Den bestandige maskerade - Historisk Tidsskrift

344 Peter Henningsen
system thus became a battering ram in the transition to modern society, where
success reputedly depends on the individual’s talent and industry, and where
birth plays only a minor role – something virtually inconceivable in the preabsolutist
period of estate society.
The culture of rank and social rivalry generated, however, such a powerful
degree of social control and so many norms for what “one” does and what “one”
does not that social intercourse came to resemble a carefully choreographed
stage play, where certain things were to be done in a certain way, if one wished
to be taken into account. It was also a society, where a downfall from social grace
struck those who failed to master the aristocratic code of honour and aristocratic
norms of elegant conduct. It could be called a kind of theatre culture, where
social roles were precisely defined, and where all the actors were expected to act
out their parts in a previously prescribed manner. This was the rigid Rococo play
that was ousted in the 1780s and 1790s in a movement that found its strongest
expression in the French Revolution and the bourgeois currents of fashion that
later eliminated aristocratic culture from the social map.
Translated by Michael Wolfe