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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tres Tres Bien, April 27, 2000
Tocqueville has always been, and probably always will be, known as the author of "Democracy in America," a wide-ranging and perspicacious study of the early republic. However, it's when he writes about his own France, and its political system that he knows so intimately, that Tocqueville is at his best. Unlike "Democracy," "The Ancient Regime" is neither sprawling, judgmental, nor inaccurate. These are excusable lapses, of course, in a grand work of poignant analysis, but such deficiencies do not mar "The Ancient Regime." This book is succinct, beautifully written, expertly researched, and incredibly original. Because Tocqueville was French and worked in the French government, this work is much more focused, specific, and accurate than "Democracy" (written hastily after a 9-month tour of America in 1830-31). It is simply a brilliant work, the creation of a curious and sometimes eccentric mind.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What caused the French Revolution ?, December 4, 2008
This review is from: The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume II: Notes on the French Revolution and Napoleon (Hardcover)
This was required reading for a graduate course in the history of the French Revolution. Alexis De Tocqueville's research for his book The Old Regime and the Revolution taught him that there were several socio-political and economic causes that led to the Revolution. There is enough excellent historical scholarship available to finally put to bed the myth that the Enlightenment was in and of itself the impetus that caused French citizens to storm the Bastille. According to Tocqueville's excellent analysis in his book, he argues that the waning vestiges of feudalism sowed the seeds of destruction of the Old Regime. The reasons why in France the vestiges of feudalism were torn down in the cataclysmic crash of the French Revolution and not discarded as peaceably, as say in England, is the question to which his book was devoted. The first social structure he turns his attention to is the Church, the Second Estate of France, because of the socio-economic and political power it occupied in the nation.
When it came to his observations that the influence the philosophes had on the Revolution, he found that it was not unusual to find intellectuals writing about improving society and that ambition had been historically evident since the early Greeks. What Tocqueville became interested in was that since the mid-eighteenth century, this desire became the bedrock of Enlightenment writing in France and was soaked up like a sponge by its citizenry. Thus, he wrote, "The philosophy of the eighteenth century is rightly considered one of the principle causes of the Revolution and it is certainly true that that philosophy was deeply irreligious" (Tocqueville, 96). Therefore, Tocqueville argued that one of the central causes of the Revolution was the attacks on the Church by the Philosophes throughout the eighteenth century. "The priests were not hated because they claimed to regulate the affairs of the other world, but because they were landowners, lords, tithe collectors, and administrators in this one" (97).
Tocqueville noted in his book that during the eighteenth century, for the most part, French intellectuals had no experience or say in governmental affairs. Tocqueville lamented that the philosophe's lack of experience created, "A frightening sight! For what is merit in a writer is sometimes vice in a statesman, and the same things which have often made lovely books can lead to great revolutions" (Tocqueville, 201). However, Tocqueville also found that the country, "...was at the same time the most educated of all nations on earth, and the most fond of things intellectual, one will understand without difficulty how writers became a political power in France, and ended up being the most important one" (Tocqueville 200).
Recommended reading for anyone interested in political philosophy, enlightenment history, and the French Revolution. I also recommend you read the book that Tocqueville is most famous for "Democracy In America" although written in the 1830's it is still the most prescient look at America and its citizenry.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
the great French observer of America looks at France, October 13, 2000
Alexis de Tocqueville is, of course, the most perceptive observer of American democracy ever to grace our shores, his Democracy in America one of the most important books ever written about democracy in general and the American Republic in specific. Here, in a less read work, he takes on the origins of the French Revolution and the peculiar French form of democracy it brought and proves an equally keen observer of his own country and countrymen. De Tocqueville makes several vital points about the French Revolution: first, that it built gradually and, given circumstances in France, was inevitable; second, where the American Revolution had as its lodestar the ideal of freedom, the French Revolution was motivated by a passionate hatred of inequality; third, the demise of all insitutions other than the monarchy in France made it certain that when Revolution came, it would be violent and unchecked; finally, this combination of factors lead to the bizarre nature of the French Revolution, with no developed institutions to turn to once the King was gone and with no great emphasis placed on freedom, the French people were willing to tolerate the nihilism of the Terror and the authoritarianism of the governments that replaced the monarchy. He does not make the case, but it lies before us, that the American Revolution was fundamentally a positive action, a demand for greater freedom, but the French Revolution was a negative action, a demand that the few not own more than the many. This book was to be followed by a second volume dealing with the the Revolution itself, but he died before he could continue the work. That is a shame; it would have been interesting to have some more insight from him into the French, it seems unlikely that anyone has ever rendered a better description of his people than the one he offers in his Conclusion: When I observe France from this angle [their temperament] I find the nation itself far more remarkable than any of the events in its long history. It hardly seems possible that there can ever have existed any other people so full of contrasts and so extreme in all their doings, so much guided by their emotions and so little by fixed principles, always behaving better, or worse, than one expected of them....Undisciplined by temperament, the Frenchman is always readier to put up with arbitrary rule, however harsh, of an autocrat than with a free, well-ordered government by his fellow citizens, however worthy of respect they be. At one moment he is up in arms against authority and the next we find him serving the powers that be with a zeal such as the most servile races never display. In the context of this paragraph, we can begin to understand Vichy France and the bureaucratic tyranny of the modern French nation. I say "begin"... GRADE: B+
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