Alexis de Tocqueville · Politics
Tocqueville’s last great work turned from America to the French Revolution, and to the deepest tension in his thought: that a people may passionately love <em>equality</em> while caring little for <em>liberty</em> - and that the Revolution, far from destroying the centralised state, completed it.
Twenty years after Democracy in America, near the end of his life, Tocqueville turned from the new world to the great event that had haunted his family and his nation: the French Revolution. In The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), he brought to the study of the Revolution the same penetrating method he had brought to America - looking beneath the surface of dramatic events for the deep social causes, the long, slow movements of which the Revolution was only the violent culmination. The result was a work that overturned the conventional understanding of the Revolution and remains one of the most original books ever written about it.
The conventional view, held by friends and enemies of the Revolution alike, was that 1789 marked a total break - a sudden, radical rupture that swept away the old order entirely and began the world anew. Revolutionaries celebrated this rupture; reactionaries lamented it; but both agreed it was a rupture. Tocqueville’s great and disturbing thesis was that this was largely an illusion. The Revolution, he argued, was far more a continuation than a break - that beneath the violent surface, the new France inherited far more from the old monarchy than anyone wished to admit, and that the deepest tendencies the Revolution is credited with creating had in fact been at work, under the monarchy, for generations before 1789. To understand the Revolution, Tocqueville insisted, you must understand the old regime that produced it - for the Revolution did not spring from nothing, nor create a wholly new world, but carried to completion processes long under way.
The most powerful and counterintuitive of Tocqueville’s arguments concerns centralisation - the very thing he had warned against as the great enemy of liberty. The Revolution, in the popular imagination, had swept away the old order and built a new, modern, centralised state in its place. Tocqueville showed that this got the story almost exactly backwards. The centralised administrative state was not the creation of the Revolution; it was the creation of the monarchy, built up steadily over the centuries before 1789 as the French kings, in their long struggle to subdue the independent nobility and the provincial liberties, drew more and more power and function into the central government and its corps of royal administrators.
Long before the Revolution, Tocqueville demonstrated from the archives, France had already become a remarkably centralised state. The old intermediate powers - the nobility, the provincial estates, the local liberties and self-governing bodies - had been progressively stripped of their real authority and reduced to empty privileges and social distinctions, while the actual business of governing had migrated to the central administration. The nobles still had their titles and their tax exemptions, but they no longer governed; the real power had passed to the royal officials directing affairs from the centre. The old regime, in other words, had already hollowed out the local and intermediate liberties and concentrated power at the centre - had already done much of the levelling and centralising that the Revolution is credited with.
What did the Revolution do, then? It completed the process. It swept away the last remnants of the intermediate powers - the surviving privileges of the nobility, the last provincial liberties - that had still stood, however feebly, between the individual and the central state. And in doing so, it removed the final barriers to the centralised power the monarchy had built, leaving the central state more dominant than ever, now facing a mass of equal individuals with nothing between them and its authority. The Revolution thus did not break the centralised state but perfected it, inheriting the machine the monarchy had constructed and stripping away the last obstacles to its operation. This is the great irony Tocqueville uncovered: the Revolution, made in the name of liberty, strengthened the centralised power that is liberty’s enemy; it destroyed the old aristocratic order but inherited and completed the centralising work that order’s kings had begun. The road to the modern centralised state ran straight through the Revolution, but it had been laid by the monarchy long before.
At the deepest level, The Old Regime returns to the great theme that runs through all of Tocqueville’s work and reaches here its most pointed expression: the tension between equality and liberty, and the disturbing discovery that a people may love the first far more than the second. The French, Tocqueville argued, made their Revolution far more for the sake of equality than for the sake of freedom - and this preference, he believed, was the key to understanding both the Revolution’s course and its ultimate betrayal of its own liberating promise.
Equality and liberty, Tocqueville insisted, are not the same thing, and they do not always go together; indeed they can pull against each other. The passion for equality is, he thought, the stronger, more universal, and more enduring of the two democratic passions - a deep, insatiable, almost instinctive longing that equal peoples feel for the levelling of all distinctions and the abolition of every superiority. The love of liberty - of genuine self-government, of the active management of public affairs, of the dispersal of power - is rarer, more demanding, and more easily abandoned. And the crucial, dangerous point is that the two can be satisfied separately: a people can have equality without liberty. They can be equal among themselves - all equally without distinction, all equally subject - while being equally unfree, equally ruled by a central power above them all. Equality in servitude is still equality; and a people that cares more for equality than for freedom may accept it, may even welcome it, so long as no one is raised above the rest.
This, Tocqueville feared, was the deep logic of the French Revolution and of its terrible sequel. The French passionately desired equality - the abolition of aristocratic privilege, the levelling of ranks, the equal subjection of all to the same law and the same power. This passion they largely satisfied. But the love of liberty - of real self-government, of free institutions, of dispersed power - was weaker and more easily lost; and so, having achieved their equality, the French repeatedly proved willing to surrender their liberty to a strong central power that promised order and preserved the equality they prized. They would accept a master, even an absolute one, provided he was the equal master of all and maintained the levelling they desired. This is why the Revolution, made in the name of both liberty and equality, secured the equality but lost the liberty - culminating not in free self-government but in the centralised, equalising despotism of Napoleon, who gave the French the equality they craved under a tyranny they accepted. The Revolution’s tragedy, for Tocqueville, was that its love of equality outran and finally devoured its love of liberty - and that this was no accident, but the expression of a permanent danger in the democratic soul: that the passion for equality, if it is not joined to and disciplined by an equal passion for liberty, can lead a people not to freedom but to a new and equal servitude.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Tocqueville’s analysis of the French Revolution in The Old Regime and the Revolution . Explain in your own words two of his great paradoxes: that the Revolution continued the monarchy’s centralisation, and that a people can love equality more than liberty.
Leads to Karl Marx.
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