Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Long after daybreak he awoke to the sound of gunfire: the bedroom window was shaking. Marie said that it had been going on for an hour, but she had let him sleep as he would need all his strength that day (she was not a daughter of the Royal Navy for nothing). Tocqueville dressed at once and went to the Assembly, where he stayed until he was sent out with three colleagues (Cormenin was one) to give moral support to the troops. He found time to scribble a note to Marie, urging her to take herself and Comte Hervé to safety at Saint-Germain or Versailles; she did so in such a hurry that she forgot to let Tocqueville know where she would be, or that she had got there safely. It added to the anxieties of a dreadful day, when the insurgency was at its height. Tocqueville wrote to Clamorgan saying that if the Assembly were defeated in Paris it would leave the city and call France to arms. ‘I hope that France would hear it, for this is not about political forms, but about property, family, civilization, in short everything that makes life worth living ... But what a war, my friend, what an appalling war!’48

  The Assembly’s victory, though not easy, was never really uncertain. In July 1830 and in February 1848 the Parisian insurgents were opposed only by unpopular and ill-organized governments; they had taken the offensive and achieved speedy success. In June 1848 their foe was capable, resolute and strong, not least in its access to endless reinforcements; and the Parisians stood on the defensive. They had been scandalously treated. Not only would the closure of the workshops apparently deprive them of all public relief, but the able-bodied among them – the chief breadwinners – were now threatened with either years of military service or with transportation to the Second Republic’s equivalent of labour-camps. The barricades were erected so that they could stay at home, or at least die fighting. Cavaignac, initially short of troops, took his time about launching his onslaught, which made some of the less courageous representatives hysterical, but he knew what he was doing. The insurgents were challenging him to defeat them, barricade by barricade, house by house: Tocqueville was reminded of the siege of Saragossa in 1808, when for months the Spanish heroically resisted the army of Napoleon. The Parisians might have been even more dangerous and harder to subdue had they relied on sniper fire, which was what demoralized Marmont’s men in 1830. As it was, they fought with unexpected skill and tenacity; but Cavaignac was able to defeat them with cannon and cavalry. By the afternoon of 26 June it was all over; order reigned in Paris. Tocqueville left the Assembly for the rue de la Madeleine; as he walked along he could survey the field of victory.49

  ‘One would like to discover in his writing some of the accents of pity shown by men like Armand de Melun,’* says André Jardin, but Tocqueville remained implacable. Another sightseer on 26 June was the great Russian socialist Alexander Herzen, who was arrested near the Madeleine by a National Guard officer, who thought he looked a suspicious customer. He was taken off to a police station, surrounded by soldiers.

  The first man we met was a représentant du peuple with the silly badge in his button-hole: it was De Tocqueville, the writer on America. I appealed to him and told him what had happened: it was not a joking matter; they kept people in prison without any sort of trial, threw them into the cellars of the Tuileries, and shot them.† De Tocqueville did not even ask who we were; he very politely bowed himself off, delivering himself of the following banality: ‘The legislative authority has no right to interfere with the executive.’ He might well be a minister under Napoleon III!

  (Herzen was released some hours later.)50

  Tocqueville had no doubts about the necessity of this latest massacre in Paris, and even Lamartine and Louis Blanc accepted that the rising had to be suppressed. It had been provoked, Tocqueville continued to believe, by the Left, and no counter-measures could be too rigorous. Only in personal relations might he relax. When in 1849 his colleague on the constitutional committee Victor Considérant was driven into exile because of his part in the rising of that year, he wrote to Tocqueville for help in protecting some Italian property of their friend, the Princess Belgiojoso.* Tocqueville, who was foreign minister at the time, responded favourably at once, though not without making some severe remarks about the bloodthirsty character of Considérant’s political friends. But this mitigation of his attitude, if that is what it was, seems to have been unique.51

  * ‘Parties never know one another: they get close, they shove, they grapple, they never see.’

  * Léonor-Joseph Havin (1799–1868), whose father had been a member of the Convention, was deputy for Saint-Lô, 1831–48. He belonged to the dynastic Left, and supported AT’s candidacy at Valognes in 1839, but the two men, though frequently forced to collaborate, were essentially competitors for leadership in the Manche.

  * Louis Blanc, the socialist leader, was to say much the same thing: ‘the only thing which seemed certain was that Republicanism, as a form of government, was henceforth a settled matter. But this did not suffice to the earnest friends of progress. It was less the laying their hands on a political instrument which they had in view, than the future use which might be made of it.’ 1848: Historical Revelations (London: Chapman & Hall, 1858) 383.

  * Narcisse Vieillard (1791–1857), former artillery officer; former tutor to Prince Louis Napoleon. Elected deputy for Carentan (Manche) in 1842, as a member of the dynastic Left, he was defeated in 1846 and turned to republicanism. He was appointed a commissioner for the Manche at the same time as Havin.

  * Yet the Manche was not among the most conservative departments in the West. See A.-J. Tudesq, Les Grands Notables, map on p. 1069: ‘Les représentants du people, Élection d’avril 1848: les conservateurs: Répartition départmentale.’

  * Not for long. Guizot was in exile, but by-elections soon brought Thiers and Molé into the Assembly.

  * Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–85), minor poet, backbench MP (first as a Tory, then as a Whig), first biographer of John Keats. Created Baron Houghton in 1863. Under that title he is remembered as a patron of Swinburne and for his enormous collection of pornography.

  * Blanqui had only recently emerged from nine years in one of those French prisons which AT had been trying to reform since 1833.

  * Louis de Cormenin (1788–1868), jurist and political pamphleteer, had a distinguished legal career under the constitutional monarchy, when he belonged to the opposition. In 1849 he rallied to Louis Napoleon, and was a member of the conseil d’état until his death.

  * Admittedly, this point was easy to overlook in 1848, when the US Constitution had not been amended since before AT was born (and would not be again until after his death).

  † It has often occurred to me that AT would regard as corruption almost everything nowadays accepted in the West as legitimate electioneering.

  * The Garde Mobile was a device of the Provisional Government to get the gamins (urchins) of Paris off the streets. They were enlisted, put into uniform, paid well and given military training. To everyone’s surprise they proved loyal to their paymaster and shot down their fellow-citizens devotedly.

  * See above, p. 415.

  † Frédéric-Alfred-Pierre, comte de Falloux (1811–86), a devoted Catholic and legitimist, entered the Chamber of Deputies in 1847; elected to the assemblies of the Second Republic, he emerged as one of his faction’s strongest leaders.

  * Vicomte Armand de Melun (1807–77), member of the Legislative Assembly 1849–51, was the French and Catholic equivalent of the Earl of Shaftesbury. He devoted his life to mitigating the problems of the poor. In 1846 he founded the Société d’économie charitable, of which AT was a member.

  † Q uite true. The regular army behaved decently, but the vengeful National Guard committed many atrocities. Dead bodies were frequently thrown into the Seine.

  * Princess Christine Trivulzio de Belgiojoso (1808–71), a rich and patriotic Milanese, lived in exile in Paris, where she held a brilliant salon of which AT was an habitué. In 1848 she returned to Milan and raised a company of soldiers to fight the Austrians.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN<
br />
  RETROSPECTION

  1848–1851

  A history is not the less interesting for being incomplete.

  A. DE GOBINEAU 1

  THE PARISIANS HAD LOST the battle of June, but as Tocqueville immediately realized it was not clear who, if anybody, had won. The Republican government had swept away the most fervent supporters of the Republic, and done so in such a way as to win itself no new friends. The legitimists and the Orleanists had for the time being sunk their dynastic differences in order to form a new conservative grouping (they saw fit to call themselves ‘moderates’), the Committee of the rue de Poitiers, which meant to exploit the Right’s strengthened position to impose its own view of society on republican France. Its most prominent leaders were all veterans of the July Monarchy: Berryer, Molé, Broglie, above all Thiers, and it was nakedly the party of the grands notables. That was its strength and its weakness: it was not going to vanish, but its chances of regaining power, rather than influence, were poor, at any rate in the short term. It showed wary respect for the governing Republicans but attacked the Left relentlessly, greatly helped in this by the weakness of the Left’s remaining leaders: Lamartine was a spent force and Ledru-Rollin was inept. As to the old dynastic Left, to which Tocqueville belonged, it was still an army of generals without soldiers, and events since February had laid bare its essential conservatism: it accepted the Republic in good faith, but otherwise there was little to distinguish it ideologically from the rue de Poitiers. In changed circumstances it still struggled, as it had under Guizot, to establish a position that was both independent and electorally popular: still struggled and still failed. The truly moderate Republicans clung to Cavaignac and his government like drowning men to a life-raft: they had no other asset, and this one soon diminished, since Cavaignac’s popularity steadily lessened: to govern is to choose, and Cavaignac’s choices regularly alienated more voters than they pleased. There was thus a huge political void in France. It might be filled by a man and a cause, and before the end of the summer it was clear that both were at hand. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte won another by-election, returned to France from exile, and took his seat.

  In July Eugène Stoffels wrote to Tocqueville asking for a letter about politics. The reply shows his friend plunged into one of his blackest moods:

  I don’t believe in the future ... No longer do I hope – I wouldn’t say this to anyone else – no longer do I hope to see the establishment in our country of a government that is at once lawful, strong and liberal. That ideal was the dream of my whole youth, as you know, and also of the days of my prime, which have already gone by.

  Then there appeared what was to become a favourite image:

  We are sailing on a stormy, shoreless sea; or at least the shore is so distant, so uncertain that our life and perhaps that of those who come after us will have ended before it is discerned ...

  It is not that I expect an uninterrupted train of revolutions. On the contrary, I expect long intervals of order, peace and prosperity; but I do not now expect the establishment of a solid and well-ordered social and political system. How could I? In 1789, in 1815, even in 1830 it was possible to think that France had been attacked by one of those violent illnesses after which the health of society becomes more vigorous and enduring. Today we see that we are afflicted by a chronic infection.

  He concluded by saying again that what made the June insurrection so pernicious was that it was inspired by wrong ideas. Not cannon or bayonets, not even dictatorship, could defeat them permanently.2

  These thoughts and phrases were the germ of a famous passage in the Souvenirs3 and besides forming a powerful example of Tocqueville’s prophetic insight show his mind turning back to meditation on the history of France, the theme which was to dominate his thought for the rest of his days, if it had not always done so.

  The turn is illustrated quite as unmistakably in the speech that he delivered to the Assembly on 12 September. He had not previously spoken from the tribune of the new parliament, but now four days a week were being devoted to the grand debate on the constitution; it was necessary to make himself felt on the subject, and he planned three major addresses – one of which could not be delivered because of illness. On 12 September the subject was the right to work. The constitutional committee had refused to write this dangerous slogan into the constitution; after much discussion it proposed Article 8 of the preamble:

  The Republic must protect each citizen in his person, his family, his religion, his property, his work and his home ... it must ensure subsistence to the unfortunate, either by finding work for them (as much as its resources permit) or by assuring, where their families cannot, the necessities of life to those who are in no condition to work.4

  This was not enough for representatives on the Left: they proposed various amendments explicitly guaranteeing the right to work. In practice the language would make no difference: ever since the June Days the government had been doing what it could to relieve unemployment, for example by taking over the job of building and running the railway line from Paris to Lyon. But ‘the right to work’ was an ideological issue of the highest importance; Tocqueville had gone as far as he was prepared to go in concessions on the point; besides, a month previously there had been a tremendous battle in the Assembly between Proudhon and Thiers, in which Proudhon had advocated what amounted to an emergency tax on the incomes of the rich and Thiers, while tearing the proposal to pieces, had also launched a root-and-branch attack on socialism. Tocqueville too wanted to make a stand: he could not leave the topic to Thiers, whom he mistrusted as much as ever.

  His speech was a great success, heckled by the Left (the President had to call its representatives to order) and applauded by the Right; it was printed as a pamphlet as well as in the Moniteur (Tocqueville sent some specimens to be distributed in London). His line was that if the right to work was conceded the way would open inexorably to communism or socialism (defined as a form of servitude) and the destruction of property. His tactics were the ones usual in such effusions: a determination to ignore common sense and to frighten his audience with the blackest possible inferences from what, on the face of it, was a fairly harmless proposition, that the Republic ‘recognizes the right of every citizen to education, work and relief’.5 His warnings had their effect: the amendment was rejected; more evidence, perhaps, that Tocqueville’s oratory was at last becoming powerful. Of greater interest is the second theme of his speech. He wanted not only to defeat but to discredit the claim for the right to work, and he tried to do so by arguing that it was not a legitimate part of French revolutionary tradition. It was the ancien régime, he said, that was like socialism: it aspired to assume total responsibility for the lives of its subjects; the Revolution of 1789 was all about the freedom of the individual. Shamelessly, he quoted Robespierre of all people on the point (‘Abandon the former mania of governments for governing too much’), to the astonishment of his hearers (what can his father have thought?) and before that he swung into a passionate eulogy of the great Revolution in highly revealing language:

  Was it by speaking of material interests, of the material needs of men, that the French Revolution did the great things which made it illustrious in the world? ... Do you think that it was by speaking of such things that it was able to arouse, to inspire, a whole generation, setting it in motion, driving it across our frontiers, throwing it into the middle of war’s dangers, confronting it with death? No, gentlemen, no, it was by evoking things loftier and lovelier, it was by speaking of the love of country, of the country’s honour, it was by speaking of virtue, generosity, disinterestedness, glory, that it did such great things; for, after all, gentlemen, be assured that there is only one secret for making men do great things: it is by appealing to great ideas. (‘Very good! Very good!’)6

  And as to property, the great achievement of the Revolution was to distribute it more widely than ever before, making France a nation of ten million landholders; the very people most threatened by the socialists.
To be true to the glorious revolutionary tradition, the February Revolution must claim not the democratic and social republic, but the democratic Christian one. What was needed was not the right to work, but the right to public charity.7

  This sophistical, almost Jacobinical discourse is interesting as coming from the future historian of the Revolution; its interpretation of the spirit of 1789 is explicit, and would underlie all Tocqueville’s future work on the subject. It is full of other Tocquevillean traits – for instance, the United States is held up as a model democracy where socialism is never thought of – but perhaps its most striking characteristic is its impudence. This orator, who disliked all revolutions, and the February Revolution in particular, which he would have stopped if he could, now tells the men who made it that they had got it all wrong. It raises doubts about Tocqueville’s sincerity, doubts reinforced by the first half of his next speech, delivered on 5 October, when on behalf of the constitutional committee he argued in favour of choosing the president by popular vote, rather than by vote of the Assembly. His account of a parliament which combined legislative and executive supremacy could hardly have been more scathing: it would not be like the revolutionary Convention, he conceded at last, there would be no repetition of the Reign of Terror, but under such an Assembly ‘we will have a tyrannical, busybody government, a changeable, violent, thoughtless, scatterbrain government, without traditions, without wisdom ... and, I must add, a profoundly corrupt and corrupting government.’8 The existing Assembly might well have resented these strictures, but it did not protest, and towards the end of his speech Tocqueville showed that like many former Orleanists he accepted the Republic as the best government in the country’s circumstances, and went beyond them in his interpretation of current opinion: