The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime, ed. William Doyle

Abstract

In an excellent short book first published in 1986, the eminent editor of this volume stated firmly that the ‘ancien’ in ‘ancien régime’ meant ‘former’ rather than ‘old’, and that it was a concept created by the French Revolutionaries. He has not changed his mind. His introduction begins: ‘We owe the idea of the ancien régime to the French Revolution’. He returns to the issue in the conclusion, emphasising once again that ancien ‘meant “old” in the sense of “former”’. So one might expect that what comes in between would be a series of deconstructions of the concept in its various aspects as it was created after 1789. Mercifully perhaps, this is not what we get. Instead, there are thirty substantive chapters divided into seven sections: ‘Government’, ‘Society’, ‘Economy’, ‘Religion’, ‘Culture’, ‘Solvents’ and ‘Test Cases’. The last-named category comprises essays on Napoleon, Great Britain, Colonial America and the Holy Roman Empire. The various authors have taken their brief to mean a discussion of the salient characteristics of their topics as they existed in the eighteenth century (with the occasional backward look at the second half of the seventeenth), not post-revolutionary interpretations and distortions.