The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789 / And the Causes Which Led to That Event

by Alexis de Tocqueville

CHAPTER XIX.

SHOWING THAT A GREAT ADMINISTRATIVE REVOLUTION HAD PRECEDED THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION, AND WHAT WERE THE CONSEQUENCES IT PRODUCED.

Nothing had yet been changed in the form of the French Government, but already the greater part of the secondary laws which regulated the condition of persons and the administration of affairs had been abolished or modified.

The destruction of the Guilds, followed by their partial and incomplete restoration, had totally changed all the old relations between workmen and their employers. These relations had become not only different, but uncertain and difficult. The police of the masters was at an end; the authority of the State over the trades was imperfectly established; and the artisan, placed in a constrained and undecided position between the Government and his employer, did not know to whom he was to look for protection, or from whom he was to submit to restraint. This state of discontent and anarchy, into which the whole lower class of the towns had been plunged at one blow, produced very great consequences as soon as the people began to reappear on the political stage.

One year before the Revolution a Royal edict had disturbed the order of the administration of justice in all its parts; several new jurisdictions had been created, a multitude of others abolished, and all the rules of judicial competence changed. Now in France, as I have already shown, the number of persons engaged in administering justice and in executing the sentences of the law was enormous. In fact, it may be said that the whole of the middle class was more or less connected with the tribunals. The effect of this law, therefore, was to unsettle the station and property of thousands of families, and to place them in a new and precarious position. The edict was little less inconvenient to litigants, who found it difficult, in the midst of this judicial revolution, to discover what laws were applicable to their cases, and by what tribunals they were to be decided.

But it was the radical reform which the Administration, properly so called, underwent in 1787, which more than all the rest first threw public affairs into disorder, and shook the private existence of every individual citizen.

I have already mentioned that in what were termed the pays d’élection, that is to say, in about three-quarters of France, the whole administration of each district was abandoned to one man, the Intendant, who acted not only without control, but without advice.

In 1787, in addition to the Intendant, a Provincial Assembly was created, which assumed the real administration of the country. In each village an elective municipal body likewise took the place of the ancient parochial assemblies, and in most cases of the Syndic.

A state of the law so opposed to that which had preceded it, and which so completely changed not only the whole course of affairs, but the relative position of persons, was applied in all places at the same moment and almost in the same manner, without the slightest regard to previous usages or to the peculiar situation of each province, so fully had the passion for unity which characterised the Revolution taken possession of the ancient Government, which the Revolution was about to destroy.