Tocqueville on Equality and Social Discontent

I've been reading Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, a work that discusses the several causes of the French Revolution and one of whose basic themes is that the legal and political reforms following the Revolution were actually already in place in the late stages of the ancien régime. After the distempers of the Revolution subsided, those same governmental reforms and ways of conducting state business returned.

In fact it was the reforms that hastened on the Revolution. The anger and dissatisfaction of the people became unbearable not because equality was in decline or at its lowest ebb before the Revolution, but because it was rising. The point is about the political psychology of equality, and, allowing for changed circumstances, it isn't applicable only to pre-revolutionary states but can be seen to operate in many contexts. The more people believe themselves to be equal to one another in every respect, the less inequalities of any respect become tolerable. From Chapter XVI ("That the Reign of Louis XVI Was the Most Prosperous Era Of the Old Monarchy, and How That Prosperity Hastened the Revolution"): 

Revolutions are not always brought about by a decline from bad to worse. Nations that have endured patiently and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming oppression, often burst into rebellion against the yoke the moment it begins to grow lighter. The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement over its predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform. A sovereign who seeks to relieve his subjects after long periods of oppression is lost, unless he be a man of great genius. Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable become intolerable when once the idea of escape from them is suggested. The very redress of grievances throws new light on those which are left untouched, and throws fresh poignancy to their smart: if the pain be less, the patient’s sensibility is greater. Never had the feudal system seemed so hateful to the French as at the moment of its proximate destruction….

No one in 1780 had any idea that France was on the decline; on the contrary, there seemed to be no bounds to its progress. It was then that the theory of the continual and indefinite perfectibility of man took its rise. Twenty years before, nothing was hoped from the future; in 1780, nothing was feared. Imagination anticipated a coming era of unheard of felicity, diverted attention from present blessings, and concentrated it upon novelties.