The Old Regime and the Revolution
P.. Translator’s Note to the Posthumous Chapters
Section summary
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.
The chapters which follow were not included in the work first published by M. de Tocqueville in 1855. They are the continuation of it, left unfinished at the time of his death in 1859, and published in 1865 by M. de Beaumont amongst the posthumous works of his friend. They are now translated for the first time. Although they must be regarded as incomplete, since they never received the final revision of the author, and the latter portions of them are fragmentary, yet they are not, I think, unworthy to form part of the work to which they were intended to belong, and a melancholy interest attaches to them as the last meditations of a great and original thinker. In the French text an attempt has been made to distinguish, by a different type, the passages which are more carefully finished from those which consisted merely of notes for further elaboration. But as this arrangement breaks the uniformity of the text more than is necessary, I have not adopted it.—H. R.