I will now set aside the persistent and general facts that prepared the way for the great revolution that it is my purpose to describe and turn to the particular and more recent facts that determined its place, birth, and character.

Of all the nations of Europe, France had long been the most literary. Yet men of letters had never before exhibited a spirit of the sort that emerged around the middle of the eighteenth century, nor had they previously occupied the place in society that they assumed at that time. Nothing like this had ever been seen in France or, I believe, anywhere else.

In France, men of letters did not regularly participate in affairs, as they did in England. Indeed, they had never been so far removed from the world of affairs. They were not invested with authority of any kind and fulfilled no public function in a society already replete with functionaries.

Yet unlike most of their German counterparts, they did not avoid politics entirely or confine themselves to pure philosophy or belles lettres. They took a persistent interest in subjects related to government. In truth, this was their defining occupation. They could be heard, whenever one wished, expounding the origins of society and primitive social forms, the fundamental rights of citizens and prerogatives of authority, the natural and artificial relations among men, the mistakenness or legitimacy of custom, and the essential principles of law.

Nothing is more apt to remind philosophers and statesmen of the need for modesty than the history of the French Revolution, for no event was greater or longer in the making or more fully prepared yet so little anticipated.

Not even Frederick the Great, for all his genius, sensed what was coming. He was in contact with it yet failed to see it. Indeed, his actions were in accord with the spirit of the Revolution before the fact. He was its precursor and, in a manner of speaking, its agent. Yet he did not see it looming on the horizon, and when at last it did show its face, the remarkable new features that would set it apart from a host of other revolutions initially went unnoticed.

Outside of France the Revolution aroused universal curiosity. It made people everywhere think that new times were coming and stirred vague hopes of change and reform, but no one yet suspected what it was to become. Princes and their ministers lacked even the shadowy forebodings that agitated the masses. At first they regarded the Revolution as one of those periodic maladies to which the constitutions of all nations are liable, whose only effect is to afford new opportunities to the policy of their neighbors. If by chance they hit upon the truth about the Revolution, they did so unwittingly.

In no other country of Europe were the regular courts less subservient to the government than in France, but by the same token there were few other countries in which recourse to special courts was more common. These two things were more closely related than one might imagine. The king had virtually no influence on the fate of judges. He could not remove them, transfer them, or even, as a general rule, promote them. In short, he had no hold over them, whether through ambition or fear. He soon came to regard this independence as an impediment to his will. Hence, more than anywhere else, he was driven to deny them jurisdiction over cases directly impinging on royal power and to create alongside the regular courts, for his own private use, a more subservient type of tribunal, one that would offer a certain semblance of justice to his subjects without obliging him to fear the reality.

In countries, including certain parts of Germany, where the regular courts had never been as independent of the government as were the French tribunals of the time, no such precautions were taken, and administrative justice never existed. The prince already wielded enough power over judges that he had no need for commissaires, or commissioners, as French administrative judges were called.

In the wake of the great revolution of the sixteenth century, when the critical spirit had applied itself to the task of distinguishing false from true among the various Christian traditions, bolder and more curious minds had repeatedly dared to contest or reject all of them. The same spirit that had led millions of Catholics to abandon Catholicism in Luther's time impelled a few individual Christians every year to abandon Christianity itself: unbelief followed heresy.

In general terms it is safe to say that by the eighteenth century, Christianity had lost much of its power throughout Europe. In most countries, however, it was neglected rather than violently combated. Even those countries that abandoned religion did so almost regretfully. Irreligion was widespread among princes and clever wits but had yet to penetrate deeply into the middle and lower classes. It was still an intellectual caprice, not a common opinion. In 1787, Mirabeau said that “it is widely believed in Germany that the Prussian provinces are full of atheists. The truth is that although some freethinkers can be found there, the common people are as devoted to religion as in the most devout countries, and indeed there is no shortage of fanatics.” It was deeply to be regretted, moreover, that Frederick II had not authorized the marriage of Catholic priests and, even more, that he had refused to allow those who did marry to keep the income from their benefices, “a measure, I daresay, that would have been worthy of that great man.”

For 140 years, the people had been entirely absent from the political scene, so it was simply taken for granted that they would never be capable of putting in an appearance. Because they seemed so impassive, they were deemed to be deaf. When their fate began to arouse interest, others began to speak in front of them as if they were not there. Apparently, only those situated above the people were supposed to be able to hear what was said, and the only danger to fear was that they might not get the point.

Those who had the most to fear from the people's wrath discussed out loud, and in their presence, the cruel injustices of which the people had always been the victims. They pointed out to one another the monstrous flaws in the institutions that had oppressed the people most. They used their rhetorical skills to depict the people's misery and ill-remunerated labor. By thus attempting to relieve the people, they filled them with fury. I speak not of writers but of the government and its principal agents and of the privileged themselves.

Nothing had yet changed in the form of government, yet most of the secondary laws that govern the lives of individuals and the administration of affairs had already been abolished or amended.

The destruction of the guilds, followed by their partial and incomplete reinstatement, had profoundly altered all existing relations between worker and master. These were not only different but also uncertain and strained. The regulations governing Sunday work were abolished. State oversight was not yet firmly established, and the artisan, placed in a difficult and ambiguous position between the government and the employer, had no idea which of the two could protect him or was supposed to monitor him. The uncomfortable and anarchical state to which the entire urban lower class had been reduced in one fell swoop had immense consequences the moment the people began to return to the political scene.

A year before the Revolution, a royal edict turned the system of justice upside down. Several new jurisdictions were created, a host of others were abolished, and all jurisdictional regulations were changed. Now, in France, as I noted previously, the number of people involved either in judging or enforcing judicial decisions was immense. In truth, the entire bourgeoisie was directly or indirectly dependent on the courts. The immediate effect of the law was therefore to threaten the position and fortune of thousands of families, who suddenly found themselves on a new and more precarious footing.

Of all the maladies that afflicted the constitution of the Ancien Régime and condemned it to perish, I have just described the most mortal. I want now to take another look at the source of this most strange and dangerous malady and show how many other ills stemmed from it as well.

If, beginning in the Middle Ages, the English had lost all of their political liberty and all the local freedoms that cannot survive for long without it, the various classes that make up their aristocracy would more than likely have split apart from one another, as happened not only in France but also, to one degree or another, on the rest of the continent, while at the same time they would have separated themselves as a group from the people. But liberty forced all classes to maintain contact with one another so that when necessary they could find common ground.

It is interesting to observe how the English nobility, driven by ambition, was able to mingle with its inferiors and treat them as equals whenever it saw the need to do so. Arthur Young, whom I quoted earlier, and whose book is one of the most instructive works about old France that exists, tells how one day he happened to find himself at the country home of the duc de Liancourt, to whom he mentioned his wish to question some of the cleverer and wealthier farmers of the region.

Let us now briefly recapitulate what was said in the three previous chapters: a single body at the center of the kingdom controlled the public administration throughout the country; the same minister was in charge of nearly all domestic affairs; in each province, a single agent managed all details; there was no subordinate administrative body or any other type of body that could act without prior authorization; special courts heard all cases in which the administration had an interest and protected all its agents. What is this if not the centralization with which we are familiar? Its formal institutions were less identifiable than they are today, its procedures were less regulated, its existence was more agitated, but it was the same being. In the interim, it was unnecessary to add or take away anything essential. It was enough to eliminate everything that had been built around it to reveal what we see today.

Most of the institutions that I have just described were subsequently imitated in a hundred different places, but at the time they were peculiar to France, and we shall soon see what a great influence they had on the French Revolution and its aftermath.

But how was it possible for institutions of such novel design to establish themselves in France amid the rubble of feudal society?

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.

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.

I want to conclude by bringing together some of the features that I have thus far described separately, to see how the Revolution emerged naturally from the Ancien Régime whose portrait I have just painted.

When we reflect that it was in France that the feudal system most completely lost its ability to protect or serve without losing its capacity to harm or vex, it becomes less surprising that the Revolution that would so violently sweep away the old European constitution should have erupted here rather than elsewhere.

When we note that the nobility, having lost its former political rights and having ceased, more than anywhere else in feudal Europe, to administer and lead the population, nevertheless not only preserved but greatly increased its pecuniary immunities and individual advantages; and that, while becoming a subordinate class, it remained privileged and closed, or, as I put it earlier, became less and less of an aristocracy and more and more of a caste; it will come as no surprise that its privileges should have seemed so inexplicable and detestable to the French, or that democratic envy should have flared up in the French heart so intensely that it still burns there today.

When we observe, finally, that this nobility, separated from the middle class that it had rejected from its bosom, and from the people whose heart it had allowed to escape, was utterly isolated in the nation's midst, apparently at the head of an army but in reality a corps of officers without soldiers, we can understand how, after having stood for a thousand years, it could have been toppled in one night.

In the eighteenth century, the French peasant may no longer have been prey to petty feudal despots; he was only rarely the target of violence by the government. He enjoyed civil liberty and owned a portion of land. But all the other classes had drawn apart from him, and he lived more isolated, perhaps, than had ever been the case anywhere else in the world. His oppression was of a new and singular sort, and the effects of this deserve close and particular attention.

Early in the seventeenth century, Henri IV complained, according to Péréfixe, that nobles were abandoning the countryside. By the middle of the eighteenth century, this desertion had become almost general. All contemporary sources mention this fact and deplore it: economists in their books, intendants in their correspondence, and agricultural societies in their reports. Incontrovertible proof can be found in the records of the capitation, which was collected at the actual place of residence. Receipts from all of the upper nobility and a portion of the middling nobility were collected in Paris.

Scarcely any nobles remained in the countryside except those with fortunes too small to enable them to leave. These found themselves, relative to their peasant neighbors, in a position in which I do not believe any wealthy landowner had ever found himself before. Since the noble was no longer the peasants' leader, he did not have the interest he once had in getting on with them, helping them out, and showing them the way forward.

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.

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.

In 1789 the French tried harder than any other people has ever done to sever their past from their future, as it were, and hollow out an abyss between what they had been and what they wished to become. To that end, they took any number of precautions to ensure that they would carry over nothing from the past into their new condition. They imposed all sorts of constraints on themselves so that, in fashioning the people they were to be in the future, they would not resemble their fathers. They spared no effort to make themselves unrecognizable.

In this singular enterprise I have always thought that they were far less successful than people outside France generally believe and than the French themselves believed initially. I was convinced that, unbeknownst to themselves, they had taken from the Ancien Régime most of the feelings, habits, and ideas that guided the Revolution which destroyed it, and that, without intending to, they had built the new society out of the debris of the old. Hence, in order to understand the Revolution and its achievements properly, we must temporarily avert our eyes from the France that exists today and begin our investigation at the tomb of the France that is no more.