Elster Jon, Goldhammer Arthur. Tocqueville: The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution (ENG)

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II.7 How the Capital Subsumed the Country

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radius of fteen leagues.” No one worried about the real danger to which

such a concentration might give rise.

Thus, Paris became the master of France, and already the army was

gathering that would make itself master of Paris.

There is fairly wide agreement today, I think, that administrative

centralization and Parisian omnipotence played a large part in the fall

of all the governments that we have seen succeed one another over the

past forty years. It will not be difcult for me to show that the same con-

junction of circumstances was largely responsible for the sudden and

violent collapse of the old monarchy, and that it must be included among

the principal causes of that rst revolution of which all the others were

offspring.



II.8 –That France Was the Country Where

People Had Become Most Alike

Anyone who examines Ancien Régime France closely will come away

with two quite different images.

At times it seems that everyone who lived there, particularly those who

occupied the middle and upper regions of society – the only ones visible

to us – was exactly like everyone else.

Yet within this uniform multitude there remained an astonishing

variety of small barriers, which divided the multitude into many differ-

ent parts, and within each of these enclaves there emerged something like

a separate society, which was concerned only with its own interests and

did not take part in the life of the whole.

When I think of this almost innite division and reect on the fact

that nowhere else were citizens less prepared to act in common and help

one another out in a time of crisis than in France, I can understand how a

great revolution was able to turn such a society upside down in an instant.

I can imagine all those little barriers overturned by the great upheaval

itself. And when I do this, I immediately see a social body perhaps more

compact and homogeneous than the world has ever known.

I have explained how the distinctive life of the various provinces

throughout the kingdom had long since been snuffed out. This contrib-

uted greatly to making all the French quite similar to one another. Despite

persistent diversities, the unity of the nation was already transparent.

The uniformity of legislation makes this clear. As we proceed through the

eighteenth century, we see a growing number of edicts, royal declarations,

and council decrees that apply the same rules in the same way to all parts

II.8 France, a Country of People Most Alike



of the kingdom. It was not only the governors but also the governed who

imagined legislation so general and uniform that it could be the same for

everyone everywhere. The idea of such legislation can be found in all the

reform projects that were proposed one after another during the thirty

years leading up to the Revolution. Two centuries earlier, the material

basis for such an idea, if I may put it that way, would have been lacking.

Not only were the provinces increasingly alike, but within each province

people of different classes also became more and more similar despite the

particularities of their condition, at least if we except the lower orders.

Nothing brings this out more clearly than reading the grievance books

submitted by the various orders in 189. It is apparent that the people

who drafted these grievances differed profoundly in terms of their inter-

ests, yet in all other respects appear to have been similar.

If you study how things proceeded in earlier sessions of the Estates

General, you will come away with an entirely different picture: bourgeois

and noble then had more common interests and joint concerns. They

exhibited far less reciprocal animosity but still seemed to belong to two

distinct races.

Time, which had maintained and in many respects aggravated the

privileges that separated them, had done a remarkable job of making

them similar in every other way.

French nobles had been growing steadily poorer for several centuries.

“Despite its privileges, the nobility is daily falling deeper into ruin and

annihilation, and the Third Estate is snapping up fortunes,” one noble-

man sadly observed in 155. Yet the laws that protected the property of

nobles remained the same as always. Nothing in their economic condition

seemed to have changed. Nevertheless, they grew poorer everywhere in

precise proportion to their loss of power.

One might say that human institutions resemble man himself in that,

quite apart from the organs that fulll the various vital functions, there

is an invisible central force, which is the very principle of life. When that

life-giving ame is extinguished, the organs may appear to function as

before, yet in vain, for everything withers at once and dies. French nobles

still had entailments. Indeed, Burke remarks that in his time entailments

were more common and obligatory in France than in England, along with

primogeniture, perpetual ground rents, and the various things collected

under the head of “usage rights.” French nobles had been relieved of the

very onerous obligation to make war at their own expense, yet their immu-

nity from taxation had been maintained and in fact expanded considerably.

Book II

8

In other words, they retained the indemnity while shedding the burden.

In addition, they enjoyed several other pecuniary advantages that their

fathers had never possessed. Yet they gradually grew poorer as they lost

the habit and spirit of government. Indeed, this gradual impoverishment

must bear part of the blame for the great division in landed property

that we remarked on previously. The nobleman had ceded his land to

the peasants plot by plot, retaining only the seigniorial rents for himself,

thereby preserving the appearance rather than the reality of his former

estate. Several French provinces, including Limousin, of which Turgot

wrote, had only a small, impoverished nobility, which owned almost no

land and lived almost exclusively on seigniorial dues and ground rents.

“In this district,” said one intendant as early as the beginning of the

century, “there are still several thousand noble families, yet not fteen

of them have an income of twenty thousand livres.” In 150, another

intendant (for Franche-Comté) sent his successor a brieng of sorts,

in which he said: “The nobility of this region is reasonably decent but

quite poor, and as proud as it is poor. Its humiliation is proportionate to

what it was in the past. It would not be bad policy to maintain it in this

impoverished state so as to oblige it to serve us and leave it in need of our

assistance.” He added: “It is a fraternity that accepts only those who can

prove four quarters of nobility. It is not licensed but merely tolerated, and

it meets only once a year, in the presence of the intendant. After dining

and attending mass together, these nobles return home, some on their

Rosinantes, others on foot. The comical aspect of this gathering is some-

thing you cannot miss.”

This gradual impoverishment of the nobility was more or less visible

not only in France but also throughout the continent, where the feudal

system was nearing its end, as in France, but had not yet been replaced by

a new form of aristocracy. In the German nations along the Rhine, this

decadence was especially obvious and quite widely noted. The opposite

was true only in England, where the old noble families that had survived

had not only preserved but greatly increased their wealth. They remained

rst in wealth as well as power. The new families that had risen alongside

them had merely imitated their opulence without surpassing it.

In France, it seemed that all the property that nobles lost ended in the

hands of commoners. It was almost as if the whole of what they gained

came at the nobles’ expense. Yet no law prevented the bourgeois from

ruining himself or helped him to grow rich; he steadily enriched himself

nevertheless. Many commoners became as wealthy as the nobleman, and

II.8 France, a Country of People Most Alike

9

some even wealthier. What is more, the bourgeois’s wealth was of the

same kind as the noble’s: although he usually lived in a town, he often

owned elds and sometimes even acquired a seigneury.

Education and lifestyle had already created a thousand other resem-

blances between the bourgeois and the noble. The former was as well

educated as the latter, and – mark this well – his education drew on pre-

cisely the same sources. Both were illuminated by the same sun. The

education of both had been equally theoretical and literary. Paris, which

increasingly became France’s sole tutor, ultimately imposed a common

mold and style on all intellect.

At the end of the eighteenth century, it was probably still possible to

perceive a difference between the manners of the nobility and those of the

bourgeoisie, for nothing is slower to achieve equality than that supercial

aspect of mores known as manners. At bottom, however, all who stood

above the common people resembled one another. They had the same

ideas and habits, shared the same tastes, indulged in the same pleasures,

read the same books, and spoke the same language. The only remaining

difference between them was a matter of rights.

I doubt that this convergence had taken place to the same degree any-

where else, even in England, where the different classes, though solidly

attached to one another by common interests, often still differed in regard

to intellect and mores because political liberty, which has the admirable

power to foster necessary relations and mutual ties of dependence among

citizens of all classes, does not always make them similar in doing so.

In the long run, it is government by a single individual that always has

the inevitable effect of making people both similar to one another and

mutually indifferent to the fate of their fellows.



II.9 – How Men So Similar Were More Separate

Than Ever, Divided into Small Groups Alien

and Indifferent to One Another

Let us now consider the other side of the picture and see how these same

Frenchmen, who were alike in so many ways, were nevertheless more

isolated from one another than people perhaps anywhere else, and more

even than they had ever been previously in France.

It seems quite clear that at the time the feudal system established itself

in Europe, what has since come to be called the nobility did not immedi-

ately constitute a caste; rather, it originally comprised the foremost men

and women in the nation and was thus initially merely an aristocracy.

This is not an issue I want to discuss here. Sufce it to say that by the

Middle Ages, the nobility had become a caste, by which I mean that birth

was its distinguishing characteristic.

The nobility did retain one essential characteristic of an aristocracy,

that of being a body of citizens who govern, but birth alone decided those

who would stand at the head of this body. Anyone who was not born noble

was excluded from this closed and separate class and occupied a position

in the state that could be high or low but always remained subordinate.

Wherever the feudal system became established on the European con-

tinent, it ended in caste. Only in England did it return to aristocracy.

I have always found it astonishing that a fact that sets England apart

from all other modern nations, and which alone can explain the peculiari-

ties of its laws, its spirit, and its history, has not drawn even more atten-

tion from philosophers and statesmen than it has, and I am surprised that

II.9 Men So Similar but More Separate Than Ever



habit has ultimately made it all but invisible to the English themselves.

It has been half-noticed and half-described yet, to my mind, never fully

and clearly perceived. To be sure, Montesquieu, visiting Great Britain in

729, wrote: “Here I am in a country that bears little resemblance to the

rest of Europe.” But to that he adds nothing else.

What made the England of that time so different from the rest of

Europe was less its Parliament, its freedom, the public nature of its

political debate, and its jury system than something even more specic

and inuential. England was the only country where the caste system

had been not altered but effectively destroyed. Nobles and commoners

there jointly followed the same affairs, entered the same professions, and,

what is even more signicant, intermarried. The daughter of the greatest

English lord could already marry a new man without hanging her head

in shame.

If you want to know whether caste, together with the ideas, habits,

and barriers that it invariably creates, has been denitively eliminated

in any nation, look to marriage. There alone will you nd the decisive

evidence you need. In France, even today, after sixty years of democ-

racy, you would often search in vain. Old and new families that may seem

indistinguishable in every respect still avoid mixing in marriage as much

as they possibly can.

It has often been said that the English nobility was more cautious,

shrewd, and open than any other. What should have been said instead

was that, strictly speaking, there has been no nobility in England for quite

some time, if one takes the word in the ancient, circumscribed sense that

it has retained everywhere else.

This remarkable revolution has vanished into the night of time, but a

living token remains: in language. Centuries ago, the word gentleman took

on an entirely new meaning in England, and the word commoner ceased to

exist. It would already have been impossible to translate the following line

from Tartuffe literally into English when Molière wrote it in 664:

Et, tel que l’on le voit, il est bon gentilhomme. (“And as you can see,

he is a ne gentleman.”)

Let us once again apply the science of language to the science of

history: trace through space and time the fate of the word gentleman,

which derives from the French word gentilhomme, and you will nd that

in England its meaning broadened as the gap between the two classes

Book II

2

narrowed and noble and commoner began to mingle. As the centuries

passed, the word began to be applied to men somewhat lower down the

social scale. Ultimately it traveled with the English to America, and there

it would be applied indiscriminately to all citizens. Its history coincides

with the history of democracy.

In France, the word gentilhomme has always remained narrowly cir-

cumscribed by its original meaning. Since the Revolution, it has virtually

disappeared from common usage, but its meaning never changed. The

word, which served to denote the members of the noble caste, was pre-

served intact because the caste itself had been preserved, as isolated as

ever from everyone else.

I am going to press this point much further, however: I contend that

the noble caste had become much more isolated than it had been at the

time of the word’s inception, and that what took place in France was a

change in the opposite direction from that which occurred in England.

Although bourgeois and noble became more similar in France, they

had also increasingly isolated themselves from each other. We must take

great care not to confuse these two phenomena. It is especially important

to maintain this distinction because the two changes, instead of attenuat-

ing each other’s effects, often reinforce them.

In the Middle Ages, and as long as feudalism persisted, anyone who

held land of the lord (and who was therefore called his vassal, in feudal

terminology) regularly joined the lord in governing the manor, even

though the vassal was often not a noble. Indeed, participation in the gov-

ernment of the manor was the principal condition of his tenure. Not only

was the vassal obliged to follow the lord in battle; he was also required, by

virtue of the title to his property, to spend a certain part of the year at the

lord’s court, that is, to assist in the work of dispensing justice and admin-

istering the estate. The lord’s court was the main cog in the machinery

of feudal government. It gures in all the old laws of Europe. In our

own day, I have found what are quite obviously vestiges of those laws in

several parts of Germany. Edme de Fréminville, the learned scholar of

feudal law who, thirty years before the French Revolution, wrote a thick

book on feudal dues and the revision of the terriers, or land registers, tells

us that he found in “the titles of any number of estates that the vassals

were obliged to appear every two weeks at the lord’s court, where they

sat together with the lord or his regular judge and heard accusations and

complaints that had arisen among the residents.” He added that he found

“in some cases eighty, in others a hundred and fty, and in still others

II.9 Men So Similar but More Separate Than Ever



as many as two hundred of these vassals on one estate. A great many of

them were commoners.” I cite this here not as proof – there are countless

others – but as an example of the way in which originally, and for a long

time thereafter, the upper echelon of rural commoners approached the

class of gentilshommes and regularly mingled with them in the conduct of

joint business. What the lord’s court did for small rural landowners, the

provincial estates and later the Estates General did for the bourgeois of

the towns.

It is impossible to study the surviving records of the Estates General

of the fourteenth century without being astonished by the place that the

Third Estate occupied and the power it exercised in those assemblies.

As an individual, the bourgeois of the fourteenth century was no doubt

quite inferior to the bourgeois of the eighteenth, but the bourgeoisie as a

body occupied a higher and more secure place in the political society of

that earlier time. Its right to participate in government was uncontested.

It always played an important and often a preponderant role in political

assemblies. The other classes constantly felt the need to take its wishes

into account.

What is most striking, however, is that the nobility and Third Estate

then found it easier to administer affairs jointly, and to mount joint resis-

tance to the central government, than they would later on. This can be

seen not only in the Estates General of the fourteenth century, several

of which assumed, because of the misfortunes of that era, an irregular

and revolutionary character, but also in the provincial estates of the same

period, which show no sign of having proceeded in anything other than

the usual and regular fashion. Thus, for example, in Auvergne we see the

three orders taking the most important decisions in common and choos-

ing commissioners from the ranks of all three to oversee the execution

of those decisions. We nd the same thing happening in this period in

Champagne. Everyone is familiar with the celebrated declaration whereby

the nobles and bourgeois of many towns joined together at the beginning

of the fourteenth century to defend the freedoms granted to the nation

and the privileges awarded to their provinces against the encroachments

of royal power. One nds in this period of our history any number of

such episodes, which read like pages taken from the history of England.

Nothing of the kind can be seen in subsequent centuries.

Indeed, as the government of the manor broke down, as meetings of

the Estates General became increasingly infrequent or ceased altogether,

and as general liberties nally succumbed, taking local liberties down

Book II

4

with them, the bourgeois and the noble ceased to make contact in the

conduct of public affairs. They no longer felt any need to come together

or to reach an understanding. As they became steadily more indepen-

dent, they also became more alienated from each other. By the eighteenth

century this revolution was complete: bourgeois and noble no longer met

at all, except by chance in private life. No longer were the two classes

merely rivals; they had become enemies.

What seems quite peculiar to France, moreover, is the fact that even as

the nobility as an order was thus losing its political powers, the noble as indi-

vidual was acquiring a number of privileges that he had never before pos-

sessed, or increasing those which were already his. One might say that the

limbs gained at the expense of the body. The nobility less and less enjoyed

the right to command, but nobles more and more claimed the exclusive

prerogative of being the principal servants of the master. It had been easier

for a commoner to become an ofcer under Louis XIV than it was under

Louis XVI. This type of promotion was common in Prussia when it was

almost unheard of in France. Every privilege, once obtained, adhered to

the blood; blood and privilege became inseparable. The more the nobility

ceased to be an aristocracy, the more it seemed to become a caste.

Let us take the most odious of all these privileges, exemption from

taxation. It is easy to see that tax exemptions grew steadily in France

from the fteenth century to the time of the French Revolution. The

value of an exemption increased because public expenditure grew rapidly.

When the taille yielded ,2, livres under Charles VII, exemption

was a minor privilege. When it yielded  million under Louis XVI, it

was major. When the taille was the only tax on commoners, the noble

exemption was not particularly glaring, but when taxes of this type pro-

liferated under a thousand different names and in a thousand different

forms, when four other taxes were assimilated to the basic charge, and

when exactions unknown in the Middle Ages, such as the compulsory

labor on public works, militia service, and other requirements were

added to the mix, the noble exemption seemed immense. The inequality,

though great, was, to be sure, more apparent than real, for the noble was

often affected indirectly, through his tenants, by the tax from which he

was himself exempt. But in such matters, the inequality one sees is more

painful than the inequality one feels.

Louis XIV, pressed by the nancial necessities that overwhelmed him

at the end of his reign, had established two common taxes, the capitation