Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  A day or two later Grandmaison noticed that the usually undisturbed quiet of the archives was being broken by a number of persons who came to gape at the celebrated visitor. He asked Tocqueville if he would like to share the archivist’s own office. It was small, and rather cramped for two, but it was private, and looked onto the prefect’s kitchen-garden. Tocqueville gratefully accepted: perhaps he was reminded of the garret in which he wrote the 1835 Démocratie; at any rate, he worked in Grandmaison’s office for the rest of his time in Tours, at an old battered desk which in future years was in Grandmaison’s eyes the most valuable piece of furniture in the room. Tocqueville took to visiting the archives almost every day; it is not surprising that he and Grandmaison began to become friends as soon as Tocqueville was sure that he was not dealing with a Bonapartist stooge. For his part Grandmaison succumbed to Tocqueville’s charm, his kindness, and his brilliant conversation. Tocqueville made a point of chatting to him for fifteen minutes or so every day, and readily discussed the documents with him. Forty years later Grandmaison remembered Tocqueville’s sonorous and musical voice,* his pure and elegant diction, his sober but expressive gestures, above all his slightly malicious smile and the brightness of his eye.30

  Guided by Grandmaison, Tocqueville plunged into the official correspondence of the old intendants, agents of the Crown who in the eighteenth century governed most of France. They were the forerunners of the nineteenth-century prefects, and Tocqueville had been brought up in prefectures. He had been a minister. The documents were exactly to his taste. Before long he was writing to Freslon:

  At Tours I have found not buried treasure, but a deposit as precious, to further my undertaking (I think, by the way, that one would make the same discovery in the archives of every prefecture which was formerly the seat of a généralité). It is a collection of papers which will give to any student a clear idea of the ways in which all the various business of public administration was conducted ...

  At this stage he thought that he was merely doing the preliminary work for a single chapter, but before long he began to realize that he was amassing material which would make half a book, at least. As he was eventually to say in the foreword to the Ancien Régime:

  In a country where the public administration has become all-powerful, few ideas, desires or grievances arise which do not, sooner or later, come naked to its attention. Visitors to its archives will acquire not only a very precise idea of its procedures, the whole country will be revealed. A foreigner who today was shown all the confidential correspondence which fills the files of the ministry of the interior and the prefectures would soon know more about us than we do ourselves ... I have discovered the ancien régime still alive in its ideas, its passions, its prejudices, its practices ... I have in this way acquired many insights into that old society which its contemporaries did not have, for I had before my eyes that which was never shown them.

  This was a discovery that Tocqueville could not keep to himself. For a while the Revolution, like Napoleon previously, began to recede as a topic.31

  To safeguard his health Tocqueville passed only his mornings at the archives. He devoted his afternoons to the study of German, which he did not enjoy but thought indispensable for his current project; in the end he acquired a sound reading knowledge of a tongue which he found deeply unsympathetic. He hired a tutor in German, and it was no doubt a help that Marie knew the language well. In the evenings, after dinner, they read to each other. Tocqueville was especially fond of travel books.32

  It was a quiet life which suited them both. By October Tocqueville could report to Beaumont that they were well, and that Marie was in better spirits than she had been for years. They continued to have nothing to do with the locals, except for Grandmaison, who came to dinner several times, but a steady stream of visitors from afar descended on Saint-Cyr: Comte Hervé, Ampère (who stayed for several weeks), Kergorlay, Guerry, Beaumont, Corcelle and so on – mostly summer visitors. Less welcome was Mrs Grote, who came in the winter, just when Tocqueville was beginning to write. She was blithely demanding. She stayed in Tours for ten days or so in February, and although she was fobbed off with the Hôtel de l’Univers (recently built to take advantage of the new custom generated by the railway) she had to be visited or entertained to a meal every day. Tocqueville lamented at length to Beaumont: ‘The obligation to entertain Mrs Grote is not a light obligation and besides we have become so fond of our own little ways that the intrusion into our life of people whom we greatly like but who are not, after all, intimate friends, vexes us somewhat, my wife above all.’ There was no knowing how long she would stay, or what she would do next: Tocqueville tried to deter her from descending on Beaumont by saying that because of building works there would be no room for her at Beaumont-la-Chartre. This letter would have cruelly mortified Mrs Grote had she read it, for she was devoted to Alexis, and he was never slow to flatter her. (In general he did not think it necessary to be sincere to women, except his wife, and his letters to them always overflowed with elaborate compliments.33 )

  An even more tiresome attention was of a different nature. Arthur de Gobineau, Tocqueville’s former chef de cabinet, sent him the first two volumes, just published, of his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Comte Hervé brought them to Saint-Cyr, and Tocqueville read them during October. It was a distressing experience. Tocqueville had real affection for Gobineau, who had furthermore often made himself useful as a research assistant, but he could not hide from himself or the author that the Essay was a sad disappointment to him (and the final two volumes, which came out in 1856, were no better). It was, in fact, one of the most mortally mischievous books published in the whole nineteenth century. Gobineau’s formal education was fragmentary and incomplete; his attitude to the world was that of an extremely opinionated autodidact. He had good German and had picked up some philology (just then an extremely fashionable study) and learned some Sanskrit; this led him to conceive a myth which explained the fact – quite certain, in his opinion – that the whole of humanity was degenerate. Once there had been a clear division between the three human races – white, yellow and black – of which one, the white, was pre-eminent for intelligence, beauty, strength and wisdom, and was responsible for all the great achievements of civilization. But, fatally, the great race had interbred with its inferiors, and after three thousand years was largely indistinguishable from them. Things had got particularly bad in the last five hundred years, and were going to get worse: civilization and humanity itself were dying. Already the human population everywhere was shrinking. Man had no more than five or six thousand years left.34

  This nonsense had the great advantage, from Gobineau’s point of view – that of a bourgeois passing himself off as a noble whose inheritance had been lost during the French Revolution* – of explaining his misfortunes and foretelling the ruin of his enemies. As J.-J. Chevallier puts it, it was ‘intellectual revenge and psychological compensation masquerading as a philosophy of history’. To Tocqueville it had two crucial disadvantages: it was not credible, and its possible consequences were appalling. He told Beaumont that Gobineau wrote like a horse-dealer rather than a statesman (the simile came naturally to a man from the Cotentin): ‘I believe absolutely none of it.’ He was not quite so frank to the author himself. Gobineau had always insisted that his findings were entirely scientific, and Tocqueville never chose to challenge him on that score. Probably he realized from the first that Gobineau was unpersuadable: he had a gift for assuming and relentlessly defending indefensible positions. Before long he would be claiming to have deciphered the cuneiform inscriptions of Nineveh and to have proved that they were Persian, not Assyrian. But as a moralist and politician Tocqueville protested incessantly against the probable consequences of Gobineau’s doctrines. They were fatalist, and he was against all forms of determinism, whether deriving from Augustine, the Calvinists, the Jansenists or from Gobineau’s theory of race, for they all ended in the cramping or the complete abolition of human lib
erty. He thought all such doctrines probably false and certainly pernicious. In whose interest could it be to persuade backward or enslaved peoples that, being what they were, they could have no hope of bettering their condition, changing their manners or reforming their government?

  Do you not see that your doctrine leads naturally to all the evils to which permanent inequality gives birth, to pride, violence, contempt of one’s fellows, tyranny and degradation in all its forms? ... Courage, energy, uprightness, foresight, common sense are the true reasons for the prosperity of empires as for that of families and, in short, the destiny of Man, whether as an individual or a nation, is what he wishes to make it.35

  For the time being, though the correspondence continued, the debate was suspended, not to be resumed until after the publication of the Ancien Régime. One day, unforeseen by Tocqueville, it would be important to the world; in 1853 it was simply part of the background to an author’s struggles. Tocqueville read books and documents, he made notes, he sorted his notes; but his problem that autumn seems to have been something like writer’s block. His temperament still swerved up and down, and when it was down he suffered grievous self-doubt, in spite of the excellence of the Brumaire chapters written the year before. In September he announced that he would ‘go into winter quarters’ on 15 October and force himself to write at least the all-important first chapter. On 19 October he told Kergorlay that he would begin writing in December. Four days later, writing to Rivet, he was more optimistic, and expected to start in ten days’ time; but when the ten days were up he was only promising to start the following week; he simultaneously worried to Freslon that a good book might be impossible, and then what would he do? ‘Vivre pour vivre has never been possible for me.’ Two weeks later he was still, he said, standing on the edge of the big ditch; and writing to Mrs Grote on 22 November, almost exactly two months after his first letter to Freslon, all he could say was that he could feel the writer’s itch coming upon him ... Eventually he started.36

  By the end of May, when he and Marie left Saint-Cyr, he seems to have drafted most of what became L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution.37 He had put aside his notes for the time being and plunged ahead; when it came to the point he wrote very fast. The whole draft would eventually be revised, most of it heavily; but the first five chapters, which eventually appeared as Book One, were only to be lightly altered, and because of their character need to be considered separately from the rest of the work. It is therefore convenient to examine them at this point in the story.

  They take up only eighteen pages of the Oeuvres complètes edition. The writing is so simple, its discourse so trenchant, Tocqueville makes it all seem so easy, that its importance may well be overlooked, especially as Book One has (apparently) so tenuous a connection to Book Two (which was not divided into Books Two and Three until the second edition). But easy it was not.

  Tocqueville laboured anxiously at his style. Sometimes, he told Mrs Grote, he was hung up for days together, ‘having the thoughts, yet not hitting off the “phrases” in a way to satisfy his critical ear ...’. Beaumont was to tell Senior, ‘I have known him recast a sentence 20 times over.’ But it is doubtful if this perfectionist tinkering achieved very much. Tocqueville always struck off elegant and lucid first drafts that usually needed little polishing (his obituary of Le Peletier d’Aunay, dashed down at the family’s request in 1855, reads excellently). His only serious problem with Book One was the risk of redundancy. It was essential that he include nothing that was not strictly pertinent to his theme.38

  Book One’s striking difference from the rest of the Ancien Régime arose because it was meant as overture to the larger work, the great book on the Revolution which he did not live to finish, of which the Ancien Régime was meant to be no more than the first volume. As Tocqueville told his favourite nephew Hubert in March, he planned not so much a history, or a series of philosophical observations, as a blending of the two. He meant to follow the French Revolution from epoch to epoch, from its beginning to the fall of the Empire, paying more attention to the general movement of events than to particular incidents. (The Ancien Régime as published illustrates this technique.39 ) It was necessary to find a way of making these points to his readers so that they would know what to expect. Book One is Tocqueville’s attempt to do so. It reads like an expansion and rephrasing of the project that he sketched in his letter to Mme de Circourt eighteen months earlier.* He insists that it is now possible to understand the origins and nature of the Revolution far better than did contemporaries, such as Edmund Burke.40 He makes several firm remarks contradicting past and current assumptions about the Revolution: ‘the first and last objective of the Revolution was not, as has been generally believed, to destroy the power of religion and weaken that of the State’; rather, where the State was concerned, it was to sweep away all the institutions of the Middle Ages – parliaments, orders, privileges, local self-government – the old constitution of Europe – and replace them with a much more modern, powerful, centralized system. For the rest, he mostly asked searching questions: what did Europeans of the day think of the Revolution? Why was it launched? Why did it break out in France rather than elsewhere? Why did it take one course in France and others in other countries? The time had come, said Tocqueville, to answer these questions and he thought he could do so.41

  No-one, after reading Book One, could be in any doubt as to what Tocqueville was about, but he sacrificed much in achieving this lucidity. He gives a few unsourced quotations, mostly from Burke, and makes a few allusions to events, but there is nothing in his exposition which can accurately be called evidence or argument. It is all assertion. Perhaps that is why Tocqueville eventually denounced these five small chapters as the most mediocre and least original part of his whole book. ‘At least it has the merit of being short.’ His technique occasionally led him astray. For instance, one of his themes is that the Revolution attacked the Church, not religion; religion was something planted in the hearts of the people, and after unjust ecclesiastical privilege had been swept away it revived: religion, even Catholicism, is in no way incompatible with democracy. This was a theme first sounded in the Démocratie; it had not gained in plausibility in the twenty years between the two books; but like Tocqueville’s other sweeping statements it was presented without evidence, and seemed no less plausible; in that company, its element of wishful thinking was disguised from the author, if not from his readers. And taken as a whole the five chapters were little more than a summary of some of Tocqueville’s favourite notions. They have the charm of his conversation; they are scarcely scholarly. Perhaps it does not matter. They open the book superbly, which no doubt explains why Tocqueville let them stand. He wanted readers, and this was a good way to get them.42

  Tocqueville and Marie gave up Les Trésorières on 28 May 1854, when their lease expired. As a medical experiment their sojourn had been only moderately successful. Tocqueville believed that Marie’s health was restored, but he himself had had several bad stomach attacks during the year and left Tours no better than when he arrived. The place had had attractions (not only the archives) of which the nearness of the Beaumonts was the most important. Tocqueville wrote to Gustave two days before he left Saint-Cyr:

  My wife said to me this very morning, as we chatted before getting up (I idle somewhat at that moment of the day) that the only consolation she had in leaving the neighbourhood of such good friends as you two was the thought that Time and all the good and bad fortune which it has delivered in its flow have only strengthened the ties of our friendship, while for so many other people it is the great unbinder [délieur].

  Tocqueville added a telling observation about Clémentine and Marie to this glimpse of his marital life: ‘We enjoyed the company of Madame de Beaumont more than ever. Her society is not only attractive to my wife, but singularly good for her. There are some people I greatly love but yet from whose company I scarcely ever see her emerge other than upset and cross.’ (Tocqueville was no doubt thinking of hi
s brothers and their wives.)

  When she leaves Madame de Beaumont she seems serene and happy with everybody, notably with me, which I find very agreeable. It must be that your wife, as well as having that natural kindness which sets her apart from so many others, has some delicate art which can easily manage a mind that does not willingly adapt to the views of other people.43

  This letter throws some light on the state of the Tocqueville marriage, which now had to endure a testing five months. Tocqueville was bent, with all the energetic determination of his character, on his proposed visit to Germany. Marie was not as sure: another cholera epidemic was spreading across western Europe, and she had reason to fear that her health would not be equal to such a journey. She would have preferred to spend the summer at Tocqueville. But her husband was so ardent for the voyage that he convinced himself that Marie was quite well and (except when he was actually suffering from stomach aches) that he was himself fit again. His eagerness was of long standing, and he needed a holiday after his months of toil. He gave many other reasons, all connected with the French Revolution and the ancien régime, but he had gone as eagerly to Germany in 1849, when they did not apply. His zest for travel was still alive, and we must surely suspect that his intuition told him that the nation on the far side of the Rhine was more than ever worth a French statesman’s attention. Tocqueville had long believed, with most of his countrymen who thought about such matters, that the real danger to France came from Russia, with which, in that very year, war broke out. Under the Second Republic, as he says in the Souvenirs, he favoured the unification of Germany so that it could assist the West in resisting the Tsar.* It is hard to believe that he did not have such considerations somewhere in mind as he planned his visit to Bonn, Dresden and Berlin.44