The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution (AR) is one of the best and best-known works of history ever written. Some might object that it does not really belong to the genre of history, as it contains no narrative. In the opening sentences of the work, Tocqueville himself asserts, “This book is not a history of the French Revolution, which has been recounted too brilliantly for me to contemplate doing it again. It is rather a study of that Revolution.” As he also explains in the Foreword, he intended to write a second volume that would include a narrative of the Revolution itself. His drafts for that volume are absorbingly interesting, and I shall say a bit about them later.

The possible objection can be sustained only if one has a needlessly purist conception of historical writing. French historians in the twentieth century often contrasted the histoire de la longue durée with the histoire événementielle, the long-term study of institutional and cultural change with the short-term narrative of actions and events. AR certainly spans a long period, from Charles VII in the fifteenth century to the years immediately before the Revolution. Tocqueville shows, for instance, how a resourceful nobility slowly turned into an impotent aristocracy, and how the towns gradually lost their independence until only a hollow shell remained.