Introduction

After leaving politics Tocqueville buried himself in archives across France, reading great quantities of administrative papers, local reports and petitions of the Old Regime, and wrote this book. He advances a series of surprising theses: the Revolution did not break with the past as completely as people believed, and the centralisation of the Old Regime carried on from the monarchy into the Revolution and the Empire; on the eve of the Revolution France was one of the most prosperous countries in Europe and its peasants among the best off, but it was precisely when conditions began to improve that the old oppression came to seem unbearable: 'the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally when it begins to reform'; and men of letters indulged in abstract theory because they had never been allowed any share in practical politics. It is a masterpiece of history and political science.