When Things Crumble

Book reviewed: The Old Regime and the Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville is primarily known for Democracy in America, his penetrating analysis of democracy (and not only of the one in America). While the work is an indisputable masterpiece, it has the effect of eclipsing his other texts. I am thinking here of The Old Regime and the Revolution, something of a poor relation of Democracy in America. Published in 1856, this book shows not only the same clarity of vision and analytical prowess that de Tocqueville brought to his magnum opus, but also his formidable grasp of human affairs. De Tocqueville was one of those perspicacious students of human nature whose writings never fade and are forever relevant. Additionally, readers who are strapped for time will be relieved to learn that the treatise is a fraction of the length of his more famous work.

You couldn’t ask for a better guide to take you through the period of French history in question. De Tocqueville was no armchair historian. He was born in 1805, close enough to the Revolution to gauge its effects, but not close enough to fall under the sway of its tempestuous passions. Although de Tocqueville came from an aristocratic family that had found itself on the losing side of the upheaval, he did not seem to bear the Revolution any grudge. The historical process is impersonal; anyone who loses sight of that loses the ability to tell what time it is. De Tocqueville could tell what time it was and knew exactly which way the wind blew. His keen awareness of the forces of history, and his openness to the changes they wrought, made him an acute reader of his time; his devotion to liberty and human dignity, well ahead of it. All in all, the reader is in good hands.

The Old Regime and the Revolution is not a history of the Ancien Régime or of the French Revolution, but instead an analysis of what led one to the other, and what the “other” actually was. De Tocqueville rejects the view that the French Revolution was a kind of New French Order underwritten by an anarchic ethos. Its goal was not to perpetuate disorder or create a “stable chaos,” but to increase the power of public authority; not to dismantle all the institutions and erect an ochlocracy, but to replace the sclerotic juggernaut of the Old Regime with a simpler and more uniform system that had equal conditions as its foundation.

Fair enough, but hardly groundbreaking. It starts to get much more interesting when de Tocqueville asserts that, though the French Revolution destroyed the preceding order, in one important way it was more of a mutation of the Old Regime — old wine in a new bottle, if you like. It is impossible to understand the French Revolution without understanding this fact. So what was the old wine like? By the Middle Ages, Europe was composed of the debris of the Roman Empire — a multitude of disparate societies that nevertheless had the same legal structure, resembling each other in their political and social constitution more than they would in the 19th century. Far from the benighted era of illiteracy and misery that we usually conjure when we think of that period, de Tocqueville insists that the Middle Ages were a time of relative sophistication, prosperity and liberty. Some of the 14th-century registers he came across, for example, were masterpieces of method, clarity, and intelligence; similar documents became increasingly confused and incomplete the nearer de Tocqueville came to his own time. We like to imagine that our history since the Middle Ages has been a long stretch of progress; de Tocqueville makes short work of this commonplace. On the contrary, he writes, after the Middle Ages, the old constitution of European societies slowly sank into debility until, by the 18th century, it was mostly in ruins.

What made France unique among the European countries afflicted by this debility was its centralized nature. The king ran the country with the help of the Royal Council, the Controller-General, and the provincial Intendants (curiously, men of modest birth). The towns had lost whatever autonomy they had once had; the provinces had lost their vitality and industry, their best and brightest, to the capital. Paris had devoured everything and become France itself. There were simply too few people trying to solve too many problems; the predictable result was corruption and a bloated bureaucracy. A parish, de Tocqueville tells us, had to wait at least a year to receive approval to build a bell tower or repair its presbytery — and that was the best-case scenario. In reality, the process could easily take as long as 2–3 years. By the 1780s, this sclerotic clunker of a system was spent. Its own unwieldiness paralyzed and hampered it, making it impotent and unable to withstand the political equivalent of a bank run. All that was needed was a bit of a push for the whole edifice to topple.

But it was precisely the administrative centralization of the Old Regime that the French Revolution never swept away. Both the Old Regime and the revolution it spawned were highly centralized affairs. Even the enemies of the Old Regime had never imagined that they could liquidate the regime outside the administrative apparatus. De Tocqueville writes, “The early efforts of the Revolution had destroyed this great institution of the monarchy; it was restored in 1800” — restored and passed off as an achievement of the Revolution. For de Tocqueville, the restoration of administrative centralization after the French Revolution was a logical outcome. Centralization is the natural outcome in all political relations, and this is especially true in a society that liquidates its aristocracy. In Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, one of the most fascinating books on revolution I’ve ever read, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy corroborates this by noting that Napoleon, though he made himself emperor, conformed to the ideals of the French Revolution more than the federalists of 1790, who attempted to decentralize France by going back to the estates of 1614 and were consequently crushed.

What was it about life in pre-revolutionary France that made the Old Regime so intolerable? Paradoxically, the life of the peasant was in many ways better than in other parts of Europe. De Tocqueville points out that the armies of both Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa were filled with serfs, and serfdom wasn’t abolished in many parts of Germany until the 19th century. Nothing like this existed in the France of the Old Regime, where peasants, for the most part, were free to dispose of themselves as they saw fit — and that is precisely what explains the paradox. The French peasant had become a freeholder, but the Old Regime remained an essentially feudal system, which meant the peasant felt the taxes levied on his land much more acutely. At the same time, the nobility had lost its political power but retained its privileges. This made the inequality between seigneur and peasant more prominent and, consequently, more unbearable. De Tocqueville shows that the most propitious time for revolts is not when the oppression is at its worst, but precisely when the oppressed have tasted freedom and when the most glaring symbols of oppression have been jettisoned. Russian history confirms this thesis: the tsar who emancipated the serfs was assassinated, and conditions in Russia just before the Bolshevik Revolution were in many ways better than they had ever been before, the debacle of the First World War notwithstanding.

The Old Regime continued to offer tax exemptions and other privileges to the nobility, stupidly placing most of the tax burden on those least capable of paying it, and so adding to the discontent. It is the nobleman with his privileged tax status that the peasant despised, much more so than the king himself. The phrase “Let them eat cake” symbolizes for us the cruelty of the royal court and the grievances of those who were glibly told to stuff themselves with sugar, but the Revolution was not primarily anti-monarchical. Rosenstock-Huessy argues that the opulence of Louis XVI, such as it was, did not irritate the peasant as much as we might think. In fact, it was when the king “turned out to be perfectly honest, decent, and brave” that the masses realized the situation was irremediable. If the king himself was corrupt, the system could be salvaged; they only needed to wait for the king to die. But if the system itself was rotten, nothing could save it. Rosenstock-Huessy explains that the French Revolution did not seek to rid France of the sovereign, but to rid it of a sovereign who depended on “priesthood, family ties, privilege . . . France was not and is not anti-royal, but anti-clerical, anti-aristocratic, and anti-dynastic.”

The peasant was at the bottom of the totem pole, but relations between other classes were also complex. When the feudal system first emerged in Europe, the nobility was nourished by the leading men of the land (de Tocqueville doesn’t say what made them “leading,” but most likely, those were men who had distinguished themselves on the battlefield); the nobility was consequently aristocratic. Since the Middle Ages, the top echelon gradually turned hereditary, and the nobility morphed into a caste. While privilege was a matter of birthright virtually everywhere, the nobility’s level of insularity depended on where you went. In England, which generally comes off rather well in the text, the nobility wasn’t averse to mixing with the bourgeoisie when the circumstances called for it. The English weren’t any less snooty than their peers on the Continent, but they were governed less by class consciousness than by practical considerations, and accepted democratization whenever it was good for business and national welfare. The remnants of this democratization can be traced semantically — once reserved for men of privilege, the words “gentleman” and “sir” are now applied to just about anyone, and you need only enter a place like Walmart or Starbucks to qualify. No such democratization existed in France, where the nobility, emphasizing class purity, retreated behind a moat. As the towns had lost their autonomy to centralization, and occasions for some class mixing previously encouraged by decentralized institutions had become all but nonexistent, by the 18th century only chance could bring the nobleman and the bourgeois together. The decline of the nobleman’s political power did not correspond to any decline in his privileges, which had suffered no loss, and the bourgeois responded to it the same way the peasant did to his superior classes. The nobleman and the bourgeois were more than just rivals, they were enemies.

It is not that the nobility was impenetrable. A bourgeois could buy his way into the nobility, but “the Versailles of the grimaces,” as Ortega y Gasset described the Old Regime aristocracy, ensured that the admission ticket to crash fancy salon parties only sharpened class distinctions. The newly ennobled bourgeois could no longer associate with those he’d left behind and taunted them by the very fact of his inaccessibility, but the aristocratic purebloods whose club he’d joined were not necessarily friends either, since in the final analysis he was a parvenu — and such indeed was the unhappy lot of some freshly minted nobles in the provinces, who were suddenly too noble for the bourgeois but insufficiently noble for the nobility. It is the stuff neuroses are made of.

The Church, the one institution that was supposed to defend the oppressed by virtue of its dogma, was also widely despised. The common view, of course, is that the Church must have been awful. It is a myth that de Tocqueville debunks, so long as “Church” stands for “French clergy.” His view of the French clergy is remarkably positive. For one thing, French clergymen were often noblemen by birth, and they brought the pride of their origins, and the lack of servility it bestowed upon them, to their ecclesiastical role. De Tocqueville speaks of the 1789 notes of the clerical order; the records revealed an extraordinary attachment to civil and individual liberty. The clergy called for a fair justice system, transparency, a meritocratic employment system, assemblies, political representation, and many other things that go into a liberal democratic order; of divine order, there was not a word. De Tocqueville doubts there had ever been a more enlightened clergy than the one in France on the cusp of the Revolution, and he believes that its despoilment by the revolutionary masses, both political and economic, only served to strengthen the power of the Holy See and that of temporal rulers, at the cost of people’s freedom. It is unclear how one can reconcile the enlightened clergy with the rather unflattering portrait that de Tocqueville paints of the Church itself. Once an institution that ruled over the Caesars of the day, its power had eroded to a point where it became a client of temporal rulers, lending them its moral authority and compromising itself in the eyes of the people. When the Revolution took place, the Church was one of its primary targets, and no enlightened clergymen could save it.

While one might think that the French Revolution broke out when economic misery had reached its apogee, de Tocqueville tells us that the last two decades of the Old Regime were a period of prosperity. The population had increased, various economic actors had grown rich, and industry had blossomed; the government had become more considerate of the country’s poorest and less stringent in imposing tax penalties. Along with an ill-advised overhaul of the administrative apparatus, this had the opposite of the desired effect, whatever the effect the government actually desired. As the French economy advanced in the years running up to the Revolution, the government turned into one of the leading business entities; its fortune mixed with private fortunes as it had never before. Its participation in the economy, however, had not made the government more competent. Things are at their most dangerous, de Tocqueville says, when a bad government sets out to reform itself; only a genius can save a reform-minded ruler after a long period of oppression. The government’s mismanagement and profligacy were such that in 1789, it owed 600 million francs to its creditors, who themselves were debtors — yet another grievance on the list of those the commercial classes already had against the Old Regime. Additionally, the prosperity had had a pruritic effect on people who had not been able to profit from it — nothing irritates more than a rising tide that fails to lift your own boat. What might have been tolerable three decades before was now insufferable, and the commercial classes clamored for an economic reset. The Revolution was supposed to be the reset.

But it wasn’t men of action who most influenced the French Revolution, but men of letters. Towards the middle of the 18th century, a constellation of philosophes — de Tocqueville uses the word “writers,” but it is safe to assume he has the famous philosophes in mind — had formed, men united in their hatred of the traditional world and their dream of replacing it with simple rules inspired by reason and natural law. The philosophes had no experience of government and of genuine liberty, and lacked an appreciation of the complexity of the problems they were proposing to solve; their naivety made them partial to solutions as simple as they were extreme. They erected theoretical Frankensteins and fell in love with them, oblivious to what, and who, these Frankensteins might crush. What’s more, the philosophes found a receptive audience. Lacking any experience of, and involvement with, daily administration and governance, the masses, too, thought that the problems of their society could be solved through the simple, extreme solutions advocated by the philosophes. Bizarrely, even the aristocracy showed indulgence for the literary gadflies; convinced of the unassailability of their privileges, aristocrats giddily toyed with ideas that, when put in practice, would take away everything they had. It was a hideous spectacle in which the actors didn’t realize that “what is a quality in the writer is often a vice in the statesman, and the same things that make beautiful novels can lead to great revolutions” — generally speaking, men of letters shouldn’t be running things.

De Tocqueville probably didn’t know it while writing the book, but there was another country where writers had begun to exercise a similarly singular influence on national life. It is impossible to overstate the role of literature in the Russia of the 19th century, where it also developed as a form of opposition to the old order. By the mid-1850s, the “ice age” of Nicholas I had purged most spheres of Russian society of free discourse; it was left to literature to become that sanctuary where Russia’s free spirits could roam with some degree of liberty, and Russians would continue to flock there well into the 20th century. The Russian greats, of course, lacked the flippancy of the philosophes and their penchant for extreme solutions. They approached their métier with a lot more gravitas and, as far as I know, it didn’t occur to any Russian writer to appropriate the name of his country for use as a pseudonym, the way Anatole France did, thus turning literature into a synecdoche for the entire nation. Nevertheless, the poet Yevtushenko’s famous remark that, in Russia, the poet is more than just a poet — something that could have easily been said of writers in toto — emphasized the text-centric nature of Russia and its quasi-religious veneration of literature. Like the Old Regime, tsarist Russia was blown to smithereens by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The philosophes weren’t the only intellectuals in France issuing clarion calls to set the house on fire. 18th-century France was home to a number of economists with some rather extravagant notions. These economists were not as well known as the philosophes, and their contribution to the French Revolution was modest, but their general ideas were of a piece and permeated the era. Like the philosophes, they detested the institutions of the Old Regime and called for a complete regeneration of French society. But when it came to making French society freer, they had some weird recipes. They believed the sole bulwark against despotism was public enlightenment and that a free nation was an educated one — what de Tocqueville calls “intellectual medication.” But in their model, it was the state that had to administer the medication — and a lot more besides. To quote an obscure abbot mentioned in the text, “The State does with men whatever it wants.” As de Tocqueville points out, that sums up the mindset of these doctrinaires. The “Natural Code” of a certain Morelly proposed, among other things, common ownership of property, absolute equality, the uniformity of everything, the mechanical regularity of all individual movements (whatever that means), and the complete absorption of the citizen in the social body. If this dystopia sounds familiar, it’s because it is — these ideas would find their expression in the new state set up by the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet Union did not limit its reach to economic policy, which rested on common ownership of property; it sought to pervade every aspect of the lives of its citizenry. The story of the Soviet Union is the story of ceaseless attacks against the individual, who was entirely subsumed by the state; echoing abbot Bodeau, the regime did with men what it pleased. The French economists would have felt right at home in the early years of the Soviet paradise, though had they been foolish enough to stick around, they would have seen the other side of that paradise once Stalin was in charge. De Tocqueville dispels the misconception that “socialism” came about in the 19th century; by 1750, French economists had made it part of their discourse, while the French monarchy had, in a way, made it its practice. If French revolutionaries showed scant respect towards private property, it was because the French kings had made private property an arbitrary concept. The edicts of Louis XIV made it clear that all the lands of the kingdom belonged to the monarch; everyone else enjoyed merely possessive ownership, one that could be contested by the king at any time. “It is curious,” de Tocqueville writes, “to see modern socialism take its roots in royal despotism.”

If socialism and centralization grew from the same soil, as de Tocqueville argues, communist ideology should be traced back not to Marx and Engels, but to men such as Bodeau, Quesnay, Morelly, Mercier de la Rivière. These were the original “engineers of human souls” who unleashed the specter sighted by Marx a century later, men who slipped out of history, their names relegated to its dustbin, but whose “destructive theories of socialism,” as de Tocqueville puts it, would prove to be so adhesive. It is interesting that, like some of today’s “thought leaders,” the economists held up China as the model state that France ought to emulate. They were enchanted by reports of its absolute sovereign, its use of philosophy where the French only had religion, and its aristocracy of the literate. De Tocqueville rightly lampoons those sinophiles who had never set foot in the Middle Kingdom and knew next to nothing about it, and for whom theoretical constructs superseded real life.

By 1770, the French public had gotten a taste of liberty, and the economists were forced to dilute their étatisme with ideas more palatable to society. But the political apparatus brought about by the French Revolution was also diluted: a legislative body and a government of the elected were mixed with unfettered administrative centralization. Instead of hereditary noblemen, French society now had public servants with unlimited power. As always, the road to hell was paved with good intentions.

The administrative centralization of the Old Regime had given French society two contradictory characteristics. On the one hand, French society (meaning the privileged classes and the bourgeoisie — the peasant was socially invisible) was extremely uniform: everybody thought, dressed, and spoke alike. On the other hand, each class was a palimpsest of variegated groups and interests that precluded class solidarity. This suited the French monarchy just fine: a lack of cohesion and a profusion of private interests ensured that the groups could not coalesce into a united front to oppose the monarchy. Every sordid aspect of French society described by de Tocqueville owes itself to “the art that most of the [French] kings practiced to divide people in order to maintain absolute rule over them.” The art never seems to have been perfected — like so many modern Western governments, de Tocqueville’s Old Regime is paranoid, thin-skinned, and utterly myopic in its inability to see it’s tottering on the edge of the abyss. In any case, the art ended up destroying the artist. If the lack of solidarity and mutual interests prevented people from coming together to challenge the king, it also prevented them from springing to the king’s defense. When people took the streets, the whole edifice crumbled in the blink of an eye. Ultimately, the Old Regime was hoisted by its own petard.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Enlightenment and the French Revolution lately. We are all children of the Revolution, and as the liberal order (I am not convinced it is all that liberal anymore, but we need not go into that now) faces heavy headwinds, the patrimony of the Revolution is being reassessed. While I do not share the view of those currents, typically on the right of the political spectrum, that hold both the Enlightenment and the revolution it engendered as responsible for all the ills of modernity, I must admit that the view I had of both in my callow years has evolved. I am inclined to agree that the Enlightenment thinkers, whom I once saw bathed in a halo of glory, left posterity with more than just the pure search for reason; they also planted the seeds of totalitarianism and, by rejecting God, deprived man of his navigation system. At the same time, while I feel the same revulsion towards the orgy of violence triggered by the French Revolution, I am reluctant to dismiss it the way some conservatives do. For millions, the Revolution heralded a new dawn. Rosenstock-Huessy reminds us that the ideas of the French Revolution inspired the Risorgimento and German unification, the Civil War in the US, the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, universal franchise in England and Germany, and Bolivar’s wars of independence in South America. Rosenstock-Huessy saw the French Revolution as nothing short of a civilizing mission that made Europe a “definite power and tendency.” As he poetically puts it in Out of Revolution, “We all, in so far as we are human, are present and represented on the stage of the French Revolution.” Clearly, a historic event with such an emancipatory thrust requires a nuanced appraisal and cannot be neatly placed along the good-evil axis.

Although our democratized society doesn’t have the kind of aristocracy that de Tocqueville was so preoccupied with in his day, it still has elites, and at a time of waning meritocracy, they are becoming ever more hereditary. The Old Regime and the Revolution has a lot to teach them — pity they are unlikely to bother. Like the aristocrats of the Old Regime, modern elites form a fairly watertight caste whose interests widely diverge from those of the rest of society. As in the Old Regime, when financial problems arise, most of the burden is passed on to the least fortunate. Warren Buffet, one of the world’s richest men, once said he paid a lower tax rate on his income than his secretary. As millions of people faced job losses, business closures, and an uncertain future in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the total net worth of the world’s wealthiest increased by almost $2 trillion that year; the pandemic has minted some forty new billionaires who have benefited directly from the Covid crisis. In a way, early ancient Rome was more egalitarian than modern American society; the richest Romans were only 10–20 times wealthier than the average Romans, and in hard times most of the burden was placed on the affluent. Like the aristocrats of the Old Regime, modern elites are not, shall we say, especially solicitous of commoners; unlike the French 18th-century elites, modern elites have fewer telluric attachments, since contemporary travel and globalization have made it easier to treat the planet like a giant playground. Like the aristocrats of the Old Regime (and some of pre-revolutionary Russia’s magnates, men such as Savva Morozov, who supported the Bolsheviks), modern elites are happy to entertain ideas that might bring about their own downfall. Thus, the elites have been big supporters of woke causes, apparently oblivious to the risk that a highly politicized mob hell-bent on destroying all vestiges of the old order might realize equality applies to not only social causes, but also to economic ones. Whether the elites support woke ideology out of genuine concern for the marginalized or, as some have claimed, out of the need to abide by the terms of an unofficial post-credit-crisis agreement between Big Business and woke leaders that provides largesse to woke causes in exchange for silence on economic inequality, is unclear. What is clear is that the elites are skating on thin ice and, like the elites of the Old Regime, they are completely blind to the dangers. As was the case with the Old Regime, modern society is characterized by a uniform mass that contains within it a plethora of private interests. These private interests might prevent the emergence of opposition to the system, but they will also ensure there is no one to defend the system once it is attacked.

De Tocqueville’s exordial warning in the introduction was written with us in mind. De Tocqueville argues that democratizing societies that have done away with their aristocracies are most at risk of succumbing to despotism. Whatever its virtues, democratization individualizes man, releasing him from class and family bonds; man’s interests are reduced exclusively to his private affairs. Citizens should never be political — the politicization of everything is a sign of a fractured society — but they should participate in those public affairs that concern the daily life of their community. No easy task in a democratized society. By losing sight of public affairs, man runs the risk of losing his freedom. This is especially a problem in societies that rely on money as the main social marker. People’s attention is diverted to the task of becoming rich, keeping up with the Joneses, or just staying afloat; these passions “occupy the imagination of people . . . and make them tremble at the very idea of a revolution.” The pernicious tendencies of democratization are encouraged by rulers who need subjects and not citizens. The risk for some of today’s money-oriented, democratized societies is obvious.

Possibly the most important lesson of the book is the significance of religion. This will be a hard one to swallow for our secular age, but there is no escaping it: faith matters. De Tocqueville highlights the religious nature of the French Revolution. If, as Carl Schmitt wrote, all political concepts are secularized theological concepts (with God corresponding to the sovereign, the miracle to the exception), then the French Revolution can be viewed as an eschatological expression. It was a political phenomenon, of course, but its universalism gave the Revolution the force of a religion that transformed it from a political revolution to a universal one. But a religion it was not. Its greatest fault was that it wanted to banish religion from society, offering no system of belief as a substitute. Rosenstock-Huessy concurs: “Reason was overruled by blind passions, because Reason had degraded the peers: Hunger and Love, Old Age and Tradition.” The rarefied peaks of cold reason are not for most people; atheism, de Tocqueville insists, is contrary to man’s instincts. The Revolution went for the souls of men, tore God out of their hearts, and left them empty. But what can one build on emptiness? Unsurprisingly, the Bolshevik Revolution also attacked religion, destroying habitual points of reference and an age-old cultural legacy. Like the French Revolution, it had religious overtones (see Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government — the theistic character of the Russian Revolution is one of the central themes of the book); like the French Revolution, it resulted in a highly centralized state with its very own (Red) tsar. The Soviet state lasted longer than that of republican France; more than a century later, Russia is still paying the price for the inability of the Soviet regime to offer its people a viable replacement for the religion it had extirpated.

Modern Western societies are also inimical to religion, and the absence of meaning, among young people especially, is palpable. The constant search for identity (often manifested in the proliferation of sexual lifestyles, current obsession with “gender fluidity,” and other such things) is a search for meaning. Similarly, in its language, rituals, and intolerance of any dissent, the response to the pandemic also looked like an attempt to find meaning by using science (“The Science”) as a religion; all such attempts can do is discredit science without getting us closer to any meaning. A society that believes in nothing cannot flourish; religion is one of the key ingredients of social cohesion, without which societies fall apart. This doesn’t mean that theocracy is the answer, but if you want to live in a strong society, you need to understand what has made societies strong historically.

Reading books about a phenomenon as momentous as the French Revolution, no matter how insightful, I always get the feeling that there is more to the story. History conceals a dark corner that can never be illuminated, no matter how brilliant the analyst or his analysis. So it is with The Old Regime and the Revolution. De Tocqueville is well aware of this limitation and, faute de mieux, he falls back on the genius of the “French race,” with all its glorious contradictions. But the Russian Revolution showed that the French one was not a sui generis event. Perhaps, as Tolstoy believed, revolutions have less to do with the genius of any nation than with the existence of mysterious laws of history we have yet to decode. Or perhaps, as seems more likely to me, history cannot be completely understood without the help of metaphysics.

But you don’t read de Tocqueville for historiosophical revelations. Above all, The Old Regime and the Revolution is a meditation on freedom and liberty. It offers timeless truths that, in their complacency and inertia, people are inclined to forget. De Tocqueville reminds us that freedom is not something one finds in the gutter, like Napoleon’s crown, nor can it be picked up by anybody with a sword. He reminds us that freedom is delicate and requires its own hothouses in which it needs to be cultivated. It cannot be granted or conquered, and it certainly can’t be bought. It is independent of any prosperity that it may or may not confer upon its beneficiaries. “What has always set the hearts of some men on liberty,” de Tocqueville writes, “is its own attractions, its own charm, independent of any benefits. It is the pleasure offered by the ability to speak, act, and breathe without any constraints other than those imposed by the laws of God. He who uses liberty to look for other things will only find servitude.”