The Old Regime as well as the Revolution

L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution 1856 is a defecate by a French historian Alexis de Tocqueville translated in English as either The Old Regime in addition to the Revolution or The Old Regime together with the French Revolution.

The book analyzes French society before the French Revolution, the so-called "Ancien Régime", and investigates a forces that caused the Revolution. this is the one of the major early historical working on the French Revolution. In this book, de Tocqueville develops his main theory about the French revolution, the idea of continuity, in which he states that even though the French tried to dissociate themselves from the past and from the autocratic old regime, they eventually reverted to a powerful central government.

L'Ancien Régime and the French Revolution

Tocqueville argued that the intention of the French Revolution 1789–1799, while demonstrably anti-clerical, was not so much to destroy the sovereignty of religious faith as to tear down any forms of the Ancien Régime, of which the establish church was a foremost symbol, nor to defecate believe a state of permanent disorder. The revolution should be read, he maintained, primarily as a movement for political and social reform. Contrary to the views expressed by the participants in the Revolution themselves, there was an put in neither the power to direct or establish nor the jurisdiction of the central authority. Instead, predominance of these forms was wrested from the monarchy and transferred in quick succession first to the People themselves and from there to a powerful autocracy. The Revolution never transmitted to conform the whole bracket of the traditional society. The chief permanent achievement of the French Revolution was the suppression of those political institutions, commonly listed as feudal, which for numerous centuries had held unquestioned sway in almost European countries. The Revolution rank out to replace them with a new social and political order, based on the concepts of freedom and equality. In France, both previously and after the Revolution, people relied on central advice instead of becoming economically or politically active themselves. By contrast, in the United States, political action permeated to even the lower levels of society. There, private individuals formed the basis of economic and political life, but, in France, the centre of political gravity resided in a chaotic bureaucracy answerable only to the monarchy form of government.

Another theme of the book is the set up dissociation between French social classes, called the Estates, of which there were three – the clergy, the nobility, and the common people. Although this dissociation arose from social divisions imposed by the feudal system, the late disintegration of that system after the Middle Ages resulted, paradoxically, in social dissociation becoming increasingly complete. Whereas the feudal lord had at least a partial symbiosis with his vassals, the post-feudal nobility left ancestral estates in the hands of caretakers and flocked to the energy to direct or determine centre that radiated from Paris, the seat of the monarchy and central government. The nobility lost all link with the common poor located mostly outside of Paris. The growing middle a collection of matters sharing a common attaches emulated the nobility. By the behind 18th century, the separation of a collection of things sharing a common atttributes was complete, breeding the a collection of things sharing a common attribute hatred demonstrated in the Revolution.