Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  His account of the peasantry under the old order has always been much admired, and owed a great deal to his experience as a landowner and politician in the Cotentin. It was not only as a joke that he once described himself on a census form as a ‘writer and peasant’. He lived among the farmers of Normandy as neighbour, landlord and (for many years) as deputy, and knew them intimately. He shared their concerns, but he never became one of them. He was their friend, but judged them dispassionately and acutely. When, therefore, he met them (or rather their ancestors) in the records of the ancien régime he instantly recognized them, and was able to write about them persuasively. He used their hopes and difficulties as the perfect means for conveying just what was wrong with the old order. After listing the oppressive feudal dues to which the noblesse and the laws subjected the peasantry, he goes on:

  Please picture to yourself the peasant of the eighteenth century, or rather, the one you know today, for he is always the same: his status has changed, but not his outlook. See him as the documents which I have cited depict him, so passionately in love with the land that he devotes all his savings to buying it and buys it at any price. Yet to acquire it he must first pay a fee, not to the government, but to other landowners of the neighbourhood, strangers as much as he is himself to the conduct of public business, and almost as powerless. At last he gets possession of it; he plants it with his heart as well as his corn. This little corner of earth which in all the vast world is his very own fills his spirit with pride and independence. Then those same neighbours descend on him to drag him from his fields and make him work somewhere else for nothing. If he wants to protect his crops against their deer, the same people prevent him; and they wait for him at the river-crossing to exact a toll. He meets them again at the market-place, where they sell him the right to sell his own produce; and when, home again, he wants to use the rest of his corn, that corn which he has watched and tended himself, he cannot do so until he has sent it for grinding to the mill and to be baked in the oven of these same men. Part of the income from his little estate goes to pay rent, a rent which is never resigned and cannot be bought out.26

  Great historians do not just record or explain the past; they awaken it, and their readers. This passage shows how Tocqueville was equal to the challenge, as can also be demonstrated by comparing his book with almost any recent study of merit on the same subject. For one example (taken not quite at random): William Doyle’s Oxford History of the French Revolution opens with a chapter, ‘France under Louis XVI’, which covers exactly the same ground as the Ancien Régime. Readers of the older book will feel at home at once, which in itself says a lot for Tocqueville. But there are great differences between the two texts, and at first sight they seem all in Professor Doyle’s favour. His picture of the old order is in every respect fuller, more detailed and more nuanced than Tocqueville’s, and on the whole is even more damning; still more impressive is the depth of learning which underlies every paragraph. Doyle draws on a century and a half of research into his subject, as well as his own investigations; furthermore, the premises from which historians now go to work on such a topic have shifted irreversibly. Doyle starts his chapter with geographical description and economic analysis; it would scarcely occur to him, or to anyone else nowadays, to do otherwise. Some may see in this an example of the long reach of Karl Marx’s historical materialism, but the influence of Fernand Braudel and his school is probably much greater. There are limits to what can be done in forty pages, but within that restriction Doyle has come close to achieving total history in a fashion that Tocqueville could never have conceived: in his time the work had simply not yet been done, the theories not yet propounded; he himself was a pioneer in both respects. For those who need up-to-date history (students with exams to sit, above all) there can be no contest: Doyle is the man.

  Yet it can be argued that Tocqueville and Doyle complement each other. Both are well aware of the absolutely central importance of the peasantry to any account of the ancien régime (they made up 80 per cent of the French population). Both understand the misery in which most peasants lived, though Tocqueville, characteristically, attributes it above all to bad laws and customs, whereas Doyle displays a wider range of factors, beginning with the rapid growth of population that was outstripping available resources. Both describe a rural society that was on the brink of collapse. Doyle is more scientific, but it is Tocqueville who makes the reader care.27

  He is particularly good on the ways in which the government and the privileged classes unjustly burdened the unprivileged:

  I have handled many of the militia rolls for a large number of parishes drawn up in 1789; I could see who were exempt from the draw in each one of them: here a gentleman’s domestic, there the porter of an abbey; a third is only the valet of a bourgeois, it is true, but that bourgeois ‘lives nobly’.* Only prosperity brings exemption; when a farmer appears annually on the list of a parish’s most highly taxed inhabitants, his sons have the privilege of being exempt from the militia; allegedly, for the encouragement of agriculture. The Economists,† strong supporters of equality in everything else, are not at all shocked by this privilege; they merely suggest that it be extended to other deserving classes, that is to say, that the burden of the poorest and most friendless peasants become even heavier. ‘The pitiful pay of the soldier,’ says one of them, ‘and the manner in which he is bedded, clothed, fed, his entire subordination to military discipline, would make it too cruel to recruit any but men from the lowest levels of the people.’

  Tocqueville does his utmost to list all the sufferings of the country people under the ancien régime, so that their ultimate rebellion may be fully comprehensible; although, admittedly, he changes his tune when he refers to the actual uprising of 1789. Then the peasants are denounced for their cupidity, envy and hatred.28

  Yet after reading such passages we too feel like revolutionaries; Tocqueville has made himself the voice of the countryside; when we read him we come close to the revolutionary mentality of 1789; we understand the Great Fear, not in its illusions about bandits, and an aristocratic plot, but in its sense that an opportunity had come which must be seized: an opportunity to break an intolerable system of social oppression, the one so carefully described by Tocqueville. He works on our emotions, as Doyle does not.

  Similar points might be made about other passages in the Ancien Régime, all amounting to this, that here we have the living stuff of history. Using the archives, Tocqueville, with steely precision, shows how the monstrous machine of the French state in its ceaseless search for revenue, weighed ever more heavily on the poorer elements in society without succeeding in any large enterprise: the French were plunged into servitude, but nobody profited. The demonstration is so unlike most of Tocqueville’s other writing that some additional explanation, beyond research, literary genius and a home in the country, seems called for. Perhaps it is worth recollecting that Tocqueville had travelled in Sicily and Ireland; he may even have been influenced by memories of rural poverty in Wiltshire in 1833. However it was, he wrote for once from the point of view of the disadvantaged, not that of the ‘enlightened classes’.

  His sociology of the old order has many flaws. He almost entirely overlooks the rural poor, the throngs of beggars and landless labourers. In spite of his interest in religion and his insistence that the Revolution was a quasi-religious movement, resembling the Reformation, he has little to say about the First Estate, the Church, although its importance as part of the ancien régime and as an issue in the Revolution can hardly be overstated: he mentions its role as an oppressor of the peasantry through feudal dues, and not much else. He has little to say about the artisan class, and not much about the middle class, in spite of their gigantic part in the Revolution (this reflects that disdain for the bourgeoisie which was such an unhappy aspect of his character). Surprisingly, his description of the noblesse is inferior to that in his 1836 article. The nobility was the only category of Frenchmen, peasants apart, which Tocqueville really
knew and understood. Perhaps he knew it too well, and did not feel the need to research it (he appears to have made no use of the family archives to which he had access – the Tocqueville, Rosanbo and Chateaubriand papers). He makes too many rash generalizations: for instance, that as a body the nobles were getting poorer.29 He has plenty to say about them, but the total effect is curiously vague: they never come to life as individuals as, for all his hostility, the intendants whom he quotes so plentifully do.30

  These failings are regrettable, but were more or less unavoidable in a pioneering work. Much more important is the success of his grand design. In Book Two he establishes what may be called his frame of reference, showing clearly, eloquently and knowledgeably the ancien régime in all its complications of oppression and obsolescence. Then in Book Three he turns explicitly from the ultimate causes of the Revolution to its occasions, to the circumstances and events which settled its time and place of outbreak, and its character.31 In Book Three’s first seven chapters he lists these secondary causes: the influence of the politically inexperienced writers of the French Enlightenment; the unforeseen consequences of the growth of national prosperity and of the royal government’s constant meddling with the laws and administration of France; and so on. It is easy enough to make such lists and not especially difficult to settle their relative importance, at least to the writer’s satisfaction; but Tocqueville’s genius was to convey the way in which they operated together, so that the reader can share the helpless bewilderment of the citizens which by 1788 at latest had made the Revolution unavoidable, for a government which is collapsing uncontrollably has to be replaced. One of the themes which Tocqueville emphasizes and re-emphasizes is that having had no experience of free politics, or indeed of politics at all, the French had neither the knowledge nor the prudence which might have enabled them to avoid catastrophe. Here he was bringing his own political experience to bear, and it is interesting to see that among the necessary free institutions which the French lacked he lists at last well-led and organized political parties.32 His experience also makes itself felt in the eighth chapter, when he summarizes the argument of his book, stresses the importance of the ancien régime to our understanding both of the Revolution and of nineteenth-century France, and sketches the country’s post-1789 history. His conclusion is mournful:

  The Old Order had effectively incorporated a whole ensemble of modern institutions, recently set up, which, being in no way hostile to equality, could easily take their place in the new society, while yet offering conspicuous facilities to despotism. They were excavated from the ruins of all the other institutions, and re-established. They had formerly given birth to habits, passions and ideas which tended to make men docile and divided; now they were revived and exploited. Centralization too was restored from its ruin; and as, at the same time that it was rebuilt, everything which formerly could have limited it was left demolished, we saw emerge, as it were from the very guts of a nation that had just overthrown its royalty a sudden new power that was more extensive, more intrusive, more absolute than any ever exercised by our kings ... The dictator fell, but all that was most solid in his work remained standing; his government died, his administration lived, and whenever since then oppression has been attacked, the attackers have settled for putting a head of Liberty on servile shoulders.33

  But Tocqueville did not quite despair: in the great tirade on the character of the French which I have already quoted he plainly warned Napoleon III not to take their submission for granted, and elsewhere in the book he praised liberty for its moral and practical value in language whose very eloquence shows that he did not despair of carrying conviction: men who value liberty only for its material benefits, he said, never keep it long.

  In every epoch that which has so so strongly bound the hearts of certain men to it has been its own attraction, its own charm, independent of its material benefits; it is the pleasure of being able to speak, act and breathe without constraint, under the government of God and the laws alone. All who seek to gain from liberty something other than itself are born to be slaves.34

  At moments like this Tocqueville speaks to every age.

  But as a historian (to the degree that his roles can be distinguished) his message is somewhat more complex, and is summed up in this, the last chapter of his book, as it was stated on his opening page. In 1789 the French tried to make a clean sweep of their past, and to found a new state and society shaped solely by their sense of what was right and rational. Tocqueville’s message, which makes itself urgently felt as he nears his conclusion, is that this was not done, because it was impossible; and he might well congratulate himself for having stated it convincingly. His task was not quite complete: it would next be necessary to write a study of the Revolution and of Napoleon to show how the old order was resurrected, and how the twin desires for equality and freedom shaped the new society. In his closing sentences he demonstrated that he knew this very well:

  So here I am come to the threshold of that memorable revolution; I will not cross it just yet: soon, perhaps, I will be able to do so. If so, I will no longer be considering its causes, I will be studying the thing in itself, and I will dare to judge the society which came out of it.35

  Surely these are the words of a man in complete command of his talent and of his ideas. Yet when he got to Paris he discovered that there was still much work to be done. First he had to find a publisher. He was helped by Ampère’s friend and colleague Louis de Loménie,* who introduced him to Michel Lévy, a publisher much patronized by liberals under the Second Empire (Ampère made use of him). On 16 February Tocqueville signed a contract,36 and immediately began to worry about the book’s title. Ampère suggested Causes of the Revolution, which would have plainly indicated Tocqueville’s main theme and have hinted at the possibility of further volumes on the course of the Revolution and its consequences. He liked Tocqueville’s proposed La Révolution as a title for the whole work, commenting approvingly, ‘you are going to write the philosophical history of the Revolution.’ Lévy wanted to call the book La Révolution Française, which Tocqueville was half-inclined to agree to: as a title it was imprecise and hardly new, but then it was also short and unpretentious. Beaumont had nothing better to offer, but Reeve, who was now in constant correspondence with Tocqueville about the English translation, thought that the title ought to indicate more precisely what the book was actually about – ‘the sources of the Revolution’. There, indeed, was the difficulty. Tocqueville had never wanted to publish a study of the ancien régime for its own sake, and as we have seen, Book One, as conceived and published, reads like the opening of a work quite different from that in which it actually appeared. But the fact had to be faced: not only had Tocqueville written a book on the ancien régime and how it had precipitated the Revolution, he had done so in a startlingly new fashion: that was its interest and its merit. So someone (can it have been Marie, who returned to Paris late in February?) suggested a title, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution française, which the publisher liked. So did Mignet (himself a historian of the Revolution) but Beaumont and Rivet did not. Tocqueville would have dithered still, but meanwhile Lévy began to advertise the book under the new title.† Tocqueville accepted the fait accompli, which did have the merit of naming the book’s two chief concerns. The discussion had lasted the best part of a month.37

  Long before then Tocqueville had delivered the manuscript to Lévy, whose printers promptly rejected it as illegible. It had to be recopied, we are not told by whom (again, perhaps, Marie), and while that was happening Tocqueville rewrote chapter 10 of Book Two (‘How the Destruction of Political Liberty and the Separation between the Classes Caused Almost All the Diseases of Which the Old Order Died’). He also began to multiply the endnotes.

  He had always had a weakness for appendices, large and small, from the Système pénitentiaire onwards, but now his pen ran away with him. In the Oeuvres complètes the main text of the Ancien Régime runs to 162 pages, the appendix on the governmen
t of Languedoc, as an example of a pays d’état, to five; the notes (in markedly smaller type) to fifty-six. Only Book Two is substantially longer (ninety-one pages) and it would be far less impressive without its annotation. The notes, in fact, are an essential part of the book, which can only be appraised properly if they are taken into account. All of them are weighty, and some (the Languedoc appendix, for example, and the analysis of the cahiers of the nobility) are long essays.

  Undoubtedly, with better planning or exhaustive revision much of the material in these notes could have been incorporated in the body of the text; but even if Tocqueville now felt that he had pruned his chapters too much he was understandably unwilling to rewrite them yet again, and anyway there was his commitment to Lévy to consider. Many of the notes were too substantial to have been incorporated in any circumstances. It hardly mattered. Tocqueville was not writing a textbook; the notes as they stand are a further expression of their author’s mind and taste, thereby adding to the book’s attraction.

  It was a different matter with the Foreword. Tocqueville, once printing was under way, gave a set of proofs to Loménie. Loménie made one devastating criticism: Tocqueville had said too little about liberty in his account of the old order and the Revolution.

  ... one might suppose from his book that he allotted little significance to the spirit of liberty in the revolution, although he must have been aware that the constitution of’91, the direct expression of the spirit of 1789, was as liberal as it was democratic, even that it was too liberal, for, in excessively weakening the powers of the executive, it broke too sharply with the already ancient habits of centralization, which he had been the first to discern and describe so well.