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.2 - Why Administrative Centralization Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime and Not, As Some Say, the Work of the Revolution or Empire
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
Back in the days when we had political assemblies in France, I once heard an orator refer to administrative centralization as “that admirable triumph of the Revolution, for which we are the envy of Europe.” I am prepared to grant that centralization was an admirable triumph and that we are the envy of Europe for it, but I maintain that it was not a triumph of the Revolution. On the contrary, it was a product of the Ancien Régime, and, I would add, the only portion of the political constitution of the Ancien Régime that survived the Revolution because it was the only one that could adapt to the new social state that the Revolution created. The reader who has the patience to read this chapter attentively will perhaps find that I have proved my thesis with a superfluity of evidence.
First, I beg the reader's indulgence if I neglect for now the so-called pays d'états, that is, provinces that administered themselves, or, rather, still appeared to administer themselves, at least in part.
The pays d'états, occupying the far reaches of the kingdom, contained scarcely a quarter of the total population of France, and in only two of them was provincial liberty really still alive. I will show later the extent to which the central government had subjected them to the same rules as the rest of the country.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Tocqueville: The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution , pp. 39 - 46Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011