Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Election day was Sunday, 2 March. When the result was declared a large crowd insisted on escorting Tocqueville to his inn, the Hôtel du Louvre, cheering all the way. Once there, he addressed them suitably from the balcony, mentioning his gratitude, his patriotism, his independence of the government and of all parties. Finally:

  I am the deputy of the whole arrondissement and of all those who live here. Whenever, therefore, one of you has a just request on behalf of a commune or a canton, he may confidently turn to me. Elector or non-elector, someone who has voted for me or against me – he can be sure of my energetic support. I have never doubted that those who today denied me their suffrage were guided in that only by conscience, and I approve all that conscience dictates. I will take away a mind full of remembrance of my friends, but from today, I am happy to state, I have forgotten the names of all my honourable opponents.59

  Such was the spirit in which he began his parliamentary career. The outlook seemed bright. The only cloud was that De la démocratie en Amérique was still unfinished.

  * AT moved house in Paris repeatedly between his marriage and his death; he lived always in lodgings when not in a hotel or staying with his father. It is perhaps worth remarking that in 1839 he moved from the Left Bank to the Right, and went back only once.

  * Moeurs, surely, in the original (the letter is extant only in a nineteenth-century translation).

  † See above, p. 9.

  * See above p. 62.

  * Charles de Rémusat (1797–1875), son of Napoleon I’s lord chamberlain; married one of La Fayette’s granddaughters, like Gustave de Beaumont and Francisque de Corcelle. Deputy and representative from the Haute Garonne, 1830–51. He was a close associate of Thiers and served as minister of the interior in the Thiers cabinet of 1840. He succeeded Royer-Collard at the Académie Française, 1846. Thiers appointed him foreign minister in 1871. His memoirs, not published until after the Second World War, are an invaluable and agreeably written source for his period.

  * Every department had a conseil-général (departmental council) to help the work of the prefects. One of the most important reforms of the July Monarchy had been to make them elective, so that they could act to a modest extent as checks on the otherwise all-powerful central administration.

  * Described later in this chapter.

  † In which month he became a member of the Institut de France when he was elected to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.

  * Twenty years later AT himself makes and elaborates this point in his preparatory notes for the unfinished second volume of the Ancien Régime. See OC II ii 198–9, and the Pléiade edition, 611–12.

  * And see above, pp. 50–51.

  * Another untranslatable play on words. ‘I have been defeated, but never deflated’ is the best I can do.

  * ‘No nobles at any price!’

  * Parliamentary governments can survive on less, but the lack of institutionalized discipline under the July Monarchy – a whipping-in system – meant that Molé, with such a reduced majority, could never be sure of carrying anything – an intolerable state of affairs for any head of government.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WRITING DEMOCRACY

  1839–1840

  Tocqueville m’a tout l’air de s’attacher à la démocratie comme Pascal à la croix: en enrageant. C’est bien pour le talent qui n’est qu’une belle lutte; mais pour la vérité et la plenitude des convictions, cela donne à penser.*

  SAINTE-BEUVE,’NOTES ET PENSÉES’ 1

  THE JOY OF VICTORY was swiftly followed by a reaction. It may be remembered that Tocqueville had already been unwell when the election campaign began. Now he collapsed, and retired for a few days to his chateau, where his wife nursed him through a sharp illness: ‘I think I would be dead already without Marie’s physical and moral support,’ he wrote to Édouard. ‘I must admit to you that in that aspect my future looks black. I am not sure of the first condition of success, that is, staying alive.’ He told Eugène Stoffels, ‘I have to acknowledge that I no longer have at my command that iron constitution [corps de fer] which you knew in me of old, and which lent itself so readily to all my passions, and to the greatest strivings of my soul.’ Matters were not helped by the exhausting flood of letters and visits of congratulation which poured in after his election victory, or by the awful news that Beaumont had been defeated at Saint-Calais (Sarthe); but a few days restored his vigour, and on 14 March he set off for Paris, by way of Valognes, in good spirits.2

  It is doubtful if Tocqueville ever really had an iron constitution, whatever he told himself, although he certainly had great vitality, as his recovery from his winter illness in Tennessee demonstrated. His ‘gastritis’ might leave him alone for months, and then return so savagely as to prostrate him for days, and by the 1850s, according to Nassau Senior, digestion could be so painful to him that he often had to spend an hour suffering by himself after dinner. By 1848 or 1849 he had contracted tuberculosis, which in the end killed him. But even before that calamity he had good reason to worry about his health, and probably had ailments of which we know nothing. The bills for medicines sent in to his address grew steadily longer and more frequent.3

  Nevertheless, his début in the Chamber was highly successful. He fretted beforehand, in characteristic fashion, as to where he should sit: in the eyes of his constituents, he told Corcelle, ‘the place where one plants one’s behind is of the first importance.’4 But by the time the new Chamber met, on 4 April, he was safe where he wanted to be, among the deputies of what was called the Centre-Left. The political situation was extremely confused. Molé had lost fifteen supporters, and resigned on 8 March, but no stable ministry could be found to replace him. He remained in place until early April, when he was at last superseded by an avowedly interim cabinet, and then in May by Marshal Soult, who became both prime minister and foreign minister. No-one expected him to last long. He was only brought to power by the need to reassure the citizens after Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbès staged an unsuccessful insurrection in the streets of Paris. The National Guard had been called out, and Tocqueville served unremarkably in its ranks. But apart from that episode he was not much concerned, this session, with the fate of governments. His chief business, once he had found his way around, was with slavery. He made a fiery speech at the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in which he established himself as an abolitionist, and when the Chamber set up a committee to investigate the subject he was made its rapporteur. He worked at his report throughout the summer; it was published in the autumn. He was rightly proud of it. It exhibits many of his most characteristic virtues: it was based on thorough research (Senior sent over several volumes of British parliamentary papers on the theme), eloquently written but coolly argued, and advocated that all slaves should be promptly and simultaneously emancipated in the French Empire. He distributed many copies among his friends.5 He also made his first speech in the Chamber. A great international crisis was brewing, over the affairs of the eastern Mediterranean, and Tocqueville mounted the tribune to insist that France must take a leading part in any settlement, and that the government must see to it. He was gratified to find that he had made a success, though he was a cold orator. Chateaubriand sent him a letter of congratulations.6

  He had begun well, but he was not enjoying himself. That autumn he wrote to Corcelle that he regretted being a deputy; he couldn’t imagine why he had so longed to be elected; he could do no good. He despised party politics, the politics of low ambition, vulgar camaraderie and envy; revolution would be better than that. Were they never again to see the winds of true political passion arise, when politics might be violent and cruel but would nevertheless be great? He would never, he said, get used to the present state of affairs; never. At the end of the session, in late July, he was glad to escape to Tocqueville and his long-neglected book.7

  This and other utterances of his parliamentary years show that Tocqueville entered politics with some thoroughly Romantic notions: he ha
d been more influenced by the epic story of the Revolution and Napoleon than he would have liked to admit. (It is hard to believe that in sober mood he would ever have said that he yearned for revolution.) It was immature, but it would not have been dangerous but for the fact that many other Frenchmen had the same attitude. During the last crisis of the Molé ministry Lamartine had proclaimed to the Chamber that ‘La France est une nation qui s’ennuie,’ and the ennui of peoples, he warned, could easily lead to chaos and ruin. By ennui Lamartine meant not only disappointment with the domestic timidity of the July regime, which, whether administratively or legislatively, always ended up by doing less than it might and much less than it should, but restlessness about France’s reduced position in Europe. ‘You must not believe, gentlemen, that because we are weary of the great upheavals which have rocked the century and ourselves, others too are weary and fear the slightest change. The generations which are rising up round us are not weary; it is their turn to demand action.’ All this is strikingly like Tocqueville, and it excited citizens throughout France. Much of the bitter future was foreshadowed in Lamartine’s words, and we may think that he and his hearers were deceiving themselves: France was not nearly so eager for a new struggle as they thought; but for the time being such attitudinizing seemed both appealing and sensible.8

  Summer at Tocqueville, in spite of the everlasting building work, was as agreeable as always. The only disturbance was a terrible thunderstorm on the night of 26 August. Thunder shook the walls of the chateau, lightning flashed round the bedrooms and left behind a strong, unpleasant smell of sulphur; casements were smashed and hundreds of slates on the roof thrown down, but no irreparable damage was done. Tocqueville’s chief reaction was pride in Marie’s calm courage: ‘she was like a very Caesar. There were two or three other women in the house who were unfortunately unable to follow her noble example, and deafened us with their clamour long after all danger was past.’9 * This apart, life was tranquil, and Tocqueville turned with pleasure to revising his slavery report and to putting the finishing touches to the Démocratie. J.-J. Ampère, whom Tocqueville had begun to get to know very well and greatly liked, came to stay in September and gave his counsel.† Tocqueville ploughed ahead speedily, and on 2 November again reported that he had written the last words. Ten days later he was in Paris, and for the next few months his life was dominated by the business of getting the book into print. Except for an incessant trickle of constituency business his correspondence dwindled almost to nothing, although he was in close touch with Henry Reeve about the English translation, which they contrived should be published simultaneously with the French original, which appeared at last on 24 April 1840.

  For months Tocqueville had been fretting about the book’s reception, which had earned him a scolding from Royer-Collard: ‘You worry too much about success; you will never do anything great and liberating if you always have one eye on the press. You work for the future and, I hope, for posterity. That alone should concern you.’10 Tocqueville no doubt saw the sense of this, as well as the huge compliment, but he was incapable of taking the advice. ‘It’s a serious business,’ he told Beaumont. ‘... Although I have so far gone only waist-deep into politics, it’s been enough to make enemies of some newspapers which, allied to literary jealousies and the faults of the work, could do me a bad turn.’ He was afraid that although the book gained power from being devoted to a single theme, it might also seem monotonous and boring. He worried that Reeve’s translation might give him too conservative a colouring, as the translation of the 1835 volumes had done: the criticisms he made of democracy were those of a friend, not a critic: ‘it is necessary that your translation preserve that characteristic.’ He summed up the whole matter in advance to John Mill, whose approval he was particularly anxious to earn: ‘You will bear in mind, while reading the book, that it is written in a country and for a country where, equality having triumphed irreversibly and aristocracy having disappeared entirely, the main task from now on will be to fight the pernicious tendencies of the new order, not to bring that order about. So I often speak hard truths to the new society in America or France, but I speak them as a friend ... In this country equality has all sorts of flatterers, but scarcely any staunch and honest counsellors.’ He was somewhat reassured when Reeve, having worked his way through half the proofs, wrote to express his admiration: ‘I was particularly impressed by the chapters on the sources of Poetry, the joylessness of democratic peoples, and the one on public works ... you have written the Book of the People for France, as Machiavelli wrote the Book of the Prince for Caesar Borgia.’ He was gratified to be one of the first readers.11

  Yet Tocqueville’s anxiety was not unreasonable. The work which he had undertaken was the most ambitious that he ever attempted. He had said from the first that the 1835 Démocratie was incomplete, focusing too exclusively on politics, laws and institutions (in this judgement he was surely too harsh). It needed a supplement, either by Gustave de Beaumont or by himself. In the event, each wrote one: Beaumont his Marie (and, arguably, his L’Irlande); Tocqueville, his extension of the Démocratie into two further volumes. His subject, he told everybody, was the influence of equality on men’s ideas and opinions;12 indeed, on the whole of human life. It was an impossible task. He struggled with it for four years before achieving what he regarded as a publishable text, and even then the subject was not exhausted, though he was. Failure was inherent in his situation: he was attempting something huge, and altogether new. Not enough research had been done by anyone to supply him with arguments and information: he had to rely wholly on himself and on the comments of his friends. There being only one fully modern democracy in the world, whether one took the word politically or socially, it was difficult to decide what was universally true of the system, and what was merely American, as Tocqueville acknowledged. He tried to meet the point by reading and investigation, but as we have seen he got nothing out of Plato and Machiavelli (perhaps he smiled wryly at Reeve’s compliment) or the Swiss constitution. The classical and modern authors that he read, or dipped into, were not much more helpful: Aristotle, Plutarch, Aquinas, Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, La Bruyère, Mme de Sévigné, Saint-Évremond, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Fontenelle, Massillon, Malesherbes, Guizot, Lacordaire, Mignet.13 (It is an odd list, and some of its items were to be positively injurious to Tocqueville’s thought.) He was, in fact, his own best authority, but the water in his well was running low: not much fresh material could be found in his American notebooks, though he still made good use of them from time to time, and of his English ones. It is even half true that he had nothing to say which he had not already put into the 1835 Démocratie: the 1840 Démocratie, in a sense, is simply a vast elaboration.’ So failure was inevitable; but some failures are more valuable than many successes. It was not dishonourable to Tocqueville that he was a pioneer who occasionally lost his way in the forest, or that many others have since followed and improved the trail which he cut.

  The 1840 Démocratie is much debated. Its merits, its defects and its applicability are, and have always been, the subject of fierce controversy.* But a biographer would endanger the success of his own work by entering far into the discussion. Any thorough critique of the book would be so long as to throw the biography out of shape, and might even compromise the entire undertaking. Yet the work was patently a great event in its writer’s life, and must be registered as such. The trick is to read it, so far as may be, as autobiographical, and to eschew all other angles of approach. In such a reading even blemishes are valuable, because significant. For good or bad, Tocqueville put the whole of himself into this book. The biographer’s task is to show how he did it, and to display him.

  He wrote for fame, or at least that was one of his motives. Not that he planned a literary career: he despised the trade. But he meant to use renewed literary success to force his way into the Académie Française as well as the Chamber of Deputies, and to be heard respectfully in both. It was an achievement well within his grasp. He ha
d matured as a writer since 1835. The second Démocratie was not to be an inspired hotch-potch like the first. As we have seen, the grand theme was to be analysed under four main headings, and each chapter was to have a logical place in the overall pattern. In practice, Tocqueville remained at the mercy of his method, which he described in several letters. ‘It is my custom only to decide the plan and principal ideas, and then to follow the course of my thoughts, quickly or slowly, as they serve me,’14 but he largely achieved his scheme. And his style was much easier, more like that of his letters than the careful prose of the 1835 Démocratie: he wrote personally, as if among friends.

  The book was solidly constructed round the antithesis between a theoretical model of ‘aristocratic’ society and one of ‘democracy’. In itself this was a reasonable device for conveying Tocqueville’s thought, and it had precedents all the way back to Plato’s Republic; but it also carried with it certain dangers that Tocqueville did not manage to avoid. It is doubtful that he saw them. Superficially this was because of the philosophical method he chose to employ. The fact that he looked into Francis Bacon suggests that he considered adopting an inductive method, but if so he will have had to conclude that it was impracticable, for lack of data – a problem which he tried to conceal from himself, perhaps, as well as his readers, by constant references to ‘democratic nations’ (meaning France and America) but which nevertheless dogged him throughout his work. He turned to Cartesian deduction instead, and stuck to it all too faithfully. (This decision partly explains a curiosity that has been too little noticed, the fact that the opening chapter is devoted to ‘the Philosophical Method of the Americans’, which according to Tocqueville was a sort of frontier Cartesianism.15 )It can be argued that since Tocqueville wanted to write about modern democracy and was short of evidence, he had no other choice if he wanted to be scientific rather than just journalistic, but even if so he made a fundamental mistake. Nothing in Descartes or anyone else makes it unnecessary or undesirable for a philosopher to test his deductions against such empirical evidence as he has, rather the contrary; but Tocqueville gives no sign that he has grasped this vital point. Instead he firmly states his premiss at the opening of every chapter – for example, in Book I, chapter XI: ‘Democratic nations ... will cultivate the arts which serve to make life comfortable, in preference to those which try to make it beautiful’;16 infers his way to one or more conclusions; and then, if he happens to think of a scrap of supporting information, adds it by way of decoration (here, a contrast between the aristocratic art of Raphael and the democratic art of Jacques-Louis David).17 Taken overall, no procedure could be more unpersuasive, at least to the hostile or the sceptical. For instance, Tocqueville’s grand theme in the last section of the book (‘the Influence of Democratic Ideas and Feelings on Political Society’) is that a democratic society may give rise to a benevolently tyrannical state which will gradually suck the energy and manhood out of its citizens. As an illustration of this tendency he fastens on working men’s savings banks (which he had recently discussed in his unfinished ‘second Memoir on Pauperism’).18 These were favourite devices among liberal theorists of the period who could not swallow socialism: to encourage saving in the working class was to do something to resist the ill-effects of unemployment and perhaps to buy off unrest. It was insufficient (not many workers could save anything out of their miserable wages) but it was something, and philanthropists took up the idea enthusiastically. But no private group could guarantee the depositors against the risk of losing everything; only the state could do that, so it did, and guaranteed the rate of interest too. This was too much for Tocqueville: here was a flagrant case of undue centralization and interference with the rights of private property and the sacred duty of self-reliance.19 It did not occur to him that he was making himself ridiculous and undermining his larger argument, since indigence is more likely to sap energy and manhood than savings banks. Nor did he help himself by his shocked denunciation of democratic governments (i.e. the Orleanist regime) for borrowing money rather than supplying their needs by taxation, as happened, he said, in the good old aristocratic times. He should have remembered what brought about the summoning of the Estates-General in 1789, to give but one example.20