Class And State In Ancien Regime France

David Parker's challenging interpretation presents a broad, in-depth study of the economic, social, ideological and political foundations of French Absolutism. This stimulating reassessment runs contrary to much revisionist historiography.

This contains history and information about the French revolution. The society of the ancien regime is depicted as the author saw it and is offered as a handbook for facts and theory.

The Ancien Régime and the Revolution is a comparison of revolutionary France and the despotic rule it toppled. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) is an objective observer of both periods – providing a merciless critique of the ancien régime, with its venality, oppression and inequality, yet acknowledging the reforms introduced under Louis XVI, and claiming that the post-Revolution state was in many ways as tyrannical as that of the King; its once lofty and egalitarian ideals corrupted and forgotten. Writing in the 1850s, Tocqueville wished to expose the return to despotism he witnessed in his own time under Napoleon III, by illuminating the grand, but ultimately doomed, call to liberty made by the French people in 1789. His eloquent and instructive study raises questions about liberty, nationalism and justice that remain urgent today.

Taking the province of Languedoc as a microcosm for France as a whole, this comprehensively researched riveting narrative demonstrates the way in which the class relations enforced by the absolutist state brought about the revolutionary upheaval of 1789.

First published in French in 1974, David D. Bien's essay on the nature of nobility in old regime France pivoted around the 1781 "Ségur regulation" that required four generations of nobility for most officers entering the army. Once seen as a classic manifestation of the so-called "aristocratic reaction" against commoners, the loi Ségur, in Bien's deft analysis, instead emerges as a telling sign of tensions within an increasingly divided nobility. While exploding crude myths about class conflict and its causative role in the Revolution, Bien mounts a strong case for viewing eighteenth-century social tensions as the product of professional identity as much as social class. This study is presented here for the first time in English with a short preface by Rafe Blaufarb, and a wide-ranging introduction by Jay M. Smith that places Bien's work in the wider context of historical thinking over the past half-century on the origins of the French Revolution.

This1856 volume constitutes one of the most important books ever written about the French Revolution. It explores the rebellion's origins and consequences, offering timeless insights into the pursuit of individual and political freedom."