《旧制度与大革命·卷二·第一章·何以封建权利在法国最招人恨》第2节
I am not seeking out these provisions in obsolete laws. They are to be met with even in the Code framed by Frederic the Great and promulgated by his successor at the very time of the outbreak of the French Revolution. Nothing of the kind had existed in France for a long period of time. The peasant came, and went, and bought, and sold, and dealt, and laboured, as he pleased. The last traces of serfdom could only be detected in one or two of the eastern provinces annexed to France by conquest; everywhere else the institution had disappeared; and indeed its abolition had occurred so long before that even the date of it was forgotten. The researches of archæologists of our own day have proved that as early as the thirteenth century serfdom was no longer to be met with in Normandy. But in the condition of the people in France another and a still greater revolution had taken place. The French peasant had not only ceased to be a serf; he had become an Owner of Land. This fact is still at the present time so imperfectly established, and its consequences, as will presently be seen, have been so remarkable, that I must be permitted to pause for a moment to examine it. It has long been believed that the subdivision of landed property in France dates from the Revolution of 1789, and was only the result of that Revolution. The contrary is demonstrable by every species of evidence. Twenty years at least before that Revolution, Agricultural Societies were in existence which already deplored the excessive subdivision of the soil. ‘The division of inheritances,’ said M. de Turgot, about the same time, ‘is such that what sufficed for a single family is shared among five or six children. These children and their families can therefore no longer subsist exclusively by the land.’ Necker said a few years later that there was in France an immensity of small rural properties. I have met the following expressions in a secret Report made to one of the provincial Intendants a few years before the Revolution:--‘Inheritances are divided in an equal and alarming manner, and as every one wishes to have something of everything, and everywhere, the plots of land are infinitely divided and perpetually subdivided.’ Might not this sentence have been written in our days?
注释摘要
托克维尔在这里做的是一个关键的历史事实修正，直接针对当时法国人普遍相信的一个神话：土地细分是 1789 年革命的产物。他用了层层推进的证据链来拆解这个错觉。他的推理逻辑很清晰——先说法国的农奴制早就不存在了，再说农民不但自由，而且已经是土地所有者，然后证明这种土地所有权的广泛分布远在革命之前。他引的证人很讲究：杜尔哥是重农学派的开明官员，内克是财政大臣，还…