Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

And he seems to have pleased her. They were absorbed for an hour in a conversation about politics. Sand was already disillusioned with the revolution, and in two weeks’ time would retreat to Berry, where she found that she was regarded as a dangerous communist; but she interested Tocqueville greatly, for ‘it was the first time that I had found myself having a direct and easy conversation with someone who could and would tell me what was going on in the camp of our opponents.’ She had not yet fully understood what was going to happen.

  Mme Sand painted for me, in great detail and with striking vivacity, the condition of the Parisian workers, their organization, their numbers, their arms, their preparations, their opinions, their passions, their terrible determination. I thought the picture over-drawn; it was not, as the event proved. She herself seemed to me very frightened of a popular victory, and showed a certain solemn pity for what was going to happen to us. ‘Try to get your friends, Monsieur,’ she said to me, ‘not to drive the people onto the streets by alarming or irritating them; at the same time, I would like to persuade mine to be patient; for, if battle is joined, you must understand that you will all perish.’

  Tocqueville did not find these words encouraging.24

  The Sibyl had spoken, but not in time. It was too late for individuals to divert the course of events, as Lamartine now discovered. He had been elected to the Assembly by Paris and ten departments with a total of 1,600,000 votes, but his popularity was based on illusions. The Left supported him as the founder, more or less, of the Republic; the Right hoped that he would use his power to crush all revolutionaries. Both sides were disappointed, for Lamartine believed in compromise and conciliation. When the new Assembly decided to replace the Provisional Government with an Executive Committee, rather like the Directory of 1795, he was ready to let Louis Blanc be discarded but insisted on retaining Ledru-Rollin, the leader and epitome of les républicains de la veille. This punctured his popularity with the conservatives, the vast majority of the Assembly, who could make no distinction between one sort of radical and another; his standing rapidly declined and was never to recover.

  Then, on 15 May, when the Assembly had not yet finished organizing itself, it was invaded by the crowd. It was the turning-point of the 1848 revolution and remains its most mysterious episode. Many at the time (including Tocqueville and Beaumont) believed that the plan was to massacre the representatives, or at the very least to send the Executive Committee packing and replace it with a Committee of Public Safety; some historians nowadays think it was cunningly manipulated by the government to discredit the most radical leaders and contrive a pretext for throwing them into jail.25 Anything is possible in a revolution. It seems clear that the ministry of the interior had agents in the crowd – it would be surprising had it not; how far they actually controlled what occurred can only be guessed. The actual events of the day do not suggest that anyone was in control. However, there is general agreement on three points. First, the crowd, of 20,000–50,000 people, was in holiday mood. The spring day was as hot as summer. The demonstrators were unarmed. Their chief concern, on which they insisted, was Poland. As they approached the Palais Bourbon a unanimous cry of Vive la Pologne! went up, which Tocqueville later said was the most formidable sound that he had ever heard.26 To the Parisians, who believed in France’s mission to free the nations, and to the many Polish exiles in the crowd, the liberation of Poland from Russian and German rule was a point of honour. It was hardly an urgent matter: in that Year of Revolutions Poland was one of the few European countries where nothing much happened. Lamartine and his colleagues had no intention of provoking a European war about Poland. The crowd brought along a petition protesting against such pusillanimity.

  Second, none of the leading radicals – not Blanqui, not Barbès, not Blanc, not Raspail, and certainly not Proudhon, who conspicuously stayed at home that day – approved of the demonstration; they saw, as the crowd as yet did not, that the balance of force had for the moment swung against the Left, and that it was folly to give the conservatives an excuse for repression. But the people did not realize that the revolution had entered a new phase, in which demonstrations could achieve nothing. So in the spirit of Ledru-Rollin’s immortal explanation, given a year later (‘I am their leader, I must follow them’), Blanqui and Raspail let themselves be drawn into the march, although they thought that no good would come of it and were sure that it could not overthrow the Assembly: as Blanqui explained at his trial the following spring, there was too large a majority against the socialists for such an enterprise to succeed, not only in the National Guard and the provinces, but among most Parisian workers. A government so formed would not have lasted eight days: ‘I say that it would have been absurd to risk our political future on a throw of the dice when the odds against us were ninety-nine to one.’ Barbès and Blanc agreed.27

  Third, whatever the demonstrators’ intentions, the effect on the conservatives and moderates, and especially on the conservative representatives, was as disastrous as Blanqui can possibly have feared. They had expected trouble ever since a preliminary demonstration two days previously; some of them had come armed to the Assembly. Tocqueville brought a swordstick, which he left propped up in a corridor outside the debating-chamber. The Assembly building was a huge wooden affair, hastily run up in the courtyard of the Palais Bourbon when it was realized that the old Chamber of Deputies was far too small for the new parliament, which had 900 members. Nassau Senior, when he visited it on 19 May, noticed the resemblance of its layout to that of the House of Commons, but also that it was so large that no-one could make himself heard unless there was perfect silence, and even then he had to shout, ‘which is fatal to good speaking’.28 This had some bearing on what occurred on 15 May. At about noon the vast crowd surged across the pont de la Concorde and surrounded the Palais Bourbon. There were troops on duty to control the people, but not enough. Courtais, the commander, agreed that a delegation of twenty-five might enter to present the Polish petition, but when the doors were opened not only the twenty-five but as many of those behind them as possible also pushed in, more, apparently, by an instinctive movement than by design. There were some 2,000 intruders. For the next four hours all was confusion in the chamber. Demonstrators crowded the galleries until they were ready to collapse, and thronged round the representatives on the benches and the floor. The noise, dust and heat were appalling. The President of the Assembly banged his gavel ineffectively; the bolder members of the crowd thought that they would like to make speeches from the tribune, and fought each other to possess it. Raspail read out the petition about Poland. Barbès made a speech demanding war and a special tax on the rich. Blanc made three speeches to the crowd inside and outside the building, urging the demonstrators to behave legally and respectfully and leave the Assembly alone, but all he gained by this was to be carried back into the chamber shoulder-high, in spite of his attempts to escape. Blanqui spoke on Poland and on the workers’ poverty, but was pushed aside by another leader, Hüber (apparently an agent provocateur), who bellowed out, ‘I declare the Assembly dissolved!’ Barbès, seeing nothing else for it, proclaimed a new Provisional Government and led off many demonstrators to the Hôtel de Ville (the whole affair had become a parody of 24 February). Suddenly drums were heard and the National Guard entered the chamber, putting the last of the crowd to flight. Outside, most had long since gone home; Barbès and his followers were easily arrested at the Hôtel de Ville, and in the next few days Blanqui and others were also taken. Many of the radical clubs were closed down by order of the police.29

  The affair seems almost comical in retrospect, but it is hardly surprising that it terrified the majority of the representatives; it scandalized a great many sincere republicans who believed in parliamentary democracy; and the National Guardsmen who came to the rescue were so angry that Louis Blanc (who was blamed for everything) and Courtais (who was blamed for letting in the demonstrators) would have been lynched had not some of the representatives come to their defence: Tocqueville foun
d himself shouting about Courtais, ‘Tear off his epaulettes, but don’t kill him!’ From now on the cry was, Il faut en finir! (‘This mustn’t go on!’) Paris would have to be disciplined. Next day Tocqueville himself said that the whole thing had been got up by Barbès, who, if he had been able to get a proper hearing, would have compelled the Assembly to choose between agreeing to his demands or death on the spot. This baseless assertion shows how powerful preexistent opinion can be, for on the day itself Tocqueville, sticking to his usual place according to his rule, formed a somewhat different impression of the situation. True, he saw in Blanqui what he wanted to see:

  a man ... the recollection of whom has always since filled me with disgust and horror; he had sunken and withered cheeks, white lips, a sickly, wicked and unclean air, a dirty pallor, the look of a mouldered corpse, no visible linen, an old black frock-coat wrapped tight round his lank and fleshless limbs; he seemed to have been living in a sewer ...*

  but for the rest he noticed that even if some of the demonstrators had hidden arms they seemed to have no intention of using them. Many seemed only to want to have a look round, ‘for even in our bloodiest riots, there is always a multitude of men, half rascals and half gapers, who think that they are at a show.’ Fists were shaken at the representatives and insults hurled; but Tocqueville could not help noticing signs of vivacious intelligence among the sweaty and in some cases drunken visitors:

  I heard a man in a worker’s blouse, just beside me, saying to his comrade, ‘See that vulture over there? I’d like to wring his neck.’ Following the indication of his eye and arm, I saw without trouble that he meant Lacordaire, who could be seen sitting in his Dominican habit on the upper benches of the Left. I thought the remark shocking but the comparison admirable, for the long, bony neck of the reverend father, emerging from his white hood, his shaven head surrounded only by tufts of black hair – his narrow face, his hooked nose – his close-set, staring, brilliant eyes – all indeed gave him a look of the bird of prey which the man mentioned; I was much taken with the observation.30

  Tocqueville had another encounter with the humanity of the invaders when the National Guard finally arrived. As the crowd surged about in all directions he found himself confronting a young man with a sabre in one hand and Tocqueville’s swordstick in the other. He was shouting ‘Vive l’Assemblée Nationale!,’ which may have emboldened Tocqueville to demand his property:

  Tocqueville to demand ‘That’s my stick!’

  ‘It belongs to me.’

  ‘It is so much mine that I know there is a sword inside it.’

  ‘Of course there is, I had it put in two days ago. Who are you?’

  Tocqueville told him; the young man doffed his hat and presented the stick to him, saying that while it was his, he was happy to lend it to Tocqueville, who might need it that afternoon: ‘I will do myself the honour of collecting it from your home.’ Next day Tocqueville found what was certainly his own stick lying in a corner of the Assembly building. The two weapons were so exactly alike that he did not know which it was that he handed over when the supposed thief came to reclaim his property.31

  The former magistrate reflected that the story would be very instructive to a judge, warning him against jumping to conclusions even in the face of the clearest evidence; but he did not make any other inferences, for instance, that lethal weapons should not be left about in corridors, or that the workers might not really be dangerous. Like his fellow representatives, he was as convinced as ever that the Parisians would only respond to a heavy hand, and like them he wanted revenge for his fright. The road to the disastrous days of June was now open.

  He filled the interim with an important task. On 18 May the Assembly chose him among the first for the committee which was to draft the Republic’s constitution. It met and laboured throughout the rest of May and during the first two and a half weeks of June.

  In the Souvenirs Tocqueville gives an extremely scornful account of the committee’s proceedings and of his own part in them. He was well aware that something went terribly wrong. His account is acute and convincing at many points. But the committee minutes survive (they were ‘very badly composed’, according to Tocqueville) and the impression which they leave is not exactly that made by the Souvenirs.32

  Plato went to Syracuse, Madison to Philadelphia: Tocqueville knew that an extraordinary opportunity had come his way, but he did not expect the committee, made up of republicans, socialists, and veterans of the July Chamber like himself to make much of it. The committee, he thought, ‘scarcely resembled the men, so certain of their end and so familiar with the means necessary to attain it who, sixty years ago, under Washington’s chairmanship, so successfully drew up the American Constitution’. Lack of time, he added, and the pressure of events elsewhere made success even less likely.33

  Yet anyone who reads both the committee minutes of 1848 and the records of the constitutional convention of 1787 (which Tocqueville never saw) will be struck by the resemblance between them. Just as Madison opened the convention’s deliberations by submitting the Virginia Plan, which thereafter supplied the text for discussion, so Cormenin, the committee’s chairman,* encouraged by Beaumont (who was also on the committee), submitted a draft constitution for debate. Tocqueville was dismayed by the littleness of his colleagues, most of whom struck him as quite excessively swayed by vanity, political commitments and preoccupations, and narrow interests: but he would have been equally dismayed in 1787 by, for example, the recklessness with which the Southern delegates insisted on writing slavery into the US Constitution. Tocqueville mocked his most celebrated colleague, the ex-priest Lammenais, who on discovering that the committee was inclined to argue with his assertions and to go about its business in its own way, walked out in a huff, never to return; but Alexander Hamilton behaved no better at Philadelphia. Tocqueville remarked that most of the committee members were too ignorant and confused to discuss the general principles which could or should have shaped their drafts; ‘and those who had formed clearer [notions] were ill at ease in having to expound them.’ They did not want to provoke long, fruitless discussion. ‘In this way we ambled along to the end, adopting great principles explicitly for reasons of petty detail, and little by little building up the whole machinery of government without properly taking into account the relative strength of the various wheels and the manner in which they would work together.’ This was undoubtedly true; the minutes confirm it; and it was disastrous; but it would have happened at Philadelphia too without the firm leadership of James Madison and James Wilson, and as Tocqueville concedes, some parts of the constitution – those dealing with the legal system – being drafted by men who knew their business thoroughly (most members of the committee were, or had been, lawyers) were excellent.34

  Why, then, was the 1848 constitution, unlike that of 1787, a palpable failure? And why was Tocqueville unable to impose his views? He tried to reply to both these questions in the Souvenirs, but was too close to the matter to be objective. The minutes suggest answers.

  The committee members may not have been willing or able to discuss political philosophy, but most of them shared the same preconceptions. Thus when the socialist Considérant put forward the proposal that women should be given the vote he said he knew that it would not be accepted, but he may have been surprised when it was not even attacked (was this the episode which led Tocqueville to remark that Considérant ‘would have deserved to be sent to a madhouse’ had he been sincere?). One of the points on which all agreed was that in the Republic the National Assembly, as representing the sovereign people, would be supreme; yet – or perhaps I should say, therefore – the committee’s constant, concentrated preoccupation was how to check it. At first sight this is bewildering. Parliamentarians ought to believe in parliaments, and usually do. As everyone knew, the Assembly was in great danger and might soon be fighting for its life. This made no difference. The committeemen were experienced enough to know that the overwhelming victory of the conservatives in
the spring elections might never be repeated; or, at least, that one day ‘the Mountain’ (as the Left now called itself – another revolutionary reminiscence) might win the majority. Haunted by the usual memories the committee supposed that its prime duty was to make sure that the Assembly could never legally turn into another Convention. Tocqueville’s proposal that the legislature be bicameral, in the name of checks and balances, was rejected: as he says, public opinion had pronounced strongly in favour of a single Chamber, not only in Paris, but in nearly every department; but other means of weakening the Assembly were found. On the whole, they coalesced as a single device: strengthening the executive.35

  Tocqueville observed that most of his colleagues were unable to shake off the past: remembering the failure, fifty years previously, of the Directory, they were determined to have a one-man executive; a president. Tocqueville agreed to this. But he realized that in a country with such a powerful monarchical tradition such an innovation might be extremely dangerous, for it was not innovative enough. Now for the first time he saw clearly the great truth that was to dominate all his later historical writing: that continuity is at least as powerful a force as change. (This is another point which the US Constitution illustrates: in one light it appears only as the charter of a reformed British Empire.) The committee members could not differentiate a president from a king, and a French king at that. At every turn they heaped powers and privileges upon him. Thus, when it was a question of fixing his salary they considered, among other matters, that Paris had always lived in large part off the luxury trades generated by the Court. So they bid up the president’s salary to 600,000 francs per annum (£24,000), to renew this stimulus. There was to be a presidential court. For a private citizen such a salary would be enormous, but it was inadequate for the splendours envisaged. One of the difficulties of Louis Napoleon’s presidency is thus foreshadowed: he was certain to overspend (and did so lavishly). But indeed every detail of the presidency as devised by the committee seems premonitory not of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte the man, but of the office which he was to win and of the way in which, in it, he conducted himself. Executive usurpation, the threat which so unnecessarily exercised Americans in the early nineteenth century, was certain to be an eventuality in France even before it was thought possible that the Bonapartist pretender would be a serious candidate for the presidency. There was no other way in which the office, as designed, could be conducted.