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.6 - On Administrative Mores under the Ancien Régime
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
It is impossible to read the correspondence of an intendant of the Ancien Régime with his superiors and subordinates without being astonished by the way in which the institutional similarity between then and now made the administrators of that time resemble the administrators of today. They seem to link hands across the abyss of the Revolution. I would say the same thing of the people subject to their administration. No better illustration exists of the power of legislation over the minds of men.
Ministers had already conceived the desire to scrutinize personally every detail of the government's action and to monitor everything from Paris. As time went by and the administration perfected its methods, this passion increased. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was impossible to set up a charity workshop in a remote corner of some distant province without attracting the notice of the comptroller general, who would seek personally to monitor all expenditure on the project, draft the regulations governing it, and select its location. If a poorhouse was built, he would want to be apprised of the names of the beggars who turned up and the precise dates at which they entered and left.
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- Tocqueville: The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution , pp. 62 - 70Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011