The Ancien Régime and the Revolution

"What is so great about Tocqueville is that he looks at archives and studies the events, but he applies to it an amazing synthetic and analytical intelligence. It’s the same intelligence that he applied to American society , which he visited in the 1830s. What’s striking is that he is able to develop broad analytical categories that relate the French Revolution to the direction of modern society as a whole, which he sees as the destruction of the aristocracy and the coming of democracy . But he adds a twist that will remain influential to this day, which is that he points to the weakness of democracy as a form of government. It has an internal, inherent tendency to lead to despotism unless there are certain conditions that prevent that from happening. “Democracy has an internal, inherent tendency to lead to despotism” This is an incredibly brilliant perception. He comes to it, in part, because he is involved in the 1848 revolution, and he’s unbelievably disappointed by the rise of Louis Napoleon [Napoleon’s nephew, who became Emperor Napoleon III in 1852]. He was born in the Napoleonic period, and he says, “How can this be? We have these revolutions in the name of liberty and we end up with a despotic, authoritarian ruler.” It’s a problem we still grapple with today. Why do revolutions in the name of democracy – we see them happening at this very moment – end up having a problem institutionalising themselves as true democracies? The Tocquevillean answer is still an incredibly important answer, which is that you are more likely to end up as a democracy if you have institutions that support a democratic political life. It’s a tragedy and a paradox. You make a revolution because you don’t have the institutions that support a democratic political life. You do it in order to get a democratic political life, but you don’t have the infrastructure in place to make that possible. So the question becomes how do you get from the desire to the reality of democratic political life? What Tocqueville loves about the United States is that they have this infrastructure already, because of the forms of local representative government that had already developed before they broke from Great Britain. But he’s leaving us with a problem that we still have to confront. Should we not want people to have democracy if they don’t have the institutions already? If they’re not already democratic can we really say that to people in the world: “I’m sorry you don’t have democratic institutions, therefore you’re not really able to have democracy.” Of course we can’t. So we have to figure out how you make this transition. My own personal critique of Tocqueville is that he is too negative about what goes on during the revolution. What goes on during the revolution is, in my view, an incredible upsurge of new kinds of democratic institutions. It’s just they don’t have time to totally take root. Yes, but he is able to stand back. What’s amazing is that he is actually a minister in the 1848 government. It’s not that he’s just kind of around. He’s actively involved, and yet he’s able to deliver this analytical tour de force. After the events unravel in the way they unravel, he is able to stand back and say, “What is going on? What explains how this could possibly happen? Why does this keep happening in French society?” What’s incredible about Tocqueville – and I’m not particularly sympathetic with his political point of view, necessarily – is his intelligence in grasping these fundamental categories and explaining them in the most amazingly penetrating, limpid and fascinating prose. He gives you these turns of phrase – you actually can’t believe it when you’re reading it. You just think, “Wow. That is such a great way of saying it.” It’s absolutely crucial and probably the single most important thing that he is arguing. I’m actually not convinced he is right about it, but it’s a very powerful analysis. He basically says that countries develop a style of governing and that it’s extremely difficult to get away from that style of governing. For example, in interpretations of the Russian Revolution there’s a complete division between those who feel that communism took over the basic characteristics of Tsarist rule – which was incredibly centralised and authoritarian, and relied on the secret service – and those who believe that Marxism completely changed everything. This kind of division of opinion exists for all the major revolutions, in part because of the influence of this Tocquevillean analysis, which is that you have a style of ruling, and it’s very hard to change it. Yes, he really doesn’t like Louis XIV, but he really likes Louis XVI. Historical opinion is now in fact much kinder to Louis XVI. Louis XVI tried to reform, he tried to be a good king, he didn’t have any mistresses, he wasn’t wasting a lot of money buying baubles for members of his court. He was trying to be the new-style king, but in a situation in which it turned out to be impossible for him to push that through as a project. So much in Tocqueville has had such an enormous influence on social scientific thinking about social and political movements. So yes, amongst them, is what’s called the revolution of “rising expectations”. He points to the fact that it’s not a France that’s in misery, it’s a France that’s getting better and better off. This is the problem. People have higher expectations and then they’re more disappointed. Tocqueville just had all these incredibly brilliant insights about how this worked, and part of it was because, frankly, he didn’t write in the historical mode. He wrote in a sociological mode. So he could say: “I don’t need to tell you what happened in 1789, I’m just going to tell you what it meant.”"