Re-inventing the Ancien Régime in Post-Napoleonic Europe

Abstract

Abstract'Revolution' as a historical category has received continuous academic interest and scrutiny, whereas the regime invented by the French Revolution has received less sophisticated theoretical analysis and unpacking. The term ancien régime was created in the moment of its death. The subsequent restructuring and politicization of this concept during the post-Napoleonic era remains largely unstudied. It is the argument here that the world after 1815 created a number of 'new old regimes'. These political systems, which made reference to ancien régime inheritances, were not straightforward reflections of a 'real past'. They were malleable discourses that could be calibrated to corroborate the competing claims made by conservatives, radicals and liberals about how post-Napoleonic Europe was to be organized. The 'new old regime' of the nineteenth century, though historically grounded, was instrumental in design and made little effort to resurrect the 'real past' to which it purportedly made constant reference. The battle to define the 'new old regime' was not a rear-guard action but lay at the very heart of European politics after 1815. The forces of nationhood, constitutionalism, parliamentarianism, liberalism and democracy unfurled by the twin titans of revolution and Napoleonic conquest were not guaranteed to win the day. Dynasticism, aristocratic hierarchy, military glory, religious revival, village communalism and regionalism continued to prosper during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Nationhood as Practice and the Modernity of Nations: A Conceptual Proposal

“…In some of their forms, politicized ethnopolitical ideas of nation only differ from liberal ones in the respect that sovereignty is not included in the equation, either because the subject does not intend to affirm that his or her nation is or should be the ultimate source of political power or because he or she opposes the principle of national sovereignty as a political stance. My proposal implies that, without ethnotypical nationhood, liberal revolutionaries would have been unable to develop and socially extend their Rousseauean nation of citizens, and counterrevolutionaries and Restoration regimes could not have developed their forms of hybridism as they did (Caiani 2017). According to this interpretation, the Age of Revolutions may have been a moment of "transition" and not merely one of "invention.…”

Long conflict and how it ends: Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Ireland

“…The French Revolution shattered the political and religious assumptions of Europe's ancien régime states and societies (Aston, 2000(Aston, , 2002. The Revolution's radical phase quickly passed, but its principles surviveduniversal rights, equality, separation of church and state, universal franchise, citizenship, the nationand prevented any return to the old order (Caiani, 2017). Meanwhile, the diffusion of the English technological, industrial and urban revolution was undermining the old order's economic and social basis (Pilbeam, 2000).…”

Indigenous patrimonialization as an operation of the liberal state

“…The French Revolution yielded yet another semantic variation of patrimony. As witnesses to the creation of a New World, European governments began to ponder the need to protect symbols of the ancien régime , an exercise that gave rise to various narrative strategies recognizing the pre-Revolutionary legacy of the monarchy (Caiani 2017). These strategies were consolidated from 1830 to 1840, a period that saw wide-ranging debate on protecting the ‘national heritage’ (Swenson 2015, 32).…”