 The theme recurs throughout nineteenth-century French literature, with Balzac and Flaubert alike attacking the mores of the new upper classes.To this mindset, the Ancien Régime expressed a bygone era of refinement and grace, before the Revolution and its associated changes disrupted the aristocratic tradition and ushered in a crude, uncertain modernity.The historian Alexis de Tocqueville argued against this defining narrative in his classic study, "L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution", highlighting the continuities between pre- and post-revolutionary French institutions.