English Translation

d Hermann Raschhofer: The Bohemian nobility B I. Since the struggle of the national rulers who are pressing for absolutism against the estates, i.e. with the beginning of the l7th century, in the most important countries of Europe, special lines of development and structures have been used. The most recent, until our day, is the outstanding political role of the nobility in England. There absolutism has only been an episode. Insularity and global political expansion distracted the political energies outside and ensured an organizational development of the internal conditions seen as a whole. Parliament is far into the 1 9th century. In the 19th century, the House of Lords still expressed the political significance of the nobility, which, of course, has largely lost its former character due to its increasing family ties with high finance, as well as through the nobilization of Jewish and other economic freemen, and is today a social foil of the plutocracy. For the Central European developments, however, not the English but first the Spanish and then the French conditions have been exemplary. The decisive process in the French nobility lies in the refraction of the fronde by Richelieu, it initiates the depoliticization of the French aristocracy. He loses - 2 -