Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Bibliographical Note
- Chronology
- TOCQUEVILLE: THE ANCIEN RÉGIME AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
- Foreword
- Book I
- Book II
- II.1 Why Feudal Prerogatives Had Become More Odious to the People in France Than Anywhere Else
- II.2 Why Administrative Centralization Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime and Not, As Some Say, the Work of the Revolution or Empire
- II.3 How What Today Is Called Administrative Tutelage Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime
- II.4 How Administrative Justice and the Immunity of Public Officials Were Institutions of the Ancien Régime
- II.5 How Centralization Was Thus Able to Insinuate Itself among the Old Powers and Supplant Them Without Destroying Them
- II.6 On Administrative Mores under the Ancien Régime
- II.7 How France, of All the Countries of Europe, Was Already the One in Which the Capital Had Achieved the Greatest Preponderance over the Provinces and Most Fully Subsumed the Entire Country
- II.8 That France Was the Country Where People Had Become Most Alike
- II.9 How Men So Similar Were More Separate Than Ever, Divided into Small Groups Alien and Indifferent to One Another
- II.10 How the Destruction of Political Liberty and the Separation of Classes Caused Nearly All the Maladies That Proved Fatal to the Ancien Régime
- II.11 On the Kind of Liberty to Be Found under the Ancien Régime and Its Influence on the Revolution
- II.12 How, Despite the Progress of Civilization, the Condition of the French Peasant Was Sometimes Worse in the Eighteenth Century Than It Had Been in the Thirteenth
- Book III
- Appendix: On the Pays d'états, and in Particular Languedoc
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
II.8 - That France Was the Country Where People Had Become Most Alike
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Bibliographical Note
- Chronology
- TOCQUEVILLE: THE ANCIEN RÉGIME AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
- Foreword
- Book I
- Book II
- II.1 Why Feudal Prerogatives Had Become More Odious to the People in France Than Anywhere Else
- II.2 Why Administrative Centralization Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime and Not, As Some Say, the Work of the Revolution or Empire
- II.3 How What Today Is Called Administrative Tutelage Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime
- II.4 How Administrative Justice and the Immunity of Public Officials Were Institutions of the Ancien Régime
- II.5 How Centralization Was Thus Able to Insinuate Itself among the Old Powers and Supplant Them Without Destroying Them
- II.6 On Administrative Mores under the Ancien Régime
- II.7 How France, of All the Countries of Europe, Was Already the One in Which the Capital Had Achieved the Greatest Preponderance over the Provinces and Most Fully Subsumed the Entire Country
- II.8 That France Was the Country Where People Had Become Most Alike
- II.9 How Men So Similar Were More Separate Than Ever, Divided into Small Groups Alien and Indifferent to One Another
- II.10 How the Destruction of Political Liberty and the Separation of Classes Caused Nearly All the Maladies That Proved Fatal to the Ancien Régime
- II.11 On the Kind of Liberty to Be Found under the Ancien Régime and Its Influence on the Revolution
- II.12 How, Despite the Progress of Civilization, the Condition of the French Peasant Was Sometimes Worse in the Eighteenth Century Than It Had Been in the Thirteenth
- Book III
- Appendix: On the Pays d'états, and in Particular Languedoc
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
Summary
Anyone who examines Ancien Régime France closely will come away with two quite different images.
At times it seems that everyone who lived there, particularly those who occupied the middle and upper regions of society – the only ones visible to us – was exactly like everyone else.
Yet within this uniform multitude there remained an astonishing variety of small barriers, which divided the multitude into many different parts, and within each of these enclaves there emerged something like a separate society, which was concerned only with its own interests and did not take part in the life of the whole.
When I think of this almost infinite division and reflect on the fact that nowhere else were citizens less prepared to act in common and help one another out in a time of crisis than in France, I can understand how a great revolution was able to turn such a society upside down in an instant. I can imagine all those little barriers overturned by the great upheaval itself. And when I do this, I immediately see a social body perhaps more compact and homogeneous than the world has ever known.
I have explained how the distinctive life of the various provinces throughout the kingdom had long since been snuffed out. This contributed greatly to making all the French quite similar to one another. Despite persistent diversities, the unity of the nation was already transparent. The uniformity of legislation makes this clear.
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- Tocqueville: The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution , pp. 76 - 79Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011