Here I am at last at Tocqueville, in my family’s ancient ruins. I can see three miles away the port where William embarked for the conquest of England. I am surrounded by Normans whose names appear in the roll of the conquerors. I must admit that all that chatouille de mon coeur l’orgeuilleuse faiblesse * and rouses in me a puerile enthusiasm of which I will soon be ashamed.23
(He did not yet suspect that one day his fondness for Tocqueville and its neighbourhood would develop into a passion.) He began to pour out to Beaumont the results of his study of English history. He had just finished reading a translation of John Lingard’s History of England, or as much of it as had been published: the final volume was not to appear until 1830. He had much to say – 10,000 words or so.
He and Beaumont had already agreed to study together, but it is not clear how they planned to do so, or what exactly they read. They were certainly not systematic, but then why should they be? – they were not reading for a degree. If they regularly wrote book reports for each other, then the Lingard letter is the only one to survive. But it reads as something spontaneous. Tocqueville is bursting with enthusiasm and ideas, and is evidently quite sure that Beaumont will respond suitably. The letter is thus an early and impressive testimony to their friendship.
Tocqueville had been interested in England for some years – England, the ancient enemy, who had beaten France in war and outstripped her in peace; M. Mougin had encouraged him to study French and English history in tandem.24 He had not yet learned to like the islanders, and his blood boiled with patriotic rage when he came to Lingard’s account of Edward III, ‘who waged in France a war of devastation, he who wanted to reign there’. He even gloated a little when he read of the barbarian invasions by Scots, Saxons, Danes and Normans – ‘successive revolutions besides which ours have been jokes’. But he did not allow such feelings to impede his analysis. He wanted to understand why France had failed where England had succeeded, and had no doubt about the answer, which every page of Lingard confirmed. England was and had been strong because of her liberty; France had been weakened, not exactly by despotism, but by a tangled social and political system which made the growth of liberty desperately difficult.25
It would be profitless to follow Tocqueville through every page of his précis. John Lingard was a Catholic priest who astonished Protestant bigots by his honest scholarship; but it would be absurd to pretend that his views and information can be of any weight today. He was neither a Gibbon nor a Macaulay, and as to his style, Tocqueville called him a pisse-froid. Furthermore, Tocqueville was writing without the book in front of him: he had apparently sent it back to Paris.26 This no doubt explains some of the oddities of his summary, but anyway he was writing as a complete novice in his subject. On the whole the Lingard letter, as a discussion of English history, reads like an undergraduate’s brilliant but over-long essay.
Regarded as a document of Tocqueville’s intellectual development, it is much more impressive. Since the Voyage en Sicile he has reached maturity. He has found his themes and his style – that classical French style in which the unanswerable aphorism plays so essential a part. ‘La rage des historiens est de vouloir des événements decisifs.’ It is not wholly unlike some English authors – in a heavier manner, Samuel Johnson had the trick of it (‘Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief’) – but in French writing it is swifter, more luminous, and far more common. The language exacts it of its votaries. It had come to Tocqueville, and was never to leave him: except for his youthful élan and cheerful inaccuracy, the Lingard letter might have been written twenty or thirty years later. Mme Françoise Mélonio writing of this period (not of this document) alludes to Tocqueville’s precocity.27 It is clear what she means, but precocity does not seem to be the right word. Many and many a talent has announced itself at the age of twenty-three. The vigour of manhood is suddenly at the flood, tutelage and self-doubt are shaken off, and a Byron, an Hugo, a Picasso appears. At twenty-four Pitt was Prime Minister; at twenty-five Bonaparte captured Toulon. Tocqueville’s time had come (even if he did not shake off all self-doubt); it must be added that it was almost certainly the stimulus of Beaumont which made him take to the air.
The appearance of many of the chief Tocquevillean themes is even more striking, and yet is indistinguishable from the emergence of the style. At the end of a long passage comparing the struggles of king, nobles and commons in France and England, and emphasizing their differences, he points out that they ended in the same way: ‘after all, a reasonable equality must be the sole condition natural to Man, since all nations come to it though they depart from such different points and travel by such diverse routes.’28 Equality! – one of his three perennial preoccupations; and the reader does not have to look far in the Lingard letter for the other two, revolution and liberty.
He cannot yet systematize his insights; indeed, for all his decisive manner, he is putting questions and advancing hypotheses rather than fully thought-out conclusions; but his political concerns and opinions give his approach a certain consistency. On the whole it is remarkable how few are his sidelong glances at the current state of France, but it would have been beyond human strength to eschew them altogether. Nothing remains of the lively debates that must have gone on between Tocqueville and his friends, Tocqueville and his family; but perhaps we may catch some echoes. He was still clinging to the cherished myth that the noblesse were and ought to be the true guarantors of French liberty. André Jardin detected the influence of Montesquieu, Boulainvillers and Augustin Thierry* in this doctrine, which had formerly been dear to the noblesse de robe, but the facts of life were beginning to refute it. By 1828 it was clear that the great question of the day was whether the returned émigrés would succeed in their attempt to establish a permanent ascendancy over the French state and French society, and that liberty was no part of their programme. Tocqueville is still unaware that a decisive crisis is approaching, but his intuition seems to be working against his consciousness. He observes of the Plantagenets’ loss of Normandy that ‘it did not diminish the tyranny of John, for it is the rule with all such dominions, past, present and future, that pretensions increase as power diminishes.’ He points out that Magna Carta was at first not in the least what its modern partisans think it, ‘the two Houses, ministerial responsibility, voted taxation and a thousand other things ...’ It had been drawn up simply in the interest of the nobility. But it gave a precise shape to opposition. ‘That is all a revolution needs. Magna Carta became the standard thenceforward under which marched a host of men for whom its details were unknown or unimportant.’ Henry III was a decent enough king, but so null that he let the country drift into revolution.29 Can a young man of Tocqueville’s lively intelligence, writing to another such, have possibly said these things without having in mind the incursions of Charles X on the chambers, the struggle over the Charter of 1814, and the failure of Louis XVI? Professor Douglas Johnson would think not. He wrote: ‘The crowds of young people who applauded Guizot at the Sorbonne, or who applauded Amédée Thierry at Besançon, or who were later to applaud Michelet, were enthusiastic for their liberal opinions as much as for their eloquence and erudition. In nineteenth-century France it was never possible to leave politics behind. Every form of thought was charged with politics. A comment on the ambition of Clovis, on the government of Charlemagne ... was taken to be an allusion to the contemporary scene.’30
At the very least we can say that history had justified itself as a subject of study. That winter (1828–9) Tocqueville and Beaumont started to read the economist J.B. Say (they do not appear to have got very far); and they were learning English. But in the spring they began to go to François Guizot’s celebrated historical lectures at the Sorbonne, and another epoch in Tocqueville’s education opened.
Guizot was more than halfway through his course on the history of civilization in France when Tocqueville, who had been laid up with what sounds like a ferocious bout of influenza, but may have been measles, began to atte
nd (Beaumont got there sooner);31 and even then he did not go to every session. Yet the importance of the experience can hardly be overstated, whether we are considering him as a future writer or as a future politician.
For one thing, Guizot was to him a new type socially and intellectually. ‘I am one of those whom the élan of 1789 raised up and who will never consent to descend again,’ said the veteran in his memoirs, and he might equally well have said it in 1829.32 Born in Nîmes in 1787, he had been brought up as a Protestant of the straitest sect, and would have had few career opportunities under the ancien régime. The Revolution did indeed change all that, but his father was guillotined in April 1794 (the same month as Malesherbes). Guizot was taken to say good-bye to him in prison. The family was stripped of all its property and after some years migrated to Geneva, temporarily annexed to France. Guizot never forgot the Midi, but he could never again bear to live there. In Geneva he received an excellent education, learning English and German among other things. He arrived in Paris in 1806, with a letter of introduction and without a sou. He found work as a literary journalist and in an astonishingly short time established himself in the heart of philosophical Paris: even Chateaubriand was, briefly, a friend (politics soon divided them). He was appointed professor of history at the Sorbonne in 1812; in 1814, at the first Restoration, he became Secretary-General of the Ministry of the Interior, thanks to his friend Royer-Collard, leader of those who would soon be called the Doctrinaires – the first liberals. He stuck to the Bourbons during the Hundred Days; afterwards, so great and evident was his ability that he exercised vast political influence during the liberal phase of the Restoration, though he was still too young to be a deputy. All this changed with the coming to power of Villèle: in 1822 Guizot, with several colleagues, was forbidden to lecture any more; he had already been dismissed from the Conseil d’État. He returned to full-time historical research and part-time journalism, but also displayed remarkable skill as a political organizer: he was the mainspring of the association Aide-toi, le Ciel t’Aidera (‘God helps those who help themselves’), which organized the liberals’ first great victory, in the parliamentary election of 1827, when they captured some 180 seats, having previously only held fifty. The result was the fall of Villèle and the formation of the Martignac ministry, which immediately lifted the ban on Guizot’s lectures. In short, it was not merely a professor whom Tocqueville and Beaumont went to hear, but a party leader.
Guizot was a speaker and teacher of outstanding talent. As a lecturer, he sacrificed everything for the sake of lucidity. No fascinating but incidental facts, no jokes, no sudden thoughts were allowed to interrupt the course of his limpid exposition. He meant, above all, to be understood and to be remembered. He succeeded almost perfectly, as Tocqueville’s surviving notes amply demonstrate. Guizot on the rostrum was irresistible. He spoke distinctly in a sonorous voice, and subdued any restlessness in his audience by the power of his huge sombre eyes. He even dressed up to his role: the high black stock which he always wore made him seem the embodiment of stern Calvinist integrity. No wonder his hearers were transfixed.33
At one level his lectures imparted basic information. Like so many in his time Tocqueville had succumbed to the fascination of medieval history, but his ignorance was still immense. Thus we find him writing to Beaumont in the summer of 1829, concerning Guizot’s lectures of the previous year, which he had not heard* but was now reading, ‘[They have] given me some fairly vast insights into the IVth century, which was totally unknown to me.’34 With fourteen centuries to cover in twenty-four lectures Guizot could only articulate the bare bones of history; he frequently reminded his listeners that he was making huge omissions; but he could not omit everything, and as every experienced lecturer knows, student audiences are always hungry for facts to write down. Hence Tocqueville’s careful enumeration of Charlemagne’s fifty-three wars (‘18 v. the Saxons’).35
It was also possible to take the lectures as political allegories. Guizot was well aware of this, but as he was a serious érudit he did his best to evade the tendency. One of his few references to the nineteenth century was a comparison of Napoleon’s successes and failures with those of Charlemagne, which nobody could object to except those who thought it was unfair to Charlemagne. Tocqueville took no interest in cheap political points, though he cannot have failed to notice that Guizot’s depiction of feudalism and the Middle Ages was quite incompatible with the Ultra myth of a golden age when king, noblesse and peasants lived harmoniously together under the pastoral care of a benevolent Church. He carefully copied the lecturer’s words:
The Middle Ages, in short, were the heroic age of France, the age of poetry and romance, the true realm of fancy, when fancy was stronger than we may think possible in the lives of men. On the other hand, gentlemen, the hatred that the Middle Ages have aroused is even easier to explain: the common people were so unhappy during that period of their existence, they emerged so damaged and with so much effort from the condition into which it plunged them, that a deep instinct makes its memory agonizing ... The French Revolution, gentlemen, was no more than a defining explosion of hatred against the ideas, the manners and the laws which were bequeathed to us by the Middle Ages.
Yet it was at the end of this very passage that Guizot threw off the aphorism ‘A people with no memory of its past is like a mature man who has lost all recollection of his youth.’ This thought too was faithfully copied down.36
For what most fascinated Tocqueville about Guizot’s lectures was their ambition, their profundity, their scope. They were so immensely suggestive – or, as he would have put it, so full of idées mères. They were the inspiration which he needed; they showed him his own way forward. They were no mere chronicles, like the work of Thiers and Lingard. ‘I am not writing [sic] of history properly so-called, but of the development of French civilization.’ ‘The history of civilization, in my view, has two purposes: it combines the history of society and that of human intelligence, it pursues both the march of events and that of ideas.’ History must cease to be a narrow specialism, it must be comprehensive: ‘It must trace [Man’s] mental developments through events, manners, opinions, laws, intellectual monuments, it must condescend to self-examination, even to measuring the foreign influences to which Man finds himself subjected.’37 Nowadays these observations do not seem at all startling, but they were highly original in their day. It was through Guizot that Tocqueville realized he must study not events (‘faits’) but their significance.
Guizot’s analysis of feudalism made a deep impression. This word (in French féodalité) was an eighteenth-century, if not Revolutionary, coinage, which was destined for a long life as a thought-suppressing cliché of Marxism, an unanalytical term of abuse. Guizot was absolutely removed from such usage. He identified the essence of feudalism as a system of land tenure, and carefully described how it worked. From there he moved on to discuss the labour force, the towns, and the rise of royal government; by the time that he had finished he had made a complete and intelligible sketch of a society in all its workings, and the dates which he gave for its duration (roughly from the reign of Hugues Capet to that of Philippe le Bel) seemed almost self-evident; from the beginning of the fourteenth century onwards feudalism (he said) was merely one obsolete element in an altered society. Tocqueville learned from Guizot how important it was to use archival sources, and how to do so, how to reason historically (in terms of social forces, not the divine will)* and how to relate institutions to one another and to society as a whole. Eventually he would see that Guizot’s methods could be applied to the present, as well as to the past – that one could be a political scientist or a sociologist as well as a historian. The results would be displayed in De la démocratie en Amérique.
But not yet. He had not yet discovered his subject. In October 1829, in a letter in which he poured out his soul on many matters to Beaumont, he lamented his ignorance. He knew more than Beaumont about historical events, no doubt:
but as to wha
t brought them about, what support men have given to those who have moved them during the last two centuries, the condition to which revolutions had borne the nations by the end of that period, that in which they left them, their classification, their manners, their instincts, their current resources, the division and disposition of those resources, I am ignorant of all that to which, in my opinion, all other studies can serve only as an introduction.
Perhaps they should take up geography.38
The Lingard letter shows that another study was as important as ever. On the opening page we learn that one of Tocqueville’s motives for travelling to the Cotentin in 1828 was to pursue Mademoiselle X (as he discreetly calls her – her pseudonymity is never breached), a young lady of Valognes; he analyses his feelings for her in the best French psychological style:
Mlle X. gains enormously from being seen regularly and I never felt more like falling in love with her than now. But let us understand each other on this point. You will say that there can be no question of love, which is not a child of time but comes to one at a stroke, full-blown, but only of a real friendship. M., for her Christian name also begins with M., has decidedly the most frank and open character, the freest from petty passions that I have ever seen in a woman. She is so spontaneously vivacious and she has such a good heart that you get attached in spite of yourself. She is a complete original and in her way unique. Add that she is very pretty, which for a long time I was not sure of, but I am now certain about it since my brother [Hippolyte] has said she is. This last remark will make you laugh, but investigate yourself, my dear philosopher, and see if by chance it may not be confirmed at the bottom of the human heart ... I am not in love ... but I am at the point of wanting to be able to tell her that I love another and to ask her to keep a corner for me in her affections to which, in truth, I begin seriously to aspire.39
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