Yet in 1810 he became maire (the same word as ‘mayor’, but differing from the English office as a French commune differs from an English town) of Verneuil, which entailed taking an oath of loyalty to the imperial regime. The reasons he gives for this action are significant. He acknowledges that loyalty to his family and to the memory of ‘the defender of Louis XVI’ obliged him to keep his distance from any government which was not that of a Bourbon; but being maire would shield him from the plots of envious and ill-intentioned peasants, and give him the chance of acquiring some patronage which would be useful to others and himself. In other words, Hervé wanted to increase and consolidate his local influence. André Jardin detects in this a ‘quasi-feudal’ sense of noblesse oblige: he behaved as if the commune was an extension of his personal estate, and had to be reminded that it was his official deputy, not his steward, who was supposed to run Verneuil during the maire’s absences (which were frequent: the Tocquevilles passed their winters in Paris). Either way, he had seen his opportunity and taken it: it was available to him because the régime was always short of qualified men to fill the positions which it created. And although Hervé would never have admitted it (he prided himself on having always served the same master, the true king of France) it was in fact a first step towards endorsing the Empire. ‘The Emperor was then at the apogee of his glory’; there was no premonition of the prodigious events to come.3
Hervé was now in his late thirties; he had good abilities, and so far had had no chance to employ them in public life. As maire he could at least keep a strict (perhaps an over-strict) eye on his subordinates. His energy and ambition demanded an outlet as would, one day, those of Alexis, who felt that he inherited his father’s temperament:
this unquiet mind, this consuming impatience, this need for acute and repeated excitement [which] characterize our father to an almost childish degree. This disposition can give great élan at certain moments. But more often it torments one for no cause, agitates fruitlessly, and makes those who possess it very unhappy. Such, I see plainly, is often my condition ...4
It is difficult to know exactly what to make of this passage. Tocqueville gives a recognizable likeness of himself. Such a life as his father was obliged to lead while youth slipped away would have been intolerable to him: he complained bitterly of far milder restrictions under the Second Empire. But nothing in what we know of Hervé from his life, his writings, or his portraits, which seem to show a cheerful, shrewd, energetic and self-confident man – above all, a man at ease with himself – fits with his son’s remarks. In his memoirs he emerges as warmhearted, sensitive, and frequently ironical. On the other hand, Alexis would be most unlikely to make unrecognizable statements about their father when writing to his brother Édouard, as he was here. Perhaps it would be wisest to reflect that all human beings are bundles of inconsistencies and leave it at that; or perhaps the truth is that their common restlessness operated differently in father and son. It gave Hervé élan, which at times his less vigorous children may have found hard to bear; but it tormented Alexis, whose temperament in other respects seems closely to resemble his mother’s.
Hervé could and did count his blessings. He enjoyed ‘cette bonne vie de château’, even though little worth recording ever happened. Louis de Rosanbo and his wife had settled nearby, and visits were constantly exchanged. He studied law as part of his job as maire, and was to reap the benefit in a few years. But most of his time was spent on the education of his children, and the cultivation of his land, and on hunting, ‘for which I had a great liking’. (In these respects his sons were to be very like him.) The rest of his time was devoted to the pleasures of society – too much so, he sometimes thought. Verneuil was so near to Paris, and he had so many relations, friends and acquaintances, that he and his family were seldom alone. But then, the visitors were all agreeable. In fact, the only real cloud on life, until the war took a bad turn, was the continuing ill-health of his wife.
Madame de Tocqueville’s infirmities had certainly not been helped by her experience of prison and Terror. Jardin describes her as capricious, impatient, even extravagant, and at bottom always melancholy, ‘which was nothing exceptional among those who escaped the Terror. The family atmosphere during Alexis de Tocqueville’s young years must have been greatly darkened by it.’ Rédier is more sympathetic, yet says that she was often cross and discontented, and suffered perpetually from migraine. Abbé Le Sueur mentions her great irritability. But the language which Alexis uses to her in his letters is always respectfully affectionate, and his young cousin Louis de Kergorlay seems genuinely to have liked her: he called on her regularly after he grew up, telling Alexis that he was touched by the kindness that, in spite of her troubles, she showed to him; he thought her lovable.5 She remains a shadowy figure. Her wish for a daughter suggests that she felt herself unlucky, her immediate family being entirely masculine: the business of her life for more than twenty years was to bring up five boys; by 1800 her mother and both her sisters were dead. Her one surviving letter to Alexis is lively and affectionate (perhaps that is why it was kept) though chiefly concerned with how ill she has been made by a thunderstorm. In his letters to her there is a certain reserve – even when, writing from America, he admits to homesickness. The American letters were certainly meant to be handed round the family circle and read aloud, yet those addressed to his father, his brothers and even his sisters-in-law always contain touches particular to each correspondent. All he can find to talk about to his mother is her health, which he is careful to mention every single time he writes. In a letter written just after her death he remarks that she had endured twenty years of misery.6 Sad to say, her only immaterial legacies to her son seem to have been her uncertain temper and her sickliness, whereas he found in his father the best of companions and the most reliable of friends. When at length Hervé died, Alexis wrote:
You saw how friendly and gentle he was; these qualities, which even foreigners noticed, showed themselves to his sons in a limitless indulgence and the tenderness of a mother; in an unwearying but never intrusive interest in all our affairs. This sensibility, instead of weakening, grew steadily more marked with the years, which I have never seen in anyone else. He had always been good-hearted; but as he aged he became the kindest of men.7
It is perhaps just to infer that if the family atmosphere was indeed darkened, Mme de Tocqueville lost most by it. Yet she is at the centre of her son’s earliest recorded memory.
At this day I remember, as if it were still before me, an evening in my father’s château, when some family rejoicing had brought together a large number of our near relations. The servants were gone, and we sat round the fire. My mother, whose voice was sweet and touching, began to sing a well-known royalist song, of which the sorrows of Louis XVI and his death were the subject. When she ended, we were all in tears; not for our own misfortunes, not even for the loss of so many of our own blood, who had perished on the field of civil war and on the scaffold, but for the fate of a single man, who had died fifteen years before, and whom few of us who wept for him had ever seen. But this man had been our king.8
This is a significant anecdote in several ways. Tocqueville is precise about when the incident occurred: fifteen years after the King’s death, therefore in 1808, when Alexis can have been, at the very most, three years and a few months old. If he is right about the date, the story is evidence of his precocity; but even if he is wrong by a year or two it is no wonder that the episode affected him deeply. The cousins gathered round the fire – Tocqueville, Rosanbo, Chateaubriand – had particular reasons for mourning the King’s death. It had entailed so much loss and suffering for their families; the martyrdom of Louis XVI was the idea that gave meaning and dignity to their sorrows. Tocqueville was to forsake this family creed in his early twenties, but he could never entirely put loyalty from him, as his references to the House of Bourbon – even when he had despaired of it – so different from what he said about the House of Orleans, let alone the Bonapartes
– amply illustrate; and he is noticeably reticent, almost tender, in his references to Louis in the Ancien Régime (he may even have agreed with the regicide Barbaroux that bad causes have their martyrs as well as good ones). He does not say, or want us to think, that his family had forgotten the sufferings which they and their order had endured. The death of the King and the ruin of his noblesse were far too closely intertwined for that, and between them had put an end to the frondeur tradition by which the nobles had felt free to go to almost any lengths in opposing and sabotaging royal policy when they saw fit. Every adult in the room at Verneuil knew what it was to be murderously persecuted, not for actions, not for thoughts, but merely for identity, for being noble. Saint-Just’s vicious remark ‘One cannot reign innocently’9 had been extended to them, and like the surviving victims of the death camps and the labour camps in the twentieth century many of the traumatized survivors could never free themselves of the nightmare. The cost to themselves and to France was huge. For nearly two hundred years French conservatives were convinced that persons on the Left were all assassins at heart;* the Left believed that all royalists were traitors. All events were interpreted to reinforce these beliefs, and the weakness they induced in the body politic had much to do with the catastrophes of 1848, 1870–71, and 1940 (to mention only the worst). This was the first and heaviest of the ideological chains which Alexis de Tocqueville was to spend his life trying to break.
Not that he had any such ideas in his childhood. ‘The whole object of those among whom I was brought up, was to amuse, and be amused. Politics was never talked of, and I believe very little thought of.’10 That is, it was never talked of until the servants had left the room and bright little boys were in bed: Napoleonic France was a police state. Besides, the extended family was not at one on political issues. If Le Peletier de Rosanbo had died for the parlement, Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau (cidevant marquis) had been a leading Jacobin, had voted in the Convention for the death of Louis XVI, and had been stabbed to death on that account the day before the King’s execution. The Jacobins honoured him as the first martyr of the Revolution. His widow tried to atone for his apostasy by serving as a royalist courier up and down France for the rest of her life.11 His daughter was more distressed that her father had been a regicide than that he had been murdered, whereas his brother adopted Babeuf’s children after their father’s execution. Félix Le Peletier d’Aunay went into the civil service under Napoleon; so did a more distant cousin, the young Comte Molé. Young Alexis was apparently oblivious of these divisions.
Literature was one of the standing subjects of conversation. Every new book of any merit was read aloud, and canvassed and criticized with an attention and a detail which we should now think a deplorable waste of time. I recollect how everybody used to be in ecstasy about things of Delille’s,* which nothing would tempt me now to look at. Every considerable country house had its theatre, and its society often furnished admirable actors. I remember my father returning after a short absence to a large party in his house. We amused ourselves by receiving him in disguise. Chateaubriand was an old woman ... Every incident was matter for a little poem.12
Chateaubriand ... Alexis de Tocqueville was not the only immortal in the group. The great writer had in 1807 bought a house near Verneuil, the Vallée-aux-Loups, where he endured the pains of living with his wife and of being in disgrace at Court (he could never keep out of hot water for long). It was, quite possibly, the happiest period of his life: anyway, he planned that it should be. He had recently made a much-publicized pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which he entered on what he thought was his birthday, thereby bettering Jesus Christ. In his garden he planted exotic trees which he had brought back from the East (Malesherbes would have been pleased) and looked forward to enjoying their shade in his old age. He wrote copiously, and presented himself as living in a kind of hermitage: ‘I may be a knight-errant, but I have the sedentary tastes of a monk: since I settled in this retreat, I doubt if I have stepped out of its enclosure as much as three times.’13 This was not exact: in 1811 he took refuge at Verneuil after once more incurring the wrath of Napoleon. Their first breach had occurred in 1807, when Chateaubriand’s journal, the Mercure de France, was suppressed for threatening the new Nero with a new Tacitus:* this was what drove the writer to the Vallée-aux-Loups. In 1809 a Chateaubriand cousin, Armand, an émigré, was shot for carrying letters from the Bourbon princes into France: pleas for mercy by François-René were in vain. Napoleon next made the conciliatory gesture of forcing the Institut’s ‘class of language and literature’ (the ci-devant Académie Française) to elect him to membership, but blue-pencilled the speech which he proposed to give at his reception: as a result Chateaubriand refused to take his fauteuil † until the Restoration. Napoleon made dreadful threats, which the marquise de Fontanes persuaded him to forget; but Chateaubriand thought he would be less conspicuous at Verneuil than at the Vallée-aux-Loups. He and Mme de Chateaubriand stayed there for several months. Hervé de Tocqueville recalls:
Seated in a corner of the room, while others played cards or conversed, he would be seen, pensive and silent, withdrawn from all that surrounded him. Thus he composed whole rants [tirades entières] of his tragedy [Moïse] which he next wrote down. For the rest of the time, he was always in a gay humour ...*
By the time he wrote his memoirs Hervé’s attitude to his illustrious kinsman had become infinitely ironical. He did him the justice to remark that when he returned from exile Chateaubriand was simple and modest and lacking confidence in his literary powers. This was quickly put right when the Génie du Christianisme went into sixteen editions in no time at all. ‘Words flowed from his pen which moved the soul profoundly. The author seemed to know the heart’s most delicate strings; he could touch each one as he would, when he would.’ But Hervé noticed that he never found time to visit his nephews at school, however often he was reminded. ‘M. de Chateaubriand is certainly not sensitive.’ But they were friends, and such reflections did not stop Hervé from subscribing when, in 1812, the duchesse de Duras (one of the devoted ladies whom Mme de Chateaubriand derisively referred to as ‘les Madames’) hit on a scheme, later revived by Mme Récamier, to pay the writer’s debts by selling shares in a company whose assets were to consist of the copyright of Chateaubriand’s next book. It did not solve his financial problems (nothing could) but he did not foresee that.14
Curiously, François-René, never less than entirely self-preoccupied, is the only person known to have recorded an impression of the child Alexis de Tocqueville. It is a very characteristic effusion:
M. de Tocqueville, my brother’s brother-in-law and the guardian of my two orphaned nephews, was living in the château that had belonged to Madame de Senozan: such legacies of the scaffold were everywhere. There I saw my nephews growing up with their three Tocqueville cousins, among whom Alexis, future author of De la démocratie en Amérique, stood out. He was more spoiled at Verneuil than I ever was at Combourg. Is he the last celebrity whom I shall have seen unknown in swaddling-clothes? Alexis de Tocqueville has explored the cities of America, I its wilderness.15
It would be easy but ill-advised to discount this passage. Chateaubriand was not a man for unambiguous statements, but he does commit himself to the observation that Tocqueville was spoiled or pampered (gâté). He was self-centred but not malicious, except when in a rage: we may believe him. Besides, André Jardin also feels that Tocqueville was spoiled, and that it explains certain features of his adult character.16
Alexis was so very much younger than his company. His cousin Louis de Kergorlay (1804–80) was of much the same age, and the Kergorlays lived in the same Parisian street as the Tocquevilles during the winter (rue Saint-Dominique, seventh arrondissement) and, in summer, at their chateau of Fosseuse in the Oise – not very far from Verneuil. Kergorlay would become the closest friend of Tocqueville’s adolescence, but that was in the future. Meanwhile Alexis (we may guess) was the sort of child that adults like to indulge: delicate, pretty, int
elligent, eager. The tradition by which French nobles were cold, if not cruel, to their children seems to have died with the eighteenth century. Finally and most important, we have the direct testimony of Tocqueville himself. His remarks about his father’s boundless indulgence have already been quoted; the death of the Abbé Le Sueur in 1831 – Le Sueur taught the sons as he had the father – elicited a similar eulogy, which confirms the impression of an almost suffocating intensity of affection. The boys had nicknamed him ‘Bébé’ – no doubt a corruption of ‘Abbé’, but the name would never have stuck to a grimmer man. He taught them, ate with them at table, tucked them into bed at night and blew out their candle.17 They rewarded him with absolute devotion. When, in America, Alexis learned of his death, he wrote to Édouard: ‘we have lost what neither time nor friendship nor the future, whatever it may be, can restore to us, something given to few people in this world: a being whose every thought, every affection, belonged to us alone; who lived only for us. I have never seen or heard of a like devotion.’18 Tocqueville rebelled passionately against Fate when it dealt him such blows, and never tried to disguise his feelings. It was just the same when his father died in June 1856. L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution was on the very point of publication; Tocqueville would have stopped it, to mark his grief, had he been able to.19 Anyone who has loved and lost will sympathize with this extravagance, but it must be seen as one of a series of occasions on which Tocqueville allowed unchecked instinct to carry him away. He rebelled against human destiny, and it is surely likely that one reason was that too-happy, too-secure childhood which he regretted so deeply (nostalgia brims through his letters), when he was carefully sheltered from all anxiety, when every incident was matter for a poem, and when Bébé taught him simple distinctions between right and wrong.
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