The President of the United States occupies a palace which in Paris would be spoken of only as a handsome private mansion; its interior is decorated in good taste, but plainly; the salon in which he receives visitors is infinitely less magnificent than those of our ministers; he has no guards watching at his door and, if he has courtiers, they are not very assiduous in their attentions, for when we entered the room he was alone, although it was the day he devotes to receiving the public, and during the whole of our visit only two or three other people came in ... he gave us each a glass of Madeira for which we thanked him, calling him ‘Sir’ like the first visitor.
Tocqueville was struck by the fact that Jackson shook hands with everyone. It was all a long way from the Tuileries.65
Tocqueville, like so many other visitors to Washington in the early nineteenth century, allowed himself to be ironical at the failed pretensions of the place: he told his father:
If anyone wants to estimate humanity’s power to calculate the future, he must visit Washington ... Today [it] displays an arid, sun-burned plain, on which are scattered two or three magnificent buildings and the five or six villages which make up the town. Unless you are Alexander or Peter the Great, at least, you should have nothing to do with creating the capital of an empire.
All the same, he enjoyed himself there. They were welcomed as warmly as ever, by old friends and new.
Washington at this moment contains the most important men of the whole Union. For us it is no longer a question of obtaining from them suggestions about topics we are ignorant of, but of re-examining, in conversation with them, almost everything we already know. We are settling the doubtful points.
Tocqueville conceded to Édouard that he had only a superficial impression of the South, and (as I have mentioned) that two years would be needed to compose a complete and exact picture of the United States; still, he thought that his time in America had been usefully and agreeably spent, not wasted; at the very least he had piled up documents, talked much and thought much. He modestly hoped that he would be able to write a useful book on his return to France.66
The prospect of that return now dominated everything he wrote and thought. Beaumont had been more or less homesick throughout the journey, constantly demanding longer and more frequent letters from the members of his family, and scolding them when they failed him. Now his one idea was that they should all gather at Beaumont-la-Chartre to welcome him back. Tocqueville’s outlook was much more complicated. He still had grave doubts about the stability of the July Monarchy: news had reached him of a revolt in Lyon; strangely, this made him think that ‘the wind ... begins to blow hard from the side of Royalism’.* But as to French politics, he said, he wrote like a blind man. The uncertainty he was in made it impossible to foresee what he would do on his return. Should he resign his post, as he often felt like doing, or try once more for promotion? ‘At least I see clearly that I won't resume the robe of a juge suppléant’† – Versailles would know him no more, unless under another title. He wrote to Chabrol:
That matter is settled (but don’t mention it to anyone). I think I would make myself ridiculous if I acted otherwise. When I say that I will be seen no more at Versailles, I certainly go too far. I will probably show myself there two days after I get to Paris. But the visit will be incognito and I will not have come to deal with either political or judicial business. I hope that you will be able to let me have a bed in your apartment for one night. Perhaps I won’t make much use of it, but appearances must be respected. You know my main reason for visiting you so promptly, and I would be a humbug to deny it; but I want you to know that the pleasure I expect from my return to Versailles is doubled by the thought that I will find you there too.67
He and Beaumont had given up the idea of returning by way of Liverpool. Tocqueville had heard rumours that cholera had reached England even before he got to Washington; he wrote to Chabrol:
I see from her letters that your neighbour is very frightened. Use all your influence, mon cher ami, to calm her. During epidemics extreme terror sometimes makes one susceptible to infection. Besides, however rapid the march of the malady may be, I sincerely hope to get to France before it. If that actually happens and Marie is still there, I will almost answer for it that I can restore her habitual tranquillity.68
In Washington the rumours were confirmed: cholera had reached Sunderland (in February it would reach London). ‘We have no wish to make its acquaintance,’ said Beaumont, nor did they wish to be detained in quarantine on arriving in France. So they decided to sail directly from New York to Le Havre, and after some difficulty in finding a boat booked a passage on the same ship, Le Havre, that had carried them to America nearly a year previously. Tocqueville was bitterly disappointed at hitches which delayed their departure by ten days, the more so as his impatience to be in France killed his interest in America and Americans: after his return he was to remark to Beaumont that he seemed to have been reduced to imbecility during his last month in the United States. He wrote to Joel Poinsett from New York that:
we are already living more in France than in America. Hitherto the friendly hospitality that we have found among your countrymen has almost made us forget that we were far from our native land. We still meet with the same kindness, and feel it with the same gratitude, but it is no longer enough, and we realize for the first time that we are only foreigners here.
Another irritation was the necessity of reassuring his family that he was not going to be wrecked by the equinoctial gales. He pooh-poohed the danger:
We ran a hundred times more risks on the steamboats, but you were never anxious. Yet thirty of them blew up or were wrecked during our first six weeks in the US. We left one of them three hours before the explosion; another time, we split like a nutshell on a rock.
The Atlantic was harmless in comparison. ‘I have seen enough of waves and sailors not to worry.’ He and Beaumont were also kept busy to the last by the need to write letters of farewell, and letters acknowledging the various documents which Jared Sparks and others continued to heap upon them.69
Le Havre sailed on 20 February. Neither of the commissioners ever recorded his thoughts and feelings as America slipped behind them for ever.
* See above, p.30.
* One of the curiosities of AT’s visit to Boston is that he never saw fit to visit Harvard; indeed, he never visited any American university, not even Yale.
* A French usage: here (and in many other places) AT means ‘state’, in the US sense.
* Otherwise unidentified. Not to be confused with Henry Clay of Kentucky.
* This remark is the direct opposite of AT’s own observations; but then AT’s point of view, that of a noble from an intensely hierarchical society, was very different from Adams’s. The two men contradicted each other, but both were right.
* Joel Poinsett (1779–1851), a South Carolinian, had been US minister to Mexico and was to be Secretary of War under President Van Buren. He was a close associate of Andrew Jackson, and led the resistance to nullification in his native state. For good or ill, it was he who introduced the poinsettia to the United States.
† We see here the germs of the free soil ideology (see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, New York, 1970) which contributed to the inter-sectional hostility which brought on the American Civil War. But it must be added that Mr Walker much exaggerated the difference between Ohio and Kentucky, and seriously misled Tocqueville.
* See above, p. 31.
* AT is largely repeating some thoughts on the Restoration and the jury which he had first written down on 11 October (OC V i 181–2). There, he had identified the Restoration’s fatal mistake as its attempt to combine the principle of popular sovereignty with that of divine right.
* He meant legitimism; he had forgotten, or in his heart did not believe, that the Orleanists were also royalists.
† The title which the Orleanists had substituted for juge auditeur.
CHAPTER TEN
WRITING
PRISONS
1832
J’aurais pu voler, moi, pauvre homme;
Mais non: mieux vaut tendre la main.
Au plus, j’ai dérobé la pomme Qui mûrit au bord du chemin.
Vingt fois pourtant on me verrouille Dans les cachots de par le roi.
De mon seul bien on me dépouille.
Vieux vagabond, le soleil est à moi.*
JEAN-PIERRE DE BRANGER
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN a purely triumphal re-entry. In spite of various difficulties and some danger, they had achieved all their purposes and nearly completed their prison investigations. There were various loose ends to tie in; otherwise there seemed to be nothing to stop them writing their report speedily and thereby achieving recognition as leading authorities on penology and as potential statesmen. And so indeed it proved. Their families were delighted to welcome them home, as were Marie Mottley and, no doubt, the faithful Chabrol. But in all too many other ways they found themselves perplexed, obstructed and disappointed.
They got a hint of what to expect almost at once. It is unknown exactly when they reached Le Havre, but they were probably back in Paris by 24 March. They asked for an immediate interview with the Minister of the Interior, but their request was not even acknowledged. After waiting impatiently for a week Beaumont left for Beaumont-la-Chartre and the family reunion which he had talked about so much in his letters.
His collaborator sat in Paris, prostrate. Tocqueville had been living on his nerves for a year, perpetually driving himself to prodigies of exertion, and now Nature rebelled. Symptoms of what was to come may perhaps be discerned in the record of his last weeks in America. Neither he nor Beaumont ever wrote a word about their homeward voyage. Pierson says baldly, ‘They were suddenly so tired.’1 Certainly Tocqueville was, and his cross-grained temperament made it impossible for him to be patient while his energy renewed itself. He sat slumped in a huge armchair which his father had given him, his eyes half-shut, waiting, he said, for the genius of the penitentiary system to appear; which it didn’t.2 Charles Stoffels came to call and told his brother afterwards that Tocqueville was suffering from an attack of spleen. Tocqueville agreed, admitting to ennui, melancholy, and a sort of moral exhaustion ‘which are, I think, the ingredients of spleen’. He put it down to the sudden change in his occupations. He was delighted to be home again, and yet he did not know how to cope with idleness after his year of almost feverish agitation. ‘I was weary of tranquillity even before my body had recovered from its fatigue.’ So he reported to Eugène Stoffels in late April; he added the news that he was not yet dead. This was barely a joke.3
For cholera had reached the Channel coast at much the same time as Tocqueville and Beaumont. It appeared at Calais on 15 March and in Paris ten days later; by the end of the month ninety persons had died of this agonizing and filthy disease in the capital alone.4 The pandemic found the French as ill-prepared as every other nation. Professional medicine had no understanding of what was happening (the cholera bacillus was not identified until 1883)5 so the public authorities were unable to devise any effective sanitary measures: the best they could do was to spray the gutters of the boulevards with chloride.6 * The political as well as the medical results of the epidemic were disastrous. Ignoring the fact that the outbreak was worldwide, the rich blamed it on the poor for their squalid way of life and the poor said that the rich were trying to exterminate them by poisoning the water-supply. Class antipathy, already much heightened by the July Revolution, was exacerbated again: class war began to be a real possibility. The Orleanist monarchy, which had long outlived its brief initial flush of popularity, began to find it impossible to reach out to new supporters so as to be seen as a national rather than a factional regime. This was to do much to frustrate Tocqueville’s political aspirations.
He did not foresee it, and seems also to have been a little slow to grasp the full scale of the horror now visiting Paris. Beaumont in the country had begun to draft the prison report, since there was no telling when Tocqueville would feel equal to doing so, but he needed help, and sent a long list of penitentiary questions, which Tocqueville discussed on 4 April. He complained that he was still in a state of imbecility, and that Beaumont’s questions were too vague to be answered; then he gave a cheerful account of a pleasant chat which he had had with their patron, le cousin Le Peletier d’Aunay, who had given plenty of advice, much of it good; but in retrospect the really significant passages in this letter were the exordium and the postscript. He began on 4 April by assuring Beaumont (as he would Stoffels) that he was not dead, although fifty new cases of cholera had broken out in his district – le quartier Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin – since yesterday; the postscript was written on 6 April, from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he had gone to arrange a refuge for his parents with the Ollivier family, as in 1830. Between the two dates the upper class in Paris had panicked as they suddenly realized that they were no safer than anyone else. Casimir Périer, the head of the government, had contracted cholera when visiting the sick in a hospital: he was to die in May. Comte Molé’s only child, Mme de Champlâtreux, and yet another Tocqueville cousin, the marquis de Chauvelin,* caught the disease and died almost at once; and Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, in the heart of the noble faubourg, had one of the highest mortality rates in the city. A flight out of town began. Tocqueville urged Beaumont on no account to return to Paris for the time being.7
The Tocquevilles felt safe once ensconced at Saint-Germain, but Beaumont had set off for Paris before the letter from Alexis arrived. He sent a line ahead to forewarn of his arrival. So Tocqueville wrote another letter, anxiously inscribed on the envelope, ‘The hotel porter is entreated to give this letter to M. de Beaumont as soon as he arrives’, insisting that Beaumont not spend a night in Paris but come at once to Saint-Germain. Apart from many other considerations, it would be a splendid place in which to work on the prison report. Hervé de Tocqueville added a friendly postscript in the same sense. Beaumont does not seem to have paid much attention to these pleas: on 12 April he was in Paris trying once more to get an interview with the minister of public works. He still did not succeed: the minister (comte d’Argout) was too ill with cholera to receive him.8
So far as can be judged (documentation is lacking) the collaborators did thereafter set to work, probably at Saint-Germain, where Tocqueville remained well into May; but both had their troubles. They had left France for a year in the hope that things would have settled down politically by the time they got back, but this had not happened. Some young legitimist hotheads had in February devised a ridiculous plot to kidnap or even murder the royal family during a ball at the Tuileries (Chateaubriand, whom they tried to draw into the scheme, advised against it in vain); it failed, but another conspiracy was hatched immediately. It involved Kergorlay. He and his father had disappeared from France during the winter (it is clear from Tocqueville’s letters to Mme de Kergorlay that he had a rough idea why)9 and at the end of April everything became painfully public. The duchesse de Berry, who regarded herself as the rightful Regent of France (since Charles X had abdicated, Louis-Philippe was a usurper, and her son, ‘Henri V’, was a minor), had hired a Sardinian steamer, the Carlo Alberto, and landed in Provence, expecting to raise Marseille in the name of legitimacy. (It was like a parody of the Hundred Days.) But the people did not stir; so then, instead of returning to Italy as her more sensible counsellors advised, she travelled incognita through France to start a rising in the Vendée. The Kergorlays were part of her original band, but after the Marseille fiasco they stayed aboard the Carlo Alberto, meaning to sail to Spain. On 29 April a shortage of coal forced them to put in at Toulon, where they were immediately arrested.
Kergorlay was a young idiot (‘ce fou de Kergorlay,’ says Mme Perrot)10 but Tocqueville was not going to leave him in the lurch. As soon as it could be arranged he travelled to Marseille, where the Kergorlays père et fils were jailed, acting as an escort to the comtesse de Kergorlay and her daughters, who were hurrying to the prisoners’ sid
e. It was not inconvenient: while in the south he could visit the bagne (convict prison) at Toulon. He and Beaumont were well aware that they knew less than was necessary, if they were to make convincing arguments, about French prisons. In fact Beaumont suggested that, after inspecting Toulon, Tocqueville should meet him in Geneva, so that together they could visit the penitentiaries of Switzerland.
Alexis de Tocqueville Page 27
