The real causes of the French Revolution

You were told, while visiting the college and high school that the French Revolution was its causes only in the great philosophical treatises written by Rousseau, Montesquieu and Voltaire? Scan this idea simply by reading Tocqueville who, like nobody analyzed the slow decomposition of the old regime that spawned it not as brutal upheaval and suddenly they say and called the 1789 Revolution.

Indeed, Tocqueville are two main steps: the root causes of the Revolution and the recent cases. The course of his look attentive all parts of the Old Regime society: administrative, political, social and economic justice. It is hard to imagine the hours of work necessary to recount archive to reach this brilliant work of synthesis.
Because the causes of the Revolution are multiple and rooted in time. Although Tocqueville warns us that there is no injustice that is caused when a tax that creates new!
The reasons therefore. One can list them briefly:
- Sales increased more offices for nobles and bourgeois who in this way is exempt from paying taxes.
- Rural exodus of these two classes is therefore separate from the rest of the population (farmers).
- The nobles and lords are dispossessed of their administrative powers to the benefit of stewards and their myriad of sub-delegated (bureaucratic state).
- Increasing the power of the state that is becoming increasingly centralized and especially more distant realities of the people.
- Increasing indirect taxes (size) ever paid by farmers and still less by the wealthy.
- Maintenance of privileges for nobles (lords) while they hardly administering their communities and were established in cities. Hence the anger of farmers who no longer tolerate this injustice.
- The peasants had accessed the property (there were many small landowners) but some feudal customs had survived (chore obligation to serve in the militia ...)
- Increase of the poor and setting up an assistantship system (charity workshops = free labor) very badly by the population.
- Increase the number of delusional servants who want to learn their craft workers, multiplication decrees and standards ... and of taxes, extremely slow administration. Administration increasingly repressive and arrogant.
- Exclusion of the political life of village communities and thus the vast majority of the population in favor of notables assembled.
- Permanent change laws and tax bases.
- Abandonment of the campaigns of all the industrial fabric.

Just one question: does it remind you of anything?

It will be appreciated that with all these flaws accumulated over three hundred years poor Louis XVI (great reformer elsewhere) despite its good intentions to restore order in all this stuff (and he succeeded pretty much too late ), could not straighten the machine. The damage was done.
In addition, Louis XVI by exposing the general public at the end of his reign had all the faults the administration has excites hatred against the government. And the people who had won freedoms (home ownership) and a new taste for freedom, has not been content to follow Louis XVI in his reforms but the beat. For it is when the monarchy knew his greatest social advances in justice and it was overturned. Paradox of history. In any case the Tocqueville thesis.

And masterful book essential for anyone who wants to understand (beyond the soup served by the National Education) the origins of the French Revolution. However, it is regrettable that Tocqueville is not more critical of the disastrous economic policies of Turgot. We must see here the limits and liberal bias of the author.