Appendix 2- The Ancien Regime

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Appendix two, the Ancien Regime. One of the inspirations for the revolutions podcast is an old, old book called Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton. It first came out in 1939, so it's an old, old book. Brinton set out to compare and contrast four great revolutions. The English revolution, the American revolution, the French revolution, and the Russian revolution, and then attempt to identify enough structural similarities between them to at least gesture in the direction of the existence of a uniform process for all revolutions. I read Anatomy of Revolution once when I was young and then came back around to it much later in life just as I was wrapping up the history of Rome. And if you don't remember this story, what happened is I reread Anatomy of Revolution because I was taking a class at the University of Texas where I had to write a paper about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Movement. The paper I wrote applied the patterns Brinton identified in Anatomy of Revolution to the United Farm Workers Movement. Writing that paper is when the idea for the Revolutions podcast first struck me. So here we are about a decade later coming back around to follow in Brinton's footsteps. Not to copy his model, but to walk through the 10 examples that we have at our disposal to identify in our own way and to our own satisfaction what kind of identifiable patterns exist within the random chaos of revolutionary history. Now, as we go through this process over the next several appendices, we will be sticking tight to my boring thesis that major historical ruptures like revolutions are the result of individual agency acting upon large structural conditions. Both factors need to be taken into account when describing the development and unfolding of a revolution. But hopefully, along the way, we'll find some similarities both in the structures, the larger forces impacting events, and also the decisions made by individual actors. All revolutions, after all, must have at least a few things in common. Otherwise, they wouldn't be recognizable as the same type of thing. So I want to begin where all revolutions begin, with an existing political structure. You can't have a revolution without something to overthrow, something to turn the regime into the Alsion regime. If you've read around in revolutionary history, you'll find historians and authors often using that term. Ancien Regime, which was obviously first applied in terms of the French Revolution, to any pre revolutionary state, whether we're talking about czarist Russia, the Mexican Porfiriato, or the kingdoms of Charles Stewart. And one thing English speakers need to always be aware of is that the word ancien can be a bit of a foamy, a false friend. It looks very much like we're talking about an ancient regime. Something deeply rooted in the past. A sovereign entity that has prevailed for time immemorial and whose roots stretch deep into …