Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  As Alexis grew up he was probably relieved when he could escape to Kergorlay from such a household, but he was still devoted to Bébé, and when in 1820 his father summoned him to live in Metz he was passionately distressed at parting from his old tutor. Le Sueur tried to console him:

  I wish that the happiness of living with a father who loves you and whom you love was a happiness without blemish. For our consolation, we must tell each other that Providence will perhaps reunite us sooner than we hope ... Ponder, my friend, on the motive which has separated us. With all your strength put away lost time by making good use of the present. It is the only way of securing you a happy future. Above all, put God at the forefront of your work and all your notions ...14

  It seems clear that although Hervé probably welcomed company in the prefecture, the chief reason for returning Alexis to Metz was the need to educate him properly. ‘At Metz you have found a better master than I,’ wrote Le Sueur, after hearing that one of the teachers at the lycée was to become a tutor to Alexis; ‘ ... it was time. ... With the best will in the world, I would have let you waste the best years of your life. The natural talent which God has given you would have remained buried, and France would have been deprived of an enlightened judge or a distinguished orator or a celebrated diplomat.’15 Two things stand out from this letter: that the boy’s remarkable gifts were already apparent, and that for the time being he found them little consolation for being uprooted. The abbé is trying to awaken his ambition.

  Yet he was not entered at the lycée for another eighteen months – not until November 1821, by which time he was sixteen. The delay in enrolling him must have had a cause – perhaps he was thought too delicate, too immature, or simply too ill-prepared academically – but it may have been unfortunate. It did nothing for his sociability. He seems to have been a solitary child: during his early adolescence his only friends were Bébé, Kergorlay, who was not always available, and Édouard, who was not always available either. When at last he became a lycéen he made friends quickly (later he was to write affectionately of ‘my old friends in the rhetoric class’), and one of them, Eugène Stoffels, of an undistinguished middle-class family, soon became nearly as dear to him as Kergorlay himself: he was almost the only person outside his own family with whom Tocqueville used the tutoyer. He and Tocqueville sat together on the rough-hewn benches in class and learned simultaneously how to turn a phrase and how to bite their nails.16 But his schooldays did not last long enough (less than two years)* to accustom him to middle-class manners and middle-class company. This seriously hampered him when he became a politician and had to rub shoulders with a great many people whose good will he needed but whom he regarded as coarse and vulgar.

  Meanwhile, he had come to a decisive moment in his life; in fact, to several. For instance, as his intellectual brilliance became clearer and clearer – he walked off with an armful of prizes at the end of his first year in the lycée – Kergorlay and Le Sueur began to quarrel over his future. Kergorlay was already committed to the army, and wanted Tocqueville to join him, putting his arguments in a series of lively letters written, it must he said, with a routine elegance that no eighteen-year-old in modern Britain could approach. The abbé and the Tocqueville parents thought the idea preposterous. Le Sueur mustered all his resources to stop it; we find him writing to Édouard in September 1822, after the younger brother’s academic triumph:

  Mon petit Édouard, you have got to persuade him not to become a soldier. You know the drawbacks of that trade better than any of us and I am sure that he will listen to his brothers more than to his father on the point. It was that mad boy Louis Kergorlay who put the idea into his head. They are about to get together again and I am much inclined to ask M. Loulou to leave us in peace and mind his own business.17

  And a few days later, reporting that Mme de Tocqueville has given Alexis a gold watch in recognition of his achievement (‘he was in transports of joy’), the abbé adds, ‘what a shame it would be to snuff out such a talent under a helmet when it has made its début with such distinction!’ Bébé was particularly impressed by his former pupil’s prize-winning essay, Discours sur le progrès des arts dans la Grèce (now missing). He must have been relieved when Alexis decided upon a civilian career, in spite of all his cousin’s eloquence, and in spite of a Norman neighbour’s disapproval of his choice of the law: ‘Remember, Sir, that your family have always been noblesse de l’épée,’ said Mme de Blangy of Saint-Pierre-Église.18 (She chose to forget the maternal line.)

  The abbé might be pleased, but he did not yet know that Tocqueville had been struggling for the past two years with two other problems which seemed to him quite as important as the question of his career; the outcome was very different from anything that Le Sueur could have wished.

  In the years at Metz Hervé and Alexis de Tocqueville developed a new relationship with each other, in which mutual respect and sympathy were as important as simple affection. In 1822 the prefect had his portrait painted, a work in which Alexis also appeared, sitting behind his father, apparently taking notes or dictation (an implausible occupation, given the young man’s already atrocious handwriting, about which Abbé Le Sueur often scolded him). The picture gives a happy sense of partnership, though Le Sueur had several objections to it, among them a complaint that it made Alexis look like a mulatto. But if the portrait is essentially truthful, it does not tell the whole truth.

  The prefect was a busy man, and all too often left his son to himself while he went about his business in the department – everything from fixing elections to building bridges to acting as chief of police; never before or afterwards did the prefects have quite so much autonomous responsibility as they were given under the Restoration. Teachers kept Alexis applied to his studies for most of the year, and the boy probably paid visits to his mother in Paris and to Kergorlay in the Oise; but during the summer vacation of 1821* he was on his own, loitering about the prefecture, and naturally found his way to the library, full of his father’s books. Thirty-five years later he wrote to the devout Mme Sophie Swetchine:

  Have I ever told you about an incident of my youth, one which has deeply marked my entire life? Withdrawn into a kind of solitude during the years which immediately followed my childhood, and given over to an insatiable curiosity which had nothing but the books of a large library to turn to for satisfaction, I stuffed my mind pell-mell with all sorts of notions and ideas that usually come at a later age. Until that time my days had passed in a home full of a faith which had not let my soul be so much as brushed by doubt. Now doubt entered, or rather rushed upon me with unheard-of violence, not just doubt of this or that proposition, but doubt of everything. Suddenly I felt a sensation like that reported by those who have been through an earthquake, when the ground has shaken beneath their feet, the walls around them, the ceiling overhead, the objects in their hands, and all Nature before their eyes. I was overcome by the blackest melancholy, seized by an extreme disgust for the life which I had not even begun, and crushed, as it were, by distress and terror at the sight of the road through the world which lay before me. Violent passions drew me out of this state of despair; they distracted me from the contemplation of intellectual ruin towards the life of the senses; but from time to time these impressions of first youth (I was then sixteen years old) again possess me; once more my intellectual world totters and I am again lost and desperate in a powerful tide which shakes or inverts every truth on which I have based my beliefs and conduct ...19

  There is no reason to question the sincerity and accuracy of this account. It squares exactly with everything else that Tocqueville ever said about his religious and philosophical views. For instance, in 1831 he wrote from America to Charles Stoffels, Eugène’s brother, who was suffering from an attack of intellectual anxiety like his own:

  When I first began to think, I supposed that the world was full of demonstrated truths; that it was only necessary to look hard to see them. But when I applied myself to considering them, I perceiv
ed nothing but inescapable doubts. I can’t well tell you, my dear Charles, what a horrible state this discovery left me in. It was the unhappiest time of my life; I can only compare myself to a man suffering from giddiness who thinks the floor is shaking beneath him and sees the walls moving round him; even today, I remember that moment with horror.20

  Evidently it was the moment that he was to describe to Mme Swetchine decades later.

  It is impossible to understand Tocqueville or his thought without giving careful consideration to his religious ideas in general and this crisis in particular. For one thing, it exemplifies the lifelong predicament in which he found himself: caught between two worlds, unable to repose in the one where he was born, unable to go forward confidently into the one he saw rising inexorably before him. The dilemma was one which tormented all too many of his contemporaries. He might have resolved it had it been simply intellectual, but it was also, perhaps most of all, a question of the emotions, of his innermost being. It was not and is not something to be treated lightly.21

  ‘If I were required to classify human miseries, I would put them in this order: 1. Illness. 2. Death. 3. Doubt.’ He made this remark several times while he was in America,22 but it was doubt which he was driven to discuss: he was too much of a stoic to waste time lamenting his poor health or whining about the inevitable, though he dreaded it. He was also courageous in facing doubt. Very little could be known (he had read Descartes) but to despair for that reason was to despair of existence, since uncertainty was one of the inflexible laws of human nature. It was not a reason for spiritual paralysis, for feeble inaction. ‘When I have to take a decision, I weigh up the pros and cons with great care, and instead of despairing because I can’t attain complete conviction, I set out for the goal that seems to me the likeliest, and do so as if I had never had any qualms.’ We must not expect too much or too little from life. Life is ‘a serious task allotted to us, which it is our duty to execute as well as possible.’ This thought consoled and strengthened him, and enabled him to put up with the troubles, the tedium, the vulgarity of modern times. Writing to another friend, Ernest de Chabrol, on the same subject, Tocqueville admitted that while others were happy to live in the perpetual half-light of uncertainty, it wearied and demoralized him; but on the whole his determination to defy doubt, to live and to act, fortified him throughout his days.23

  But if such were the maxims with which Tocqueville comforted himself in his maturity, it was several years before he could get over his first distress. We must not forget the boy in the library. The nature and consequences of his intellectual crisis must be carefully examined.

  André Jardin has little doubt that Abbé Le Sueur exposed his pupil to religious works and doctrines that were, if not Jansenist, at least jansenisant. But it is doubtful how much this meant in the early nineteenth century. The great seventeenth-century battles over the doctrine of grace, the eighteenth-century struggle between Jansenists and Jesuits, between King and parlements (which lay in the background of the coming of the French Revolution) were issues of the past, interesting only because they eventually inspired Sainte-Beuve to write his masterpiece, Port-Royal. But as Jardin points out, the gloomy morality of the Jansenists, their insistence on original sin (Anglo-Saxons will notice a strong resemblance to the Evangelical party) were still current, and may well have affected Tocqueville for life. It is much more certain that Le Sueur brought up his charge in simple faith and loyalty to Throne and Altar, a faith and loyalty which almost everything in Tocqueville’s world reinforced, until those summer days in Metz.24

  In his letter to Mme Swetchine, Tocqueville says that he turned to the library because he was consumed by insatiable curiosity. He had reached puberty, his mind was awake, and nobody will be surprised that he began to find the simple piety of his childhood inadequate: as manhood approached, he was bound to start thinking for himself. Nor is it surprising that a budding writer should be forced by words on the page (possibly those of Descartes, probably those of Voltaire and Rousseau) to face for the first time the great problems of belief and unbelief. That the scale should tip so quickly on the side of unbelief suggests that he was already having doubts; or, at the very least, that he felt it necessary to apply himself to considering religious fundamentals, as he says in his letter to Charles Stoffels. The creed he had learned from Le Sueur was not such as to resist criticism very effectively. Had he previously read Pascal (eventually a favourite author) or encountered the Catholic revival of the Restoration as embodied in the figure of Lamennais, with his insistence on the inadequacy of human reason and on the wisdom of God as revealed in the life of Christ, in history and in the infallible papacy, he might have held out longer – but not very much longer.

  Le Sueur was to worry that at school Alexis might read bad books (‘like swallowing poison’) or fall into bad company, which was perceptive of him, but ineffective.25 Tocqueville could not have preserved his intellectual virginity: he was about to enter one of those lycées which Lamennais denounced as ‘seminaries of atheism and vestibules of hell’, where, inevitably, he discussed with his comrades the problem of faith* (and also, Jardin suggests, politics).26 But the damage had been done before then.

  We must not exaggerate the reach of Tocqueville’s doubt: he became a deist, not an atheist, believing firmly in the existence and providence of God, and in an afterlife, on the curious if Cartesian grounds that God would not have been so unjust as to implant the idea in men if it were not true.27 What he rejected was the entire apparatus of organized Christianity, especially the dogmas and authority of the Catholic Church: they might do for the poor and ignorant, but not for him. After 1821 he never again received communion until he was on his death-bed, and his motives for doing so then are much debated.28 * What needs explanation is that this shedding of obsolete mental baggage caused him not relief but extreme distress; and what needs exploration is his final view of the place of religion in human life and society. The two topics are closely intertwined.

  More than twelve years after the Metz episode, when, in his first great work, Tocqueville was discussing the place of religion in modern democracies, he composed a deeply pondered and heartfelt passage which, in the light of the Swetchine letter, must be read as personal. Religion, he says, is a permanent aspect of human life.

  The short space of sixty years will never close off Man’s imagination; his heart will never find sufficiency in the incomplete joys of this life. Alone among living things, Man experiences both a spontaneous disgust for existence and an immense desire to exist: he despises life and fears unbeing. These contradictory instincts drive his soul incessantly towards the contemplation of another world, and it is religion which will take him there. Religion, then, is only a particular kind of hope, and it is also as natural to the human heart as hope itself.

  Unbelief, however brought about, is unnatural, an accident: ‘faith alone is the permanent condition of humanity.’ Unbelief, he sadly concedes, nowadays exists. ‘What I will call negative doctrines’ silently undermine faith. ‘Men there are who, as if through forgetfulness, allow the goal of their dearest hopes to elude them. Carried away by an invisible current which they lack the courage to struggle against, while regretting their surrender, they abandon the faith which they love to follow the doubt which leads them to despair.’ But while ceasing to accept religion as true, the doubter continues to find it useful. Considering religious belief in its human aspect, he acknowledges its empire over morals, its influence on law. He understands how it can make men live in peace and prepare them to die quietly. So he regrets the faith which he has lost and, deprived of a good whose value he knows, he fears to snatch it from those who possess it still.29

  Nothing could make Tocqueville’s painful position clearer. His distress was very much one of his period, culture and class: it was widely felt all over the West – we may think of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. Philosophy, history and science had combined to destroy for ever, for those with ears to hear, the framework
of Christian, and even pre-Christian belief which had for so long given meaning and comfort to existence. Its loss was an agony of rage, fear and denial – at the least, of sorrow and anxiety – like that which is tearing at the Islamic world today. For behind the loss of traditional faith lay a deeper possibility: the discovery of the abyss, the absurd, the Universe’s unawareness of our sufferings, which seems so cruel:

  ... the crack in the tea-cup opens

  A lane to the land of the dead.

  For Tocqueville there seem to have been special emotions to deepen his anguish.

  Whatever his feelings about his mother (and it cannot be stated too emphatically that any opinion must largely be conjecture) he might well feel guilt about repudiating the religion which was a central concern of her existence, the more so if the repudiation was in any respect an act of rebellion (he certainly did not like her way of life: during the vacation of 1822, writing from Paris, he complained to Eugène Stoffels that ‘since I came here I have led a monotonous, tranquil existence which hardly suits my character and tastes ...’).30 We know that he loved Le Sueur, and that the abbé was deeply upset by Tocqueville’s apostasy when he found out about it. His father was less likely to be shocked – there is reason to believe that where his youngest son was concerned he was more or less unshockable – but although he may not have been particularly devout (nowhere in his memoirs does he say anything about his personal religious convictions, and his parents’ prayers for him seem to have been thrown away: who owned the dangerous books, after all?), he scrupulously carried out the public observances required of a Restoration prefect. On the other hand, he disliked the aggressive religious policy of the Restoration, which may be summed up as an attempt to restore the Church to something like its position under the ancien régime by means of energetic proselytizing and the activities of the so-called Congregation, which combined the attributes of a pressure-group and a semi-secret society – a kind of Catholic Freemasonry, in fact (Louis de Rosanbo was a member). The activities of the Congregation continually irritated the prefect: his strong common sense feared the consequences of stirring up Catholic zeal, and he disliked being compelled to lend his presence to missionary processions (on one occasion he feigned illness in order to avoid such a participation).31 Here was common ground with Alexis; but Hervé, ambitious for himself and for his son, might well fear the worldly consequences of disaffiliation from the Church. There would eventually be a powerful anti-clerical reaction, one of the causes of the 1830 Revolution – Alexis once asserted that it was the chief cause.32 Meanwhile, religion was a matter of politics; to lapse from Catholicism might well he seen as disloyalty (although as things turned out it freed Alexis to set his own political course). Such considerations might well weigh with the prefect, if not his son, who became a deist because he could not help it, and throughout his life showed clear hostility to all attempts by the Church to recapture a privileged position (whereas he was sympathetic to similar efforts by the legal profession).