He travelled from Warwick by way of Bath, and arrived at Longford on 31 August. Again he was in raptures: ‘I have seen and lived in several of the finest chateaux in France, but this decidedly surpasses them all in the art of combining the small agreeabilities of life.’ His bedroom was as big as a ballroom, and if he had wanted to he could easily have drowned himself in the smallest of the four or five washbasins provided.24
Besides all its comforts, Longford castle was as striking, architecturally, as Warwick, although it was not Tocqueville’s favourite Gothic, but Tudor. On 1 September the pheasant season began, and we may assume that he went out with a gun (he had looked forward eagerly to the treat, only regretting that the fox-hunting season had not started). Lord Radnor was a gracious host, but Tocqueville’s usual preoccupations now reasserted themselves. He can hardly have failed to talk about the Poor Law when he was with Senior, and on 3 September Lord Radnor, acting as a JP, had to go to Salisbury for the petty sessions. He took his guest with him. Tocqueville and Beaumont had long been aware of the links between penal policy and the problem of poverty; now, watching the Old Poor Law operating in all the glory of its abuses, Tocqueville realized that he had come across another major social problem, one, as it turned out, that was to preoccupy him for years to come. On this occasion he was chiefly struck by the way in which old and young men, single and married mothers, claimed public assistance even when they had no moral, as opposed to legal, right to it, or even economic need for it. Some young men complained that their village vestry would give them neither work nor charity; Lord Radnor growled to Tocqueville that he knew them, they were young scoundrels who were always ready to drink away their wages in taverns because they knew that the parish was obliged to support them. Young women, he said, did not mind having illegitimate children because they could always name rich men as fathers, or if that failed depend on the Poor Law. The law was undermining morality. Tocqueville decided that there was something to be said for the French law forbidding enquiry into paternity: it taught young women to look after themselves, which was very necessary, because nothing would stop young men from attempting seduction (experto crede). He pumped Lord Radnor on the subject, and also on several others, including his usual warhorse, the inheritance laws (‘What happens to younger sons under your current laws of succession?’).25
It was time to go home, and he was missing Marie; but as he wrote to Mrs Belam, in slightly peculiar English, his tour had been a great success. ‘The country is generally very pretty, and the inhabitants receive the foreigners with the greatest ease and attention ... I have not been called a single time chien de français. You see that I must be full of gratitude, so I am.’26 He was back in London by 7 September, when he wrote a substantial essay, ‘Last Impressions of England’. It was his attempt to distil the lessons he had learned from his journey, and repays close reading.27 Much of what he says is a repetition, or slight elaboration, of points already made (about the open elite, for instance, and pauperism – ‘the condition of the poor is England’s worst affliction’), but much the most interesting observation is his conclusion that there is not going to be a violent revolution after all. (This may put the reader in mind of the moment in America when he at last committed himself to the proposition that the middle class could govern a state.) He admits that he has changed his mind, and wrestles with the question of why he did so and what he now expects. His most important point is that the English are a people seasoned by liberty. They have enjoyed freedom of the press for a century, and have thoroughly tested all ideas by debate, even the most extreme. They are ill-content with the present and hate the past, but they will rush into nothing. He contrasts this state of mind with that of the French in 1789, and thereby launches a train of thought which in due course would leave its mark on L’Ancien Régime. He does not waver from his opinion that the political ascendancy of the British aristocracy is doomed, but its fall will take a long time, if only because the English are all snobs: ‘The whole of English society still runs on aristocratic lines and has contracted habits which only a violent revolution or the slow and continual pressure of new laws can destroy.’28 *
The essay is a splendid illustration of Tocqueville’s penetrating intelligence, and a good example of how much he could infer from the scantiest evidence. It would have made a good article for Beaumont’s review, had that ever materialized. But another country now at last reclaimed his attention. Tocqueville left England on 7 September, and as soon as he got back to Paris began to work full time on his book about America.
* The absurdity was not all on one side. When the Carlo Alberto was seized, a black ship’s boy was found aboard. The local authorities were sure that he was the duc de Bordeaux in disguise, and the wretched child was scrubbed hard to make the colour come off (Jardin, 189).
* She was not poor, either. André Jardin points out that at the time of her marriage she had an annual income of 8,000 to 10,000 francs – say £800 (Jardin, 49).
* Probably Edward Lytton-Bulwer, MP and popular novelist; later the first Lord Lytton.
* Nassau William Senior (1790–1864) was the son of a country clergyman. Trained as a lawyer, he practised successfully as a conveyancer for many years, but it was work as an economist and governmental adviser that made him eminent.
* Scott had not been dead a year. It may be necessary to add that Amy Robsart, both in fact and fiction, died at Cumnor not Kenilworth, of falling (or being pushed) downstairs.
* These observations exemplify Tocqueville’s theory about manners. It is experience which has fitted the English for their kind of liberty, as it has fitted the Americans for theirs. Marx was recognizing the same reality when he burst out to Engels that England was cursed with a bourgeois aristocracy, a bourgeois proletariat and a bourgeois bourgeoisie.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WRITING AMERICA
1833–1834
J’avoue que dans l’Amérique j’ai vu plus que l’Amérique; j’y ai cherché une image de la démocratie elle-même, de ses penchants, de son caractère, de ses préjugés, de ses passions; j’ai voulu la connaître, ne fût-ce que pour savoir du moins ce que nous devions espérer ou craindre d’elle.*
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE,
DE LA DÉMOCRATIE EN AMÉRIQUE1
‘WHEN I GOT HERE, I threw myself upon America in a kind of frenzy,’ wrote Tocqueville in Paris to Beaumont in the Sarthe on 1 November.
The fit persists still, although through lapse of time it may seem to be ending. I think my work will be the better for it, though not my health, which suffers from the extreme preoccupation of my mind; for I think of hardly anything else, even when handling my cock. My ideas are enlarged and generalized. Is that good or bad? I am waiting for you to tell me. I expect to have finished with the institutions by the 1st of January next and I have a good mind to issue this first volume before the second.2
Years later Beaumont held up this moment of Tocqueville’s life as almost idyllic:
Exempt from all professional duties, not yet married but already in love with his future wife, his mind tranquil and his heart full, he was in that situation, so rare in life and always so short, when a man, free from all obligations ... only seeing as much of his family and society as he chooses, takes full possession of his intellectual independence.3
The letter just quoted is not quite consistent with this agreeable picture. Beaumont did not take full account of his friend’s character and emotions, and of how they led him to perceive his position. He might feel that he had paid for his freedom with his once-promising career; that if he had not yet married, it was because he was not allowed to; and he had just passed his twenty-eighth birthday, that terrible moment when a man realizes that he will one day be thirty.
He was passionately ambitious politically, but was deeply at odds with the three main parties of his day, the legitimist, Orleanist and republican. His success with the Système pénitentiaire had confirmed his belief in his abilities, but the book had exhibited them insuffici
ently. The other book on America which he had planned for so long must now be written, must be a masterpiece and must be his unburdening: in it he would hurl his convictions at the world. He had delayed long enough. His trip to England had not been a waste of time, but when he came back he found that Beaumont was at work on his own second book, the novel Marie – slowly, as yet, but nevertheless at work. And the topic itself, America, was returning to his mind ever more insistently. It is no wonder, given his temperament, that he set to work so furiously.
Throughout his life he needed solitude and silence for serious labour. So now every morning he left his parents’ house in the rue de Verneuil (although it was then, as now, what passes for a quiet street in Paris) to climb up to what Beaumont describes as a ‘mansarde mystérieuse’ nearby – an attic room, of which very few people knew the secret. By mid-November he was writing to Kergorlay:
My life is as regular as a monk’s. From morning to dinner my existence is toute de tête, and in the evening I go to Marie’s.* And with the utmost pleasure I rediscover the tenderest, sweetest intimacy and have long chats by the fireside that I never tire of. Next day I start all over again ...
His days were not entirely disengaged: Beaumont was still hoping to launch his review, and Kergorlay wanted to interest him in an investment in Algeria, but on the whole he was wonderfully undisturbed. Beaumont returned to Paris at the end of November, and thereafter they conferred on the progress and problems of their books; otherwise he probably had no visitors at all. In these circumstances De la démocratie en Amérique went ahead with speed.4
Tocqueville had a vast accumulation of papers and books to sort through and digest; James Schleifer thinks that he may have started this necessary work before he went to England, but there is nothing to confirm or refute the suggestion.5 Dr Schleifer gives a splendidly lucid account of how Tocqueville reduced his materials to order and began to devise a scheme for his book. At one early moment, for example, he thought of dividing his exposition into three parts: political society, civil society and religious society. Soon afterwards he decided to drop the third section, although religion was to figure largely throughout the Démocratie, both in the 1835 volumes and those published in 1840. But he stuck, in a rough-and-ready way, to the distinction between political and civil society (‘never entirely satisfactory,’ says Dr Schleifer, with reason6 ) and they accordingly are the topics of what became volumes 1 and 2 respectively. He discovered that yet more research was needed, and enlisted two young Americans, Theodore Sedgwick III and Francis J. Lippitt, to find, read and summarize books and arguments for him. Most of this donkeywork was performed by Lippitt, who has left a nice description of Tocqueville’s appearance at that time:
His physique was not at all striking. He was slightly built, and his height did not exceed 5 feet 6 inches ... There was certainly nothing about the contour of his head or the expression of his face that indicated him to be a man of more than ordinary intelligence. His manner was quiet and dignified, but somewhat cold.
He did not tell Lippitt what he was up to.7
He was more forthcoming with Sedgwick, whom he found to be a valuable intellectual stimulus: they became, and remained for life, warm friends. Sedgwick kept a journal, and was the first person ever to record Tocqueville’s conversation properly:
Saturday 4th Jan’y [1834] about 12 called on M. Tocqueville he says the Administration of France is a chaos & that the Ordre Justiciaire is the most remarkable part of the whole Administrative System, that he says is in high order – He said that all the Administrative System was founded under Napoleon & that it is essentially inconsistent with the representative and free order of things ... to the Legation to look for some Books about the Indians which Tocqueville wanted ...
Monday 20 Jan 1834 ... Tocqueville came about past 11* and staid till 1 – Talking partly about the work he is to publish on our Country & partly about France –
He says that as regards the religious spirit – Paris is an exception to the rest of France where in certain parts they are profoundly religious – that in Paris les classes moyennes les Boutiquiers, les Marchands, les Gardes Nationales have not the slightest religious principle while the upper classes who were first irreligious – are now generally the contrary – He says that the manners of the nation have changed entirely within 50 years – (the same thing is remarked with us) the suavity, the amenity of the men of the anterevolutionary period is exchanged for a brusquerie which is bourgeois.8
The book made extraordinarily rapid progress. Relying on various indications in the working manuscript and in the letters, Dr Schleifer has concluded that Tocqueville began to draft it in November 1834, and it was apparently ready for the copyist by mid-August 1835.9 De la démocratie en Amérique is not particularly long, but it is detailed and complex, covering a vast range of topics, and it is astonishing that Tocqueville could polish it off so fast: perhaps his training in preparing legal papers for the parquet helped him. Once he had decided on a list of possible chapters, his method of composition was to write in a column down the right-hand side of a page, leaving a column of blank paper of equal size to the left. He wrote second thoughts of all kinds in this left-hand column, crossed out discarded sentences and paragraphs in both columns, and sometimes inserted or pasted in bits of paper with yet more versions – all in his excruciating handwriting. How his copyists succeeded in producing a correct and coherent manuscript from this scrawling and patchwork remains a mystery: presumably they were professionals. How Tocqueville himself got it all into order is just as baffling. On 5 July 1834 he wrote to Beaumont: ‘this second section [i.e. what became volume 2] makes my head spin. Almost everything is yet to do or must be done over again. What I have so far is only an incomplete sketch and sometimes not one page in three of my original manuscript survives.’ Yet he was already negotiating with a publisher, Charles Gosselin, and we learn from his next letter, of 14 July, that he had been getting advice from Virginie Ancelot (whose salon he had begun to visit after his return from America) on how to puff his book in the press.* Mme Ancelot was well-acquainted with the world of letters: she and her husband wrote light comedies (vaudevilles) for the theatres. She tells us in her memoirs that Tocqueville read ‘fragments’ of his work to her before publication – presumably at this time, the summer of 1834. Tocqueville was probably seeking reassurance, but he had great confidence in his powers, as is shown by a buoyant letter which he wrote to Charles Stoffels on 31 July. Stoffels wanted to improve his literary style, and Tocqueville, warmly approving, did not hesitate to offer advice:
I don’t myself have a style that satisfies me in the least; however, I have much studied and long meditated on the style of others, and I am convinced of what I now tell you: in the great French writers of whatever epoch you like there is a certain characteristic turn of thought, a certain manner of getting the reader’s attention which is personal to each of them. I think that we are born with this individual stamp; or at least I confess that I don’t see any other way of acquiring it, for if you try to imitate an author’s particularity you fall into what painters call pastiche, while if you try not to imitate anybody, you become colourless.
The underlying characteristic of all the great French writers, from the time of Louis XIV to that of Mme de Staël and M. de Chateaubriand, is, he says, good sense. It would take a long time to define good sense in writing, but at least it is:
care to present ideas in the simplest order, the easiest to grasp ... care to employ words in their true meaning, and as much as possible in their narrowest and most certain sense, so that the reader always knows precisely what object or image you wish to lay before him.
This is not the language of a man with serious doubts about the enterprise he was completing, though he did not always live up to his own precepts. In mid-August, as planned, he went off to the Sarthe to show his manuscript to Beaumont.10
Corrections and revisions were made in the light of second thoughts and of criticisms received from Beaumon
t and other friends, and from relations; but the impression is irresistible that the Démocratie was poured out rather than coolly composed, an impression strongly reinforced by a careful scrutiny of the published work.
At first reading it leaves nothing to be desired, nothing to be explained. It sweeps you away. Its programme is boldly stated in the Introduction, and the author’s eloquence, intelligence and imagination carry the reader speedily on to the last words of the Conclusion. Its style conforms on the whole to Tocqueville’s principles, its structure seems simple and intelligible and it has a new idea on almost every one of its four hundred or so pages. It is not quite without longueurs, but on the whole it is as lively as possible, and everyone seriously interested in France, democracy, modern history or the United States can read it with pleasure and profit.
But a second – or third – reading shows that the dazzling first impression is somewhat misleading. The structure, for instance, turns out to be not so much simple as almost non-existent. The 1840 Démocratie has a severely lucid and logical framework; the 1835 Démocratie, by contrast, seems ramshackle. It consists of four distinct components (not counting the endnotes), written in the following order: the first volume, on the political institutions of the United States (157 pages of the Oeuvres complètes edition); chapters 1–9 of the second volume, on American political society (155 pages); chapter 10 of the second volume, on ‘what is American without being democratic’11 (100 pages); and the Introduction, written last (fourteen pages). Tocqueville’s scheme, we might say, is to be a political scientist in volume 1 and a sociologist in volume 2, a plan not merely logical but almost inevitable (James Bryce was to do much the same in his American Commonwealth fifty years later). But Tocqueville could not really conform to it. The first volume is sufficiently coherent. It opens with a chapter on North American geography (a chapter with some wonderful chateaubrianesque word-painting) 12 and three on the history of the ‘Anglo-Americans’ – their point de départ; then it plunges into a laborious description of their political and constitutional system. The sovereignty of the people is identified as the essential principle of American government and society (a thought which recurs throughout the book) and Jared Sparks’s account of the township system of New England is exhaustively appropriated. A brief but sufficient account of state government leads to an essay on centralization, where a characteristic Tocquevillean doctrine gets its first airing; the political role of the American courts is well described. Next Tocqueville tackles the federal government. Eccentricities begin to appear. His account of the presidency is unsatisfactory (strange as the fact may seem today, the institution was then too much of a novelty to be easily understood by Europeans), but he devotes many pages to analysing it. He says almost nothing at this point about Congress (and not much elsewhere),* although Joel Poinsett had told him that it was the most important political institution in the country† and, I may add, was the key to understanding the whole political system. This omission is all the stranger because several remarks show that Tocqueville was worried about the possibility of what he calls ‘legislative tyranny’.13 An excellent account of the federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, is not a wholly sufficient compensation. Nothing substantial is said at this point about political parties and their organization, although then as now they were essential to the operation of the system; and although so much space has been devoted to the government of New England villages nothing is said about American cities and their governmental problems, which were growing as fast as the cities themselves.
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