Mobility in the European Aristocracy during the Age of Enlightenment: The Example of Princess Helena Potocka
Mobility in the European Aristocracy during the Age of Enlightenment: The Example of Princess Helena Potocka

Summary/Abstract: Helena Potocka offers a wonderful case study because she was a perfect representativeof the high European aristocracy under French influence. Educated in a Parisian religious house,she had the culture of the young girls of the nobility of Versailles. Her matrimonial alliance with theson of the Prince de Ligne poses the problem of matrimonial strategies. Helena was both a free andrebellious spirit who believed in her ability to build her happiness with the side she chose. This iswhy she left Charles de Ligne; she thought she had discovered her soul mate with Vincent Potocki,but in reality, it must have been a lifelong quest. The Potocki couple are then torn between thefinancial resources of distant Ukraine, where the immense properties that finance them are located,and Parisian social life.Potocki’s very particular family situation triggered incessant mobility throughout his life, but thismobility had very varied motivations and was one of the main characteristics of the high Europeanaristocracy, which had the financial means to travel to all parts of Europe. The internationalcirculations of the aristocracy produced, within this social group, a growing cosmopolitanism: in fact,the aristocrats of the various nations of Europe rubbed shoulders and mixed more and more in thevarious spaces of sociability that were theirs. This worldly cosmopolitanism led to the progressivediffusion within this elite of common modes of consumption, behavior, and thought—in short, anaristocratic European Habitus.

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