“In the long period of rankling unrest and rising discontent preceding the Revolution all sorts of schemes were worked up for the establishment of a new social order and a new method of government. The ends proposed by the reformers varied greatly, but the means were always the same. They wished to make use of the central power, as it stood, for shattering the whole social structure.and rebuilding it on lines that seemed to them desirable. For, to their thinking, only the central authority could bring this “ideal State” into being, and there should be no limit to its might, as there was none to its right. The one thing needed was to persuade it to exercise its power in the right direction.
. . .
Such notions were not confined. to books; they had taken root in people’s minds and were implicit in their ways of living; in fact, they entered into the very texture of everyday life throughout the country. It never occurred to anyone that any large-scale enterprise could be put through successfully without the intervention of the State.
. . .
To the mind of the great majority of people only the government was capable of maintaining order in the land. The populace had a salutary dread of the mounted police, and of them alone, while the landed proprietors regarded them as the only force in which they could feel some confidence. The mounted policeman was, in fact, the embodiment of law and order, not merely its chief defender. “No one,” we read in the minutes of the Provincial Assembly of Guienne, “can have failed to notice how the mere sight of a mounted policeman is enough to bring to heel even the most truculent disturbers of the peace.” For this reason every man of property wanted to have a detachment of mounted police posted at his door, and the records of the intendancies are full of such requests. No one seemed to have had the faintest inkling that the protector might one day become the master.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 1858. Stuart Gilbert translation, 1978, pp. 68-69.