Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Most details of the Verneuil days have vanished beyond conjecture. Alexis was fond of both his brothers, though as he grew up he came to think that Hippolyte was more headstrong than sensible; Édouard was much more sympathetic. At the New Year the children would be given presents, in the old French style, and the adults would write letters full of news and greeting to their friends. Tocqueville never forgot the tradition, although it occasionally slipped his mind, as on New Year’s Day, 1832, in New Orleans, when he and Gustave de Beaumont intruded on a family party in that still largely French city:

  The Eagle of the New Orleans Bar [Étienne Mazureau], wrapped in a dressing-gown, and sitting in the corner by what is called a French fireplace in Louisiana and a rustic one in France, was at that very moment receiving the best wishes of the family gathered about him. There were his children, grandchildren, nephews, first cousins, second cousins even, sugar-plums, toys and pots of jam – the family picture was complete. It was only left for us to be moved, even to tears of joy, like any eighteenth-century philosopher in a book. Joy reigned on every face, harmony in every heart. We are such good friends on New Year’s Day!

  As for the two of us, we stood as if struck dumb by the spectacle. At length light broke in, even on us. Now we understood the astonishment of the Negro servants, those good Negroes whom we had treated as churls. To present a letter of introduction on New Year’s Day! What unseemliness!

  Alas, where now is the happy time when I would sooner have forgotten my name than the coming of the first of January!20

  We surely learn a great deal about Tocqueville’s earliest years from this passage.

  Great events suddenly destroyed the idyll.

  By 1812 the Napoleonic régime was gravely weakened, as was clearly demonstrated by the nearly successful conspiracy of General Malet, who attempted to seize Paris during the Emperor’s absence in Russia. Napoleon was trying his countrymen too high. The perpetual war, bringing with it appalling casualties, savage taxation, economic ruin, the ever more hateful conscription, and little gain for anybody, was more than they could bear: everyone yearned for peace. One consequence of this state of mind was a revival of royalism; the organization known as the Chevaliers de la Foi was founded, ostensibly as a nationwide Catholic charity, but really as a secret society to further the interests of the Bourbons and seize any opportunity which arose.21 Chateaubriand, probably, was a member, but it seems that Hervé de Tocqueville was not.22 A marked strain of prudence runs throughout Hervé’s career, though he was heroic when necessary. Then the defeats began. 1812 was the year of the retreat from Moscow; 1813, of the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig; winter brought the enemy to the very gates of France. This might not have meant the end for Napoleon had he not been blinded by the furious arrogance of his character and his faith in his military genius. Again and again his enemies offered him generous terms; again and again he spurned them, preferring to gamble everything on another battle, and not choosing to see that even victories could not now do him much good, so vast were the armies arrayed against him and so diminished his resources. The Austrians were in the Franche-Comté, the Russians in Lorraine, Wellington had crossed the Pyrenees into Gascony. Napoleon did not relent. The terrible conscription went on.

  This created difficulties for the maire of Verneuil. His office was lowly, but part nevertheless of the Napoleonic machine, the purpose of which was to grind out tax receipts and soldiers. Comte Hervé had no sympathy with either aim; he seems to have shared the views of Chateaubriand, who in his famous pamphlet De Buonaparte et des Bourbons would soon be denouncing the conscription as homicidal and hellish: ‘Each French generation was cut down systematically like trees in a forest: each year eighty thousand young men were slaughtered.’ Hervé did his best to sabotage the process. ‘It was held that the notice of conscription was a sentence of death and I exerted myself to rescue the young men of my commune. The law exempted married men and I encouraged marriages by all the means in my power. When the emergency grew too pressing I sometimes published the banns and held the wedding on the same day, thus exposing myself with more zeal than prudence to grave penalties for saving that young generation confided to my care.’ He was not alone: in the royalist Vendée, for instance, the authorities abandoned the attempt to enforce the conscription, so great was the resistance.23

  At this time Alexis de Tocqueville was in his eighth and ninth years. It is worth dwelling on this episode because it helps to explain his unrelenting, lifelong opposition to military dictatorship and the Bonapartes. If not at the time, then later, he will have learned of his father’s actions; if not in 1814, then before long, he will have read Chateaubriand. And he can hardly have been unaware of the maire’s vigorous response when hospital ships, carrying the wounded down the Seine to Normandy, brought typhus with them, creating dreadful mortality in the riverside villages. Hervé fumigated every house in Verneuil with vinegar, and burned the straw mattresses on which the sick had lain, measures which seem to have been effective, for there were only two deaths, one of them that of the Tocquevilles’ cook who had rashly taken some soup to the sufferers.

  France, which had embraced the Consulate and the Empire as a chance to rest from the tumult, fear and exhaustion of the Revolution and its wars, was stirring again. Even the Corps Législatif, previously always so docile, demanded peace, liberty and political rights, for which impertinence its master summarily dissolved it on 31 December 1813. Chateaubriand, tiring of the distant sound of artillery, dared to leave the Vallée-aux-Loups for the rue de Rivoli, taking with him the unfinished De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, on which he was working in secret.* Paris sensed that something fundamental was changing. Its temper is perhaps best conveyed by that most delightful of memoir-writers, the comtesse de Boigne:

  I remember that M. de Châteauvieux ... who was absent from Paris for two years, arrived at the beginning of 1814. His first visit when he reached town was to my house. There he heard speeches of such hostility that, as he has since told me, his chief desire was to get away. Throughout the night he dreamt of nothing but dungeons and Vincennes, although he had made a firm resolve never again to visit so imprudent a society. The next day he continued his round of visits, and was astonished to find the same attitude and the same freedom of speech everywhere, even among the middle classes and in the shops. We were not struck by the fact, because the change had been gradual and general. It was apparent even at the table of the Minister of Police, where the Abbé de Pradt said that there was one émigré whom it was time to recall to France, and that was common sense. M. de Châteauvieux was petrified ...24

  Refugees began to pour into Paris. The Seine filled with the bodies of dead soldiers. On 12 March a detachment of Wellington’s army occupied Bordeaux; the maire immediately donned the white cockade of the Bourbons, and that afternoon Louis XVI’s nephew, the duc d’Angoulême, entered the city amid frantic enthusiasm.* It was a crucial episode in the Restoration: nowhere else had the returning princes met any real welcome, and the Allied commanders had kept the comte d’Artois, Angoulême’s father, under virtual house arrest. But news of the duc’s triumph reached Paris and the North just as the last conference, the last serious attempt to make peace with Napoleon, was collapsing because of the Emperor’s incorrigibility: it broke up on 19 March. Castlereagh and Metternich now saw that the return of the Bourbons was inevitable, Napoleon being impossible and nobody but the Tsar supporting the ambitions of Bernadotte. Events moved with great speed. On 28 March Napoleon, whose political judgement seems at this time to have deserted him completely, began to execute a brilliant military manoeuvre which had the sole inconvenience of leaving Paris open to the invaders. The Emperor had forgotten the law so repeatedly demonstrated during the Revolution (it was not to be revoked until 1871) that the master of Paris was the master of France. The Allies marched, and on the 29th Marie Louise, obeying her husband’s order (another disastrous misjudgement) fled to the Loire with the entire imperial government: Hervé de Tocqueville sa
w her cortège set off from the Tuileries. Next day, the 30th, Chateaubriand finished his pamphlet and the Allied armies fought their way to the suburbs, at the cost of 9,000 casualties. The French commanders asked for terms.

  It was the moment that the Chevaliers de la Foi had been waiting for. On the morning of 31 March their young men staged a demonstration: sporting the white cockade they paraded through the streets shouting ‘Vive le Roi!’ But there were not very many of them, and nobody joined in. Mme de Boigne saw them pass her window five times, never increasing in number. It scarcely mattered. At eleven that morning the Allied sovereigns entered Paris and were enthusiastically welcomed by the people. They behaved perfectly. The Tsar was taken on a tour of the city and shown the column in the place Vendôme with Napoleon’s statue on top. He said only, ‘If I were raised so high I would be afraid of getting dizzy.’ Some of the Chevaliers seem to have thought this was a hint: a few days later they pulled down the statue with a rope. Mme de Boigne did not approve: she thought the action entirely foolish and unnecessary. Like Chateaubriand, and no doubt like thousands of other Parisians, she was divided between anger at Napoleon and patriotic resentment of the conquerors. No foreign army had entered Paris for nearly four hundred years.25

  That same day Hervé de Tocqueville packed his wife, his youngest son and some servants into two carriages and set off from Verneuil to Paris: presumably he could no longer bear to be absent from the centre of action. In spite of alarms about Cossacks and the retreating French army they arrived safely, if circuitously, in the rue Saint-Dominique that evening. Le Sueur and the two elder boys were left behind. Hervé may have hoped to do something for the royalist cause, which seemed to be on a knife-edge. By 1 April the royalists controlled the press and Paris was placarded with announcements that a work by Chateaubriand was about to appear. It was the secret pamphlet, and came out on 4 April, just in time (according to the author) to sway the Tsar in favour of Louis XVIII, which if true explains why the King said later that De Buonaparte was worth more to him than an army;26 but Louis was a master of gracious insincerities. Perhaps the real importance of the pamphlet lay in its huge popular success, the most sensational since 1789, for it legitimized the Restoration in the eyes of the French. On the day it was ready the Madames and other noble ladies, Mme de Tocqueville quite possibly among them, undertook to distribute it through all Paris.

  At this point a child’s voice comes clearly and suddenly through the clamour. Alexis de Tocqueville was much excited by the goings-on, even if he did not entirely understand them, but he missed Verneuil and all the people there, and wrote four letters in less than three weeks to say so:

  [Early April]. Good morning, dear little Bébé, I love you a lot. I will be so happy to see you again, and my brothers too, I kiss them with all my heart. I am having a fine time here with my dear Mamma and we are very well. Goodbye, little Bébé, I kiss the tip of your nose. Remember me to Nurse. Alexis.

  Paris, 4 April. Good morning, little Bébé, I hope you are very well. Why didn’t you come with us? How you would have shouted ‘Vive le roi!’ I must tell you something, yesterday Mamma, just after breakfast, went out visiting, and left me behind and did not come back until after half past five; then we had dinner. And do you know, after dinner she said she was going off again to bring back my brothers.

  Goodbye. I hope you will come back soon. While I’m waiting, I kiss you with all my heart. Say to Alain, when you see him, that I wish him a very good day. Alexis.

  Alain seems to have been a gardener at Verneuil.

  [Paris,] 9 April. Dear little Bébé, I wish you good day, I am going to tell you something. It is this, Papa, three days ago, bought Hippolyte and Édouard a dappled grey horse. ... Mamma has had a migraine since the day before yesterday. They have put leeches under her shoulders.

  The statue on the column in the place Vendôme has just been knocked down and they have put in its place a white flag with fleur de lys on it.

  Goodbye, please tell me if Alain has finished the pea-patch that we started. Try and come soon. Hugs and kisses. Alexis.

  Paris, 22 April. My dear Bébé, please tell me if they have put in sticks to prop up my peas.

  I am certainly going to surprise you, I have done my exercises, which I have sent you by Édouard.

  Goodbye, little Bébe, I kiss you with all my heart and also Louis and Auguste.

  Give Alain lots of best wishes from me.27

  In this way Alexis de Tocqueville went through his first revolution.

  * ‘A Pyrenean troubadour / Whose eyes were drowned in tears / Sang to his fellow-mountaineers / This burthen, breeding fears: /The son of Henry of Navarre / In Paris lies a prisoner.’ This was the song which AT’s mother sang. See below, p. 25.

  * The name ‘Tocqueville’ does not appear on the birth-certificate; the father simply signs himself ‘Clérel’. Revolutionary orthodoxy was not quite dead. One of the witnesses signing the document was the Abbé Le Sueur.

  * Such a conservative once assured me that I had taken my life in my hands by dining in a restaurant near the place de la Bastille. By a curious irony, he was a direct descendant of the terrorist Bertrand Barère.

  * The Abbé Delille, a member of the Académie Française, was an ardent royalist. He once astonished Chateaubriand by offering to turn some pages of what became the Mémoires d’outre-tombe into verse. HT admired Delille all his life: see his Louis XVI, p. 243n.

  * It tells a great deal about conditions in Napoleonic Europe that when the young Guizot arrived for his first visit to Mme de Staël in Switzerland and was asked for news of Paris, he enraptured her simply by reciting Chateaubriand’s inflammatory paragraph (Guizot, Mémoires, vol I, 11–12).

  † Chateaubriand’s predecessor, Marie-Joseph Chénier, had been, among other things, a regicide. The Emperor was displeased by Chateaubriand’s animadversions on the fact. ‘How dare the Académie prate of regicides when I, crowned as I am, who should hate them much more, dine with them and sit next to Cambacérès?’ (Clément, Chateaubriand, 234).

  * Rédier (p. 33) comments: ‘Sur la gaieté de Chateaubriand, il n’y a beaucoup de documents.'

  * Or so he supposed, but whenever he went out during the day he casually left the document among the litter on his desk. Mme de Chateaubriand charged herself with looking after it. At night Chateaubriand hid it under his pillow.

  * This enthusiasm owed much to the fact that Wellington kept his troops in hand, whereas the imperial army, under Soult, plundered and ravaged the countryside as it was used to doing in Spain, Portugal, Russia, etc.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

  1814–1829

  A man succeeds at nothing, especially in his youth, if he does not have a trace of le diable au corps. At your age I would have been ready to leap over the towers of Notre-Dame if I had known I would find what I was seeking on the other side.

  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE TO ALEXIS STOFFELS,

  4 JANUARY 18561

  EVENTS HAD NOW AN IRRESISTIBLE MOMENTUM. On 6 April Napoleon abdicated at Fontainebleau; on the 12th the comte d’Artois entered Paris as the lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and was greeted with extravagant delight by an enormous crowd; Hervé and Hippolyte de Tocqueville (the latter no doubt riding the dappled horse) were part of his ceremonial cavalry escort. Artois reviewed them near a spot where the dead of the battle of 30 March had only just been buried; war had battered the nearby houses, which were now without doors, windows or occupants; Hervé thought it a dolorous sight for the returning princes. On the other hand, he noticed that they were welcomed most enthusiastically by women. ‘The first restoration was the counter-revolution of the women. Robespierre perished because the nation could no longer tolerate the blood shed on the scaffolds. Napoleon fell because the nation was weary of the blood shed in the battles’ – and the women most of all.2

  On 23 April the provisional government signed an armistice with the Allies and on 3 May King Louis XVIII arrived, h
aving just issued the celebrated Declaration of Saint-Ouen in which he conferred on his subjects the Charter of their rights and the new order of government. He was welcomed perhaps with as much joy as his brother, only less delirium. On 4 June the Charter was presented to the Senate and the Corps Législatif in a joint session, and adopted in another wave of enthusiasm. It was probably the greatest moment of the Bourbon dynasty since the days of Henri IV; certainly the greatest moment of the Restoration.3