The full details of this sad, predictable comedy need not be chronicled; but one of its scenes is so revealing not only of Tocqueville’s character, but of the most important aspects of his life as a deputy, that it merits description here.
In the spring of 1841 he and Beaumont fulfilled a longstanding scheme and made a journey to Algeria. It was quite in the spirit of their voyages to America and England, for Beaumont hoped to get a book out of it, and Tocqueville to satisfy his curiosity and pursue his political education; but as a variant they took Hippolyte de Tocqueville with them. The trip would not be without its dangers. The conquest of the country was still far from complete; no European was safe without a military escort any distance beyond the principal towns. The documents suggest that the travellers’ wives did not approve of the adventure: Tocqueville may have been glad to get away from his for a while. The journey was supposed to last two months. Tocqueville, inevitably, was seasick on the voyage from Toulon (Hippolyte, unused to the sea, was much iller); nevertheless he was all eager attention as they approached Algiers, where to their surprise and joy they were met by Corcelle, who joined the party. Tocqueville was unprepared for what he found on shore: a sampler of all races, costumes and languages, ‘Europeans, Asiatics, Arabs, Moors, Kabyles, Negroes, each with their own outlook and all confined here in a place too small to hold them’; a town of labyrinths, where half the houses were in ruins and the other half were being rebuilt. Hammering was incessant. It all reminded Tocqueville, he said, of Cincinnati (perhaps the most unexpected remark he ever made).45 The weather was agreeable, and all auspices seemed fair. He started with a will to take notes in the old style.
The 1841 Algerian notebook might have been his masterpiece in that line;* not only was he as observant and intelligent as ever but, no doubt because all talk was in French, he was able to reproduce the utterance of the men he interviewed more vividly:
[ Philippeville, 30† May.] Lunch with the commanding officer: he is a colonel.
‘Nothing, gentlemen, but force and terror can succeed with these people. The other day, I went on a razzia.‡ I’m sorry you weren’t there. There was this tribe which allowed some men who had just been stealing from us and murdering us to escape through its territory. I must add that I didn’t want to go to extremes. After I had killed five or six men, I spared the cattle. There was even a tribesman, one of our friends, from whom they had stolen two mules, I ordered another Arab of whom we had reason to complain to give him two cows. Only terror, gentlemen, works with these people. The other day there was a murder on the highway. An Arab suspect was brought before me. I interrogated him and then I had his head cut off. You will see his head on the Constantine gate. As to your so-called colonists at Philippeville, they are rabble; men who think the Army is here just to make their fortune; thieves who would be nothing without us yet who in spite of that I can hardly get to stand guard-duty. Yesterday, I put in a requisition of their carts and horses to bring in the hay and I announced that the first who refused would be sent until further orders to the blockhaus of the Apes (that’s a blockhaus stuck away on a parched, burnt-over mountain).’
All that was said by a man who had the air of being the best chap in the world. A sailor who was there, and who owned some land, replied vigorously that it was wrong to treat the colonists in this way; that without the colony there was nothing stable or profitable in Africa; that there could be no colony without land and so it would have been better to dispossess the tribes closest at hand in order to put Europeans in their place.
And I, listening mournfully to all this, asked myself what could be the future of a country given over to such men and where would this cascade of violence and injustice end, if not in the revolt of the natives and the ruin of the Europeans?46
It will be seen that Tocqueville had not lost his gift for seizing the essential; unfortunately, where Algeria was concerned, he refused to believe what his intelligence told him. It is clear enough, 170 years after it began, that the French invasion and occupation of Algeria was a catastrophe for all concerned, the evil consequences of which are still being felt; and much of the unwisdom of the enterprise was already evident for those who cared to look (Corcelle was particularly dismayed by the cruelty of the razzias and the genocidal language – to use a modern term – of the press in Algiers).47 But Tocqueville could not or would not make the inferences which leap to the modern eye. He studied, he spoke, he wrote voluminously about Algeria;* he was fiercely critical of misgovernment there, and after his second journey, in 1846, succeeded in driving Bugeaud out of his command;† but he could never admit, even to himself, that the whole adventure was a horrible mistake. On the contrary, he said in the Chamber that however much he disagreed with the Soult–Guizot ministry on other matters, he was happy to collaborate with it on Algerian policy, and this olive-branch cannot be dismissed as merely careerist. Tocqueville, it must be said plainly, was a nineteenth-century French nationalist. He was fascinated by the growth of British rule in India, and thought seriously of writing a book on the subject. He admired the Anglo-Saxons so much that he may reasonably be labelled an Anglophile. But he resented the ascendancy of the British Empire; he opposed the Anglo-French entente cordiale which was the central achievement of Louis-Philippe’s diplomacy; he wished that Napoleon had won at Waterloo; he was eager to assert French power and independence at every opportunity, and if a colonial empire was the way to restore French primacy, or at any rate to catch up with the British, he would enthusiastically support it. Besides, he accepted the ancient, ruinous argument of Pericles: ‘You now hold your empire down by force: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.’48 French prestige was at stake in Algeria, and if necessary hecatombs must be paid for it. Tocqueville should have known better, but the only alternative to Bugeaud’s military government which he offered was the equally disastrous policy of colonization, of settling Algeria with Europeans. He knew what a settler society was like, for he had visited and criticized both Ireland and the American South, but he would not admit that France in Algeria was manufacturing her own equivalent of the Irish problem.
It was a matter of the emotions. Every so often common sense, or prophetic insight, broke through: when a choice had to be made he always opposed war, and in his enormous official report on Algeria in 1847 he said that if the original inhabitants of Algeria were treated only as so many obstacles to be driven off or trodden under, if they were to be strangled and smothered rather than educated towards civilization, then Algeria would become, sooner or later, a battleground where the two peoples would fight each other mercilessly, and where one of them would perish: ‘God spare us, gentlemen, from such a fate!’49 But he never acted as if he believed his own perceptions.50
Nationalism was the oxygen of nineteenth-century Europe, or perhaps I should say the chronic influenza. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were largely expressions of French nationalism; nationalism largely shaped the history of all other European countries, and of the United States, from 1815 or earlier, and culminated in the Great War of 1914. A biographical explanation of Tocqueville’s attitude may therefore seem superfluous; he shared the assumptions of his generation and could scarcely have avoided doing so. Over time he grew more realistic, although he remained romantically patriotic. But if we are to understand him, we should perhaps remind ourselves that he was still Chateaubriand’s kinsman and that he had a deep devotion to the French writers of the seventeenth century. Molière, Pascal, Bossuet, Racine: these characterized his country’s greatness, and his deepest wish seems to have been that France should attain that level again. The distance between that wish and international assertiveness may seem wide, but the century of Pascal was also the century of Louis XIV, of whom Tocqueville deeply disapproved, but who probably influenced him, as Napoleon did, more than he ever realized.51
His Algerian notebook was cut short when he fell ill. Although he had manfully lied to Marie on the topic, his health had been getti
ng steadily worse from the moment that he arrived in Algeria – the usual intestinal trouble, no doubt. When the party reached Mostaganem it lodged with Bugeaud, who invited his guests to go with him into the interior on a razzia against Abd-el-Kadr, the leader of the Algerian resistance. Tocqueville longed to go, and it would have been an exciting experience: the column fought three successful battles before it got back to Mostaganem; it sacked the stronghold of Tackdempt and occupied Mascara.52 But Tocqueville’s friends were sure that he was not fit for such an adventure, and persuaded him to be sensible. Beaumont stayed to look after him while Hippolyte and Corcelle went with the army. Tocqueville resisted his weakness for another two weeks, but at Camp Eddis, outside Philippeville, the day after his lunch with the colonel, he went down with a bad attack of dysentery: he twice lost consciousness and at one point had to be carried on a stretcher; it was days before he was free of the bloody flux. Beaumont nursed him as devotedly as ever. They decided to return to France as soon as Tocqueville was able to travel, and arrived at Toulon early in the morning of 12 June. Tocqueville wrote at once to Marie, telling the whole story, and concluding: ‘I am no longer exactly ill, but am still in pain and excessively feeble.’ He and Beaumont, he said, would return to Paris in short stages.53
It was a miserable story. Perhaps the most striking thing about it today is the nature of Tocqueville’s response to his misfortunes. The departure of Hippolyte and Corcelle with Bugeaud made him intensely wretched for days. It was years since he had been so upset. He kept on asking himself if he had done the right thing by staying behind, although his reason and his friends shouted yes! ‘Instinct revolts. This is the first time that I ever gave up a scheme that was both silly and dangerous. That worries me. I think one must beware of a common sense which is too inclined to avoid dangers, even useless ones.’ Tocqueville was now in his late thirties, but the spoiled child in him was not quite outgrown, nor the rashly eager traveller observed by Beaumont in America: ‘Instead of sparing his feeble frame, he seemed at heart to want to submit it to the roughest and even the most dangerous tests.’ Tocqueville sadly conceded that dangerous journeys were not for married men in weak health; but he hated the concession.54
He displayed his character even more vividly in the letters which he wrote to Marie after his return to France. Even from Algeria he sent letters full of sexual longing and frustration: ‘Ma petite amie chérie, everything in me wants you, my heart, and also I assure you my senses. This burning climate excites them but all the same I have been up to this minute completely chaste, I give you my most sacred word of honour. Not only have I not been unfaithful, which is no great merit, given the life I lead, but I have not even succumbed to desire in another way, which is more meritorious. Guess how delightedly I will throw myself into your arms.’ But it struck him that she might be menstruating when he got home. She must write at once about her timetable. ‘Think of me, love me, because I adore you.’55
He was even more emphatic as he and Beaumont inched their way across the Midi. His illness had destroyed the tone of his mind; he fretted about his body: ‘It is a machine which needs rest, but unhappily it is in the clutches of a mind which rest murders.’ He fretted about Beaumont: nobody, except Marie herself, could have looked after him better, but he must be bitterly disappointed, for the need to nurse Tocqueville had made it impossible to work on his book. Above all he thought of Marie and sex. He meant to spend a day or two staying with his father in Paris, so as not to be a complete wreck when he got home; he still wanted to know when Marie’s menses began and ended. ‘Mon amie adorée, how ravishing it will be to fold you in my arms. And won’t that moment seem sweet to you? Do you love me as passionately as I suppose and as I love you? ... I must break off to catch the post.’56
His health and spirits revived markedly as he went up the Rhone; he reached Paris, and received dramatic news: Lacuée de Cessac, of the Académie Française, was dead, and the obvious candidate to succeed him was Tocqueville, who had yearned for a fauteuil ever since his first success as an author. He instantly decided to spend a few extra days in Paris, in order to make the required visits to the available academicians, and hastily informed Marie (‘a new ennui has befallen me’).57 He did not arrive in Tocqueville until 30 June, when, contrary to his hopes, he met an extremely frosty reception.
Marie had reason on her side. She had been without her husband for over two months, and had had to endure many small annoyances. He had nearly died (she must have been appallingly worried). He had sent her letters boiling with a lover’s impatience and then, at the last moment, put off his return in order to linger in Paris. No doubt she thought the worst, but matters were bad enough without that. She did not forgive him for three days.
When she allowed herself to calm down, she must have reflected that, given the circumstances and Tocqueville’s character, little less than the knowledge that she was dying would have brought him away from Paris and his academic campaign. Whether the Académie deserved its prestige is a point not worth discussing. Tocqueville hungered for certified fame and merit, and to become an Immortal was an even better mark of status than favourable book-reviews and steady sales. He knew what Malesherbes had said at his reception in 1775 after he had been elected without competition: that the Académie was a tribunal, independent of all authorities, and respected by all authorities:
which values all talents, which judges all kinds of merit, and in this enlightened century, a century in which every citizen can speak to the entire Nation by means of the press, those who have the gift of teaching men, or of moving them – the Men of Letters, in short – are to our dispersed people what the orators of Rome and Athens were to their peoples assembled.58 *
This was a mission worth aspiring to. Besides, Cessac’s death had created two vacancies in the Institut: he had also been a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. Tocqueville was determined to get this other place for Beaumont. So he remained in Paris and, in both matters, campaigned successfully. It is to be hoped that Marie came to see that it is useless to punish people for misdeeds which they truly cannot help (however, next time Tocqueville went away to Algiers, she accompanied him).
He spent the summer and autumn recuperating slowly at his chateau: it took much longer than he had hoped. In December he was elected to the Académie with twenty votes out of the thirty cast; a week later Beaumont was chosen to replace Cessac at the Sciences Politiques. During the next four months one of Tocqueville’s chief preoccupations was the writing of his reception speech.
It was not altogether easy. The custom of the academy required that he speak a eulogy of his predecessor, and Cessac was an unrewarding subject, a general and administrator who devotedly served every régime from the old monarchy to the first Restoration. At first Tocqueville thought of humanizing him with personal anecdotes but could think of none, though he had known him at the Sciences Politiques, for he had given only the impression of duty personified. He consulted Thiers (political disputes were not allowed to sully academic relations), who was happy to send Tocqueville a letter to Cessac from Napoleon himself; but it began, ‘My dear Cessac, you are a fool,’ so that was no good.59 Royer-Collard had a disobliging and therefore unusable anecdote of Cessac (who became pious in his old age) worrying on his deathbed about his sexual sins, but not at all about having been the official who annually supplied Napoleon with hundreds of thousands of conscripts to destroy in Russia and Germany. But Royer also made the excellent suggestion that Tocqueville should use his oration as an opportunity to pass philosophical judgement on the Empire and its servants, those men of whom Cessac was the type, ‘the great citizens of absolute power’.60 Tocqueville seized this idea gratefully, and carried it out exactly. In this way academic necessity briefly got him back to what posterity must surely regard as his proper business.
It was a supremely elegant performance, which reveals new shades of meaning at each re-reading. Tocqueville did his best for poor Cessac (‘he became a Christian as
fervent as he was sincere’) but could not disguise his opinion that his predecessor was an unimaginative timeserver (‘he served God as he had done the Emperor)’. Napoleon and his regime were treated candidly:
He was as great as a man can be without virtue.
The singularity of his genius justified in the eyes of his contemporaries and as it were legitimated their extreme subservience; the hero hid the despot; and it was possible to think that in obeying him one submitted less to his power than to the man. But after Napoleon had finished with enlightening and animating the new world that he had created, nothing remained of him but his despotism ...
The chief interest of the piece is that although Tocqueville keeps himself out of view (‘there is something yet more modest than speaking modestly about oneself, and that is to say nothing at all on the subject’), the discourse is a distillation of his profoundest thought. It was a suitable offering to the Académie: the Immortals might as well know what they were getting; but it was also a valuable exercise for Tocqueville himself, a moment when he thought through his past and present work, and intuited where he was going to go next. De la démocratie en Amérique, or rather its doctrines, frequently makes itself felt: for instance, in explaining what he took to be the central achievement of the French Revolution, Tocqueville at last gives a sound working definition of égalité des conditions:
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