Name: L'ancien régime et la Révolution
ISBN: 9780486476025

L'ancien régime et la Révolution

L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) is a work by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville translated in English as either The Old Regime and the Revolution or The Old Regime and the French Revolution. The book analyzes French society before the French Revolution, the so-called "Ancien Régime", and investigates the forces that caused the Revolution. It is one of the major early historical works on the French Revolution. In this book, de Tocqueville develops his main theory about the French revolution, the theory of continuity, in which he states that even though the French tried to dissociate themselves from the past and from the autocratic old regime, they eventually reverted to a powerful central government.

What Hacker News says

watwutSep 2019

L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) by Alexis de Tocqueville. In English it is either The Old Regime and the Revolution or The Old Regime and the French Revolution.

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paganelDec 2010

> He left behind one or two books that are still worth reading, but his most important legacy was his simplest.

Was this irony/sarcasm? Because my detector is off.

First of all, I read his 2 volumes of "Democracy in America" a couple of years ago, right after I had read Thucydides's "History of the Peloponnesian War" and just before reading Lord Acton's essays on liberty, and I challenge any of today's economists/political thinkers to come up with something at least 50% better.

Second, Tocqueville's "L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution" is in my opinion the book that best describes/explains the French Revolution, which I also think is the event that most defines the last 200 years of Western history and political thought, starting from Kant and continuing with guys like Marx and Lenin.

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vduprasSep 2025

As Tocqueville writes in "De l'ancien régime et la révolution", centralization was already underway since Louis XIV, and heavily. Napoleon just picked up on it and continued the process.

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