The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856)

Tocqueville sought to demonstrate the continuity of political behavior and attitudes that made post-revolutionary French society as prepared to accept despotism as that of the old regime. In this final study, the traumatic events of the 1848-51 years were clearly the source of his emphasis on the durability of centralization and class hostility in French history. France seemed less like the democratic society of the future that he had envisioned in America than the prisoner of its own past. Against the pessimism of his analysis of French political trends, The Old Regime reaffirmed the libertarian example of the Anglo-American world. The acclaim that received this study briefly dispelled the melancholy of its autor later years. Once again a public figure, he paid a visit to England in 1857 which culminated in an audience with the Prince Consort and that was the last public triumph of his life ( )

ubblicato nel 1856, L’antico regime e la rivoluzione costituisce un punto di svolta nella storiografia sulla rivoluzione francese: in un’indagine approfondita, nata dall’analisi di moltissimi documenti, testimonianze e atti pubblici, Tocqueville non solo fa luce sulle contraddizioni interne all’antico regime che portarono ai moti del 1789, ma dimostra anche – ribaltando la vulgata tradizionale che vedeva nella rivoluzione un punto di assoluta rottura – una sorprendente continuità nell’ordinamento giuridico e amministrativo della Francia prerivoluzionaria e di quella ottocentesca. Eccezionale per la limpidezza della trattazione, l’opera di Tocqueville rappresenta ancora oggi un testo fondamentale per comprendere uno dei momenti fondativi dell’Europa moderna, un prezioso modello di analisi per osservare in che modo gli aspetti sociali, giuridici e politici si intreccino nel determinare i mutamenti delle società.

susanna's rec

I read this excellent first volume of de Tocqueville's planned history of the French Revolution (he didn't live to complete it, alas) in my senior year in college, in a senior seminar on the Russian Revolution. A thorough exegesis of why the French ancien regime was ripe for downfall in 1789. ( )

Toqueville's study of how the development of institutions under the Ancien Régime laid the ground for the Revolution.