France of the ancien régime has acquired a legendary aura, for better or worse. The 150 years preceding the Revolution were felt by many living at the time (or at least many of the privileged few) to be a summit of European civilization, worthy of being set alongside Pericles's Athens or Augustan Rome. Even today, they exert their ambiguous fascination on nostalgic or not-so-nostalgic observers. They can be seen as a high point of what Norbert Elias called the ‘civilizing process’, the triumph of politeness. In the eighteenth century, Voltaire and others were elaborating the myth of the ‘siécle de Louis le Grand’ (as Perrault put it); later, Clive Bell was to cite Voltaire's own society as one of his examples of ‘civilization’, a period characterized by reason, tolerance and elegant sociability. Less agreeably though, this is the time of what Michel Foucault called ‘le grand renfermement’, when popular and irrational beliefs were squeezed into the margins, locked away by the onward march of a repressive rationalism. Or else it is the old regime, a hierarchical age when the polite orders controlled and exploited a largely peasant society.

These grand images, like most other historical generalizations, are easily disproved or subverted. Even so, they seem to me a good starting point, for they are linked to problems that continue to beset those who live in ‘civilized’ Western nations and produce or consume polite culture.