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History of the Orchid Pavilion
Editor|History of the Orchid Pavilion
The "revolution" as a historical category has received continuous academic attention and scrutiny, while the polity created by the French Revolution has been subject to less complex theoretical analysis and interpretation.
The term Ancien Régime was coined at the moment of its death.
In the post-Napoleonic era, the subsequent restructuring and politicization of the concept remained largely unstudied.
The argument here is that the post-1815 world created many "old and new institutions".
These political systems reference the legacy of the old system and are not a direct reflection of the "real past."
They are malleable discourses that can be calibrated to substantiate the competing claims of conservatives, radicals, and liberals about how post-Napoleonic Europe should be organized.
The 19th-century "Old and New Institutions," while having historical foundations, were helpful in design, and made little effort to revive the allegedly constant reference to the "real past."
The struggle to define the "old and new institutions" was not a guard battle, but central to post-1815 European politics.
The forces of the state, constitutionalism, parliamentarism, liberalism and democracy, demonstrated by the twin giants of revolution and Napoleon's conquest, will not necessarily win.
Dynastyism, aristocratic hierarchies, military glory, religious revivals, rural autonomy and regionalism continued to flourish in the first half of the nineteenth century.
"Revolution" as a historical category has received sustained attention and academic scrutiny over the past two centuries.
This process culminated in 1989 when Alain Rey published an exhaustive study entitled Revolution: A History of One Man', which in about 400 pages detailed the semantic changes and new meanings the term acquired from the 18th century onwards.
Surprisingly, the polity invented by the French Revolution has received less sophisticated theoretical analysis and unpacking.
Paradoxically, the social and political system (especially before the French Revolution of 1789) was that it was conceived at the moment of death.
Only its expiration time is recorded; Its birth went unnoticed.
The reason for this is that the concept is a label of controversy, which the new political elite of revolutionary France uses to forget the past.
The corrupt complexist and particularist structures that have governed and governed the European world since the Baroque era will be cleansed and replaced by a reborn vision of humanity.
The reforms of the 90s of the 18th century attempted to create a blank slate reflecting the state of nature.
It is hoped that, from this pure starting point, an efficient and enlightened political society will emerge.
Since the 60s and 70s of the 20th century, revisionist historians across Europe have struggled with this disparaging and derogatory view of the pre-1789 world.
We now have a more nuanced understanding of the continent's political systems and cultures since the end of the Thirty Years' War.
The purpose of this article is not to look for the "real" old system, there are many excellent studies that usefully pursue this elusive subject.
William Doyle, T.C.W. Branning, Franco Venturi, Michel Antoine, and the more controversial J.C.D. Clark, to name just a few, did their best to understand the absolutist world of the eighteenth century.
If the old system is a complete "construction" or merely a "manifestation".
The argument presented here is based on the simple fact that words and the concepts they describe are different entities.
Their relationship is interesting and unstable.
Neologisms divide conceptual anxieties, priorities, and intellectual battlegrounds of any era.
Some historians still tend to assume that the relationship between "word" and "concept" is linear.
For example, a few decades ago, the Italian intellectual historian Diego Venturano made an elegant argument in which he claimed that the compound noun Ancien Régime was chosen over the more precise choice of ancient government. According to Venturino, the politicians of the Constituent Assembly did not want to harm the monarchy or its bureaucracy when they rejected the pre-1789 world.
As a result, they chose a broader, less compromising expression to describe the social, cultural, and political world they wanted to transcend.
For Venutrino, this expression allows delegates to denounce the mentality rather than specific individuals or institutions.
While this feels convincing, it is undermined by a small issue.
There is little evidence that the term government is seriously regarded as an alternative conceptual regime.
At least in my opinion, from the very beginning, a revolutionary rejection of the past is not a compromise solution, but a completely opposite solution to everything that happened before it stopped.
The only redeemable past invoked by the people of 1789 is the Greco-Roman classical world, which was safely shrouded in a millennia-old mist.
It can be concluded that whatever happens to the Ancien Régime, perhaps, it has existed for centuries and does not need a term to describe it.
It was only with its political implosion that a new word became necessary.
Labeling rejected "things" is crucial.
The revolutionaries of the 90s of the 18th century conceptualized the socio-political order they replaced in very superficial terms.
Subsequently, the Napoleonic Empire would claim that it used and synthesized the best elements of the world around 1789.
It was only in the 19th century that there was a debate about the Ancien Régime and more importantly how its legacy influenced contemporary politics.
The argument here (which does not claim to be decisive, but part of a larger ongoing project) is that the post-1815 world created many "old and new institutions".
These political systems reference the legacy of the old system and are not a direct reflection of the "real past."
They are malleable discourses that can be calibrated to substantiate the competing claims of conservatives, radicals, and liberals about how post-Napoleonic Europe should be organized.
The "old and new institutions" of the 19th century, while having a historical basis, helped to achieve their purpose and made no effort to revive the "real past" to which it allegedly constantly refused.
As Mark Bloch in his historian's craft:
Thus, the period most bound by tradition is also the most free for its true heritage.
It is as if, out of curiosity compensation for the irresistible creative impulse, they are naturally driven by reverence for the past to create it.
Much of the inspiration that followed came from Marxist historians, notably Arnold Meyer's controversial book The Continuing Existence of the Old Regime, published in 1981.
In this highly original and unorthodox study, Mayer confidently states:
The theme of the book is that "premodern" elements are not the decaying and fragile remnants of the existing civil and political social nature of Europe.
This is not to deny the growing importance of modern forces that undermine and challenge the old order.
But it is said that until 1914, the forces of inertia and resistance contained and suppressed this dynamic and expanding new society and the old system dominated European history.
The main problem with Meier's work is that it is a product of the growing insecurity of the 80s.
Historians of the Marxist tradition increasingly need to explain why history did not go according to plan.
It is for this reason that they explain the failure of their prophecy of modernity, by resorting to a roadblock that hinders all progress by resorting to an old system.
The monarchy and aristocracy of nineteenth-century Europe were too deeply rooted for bourgeois revolutionaries and the socialist proletariat to be eradicated.
The persistence of the old system highlights how society failed to evolve as it "should" do.
In the face of the stagnation of the nineteenth century, Meier's surprise has been weakened by the revisionist scholarship of the past few decades.
Still, his argument is persuasive, even if the agenda behind it is not.
Many of the cultural, social and political edifices that revolutionaries of the 1890s and Napoleonic imperial administrators tried to destroy still stand in 1815.
The biggest problem with Meier's work lies in his historical-materialist approach to evidence, likewise his half-century examination of the periodization of 1848-1914.
Even after 1848, "social progress" may have been slow, but the mentality after the European revolutions changed dramatically, even among the major reactionaries.
Another theory that has proven useful when studying post-revolutionary Europe is the late Eric Hobsbawm's concept of "virtual tradition."
The elder of the British Marxist school said that many of the rituals, conventions and symbols of the 19th century were a synthesis of historical symbols and practical innovations.
As he said:
A virtual tradition is conceived as a set of conventions, usually governed by overt or tacit rules, of a ritual or symbolic nature, that seeks to inculcate certain values and behavioral norms through repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.
Europe after the French and Industrial Revolutions underwent confusing economic, social, political, or cultural changes.
In essence, for Hobsbawm, a changing world needed new rituals, ceremonies, flags, and music to undo the instability caused by the corruption of the old order.
For the historian, the "tradition of invention" had a conservative and authoritarian function, maintaining the cultural hegemony of the elite over the masses.
Perhaps even less wise, Hobsbawm concludes: "As long as there is such a reference to the historical past, the characteristic of traditional 'fiction' is that its continuity is artificial."
The conclusion that new religious ceremonies are aimed at stabilizing and harmonious societies is worth cherishing.
However, the idea that 19th-century elites and governments created such cultural artworks out of thin air is a bit overblown.
The true dynastic culture, chivalric culture, ceremonial culture and court culture The Ancien Régime provided 19th-century politicians and politicians with a powerful arsenal of symbols and practices to support their agenda.
After all, nothing is created out of nothing.
Another overlooked historical dimension is the failure to consider the protagonists of post-Napoleonic Europe from a strong comparative perspective.
The politicians who won after 1815, because of similar life experiences, shared political views and focused on their pasts in very similar ways.
As Karl Mannheim and Alan Spitzer recently showed long ago, the concept of "generation" remains important, albeit underappreciated, in historical research.
Individuals, or rather, groups, are born at specific historical moments, share a common social environment, and carry heavy baggage.
The religion, culture and education taught by their parents and grandparents gave them a common starting point.
However, humans do not simply copy each other; There is a big difference between past and present generations.
New environments and different experiences mean that "age groups" have very different understandings of historical time and its significance.
This is what the art historian Moritz Pindar wittily defines as "contemporaneous non-simultaneity."
The "generation unit" defined by Mannheim has a different experience of history than "real" time.
The "old and new system" fits this model well.
"Generational history" can make an important contribution to understanding the elites of post-Napoleonic Europe.
These people gradually matured in the 90s of the 18th century.
Their Ancien Régime French Revolutionary War completely destroyed tradition.
These events and the collective trauma of the invasion brought them together in exile.
An obvious consequence of the forced migration of elites was that many of these dignitaries were not natives of the dynasties and countries they served.
bibliography
[1] William Doyle, The Ancien Régime in Post-Napoleonic Europe