Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Tocqueville refused to let Beaumont waste his time and money in nursing him; he made him stay in Regent Street, and only allowed him to come to dinner at Hampstead every second day. In these circumstances Reeve’s conversation was a great comfort. The young man, though a very conservative Whig, greatly admired the Démocratie and decided to translate it. He worked at the job throughout the summer, and no doubt benefited from the author’s advice during the period of illness. By the time Tocqueville was better again they were firm friends.38

  Tocqueville had by then been in England for nearly a month. Illness or no illness, he had made good use of his time. At first his opportunities were somewhat limited by the grand society in which he was moving. As a result he grew preoccupied with class and class relations: ‘The respect given to wealth in England is frightful to observe.’ He and Beaumont did not pretend to be rich, but as they were foreigners they were forgiven – there was something piquant in the idea that two such men, without lackeys or carriages, even if they were of ancient families, could produce books of merit. When they broke out of their gilded circle and dined with the family of a City merchant the snobbery was still worse:

  Our hosts were sterling fellows, full of cordiality, but I won’t hide from you that they were terribly like Americans. We would have told them so except that throughout dinner they did nothing but make fun of the Americans who, according to them, had no company manners. At the same time our hosts, being great Tories, took pains to make us think that they were on close terms with the aristocracy.

  He had noticed the same sort of thing eighteen months before: ‘They complain of the distance and chill reserve of the great lords, but how could it be otherwise when the only thought of those they meet is to exploit them for their own ends?’39 Tocqueville began to doubt his earlier conclusion that there was not going to be a revolution in Britain: surely all that ostentatious wealth, even though it generated so much servility, must also be generating resentment? Surely the peasants must covet the lands monopolized by the gentry and nobility? He was quite cross when a noble lady remarked in his presence that people had been threatening her with revolution all her life and it had never happened (‘The same might be said of death,’ someone riposted). Tocqueville dismissed the remark as typical of the Whigs and their limitations. They had been gambling with the British constitution for a century and a half and didn’t realize that the game was up:

  And the English in general seem to me to have great difficulty in grasping general, undetermined ideas. They judge facts of the day perfectly well, but their tendency and long-term consequences aren’t understood. The Whigs seem to me to exhibit this characteristic more than most. More than anybody else they have need of illusions ...

  It was perhaps this sort of experience which made him decide that his next book must still be on America. Beaumont could have England, if he wanted it.40

  Nevertheless Tocqueville remained deeply preoccupied with the question of the fate of the English aristocracy. In a remarkable letter to Comte Molé summing up his views at this point he struggles with the failure of Britain to conform to the pattern of democratic transformation announced in the Démocratie;41 he clings to the prediction that class war will bring about equality of status, as in France and America; but he has had to take into account the economic conditions of Britain as she industralized, and is reduced to predicting that this difference will produce the same result.42 Class war is class war, whatever the ingredients. But Tocqueville has had to surrender one of his most cherished beliefs, that the hunger for landed property is the essential motor of the age of the democratic revolution.

  For this he had Nassau Senior to thank. The economist had taken up the subject in his letter about the Démocratie: ‘I do not think that in England the wealth of the poor has been sacrificed to that of the rich ... [the English labourer] has not landed property, because it is more profitable to him to work for another than to cultivate.’ Tocqueville had energetically defended his view, but Senior did not give ground.43 They renewed the argument on 24 May, if they had not done so before. There was a remarkable witness: the young Cavour:

  I found Mr Senior walking in the garden with M. de Tocqueville and M. Beaumont, discussing the great subject of the Division of Property. An extraordinary thing was the radical Englishman was in favour of large ownership and the legitimist Frenchman of small ownership. Mr Senior thinks that the small proprietor has neither security nor comfort, and that it is much better for him to be in the employ of a large proprietor and have nothing to fear from bad luck or bad seasons. M. Tocqueville refuted his argument very well both on moral and material grounds.

  De Tocqueville observed acutely that at the present moment two contrary and up to a certain point incompatible movements were in action: a political-democratic movement and a social-aristocratic one, that is to say, on the one side a general and equal redistribution of political rights amongst a continually increasing number of individuals, and on the other a proportionally increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. This anomaly cannot last long without a grave danger to the State. It will be necessary to bring the political and social forces into harmony. It is the only means of assuring stability.44

  But it would not do. Whether Tocqueville admitted it or not (and the letter to Molé shows him weakening), the fundamental basis of British economy, society and politics was being transformed. Agricultural land-ownership was no longer the sole key to power, prosperity and survival, whatever was the case in France, and theory would have to take account of the fact.

  In the background was Tocqueville’s Mémoire sur le paupérisme, which he had finished just before leaving France, and which would be published by the Cherbourg academy that autumn.45 It has been taken very seriously by some recent writers46 but I find it one of Tocqueville’s weakest efforts. For this the hurry in which he wrote is no doubt to blame. Presumably he chose the subject himself (he had already written a strongly Malthusian appendix on ‘American Pauperism’ for the Système pénitentiaire)47 but when he got to work he quickly discovered that his visit to Salisbury Sessions with Lord Radnor and a reading of the work of Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont* would not be enough to carry his discussion much further forward. So he wrote for help to Nassau Senior, who sent him copies of his 1833 report on the Poor Law, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and several other publications on the subject.48 But even Tocqueville could not digest so much material in three weeks, and the resultant Mémoire is a triumph of manner disguising lack of matter. It has three principal faults. First, like his work on prisons, it shows all too clearly the limits of his intellectual and moral sympathies. He had interviewed convicts in America, however unprofitably; there is no evidence that he ever had a conversation with a pauper. To him, unemployment merely demonstrated that ‘Man, like all complex organisms, is passionately lazy by nature.’49 Second, he finds fault with all proposals for dealing with the causes and effects of poverty without having anything better to propose. Finally, and most important for our present concern, he had only the sketchiest knowledge of the history of poor relief in England and did not understand the New Poor Law which Senior and his colleague Edwin Chadwick had devised for their country. So it was impossible for him either to accept the new system or to subject it to any of the serious criticisms which it richly deserved.

  Some of these inadequacies became obvious, even to Tocqueville, in a year or two: he tried to write a second report on pauperism for Cherbourg, but gave it up as a bad job.50 But he never gave up his fundamental attitude. He saw, with everyone else, that private charity of the traditional kind could not cope with the perpetual modern problems of over-population and un-or under-employment; he did not believe in any of the new remedies on offer, whether a Poor Law (Senior) or workers’ savings-banks (Villeneuve-Bargemont), except as short-term expedients; and the vision to which in his heart he clung was the creation of a society of broadly equal peasant-proprietors, economically secure, in which leadership would be exercised
by a class of educated notables like himself.

  As a response to the problems of an urbanizing industrializing world this vision is breathtakingly inadequate, but it has to be acknowledged that the society which it imagines has a strong resemblance to the rural France that emerged from the Revolution, what is sometimes called La France profonde, the protection of which has been such a leading principle of French government policy both in the twentieth century and (so far) in the twenty-first. Tocqueville, it might almost be said, was anticipating from afar the Common Agricultural Policy.

  But there was more to it than the trammels of national experience. When Tocqueville visited England in 1835 he was thinking seriously about his own future. His impending marriage would force his parents to set him up with his own domicile at last, and although he may not have guessed that his mother’s death was imminent, and certainly did not know what estate, if any, would be settled on him, he was already reconsidering his disdain for a life of potatoes. He was now getting used to making long, enjoyable visits to his brothers at their chateaux, especially to Édouard’s Baugy, near Compiègne – Édouard, whose strongly Christian views on agronomy were substantially the same as his own, and may be presumed to have influenced and been influenced by them.51 Happiness might well be increased by a country house of his own which he could share with Marie. It was the pattern of his time and his caste. Properly managed, it could secure him a solid base for his political career. And as a leader in a democratic countryside he would be able to vindicate the doctrines of De la démocratie en Amérique – no little advantage. No wonder he clung to the persuasion that England was only an exception to the general law of modern development which he had proclaimed – an exception that would fall into line one day, even if it meant another bloody revolution.

  Such were his views when a few days after the conversation with Senior he met John Stuart Mill for the first time. Mill, if not yet eminent, was well on his way towards eminence. He had discovered the Démocratie with great excitement in April, and written to his agent in Paris: ‘Can you tell me anything of Tocqueville? What is his history? And in what estimation is he held in France?’ He was just launching the London Review, and on 19 May settled that he would notice the Démocratie in the third number that autumn, which as we have seen, he did.52 Apparently he still did not know that Tocqueville was actually in London, but that was soon put right: one of their common acquaintances introduced them on 26 May. It was the meeting of two greatly gifted but very different minds. Mill was incomparably lucid, logical and well-informed; perhaps his greatest quality was his unimpeachable integrity; next to that, his earnest public spirit. Mentally, Tocqueville was much untidier, but he had an imaginative gift which Mill lacked and, recognizing his lack, deeply respected. They got on exceedingly well, but Tocqueville took the lead. Probably because Senior had at last made him see the significance of the Poor Law Amendment Act, which took away control of the workhouses from the country squires and gave it to London-appointed officials, Tocqueville had conceived the idea that the radically, almost chaotically localized English government of tradition was about to be superseded by a centralized system. It was one of his luckier shots, and as usual he ran away with his notion. Mill defended the tendency. English decentralization, he said, was unsystematic, like its begetter, the English mind, and he expected the new forms of local government to be thoroughly independent of central government. But Tocqueville thought that ‘the English mind’ was really the aristocratic mind, and asked Mill if centralization were not a natural consequence of that great cause of everything, democracy? Mill said that he would need time to think about it.53

  The conversation was a great success, and was resumed on 29 May, with the MP John Roebuck making a third. These English radicals much impressed Tocqueville. Unlike their French equivalents, they were not revolutionaries, they respected law, property and religion (‘there are a great number of passionate sectarians among them’) and were more or less educated gentlemen, whereas the French radical was poor, coarse, impudent and profoundly ignorant of political science.54 Here was new support for an old prejudice. But his liking for Mill went beyond such considerations. He was deeply gratified when Mill pressed him to become a contributor to the London Review, essentially on his own terms, but thought that his new friend exaggerated his merits:

  I love liberty by inclination, equality by instinct and reason. These two passions which all men feign I think I really feel within me, and for them I am ready to make great sacrifices. Such are the only advantages that I recognize in myself. They amount rather to the absence of certain vices than to the possession of any unusual qualities.

  He wanted to see as much of Mill as possible, and pressed him to come to dinner on 14 June, before Tocqueville went back to France for two or three days (to attend Marie’s reception into the Church, though he did not explain this). ‘I would gladly arrange to pass two or three hours with you before getting into my coach.’ Before long, inevitably, he agreed to write something for Mill’s journal (the article on pre-Revolutionary France already mentioned).55 *

  Apparently Tocqueville was not expected at Boulogne, where the ceremony that made Marie a Catholic took place, but the outcome of the sudden impulse which took him there was happy. The clouds of the spring dispersed: Marie realized anew that he loved her, and was restored to happiness and serenity. Alexis too grew calm and gay; he returned to London resolved to enjoy his last days there. The weather was better, and he was as fascinated as ever by the bizarrerie of the English scene. Previously he had told Mme Ancelot about running into Byron’s daughter Ada at a fashionable party; now he described a banquet given by Lord Brougham for 200 of his intimate friends:

  Don’t suppose, Madame, that one goes to such a dinner for the food. Eating is the excuse; orating is the real point of the occasion. After the frugal repast has disappeared, a great silence falls and a kind of herald, standing on a stool, pompously calls on the guests to charge their glasses, then the host rises and proposes the health of someone or something, which is only an excuse for making a speech about that someone; for mentioning the House of Lords, the Commons, the magistracy, the Army, the Press, the public schools and in short everything of which there was no question five minutes earlier; when the orator has finished, the guests all stand, silently empty their glasses, then wave them under their noses nine times, crying with a very solemn air each time, Hurrah! with all the strength that Nature has given to their lungs; that is the first display of enthusiasm. Next they proceed to the second, rapping on the tables; this exercise lasts a long or a short time, depending on the enthusiasm or the fatigue of the diners. The same ceremony is gone through fifteen or twenty times, always with the same silence, the same solemnity and the same imperturbable gravity, it is a matter of State ... all this, dear Madame, in the most civilized and intelligent nation in the world, only a hundred leagues from Paris.56

  He continued to make friends: one lady, Harriet Grote, the lively wife of George Grote, historian and radical MP, found him ‘a most engaging person. Full of intelligence and knowledge, free from boasting and self-sufficiency – of gentle manners, and handsome countenance. In conversing he displays a candid and unprejudiced mind ...’57 Such was his prestige that he was invited to testify before a parliamentary committee on electoral corruption, and did so on 22 June. That day the committee was chiefly concerned with the secret ballot, a favourite radical proposal; Tocqueville’s business was to explain how it worked in France, which he did with notable precision and intelligence (interestingly, he admitted that he had paid no particular attention to the secret ballot while he was in the United States, indeed, that he had paid insufficient attention to elections there).58

  It was the high point of his visit, and perhaps he had lingered in London on that account; at any rate, he and Beaumont started their journey to Ireland two days later. They had their usual ill-luck with stagecoaches on the way to Coventry, their first stop: ‘Ten hours spent on the roof of a diligence, with a st
orm of wind and a flood of rain, were enough to make us regret, in the midst of the world’s most civilized country, the American wilderness. From time to time we glowered at the aristocracy of the stagecoach, who were sitting inside, however we did not launch a Revolution.’59 During the next ten days they made their way slowly through the Midlands and Lancashire.

  It was a revelation. This was an England they had never seen, and hardly seem to have expected. The people in Birmingham were as hospitable as those in London, but in every other respect were entirely different. They had no leisure of any kind: ‘they work as if they were to become rich tonight and die tomorrow.’ They were intelligent, but in the American way. The town was a vast slum, like the faubourg Saint-Antoine. The noise of steam and hammers was incessant. ‘Everything is black, dirty and dark, although every moment breeds gold and silver.’60 On 20 June they reached Manchester, which Tocqueville found an even less attractive industrial capital:

  At Birmingham, almost every house is occupied by one family only; at Manchester, part of the population lives in damp cellars, hot, stinking and unhealthy: thirteen or fifteen individuals in each one. At Birmingham that is very rare. At Manchester, stagnant water, streets ill-paved or not paved at all. Too few public privies. These conditions are almost unknown at Birmingham. At Manchester some great capitalists, thousands of poor workers, next to no middle class ... the workers are gathered into factories by the thousand – by two thousand – three. At Birmingham, the workers labour at home or in small workshops alongside their masters. At Manchester, they need women and children above all. At Birmingham, men especially, few women.