《旧制度与大革命·卷二·第二十章·革命自然从既有事实中产生》第4节
Even the peculiarities of its condition had imparted to the French people several virtues of no common occurrence. Emancipated early, and long possessed of a part of the soil, isolated rather than dependent, the French showed themselves at once temperate and proud; sons of labour, indifferent to the delicacies of life, resigned to its greatest evils, firm in danger--a simple and manly race who were about to fill those mighty armies before which Europe was to bow. But the same cause made them dangerous masters. As they had borne almost alone for centuries all the burden of public wrongs--as they had lived apart feeding in silence on their prejudices, their jealousies, and their hatreds, they had become hardened by the rigour of their destiny, and capable both of enduring and of inflicting every evil. Such was the state of the French people when, laying hands on the government, it undertook to complete the work of the Revolution. Books had supplied the theory; the people undertook the practical application, and adapted the conceptions of those writers to the impulse of their own passions. Those who have attentively considered, in these pages, the state of France in the eighteenth century must have remembered the birth and development of two leading passions, which, however, were not contemporaneous, and which did not always tend to the same end. The first, more deeply seated and proceeding from a more remote source, was the violent and inextinguishable hatred of inequality. This passion, born and nurtured in presence of the inequality it abhorred, had long impelled the French with a continuous and irresistible force to raze to their foundations all that remained of the institutions of the Middle Ages, and upon the ground thus cleared to construct a society in which men should be as much alike and their conditions as equal as human nature admits of. The second, of a more recent date and a less tenacious root, led them to desire to live, not only equal but free.
注释摘要
托克维尔在这一段里转向了对法兰西民族性格本身的分析，试图解释为什么同样的制度性原因落在这片土地上会结出如此特殊的果实。他首先承认，旧制度下的生存条件反倒锤炼出法国普通民众一些不寻常的品质。这里的“解放得很早”指的是法国农民很早就已不再是农奴，而且很多人都获得了小块土地的所有权。他们不依附于领主，也不依附于任何人，这种孤立而独立的生存状态塑造了一种既节制又骄…