L'ancien régime et la Révolution

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First Sentence

"When Tocqueville finished The Old Regime and the Revolution in February 1856, he wrote to his English translator about what was at stake in his next work: "It will make the Revolution with its unique character emerge from what [the first volume] contained, and if I am not mistaken it will display the general movement inside and outside France."

Description

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.