BiblioVault - Books about Old Regime

Backstage at the Revolution

How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime

Victoria Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 2008

On July 14, 1789, a crowd of angry French citizens en route to the Bastille broke into the Paris Opera and helped themselves to any sturdy weapon they could find. Yet despite its long association with the royal court, its special privileges, and the splendor of its performances, the Opera itself was spared, even protected, by Revolutionary officials. Victoria Johnson’s Backstage at the Revolution tells the story of how this legendary opera house, despite being a lightning rod for charges of tyranny and waste, weathered the most dramatic political upheaval in European history.
Sifting through royal edicts, private letters, and Revolutionary records of all kinds, Johnson uncovers the roots of the Opera’s survival in its identity as a uniquely privileged icon of French culture—an identity established by the conditions of its founding one hundred years earlier under Louis XIV. Johnson’s rich cultural history moves between both epochs, taking readers backstage to see how a motley crew of singers, dancers, royal ministers, poet entrepreneurs, shady managers, and the king of France all played a part in the creation and preservation of one of the world’s most fabled cultural institutions.

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Colonialism and Science

Saint Domingue and the Old Regime

James E. McClellan III

University of Chicago Press, 2010

How was the character of science shaped by the colonial experience? In turn, how might we make sense of how science contributed to colonialism? Saint Domingue (now Haiti) was the world’s richest colony in the eighteenth century and home to an active society of science—one of only three in the world, at that time. In this deeply researched and pathbreaking study of the colony, James E. McClellan III first raised his incisive questions about the relationship between science and society that historians of the colonial experience are still grappling with today. Long considered rare, the book is now back in print in an English-language edition, accompanied by a new foreword by Vertus Saint-Louis, a native of Haiti and a widely-acknowledged expert on colonialism. Frequently cited as the crucial starting point in understanding the Haitian revolution, Colonialism and Science will be welcomed by students and scholars alike.

“By deftly weaving together imperialism and science in the story of French colonialism, [McClellan] . . . brings to light the history of an almost forgotten colony.”—Journal of Modern History

“McClellan has produced an impressive case study offering excellent surveys of Saint Domingue’s colonial history and its history of science.”—Isis

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Daughters of Eve

A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle

Lenard R. Berlanstein

Harvard University Press, 2001

Famous and seductive, female stage performers haunted French public life in the century before and after the Revolution. This pathbreaking study delineates the distinctive place of actresses, dancers, and singers within the French erotic and political imaginations. From the moment they became an unofficial caste of mistresses to France's elite during the reign of Louis XIV, their image fluctuated between emasculating men and delighting them.

Drawing upon newspaper accounts, society columns, theater criticism, government reports, autobiographies, public rituals, and a huge corpus of fiction, Lenard Berlanstein argues that the public image of actresses was shaped by the political climate and ruling ideology; thus they were deified in one era and damned in the next. Tolerated when civil society functioned and demonized when it faltered, they finally passed from notoriety to celebrity with the stabilization of parliamentary life after 1880. Only then could female fans admire them openly, and could the state officially recognize their contributions to national life.

Daughters of Eve is a provocative look at how a culture creates social perceptions and reshuffles collective identities in response to political change.

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From Old Regime to Industrial State

A History of German Industrialization from the Eighteenth Century to World War I

Richard H. Tilly and Michael Kopsidis

University of Chicago Press, 2020

In From Old Regime to Industrial State, Richard H. Tilly and Michael Kopsidis question established thinking about Germany’s industrialization. While some hold that Germany experienced a sudden breakthrough to industrialization, the authors instead consider a long view, incorporating market demand, agricultural advances, and regional variations in industrial innovativeness, customs, and governance. They begin their assessment earlier than previous studies to show how the 18th-century emergence of international trade and the accumulation of capital by merchants fed commercial expansion and innovation. This book provides the history behind the modern German economic juggernaut.

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The Literary Underground of the Old Regime

Robert Darnton

Harvard University Press, 1982

Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers, smugglers, and police spies that composed the literary underground of the Enlightenment.

Here are the ambitious writers who crowded into Paris seeking fame and fortune within the Republic of Letters, but who instead sank into the miserable world of Grub Street—victims of a closed world of protection and privilege. Venting their frustrations in an illicit literature of vitriolic pamphlets, libelles, and chroniques scandaleuses, these “Rousseaus of the gutter” desecrated everything sacred in the social order of the Old Regime. Here too are the workers who printed their writings and the clandestine booksellers who distributed them.

While censorship, a monopolistic guild, and the police contained the visible publishing industry within the limits of official orthodoxies, a prolific literary underworld disseminated a vast illegal literature that conveyed a seditious ideology to readers everywhere in France. Covering their traces in order to survive, the creators of this eighteenth-century counterculture have virtually disappeared from history. By drawing on an ingenious selection of previously hidden sources, such as police ledgers and publishers’ records, Robert Darnton reveals for the first time the fascinating story of that forgotten underworld.

The activities of the underground bear on a broad range of issues in history and literature, and they directly concern the problem of uncovering the ideological origins of the French Revolution. This engaging book illuminates those issues and provides a fresh view of publishing history that will inform and delight the general reader.

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The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I

The Complete Text

Alexis de Tocqueville

University of Chicago Press, 1998

The Old Regime and the Revolution is Alexis de Tocqueville's great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution. One of the most profound and influential studies of this pivotal event, it remains a relevant and stimulating discussion of the problem of preserving individual and political freedom in the modern world. Alan Kahan's translation provides a faithful, readable rendering of Tocqueville's last masterpiece, and includes notes and variants which reveal Tocqueville's sources and include excerpts from his drafts and revisions. The introduction by France's most eminent scholars of Tocqueville and the French Revolution, Françoise Mélonio and the late François Furet, provides a brilliant analysis of the work.

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The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume II

Notes on the French Revolution and Napoleon

Alexis de Tocqueville

University of Chicago Press, 2001

With his monumental work The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)-best known for his classic Democracy in America— envisioned a multivolume philosophic study of the origins of modern France that would examine the implications of French history on the nature and development of democratic society. Volume 1, which covered the eighteenth-century background to the Revolution, was published to great acclaim in 1856. On the continuation of this project, he wrote: "When this Revolution has finished its work, [this volume] will show what that work really was, and what the new society which has come from that violent labor is, what the Revolution has taken away and what it has preserved from that old regime against which it was directed."

Tocqueville died in the midst of this work. Here in volume 2—in clear, up-to-date English—is all that he had completed, including the chapters he started for a work on Napoleon, notes and analyses he made in the course of researching and writing the first volume, and his notes on his preparation for his continuation. Based on the new French edition of The Old Regime, most of the translated texts have never before appeared in English, and many of those that have appeared have been considerable altered. More than ever before, readers will be able to see how Tocqueville's account of the Revolution would have come out, had he lived to finish it. This handsomely produced volume completes the set and is essential reading for anyone interested in the French Revolution or in Tocqueville's thought.

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Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime

Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou, Editors

University of Minnesota Press, 1978

Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime was first published in 1978. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this book, which is especially suitable for course use, eleven scholars examine one of the most important institutions of imperial Russia, the Orthodox church in the two centuries before the Russian revolution. The material is arranged in two sections, the first devoted to Orthodoxy's role in Russian social and cultural life and the second dealing with the church's relationship to the tsarist regime.

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University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization, Volume 7

The Old Regime and the French Revolution

Edited by Keith M. Baker

University of Chicago Press, 1987

The University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization (nine volumes) makes available to students and teachers a unique selection of primary documents, many in new translations. These readings, prepared for the highly praised Western civilization sequence at the University of Chicago, were chosen by an outstanding group of scholars whose experience teaching that course spans almost four decades. Each volume includes rarely anthologized selections as well as standard, more familiar texts; a bibliography of recommended parallel readings; and introductions providing background for the selections. Beginning with Periclean Athens and concluding with twentieth-century Europe, these source materials enable teachers and students to explore a variety of critical approaches to important events and themes in Western history.

Individual volumes provide essential background reading for courses covering specific eras and periods. The complete nine-volume series is ideal for general courses in history and Western civilization sequences.

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Utopia's Garden

French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution

E. C. Spary

University of Chicago Press, 2000

The royal Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi, was a jewel in the crown of the French Old Regime, praised by both rulers and scientific practitioners. Yet unlike many such institutions, the Jardin not only survived the French Revolution but by 1800 had become the world's leading public establishment of natural history: the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle.

E. C. Spary traces the scientific, administrative, and political strategies that enabled the foundation of the Muséum, arguing that agriculture and animal breeding rank alongside classification and collections in explaining why natural history was important for French rulers. But the Muséum's success was also a consequence of its employees' Revolutionary rhetoric: by displaying the natural order, they suggested, the institution could assist in fashioning a self-educating, self-policing Republican people. Natural history was presented as an indispensable source of national prosperity and individual virtue.

Spary's fascinating account opens a new chapter in the history of France, science, and the Enlightenment.

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