Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  From a letter written to Édouard three years later, not from the journal, we learn how much Tocqueville liked Naples when he got there: ‘Nothing else in my travels ever gave me the sweet and agreeable sensations that I got from the sky and shores of Naples. The impression is still vivid, and I would be vexed to die without having gone back.’19 ‡ He climbed Vesuvius. But the Voyage as we have it starts only with the departure of his ship from Naples, bound for Sicily. He seizes the opportunity to show that he has read Tacitus, favourite historian of the French opposition under Napoleon: he gazes up at the horrid rocks of Capri and decides that they were a fitting perch for such a bird of prey as Tiberius. Then a storm blows up. Three years before, at the time of the English scheme, Tocqueville wrote longingly of the sea; now his enthusiasm is to be rigorously tested. Huge waves arise, sea-spray covers the decks. Thunder and lightning. Tocqueville has always found night-storms, and the calm which proceeds them, sublime: ‘but those who have not gone through the same spectacle far out at sea have missed the most terrible scene which nature can present ... the waves boiled around us with an energy of which I had had no idea.’ Some poor passengers begin to chant a psalm, which moves him greatly: ‘what philosopher was ever so sure of his system as not to do likewise when faced with this terrible manifestation of divine omnipotence?’ The ship is laid on her beam-ends, waves pour into the cabins, passengers shriek and a dog howls, but the vessel rights herself. Rain pours down and the night seems endless; with dawn Tocqueville is happy to think that the danger is over and pokes a cheerful head out of his cabin, but the sailors are staring in alarm at the west, where a new storm is rapidly developing, likely to drive them onto the lee-shore straight ahead. Tocqueville crawls along the deck from handhold to handhold (‘no living creature could have walked a step without instantly being thrown into the sea’) to ask the captain if they are really in danger; the captain replies only, ‘Credo così’ (‘I should say so’). Tocqueville crawls back to the cabin, but before he gets there an old sailor grabs him by the sleeve and says, grinding his teeth, ‘It was your urgency to be off which made us leave port. Any moment now you’ll see what that means for you and for us.’ Tocqueville thinks this unfair, as before he and Édouard boarded they were assured that there was nothing to fear but ‘una burasca’ (a squall). He gets back to his brother and they try to prepare for shipwreck. A sailor comes by, collecting alms for souls in Purgatory.

  That made us think of the religion into which we had been born and to which our earliest thoughts had been guided; we prayed briefly and then sat beside the cabin door. I folded my arms across my chest and put myself to reviewing the few years that I had lived so far. I admit frankly that in that moment, when I believed myself about to appear before the Supreme Judge, the object of human existence seemed altogether different from what I had judged it until that moment. Matters that I had considered very important until then appeared infinitely petty ... the worst moment came when I fell to thinking of those we would leave behind. When I imagined the way in which news of the event would reach them, by purely public channels, I felt that tears were pricking my eyes, and I hastened to busy myself about something else, so as not to waste the strength which I thought I would soon need.

  Fortunately the ship survived the second storm, though she was blown far off her course, and because of contrary winds landed them not at Palermo but at Oliveri, a tiny place 150 kilometres to the east. It was 12 March. They were delighted by the green grass and flowering shrubs, the aloes and the figtrees (‘we had left winter in Italy’) but they soon noticed that there was not a single glass window in the village. The next day they set off for Palermo, escorted by a soldier, gun in his hand, dagger in his belt, riding on a vigorous horse, and three barefooted young peasants whose business it was to keep the mule-train moving. There seem to have been more travellers than just the two brothers: some had saddles, but others had to sit precariously perched on top of the baggage.

  Beaumont has not preserved any remarks about Palermo except that it was believed by the people that if Napoleon had conquered Sicily he would have thrown Monte Pelligrino into the sea: ‘Nothing in the world could better suggest the supernatural power over the minds of his contemporaries which that man acquired.’ They left on 17 March, and crossed the island from one antique site to another: Segesta, Selinus, Agrigentum. At every spot Tocqueville records suitable thoughts about Classical history and Classical architecture. But it is modern Sicily that stimulates him to be himself, or rather, the man he is becoming:

  There are no villages in Sicily, only towns, and not a few of those. After having gone eight or ten leagues, crossing an almost completely empty country, it is surprising suddenly to enter a town of 20,000 souls, which no highway, no street hubbub, has announced from afar. What little there is of industry and well-being has retreated to these places, as warmth in a paralytic body retires little by little towards the heart. The cause of this singular state of affairs is not hard to find. The only great landlords of Sicily are the nobles and the monasteries ... The nobles dissipate their revenues in Palermo or Naples, giving no thought to their holdings in Sicily except for the rents they receive. Many of them, we were told, have never even visited their lands. As to the monks, a race eminently given over by nature to routine, they tranquilly eat up their customary revenues, without thinking how they might be increased. However, the people, who have little or no stake in the land and whose harvests can find no market, are little by little abandoning the fields.

  A day or two later he indulges in another bout of political economy, trying to arrive at the truth about large estates and peasant smallholdings: which makes for greater prosperity? He arrives at the rather unsatisfactory conclusion that the former suit the north, the latter the south: ‘If I were king of England I would favour great estates, if master of Sicily I would do all I could to encourage small ones; but being neither the one nor the other, I return quickly to my journal.’ He had perhaps been alerted to the question of landholdings (it would long preoccupy him) by the fierce debates of a year or two back in the French parliament; he was feeing his way towards what today we would call topics in social science; but what is most striking in these passages is their liberalism. Reacting to a specimen of the ancien régime at its very worst, he writes like a man of 1789; which, considering what he actually was, may in retrospect be seen as ominous for the restored French monarchy.

  Next, the ascent of Etna. Tocqueville exerted all his powers to pull off a truly chateaubrianesque effusion, but he had to get Édouard and himself to the top first:

  We crossed the latest hillock formed by the repeated falls of ash, of which the slope is, therefore, very steep. On this shifting soil, as steep as a roof, we could not take a step without sinking in deep and often slipped back by more than a fathom. I had already experienced the unpleasantness of a similar path when I visited Vesuvius. But here was something more: to the difficulty of getting along such a road was added that of breathing at such a height. We were then about 1,700 fathoms [more than 10,000 feet] above Catania. The air was thin but however not pure. Volcanic seepings filled it with sulphurous fumes. We had to halt every ten or fifteen paces. When we did, we collapsed on the ash and for several seconds felt extraordinary thumpings in our chests. My head ached as if it were clamped into an iron bonnet. Édouard admitted that he was not sure that he could get to the top.

  It will be remembered that Édouard was asthmatic. Nevertheless he did get to the top, inspired perhaps by his dauntless younger brother; and together they saw the sun come up over Sicily.

  We were making one of our forced halts when the guide, clapping his hands, cried out in a voice that I still seem to hear, ‘Il sole, il sole!’ We turned immediately to face east; the sky was thick with clouds; nevertheless the sun, looking like a red-hot iron millstone, in spite of all obstacles brought up day, and showed half himself above the sea of Greece. A reddish, violet shade spilt over the waves and bloodied the mountains of Calabria that stretched bef
ore us. It was a sight such as one sees only once in a lifetime, one of those severe and terrible beauties of Nature that drive you in on yourself and crush you with a sense of your littleness. There mingled with this splendour something sad, something strangely gloomy. The immense star shed but a doubtful light. He seemed to drag himself up the heights of heaven rather than climb. That, we said to ourselves, is how he will rise on the world’s last day.

  Then he spoils it all by evoking Pluto, Proserpine, Ceres, Pan, et cetera, a mythological list ‘such as a College easily supplies’, and concludes, almost lapsing into verse, ‘Terre de dieux et des héros! Pauvre Sicile! que sont devenues tes brillantes chimères!’* His inability to maintain a consistent language suggests very strongly that whether he realized it or not he was writing against the grain; but it was several years yet before he abandoned his attempts at Romantic rhapsody (the Classical gods vanished much sooner).

  After Etna came Stromboli (his third volcano) and a bad attack of homesickness; then a final literary experiment, an imaginary conversation between a Sicilian nobleman, Don Ambrosio, and one from Naples, Don Carlo, in which the political and moral weaknesses of both types were ruthlessly depicted.

  Don Carlo (laughing bitterly): Very well, if our yoke weighs so heavily upon you, why not break it? Why is the tocsin not ringing over your fields? What are you waiting for? Are you gathering, are you marching? No! You will never decide that oppression has gone too far, and, down to your latest descendants, you will always defer vengeance to tomorrow. But should you ever be bold enough to raise the banner of revolt, how easily Naples will pulverize your weakness! Search your memory; remember 1820.* Where are your ships, your soldiers? Your young men hate the trade of arms. There are no Sicilians in the army.

  Don Ambrosio (in a constrained and altered voice): It is true; all that is too true: what good to hide it? And yet, we were not born for slavery ...

  (These words were first published in 1861, the year after Garibaldi landed at Marsala.)

  The dialogue is a great success. It seems a pity that Tocqueville never did such a thing again (although, significantly, some of his writing about Ireland resembles it). Taken as a whole, the Voyage en Sicile is full of achievement, as well as promise: there ought to be a modern English translation. It shows that intellectually Tocqueville was maturing fast, which was just as well: for on 6 April 1827, even before he got home from Italy, he was appointed juge-auditeur at the law-courts of Versailles.

  * Unidentified.

  * Why is there not a statute of Gibbon on the slopes of the Capitol?

  † A year later Chateaubriand himself came to Rome as French ambassador; in his memoirs he gives an unintentionally distressing account of his nephew Christian, who after seeing service as an army officer went to Rome as a Jesuit novice. Presumably the Tocqueville brothers enjoyed their cousin’s company during their visit.

  ‡ Perhaps that is why in 1850 he did go back, when he may well have feared that he was dying. His wife feared it.

  * ‘Land of gods and heroes! Poor Sicily! Where now are your brilliant fantasies?’

  * In 1820 a sudden rebellion forced Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies to grant his subjects a constitution, but the prompt arrival of an Austrian army enabled him to withdraw this concession.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PUPILLAGE

  1827–1830

  He thought about himself and the whole earth,

  Of man the wonderful and of the stars

  And how the deuce they ever could have birth,

  And then he thought of earthquakes and of wars,

  How many miles the moon might have in girth,

  Of air balloons and of the many bars

  To perfect knowledge of the boundless skies,

  And then he thought of Donna Julia’s eyes.

  LORD BYRON, DON JUAN

  IT WAS HIS FATHER’S doing.

  In June 1826, Comte Hervé had achieved a long-standing ambition: he was appointed prefect of the Seine-et-Oise, of which Versailles was the chef-lieu. In 1815 Chateaubriand had presumptuously promised him the job, and when, in 1823, he entered the Villèle ministry as foreign minister, Hervé again cherished high hopes; but as he afterwards remarked bitterly, he should have realized that M. de Chateaubriand never thought of anyone but himself.1 When, soon afterwards, Chateaubriand went into opposition, Hervé stuck to Villèle; perhaps the Seine-et-Oise was his belated reward. Placed between Normandy and Paris, the department permitted Hervé to keep in touch easily with his estates and his wife (though she still refused to live in a prefecture), and he knew it well from his Verneuil days. In another respect it was a suitable posting for a verdet, a long-standing follower of the comte d’Artois, for Artois was now King Charles X and resided in summer at Saint-Cloud, where he required the prefect to pay his court. The château at Versailles was too dilapidated for occupation, but the king made a point of visiting the town from time to time and dining in public at the Grand Trianon.2 The prefect had to be in attendance; nor was that all. He was appointed gentleman of the bed-chamber and in his memoirs has left a faintly ironical account of the last Bourbons’ attempts to emulate Louis XIV in an age of greatly reduced resources:

  There was nothing burdensome about my service. It consisted of an obligation to accompany the King to mass. On his return, we assembled briefly in the drawing-room. The King said something polite to each of us. The Dauphin and the Princesses formally bowed and curtsied to him, and then retired. He himself returned to his apartments and I would be free until eight in the evening, when I had to reappear, by standing order. My task was thus complete.

  My privileges consisted in partaking, if I liked, of an excellent déjeuner and a very good dinner at the table of the premier maître d’hôtel and then staying to play cards with the King, an exceedingly tedious honour.

  The King played whist every evening, the only moment in his life when he shed his usual urbanity. He would scold his partner and even his opponents. M. le Dauphin* would play a game of chess and then retire at nine o’clock. Those of us who were not required by the one or the other party played écarté. Madame la Dauphine worked at her tapestry until she put down her canvas in order to take her turn at écarté. The atmosphere was cold as ice. Respect prevented any sort of relaxation and imposed boredom instead. At half past ten the evening would end.3

  The prefect had come a long way from his dungeon in Port-Libre; nevertheless, he probably preferred the meetings of his departmental conseil général, which, as André Jardin remarks, served also as a family reunion, for there he would meet his relations Louis de Rosanbo, Comte Molé and Félix Le Peletier d’Aunay, all of whom had estates in the Seine-et-Oise. The conseil was divided between liberals and conservatives, and from 1827 onwards d’Aunay sat in the Chamber of Deputies as deputy from the Seine-et-Oise and a leading member of the opposition; but they all agreed in praising their prefect.4 Nobody made any objection to the installation of his youngest son as a juge-auditeur and resident of the Versailles prefecture. Questions of a conflict of interest simply did not arise. The young man, at twenty-one, was old enough to qualify as a magistrate, and he was the arrière-petit-fils of M. de Malesherbes. Under the Bourbons the noblesse de robe regrouped, like the noblesse d’épée. There could be no question of reviving the old parlements, but by accepting only candidates of good family for legal posts the courthouses of the new France could be made into fairly satisfactory substitutes. It could all be justified in the name of creating a noblesse of service.5 As such it was a renewed denial of the cherished Revolutionary principle, that all careers should be equally open to talent.

  There is no reason to suppose that Alexis de Tocqueville saw anything wrong with his father’s plan. It was an excellent way to launch his legal career. French tribunals, including that at Versailles, were each organized into two chambers, one for hearing and deciding cases, the other for investigating them and, if necessary, prosecuting – the parquet. Juges-auditeurs were the lowliest members of the pa
rquet – unsalaried young gentlemen learning their trade who, it seems, could work as much or as little as they pleased. Tocqueville, full of ambition, was determined to learn and work as hard as possible.

  He entered on his duties in June 1827, and felt the emotions usual to those starting their first job. He told Édouard that it was not life as he had envisaged it at sixteen, but his comrades were welcoming, and the work, though dull in itself, was interesting as a challenge. ‘Although I know moments of deep boredom and even disgust, I would for many reasons like to see you occupied as I am.’ (Édouard had still not found any career.) Two weeks later he wrote in more detail and with greater frankness to Kergorlay:

  beforehand, I thought myself fairly good at law, but I was greatly deceived. I was, as to law, as someone just out of school is to science. My head was full of unshaped material, that was all. When I have to apply it, I am lost, and my inadequacy makes me despair; I am by far the feeblest of us all, and though vanity, which is as much part of me as it is of everyone else, whispers that when I have worked as long as the others I will be as advanced as they are, I still feel crushed. For generally speaking, as I feel every day, I have a craving to excel which will make my life a torment ... I find it hard to get used to speaking in public; I grope for words and cut my arguments too short. Beside me are men who reason ill and speak well; that puts me in a continual rage. It seems to me that I am their superior, but when I want to make an effect, I know I am inferior. On the other hand ... I am not bored; you can’t imagine what it is like to think seriously about a point of law. The work in the end forces me to find it interesting. So law which disgusted me in theory doesn’t produce the same effect in practice. All my abilities come together to find a solution or method; I feel that my mind is active, and developing in every way, and the result is the same well-being that I knew in my heart when I was in love ... my companions all seem to be prigs, more or less, but there is more to them than I thought at first. Almost all of them now show me a friendship and a good fellowship which is agreeable enough, ... and on close examination I have found among them one or two truly honourable young men full of good feeling and integrity. This discovery has enabled me to overcome the natural disgust I feel at legal minds and manners. To sum up, mon cher ami, I begin to think that I will enter into the spirit of my calling ...