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Tocqueville's Old Regime: Political History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Delba Winthrop
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Extract

It has been said of Alexis de Tocqueville that he is the most frequently quoted and least read author of all, rivaling and surpassing even William Shakespeare for this dubious honor. Virtually every American social scientist who as much as pays lip service to tradition manages to quote Tocqueville at least once. But this deference is to the author of Democracy in America, not of The Old Regime and the Revolution, for the latter book is, with the exception of one passage, neither read nor quoted. The Old Regime is neglected today because it is a political history, and today political history is not appreciated. What is “political history”?

Tocqueville's “political history” belongs to a genre of which he considered Montesquieu's “Sur la grandeur et la decadence des Romains” to be the finest example. Tocqueville thought that the nature and habits of his intellect suited him to evaluating modern societies and foreseeing their probable futures, but at the same time he believed he could do this most effectively in historical studies. While flatly denying that one can learn lessons from history in any simple sense, he did nonetheless hold that from an examination of historical particulars one can grasp the universal principles of social existence. His intention in writing The Old Regime was to enable his reader to achieve this same grasp. He, like Montesquieu, would not merely recount facts, but make known their causes and consequences and judge them. He would have to choose his facts well, so that they supported his theses. He would have to present them without making “the character of the work … visible” in the hope that “the reader would be conducted naturally from one reflection to another by the interest of the narrative.” Thus what I have called political history is understood by Tocqueville to be a selective, but not necessarily incorrect, use of the facts of history for the purposes of shedding light on the present and of teaching others to see and judge the present for themselves. Given Tocqueville's stated intention, we cannot read his work as either scientific history or political polemic.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 1981 , pp. 88 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1981

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References

1 Baker, Russell, “Off the Top of De Tocq,” in The New York Times, 23 11 1976, p. 33.Google Scholar

2 de Tocqueville, Alexis, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Gilbert, Stuart (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 176–77Google Scholar. Tocqueville was perhaps the first to expound the theory of “revolutions of rising expectations.”

3 Tocqueville, to Kergolay, , 15 12 1850Google Scholar, in Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville et de Louis de Kergolay, ed. Mayer, J. P. (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), p. 233Google Scholar. The full title of the work of Montesquieu's to which Tocqueville refers is Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains, et de leur décadence.

4 Ibid., p. 231.

5 Tocqueville, to Presion, , 11 09 1857Google Scholar, in Oeuvres et correspondance inédites, ed. de Beaumont, Gustave (Paris, 1861), 2:406.Google Scholar

6 Tocqueville, to Kergolay, , Correspondance, p. 232.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., p. 232–33.

8 Although for the convenience of my readers I have used the readily available Gilbert translation wherever possible, I have corrected it as necessary. I have retained Tocque-ville's original title, The Old Regime and the Revolution (not The French Revolution). All corrections are based upon the definitive edition of L'Ancien Régime et la Revolution, ed. Mayer, J. P. (Paris: Gallimard, 1952).Google Scholar

9 Cf. Redier, Antoine, Comme disait Monsieur de Tocqueville … (Paris, 1925), p. 257Google Scholar; Reinhard, Marcel, “Tocqueville Historien de la Revolution,” Alexis de Tocqueville: Livre du Centenaire 1859–1959 (Paris, 1960), p. 171.Google Scholar

10 The best biography of the period of Tocqueville's life during which he wrote The Old Regime is Herr, Richard, Tocqueville and the Old Regime (Princeton, 1962).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 In a footnote (p. 714) to a crucial passage in Democracy in America (p. 47)Google Scholar, Tocqueville recommends that one study the opinions and mores of the founding generation of a republic in order to appreciate their influence on its future (de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. Lawrence, George [Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969])Google Scholar. Not having made this recommended study with respect to America, Tocqueville there provides a bibliography of historians who have done so. One might say that it is precisely this kind of study that he himself has made with respect to the French republic in his preparation of The Old Regime.

12 For useful surveys and bibliographies of the secondary literature on The Old Regime, see Herr, , Tocqueville, pp. 107–35Google Scholar; and Birnbaum, Pierre, Sociologie de Tocqueville (Paris, 1970), pp. 154–59Google Scholar. Herr apparently wishes to avoid the defects of previous commentaries, but he tellingly divides his survey into chapters entitled “The Old Regime As Tract” and “… As History.” While a number of the early reviews of The Old Regime as well as some of the best contemporary analyses reflect an appreciation of Tocqueville's endeavor, none could really be taken as an attempted proof of its soundness. Cf. for example, Passy, Frederick, Journal des économistes, 2e serie, 13 (1857), 43–59Google Scholar; Ed. Scherer, , Le Temps, 7 05 1861Google Scholar; Villemain, A., Journal des Debats, 1 07 1856Google Scholar; Lefebvre, G., “A propos de Tocqueville,” in Annales historiques de la Revolution Française, no. 141 (1955).Google Scholar

13 The first edition of The Old Regime not only sold out within two months of publication, but the book was highly regarded by the French Academy and the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. Herr, , Tocqueville, pp. 89–90.Google Scholar

14 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1097b22–1098a18.Google Scholar

15 Voltaire, the prototype of the makers of the Revolution, both failed to appreciate the dependence of British intellectual freedom on political freedom (p. 158) and underestimated the desire of the French immediately before the Revolution for political freedom as well as economic reform (p. 166).

16 The second volume of The Old Regime, left incomplete at Tocqueville's death, has been published in a definitive edition, de Tocqueville, Alexis, L'Ancien Régime et la Revolution, ed. Mayer, J. P. (Paris: Gallimard, 1953)Google Scholar. Substantial portions have been published in English in Tocqueville: The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, ed. and trans. Lukacs, John (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959)Google Scholar. Because of its fragmentary nature, I have not attempted to treat the volume thematically.

17 Since then, the same observation has often been made about Communist revolutions and twentieth-century phenomena like National Socialism and nationalism.

18 Tocqueville clearly distinguishes between Christianity and the pagan cults of antiquity in this respect (p. 12).

19 Tocqueville's statement that the “foundation” of religions lies in human nature (L'Ancien Régime, p. 88Google Scholar) should perhaps be modified, since he acknowledges in Democracy that an argument about the human need of or desire for religion is not the same as demonstration of the veracity of religion in general or of any religion in particular, hence of its “foundation” in another sense.

20 Indeed, he raises the reader's curiosity by adding the following observation: “In all periods, even in the Middle Ages, there have been leaders of revolt who, with a view to effecting certain changes in the established order, appealed to the universal laws governing all communities, and championed the natural rights of man against the State. But none of these ventures was successful; the firebrand which set all Europe ablaze in the eighteenth century had been easily extinguished in the fifteenth” (p. 13). What had happened since the fifteenth century?

21 The government's attempt to make itself omnipotent is, of course, an attempt to make God superfluous (cf. pp. 70–71). Moreover, on p. 151, Tocqueville spells out “the very principles on which the Church was founded [which] were incompatible with those our writers wished to embody in the new, ideal system of administration they had set their hearts on.”

22 It does not appear from Tocqueville's account that there is any necessary, as distinguished from historical, connection between feudalism and Christianity.

23 Whatever Tocqueville may mean by “natural” man, in neither The Old Regime nor Democracy does he mean an autonomous, presocial and political animal. In contrast, cf. Hobbes, Thomas, LeviathanGoogle Scholar, chaps. 13 and 14 (beg.); Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Second DiscourseGoogle Scholar, part 1 (beg.); The Social Contract, bk. I, chap. 6.

24 In the Gilbert translation this is printed as “six” generations (p. 20).

25 Ultimately, from both the religious and philosophic points of view, one would also have to take into account the nature of God or of nature and the way in which He or it does or does not impinge on political life.

26 The law is that in dividing men to rule them, one leaves oneself with no whole, that is, nothing, to rule.

27 For what Tocqueville considers the worst consequences of this habitual lawlessness, see especially part 2, chap. 4 (pp. 52–57) and part 3, chap. 6 (pp. 188–92).

28 Tocqueville does explicitly contend that the principle of socialism originated, in effect, with Louis XIV, who invoked for the first time the feudal principle that all property belongs to the state and, therefore, that all titles to property are conditional and subject to challenge by the state (p. 189).

29 The following paragraph of my text is a summary of the argument of chaps. 8–10 of part 2.

30 For a concise description of the psychology of this transformation, see Democracy, pp. 509–513.Google Scholar

31 See especially pp. 18–19, 69–70, 81, 82–84, 88, 97–98, 141, 145–46, 153–54, 175, 281, 283–86.

32 Cf. Herr, , Tocqueville, pp. 82–88Google Scholar. On the whole, Herr's monograph is useful as a biography of Tocqueville, rather than as an analysis of The Old Regime. Despite Herr's claim to have fathomed its depths, discovering the “ocean current” beneath its “whitecaps” and “tides” (p. 35), he fails to do so because he fails to develop his own observation that Tocqueville insists that his end is to force his reader to fathom the human soul (pp. 35–36).

33 Aron, Raymond, in his Main Currents of Sociological Thoughts, trans. Howard, Richard and Weaver, Helen (New York, 1965), vol. 1Google Scholar, understands Tocqueville to show that the essential fact in the failure of the Revolution was the failure of the Constituent Assembly, which signified the failure to combine the virtues of aristocracy or monarchy and the democratic movement (p. 217). Cf. pp. 96–98 of vol. 2 of The Old Regime on the worst “error” or “crime” of the Constituent Assembly, which put it for its duration at the mercy of the Parisian mob.

34 Cf. Democracy, vol. 1, part 2, chap. 6 (pp. 231–45)Google Scholar. The teaching about “rights” is the necessary teaching for our time (p. 239).

35 See above; also, The Old Regime, pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

36 For an elaboration on the means of this salutary habituation, see especially Democracy, pp. 62–88Google Scholar on decentralized administration, pp. 235–45 on the true advantages of democratic government, pp. 270–76 on the jury system, pp. 301–305 on how the Americans' practical experience helps to maintain republicanism, and pp. 509–519 on free institutions and voluntary associations.

37 Chap. 5 of part 3 is on “How the spirit of revolt was promoted by well-intentioned efforts to improve the people's lot”; chap. 6, “How certain practices of the central power completed the revolutionary education of the masses”; chap. 7, “How revolutionary changes in the administrative system preceded the political revolution and their consequences.” Chap. 8 recapitulates the factors making the revolution inevitable, given the French character.

38 It was, in Tocqueville's opinion, especially the simultaneous rejections of religious and political and social traditions that had such disastrous consequences. “In the French Revolution, however, both religious institutions and the whole system of government were thrown into the melting pot, with the result that men's minds were thrown in a state of utter confusion; they knew neither what to hold on to, nor where to stop. Revolutionaries of a hitherto unknown breed came on the scene: men who carried audacity to the point of sheer insanity; who balked at no innovation and, unchecked by any scruples, acted with an unprecedented ruthlessness” (p. 157). It should be recalled that he contends that the repudiation of Christianity was a necessary element of the political revolution intended.

39 In a passage in the second volume of The Old Regime, Tocqueville makes a similar statement, but there he acknowledges the universality of the desire for freedom. “There is, thus, an intellectual interest in liberty, the main source of which is the tangible benefices it provides. And there is an instinctive tendency, irresistible and hardly conscious, born out of the mysterious sources of all great human passions. Never forget this in your thoughts. It is a taste which, it is true, all men have in some way or another; but its primacy exists only in the hearts of very few. … It is the common source not only of political liberty but of all of the high and manly virtues. … It is not so much the material advantages provided but the enjoyment of freedom which attaches free people strongly and jealously to their rights” (pp. 167–68).

Lively contends that “the defence of liberty was the whole purpose of [Tocqueville's] writings” (Lively, Jack, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville [Oxford, 1962], p. 37Google Scholar). But he denies that Tocqueville had an interest in or capacity for attempting a philosophical, as distinguished from political, defense of liberty (pp. 252–53). It is true that Tocqueville does not provide this defense in The Old Regime; it is not appropriate to a political history. As indicated above, however, part 1 of the book reveals that Tocqueville appreciated the significance of such defenses. Throughout Democracy, but especially in volume 2, he hints at what that defense must be, even if he provides no demonstrative proof of its correctness.

40 See above. Consider also Tocqueville's analyses of England and Languedoc.

41 See above.

42 Democracy begins and concludes with a consideration of the role of Providence in human politics, and it therefore presumably contains an argument leading to the conclusion, which Tocqueville presents as a statement of fact (pp. 9, 12, 705).

43 Not only for Hobbes, but even for Rousseau, public virtue is a consequence of the desire for the preservation of oneself and one's goods: Leviathan, chap. 15 (end); The Social Contract, bk. 1, chap. 6.

44 See above.

45 The Revolution, Tocqueville said earlier, was the making often generations of men, and the revolutionary “religion” could not have enflamed men's passions prior to the sixteenth century. Tocqueville well knew that the ideas of the eighteenth-century reformers, which had their origin in the new spirit that undermined the Old Regime, had their ultimate origin ten generations before the Revolution — in the political philosophy of Niccolo Machiavelli. His work was carried on by Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. The history of these reformers, not the philosophes or economistes, would be one of a true revolution in human affairs. Cf. Democracy, pp. 429–31, 663.Google Scholar