Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Events would soon confirm that these various episodes did indeed portend a great crisis, but Tocqueville’s apprehensions were aroused even more by his reading. Alerted, perhaps, by the extraordinary success of Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie, he began to study socialist authors such as Louis Blanc, François Fourier and Robert Owen. In the autumn of 1847 he wrote a strikingly civil letter to Prosper Enfantin, the Saint-Simonian leader, who had sent him a copy of his latest work:

  There is, throughout your book, a lively awareness of the suffering of the poor and enthusiasm for everything which can equalize the sum of human happiness in this world. I too believe that the drive of the long revolution which our fathers began and of which we will not see the end is towards a greater development of equality on the Earth and a more and more equal sharing of the goods which it produces.

  He could not approve of Saint-Simonian methods (his suspicions of that sect largely explain his initially ungenerous attitude to Michel Chevalier), but he was glad to think that he and Enfantin had the same goal, and he signed off with assurances of his most distinguished consideration.10

  However much allowance is made for conventional courtesy, Tocqueville’s sincerity in this letter need not be doubted: he had said much the same in a letter to Arthur de Gobineau as early as 1843. There had been a shift in Tocqueville’s thought: the protean word equality has acquired a meaning which would be acceptable to any modern Christian or Social Democrat. But at about this time he also seems to have read Proudhon, and another word suddenly gained prominence in his vocabulary: property.11

  What is Property? had been published in 1840 (the same year as the second part of the Démocratie) and had created a sensation by its blunt answer to its own question: ‘Property is theft.’ This dangerous epigram made all property-holders, large or small, shake in their guilty shoes, although at this stage Proudhon, the voice of the French peasantry and artisanat, had in mind mainly the property in land which, in spite of the Revolution, still underpinned the ascendancy of the notables: only later was he to attack industrial capitalists, and he never questioned – indeed, he asserted – the right of every citizen to ownership of his dwelling, his cabbage-patch and the tools of his trade. He had been much influenced by the 1835 Démocratie, and agreed with Tocqueville on many points – for instance, on decentralization and the dangers of violent revolution. He was quite as great a writer, and is still temptingly quotable, but here it is only necessary to establish that whenever he took up a theme from Tocqueville he pressed it to extremes. For instance: ‘humanity, for the last four thousand years, has been going through a process of levelling ... French society, unknown to itself and by the fatality of Providential laws, is every day engaged in demolishing property (for example, by the laws of expropriation, the conversion of bonds, the protection of the labour of women and children).’12 ‘Property is the last of the false gods.’13

  As a liberal and a landowner, Tocqueville could not be expected to welcome such an unusual disciple.14 He was no exception to the depressing truth that wealth usually makes its owners timid rather than brave. So it is not surprising that he took fright in a particular way as soon as he sensed that the July Monarchy, dedicated to the protection of property, was in danger. His reaction did not even have the merit of originality. As far back as December 1788, when the Estates-General was about to be summoned, the princes of the blood had warned Louis XVI:

  The State is in peril ... soon the rights of property will be attacked, and inequality of wealth will be set up as a matter for reform; already the suppression of feudal rights has been proposed. Can Your Majesty bring yourself to sacrifice and humiliate your brave, ancient and respectable nobility?15

  Allowing for the abolition of feudal rights, Tocqueville’s position sixty years later was no different. He was determined to resist all pernicious new doctrines. He held that property (undefined, as usual) was the last guarantee of ordered, civilized society and must be protected at all costs.16 He stuck implacably, indeed bloodily, to this doctrine throughout 1848, like so many lesser men. This attitude was the root of the year’s tragedy. Frenchmen knew too little of each other. Certainly the notables, Tocqueville among them, projected their own violent hatred and panic onto the urban workers, and in doing so created the very monster which they feared. Tocqueville was not even exceptional in expressing his fear in ideological terms, as if he were resolved to demonstrate the accuracy of the Marxian tenet that ideas are determined by material circumstances, and have no other validity. But not many had his natural genius for historical and political reflection; which explains why his less intellectual colleagues were slow to respond to his message.

  In 1847 the emergency had not yet arrived, and Tocqueville’s socialist reading, perhaps reinforced by the work he did on his oration on virtue, and by the economic crisis, explains why at this moment his pendulum swung briefly as far to the left as it was ever to go. He took up his pen. It had become increasingly clear, even to many of Guizot’s followers, that for all its parliamentary strength the ministry was stagnant, and that France could not afford such inertia. Tocqueville and Dufaure* thought that they saw an opportunity. The King would never again accept Thiers as first minister if he could help it, for fear of being plunged into another dangerous foreign crisis, and Barrot had now signed on as Thiers’s junior partner. So Tocqueville’s group hoped that if they formed themselves into a new party (they proposed to call themselves the Young Left) with a programme of moderate reform, they could attract enough conservatives – men like the intelligent and energetic Charles-Auguste de Morny* – to destroy Guizot’s majority in the Chamber and, if the King saw sense, to take his place. Dufaure asked Tocqueville to draft a manifesto, and during October 1847, while Tocqueville and Marie were visiting Comte Hervé at Clairoix (Oise), where the old man was now living with his acknowledged companion (dame de compagnie), Mme Guermarquer, widow of the family agent at Lannion, Alexis got down to work. The document he produced was never used, presumably because events moved too fast; it survives only in revealing fragments.17 They show Tocqueville struggling with most of the usual problems of his career in the Chamber as he tries to find a way of distinguishing his position clearly from both Guizot and Thiers, and analyses the underlying weakness of the regime in pages which would eventually be inserted, little modified, into the Souvenirs; but there are novelties, and they seem clearly to stem from his examination of socialist writings. He sees that the July regime has become identified with the rights and power of the propertied class, and will now be challenged on this ground:

  it is between those who have possessions and those who do not that the struggle of parties will now be waged. The great battlefield will be property and political questions will turn chiefly on greater or lesser modifications of property rights. So we are again going to see great public agitation and great parties.18

  If socialist doctrines on the point are not to be victorious something will have to be done for the poor and the labouring classes. The poorest should be exempt from taxation; welfare institutions should be set up: savings banks, credit bureaux, free schools, factory acts, charity workshops (ouvroirs), a poor law, etc.

  In short, there are three methods for relieving the people: 1. By lifting some of the public dues off them or at least only charging them proportionately to their means. 2. By setting up institutions which will enable them to get out of debt and look after themselves. 3. By direct assistance to the needy.

  The current parliamentary parties are united, he says, in their indifference to the plight of the people; unless this changes there will eventually be a grave crisis, though he does not expect it to come soon.19

  It can hardly be denied that Tocqueville (perhaps belatedly) had put his finger on a real problem and real if limited remedies, but his views do not seem to have found favour with his friends; and anyway the crisis of the regime was about to be touched off by a very different reform programme.

  Tocqueville now explicitly accepted the view that th
e working people, who had carried the July Revolution, had reason to feel cheated of the fruits of victory: this was one of the most important tenets of the republican Left. But Odilon Barrot and his followers of the ‘dynastic Left’ (Gustave de Beaumont among them) believed that the central issue was electoral and parliamentary reform, meaning that placemen (prefects and other officials) should be barred from election to the Chamber, and that the size of the electorate should be doubled. After the defeat of 1846 it was more than ever difficult to see how this moderate and sensible programme could be carried into law, and the September laws made it formidably difficult to agitate – avowedly political public meetings, for instance, were illegal. So the dynastic Left launched the celebrated ‘banquets’ campaign in the summer of 1847. This was possible because it was legal for subscribers to meet for public dinners, provided that all non-subscribers were excluded. Barrot went up and down France eating and drinking at crowded feasts, where the diners could propose radical toasts and demand reform. Most of the opposition deputies participated, but there were some conspicuous exceptions: Thiers, for instance; Dufaure; Tocqueville. Although Tocqueville gave Thiers no credit for his abstention, their reasons were the same. The banqueters were appealing to the pays réel against the pays légal; their agitation was subversive, and if it failed would merely have made them more odious to the King and the conservative majority; if it succeeded in rousing the people anything might happen. Unsurprisingly, this was also Guizot’s view.20

  By December, when the political world reassembled in Paris, it seemed that the banquets had failed: they had come and gone and left no trace. The last of them was supposed to be held in Paris after parliament met, but even that was now doubtful. The only banquet which had roused real enthusiasm was the one honouring Lamartine in July, in Mâcon, his constituency, which had been a tribute to the author of the Girondins rather than part of the campaign. Lamartine took advantage of the occasion, and defied a thunderstorm which erupted overhead to make some highly inflammatory remarks. But for the rest, the banquets had chiefly served to advertise the split between the republicans and the dynastic Left. As so often before, the opposition’s divisions made it deplorably ineffective.

  Attention turned to the opening session of the Chambers. There was a general belief that the ministry was weaker than it seemed on paper: Guizot himself shared it. He was alarmed and angered by the banquets, and by the clamour of the opposition press; he was also worried by the rise of the ‘progressive conservatives’ – he said, years later, that had they known how to be patient they would soon have attained a majority in the Chamber, ‘but impatience and lack of foresight, those two fatal maladies of so many political performers’ overwhelmed them. More seriously, Guizot, although he was now prime minister as well as foreign minister (Soult having retired) was tactically constrained, not only by his own rigidity and his belief that he was indispensable, but by the insuperable obstinacy of the King, who was displeased on the one occasion when Guizot hinted that reform might eventually be possible, and threatened to use his veto for the first time if any reform measure were passed by the Chambers.21 Louis-Philippe, from having been the solution in 1830, had become the central problem. He was brave, intelligent and kindly, but he had an excessive admiration for his own talents. His insistence on ruling France from behind a façade of liberal institutions deceived nobody and pleased few. His weaknesses had grown more pronounced as he aged, especially the compulsive garrulity which made it almost impossible for him to listen to his ministers or anyone else, as Tocqueville discovered on the one occasion that he was given a private audience. ‘I want you to talk to me a little about America,’ said the King, but Tocqueville knew that this meant he was going to talk on the subject himself, which he did for three-quarters of an hour.22 In these circumstances it is not surprising that Guizot decided to follow his own reactionary instincts. Like Charles X in similar difficulties, he decided to rally his supporters by carrying the battle to the foe. The King having pledged his unwavering support, Guizot inserted in the Speech from the Throne, which opened the session, a deliberately provocative phrase denouncing the opposition’s ‘hostile or blind passions’.* The bait was taken, and for the next few weeks fury raged in the Chamber, with Guizot icily (and unwisely) refusing to make the slightest concession and the opposition deputies denouncing him as worse than Polignac. The resemblance was certainly becoming very striking and, to Tocqueville, alarming.

  He spoke on 27 January, in what was his most famous and successful speech, although – or perhaps because – it was less formally impressive than some of his other orations. Its power lay in its rhetoric. Tocqueville had two purposes. The first was to play his part in the opposition’s grand scheme to pin the accusation of corruption not just to the government as a whole, or to lesser ministers, but for the first time to Guizot himself, his official secretary having been caught in jobbery. Tocqueville did not miss the chance to revel in self-righteous denunciation:

  Never, never would I have believed, while hearing the minister for foreign affairs expound from this tribune with admirably chosen words the moral law of politics, while hearing him hold such language as to make me proud of my country, though I am of the opposition – never, assuredly, would I have believed that what has happened was possible.

  It was gratifying to agitate the Chamber with this sort of thing. But he also had something fresher to say. The government, he urged (and he clearly had the whole regime in mind) must mend its ways or it would fall.

  People say that there is no danger because there are no riots; they say that since there is no significant disorder on the surface of society, revolution is far from us. Gentlemen, let me say that I think you are deceiving yourselves ... Look at what is going on among the working classes which today, I admit, are peaceable. It is true that they are not afflicted by political passions, properly so called, to the same extent that they were formerly; but don’t you see that their passions, from being political, have turned social? ... Are you not listening to what they say every day among themselves? Don’t you hear them repeating incessantly that all those above them are incapable and unworthy of governing? That the present distribution of goods in society is unjust? That the foundations of property are not equitable?

  If such opinions continued to spread there would be a mighty revolution sooner or later. The ministry must change its ways. Throughout history governments had fallen when they became unworthy of power.

  Gentlemen, consider the old monarchy. It was stronger than you, stronger in its origins; it relied more surely than you can on tradition, on ancient manners and antique beliefs; it was stronger than you, and yet it tumbled down into the dust. And why did it fall? Do you think it was by accident? Do you think it was the doing of one person, or of the deficit, of the oath in the tennis-court, of La Fayette or Mirabeau? No, gentlemen; there was a deeper, truer cause, and that cause was that the then ruling class had become, by its unconcern, its selfishness, and its vices, incapable and unworthy of governing! (‘ Hear hear! Hear hear!’)

  He ended by pleading for reform, or if not for that, then for a change of heart in the government; otherwise nothing lay ahead but the abyss.23

  Tocqueville for once said much that the Chamber wanted to hear, and his success was correspondingly great; but Dufaure told him that it would have been even greater if he had not tried to frighten the house with his talk of revolution: nobody believed it. And Tocqueville, searching his soul eighteen months later, discovered that he had not entirely believed it himself. Who could have expected such a revolution as was actually going to occur? ‘I believe I saw more clearly than anyone else the general causes which were driving the July Monarchy to its ruin. I did not imagine the accidents which were going to bring it about. Nevertheless the days which separated us from the catastrophe were rapidly running out.’24

  Indeed they were. The government’s essential mistake was to drive the opposition to extremes; the mistake of the opposition leaders was to try to draw bac
k at the last minute. Their anguished dithering over the proposed Parisian banquet would be purely comic had its outcome been less serious. Vanity, timidity, ambition and foolishness (Tocqueville was to say of Barrot that he always blended a certain silliness in his faults as well as in his virtues)25 drove them down the road to a disaster that most did not want. The dynastic opposition could not decide whether it dreaded the government or the people of Paris more; most of the republicans feared to provoke a savage repression. Almost everyone was secretly relieved when the government formally banned the banquet. Barrot proposed to save face by moving a vote of censure on Guizot in the Chamber. It was a last gesture of futility: Guizot treated it with contempt. But meanwhile events had taken the turn which Tocqueville had increasingly feared: the Parisians had gone down into the streets, and many of them meant business.