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agtw 's review for:
The Ancien Régime and the Revolution
by Alexis de Tocqueville
challenging
informative
slow-paced
For the past two months, I have been embroiled with the first shard of de Tocqueville's altogether-unfinished domestic masterwork. The Ancien Régime and the Revolution is without a doubt the slowest, densest, most bluntly inaccessible book I have committed myself to.
The information showcased within its meagre 207 pages could be stretched to double that number, not to mention the addition of de Tocqueville's extensive notes section, taking up almost the final third of the book. It entails the framework of the Ancien Régime in 18th-century France, with every nook of grey administrative wording and structure outlined, from the overseeing of road construction to the oversights in local governments' assembly structure.
The main grasp from an overload of delicately-researched text is this: the French Revolution stemmed inevitably from both the inadequacy of the Régime and the attempt at reforms that immediately preceded it. It is also impossible to ignore the sense of haphazardness shown among the Revolution's contributors, seen plainly with what followed in the Terror and accession of Napoleon, but also with what Tocqueville notes as a completely unstructured resistance to a far better structured Régime - it'd be hard to find just ten men together who shared the same revolutionary ideals at the same time.
The Revolution was an upheaval of class boundaries, with anything supplementary to this all but lost in the following years. Tocqueville emphasises that hatred of inequality was the only cause rooted in all revolutionaries, with a 'free' state only secondary. I should now give way to a particularly memorable excerpt amongst the sea of academic jargon that besets these pages.
"But when the rich man and the poor man no longer have any shared interest, any shared grievances, any shared business, the shadows which conceal the mind of the one from that of the other become unfathomable and these two men could live side by side for ever without any contact between them. It is strange to see in what a bizarre state of security all those who occupied the upper and middle stories of the social edifice were living at the very moment when the Revolution was beginning and to hear them discoursing cleverly among themselves on the virtues of the common people, on their gentleness, their devotion, their innocent pleasures, when '93 was already opening beneath their feet: what an absurd and terrible spectacle!"
I think he could have left it at that. An absurd and terrible spectacle.
The information showcased within its meagre 207 pages could be stretched to double that number, not to mention the addition of de Tocqueville's extensive notes section, taking up almost the final third of the book. It entails the framework of the Ancien Régime in 18th-century France, with every nook of grey administrative wording and structure outlined, from the overseeing of road construction to the oversights in local governments' assembly structure.
The main grasp from an overload of delicately-researched text is this: the French Revolution stemmed inevitably from both the inadequacy of the Régime and the attempt at reforms that immediately preceded it. It is also impossible to ignore the sense of haphazardness shown among the Revolution's contributors, seen plainly with what followed in the Terror and accession of Napoleon, but also with what Tocqueville notes as a completely unstructured resistance to a far better structured Régime - it'd be hard to find just ten men together who shared the same revolutionary ideals at the same time.
The Revolution was an upheaval of class boundaries, with anything supplementary to this all but lost in the following years. Tocqueville emphasises that hatred of inequality was the only cause rooted in all revolutionaries, with a 'free' state only secondary. I should now give way to a particularly memorable excerpt amongst the sea of academic jargon that besets these pages.
"But when the rich man and the poor man no longer have any shared interest, any shared grievances, any shared business, the shadows which conceal the mind of the one from that of the other become unfathomable and these two men could live side by side for ever without any contact between them. It is strange to see in what a bizarre state of security all those who occupied the upper and middle stories of the social edifice were living at the very moment when the Revolution was beginning and to hear them discoursing cleverly among themselves on the virtues of the common people, on their gentleness, their devotion, their innocent pleasures, when '93 was already opening beneath their feet: what an absurd and terrible spectacle!"
I think he could have left it at that. An absurd and terrible spectacle.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Classism
Minor: Death, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Religious bigotry, War