《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15节
In all future ages the ruins of that great House of France, which had seemed destined to extend over the whole of Europe, will be the wonder of mankind; but those who read its history with attention will understand without difficulty its fall. Almost all the vices, almost all the errors, almost all the fatal prejudices I have had occasion to describe, owed either their origin, or their duration, or their extent to the arts practised by most of the kings of France to divide their subjects in order to govern them more absolutely. But when the middle classes were thus thoroughly severed from the nobility, and the peasantry from the nobility, as well as from the middle classes--when, by the progress of the same influences within each class, each of them was internally subdivided into minute bodies, almost as isolated from each other as the classes to which they belonged, the result was one homogeneous mass, the parts of which no longer cohered. Nothing was any longer so organised as to thwart the Government--nothing so as to assist it; insomuch that the whole fabric of the grandeur of the monarchy might fall to pieces at once and in a moment as soon as the society on which it rested was disturbed. And the people, which alone seem to have learnt something from the misconduct and the mistakes of all its masters, if indeed it escaped their empire, failed to shake off the false notions, the vicious habits, the evil tendencies which those masters had imparted to it, or allowed it to assume. Sometimes that people has carried the predilections of a slave into the enjoyment of its liberty, alike incapable of self-government and hostile to those who would have directed it. I now resume my track; and, losing sight of the old and general facts which have prepared the great Revolution I design to paint, I proceed to the more particular and more recent incidents which finally determined its occurrence, its origin, and its character.
注释摘要
托克维尔在这里用一个近乎墓志铭式的段落为全书的前半部论证收束。他的推理是一条因果链，起点是波旁王朝历代君主刻意推行的一项治理技艺：为了更不受制约地进行统治，国王们系统性地将臣民分割开来。具体做法就是把贵族与中产阶级彻底隔断，把农民与贵族和中产阶级同时隔断，然后用同样的逻辑把各个阶级内部再切割成无数彼此封闭的微小团体。他在本章前面已经详细描写过贵族如何脱离土…