The Old Regime and the French Revolution Quotes

“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“The most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms. ... They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“They took over from the old order not only most of its customs, conventions, and modes of thought, but even those ideas which prompted our revolutionaries to destroy it; that, in fact, though nothing was further from their intentions, they used the debris of the old order for building up the new.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable become intolerable once the idea of escape from them is suggested.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“One's love for despotism is in exact proportion to one's contempt for one's country.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“French sought reforms before liberties... They hate, not certain specific privileges, but all distinctions of classes; they would insist upon equality of rights in the midst of slavery. They respect neither contracts nor private rights; indeed, they hardly recognize individual rights at all in their absorbing devotion to the public good... They conceived all the social and administrative reforms effected by the Revolution before the idea of free institutions had once flashed upon their mind… Most of them were strongly opposed to deliberative assemblies, to local and subordinate authorities, and to the various checks which have been established from time to time in free countries to counterbalance the supreme government... French nation is prepared to tolerate in a government, that favors and flatters its desire for equality, practices and principles that are, in fact, the tools of despotism.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“Centralization and socialism are products of the same soil. The one is to the other what the cultivated fruit is to the wild stock.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“Revolutions are not always brought about by a gradual decline from bad to worse. Nations that have endured patiently and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming oppression, often burst into rebellion against the yoke the moment it begins to grow lighter. The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“They had embraced the ideal of a society in which the sole aristocracy would consist of public officials and a single, all-powerful administration would control the state and be the guardian of individuals. Although they wished to be free, they had no intention of abandoning this fundamental idea. They merely attempted to reconcile it with the idea of liberty. Hence, they sought to combine unlimited administrative centralization with a preponderant legislative body: bureaucratic administration and representative government. The nation as a body enjoyed all the rights of sovereignty, but each individual citizen was gripped in the tightest dependency. The experience and virtues of a free people were required of the former, the qualities of a good servant of the latter.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“Despotism alone can provide that atmosphere of secrecy which favors crooked dealing and enables the freebooters of finance to make illicit fortunes.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“In the darkness of the future three truths may be plainly discerned. The first is, that all the men of our day are driven, sometimes slowly, sometimes violently, by an unknown force—which may possibly be regulated or moderated, but can not be overcome—toward the destruction of aristocracies. The second is, that, among all human societies, those in which there exists and can exist no aristocracy are precisely those in which it will be most difficult to resist, for any length of time, the establishment of despotism. And the third is, that despotisms can never be so injurious as in societies of this nature; for despotism is the form of government which is best adapted to facilitate the development of the vices to which these societies are prone, and naturally encourages the very propensities that are indigenous in their disposition.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

“People sought reforms, not rights. Had the throne then been occupied by a monarch of the calibre and character of Frederick the Great, I have no doubt he would have accomplished many of the reforms which were brought about by the Revolution; and that not only without endangering his throne, but with a large gain of power.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“People think that the destructive theories that nowadays go by the name “socialism” are of recent origin. This is a mistake: these theories were contemporaneous with the first Economists. While they employed the all-powerful government of their dreams as an instrument to change the forms of society, socialists imagined seizing the same power to undermine its base.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“Provincial liberties can subsist for a time without national liberty when those liberties are ancient and linked to habit, mores, and memories, while despotism is new. But it is unreasonable to think that one can create local liberties at will or even maintain them for long if general liberty is suppressed.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“do not know whether this is true, but there can be no doubt that in the eighteenth century, centralization did not prevent them from doing so. The administrative history of the age is filled with their chaotic affairs.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“the old feudal society, if the lord possessed great rights, he also bore great burdens. It was his responsibility to aid the indigent within the limits of his domains. We find a last vestige of this old law of Europe in the Prussian code of 1795, which states that “the lord shall see to it that poor peasants receive an education. Insofar as possible he shall provide those of his vassals who have no land with the means of subsistence. Should any lapse into indigence, he shall come to their aid.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“reader who has the patience to read this chapter attentively”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“I once heard an orator refer to administrative centralization as “that admirable triumph of the Revolution, for which we are the envy of Europe.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“most German states in 1788, a peasant could not leave his lord’s domain, and if he did leave he could be pursued wherever he went and forcibly returned. He was subject to the jurisdiction of his lord, who kept an eye on his private life and punished his intemperance and laziness.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“everything that was vital, active, and productive was new, and not simply new but in contradiction with the old.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“There are times when men are so different from one another that the idea of a single law applicable to all is almost incomprehensible.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“But clear away all this debris and you will see an immense and unified central government, which has drawn in and devoured all the bits of authority and influence that were once parceled out among a host of secondary powers, orders, classes, professions, families, and individuals – scattered, as it were, throughout the social body. No comparable power has existed in the world since the fall of the Roman Empire. The Revolution created this new power, or, rather, it created the ruins from which the new power emerged on its own. The governments that it instituted are, to be sure, more fragile but a hundred times more powerful than those that it toppled – fragile and powerful for the same reasons, as we shall see in due course.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“it would be strange indeed if institutions that tend to promote the ideas and passions of the people had the inevitable and enduring effect of encouraging impiety.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“gradual restoration of the power of the Church and a reaffirmation of its influence over the minds of men.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“For the rest, the eighteenth-century philosophes attacked the Church with a kind of fury. They attacked its clergy, its hierarchy, its institutions, and its dogma, and, the better to demolish all these things, they sought to undermine the very foundations of Christianity itself.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“because great revolutions that succeed erase the causes that produced them and become incomprehensible by dint of their very success.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“circumjacent”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

“After destroying political institutions, it abolished civil institutions. First it changed laws, then mores, customs, and even language. Having shredded the fabric of government, it undermined the foundations of society and ultimately went after God himself.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution