Ancien Regime PORTABLE

ANCIEN RÉGIME. The term ancien régime (Old Regime) came into use in the late summer of 1789 as participants in the French Revolution realized how great a rupture they had made from the recent past. "Ancien régime" therefore came into existence only after the ancien régime was finished. No one was ever very specific about when it began. Sometimes revolutionaries implied that the term referred to the entire past of France at least from medieval times onward. At other times, it meant simply the recent pre-revolutionary past.

ancien regime

The term itself evolved during the Revolution. According to the preamble to the Constitution of 1791, the Revolution had abolished hereditary and feudal nobility, venality of office, the guilds, monastic vows, and all privileges. The text says nothing about the monarchy, the abolition of the tithe, and the ending of the church's corporate existence, and it mentions seigneurialism only by allusion. Undoubtedly, the reason was that when the Constitution was promulgated, these issues were not entirely settled. When the monarchy was abolished and the Republic founded (September 1792), the term took on a much more aggressive meaning; republican politicians portrayed the ancien régime as uniformly oppressive and claimed that the Revolution had liberated the countryside from noble domination, clerical superstition, and a cruel monarchy. Early revolutionaries believed that they had reestablished liberty and equality before the law. For the Jacobins, escaping the ancien régime was a physical and spiritual emancipation.

Historians like Alexis de Tocqueville in the nineteenth century questioned this assumption that the Revolution was a violent break in national history. Instead, said Tocqueville, it witnessed the culmination of the construction of the centralized state. For modern historians, ancien régime is a convenient shorthand. It generally means the period in French history from about 1650 to 1789. It defines a France ruled by divine-right absolute monarchy, accompanied by a society based upon privileges for individuals, groups, corporations, provinces, towns, and so on; and capped by a monopoly of public worship reserved for the Catholic Church. The new regime, by contrast, was a constitutional monarchy based upon the rule of law, religious toleration, and equality of rights.

AbstractIn this paper we exploit the invasion of Europe, particularly Germany, by French Revolutionary armies as a natural experiment to investigate the causal effect of the institutions of the ancien régime on economic development. A central hypothesis which can account for comparative development within Europe is that economic growth emerged first in places which earliest escaped ancien régime and feudal institutions. However, though there is a correlation between these two events, this does not demonstrate that it was the collapse of the ancien régime that caused the rise of capitalism. This is because there may be problems of reverse causation and omitted variable bias. We show how the institutional reforms (essentially the abolition of the ancien régime) brought by the French in Germany can be exploited to resolve these problems. These reforms were akin to an exogenous change in institutions unrelated to the underlying economic potential of the areas reformed. We can therefore compare the economic performance of the areas reformed to those not reformed before and after the Revolutionary period to examine the impact of the reforms. The evidence we present is consistent with the hypothesis that the institutions of the ancien régime did indeed impede capitalism.

Francis I's ties with the Ottoman Empire marked the birth of court-sponsored Orientalism in France. Under Louis XIV, French society was transformed by cross-cultural contacts with the Ottomans, India, Persia, China, Siam and the Americas. The consumption of silk, cotton cloth, spices, coffee, tea, china, gems, flowers and other luxury goods transformed daily life and gave rise to a new discourse about the 'Orient' which in turn shaped ideas about science, economy and politics, and against absolutist monarchy. An original account of the ancient regime, this book highlights France's use of the exotic and analyzes French discourse about Islam and the 'Orient'.

Sumptuary law, the regulation of luxury by social station, was enacted in France throughout the ancien regime. An analysis of the frequency and types of sumptuary laws enacted shows that such legislation was prompted by concerns about the correct ordering of French society. Several themes were common to anti-luxury legislation between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sumptuary laws regulated the material culture of elite society. They served to protect the interests of the poor by ensuring that the surplus wealth of nobles and the rich was redistributed down the social hierarchy. In the sixteenth century, for example, sumptuary laws were enacted to curb the power and wealth of the French nobility by manipulating its material symbols, while Revolutionary legislators used sumptuary taxes to redistribute the tax burden in favor of the working poor.

Thirty-six distinguised speakers from across Europe will focus on the provocative historiographical issue of whether the post-Napoleonic order represented an attempt to reconcile the heritage of the ancien régime with a deeply transformed world.

Many texts and visual images produced in France from the later seventeenth century through the mid-eighteenth displayed a concern with idolatry. Literary figures from La Fontaine to Voltaire, ecclesiastics including Bossuet and Jurieu, and antiquarians and theorists of art such as Charles Perrault, La Font de Saint-Yenne and Antoine Le Mierre also associated the worship of false gods with sculpture. Bound up with interest in ancient and non- European mores and forms of worship, the idolatry-sculpture linkage also fed into contemporary political and religious debates. Huguenots, Jansenists, and philosophes utilized the connection to assist in promoting their views. Several public political and religious monuments appear to have been created partly in reaction to their charges. 041b061a72