The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution

With this book, Alexis de Tocqueville envisioned a multi-volume philosophic study of the origins of modern France that would examine the implications of French history on the nature and development of democratic society. Tocqueville worried that although the revolutionary legacy was still alive and well, liberty was no longer its primary objective. He believed, indeed, that it had been a casualty of how the French Revolution emerged. He feared that just as the first Republic had fallen to Napoleon and the second had succumbed to his nephew Napoleon III, all future revolutions might experience the same fate. Here he ruminates about the shortcomings of the French Revolution.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-û1859) was a historian, social critic, and politician whose study of the early American republic, Democracy in America, is a political text of enduring significance. Gerald Bevan is the translator of the Penguin Classics edition of de Tocqueville-'s Democracy in America.