Word: ancien
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Marat starts with the support of his countrymen, but his motives for joining and ultimately leading the Revolution are slowly twisted at de Sade's beckoning. His supporters accuse him of joining the Revolution only after having failed to gain fame in the ancien regime, he is shown to be a loser and a power-hungry wretch. In the end, Marat himself is convinced by these torturers of his own base motives. He asks himself, "Each argument was true...and now...why does everything sound so false?" as they cheer him on sarcastically: "Marat for Dictator!" And all the while...
...Clinton, New York was a must-win state. A loss to Brown would reignite efforts among Democratic insiders to find another candidate. But Brown's slashing street attacks have eroded Clinton's claim to be the agent of change against Bush's ancien regime. "Clinton is the personification of a system and a politics that don't work," Brown barked. "I constitute a challenge to the failed status quo." Only in the last few days of the campaign, when Clinton loosened up and displayed more passion on the stump, did he seem to hit his stride...
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama (1989). An immensely readable work of distinguished scholarship that guillotined many of the romantic myths about the beginnings of French democracy, notably that the ancien regime was hopelessly reactionary and the masses supported free trade and religious toleration...
...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...