Three Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution: On the Ancien Régime as it Existed on the Continent Before the French Revolution |
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Ancien Regime appealed to natural aristocracy become believe cause central despotism chivalry Church civilization conquered Continent cracy creature of circumstances dared decay duty eighteenth century England equally EQUESTRIAN Europe evil existed fact Fenelon folly France Freemasonry French noblesse French Revolution German Gil Blas Government heart helot hereditary honest honour horse human ideal invented king knight labour learnt least lettre de cachet live Lord Louis Louis XIV Madame de Maintenon mankind Masonry masses ment merely middle age middle class mind moral nation nature never nobility noble once philosophers physical science picturesque political poor PREFACE primæval prince progress public opinion race ranks reason recollect religion ride Roman Sage seems sense seventeenth social soul spirit superior surely teenth century Télémaque thereof things thought tion Tocqueville Tocqueville's tribe true vanity virtue Voltaire whole wicked wise women word wrong
Popular passages
Page 43 - by the ComptrollerGeneral and Council of State, with their provincial intendants. " Do you know," said Law to the Marquis d'Argenson, "that this kingdom of France is governed by thirty intendants ? You have neither parliament, nor estates, nor governors. It is upon thirty masters of requests, despatched into the provinces, that their evil or their good, their fertility or their sterility, entirely depend.
Page iii - ANCIEN REGIME AS IT EXISTED ON THE CONTINENT BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. BY C. KINGSLEY, MA PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY
Page 81 - hurrying, it may be, whole regiments of free and educated citizen-soldiers, who fight, they know for what. How sad to see the alte schloss desecrated by tourists, and the neue schloss converted into a cold-water cure. How sad to see the village, church and all, built up again bran-new, and whitewashed to the very
Page 43 - Comite de Salut Public,' and commissioners sent forth to the four winds of heaven in bonnet rouge and carmagnole complete, to build up and pull down, according to their wicked will, were only handling, somewhat more roughly, the same wires which had been handled for several generations past by the
Page 48 - day of May, 1775, these waste multitudes do here, at Versailles chateau, in wide-spread wretchedness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged raggedness, present as in legible hieroglyphic writing their petition of grievances. The , chateau gates must be shut; but the king will appear on the balcony and speak to them. They have seen the king's face; their petition of grievances has been, if not read, looked at.
Page 131 - All, all outward things, be sure of it, are good or evil, exactly as far as they are in the hands of good men or of bad. Moreover, paradoxical as it may seem, railroads and telegraphs, instead of inaugurating an era of progress, may possibly only retard it.
Page xvii - because the aristocracy is open to all, but rather, because its outline was indistinct, and its limit unknown: not so much because any man might be admitted into it, as because it was impossible to say with certainty when he took rank there:
Page 28 - who reads the French memoirs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not to perceive, if he be wise, that the aristocracy therein depicted was ripe for ruin—yea, already ruined—under any form of government whatsoever, independent of all political changes. Indeed, many of the political changes were not the causes, but the effects, of the
Page xii - difference between the pretender and the honest man. The causes of this state of society, which is peculiar to Britain, must be sought far back in the ages. It would seem that the distinction between " earl and churl" (the noble and the non-noble freeman) was crushed out in this island by the two Norman conquests—that of the Anglo-Saxon
Page 69 - or other. Venus plays but the same part as she does in the Tannenhauser legends of the Middle Age. Her hatred against Telemachus is an integral element of the plot. She, with the other women or nymphs of the romance, in spite of all Fenelon's mercy and courtesy