ABSTRACT
In France the embodied time chooses a different way than in Germany. Unlike a time of rise and fall, the French nobleman Tocqueville constitutes a time of “the synchronicity of the non-synchronous”. Past, present and future are not perceived as following one another but as juxtaposed. They are not incarnated in political entities but in societal systems. The past is substantiated in an aristocratic system and the future in a democratic one. In his Democracy in America, Tocqueville perceives the United States as the future of a still aristocratic Europe. In The Old Regime and the Revolution in France, he observes France before the French Revolution as aristocratic, but undermined by future, egalitarian aspects. After the revolution it is a modernizing society, hampered by the stubborn aristocratic elite of the past.
