Tocqueville attempts to recount the milieu at the end of the Ancien Regime, which set the stage for the French Revolution’s dramatic sweep across the country. He begins, “Because men are no longer tied to one another by bonds of caste, class, guild, or family, they are only too apt to attend solely to their private interests, only too inclined to think exclusively of themselves and to withdraw into a narrow individualism that stifles all public virtue. Despotism, far from combatting this tendency, makes it irresistible, for it deprives citizens of all common passions, all mutual needs, all necessity to reach a common understanding, and all opportunity to act in concert. It immures them, as it were, to private life…. In this type of society, where nothing is fixed, everyone is racked constantly by the fear of falling lower in the social scale and by the ardor to rise…. These passions have spread readily to all classes, even those in which they were previously alien…. Despotism alone has the power to create the secrecy and the shadows in which greed can thrive and dishonest profits can be amassed in defiance of dishonor. Without despotism these selfish passions would be strong; with it they rule.”
Tocqueville contrasts the twin aims of liberty and equality, which helped to propel the revolution, “Only freedom can rescue citizens from the isolation in which the very independence of their condition has mired them…. Only freedom can substitute higher, more powerful passions for the love of material comforts and supply ambition with goals more worthy than the acquisition of wealth…. Democratic societies that are not free may yet be rich, refined, ornate, and even magnificent, powerful by dint of their homogeneous mass. One may find in such societies many private virtues, good fathers, honest merchants, and worthy landowners. One may even come across good Christians, since the true Christian’s homeland is not of this world…. But what one will never find in such societies, I make bold to assert, is great citizens, much less a great people, and I maintain without fear of contradiction that the common level of hearts and minds will steadily diminish so long as equality and despotism remain conjoined.” Tocqueville offers this preview, “The Revolution nevertheless pursued its own course. The monster reared its head, and its novel and terrifying features were revealed. After destroying political institutions, it abolished civil institutions. First it changed laws, then mores, customs, and even language. Having shredded the fabric of government, it undermined the foundations of society and ultimately went after God himself…. Since the French Revolution had as its objective not simply to change the existing government but to abolish the existing form of society, it was obliged simultaneously to attack all established powers, to undermine all acknowledged influences, to efface traditions, to renew mores and customs, and somehow to rid the human mind of all the ideas on which respect and obedience had previously been founded.”
Under the Ancien Regime, the centralization of governance preceded the revolution and abetted its rapid progress. The revolution swept away what was remaining in one foul swoop, “Clear away all this debris and you will see an immense and unified central government, which has drawn in and devoured all the bits of authority and influence that were once parceled out among a host of secondary powers, orders, classes, professions, families, and individuals—scattered, as it were, throughout the social body. No comparable power has existed in the world since the fall of the Roman Empire. The Revolution created this new power…. All strive to eliminate immunities and abolish privileges within their states. All blur distinctions of rank, equalize conditions, replace the aristocracy with functionaries, substitute uniform rules for local privileges, and impose unified government where once there was a diversity of powers…. Its sole effect was to abolish the political institutions, usually called feudal, that had for centuries reigned unopposed in most of the nations of Europe, and to replace them with a simpler and more uniform social and political order based on equality of conditions…. When a people destroys the aristocracy in its midst, it propels itself toward centralization…. There is a tendency for all the powers within it to become one.”
Tocqueville waxes on about the days of old, “The French in those days loved joy and adored pleasure. They may have been more undisciplined in their habits and more chaotic in their passions and ideas than Frenchmen today, but they knew nothing of the temperate and decent sensualism that we see today. In the upper classes, more time was spent in embellishing life rather than in making it comfortable, and in seeking distinction rather than acquiring wealth. Even in the middle classes, no one allowed himself to become completely absorbed in the pursuit of prosperity. Many people abandoned that pursuit in favor of loftier and more refined pleasures. Everyone invested in some good beyond money…. However subject the men of the Ancien Regime were to the will of the king, they were strangers to one kind of obedience: they did not know what it was to bow to an illegitimate or contested power, to a government that one barely honored and frequently scorned but to which one nevertheless submitted freely because of its power to help or harm…. Let us not despise our fathers; we have no right to do so. May it please God that we may recover, along with their prejudices and faults, a little of their grandeur!”
The bourgeoisie were a class in flux immediately preceding the revolution. “The immunities of all sorts that so regrettably separated the bourgeoisie from the common people tended to make the former into a false aristocracy that often exhibited the pride and recalcitrance of the true one. In each of the many small associations into which it was divided, one readily forgot the general good but was constantly preoccupied with its interests and rights as a body.” Tocqueville also gives a summation of the pitiful state of the aristocracy towards the end of the Ancien Regime, “Nobles who had not wanted bourgeois as partners or fellow citizens now had to face them as rivals, before long as enemies, and ultimately as masters. An alien power had freed them from the obligation to lead, protect, and assist their vassals, but since it had left them their pecuniary rights and honorific privileges, they judged that nothing had been lost. Since they continued to march at the head of every procession, they believed that they were still leaders, and indeed they continued to be surrounded by men to whom they referred in official documents as their subjects. Others were referred to as their vassals, their tenants, and their farmers. In reality, they had no followers. They were alone, and when the people at last rose up against them, they had no choice but to flee.”
Tocqueville turns his attention back to the shortsightedness of the bourgeoisie, “The bourgeois was as ardent in procuring exceptions as the nobleman was in maintaining his privileges. The peasants from whose ranks he sprang had become not only strangers to him but, in a sense, compete unknowns, and it was only after he had put arms in their hands that he realized he had aroused passions of which he had no inkling, which he was as powerless to restrain as to lead, and of which he was to become the victim after having been the promoter…. When the bourgeois had thus been isolated from the noble, and the peasant from the noble and bourgeois, and when, by a similar process within each class, there emerged distinct small groups almost as isolated from one another as the classes were, it became clear that the whole society had been reduced to a homogeneous mass with nothing to hold its parts together…. Thus, the princely magnificence of the whole edifice could collapse all at once, in the blink of an eye, the moment the society that served as its foundation began to tremble.”
Tocqueville squarely puts the blame on the philosophers, economists, writers, and intellectuals for fomenting the initial abstract ideas, which would be practically unleashed during the course of the revolution. “An aristocracy, when it is vigorous, does not merely take the lead in public affairs. It also shapes opinions, sets the tone for writers, and imparts authority to ideas…. What is more, the very aristocracy whose place the writers took encouraged the enterprise. It had so completely forgotten how general theories, once accepted, are inevitably transformed into political passions and actions that it treated as mere ingenious intellectual games the doctrines most hostile to its privileges and even its existence as a class…. Those who would become the victims of that revolution were totally unaware of this. They believed that the total and sudden transformation of such an old and complex society could be achieved without disruption, with the aid of reason and by its force alone…. When one studies the history of our Revolution, one finds that the spirit that guided it was precisely the same spirit that gave rise to so many abstract books on government: The same fondness for general theories, complete systems of legislation, and exact symmetry in the law; the same contempt for existing facts; the same confidence in theory; the same taste for the original, ingenious, and novel in institutions; the same urge to remake the entire constitution in accordance with the rules of logic and a coherent plan, rather than seek to amend its faulty parts.”
The revolution utterly destroyed the eminence of the Catholic Church in France. Tocqueville tracks the ebbs and flows of the institution of religion, “See how respect for religion has gradually regained its influence among the various classes of the nation as each of them acquired public experience in the harsh school of revolution…. Little by little, respect for religion progressed wherever men had something to lose in popular disorder, and disbelief disappeared, or at least went into hiding, as fear of revolution manifested itself.” However, during the revolution, men had initially fooled themselves with a new secular faith, “When religion deserted souls, it did not leave them, as so often happens, empty and debilitated. For a time they brimmed with new feelings and ideas, which temporarily took the place of religion and prevented any immediate lapse into depression…. They did not doubt the perfectibility or power of man…. These sentiments and passions had become for them a kind of new religion…. However, religious laws were abolished even as civil laws were overturned, so that the human mind lost its bearings altogether. It no longer knew what to hold on to or where to stop.”
Tocqueville recounts the folly of the masses. “People so ill-prepared to act for themselves could hardly expect to reform everything at once without destroying everything…. When the French rediscovered their love of political liberty, they had already conceived certain ideas about government that were not only not easy to reconcile with the existence of free institutions but almost hostile to them…. They had embraced the ideal of a society in which the sole aristocracy would consist of public officials and a single, all-powerful administration would control the state and be the guardian of individuals…. Hence, they sought to combine unlimited administrative centralization with a preponderant legislative body: bureaucratic administration and representative government. The nation as a body enjoyed all the rights of sovereignty, but each individual citizen was gripped in the tightest dependency.”
The French kings were not spared Tocqueville’s critique, “When the people witnessed the downfall and disappearance of the parlement, which was nearly as old as the monarchy itself and previously thought to be unshakable, they vaguely understood that a time of violence and hazard was approaching, one of those times in which everything becomes possible, when few things are so old as to be respectable or so new that they cannot be tried.” But for Tocqueville, it all led back to the follies of the armchair philosophers, rational idealists, and scribblers with their pens, “There is no more dangerous an example than that of violence exercised for good purposes by men of good will…. The contrast between the benign character of the theories and the violence of the acts, which was one of the strangest features of the French Revolution, will not surprise anyone who observes that the groundwork for the Revolution was laid by the most civilized classes of the nation and carried out by the coarsest and most uncultivated.” And for Tocqueville, the preeminent original sin was the consolidation of the levers of power across the French nation, which had its roots in the Ancien Regime, “Centralization was salvaged from the ruins and restored. And because it was raised up again, while everything that had once kept it in check still lay in ruins, what suddenly emerged from the entrails of a nation that had just overthrown the monarchy was a power more extensive, more minute, and more absolute than our kings had ever exercised…. His government died but his administration lived on, and since then, whenever anyone has tried to topple absolute power, he has merely placed Liberty’s head on a servile body.”
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