The Old Regime and the Revolution

Summary

The Old Regime and the Revolution (L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution), published in Paris in June 1856, is Alexis de Tocqueville's study of France before 1789. Its argument is that the Revolution, which its makers believed had broken French history in two, in fact completed a work the monarchy had long been doing: the concentration of power in a central administration and the levelling of the French into similar, separated individuals. Tocqueville based the book on years of reading in the archives of the old intendancies, especially at Tours, and in the registers of grievances of 1789. The library text is John Bonner's translation, published in New York by Harper & Brothers in the same year, complete with appendix and notes but taken from a scanned copy in which scanning errors remain. Bonner arranges the work in two books, the second of twenty chapters, where the French editions have three. Book I clears the ground. Contemporaries saw the Revolution as monstrous or miraculous; its real aim was not to destroy religion or weaken authority but to abolish the remains of feudal institutions and establish a more uniform and powerful public order. It spread across borders like a religious revolution, preaching rights for all humanity, and it swept away institutions that were decaying everywhere in Europe. Book II explains why it happened in France. Feudal dues were hated most where they were lightest, because the French peasant already owned land but still paid dues to a lord who no longer governed him. Administrative centralization, usually credited to the Revolution and Napoleon, was the work of the old monarchy: the royal council, the controller-general and some thirty intendants, with their subdelegates, managed taxes, roads, poor relief and parish affairs, and officials could be tried only by administrative courts. Paris drew the life of the provinces to itself. The French had grown more alike in ideas and manners than any other people, yet were divided into small groups, nobles, bourgeois, peasants and guilds, each jealous of its own exemptions and indifferent to the rest; Tocqueville calls the loss of political liberty and this division the diseases of which the old regime died. Some liberty survived in the parlements, the clergy and the independence of officials, but the peasant was left isolated, burdened with the taille and the corvée and abandoned by the nobles who had moved to the towns. Men of letters, who had no experience of public business, became the country's political leaders and spread abstract, simple theories of society; irreligion became a general passion; and the Economists (the physiocrats) sought reform through an enlightened central power rather than through liberty. Under Louis XVI, the most prosperous era of the monarchy, the government's own attempts at reform and relief inflamed resentment, taught the people to expect everything from the state, and showed that grievances once relieved become harder to bear. The Revolution, Tocqueville concludes, sprang out of these facts. An appendix describes Languedoc, a province that kept its own estates.

Top Lessons

• Revolutions inherit more than they destroy

  The men of 1789 believed they were making a clean break. Tocqueville shows that centralization, the habit of looking to the state for everything, and the separation of classes all came from the old monarchy and passed intact into the new order. A people cannot easily escape its own history.

• Grievances grow sharper as they lighten

  Tocqueville observes that the Revolution broke out where feudal burdens were lightest and in the most prosperous reign of the monarchy. Evils endured as inevitable become intolerable once escape seems possible, and partial relief makes the remaining burdens more keenly felt.

• Equality without liberty isolates

  The French had become alike in manners and ideas but had lost the habits of acting together. Each class guarded its own exemptions, and every local question went to an official. Tocqueville argues that only free institutions, in which citizens manage common affairs, can draw people out of this isolation.

• Ideas without experience

  The men of letters who led French opinion had no share in public business and therefore preferred simple, general systems to the complicated practice of law and custom. Tocqueville thought this made the Revolution bold in theory and careless of the traditions that might have restrained it.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Tocqueville often reasons in medical images: Book II, ch. 10 speaks of the diseases of which the old regime died, and ch. 16 ends its argument about reform with the image of a patient whose pain is lessened but whose sensibility has grown. The image recalls the period's language of political pathology rather than any medical theory. The chapters on the peasantry and on the government's relief efforts (chs. 12 and 17) document dearth, begging and the charity workshops and distributions of corn and rice managed by the intendants, material useful for the history of poor relief and public assistance before the Revolution.

• Book II, ch. 16

  Evils patiently endured become intolerable once escape seems possible; the pain lessened, the patient's sensibility greater.

• Book II, chs. 12 and 17

  The peasant's condition in years of dearth, and the intendants' relief measures, which publicized the misery they meant to ease.