Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Tocqueville was appalled by Manchester, and devoted several pages of his notebook to a description of ‘this new Hell’, which has become famous. He drove home the contrast between the miserable dwellings of the workers and the bright palaces where they were forced to toil; between Manchester, the factory city, and more civilized places such as Paris (‘Nowhere do you hear the sound of horses carrying the rich inhabitant to his home or his recreation’). ‘It is in the midst of this infected sewer that the great river of human industry rises and fertilizes the world ... It is there that human intelligence perfects and brutalizes itself, that civilization produces its marvels and that civilized man returns almost to savagery.’61 Liverpool, where they arrived on 4 or 5 July, was only slightly less disheartening: ‘A fine city. The poverty is almost as great as in Manchester, but it is hidden. Fifty thousand poor people live in cellars.’62

  Tocqueville’s response to the Black Country and the cotton towns was that of all humane persons in the nineteenth century. It is to his credit that he felt he had to write down his disgusted impressions. But it is notable that he did not allow them to divert the course of his investigations. Centralization and local government were what he wanted to understand, were what he chiefly asked and wrote about. The spectacle of the Industrial Revolution made little alteration to his thought, although the whole future of humanity was bound up in it.

  (What would have happened had he ever met Friedrich Engels?)

  He was not so intellectually impervious to the next great sink of human misery that he encountered, in Ireland. England, a complex phenomenon, had perplexed him, but Ireland was another matter. It was England’s Sicily. It was a vast display of rural poverty, a subject on which he had been reflecting, off and on, for years. He and Beaumont had discussed Ireland with Mill and Senior while they were in London – Senior had even staged a discussion between himself and John Revans, secretary of the Irish Poor Law Commission, for their benefit. So they were not quite uninstructed and unprepared, but they brought no dogma to their investigation. Yet Ireland managed to surprise them, for it was a country ruined by its aristocracy, it seemed, a possibility which Tocqueville (who should have known better) had envisaged only in Sicily.

  They arrived in Dublin from Liverpool on 6 July; Tocqueville was unwell for a day or two, but they were soon hard at work. On 11 July they talked to two intelligent Protestants, who, while analysing the disastrous state of agriculture in Ireland, remarked that ‘Here we have all the evils of aristocracy without a single one of its advantages.’ The same day they attended a banquet in honour of the Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Mulgrave. A toast was proposed to ‘the resident noblemen’ and drunk with acclaim. Tocqueville noted that one could only understand this after having been in Ireland for some time (it was his sixth day there). The toast was a jibe at absentee landlords.63

  This is a good example of Tocqueville’s matured powers as an observer. He now knew how to find significance in every encounter, however slight. In contrast with his American procedures, he now listened to everyone with something to say – Protestants, we see, as well as Catholics – which in such a bitterly divided country was essential for the formation of accurate views. Towards the end of his visit he remarked tetchily that it would take three months to understand Ireland, not just three weeks,64 and he certainly did not see everything – he never got to Ulster, for example. But he seized every opportunity that came his way. He never lost sight of the fact that this was a society in crisis, and the best compliment that may be paid him today is that although he did not know that the crisis would culminate ten years later in the Great Famine, he mentioned most of the factors which brought about that disaster, and his journal may still be read profitably by those trying to understand it.

  It helped that Ireland was a Catholic country. A convivial dinner with the Bishop of Ossory reminded him of France: the conversation was ‘enthusiastic, superficial, frivolous, often marked by jokes and witticisms’ – nothing like an English banquet. Tocqueville was also reminded of France when he and Beaumont found themselves sharing a stagecoach between Kilkenny and Cork with two cheerfully drunk young men who shouted pleasantries at everyone they saw on the road and got laughing rejoinders from men and women alike.65 But the most valuable thing was that as Frenchmen and Catholics they were welcomed by every bishop and priest they met and given absolutely frank answers to their questions (although it does not seem that discretion was much practised by any Irishman). They all felt at home together. In this way Tocqueville and Beaumont were shown all the woes of Ireland, and could not help noticing how consistent the picture was. Thus the Bishop of Ossory told them:

  Travel into Mayo, you will meet there thousands of men on the point of dying of hunger, literally. The Marquis of Sligo has 70,000 acres of land in the same county, of which he eats the revenue in England. Yet the law does not compel this man to give his fellows any portion of his superfluity. Why are so many people dying of hunger in Mayo? Because the landlords think it in their interest to convert everything to grazing and that, if they can get themselves a little more money, they can laugh at every other consideration.66

  At length Tocqueville consolidated his notes into a remarkable piece of travel writing describing a day spent with a country priest in his parish. It was a fictionalized account of his experiences, rather like Beaumont’s Marie, only better written; and it faintly recalls the dialogue between the Sicilian and the Neapolitan of 1827:

  I can imagine, I said, that a Protestant lord living in the midst of a hostile population might not be very ready to alleviate public distress, but in Ireland you have a certain number of great Catholic landowners. Don’t they set a better example?

  Not at all, replied the priest. Catholics and Protestants oppress the people in much the same manner. From the moment that a Catholic becomes a great landowner, he conceives for the people’s needs that selfish contempt which seems natural to aristocrats, and like the others he greedily seizes every chance of enriching himself at the expense of the poor.67

  Tocqueville intended to draw a parallel portrait of the life of a Protestant clergyman, but never got further than making a few notes. It was the fate of ‘Quinze jours dans le désert’ all over again.

  Nevertheless, the seventy-seven printed pages of the Irish journal are so full of information – about absentee landlords, rural violence, schools, interfaith hostility, poverty, hunger and so on – that it is strange at first sight that Tocqueville never made any use of them. The main reason was that while there was certainly a book to be written about Ireland, Beaumont was the man for the job. Tocqueville was still hesitating about his next literary venture, and still had a lot to say about America. He was as determined as ever not to compete with his friend. Beaumont remembered that one evening in Kilkenny they had a long conversation in which they compared the English and the Irish aristocracies then each made a memorandum. Beaumont’s subsequently went into his book; Tocqueville’s (entitled ‘How Aristocracy can form both one of the Best and one of the Worst of all Governments’) was suppressed until after his death, for the same reason which suppressed ‘Quinze jours’.68 It was less of a loss to the world than might appear: in their views of Ireland Tocqueville and Beaumont were, as always, entirely at one (though Beaumont enriched his ideas by paying a second visit in 1837), and Beaumont’s book in places reads exactly like Tocqueville in both style and argument.69

  A second reason for Tocqueville’s reticence about Ireland was that he could not entirely concentrate on the subject. Although many documents have been destroyed or lost (particularly Marie Mottley’s letters) we find that the course of true love was still not invariably running smooth. From such letters as survive it is clear that Tocqueville wrote regularly to his fiancée, amusing her with a detailed chronicle of his journeyings. But at least once he had to write to her in a different strain, when something occurred which drove her to seek reassurance (as she would repeatedly do during the rest of their life together):

  I never
could divide the world into more than two parts: on the one side, action, glamour, fame – the outer world; on the other, the heart’s sweet affections, the sharing of all opinions, the confiding of all thoughts – there, I see only you, I have never met anyone there but you. You are my only image of all that enchanting side of life. You alone will be that image for ever. Marie, I repeat again what I have said before: we are bound to one another for life, until death.70

  We do not know what had upset her, but it is possible to guess. Among the letters waiting for Tocqueville when he got to Dublin was one, also now lost, from Kergorlay; in his reply Tocqueville recounted the success of his trip to Boulogne, but added ominously, ‘if I don’t find you at Paris when I get there, please may I at least find a letter from you setting out fully what you have made of the conduct of my family and of Marie since my departure.’ Trouble, he evidently feared, was brewing in a fresh quarter: another letter waiting for him was from Édouard and Alexandrine, which for days he could not bring himself to read properly. It was full of anxious affection, but it advised against his marriage to Marie for various reasons, the chief, it appears, being the writers’ fear that it would destroy the brothers’ friendship. Alexis exerted himself to banish this notion: rather he hoped, he said, that Marie would bind them all together even more closely; but he added, ‘I have not made any decision.’ This remark would hardly have pleased Marie had it come to her attention; however, it is difficult to believe that it was sincere or realistic.71

  Perhaps the Kergorlay letter implies that Marie and the Tocqueville family were supposed to get to know each other during the absence of Alexis, but if so there is nothing to indicate that they did: Tocqueville’s surviving letters to his parents from Ireland contain no reference to Marie at all. Still, it is clear that he was once more anxious and gloomy when, after attending the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which that year took place in Dublin, he said goodbye to Beaumont (who was off to Scotland) and headed for France on 15 August. Neither then nor later was he in any mood to write up his Irish researches.

  He travelled slowly, partly because of ill-health, partly, no doubt, because of what awaited him in Paris. Tocqueville had a sharp tongue, but he was not quarrelsome and his affections were acute. He was fearfully sea-sick on the way to Cherbourg, so he stayed with Hippolyte at Nacqueville for two nights for fear of gastritis. He was somewhat cheered by his sister-in-law Emilie, who promised him her support, whatever his decision about Marie. When he got back to Paris he found that his cousin Marie de Macmahon, Louis de Rosanbo’s daughter, was dying of what sounds like tuberculosis. But he had other business on hand which must have seemed to him even more engrossing.72

  We catch glimpses of him in Paris and at Baugy; then on 14 October he writes to his cousin Camille d’Orglandes announcing his imminent marriage. It is a curious letter, written only nine days before the contract was to be signed: this suggests that Tocqueville was still afraid of family rows, and anxious to minimize their possibility. Even more curious are the flat lies which he tells about his bride: he says he met her through a family which he had come to know in England (in other words, since 1832), that she is a Catholic (true, but misleading), that she comes of a very honourable family and is roughly his age. He is thus pretending that he is not committing a mésalliance; but what can have been the point? D’Orglandes was certain to find out the truth before long, if he did not know it already, unless the whole Tocqueville family was uniting to maintain the fiction. But all this matters less than the fact announced. The contract was signed on 23 October at Marie’s apartment in the rue de Belle Chasse. Three days later the religious ceremony was performed at the church of St Thomas d’Aquin. Everyone was there: the whole Tocqueville family, Mrs Belam, Beaumont and Kergorlay. All the amenities were observed, whatever the private thoughts of the witnesses, or the disputes beforehand. Alexis and Marie were beginning their new life with a fair wind.73

  * Up till now the book has been doing wonderfully. I am bewildered by its success; for I feared, if not a failure, at least a chilly welcome, because of the care taken by the author to stand aloof from all the parties.

  * We hear no more of this affair. AT usually complied with all Kergorlay’s requests and commands, but it is hard to imagine him agreeing to this one.

  * The nickname (‘the happy medium’) given to supporters of Louis-Philippe.

  * C-F-P (‘Francisque’) Tircuy de Corcelle (1802–92) came from a noble family that was both Burgundian and Norman. A Norman landowner after 1844 he was a neighbour of AT. His father, an émigré who returned to France after Thermidor, supported Napoleon in 1815 and again went into brief exile. Francisque was largely brought up by a pious uncle, but followed his father into the Carbonaro conspiracies of the 1820s. In 1830 he was a close associate of La Fayette, one of whose grand-daughters he married and whose Memoirs he was to edit (with C. de Rémusat), but he soon began to move towards the Right. He met At in about 1835, and they became close friends.

  * Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont, Économie politique chrétienne, ou recherches sur la nature et les causes du paupérisme en France et en Europe, et sur les moyens de le soulager et de le prévenir (Paris, 1834). Villeneuve-Bargemont (1784–1850) was a philanthropic legitimist who served as a prefect under the Restoration, like Hervé de Tocqueville.

  * See above, p. 4.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  INTO POLITICS

  1835–1839

  Don’t imagine, mon cher ami, that I am unthinkingly enthusiastic, or enthusiastic at all, about the life of the mind. I have always valued action above everything else.

  TOCQUEVILLE TO KERGORLAY,

  4 OCTOBER 18371

  TO BEGIN WITH they were going to live at 12, rue de Bourgogne,* in the heart of the faubourg Saint-Germain, but while the furnishings were being prepared they went to Édouard and Alexandrine at Baugy, where Tocqueville’s high hopes of friendship all round seemed to be realized. It was one of his amiable traits that he liked to have his friends round him when he was happy. He loved Baugy and its inhabitants, and in January had urged Beaumont to join him there: ‘They have put me in the keep ... where they showed me a room for Alexis and next to it one for Gustave.’ Now he renewed the invitation: ‘Bring a gun ... We might be inconvenienced without it.’2 The tone is still that of a bachelor, but two weeks later, when he returned to Baugy after a short visit to Paris (a new edition of the Système pénitentiaire was being prepared), he reported that he found there a nice warm bed and a most loving reception.3 Kergorlay wrote, gloomy about himself as usual, but glad to have heard from Comte Hervé and Beaumont that the all-important first weeks of marriage had been successful: he also hoped (it turned out, in vain) that Marie would discard any memories of his opposition, for he was now nothing but a wrestler defeated and disarmed. Four hundred faire part cards had been sent out; the replies of congratulation poured in, including one from Camille d’Orglandes and several from England. Sarah Austin (Henry Reeve’s aunt, and a woman of letters) was acknowledged by a touching avowal: ‘how much I wish to present Madame de Tocqueville to you. I hope with her to enjoy two things not easily found united in this world – a busy intellectual and a tranquil calm home-life.’ He went on, even more revealingly: ‘Such is my dream; and in order to make it a reality, I have had the audacity to choose my wife for myself. Now that the thing is done, a good many people think I acted wisely. But I do not aspire to revolutionize our habits;* many a year will pass by ere marriage, generally speaking, will cease to be anything but an affaire [business agreement].’ In spite of all that it had cost him to keep himself up to the mark, Tocqueville had triumphed and acted in accordance with his consistent beliefs.† Nothing he ever did was more democratic, modern, or honourable.4

  The honeymoon at Baugy was, in short, a great success, but after three weeks or so Tocqueville began to feel restless for lack of work. ‘I am impatient to be settled in my own home and back in a groove.’ He threatened to sen
d some dilatory cabinet-makers a ‘thunderous’ letter by the hand of his valet, Jacques.5 A graver matter soon made such concerns inconsequential. The comtesse de Tocqueville had been in failing health for months. Alexis may not at first have realized it: at any rate, in his surviving letters to her from Ireland he does not (for once) mention her ailments. By December her condition was all too obvious: Camille d’Orglandes was much concerned by her ‘deplorable health’, adding that Comte Hervé had thought her rather better in the days leading up to Tocqueville’s wedding; d’Orglandes hoped, without much confidence, that the improvement had been maintained. But the end came on 9 January 1836. After a month of suffering the last day was peaceful; Tocqueville described it all to Mme de Grancey, but had much less to say of his own feelings than of his uncle Rosanbo’s: ‘for he was there, don’t worry. He was the same as ever, feeling everything and thinking of everybody else as if he were unpreoccupied. His family’s fate has been so sad, my dear cousin! Providence struck down the race! His parents died on the scaffold; so did one of his three sisters, then the second died in the bloom of youth, and now the third has gone after twenty years of misery ...’ (and Rosanbo had just lost his daughter). Tocqueville wrote to his old colleague, Louis Bouchitté, thanking him for a letter of condolence and affirming his belief in an afterlife, but saying nothing personal about his mother or his loss. He came nearest to it in a letter to John Mill, whose father was dying: ‘I have just had the misfortune of losing my mother and I have felt the full extent and all the bitterness of such sorrows.’ But he doesn’t go into details.6