Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Tocqueville took this criticism nobly. He said that he was going to deal with ‘the spirit of’89’ in his next volume, but Loménie objected (‘not supposing, alas, that his prediction would be so correct’) that it was impossible to say when that volume would appear, and meanwhile Tocqueville’s comparative silence about liberty might mislead, especially as he said so much about equality. He might at least put something about his further plans in the Foreword; indeed, said Loménie, warming to his task, the Foreword as it stood was too short and dry: ‘if many people never read prefaces, equally there were many who read nothing else, especially when the book was a very serious one.’ Tocqueville was much upset by these remarks, but after he had left Loménie he decided that they were just, and rewrote not only the Foreword but the Conclusion; so it is to Loménie that we owe some of the Ancien Régime’s most eloquent pages. Loménie himself thought them splendid, but was even more impressed by his friend’s modesty and sincerity.38

  Three weeks after Tocqueville arrived there, the Congress which was formally to end the Crimean War met in Paris. He paid little attention. He did not believe that this was the last of Louis Napoleon’s wars, and made one of those remarks which sometimes sharply remind us that he was a nineteenth-century French nationalist: Russia, he thought, would be humiliated rather than enfeebled, whatever terms she had to accept, and was still a danger; ‘I firmly believe that a third campaign would have left her in a far weaker state.’ But it was his own campaign which preoccupied him. Nassau Senior arrived in Paris on 7 May, and ten days later complained that Tocqueville had been scarcely visible; but they had dined together on the 17th. ‘Tocqueville is full of his book, which is to appear in about a week.* His days and nights are devoted to correcting the proofs and to writing notes, which he thought would be trifling, but which grow in length and importance.’ His spirits were uncertain that spring. Before leaving Normandy he told Mme Swetchine that his intellectual isolation from most of his contemporaries might injure the chances of the book, ‘for long experience has taught me that a book’s success comes much more from the thoughts that a reader brings to it than from those which the writer expresses.’ Arrived in Paris, he missed Marie acutely, which, coupled with anxiety, gave him at least one sleepless night: ‘You will understand that my head was full of black thoughts during this insomnia, and how much I wanted you there to comfort me ... I told myself that the ideas in my book were such as to please nobody; that the legitimists would only find there a terribly severe picture of the ancien régime and royalty; the devout, such as Corcelle, little sympathy for the Church; the revolutionaries, little liking for the fustian of the Revolution.’ The proofs, when they came, tormented him; but he sent a set, in batches, to Beaumont as well as to Loménie, which, Beaumont and Clémentine being as always delighted with what they read, was chiefly good for his morale. That was not the end of Beaumont’s usefulness. At Tocqueville’s suggestion he wrote an article praising the Ancien Régime (a puff preliminary) which, after Tocqueville revised it (‘Your friendship said things about me which I really could not allow’) was published in the Journal des débats over the editor’s signature.39

  June arrived and publication day was imminent. Then came an urgent message: Hervé de Tocqueville was dying at Clairoix. Alexis left Paris at once.

  * This view might have surprised Gertrude Stein, who lived at 27, rue de Fleurus sixty years later.

  * Sophie Petrovna Soimonova (1782–1857), of a noble Russian family, married, 1799, General Nicholas Swetchine. In 1815, she converted to Catholicism. In 1816–17, the Swetchines settled in Paris. They got to know all the most aristocratic French Catholics; Mme Swetchine became a sort of unofficial religious director to many of them, including Montalembert and Falloux.

  * He might have cited the continuity of penal policy from the ancien régime, through the Revolution and into the nineteenth century to illustrate the point (see above, p. 228–29), but this did not occur to him.

  * Rémusat scrupulously examined this very point in his review of the Ancien Régime in the Revue des deux mondes, 1 August 1856.

  * OC II i 75; cf. OC I i 12: ‘I admit that in America I have seen more than America; I have sought there the image of democracy itself ...’

  * See above, pp. 349–51.

  * See above, pp. 82, 243–4.

  † AT does not mention Malesherbes in the Ancien Régime, but he quoted this passage in his article on the ancien régime in 1836: see OC II ii 63–4.

  ‡ See above, p. 455.

  * In his introduction to the Ancien Régime Georges Lefebvre gently rebuked AT by remarking that for a historian and sociologist ‘not to have taken sufficient account of war in the experience of the French is a surprising lacuna’ (OC II i 30).

  * A term of art, meaning that one was rich enough (whatever one’s other disqualifications) to aspire to join the noblesse.

  † Better known nowadays as the Physiocrats; writers frequently criticized by AT.

  * Louis de Loménie (1815–78) was related to Loménie de Brienne, one of the last prime ministers of the ancien régime, and was married to a great-niece of Mme Récamier. He was Ampère’s successor at the Collège de France, a student of the eighteenth century and a biographer of Beaumarchais and Mirabeau. No doubt Ampère advised AT to seek him out. In 1859 he was to publish, in the Revue des deux mondes, one of the best of all the obituary tributes to Tocqueville.

  † At some stage the word française was dropped, probably by AT, who always thought of the Revolution as a European phenomenon, like the old order which it destroyed.

  * In fact, the book did not appear for a month.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  RETREATING

  1856–1858

  Je crois qu’on peut se perfectionner toute sa vie.*

  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, 18561

  COMTE HERVÉ’S STRENGTH had been failing for the past year, which because of his great age necessarily made his family apprehensive, but neither he nor they had expected him to die immediately. He was looking forward to paying a last visit to the chateau at Tocqueville, and Alexis had just written him a letter full of the scheme, with assurances that Mme Guermarquer would be particularly welcome. After Alexis and Marie reached Clairoix, on 8 June, he seemed to rally, and next morning talked cheerfully of revisiting the scene of his childhood (‘he had no idea of his danger’), but an hour later he died. A religious service was held at Clairoix, but the comte was buried next to his first wife in the Rosanbo plot in the Picpus graveyard at Paris, a spot reserved for families of the victims of the Terror, or at least the noble ones. Nearby were (and are) the two mass-graves where many bodies of the guillotined had been flung.2

  Tocqueville was prostrated by this loss, the effect of which was made worse by the almost simultaneous deaths of Louis de Kergorlay’s father and Mrs Childe, to whom he was deeply devoted. He did not get his spirits back for more than a month. He resolved to leave Paris, ‘cette ville maudite’, as soon as possible.3 He was a man of intense feelings, and these blows struck deep.* He filled his letters with his grief for his father and with praise of him; but as when Abbé Le Sueur died had nothing particular to say. Indeed his lamentations were almost exactly the same as those which he poured out for the abbé. Posterity (or at any rate biographers) would give much for a memoir of Hervé by Alexis, or even a sketch of one in a letter, since so many documents have gone astray: only two letters from father to son have survived, and only two dozen or so from son to father after the journey to America, and those not always on the most interesting subjects: there is nothing, for example, about the two little books on eighteenth-century French history which Hervé published in 1847 and 1850.4 But Alexis felt no impulse to reflect on his father’s long and varied life, or to list his achievements. As when Le Sueur died he could think of nothing but his own need, his own loss, and memorializing would have brought no consolation. ‘He and my dear Marie, I have to say, were the only creatures tying me to life and I shudder to the bottom of
my soul when I consider that now there is only one of them.’ Again and again, in his letters, he returns to the theme of Hervé’s boundless indulgence to his children, superficially a curious emphasis, considering how thoroughly respectable all the Tocquevilles were, at least in middle age. What did Hervé have to indulge? Political differences, perhaps. But the anxious child in Alexis had never died; his father’s abundant, uncritical affection was just what he craved. Emotionally he was unprepared for the event, and in spite of his doubts could turn for comfort only to the pious rituals of the Catholic Church; besides, his more devout correspondents expected it of him.

  I saw in my father, and have seen only in him, religion completely present in the least actions of life and in every last minute of the day ... ‘Your father,’ said his confessor to me on the night before he died, ‘sent for me in the hope of consolation; and I came in the certainty of finding in him continual edification.’

  Tocqueville saw in this conclusive proof of the value of religion, but still could not believe in the Catholic creed. Who could, alas, unless God took a hand?5

  Hervé left his affairs in excellent order, so Alexis and Marie were soon able to escape to their peaceful refuge in the Cotentin; but even that did not immediately bring comfort. ‘When I got here I recognized, not for the first time, that we see places through ourselves, not in themselves.’ He was quite unable to go back to work. But he had to admit that he could not help taking an interest in the fate of the book which he had just published; so much of an interest, in fact, that it gradually brought him back to equilibrium.6

  The Ancien Régime came out a week to the day after Hervé’s death, on 16 June. Tocqueville would have stopped it if he could, as a tribute to his father, but as he had sold it to the publisher it was no longer his property; he could do nothing. Instead he was forced to enjoy a prodigious success, equalling, if not surpassing, that of the first Démocratie.7

  Letters from friends and colleagues poured in: Beaumont, Kergorlay, Mme Swetchine, Guizot, Mignet, Freslon, Duvergier d’Hauranne. The press was not so prompt, but the appearance of the book was widely announced, and reviews came out steadily from June to September. The English translation (by Henry Reeve and Lucie Duff Gordon) appeared almost simultaneously with the French original, and was well received; the Allgemeine Zeitung, to which Tocqueville and Beaumont jointly subscribed,* included what Tocqueville ungratefully called ‘an interminable and very faithful analysis of my book’, which at least spread the news across the Rhine. Best of all for the author’s morale were the sales. The first impression of the Ancien Régime was of 2,200 copies: Lévy was a much bolder publisher than Gosselin, whose first printing of the Démocratie, it will be remembered, was of only 500 copies, and his boldness was justified: the edition was exhausted by the end of July, and the second edition by the following spring. Tocqueville wrote to Kergorlay: ‘Materially speaking, the book’s success is far greater than that of the Démocratie. For the three first editions of the Démocratie did not in total amount to more copies than the first edition which we have just sold out.’8 A third edition sold as briskly. ‘Lévy is enchanted and so am I. It has produced a nice round sum in royalties for me, every penny of which I am spending on my property here. When’ (he asked Beaumont) ‘are you going to come and see how my ideas have been transformed into a garden, flowerbeds and meadows?’9

  Tocqueville took his success and his reviews (even the critical ones) with dignity and sense. For one thing, he was so immutably convinced that he was at odds with his time and that France under the Second Empire was hopelessly money-grubbing and frivolous, that both its praise and its blame could be heavily discounted. He confessed to Mme Swetchine that the pleasure of favourable reviews soon evaporated, whereas the least criticism irked him for ages; but he only deigned to reply to one specimen. Léon Plée, in the Siècle, now the leading republican newspaper (and edited by Tocqueville’s old rival, Léonor Havin), welcomed Tocqueville’s harsh portrayal of the old order, but attacked his view of the Revolution. ‘M. de Tocqueville is no friend of the Revolution, nor a eulogist of its actors, nor an admirer of its deeds; he has scarcely any sympathy even for the populace which was forced to make it.’ Tocqueville was understandably stung by this, and wrote a private letter of protest to the reviewer:

  How, sir, could you make a remark casting doubt on my sympathy for the common people when a large part of my work is, precisely, devoted to showing in a newer, truer, more vivid light the particular sort of oppression which they suffered, and also their miseries, and how the evil education instilled in them by the royal government and the upper classes explains their violence?

  He was also irritated by a review which showed, in his opinion, that its author, Lamartine, had not actually read the Ancien Régime, since the book said what the poet accused it of not saying. Tocqueville called Lamartine an ingrate, ‘for I am perhaps the only member of the Académie who still shakes hands with him.’10

  It is easy to see why Tocqueville was annoyed: Lamartine accused him of presenting the Revolution as an accident, which is a mistake no careful reader could possibly have made. There are other errors in his review. But he had certainly read the book thoroughly by May 1857, when he talked of it at length to Nassau Senior in a flood of brilliance, and although Tocqueville might still have objected to his views (which had not much changed) his eloquence makes it clear that the difference between them was narrow but crucial: Lamartine was still in love with the Revolution:

  It was an insurrection against the slavery, not of the body, but of the mind. It was an attempt by France, which personifies modern civilisation, to break out of the feudal and religious prison in which she had lived for ten centuries, and to begin a new life, with new ideas, new objects, new habits, new means, new hopes, and, as was inevitable [emphasis supplied], new dangers and new calamities.

  Whereas Tocqueville thought that the necessary transformation of France could and should have been achieved without ‘new dangers and new calamities’; he did not consider them as inevitable. Nevertheless he devoted himself to explaining how they came about: that is, to the actual causes of actual events.11

  By 1856 it was not hard to get to the Left of Tocqueville on the subject of revolution; what is a little surprising is to find Guizot taking much the same line as Lamartine, though with greater subtlety. He wrote to Tocqueville congratulating him warmly on the book, but continuing:

  I fear that you present our revolution too exclusively as political. If I am not mistaken, it aspired to reform not just society but human ideas of all matters in this world and beyond this world. It wanted to make Man the master of all things as of himself. It substituted faith in Man for faith in God. That was its philosophy, and it was its philosophy which shaped its politics. It sacrificed its politics without much regret so long as its philosophy was fulfilled and dominant. You describe admirably the sad phenomenon of the nation’s easy acquiescence in the revolutionary despotism that Man set up. That I think was its true cause.

  And he went on to say what he thought was Tocqueville’s essential position, in the Ancien Régime as in the Démocratie:

  You paint and judge modern democracy as a conquered aristocrat convinced that his conqueror is right. Perhaps you dwell too habitually on the historical aristocracy which is quite definitely conquered, and not enough on the natural aristocracy which can never be conquered for long and always in the end resumes its rights. Perhaps, if you had more steadily made this distinction, you would have felt more comfortable, while accepting democracy, in attacking what was illegitimate and anti-social in its victory.12

  The differences between the three writer-politicians are clear and important, but a century and a half later perhaps their agreements are more striking, and throw more light on the success of Tocqueville’s book. All agreed that the French Revolution was the greatest event in modern, perhaps in all, history; all accepted ‘the principles of’89’, the cause of liberty and equality; the lives of all had been dominated by t
he effects of the Revolution, good and ill; all believed that the work of the Revolution was irreversible. In these points they were at one with French public opinion. Tocqueville, in his hatred of the Second Empire, imagined himself to be more at odds with his fellow citizens (who were forever approving it in plebiscites) than he was. He foresaw that the regime would eventually be destroyed by the Emperor’s taste for military adventures, but not that before then it would steadily evolve in a liberal direction (an evolution of which the triumph of the Ancien Régime was perhaps the first omen). The French reading public was as convinced as Tocqueville himself that the Revolution was something which had to be understood, and recognized the book as a great help. It eagerly responded to the appeal for liberty in the main text, for the French wanted liberty as well as equality and security, and did not let themselves be discouraged by M. de Tocqueville’s gloomy outlook, much though they disliked it; and they had an inextinguishable pride in their country. In Tocqueville’s chapter on the peasantry they found one of the roots of that love of la France profonde which has been one of the main notes of French patriotism ever since. And if they conceded that things had often gone wrong, the Ancien Régime went far towards explaining how and why. Beaumont, who was indefatigable in gathering news about the book’s reception and passing it on to Tocqueville, overheard in Tours an Englishman praising it to his companion: ‘that book explains very well how France today can be so content with its present government.’ This was indeed Tocqueville’s message, and the French could grasp it quite as well as the English.13