L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) is a work by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville translated in English as either The Old Regime and the Revolution or The Old Regime and the French Revolution. The book analyzes French society before the French Revolution — the so-called "Ancien Régime" — and investigates the causes and forces that caused the Revolution. It is one of the major early historical works on the French Revolution. In this book, de Tocqueville develops his main theory about the French revolution, the theory of continuity, in which he states that even though the French tried to disassociate themselves from the past and from the autocratic old regime, they eventually reverted to a powerful central government.
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The aim of the French Revolution (1789–1799) was not to destroy the sovereignty of religious faith (church) or create a state of permanent disorder (anarchy). It was essentially a movement for political and social reform to increase the power and jurisdiction of the central authority.The Revolution never intended to change the whole nature of our traditional society. The chief permanent achievement of the French Revolution was the suppression of those political institutions, commonly described as feudal, which for many centuries had held unquestioned sway in most European countries. The Revolution set out to replace them with a new social and political order, based on the concept of equality.[1]
In the work, Tocqueville makes some key propositions, of which three are the most discernible. Firstly, he stresses the point, that even though the French tried to change close to everything with the Revolution, they fell back on patterns that were observable before it, because they could not help use them as a template. Especially, they wanted to abolish the old system still yet ended up, as it was the case before, with a strong state because, paradoxically, it was the only thing that could be envisioned to destruct the old system and yet maintain order. Thus, much of the old system had to be kept to use it to bring about its destruction. This, in Tocqueville's view is the reason why even though the French tried to change everything, much stayed as it was before.
Secondly, Tocqueville repeatedly stresses is that if people want freedom not for its own sake but for some other goal, to further their material interest, it is unlikely that freedom will not turn into a despotic form of rule, where everyone may be free to further their material interest but without political freedom. He thus argues that if material, self-interested behaviour is the offspring for action, people may vote for a government that gives them economic stability, even if the price to pay for this is political freedom.
Thirdly, seeing Tocqueville's work in context to Democracy in America, it can be argued that he saw France as being the opposite of the US. Whereas in France before (and after) the revolution, people relied on the central power instead of becoming economically or politically active themselves, in the US political action took place on a “grassroots” level. There, private individuals formed the basis of economic and political life, but, in France, this center of gravity was taken up by the bureaucratic machine.