Interpreting the Ancien Régime by David Bien (review)

François Furet considered David Bien to be the ‘premier’ historian of Old Regime France. In this volume, editors Rafe Blaufarb, Michael Christofferson, and Darrin McMahon have assembled the first collection of Bien’s major English-language articles. The Preface by Keith Baker and Introduction by Christofferson offer valuable insights into Bien’s intellectual formation at Harvard in the 1950s, his staunchly empirical methodology, and the crucial role he played in the development and spread of the revisionist movement in French Revolutionary historiography. The enormous influence of Bien’s work must be attributed to quality rather than quantity. Bien was not a theorist despite his career coinciding with the rise of French theory. Rather than opining on Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu, Bien was in the best sense of the term ‘an archive rat wary of bold, unnuanced conclusions’ (p. 20). His insistence on strict empiricism also meant that he was not a prolific publisher by today’s standards: he wrote a single monograph on the Calas Affair and around twenty articles. This book contains nine of his best-known articles, only three of which are available through online databases. It also includes an interview transcript (Chapter 11) and a fascinating, previously unpublished essay on the ‘nobilities’ of Toulouse (Chapter 10). Notable articles on aristocratic reactionism in the French army (Annales E.S.C., 1–2 (1974)) and on offices, corps, and state credit (in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, I: The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford: Pergamon, 1987), and Annales E.S.C., 2 (1988)) have been omitted, although Christofferson weaves details of their findings into his Introduction. The selected pieces distil Bien’s methods and primary thematic foci: religious tolerance (Chapters 1 and 2); nobility, the commodification of ennoblement, and state finance (Chapters 3 to 6); the growth of professionalism, particularly in the military (Chapters 8 and 9); and burgeoning democratic culture (Chapter 7). Two chapters are of particular pedagogical interest. Chapter 3, ‘Aristocracy’, presents a synthesis of Bien’s extensive exploration of the evolving meaning of nobility. Bien traces the fulmination of many categories of nobility born of the crown’s fiscal dependence on the sale of venal offices. In a similar vein, Chapter 11’s interview transcript conveys a panoramic definition of the Ancien Régime from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Bien proffers clear and illuminating commentary on the social, political, economic, and cultural characteristics that made France unique compared with other European states (Prussia, Poland, and England). An important complement to Tocqueville and Beyond: Essays on the Old Regime in Honor of David D. Bien (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), this volume will be of use to specialists in search of archival details, to those interested in the rise of Furetian revisionism, and to professors and students alike who can benefit from Bien’s ‘profound, well-written, empirically grounded work, which is a model of historical scholarship — the historian’s craft at its finest’ (p. 1). The chapters impart Bien’s wise recommendations to question our historian heroes, as he did Tocqueville and Furet, and to bring critical perspectives to long-held assumptions and generalizations in order to discern the complexities and paradoxes of the Ancien Régime.