ancien régime

1. The political and social system that existed in France before the Revolution of 1789.
2. pl., an·ciens ré·gimes (äN-syăN' rā-zhēm'). A sociopolitical or other system that no longer exists.

[French : ancien, old + régime, regime.]

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Name given to the regime which was abolished by the French Revolution. Strictly speaking, it means ‘former regime’ rather than ‘old regime’, and as such was ‘invented’ by the revolutionaries to refer to what they hoped to abolish: it was therefore first conceptualized in 1789 and 1790. Many scholars have used the term to refer only to the decades immediately preceding the Revolution; for Tocqueville it was the whole century before 1789. In fact, it was a system that integrated economic, social, ideological, juridical, and political aspects into a coherent structure, albeit one whose coherence is difficult to discern today. What disappeared in the crisis of 1789 was indeed its coherence, although many of its features, especially the economic and social structures, continued somewhat transformed until at least the mid-19th c.

The roots of the regime are to be found in the Middle Ages, when monarchy and society took definitive shape. Three notions were particularly important in moulding it: hierarchy, corporatism, and privilege. The regime was full of inconsistencies, for it had evolved in an ad hoc fashion over many generations. Institutions such as the monarchy itself, the parlements, the privileged orders like the nobility and clergy, tended to base their claims to rights and authority on custom and precedence, and the conception of their corporate rights was intensely legalistic; quarrels over jurisdiction were frequent. Except in times of crisis, as during the civil wars, there was felt to be little need to explore the inherent contradictions of theory and practice. Only in the 18th c. did political conflict and the Enlightenment lead to a demystification and desacralization of the monarchy, undermining the very basis of the regime. The extent to which the end of the old order in the crisis of 1787-9 should be viewed as a collapse resulting from the growing pressures of modernity and fiscal crisis, or as a revolutionary movement of Enlightenment ideology, is still very much a matter for debate [see Revolution, 3].

The ancien régime has always been evaluated quite differently by the Right and Left. For those on the Right, in the tradition of Taine, it was a stable, ordered society with much to admire in its hierarchy of values; while on the Left, where the influence of socialism and of the Revolutionaries themselves has remained strong, it has been condemned for its inequality, privilege, and injustice, for its lack of personal liberty and excess of despotism. In a society still moulded by the Revolution, objective evaluation has been difficult.

[Peter Campbell]

Bibliography

• A. de Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la révolution (1856)
• D. Richet, La France moderne: l'esprit des institutions (1973)
• P. R. Campbell, The Ancien Régime in France (1988)

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.

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.

Bibliography

Baker, Keith Michael, ed. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Chicago, 1987.

Doyle, William. The Old European Order, 1660–1800. 2nd ed. New York and Oxford, 1992.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Garden City, N.Y., 1955.

—DONALD SUTHERLAND

The political and social order that prevailed in France before the French Revolution, built on a belief in absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings.