Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  One who did so was Louis de Kergorlay; his verdict was particularly valued by Tocqueville, in part because Kergorlay could be relied on to see things exactly as he did himself.

  Your book gave me the greatest pleasure, the greatest sorrow; you will understand; it is excellent, but at the same time written in a tongue which our contemporaries can scarcely understand ... How right you were when you said to me recently that you felt completely isolated even among your closest friends.* I am in exactly the same case.

  But in discussing the book Kergorlay soon moved away from its matter to its manner. As we know, Kergorlay understood, as no-one else seems to have done, how intense was Tocqueville’s literary ambition. After several pages of praise – he thought that the new book was quite as good as the Démocratie and in some respects better, ‘for one finds there the more complete experience of a politician and practical knowledge of actual humanity’ – he mentioned that he had noticed various small inelegances of detail, probably the result of the haste with which the book was produced. In his reply, after thanking Kergorlay warmly for the pleasure which his letter caused him, Tocqueville begged to be told of every blunder; which Kergorlay undertook to do, though he found it strange to be correcting a member of the Académie Française, which had the responsibility of prescribing good French. He read the book a second and then a third time, and his corrections, with a few suggested by Corcelle, were adopted in the third impression of the Ancien Régime (not having arrived in time for the second). It ill becomes an Englishman to pronounce on the point, but they do not seem to amount to much, and Kergorlay’s one general criticism – that Tocqueville tried too hard to make everything as clear as possible, forgetting that readers liked to use their intelligence occasionally – seems misguided; Mme Swetchine’s praise of the ‘incomparable beauty’ of Tocqueville’s language seems much better justified – but then, she was not French either. Tocqueville accepted his friend’s strictures with striking humility. Perhaps humility is not quite the right word: ‘thrown back into the life of letters, I have more reason than ever to make myself as distinguished as possible.’ So he begged Kergorlay to be really thorough in his observations. ‘I know that between my style and that of the greatest writers is some kind of obstacle which I must cross if I am to move out of the crowd into their ranks.’ Kergorlay did his excellent best to help; among other things he, who had once recommended immersion in Pascal, Montesquieu and Rousseau, now advised a course of Voltaire.14

  Much less welcome comments came from Arthur de Gobineau, who was having a difficult time as a member of a special French diplomatic mission to Persia. The third and fourth volumes of his Essai on race had been published that spring, and copies had been sent to Tocqueville, apparently in the hope that he would lecture on them to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. This Tocqueville refused to do, because of his mourning for his father and because he disagreed so entirely with Gobineau’s immoral ideas about human decadence. In explaining this he allowed himself what looks like a pun: ‘my mind is so toqué * in this respect that the very reasons which you give me to make your ideas acceptable drive me further and further into opposition.’ Gobineau had defended himself by saying that he was no more immoral than a doctor who tells his patient that his disease is mortal.

  I reply that if the act is not immoral in itself, it can only produce immoral or pernicious consequences. If my doctor came to me one morning to say, ‘My dear sir, I have the honour to announce that you have a mortal illness, and as it affects your very constitution, I have the advantage of being able to add that there is absolutely no chance of saving you in any way,’ I would first be tempted to knock the fellow down.

  Then, he thought, he would hide himself under the blankets to await the promised end, or follow the example of the refugees from the plague in Boccaccio, eating, drinking and making merry.† (Perhaps this passage should be borne in mind when considering Tocqueville’s actual dealings with doctors.) He tried to comfort Gobineau for the small success of his Essai in France by explaining that nobody there read books any more, blandly overlooking his own success with the Ancien Régime. Gobineau, he thought, might have better luck in Germany (as unhappily he did, when his book fell into the hands of the anti-semitic circle round Richard Wagner).15

  It must be admitted that this letter was provocative. After reading the Ancien Régime Gobineau counterattacked. He avowed himself an extreme reactionary (if reactionary is not too weak a word): everything had begun to go wrong, he thought, in the reign of Philippe le Bel (1285–1314), when the King and his lawyers began the destruction of feudal liberty, of all things ‘the most calumniated and the worst understood’. He was delighted to find confirmation of these ideas in Tocqueville. ‘You have admirably shown that the French Revolution invented nothing.’ But what, then, could Tocqueville find to admire in the men of’89, the members of the Constituent Assembly? All they had done was to open the door to violence and to all the atrocities of democracy. They had cried ‘tyranny!’ when there was no tyranny, and had exerted themselves only to do badly what many centuries had been quietly preparing. ‘You think that we can mitigate the evil which they did by referring to “generous mistakes”.* Why generous?’ Gobineau hated the Montagnards, but he despised the Constituents.

  Then he struck at Tocqueville’s throat by denying that parliaments were really free institutions, and that the French would ever be fit for liberty. They were a people who always had the same government, whether under a republic, a parliamentary monarchy or an empire. For they piously preserved an immoderate love for the involvement of the State in all their affairs, for the gendarmerie, for the tax-collector, for the road-surveyor, they had no understanding of local self-government and valued absolute centralization unreservedly. Did Tocqueville remember the time when they worked together at the foreign ministry? Europe was in flames, yet Tocqueville had had to find time to deal with tiresome parliamentary questions before being partially disavowed by the majority in the Assembly and forced out of office. ‘What did the liberty or honour of the country gain from such a form of government?’ Anarchy from time to time and despotism always – such was the fate of France, and Gobineau preferred the despotism of the embroidered coat to that of the deputy’s black one or to that of the working-man’s blouse.16

  Part caricature of Tocqueville’s ideas, part contradiction, this was a formidable challenge. Tocqueville rose to it in a magnificent letter which is one of the most important things he ever wrote.

  Gobineau had asserted that, in spite of Tocqueville’s suspicions to the contrary, he had become a committed believer in Christianity. Tocqueville accepted this, but seized the opportunity of arguing forcibly that Gobineau’s racial theories were logically and doctrinally incompatible with that religion.

  Christianity evidently tends to make all men brothers and equals. Your doctrine makes them cousins at best whose common father is only heavenly; here below there are only conquerors and the conquered, masters and slaves by right of birth, so no wonder your teachings are approved, cited, commented upon by whom? By owners of Negroes who favour eternal servitude based on radical racial difference.

  (Gobineau’s Essai had been welcomed in the southern United States.)

  I know that there are at present in the south of the United States Christian priests, perhaps good ones (even if they are slaveholders) who preach from their pulpits doctrines which are doubtless analogous to yours.

  But the mass of more disinterested Christians would never feel the least sympathy for Gobineau’s views. Tocqueville congratulated Gobineau on his new-found faith, but regretted that not everybody who sought it could find it (a month later he would be enlarging on this palpable reference to himself in his great letter to Mme Swetchine).17

  Moving on to politics, Tocqueville declined further debate. He and Gobineau belonged to diametrically opposed schools: what could argument between them achieve? But Tocqueville set out his creed: he made the most precise and explicit statement of h
is political beliefs that he ever uttered.

  You consider the men of our time to be big children, very degenerate and very badly brought-up. And in consequence you think it proper to guide them by show, by noise, by much tinsel, fine embroidery and gaudy uniforms which, very often, are only liveries. I think like you that our contemporaries are quite badly brought-up, which is the main cause of their misery and weakness; but I believe that a better education could correct the evil which a bad education created; I believe that it is impermissible to abandon the undertaking. I believe that we can yet turn all men to account by an intelligent appeal to their natural honesty and common sense. The fact is, I want to treat them as adults. Perhaps I am wrong. But I follow the course marked out by my principles and, what is more, enjoy a deep and noble pleasure in following it. You deeply despise the human race, at least our part of it; you think it not only fallen but incapable of ever rising again ... For my part, as I feel neither the right nor the wish to entertain such opinions of my species and my country, I think it is not necessary to despair of them. In my opinion, human societies, like individuals, amount to something only in liberty. I have always said that liberty may be more difficult to establish and maintain in democratic societies like ours than in certain aristocratic societies which came before us, but I will never be so rash as to think that it may be impossible. And God forbid that my mind should ever be crossed by the thought that it is necessary to despair of success ... You will allow me to have less confidence in your teaching than in the goodness and justice of God.18

  In this way Tocqueville confronted what can nowadays be recognized as an early sketch of fascism. Gobineau gave up: ‘You have replied with six pages of irony to my reasoning. So I infer that you don’t want to debate ...’19 He did not try again.

  The rest of Tocqueville’s correspondence during his autumn, winter and spring in the Cotentin contains much equally interesting material. John Stuart Mill wrote, after a silence of thirteen years (and a prompting by George Grote), to thank Tocqueville for a copy of the Ancien Régime and to praise the book in a way which showed that he understood his author as well as ever: ‘I cannot say enough to express my deep sympathy with the noble love of liberty that dominates your work and makes of it one continual protest against the depressing regime that your great country, the world’s right eye, is reduced to enduring at the moment.’ Tocqueville was immensely pleased, and replied at once: ‘there is no-one whose opinion matters to me so much as yours ... Until I had your approval, I could not feel certain that I had done well.’ Tocqueville was already contemplating a visit to England in the spring, and hoped that they would meet then.20

  Another voice from the past was more painful. Madame François Begin, the former Rosalie Malye, Tocqueville’s first love, had fallen on hard times, and wrote to Kergorlay asking him to approach Tocqueville on her behalf: she seems to have wanted a cash loan.* Tocqueville writhed for two days over the question of what to do. He was quite willing to help Rosalie, indeed felt a moral obligation to do so; the difficulty was Marie. If she knew about the business she would be furiously jealous of the past, and would be angrily suspicious of any renewal of the friendship, even on the most respectable terms. At the moment she had no suspicions of any kind, and Tocqueville felt it would be imprudent to rouse her. He had no right to upset her – his first obligation was to her happiness. He tried to think of a way of helping Rosalie secretly, but since Marie was in charge of their finances there is no reason to think that he succeeded. We hear no more of Mme Begin.21

  The episode suggests various questions. A few months later Tocqueville sketched his wife’s character to Mme Swetchine, to whom he nowadays wrote in his most informal, confidential fashion. He was now working seriously on the sequel to the Ancien Régime but was feeling ‘unhinged, as one would say in English’. There was nothing surprising in that: ‘A vaguely restless soul and the incoherent activity of desire have always been a chronic malady with me.’ He was lucky to live with a woman who could mitigate ‘this great ridiculous misery’. But she could not heal him completely. ‘She creates round herself a serenity which at moments also comes to me, but which always soon eludes me and abandons me to a causeless, impotent agitation which often makes my soul spin like a wheel out of gear.’22 Tocqueville is trying to be frank; he has already told Mme Swetchine that Marie feels and thinks ‘passionately and violently.’ But he cannot quite bring himself to say that her capacity for making scenes has cowed him; that she is a soothing, well-behaved companion as long as she has her own way in everything – which is impossible.

  Much though Tocqueville enjoyed life in the country, and much though he disparaged Paris, he had to spend part of the year there for the sake of his work, and in view of the lively picture painted by Nassau Senior of his life in Paris in the spring of 1857 (for example), it is impossible not to feel that he liked living among his friends again, for short periods at least. The trouble was that Marie did not. ‘Contact with the world, above all with our world,’ Tocqueville told Beaumont, ‘she finds irritating and disagreeable.’ Contact with her husband’s family was worse. She and Émilie had not spoken to each other for ten years. In the autumn of 1856, perhaps because of Comte Hervé’s death (Alexis disliked the prospect of the family drifting apart), an attempt was made at reconciliation: he and Marie visited Nacqueville for four days. The occasion was a total failure, for which Tocqueville did not blame his wife. His respect for Comte Hippolyte’s character and judgement was much less than his affection, and he thought that his marriage to Émilie had been bad for both of them. Men with weak characters, he told Beaumont in the spring, should not marry vulgar women who hid in the hearts under their silk and lace only vanity and a limitless love of money. ‘The Belisle family was always worthless. I’m sure you have been convinced of this as long as I have.’23

  The quarrel reinforces our sense of Marie’s insecurity. After twenty years of marriage she still needed constant emotional reassurance, and though she had lived in the most polished society of France all that time, she seems still to have felt snubbed by its members. Her predicament is illustrated by one of Monckton Milnes’s anecdotes about his visits to the Tocqueville chateau. At lunch a tactless guest held forth about the horror of misalliances. Tocqueville took his wife’s hand, kissed it, and said, ‘I married for love and by God! it has been a success!’ It was a fine gesture, but if Marie had often to endure such slights it is no wonder that she became unsociable. She was devoted to Gustave and Clémentine de Beaumont, and everyone loved Ampère, but otherwise she seems to have felt comfortable only with her country neighbours and with English people such as Mme de Lamartine and the two Lagden sisters who looked after Prosper Mérimée’s domestic life. Then there was her health, which so often seemed worse than her husband’s. All in all, the impression must be that at this period she needed support as much as she gave it, and that she might well not be equal to a serious crisis.24

  During the winter of 1856–7, after a long bout of his usual procrastination, Tocqueville again took up work on the French Revolution. He faced renewed difficulties. At one level he knew just what was necessary: he had to repeat the documentary triumph of the Ancien Régime. Just as his immersion in the archives of Tours had brought the eighteenth century to life for him, so now he hoped to discover the soul of the Revolution by plunging into ‘a mass of newspapers, pamphlets and unpublished papers’ such as he could find in the archives of Paris. But whereas he had arrived in Tours with various testable hypotheses and a clear idea of the questions he wanted to ask, he was now without an idée mère, to use his favourite phrase. The vast abundance of available documentation daunted him. His thoughts turned again to Napoleon and the project of setting him squarely in the revolutionary context. He considered examining the record of the Constituent Assembly, but nothing was settled when he arrived in Paris at the end of March, except that the trip to England was now a definite intention.25

  Tocqueville had learned of the immense collection of Fren
ch Revolution pamphlets in the British Museum, and with his characteristic hunger for primary sources thought that he might find the inspiration which he wanted there. But as there was no shortage of such sources in France it may be guessed that his old impulse for travel was stirring again. His many English friends had for years been urging him to visit them, and he was curious to see the country again. He would travel alone, or at least only with Auguste, his valet.* Marie was a stout English patriot, but she had not visited her native land for at least thirty years, and there is no evidence that she wanted to do so now. Journeys always made her ill, and she remembered the horrors of her voyage to Naples: she would not risk the Straits of Dover. She went instead to spend the summer with her aunt at Chamarande. Tocqueville joined her there for a few weeks before setting off to spend the last days of June and most of July across the Channel.

  This last visit to England has seldom or never received from scholars the attention it deserves, except from Seymour Drescher, who perceptively calls it ‘in a sense the last public act of his life’. Yet the journey itself and Tocqueville’s responses are so amply documented that his character emerges before us as in a final flowering: as vividly as in the travel diaries of his youth, which his letters to Marie from London much resemble.26 He was as bright-eyed and observant as ever; he could still discover significance in the slightest encounter. He wanted to find out what changes had occurred in the twenty-two years since his last visit; to his surprise there were few, or rather, only one. The signs of demagogy and revolution which he had detected here and there in 1835 had completely disappeared. ‘In appearance, at least, aristocratic institutions there are stronger and less challenged than in my youth. England is still the only country anywhere which can give the idea of the European ancien régime, reformed and perfected.’ He still did not believe that this state of affairs would last for ever: there was still too great a gulf between the rich and the poor. He took to walking back from the British Museum to his hotel in Albemarle Street, his day’s work being done, through the working-class lanes and alleys which lay behind the splendid main roads. Conditions seemed worse than those in the poor quarters of Paris, and if the cleanliness of some Londoners was admirable, the dirt of the others was abominable. ‘You can’t imagine what happens to linen, faces and hair from the coal-smuts that rain from the sky and against which only incessant care can protect you.’ He thought that nobodies in England fell further into squalor than those anywhere else. But he did not allow these observations to diminish his pleasure when he went down to visit Lord Radnor at Coleshill, one of his Wiltshire estates: