The Old Regime and the Revolution

Contents

1. Preliminary Notice 21 min 8

   Tocqueville presents the book as a study of the Revolution rather than a history of it. Using the 1789 cahiers and the confidential archives of the intendants, he argues that the French carried far more of the old society into the new than they believed, and sets out to explain why the Revolution broke out in France first and why the monarchy fell so suddenly. He announces a sequel running to the Empire, attacks under cover of Napoleon I the plebiscitary despotism of his own day, and restates from Democracy in America his conviction that only political freedom can counter the isolation and love of money bred by equality.

2. I.1 Opposing Judgments Passed on the French Revolution at Its Origin 10 min 6

   No great event was less foreseen than the French Revolution. Frederick the Great, the sovereigns who met at Pillnitz, Arthur Young and even Burke first mistook it for a local disorder that would weaken France or strengthen privilege, and the French themselves, judging by their instructions of 1789, feared only the Crown. As the Revolution spread across Europe, judgment swung to the opposite extreme: Maistre and the later Burke saw it as satanic or monstrous. Tocqueville proposes that his own generation, close enough to understand it and far enough to be calm, can now ask what it really destroyed and created.

3. I.2 The Fundamental and Final Object of the Revolution Was Not, as Has Been Supposed, the Destruction of Religious Authority and the Weakening of Political Power 10 min 4

   The Revolution’s hostility to religion was a passing feature, not its essence. The philosophers attacked the Church because it was a great landowner, tithe-holder and privileged political body, and religion has recovered as those privileges disappeared. Nor was the Revolution anarchic at bottom. Mirabeau told the King secretly that sweeping away parlements, provincial estates, orders and privileges served royal power. Behind the ruins stood an immense central power absorbing all the authority once scattered through society, a model that even the Revolution’s enemies in Europe have since copied.

4. I.3 Showing That the French Revolution Was a Political Revolution Which Followed the Course of Religious Revolutions, and for What Reasons 9 min 2

   The French Revolution resembled a religious revolution more than any political one. Like the Reformation, it crossed frontiers, divided nations and made converts abroad, because it addressed man in the abstract and proclaimed universal rights rather than French ones. It became a kind of religion without God or afterlife, with its own apostles and martyrs. Such appeals to natural right had failed in earlier centuries; they succeeded in the eighteenth because the condition of European societies had changed enough for men to accept a single law for all.

5. I.4 Showing That Nearly the Whole of Europe Had Had Precisely the Same Institutions, and That These Institutions Were Everywhere Falling to Pieces 11 min 6

   Across medieval Europe, from Poland to the Irish Channel, the same feudal institutions prevailed: lordships, manorial courts, dues and services, guilds, assemblies of estates. By the eighteenth century this common constitution was decaying everywhere. German free towns kept their forms without their spirit, manor rolls grew confused, and old institutions were hated the more as they grew weaker, while the new forces of royalty and administration advanced on their ruins. England had abolished feudalism in substance in the seventeenth century while keeping its forms. France must be understood within this European picture.

6. I.5 What Was the Peculiar Scope of the French Revolution 6 min 3

   Tocqueville draws his conclusions. The Revolution was neither anti-religious at heart nor anarchic; it strengthened public authority. Its one great work was to abolish the feudal institutions common to Europe and put in their place a simpler, uniform society based on equality of conditions. It completed suddenly and violently a process ten generations old, which would otherwise have happened gradually. Burke, lamenting the destruction of balances, failed to see that he was watching the end of Europe’s ancient common law. Book II will ask why this happened first in France.

7. II.1 Why Feudal Rights Had Become More Odious to the People in France than in Any Other Country 24 min 19

   The Revolution broke out where feudal burdens were lightest. German peasants were still largely serfs owing heavy labour; the French peasant had been free for centuries and already owned much of the land, a subdivision of property that long predated 1789. Tocqueville lists the surviving seigneurial rights: labour dues, tolls, banalités, lods et ventes, perpetual rents and the Church’s tithe. Because the peasant was an owner and the lord no longer governed, protected or judged, these dues looked like pure exactions, and the surviving remnant of feudalism became a hundred times more hateful.

8. II.2 Showing That Administrative Centralisation Is an Institution Anterior in France to the Revolution of 1789, and Not the Product of the Revolution or of the Empire, as Is Commonly Said 22 min 10

   Administrative centralisation was not created by the Revolution or by Napoleon; it was the one part of the monarchy’s constitution that survived 1789. Beneath the tangle of venal offices and old authorities stood a new machine: the King’s Council, the Controller-General, and in each province an intendant with his subdelegates. They fixed and assessed the taille and other taxes, ran the militia, public works and the Ponts et Chaussées, kept order through the mounted police, issued countless regulations, relieved the poor through charitable workshops and even told peasants and artisans how to farm and manufacture.

9. II.3 Showing That What Is Now Called Administrative Tutelage Was an Institution in France Anterior to the Revolution 24 min 7

   Town and village self-government survived feudalism but not the monarchy. From 1692 the Crown sold municipal offices and resold the right of election seven times for money, leaving towns in the hands of narrow oligarchies of notables under the intendant’s close control. The rural parish, which shared a medieval origin with the New England township, kept the forms of democratic assembly but could not repair a steeple or spend twenty-five livres without the Council’s leave. Every corporate body in France was already under the administrative tutelage later associated with the Empire.

10. II.4 Administrative Jurisdiction and the Immunity of Public Officers Are Institutions of France Anterior to the Revolution 11 min 6

    Because the ordinary judges were independent and irremovable, the Crown withdrew cases touching its interests from them. Royal edicts reserved disputes to the intendant and the Council, and through evocation the Council called up any suit it chose, even private quarrels and criminal trials of rioters. Officials accused by citizens were shielded from the courts. Modern France merely legalised these practices, in the system of administrative justice and in the constitutional rule that agents of government cannot be prosecuted without its consent.

11. II.5 Showing How Centralisation Had Been Able to Introduce Itself Among the Ancient Institutions of France, and to Supplant Without Destroying Them 8 min 6

    Summing up, Tocqueville finds in the old regime every element of modern French centralisation. It grew by patience rather than force: the monarchy left the old powers their names and honours but drew away their substance, substituting the intendant. Only the parlements resisted, and they turned increasingly to politics. In its last decades the administration became more skilled and milder. Destroyed in 1789, it was restored in 1800, because a society without aristocracy slides naturally into centralisation, and centralisation had itself prepared the Revolution.

12. II.6 The Administrative Habits of France Before the Revolution 24 min 8

    The intendants’ correspondence reveals administrative habits identical to those of the 1850s: ministers who want every detail referred to Paris, endless delays and paperwork, statistical inquiries, a colourless official style, and a corps of officials forming a new aristocracy. The government feared every independent association and the press, yet allowed free abstract speculation. Its laws were severe and its practice lax, so the French never learned to respect law. Everyone, even reformers and nobles, looked to the state for everything, so centralisation was easily rebuilt after 1800.

13. II.7 Of All European Nations France Was Already That in Which the Metropolis Had Acquired the Greatest Preponderance Over the Provinces, and Had Most Completely Absorbed the Whole Empire 11 min 3

    The dominance of Paris came from the nature of the government, not from the city’s size. Montesquieu and the elder Mirabeau already complained that Paris was devouring the provinces; kings tried vainly to limit its growth while concentrating all public life there. By 1789 provincial towns waited to learn what Paris thought, and the provinces were dead enough to be cut into departments without resistance. Paris had also become a manufacturing city, its working population swelled by the guild-free faubourgs such as Saint-Antoine: the popular army of the Revolution was already assembling.

14. II.8 France Was the Country in Which Men Had Become the Most Alike 10 min 3

    Frenchmen above the common people had become remarkably alike. Uniform legislation, the decline of provincial life and a common Parisian literary education gave nobles and bourgeois the same ideas, tastes and language. The nobility, despite its privileges, grew poorer as it lost its governing role, selling land to peasants and keeping only dues, while the middle classes grew rich and even bought seigneuries. Only their legal rights still divided them. Political liberty might have bound them together; absolute government made them alike but mutually indifferent.

15. II.9 Showing How Men Thus Similar Were More Divided than Ever into Small Groups, Estranged from and Indifferent to Each Other 36 min 14

    Though alike, the French were more divided than ever. Elsewhere on the continent feudal nobility hardened into a caste, while in England it became an open aristocracy, as the history of the word gentleman shows. In France nobles and bourgeois, once partners in lords’ courts and estates, met no longer in public life. Tax exemption, growing with the taille, drew the line afresh each year. Ennoblement through office only sharpened envy. The bourgeoisie fled to the towns, bought offices and exemptions, despised the peasants and split into countless jealous corporations: a collective individualism.

16. II.10 The Destruction of Political Liberty and the Estrangement of Classes Were the Causes of Almost All the Disorders Which Led to the Dissolution of the Old Society of France 26 min 13

    The separation of classes was rooted in the loss of political liberty. When Charles VII levied the taille without the Estates and the nobility accepted exemption in return, the Crown gained endless revenue without consent. To avoid summoning the Estates, kings resorted to expedients that became institutions: the franc-fief, guilds sold as monopolies, venal offices, repeated resale of nobility and municipal rights. Kings deliberately kept classes apart so they could never resist together; only Louis XVI tried to unite them. Turgot confessed the nation could not act in common, and in 1789 the classes met in hatred.

17. II.11 Of the Species of Liberty Which Existed Under the Old Monarchy, and of the Influence of That Liberty on the Revolution 29 min 15

    Tocqueville qualifies his picture of an all-powerful centralised state. A strange, irregular liberty survived under the old monarchy. Venal offices the crown could not revoke, a proud nobility, a landowning and self-governing clergy, corporate middle-class bodies, and above all irremovable, outspoken law courts all checked royal power. He praises the clergy's cahiers of 1789 and the magistrates' defiance of 1771. This liberty, though, was tied to privilege and exemption, out of reach of the peasants. It bred bold characters able to overthrow despotism but perhaps unfit to found constitutional government.

18. II.12 Showing That the Condition of the French Peasantry, Notwithstanding the Progress of Civilisation, Was Sometimes Worse in the Eighteenth Century than It Had Been in the Thirteenth 39 min 20

    The French peasant of the eighteenth century was free and often owned land, yet he was more isolated than ever. Nobles and rich commoners had left for the towns, and absentee or merely resident lords exacted their dues without protecting anyone. Tocqueville details the arbitrary taille and its ruined collectors, the militia draw, the royal road corvée, the round-ups of beggars and summary justice. The upper classes neither saw nor understood the peasants' resentment. By dividing the orders to rule them, the kings produced a society of separate fragments that could neither resist nor support the government.

19. III.1 Showing That Towards the Middle of the Eighteenth Century Men of Letters Became the Leading Political Men of France, and of the Effects of This Occurrence 25 min 6

    Opening the account of the Revolution's immediate causes, Tocqueville explains how men of letters became France's real politicians in the mid-eighteenth century. With no political liberty or practical experience, writers and readers alike took up abstract theories of reason and natural law as answers to concrete grievances. Nobles played with ideas fatal to themselves; even Turgot misjudged representative government. The cahiers of 1789 together demanded the abolition of every existing institution. The nation absorbed the writers' temperament, so the Revolution was conducted in a literary, systematic spirit that still marks French politics.

20. III.2 Showing How Irreligion Had Become a General and Dominant Passion Amongst the French of the Eighteenth Century, and What Influence This Fact Had on the Character of the Revolution 21 min 3

    Why did unbelief become a general and militant passion in France alone? Not because the French Church was especially corrupt, Tocqueville answers, but because it was bound up with the political order, censored writers, and was weakly defended. Semi-persecution only strengthened its enemies. England and America, with free institutions, kept religion as a support of order, and in France each class returned to faith once it had something to lose. Irreligion left the revolutionaries with a heroic faith in humanity but removed every fixed point, creating a new and enduring type of revolutionary.

21. III.3 That the French Aimed at Reform Before Liberty 27 min 8

    The taste for political liberty came last among the Revolution's ideas and was the first to fade. Tocqueville analyses the physiocrats, who anticipated nearly all the Revolution's reforms but rejected checks and balances. They wanted to use the absolute administrative state as their instrument, admired China, and dreamed of democratic despotism, while Morelly already preached socialism. Only around 1770, with the Maupeou crisis, did the French begin to want to run their own affairs. The book ends with Tocqueville's credo that freedom must be loved for itself, not for its material gifts.

22. III.4 Showing That the Reign of Louis XVI. Was the Most Prosperous Epoch of the Old French Monarchy, and How This Very Prosperity Accelerated the Revolution 24 min 9

    After decades of stagnation under Louis XIV and Louis XV, France grew rapidly in the thirty years before 1789. Administration became humane and reforming, trade and revenue soared, and public opinion governed even the king. Yet discontent grew fastest where improvement was greatest, around Paris, while the unreformed west later defended the old order. Tocqueville states his famous rule that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform. He adds a material cause: the crown's irregular finances turned its many creditors and contractors into revolutionaries.

23. III.5 Showing That the French People Were Excited to Revolt by the Means Taken to Relieve Them 18 min 6

    In their sympathy for the poor, the king, ministers, provincial assemblies and privileged classes denounced the injustices of the corvée, taille and guilds in published edicts and reports, as though the people could not hear. Their compassion was mixed with contempt. Provincial assemblies in 1788 even asked peasants to list every privilege and abuse in their parishes, and the replies already speak the Revolution's language. Unlike the Reformation, Tocqueville concludes, 1789 was set in motion by the disinterested enthusiasm of the enlightened classes, inflaming the real grievances of the people.

24. III.6 Concerning Some Practices by Which the Government Completed the Revolutionary Education of the People of France 11 min 4

    The monarchy itself taught the people revolutionary habits. It overturned ancient institutions like the parlements, and Louis XIV proclaimed the king owner of all land. The administration seized land for roads without paying, diverted charitable endowments, fixed food prices in famines, and tried peasants by summary provost courts. Many methods of the revolutionary government had precedents in the old regime's treatment of the common people.

25. III.7 Showing That a Great Administrative Revolution Had Preceded the Political Revolution, and What Were the Consequences It Produced 24 min 9

    Before the political revolution came an administrative one. The guild reforms, the judicial edict of 1788 and above all the provincial assemblies of 1787 overturned the institutions that governed daily life. Collective bodies that wrangled with the intendants replaced the intendant's single rule, and village councils set peasants over their former lords while tax privileges remained. Unlike the English Revolution, or France's later revolutions, which left administration intact, 1789 struck a society already unsettled in all its secondary laws, and so produced unparalleled confusion.

26. III.8 Showing That the Revolution Proceeded Naturally from the Existing State of France 19 min 6

    Tocqueville draws the threads together. Feudalism had kept its burdens but lost its uses, the nobility had become a caste without followers, centralisation had made Paris the whole country, and a nation without political experience followed philosophers. Irreligion removed all restraint, and a brutalised people applied the theories. Two passions drove the Revolution: an ancient hatred of inequality and a newer, weaker love of freedom. When freedom faltered, Napoleon restored the old centralisation. The book closes with a portrait of the French character and a promise of a sequel.

27. App. On the Pays d’États, and Especially on the Constitutions of Languedoc 25 min 4

    Tocqueville examines the pays d'états, provinces that kept their Estates, focusing on Languedoc. Even there the crown and intendant controlled much. But an assembly of notables, the right to carry out public works and to levy taxes itself, real rather than personal taxation, and voting in common with a strong Third Estate gave Languedoc good roads, paid compensation, sound credit and cooperation among the orders. It shows what all the provinces might have become had the kings improved local institutions instead of destroying them.

28. P. Translator’s Note to the Posthumous Chapters 1 min 2

    Reeve’s note introducing the seven chapters Tocqueville drafted for the sequel on the Revolution itself. Left unfinished at his death in 1859, they were published by Beaumont in 1865 and translated here for the first time. Reeve admits they lack final revision and that the later parts are fragmentary.

29. P.1 Of the Violent and Undefined Agitation of the Human Mind at the Moment When the French Revolution Broke Out 22 min 17

    In the decade or two before 1789 a restless agitation gripped the educated classes of all Europe, especially Germany: pride in human reason joined to contempt for existing institutions. Tocqueville draws on German letters and memoirs, including Forster, Jacobi, Müller and Steffens. He describes the craze for Basedow’s schools, the secret societies and charlatans (Illuminati, Rosicrucians, Mesmer, Cagliostro), and the enthusiasm for American independence. The ferment touched princes, nobles, merchants and writers, not the poor. He rejects the theory of a conspiracy of secret societies: all these were symptoms of institutions that no longer fitted society.

30. P.2 How This Vague Perturbation of the Human Mind Suddenly Became in France a Positive Passion, and What Form This Passion at First Assumed 11 min 5

    In 1787 the vague unrest became in France a positive passion: hatred of arbitrary power, felt first by the privileged orders. The Assembly of Notables, called to approve Calonne’s reforms (a universal land tax, the end of the corvée, internal free trade, provincial assemblies), resisted measures that favoured the people yet won public applause for opposing the government. Tocqueville explains the paradox by centralisation: a government that had undertaken to do everything was blamed for everything, and every grievance turned against it.

31. P.3 How the Parliaments of France, Following Precedent, Overthrew the Monarchy 47 min 34

    Following old precedent, the Parlements remonstrated against the edicts of 1787, but now in the language of national sovereignty and the rights of man, and demanded the Estates-General. The arrest of d’Eprémesnil, the May Edicts of 1788 and the uniform resistance of all thirteen Parlements followed. Nobles, clergy and then the bourgeoisie joined the resistance, often claiming ancient privileges, while Paris saw new kinds of riot. The union of the three orders of Dauphiny at Vizille showed that the crown, which ruled by dividing classes, could not govern against them united. It conceded the Estates-General.

32. P.4 The Parliaments Discover That They Have Lost All Authority, Just When They Thought Themselves Masters of the Kingdom 13 min 4

    Restored in triumph in autumn 1788, the Parlements found their popularity gone within weeks. Pamphlets denounced them as an aristocracy of lawyers, d’Eprémesnil returned to Paris unnoticed, and the courts could not understand the change. Tocqueville explains it: venal, hereditary and opposed to the spirit of the age, the Parlements had been popular only as the last barrier against despotism. Once absolute power was beaten, they were useless to the nation, and the King had only to endure their triumph.

33. P.5 Absolute Power Being Subdued, the True Spirit of the Revolution Forthwith Became Manifest 29 min 17

    With the crown beaten, the true spirit of the Revolution appeared: the war of the commons against privilege. Brienne threw the form of the Estates-General open to public research, and debate ran in months from antiquarian precedent to Rousseau and pure numerical democracy, illustrated by Sieyès’s arithmetic. The nobility, sharing its enemies’ ideas, could not defend itself. The crown doubled the Third Estate but left the vote in common unsettled, the most dangerous course. Tocqueville marvels that trivial people set such immense events going.

34. P.6 The Preparation of the Instructions to the Members of the States-General Drove the Conception of a Radical Revolution Home to the Mind of the People 7 min 3

    The drawing up of the cahiers in 1789 carried the Revolution to the countryside. In the Middle Ages the commons had been townsmen whose free complaint threatened nothing; now some twenty million peasants met in their parishes to list every grievance against the laws. Their complaints were concrete: dues, labour services, the lord’s pigeons and rabbits, and they fixed on the lord as their common enemy. A poor harvest in 1788 and a terrible winter sharpened their anger.

35. P.7 How, on the Eve of the Convocation of the National Assembly, the Mind of the Nation Was More Enlarged, and Its Spirit Raised 9 min 2

    On the eve of the Estates-General all classes paused, aware that they were about to remake every law, and believed they were founding principles for all mankind. Tocqueville celebrates the selflessness and confidence of 1789, before the love of well-being and fear of revolution had humbled the French. The classes briefly agreed on a common programme of liberty, and the whole of Europe was moved. The chapter ends with a tribute to France’s unique capacity for such moments.