Alexis de Tocqueville, Part 5: The Old Regime and the Revolution

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Tocqueville's last book begins with a puzzle he had been living inside for years. France had overthrown its monarchy in 1789, and again in 1830, and again in 1848. Each time, a new regime promised a fresh start. Each time, within a few years, power ended up concentrated in Paris, and in 1851 another Bonaparte took it. Why did the French keep making revolutions and keep ending up in the same place?

The Old Regime and the Revolution, published in 1856, is his answer. It is the closing part of this Book Report series, and in some ways it is the book where Tocqueville became a historian.

After the coup of 1851 ended his political career, he changed his method. Democracy in America had been built from travel, conversations and reasoning. This time he went into the archives. He read the records of the royal administrators who had governed the French provinces in the eighteenth century, especially the files of the district around Tours, in the center of France. He read the long lists of grievances that every part of French society drew up in 1789, the year the Estates General met. He calls them the testament of the old society, the authentic declaration of its last wishes, and says such a document is unique in history.

What he found in the files surprised him. The Revolution had described itself as a clean break with a feudal past. Tocqueville argues that in one of the most important respects, it was nothing of the kind.

His clearest example is centralization. Once, he says, he heard a speaker in parliament praise France's centralized administration as "that admirable achievement of the Revolution which Europe envies us." Tocqueville's chapter title answers the speaker directly: administrative centralization was an institution of the old monarchy, not a product of the Revolution or of Napoleon.

The evidence is wonderfully concrete. By the eighteenth century, the provinces were run by royal officials called intendants, who answered to the king's council in Paris. A village could still elect its local officers, but it could not levy a rate, sell or buy property, or go to court without permission from above. To repair a church steeple damaged by wind, or rebuild the gable of a parsonage, a rural parish needed a decision from the royal council. Tocqueville found requests for permission to spend twenty-five livres. He reports that such permission usually took at least a year, often two or three. The council itself admitted in 1773 that its formalities caused infinite delays, and then added that the formalities were all necessary.

Readers who remember volume one of Democracy in America will see the mirror image. In New England, the township came before the county, the state and the nation, and people learned liberty by running their own small affairs. In France, the crown had spent centuries taking those small affairs away. The Revolution destroyed the monarchy, but it inherited the machine, and every later regime inherited it too.

His second argument explains the anger. Why did feudal privileges provoke more hatred in France than in Germany, where they were actually heavier? Because French peasants already owned land. Tocqueville cites the English agricultural writer Arthur Young, who was astonished to find that peasants owned a large share of French soil. A landless serf might accept dues as part of the order of things. A peasant who owned his field felt every payment to the local lord as a charge on his own property, levied by someone who no longer protected him, judged him or governed him. The nobles had lost their old public duties and kept their privileges, including exemptions from major taxes. Privilege without function is very hard to defend.

Third, he describes a society broken into separate compartments. Nobles, middle classes and peasants had little to do with one another, each guarding its own small distinctions. Paris absorbed the political and intellectual life of the provinces. When the crisis came, there were no habits of working together, and no local institutions people trusted.

Fourth, he explains the role of writers. The royal government allowed broad, abstract discussion of religion, philosophy and politics, so long as nobody criticized its own agents. As a result, men of letters, with no rank, no responsibility and no experience of government, became the leading political figures of France. Their ideas were general, rational and untested. When the old structure fell, those abstractions were what people had to build with. Tocqueville adds that the French wanted reform before they wanted liberty. A powerful, rational state that would sweep away privilege appealed to many reformers more than slow self-government did.

His most famous argument is the counterintuitive one about timing. The Revolution did not break out when France was at its most miserable. Tocqueville insists that the reign of Louis the Sixteenth was the most prosperous period of the old monarchy, and that the prosperity sped the Revolution up. In Reeve's translation, he writes that "the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that when it enters upon the work of reform." Evils that people endure patiently while they seem inevitable become intolerable once escape seems possible. The government's own efforts at reform gave people reasons to hope and new reasons to resent.

This idea has traveled far. Students of revolutions in other countries still return to it, because it explains why improvement can increase unrest rather than calm it.

The book also has a character sketch of the French nation that sounds like a man describing a relative. The French, he writes, are the most brilliant and the most dangerous of the nations of Europe, fitted to become by turns an object of admiration, hatred, pity or terror, but never of indifference.

Historians since 1856 have corrected and complicated much of this. The archives he used were a sample, and the old regime was more varied than his strongest statements suggest. But the book changed the question. Instead of asking what the Revolution destroyed, it asked what the Revolution carried forward.

Tocqueville planned a second volume on the Revolution itself and Napoleon. He was still working on it when tuberculosis killed him in Cannes in 1859.

Taken together, his books keep circling a single concern. Equality was coming, and he accepted it. What he feared was equality without the habits of freedom: citizens who are equal, comfortable, isolated and administered. America showed him one way through, built on town meetings, juries and associations. France showed him the other path, a powerful center and repeated explosions. He wrote about both with unusual fairness, including to the parts of the world that were leaving people like him behind. That is a good reason to keep reading him, and to check the quotations.