Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  ‘The day after my wedding I went with my wife to make a call in Malesherbes town; there she was seized with a nervous attack.* I had never seen anything like it, I was extremely frightened. I thought she was going to die. Her parents reassured me, but the fact was that she was already liable to that nervous affliction which has got worse since and which has thrown a sombre pall over her existence and mine, but I had never been warned.’

  It is difficult to acquit the Rosanbos of irresponsibility, to say the least. Hervé was diffident and inexperienced, but he was not a man who would ever flinch from a duty, and he had the intelligence and character to bear up under any such burden. He never failed his wife. She caused him much unhappiness, nevertheless, and he should at least have been given the opportunity of walking into the trap with open eyes. But beyond setting out the tale in his memoirs, he never seems to have complained.

  For the time being he consoled himself with the company at Malesherbes. There was Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, returned from emigration to look after his wife Aline and their two small sons, Louis and Christian; there was the youngest Rosanbo daughter, Suzanne-Guillemette, who had recently married her first cousin, Charles Le Peletier d’Aunay; there were M. and Mme de Rosanbo and their son Louis, aged fifteen. Malesherbes’ youngest daughter, Marie de Montboissier, had emigrated to Switzerland, from where she wrote indiscreet letters to her sisters. It seems that in spite of all that had happened these royalists had not yet grasped the nature and the extremity of their danger. The family could not believe that the Jacobins would try to kill Malesherbes, and although he himself had no such illusion he did not think that any move would be made against the others. He was resolved to stay in France in case he could help Marie-Antoinette or the King’s sister, Madame Elisabeth, if they were put on trial; besides, he wanted to testify to the glorious memory of Louis XVI (much more reverenced in death than he had ever been in life) and believed that he could not do so effectively if he emigrated. He even went back to Paris for a few weeks in the summer of 1793, until he received a secret warning from the Committee of General Security to make himself scarce. He took the hint.23

  Spring, summer, autumn: in spite of everything the family was happy. ‘The life we led was very agreeable,’ Hervé was to record.

  At nine o’clock every evening everybody gathered in the salon. M. de Malesherbes would arrive and seize on one of us for a talk which went on until midnight. While talking he never failed to undo the buttons, of coat and waistcoat, of his interlocutor. [We are not told how he treated ladies.] At midnight he went to bed fully clothed, and slept for several hours; he was made to keep his clothes on because he had the habit, when an idea struck him in the middle of the night, of getting up to write it down. At such moments he never thought of getting dressed, and several times he had suffered badly from cold.

  They were left unmolested until the winter, but eventually the authorities searched the Rosanbo mansion in Paris and there found, along with such incriminating evidence as a bust of Louis XIV given by that monarch to one of Rosanbo’s ancestors, a manuscript dating from 1790 in which Rosanbo, who had then been a President of the Paris parlement, and his fellow magistrates had formally protested against the abolition of that body, just as they had protested against its abolition under Louis XV. There was also a vast amount of compromising correspondence: sixty letters from François-René de Chateaubriand, for example. The head of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Fouquier-Tinville, himself scrutinized all the evidence, and then a warrant was issued for Rosanbo’s arrest.24

  On 17 December we were at table [says Hervé de Tocqueville] when the concierge of the château came in with consternation on his face and, employing unusual language, said: ‘Citizen Rosanbo, outside are some citizens from Paris asking for you.’ We all turned pale. M. de Rosanbo left the room at once, and our anxiety was extreme when it became clear that he was not coming back.

  Early next morning the Parisians (two workers from the Bondy Section) carried him off to prison as a conspirator against the security of the republic, one and indivisible. Two days later Malesherbes and the rest followed. The house had been searched and more compromising letters had been found (those of Mme de Montboissier in particular), though nothing which directly inculpated Malesherbes, the Chateaubriands, or the Tocquevilles.* It hardly mattered. All were incarcerated. Hervé: ‘I had never seen a prison. I don’t know how to express what I felt when I had to crawl through a door only three feet high and heard the great key turn in the locks behind us.’

  The sans-culottes were delighted with the arrests; not so the people of Malesherbes. One tradition affirms that when the prisoners were carried off on 20 December some of the villagers ran after their carriages, shouting angry protests and trying to free them. It is at least certain that the officers of the commune sent an attestation of the old nobleman’s good citizenship to Paris, and displayed a copy in the office of the maire for three days without provoking any opposition. ‘We certify and attest that Citizen Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon has at all times shown himself to be the most zealous possible defender of the rights of the people ...’ It did no good.25

  The Reign of Terror was in full swing: the war must be won and the Revolution saved, and judicial murder was one of the means employed. It could be delayed, but not finally averted. Rosanbo was executed on 20 April 1794; Mme de Rosanbo on the 21st, for being his wife, and on the same day Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, for having been an émigré and for corresponding with émigrés; Mme de Chateaubriand, for the same, although she had never emigrated; and Malesherbes himself. He made a worthy exit. His hands tied, he was being led from the court-room to the tumbril when he stumbled on the threshold. ‘Mauvais présage,’ said he. ‘Un Romain ne serait pas allé plus avant.’26 †

  As Jean-Baptiste was led away to the Revolutionary Tribunal, Hervé asked his permission to take charge of his sons, who were being sheltered by a peasant family at Malesherbes. Jean-Baptiste willingly agreed, but his brother-in-law must have wondered if he would live to take up his obligation. In June the Convention passed the notorious law of 22 Prairial, which stripped accused prisoners of all legal or judicial protections and, in Norman Hampson’s phrase, ‘was little more than a formal way of clearing the gaols’.27 Fortunately the prison of Port-Libre [sic], where the Tocquevilles were confined, was not immediately selected for one of the resultant repetitions of the September Massacres. Prisoners were taken away to die in handfuls rather than wholesale. Every afternoon a grim little ritual occurred: a jailer would approach five or six prisoners with the words, ‘Citizens, you are wanted at the office.’ Sometimes he added, ‘You won’t need to take anything with you.’ There would follow heartrending scenes of farewell. To avoid witnessing them (he sorrowed enough anyway) Hervé made a habit of taking a nap at that hour. One day he woke up to find that his hair had gone white from the strain. He was twenty-one years old, and as he says in his memoirs, his responsibilities were crushing, even apart from the constant threat of the guillotine: he had to look after his brother-in-law, Louis de Rosanbo, now seventeen, and two young women, his wife and her surviving sister, Mme d’Aunay; and their health was collapsing from grief and fear.

  The terms of their imprisonment deteriorated. Prisoners were no longer allowed to prepare their own meals and eat them in privacy, they had to share a common table and eat the common food, which was very bad though not actually poisonous (‘le cuisinier de notre prison était honnête homme’*). No-one dared complain, lest spies report an attempt to spread dissaffection; they even had to pretend to like the food, to prove their patriotic devotion: ‘One day we were reproached by one of those shameless scoundrels, smiling hellishly, for not having a good appetite.’ This moral sadism reached its climax on the Feast of the Supreme Being (8 June 1794). Executions went on as usual, but the prisoners who were spared that day were herded into the common room of the jail for a patriotic concert, men on one side, women on the other. Larive, once a tragedian at the Théâtre Fran
çais, was obliged to declaim suitable verses, and one of the ladies, Mlle de Béthisy, ‘who had a superb voice’, was forced to sing the ‘Marseillaise’:

  Marchons, marchons, qu’un sang impur

  Abreuve nos sillons!

  This was too much for Suzanne d’Aunay: she had a hysterical attack and began to cry, ‘Oh! the monsters! The monsters!’ This might get them all guillotined. Hervé rushed over, caught her in his arms, and repressed her cries, which fortunately none of the jailers noticed.

  Some days later Hervé was trapped into paying a bribe to the prison-keepers, for which, he subsequently discovered, he would have been sent to the scaffold on XII Thermidor; but on the afternoon of the IX (27 July), as he was looking out of his window, he saw a cripple being carried into the prison by a gendarme. It was Couthon, one of Robespierre’s closest associates. Newsboys’ cries in the street announced the arrest of Robespierre. Then came word that he had been rescued and taken to the Hôtel de Ville. Through the night and day following the prisoners of Port-Libre waited in the sharpest anxiety. But for them it all ended happily. The Tocquevilles had to wait until October to be liberated, but on the 20th – ten months to the day since their arrest – they were set free; and Abbé Le Sueur was at the door to welcome them. ‘How cloudless the sky looked! How fresh the air seemed! How vast was the horizon!’ They hired a fiacre and drove about Paris all day ‘to feel their liberty’.28 But as Hervé later remarked, grief still threatened their joy: ‘Nine of us had entered the house of grief, only four came out. Our parents,* our friends had disappeared, and the wreckage of two families had no one to rely on except a young man of twenty-two who knew little of the world and whose only experience was of misfortune.’† Nevertheless, he was alive, and free.

  * Best known in English as the Cherbourg Peninsula.

  * In French, Notables. There is no good equivalent for this word in day-to-day English, so ‘notable’ will have to do.

  † The Jansenists were a party in the French Church which in the name of Divine grace resisted the orthodox alliance of the Church hierarchy with the monarchy. Louis XIV regarded them as no better than Huguenots and republicans.

  * ‘Abbé’ is the colloquial designation of a priest; cf. ‘Father’ in English.

  * Petitions of grievances. Each election district of each of the three orders which made up the Estates-General drew up such a cahier.

  * In fairness to Robespierre it should be said that there is no evidence that he had a hand in the destruction of Malesherbes. Nor did he try to prevent it.

  * Exactly what this means is not clear.

  * According to HT, what upset the noble inhabitants of the chateau more than anything else was that the intruders used the tutoyer to them all, even the ladies. The suspects would not reciprocate, which was in turn resented.

  † ‘A bad omen. A Roman would travel no further.’

  * ‘The cook in our prison was one of us.’

  * Note how completely HT identifies himself with his wife’s family.

  † HT somewhat understates the disaster which befell Malesherbes, his family and household. As well as the Rosanbos, the Chateaubriands and Malesherbes himself, his sister, Mme de Senozan (whose letters, which showed her to be actively plotting with the émigrés, precipitated the investigation and arrests), was executed three weeks after her brother. Malesherbes’s two secretaries were guillotined; only his valet-de-chambre was spared.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ROYALISTS

  1794–1814

  Un troubadour béarnais

  Les yeux inondés de larmes

  A ses montagnards chantait

  Ce refrain, source d’alarmes:

  Louis, le fils d’Henri

  Est prisonnier dans Paris.*

  RELEASE FROM PRISON put an end to danger but not to difficulty. Hardly had the last prisoners been freed than the Convention ordered that all nobles must leave Paris.1 The Tocquevilles found refuge at Saint-Mandé, just outside the city, and there spent the frightful winter of 1794–5, the coldest, hungriest and most deadly of the Revolution. In Paris, starvation was followed by an epidemic of dysentery. In Saint-Mandé, ‘Mme de Tocqueville was dangerously ill with a nervous fever.’ Towards winter’s end the Convention relented, and allowed the nobles to return; the Tocquevilles settled for a time in the Hôtel de Rosanbo, where everything easily portable had been stolen. Bread was still in short supply and they often had to eat cakes of rice instead, but Hervé noted sardonically that there was plenty of meat in the restaurants, where the profiteers of the Revolution were spending their gains. In the summer of 1796 the Tocquevilles returned at last to Malesherbes, which had also been comprehensively looted.

  Hervé wasted no time after his release. A family council confirmed his position as guardian of the two Chateaubriand boys (who had been sheltered by their old nurse). He set to work to restore the income from the Chateaubriand estates, though it was a slow business. It was not so difficult to rescue his own estates, since he had neither emigrated nor been convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal, but he had at least one narrow escape. During the Revolution the peasants had burned the roof off the detested pigeon-tower at Tocqueville and killed all the birds, but had otherwise left the chateau alone. Some of them, however, cast covetous eyes on its land. They went to the local administration and claimed the right to buy it, or some of it: if the comte de Tocqueville was not an émigré, he ought to have been, and anyway it would be easy and risk-free to add his name to the list of the proscribed, whose property could be sequestrated. Fortunately Hervé’s devoted man of business was able to frustrate this initiative.

  By now Hervé himself was emerging as man of real practical ability, utterly dependable. Even the Damas (somewhat to their surprise) came to acknowledge it. In 1802 he travelled into Germany as escort to his cousin, Elisabeth-Charlotte de Damas, when she needed her still-exiled father Comte Étienne’s consent to her marriage (which was not forthcoming: he persuaded her to marry someone else). Hervé also rescued the Malesherbes inheritance and protected the rights of Mme de Montboissier. In 1800 or thereabouts he and Louis de Rosanbo successfully approached Mme Bonaparte, the wife of the First Consul, to get Mme de Montboissier’s sentence of exile lifted. (Thirty years later he still remembered Josephine fondly: ‘she had already lost her looks, but she kept that incomparable grace which was to distinguish her on the Throne ...’). And he managed to arrive at a satisfactory agreement with the numerous creditors who had large claims on the Rosanbo estates.2

  This was of immediate importance to him. His wife was one of the principal Rosanbo heirs, and the Chateaubriand boys, who were effectively being brought up as his sons, were two more. The ménage needed a settled home, all the more because, in 1797, Mme de Tocqueville bore a son, Hippolyte (nursing him, her husband tells us proudly in his memoirs, with her own milk). In 1800 a second son, Édouard, was born. Malesherbes was now Louis de Chateaubriand’s property, and perhaps for this reason (Louis would one day want it for himself ) or because it was not close enough to Paris, Hervé decided to move. (Tocqueville, of course, was even farther, and anyway, in view of the renewed war with Britain, may have been deemed dangerously close to the coast.) At any rate, in 1802 the Tocquevilles settled at the château of Verneuil-sur-Seine, a property which had belonged to Mme de Senozan, M. de Malesherbes’ guillotined sister. At first it was rented, but in 1807 the large white house and its park became the property of the Tocquevilles when the Lamoignon estate was finally distributed among the inheritors.

  Until then the comte and comtesse also maintained a house in Paris, at 987 rue de la Ville-l’Évêque, and it was there, at two in the afternoon, XI Thermidor An XIII (29 July 1805) that Mme de Tocqueville gave birth to her third and last son, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel.* Mme de Tocqueville was desolated by the appearance of another boy: she had badly wanted a girl. But Hervé said that the baby’s face was so individual and expressive that he was sure to be a great man: ‘I added, as a joke, that he would bec
ome Emperor one day.’ We are not told if this cheered up the mother at all.

  During the following winter Mme de Tocqueville’s health took ‘a convulsive turn’ (un tour convulsif) which never slackened for three months. The doctors said that winter in a warmer climate was essential for her, so in November 1806 the whole family (including the young Chateaubriands, removed discontentedly from their school and their friends) set off for Italy. But in the Alps Édouard had the first of the dangerous asthma attacks which were to afflict him throughout life, and in Turin Hervé was warned (rather late in the day) that in view of the continuing war Naples, his destination, was dangerous. So he retreated to Nice, where Mme de Tocqueville’s health greatly improved, and where the Chateaubriands, pious youths, were shocked at being taken to the opera. Christian, the younger, sat in the back of the box throughout the performance, with his eyes shut.

  After a leisurely journey home they were back in Verneuil in May 1807. Life began to resume something of the old plaisir. Hervé might have been prepared to serve the state had the Republic lasted; but he could not and would not abandon the Bourbons for the new dynasty of Bonaparte. He devoted himself instead to improving his property. The Tocquevilles became part of one of the little groups which formed all over France under the Napoleonic Empire; groups of passive, tacit dissent from the assumptions of the time. As members of such a group they acknowledged the ideals which kept it together, and were loyal to the individuals who composed it, but the circumstances which led to its formation militated against any particular activity. To intervene in public affairs would be to risk renewed disaster. Under the Bonapartist regime conformity to the master’s slightest wish was the order of the day. Those who, admiring the genius of the Emperor and acknowledging the achievements of France since the Revolution, tried to cooperate with Napoleon while keeping faith with their own principles always got into difficulties. For instance, François-René de Chateaubriand, who was struck off the list of proscribed émigrés by Napoleon’s sister Elisa, and who returned to France in 1800, was winning fame as an author. He dedicated the second edition of his Génie du Christianisme to the First Consul, and was eventually rewarded with a diplomatic post. But the kidnapping and murder of the duc d’Enghien in 1804 revolted him: he resigned, and rejoined his relations in private life. Mme de Staël, Pius VII, Alexander I of Russia, Louis of Holland – these are only some other conspicuous names on the list of those who in the last resort could not pay the price of complete submission. Yet the price of active resistance was fearfully high. To lie low and wait for better days was, many thought, the course of prudence. Something could thus be conserved. So reasoned Talleyrand. So, on the whole, reasoned Hervé de Tocqueville.