The travellers reached Marseille on 17 May, and Tocqueville went at once to the prison, claiming admission as Kergorlay’s cousin. It was a painful experience. As he sat waiting he remembered that the last time he had seen his friend was just before he left for America, and though on that occasion he had worried about possible future misfortunes he had never anticipated that they would next meet in jail, of all places. Louis’s great joy at seeing Alexis dispersed Tocqueville’s gloom, but although they were allowed to talk for half an hour they could not say anything serious in the warder’s presence. Tocqueville came on a second visit two days later.11
All seemed to be going as well as might be, although Tocqueville was afraid that the duchesse de Berry’s activities in the bocage (rumours were flying about) would complicate matters. He decided that now was the moment to go to Toulon and inspect the bagne. He arrived there on 20 May, and the next day read in a week-old Moniteur which had just arrived on the coast that Gustave de Beaumont had been dismissed from his post as substitut in Paris.12
The announcement seems to have come as a total surprise, though Tocqueville must have known that Beaumont was in trouble. The issue was the first of the unpleasant scandals which afflicted the July Monarchy throughout its existence. The last prince de Condé had been found hanged (with two cravats) in his bedroom, and although he may have committed suicide or may have had an accident while trying for a sexual thrill, a great many people believed that he had been murdered by his mistress, Sophie Dawes, baronne de Feuchères, an English adventuress. She had been barred from court by Louis XVIII when he discovered that her marriage to the baron de Feuchères was a sham; under Charles X she was readmitted in return for bullying Condé into leaving most of his vast fortune to the duc d’Aumale, a younger son of Louis-Philippe (Mme de Feuchères got the residue). Then came the July Revolution: Condé began to think of emigrating and changing his will; Sophie Dawes felt her hold on him slackening, Louis-Philippe saw the great chateau of Chantilly slipping out of his grasp. The prince died on the night of 26–7 August 1830. A court brought in a verdict of suicide, but the incredulous reaction of public opinion is understandable. Mme de Feuchères, with the all-too-evident backing of the King, brought a suit for criminal libel against the Rohan family, whom the will had robbed of what would otherwise have been their inheritance, and who had spoken their minds much too freely (eventually Louis de Rohan was fined and sent to jail for three months). Beaumont was ordered to act as prosecutor in the case, and when he refused was summarily dismissed.13
Tocqueville was outraged. The attempt to force Beaumont into public association with Sophie Dawes seemed like a crude attempt to dishonour him for ever in the eyes of the legitimist party, which largely consisted of his friends and relations. Beaumont had argued in vain that he was still on leave and that anyway he was professionally ignorant of the case, which had been prepared in his absence; his real reason was that although he accepted the July Monarchy he wanted no part of its squalid intrigues. His attitude was an implied rebuke to the King himself. He had to go. His friend wrote as follows to the Procureur Général:
Being in Toulon at the moment, where I am inspecting the bagne and the other prisons of the town, I only learned today, from the Moniteur of 16 April, of the harsh and, I may say, supremely unjust decision with which M. le garde des sceaux has favoured M. de Beaumont.
Long bound in intimate friendship with the man just struck down by dismissal in this way, whose principles I share and whose conduct I approve, I think it my duty to share his fate of my own accord, and with him to abandon a profession in which neither a clear conscience nor services performed can guarantee a man against undeserved disgrace.
M. le procureur général, I have the honour to request you to bring to the attention of M. le garde des sceaux my resignation as juge suppléant at the Versailles tribunal.14
It was another splendid affirmation of friendship, even if Tocqueville sacrificed little by it (whereas Beaumont had lost a highly promising career).15 As he had told Chabrol, he had not intended to continue as juge suppléant: promotion or resignation was his plan, and it was perhaps only his bout of spleen which had prevented him from doing anything about it before. Anyway, he had still been on leave, and there was the prison report to complete. But he had not intended to resign with such éclat, and was blazingly sincere in his indignation. It was a sorry ending to what had once seemed so bright a prospect, and might well have made him regret again the painful decision to take the oath in 1830, which had done him no good, except – a large exception – to make the American mission possible.
At any rate the episode dissipated the last traces of his lethargy. His report on the bagne of Toulon is briskness itself. He was by then a thoroughly seasoned inspector of prisons, as he showed in every sentence. Toulon was the first jail which he had visited since his return from America, and he knew exactly what he wanted to find out and how to assess his findings. The bagne was notoriously brutal, and at the back of his mind he was always comparing it with Sing-Sing. By that standard it failed badly: not the least attempt was made to reform the convicts, they corrupted each other (of the hundred patients in the hospital ward twenty-six were there because of venereal infections which they had caught from one another, ‘the shameful consequence of the most infamous of vices’) and the warders were terrified of the prisoners: ‘the governor admitted to me that since the July Revolution a spirit of independence has gained ground among the convicts and that authority is obliged to shut its eyes to many small abuses in order to avoid great evils.’ On the other hand, Toulon was preferable to the maisons centrales of France. Discipline was better. The work was healthier, and punishment by whipping was healthier than by the cachot, the punishment cell. A bagne was cheaper to build and run than a maison centrale, and there were fewer recidivists, such was the salutary terror which it inspired (‘there are only two ways in which to influence the will of man: persuasion and fear’). The ‘bastard charity’ known as modern philanthropy had so softened the regime in the maisons centrales that they had become mere schools of corruption. At least the bagne did not make its inmates worse. (This observation does not seem quite consistent with some of Tocqueville’s other comments.) Nevertheless, Tocqueville had various suggestions for reform. For instance, he thought that if proper workshops were organized (here he probably had the example of Auburn in mind) the use of leg-irons might be discontinued, which would eliminate the prison’s most hideous aspect, ‘deeply touch’ the despised philanthropists, and diminish the prison’s undeservedly black reputation.16
After drafting this document Tocqueville returned to Marseille on 25 May, and found that Kergorlay’s position had worsened, no doubt, as foreseen, because of the duchesse de Berry’s activities. He was allowed no visitors, not even his mother, and certainly not Tocqueville. This produced a day of collisions, as Tocqueville was sent from the pillar of the police chief at Marseille to the post of the chief magistrate and back again. He gave rather better than he got: he who had associated so long and on such equal terms with the great men of America was not going to tolerate nonsense from minor French officials. He said to the magistrate, president of the Aix tribunal, that he too had been a magistrate, he knew that prisoners could be held incommunicado only in the most special circumstances, and that an official who ignored this rule risked being held to account; but even that threat did not shake M. Pataille, who, when he had run out of lies, evasions and weak pleasantries, simply refused to receive Tocqueville again. It is possible to sympathize with him somewhat. He knew that Louis de Kergorlay, directly or indirectly, had been involved in a plot to overthrow the government of France by force; he had to be held until trial, and he had to be prevented from treasonable communications. How could Pataille be sure that his imperious visitor was not another conspirator? So Tocqueville eventually gave up, and wrote a coldly exact narration of his encounter for Mme de Kergorlay’s use. She continued the fight for access, and got a furious account of her wrongs, includi
ng Tocqueville’s exclusion, into the Gazette du Midi, a strongly legitimist newspaper; but Tocqueville left Marseille for Geneva on 21 May.17
He took what seems a somewhat leisurely and circuitous route, by way of Gap, Grenoble and Lyon; he may have been amusing himself by following Napoleon’s route of 1815, and there was no hurry, since Beaumont was not planning to arrive in Geneva until 1 June. He had written to Tocqueville, taking his dismissal tranquilly, though complaining of the government’s ingratitude; but he could not hide that it left him once again dependent on his father financially, and presumably that was why, in the end, he did not go to Geneva. Tocqueville’s spirits sank, and his movements became still slower. Another of his friends, Blosseville, had published a book on the British penal colonies in Australia; Tocqueville, who was no friend to transportation, wrote a severe review of it, for his own use, in Gap on 31 May. The news from the West was distressing. On 3 June, from Lyon, he wrote to Marie:
The royalists [again that curious usage] will perhaps have some transient success, but I still predict to you that they will be crushed. How much loyal and honourable blood will flow! I have already seen in the paper the name of a brave young man I knew. He has just been wretchedly killed. Explain to me why in every age honour and incompetence go hand in hand? Who were braver, more loyal and, at the same time, more maladroit and unlucky than your Jacobites? Our French royalists are following just the same path.
He went on to Geneva, and again wrote trenchant reports, on the penitentiaries there and at Lausanne. The prisoners were made far too comfortable, he said: at Geneva they even got baths once a month. The management had forgotten that ‘the goal of real philanthropy is not to make prisoners happy, but to make them better.’ Geneva was a bonbonnière of a prison – the same word which he had used to describe the houses on Long Island a year previously: perhaps it was put into his head by the penitentiary at Lausanne, a fine, arcaded building placed on a height next to the great lake (‘luxe extraordinaire’). But he was pleased to find that Christianity was an important part of the discipline at both establishments. Then on 7 June he heard that serious revolutionary disturbances had broken out in Paris, and at once left for home.18
The Orleanist regime was under fierce attack from two sides, largely because of the cholera epidemic. The duchesse de Berry hoped that the suffering caused by the epidemic, and by the long economic recession which had started in 1828, would be her recruiting officer in the west. Much more dangerous was the rising in Paris which followed the death from cholera of the Bonapartist general Lamarque. The young republican conspirators of the secret societies (honour and incompetence can go hand in hand on the Left as well as the Right) made the funeral into a demonstration and the demonstration into an attempt to overthrow the monarchy. But the government was well-prepared and the King showed remarkable personal courage, which inspired the National Guard; on 6 June the rising was crushed. It had been a furious and dangerous affair, and the barricades had risen most thickly in the streets where cholera had been most murderous.19
By the time Tocqueville reached Saint-Germain the tragic business was finished. The alarm over, he was able to devote himself partly to the prison report and partly to l’affaire Kergorlay. He is not very visible to posterity, because although he wrote to Louis regularly, Kergorlay kept none of his letters, and Marie preserved only fragments of two letters written to her in July. But we know that, singly or together, Tocqueville and Beaumont continued their inspections, visiting at least four prisons and a maison de refuge in Paris during August. It is clear from the Système pénitentiaire itself that they both worked extremely hard on the text of their report throughout the summer, wanting to finish it as soon as possible.20
It was trouble enough, but Kergorlay gave more. He took to writing enormous letters on every subject that crossed his mind, full of touching avowals (‘I love you with all my heart, more than ever, I need you, I need only you, I would be so happy if we were together ...’) but also full of urgent demands, of which the largest concerned a pamphlet written by the prisoner which proved, to its author’s satisfaction, that the seizure of the Carlo Alberto and her passengers was illegal. Tocqueville was required to undertake what must have been the extremely onerous task of distributing the thousand or so copies printed (‘You told me in your last letter that you would love to be of use to me in some way; I know that what I now ask is not exactly what you had in mind, but ...’) to various booksellers and legitimist journals, and to some of the most notorious legitimist plotters in France, including a young man who had tried to run down Louis-Philippe with his carriage as the King was crossing the place Vendôme on foot.* Other requests were not quite so troublesome; Tocqueville seems to have carried out all of them without complaint.21
In this way he passed the summer and early autumn. In October the penitentiary report was sent to the minister of the interior with six folio volumes of printed and manuscript documents as pièces justificatives, being the whole of the vast dossier which Tocqueville and Beaumont had amassed in America and which, it will be remembered, they had had to buy a trunk to contain. (Unfortunately this valuable archive, along with the original report, has long since disappeared.) The authors had always intended to publish their report as well as presenting it, and it came out a few weeks later. Without being a great success in the bookshops (as Mme Perrot puts it) it was as much a succès d’estime as Tocqueville and Beaumont could possibly have wished in both official and savant circles. It was favourably reviewed everywhere and awarded the Prix Monthyon by the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. There was hardly a dissenting voice (at first) and the Constitutionnel may be taken as representative in hailing ‘the work of our young and courageous compatriots’. They had made their mark.22
Le Système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis et son application en France is indeed a remarkable book, and remains a classic of penology. If for nothing else, it would deserve to be honoured still for setting new standards of research and assessment in the study of prisons. It is also one of the most valuable documents to have come out of Jacksonian America, and should be read by all who seek to understand that epoch in the history of the United States. But any adequate discussion of the book in these respects lies beyond a biography’s scope. Comment must be restricted to what the work tells us about Alexis de Tocqueville.
No reader of the travel notes will be much surprised by anything in the treatise. The heart of the Système pénitentiaire is a comparison of the three prisons of Sing-Sing, Auburn and Cherry Hill (with frequent reference to other American jails) and a consideration of how applicable their example is to the prison system of France. These themes appear continuously in the surviving letters, diary notes and memoranda that Tocqueville and Beaumont made between May 1831 and August 1832. What does catch the eye freshly is the clarity, simplicity and logic with which a vast body of material has been reduced to literary form. The Système pénitentiaire is, above all, a limpid book. Most of the credit for that belongs to Beaumont.
Tocqueville was the first to say so. Although, or perhaps because, he became separately famous after the publication of his Démocratie, he was always anxious to do whatever he could to further Beaumont’s reputation as a valuable author. When he was about to publish the second part of the Démocratie (in 1840) he thought of printing ‘Quinze jours dans le désert’ as an appendix; but ‘according to his customary practice’ he first read it aloud to Beaumont; who, hearing it with great admiration, remarked that it cast his own descriptive passages in his novel Marie into the shade. That was enough for Tocqueville: he put the manuscript away, and it was never published in his lifetime (however, Beaumont made sure that it appeared in the first volume of his edition of the Oeuvres).23 And when he was pushing Beaumont’s candidature for the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques he wrote to the historian François Mignet, the secretary:
Mon cher confrère ... You know M. de Beaumont’s claims, but there is one detail that perhaps you do not know. The first
work that we published jointly, M. de Beaumont and I, on American prisons, was put together by the energy of M. de Beaumont. I only supplied my observations and some notes. I have never hidden from my friends the fact that although our two names were attached to the book, which I may now boast had a great success, M. de Beaumont was, so to say, the sole author. I am happy to have a chance to make these facts public ...24
These incidents are further illustrations of Tocqueville’s devotion as a friend, but as to the Système pénitentiaire the documents show that he was greatly understating his contribution. According to Mme Perrot, he was responsible for about a third of the text as published, including the all-important ‘Notes alphabétiques’ and ‘Notes statistiques’.25 Yet he was truthful in calling Beaumont ‘the author’, as he did to his friend himself, because of the structure of the book. Nearly half of it consists of appendices and end notes, in writing which Tocqueville had a big, perhaps even a predominant part; but the main text, consisting of a foreword and three sections – on the American penitentiary system, on its possible application to France, and on American maisons de refuge, respectively – were written entirely by Beaumont. Not that that ended Tocqueville’s contributions: in the intervals of attending to Kergorlay’s affairs he spent the summer of 1832 visiting prisons, as we have seen, and going over every page of the work, making comments and suggestions which Beaumont frequently adopted, even if in modified form (thus, he rewrote, abridged and included a typically Tocquevillean outburst against Napoleon).26 More fundamental than any of these considerations is the fact that during their American sojourn Tocqueville and Beaumont had agreed about almost everything, and on prison matters they always thought and spoke as one. It is impossible to say who formed which ideas first, and it does not matter anyway. The Système pénitentiaire was in the profoundest sense a truly collaborative work.
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