Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Hardly had this child been born [she writes] than my husband offered him to God and consecrated him to Him. He [her husband] was present at the christening ceremony, pénétré with faith and religion. Several persons have told me that nothing in the world could be more touching or more edifying than the sight of him at that moment. When he came back to my side he told me that he had been extremely moved, and that he had asked God with all his heart to remove the child from the world if he should prove to be un mauvais sujet [black sheep]. ... He often said to me that it was necessary to offer this little treasure to God every day, and to be ready to sacrifice it to Him, because it had belonged to Him before it was ours.9

  So pious a man could not be a follower of the philosophes; but he had picked up some of Rousseau’s ideas about the rearing of children (he owned several books on education). He thought he could make his little boy hardy by dressing him in nothing but a linen shirt, whatever the weather, without shoes or stockings. Before long the child was seriously ill, but before he was quite at the point of death the father himself died, urging his son at all times to love and respect his mother, and to take her advice even if he lived to be fifty.

  The boy was named Hervé Louis François Bonaventure; he was always known as Hervé (although his name-day feast was that of St Louis, which eventually he shared with his wife, Louise). For a few years after his father’s death he was extremely happy: he loved Tocqueville and the country round; we do not hear of any playmates. At the age of eight he was sent to the Collège d’Harcourt in Paris, a school favoured by pious noble families: it was extremely expensive.10 Unluckily Hervé was given in charge to a priest who was both cruel and an unbeliever. He gave the boy too little to eat, and whipped him when, as was inevitable, he stole an apple. He was so regularly brutal that Hervé, according to himself, suffered from constant terror; he became both timid and sneaking. Then, one day, one of his Damas uncles noticed works by Voltaire and Rousseau on the tutor’s bookshelves. This was serious: the tutor was quickly dismissed and a substitute found, the Abbé Louis Le Sueur, who won Hervé’s heart at their first meeting by giving him a hunk of bread, which the boy immediately wolfed down. Le Sueur was a man of simple religious faith, witty, urbane and cultivated, but it was his immense kindliness which won the lifelong devotion of Hervé de Tocqueville, as of his sons afterwards. Before long he had taken the place of a father in his pupil’s life. It was just as well, for when Hervé was thirteen his mother contracted a fatal case of smallpox. He was not allowed to enter her bedroom, for fear of infection; but he stayed the other side of her door, and heard her death-cries. ‘Forty-nine years later they still echo in my heart.’ It did not matter to him particularly that in spite of all precautions he caught the disease, fortunately only a mild infection. He felt appallingly lonely: his aunts and uncles and grandmother could not fill the void. Rather the reverse: he was very shy, and one of his aunts, thinking him a dolt, made him the regular butt of her wit. It was just as well that he had the abbé to love him.*

  He left school almost at the very moment that the Revolution broke out.

  Like every other Frenchman he was confronted with the immediate, inescapable need to make painful choices. He discovered that neither the traditions of his family nor the tumultuous experiences of the time were much help to him in working out a course that was both honourable and safe.

  I have often heard that my grandmother, a woman of great piety, [said Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1850s] after having urged her young son to exercise the virtues of a private life, never failed to add – ‘And then, my child, never forget that a man belongs, above all, to his country; that there is no sacrifice which he must not make to it; and that God requires him to be ready to devote, on every occasion, his time, his fortune, and his life, to the service of the State and the King.’11

  It is unmistakably the voice of Catherine de Tocqueville, and it is the creed by which all her immediate descendants tried to live, but it was not applicable in 1789. For one thing, most of her family, the Damas, left France for Brussels in the grotesquely named émigration joyeuse which followed the fall of the Bastille, and they summoned young Hervé to join them as of right: had they not previously obtained for him a reserve commission in the Vexin regiment, of which his uncle Charles was colonel? But Hervé, who had grown up an earnest, even priggish young man, had already formed an aversion to what he saw as the frivolity and immorality of the great nobles, which he was inclined to blame for the fall of the King’s government. Besides, the advantage of the commission in his eyes was that it expressly allowed him to stay in Paris and continue his education. He disapproved of the emigration, thinking that it was largely inspired by mere fashion, and was a desertion of king and country. He was not yet without hope that a liberal, reforming government would emerge. He had lodged for some time with the son of General de La Fayette, who was also a victim of the Rousseau treatment, so that he became feeble in both body and mind; but Hervé thought that ‘the hero of two worlds’ might gain power and exercise it wisely, so he stayed where he was. Madame de La Fayette began to disillusion him. She did not share her husband’s enthusiasm for the Revolution: on one occasion, when she was collecting alms for penniless ‘conquerors of the Bastille’ (leaders of the crowd which had stormed the prison on 14 July) she pushed her collector’s bag disdainfully at Hervé, remarking, ‘Do admit that I look a fool.’

  He stayed in Paris until after the royal family’s flight to Varennes in 1791, in which his uncle Louis de Damas figured ingloriously; then at last he went to Brussels. The Damas got him a commission in an émigré regiment, but things were just as bad as he had feared: money which should have been husbanded against hard times was flung away on ‘senseless luxury’ because the refugees were sure that it could only be a matter of months before they returned to France in triumph; every hopeful rumour, and there were many, was believed. Hervé did not share these illusions and saw no point in staying. He went back to Paris and enlisted as an ordinary soldier in the King’s Guard. ‘I wanted to prove to the King that my devotion was untainted by personal ambition.’ But then the National Assembly forced Louis XVI to disband the Guard.

  Hervé witnessed the successful attack on the Tuileries of 10 August 1792. Like many others he tried in vain to save the king, and was lucky to get home unscathed and unsuspected (he hid his sabre and his gun in the room of the Abbé Le Sueur). As he crossed the Place Louis XV (soon to be the place de la Révolution) he saw that it was heaped with the decapitated bodies of the Swiss Guards: ‘Women and children stripped the bodies, and fought each other, their feet covered in blood, for rags of clothes torn off the victims. The rage and cupidity were even more horrible than the murders.’ That evening the city was covered by a black and stinking cloud of smoke: the revolutionaries had piled up the bodies and burnt them. Hervé’s preoccupation now was to save Le Sueur. He contrived to send the abbé out of Paris to his family in Picardy, and followed him next day. In this way they escaped the September massacres. Six months later Hervé married.

  This event was in part an attempt by all concerned to keep some sort of normal life going even in desperate times. Louise Le Peletier de Rosanbo (1771–1836) was the second of three sisters; Hervé, who met her at a party, seems to have known no more of her than that she was pretty, and she knew as little of him.12 Both came from good families and in ordinary times would have been accounted well-off, even rich. They would make a good match, so the usual negotiations went ahead. It was all according to custom – a custom of which Alexis de Tocqueville was to express almost violent disapproval. Attaching enormous importance to successful marriages, he denounced the fact that in France a young man and woman could marry while knowing nothing essential about each other. Can he have been thinking of his parents? In France, he grumbled, the choice of a wife was taken less seriously than the choice of a pair of gloves.13 He advised his nephew Hubert to make every effort to know any prospective bride’s family, if he could not get to know her: ‘few good tr
ees produce bad fruit.’14 This maxim would have given Hervé no trouble, had it come his way, for Mlle de Rosanbo was a granddaughter of Chrétien-Guillaume Lamoignon de Malesherbes.

  At this point we encounter the second strain in Alexis de Tocqueville’s ancestry: it was possibly even more important than that of his father’s family. The Lamoignon were one of the greatest clans of the noblesse de robe. Malesherbes was First President of the Cour des Aides, the body which administered the tax laws. Nevertheless, he had been a thorn in the side of French government ever since his youth, when because he was a Lamoignon and his father was chancellor he had been appointed director of the Librairie – that is, censor of publications. In that post he had fostered freedom of the press, protecting the philosophes (he was one himself ), ensuring the continued publication of the Encyclopédie after the Church tried to suppress it, and helping Jean-Jacques Rousseau so tactfully that he kept the respect of that paranoid genius. As First President he was one of the leaders in the struggle of the parlements against the measures of Louis XV which in 1771 resulted in the abolition of the old courts and the exile of their members to their estates. Malesherbes did not mind: his fall meant that he could devote himself to his real passion, botany. But Louis XVI not only recalled the parlements on his accession in 1774: he appointed Malesherbes a minister at the same time that Malesherbes’s friend Turgot was made controller-general of finance. Neither man was enough of a courtier to succeed at Versailles: they were soon ousted. Nevertheless, Malesherbes now felt himself entitled to send the king memoranda whenever he wished on whatever subject seemed to him to be urgent. He recommended the abolition of lettres de cachet and the fiscal privileges of the nobility; he advocated toleration for Protestants and citizenship for Jews; he wanted expenditure on the splendours of the Court to be ruthlessly cut, urged the summoning of a National Assembly and, just before the Estates-General were convened in 1789, advised the king to remember the fate of Charles I and take thought to avoid it (Louis later avowed his regret for not having followed this advice). He helped to draw up several of the cahiers de doléances *(presumably of the nobility) in 1788–9,15 those same cahiers which one day Alexis de Tocqueville would analyse in his Ancien Régime. Tocqueville does not mention his great-grandfather in that connection, but quotes substantially from one of his protests to Louis XV: ‘You hold your crown, sire, from God alone; but you are not going to deny yourself the satisfaction of believing that you also owe your power to the voluntary submission of your subjects. In France certain inviolable rights belong to the nation; your ministers will not be bold enough to deny it to you ... No, sire, in spite of much effort, no-one has yet persuaded you that there is no difference between the French nation and a people enslaved.’16 Tocqueville’s point was that Malesherbes both expressed and shaped the pre-revolutionary climate of opinion.

  Malesherbes briefly served again as a minister in 1786–87, but declined to serve in the Estates-General of 1789, although at first he strongly approved of what was going on. He was content, at this moment, to enjoy private life. In 1787 his eldest granddaughter had married the young Jean-Baptiste, comte de Chateaubriand, head of a Breton family of much the same standing as the Norman Tocqueville. This union brought the comte’s younger brother into the Malesherbes circle: François-René de Chateaubriand, destined to be the greatest French writer of his generation and eventually a decisive influence on Alexis de Tocqueville. He was warmly welcomed, and in his memoirs has much to say of Malesherbes and his family:

  M. de Malesherbes had three daughters, Mesdames de Rosanbo, d’Aunay, de Montboissier: Mme de Rosanbo was his favourite, because she shared his opinions. [She and her husband] Président de Rosanbo also had three daughters, Mesdames de Chateaubriand, d’Aunay and de Tocqueville, and a son [Louis] whose brilliant intelligence was veiled by his perfect Christianity. M. de Malesherbes delighted in the company of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Many times, at the beginning of the Revolution, I saw him arrive at Mme de Rosanbo’s, hot and bothered by politics, and throw off his wig, lie on my sister-in-law’s carpet, and let himself be swarmed over by a mob of shrieking infants. ... He was a man of science, integrity and courage, but always on the boil, impassioned to the point that one day, when talking to me about Condorcet, he said, ‘That man was once my friend; today, I would have no scruple about killing him like a dog.’17

  (Since the Revolution was going to murder both Malesherbes and Condorcet this remark seems unfortunate.)

  Malesherbes was otherwise a kindly man, and seems to have noticed that François-René was someone quite out of the common. He took the boy under his wing. They were both becoming disillusioned and alarmed about the Revolution. Chateaubriand had long wanted to go to America; now that he knew he was a writer he desired it more than ever: he wanted authentic experience of unknown lands and noble savages to give power to his work. But not expecting his relations (who would have to pay for the trip) to sympathize with such a project, he gave out that he would go on foot to discover the North-West Passage – ‘a scheme so staggeringly impractical’, says George D. Painter, ‘that it could not but appeal to the hardest heads in that enterprising age’.18 Malesherbes was especially enthusiastic: ‘If I were younger I’d go with you ... But at my age a man must die where he is.’ The scheme was a fantasy: apart from anything else, the North-West Passage did not exist, as Malesherbes, a student of geography, should have guessed. But Chateaubriand, the penniless child of a social order that was collapsing round him, his head whirling with notions of virtuous farmers, Red Indians and a communion with Nature in vast solitudes, had every motive to seek his fortunes elsewhere, and anyway all young men like to travel. His voyage would be one, not of geographical, but of self discovery. To Malesherbes the philosophe and botanist, on the other hand, the allure of a new country was enormous. ‘Do not forget to write to me by every ship ... It is a pity that you know no botany.’ Chateaubriand sailed for America in January 1791.19

  He returned exactly a year later, after numerous adventures which had given him a huge literary capital that in a few years he would use to launch the Romantic age (the North-West Passage remained undisturbed). As soon as he got back his family married him to a young woman whom he had never met and would never much like, but who was supposed (incorrectly) to be rich. Chateaubriand soon left her in Paris and went off to join the army of the emigration (‘No royalist could stay at home without being considered a coward’) more or less as Hervé de Tocqueville was deserting it. Malesherbes thoroughly approved of this new adventure, and urged François-René to take his brother with him, which, fatally for Jean-Baptiste, he did.20

  Malesherbes soon met his destiny. The monarchy fell, the King was to be put on trial; the former magistrate and minister volunteered to be his chief counsel. He told the President of the Convention: ‘I was twice called to the Council of him who was my master, at a time when that employment was the object of everyone’s ambition: I owe him the same service when such employment has become, in the judgement of many men, dangerous.’ Louis XVI gladly accepted the offer, and there followed the most touching passage of both men’s lives, as they conferred on the King’s defence and talked about the past. Louis had two other counsel, able and devoted, but he regarded Malesherbes as an old friend, the last left to him. Malesherbes, cheerful and optimistic by nature, at first supposed he could win the king an acquittal, or at least save his life, but by the end of the trial he knew that such hope was vain. He broke down in tears when he tried to give a closing speech to the Convention. ‘Robespierre rose and said that he forgave Malesherbes the tears he had just shed for Louis,’ but the king must die.21

  After the execution Malesherbes felt that he was a marked man. ‘Robespierre’s eye is on me everywhere,’ he said. ‘... That man must hate me, for he wishes to pass for virtuous.’22 * He and his family left Paris for their estate at Malesherbes in the Orléannais. And then Hervé de Tocqueville turned up to marry Louise de Rosanbo.

  ‘I arriv
ed at Malesherbes on 30 January 1793; as I got out of the coach I saw M. de Malesherbes under the peristyle. The venerable old man, whom I was meeting for the first time, opened his arms to me as if I were already his son, and thereafter the closest confidence was united in me with the respect that he inspired.’ Hervé fell as completely under Malesherbes’s generous spell as had Chateaubriand: they were both fatherless boys, and Malesherbes’s ready kindness and interest were irresistible. Lonely, anxious and shy, Hervé suddenly found that he had a large and lively family to call his own. He fell in love with everyone at Malesherbes, including his fiancée. The wooing was not without its difficulties. Louise de Rosanbo was as pretty as ever, and Hervé began to find her charming; but before he succumbed he thought they should have a private and frank conversation about what marriage would entail. This was unconventional, especially if Hervé raised the matter of sex; Mlle de Rosanbo responded so coldly that Hervé wondered if it would not be best to withdraw; but a second conversation (no doubt the young lady’s mother had advised her) went much better. All seemed well. ‘Confidence was not slow to grow and was soon followed by a lively and tender affection.’ They were married on 12 March 1793 in some secrecy by the local curé, who, being a refractory priest (that is, one who refused to accept the ‘constitutional’ Church set up by the National Assembly), had gone into hiding.