Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  It is not hard to see why they fell in love. The country between Montreal and Quebec was more like Europe, and particularly France, than anywhere else they had so far seen in North America. All traces of the wilderness had vanished; from the deck of the steamboat which carried them down the St Lawrence, Tocqueville and Beaumont admired the landscape of tilled earth, church belfries and an abundant population which had replaced it. Montreal looked exactly like a French provincial town, and everybody spoke French. It was natural to feel indignant that such a thriving colony lay under British rule; Beaumont denounced ‘the shameful treaty of 1763’ to his father. Then, the people were so charming, gayer than the metropolitan French had been since the Revolution, and much more so than the gloomy, restless, money-mad Americans: Beaumont went so far as to say that it was not until he got to Canada that he heard anyone in North America laugh.

  Tocqueville was tempted to conclude that a nation’s character was hereditary, or at least derived far more from its blood than from its political institutions and physical geography. The Canadiens called their country New France, but it was really the Old France, France of the ancien régime purged of its faults, and not having endured a revolution. Equality was advancing in Canada as in the United States, and people complained of the remaining feudal dues, but those were so trifling! The clergy was enlightened, pious, democratic, and still French in character – ‘gay, lively, mocking, lovers of glory and fame ...’ The peasants were just like French ones – they took pride in their independence and detested the memory of feudalism. They grew their own food and made their own clothes; every village was a family, and there was no sexual misbehaviour. Their religion was much superior to that of France – no statues of the Virgin on the streets or ex-votos in the churches: ‘here, catholicism excites neither the hate nor the sarcasm of Protestants,’ said Tocqueville. ‘I admit that, so far as I am concerned, it is more spiritually satisfying than the Protestantism of the United States. Here, the curé is indeed the shepherd of his flock; there is nothing here of the industrial religion of most American ministers.’ Priests, in fact, were useless if they were not like those of Canada.65

  It was Utopia for the two young nobles, seeming to show that the ideals with which they had grown up were not, after all, totally illusory, and rousing all their eager patriotism (never very far from the surface). But in terms of their mission they had been wasting their time, and Tocqueville would soon get a letter from Le Peletier d’Aunay warning him to report to his superiors more frequently if he did not want his leave to be curtailed.66 As it turned out, half their time in North America was almost gone, and it was nearly two months since they had done any serious prison study, let alone investigated democracy in the United States. To be sure, they had always planned to head for New England after their Canadian visit; but though they may not immediately have realized it, they were turning their backs on more than mosquitoes when they headed south on 2 September. On 3 September they travelled down Lake Champlain, and on the 5th were back in Albany, which they had left on the Fourth of July. The most intense and serious phase of their pilgrimage was about to begin.

  * One of AT’s notebooks and all of Beaumont’s are lost, except for fragments; the same is true of most of AT’s letters to Marie and Kergorlay.

  * AT had not yet developed the allergy to tobacco which afflicted him in middle age.

  * Eventually AT and GB met two of the Tappans in Boston.

  * Americans were so impressed by the noble particule and so unaware of French usage that they almost invariably referred to AT as ‘De Tocqueville’ until after the Second World War; and the practice has not entirely died out, even today.

  * This, according to Tocqueville. He was apparently unaware that Throop was also a successful lawyer.

  * The last act of Die Meistersinger comes to mind.

  * AT got to know Hall in person after his return to Europe. Hall eventually published a deeply respectful review of the Démocratie.

  * ‘Vous voulez voir des bois, nous disaient en souriant nos hôtes, allez tout droit devant vous ...’

  * The title is an aspiration. AT did not manage to describe more than one bare week.

  * It took half a century or more for Americans to get used to the new currency of dollars and cents.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A REPUBLIC OBSERVED

  1831–1832

  Sir, a foreigner, when he sends his work from the press, ought to be on his guard against catching the error and mistaken enthusiasm of the people among whom he happens to be.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1773

  THEY REACHED BOSTON on 9 September and found a packet of letters waiting for them; as he sorted out his share Tocqueville noticed apprehensively that there was nothing from Abbé Le Sueur. He soon found his fears justified by what his family wrote. Bébé was dead. Tocqueville poured out his grief in the passionate letter to Édouard already quoted.* ‘Yesterday evening, I prayed to him as a saint.’ He could hardly see what he wrote for tears.1 His grief must inspire respect and sympathy, but it is notable that the personality of the shrewd and witty priest is lost to view in Tocqueville’s lamentations for someone who was, to him, primarily a source of love and reassurance, of the ostensibly uncritical tenderness which the mourner needed so much and valued so highly. An oddity of the episode is that he did not immediately tell Beaumont what had happened. Beaumont would not have been anything other than warmly sympathetic; but in speaking to him Tocqueville would have had to confront his own guilt. ‘It would have been the greatest of all consolations for me to have been able to place myself at his side and receive his final blessing,’ he wrote to his mother;2 but he had known before he left France that Bébé was rapidly failing. He had sailed just the same. No-one had refused him the consolation of watching at Le Sueur’s death-bed: he himself had made it impossible. Nor did he allow his loss to deflect him from his American investigations, though for the time being it much diminished his pleasure in them: ‘I turn to the work which interests me most like a convict to the treadmill.’3

  His sorrow haunted him, though with healthily diminishing intensity, for the rest of his American journey; but his work was restorative and distracting, and so was the place where he now found himself. Years and years later he wrote to an American friend that if he had to live in America, it would be in Boston, where there were so many cultivated and friendly people; and it is easy to see why the town impressed him so favourably. Coming fresh from the wild, he and Beaumont were as delighted with Massachusetts as they had been with Canada. Massachusetts too was an old country, according to Beaumont: ‘I call any country old which has existed for two hundred years ... You don’t see tree-stumps in Massachusetts fields, or log huts serving as houses.’ Tocqueville wrote a few days later that:

  Boston is a pretty town, sited picturesquely on several hills surrounded by water. From what we have seen of the inhabitants so far, they differ completely from the people we met in New York. Their society, at least that into which we have been introduced, and I think it is the best, is almost exactly like the upper classes of Europe. Luxury and refinement reign. Almost all the women speak French well, and all the men we have met so far have been to Europe. Their manners are distinguished, their conversation is intellectual; one feels free of the commercial habits and financier’s outlook which make New York society so vulgar. At Boston there already exists a certain number of people who, having nothing to do, pursue the pleasures of the intellect. Some of them are writers ...

  True, they mostly wrote on religious matters, but Tocqueville forgave them. He felt at home in America for the first time.4

  They were given their usual warm welcome, once the Bostonians discovered that the famous French commissioners had arrived. The familiar routine resumed: when they were not dining out, they were dancing. They pursued their prison investigations: ‘We’re incontrovertibly going to be the premiers pénitenciers of the whole word,’ Beaumont boasted.5 But the heart of their Boston experience was to be their d
aily or twice-daily conversations with the city’s politically sagacious savants. So far their investigations into democracy had been somewhat impressionistic and haphazard. Now, under the stimulus of so much intelligent discourse, they became systematic.

  The most useful man they met was Jared Sparks, sometime editor of the North American Review, future president of Harvard (in which capacity he would confer an honorary degree on Tocqueville), first editor and publisher of the papers of George Washington. As a historical scholar, he was in a way the American equivalent of Guizot – they were nearly the same age – except that he had no wish to enter politics, and turned down the opportunity to become a Congressman. On 17 September he showed Tocqueville his vast collection of Washington’s papers. Tocqueville was amazed at the beautiful regular handwriting and the hundreds of signatures, each of which might have been a facsimile of any of the others. The documents he was shown were business papers, dealing with military administration and Washington’s private affairs; they would have done credit to a clerk. How could so large-minded a man have condescended to such details? Two days later Sparks, who if not a participant was a most intelligent observer of politics, gave his views on Andrew Jackson. Most educated men agreed that the general was not fit to be President, he said, but he would be re-elected because the people were slow to change their ideas: they had been taught for years that Jackson was a great man, and there was no time before the 1832 election to re-educate them. Tocqueville had once more fallen among Federalists: he wrote down what he was told without comment, but with all too much credulity.6

  The trouble was that the Bostonians, though opening many fresh windows, all tended to say the same thing. Thus on 29 September a third conversation with Sparks took place, of which, fortunately and unusually, we have Beaumont’s account in a surviving fragment of journal, as well as Tocqueville’s. Sparks spoke good French, and the commissioners appear to have encouraged him to hold forth at length. Much ground was covered: New England town meetings, democracy in Connecticut where Sparks had been born, the rivalry between Jackson and Henry Clay, American newspapers, decentralization ... many topics were laid out, and Sparks’s views on them would eventually reappear, undiluted if uncredited, in De la démocratie en Amérique. But he was not the first to expound them; rather, it is as if Tocqueville and Beaumont were using this particularly intelligent and well-informed friend to test views that they had already been exposed to. Thus, Sparks insisted on the importance of ‘the point of departure’: New England owed her freedom to the circumstances of her original foundation, to her colonial past. ‘We arrived here as republicans and religious enthusiasts ... Those who want to imitate us should consider that our history is unprecedented.’ This was an idea which Tocqueville promptly laid before Alexander Everett, a former US minister at the Spanish court, and Everett at once endorsed it, if with a slightly different twist: ‘A people’s point de départ is an immense thing. Its consequences for good or ill are perpetually surprising in their scope.’ He instanced the practice of imprisonment for debt, inherited from England, that was only slowly being abolished in the various states. Sparks also let fall the remark that in the United States it was dogma that the majority was always right; he added, almost in passing, that ‘sometimes the majority has oppressed the minority. Fortunately we have in the governor’s veto power and above all in the judges’ right to refuse to apply an unconstitutional law a guarantee against democracy’s passions and mistakes.’ The grandson of le président Rosanbo simply could not resist this suggestion, particularly as he was already exploring the political aspect of the US legal system, especially the jury (which in the end was to be perhaps the most original part of his work). Unhappily the more seriously Tocqueville took Sparks’s notion the more he tended to exaggerate the danger which it was supposed to counteract, the abuse of majority power, as Sparks found to his dismay when the Démocratie was published. He had little else to complain of: Tocqueville drew on him so exhaustively (not least by inducing him to write a valuable essay on ‘The Government of Towns in Massachusetts’) as almost to entitle him to be named as co-author. Nevertheless, his casual remark was the seed from which gradually developed Tocqueville’s most serious mistake.7

  Tocqueville found it difficult to let go any notion once formed. Thus, he clung to his Livingston-inspired idea about the laws of inheritance. He still thought that they explained the emergence of democracy in America and the decline of civilization. In Boston, Beaumont came to understand the truth: that the post-revolutionary laws of inheritance were much more democratic, in the sense of equalizing, in France than in the United States. In France, which was still a monarchy, entail and primogeniture had been abolished to secure the interests of families as such: every heir was to enjoy equal rights. The testator could only make a will within strict limits. An attempt by the Ultras in 1826 to restore some measure of primogeniture had led to one of the first great battles of the reign of Charles X. This incident may well have shaped Tocqueville’s views, which in this instance were absolutely typical of his caste. In republican America, on the other hand, the testator could do as he liked: entail and primogeniture had been abolished to secure the interest of the individual property-holder. Unfortunately Beaumont never did anything with this discovery, and it was long before Tocqueville acknowledged it.8

  Yet after a week in Boston he found himself forced to contemplate intellectual, or one might even say logical difficulties which would have to be resolved if his political investigations were to have a successful outcome. The first, if not the most important, was the fact that American democracy was a success. It contradicted everything which in Europe he had thought normal and natural, and yet it worked.

  An incredible outward equality reigns in America. All classes mingle incessantly, and there is not the least indication of their different social positions. Everyone shakes hands. At Canandaigua I saw a district attorney shake hands with a prisoner ... I don’t think that there is any trade which in itself demeans the person who practises it. You are constantly reading in the newspapers in praise of a man that ‘he keeps a respectable tavern in such [a] place’. It is palpable that white servants see themselves as their masters’ equals. They chat with them familiarly. Aboard the steamboats we at first tried to tip the steward. People stopped us from doing so on the grounds that it would humiliate him. In taverns, I have seen the waiter sit down next to us at table once everyone had been served ...

  It was not even considered shameful to be a hangman. And no fuss was made of great men. When they met John Quincy Adams, former President of the United States, at dinner, he was received very politely, as a distinguished guest, but that was all. Most of those present simply addressed him as ‘Sir’, though a few said ‘Mr President’; either way it was quite unlike Versailles or Saint-Cloud. Women seemed to cope successfully without the personal maids and heaps of luggage that ladies in Europe found necessary when travelling.9 And the political system which sustained, or was sustained by, this remarkably egalitarian society was just as surprising. Foiled at Albany, in Boston Tocqueville got a secure grasp of the way in which American government worked. He talked to Josiah Quincy, the current president of Harvard,* who besides emphasizing the point de départ – Massachusetts, he said, was almost as free before the Revolution as she was in 1831: ‘We put the name of the people where formerly was that of the king. Otherwise nothing changed among us’ – stressed the importance of local government and, as a consequence, the weakness of the central authority: ‘The state of Massachusetts is an association of little republics which name their own magistrates and manage their own affairs.’ The state legislature dealt only with statewide business. Much impressed by these remarks, Tocqueville reflected that one of the happiest consequences of such absence of government was the development of individual initiative and self-reliance. When an American projected some public benefit (‘a school, a hospital, a road’), he relied, often successfully, only on his own efforts. The outcome might be less satisfactory than
that of official activity, ‘but altogether, the general result of all these individual undertakings surpasses by much that which a bureaucracy could undertake’ and the moral and political benefits were more than enough to counterbalance any falling short. It was deeply impressive, and led Tocqueville to write that ‘a good government’s greatest care should be to accustom the people, little by little, to do without it’ (which is like the famous American slogan ‘That government is best which governs least’). By the end of September he felt able to tell himself that there were two great social principles which ruled American society, and to which it was always necessary to turn to explain the laws and habits which governed it:

  1. The majority can err on some points, but on the whole it is always right and there is no moral power superior to it.

  2. Every individual, private person, society, township or nation,* is the sole legitimate judge of its own interest, and so long as it does not damage the interests of anybody else, nobody has the right to interfere.

  I think that I must never lose sight of this note.

  He never did.10

  But on the same day he wrote: ‘An entirely democratic government is a machine so dangerous, even in America, that it has been necessary to take a host of precautions against the mistakes and passions of Democracy.’ He lists the bicameral legislature, the governor’s veto and judicial independence as among these precautions; he seems to be elaborating what Sparks told him, or what he thinks Sparks told him. But he does not yet see, and never will, that the American constitutions, from the state to the federal, rely principally on elections to control majorities, by converting them into minorities if necessary; this, no doubt, partly because, visiting the land of elections, he contrived, in the course of nine months, not to witness a single one. Nor does he see that the chief concern of the constitution-makers, at any rate from 1789 onwards, was to use the majority to check abusive minorities. They did not (and do not) always succeed, but that hardly excuses Tocqueville’s blindness to the dangers of special interests.11