How to deal with the legacy of the French Revolution was a key question for Tocqueville throughout his life. He himself was always a defender of the spirit of liberty and equality. But unlike other commentators, he never described the Revolution as democratic. As the first volume of L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (see Chap. 4 ) makes clear, the Revolution was preceded by a complex social development. It led to a levelling of the classes, but it did not create a democracy. Nor did the establishment of the Republic mean the realization of a democracy. For Tocqueville, the Revolution was rather a political event in a long evolution towards modern democracy, whose social, legal and political preconditions he had already tried to explore in De la démocratie en Amérique (see Chap. 3). He, therefore, did not interpret the Revolution as an absolute break with the past. Rather, he sought to show that even the revolutionaries held absolutist notions of state and society, which he described as fatal to modern democracy because they undermined active citizenship. His approach to French history was thus politically motivated, although his texts, especially his study L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856), are now considered classics of historical scholarship.