Alexis de Tocqueville: The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution

“Democratic societies that are not free may yet be rich, refined, ornate, and even magnificent,
powerful by dint of their homogeneous mass. One may find in such societies many private
virtues, good fathers, honest merchants, and worthy landowners. One may even come across
good Christians, since the true Christian’s homeland is not of this world and the glory of the
Christian faith is to have produced good people in the midst of the worst corruption and under
the vilest governments. The Roman Empire in its uttermost decadence was full of them. But
what one will never find in such societies, I make bold to assert, is great citizens, much less a
great people, and I maintain without fear of contradiction that the common level of hearts and
minds will steadily diminish so long as equality and despotism remain conjoined.” (Foreword).

Main Question: How could this work be characterized as one of social science, as distinct from
history or abstract political philosophy?

Three examples of many of Tocqueville’s structural, sociological, and psychological mode of

analysis:

1) “If the French peasant had still been subject to the administration of his lord, feudal
dues would have seemed far less unbearable to him” (p. 37). Just as the royal militia
replaced the nobles in their military function, so did the royal intendant and his
subdélégué replace the seigneur in his administrative function. And just as the tax
exemption fueled the envy of the bourgeois for the nobles, so did the withdrawal of the
nobles from local administration fuel the hatred the peasantry felt for them.

2) At the beginning of Book II, he asks why the Revolution occurred in France rather than in
Germany, given that feudal burdens were lighter in France. Somehow, “their yoke
seemed most unbearable where in fact its burden was lightest” (p. 31). The resolution of
the paradox is that in Germany the nobles still performed the administrative functions
that justified their appropriation of feudal benefits.

3) “The half-measures that were imposed on the enemies of the Church at that time did
not diminish their power but rather increased it.... Authors were persecuted just enough
to elicit complaint but not enough to provoke fear. They were subjected to enough
restraint to provoke resistance but not to the heavy yoke that might quell it.”

De Tocqueville’s main question: Not why Revolutions happen, nor why this revolution
happened, but why did this Revolution happen in France?

“Tocqueville effect” – revolutions occur when conditions are improving, not (as Marx
sometimes asserted) when they are going from bad to worse.
Paradox of the Revolution: “Since the French Revolution had as its objective not simply to
change the existing government but to abolish the existing form of society, it was obliged
simultaneously to attack all established powers, to undermine all acknowledged influences, to
efface traditions, to renew mores and customs, and somehow to rid the human mind of all the
ideas on which respect and obedience had previously been founded. This accounts for its
singularly anarchical character. But clear away all this debris and you will see an immense and
unified central government, which has drawn in and devoured all the bits of authority and
influence that were once parceled out among a host of secondary powers, orders, classes,
professions, families, and individuals – scattered, as it were, throughout the social body.”

Essential Problem with the Aristocratic Class: “When the nobility possesses not only privileges
but also powers, when it governs and administers, its special prerogatives can be greater and
yet at the same time less noticed. In feudal times, the nobility was seen in much the same way
as we see the government today: people accepted the burdens it imposed in exchange for the
guarantees it offered. Nobles possessed irksome privileges and onerous prerogatives, but they
maintained public order, administered justice, enforced the law, came to the aid of the weak,
and took charge of common affairs. To the extent that the nobility ceases to do these things, its
privileges seem more burdensome, until ultimately it becomes impossible to understand why
they even exist.”

“Because the lord had been deprived of his former powers, he shed his former obligations. No
local authority, council, or provincial or parish association had taken his place. No one was any
longer obliged by law to take care of the rural poor. The central government had rashly
assumed sole responsibility for their needs.”

The Best of the Ancien Regime: What the Revolution Destroyed:

“We must be careful, moreover, not to measure a man’s baseness by the degree of his
submission to the sovereign power; this would prove to be a misleading gauge. However
subject the men of the Ancien Régime were to the will of the king, they were strangers to one
kind of obedience: they did not know what it was to bow to an illegitimate or contested power,
to a government that one barely honored and frequently scorned but to which one
nevertheless submitted freely because of its power to help or harm. That degraded form of
servitude was always alien to them. The king inspired sentiments that not even the most
absolute rulers who have arisen in the world since then have been able to evoke – sentiments
that have become all but incomprehensible to us because of the degree to which the
Revolution plucked their roots from our hearts. Toward him they felt both the tender affection
that one feels for a father and the respect that one owes only to God. In obeying his most
arbitrary commands, they surrendered less to compulsion than to love, and often they
maintained a very free spirit even in conditions of the utmost dependence. For them, the
greatest evil in obedience was that it should be coerced; for us it is the least. The worst part of
obedience is the servile sentiment from which it stems. Let us not despise our fathers; we have
no right to do so. May it please God that we may recover, along with their prejudices and faults,
a little of their grandeur! It would therefore be quite wrong to believe that the Ancien Régime
was a time of servility and dependence. Liberty was far more prevalent.”

Excellent Summary of the Thesis:

Book II, 12: “Astonishment will forever greet the ruins of the great House of France, which had
once seemed destined to rule all Europe, but those who study its history carefully will have no
difficulty understanding its fall. Nearly all the unfortunate defects, errors, and prejudices I have
just described owe either their origin, duration, or development to the skill that most of our
kings have had in dividing men in order to govern them more absolutely. But when the
bourgeois had thus been isolated from the noble, and the peasant from the noble and
bourgeois, and when, by a similar process within each class, there emerged distinct small
groups almost as isolated from one another as the classes were, it became clear that the whole
society had been reduced to a homogeneous mass with nothing to hold its parts together.
Nothing was left that could obstruct the government, nor anything that could shore it up. Thus,
the princely magnificence of the whole edifice could collapse all at once, in the blink of an eye,
the moment the society that served as its foundation began to tremble. And finally, the people,
who alone seemed to have profited from the blunders and errors of all their masters – although
they did, in fact, manage to escape the dominion of their rulers, they were unable to shake off
the yoke of false ideas, corrupt habits, and wicked inclinations that those rulers had imparted to
them or allowed them to acquire. At times we find the people bringing the tastes of slaves with
them into the very exercise of freedom, as incapable of governing themselves as they were
unforgiving of their teachers.”

A Message to Americans in 2023?

Book III: “With those who denied Christianity raising their voices and those who still believed
remaining silent, what happened was something we have often seen since that time, not only in
religion but in every other area as well. People who clung to the old faith were afraid that no
one else remained faithful, and, dreading isolation more than error, they joined the crowd
without sharing its ideas. What was still the sentiment of only part of the nation therefore
appeared to be the opinion of all, and thus seemed irresistible to the very people who created
that false appearance.”