Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  What is curious about this rebuke is that it should have been necessary. Tocqueville knew a great deal about American diplomatic history; he actually quotes George Washington’s Farewell Address at length in this very chapter; and he knew well Edward Livingston, Andrew Jackson’s Minister Plenipotentiary in France from 1833 to 1835, and formerly Secretary of State. Livingston was indeed the only American informant acknowledged by name in the Démocratie. So Tocqueville must have realized that the foreign policy of the United States, as conducted from the days of Benjamin Franklin to those of Jackson, had been singularly consistent, intelligent and successful. He saw the dilemma and solved it by the thought that George Washington, who saved the people from their impulse to involve themselves in the wars of the French Revolution, was really an aristocrat. In the teeth of the record he insisted that democracies can never undertake or persist in great diplomatic designs, maintain necessary secrecy or exercise patience. He did not give any examples of an aristocracy turning in a superior performance, and would have been hard-pressed to find one had he looked at, say, the history of France in the eighteenth century.30

  This disjuncture between what Tocqueville knew and what he alleged is so odd that it demands explanation.

  It must not be supposed that he was insincere. A gentilhomme in every fibre, it was easy enough for him to surrender to the instincts of his caste and shake his head over everything that might go wrong in a republic. In the fire and urgency of composition he might well go further than cool reflection would have approved – but having once adopted a position he never withdrew from it. And there was great plausibility in everything he said so long as he kept to generalities and abstractions. Even there he cannot always be acquitted of class bias. For instance, he returned to the subject of centralization, insisting that in the wrong hands (a tyrannous majority) it could be fatal to liberty, while emphasizing that no such threat yet existed in the United States.31 He was, in fact, a warm admirer of American federalism and local self-government, and his doctrine of decentralization was perhaps the most characteristic part of his message. But today his readers should bear in mind that opposition to centralization became something of a shibboleth among legitimist nobles after 1830. They had lost Paris and the Court, but they had retained great local influence – especially in the west, where they were strongest – and it was natural for them therefore to oppose centralized administration as much as possible. Hervé de Tocqueville, with his belief in strong national government, was behind the times. Not so his son, who may also have been influenced by the cry of ‘states’ rights’ in America.

  At least centralization was and is a real issue. Not so tyranny of the majority. Tocqueville could generalize as much as he liked, but when it came to demonstration he was at a stand. Finally he could only instance a wartime lynch-mob in Baltimore in 1812, racial prejudice in Philadelphia, and the allegation that unorthodox writers did not always get the sales and reviews which they deserved.32 He did not ask himself if riots, racism and philistinism were unknown in European societies, and when he came to list the various devices by which an oppressive majority could be circumvented he did not point out that every one of them was already operative in the United States.

  Yet whatever ground Tocqueville conceded to the alarmists (too much for the effectiveness of his pamphlet), his central position was unaffected. He wanted to persuade his countrymen that democracy, as America showed it might be, was worth a try, and that all the alternatives were worse. History has substantially vindicated him (so far) and France, in the later twentieth century, accepted a Tocquevillean republic after trying almost everything else. But the fact that it took the French roughly a century and a quarter to get to that point demonstrates how difficult was the task that Tocqueville had set himself. His non-partisan stance might win him readers, but not adherents. To accept his reasoning would have required the legitimists to abandon their raison d’être, loyalty to the House of Bourbon and the memory of the ancien régime. Republicans would have had to give up their faith in class war and revolutionary dictatorship, and accept the July Monarchy as a reasonable compromise between parties. As for the Orleanists, who had most to gain from espousing Tocqueville’s views, they were both too timid and too narrowly selfish in their class attitudes to do so. The Bonapartists, lurking in the wings, were the party of Caesar; Tocqueville himself drew the line at them. Opposition to Bonapartism was his most unvarying political principle from first to last.

  Read today as a pamphlet, the Démocratie seems striking chiefly for its good sense and accuracy; but it is far more impressive as a work of analysis, political, historical and sociological. Nothing among Tocqueville’s American discoveries exceeded the importance of the point de départ as a concept. The more he reflected on it the more he grasped its profound implications. The first Americans reached New England (he never paid much attention to the foundation of Virginia) as religious republicans, and from that everything else flowed. But the point de départ could only have been so effective because it was reinforced by other circumstances: by time – the 150 or so years during which the experiment unfolded – and by experience. Tocqueville came to lay great stress on a people’s practical experience of government: we have seen him applying the idea to British society. History shaped society, but society also shaped history: the interweaving operation of these forces made a nation. The point seems trite enough today, and the whole mind of the Romantic age can be seen moving towards it in, for example, Scott’s novels as well as in Guizot’s lectures; but Tocqueville was the first to make it his own, and generate a masterpiece from it.

  He distinguished three forces at work: the physical environment, the legal system, and les moeurs, of which les moeurs was the most important. He was well aware that he was giving this word a new and much-extended meaning. In his American letters and notebooks he mostly used it to refer to sexual morality, but by the time he came to write the Démocratie he had much bigger ideas: ‘by this word I understand the intellectual and moral tendencies which men bring to the social state.’33 * This coinage explained to Tocqueville what he had been doing in America. It gave him licence to display all the results of his researches; for example into the political effects of religion in the United States. ‘If by this point of my book I have not made the reader aware of the importance which I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, to their opinions, in a word to their manners, in sustaining their laws, I have failed in the chief object which I set myself in starting to write.’33 It would have been a very dull reader who missed the point.

  It cannot be denied that Tocqueville’s sense of what procedure was necessary for analysing and explaining a society was correct, and the result was a portrait of America which still repays study and, in its day, was the first of its kind; but it led him into a profound difficulty from which he was never wholly able to escape. The more that he studied, reflected, and wrote, the more the Americans appeared a distinct and peculiar people, unlike even their first progenitors, the British. Not that Tocqueville was a believer in American exceptionalism in the vulgar sense: he never succumbed to the delusion that the laws of social evolution were suspended for the benefit of the United States. But if, as his investigations demonstrated conclusively, American institutions and the American political system resulted from that people’s point de départ, and from their geography, laws and manners, how could they be successfully imitated in France? It was a reasonable question, even if one were not a believer in French exceptionalism (and Tocqueville, if not a rabid nationalist, was at all times a warm patriot). No wonder that he offered only cautious recommendations, as we have seen. ‘One can only hazard opinions,’ he said.34 His opinion, in flat defiance of the view which he was to state in his Introduction, and which forms the epigraph of this chapter, was that democracy and the American political system were not interchangeable terms, but what he had seen in America had convinced him that the prudent and gradual introduction of democratic institutions, which in
this way would become part of the habits and opinions of the people – in other words, their moeurs – was a real possibility, and he was to spend the rest of his life advocating it; but he could not pretend that he was offering anything more than a hope. And although he would exert his considerable powers of persuasion to convert his readers to that hope, he was well aware that ultimate success or failure lay predominantly with forces outside his control. The convictions, passions and interests that divided France were not going to yield immediately to sweet reason. Hence Tocqueville’s doctrine was for long more honoured in Britain and the United States, where it was not particularly needed (being a rationalization of their actual history and politics) than in France, where it was.

  But he never quite gave up hope. The excesses of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic dictatorship had shown all too clearly what the future might hold: a society in which the citizens were equal in degradation, thrust down below the right level of humanity into slavery to a single man. America displayed an alternative.

  It is difficult to induce the people to take part in government; it is still more difficult to supply them with the experience and the beliefs which they lack, but need in order to govern well. The democratic will is volatile;* its agents, vulgar; its laws, imperfect. I admit all this. But if it is true that soon there will be no middle way between the empire of democracy and the yoke of one man, ought we not to try rather for the former than submit voluntarily to the latter? And if it were necessary to accept complete equality, would it not be better to allow ourselves to be levelled in liberty rather than under a despot?35

  Tocqueville did not want to turn Frenchmen into Anglo-Americans, even if it were possible. ‘My purpose has rather been to demonstrate, using the American example, that their laws and, above all, their manners can permit a democratic people to remain free.’ French liberty would and should be different from American: ‘I would think it a great misfortune for humanity if liberty had to take the same form in every place.’ Yet by careful preparation, during as much time as it took, a people might be trained for liberty, and once so trained, could exercise it. The alternative was universal tyranny, disastrous for noble and bourgeois, rich man and pauper.36

  So ended volume 2, chapter 9, and having reached this point Tocqueville asked himself if there need be a chapter 10. His message about democracy was now as clear, strong and complete as he could make it. On the other hand, this book was as much about America as it was about democracy, and there was still much to say about the country (he had not yet exhausted his notebooks); furthermore his readers would rightly expect it of him. He decided to press on; but in spite of its precise and limited title (‘Some Reflections on the Present State and Probable Future of the Three Races Which Inhabit the Territory of the United States’) chapter 10 has the appearance of another ragbag. Tocqueville now seems determined to leave nothing out: he writes as if it is more important to report his thoughts and observations than to make them hang together; he apologizes for sometimes repeating himself, but does not seem to know or care that he occasionally contradicts himself;* and few readers are likely to blame him, so deep and wide-ranging and so many are his observations on such topics as race relations, the dangers facing the Union, the Americans as a business people, and so on. ‘These matters, which bear on my main subject, are not part of it: they are American without being democratic, and it is above all the portrait of democracy which I have attempted.’37 Away he went.

  Throughout the Démocratie of 1835 he likes to explain to his readers and to himself what he is up to; it is an endearing trait; but here he gives himself away. His headlong process of composition has let him down, and now he is misleading. ‘American without being democratic ...’ Nothing could be less true of the topics that he was about to discuss – for example, race relations. It is not too much to say that from colonial times onwards the race question has always been the central difficulty of American democracy, and this was never truer than in Tocqueville’s day. The United States was a slave-holding republic, and many are the works of polemic and scholarship which have explored the meaning of that contradiction.* In chapter 10 Tocqueville explores it himself, with all his usual intelligence and more than his usual humanity: it is as if he found it easier to sympathize with slaves than with convicts, even if his analysis was somewhat tainted with what we must call racism, picked up, undoubtedly, from his authorities.† But he blunders in not pointing out that here was a supreme example of the way in which manners shape society and politics. Had he integrated his discussion of slavery into the exposition of his theory he would greatly have strengthened both, and he would also have strengthened his case for liberal democracy, since the only cure for the disease of slavery was to free the slaves and concede them equal rights (as was, in the end, so painfully to happen). But Tocqueville had saddled himself with a formula, and did not re-examine it. Scribbling away in his garret for dear life, he had not the temperament nor, he thought, the time (but his deadlines were all self-imposed) for structural revision. Words, sentences, paragraphs might be, and were, gone over again and again; the larger shaping of his treatise never received more than perfunctory attention.

  Yet the omission hardly matters. As in the earlier sections, deep recurring preoccupations give the ragbag coherence and link it vitally to the rest of the book. I might even say that Tocqueville has found another way of making his case, and is beginning at the beginning for the third time. He was by now incapable of writing about America without bringing in his favourite themes: they bubbled to the surface whatever his topic, and his topics, as I have said, were in themselves democratic, or he made them so. When he thought to write something about American maritime commerce (it would have been a shame to waste the conversations he had had with Mr Schermerhorn during the voyage to America), how did he account for its success? Why, in terms of the American national character:

  Any American, taken at random, will be found to be hot in his desires, enterprising, adventurous, above all an innovator. This spirit stows itself, indeed, in all he does; it is part of his laws, his politics, his religious doctrines, his economic and social theories, his private business; it goes everywhere with him, to the depths of the forests as much as to the hearts of the cities. The same spirit, applied to seaborne trade, makes the Americans sail faster and sell cheaper than all other merchants ...38

  It is another example of manners at work, which is why Tocqueville discusses it. It is never predictable what he will talk of next, but certain what he will say. Thus, when he enlarges on one of his favourite themes, the value of free associations spontaneously formed by private citizens, the example he chooses to give is the American political party (and he takes the opportunity to discuss Andrew Jackson’s presidential record soberly and elaborately). Chapter 10, in fact, is only superficially an afterthought: whether Tocqueville consciously realized it or not, it brilliantly reinforces his earlier arguments, and much enriches his portrait of democracy.*

  After the last chapter comes the first. To anyone reading the Démocratie in the order in which Tocqueville wrote it (and however often it has been read before) the Introduction comes as a slight shock, for it is mostly about France and Europe, which are largely lost to sight behind American detail in chapter 10. Tocqueville mentions the United States in his opening sentence and then no more for ten pages (out of fourteen). His subject is instead the great historical transformation which he calls ‘the democratic revolution’: the transition, taking many generations, from a society dominated by a military nobility, whose wealth was in land, to a society of infinite diversity, in wealth and occupation, where no one caste enjoys dominance, but all share equality of status.* More particularly, he is concerned with the broken and directionless state of France in the wake of the revolutions of 1789 and 1830. If his grand historical scheme is based on Guizot and (somewhat) on Lingard, his view of post-Revolutionary France is all his own. The old order, he says, is gone for good: never again will kings and nobles exercise power in th
e traditional way (of which he paints, nostalgically, a pretty but unhistorical picture).39 It is no use gazing back longingly at the receding shore and at the wrecks littered upon it; all eyes should be directed to the cataracts ahead and the question of how to get through them: ‘a new political science is needed for a wholly new world.’40 The Christian world is condemned to democracy, it is God’s will; the task must be to secure its benefits rather than succumb to its evils, and Tocqueville’s book is designed to show how. He is as elitist as ever. While never in so many words admitting that part of the work of the French Revolution had been to create a new governing class, the notables, to which he himself belonged, he is firm in asserting that the educated classes must seize control of the democratic movement and direct it according to their superior knowledge and understanding, for otherwise the violent and ignorant lower orders will destroy society. There is not much time left; action is urgent; but the rewards may be great:

  I dream of a society where all, regarding the law as their own handiwork, love it and submit to it without difficulty; where, the authority of government being respected as necessary rather than divine, love is felt for the head of state not as a passion but as a calm and rational sentiment. Each citizen having his rights, and being sure of keeping them, a manly, mutual confidence would be established between the classes, and a sort of reciprocal condescension, as far from pride as from humiliation. Educated in their real interests, the people would understand that to profit by the blessings of society it is necessary to pay for them. Free associations among the citizens would replace the power of individual nobles, and the State would be sheltered alike from tyranny and licence ... Changes in the body of society would he regulated and gradual; should there be less distinction than under an aristocracy, there would also be less poverty; enjoyments would be less spectacular, well-being more general; learning and science would diminish, but ignorance be rarer; passions would be less violent and manners gentler; there would be more vice and less crime.41