From the Church to the State and to Lordship

Despite a succession of advances and setbacks observed here and there, the suppression of regular religion in the age of revolution represented a definitive and irreversible process of the ascendancy of new social groups and classes and, at the same time, the suppression of the power of the two pillars of the ancien régime: the clergy and the nobility. It was also the nation that asserted itself as a “new historical actor”, with a new political and social agency of its own, and also with a new ambition for property and patrimony.