the very best part of the city, does s/he tend to think, “yeah, right…“von”…it figures.”?