UNIT 1. THE ANCIEN REGIME

 

UNIT 1. THE ANCIEN REGIME

CARICATURE DEPICTING THE SOCIETY OF THE ANCIEN REGIME

The image perfectly represents how the society at the end of the 18th, in which the Third State (humble classes of society) sustained the Second and Third States (Aristocracy and the Church mainly).

 

ACTIVITY 1. The  SOCIAL PYRAMID of the Ancien Regime

a) Describe the characteristics of the state society, specifying what aspect determined its division and analyzing each group.

b) Reasons why it was a static and unequal society

 

ACTIVITY 2. The  ABSOLUTE MONARCHY  during the Ancien Regime

Below is the image of the "Sun King". Taking into account the ABSOLUTISM aspects we have studied in class, it answers the following questions:

 a) What KING is this?

b) What PHRASE is attributed to this monarch who also sums up in herself the spirit of ABSOLUTISM during the Ancien Regime?

c) Explains in detail what are the CHARACTERISTICS of the ABSOLUTE MONARCHY.

 

ACTIVITY 3. THE ENLICHTMENT

Carefully read the following short texts from three thinkers in the Enlightenment.

 

Now answer the following questions:

a) What is the MAIN IDEA that follows from each of the texts separately?

b) Develop a small SCHEME in which you are able to include the IDEOLOGICAL BASES of the ENLIGHTMENT.

 

ACTIVITY 4. ILLUSTRATED DESPOTISM

Below is an opinion text by the historian José Luis Gómez Urdánez, Professor of Modern History at the University of La Rioja, appeared in La Vanguardia..

The most praised king in the history of Spain was first and foremost a religious man in the extreme, and his conception of the monarchy was that of the absolute king to which God would ask more responsibility than  others. Baretti says he was "always the enemy of all sorts of innovations."

He was cruel on some occasions,for example, to his brother Don Luis, whom he removed the surname Bourbon and expelled from the court, and with Olavide, whose prison and sentence was always agreed with his plaácet.

And yet he was an enlightened king and modernizer. He knew how to do without doing,or what is the same, he let his ministers rule, who never forgot the limits that the king would not allow to exceed. But that was the reforms of Charles III, and there were few.

The disastrous reign of his son, the final crisis of the dynasty in Bayonne and the impossibility of recalling with some enthusiasm his father Philip V and his half-brother Ferdinand VI,led theLiberals to create the myth of the progressive king – the one they needed and did not have – although already alive, the  illustrators of Charles III took care of "to pave His Majesty's way of Glory".

Answers the following questions:

a) Which king does this text refer to?

b) What 18th-century political concept does it refer to?

c) What phrase summarizes the fundamental ideas of this policy?

d) Prepare a short SHEME in which you include its OBJECTIVES.

 

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IT HAS HELPED YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PART OF THE STORY

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