the French Revolution had destroyed all that remained of castes and classes; it had abolished every kind of privilege, dissolved private associations, divided goods, diffused knowledge, and built a nation of citizens more like each other in their fortunes and their education than had ever before been seen on Earth ... it guaranteed us for ever against the worst of all tyrannies, that of a class; but at the same time it made our liberty more problematic.
It can be seen that Tocqueville’s mind is also moving forwards to the questions that he was to consider in the Ancien Régime; and perhaps the most impressive passage is a panegyric on liberty, which foreshadows the Souvenirs as well:
I believe firmly that it rests with our contemporaries to be great as well as prosperous on condition that they remain free. Nothing but liberty can call up in us those powerful feelings in common which carry away and support our souls beyond the ordinary; it alone can bring variety into the uniformity of our condition and the monotony of our manners; it alone can divert our minds from petty concerns, and elevate the goal of our desires.61
The elite of France, led by Queen Marie-Amélie, crowded the hall of the Institut under the famous cupola to hear Tocqueville’s address and Comte Molé’s reply of welcome; everyone was looking forward to a brilliant intellectual tournament. On the whole they were disappointed. As in the Chamber, Tocqueville was better read than heard, and the moment was not quite right for an anti-Napoleonic diatribe: the Emperor’s body had been brought back from St Helena and splendidly re-interred in the Invalides only fifteen months before. Many in the audience were frankly bored, and most thought that Molé had the better of the exchange. He too might be labelled a timeserver, and in defending Cessac and Napoleon he was defending himself. He did so with waspish elegance, but today his plea for the regime of Brumaire and the men who served it wears a commonplace air. Even in 1842 there were dissenters: Guizot’s verdict has been cited already, and Royer-Collard (not surprisingly) thought Tocqueville’s address much the better of the two, as he told the duchesse de Dino – no doubt he also told Tocqueville.
Some time before – after Tocqueville’s second speech on the Eastern question – the duchesse had asked Royer what he thought of Tocqueville as a politician. His response had been grudging: ‘He has a fund of honest motives which is not adequate for his purposes, and which he imprudently expends, but some remnants of which will always be left to him. I am afraid that in his anxiety to succeed he will wander into impossible paths by an attempt to reconcile irreconcilable elements.’ He offered one hand to the Left, said the sage, and another to the Right and would have offered a third hand if he had it. ‘Our hermit of the rue d’Enfer displays a considerable spice of malignity beneath his excellent qualities,’ commented the duchesse, who liked Tocqueville.62 But even Royer-Collard would not have accused Tocqueville of gesturing to all sides in his academic address. He had defied the worshippers of Napoleon and the supporters of the juste milieu and reaffirmed his commitment to uncompromisable principles of liberty and integrity. He had given meaning to his stance of political independence: we can see why his friends always stuck to him. At the same time we can see why independence turned so quickly into impotent isolation. Royer-Collard understood. He thought that the criticisms in Tocqueville’s speech had been too accurate to be popular: ‘the Emperor and the Empire have a greater influence over men’s minds than I was aware.’63
So Tocqueville’s political career was doomed to stagnate – until there was a new revolution.
* Jean-Charles, baron Rivet (1800–1872), formerly a prefect and conseiller d’état, entered the Chamber for the Corrèze in 1839. A fierce opponent of Guizot, he was defeated in the elections of 1846. Elected to the National Assembly in 1848, he was again defeated in 1849, and went back to the conseil d’état until the coup of 1851.
*A deputy voting with the ‘dynastic Left’ during the July Monarchy.
† Rémusat, perhaps jealous of Beaumont’s growing rapport with Thiers, dismissed him as capable only of making a very bad minister of the second rank.
* See above, p. 56–7.
* ‘He might profess to despise the arts of the politician, but he had them all. No Tammany boss would have worked harder to see that the votes were there. Without ceasing to think of himself as an aristocrat, he was prepared to stoop to conquer’ (Max Beloff, Times Literary Supplement, 12 July 1996).
* Charles X’s coup in 1830 had been in part an attempt to replace these new men with Ultras. It failed.
† The social structure of France under the July Monarchy is admirably described and analysed by Roger Price in The French Second Republic (London, 1972), 5–94.
* Not one of its author’s best-known works. AT read it in translation.
* The notebooks which he kept during his second journey to Algeria in 1846 have been almost entirely lost.
† Modern Skika.
‡ Razzia: the sort of bloody expeditions which, under General Bugeaud, the French used against the natives of Algeria to pre-empt, punish or merely discourage resistance.
* Algeria takes up 350 pages in the Oeuvres complètes, not counting letters.
† Thomas-Robert Bugeaud de la Piconnerie (1784–1849), duc d’Isly, marshal of France. The leader and commander of the French enterprise in Algeria for most of the July Monarchy. AT deeply disapproved of his methods of war and government.
*This passage – indeed, Malesherbes’s entire address – has a clear bearing on Book 3, ch. I, of his descendant’s Ancien Régime: ‘How, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the men of letters became the chief politicians of the country, and what resulted.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FEBRUARY
1847–48
Quoiqu’il n’y ait rien de plus clairement établi dans la législation de Dieu sur les sociétés humaines, que le rapport nécessaire qui unit les grands mouvements intellectuels aux grands mouvements politiques, les chefs des nations ne semblent jamais l’apercevoir que quand on le leur met sous les yeux.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE1 *
ALL OVER WESTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE the harvest of 1846 failed, destroyed by incessant rain and the potato blight which had already brought on the Great Famine in Ireland. In France, as so often before in the country’s history, the resultant dearth led to rage and riot: the price of bread at one moment rose to 90 centimes per kilo, inducing Victor Hugo to remark that ‘les jacqueries germent.’2 In the town of Buzençais (Indre) the outbreak of violence was particularly savage: after it had been repressed three of its leaders were guillotined. One of the objects of popular hatred there was a rich man called Chambert. On the evening of 13 January 1847 his servants were warned to make themselves scarce next day or they would share their master’s fate. Next day came, and so did the mob: the town and its biggest factory were sacked and Chambert’s house was attacked. A man called Venin (‘I am the chief brigand’) marched into the sitting-room; Chambert’s valet bravely knocked him down, but then thought better of it and ran away. Chambert, who had gone for his gun, came back and shot Venin dead. For this he was hunted from room to room and then from house to house; cornered at last, he was beaten to death, crying, ‘Mercy, friends!’ ‘You have no friends,’ was the reply; then the rioters went back to the Chambert house to deal with their victim’s old mother.
Fortunately for her a devoted servant, Madeleine Blanchet, stood by her. First she tried to get her mistress away to safety; but then, surrounded in the courtyard by a crowd which knocked Mme Chambert down and showed every sign of intending another murder, she turned at bay, shouting, ‘You won’t kill my mistress without killing me!’ and did her best to intercept the blows, although Mme Chambert urged her to escape: ‘Be off, my poor girl, let me die here, be off!’ Two men were touched by this heroism and helped Blanchet to take Mme Chambert to a place of safety; but the woman’s blood was up, she returned to the house, now being looted, to save what she could of the family’s possessions, and was surprisingly successful. News of her
exploits eventually reached the Académie Française, which annually awarded prizes for virtue. It decided to give Blanchet a special one of 5,000 francs and a gold medal. The speaker at the prize-giving (there were seven other awards) was Alexis de Tocqueville.3
Tocqueville hated having to deliver this oration, largely because he was expected to moralize at length (in the end he cut fourteen pages of his draft, and confined himself to describing the deeds of the prizewinners); but he told the Blanchet story thrillingly. The whole speech deserves a place of honour among his minor works: it is one of his few encounters with the actualities of life for the French poor. Thus he shows (perhaps without meaning to) how inescapable and crushing was the burden of debt on the working classes. Yet he does not mention what, to a later eye, is the most obvious lesson of the stories he tells: they all illustrate the inanity of the July regime, a government which apparently could not protect the rich and would not help the poor. It had no support among the workers of the towns and did not deserve any: even the Académie’s prizes came rather too late to be useful (if welcome), given that the recipients were being rewarded for the virtue of having already saved themselves or others.* Such reflections could have no place at a prize-giving; but only ten weeks previously Tocqueville, serving his term as rotatory director of the Académie and president of the Institut, had made a speech formally congratulating the King on his name-day and expressing the hope that he would long enjoy the glory of reigning by the consent of his intelligent people. In his reply Louis-Philippe, among other banalities, congratulated France on enjoying ‘peace, order and liberty’. (It was on this occasion that Rémusat made Tocqueville laugh indecorously by murmuring in his ear that ‘the loyal citizen must be suitably moved, but the academician suffers.’4 ) There is no hint that anyone in the charmed circle as yet foresaw trouble.
But the July Monarchy was increasingly unstable. Its founders had tried to do for France what has been done successfully in many other European countries – Belgium, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and, above all, Spain, a state with as turbulent a history as its northern neighbour, where the Bourbons have frequently been dislodged, but still reign. The Spanish instance shows not so much that murderous disagreements may destroy monarchies, as that powerful popular consensus can renew them whatever the difficulties. The July Monarchy never won such a consensus, though it had much intelligent support. Disagreement among its leaders helped to bring it down; but so, perhaps, did their agreement. The rationale of the regime was that France should be governed by its wealthiest and best-trained citizens – the notables. Property qualifications for the vote and for eligibility to the Chamber, measured by the amount of tax paid by each individual, were slightly easier than they had been under the Restoration, when the electorate never numbered as many as 100,000 persons. In 1831 that of the new regime comprised 166,583 voters, who by 1847 had increased to 241,000 – but they were still less than 3 per cent of the adult male population, whereas in Britain, after the Great Reform Act, the electorate was, roughly, 10 per cent of adult males, and in the United States every adult white male citizen had the vote. Thus the vast majority of Frenchmen were still barred from any direct share in power, and a growing number actively resented the fact.
Here was a threat to the regime which could never be disarmed. The obvious course would have been to extend the franchise somewhat, but no single small extension would alter the fact that the majority of citizens was excluded. On the other hand a bold extension – a turn perhaps to universal male suffrage – would overthrow the very foundation of the regime, its insistence on what the notables called ‘political capacity’, on their right, along with the petty oligarchs of town and country, to monopolize power. Politicians who took this view, who in this way were essentially conservative, held office from first to last under Louis-Philippe and refused to contemplate any radical reform (and in 1846 Richard Cobden, the leader of the Anti-Corn Law League, was astonished at the failure of the French opposition to demand more than insignificant changes).5 The majority of the monarchy’s supporters, the so-called party of resistance, would not tolerate any change at all. So the opposing ‘party of movement’, which never won a majority in the Chamber, was eventually driven to employ tactics which threatened the stability or even the very existence of the regime: in no other way could it hope either to win power or push through any new laws which it might think necessary – laws about schools, the abolition of slavery, prison reform, and so on.
This state of affairs meant that the monarchy came to be largely at the mercy of events. It was constantly jolted by international emergencies, riots, economic crises and attempts on the life of Louis-Philippe (‘It is only in hunting me that there is no close season,’ he observed),6 which, cumulatively, left it greatly weakened. It was not helped by its absolute refusal to make concessions. The King would not hear of diplomatic initiatives which might lead to war; Guizot would not (or at any rate did not) countenance any extension of the franchise. To secure their hold on power he and Duchâtel perfected le système Guizot, which seemed to the opposition to be a perversion of the work of the July Revolution. The 1840 ministry (Soult–Guizot) relied on the September press laws and on a system of electoral fraud and corruption which, while not particularly surprising or shocking to anyone with some knowledge of English parliamentary history or American machine politics, scandalized earnest liberals like Tocqueville. By 1846 the ministry was so practised in its black arts that, in a fatal triumph which broke all precedents, it won a general election with a majority of 100 seats. A real organized conservative party seemed at last to have emerged. But the ministry was as wedded to inertia as ever, and no countervailing liberal party arose to force it into action: as Guizot remarked, there were no French Whigs, only a hopelessly divided opposition which had as one of its components an increasingly vigorous republican faction, although it was illegal to advocate republicanism. The conservatives began to lapse back into factionalism themselves.
In these circumstances the individual traits of the political leaders counted for little, although as Tocqueville liked to point out they were collectively as distinguished a generation as France had known. Guizot was one of the greatest of French parliamentarians; Thiers, for all his attitudinizing and eccentricities (‘In Thiers there were unplumbed depths of shallowness,’ says Douglas Johnson) and the unswerving egoism which made him so bad a party leader, yet kept the idea of constitutional opposition alive by his vigour, eloquence and intelligence. Odilon Barrot was a lesser man but a good speaker and a conscientious organizer. The stormy petrel Lamartine was even more egoistic than Thiers; yet if his inconsistency and opportunism deprived him of any solid influence in the Chamber, his eloquence and radicalism won him a great following in the country at large. But all the activity of these men was a winnowing of the wind. No long-term achievements seemed possible; politically they all lived from day to day. According to Tocqueville public opinion generally was sunk in apathy. The victory of 1846 confirmed Louis-Philippe and Guizot in their fatal complacency, reminiscent of that of Charles X and Polignac.7
Tocqueville had no such reason for short-sightedness, and during the summer of 1847 he began to feel seriously anxious about the future. Characteristically, he was less perturbed by the economic crisis and by the increasing illiberalism of the regime, than by the movement of ideas.
At the end of July he and Marie retired as usual to their chateau. The only writing which Tocqueville had in hand was an essay on the history of Cherbourg for a volume edited by Aristide Guilbert: it was essentially another move in his long and still unsuccessful campaign to bring a railway to the Cotentin. He attended the conseil-général and, we may presume, cultivated his constituents. The result was a slowly growing uneasiness about the political outlook. France, he told Nassau Senior, was peaceful and fairly prosperous (this statement was erroneous); but although everything seemed calm, many minds were starting to think that the present system could not last. Tocqueville did not at firs
t agree (what could be put in its place?) but he never stopped saying that for seventeen years the government had been corrupting ‘the middle class’ – by which, as we have seen, he meant the pays légal – turning it into ‘a petty, corrupt, vulgar aristocracy’ which it was degrading to be governed by. If this opinion became general it might lead to great misfortune, he thought (but he went on propagating it). He wrote to Corcelle:
I don’t know if your neighbourhood resembles mine. Here, people’s minds are calm, even apathetic, little concerned with politics, with no marked liking for any idea or any man, but surprisingly given over to a deep, unaggressive contempt for all ministers and administrators, and infested with the unshakeable conviction that everything is for sale or may be got by favour and that political immorality is the general, habitual atmosphere in which the political world moves.*
Nobody wanted to do anything about it, but as Tocqueville pondered these attitudes he began to be alarmed. He did not see how a government with so little support could last much longer: ‘for the first time since the Revolution of July I fear that we may yet have to live through some more revolutionary trials.’ He did not see when or how it could happen, but a storm would arise sooner or later, unless something happened to revive public morals.8
He and his correspondents, Corcelle and Beaumont, were shocked by two great scandals which burst on France that summer: two former Orleanist ministers were sent to prison for having taken bribes, and the duc de Choiseul-Praslin murdered his duchesse (the daughter of Marshal Sébastiani, another ex-minister) in every circumstance of incompetent cruelty. The duc was allowed to kill himself with arsenic before being brought to trial, which, as everyone noticed, was not what would have happened to a working man. The affair, said Tocqueville, gave him nightmares; worse, as he wrote to Beaumont, ‘it is impossible to suppose that this string of criminal, shameful deeds erupting in the midst of the upper classes doesn’t demonstrate a profound sickness in national morality and, especially, that it won’t weaken the ascendancy of society’s summit over its base.’ In short, the notables were discrediting themselves. Beaumont, whose family had known and liked the duchesse, quite agreed: ‘it is all too clear that the public sensation has only been so great because it has roused in the masses the one revolutionary passion remaining to them; that of equality.’ He also denounced Lamartine’s History of the Girondins, which had just appeared and was selling thousands of copies: ‘The book is perfidious in that while it judges severely the crimes of which it paints the most terrible picture, it at the same time always apologizes for the criminals’ (Chateaubriand was more succinct: ‘The miscreant! He has gilded the guillotine!’).9 *
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