《旧制度与大革命·卷二·第十二章·何以十八世纪法国农民处境反不如十三世纪》第13节
There is something fallacious in the merriment which the French often exhibit in the midst of the greatest calamities. It only proves that, believing their ill fortune to be inevitable, they seek to throw it off by not thinking of it, but not that they do not feel it. Open to them a door of escape from the evil they seem to bear so lightly, and they will rush towards it with such violence as to pass over your body without so much as seeing you, if you are on their path. These things are clear to us, from our point of observation; but they were invisible to contemporary eyes. It is always with great difficulty that men belonging to the upper classes succeed in discerning with precision what is passing in the mind of the common people, and especially of the peasantry. The education and the manner of life of the peasantry give them certain views of their own, which remain shut to all other classes. But when the poor and the rich have scarcely any common interests, common grievances, or common business, the darkness which conceals the mind of the one from the mind of the other becomes impenetrable, and the two classes might live for ever side by side without the slightest interpenetration. It is curious to observe in what strange security all those who inhabited the upper or the middle storeys of the social edifice were living at the very time when the Revolution was beginning, and to mark how ingeniously they discoursed on the virtues of the common people, on their gentleness, on their attachment to themselves, on their innocent diversions; the absurd and terrible contrast of ‘93 was already beneath their feet. Let us here pause for a moment as we proceed to consider, amidst all these minute particulars which I have been describing, one of the greatest laws of Providence in the government of human societies.
注释摘要
托克维尔在这里转入了一种社会心理学的解剖，他关心的不再是制度条文，而是阶级隔离在人的内心造成的后果。法国农民常被观察者描述为快活，哪怕处境极为困苦。托克维尔指出这种快活具有欺骗性：它不证明苦难不存在，也不证明农民无感于自身遭遇，它只证明苦难被感受为无法逃避的命运。当一个人确信厄运不可更改，他就会用不去想的方式来卸下它的重量，而不是真的感觉不到它的重量。这句…