Ancien Régime Criticisms: Enlightenment Perspectives on 18th Century Society

Criticism of the Ancien Régime

Throughout the 18th century, the prevailing system was characterized by political absolutism, a feudal estate society, and a fundamentally agrarian economy. Enlightenment thought, in its most radical version, pointed out its shortcomings and inefficiencies:

Key Shortcomings and Inefficiencies

• Legal Inequality of Estate Society

  Society was divided into estates or social classes with different rights, duties, and privileges, determined by birth and social status, rather than individual ability or merit. This system reflected a rigid hierarchy that limited social mobility and consolidated the power of certain (privileged) classes over others (the Third Estate).

• Survival of a Feudal Economy

  Although there had been a growth in trade and markets, fiefs, privileged corporations (guilds), price controls, and goods that could not be sold or bought prevented the full development of the free market.

• Obstacles to Free Thought and Civil Rights

  The power of kings and the Church, and their ability to influence laws, limited the exercise of new ideas, individual rights, and freedom of expression (censorship).

• Survival of the Seigneurial Regime

  The Church and the nobility maintained their fiefs in which the inhabitants had to work for their lords, pay them taxes, and remain subject to their laws. Under these conditions, anyone who was not a master was therefore a subject or a servant.

  Subjects were the set of inhabitants of a kingdom, regardless of their status, and owed obedience and loyalty to the monarch. Serfs were people subject to a lord as inhabitants of his fiefdom, in which they had to work and provide services in exchange for protection and the right to cultivate for their subsistence. Although they were not slaves in the strict sense (they could not be sold as commodities), their personal freedom was very limited, and they could not leave their master's fief without his permission.

Faced with this situation, the bourgeoisie (professionals in crafts, commerce, finance, law, medicine, etc.), which had increased its wealth and influence during the Modern Age, perceived its marginalization in the face of privileged social groups, sometimes less wealthy than themselves, as unjustified.