The Freeman 1972 - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

1972 ON APPEASING ENVY 145eighteenth-century middle class wasrich, in. a position to fill almost anyemployment, almost as powerful asthe nobility. It was exasperated bythis "almost" and stimulated by theproximity of its goal; impatience isalways provoked by the final strides. 5I have quoted this passage becauseI do not find the theorystated in quite this condensedform by Tocqueville himself. Yetthis. is essentially the theme of hisL'Ancien Regime et la Revolution,and he presented impressive factualdocumentation to support it.As the prosperity which I havejust described began to extend inFrance, the community neverthelessbecame more unsettled and uneasy;public discontent grew fierce; hatredagainst all established institutionsincreased. The nation was visibly advancingtoward a revolution. . . .It might be said that the Frenchfound their position the more intolerableprecisely where it had becomebetter. Surprising as this factis, history is full of such contradictions.It is not always by going from badto worse that a country falls intorevolution. It happens most frequentlythat a people, which had supportedthe most crushing laws withoutcomplaint, and apparently as ifthey were unfelt, throws them offwith violence as·soon as the burden5 Emile Faguet, Politicians and M oralistsof the Nineteenth Century (Boston:Little, Brown; 1928), p. 93.begins to be diminished. The state ofthings destroyed by a revolution isalmost always somewhat better thanthat which immediately preceded it;and experience has shown that themost dangerous moment for a badgovernment is usually that when itenters upon the work of reform.Nothing short of great political geniuscan save a sovereign who undertakesto relieve his subjects after along period of oppression. The evilswhich were endured with patienceso long as they were inevitable seemintolerable as soon as a hope can beentertained of escaping from them.The abuses which are removed seemto lay bare those which remain, andto render the sense of them moreacute; the evil has decreased, it istrue, but the perception of the evilis more keen. . . .No one any longer contended in1780 that France was in a state ofdecline; there seemed, on the contrary,to be just then no bounds toher progress. Then it was that thetheory of the continual and indefiniteperfectibility. of man took its origin.Twenty years before nothing was tobe hoped of the future: then nothingwas to be feared. The imagination,grasping at this near, and unheardof felicity, caused men to overlookthe advantages they already possessed,and hurried them forward tosomething new. 66 Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Stateof Society in France before the Revolutionof 1789. (London : John Murray,1856) pp. 321-324. Also' available as TheOld Regime and. the French Revolutionin a Doubleday paperback.