Alexis de Tocqueville
Page 69
The journey was an almost complete failure. They reached Bonn on 19 June, having travelled by way of Brussels, where they met the exiled Lamoricière. Along the way Marie’s forebodings were all too thoroughly justified: her old uterine affliction returned, and for the first six weeks of their stay (they took a furnished flat with a view across lawns to the Rhine) she led the life of a semi-invalid. Tocqueville’s research and scholarly contacts in Bonn went well, though he still could not hold a conversation in German and formed the decided impression that most German professors were pedants. A pleasant change was afforded by two new English acquaintances, George Cornewall Lewis and his wife, Lady Theresa Villiers.† Lewis was a coming man in British public life, and Tocqueville held forth to him unguardedly on the horrors of Louis Napoleon’s despotism: ‘His govt is far more oppressive & interfering than the govt of his uncle.’ He explained the legend of Napoleon in Balzacian terms: ‘in every village there was some vieux soldat who cd relate the wars of the empire – who remembered its glories & triumphs – who had forgotten its misery & disasters – & who converted it into a sort of mythical tale. Every such man was the center of a little circle of listeners & admirers – & his accounts constituted nearly all that the country people knew of the Past.’45 The Lewises and the Tocquevilles decidedly took to each other, and thenceforward Lewis was reckoned among Tocqueville’s most valuable English friends.
But the Lewises left Bonn and disaster struck. Marie had a severe rheumatic attack which completely robbed her of the use of her right hand and arm. All thoughts of Dresden and Berlin had to be abandoned. On medical advice they went instead to the spa of Wildbad in the Black Forest, so that Marie could take a course of hot baths there.46
It is to be hoped that the volatile Tocqueville did not make matters even more difficult for them both by losing his temper, but however much he loved his wife the strain on his patience was severe. Marie’s condition deteriorated: Tocqueville had to dress her and cut up food for her. Her treatment was worryingly expensive. They knew nobody at Wildbad, and nobody spoke French. Tocqueville thought the place a sunless hole, all too aptly named (‘le bain sauvage’). Two or three grand hotels lay in a wilderness of pine trees and mountains, and society was entirely made up of the hunchbacked, the twisted, the one-armed, the crippled and the legless: ‘I begin to believe that a man with the use of two legs and two arms is an exception among the human race.’ Worst of all, his work was at a standstill. For lack of anything else to do he began to study a collection of the laws of the duchy of Württemberg; characteristically, he eventually found them so interesting that they figure in a long note to the Ancien Régime, but it was a meagre amusement. Eventually the devoted Ampère found his way to them and did his best to cheer them up during the last week of their ordeal; but Marie’s hand got very little better, and it was a defeated party which trailed slowly back to France in late September.47
They crossed the frontier at Valenciennes, where they were searched and every printed paper, whatever its nature, was confiscated. ‘I recognized my country.’ Tocqueville reflected that patriotism had little to do with the soil of the fatherland. ‘I have just passed three months in a country which, compared to ours, can be called a land of liberty, and the thought of again breathing the air of France enslaved and so content with its enslavement depressed me.’ The events of the next six months did nothing to cheer him. The cholera epidemic continued. The Crimean War, which had started well, was sinking into a winter stalemate at Sevastopol, and news of the suffering of the allied armies was beginning to circulate. British military mismanagement was not only discrediting that country’s aristocracy and destroying its military reputation but damaging the credit of liberalism. Tocqueville could not forgive the British for making an alliance with Napoleon III. He could not forgive his countrymen either.
I find with pleasure as time goes by that my heart is not one of those which are allured by victory, and that I get more devoted to my cause the more I see it conquered and abandoned. I feel less and less able to associate with those who are its enemies, or are even just indifferent to it, the more that luck appears to overwhelm the new regime with its favours and thus to justify it in the eyes of the mob.48
Such was the ground-bass of Tocqueville’s correspondence during the winter. The descant was more positive. Marie, Ampère and he went straight from Valenciennes to stay with Comte Hervé in his little house at Clairoix near Compiègne, but it was too damp for Marie and her rheumatism, so after Ampère’s departure they took a house that was even smaller, a sort of miniature Trésorières, and underfurnished (the comte lent them some sticks), but was at least warm, dry and sunny. It was their sixth change of residence (not counting hotels) in six months, but now for a time their gypsying ceased. They were supposed to move to Paris in January – then in February – then in March – but somehow there was always a reason for not doing so when the time came. Marie’s health began to improve steadily, if not without setbacks (Tocqueville marvelled at her patience). Alexis made a short visit to Paris to collect his books and working papers.49
He had not looked at his Tours notes for five months, and had made plenty more during his stay in Germany, so the first thing to do was to reduce them all to order.50 He sorted them into seventeen separate files, and then compiled an index under eleven distinct headings, which together summed up the subject he meant to explore, so accurately that today they are recognizable as an anatomy of the book which he finally wrote;* then he went through them all, using his index to find and make useful extracts. It must have been extremely laborious, and in view of the sparseness of his citation in the finished work may seem to have been unnecessary, but it served the double purpose of reacquainting him with his material and of convincing him that he had thoroughly mastered his subject – very useful psychologically, for he was going to have fits of anxiety about the whole thing right up to publication day. Only when the whole process was complete did he take out his draft chapters and rewrite them thoroughly in the light of his documentation, quoting memoirs, letters, cahiers de doléances, monographs and official papers to clinch his arguments. By April, when at last he and Marie moved to Paris, he had given seventeen chapters – those which now form Books One and Two – more or less their final form.
It will be seen that Tocqueville’s latest hermitage was as productive for him as any of the others. His father and Mme Guermarquer went back to the place de la Madeleine in January; after that Tocqueville had no distractions of any sort. The weather was unkind: in mid-February a blizzard blanketed France, and winter did not wholly relax its grip until May. Tocqueville and Marie found that the only room in their house which was really sunny in such conditions was his study: they lived there by day and night (nothing is said about how their servants managed). Tocqueville was attacked by grippe at the end of January, to his desperate disappointment, for he had been working ‘with a flaming ardour’; besides, confined to his room, he missed the open air, where he liked to spend as much time as possible, even in winter, and not being able to work transformed his refuge into a prison. But he made a swift recovery and was even well enough to make a second short visit to Paris in mid-February, from which he was heartily glad to return to his ‘chères paperasses’ (though he was beginning to tire of Compiègne itself ). Then came the blizzard. Tocqueville walked every day for an hour in the snow-buried forest and remembered the even whiter woods of Tennessee nearly twenty-five years earlier. The chief difference in the scene, he sadly reflected, lay in himself: twenty-five years made a revolution in any man’s life. But (he thought, more cheerfully) if he had to start again he would do nothing differently, bar various small stupidities; and above all (he told Beaumont) he had kept the friend with whom he had hunted parrots at Memphis. His single worry now was about his father. The comte too had caught the grippe, and though he recovered, it did not seem to be to full health. Tocqueville was forced to reflect on Hervé’s great age, and also on his character: ‘You can’t imagine what a tender, lo
veable old man he is. He has never shown more affection to his children than during the last few years nor a more charming good humour to everybody.’ At least he showed no immediate signs of dying.51
By the end of March it was time to leave Compiègne. When he could bring himself to write Tocqueville worked in long, concentrated bursts, which eventually exhausted him; now, as at Tours ten months earlier, he had to pause. One symptom was that he was finding what became Book Three, chapter 1, on the position of the men of letters in eighteenth-century France, extremely difficult. Back in Paris, where the demands of his social and academic life instantly resumed, it was no easier. He decided to put off further work on his manuscript until he went to Tocqueville in June. But in the twelve chapters of Book Two which he had finished he had written what André Jardin justly calls the essential part of his book – ‘the vast picture of France on the eve of 1789’.52
* ‘I never wanted power, only fame.’
* This was a reasonable fear. Four years later the imperial government arbitrarily appointed ten extra members to the Académie, to keep it in order. This was in flat defiance of the academy’s constitution. The intruders were known to the other members as ‘the garrison’.
* So admirably analysed and described by Sudhir Hazareesingh in The Legend of Napoleon (London: Granta Books, 2004). See also Pieter Geyl, Napoleon For and Against (London, 1949).
* See above, p. 402.
* Alexandre Freslon (1808–67). Lawyer, journalist, Republican politician. A member of the National Assembly, 1848–9; minister of education for two months under Cavaignac, 1848. Friend of AT and opponent of the Second Empire.
* A long footnote in the ‘Correspondance familiale’, OC XIV 288 n.3, gives full details of Hippolyte’s eccentricities.
* Edward Vernon Childe (1804–61), of Boston; he was for a decade or so the Parisian correspondent of several New York newspapers. He returned to America in 1856, after his wife’s death; from there he wrote a valuable series of letters to AT.
* Christian von Bunsen (1791–1860) was the Prussian ambassador in London 1842–54; he and AT had many English friends in common, notably Mrs Grote, who was the initial link between them. Bunsen highly approved of Tocqueville’s plan, and as a sign of respect sent him his book on the Church under the emperor Commodus. AT did not at once find time to read it.
* Grandmaison is unique among witnesses in characterizing AT’s voice.
* Gobineau did not have a genuine claim either to the noble particule, ‘de’, which his family had appropriated, or to the title of comte, which he assumed after the death of an uncle in 1855.
* See above, p. 532.
* A. J. P. Taylor poured scorn on this calculation in The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (Oxford, 1954), 34; but then he was fanatically anti-German.
† George Cornewall Lewis (1806–63), politician and polymathic author. Poor law commissioner, 1834–46. Married Lady Theresa (sister of the Earl of Clarendon), 1844. Editor of the Edinburgh Review, 1850–55. Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1855–8. Home Secretary, 1859–61; Secretary of War, 1861–3. Baronet in succession to his father, 1855. He was the sort of earnest, erudite man to whom AT was often attracted. His best-known remark was, ‘Life would be tolerable were it not for its amusements.’
*‘England, Germany; Municipal and Provincial Administration, Taxes, Taille, Capitation, Public Charges; Provincial Institutions, Bourgeoisie, People; Nobility, Seigneurs, Feudal Rights; Unclassifiable; Administration, Centralization, Intendants; Bookselling, Press; Great Council, King’s Council; Justice, Parliament; Church, Clergy; Maréchaussée [mounted police].’ See Gannet, Tocqueville, 213 n.42.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WRITING REVOLUTION
1855–1856
Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor
And the poor man loved the great;
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.
LORD MACAULAY, LAYS OF ANCIENT ROME
EVEN IF TOCQUEVILLE had growing reservations about Parisian life (after a few months in the country he defined the obligations of society as the duty imposed by civilization to bore and be bored1 ) he could still be stimulated by it, and his return to the city in April came at an exciting moment: the Emperor had apparently decided to bring the Institut, now the only centre of audible opposition in France, to heel. He proposed some radical alterations to its statutes, which would have the effect of ending the academicians’ independence. Naturally they were highly indignant, and Tocqueville threw himself joyfully into their campaign of resistance, which before long succeeded. But he did not give up research: he went regularly to the Archives Nationales. He and Marie lodged for seven weeks at 37, rue de Fleurus, their pied-à-cha terre near the Luxembourg, which their smart friends thought fearfully out of the way.* Tocqueville did not care: money saved by living in such a way could go towards necessary repairs and improvements to his chateau. In late May Marie went to visit Mrs Belam at Chamarande. Tocqueville returned to civilization, as he put it – he moved in with his father at the place de la Madeleine. He missed Marie, and when she wrote to say that she had had an attack of some kind and lost the use of her voice he panicked, having perhaps become chronically anxious about her health as a result of her years of invalidism: not only did he decide to join her at Chamarande as soon as he could, he wrote a letter to Mrs Belam’s servant ‘recommending’ that if Mme de Tocqueville grew worse she was to let him know at once. Mrs Belam was now a very old woman, and no doubt Tocqueville felt that he could not rely on her. Fortunately Marie soon recovered. She was still anxious about her inheritance, for Mrs Belam, a recent convert to Catholicism, had become excessively devoted to her curé. Tocqueville told her not to worry: ‘I certainly didn’t marry you for your money.’ If necessary he was even prepared to take Mrs Belam into his household, for ‘you have never been so precious to me, and while I can keep you I don’t think I have the right to complain of anything at all.’ He admitted that he had hesitated twenty years earlier, but today he would take the same decision with greater love and absolute certainty.2
At the beginning of June they went to Tocqueville. Marie travelled there directly, but as before Tocqueville made a detour by way of Beaumont-la-Chartre, where he was warmly welcomed. He read the new chapters of his book to his host and hostess, who were warmly enthusiastic, but Tocqueville unjustly suspected them of being too much influenced by friendship. He had one of his stomach attacks, perhaps brought on by anxiety.3
At home again he was happier than he had been for a year. Even before he reached the chateau he had slipped back into his role as the great man of the district: when he passed through Valognes he was careful to call on all the proper people, lest they should think that he was dropping them now that he was no longer a politician in need of their votes. He was received, he said, with friendly warmth, ‘but with Norman prudence, that is to say nobody mentioned what was on everybody’s mind – politics.’ His spirits shot up as he got back into the carriage and rolled on towards Tocqueville. It was beautiful weather, and he was delighted to see his house again, though the grounds were now terribly overgrown with young trees which would have to be cut down. He and Marie were both well – ‘God send that we remain so! Health, good weather and home nowadays seem to me quite sufficient for human happiness. I was not always so moderate in my desires. But in just compensation age, which has robbed me of so much, has at least given me the art I once lacked completely, of contenting myself with my circumstances.’ It was wonderful to be back, after wandering about for three years from place to place, none of which entirely suited them.4
Settling in had its cares, but Tocqueville found everything charming. The house was soon full of workmen building a new chimney to heat both his study and bedroom, but he did not much mind. He was more interested i
n playing the country squire. There was an outbreak of smallpox in the village, and he had everyone vaccinated – poor Marie’s body reacted badly. He listened to his neighbours’ talk, and found them only moderately concerned with the war, now entering its second year: ‘they fear above all the rise in expenditure, and when they have time they moan about the loss of their sons, gone for soldiers, but at bottom they are so much delighted at selling their beasts and their corn so dear that everything else is lost in their joy.’ He began to see how country-dwellers sank into their own form of gross materialism: he hoped to resist the infection. He was fascinated by the letters from the army which illiterate peasants brought to him to read out.
This correspondence should be read in order to understand the singular character of the French peasant. It is strange to see the ease with which these men become accustomed to the risks of military life, to danger and death, and yet how their hearts cling to their fields and to the occupations of country life. The horrors of war are described with simplicity, and almost with enjoyment. But in the midst of these accounts one finds such remarks as: ‘What crops do you intend to sow in such a field next year?’ ‘How is the mare?’ ‘Has the cow a fine calf?’ & c. No minds can be more versatile and at the same time more constant. I have always thought that, after all, the peasantry is superior to all other classes in France.