It was a charming occasion; the same sort of thing happened in a thousand places in France that Easter. The beautiful revolution was not quite finished. The national turn-out was 84 per cent, the highest in French parliamentary history. Tocqueville did outstandingly well, getting 110,704 votes out of the 120,000 cast in the Manche: only the two commissioners came in ahead of him. The Manche sent sixteen representatives to the Assembly, so all in all Tocqueville, who had yet again run without party or official support, might well feel that he had emerged as the leading politician of his department. Even so, with a politician’s eye he noticed that his victory had not been quite complete: several communes in his former constituency, Valognes, failed to give him a majority. How was this? Clamorgan assured him that the intrigues of some longstanding opponents explained it, and Tocqueville professed himself satisfied. He was gratified that in Cherbourg what he called ‘the lively party’ (le parti vif) – republicans and socialists – which had opposed him, was defeated.16 But these details leave the nature of his support unanalysed. Once it is considered, a pattern of great significance emerges.
During the July Monarchy Tocqueville’s support had consisted essentially of people like Clamorgan – a rural middle class of farmers, local officials and professional men, all of a certain standing in the world; we may presume (and Tocqueville’s statements in the Souvenirs imply) that in 1848 he enjoyed the support of such men throughout the department. But there were not enough of these small notables to explain the size of his vote. It can be assumed that to the extent that they were leaders in their neighbourhoods they carried with them other men of their type. But another element was probably at least as important. The legitimists felt freed by the February Revolution. The usurper had fallen, there could be no more question of taking a disloyal oath, and the future of France was once more wholly uncertain. Anything could happen, and the nobles felt it their duty and pleasure to participate in electoral politics again. (So did the Church: when the Assembly met Tocqueville noticed with some surprise that three bishops and more than a dozen other priests, including the great Dominican preacher Lacordaire, had been elected.) Tocqueville was the beneficiary in the Manche. Whatever he called himself, the nobles knew that he was one of them, and was yielding at last to the bidding of his ancestry. On the day of the election he left for Paris as soon as he had voted, but on his way stopped briefly at Valognes. His constituents there crowded round promising to come to his rescue if the Assembly were attacked: they shared his apprehensions. He writes in the Souvenirs: ‘I blame myself for having at the time seen nothing in these pledges but vain words, for as a matter of fact they did all come, they and many others, as we shall see.’ When, on the last of the June Days, they do arrive, he tells us who they are:
I was moved at recognizing among them many landowners, lawyers, doctors and farmers, who were my friends and neighbours. Almost all the old nobility of the region had taken up arms on this occasion and joined the column. It was so almost everywhere in France. From the muddiest squireens to the elegant and useless heirs of the greatest houses, all remembered that they had once belonged to a ruling class of warriors, and everywhere they gave an example of promptness and vigour, so great is the vitality of those old aristocratic corps.
For he goes on, helplessly surrendering to myth and nostalgia: ‘they were still like themselves even when they had been humbled to the dust, and rose up several times out of the shadow of death before resting there for ever.’17 This passage gives the game away: Tocqueville is describing a movement of which he himself was part, or even the embodiment.
And what was that movement? Tocqueville does not mention what was probably its most important, because most numerous, element: the peasantry, who were outraged by the Provisional Government’s decision to raise the land tax by 45 per cent. This grievance bound them to their lordly neighbours. It was the last straw, and the moment had come for the Vendée, or perhaps one should say the bocage, to take its revenge. The June Days were to be as much a collision of sections (to use a nineteenth-century American term) as of classes. The West resolved that the tyranny of Paris must be broken. Tocqueville and his friends did not see in their opponents desperate Frenchmen, taking up arms in June only because 1848 had betrayed them even more completely than 1830, and left them without work or food; they saw only the infidel, Jacobin city which had oppressed them ever since the fall of the Bastille. (Tocqueville, the intellectual, still saw Parisians as the deluded victims of socialist visions, who had to be taught a lesson in sound economics.) All these impulses were already at work during the election. For the Manchois the beautiful revolution was already dead, or rather it had never lived: it had been stillborn.*
The opening of the Constituent Assembly on 4 May was an emotional, joyous occasion, when everyone cheered the Republic, whatever their real views. It also marked the coming of the ugly revolution.
The Provisional Government that had been set up in the Hôtel de Ville on 24 February was never more than an unstable, temporary expedient, but it deserves to be remembered with respect because of the many sweeping reforms which it decreed or attempted: for example, it introduced universal male suffrage, limited the working day, abolished slavery in the French empire and imprisonment for debt, and ended capital punishment for purely political offences: there was not to be another Reign of Terror. It was a government of sincere republicans, unlike most of those which followed it until the Franco-Prussian War. Its members were not of one mind ideologically or personally: it was only an uneasy coalition of liberal and radicals, who undoubtedly made mistakes: everyone does. They were defeated by the size and intractability of the problems which they faced, and it is exceedingly unlikely that any government, of any stripe, could have done better. For one thing the February Revolution had been too sudden and too swift: no-one was prepared, either with policies or personnel, to replace Guizot. Government, for months to come, could be nothing but desperate improvisation.
The revolution had made a bad economic situation disastrous. Tocqueville’s letters during his election campaign are full of personal money worries, unlike any other period of his correspondence. Writing to Clamorgan in early April he says: ‘Paris is like a battlefield covered with the dead or dying. Almost everyone I meet here is either ruined or about to be ruined. [Mme de Tocqueville and I] as yet are suffering only in our income, but the number of families who have lost both income and capital is immense.’18 Trade was at a standstill. There had been a run on the banks, which had nearly broken the Banque de France; gold coin had disappeared, such paper money as was available rapidly depreciated, and anyway there was not enough of it. In the circumstances it is not surprising that there were ceaseless bankruptcies (Marx lays great stress on these in his Class Struggles) and general unemployment. This set of problems alone would have been enough to test any government to the utmost. But there were others.
‘The earth is again quaking in Europe’ had not been the least accurate warning in Tocqueville’s January speech,19 although in the weeks following there is hardly a reference to any country but France in his papers. Even before the Parisian revolution another had broken out in Naples; by May there had been upheavals throughout Italy, in Austria, in Hungary, in Prussia. Now was the time, it seemed to some, when France could at last tear up the hated treaties of 1815 and march again to the liberation of the nations, especially the Poles. The difficulty was that with most of the country opposed to such a war, with an empty treasury and a quite unprepared army, the enterprise would be no better than a gamble, and if governments beyond the Rhine and the Alps had been broken their armies had not. It seemed sensible, then, to continue the pacific policy of Louis-Philippe, if in somewhat more assertive language, and Lamartine, as foreign minister, did so. When the fanatical Jacobin Delescluze, whom Ledru-Rollin had rashly sent as a commissioner to the Nord, attacked a town just across the Franco-Belgian border in the name of liberating Belgium, Lamartine eagerly disavowed him and apologized to the outraged Belgian governmen
t; but unfortunately the enthusiasts for a revolutionary foreign policy were concentrated in Paris, and might at any moment drive Lamartine from office as nothing but a new Guizot.
Still more threatening was the social question. The workers of Paris, having overthrown the July regime, understandably expected to make substantial gains under its successor. They were unemployed, ill-housed, ill-clad and hungry. Their demands were condensed into the slogan ‘the right to work’, which actually embodied two ideas: a claim for employment and a claim for relief. Neither claim was unreasonable or unattainable: given a little time, energy and intelligence, a useful programme of public works could have been devised for Paris, as happened at Marseille, where the commissioner Émile Ollivier set the unemployed to digging a canal. Louis Blanc, the socialist who had been thrust into the Provisional Government by the workers, had plenty of ideas for effective relief; he was placed in the Luxembourg Palace to preside over a commission which held hearings on the workers’ problems. In spite of their desperation (half the businesses of Paris, and therefore the employment which they provided, disappeared in 1848) the workers seem for a long time to have been remarkably patient and good-humoured. They were anxious for help, but as one of their leaders famously told the Provisional Government during its first meeting, ‘the people will wait; they will put three months of misery at the service of the Republic.’ But fear and hatred, those passions which feel like wisdom, grew steadily more intense in France beyond the capital, and the Parisians themselves were starkly divided. The fact was that in the 1840s Paris was becoming something quite new to the French: a rapidly industrializing city that was also rapidly increasing in population as it drew workers to itself from all over the country. Very few people had any useful ideas as to how this phenomenon might be managed, or how such a city could be decently governed. Meanwhile, it was frightening.
All these problems were connected, and the Provisional Government was defeated by the connection. ‘There have been wickeder revolutionaries than those of 1848,’ said Tocqueville, ‘but I do not think that there have ever been any who were stupider.’ He would have done well to include himself in this condemnation. Writing to Nassau Senior he blamed France’s troubles as usual on wrong notions of political economy held by most of the population, but his own were no better. He clung to the doctrines which he had picked up in his youth, the commonplaces of the juste milieu, and exaggerated them: he was all too sure that if the state interfered in the economic process by alleviating unemployment with a dole, or public works, or by regulating hours of work and wage rates, enterprise would suffer and everyone would be worse off in the end. It is perhaps unfair to point out that ever since Bismarck set out to kill socialism with kindness governments have been interfering in just the ways that Tocqueville dreaded, and in many more besides, yet civilization continues. What is not unfair is to remark that at no point in 1848 did Tocqueville display the slightest fellow-feeling for the workers in their distress, and consequently had no gleam of understanding about them. In this he was entirely at one with most of his fellow parliamentarians. The majority of the Provisional Government and its successor, the Executive Committee, also did not understand. ‘Ah, M. Arago, you have never suffered from hunger,’ said the insurgents of June to one of its members when he tried to reason with the builders of a barricade. The panic and stony-heartedness of the conservatives – of those who would soon be called ‘the Party of Order’ – was the chief cause of the disasters which afflicted France that summer.20
If Tocqueville was no worse than others, he was no better. Like Marx on the other side he wrote of the great social conflict as if it were entirely a matter of class war. Like any legitimist (and he was very like a legitimist) he denounced the centralization of government as inimical to liberty, but on examination his conception of liberty is almost indistinguishable from his idea of order. The course of events suggests very strongly that the issue was largely the clash between country and town; between the agrarian past and the industrializing future. That year witnessed the last jacquerie, or traditional peasant rising, when, after February, railway lines and railway stations were attacked, cotton mills were destroyed and there were risings against the new forest laws in the Pyrenees and the Alps. Tocqueville did not grasp this aspect of what was happening, still less did he suggest ways of handling it. As a practical matter he was now a republican, but he gave scarcely any details about how he thought the republic should work: it was enough to refer enquirers to the United States as depicted in his book. He found it much easier to attack other people’s ideas. But his words and deeds give the game away. His ideal society was still a larger version of the Cotentin. Intelligent peasants would defer to educated gentlemen, and both would combine to keep the dangerous towns under control. ‘Liberty under law’ was the slogan: and the law was the one protecting property.
Tocqueville regarded the opening of what was called the Constituent Assembly (in a characteristic reminiscence of 1789) with thoroughly mixed feelings. He explained himself most fully to Beaumont just before election day. He foresaw little but embarrassment, even danger, in the new parliament, and could not be sure of doing anything useful there. ‘However, I would be sorry to see the doors of the Assembly close in my face. I have several reasons. Politics has become our career. Perhaps we were wrong to take it up, but take it up we did. It would grieve me to abandon it just when such great events are occurring, to be dismissed from my country’s affairs just when my country is being so sorely tried.’ At least they were rid of Thiers, Molé and Guizot* and all that shabby world of party politics; this was some consolation for the inexperience, ignorance and folly of the new government. And there was still his friendship with Beaumont, which experience had made wiser and more tolerant but no less deep and sincere: it helped him to resist gloomy thoughts.21
Not with complete success. He wrote to Clamorgan that a fight between the supporters of the Assembly and ‘the violent party’ was certain, and palpably he desired it. He even told Mathilde de Kergorlay (in 1846 Louis had got married at last) that unless a great man fell out of the clouds to save them, all France would collapse into anarchy, civil war and general ruin (his prayer would be answered, unacceptably, seven months later).22
The Provisional Government could not please everybody, and ended by pleasing nobody. Millions of peasant landowners had been alienated, as we have seen, by the rise in the land-tax (imposed to avert national bankruptcy). The Parisians still claimed the right to work, but a viable system of unemployment relief could not be invented overnight, and the government was ideologically split on the very idea. All it agreed to were the so-called national workshops, which might have worked well, but were never properly supported. Their name, ateliers nationaux, recalled, and was meant to recall, Louis Blanc’s proposal of ateliers sociaux – workers’ co-operatives – but otherwise had nothing in common with them. Blanc himself thought the national workshops were appalling: ‘[they] devoured vast sums of public money in useless labour, sterile and humiliating as being a sort of hypocritical alms-giving, under a flimsy veil.’23 In Paris, they were little more than refuges where unemployed workers could draw a dole and loaf, which a great many of them resented. The workshops were indeed very expensive and a focus for the anger of taxpayers, who would not accept that, in the workshops or out of them, the men and their families would have to be saved from starvation. And the people, seeing that gains from the revolution were slow in coming, began to feel betrayed: on one occasion Louis Blanc himself was denounced as a traitor to the cause.
The period between February and May was one of almost incessant tumult, of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations (Tocqueville, as a member of the National Guard, shouldered his musket during one of them). Demonstrations were mostly good-tempered and undirected, but they had a tendency to turn into riots, and the government was perpetually afraid of being overthrown: on the eve of one episode Lamartine burned all his papers. The situation was explosive, and a great deal would depend on the
wisdom of the leaders of both sides. George Sand did not help. She was working as a propagandist for Ledru-Rollin in the ministry of the interior, and without his knowledge issued a leaflet saying, in effect, that if the new Assembly did not satisfy the Parisians they should throw it out. This greatly alarmed the conservatives, since it was just what they feared.
George Sand and Tocqueville met on 3 May, as guests of Richard Monckton Milnes, an Englishman well-known to them both, who like many others (including Nassau Senior) had come over to Paris to witness the revolution.* It was his custom to invite guests of all views, often conflicting, to what he called ‘breakfast’ (someone asked Carlyle what would happen if Christ returned to Earth: ‘Monckton Milnes would invite him to breakfast’) but was really lunch (déjeuner). The practice was popular in London but startling in Paris. It startled Tocqueville, though he seems to have known beforehand that Mme Sand would be of the company. Milnes placed them next to each other, to Tocqueville’s dismay:
I had never spoken to her, I don’t think that I had ever seen her (for I had seldom gone into the world of literary adventurers in which she lived) ... I was very prejudiced against Mme Sand, for I loathe women writers, above all those who systematically disguise the weaknesses of their sex, instead of interesting us by displaying their real characteristics; but in spite of that, she pleased me.
Alexis de Tocqueville Page 55
