* Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82). Met AT 1842–43, and assisted him in some enquiries into modern (especially German) political philosophy. Worked on the Commerce during AT’s involvement with that paper, and collaborated with Kergorlay in editing the short-lived Revue provinciale, 1848–49.
* Guizot’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps began to appear in 1859. Each chapter was followed by a generous printing of documents.
† GB’s memoir of February 1848 confirms the accuracy of AT’s notes on his 1850 interview.
* ‘Madam, I have never coined a phrase in my life.’
* Thiers’s History of the Consulate and Empire began to be published in 1845; its last volumes did not appear until 1862.
* See above, pp. 426–7.
CHAPTER TWENTY
DECEMBER
1851–1852
Even after 1848, tho’ the Bourbons were discredited we shd not have tolerated a Bonaparte, if we had not lost all our self possession in our terror of the Rouges. That terror created him ...
TOCQUEVILLE, CONVERSATION WITH SENIOR,
9 APRIL, 18571
TOCQUEVILLE AND MARIE left Sorrento on 14 April 1851 and arrived in Paris on the 30th. All thoughts of literature had to be put aside. The long political crisis, so faithfully chronicled by Beaumont in his letters, was approaching its dénouement, and Tocqueville could not stay aloof, though by 1 December he was saying that were it not for honour he would resign from the Assembly at once.2
In March 1848 he had congratulated himself on seeing his way clear before him. Now, except that he had to earn his parliamentary salary, nothing was clear. Nothing is very clear in retrospect, either. The French political world was in a turmoil of disputes about ends and means, and as Tocqueville said repeatedly, it was impossible to tell what the future would be, whether in the short or the long term – this, although the air was thick with threats and warnings of coups d’état, either by the president or the Assembly.
The situation was eventually to be resolved by a presidential coup on 2 December, which was itself to be a matter of fierce debate and was a permanent stain on the reputation of Louis Napoleon, partly because of blunders in its execution. Yet it must not be judged, after more than a century and a half, as self-evidently inexcusable. Louis Napoleon had been elected with more than five and a half million votes to fewer than two million for all his rivals combined, and was confident that if he could stand again he would be triumphantly re-elected, not just because there was no convincing competitor, but because of his performance in office and, still more, because he represented stability, for which the citizens deeply longed. When Tocqueville spent three weeks in the Manche that summer he discovered that most of the voters were solidly behind the president. ‘He is in office, which is a determining reason for our peasants, who have no enthusiasm for him but say, in the manner you know, of their own accord, “Why change a man who hasn’t made any mistakes?”’3 Under Louis Napoleon, France again had an effective government, and prosperity, at least in the towns, was beginning to return. If Bonaparte had not actually restored France’s international prestige, most Frenchmen thought that he had, which did just as well. He had made many official tours (including the visit to Cherbourg), in which he and France got to know each other (very necessary: he had not lived in the country since his childhood). He became generally accepted as a dignified and competent head of state. He had earned a second term, and the constitutional ban on it seemed ridiculous and undemocratic. Somehow or other it must be circumvented or repealed; if it were, the people would certainly approve.
Even if that had been all, repeal would probably not have been possible, since it would require amendments to the constitution, but Tocqueville, who had been studying the president’s character closely for two years, was certain that it was not all. Louis Napoleon, he said, was not content to be a mere democratically elected president, however powerful or popular. ‘He trusted in his star; he believed firmly that he was the tool of destiny and the necessary man ... I doubt if Charles X himself was ever more infatuated with his own legitimacy than he was with his.’4 It was perhaps a weakness in Tocqueville that to him a strong monarch always seemed an actual or potential despot, whether Charles X, Louis-Philippe or Louis Napoleon; it does not follow that he was always wrong. He feared and detested Bonapartism. He had warned against the thing, if not the name, in the Démocratie.5 He did not have the vocabulary to do his views justice: the word ‘dictator’ was not yet current in its full modern sense of brutal and illegitimate power; but he had never forgotten Napoleon I and was correctly convinced that Louis Napoleon meant to emulate him. Louis Napoleon had little taste for liberty and, in Tocqueville’s opinion, particularly detested parliaments. He was a danger to France.
But what was the alternative? The Mountain had been driven from power. Almost the only thing which could unite conservatives was the prospect, however dim, of its return. For the rest, factions of Orleanists, legitimists, moderate Republicans and, increasingly, Bonapartists quarrelled carelessly in the Assembly. The dominant group there was still that of Thiers and the resurgent Orleanists who, to judge by their behaviour, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing like the Bourbons before them. Thiers had uttered his famous mot, ‘the Republic ... is of all governments that which divides us least,’ but he did not act as if he meant it, or even understood it: he first said it during the Assembly debate on the loi Falloux (which might just as reasonably have been called the loi Thiers), the schools measure which by largely handing over primary education to the Church exacerbated and embittered anticlericalism so that it remained one of the most divisive issues in French politics for the next hundred years and more.6 (It was also at this time that Thiers dismissed the French lower classes as ‘the vile multitude’ or mob – in the debate on the law of 31 May 1850 which disfranchised three million citizens.)* Thiers and the other Burgraves seem to have regarded the 1848 revolution as a mere unfortunate accident; they did not take the Republic seriously (whereas Tocqueville did: it was his strength). They respected nobody’s opinions but their own, failed to take realistic account of the return of Bonapartism, and were incapable of concession or compromise. As a result the Assembly grew more and more isolated and unrepresentative, and therefore steadily feebler, though the representatives did not realize this until too late. Louis Napoleon made a perfectly just point in a speech at Dijon on 11 June 1851, when he remarked of the Assembly, ‘For three years, it has been noticeable that I have always been supported when it has been a matter of fighting disorder with severity; but when I have wanted to do good ... by taking measures to improve the condition of the people, I have met only inertia.’7 His complaint was contemptuously ignored. The Burgraves intrigued ceaselessly to bring back the Orléans family: they hoped to run the Prince de Joinville, one of Louis-Philippe’s sons, for the presidency in 1852. It was widely suspected that they would themselves stage a coup d’état if they could get enough support in the army: they had great hopes of General Changarnier, the commander in Paris, until Louis Napoleon dismissed him. Meanwhile they postured as ‘the party of order’, and hoped to thwart Louis Napoleon’s designs, whatever they were, by using the majority in the Assembly; but this turned out to be impossible because the other main component of the majority, the legitimists, detested Orléans far more than Bonaparte, and would not co-operate systematically. Attempts at ‘fusion’, that is, at uniting behind the last of the Bourbons, the childless ‘Henri V’ – the comte de Chambord, formerly the duc de Bordeaux – in return for his recognition of Louis-Philippe’s grandson, the comte de Paris, as his rightful heir, did not succeed: Chambord would make no concessions. He meant eventually to return to France at God’s invitation, not as the result of intrigues in a discredited Assembly (it did not strike him that if such had been the attitude of his great-uncle Louis XVIII there would have been no Restoration in 1814).
Tocqueville could not associate himself with such a crew, not least because, by using their po
wer to disrupt the Republic as much as they could, they threatened a return of what he called anarchy; for his fear of the Mountain was still powerful, though he did not need to insist on it as much as in 1848. A new theme emerges in his writings at this time, a respect for the French people. They had come through the turbulence of the recent past with extraordinary self-discipline, he thought; they had profited from their revolutionary education; but still he did not entirely trust them, or at least not the Parisians. He feared that the elections of 1852, in which the Assembly and the presidency would be renewed, would bring in a Red parliamentary majority, which would once more endanger property. This fear of 1852 was widespread, and seems to have grown stronger as 1851 neared its end.8
It was while he was still at Sorrento that Tocqueville decided that the best thing to do in this tangle was to support Louis Napoleon, on conditions. He decided, tentatively, to treat the president’s ambition for re-election as legitimate, and to work to have the constitution amended to make a second term legal. On his return to Paris he found that many others had come to the same conclusion: for once he was with the majority. Unfortunately there were many difficulties about this course. The worst was the near-impossibility of amending the constitution at all, let alone in time for the 1852 elections. In their anxiety to protect the Republic against assaults from either Left or Right the constitutional committee had laid it down that revision could only be considered during the last year of an Assembly’s term; that for a given amendment to pass, the Assembly had to vote for it three times, at monthly intervals, passing it each time by a three-quarters majority; and that the quorum for such a vote was to be five hundred.9 It is never easy to get such majorities, especially on important questions, or to keep them together. Even the US Constitution only requires two-thirds majorities, in both chambers, each voting once, to pass amendments.* In the French Assembly of 1851 the task was almost impossible, for the committed Republicans regarded the proposed amendment, legalizing the president’s consecutive re-election, as no more than a dodge to resurrect monarchy. Most of Tocqueville’s closest associates, among them Dufaure, took this view: they could not overlook the fact that had Cavaignac been elected there would have been no problem. It was the president’s Napoleonic ambitions which created the crisis, and it could even be argued that such ambitions justified the one-term rule, which hampered them. Thiers, who had broken entirely with Louis Napoleon, was committed to the Joinville candidacy. However, his influence was not what it had been: many other leading conservatives, including the duc de Broglie (one of the Burgraves) and Montalembert, the leader of the Catholics in the Assembly, supported revision. Naturally Louis Napoleon, whose influence was steadily increasing, did so.
Tocqueville’s plan was not quite hopeless, but at first he himself was. When Nassau Senior came to Paris early in May Tocqueville told him that it was childish to hope for a legal majority in favour of revision. And there was the related problem of the suffrage ‘law of 31 May’. It had been passed in a moment of panic, when the Left had won four by-elections in Paris. The Right had won ten by-elections at the same time, but it was a curious feature of the party of order that it was always less impressed by its victories than by the fact that they were never quite total. So as Émile de Girardin said to Senior, the law replaced universal suffrage with a new version of Guizot’s pays légal. Tocqueville held that the measure destroyed in advance the legitimacy of any elections held under it: sovereignty of the people meant what it said, and universal suffrage was necessary in a republic. Perhaps surprisingly, this somewhat advanced position became one of his principles.* The law of 31 May would have to be repealed.10
Louis Napoleon took a less high-minded view of the matter: ‘Do you suppose that after having been elected by six million votes I would want an electoral system which would only give me four million?’ He made this remark on 15 May, during an interview at the Elysée to which he had summoned Tocqueville. Tocqueville found it hard to imagine why he had been sent for, but it seems clear enough in retrospect. The Prince-President (as he was now usually called) was a skilful chess-player beginning his end-game. His half-brother, Auguste de Morny, was already convinced that only force could resolve the great political dilemma, but Louis Napoleon, always slow to make up his mind, was even more cautious than usual at this time, if only because a coup d’état could all too easily go wrong. He would exhaust all possibilities of a legal re-election before committing himself to other methods. He would give the Assembly a last chance to be sensible; he set about rallying as much support as possible for constitutional revision by constitutional means. He liked Tocqueville, who (according to himself ) had always treated him with respect and consideration during his brief ministry, and was conspicuously upright. He now hoped to enlist him for the coming battle, which was not difficult, Tocqueville having already made his choice.11
Tocqueville’s chief preoccupation during the interview was to understand his host. ‘There is nothing more difficult than to get past the immobile surface of that face and get to the bottom of his mind,’ he wrote afterwards; ‘one can never gather anything from a conversation with him but impressions.’ (He was to say much the same in the Souvenirs: ‘his eyes were dull and opaque like that thick glass used in ships’ cabins, which lets in light but through which nothing can be seen.’) Tocqueville was perhaps hampered by his own cleverness: the Prince-President seems to have agreed straightforwardly with almost everything that he said, and he gave Tocqueville impressions which later events proved to have been wholly accurate. He had very little hope that the Assembly would give him his constitutional revision; he was far from having given up the idea of launching a coup d’état, and he was determined to smash the law of 31 May, but wanted to do it at the last minute, ‘as a kind of appeal to the people and a blow struck against the Assembly’. Tocqueville was equally frank, and warned the president earnestly against a resort to force, making it plain that he himself would have nothing to do with such an adventure.12
Nothing could be done about revision before the end of May, when the Assembly would enter the last year of its term. The weather was frightful. Tocqueville passed the time by trying to clarify his views on paper, but the memorandum which he wrote only shows him recoiling from every likely outcome. It amounted to this, that to stick by the letter of the constitution was impossible, but to violate it was wrong, and might lead to worse still ... He broke off in mid-sentence.13
At the beginning of June, through the kindness of Rivet, Tocqueville and Marie moved to a house in a park on the edge of Versailles, the Grille du Grand Montreuil, and liked it so much that they stayed there throughout the summer and autumn. The country surroundings were good for both of them, and Tocqueville found it easy to take the train from Versailles to Paris when he was needed at the Assembly. There, Broglie had introduced a bill proposing to call a new Constituent Assembly to revise the constitution. The bill went through the usual procedures; a committee was set up to report on it, and Tocqueville was a prominent member and, eventually, the rapporteur. He spoke up for revision at every opportunity, on the grounds that ‘the election of 10 December’ had created a situation (meaning the fact that the executive and the legislature could not work together) from which there was no escape except by violence, illegality, or revision. He wanted a new Constituent Assembly to please the legitimists, who still hoped to bring back the comte de Chambord, and the repeal of the 31 May law to please the Republicans. Broglie charged him with inconsistency and Barrot, in his memoirs, with not being sufficiently committed to revision; he answered them both by remarking that it was not enough to support revision theoretically; there had to be a demonstration of practicality by a readiness to make any concessions compatible with honour that would increase the number of supporters. This was good sense, and the fact that he uttered it demonstrated how much he had learned since he first entered politics. As rapporteur he showed himself as good as his word, listening patiently to the criticisms of such colleagues as Barrot and Montale
mbert, and answering them respectfully. He probably changed no views, but the committee was unanimous in accepting his report as the best basis for discussion in the Assembly.14
The debate began inauspiciously, for a number of Republicans wanted to record their votes against revision even before hearing the report, which the president of the Assembly refused to allow; there was much hubbub before Tocqueville could get a hearing. No doubt he suffered as usual from stage-fright; he was also anxious about his throat, asking permission to read out only the first, longer and more important of the report’s two sections. ‘Not long ago I was seriously ill, and I’m afraid that to read out the whole of this work would be too much for me.’ Unanimous consent was readily given.15
The report that followed was Tocqueville’s last parliamentary performance. It was written with all his characteristic lucidity and economical eloquence; it contains much forceful argument. Unfortunately, for all its merits, it could not be equal to the historical moment; it cannot be ranked among its author’s best writings; it is only an exercise in practical politics. It is highly illuminating for all that.
He began by saying that he would not beat about the bush, but in a sense the whole speech was an exercise in obfuscation. He flattered his hearers by calling them statesmen, ‘not rhetoricians or children’, but men who knew the way of the world and were not to be satisfied by words alone; he professed to be laying deep constitutional, even philosophical problems before them; but what he was really trying to do was to rally the so-called party of order to seize its last chance. Unless conservatives of all stripes could unite in the Assembly and agree on a course of action they were doomed to defeat and might as well surrender to the Prince-President at once. Tocqueville’s business was to put over this message without actually offending the representatives by stating it. His report thus lacks something of his usual intellectual distinction, and even has an appearance of inconsistency, since in speaking for the majority of the committee (always in the spirit of compromise and concession) Tocqueville not only had to take care to do justice to the views of the minority, but also to the different shades of opinion within the majority itself; nor did he quite resist the temptation to enlarge on his own particular views.
Alexis de Tocqueville Page 63
