Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Bibliographical Note
- Chronology
- TOCQUEVILLE: THE ANCIEN RÉGIME AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
- Foreword
- Book I
- Book II
- II.1 Why Feudal Prerogatives Had Become More Odious to the People in France Than Anywhere Else
- II.2 Why Administrative Centralization Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime and Not, As Some Say, the Work of the Revolution or Empire
- II.3 How What Today Is Called Administrative Tutelage Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime
- II.4 How Administrative Justice and the Immunity of Public Officials Were Institutions of the Ancien Régime
- II.5 How Centralization Was Thus Able to Insinuate Itself among the Old Powers and Supplant Them Without Destroying Them
- II.6 On Administrative Mores under the Ancien Régime
- II.7 How France, of All the Countries of Europe, Was Already the One in Which the Capital Had Achieved the Greatest Preponderance over the Provinces and Most Fully Subsumed the Entire Country
- II.8 That France Was the Country Where People Had Become Most Alike
- II.9 How Men So Similar Were More Separate Than Ever, Divided into Small Groups Alien and Indifferent to One Another
- II.10 How the Destruction of Political Liberty and the Separation of Classes Caused Nearly All the Maladies That Proved Fatal to the Ancien Régime
- II.11 On the Kind of Liberty to Be Found under the Ancien Régime and Its Influence on the Revolution
- II.12 How, Despite the Progress of Civilization, the Condition of the French Peasant Was Sometimes Worse in the Eighteenth Century Than It Had Been in the Thirteenth
- Book III
- Appendix: On the Pays d'états, and in Particular Languedoc
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
II.5 - How Centralization Was Thus Able to Insinuate Itself among the Old Powers and Supplant Them Without Destroying Them
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Bibliographical Note
- Chronology
- TOCQUEVILLE: THE ANCIEN RÉGIME AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
- Foreword
- Book I
- Book II
- II.1 Why Feudal Prerogatives Had Become More Odious to the People in France Than Anywhere Else
- II.2 Why Administrative Centralization Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime and Not, As Some Say, the Work of the Revolution or Empire
- II.3 How What Today Is Called Administrative Tutelage Is an Institution of the Ancien Régime
- II.4 How Administrative Justice and the Immunity of Public Officials Were Institutions of the Ancien Régime
- II.5 How Centralization Was Thus Able to Insinuate Itself among the Old Powers and Supplant Them Without Destroying Them
- II.6 On Administrative Mores under the Ancien Régime
- II.7 How France, of All the Countries of Europe, Was Already the One in Which the Capital Had Achieved the Greatest Preponderance over the Provinces and Most Fully Subsumed the Entire Country
- II.8 That France Was the Country Where People Had Become Most Alike
- II.9 How Men So Similar Were More Separate Than Ever, Divided into Small Groups Alien and Indifferent to One Another
- II.10 How the Destruction of Political Liberty and the Separation of Classes Caused Nearly All the Maladies That Proved Fatal to the Ancien Régime
- II.11 On the Kind of Liberty to Be Found under the Ancien Régime and Its Influence on the Revolution
- II.12 How, Despite the Progress of Civilization, the Condition of the French Peasant Was Sometimes Worse in the Eighteenth Century Than It Had Been in the Thirteenth
- Book III
- Appendix: On the Pays d'états, and in Particular Languedoc
- Notes
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
Summary
Let us now briefly recapitulate what was said in the three previous chapters: a single body at the center of the kingdom controlled the public administration throughout the country; the same minister was in charge of nearly all domestic affairs; in each province, a single agent managed all details; there was no subordinate administrative body or any other type of body that could act without prior authorization; special courts heard all cases in which the administration had an interest and protected all its agents. What is this if not the centralization with which we are familiar? Its formal institutions were less identifiable than they are today, its procedures were less regulated, its existence was more agitated, but it was the same being. In the interim, it was unnecessary to add or take away anything essential. It was enough to eliminate everything that had been built around it to reveal what we see today.
Most of the institutions that I have just described were subsequently imitated in a hundred different places, but at the time they were peculiar to France, and we shall soon see what a great influence they had on the French Revolution and its aftermath.
But how was it possible for institutions of such novel design to establish themselves in France amid the rubble of feudal society?
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- Tocqueville: The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution , pp. 59 - 61Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011