Word: ancien
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...revolution: nobles seeking to weaken royal power played a driving role in the rebellion, for example; few peasants suffered under a feudal yoke. In the U.S. a much heralded new work by Harvard University's Simon Schama, called Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, depicts the ancien regime in a positive light -- not too differently from France's current best seller La Revolution, by historian Francois Furet. "The French have come to realize that the revolution was a magnificent event that turned out badly," says Furet, a professor at Paris' Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the University of Chicago...
Humorist Calvin Trillin at Beloit College, Beloit, Wis.: I have divided up the United States into two sections. One section is the part of the U.S. that had major league baseball before the Second World War. That's the ancien U.S., and the rest of the U.S. is the rest of the U.S. That's the second part that's called the expansion-team U.S. -- where we stand today. The way you can tell the difference is that the old U.S. still has regular European ethnic neighborhoods, and in an Italian restaurant in the ancien U.S., the waiters have names...
...Africa appears to me parallel in one respect to that of the Philippines, with a government able to impose itself for a relatively long period while the tension builds up and the period may end up in a bloody revolution. After all, it took 146 years for the French ancien regime (say, from 1643--Louis XIV's coming as a King--to 1789) to evolve into the French revolution. I would not call the ancien regime "highly politically stable". Different people have perceived differently during those 146 years, and since...
...this somewhat speculative re-creation of the ancien régime is solidly based on Darnton's mastery of its most obscure documents. He has discovered, for example, that there was a police official who spent the years 1748 to 1753 writing more than 500 still unpublished dossiers covering virtually every writer in Paris. They included all those troublesome philosophes whose skeptical criticisms of the Bourbon monarchy contributed to its downfall, yet this diligent police analyst never used the term philosophes, never considered them as a group, never imagined that any writers could have political importance...
Throughout his New World adventure, however, Lafayette remained curiously immune to the principles he was fighting for. "It had not yet occurred to him that democracy was for export," writes Bernier. The soldier returned to France an enthusiastic supporter of the ancien régime. Yet as the toast of Paris salons, he met some of the new egalitarian thinkers of the day and became a genuine convert to the cause of democracy. His new ideals and his ever growing popularity drew him into the French Revolution, and at 31 he became vice president of the new National Assembly...