"People under the Old Regime"

This image shows "the people" as a chained and blindfolded man being crushed under the weight of the rich, including both clergy and nobility. Such a perspective on the period before 1789 purposely exaggerates social divisions and would have found few proponents before the Revolution, but the image does reveal the social clash felt so intensely by the revolutionaries.

The Old Regime• ancien régime: the patterns of social, political,

and economic relationships in Europe France before 1789

• Society organized into three groups—each with their own set of rights

The Church (1st Estate)

• Less than 1% of population

• Church owned 20% of land in France, but paid no taxes to state

• Closely associated with gov’t and aristocracy

• Functioned as a branch of gov’tcollected agricultural taxes (tithe), operated schools, registered births, marriages, and deaths

The Aristocracy(2nd Estate)• 1–5 % of population• Traditional land-owning elite (25-33%)• Exempt from most taxes, BUT collected dues

from peasant farmers• Held most high offices in gov’t army, and

Church• most social, political, economic power• wealth based on land and inherited privilege• Exclusive rights to hunt and fish

Ch. 19 Aristocratic Privileges and Resurgence

• P. 579-581

• Define the qualities of the different rights and privileges of nobility in Britain and France.

• Describe the “aristocratic resurgence” and how they tried to maintain status

• Answer RQ #1 on p. 614

The Aristocracy (cont.)• British nobility—smallest, wealthiest, best defined, most

socially responsible– about 400 families, eldest males of each in House of

Lords– owned about ¼ of all arable land

• French nobility—less clear-cut; about 400,000 nobles– “nobles of the sword”—nobility derived from military

service– “nobles of the robe”—from service in bureaucracy, or

purchased– some wealthy, some poor, but all shared certain

hereditary privileges• Eastern European nobilities—military traditions

important; extensive repressive power over serfs

Aristocratic Resurgence

• Europe-wide reaction to threat from expanding power of monarchies– tried to preserve privileges by making nobility harder

to attain– pushed to reserve high-ranking

military/government/church appointments for nobles– sought to leverage existing noble-controlled

institutions (British Parliament, French parlements, German provincial diets, etc.)

– tried to shore up wealth through new tax exemptions, raising rents

The Third Estate (95%)• Members included the middle-class

(bourgeoisie), urban artisans, and peasants (majority)

• Third Estate owned about 40% of land– Had the most obligations or taxes: taille (agricultural),

tithes (Church), gabelle (salt), vingtieme (income), banalites (feudal dues), corvee (forced labor)

– 50% of their income went to taxes

• Between 1730 and 1780, prices rose 65%, while wages increased only 22%

• TE were denied good jobs and wanted to reform an outdated system that gave the majority of the population no political or social rights

• As France’s financial system worsened, King Louis XIV increased taxes on TE

• The letter de cachet used by the king to put his political opponents into jail without charges, bail, or trial.

Emmanuel Sieyes, Bourgeois Disdain for Special Privileges of the Aristocracy

• “What is the Third Estate? Everything”

• “What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing”

• “What does it want to be? Something”

Peasant Rebellions

• Russia: Pugachev’s Rebellion (1773–1775)—all of southern Russia; eventually crushed; largest 18th c. uprising

• Eastern Europe: smaller revolts in Bohemia, Transylvania, Moravia, Austria

• Western Europe: almost no revolts, but rural riots in England; usually attempts to assert traditional rights against innovations—thus conservative

Peasants & Serfs

• lives of economic and social dependency, exploitation, vulnerability

• power of European landlords increased from west to east

• French peasants: banalitiés (feudal dues); corveé (annual forced labor)

• Habsburg serfs: near-slavery; robot (compulsory service to lord)

• Russian serfs: worst off; noble wealth measured by number of serfs, not acres

• Ottoman Empire (SE Europe): peasants nominally free; marginally empowered by scarcity of labor

An Aristocratic Couple Portraits, such as this one of the English landowner, RobertAndrews and His Wife, by Thomas Gainsborough (1728–1788), contain many clues to the aristocratic dominance of landed society.© National Gallery, London