THE UNITED STATES: DEMOCRACY
AND SLAVERY
In the spring of 1791, on leave from the French army, Chateaubriand sailed to the United States, landing at Baltimore and visiting Philadelphia, New York, Albany and Niagara Falls before returning to France that winter. On the strength of his acquaintance with the Mohawk country in 1801 he published his novel Atala, about an Indian girl of that name, portrayed as a noble savage, living in the virgin forests of the New World. The following year he published René, the story of a melancholy Frenchman who takes a ship for the French colony of Louisiana in 1725, hears the story of Atala from an old Indian, Chactas, and dies fighting for the Natchez tribe of Louisiana against the French. These hugely popular works conveyed an image of America still in a state of nature, beloved of Romantics fleeing the modern world. Yet they were pure invention. Chateaubriand never travelled down the Mississippi, and the Natchez had long been dispersed by French settlers and soldiers.35
Louisiana itself, a vast area of land west of the Mississippi, stretching west to the Rockies and north to Canada, had been ceded by France to Spain in 1763 in return for Spain’s part in the Seven Years War against the British. Napoleon recovered it from Spain in 1800, hoping to restore France’s colonial empire, but when he realized that he would be unable to defend it he sold it in 1803 to the Americans, 838,000 square miles for 60 million francs, in order to fund the war against Britain.36 Thomas Jefferson, the American president, offered the governorship of Louisiana to his old friend and comrade in the struggle for American independence, Lafayette, but Lafayette turned down the offer, saying that while liberty was safe in America, it was threatened in a Europe under Napoleonic despotism, and it was his duty to remain in the Old World to work for its restoration.37
America, for the French, was thus on one hand the virgin forests peopled by noble savages of Chateaubriand, and on the other the land of liberty to which they themselves, and especially Lafayette, had contributed. America was the model of the free government they craved but had been unable to realize as the Revolution lurched from Robespierre’s Terror to Napoleon’s despotism. Jefferson’s message to Lafayette was always that free institutions needed long maturing and that Lafayette’s sudden switch in the Hundred Days to hope for a ‘national insurrection’ under Napoleon to restore the gains of the Revolution was folly. He had advised Lafayette to compromise with the king to secure constitutional monarchy in 1789 and he proposed the same in 1815. As if to justify French views of liberty, Lafayette constantly reminded Jefferson that slavery in the Southern states, which was spreading out to new states formed after the Louisiana Purchase, such as Missouri, was a ‘wide blot on American philanthropy… ever thrown in my face when I indulge my patriotism’.38
In 1824–5 Lafayette toured the United States at the invitation of President Monroe. He visited twenty-four states in twelve months, including the tomb of Washington at Mount Vernon on the Potomac and the battlefield of Yorktown, and embraced his old friend Jefferson at Montebello. There he was concerned that like all planters in Virginia Jefferson farmed his vast property with slave labour. In the deep South he was also concerned about treaties being forced on the Indians obliging them to withdraw west across the Mississippi, which did not compare with the crimes of violence used by the British against their Asian subjects, but would probably nevertheless result in their destruction. All this, however, was forgotten at the final banquet offered to him in Washington, when Lafayette announced how happy he was ‘to see the American people daily more attached to the liberal institutions which they have made such a success, while in Europe they were touched by a withering hand’.39
Matters of American democracy, the treatment of Indians and slavery were thus not new issues when Tocqueville set sail for the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, in 1831. Aged only twenty-five, he had decided against taking an oath to the July Monarchy required of him as a young magistrate, but secured a commission to study the American prison system. He obtained a letter of introduction from Chateaubriand, to whom he was distantly related, while Beaumont asked for one from Lafayette, whom Tocqueville considered a ‘vain and dangerous demagogue’.40 Tocqueville had been seduced by the idea of the inexorable rise of democracy thanks to Guizot’s lectures on civilization in Europe which he had attended in 1829–30, and was keen to see what must come to Europe working in the democratic laboratory of the United States. He learned English from an American girl on the ship that sailed from Le Havre and arrived in New York on 14 April 1831. He was immediately impressed that ‘the whole of society seems to have melted into a middle class. No one seems to have the elegant manners and the refined courtesy of the high classes in Europe… But at the same time no one is what in France one might call ill-bred.’41
This impression was elaborated in the first volume of Democracy in America, published in 1835, as the ‘equality of conditions’ explained on the one hand by the abolition of the English law of primogeniture in favour of equal inheritance by the American revolutionaries, and on the other by the general level of education enjoyed by all American citizens.42 This equality of conditions helped to sustain democracy as a political principle, by which he meant the sovereignty of the people. But in France the sovereignty of the people had been used in turn to justify popular revolution and Napoleonic despotism. In Boston the Reverend Jared Sparks, a Unitarian minister and newspaper editor, provided Tocqueville with an account of the workings of self-government in Massachusetts. Key to maintaining free government, Tocqueville realized, were free institutions such as administrative decentralization and autonomous town councils, a powerful judiciary and jury system, associations dedicated to civic initiatives and a free press, together with sentiments which underpinned liberty such as the desire to participate in political life, a religious spirit and a willingness of individuals to help each other out. It was not a case of the French copying American laws and morals, but unless they cultivated free institutions and habits they would find themselves under ‘an equal tyranny for all’.43
Tocqueville and Beaumont, however, did not sidestep the two issues that made the American model less glorious than it might be. They visited Albany and Utica in the Mohawk valley, but did not find the noble savages of Chateaubriand, only Indians wearing dirty linen and drunk on liquor, taking, as Beaumont wrote, ‘but the vices of civilization and the rags of Europe’.44 In Democracy in America, Tocqueville chronicled the expulsion of Indian tribes beyond the Mississippi, blaming the greed of white settlers and the tyranny of state legislatures in the South, describing the silent passage of the Mississippi by a troop of Choctaws, dragging with them their children, their sick and their aged.45 Likewise he described the slavery of the South which sustained the only aristocracy that survived in the country, an evil not only for the slaves but for the masters too. Thus on the north bank of the Ohio river the population of the state of Ohio, without slaves, was industrious and prosperous, building roads, canals and factories, while on the south bank, in Kentucky, where slavery existed, the white man ‘living in idle ease, had the habits of idle men… he is less interested in money than in excitement and pleasure, hunting and war are his delights.’46 Southerners, he found, did not talk to outsiders about slavery, but to his mind it was condemned to disappear, attacked by both political economy and religion, and if it were not abolished legally a black revolution would destroy it by force. Beaumont tackled the question head-on in his 1835 novel Marie ou l’esclavage. Ludovic, a French traveller like himself, meets a beautiful girl in Baltimore, who rejects his love. He discovers that she and her brother George have been ‘tainted by a drop of black blood’ and live in fear of being exposed. ‘America is the classic soil of equality,’ reflects Ludovic, ‘but no European country has so much inequality.’ George is thrown out of a New York theatre as a black man and dies in the Carolinas defending Indian tribesmen who have been driven out by land-hungry Southern states. Marie and Ludovic find solace in the virgin forests of Saginaw, on the banks of the G
reat Lakes, where she too dies. Twenty-five years before the American Civil War Tocqueville and Beaumont acquainted the French public with the deep contradictions of American democracy.47
RUSSIA: LIBERATOR OR TYRANT?
The most likely contact an ordinary Frenchman had with Russia in the early nineteenth century was as one of Napoleon’s multinational army of 600,000 which invaded Russia in June 1812. Napoleon’s forces entered Moscow in September, abandoning it to pillage and fire, but the most gruelling experience was the retreat from Moscow and the crossing of the River Beresina on 27–28 November 1812, under fire from Russian batteries, which left terrible carnage. But just as the French made up only a part of an army composed of Italians, Poles and Germans, so some French soldiers were serving not the French emperor but the Russian tsar. The Duc de Richelieu, who emigrated during the Revolution, fought for Catherine the Great against the Turks in 1789–92 and then served Tsar Alexander in preference to Napoleon. His younger cousin, the Comte de Rochechouart, also had a commission in the Russian army, and was appointed aide-de-camp to Tsar Alexander in 1810. Having fought against the Turks until 1812 he was with the Don Cossacks on the Beresina, witnessing the carnage, and at the town of Studianska, mostly burned by the French, he occupied a room over the door of which was written the name of his childhood friend, the Baron de Mortemart. The same room, he reflected, ‘had been occupied by a Mortemart, aide-de-camp to the Emperor of the French, and then by a Rochechouart, aide-de-camp to the Emperor of Russia’.48
The relationship of French and Russians was at best ambiguous. Were the Russians to be regarded as allies or enemies, as liberators or oppressors, as Europeans or Asians? The Comte de Rochechouart was with Tsar Alexander, the Prussian king and the Austrian generalissimo Prince Schwarzenberg for their victory parade in Paris on 31 May 1814, the night before they decided not to negotiate with Napoleon but to guarantee the integrity of France. During the parade Rochechouart recalled that ‘a young woman contrived – how I do not know – to raise herself onto the stirrups of the Tsar, and shouted frantically in his ear, Vive l’Empereur Alexandre!’49 On the other hand the historian Lavisse, born in 1842, often heard his grandmother, a native of Picardy, talk of ‘the time of the enemy, escapes into the woods where hiding places had been made ready, of the joy of victories, the rout of Waterloo, and of the arrival of the Cossacks who occupied the country in 1815’.50
The victories of 1814–15 against Napoleon made Russia, as much as Great Britain, the European great power to be reckoned with. Russians occupied large areas of north-west France until 1818. The Russian Empire dominated Europe from St Petersburg, from Poland, of which the tsar was now king, and from Odessa, from which it threatened the Mediterranean. Édouard de Montulé, who visited Russia and published his account of it in 1825, observed that liberty was enjoyed only by serf-owning Russian nobles who defended serfdom by saying that without it the land would remain untilled and packed insubordinate serfs off to serve in the army for decades. And yet, he thought, ‘despite the disasters they have experienced, Russians and French have not contracted a national hatred for each other’. Much of this he attributed to the fact that educated Russians spoke French and cultivated French manners and that Russian noblewomen were charming and better educated than their French counterparts.51
The most influential account of Russia in this period was written by the Marquis Astolf de Custine, whose Russia in 1839 was published in 1843. By the age of four he had lost both his father, French ambassador in Berlin, and his grandfather, a general who had surrendered the city of Mainz to the Prussians in 1793, during the Terror, and his own reputation was gravely affected by a homosexual scandal in 1824. Soon after the publication of Democracy in America he met Alexis de Tocqueville at Madame Récamier’s salon and, envious of the achievements of a man fifteen years his junior, decided to do for Russia what Tocqueville had done for America.52
There was much about Russia that did not seem strange to Custine. The world of the Russian nobility was that of the French nobility before the Revolution. At Yaroslavl, north of Moscow, he found that the wife of the governor had been brought up by a French governess who had followed the Polignac family into exile in Russia during the Revolution. ‘The noble simplicity of her bearing reminded me’, he wrote, ‘of the manners of the old people I knew when I was a child. The traditions of the court and high society were what was most seductive about a time when our social superiority was uncon-tested.’53 But while the pre-eminence of the French nobility had been destroyed by the Revolution, in Russia it had never existed. Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks established a military and bureaucratic hierarchy which recognized not birth but only service to the state as a criterion of nobility. Russia, like France, ‘lacked a social hierarchy’ in the sense of a nobility with its own independent power-base. However, ‘without aristocracy there can only be tyranny in monarchies, as in democracies’.54 Where Tocqueville warned of the danger of the tyranny of the majority in democracies, Custine warned of the danger of autocracy in monarchies. For Custine ‘Russian government was camp discipline substituted for the order of the city, the state of siege become the normal state of society.’55
The lack of an independent nobility in Russia was accompanied by the absence of an independent Church. Custine himself observed that while the Catholic Church was generally a bastion of liberty in western European states, the Orthodox Church prevailing in Russia after the schism had fallen into the hands of the state and thus become just another instrument to enslave the Russian people. All this had consequences for the balance of power in Europe and a forthcoming struggle between civilized Europe and backward Russia. Custine feared that so-called civilized Europe was becoming weakened by democracy which replaced a military aristocracy by self-serving politicians and would not be able to resist a Russia which decided to test its strength. ‘One day the sleeping giant will raise itself and force will put an end to the reign of words. In vain, then, will defeated democracy summon the old aristocracy to defend liberty. The weapon, taken up too late by hands too long inactive, will be powerless.’ Scions of old noble families, excluded from power by the Revolution, would no longer be able to help.56
There was a common perception in France that Russia was an autocratic and arbitrary power, very different from Europe apart from St Petersburg but a real military threat. Alexandre Dumas had an enduring fascination for the noble officers of the Guard, many of whom had imbibed constitutional ideas while frequenting liberal circles in France in 1814–18, and who seized the opportunity of the death of Alexander in December 1825 to impose a constitution and civil code in Russia. The so-called Decembrist revolt was put down with great severity by Nicholas I, and over a hundred officers were sentenced variously to death, forced labour or exile in Siberia. Informed of this by a fencing master who had been in Russia, Dumas published a novel about it, Memoirs of a Master-at-Arms, in 1840. It concentrated on the suffering of one of the noble officers, and of his French wife who made the journey to Siberia through packs of wolves to share his exile.57 The publication came to the attention of Nicholas, and Dumas was denied entry into Russia during the lifetime of the tsar. Nicholas died in 1855 during the Crimean war, when France and Great Britain successfully challenged the ambitions of Russia to undermine the Ottoman Empire from the Danube and the Balkans to the Caucasus, and precipitated a crisis in the autocratic, militaristic state.
In 1858–9, after peace returned, both Dumas and the poet and critic Théophile Gautier undertook tours of Russia. Dumas returned to the question of the Decembrist revolt, and quoted the words of the brother of one of the rebels, interrogated by the tsar: ‘the emperor has complete power of life and death, and the people has no law against him.’ ‘His thirty-year reign was a continuous watch,’ said Dumas, ‘which not only gave the signal that revolutions were approaching, but kept itself at the ready to smother them, whether at home or abroad.’ Dumas reported that hearing of Russia’s imminent defeat Nicholas took poison. He wrote a study of se
rfdom in Russia, relating that like petty tsars lords made serfs work from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. on their lands, three days a week, thought nothing of giving them a hundred lashes and sent recalcitrant serfs off to the army for twenty-five years. Although Dumas was not present to witness the effects of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, he announced that ‘the Emperor Alexander has signed one of the greatest and most humane acts ever accomplished by a sovereign. He has restored liberty to twenty-three million people.’58
The account of Gautier, who went to Russia to prepare a volume on the treasures of Russian art, which never materialized, was less backward-looking. Like Custine, he found that there was much that was European about Russia. St Peterburg was ‘a northern Venice’. Alexander II, whom he espied at the Winter Palace, was quite unlike his father, with ‘an expression of majestic firmness lit up from time to time by a graceful smile’. Shakespeare was playing at the theatre with the black American actor Ira Aldridge playing Othello and Lear. In some sense the influence of Europe was deleterious. There was no Russian school of painting, and the most famous modern Russian canvas, The Last Days of Pompeii, was by Karl Briullov, who trained in Italy. Observing that the Kremlin was constantly being repainted, Gautier observed that ‘like people who are still naive, the Russians like what is new, or at least seems so.’ Otherwise Russian art was the Byzantine art of the Orthodox Church, ‘a hieratic, priestly, changeless art, where nothing is left to the fantasy or originality of the artist. Its formulae are as rigid as dogma. In this school there is neither progress, nor decadence, nor even period.’ Even then, reflected Gautier, the capital of Byzantine art was not Moscow but Mount Athos.59
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