Ancien Regime Quotes

Every time you accept the claim that you can't change human nature or you have to accept the way the world is, you are accepting the foundations of the worldview that grounded the ancien regime.

Now that the ancien regime had definitely disappeared in France, the new regime must again, after 1848, reaffirm itself, and the history of the nineteenth century up to 1914 is the history of the restoration of popular sovereignties against ancien regime monarchies; in other words, the history of the principle of nations. This principle finally triumphs in 1919, which witnesses the disappearance of all absolutist monarchies in Europe.3

In the darkness of the future three truths may be plainly discerned. The first is, that all the men of our day are driven, sometimes slowly, sometimes violently, by an unknown force—which may possibly be regulated or moderated, but can not be overcome—toward the destruction of aristocracies. The second is, that, among all human societies, those in which there exists and can exist no aristocracy are precisely those in which it will be most difficult to resist, for any length of time, the establishment of despotism. And the third is, that despotisms can never be so injurious as in societies of this nature; for despotism is the form of government which is best adapted to facilitate the development of the vices to which these societies are prone, and naturally encourages the very propensities that are indigenous in their disposition.

This study thereby proposes four elements that characterize Atlantic Jewish history: the demographic and economic centrality of Caribbean Jewry among hemispheric American Jewries; Portuguese Jewish hegemony among Jews in the Atlantic World; the era of slavery; and the triad of privileges, disabilities, and Jewish Emancipation.46 The Atlantic Jewish age was a time when the American Jewish epicenter was not in colonial North America or the United States but in the insular and circum-Caribbean; when for centuries most Atlantic Jews were of Iberian, and not of central or eastern European, origins; when most hemispheric American Jews lived in slave societies; and, beginning in the 1800s, when legal equality gradually began for the first time to be extended to Jews, replacing an earlier system predicated upon an ancien re´gime of dispensations and restrictions.

Burke had little notion of the conditions in which the monarchy he mourned had left us to face our new masters. The administration of the Ancien Régime had deprived the French in advance of both the ability and the desire to help one another. When the Revolution came, one would have searched in vain in most of France for ten men accustomed to acting together in a disciplined way and defending themselves. The central government alone was supposed to take charge of defending them all, so that when the royal administration lost control of that central government to a sovereign and unaccountable assembly, and this once complacent body turned terrifying, nothing could stop it or even slow it for a moment. The same cause that had brought the monarchy down so easily made everything possible after its fall.

But by opening the prospect of power to all the ambitious talents, this arrangement makes the extension of power much easier. Under the ancien regime, societies moving spirits who had as they knew no chance of a share of power, were quick to denounce its smallest encroachment. Now, on the other hand, when everyone is potentially a minister, no one is concerned to cut down office to which he aspires one day himself, or to put sand in the machine, which he means to use himself when his turn comes. Hence, it is that there is in the political circles of a modern society. A wide complicity in the extension of power.

The government officials, almost all from the middle classes, already constituted a social class with its own peculiar spirit, traditions, virtues, code of honour and pride. This was the aristocracy of the new social order which was already established and active. It simply waited for the Revolution to open up a place for it.

Natural human sociability is built around two principles, kin selection and reciprocal altruism. The principle of kin selection or inclusive fitness states that human beings will act altruistically toward genetic relatives (or individuals believed to be genetic relatives) in rough proportion to their shared genes. The principle of reciprocal altruism says that human beings will tend to develop relationships of mutual benefit or mutual harm as they interact with other individuals over time. Reciprocal altruism, unlike kin selection, does not depend on genetic relatedness; it does, however, depend on repeated, direct personal interaction and the trust relationships generated out of such interactions. These forms of social cooperation are the default ways human beings interact in the absence of incentives to adhere to other, more impersonal institutions. When impersonal institutions decay, these are the forms of cooperation that always reemerge because they are natural to human beings. What I have labeled patrimonialism is political recruitment based on either of these two principles. Thus, when bureaucratic offices were filled with the kinsmen of rulers at the end of the Han Dynasty in China, when the Janissaries wanted their sons to enter the corps, or when offices were sold as heritable property in ancien regime France, a natural patrimonial principle was simply reasserting itself.

The desire to grow rich at all costs, the taste for business, the passion for gain, the pursuit of comfort and material enjoyment are thus the most common preoccupations in despotisms.

Between 1890 and 1914 social Darwinist and Nietzschean formulas permeated the upper reaches of polity and society. Because of their antidemocratic, elitist, and combative inflection they were ideally suited to help the refractory elements of the ruling and governing classes raise up and intellectualize their deep-seated and ever-watchful illiberalism. [...] Clearly, social Darwinist and Nietzschean ideas did not express a revolt against the liberal state and bourgeois society. Rather, they embodied and fostered the recomposition of those conservative forces in the ancien régime that were determined to block all further liberal and democratic advances or to dismantle some that had been realized in the recent past.

Sajátságos módon ennek a családnak nem volt egyetlenegy tagja sem, aki mint államférfi, hadvezér vagy más téren nagy ember megokolta volna a család hatalmas önérzetét. A Rohanok ebben is olyanok voltak, mint ahogy az ember az Ancien Regime nagyurait elképzeli: sosem tettek semmi mást, csak származtak; nem röstellték a fáradságot megszületni, mint Figaro mondja.

Whoever seeks anything from freedom but freedom itself is doomed to slavery.

There is no definitive acquisition from which history can rise without losing an inch of the height it has attained: the bourgeoisie which was the revolution became the ancien regime, and, when reflecting on the French Revolution, it identifies itself with the old ruling class. At the same time that there is historical progress, there is, therefore, a consolidation, a destruction, a trampling of history; and at the same time as a permanent revolution, there is a permanent decadence which overtakes the ruling class in proportion as it rules and endures, for by ruling it abdicates what had made it "progressive," loses its rallying power, and is reduced to the protection of private interests. Throughout history, revolutions meet one another and institutions resemble one another; every revolution is the first revolution, and every institution, even a revolutionary institution, is tempted by historical precedents. This does not mean that everything is in vain and that nothing can be done: each time the struggle is different, the minimum of demandable justice rises, and, besides, according to these very principles, conservatism is utopian. But this means that the revolution which would recreate history is infinitely distant, that there is a similarity among ruling classes insofar as they are ruling and among ruled classes insofar as they are ruled, and that, for this reason, historical advances cannot be added like steps in a staircase. The Marxists know this very well when they say that the dictatorship of the proletariat turns the weapons of the bourgeoisie against the bourgeoisie. But then a proletarian philosophy of history holds to the miracle that the dictatorship may use the bourgeoisie's weapons without becoming something like a bourgeoisie; that a class may rule without becoming decadent when in point of fact any class which rules the whole proves to be particular by that very action; that a historical formation, the proletariat, may be established as a ruling class without taking upon itself the liabilities of the historical role; that it may accumulate and keep intact in itself all the energy of all past revolution and unfailingly give life to its institutional apparatus and progressively annul its degeneration. It is to act as if everything that historically exists were not at the same time movement and inertia, it is to place in history, as contents, on the one hand the principle of resistance (called the bourgeoisie) and on the other the principle of movement (called the proletariat), when these are the very structure of history as a passage to generality and to the institution of relationships among persons...To believe in proletarian revolution is to arbitrarily assert that history's sliding back on itself and the resurrection of past ghosts are bad dreams, that history carries within itself its own cure and will surprise us with it...One does not kill for relative progress. The very nature of revolution is to believe itself absolute and to not be absolute precisely because it believes itself to be so.

Royalty shared nothing in common with the royalty of the Middle Ages, possessed other powers, occupied another position, had another spirit and inspired other feelings; the administration of the state extended everywhere, settling upon the remnants of local powers; the hierarchy of public officials increasingly replaced the government of the nobility. All these new powers acted according to procedures and followed ideas which men of the Middle Ages had either not known or had condemned. These had their links in fact to a state of society beyond their experience.

Uncannily echoing the criticism that Tocqueville was soon to make of the French in the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, Comte wrote that social reformers ran into the danger of sacrificing 'true liberty to a chimerical equality.' Like Tocqueville, Comte considered the pursuit of both liberty and equality to be absurd. Both had been useful tools in the battle against the ancien regime but now their 'natural incompatibility' had become more apparent. he wrote, 'For, a free growth develops necessarily all kinds of differences, especially mental and moral ones; as a result, if one wants to maintain the same level, one must always repress evolution.' Indeed, whereas liberty encouraged the emergence of superiority and advanced regeneration, Comte believed subverted sociability and progress. Too much social solidarity would lead to the end of society.

the “Tocqueville effect” – revolutions occur when conditions are improving, not (as Marx sometimes asserted) when they are going from bad to worse.

(You can lean only on what offers resistance).

In the eighteenth century in England, it was the poor man who enjoyed the tax privilege; in France it was the rich man. There, the aristocracy took the heaviest public responsibilities on itself so that it would be allowed to govern; here it retained the tax exemption to the end to console itself for having lost the government

the most dangerous time for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform

the long-term study of institutional and cultural change with the short-term narrative of actions and events.

Democratic societies that are not free may yet be rich, refined, ornate, and even magnificent, powerful by dint of their homogeneous mass. One may find in such societies many private virtues, good fathers, honest merchants, and worthy landowners.

Having expressed my high opinion of liberty at a time when it was in favor, I can hardly be blamed for standing firm at a time when others are abandoning it.

Without boasting unduly, I think I may say that a great deal of labor has gone into this book.

Thus, each time I discovered in our forefathers one of those manly virtues that we so desperately need but no longer possess – a true spirit of independence, a yearning for greatness, faith in ourselves and in a cause – I tried to call attention to it.

Reading him is a feast of the mind.

The tragedy of the Revolution lies in the fact that its main actors, in their admirable struggle for freedom, created the conditions for a more repressive regime than the one they had brought down.

The destiny of an individual is even more uncertain than that of a nation.

most German states in 1788, a peasant could not leave his lord’s domain, and if he did leave he could be pursued wherever he went and forcibly returned. He was subject to the jurisdiction of his lord, who kept an eye on his private life and punished his intemperance and laziness.

I once heard an orator refer to administrative centralization as “that admirable triumph of the Revolution, for which we are the envy of Europe.

reader who has the patience to read this chapter attentively

do not know whether this is true, but there can be no doubt that in the eighteenth century, centralization did not prevent them from doing so. The administrative history of the age is filled with their chaotic affairs.

the old feudal society, if the lord possessed great rights, he also bore great burdens. It was his responsibility to aid the indigent within the limits of his domains. We find a last vestige of this old law of Europe in the Prussian code of 1795, which states that “the lord shall see to it that poor peasants receive an education. Insofar as possible he shall provide those of his vassals who have no land with the means of subsistence. Should any lapse into indigence, he shall come to their aid.

There are times when men are so different from one another that the idea of a single law applicable to all is almost incomprehensible.

circumjacent

because great revolutions that succeed erase the causes that produced them and become incomprehensible by dint of their very success.

After destroying political institutions, it abolished civil institutions. First it changed laws, then mores, customs, and even language. Having shredded the fabric of government, it undermined the foundations of society and ultimately went after God himself.

everything that was vital, active, and productive was new, and not simply new but in contradiction with the old.

But clear away all this debris and you will see an immense and unified central government, which has drawn in and devoured all the bits of authority and influence that were once parceled out among a host of secondary powers, orders, classes, professions, families, and individuals – scattered, as it were, throughout the social body. No comparable power has existed in the world since the fall of the Roman Empire. The Revolution created this new power, or, rather, it created the ruins from which the new power emerged on its own. The governments that it instituted are, to be sure, more fragile but a hundred times more powerful than those that it toppled – fragile and powerful for the same reasons, as we shall see in due course.

it would be strange indeed if institutions that tend to promote the ideas and passions of the people had the inevitable and enduring effect of encouraging impiety.

gradual restoration of the power of the Church and a reaffirmation of its influence over the minds of men.

For the rest, the eighteenth-century philosophes attacked the Church with a kind of fury. They attacked its clergy, its hierarchy, its institutions, and its dogma, and, the better to demolish all these things, they sought to undermine the very foundations of Christianity itself.