This article introduces a massive historical archive, which was never exploited, for the study of the lowering of the social position of the French nobility in the 19th century: the application for assistance preserved in the French Archives Nationales. The richness of this record largely exceeds that of the "foire aux places" (the race for public offices of aristocrats returning from emigration in 1814, at the time of the first restoration). Together with the traditional sources of social history, it is a very useful tool to set up a corpus for a longitudinal and social study of a drop in social status. Its value is also to enable the analysis of social decline, by its perceptible reality as by the imaginary aspects of post-revolutionary France