Tocqueville argued that the aim of the French Revolution (1789–1799), while demonstrably anti-clerical, was not so much to destroy the sovereignty of religious faith as to tear down all forms of the Ancien Régime, of which the established church was a foremost symbol, nor to create a state of permanent disorder. The revolution should be read, he maintained, primarily as a movement for political and social reform. Contrary to the views expressed by the participants in the Revolution …