De Tocqueville’s ability to generalize from a multiplicity of clashing and wildly heterogeneous facts without distorting reality is absolutely breathtaking. The generalizations, moreover, are so firmly based that they are as applicable:to our own time as they were in 1835 or 1789. The great virtue of The Old Regime and the French Revolution is its ability to look behind the Verbalism used by men to the forms that link “reaction” to “revolution” in any society. The “new,” as de Tocqueville points out, is generally the “old” in false face; and the wilder the revolution, the more total is the reaction that follows it. Thus the French Revolution, which was supposed to remake society and change the condition of man, merely fastened the vices of the monarchy on the French nation for what must often seem like eternity. Unreasoning centralization, a passion for intellectual order that denies the “organic” in man, an anarchical sense of liberty that somehow goes along with witless taxation and extreme bureaucracy, a parliamentary system running to impotence—all of these things existed under the Bourbons. The Revolution of 1789 did not abolish them, nor have any of the restorations or Coup d’états or revolutions that have punctuated French history at intervals ever since 1815. The Gallic maxim, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” was not invented by de Tocqueville. Nevertheless, it serves as an adequate description of the contents of his book.

The first big point that emerges from The Old Regime is that the French Revolution did not have its roots in poverty. What produced the bloody carnage, the excesses of the Terror, the wild effort to pour humanity into nonsensical molds, was a surfeit of statism which had dried up the individual Frenchman’s sense that he was the master of his own soul and destiny. The people, in 1789, thought they were rebelling against feudalism. Actually, they were rebelling because feudalism, which was a tissue of reciprocal rights and duties locally protected and administered, had been abolished by the monarchy. The Bourbons had a passion for the rectangular in more things than art, architecture, and gardens; they simply had to feel that people would stick to squares and cubicles, so to speak, in living lives that would move along roads as straight as matchsticks. The lack of the sense of roundness, the disappearance of spontaneity, the failure of the heart in the battle with the head u these things were increasingly characteristic of French life from top to bottom as the eighteenth century moved toward its close.

Take the condition of the peasants, for example. The peasants “were no longer bound by the ties of feudalism. They owned their own acres; they practiced their own husbandry; they scrimped and saved and added to the number of their fields as they could. In short, they had a large measure of freedom in the “castle” that is supposed to be everyman’s home.

But once the peasant had stepped off his own land he found himself completely hemmed in. The power of government had passed from the provinces and the provincial towns to Paris. Taxation was absurdly inequitable; the nobility was largely exempted from it, yet performed no function in society that could be offered as a good reason for the exemption. To save himself from what de Tocqueville calls “arbitrary, not to say ferocious, methods of taxation,” the French peasant tried to create the outward illusion of bad husbandry and utter poverty. He had little concourse with people in the towns. As for his relations with the clergy, the peasant was often antipathetic toward the church because the priests seemed as arbitrarily favored as the nobility. “The bourgeois,” says de Tocqueville, “had been completely severed from the noble, and the peasant from both alike . . . . the inevitable consequence was that, though the nation came to seem a homogeneous whole, its parts no longer held together. Nothing had been left that could obstruct the central government, but, by the same token, nothing could shore it up.”

If the peasantry had really been starved, or deprived of its individuality by the introduction of collectivist agriculture, it might have been kept in subjection practically forever. But it ate well on its own land, it protected itself fiercely, it sent its sons to the towns to become members of the middle class, and it nourished its sense of grievance at the sight of nobles who were not even required to rule. With its energies caged but not basically impaired, the peasantry was ready for rebellion at the first sight of a leadership that would promise it equality under the law.

At the other end of French society, the nobles had become a relatively functionless class. The king ruled through his intendants and his bureaucracy, leaving the nobility its privileges and its leisures but requiring nothing from it as compensation in return. In their own turn the nobles gladly relinquished their duties to serve the nation in general, or the peasants in particular, merely to gain exemption from the taxation that oppressed everybody else.

In the towns the sense of local initiative disappeared through atrophy. The Bourbons trafficked in town offices, selling them to the highest bidder. Towns were arbitrarily deprived of their right to rule themselves until they could fork up enough cold cash to buy back the right. But the right was never actually a right, for at any moment it could be “abolished”—and then resold all over again. Naturally, under such circumstances, local administration gravitated more and more into the hands of the king’s direct representatives.

The result of all this, geographically, was that Paris, the capital, became the nation, and everyone with an idea in his head migrated to Paris. Cut off from their roots, the French intellectuals of the eighteenth century tended to think in terms of paper systems dominated by symmetrical logic. The intellectuals produced the “abstract words, gaudy flowers of speech, sonorous clichés, and literary turns of phrase” that were destined to move the politicians when the great upheaval came in 1789. When peasant animosity was placed at the disposal of politicos who were themselves swayed by the intellectual’s passion for synthetic order, the result was a horror that was not to be repeated until a similar animosity was tapped by the Marxist intellectuals and politicos of Soviet Russia.

If all this were “mere history,” something to be read about in the books, then de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime would have a purely antiquarian interest. But there is so much more to de Tocqueville than “mere history” that the reader finds himself darting off on many a fruitful tangent of his own, Today, as in the France of the late eighteenth century, taxation is so arbitrary that it seems unjust. But instead of striking at peasants and ordinary townsfolk, the tax laws of today strike with special virulence at small businessmen who are trying to float themselves off into active enterprises of their own. The modern tax inequities bear down with special cruelty on the $8,000 to $20,000-a-year brackets, sometimes giving men of ideas the feeling that any unusual expenditure of energy is hardly worth the candle. The resentments of the “idea classes” can be absorbed up to a point without resulting in Violence. But it is the apathy, not the revolutionary anger, of the “idea classes” that is hurting humanity today. The results of this apathy are particularly marked in England and the Scandinavian countries. But if Americans of “idea status” haven’t succumbed to any marked degree as yet, it Would require little more than another good round of inflation to make the “idea man” feel he is on a treadmill that leads nowhere.

Another part de Tocqueville’s book that is not “mere history” is the lesson it has to teach about the dangers of centralization. These dangers have been mitigated recently by the reaction against the more extreme centralizing measures of the 1930′s. But the trend against centralization hasn’t really gotten off the ground. Central governments everywhere collect the vast bulk of the modern world’s taxes. When the next economic “downturn” comes, with its invitation to centralizing politicians to seize more and more power, de Tocqueville’s book will stand as an awful warning of what happens at the end of the centralizing road.