Dogancan zsel (ed.) Reflections on Conservatism (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011)

In the foreword to his The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856) Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “No nation had ever before embarked on so resolute an attempt as that of the French in 1789 to break with the past, to make, as it were, a scission in their life line and to create an unbridgeable gulf between all they had hitherto been and all they now aspired to be. ...in a word, they spared no pains in their endeavour to obliterate their former selves.”