Richelieu, in his will, had recommended that the court should be closed to all those who "have not the fortune of a noble origin." Louis XIV then restricted access to court offices by [the] bourgeois. ... Thus, after many preparatory movements in which the social interests of the nobility and the monarchy were ... feeling each other out, the court is given its clear role as an asylum for the nobility on the one hand, and a means of controlling and taming the old warrior class on the other. The untrammelled knightly life is gone forever.

For the majority of the nobility, not only are their economic circumstances from now on straightened, but their horizons and scope for action are narrowed. ... Even in war they no longer fight for themselves as free knights, but as officers in a strict organization. ...

The construction of Versailles corresponds perfectly to both the intertwined tendencies of the monarchy: to provide for and visibly elevate parts of the nobility while controlling and taming them. The king gives liberally, particularly to his favorites. But he demands obedience; he keeps the nobles constantly aware of their dependence on the money and ... opportunities he [alone] has to distribute.

[The] peculiarity of man discovered by Freud in men of our own time and conceptualized by him as a strict division between unconscious and conscious mental functions, far from being part of man's unchanged nature is a result of a long civilizing process in the course of which the wall of forgetfulness separating libidinal drives and "consciousness" or "reflection" has become harder and more impermeable....

[In] order to understand and explain civilizing processes one needs to investigate ... the transformation of both the personality structure and the entire social structure. ...

To be really understood, these structures and processes demand a study of the relationships between the different functional strata which are found together within a social field, and which, with the slower or more rapid shift of power-relationships arising from the specific structure of this field, are for a time reproduced over and over again. ... It means asking oneself in what way the axes of tension, the chains of functions and the institutions of a society in the fifteenth century differ from those in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and why the former change in the direction of the latter. To answer these [kinds of] questions knowledge of a wealth of particular facts is of course necessary. But beyond a certain point in the accumulation of material facts, historiography enters the phase when it ought no longer to be satisfied with the collection of further particulars and with the description of those already assembled, but should be concerned with those problems which facilitate penetration of the underlying regularities by which people in a certain society are bound over and over again to particular patterns of conduct and to very specific functional chains, for example as knights and bondsmen, kings and state officials, bourgeois and nobles, and by which these relationships and institutions change in a very specific direction. Beyond a certain point of factual knowledge, in a word, a more solid framework, a structural nexus can be perceived in the multitude of particular historical facts.

If the phases of these [civilizing] processes is followed over centuries, we see a clear tendency for standards of ... conduct to be equalized and contrasts [between classes to be] levelled out. In each of the waves of expansion which occur when the mode of conduct of a small circle spreads to larger rising classes, two phases can be clearly distinguished: a phase of colonization or assimilation in which the lower and larger outside class is still clearly inferior and governed by the example of the established upper group which, intentionally or unintentionally, permeates it with its own pattern of conduct, and a second phase of repulsion, differentiation or emancipation, in which the rising group gains perceptibly in social power and self-confidence, and in which the upper group is forced into increased restrain and isolation, and the contrasts and tensions in society are increased. ...

[The] feelings and gestures of inferiority in people rising socially as individuals take on the particular coloration from the fact that these people identify to a certain extent with the upper class. ... [People] in this situation acknowledge in one part of themselves the upper-class norms and manners as binding on themselves, without being able to adopt them with the same ease and matter-of-factness. It is this peculiar contradiction between the upper class within themselves, represented by their own super-ego, and their incapability of fulfilling its demands, it is this constant inner tension that gives their affective life and their conduct its particular character.

At the same time their predicament shows ... the importance which a strict code of manners has ... It is a prestige instrument, but it is also ... an instrument of power. It is not a little characteristic of the structure of Western society that the watchword of its colonizing movement is "civilization."

The main line of this movement of civilization, the successive rises of larger and larger groups, is the same in all Western countries. ... And similar, too, is the structural regularity underlying it, the increasing division of functions under the pressure of competition, the tendency to more equal dependence of all on all, which in the long run allows no group greater social power than others and nullifies hereditary privileges. Processes of free competition also follow a similar course. ...

It is only when we penetrate these connections that we gain access to the problem of conduct and its control by the social code at a particular time. ... We ... gain a better understanding of the changes of conduct and sentiment in a civilizing direction if we are aware of the changes in the structure of inbuilt fears to which they are connected. ... [The] structure of fears and anxieties is nothing other than the psychological counterpart of the constraints which people exert on one another through the intertwining of their activities. Fears form [one of the most important] ... channels ... through which the structure of society is transmitted to individual psychological functions. ...

The more deeply we immerse ourselves in the historical processes in the course of which prohibitions, like fears and anxieties, are formed and transformed, the stronger grows an insight which is not without importance for our actions as well as for our understanding of ourselves: we realize to what degree the fears and anxieties that move people are man-made. To be sure, the possibility of feeling fear, just like that of feeling joy, is an unalterable part of human nature. ... [But such feelings] are always determined, finally, by the structure of society; and they change with it.