Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  The King had a most delicate task, of maintaining the support given to him by the men of the Napoleonic régime – the new nobility, the administrators, the members of the two chambers – while rewarding the royalists purs,* who had always been loyal to their rightful sovereign and had suffered so greatly in his cause. (The Bourbons hoped also to conciliate the army, but that, fatally, proved to be beyond them.) Continuity in government must be preserved as much as possible, to minimize dislocating effects on the French people, already the victims of invasion, defeat, unemployment and uncertainty; but irreconcilable opponents must be weeded out and, within government, a cadre of reliable supporters must be established. And a tidal wave of applications for posts washed over the princes and the ministers; it was difficult for them to keep their long-term objectives in view while dealing with so many claimants.

  The descendants of Malesherbes did exceedingly well. Neither the King nor the duchesse d’Angoulême, Louis XVI’s daughter, needed to be reminded of what was due to the memory of the late King’s defender (but it did not hurt that the duchesse had so many of Hervé’s relations, the Damas, about her that an untranslatable pun of the time said: ‘sa maison était meublée en damas et doublée de même’† ).4 So Louis de Rosanbo was made a pair de France, meaning that he would sit in the Chamber of Peers which replaced the imperial Senate. Hippolyte and Édouard de Tocqueville were given commissions in the King’s Guard (a new, or rather a revived, corps which, like so much in the first Restoration, reflected Louis XVIII’s deep desire to bring back the ancien régime as much as possible);* and Comte Hervé was appointed prefect of the department of the Maine-et-Loire on 18 June. He was slightly disappointed: he had hoped to be made a peer, like Rosanbo, but ministers felt that that would be doing too much for one family. Given his complete inexperience in senior administration, his failure to emigrate more than briefly, and that he had done nothing for the royalist cause thereafter, and that he had not been a person of the slightest distinction before 1789, he should have thought himself lucky.

  Otherwise his attitude was straightforward. As a man of the same stripe, the baron de Frénilly, observed, ‘All the loyal men who had lain low under Bonaparte now wanted prefectures.’ Half a lifetime had passed without giving him a chance to prove himself publicly; he was a man of robust health and abounding self-confidence (he still felt shy before entering a drawing-room, but otherwise the diffident youth of 1793 was only a memory). His study of municipal law had been an excellent training, he felt, for the larger administrative duties of a prefect. Here at last was an opportunity to realize his ambition, to serve his king, his country and himself, an opportunity which would probably never recur. He seized it with both hands, and quickly established himself, his wife and his family at Angers, the administrative centre of the Maine-et-Loire. In this way emerged the pattern of their lives which was to endure, though not without modifications, for the next thirteen years.

  Before they left Paris the King invited the family of Malesherbes to a private audience at the Tuileries. It must have been an educational experience for the youngest member. ‘I shall never forget,’ said his father, ‘the impression which Louis XVIII made when he came out to receive us; we saw an enormous mass emerge from the King’s study shuffling and waddling; this mass was topped by a fine and noble head, but the expression of the features was entirely theatrical; the King came forward with his hand on his heart, his eyes raised to Heaven. He said a few perfectly well-judged words to us, delivered in the most sentimental manner. It was clear that he had rehearsed his performance. We retired from his presence with gratitude for the special kindness that he had showed us, and with the conviction that as King he would make an excellent actor.’

  In the Maine-et-Loire, Comte Hervé found himself confronted with a political problem that was to vex the Restoration government throughout its existence. His department was essentially a somewhat shrunken version of the old province of Anjou, and Anjou was sharply divided between its royalist west and its imperialist east. Hervé had a duty to govern impartially, but first he had to get his authority accepted, and the royalist leaders, each supreme in his own neighbourhood, were fiercely reluctant to acknowledge him. Their royalism, ever since 1789, had always been anti-Parisian, anti-revolutionary, rather than pro-Bourbon.* To curry favour with them the prefect pointed out that he too came from the bocage – the countryside of small woods, small fields, unkempt hedgerows and isolated farms which stretches from Cherbourg to the lower reaches of the Loire – which had been the main theatre of counter-revolution in 1793 and 1794. This enraged the men of the east, already suspicious of such a palpable royalist, and they complained to Paris. At one moment the two parties nearly came to blows. How matters might have been resolved cannot be known, for Napoleon’s return from Elba rendered the quarrel moot; but it is almost sufficient by itself to explain Hervé’s emphatic preference for administration over politics.5

  The adventure of the Hundred Days ranks among the most selfish of Napoleon’s various discreditable actions. Almost nobody wanted him any more, except the army. France was slowly settling down as she learned painfully how to make a constitutional monarchy work. The Allies had been extraordinarily generous to their defeated enemy: no indemnity was exacted, and much of the territory annexed by the Revolution was left to the French, who were also allowed to keep the loot which filled the Louvre. At the Congress of Vienna Talleyrand had successfully reasserted France’s position as one of the Great Powers, and split the coalition against her. As a result of Napoleon’s escapade all this was jeopardized or undone. Once more, France had to endure terrible defeat in battle. The prestige of the Bourbons suffered an irreparable blow, for they fled the country ignominiously, and only returned as the clients of the Duke of Wellington. All this, to amuse the Emperor. The only good to come of the affair was his final disappearance and the elimination of the army as an independent political power.

  According to Hervé de Tocqueville, he foresaw many of these consequences when the news of Napoleon’s coup reached Angers. There could be, for him, no question of acquiescence. Rather he saw a wonderful chance to play a heroic part. Angers, with the royalist west at its back, would be an excellent centre for resistance to Napoleon. With speed and energy, guns and soldiers could be brought in from Rennes and Nantes, and the Vendée* could become a Bourbon redoubt: Hervé even hoped that the King would take refuge there. Such a strategy could not defeat Napoleon, but it could keep the Bourbon cause alive, weaken the Emperor when he again fought all Europe, and earn for France some respect and mercy from the Allies when they were again victorious (as Hervé was sure they would be). It was all sound enough in theory, but the prefect quickly found that it was impracticable. While Bonaparte hastened to Paris the servants of the Bourbons seemed to lack all sense of urgency. Hervé met sloth, stupidity and (he came to suspect) treachery at every turn.6 He was embarrassed when Louis de Rosanbo and the comte d’Orglandes (Louis de Chateaubriand’s father-in-law) turned up to join the resistance: there was no resistance. Soon there was nothing for it: it was necessary to leave Angers and find a refuge. Hervé chose Lannion, near the north coast of Brittany: he had visited it with Mme de Tocqueville (who had a large property there) in 1810, and been impressed by the social harmony in the place.† But times had changed: the town was now furiously revolutionary – there were tricolours everywhere – and the countryside, because of the threat of conscription, was as furiously royalist. Luckily the maire, M. Guermarquer, was the Tocqueville agent, and his son-in-law was the sub-prefect. They were all that was helpful, but Comte Hervé thought it best to move on: for one thing, he did not see himself as a royalist guerrilla. He and his family travelled to Caen, where the atmosphere was less frantic and where it would be easier to slip away by sea to join Louis XVIII in Ghent. This scheme was soon well in hand, but one morning, before it could be carried out, Hervé and Rosanbo saw a stage-coach arrive, and from it tumbled little old Mme de Saint Fargeau with the news of Waterloo. With in
describable feelings (at any rate, he does not describe them) Hervé immediately took the road to Paris.

  He was just in time for the return of the King and the reconstruction of the government. He learned to his disgust that he was not to be sent back to the Maine-et-Loire. Chateaubriand, much too confident of his influence (he had loyally gone with the King into exile) promised him the prefecture of the Seine-et-Oise, where Verneuil lay, but in the event Chateaubriand was not made a minister and Comte Hervé was sent to the Oise (13 July 1815). Perhaps for this reason Hervé now disposed of the Verneuil chateau. Maintaining it if he was not going to live in it may have been too expensive.

  Soon afterwards he was transferred to the Côte-d’Or (31 January 1816) and then to the Moselle (19 February 1817).

  This constant shifting about was not unusual under the Restoration, though Comte Hervé never liked it. It reflected a certain tension between the administration and the government: like other prefects, Tocqueville was moved when it suited ministers, whether he was at fault or not.7 There is little point in repeating Andé Jardin’s admirable account of his career. One aspect of the matter, however, demands attention. After accompanying her husband to Angers, Lannion, Beauvais and Dijon, Mme de Tocqueville went on strike, so to say. Her health finally collapsed. It is impossible not to suspect that there was a neurotic or hysterical element in her malady, but mental suffering can be as real to a patient as physical. At any rate, when Hervé was appointed to the Moselle, Mme de Tocqueville refused to go with him to Metz.8 She stayed, for months, prostrated in Dijon, leaving it only in October, for Paris. This set the stage for the first crises in the life of Alexis de Tocqueville.

  He was twelve in July 1817, and it was high time that he began to receive a more advanced education than Abbé Le Sueur could provide. Metz was an excellent place in which to make this step.

  Metz aux campagnes magnifiques,

  Rivière aux ondes prolifiques,

  Coteaux boisés, vignes de feu,

  Cathédrale toute en volute,

  Où le vent chante sur la flute

  Et qui lui répond par la Mute

  Cette grosse voix du bon Dieu!

  (La Mute, usually called La Muette, is the great bell of the cathedral.) Even today, after three great wars and a long German occupation; today, when an extremely noisy motor-road has been run across the campagnes magnifiques, Verlaine’s evocation still seems accurate. The Gothic cathedral, built, like much of the rest of the city, of honey-coloured Jaumont stone, still lifts its pinnacles on the ridge above the river, the Moselle, that flows in half a dozen separate channels where herons and small boys fish. During the eighteenth century the town had spread onto the islands thus formed in the valley, and on the smallest of them stood the prefecture, almost palatial in scale: it had formerly been the hôtel of the intendant of the Three Bishoprics (Metz, Toul and Verdun) and although it had suffered a bad fire in 1805 it was quite habitable again by 1817 (Mme de Tocqueville may not have thought so). Behind the hôtel ran the Moselle; the front enjoyed a glorious view of the cathedral; on its east side was a large garden, sheltered from the world by high walls and the river; on its west stood an elegant theatre. Just round the corner, across a bridge, were the almost equally elegant buildings of a former convent which had been turned into a lycée (then the College Royal, now the Lycée Fabert): very convenient, if Alexis were enrolled there. Across the main channel of the river lay the old town. It had formerly been predominantly ecclesiastical, but the Revolution had changed all that: a school for artillery officers had been installed in another ex-convent. The place was full of architectural and historical interest, as well as the usual bustle of a French market-town.

  None of this weighed sufficiently with Mme de Tocqueville to affect her immediate plans: she retired to the rue Saint-Dominique, where Alexis joined her. Before that, he had apparently attended classes at the lycée: he reported his progress to Bébé;9 but the experiment was not deemed a success. Perhaps the boy’s health suffered; perhaps his father thought it would be imprudent to establish Alexis definitely at a Metz institution when he might soon and suddenly have to be removed if Comte Hervé were shifted again (as it turned out, the Metz assignment was to last for six years, much the longest of the prefect’s postings). Perhaps the comtesse insisted on having her child with her in Paris. Whatever the reasons, Alexis was for the next two and a half years confined to the household of a chronic invalid and a sexagenarian priest (Le Sueur was now combining the duties of tutor with those of domestic chaplain to the comtesse). It can hardly have forwarded his intellectual development, but he was saved from becoming any sort of muff by his friendship with his cousin, Louis de Kergorlay.

  He was unquestionably fortunate in having someone in the family so near to him in age and tastes. It was a good fortune which followed him through life, reflecting the fact that he shaped his friends besides enjoying them. He gave as well as took, and such was the strength of his mind and personality that he was the dominant partner in these relationships: they assumed his colouring. But in youth there seems to have been an even balance.

  Kergorlay’s father was a leading Ultra (that is, an extreme royalist) in the celebrated Chambre Introuvable which, elected immediately after the Hundred Days, was dominated by that party (eventually Louis XVIII found it too much of a good thing and dissolved it). Unlike many Ultras he was respected even by his opponents: Guizot in his memoirs mentions him as one of the most honourable of all the deputies.10 He was a man of the same type as Hervé de Tocqueville (also an Ultra) though politically more inflexible. His wife was related to the Tocquevilles through the Lamoignons: as events were to show, she had her share of the courage and gallantry of the line. Alexis called her ‘ma chère cousine’, but to him she was really more of an aunt, or even a deputy mother. He was devoted to all the Kergorlays, and seems to have spent many holidays at their chateau. There he could swim, learn to shoot, and acquire all the other skills and tastes of a country gentleman; there he and Louis de Kergorlay could explore and discuss the world as it unfolded for them, and share their thoughts and feelings. If Tocqueville ever had a secret from Kergorlay, posterity will never know what it was.

  Le Sueur did not entirely approve. Perhaps he recognized a rival. The boys’ frank devotion to each other may have suggested certain dangers; at any rate, when in 1821 Alexis was at last committed to the lycée at Metz the old priest sent him a letter full of advice and warning:

  Your Papa, my dear child, must have recommended that you should be upright in your dealings with all your comrades, but that you should not form any special friendships. I know better than anybody how dangerous they are, especially today when manners are so abandoned. Young people show by such practices that they may be outwardly fine and fair but that inwardly they are rotten.11

  Bébé need not have worried: Tocqueville’s temptations lay wholly and vigorously in the opposite direction. The tone of his letters to Kergorlay, while full of affectionate friendship, is devoid of passion. The same cannot quite be said of Kergorlay. Alexis was never in love with him, but it is not so clear that he was never in love with Alexis: to judge by his tone, he may have felt more than he could avow. But then, his youthful temperament was even more highly strung and self-tormenting than his friend’s. This was a relationship in which Tocqueville was for long the more level-headed participant. Its value to each of them can only be appreciated by following the course of their lives; Tocqueville states plainly what it meant to him in his youth:

  [Friendship] cannot come to birth at all ages; yet once born, I don’t see why age should weaken it or even make it change its nature, above all between those who, knowing its full value, cultivate it ceaselessly, and make sure that its essential prop does not weaken, which is, mutual confidence about big things as well as lesser ones.12

  Tocqueville was given to making such affirmations to his closest friends, but we need not doubt his sincerity: he was a warm-hearted young man.

  The education of A
lexis was not Le Sueur’s only preoccupation during the Metz years. His central task was somehow to keep the Tocqueville family together. It was not easy. Hippolyte and Édouard were fairly launched on their military careers (but Édouard was still asthmatic and in 1822 he had to resign his commission). Comte Hervé, isolated at Metz, threw himself into his work, but missed his family; and the ladies of Metz criticized his parties because there was no hostess to preside. Mme de Tocqueville became so tiresome that the abbé, while striving all the time to make her happier, felt free to be absolutely frank behind her back. In August 1821 he wrote to Édouard:

  Our celebration of St Louis’ Day was cheerless. It was lucky for me that Christian [de Chateaubriand] was here. The two of us presented your Mamma with a wreath of roses and another of myrtle; nor was that all; she clings to the old customs, and would have detested the very scent of the bouquets had they not been accompanied by some poetry. So it had to be concocted as of yore. Christian luckily gave birth to a quatrain and I to a long disquisition on patience under the ills that afflict poor human beings. You know of course that for a pill to be swallowed it must first he gilded, which is what I did. It stuck in her throat for a while, but St Louis made it go down. ... I was indeed rather rash to praise patience to a woman who always loses her temper at the least jar and who breaks windows with her least explosion. What contributed more than anything else to getting my moral accepted was the arrival of the good Abbé Ronsin, who doubtless came to preach her the same sermon ...13