Ancien Régime

A name given at the end

Nobody who lived under the Ancien Régime called it that. The phrase — “the old regime”, the former way of governing — spread through the speeches, pamphlets and decrees of 1789 and 1790, as the revolutionaries looked for a word for everything they were abolishing. To call it old was already a verdict: it belonged to the past, and the new France would be built on its ruins.

What they meant was not one institution but a whole way of ordering the kingdom: a king who answered to God alone, a society divided into orders with unequal rights, and a tangle of provinces, courts, taxes and privileges that had grown up over centuries without a plan. Historians have kept the term for France from roughly the sixteenth century to 1789, and stretched it to the rest of Europe before the age of revolutions. Why it gave way when it did is the question of Why did the Revolution happen?

A king by the grace of God

At the top stood the king, anointed with holy oil at his coronation in Reims and held to rule by divine right, answerable to God rather than to his subjects. Louis XIV, king from 1643 to 1715, made the idea visible: from 1682 he governed from the Palace of Versailles, where the great nobles lived around him and his day was a public ceremony. In the provinces, royal intendants carried out the decisions of the king’s council.

“Absolute” did not mean unlimited. The king was bound by the fundamental laws of the kingdom, such as the succession in the male line, and by the customs and privileges he had sworn to respect. His edicts became law only once the parlements — thirteen sovereign law courts, led by the Parlement of Paris — had registered them, and the parlements could send them back with remonstrances. Louis XV reminded them where power lay:

In 1771 his chancellor Maupeou broke the parlements and replaced them with new courts. Louis XVI brought them back in 1774, at the start of his reign, and they went on to resist one reforming minister after another who tried to make the privileged pay more tax.

Those who pray, those who fight, those who work

The law divided the French into three orders, or estates. The clergy came first, the nobility second, and everyone else — peasants, artisans, merchants, lawyers, bankers — made up the Third Estate. Early in the seventeenth century the jurist Charles Loyseau described this society of orders: each had its own rank, duties and rights, and a person’s place in it was fixed by birth or by office, not by wealth.

A privilege was, literally, a private law: a right that applied to some and not to others. Nobles could carry a sword, were beheaded rather than hanged, held most of the lordships with the dues and rights that went with them, and in most of the kingdom did not pay the taille. But privilege was not only noble. Provinces, towns, guilds, universities and officeholders had their own, and many commoners defended theirs as fiercely as any duke.

Who paid, and how

The taille, the main direct tax, fell on the Third Estate: nobles, clergy and many towns and officeholders escaped it. Peasants also paid the tithe to the Church — in principle a tenth of the harvest, in practice usually less — dues to their lord, and indirect taxes such as the gabelle on salt, whose price varied enormously from one province to the next. Indirect taxes were collected by private financiers, the Farmers General, who paid the crown a fixed sum in advance and kept what they raised beyond it.

The clergy paid no ordinary taxes; its assembly voted the king a “free gift” instead. New taxes created in 1695 and 1749 were meant to reach everyone, but nobles and whole provinces bargained down what they owed. Tens of thousands of public posts — judges, tax officials, notaries — were venal offices, bought like property and, from 1604, handed down to heirs for a yearly fee; the highest of them made their holders noble. The crown sold them for ready money, then could not dismiss the men who had bought them.

Nor was there one law for the kingdom. The north lived by some sixty regional customs, the south by written Roman law. Provinces such as Brittany and Languedoc kept their own estates, which bargained over their share of taxes; tolls and customs barriers stood between provinces, and weights and measures changed from town to town.

Abolished in a night, surviving in the state

The society of orders went first. On the night of 4 August 1789 nobles and clergymen in the National Assembly rose one after another to give up their privileges, and the decrees that followed opened with the words “The National Assembly entirely destroys the feudal regime.” Tithes, venal offices, tax exemptions and the privileges of provinces and towns went with it. Three weeks later the Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed that men are born and remain free and equal in rights. In 1790 the provinces gave way to departments and the parlements were abolished; in September 1792 the monarchy itself fell.

In 1856 Alexis de Tocqueville asked how much had really changed. In The Ancien Régime and the Revolution he argued that the Revolution had finished the monarchy’s own work: through their council and intendants the kings had already drawn power away from the nobles and the provinces into a single administration run from Paris, and Napoleon’s prefects carried on where the intendants had left off. He also noticed that the explosion came not where the old order weighed heaviest, but where it was easing, and when it had begun to reform.