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"…

(Reviewed:05-Jul-99)

Grade: (B+) Orrin C. Judd

Tweet