The court of the Ancien Régime presents sociologists with just as many problems as any of the many other social formations created by humans, which have been the subject of more in-depth sociological investigation, such as feudal society or the metropolis. As a central formation of that developmental stage, which was abruptly or gradually replaced by the bourgeois-civic-industrial society through a long struggle, this courtly-aristocratic society developed a civilizational and cultural character that was incorporated into the bourgeois society both as a legacy and as a counter-image, and was further developed in this way. Thus, the effort to understand the structure of the courtly society opens up an understanding of one of the last great non-bourgeois formations of the West.