AP® European History review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/euro/units/5/5-1)
Unit 5 · Topic 5.1
5.1 Contextualizing 18th-Century States
In the 1700s European states fought expensive wars over land, trade and colonies, and the bills piled up as debt. At the same time, Enlightenment ideas and a growing reading public made people question the Old Regime of kings, privileged nobles and established churches, setting up the revolutions of the late 1700s.
Key terms
- balance of power
- Old Regime
- mercantilism
- national debt
- popular sovereignty
See it on a map: 1789: On the eve of the French Revolution
The Old Regime
Historians use Old Regime (in French, ancien régime) for European society before the French Revolution. Its features: a monarch ruling by hereditary right, often claiming divine right; society divided into legal orders or estates, each with different rights; nobles and clergy holding privileges such as tax exemptions and special courts; an official church; and, in the east, serfdom.
Privilege was the key idea. Rights belonged to groups, like a noble family, a guild, a town or a province, rather than to all individuals equally.
Competition and its costs
States competed constantly under the balance of power (see 3.6). After the War of the Spanish Succession came the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), in which Prussia's Frederick the Great seized Silesia, and the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), fought in Europe, North America, the Caribbean and India. These were world wars over empire and trade as well as European borders.
Wars were paid for largely by borrowing. Britain financed its debt through Parliament and the Bank of England and paid low interest. France borrowed at higher rates and could not tax its privileged nobles and clergy effectively. By 1788, paying interest on debt took about half of French royal spending. Britain's own war debts led it to tax its American colonies, which sparked the American Revolution.
New ideas, new public
Enlightenment writers questioned privilege and argued that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed. Popular sovereignty is the idea that ultimate political authority belongs to the people, not the monarch. Rousseau's general will and Locke's government by consent pushed in this direction (see 4.3).
These ideas reached a broad public through newspapers, pamphlets, salons and coffeehouses (see 4.5). Public opinion became a political force; even absolute kings now had to justify their policies. The American Revolution (1775–1783) then showed Europeans that a people could overthrow a king, write a constitution and found a republic based on natural rights.
Pressure from below
Population growth in the 1700s (see 4.4) pushed up demand for food and land. When harvests failed, bread prices soared, and the urban poor spent most of their income on bread. Hunger made people ready to act. Combine debt, new ideas and hunger, and the Old Regime was vulnerable, nowhere more than in France.
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Contextualizing the French Revolution
Essay practice: Write two or three sentences of context for an essay on the causes of the French Revolution.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Describe the broader situation before 1789.
- Step 2: Use specific developments: wars, debt, ideas.
- Step 3: Hand off to the argument.
Answer: Model answer: Throughout the 1700s, European states fought costly wars for territory and empire, such as the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), largely on borrowed money. Meanwhile Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau argued that legitimate authority comes from the people, and the American Revolution showed those ideas could topple a king. By the 1780s France's Old Regime faced crushing debt, a privileged elite that resisted taxation and a public increasingly willing to question royal authority.
Common mistakes
- Thinking only France had debt problems. Britain's war debts helped cause the American Revolution too; the difference was how each state managed them.
- Defining Old Regime as just the king. It means the whole system of privilege, estates, church and monarchy.
- Leaving out the American Revolution's influence. It shaped both French ideas and French finances.
On the exam
- Use this topic for context paragraphs on any essay about the French Revolution or Napoleon.
- Expect sources that criticize privilege; link them to Enlightenment ideas and popular sovereignty.
Connected topics
Videos
Check yourself
4 questions on 5.1 Contextualizing 18th-Century States. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
Under France's Old Regime, the main burden of direct taxes such as the taille fell on
Britain's efforts after 1763 to make its American colonists help pay the debts of the Seven Years' War most directly led to
Which of the following was the main reason governments such as those of Britain and France built up large debts in the 1700s?
The capitaineries were a dreadful scourge on all the occupiers of land. By this term is to be understood the paramountship of certain districts granted by the king to princes of the blood, by which they were put in possession of the property of all game, even on lands not belonging to them . . . . [B]y game must be understood, whole droves of wild boars, and herds of deer not confined by any wall or pale, but wandering at pleasure over the whole country, to the destruction of crops, and to the peopling of the galleys by wretched peasants who presumed to kill them in order to save that food which was to support their helpless children. . . .
[T]here were numerous edicts for preserving the game, which prohibited weeding and hoeing lest the young partridges should be disturbed . . . .
Source: Arthur Young, English agricultural writer, Travels in France, 1792, describing conditions he observed in 1787–1789. From James Harvey Robinson, ed., Readings in European History, 1906.
The conditions Young describes are best understood as an example of
0 of 4 answered