The Ancien Régime crisis (Summary)
At 18th century most of Europe lived under the Ancien Régime social and political system:
- Unequal society divided in groups marked by birth (estates):
- Privileged: owned most of the land and public positions. Didn't pay taxes.
- Nobility
- Clergy
- Unprivileged: they had to pay taxes.
- Peassants: worked the land for the privileged.
- Urban working classes: manufacturing workers, servants, soldiers...
- Bourgeoisie: Artisans, merchants and bankers.
- Absolute Monarchy controlled the trhee branches of state: legislative, executive and judicial).
- Subsistence farming was the most important economic activity, based on the crop rotation system.
 |
| www.oneyoungindia.com |
The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that developed in Europe during 18th century that criticised the Ancien Régime, based on reason, education, tolerance, freedom and equality. Thinkers believed in a new gobernment system called political liberalism.
Rococo was an art style from the 18th century elegant and ornated.
Neoclasicism style replaced the excesive decoration of the Rococo and involved simplicity and return to classical art.
VOCABULARY
- Colonial trade: European maritime trade with colonies in other continents.
- Crop rotation: a system of growing a sequence of different crops on the same land.
- Economic liberalism: the belief that defens private propierty and the freedom of trade and industry.
- Enciclopédie: a written compilation of knowledge.
- Nobility: People of the highest social group in society, the aristocracy.
- Peassant/farmer: a person who work on the land, producing crops.
- Physiocracy: the belief that the true source of wealth is the land and its natural products.
- Slavery: the system by wich people are owned by other people as slaves and forced to work.
- Subsistence farming: agriculture wich produces only enough for people to live on.
- Tithe: a fixed and regular amount of money or goods that was given to suport a church, a priest or charity.
Comentarios