Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  It seems all but certain that Tocqueville was beginning to suffer from the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. Beaumont does not appear to have guessed what was wrong until the summer of 1858: he had been over-impressed by his friend’s former prowess as a swimmer and a climber of mountains, which seemed to prove that his lungs were among his healthiest organs; but the patient and his wife cannot have been wholly deceived, however brave the faces they assumed.

  Even so, Tocqueville was not entirely docile. Nassau Senior visited Paris in May and called on him five times, to be greeted with a torrent of talk: the episode compels the realization that Tocqueville was a chatterbox. Senior did his best to limit the damage by keeping his visits short.39

  The return to Normandy was welcome to both Tocqueville and Marie. They had not been there together since 1847, and they were happy to be home again. They did not chafe at their enforced quiet: rather, they were glad to use Tocqueville’s illness as an excuse to keep bores away. The only drawback was the weather, which was too British for Tocqueville’s taste, but he pretended that Marie felt quite at home with rain, wind and cold (they kept fires burning right through August). It was true that she got her health back fairly quickly, while his recovery was slow and incomplete. His throat was still vulnerable: he found that he could not safely read aloud, which was normally one of their chief pleasures.40

  It was a retreat in every sense, and Tocqueville used the time to take stock – did so, indeed, for the next eleven months. In terms of the outcome, it was the most important period of his life since 1832. He was beginning to feel that he had little political future. Like everyone else, he foresaw a coup d’état; the question was, when would it occur? Meanwhile the party of order in the Assembly had made an unholy pact with Louis Napoleon: he agreed to sign a law curtailing universal suffrage in return for a doubling of his salary. This sort of thing led Tocqueville to wonder if there was any point in continuing to struggle for the Republic. He wrote to Beaumont: ‘would it not employ our moderation and our acknowledged honesty better to look for the least irregular possible exit from the Constitution, the one most respectful of the national will, and try, if not to save the Republic, at least to save liberty from perishing with it?’ This would mean trying to come to an understanding with Louis Napoleon, but Tocqueville was not yet ready to make the attempt. For one thing, politics did not seem so urgent from the Cotentin as they had in Paris; for another, he felt wearily middle-aged. His long-drawn-out convalescence persuaded him that youth had gone for good; perhaps he was even getting old (he was forty-four): ‘The truth is that I am less impatient, calmer and infinitely better-tempered than I was formerly. I am richer, as you can tell, in negatives. I am becoming sterile and easy-going ...’41

  These remarks should be read sceptically. It was not in Tocqueville to do nothing if he had an alternative. As his strength returned he reached for his pen.

  Exiled for the time being from the theatre of action and unable even to give myself to any programme of study, because of the precarious state of my health, I am reduced, here in my solitude, to meditate on myself for a moment, or rather to summon up visions of the recent events in which I was an actor or of which I was a witness. The best use I can make of my leisure seems to me to be to retrace those events, to paint the men I saw taking part in them, and to ascertain and engrave on my memory, if I can, the confused features which form the indistinct physiognomy of this my time.42

  So begins the Souvenirs, his memoir of the revolution of 1848, which he started in July 1850.

  Its great value as a historical and biographical source must be clear to any reader of the present book. In spite of its ideological rigidity and many narrative gaps, it forms a document, along with the Communist Manifesto (how Tocqueville would have hated that conjunction!), where all serious study of 1848 has to start. That revolution stimulated a flood of memoirs and histories; it is a proof of Tocqueville’s powers that his Souvenirs stands out from the crowd. No more need be said on this well-established point. Nor is it necessary to measure the Souvenirs against Tocqueville’s other masterpieces, the Démocratie and the Ancien Régime. Each is a work of a different genre, meeting a distinct need. Each succeeds, as much as books can. Except in point of lucidity and intelligence they are very unlike each other; but palpably they have the same author. The same mind is gracefully at work in all of them. The point, again, is too obvious to be insisted upon. Perhaps all that need he said at last in praise of the Souvenirs is that without it Tocqueville’s oeuvre would be infinitely less fascinating; for only in this book does he take the stage himself.

  What cannot be taken for granted is the shape and nature of the book, and how Tocqueville conceived and wrote it. He himself is at first quite explicit about his intentions. He writes, in the tone of a man fighting off temptation:

  these recollections will be my mental recreation, and emphatically not a work of literature. They are set down for myself alone. This screed will be a mirror in which I shall entertain myself by contemplating my contemporaries and myself, and not a canvas for the public. Even my best friends will have absolutely no knowledge of it, for I want to be free to paint without flattery. I want to analyse sincerely what were the secret motives which shaped our actions ... and, having understood, to state them. In short, I want the record of my memories to be sincere and, for that reason, it is necessary that it remain entirely secret.

  There can be no doubt that as he went to work Tocqueville meant every word of this declaration, but the pitiless verve of his memoirs shows that he had at least one other motive. He needed to discharge pints of accumulated bile. The eruption of the February Revolution had convinced him that he was living in a world of idiots, which explains the extraordinary sardonic bite of his portraits. His description of his sister-in-law Alexandrine on the morning of 24 February is quite unsoftened by twenty years of friendship:

  My sister-in-law had lost her head, as usual. Already she imagined her husband dead and her daughters ravished. [There had been gunfire in the street outside her house all night.] My brother, although one of the staunchest of men, could not think what to do, not being himself, and I never saw more clearly that if a brave wife is an enormous asset during a revolution, a wet hen, even if she has the heart of a dove, is a frightful encumbrance. What annoyed me most was to see that my sister-in-law had no thought for her country in the lamentations which the thought of her family’s fate drew from her every second ... I admit that she was kind-hearted and even intelligent, but she had somewhat shrunk her mind and chilled her heart by devoting herself rigidly and solely, in a sort of pious selfishness, to le Bon Dieu, to her husband, her children, and above all to her health, hardly concerning herself with anybody else; the best woman and the worst citizen that one could conceive of.43

  Such acid miniatures litter the Souvenirs, and while making irresistible reading somewhat alienate us from the author: it is impossible to think that he is fair (his description of Lamartine is one of many which certainly are not) and it is therefore difficult to trust his judgement. Tocqueville came to regret his rancour. He never revised the manuscript, but he realized that it was bound to be published after his death and left strict instructions that until the last of his victims was dead the book might appear only in bowdlerized form. (So faithfully were these instructions obeyed that the complete Souvenirs was not published until 1942.) But it had been a tremendous relief to let rip during that wet summer of 1850.

  The first part, taking the story as far as the proclamation of the Republic, was poured out during July; true to his first intentions, Tocqueville revealed it to no-one except (presumably) Marie, though he told Ampère that he had something to show him (‘you alone’) if he came to Tocqueville in August. In the event Ampère did not come. Others did – Comte Hervé, Édouard and his children, Senior, his wife and daughter, Rivet – but none was let into the secret. Senior’s journal shows that Tocqueville was in high spirits, talking all the time except, because of doctor’s orders,
when driving in a carriage; even that rule was broken when he went down to Saint-Lô for the conseil-général. The improvement in his health was such that, characteristically, he decided he was as good as cured; but ten days away from home in late August and early September disillusioned him. As president of the conseil he had to be very busy and speak frequently; then it was necessary to deliver a speech of welcome when Louis Napoleon came to Cherbourg for a naval review (once more Tocqueville urged the case for the Cherbourg railway). By the time he returned to Tocqueville he was exhausted, and once more his throat was giving trouble; he told Clamorgan that he was now in worse health than he had been when he arrived in Normandy. Marie was ill again. Cold winds blew across the Cotentin; as soon as Marie was well enough to travel they left for Paris, where Tocqueville’s doctors renewed the ban on conversation and more or less ordered him to winter in the south. He and Marie left for Italy on 30 October.44

  Tocqueville had not forgotten the Souvenirs amid these other preoccupations. The project was too important to him, and became more so as he wrote. It was the expression of all his disillusionment with politics and of his anxiety, both personal and patriotic, about the future – hence the passionate tone of Part One and the speed with which he wrote. It was an eruption of his feelings – he did not even bother to divide the text into chapters. But the act of composition forced him to change most of his initial assumptions. He was a mature writer at the height of his powers; as an artist, he could not do less than his best; the result was unquestionably a work of literature – it is rather astonishing that he could have supposed for a minute that it would not be. That summer Nassau Senior, who had at times a Boswellian trick of asking useful easy questions, wanted to know which was the golden age of French literature. ‘The latter part of the seventeenth century,’ was the unhesitating reply. ‘Men wrote solely for fame, & they addressed a public small & highly cultivated. French literature was young, the highest posts were vacant: it was comparatively easy to be distinguished. Extravagance was not necessary to attract attention. Style then was the mere vehicle of thought. First of all to be perspicuous, &, being perspicuous, to be concise, was all that they aimed at.’45 Such was Tocqueville’s declaration of faith, but to the reader of the Souvenirs it is almost unnecessary – every page proclaims the admirer of Pascal and Molière, de Retz and the duc de Saint-Simon and (from a later period, but still in the great tradition) the Mémoires d’outre-tombe, so much of which he had heard read aloud in the author’s presence. The slightly contrived eloquence of the 1835 Démocratie is a thing of the past. Tocqueville now writes, as in his letters, but with greater care, with the directness, perspicacity and concision that he admired. He was beginning to compose a masterpiece.

  That being so, it was idle to tell himself that he did not expect readers. He was writing a contribution to the history of his times, as Guizot would soon be doing,* and even if he meant to defer its publication indefinitely, it would still have to conform to the standards of science. He had been producing work based on thorough documentary research ever since 1827, and he was not going to change his methods now. As early as 9 July he was writing to Clamorgan asking for help in getting hold of Parisian newspapers from 1848, though he did not say what he wanted them for; and in Paris, during October, he interviewed Odilon Barrot, Rivet and Beaumont in order to get their accounts of 24 February.† He did not explain why, but they were bound to guess. By the time that Tocqueville left for Italy the secret of the Souvenirs was not quite so absolute as had originally been intended.46

  The journey south went tolerably until they put to sea (the party consisted of Alexis, Marie, and at least two servants – a cook, and Tocqueville’s valet, Eugène). At Genoa their rather small ship was invaded by a crowd of English travellers, so that there was hardly room to move on the decks or in the saloon. Then between Leghorn and Civita Vecchia one of the worst storms that Tocqueville had ever known broke out. Waves flooded the deck continually and everyone had to take refuge in the saloon. Men, women and children were jammed against each other, according to Tocqueville, like the cargo of a slave-ship. Everyone was seasick.

  But the worst thing was that there was so little air that I really thought that I was going to suffocate. My lungs are not yet as elastic as they were before my illness and I felt that I might stop breathing at any moment. Happily there was a small skylight next to me which I managed to open; that meant that I got several waves in my face, but at least I was allowed to live, which for the moment was all I cared about.

  The storm subsided at dawn, and they landed at Civita Vecchia, but Marie had suffered so much that Tocqueville thought it unlikely that she would ever again agree to travel by sea. Passing through Rome as quickly as they could (Tocqueville did not want to get involved in the political and diplomatic situation there), they reached Naples on 21 November.47

  Tocqueville had intended to winter at Palermo, but neither he nor Marie could face another winter voyage, and possibly another storm. For a few weeks they remained at Naples. It was an interesting time to be there. The reaction against revolution was stronger, perhaps, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies than anywhere else, and the King, Ferdinand II (otherwise known as King Bomba), was busy conducting palpably rigged trials of the leading Neapolitan liberals, many of them formerly his ministers, before thrusting them into his revolting dungeons for long terms. Mr Gladstone happened to be visiting Naples that winter, and made it his business to attend the trials and inspect the prisons; the result would be the publication in 1851 of two savage pamphlets denouncing the Bourbon regime (‘the negation of God erected into a system of government’) which gave him a heroic European reputation overnight. Tocqueville met Gladstone, but his response to the Neapolitan scandal was very different, and not only because he was probably tired of visiting prisons. He dismissed the king to Corcelle as a poltroon turned into a tyrant by unnecessary fright; he told Dufaure that the pleasure of beginning to feel well again was in part spoiled by the ‘moral maladies’ of the country. It was depressing to be in a city where all liberties were either imperilled or actually destroyed, and it was largely the fault of France. ‘When the French rise in revolution they immediately plunge Europe into anarchy, and when order is re-established in France all the old abuses spring up again everywhere else. So the peoples, it must be admitted, love us scarcely more than the princes.’ The February revolution had been disastrous for Italy; it was frightful to see liberty trodden underfoot and destroyed; Tocqueville decided to avert his eyes and live only for enjoyment. That meant leaving Naples, where the inns were ruinously expensive as well as flea-ridden; and he had nothing but distaste for the Neapolitans themselves: ‘what noise! what inconceivable dirt, what rags and tatters, what vermin! You would have to go into the nastiest streets of Algiers to find anything so abominable as what you meet at every turn on the streets of Naples.’ Early in December he and Marie moved to a rented house in Sorrento, where they stayed for the next four months.48

  Sorrento delighted them and their friends – Ampère and the Seniors having soon joined them. Ampère was given a spare bedroom, and the Seniors – Nassau, his wife, and their daughter Minnie – took the first floor of the palazzo, the Belvedere Guerracino, of which the Tocquevilles had taken the second. The weather was usually balmy, the views were magnificent, the country round delightful for walking. The air was so clear that it was almost possible to count the houses in Naples, eighteen miles off across the Bay; the neighbourhood of Sorrento, said Senior, seemed gilt: ‘whatever was not white with buildings was golden with oranges.’ They took trips to Amalfi, Pompeii and Paestum, and Tocqueville climbed Vesuvius again: Mr and Mrs Senior got less than halfway up, but Minnie and Tocqueville went right to the top. He was getting back his old élan. Unfortunately Marie was still unwell. She was very seldom able to go out, and when she did she had to ride a donkey. ‘It is true that we have a terrace as long as an esplanade, from which we enjoy the best view in Sorrento; it would be an incomparable exercise yard for a p
risoner of state; but for someone who is supposed to be at liberty,’ said Tocqueville, ‘it seems very insufficient.’ He worried about getting her safely back to France; meanwhile he picked violets on his walks and gave her a large bunch every time he got home. Another cloud on his spirits was the news from France. He hungered for it, and was deeply grateful for Beaumont’s long and regular letters, yet they depressed him. He poured out his thoughts to Senior and Ampère, but it got him nowhere; essentially, France was confronted with a dangerous and insoluble dilemma, and although Tocqueville felt frustratingly useless at Sorrento he would have achieved no more had he been in Paris.49