Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
The Old Regime and the Revolution
The Revolution continued the centralisation of the monarchy instead of breaking with it.
Introduction
L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) was planned as the first volume of a history of the Revolution that Tocqueville did not live to complete. Using provincial archives, among them those of the intendancy of Tours, he shows that the monarchy had already centralised France through its intendants and the royal council, destroying local liberties while leaving the nobility its privileges without its functions. This made inequality more hateful and left individuals isolated before the state, while men of letters without practical experience of government shaped public opinion with abstract theories. Tocqueville also observes that the Revolution broke out where conditions had been improving, not where they were worst. Later historians of the Revolution, François Furet among them, took up his approach.
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