Ci-devant

"Ci-devant" may be compared to the English language term late (as in deceased), as it expresses the (figurative) death of the nobility during the legislative agenda of the Revolution.

Prior to the Revolution, the term ci-devant was a common expression, although then it was used to refer to aristocrats who had fallen into financial or social ruin - namely "people or things dispossessed of their estate or quality.

The term could also be used to refer to areas noted for their high levels of royalist sympathy or aristocratic communities - such as les ci-devants de Coblence, with Coblence (Koblenz) being the town where many exiled aristocrats had fled during the first two years of the revolution and where many of their early plans to restore the monarchy were distilled.

For example, in the novel The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), the aristocrat Baroness Orczy refers to "ci-devant counts, marquises, even dukes, who wanted to fly from France, reach England or some other equally accursed country, and there try to rouse foreign feeling against the glorious Revolution or to raise an army in order to liberate the wretched prisoners in the Temple, who had once called themselves sovereigns of France.

"[2] Similarly, Joseph Conrad in The Rover (published 1923, set during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period) wrote of a "hunter of the ci-devants and priests, purveyor of the guillotine, in short a blood-drinker.