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Week 7: Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution
In his 1856 masterpiece, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville set out explain how the eighteenth-century society, culture, and politics had produced a revolution of such epic dimensions. In his opinion, no event had ever been “so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen” as the French Revolution. His argument ran something like this.
In general, he observed, the eighteenth century was one of jarring contrasts and contradictions: in particular, European society and culture was out of kilter, so to speak, with its political organization. Tocqueville observed, on the one had, that the French “were split up more than ever before into small, isolated, self-regarding groups”: membership in the nobility, as much as at any time in the past, was still largely a matter of birth; nobles were still separated from the rest of the country by inherited legal privileges, including (among other things) exemption from certain taxes, such as the taille. The cities of France, similarly, were governed by exclusive cliques of dominant families, who hoarded local power amongst themselves; each province still had separate laws, customs, and court systems; these tended to divide each province from the rest, so that the each province, like the various social groups, tended to be self-regarding as well. What France lacked were socially and politically integrating institutions: instead, all France had was the monarchy and its institutions of justice, taxation, and so on. Tocqueville’s analysis here is drenched with the Enlightenment ideal that social harmony should be based on the fulfillment of natural, human rights. In such a society, the “general interest” would prevail over “private” or the “special” interests of particular groups, such as merchants or nobles; France’s problem was that each and every social group was preoccupied with its selfish, private interest; as a result, there was no means by which to create a “general will.”
On the other hand, Tocqueville observed, the French were becoming more and more “like each other” in matters of taste, outlook on life and so forth. This situation was deeply paradoxical: the things that had once distinguished one “order” in society from the rest—literacy and education, wealth and landowning, even manners—these social and cultural distinctions were becoming less and less visible. In a more material sense, too, the differences between the social orders were diminishing: for example, the amount of land in France that was owned by non-nobles had been growing steadily for centuries; and in cultural terms as well, the Enlightenment had popularized notions of natural rights, equality, and the rule of reason. People adopted these ideas, whether they were ready for them or not—and Tocqueville was convinced that not every group in society was ready for them. In particular, Tocqueville thought, the nobility was especially hasty and ill-advised to embrace the ideas of Enlightenment, particularly its emphasis on natural, human rights that were available to all without regard to social rank or birthright.
All this was an explosive mixture. In France, people of diverse social backgrounds participated in a culture that enshrined freedom and natural rights; but they could also see that the reality did not live up to these ideals. The fact that power and culture were “out of kilter” produced a powerful demand for reform, especially among the “enlightened” elite. To bring it about, many pinned their hopes for reform on the monarchy. This leads to Tocqueville’s next point, which is that the monarchies of pre-Revolutionary Europe and their bureaucracies were better organized and more centralized than any since the Roman Empire. Moreover, monarchies everywhere in Europe were “doing what they [could] to abolish privileges and remove immunities within their territories.” Prior to 1789, only the monarchy had the power needed to overcome the barriers of class and caste and create institutions that would integrate the population socially and politically: you cannot understand the process of reform in pre-Revolutionary France, Tocqueville believed, without the restless, centralizing energy of the state.
Tocqueville’s final point was this: powerful though it was, the eighteenth-century monarchies were not strong enough: Strong enough to attempt reform, but too weak to succeed, the eighteenth-century reforms were bound to generate anger and frustration—anger on the part of those who felt that the monarchy was trampling on their traditional rights; frustration on the part of those who yearned for reform and a more equal society. More and more, frustration became focused on the system of noble privilege; not surprisingly, the first victim of the Revolution would be the system of social divisions between noble and non-noble; but once set in motion, the dynamic of revolution soon toppled monarchy itself.
If we look at the social context of reform and revolution, however, the implications of Tocqueville's argument are clear and jarring: the old regime collapsed in France not because the middle classes were getting poorer, but they were becoming wealthier; it collapsed not because the middle classes were excluded from the best privileges society had to offer, but because they were gaining better and better access to it; it collapsed not because nobles were opposed to the Enlightenment, but because they were open to its ideals; finally, the old regime collapsed not because nobles clung to their privileges, but because they forgot their own self-interest. Tocqueville concluded that
It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into revolution…Feudalism at the height of its power had not inspired Frenchmen with so much hatred as it did on the eve of its eclipse. The slightest acts of arbitrary power under Louis XVI seemed less easy to endure than all the despotism of Louis XIV.
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