ABSTRACT
After the breakdown of the French Revolution, Count Joseph de Maistre became the most influential philosophical spokesman for restoring the old days. Against the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity", he seemed almost personally to embody the slogan "throne and altar". Liberal critics of the French Revolution would join Maistre in attacking its unliberal reign of terror. Real constitutions like the British grew organically out of history over the centuries. The vast extent of the instability following the French Revolution surprised even its supporters. Factors making Tocqueville slightly more conservative than liberal were his aristocratic distrust of the common people and of direct democracy. He expressed this distrust in political action by his role as a government official during the revolution of 1848. Like British conservatives and unlike many French ones, Tocqueville defended the concrete reality against the promises of a priori theory.
