《旧制度与大革命·卷二·第十一章·旧制度下所享有的那种自由及其影响》第9节
The habits of the French Courts of justice had become in many respects the habits of the nation. The Courts of justice had given birth to the notion that every question was open to discussion and every decision subject to appeal, and likewise to the use of publicity, and to a taste for forms of proceeding--things adverse to servitude: this was the only part of the education of a free people which the institutions of the old monarchy had given to France. The administration itself had borrowed largely from the language and the practice of the Courts. The King considered himself obliged to assign motives for his edicts, and to state his reasons before he drew the conclusion; the Council of State caused its orders to be preceded by long preambles; the Intendants promulgated their ordinances in the forms of judicial procedure. In all the administrative bodies of any antiquity, such, for example, as the body of the Treasurers of France or that of the élus (who assessed the taille), the cases were publicly debated and decided after argument at the bar. All these usages, all these formalities, were so many barriers to the arbitrary power of the sovereign. The people alone, applying that term to the lower orders of society, and especially the people of the rural districts, were almost always unable to offer any resistance to oppression except by violence. Most of the means of defence which I have here passed in review were, in fact, beyond their reach; to employ those means, a place in society where they could be seen, or a voice loud enough to make itself heard, was requisite; But above the ranks of the lower orders there was not a man in France who, if he had the courage, might not contest his obedience and resist in giving way. The King spoke as the chief of the nation rather than as its master. ‘We glory,’ said Louis XVI., at his accession, in the preamble of a decree, ‘we glory to command a free and generous nation.’ One of his ancestors had already expressed the same idea in older language, when, thanking the States-General for the boldness of their remonstrances, he said, ‘We like better to speak to freemen than to serfs.’
注释摘要
托克维尔在这一段里，把目光从行政集权转到了司法习惯上，他要解释一件事情：在一个中央权力已经吞噬了几乎所有公共事务的国家里，为什么个人的独立精神还能在相当一部分人中存留下来。他的答案是，法国旧制度下的司法机构及其运作方式，在无意识中充当了自由的学校，而这种教育是旧君主制给法国留下的唯一自由遗产。这里的“Courts of justice”主要指以高等法院为核…