The Old Regime and the Revolution
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- John Bonner
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 1 illegible passage, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~140,000 words · 642 passages
Cite this work
- APAAlexis de Tocqueville. (n.d.). The Old Regime and the Revolution (John Bonner, Trans.). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/alexis-de-tocqueville/the-old-regime-and-the-revolution
- MLAAlexis de Tocqueville. The Old Regime and the Revolution. Translated by John Bonner. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/alexis-de-tocqueville/the-old-regime-and-the-revolution.
- ChicagoAlexis de Tocqueville. The Old Regime and the Revolution. Translated by John Bonner. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/alexis-de-tocqueville/the-old-regime-and-the-revolution.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The 1856 book in which Tocqueville went to the archives to show that the French Revolution broke with the old regime far less than was believed: it continued and completed its work.
Context and history
The central thesis is that administrative centralisation — the replacement of local powers by a bureaucracy answering to Paris — was already all but accomplished before 1789, and that the Revolution inherited and finished it. Hence his most quoted and most disquieting observation: that a bad regime is in greatest danger when it begins to reform itself, and that French peasants were better off than other European populations that did not revolt. It is one of the first works of history written from archival documents with a sociological question in front of it. Tocqueville died before writing the second volume, on the Revolution itself.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
On the other hand, liberty alone can combat the vices which are natural to this class of societies, and arrest their downward progress. Nothing but liberty A2 X PEEPACE. can draw men forth from the isolation into which their independence naturally drives them — can compel them to associate together, in order to come to a common understanding, to debate, and to compromise together on their joint concerns. Liberty alone can free them from money-worship, and divert them from their petty, every-day business cares, to teach them and make them feel that there is a country above and beside them. It alone awakens more energetic and higher passions than the love of ease, provides ambition with nobler aims than the acquisition of wealth, and yields the light which reveals, in clear outline, the virtues and the vices of mankind. Democratic societies which are not free may be rich, refined, ornate, even magnificent, and powerful in proportion to the weight of their homogeneous mass ; they may develop private virtues, produce good family-men, honest merchants, respectable landowners, and even good Christians — ^for their country is not of this world, and it is the glory of their religion that it produces them in the most corrupt societies and under the worst governments — theEoman empire during its decline was full of such as these ; but there are things which such societies as those I speak of can never produce, and these are great citizens, and, above all, a great people. I will go farther; I do not hesitate to affirm that the common level of hearts and minds will never cease to sink so long as equality and despotism are combined. This is what I thought and wrote twenty years ago.…