The Ancien Regime? Flashcards
What does JCD Clark say of the ‘Ancien Regime’, broadly?
‘The social formation, alternatively pictured as “Church and King,” “Old Corruption” or an “ancien regime” was intelligible in all parts of England (in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales it took different forms)
The Confessional state
JCD Clark
‘confessional state’
a) everyone goes to church
b) not everyone goes, but everyone is of the same denomination
c) society where “parsons controlled their communities in thought and deed” (Phillps)
d) a society with no challenges to hierarchy (‘deference predominated’)
If none of this ever existed, so the idea of a ‘world we have lost’ dissolves
There was Anglican conformity, and little atheism
19th century, ‘steep rise in dissent’
decline of Anglican attendance
What does JCD Clark say of the character of the ancien regime
The term ‘ancien regime’ moves further from the status of a reification the more we emphasize the continuities between the worlds on either side of a hypothetical watershed, whether 1641, 1688, or 1832: properly, our picture of the regime becomes less monolithic, more dependent on contingency
How was dissent conceived of in the ‘Ancien Regime’? Religious dissent
Under George III, George Horne, William Smith, William Stevens (Anglicans) dwelt on positive duty of obedience to acceptable monarchs.
Were these doctrines, when preached during the American rebellion, evidence of new ‘resurgence of authoritarianism’, or part of a long-held doctrine for the state?
- during American Rebellion, ‘clergy continued to deplore ‘licentiousness and insubordination’
‘Stock phrases like “mutinous licentious spirit” or a “restless and factious spirit” disclosed an understanding of the problem as intellectual or moral, and as a frenzy rather than the cool effects of popular political organization
JCD Clark on demonstrating the existence of an ancien regime
Anglican vicars sometimes disrespected by their paritioners, and ‘sometimes confided their complaints in their diaries
John Skinner records ‘daily antagoism’ (Clark)
BUT
Should not overstate extent of conflict
Examples, like William Cole, recorded local poor dining in his kitchen
problems with ‘over-zealous choirs or too-enthusiastic bellringers, the sort of conflicts which occur when popular participation is at a high, not a low, level.
intoxication, fights
‘it was remarkable that men should be so determined to attend their parish church, even though drunk, or even if sufficiently rough in their manners to fight each other.’
How conscious were priests of dissent in their parishes?
SIGNIFICANT EVIDENCE OF A CONFESSIONAL STATE
469
the social code went wrong when it had to be implemented by tactless, rigid, intolerant, or paranoid individuals like the Rev. John Skinner.
What world view do the diaries disclose?
‘clergymen perceived threats to their social hegemony in terms of rival sectarian allegiance, not just in terms of proletarian rebellion against “deference.”
William Cole (1714-1782): ‘…the Parish swarms with Methodists’
patriarchal.
‘Rev. Legh Richmond (1797): ‘From a point of land which commanded a view…I used sometimes for a while to watch my congregation gradually assembling…How beautifully does this represent the effect produced by the voice of “the good Shepherd,” calling his sheep…’
JCD Clark’s criticisms of John Phillips’ enquiry into the confessional state
John Phillips: surely, if a confessional state existed anywhere, it must be visible in the diaries of Anglican clergymen
An opposite hypothesis seems as plausible: diarists often confide their sufferings to their journals, and in the case of the clergy these sufferings might often arise from affronts to the ideals of harmony, piety, or deference to which they think respect is due
JCD Clark’s stated aims
to argue against the familiar picture of eighteenth century England as the era of bourgeois individualism by showing the persistence of the ancien regime until 1828-32, and the autonomous importance of religion and politics in its final demise (2)
Penelope Corfield’s view of J C D Clark’s work
Penelope J. Corfield
J.C.D. Clark’s English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice:
during the Ancien Regime.
Above all, Clark’s provocative summary of eighteenth-century England as ‘Christian, monarchical,
aristocratic, rural, traditional and poor’ hardly captures the country that produced the steam engine and gained a global empire.
In particular, as Britain’s imperial history returns into the
mainstream,purely insular interpretations will not suffice.
Joanna Innes, review of JCD Clark: Summary of confessional state
In Clark’s account politics loom large, while religion occupies the floodlit centre of the stage. Until 1832, we are informed, England was a “confessional state”.
Varieties of religious belief dominated the minds of men and shaped their political projects and allegiances. Not social change, but heterodoxy or “heresy” was the chief destabilizing force at work, undermining the foundations of England’s “ancien regime” - until, with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and Catholic emancipation in 1829, two essential props of the old order were removed, and the whole edifice came crashing precipitately down.
How does Innes criticise Clark
Caricatures other work and fails to profit from it
We may need a new agenda for eighteenth-century English social history. This is not it.
Overly political - called ‘English Society 1688-1832’ (a Social History defined by political events like the Glorious Revolution and the Great Reform Act??)
INCONSISTENCY
- Clark: England was able to remain a monarchical, deferential “confessional state” for so long (one might
well suppose the argument to run) because it remained a relatively “backward” society. I
- Later: - that it is not
possible to assert of a society that it “has” any particular character;
we can only note that its members perceive it in one or another fashion
POOR IDEAS ABOUT ECONOMY
- Inspired, it seems, by the conviction that any who do not recognize eighteenth-century England as a profoundly traditional society must
envisage it as sliding along inflexible rails en route to modernization, Clark pays all too little heed to a substantial body of work which, whatever its faults, merits no such cavalier dismissal.
Joanna Innes, review of JCD Clark: Summary of his book
The consensual view as described by Clark might be termed “Whig- Marxist reductionism: History is assumed to have a necessary direction, and social and economic change are held both to provide the motor for and to determine the course of historical development
these forces figure as corrosive
forces, progressively sapping away the foundations of the old social and political order
CLARKS VIEW OF THIS
- rejection of both teleology and determinism
- Clark’s doubts about the substance of (what he has presented as)
- the orthodox account focus on the portrayal of eighteenth-century England as a rapidly and ineluctably “modernizing” society. Drawing on recent work by economic historians, Clark claims that there was
no eighteenth-century “Industrial Revolution”: no sudden spurt of growth. The eighteenth-century English economy remained predominantly agricultural
CLARKS ALTERNATIVE VISION
- This society was not without its destabilizing forces. But these were in no way the product of dynamic social change. Dynastic rivalries
were the source of the most significant threats to the stability of early eighteenth-century England; religious heterodoxy - and the so- called “radical” political views religious heterodoxy nurtured - the
major challenge facing the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century establishment
- the legislative dismantling of the “confessional state” in 1828-9 once more cleansed the slate and made possible the emergence of a new political discourse.1
Joanne Innes on JCD Clark’s Radicalism and Dissenters
IMPORTANT HISTORIOGRAPHY
IMPORTANT COMMENTS ON RADICALISM
Clark devotes the penultimate chapter of his book to a reinterpretation of “radicalism”, the final chapter to an account of the nineteenth- century demise of the “ancien regime”
Finding the “radicalism” historians have conventionally studied too flimsy a construct, he attempts to supply it with some coherence by identifying a solid core for it in the intellectual activity of sequence of heterodox Dissenters
small knots of enthusiasts scattered throughout the country arose time after time in the vanguard of petitioning campaigns; the same people who agitated for parliametary reform might well be active in campaigns for the reform of the church, of local government, of the penal laws, and of the slave trade
BUT
None the less a good case can be made for not attempting to dragoon complex and fluid patterns of activity into too neatly marshalled an order
HOWEVER
This is not the approach to rethinking “radicalism” that Clark adopts. Finding the “radicalism” historians have conventionally studied too flimsy a construct, he attempts to supply it with some coherence by identifying a solid core for it in the intellectual activity of a sequence of heterodox Dissenters
Even if heterodoxy and political radicalism were often closely correlated with one another, it does not follow that the first always gave rise to the second
Joanna Innes on The idea of an ancien regime ?
IMPORTANT
Here we have a society whose place in the world was changing very significantly over precisely the period we are concerned with. It is
clear that these larger changes had an impact on government, on the economy - and, one would assume, on society and on the intellectual
life of the time.108 Yet Clark presents us with a “Little England”, sunk in its pre-industrial ways, dominated by an idle and self- absorbed hereditary elite who are accorded deference
Joanna Innes - how closely did Britain align with other states?
- exceptionally urbanized among eighteenth-century
European societies - An exceptionally large proportion of England’s employed population appears to have been concentrated in the manufacturing sector
- England had swung around from being an importer of a
wide range of manufactured goods, and an exporter of unprocessed and semi-processed goods, to being an importer chiefly of raw materials and an exporter of colonially produced raw materials and
domestic manufacturer - at political arrangements (representative institutions) co-existed with an impressively
powerful central state apparus
Joanna Innes on the origins of the term ‘Ancien Regime’
The term “ancien regime” was initially coined by aspiring re-
formers in late eighteenth-century France as a shorthand term for those features of the old social and political order which they hoped to be able to sweep away
in the course of time the phrase has also come to be accepted as a shorthand term for a whole slice of time, variously defined but perhaps taking in the entire seventeenth and eighteenth century
JCD Clark (BOOK) on conceptualising the Ancien Regime
- ‘The Ancien regime, then, was not a thing, a stable, ‘traditional’, unchanging social form supported by deference, a system which was finally destroyed; what is addressed under that title is a hegemonic set of ideas which provided the ideological framework within which changes happened - that is, within which changes were perceived.
- Destruction was a ‘redefinition of categories and a shift of values which historians cannot exonerate as inevitable.’
PRIMARY SOURCE Samuel Horseley on the Confessional State
- ‘The bulk of the people submit with much complacency, to the religion of the state; and, where no undue arts are employed to perplex their understandings, do not usually trouble themselves or their neighbours with theological niceties’
PRIMARY SOURCE: William Wilberforce on the Confessional State
- ‘If a man was born in a Christian country, of course he is a Christian; his father was a member of the church of England, so is he.’
Broadly, the nature of religious belief in Britain in the 18th century
- The church was religious, not secular
- rather than an ‘antithesis between science and religion, ‘remarkable alliance with emergent national science’
- few were openly athiests
- declining belief in miracles, but steady trust of providence
BUT - ‘Daily life was widely secular in our sense’
JCD Clark on the middle class and the Ancien Regime (BOOK)
IMPORTANT
- It is suggested here that the middling orders and the proletarians were not yet categorised as classes…Most groups which proved themselves effective spanned the social range and had elite leadership as well as support among the middle ranks.
Views of Charles Wesley on subordination and dissent, and Wilkes
PRIMARY SOURCE: Calm Address
JCD Clark
THOUGHTS UPON LIBERTY and THOUGHTS CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF POWER 1772/3
ON SUBORDINATION
CLARK: Johnson, in familiar Anglican fashion, claimed ‘allegiance and subordination were natural, not contractual’
- the consent of individuals is merely passive, a tacit admission in every community of terms which that community grants and requires.’
- We have a few men in England, who are determined enemies to Monarchy
ON WILKES
- not right that ‘every Cobler, Tinker, Porter, Hackney-Coachman’ was talking about politics
- George III’s conduct fitting of ‘an Englishman, worthy of a Christian, and worthy of a king.’
- Wilkes’ propaganda was ‘poison’
- Clark: Anglican case against the contractarian origins of power
Paul Langford on the Ancien regime
V Short introduction
Of great constitutional changes there were few indeed; the torrent of agitation and reform which threatened the ancien régime in the nineteenth century seems in retrospect an unconscionable time arriving.
Yet appearances in this sense were deeply deceptive. The language, the objectives, even the mechanics of politics were all influenced by awareness of a large political people which lay beyond the immediate world of Whitehall and Westminster. If nothing else the power and bitterness of the polemical warfare which occurred in newspapers, prints, and pamphlets in the 1750s and 1760s would be adequate testimony to the vitality of public debate and the concern of politicians to engage in it.
