European aristocrats visiting North America developed an affinity with the warrior elites of Indian societies.

Aristocratic Encounters relates how an aristocratic discourse on American Indians took shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Titled and educated French and German visitors to North America, with the background of the French Revolution in mind, developed a new belief in their affinity with the warrior elites of Indian societies, whom they viewed as fellow aristocrats. The book includes chapters on major figures, such as Chateaubriand and Tocqueville, and on lesser, often instructive, travelers. The book contributes to a burgeoning transatlantic, even transnational, form of historical writing, crossing national boundaries to ask how Europeans understood cultures vastly different from their own.

Introduction
Part I. From Neoclassicism to Romanticism: France and American Indians 1682-1815
1. Indians in the French Enlightenment
2. Chateaubriand and the fiction of Native Aristocrats
Part II. Ending a Tradition: The French Romantic Travelers, 1815-1848
3. Critics and nostalgics
4
Tocqueville and the sociology of native aristocrats
Part III. Founding a Tradition: The German Romantic Travelers: 5. Immigrants and educated observers
6. Maximilian and the ethnography of Native Aristocrats
Epilogue: a world of new aristocrats.