Word: ancien
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...Ancien Regime...
Once he had money and independence, Voltaire settled down to a cautious but often brilliantly effective guerrilla war against France's ancien régime. He was, Besterman suggests, the first man to recognize and mobilize that new creature, public opinion...
...gifted family, he lived in a town house in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg, and at Vyra, an idyllic, rambling country estate. For Nabokov, his two brothers and two sisters and their parents, life, especially at Vyra, seems to have been the living lesson in love, order and responsibility that all ancien regime childhoods should have been but so seldom were...
...ancien régime felt a special kinship with the stylized artifice of Chinese design. Chinese porcelain was admired for its curvilinear grace, and mantelpieces and niches were filled with delicious Meissen and Chantilly imitations of Chinese styles. One of the most striking objects in the Wickes collection is the great black Chinese chest that London craftsmen lovingly set on legs of gilded wood. When the stateliness of the baroque era gave way to the studied insouciance of the court of Louis XV, chests took on a kind of portly gentility, as witness the gilt-trimmed rococo commode in Wickes...
...needs and aspirations of its poorer neighbors. The handling of the gymnasium controversy thus came, even somewhat unfairly, to epitomize the conflict between the spirit of the civil rights movement and the attack on poverty, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ways of an ancien regime. Energetic and idealistic students, alienated from the older generation by an extraordinarily wide gulf in manners and interests and offended by the plethora of human suffering, were drawn to the side of change. Where they were frustrated by the massive anonymity of the government and the unmanageability of the social system...