Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  It must be allowed that during the Mehemet Ali crisis Tocqueville showed himself to be a nationalist who was not above hankering for cheap diplomatic victories. He learned better during the next few years. But as we have seen, his chief concern was different. The July Monarchy seemed to be the liberals’ last chance. If it failed the only alternatives were republicanism or Bonapartism. Tocqueville did not yet take the threat of the latter seriously, but republicanism deeply worried him, for it meant, he thought, nothing but revolution. For this reason he was sincere in the support he proclaimed for the Orleanist monarchy, but he erred in not seeing what was required of him if that support was to be of any use. Louis-Philippe had a claim on his loyalty, though he never really acknowledged it. He seems to have supposed that it was sufficient to assert publicly the necessity of Orleanism without welcoming it or, in any but the most perfunctory sense, adopting it (his haverings about accepting the Legion of Honour will be remembered). As time went on he was given ample reason to oppose the Guizot ministry for its complacent inertia. He had the right to attack the ministry for what he thought to be its corruption and reliance on jobbery, and to try to defeat it. He was entitled to despise Louis-Philippe as a mean and pompous usurper (thereby perhaps doing something to assuage his feeling of guilt for having abandoned the Bourbons). What, as an avowed Orleanist, he was not wise to do was to merge all these criticisms into a single sustained and permanent onslaught. To the extent that he had any influence, his campaign (in which he was at one with most of the opposition) could only weaken the regime which he thought necessary.

  It is true that his influence until almost the end was small, largely restricted to a handful of deputies: Corcelle, Armand Dufaure, Victor Lanjuinais, Rivet. And by 1847 he had begun to make the necessary (from an Orleanist point of view) distinctions. His hope was to bring down the minister, not the monarch. It cannot seriously be argued that anything which he did or did not do significantly helped to bring on the revolution of 1848.

  Indeed, it was largely Guizot’s fault that Tocqueville did not reach an understanding with him. As Beaumont was to observe, Tocqueville was not born for opposition: ‘Tocqueville was eminently practical, to the great astonishment, or great annoyance, of those who hoped that the man who excelled in theory would be inadequate in action.’30 During his years as a deputy he was constantly in demand, whether as committee member or rapporteur when policy had to be considered – not merely on his old speciality, prison reform, but on slavery and the slave trade and, above all, on the government of Algeria. He was not his father’s son for nothing: in 1842 he was elected to the conseil-général of the Manche, and thereafter wrote a string of reports on subjects of local importance, especially on the great project of the Cherbourg railway. He strongly disapproved of the system of electing deputies from arrondissements, chiefly because the smaller ones (many had no more than 300 electors each) were so easy for the ministry to manipulate by fear or favour, but also because it would be easier for deputies from a department to co-operate on issues which affected all arrondissements if they were elected by the department as a whole. But while the system lasted he threw himself zealously into the work of modernizing the life and institutions of the Manche, whether he was in Paris, Saint-Lô (where the conseil-général met) or at Valognes. Yet a sense of frustration grew as he discovered how little he was actually able to achieve, in spite of all his reports.

  Beaumont was surely right in thinking that Tocqueville would have made an excellent minister; Guizot’s tactical obstinacy and ideological rigidity excluded that possibility, as it did so much that would have been useful to France; but it is worth noting that Tocqueville was on good terms with Duchâtel, the minister of the interior and Guizot’s right-hand man (there is a surprisingly friendly sketch of him in the Souvenirs, that gallery of acid portraits). Politically, Tocqueville is best described as an active, improving conservative, even if he hung the word ‘liberal’ round his neck.31 Were there any reasons other than those already given why he could not work with the conservative government?

  Tocqueville, in effect, asked himself this very question in 1850, when he began the Souvenirs, and answered it, characteristically, from a very lofty perch. An old idea reappears in a new guise. The period of French history from 1789 to 1830 was, he says, a unity, that of the struggle between the ancien régime, dominated by the aristocracy, and the new, emergent order dominated by what he calls ‘the middle class’. In 1830 the new order achieved its definitive victory, so that all political power and all the organs of government were taken over by the bourgeoisie, to the exclusion of everyone beneath it and all those who had formerly been above it. Tocqueville had the lowest opinion of this new ruling class:

  The particular spirit of the middle class became the general spirit of government; it dominated foreign policy as much as the nation’s domestic business: an active, industrious spirit, often shameless, usually well-behaved, bold sometimes from vanity and selfishness, timid by instinct, moderate in everything, except in its taste for material well-being, and mediocre [that favourite word of reproach]; a spirit which, mingled with that of the people or the aristocracy, can achieve marvels, but which on its own will only bring about a government-without virtue or greatness. Master of everything as no aristocracy ever has been or perhaps ever will be, the middle class, which must be called the governing class, being entrenched in power and, soon afterwards, in selfishness, took on an air of private enterprise, its members devoting scarcely a thought to public business except as a means of profit for private interests and happily forgetting in its petty prosperity the common people of France.32

  Having thus set the scene Tocqueville next gives a memorably penetrating and unkind description of Louis-Philippe (‘He was the accident which made the illness mortal’), painting him as deplorably middle class, in spite of his illustrious descent, and as therefore a wholly inadequate king.33

  These unkind remarks force on us several reflections. First, they are not merely inadequate but profoundly inaccurate as an account of the July regime. There was no great sociological shift: the men who ruled France under Louis-Philippe, the notables, were in terms of class, wealth, opinion, origins and careers substantially identical with those who had ruled the country since the XVIII Brumaire or even the fall of Robespierre.* The July settlement had made some minor changes in the pays légal, and the voluntary emigration to the interior of most legitimists made more, but still nearly a quarter of the deputies after 1830 were landed proprietors, as against nearly a third under the Restoration.34 And the pays légal was far too small and unrepresentative to be termed a class, or to be said to embody the power of a new class (had it been big enough to do so, the regime would probably have lasted much longer). If the term ‘middle class’ means anything, it cannot be said that the middle class ruled Orleanist France, or that the ruling class was bourgeois. The structure of society was far too complex for such generalizations.†

  What, then, did Tocqueville mean? In part, I think, he was offering not so much a theory of the July Monarchy as one of the nature of the French Revolution, which he presents as a long-contested but ultimately victorious struggle of the Third Estate against the Second (as usual, he ignores the First Estate, the clergy). By ‘middle class’ he means the Third Estate: in terms of 1789, the grande bourgeoisie. Seen in this light his usage is intelligible, if obsolete, and may serve as a reminder that the social sciences were still in their infancy. (A similar objection might be made to the terminology of the Communist Manifesto, although Marx and Engels made a huge intellectual advance by tying the concept of class to that of systems of production.) It must also be said that it suited Tocqueville to present the French Revolution as merely a struggle between estates: he did not go so far as Guizot, who in effect believed that the victory of the Third was the consummation of French history, but his interpretation did enable him, like Guizot, to claim the legacy of the Revolution for himself and his kind, and in its name to resist other claims and ideas. He w
as not merely snobbish: he began the Souvenirs during a period of more than usual bitterness, illness and discouragement. It was a relief to discharge his bile on paper. But the most important point to register is that, as so often, his views were not original; in fact they were, by 1848, commonplace. Louis-Philippe himself, who in the early days of his reign liked to pose as the Citizen-King and to be seen walking about the streets of Paris carrying his umbrella (thereby making a gift to caricaturists), was in part to blame for Tocqueville’s impression. Disdain for the bourgeoisie was part of the cant of the time: not just the bohemians’ disdain for respectability, but a common belief on the Left that Guizot’s followers were nothing but sordid scramblers after place. Tocqueville merely uttered this belief with unusual verve, in his speeches as well as in the Souvenirs.

  Most of the time he had little doubt as to its validity. As deputy he was a constant target of petitioners, and so were his colleagues. Returning to the Chamber in January 1842 for a new session, he felt able to appeal to their common experience:

  I ask all of you, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart – I ask you if, fresh from your constituencies, you have not noticed everywhere – everywhere – not just here and there, but everywhere – that the desire for jobs has become a universal passion, the dominant passion, la passion-mère (Cries of Yes yes!); that it has crept at the same time into all classes, even the agricultural classes which until now have rejected it, thanks to their energetic and healthy manners ...

  (This remark did not go down well in his constituency: he had to assure the voters of Valognes that he had not meant them.) The pays légal, he said, now tended to think that the best thing about the right to vote was the opportunity it gave to obtain an official salary.35

  It may be said, flatly, that this picture of the July regime, though it became widely diffused, thanks to Tocqueville and others, was a gross exaggeration if not an outright libel on the French people, and that even to the degree that it was true it lacked the significance which Tocqueville attributed to it. He occasionally had doubts himself. During the autumn of 1842 he began to read Tobias Smollett’s History of England from the Revolution to the Death of George II* and was struck not only by the amazing selfishness, corruption and lack of principle of the political society described, but also by how little it mattered in the end: the free institutions of Britain enabled the nation to achieve prodigies. ‘I confess that this reading has led me to wonder if we have not been judging our own time and country with excessive severity,’ he wrote to Kergorlay; and he began to realize that struggle, conflict and passion were natural and necessary in free countries.36 It was an important discovery, but the cry of corruption was far too valuable in the battle with Guizot to be discarded, and Tocqueville maintained it to the end. Had the Communist Manifesto been published a year or two sooner than it was he might have seized with delight on its remark that ‘The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.’ But even if Tocqueville and Marx had agreed on a proposition it might still be untrue; and Marx, if in the Manifesto he was not merely indulging in rhetorical exaggeration, quickly modified his position, writing in The Class Struggles in France that ‘It was not the French bourgeoisie that ruled under Louis-Philippe, but one faction of it ... the so-called finance aristocracy’; he divided the rest of the population into the industrial bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry and the ‘so-called men of talent’ – a crude but serviceable subclassification.37

  Tocqueville’s critique was an inadequate account of the French Revolution, and it did not get to the bottom of what was wrong with the Orleanist regime. Politically it was and remained a sterile attitude, although by 1844 Tocqueville was gradually moving towards partnership with Odilon Barrot, and was carrying his little group of associates with him. Nor did his efforts in committee bear much fruit: slavery was not abolished, prison reform lagged almost as much as ever, the problem of poverty was completely neglected.38 Worst of all was the slow erosion of such democratic liberties as the July Revolution had introduced. Tocqueville particularly resented the September laws (liberty of the press and of association being causes very dear to the author of the Démocratie). It is not surprising that he frequently felt trapped and oppressed by his life in politics. In 1842 he wrote to Marie from Paris wondering if he was really capable of achieving anything: ‘I fear that I am unsuited to this life which I sought, this life of daily effort, this life where I have to be always ready, alert, decisive, fertile in expedients. It is all so removed from my character, which is melancholy, lazy (except when moved by passion), despondent, deep but narrow.’

  It is not entirely easy to recognize Tocqueville in this description: he was the most active of men, and the range of his political interests was extraordinary. But he had more than politics on his mind that summer. He did not want Marie to think that he was enjoying himself: ‘All my friends dined out today, mon amie chérie; I am alone. I have just been for a melancholy walk in the Tuileries. At last I have got back and am writing to you ...’ His marriage was in trouble.39

  Kergorlay was probably the only person besides themselves who knew. On a visit to Paris in February 1841 he had found his two friends bitterly at odds. At some stage Alexis had been casually unfaithful and Marie had found out. They started to quarrel, and did so again and again for the next five years or so. It was a miserable time for both of them.

  The fact that quarrelling was possible came as a nasty surprise. Tocqueville’s volatility meant that he could never be an easy husband, but Marie must have been well aware of this before she married him. ‘She ate,’ says Rédier, ‘so slowly as to drive her ardent table-companion to despair; one day, when she had not done nibbling at some pie, Alexis got up, took away her plate and threw it on the floor. “Some more pie,” she said calmly to the servant.’40 She could handle that sort of thing; she may even have found it comic. She was usually patient and self-controlled: years later Tocqueville said of her, ‘She does not get upset for nothing; she knows how to let tranquil days and lucky circumstances unfold in perfect peace and quiet.’ This placidity was one of the things that he most loved in her. But as he also said, Marie thought and felt passionately, and sometimes responded violently to misfortune.41 She responded violently to her husband’s philandering. Kergorlay, who behaved throughout the business with marvellous tact, intelligence and affection, warned her against throwing away the treasure of her unusually close union with her husband because of an injury which was without real importance, since Alexis was devoted to her; but it was long before she could absorb the point.42 She herself was not a person to do anything lightly, so she found it difficult to believe that Tocqueville’s diversions meant little. The episode, and the prospects it opened, hit straight at her insecurity: a childless woman in a foreign land, becoming middle-aged (though she had not yet entered the menopause). She had other sorrows at about this time: the deaths of her father, two uncles, and two brothers, all occurring between 1840 and 1842. It is easy to imagine her state of mind, though we have no first-hand account of it. She could not rise above her troubles, and she found that she could no longer trust her husband, or his passionate avowals of love.

  He, for his part, was distressed and bewildered, somewhat like a child being punished for a naughtiness that it does not understand. At one stage he wrote to Kergorlay:

  It is quite clear that there is something in me which cannot satisfy Marie and that she can find no happiness except on one condition which I can’t meet except by changing from top to toe, a difficult undertaking. I love her ardently, even passionately, I confide in her unreservedly; I desire her happiness and work for it as much as is in me. For me she is, what I think few women have ever been to a man, the prime cause not only of happiness, but of tranquillity, of all endeavour, almost of life itself, yet all that is not enough for her. She would like not only to command, as a rule, my desires, but to keep them prisoner, to suppress them, so to speak. If she has not that,
she has nothing ... There is no hope of making her see reason on the point. The passage of time seems to make her more and more irritable about the episode ...

  He began to think that he was going to have to choose between wrecking his marriage and perhaps the life of the creature he loved most in the world, or somehow taming the blind instinct which from time to time drove him crazy. Yet ‘How could I manage to stop that sort of boiling of the blood that meeting a woman, whatever she may be, still causes me, as it did twenty years ago?’ The difficulty was poisoning his days, even when he and Marie found themselves beginning to be on good terms again.43

  The next few years were marked by the usual incidentals of such a story. Marie kept on saying that he did not love her; he kept on swearing that he did, putting all his eloquence into his pleas, which may have made her distrust him even more. She wrote spiteful letters, he wrote wounded, reproachful ones, which did not always conceal a desire to have the last word. As might have been predicted, money questions made things worse: when Tocqueville discouraged Marie from joining him in Paris for the short parliamentary session in the summer of 1842, on the grounds that they couldn’t afford it, she furiously inferred that he was enjoying himself with other women (not unlikely: at about this time a police spy reported to Guizot that he had seen Tocqueville picking up a woman on the Champs-Elysées).44 Kergorlay, in whom both confided, did his utmost to reconcile them. And eventually hostilities died away, as their need for each other overbore all other considerations, although Marie continued to feel insecure and Tocqueville to think that he was hard done by.