Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  But Tocqueville could take no comfort. Physically brave, he was intellectually frightened by the February Revolution, for reasons already given. Like Louis-Philippe, he looked back on France’s revolutionary history, but with a very different attitude. It would be necessary, he thought, to teach the frivolous Parisians a lesson. There would have to be war on the streets.

  He never wavered from this position. It was scarcely the finest phase of his career. The fact that half of France soon came to agree with him makes the matter worse, if anything.

  * ‘Although nothing is more clearly written in God’s law for human society than the necessary concordance between great intellectual movements and great political ones, leaders of nations never seem to notice the fact until it is thrust before their eyes.’

  * ‘Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?’ (Samuel Johnson, Letter to Lord Chesterfield).

  * He was to repeat this assertion in his speech of 27 January 1848.

  * AT thought the same: see Souvenirs, OC XII 94–5.

  * Armand Dufaure (1798–1881), lawyer, deputy for Saintes (Charente-Inférieure) 1834–48; minister of public works in the 1839 Soult ministry. He was a forceful orator and a capable politician; he and AT worked more and more closely together during the last years of the July Monarchy.

  * Charles-Auguste de Morny (1811–65), illegitimate son of the comte de Flahaut (therefore Talleyrand’s grandson) and Hortense de Beauharnais, mother of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. At this stage Morny was a supporter of Guizot, but nevertheless believed that reform was necessary.

  * Nothing more precisely illustrates the difference between nineteenth-century and current parliamentary conventions than the reaction to this phrase, which nowadays would hardly be noticed.

  * AT was now living at 30, rue de la Madeleine; the foreign ministry was a few doors away on the boulevard des Capucines. In a few years the whole area would be drastically remodelled by Haussmann.

  * Said by others to have been the duc de Montpensier, Louis-Philippe’s youngest son. But if so, surely Beaumont would have recognized him?

  *In fact Lamartine had learned that another newspaper, the Réforme, was trying to set up a different provisional government at the Hôtel de Ville; when he arrived the two slates were merged.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  JUNE

  1848

  Les partis ne se connaissent jamais les uns les autres: ils s’approchent, ils se pressent, ils se saisissent, ils ne se voient point.*

  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, SOUVENIRS1

  AN ADVANTAGE OF BEING CYCLOTHYMIC is that while you are easily plunged into the depths, you are also easily swept up to the heights. So it was with Tocqueville. On 24 February he went to bed in despair about the future of his country. The night was disturbed, since the streets were continually full of happy Parisians singing the ‘Marseillaise’, shouting their triumph, firing guns and letting off fireworks in celebration.2 But next day Tocqueville wrote what can only be described as his own shout of triumph to Paul Clamorgan. He boasted about the perspicacity which he had shown in his speech of 27 January – ‘I doubt if any politician has ever been a better prophet or seen his prophecies so completely realized’ – and gloried in the discomfiture of his critics, who had shrugged off his warnings. The country was now in a terrible state, politically and commercially, but the question was what to do next. There would have to be a constituent assembly, and while Tocqueville alleged that he had no wish to be one of its members, he would not reject a draft, although the task of representing his country might be dangerous. He urged Clamorgan to report on political attitudes in the Manche immediately; he himself would soon be arriving at Tocqueville. Two days later he wrote again, having just heard that his longstanding rival Léonor Havin* had somehow got himself appointed one of two government commissioners for the department; vigorous action would be necessary to thwart any hostile schemes.3 That Tocqueville was insincere in his protestations of indifference is also suggested by the prompt publication of a fresh edition, the twelfth, of the Démocratie. It carried a new introduction by the author claiming that the February Revolution had confirmed his prediction that the victory of democracy was near at hand and irresistible. The example of the United States, he said, was more instructive than ever. ‘The laws of the French Republic can and should be different, in many respects, from those which govern the United States, but the principles underlying the American constitution, those principles of order, of checks and balances, of true liberty, of deep and sincere respect for the laws, are indispensable to all Republics, they should be common to all, and we can predict safely that where they are not to be found the Republic will soon cease to exist.’4 This introduction repays study as Tocqueville’s manifesto for the Second Republic, expressing principles which he maintained throughout its brief and stormy existence; but it may also be read as an early attempt to establish his republican credentials in the eyes of the voters: he was not a républicain de la veille (republican of the eve) but a républicain du lendemain (of the morrow), and although he rallied to the new system he had to prove his sincerity. It helped him that he had a new publisher, Pagnerre, a staunch républicain de la veille who was also a much bolder businessman than Gosselin. Pagnerre brought out the first cheap edition of the Démocratie, consisting of 4,000 copies. It sold well: two further printings were called for that same year.5

  Tocqueville passed the first day of the new order in walking about Paris, observing. The city was as quiet as a Sunday morning, but what struck him most was the evidence of that great historical novelty, working-class victory. ‘I did not see a single one of the agents of the former public authorities, not a soldier, not a gendarme, not a policeman. The National Guard itself had disappeared. The people alone bore arms, guarded public places, supervised, ordered, punished.’ It all went so well as to constitute, one may think, a wonderful advertisement for Proudhon’s anarchism, but Tocqueville did not see it like that. He did not expect the tranquillity to last, and he despised the ideas of the revolutionaries more than ever (Proudhon himself thought that the trouble was they had no ideas: ‘there is nothing in their heads.’) The general calm did not reassure the propertied classes: their terror was enormous. ‘I do not think that it had been so great at any former revolutionary crisis, and I think it can only be compared to that felt by the great cities of the civilized Roman world when they suddenly found themselves in the power of the Vandals and the Goths.’ As to the revolutionaries themselves, they had been as much surprised by events as everyone else, yet soon a torrent of impracticable proposals poured forth to bewilder the minds of the people:

  Everybody had plans; some detailed them in the newspapers, others in the posters which soon covered every wall, others simply cried them in the open air. One would offer to destroy the inequality of wealth, another that of education, a third to level the most ancient of inequalities, that between men and women; specifics were offered against poverty, and remedies for the curse of labour which has tormented humanity since its beginning.

  Tocqueville had no difficulty in dismissing these wild notions, which he lumped under the single label of socialism, the essential character (he said) and most frightening memory of the February Revolution. The Republic was no longer an end but a means.6 *

  Karl Marx says somewhere that revolutions come in two phases, the beautiful and the ugly. The French Revolution of 1848 certainly illustrates this aphorism, if indeed it did not suggest it. Tocqueville was to claim that he had always foreseen that things would turn ugly, but the weeks of the beautiful revolution were so full of hope and happiness that they still touch the heart. George Sand, who hurried up from Berry to lend her pen to the cause, noticed, like Tocqueville, that Paris was amazingly quiet immediately after the days of February, but the streets soon came to life again, with some resurrected rituals giving a republican flavour to the usual spectacle:

 
; Who are these sturdy workmen coming along crowned with garlands, with hatchets, spades or axes under their arms as if they were guns? They are paviours, navvies, woodcutters, types of their trades, with beards prematurely grey and a trusty air, stepping out with sober assurance. Behind them come fifty others, effortlessly shouldering an enormous pine-tree, the green branches of which are looked after by children, who make sure they are not sullied by the dirt of the roadway. It is the Tree of Liberty; the symbol of the Republic is going past.7

  It will be seen that Tocqueville was not wrong in pointing out a tendency to play-act revolution, but such scenes have their charm. Tocqueville himself was not quite immune to the atmosphere. He found to his surprise that in spite of what he had said to Ampère he was, personally, glad that the July Monarchy had been destroyed. He had supported it as the best available expedient, but he had never loved it, and he had been less and less happy in the parliamentary world, for reasons already explained. Now he seemed to see new possibilities. There was no mistaking the way ahead; true, it was going to be dangerous:

  but my soul is so made that I fear danger less than uncertainty. Besides, I felt that I was still in my prime; I had no children and few needs, and above all I had at home the support, so rare and precious in a time of revolution, of a devoted wife with an acute, steadfast mind and a naturally lofty soul that would be equal to any turn of events, and could rise above any misfortunes. So I decided to throw myself neck and crop into the arena and commit myself to the defence not of such and such a government, but of the laws of society itself, not sparing my fortune, my peace of mind or my person.

  When the date of the election was announced he hurried down into Normandy to present himself to the voters: Clamorgan had told him that he was certain to win, but his presence was required.8

  The national situation was extremely difficult. At its centre was the continuing economic crisis, which Tocqueville characteristically put down to chimerical notions picked up by the workers from the socialists. Banks were failing left and right, consumption had collapsed, the Treasury was nearly empty. The only hope of salvation lay in the elections, and then in the meeting of the National Assembly: but could it operate freely, confronted, as it would be, with the aroused working population of Paris? ‘In my opinion, it should concede as many political freedoms as possible, so as to have the right to stand firm on questions of property and order,’ Tocqueville told Clamorgan.9

  Even before he left Paris he expected the majority of the new assembly to be moderate, if not conservative: all the doctors, lawyers and law officers who feared a threat to what Tocqueville called their ‘notional property’ – that is, their professional privileges and perquisites – would rally to the support of order (another new word becoming frequent in Tocqueville’s writings); but he was unprepared for what he actually found in Normandy. He wrote to Marie:

  I can hardly convey the singular impression made on me by the sight of the countryside and even of the towns which I have just come through. I might have been in a different country from the France of Paris. People minding their own business, artisans, labourers all peaceful – the tranquillity of the fields, unworried peasant faces – it all forms such a contrast with what I left behind that I began to wonder if it was I, not the placid people I was meeting, who had the wrong ideas. The truth is that revolution has as yet shown itself only in Paris. Everyone else knows it only by hearsay.10

  The electoral contest turned out to be the most satisfying that he ever went through. Initially, in spite of Clamorgan’s assurances, he was uncertain of victory, and one side of him, remembering all too clearly what things had been like in the Chamber of Deputies, yearned to be back in private life for good. He paid a flying visit to his chateau and burst into tears when he got inside: it had been five months since he was last there, and it felt like years; the contrast between the cherished pleasures of life at Tocqueville and the general state of the nation was too much for him.11 But the battle went well.

  Superficially, the challenge was much greater than the last time. The Provisional Government had not only decreed universal male suffrage but had abolished the system of representation by arrondissement: the whole department would now vote for all its representatives, as Tocqueville had long wanted. This great increase in the number and dispersion of voters proved no handicap to him in the event: the former deputy from Valognes was well-known throughout the Manche, partly because of his service on the conseil-général. He thought that his great strength was that he did not want victory too desperately. The farmers admired a candidate who refused to answer impertinent questionnaires from republican committees: he seemed a man of independent character who would stand up for their interests in Paris. Their confidence in him increased his confidence in himself, and made him speak better than he had ever done in the Chamber: ‘today I had moments which would not have been unworthy of a real orator.’

  He issued an election circular in which he explained why he had ceased to be a royalist – monarchy, he said, was no longer viable in France – and what sort of republican he had become: ‘the Republic, to me, is true, sincere, real liberty for everyone, within the limits of the law; it is the government of the country by the country’s free majority.’ He did not believe in military or Jacobin dictatorship, or in socialism: ‘for me the Republic is, above all, the reign of the rights of each man, guaranteed by the will of all; it is profound respect for all types of legitimate property.’ He had seen how the United States flourished by following these maxims. He did not believe in a war to revolutionize the whole of Europe. He would happily stand aside if there were another candidate who the voters thought would serve them better, since this was no time for personal ambitions or petty rivalries, for not only liberty but society itself was in danger (this was probably a hit at Havin).12 All this was just what the Manchois wanted to hear. The men of property, at any rate in the countryside, were closing ranks against the new regime in Paris and its dangerous doctrines.13

  Tocqueville took pleasure in at least one demagogic stunt. Commissioner Havin, as agent of the new minister of the interior, Ledru-Rollin, was trying by every means to maximize the pro-government vote, which entailed doing as little as possible for Tocqueville, with whom he had quarrelled over the affair of the banquets the previous year. Now there was to be a new banquet at Cherbourg for up to 2,000 persons, presided over by Havin and his colleague Vieillard.* They could not avoid inviting Tocqueville, but they did not give him a place at the official table or ask him to speak. They underrated their man. Modestly he took his place at a side-table, but he saw his chance when someone proposed a toast to the memory of Colonel de Bricqueville, who had died in 1844. Tocqueville went briskly to the speakers’ stand to pay his own graceful tribute to Bricqueville, and then, ‘since here I am,’ he proposed his own toast, ‘TO THE UNION OF THE TWO GREATEST REPUBLICS ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH TODAY: THE FRENCH REPUBLIC AND THE REPUBLIC OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!’ After repeating his usual line that France had much to learn from the successful democracy across the Atlantic – ‘in America the Republic is not a dictatorship enforced in the name of liberty, it is liberty itself ...’ – he went on to demand America’s help in resisting British naval dominance: ‘the land is free, but the seas are still enslaved.’ What was Cherbourg itself, if not a living protest against that slavery (an allusion to the French government’s long efforts to turn Cherbourg into a great naval base)? ‘So it is first and foremost at Cherbourg that it is proper to propose a toast, TO THE CLOSE UNION OF THE TWO REPUBLICS! And at the same time, TO THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS!’ This claptrap went down extremely well, as he had known it would, and he took pleasure in hearing from Clamorgan that Havin had felt obliged to praise the speech as very adroit; but he was too ashamed of it to reproduce the text in the Souvenirs.14

  After that his election was more or less certain. As usual he had to deny absurd rumours, including one that he was the author of the law against poaching (he denounced it as a relic of the anci
en régime). He missed Marie and lived for her letters, though when they came they reported that not only she but Jem, his favourite dog, was ill (Jem seems to have been on heat). When the letters did not arrive, or arrived late, he darkly suspected that they had been intercepted by the police (it does not seem to have occurred to him that postal services might suffer during a revolution). He too fell ill, with the usual stomach troubles, which cast him into a gloom about his electoral prospects, and he was furious when the elections were put off for two weeks, though the postponement enabled him to return to Paris for a few days. At last it was Easter Sunday, 23 April, election day. Voting was to take place in the chef-lieu of every canton, so in the morning all the electors of Tocqueville gathered together and formed into double file, in alphabetical order, for the five-kilometre walk to Saint-Pierre-Église.

  I settled to march in the place to which my name assigned me, for I knew that in democratic times and countries it is necessary to be called to the front by the people, and not to put oneself there. At the end of the long file came pack-horses and carts for the handicapped and invalids who wanted to come with us. We left behind only children and women; in all we numbered a hundred and seventy. When we got to the top of the hill overlooking Tocqueville we stopped for a moment. I knew that they wanted me to speak, so I climbed up the far side of a ditch, they stood round me in a circle, and I made such remarks as the situation suggested.

  He warned them particularly against being corrupted with food or drink at Saint-Pierre. Then they set off again and all voted at the same time, ‘and I have reason to think that they almost all voted for the same candidate’, for on arrival at Saint-Pierre, he felt exhausted and rested himself against a pillar, complaining of his weariness as he did so. An old peasant thereupon said to him: ‘I am very surprised, Monsieur de Tocqueville, that you should be tired, since we all brought you here in our pockets.’15