The Old Regime and the Revolution

Tocqueville argued that the aim of the French Revolution (1789–1799), while demonstrably anti-clerical, was not so much to destroy the sovereignty of religious faith as to tear down all forms of the Ancien Régime, of which the established church was a foremost symbol, nor to create a state of permanent disorder.

The chief permanent achievement of the French Revolution was the suppression of those political institutions, commonly described as feudal, which for many centuries had held unquestioned sway in most European countries.

The Revolution set out to replace them with a new social and political order, based on the concepts of freedom and equality.

Another theme of the book is the complete dissociation between French social classes, called the Estates, of which there were three – the clergy, the nobility, and the common people.

Whereas the feudal lord had at least a partial symbiosis with his tenants, the post-feudal nobility became absentee landlords, left their ancestral estates in the hands of caretakers, and flocked to Versailles; the seat of the monarchy and central government.