《旧制度与大革命·卷二·第十九章·一场大行政革命先于政治革命而至》第7节
The Seigneur, therefore, only figured in this Assembly in a position of absolute subjection to his former vassals, who were all at once become his masters; he was their prisoner rather than their chief. In gathering men together by such means as these, it seemed as if the object was not so much to connect them more closely with each other as to render more palpable the differences of their condition and the incompatibility of their interests. Was or was not the village Syndic still that discredited officer whose duties no one would accept but upon compulsion, or was the condition of the Syndic raised with that of the community to which he belonged as its chief agent? Even this question was not easily answered. I have found the letter of a village bailiff, written in 1788, in which he expresses his indignation at having been elected to the office of Syndic, ‘which was,’ he said, ‘contrary to all the privileges of his other post.’ To this the Comptroller-General replies that this individual must be set right: that he must be made to understand that he ought to be proud of the choice of his fellow-citizens; and that moreover the new Syndics were not to resemble the local officers who had formerly borne the same appellation, and that they would be treated with more consideration by the Government. On the other hand some of the chief inhabitants of parishes, and even men of rank, began at once to draw nearer to the peasantry, as soon as the peasantry had become a power in the State. A landed proprietor exercising a heritable jurisdiction over a village near Paris complained that the King’s Edict debarred him from taking part, even as a mere inhabitant, in the proceedings of the Parochial Assembly. Others consented, from mere public spirit, as they said, to accept even the office of Syndic. It was too late: but as the members of the higher classes of society in France thus began to approach the rural population and sought to combine with the people, the people drew back into the isolation to which it had been condemned and maintained that position. Some parochial assemblies refused to allow the Seigneur of the place to take his seat among them; others practised every kind of trick to evade the reception of persons as low-born as themselves, but who were rich. ‘We are informed,’ said the Provincial Assembly of Lower Normandy, ‘that several municipal bodies have refused to receive among their members landowners not being noble and not domiciled in the parish, though these persons have an undoubted right to sit in such meetings. Some other bodies have even refused to admit farmers not having any property in land in the parish.’
注释摘要
托克维尔在这一段里把目光从省一级的议会拉回到村庄，用村里的具体状况揭示 1787 年行政改革真正的社会后果：它不但没有拉近各阶层的距离，反而让阶级隔阂变成一场每日都在上演的羞辱仪式。他所用的两个角色——领主和村社理事——就精确地标定了这场混乱的位置。领主的身份本应意味着治理权，但在新的教区议会里，他出席的依据只是他作为“显要居民”的事实，而不是他的等级地位…