Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Tocqueville’s detestation of Louis Napoleon after the coup d’état had a passion to it which never relented. He resented the exclusion of the grands notables from political power (one of Louis Napoleon’s chief objects), but his opposition also had other, deeper roots. He had been brought up in a tradition according to which the dictatorship of the first Napoleon was the negation of all that was best in French history and civilization. He thought the new government a travesty of law, liberty and justice: it was a democratic despotism. The earliest years of Louis Napoleon’s autocracy were particularly oppressive: Tocqueville could see nothing in them but a resurrection of the police state which had blighted the country during his childhood and led it to disaster. All this was enough to stiffen his resistance, and to it was added his sense of personal failure. But the new Bonapartism had an unforeseeable effect on him which was the strongest factor of all in his opposition: it reminded him of what he really believed in. Liberty was a word that had never been absent from his vocabulary, but during his political career, and especially during the Second Republic, he had tended to confuse it with other things, above all with the protection of landed property and resistance to socialism. Under the Second Empire he was reminded almost daily of the truth. Liberty was the right to think, speak and publish as you chose; the right of free association; the right to take part in the government and politics of your country; the right to call power to account. It was security from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. It was law and justice for all; it was the hope of progress. It was, in other words, very like the democratic ideals which had informed the first volumes of De la démocratie en Amérique. Tocqueville had never become cynical, but the author of the Souvenirs was a man on the brink of despair. Paradoxically, the coup d’état, by demolishing all the confusions and compromises which had been fostered by the parliamentary system, demonstrated to Tocqueville not only political reality, but his true faith. It revealed an unbridgeable gulf between him and Louis Napoleon. The discovery was to inform all the work of his last years.

  He was lucky in having work to turn to, even though it would be long before he could bring it into focus. Those parliamentary liberals who had thus far survived from the July Monarchy were politically extinguished by the Second Empire, except for the indestructible Thiers and a small number of the close associates whom he protected; and even Thiers, after he was allowed to return from exile in August 1852, had to devote most of his time for the next decade to completing his Napoleonic history. Dufaure’s political career was to revive briefly in the early years of the Third Republic, but until then he worked as a barrister. Death cut down most of the others. Tocqueville himself was the first to go, in 1859; Beaumont followed in 1866, Lanjuinais and Lamartine in 1869; Broglie in 1870. Odilon Barrot lasted until 1873, but played little part in public life. If these men were to find renewed fulfilment in such time as was left to them they would need to take deliberate action, as did Duvergier de Hauranne, who wrote a ten-volume history of French parliamentary government, or Guizot, who devoted himself to his memoirs and the affairs of French Protestantism.

  Beaumont was especially to be pitied. In the last months of the Second Republic his world collapsed about him. His little daughter Alix died; so did his father and his father-in-law, George Washington de La Fayette, who left his affairs in such a mess that Beaumont reported gloomily to Tocqueville that while his children might eventually benefit from the La Fayette inheritance he and Clémentine never would. The loss of his parliamentary career and salary was simply the last misfortune. In January 1852 he felt forced to retire to Beaumont-la-Chartre and live with the utmost economy so as to avoid further debt and, most important of all, save enough to help his sons when it was time to launch their careers. He went to Paris only when it was absolutely necessary, and otherwise passed his days either in trying to comfort Clémentine, who took Alix’s death very hard, or at his desk, chewing his pen and trying to think of something to write about. The tone of his letters is brave but unmistakably depressed. He felt quite at a loss.3

  The same could not be said of Tocqueville. His creative energies had always been much greater than Beaumont’s, and as we have seen he had been thinking for more than a year of returning full-time to literature. He thought he knew exactly what he wanted to write. The French Revolution was to be his theme, the first Napoleon’s part in it his subject. He had always been fascinated by the Emperor, like so many of his generation; he still considered that he was the embodiment of the Revolution and the builder of modern France, for good or ill. Difficulties about these notions would soon emerge, but for the time being Tocqueville was happy enough to plunge into the Bibliothèque Nationale, emerging only to visit the Archives Nationales, where everyone was helpful, and the archives of the foreign ministry, where they were not. It was only when he lifted his head from his books and papers that the thought of his country’s condition plunged him again into gloom.4

  He soon filled a notebook, in his usual way, with information, ideas and extracts; unfortunately for him and us he lost it that summer, but there is other evidence of how his thoughts were moving. That winter, it was Tocqueville’s turn to act as president of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and with much lamentation (‘that damned academical discourse’) he prepared an elegant presidential address, to be delivered on 6 December. The coup d’état meant that it had to be postponed until 3 April, and heavily revised: in its original version it had not only proclaimed the rights of intellectual and academic freedom against the interferences of government (pouvoir), it had held up Napoleon I as a horrid warning, as the greatest enemy of the Académie itself, which he had actually closed down (it had been reopened by Guizot in 1832). After consulting Beaumont, Tocqueville decided that in the circumstances this passage was dangerously provocative: it might draw the new Bonaparte’s unfriendly attention to the Académie.* Tocqueville suppressed the passage (and thereby made his discours somewhat insipid) but the draft survives, and shows that he was again taking up the themes of his acceptance speech to the Académie Francaise, delivered ten years previously almost to the day: he was demonstrating that his account of the First Empire, when written, would not err on the side of leniency.5

  For the rest, his speech was primarily a defence of political science (what nowadays would be called political theory) as distinct from the empirical, rule-of-thumb art of government. He admitted, indeed he asserted, that to excel in the theory of politics was not to be sure of success in the arena. Illustrious authors, he said, succeeded in politics rather in spite of their ability than because of it; he hinted at Guizot and mentioned Montesquieu: it was probably a good thing that Montesquieu had confined himself to commentary; he might otherwise have become not an outstanding publicist but a failed minister, ‘something all too common’. His auditors can hardly have missed the ironic allusion to the speaker himself. Perhaps they laughed.6 But the most significant passage came a few paragraphs later, where Tocqueville said he was astonished that in France, of all countries, he should have to define, defend and assert the importance of political science, for where had it achieved more?

  Look around you, look at our monuments and ruins. Who raised the first and made the second? Who changed the appearance of things to such an extent that if your grandfathers could be reborn they would recognize neither the laws, nor the manners, nor the ideas, nor the attire, nor the customs they were used to; scarcely the language which they spoke? Who produced the French Revolution, in short, the greatest event in history?

  Answer, the political scientists, ‘who sowed in the minds of our fathers all the seeds of novelty from which suddenly sprouted so many political institutions and civil laws unknown to former times’.7 In hindsight this passage shows clearly enough which way Tocqueville’s mind was tending.

  His work in the libraries went well, but before he could make further progress his life, he felt, would have to change completely. On the day that he delivered his discours he wrote to Mrs Grote that he was longing
to get away from Paris, for since it was impossible to fight the government a man like him could only preserve his self-respect in silence, solitude, and work, conditions hard to secure in the capital. He expressed himself even more forcibly to Beaumont:

  I can’t tell you the disgust, contempt and weariness caused me by the miserable, unproductive little combinations and agitations which still prevail here in what remains of the political world and which, fortunately without leading to any other action, produce a tangled skein of small intrigue ... I sigh for my avenue of oaks and for the company of my cows.

  He was beginning to feel uncomfortable in polite society. When he uttered the word liberty he was met with the astonishment that greeted the former émigrés in 1814 who wanted to bring back the ancien régime: ‘Where have you been, my dear fellow? You’re drivelling!’ He told Mrs Grote that he would stay in the country as long as he could manage without the scholarly resources of Paris, though he would probably have to return at the end of autumn.8

  This attitude was never going to change: his opinion of the life of potatoes was completely reversed. Another reason for burying himself at Tocqueville was financial. The loss of his parliamentary salary (9,000 francs a year) was not so serious a matter to him as it was to Beaumont, but he felt it, and the large part of his income which was derived from his land in the Cotentin was affected by the bad weather and poor harvests of the early 1850s. Paris was shockingly expensive, and now there was no need to maintain a permanent residence there. Then, although he felt quite well at the moment, he and Marie never seemed to be really healthy in the city any more. They decided on a complete déménagement. They would give up their apartment, distribute some of its contents between their chateau and Comte Hervé’s flat in the place de la Madeleine, and store or sell the rest. When they had to revisit Paris they would stay with the comte or hire lodgings. It was an epoch in their lives.

  The move was long, exhausting and exasperating. In the middle of it Marie had to go off to spend a few days with her aunt at Chamarande, since it was far from clear when they would see each other again (Mrs Belam, in her late eighties, had recently been making her will). Tocqueville wrote to his wife daily, as always, now, when they were apart, and we get a wonderful glimpse of his marital attitude from his letters:

  I have at last received your letter of yesterday, my darling, and it has taken a weight off my shoulders ... What weather we had here! The rain did me more harm than if I’d been out in it. It made me worried and impatient. I told myself that you were, perhaps, the only woman in France who, though unwell, would prefer the risk of walking a league through mud and rain to hiring a horse-drawn cab. Such behaviour is so contrary to your character and intelligence that when I catch you doing it I always think it must be somebody else. Thank God, you were more lucky than wise.9

  (Marie was always afraid that horses would bolt.)

  Tocqueville did not enjoy being cooped up, day and night, in one small room while the clearing and the packing went on, but eventually all was well. Marie came back and then set off for Tocqueville while her husband travelled more circuitously by way of Beaumont-la-Chartre, where he made a short stay that cheered up Beaumont enormously:

  if you value the knowledge that you have done a good deed, know that you have never done a better, or one more deeply felt by those for whom you laboured. Without making the least disturbance in our peaceful solitude, you stimulated and enlivened it; for the first time in two years I saw my poor wife return to life with her old vivacity of mind and feeling, which had been almost extinguished. Her resurrection guaranteed mine.

  Tocqueville replied in equally good spirits from his chateau, where he was enjoying himself arranging his books. He was careful to give Beaumont all the information he would need about stage-coaches when in due course he paid a visit in his turn.10

  Alexis was always happy at Tocqueville, even when, as now, the builders had to be called in. The house had not been occupied since the summer of 1850, and scarcely for two years before that, and the ground floor was now uninhabitable: damp had rotted all the woodwork in the main salon. Tocqueville and Marie decided to cut two large new windows to let in the sunlight and thus, they hoped, keep the room dry. At first, it seems, he found it hard to adjust to his severance from the life of Paris: he besought his friends to send him news; but he meant to stay where he was for as long as possible. It was no great sacrifice. Before long he plunged into his work.11

  He found that he was in for a prolonged struggle with his materials and his ideas. His conception of his book was both clear and cloudy. It originated in his repeated observation that the great Revolution had never ended; this, he thought, was a theme worthy of his ambitions. As he wrote to Mme de Circourt two months later:

  I think there is still much to say on the French Revolution as a great movement: what caused it, what it produced, what was its tendency, where it is taking us. I think that we are well placed to see this vast subject as a whole, to assess it, to judge it; we are sufficiently near it to see it distinctly and to understand, by a sort of internal reaction, still felt in our minds and hearts, the thoughts and feelings which filled the hearts and minds of those who launched that terrible adventure into the world, yet far enough off for it not to be impossible to appraise their deeds and discern what their efforts really achieved. That is the work which I wish to undertake. But I don’t yet know from what angle to approach it, nor how to steer myself on the ocean of the French Revolution ...12

  At first he took the easy course of writing up the notes on Napoleon which he had made in Paris (it was at this point that he discovered the loss of his notebook). With speed and certainty he sketched two chapters on the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire, an VII (1799), or rather on the conditions which made it possible. As he explained in a letter to Kergorlay, he found it natural to turn to this theme because, in spite of great dissimilarities, there were great resemblances between 1799 and the era which he had just lived through. A lesser man would have been more than content with what he achieved. The chapters were written with all the verve and wit of the abandoned Souvenirs, and culminated in a brilliant picture of a weary and demoralized country looking inevitably for salvation to the army, the one remaining vigorous and successful national institution.

  All the letters of the day say the same thing: the present situation can’t last ... The nation, despairing, full at the same time of fear and feebleness, looked about listlessly for someone to come to the rescue. Who would it be? Some thought of Pichegru, others of Moreau, others of Bernadotte.

  ‘Retired to the countryside, to the deepest Bourbonnais,’ says M. Fiévée in his Memoirs, ‘I noticed only one thing which reminded me of politics: the peasants whom I met in the fields, the vineyards and the woods all accosted me to ask if there was any news of General Bonaparte and why he had not returned to France.’

  The end of chapter two. Thrilling! Who could fail to turn the page to chapter three? Only it was never written.13

  Tocqueville had several immediate excuses for going no further. With Brumaire he had plunged into the middle of things. This was no way to start a book. And if he went on as he had begun he might well find himself writing the sort of narrative history that he was determined to avoid, brilliantly though he could do it: he refused to compete with Thiers. Analysis was the thing. These reasons for breaking off seemed plausible; but there were deeper, more convincing motives.

  Ten years before he had publicly asserted that Napoleon was as great as a man could be without virtue; in the suppressed part of his academic address he had called him the great enemy of liberty. Such views, if driven home in his book, might lead to trouble with the new authorities, and Tocqueville, I guess, did not want to find that he had written a second unpublishable book. Yet it would be worse if he found himself forced to praise Bonaparte, and he knew that if he were honest he would have to do so, though not unreservedly. Tocqueville was no more unresponsive than any other nineteenth-century Frenchman to the legend of the E
mperor* and knew that he would find much to admire in Napoleon’s achievements, especially during the Consulate. Imperialists would seize on his eulogies and ignore his reservations, and nothing was farther from Tocqueville’s wishes than to reinforce Bonapartism.

  On the contrary, the two chapters which he drafted were a terrible indictment of the French people for letting themselves arrive at the point where they were ready to support the dictatorship of a Napoleon. He went much further than he had indicated to Kergorlay, and as he said to Beaumont wrote with plenty of impetus ‘because what I had to convey were almost our contemporary feelings’.14 His account of France in 1799 is an allegory, and not an obscure one, of France in 1851. For instance:

  the Jacobin Club reopened. The members once more displayed the old badges, the old language, the old slogans, for parties change very little: it is a remarkable fact that they show themselves more unbending in their ideas and practices than are, individually, any of the men of whom they are composed. The Jacobins reappeared just as they had been during the Terror, without being able to revive it. The only effect was to drive the nation still more hurriedly away from liberty, by the fear which they inspired.