Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  His only anxiety was that he might turn into a mere legal drudge.6

  He was saved from any such fate, if it ever truly threatened, by one of the honourable young men, Gustave de Beaumont (1802–66). Tocqueville had to get over his shyness and the attitude of disdain with which he compensated for his insecurity, but a year and a half later he would be invoking a friendship which, ‘I don’t know how, was born old’, and was to continue almost unclouded to life’s end.7 André Jardin has listed all the ways in which they were suited to each other. Their backgrounds were almost identical. Beaumont came from a large noble family – almost a clan – which had spread all over the bocage; his father lived on the estate of Beaumont-la-Chartre in the Sarthe; his uncle Armand was a prefect, and both were strict Ultras. Gustave was three years older than Tocqueville, but it may be significant that he too was a youngest son with a pair of older brothers. He began his legal career in 1824 or thereabouts, and advanced rapidly. He had been substitut (deputy prosecutor) at Bar-sur-Aube and transferred to the same job at Versailles in 1826; it carried a salary. According to Jardin, Beaumont was soon regarded as the young eagle of the Versailles parquet, yet he did not allow his success to swell his head. He was Tocqueville’s immediate superior and won the novice’s liking at once by proposing that they share equally the work of preparing cases. This gesture of trust and thoughtfulness was typical of Beaumont’s large friendliness; he was a good speaker, a genial partner, and highly intelligent; very much a countryman, with a touch of peasant cunning (says Jardin) that did not affect his perfect honesty.8 In any circumstances Tocqueville would have found him an excellent colleague.

  But there was more to it than that. Partly it was the attraction of opposites: Beaumont had the sunny solidity of a man at ease with himself, which Tocqueville, always a prey to self-doubt and, as he well knew, of an uncertain temper, was naturally drawn to. Beaumont, on the other hand, found in Tocqueville an intellectual brilliance which he himself could not quite match; a little, eager, highly strung man of reserved manners who yet, once his interest or affection was engaged, held nothing back. In his ‘Notice’ Beaumont recalls the impression which Tocqueville made on his colleagues:

  As soon as Alexis de Tocqueville had appeared a few times for the public prosecutor before the court of assize at Versailles, his grave utterance, his serious turn of thought, the maturity of his judgement and the superiority of his intelligence marked him out as exceptional. He had no great success with the crowd, but never failed with the elite; no-one doubted that a brilliant future was his, and more than one president of assize prophesied a high destiny for him. I need only add that in these prognostications they mentioned Malesherbes rather than Montesquieu.9

  It is a mark of Beaumont’s excellent character that he never seems to have felt jealous of this rising star; perhaps he was a follower rather than a leader; but analysis must not end there. The fact was that if the characters of the two friends differed, their intellects were profoundly alike. They had the same interests, the same concerns, the same tastes, the same ambitions; their abilities were strikingly similar; they were in all ways compatible. Perhaps no-one who has not known such a meeting of minds can really understand how precious it is, especially in early youth; but Tocqueville has done his best to enlighten us. In a letter of 8 May 1830 we find him writing to Beaumont, whom by then he had known for nearly three years:

  The fact is that you are the only man in the world on whose judgement I can rely with confidence. Kergorlay is a good judge, but he is not of our profession. You alone have both intelligence and appropriate experience. When I think it over, mon cher ami, it seems to me that we are not grateful enough for our good luck in finding and binding each other among the crowd. It was especially lucky for me; not that I am putting on false modesty and saying that I am worth less than you, although I do think that in several respects, I mean only that you have more chance of being appreciated and noticed than I, whose character seems so icy and unforthcoming. You have already made some good friends, sooner or later you would have met a man you could love as much as you do me; but among the circumspect and shrivelled souls of those who wear the black robe I don’t know where I would have found a second you if you had never crossed my path.

  (Here Tocqueville was doing himself an injustice. Throughout his life, he was good at forming friendships, and nothing is more striking about his Versailles years than the speed with which he gathered round himself a circle of like-minded young men.)

  Anyway, however it came about, the deed is done, here we are united, and to my mind it is clearly for life. The same studies, the same projects, the same locations bring us together and may well do so during the whole course of our existence. What a rare and priceless circumstance!10

  Once more the characteristically frank avowal of strong feelings; and an admission of his own stiffness among strangers. Both themes will recur.

  In the autumn of 1827 Hervé de Tocqueville was appointed a member of the Chamber of Peers. His family was not much pleased with the honour. On 23 November Alexis wrote to Kergorlay with the news: ‘Behold my father arrived at a peerage. He really wanted it four years ago, and asked for it too. Today, when he neither asked nor wished for it he is swept up among the new creations. Such is the world. He made plain his disapproval of the measure before they took it, he has not changed his mind since, and I am certain that he is right.’ At this stage Tocqueville wanted the Chamber of Peers to be taken seriously as the only aristocratic element in the Constitution, and this was impossible if the government of the day felt free to pack it when desirable and to bestow peerages as rewards on reliable backbenchers from the lower house. And he was furious with those extreme royalists who, in the recent general election, had preferred to vote for liberals rather than for supporters of the Villèle ministry. It struck him as crazy: it was merely helping men who, if they got their chance, would not only throw out Villèle but would crush all royalists like flies.11

  This letter to Kergorlay, the first to survive in which Tocqueville discusses politics, is interesting on several counts. For one thing, it is the first in which he uses the word ‘aristocratic’. It shows that he was not yet in the least a democrat – not even, in party terms, a liberal. Like his father, he was a ministerialist, as he well might be, for not only had Villèle appointed Hervé de Tocqueville to his favourite prefecture, he had shown himself the ablest, as well as the longest-serving, of all the prime ministers of the Restoration. France had prospered under Villèle; in the early twenties he had seen off a rash of ill-managed republican conspiracies; Chateaubriand’s expedition to Spain in 1823, which restored Ferdinand VII to power, had demonstrated that France was once again a country to be reckoned with (even if Ferdinand was a most discreditable client); and by some judicious measures Villèle had resolved several of the disputes, most notably that over the compensation due to former émigrés for their confiscated property, which had bedevilled and weakened the Restoration settlement. But by 1827 he had made too many enemies: the Ultra party, steadily gaining in arrogance and extremism, found him too moderate; neither the election of 1827 nor the creation of peers helped him; on 4 January 1828 he resigned. Hervé de Tocqueville, the new peer, who had that quality of common sense so conspicuously lacking in most Ultras, decided to vote with the moderates in the Chamber of Peers.12

  As a peer Comte Hervé was debarred from continuing as a prefect: for this reason he left Versailles in January 1828. This furthered the friendship of Alexis and Beaumont. They set up house together at 66, rue d’Anjou, Versailles: a quiet, grey, dignified street near the cathedral of St Louis, and within a few minutes’ walk of the royal park. It was the first time that Tocqueville had lived in a house of his own, and he found the experience delightful. He was a frequent visitor to his parents, now living together again in Paris (many of his letters were written there at this period) but to be a householder increased his sense of maturity and independence. He was not, in fact, financially independent, having no salar
y and, no doubt, tending to exceed his allowance. Once his father offered to pay his tailor’s bill, and he wrote to Beaumont: ‘I want to present him with it as soon as possible; as you know, one must never let such paternal impulses cool,’13 but he was tasting autonomy for the first time and enjoying it.

  On at least one occasion autonomy brought with it a real test of judgement. In the summer of 1829, while Tocqueville was in Normandy, the landlord wrote to Beaumont to complain angrily that Madeleine, their servant, who ran their household with admirable economy, had in their absence taken to entertaining men and women in such a way that the house was becoming notorious as little better than a brothel. Beaumont wanted to dismiss her at once, but being absent himself was content to leave the matter for Tocqueville to deal with on his imminent return. Tocqueville arrived and found that matters were even worse than he had supposed: some of the ‘canaille’ whom Madeleine had admitted to the house had stolen the silver spoons and forks. One of her lovers had drunk a great deal of the best wine. According to a neighbour, la mère Gérard, Madeleine went about the streets with soldiers and whores, stayed out late (especially when her employers were away) and had once been seen climbing up a ladder to her bedroom window, presumably when the front door was locked and she did not want to rouse Tocqueville and Beaumont (and their suspicions). She would have to go when in two or three weeks her term of employment was up; or sooner.

  The episode reads like something in the Goncourt journals. Its interest today is the light which it throws on young Tocqueville’s character. He sifts the evidence and assesses the witnesses like the experienced magistrate he has become; he is sorry for Madeleine, who having been caught is trying hard to show herself reformed; and he blames both Beaumont and himself for having let things come to such a pass. They must exert themselves in future to maintain order in the house, or do without a servant, as formerly, ‘which I must admit would be for me a painful remedy’. Their next housekeeper must not only be ugly, like Madeleine, but old: ugly young women are the worst of all, since they want to carry on as if they were pretty, and only the vilest men will take them up.14

  The parquet taught him more than how to test the evidence of servant-girls. In his years at Versailles he prepared reports on some sixty cases; it was the sort of technical training from which any potential scholar would benefit. He learned how to ascertain and apply laws, and not to be satisfied with superficial research: at the end of one 5,000-word report he apologizes because ‘a fairly serious illness did not allow us to study [the matter] as much as it undoubtedly deserved.’15 More than that, the work continued his political and historical education. Like Daumier, he noted the weaknesses of the great magistrates: they could be offhand with litigants, make jokes at their expense, shrug their shoulders in contempt while lawyers for the defence were speaking, or smile their approval of the prosecutors when proceedings had got no further than the reading out of the charges (years later, after his visit to America, he thought it would do these judges good to be stripped of their robes and official pomp).16 Several of the cases which he investigated concerned lawsuits brought by former émigrés, or their families, for the restitution of property lost during the Revolution, and although Tocqueville sympathized with the claimants he was forced to recognize that neither the law nor lawyers could nullify the events of thirty years: the Revolution was a fact to which everyone had to adjust. Its effects could be mitigated in some cases but not reversed.17 This was not a thought with which his upbringing had made him familiar.

  The profound effect of these discoveries may be inferred from the course of some of his private studies. As has already been recorded, he was advised by M. Mougin to read history.18 (This recommendation suggests great insight in Mougin, but we must remember that in the Romantic Age history was universally fascinating.) Tocqueville took the advice and began on the Histoire de la Révolution of Adolphe Thiers, which came out in several volumes between 1823 and 1828. The author’s name can have meant little or nothing to him (Thiers was only beginning to be known as a liberal journalist) but the subject was absorbing and so far unchronicled, except in memoirs. Tocqueville at twenty was utterly unprepared for what he found. Ten or eleven years later he wrote to a friend:

  I was ablaze with the loyal simplicities natural to youth; besides, the traditions of my family still kept their primal power over my imagination. So the Histoire de la Révolution was peculiarly horrifying and caused a violent hatred of the author. I regarded M. Thiers as the most perverse and dangerous of men ...19

  It was the encounter with the philosophes all over again, only this time intellectual surrender was delayed. More was not possible. A man so acute and mentally honest as Tocqueville could not defer it indefinitely, especially as his professional work was pulling him in the same direction. Thiers put into his head the dismaying notions that the Revolution was not just the outcome of a treacherous plot by the Freemasons or the duc d’Orléans; that it had been brought on by noble selfishness and royal incompetence; that its work was essentially valuable and necessary; and that even the Convention might be exonerated; that in short, as Clemenceau was to say fifty years later, the Revolution must be accepted en bloc or not at all. Tocqueville never agreed; he spent the rest of his life looking for an alternative interpretation; but it was Thiers who first forced him to realize that the debate was not so one-sided as he had been brought up to believe, and that it could be won only by the party with the best arguments and information.* How soon this sort of exposure began to affect his political principles cannot be discovered; but as we have seen he was already (perhaps unconsciously) a man of 1789 when he went to Sicily. And when in 1828 Thiers brought out a revised edition of his first two volumes Tocqueville bought them and coolly began to take notes. In 1787–8, he observed, politics was in such a state of confusion that revolution was both imminent and necessary. He distinguished emphatically between the underlying cause of the Revolution and accidental circumstances, and that cause he identified as the obsolete privileges of the noblesse and the clergy. ‘So a revolution was inevitable. It was easy.’ He listed the accidental circumstances, including contact with ‘the American republics’,* and began to compile an outline of events.

  He had come a long way in a fairly short time. A few years later he recorded in a letter to a kinsman that it was about now that he began to think that the triumph of egalitarianism – which he called democracy – was inevitable, because ordained by God: the road was opening which led to De la démocratie en Amérique; and the notes on Thiers show that he was beginning to think along the lines which eventually led him to L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution. They also show that he had no suspicion that in a few months there would be another revolution in France.20

  Any such anticipation would have seemed far-fetched to all the Tocquevilles in 1828, which may be called the last normal year of the Restoration. The new ministry, led by Jean-Baptiste de Martignac, was weak in parliament, but its moderation made it acceptable to the country at large; had the King given it his support it might well have grown stronger, but he only tolerated it: he would not even make Martignac président du conseil. However there was no immediate cause for anxiety, and Comte Hervé tranquilly devoted himself to his political duties, which had changed rather than disappeared when he ceased to be a prefect. As André Jardin puts it, he remained a faithful vassal of the Crown, in the family tradition;21 it was now his business to maximize his local influence and use it in the interest of the King’s party. Consequently he began to show a closer interest in the Cotentin, where his chief estates lay, than ever before. He spoke up for Cherbourg in the Chamber of Peers and took to visiting the region more frequently. His son Hippolyte had recently married Émilie Evrard de Belisle de Saint-Rémy, daughter of a noble family from Coutances, and although Hippolyte’s military duties kept the young couple away for most of the time they spent the autumn of 1828 in Normandy. Alexis joined them there for his own vacation. He had written to Kergorlay that he was feeling restless: ‘I f
eel as if I could undertake a long and adventurous journey with more pleasure than ever.’ On the other hand, he admitted, after such an excursion he would want to settle down again. ‘I need movement, I need rest – such are the alternatives between which I have been tossing these six or seven years.’22 Perhaps Normandy could satisfy both impulses. Furthermore, although the comtesse de Tocqueville and her new daughter-in-law were already on bad terms, Alexis hoped to remain friends with Hippolyte and Émilie. He stayed with them at Saint-Rémy and at Saint-Blaise near Valognes, where he may have met Émilie’s Bonapartist brother-in-law, Armand, comte de Bricqueville, who was the deputy for Cherbourg; finally he arrived at Tocqueville itself, accompanied by Hippolyte. While there, on 6 October, he started to write an enormous letter to Beaumont – perhaps the longest he ever wrote. After detailing his journey he went on: