《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3节
I have myself taken the infinite pains to reconstruct, as it were, the survey of landed property as it existed in France before the Revolution, and I have in some cases effected my object. In pursuance of the law of 1790, which established the land-tax, each parish had to frame a return of the landed properties then existing within its boundaries. These returns have for the most part disappeared; nevertheless I have found them in a few villages, and by comparing them with the rolls of the present holders, I have found that, in these villages, the number of landed proprietors at that time amounted to one-half, frequently to two-thirds, of their present number: a fact which is the more remarkable if it be remembered that the total population of France has augmented by more than one-fourth since that period. Already, as at the present time, the love of the peasant for property in land was intense, and all the passions which the possession of the soil has engendered in his nature were already inflamed. ‘Land is always sold above its value,’ said an excellent contemporary observer; ‘which arises from the passion of all the inhabitants to become owners of the soil. All the savings of the lower orders which elsewhere are placed out at private interest, or in the public securities, are intended in France for the purchase of land.’ Amongst the novelties which Arthur Young observed in France, when he visited that country for the first time, none struck him more than the great division of the soil among the peasantry. He averred that half the soil of France belonged to them in fee. ‘I had no idea,’ he often says, ‘of such a state of things;’ and it is true that such a state of things existed at that time nowhere but in France, or in the immediate neighbourhood of France. In England there had been peasant landowners, but the number of them had already considerably decreased. In Germany there had been at all times and in all parts of the country a certain number of peasant freeholders, who held portions of the soil in fee. The peculiar and often eccentric laws which regulated the property of these peasants are to be met with in the oldest of the Germanic customs; but this species of property was always of an exceptional character, and the number of these small proprietors was very limited.
注释摘要
托克维尔在这里做了一件当时几乎无人尝试的工作：他钻进档案，用可核查的实证材料去反驳一个流行甚广的成见，即法国土地的小块分割是大革命的产物。他找到的钥匙是 1790 年设立土地税时各堂区编制的土地清册。这些清册大多数已经散失，但他在少数村庄找到了留存，并与当代的土地持有者名册做对比。比较的结果很清楚：在大革命刚结束时，这些村庄的土地所有者的数量已经达到他写作…