The Ancient Regime

Hippolyte Taine’s fame as a historian rests on his monumental six-volume work, The Origins of Contemporary France, an effort to understand the France of his day. The Ancient Régime is the first volume, where, in a scientific fashion, drawing from memoirs, diaries, correspondence, archival material, and the arts, he performs a thorough examination of pre-revolutionary France, beginning with the royalty and the aristocracy, passing through the clergy and the citizenry, and ending with the army. In a highly readable narrative that shows compassion for all the parties involved in the subsequent upheaval, Taine provides an abundance of numbers and facts, which illustrate the centralisation, excesses, and decay of the ancien régime—cultural, moral, structural, and economic—and show how they laid the foundations for the French Revolution, which occupy the next three volumes of this work.

This new edition of John Durand’s historic translation has been enhanced with hundreds of footnotes and a comprehensive index, making the text accessible to the modern reader.