Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Yet none of these points touches the heart of the matter, which is the intensity of Tocqueville’s anguish. For as he said to Mme Swetchine, his pain recurred at intervals throughout his life, and as his entire story shows, he was always vulnerable to feelings of anxiety and loss. We are confronting a psychological pattern, and must look for a cause. In the background was the appalling upheaval of the French Revolution, which might well predispose a mind to anxiety, to doubt of everything, to finding all assurances fragile. The loss of Verneuil should perhaps be mentioned. It was the only home which Tocqueville had ever known, and he lost it when he was barely nine years old. There followed the years of traipsing round France, and then the separation of his parents. To lose his mother’s faith may have felt like cutting the last cord binding him to his past. He had once been the young darling of a large and lively household; by 1821 he may at times have felt that now nobody really wanted him, perhaps through his own fault – a fault that he was deepening by abandoning Christian belief. If so, he might well feel guilty.

  So much is speculation; what is not in doubt is that this episode is important not just because religion was important to Tocqueville, but because it brings out a particular pattern. One of the main themes of his life was the unremitting struggle of his brilliant, sensitive mind to shake free of the mental trammels of his upbringing, however painful the process, and to confront the realities of a new age. As he wrestled with the problem of Church and faith so he would later wrestle with those of politics and history. The drama would characterize all his best work.

  Meanwhile he was a boy, and miserable – but only intermittently. ‘Violent passions,’ he says, rescued him from despair, only to plunge him into other difficulties. He made the experiment of visiting a brothel, where he was overcome by self-disgust.33 Unconfirmed rumour says that André Jardin found in the Tocqueville archives the birth-certificate of a child born at about this time to Tocqueville and one of the prefecture’s maid-servants, and we know that he had a summer-house built for his use in the big garden. Jardin has no doubt as to what it was for,* and gently mocks Abbé Le Sueur for not understanding that Alexis had grown too old for childish games, and now wanted a garçonnière. 34 If he entertained many young women there it is hardly surprising that one of them was impregnated. Nor is his success with girls difficult to understand. He was short and slight, even after his growth was complete, with narrow, sloping shoulders and a narrow chest, but he had thick, wavy black hair, tending to curl, an open countenance, lively and expressive brown eyes. The face which appears in the likenesses of his youth is bright and smiling; indeed, his smile lurks even in the gravest portraits of his maturity. He had a winning tongue, energy, determination and the manners of a patrician. No wonder he was found attractive, but he could be hot-tempered and cross-grained. In 1823 he involved himself in an affair of honour. On 16 May Kergorlay wrote to him in astonishment: ‘You tell me in a mere four words that you are perhaps going to have to fight a duel! With anyone other than your closest friend such brevity would be a case of truly Spartan self-control, if anything ever is. But how could you think that I would take the news as calmly? You worry me deeply, and I burn to know how matters stand. Write to me at once.’35 That is all. We do not know the cause of the fight, or the date of its occurrence, or even if it actually happened. The prefect either stopped it or hushed it up: Jardin suggests that he was careful to keep this and other of his son’s indiscretions from the ears of the rest of the family.36 Tocqueville’s opponent appears to have been one Henrion, a protégé of Comte Hervé. Eugène Stoffels asserted that Tocqueville was entirely in the wrong; apart from that, all is obscure about the affair.

  Perhaps a girl was the cause, for Tocqueville had now fallen seriously in love for the first time. The young lady’s name was Rosalie Malye. Ten months his senior, she was one of the two daughters of a retired army officer who was employed as the archivist of Metz – as such, he might have made a most suitable father-in-law to the future historian. However, it is unlikely that marriage was ever a possibility. The Tocqueville parents would have considered it a dreadful mésalliance – Mlle Malye was neither well-born nor rich – and the lovers were very young. Unfortunately all their letters to each other are lost, and so are most of Tocqueville’s letters about the business to Kergorlay and Stoffels. On the whole it is probable that Comte Hervé regarded the matter as just the latest of his son’s scrapes. In the summer of 1822, rather to his displeasure, he was appointed prefect of the Somme and had to move his household from Metz to Amiens; he may have hoped that this would disengage Alexis from Rosalie. If so, he was to be disappointed.

  Meanwhile Tocqueville had been unburdening himself to Kergorlay about the two great subjects, religion and sex. To judge by Kergorlay’s side of the correspondence (all that survives until 1824) they had for some time been shaking their heads over the godlessness and immorality of modern youth;37 but now Tocqueville dropped pretences, and did so in the same letter in which he announced his duel. In his reply Kergorlay showed himself much too astute to tackle unbelief head on, but he did express surprise that Tocqueville should let himself be influenced by the example of the thoughtless and ignorant, by whom Kergorlay probably meant his friend’s schoolfellows. As to the other matter:

  I also wanted to speak of your temperament. But I see that we are too different on that point. I see that you catch fire as quick as gunpowder and that the important thing is not to put a match to you. With me it is quite different. The feeling is secret, confused and habitual, never leaving me alone, tickling me on its own independently of any objects to excite it, that’s to say, this or that woman. I feel less unbridled lust than you do and more love. I love, in the true sense of the word, without loving anybody; I just feel the need. But since the soul is more involved and the body less so than they are with you, I am much harder to please; I am waiting for the woman who suits me, as the Jews wait for the Messiah. Heaven grant that I don’t have to wait so long.38

  Much can be inferred about both young men from these remarks.

  It was now time to make definite decisions about Tocqueville’s career: what profession should he train for? Kergorlay’s influence was strong enough to make him persist with mathematics, necessary for entry to Saint-Cyr, the military academy, but other influences prevailed, or perhaps Tocqueville himself recognized that, as the abbé had put it, he would be wasted under a helmet. He also rejected his father’s profession, civil administration. In a letter written years later, to his nephew Hubert, he tried to explain his aversion to that career; it seems he may have been influenced by his father’s indignation at repeatedly having to move to a new department to suit the political convenience of ministers: ‘In France, administrators seldom operate in the general interest of the country, but almost always in the particular interest of the current government; and any man who isn’t ready incessantly to sacrifice the one interest to the other has no hope of promotion. So it was under the Restoration, so it was under the government of July, and it is, if possible, even more the case under our present régime.’* He settled on law and the magistracy, ‘of all civil careers ... the only one which allows a man to be a functionary and at the same time to remain true to himself’.39 To the descendant of Rosanbo and Malesherbes it was no vast sacrifice. In the autumn of 1823 he began to study law.

  This meant living with his mother in Paris; perhaps it was a relief to get away, next summer, to his father in Amiens. But he had by no means forgotten Metz. He had written to Eugène Stoffels the year before that ‘Metz and some of its inhabitants will long haunt my memory, perhaps more than I like ... Tell me something about Metz, what’s going on there, what people are saying; you know that I am fairly inquisitive.’ This meant, of course, that he wanted news of Rosalie, though it is not clear how fully Stoffels was in his confidence at this stage: that young man’s reply was mostly concerned with his own amorous pangs at a ball given in the prefecture by Hervé de Tocqueville’s successor.40 But by April 1824 Stoffels was
fully au courant, visiting Rosalie for the purpose of talking about her admirer and reporting to him afterwards. 41 And Kergorlay’s letters demonstrate beyond argument that for several years more the lovers were intensely important to each other; Tocqueville visited Metz more than once, and once at least Rosalie visited Paris. This visit, his own sexual shyness, and perhaps his complicated feelings for Alexis, caused Kergorlay real distress:

  [2 June 1825] I was quite aware, yesterday, of your chilliness to me when we left the rue de Grenelle and I know that it arose from the ridiculous and inconvenient froideur which I myself showed to the ladies.* If you thought I wasn’t extremely embarrassed the whole time you were much mistaken ... Men whose entire youth has been, like mine, drawn away from natural feelings and shut up far from everybody always lack tact for this sort of thing ... They probably took me for a carefree type who could pay such a visit without bother because he felt no embarrassment. And that is precisely what irritates me because I neither am nor could be careless concerning the regard of the only woman in whom up to the present I have seen tenderness and sincerity. That’s what she is for me and it is much indeed for someone who has never seen anything like it, at home or abroad. I am writing all this because although you said nothing, I am very sure that you noticed my cold behaviour and you know very well that we two write a thousand things to each other that we could never bring ourselves to say; all I want is that since I couldn’t show them what I felt it shan’t be hidden from you. ... Adieu. I love you and yours.

  [4 June 1825] Your letter came at a moment when it made a more particular effect than it could have at any other, for I was full of the other day’s visit and the sight of Rosalie, the few words she spoke, and besides her figure had finally made me understand how a great desire could have such an object. At the first moment when we saw each other, turning into the street, my salutation made her smile while embarrassing her and if you had been standing in front of her you would have seen that she had an air of defying me by holding your arm as if to tell me that you were hers, and mine no more. ... At that moment your fate seemed to me to be such a happy one that I came home quite depressed at having had before my eyes something which perhaps I myself will never be granted.

  Fortunately for all concerned Kergorlay did not quite lose his head. After Rosalie returned to Metz Tocqueville showed his friend a letter from her which, in Kergorlay’s opinion, proved that she loved him as much as he did her; if he followed her to Metz she would deny him nothing; but what then? The two young men took it for granted that marriage was out of the question, so Kergorlay exerted all his eloquence, his knowledge of Tocqueville and his affection in urging that something else was also out of the question. It was time to break off.

  You will be guided in your decision either by your conscience or by the advantages stemming from your choice; if conscience guides you it will not leave you in any doubt. If you think only of Rosalie’s interest and your own, be sure that there will be fewest evils in not seeing her again. If you go to Metz I am certain that you will consummate her ruin;* her happiness and her honour will be lost lifelong. She will only be made more unhappy, and you, you will be very guilty. If you do not go to Metz, you will be unhappy for some time and so will she; but, as she said, your consciences will sustain you and her life will not end in disgrace. Who knows what might happen to a woman sunk in the disgrace which you would bring about by seeing her again?

  And then an almost comically qualified avowal:

  As to any remaining hope of happiness for you, a friend is nothing besides that which I want you to give up; but if ever a friend can be a consolation to anyone, believe that I will. From this moment I promise to do anything to lessen your pain which will be neither sinful in itself nor likely to impede my career ...42

  Tocqueville did not go to Metz. So the gods amused themselves by sending Kergorlay there instead.

  For he was to be an artillery officer, and after passing through the École Polytechnique in Paris entered the artillery school in Metz, arriving there in December 1826. He was soon very thick with Stoffels, and became the go-between for Tocqueville and Rosalie. But for this the affair would probably have died away (at her first meeting with Kergorlay Rosalie complained that she had had only two letters from Tocqueville since his last departure from Metz); instead it revived.43 A few months later Rosalie married prosperously, but that did not deter her lover, who may, in the tradition of his order, have regarded a married woman as a more legitimate prey than a respectable young virgin. At any rate, he besieged her with letters, with the assistance of Kergorlay and Stoffels. Her sister Amélie was enlisted in the intrigue, with whom, to make matters still more farcical, Kergorlay fell in love, or thought he did (he found that he much enjoyed the attentions of pretty young women). Sometimes Rosalie wrote back. The letters being lost, it is impossible to say what she and Tocqueville hoped to gain from this correspondence, and her character is a mystery – even Kergorlay, who covered pages and pages reporting to Tocqueville, confessed himself baffled by her. All that is certain is that she liked receiving the letters, and did not discourage Tocqueville even when, after she became Mme Bergin, he had to write to her using lemon juice for invisible ink. Her husband intercepted one of these notes, but he did not guess at the lemon juice trick, though he was suspicious. At this point we must think of Madame Bovary, if not of Les Liaisons dangereuses, and it is sadly clear that Kergorlay and Stoffels, without realizing it, were beginning to act as a pair of pandars. The only excuse to be made for all concerned is that they were still very young. Then in 1829 Kergorlay graduated and left Metz, and the affair ended definitively. Its most palpable consequence was the consolidation of friendship between Stoffels and Kergorlay. The latter wrote to Tocqueville in 1828 that Stoffels was a man of the first order for good sense, judgement, and ‘the tact which can read in what one says that which one does not say’.44 He worried about Stoffels’s health, describing symptoms which were perhaps the first sign of the tuberculosis that eventually killed him.

  Tocqueville’s part remains almost as mysterious as Rosalie’s, but his constancy is striking: he courted her steadily, with steadily worsening prospects, for six years. Both his friends took him seriously, or they would not have been so active on his behalf. Their devotion deepened his belief in friendship: ‘Decidedly, mon cher ami, only friendship means anything in this world. The more I try other feelings, the more I am sure of it. I still can’t imagine how a man can live without a single friend ... such men can’t be worth much.’45 And it is possible that, circumstances having denied him the fulfilment of his first love, he determined that nothing and nobody should defeat him next time.

  The memory of Rosalie was still vivid to him when he revisited Metz in 1836 with his new wife. In fact he was so moved that only the hospitality of Stoffels and his own agreeable wife made the town bearable to him.

  I experienced very strange emotions on revisiting the places which had witnessed so much passion, now dead, and so many storms, now calmed. I felt differently from what I had expected. I had no regret for time past, but an appalling sense of the weakness of the human heart, which lets go so quickly what it thought to hold so fast, of the flight of Time, of man’s mutability and his inconsistency, of the void and nothingness of life. These thoughts, and a thousand more which I can no longer recall, but which crowded my brain, made Metz seem suffocating. So I was most willing to leave it. But one morning, very early, I made my way to the prefecture and asked for leave to visit the garden. I can’t convey to you the impression made on me by seeing again, after thirteen years, a place which had remained so well graven on my memory that I noticed at once every small change which had occurred during those years. In your eyes, nothing would have seemed different, but in mine Time had made a thousand destructions; and each one plunged me into deep melancholy.46