Alexis de Tocqueville
Page 15
Parliament being prorogued until 1 September everybody at first supposed that they had a breathing-space: calm reigned, and the Bourse rose remarkably. On 24 March Tocqueville did not think that anything would happen before Édouard’s return to France.24 Twelve days later he thanks his brother, with apparent sincerity, for a long letter on the Neapolitan constitution: how could he and Édouard (he asks) have spent so long in Italy in 1827 without studying this important subject? The French ministry is moving steadily to the Right: Chabrol and Courvoisier are thought to be on the point of resignation. ‘The King talks only of force, the ministers of firmness, wise royalists are worried about the future, the madmen, much the greatest number, are aux anges. Among themselves they talk of nothing but coups d’état and changing the electoral law by edict ... In the midst of all this the French people are perfectly calm.’ The courts are coming down heavily on journalists of both parties, which pleases neither side, and in the process are establishing the right of resistance to all extra-constitutional undertakings. ‘In my opinion the judges are only doing their duty.’ (In all these letters Tocqueville shows himself proud of his profession.) Tocqueville is anxious about the future of the ministry because of the mediocrity of its members (‘there is only one opinion as to its leader’), because of the number and zeal of its enemies and the lukewarmness of most of its friends, and because of the over-confidence of its most ardent supporters: ‘It’s like a perpetual Coblenz.’ The most conspicuous royalists are only a handful, so they spend all their time quarrelling with everyone else in a way that would be funny were it not so deplorable. They seem to think that they have nothing to do but dispute over the spoils of their impending triumph. The Villèlist paper and the Polignac paper attack each other every morning, for which they are much mocked by the Liberals. Six prefects have been dismissed for their constitutionalism, and replaced, by two men notorious for their part in the electoral frauds of 1827, and by four fools, among them the sous-préfet of Cherbourg. God knows how it will all end, but at the moment everything looks both lamentable and frightening.25
Three weeks later he takes advantage of a tedious half-hour in court to scribble another letter: he now thinks that there may not, after all, be an election, since it would be imprudent to dissolve the present Chamber, even though it is so refractory, while the royalists continue so divided and incapable: ‘For a party in such a state to carry the day would be something new and astonishing.’26 But on 6 May his tone is even gloomier. He finds from Édouard’s last letter that they take the same view of the situation: they see the evil but not the remedy. At least Alexis is now quite clear about the nature of the evil.
We are in fact caught in a vicious circle. If it sticks to legality I don’t see how the ministry can survive ... Its chief is over-confident and exceedingly mediocre, inspiring confidence in no-one. The royalists are uncertain, divided, without enthusiasm and, worse still, unafraid of the future because they think that anger is aimed only at the House of Bourbon and not at royalty itself and that a revolution would be trouble-free [by a revolution, here, Tocqueville probably only means a change to a Liberal ministry]. So if the ministry follows the rules laid down by the Charter, it is most unlikely that it can survive. If the King abandons it there will be a reaction and royal power will be much reduced.
However, that would still be the safest course, for to nullify the Charter would infallibly drive the King from his throne. Such, at least, is my conviction. For example, mon cher ami, let us consider cold-bloodedly what a labyrinth he would find himself in if he put aside the law. What would support him? Certainly not public opinion; almost nobody would approve the measure, I might even say that it would unite the nation against anyone who tried it. The courts perhaps? On the day that the King sets out to rule by decrees the courts would refuse to apply them; I know them and can answer for it.
So it would be necessary to turn to the army, to have soldiers incessantly in arms. ‘But are we sure that they would like this rôle for very long? that, finally, is the determining consideration: a King of seventy-two, so easy-going and so very kind in character, Charles X, is not the man to accept in cold blood such consequences, or to follow resolutely such a plan.’
Tocqueville seems to have the XVIII Brumaire in mind, and understands that Charles is no Bonaparte. Nor did he have anyone at his disposal bold or cunning enough to act successfully as his minister in the affair – no Talleyrand, no Siéyès.* So what would result from a coup?
Perhaps the fall of the ruling house and, quite certainly, an extreme enfeeblement of the royal authority, which would have been uselessly compromised. Nobody in France wants to be ruled by decree, that is the first point to grasp. It is in nobody’s interest. The judiciary would lose its importance, the peers their rank, most men of talent their hopes, the lower classes their rights, most officers their chance of promotion. What can be done against such massed determination?27
As an explanation of the Revolution of 1830 these remarks are excellent, as far as they go, but they do not go quite all the way. No more than anybody else did Tocqueville foresee the part that would be played by the people of Paris, which gave the revolution its distinctive, indeed heroic character. He was concerned almost solely with the grievances and anxieties of the notables – the Liberals, bankers, officials, journalists and so on whom the King was almost systematically alienating. It is harder to explain another omission. Some years later, writing to an Englishman, Lord Radnor, he said flatly that the religious hatreds stirred up under the Restoration were the principal cause of the Bourbons’ fall. ‘Left to themselves, the princes of the senior line would have had difficulty in surviving; united with the clergy and exposed to the burning enmities which the political power of the priests provoked, they were bound to succumb.’28 Perhaps he exaggerated after the event, but the unpopularity of the almost mythical Congregation, the Jesuits, the Catholic missions and royalist bishops was no illusion, as all readers of Le Rouge et le Noir are aware. Tocqueville in 1830 may have thought that the religious issue was not strictly relevant to his theme, although without it the obstinate folly of Charles X cannot be entirely explained; or he may have been sparing the feelings of his pious relatives.
Events took their course: Chabrol and Courvoisier resigned, as expected, when Polignac started talking about declaring a state of emergency under Article 14 of the Charter; elections were called for 27 June and (under the two-tier system then current, which gave rich landholders two votes each) 3 July; Tocqueville filled in his time by going every Saturday to hear Guizot.
It was by now impossible, even for the lecturer, to ignore the political subtext of his lectures. For instance, on 1 May his subject was the rise of the French monarchy. In the reign of St Louis, he said (ignoring Ultra nostalgia and myth-making) the King was not absolute; he did not pretend to incarnate either the state (no doubt everyone at this point remembered Louis XIV’s most famous remark) or the will of God. The change came in the reign of Philippe le Bel. ‘I am aware, gentlemen, that many people still insist on seeing nothing in human affairs but the results of pre-existing necessity, which sweeps men along unknowingly to an end of which they are ignorant. But in my opinion, if things act upon men, men have more often greatly influenced things.’ So it was with Philippe, ‘a despot in the fullest sense of the word’. It was he who began the perversion of the French monarchy; but even in his own time, there was resistance. Towards the end of his reign the noblesse began to form associations which successfully opposed his aggrandizement. The march towards absolutism was checked for a long time.29
This was highly flammable material, and Guizot heaped plenty more on the pile during the rest of the month (he gave his last lecture on 29 May). Tocqueville missed none of the implications. But in spite of himself, perhaps, he remained less concerned with the politics of the lectures than with the method and substance of the historical analysis. It was his intellect which was catching fire. Guizot’s practice was to enunciate a general proposition (for exam
ple, that Philippe le Bel began to meddle, through his tame lawyers, in all sorts of matters that had never before concerned the French kings); give two or three unanswerable demonstrations of the fact, drawn from his mastery of the archives; and then restate the proposition in a more challenging form: ‘Here, gentlemen, we have the earliest examples of that regulatory mania which has always been the distinctive character of the French monarchy.’ Any reader of the Ancien Régime will recognize the doctrine. On 8 May Guizot began to recount the rise of the Third Estate. ‘Once born, it never ceased to grow for a single moment. Born feeble, it ended by destroying everything round it. It lay lowest in the hierarchy of social powers but all classes were eventually lost in it, it absorbed them all, it became la nation toute entière.’ First, in alliance with the Crown, the Third little by little undermined and destroyed the feudal nobility, supporting absolutism ‘so that at least all would be equal under one master.’ (Tocqueville underlined this remark in his notes.) Then it turned against the monarchy which, without its support, could easily be destroyed. And then it modified that monarchy ‘in our own time’. The rise of the Third Estate was unique – there was nothing like it in Asiatic or Roman history; it was something especially French. The Third must not be confused with the bourgeoisie, that is, the inhabitants of the medieval towns. The Third made great strides in the later Middle Ages, while the towns, in the same period, lost their political autonomy. And while they were declining, small noble fiefs were being absorbed into larger ones – duchies, counties, etc. – which in turn came to be dominated by the kings. The tide of centralization had set in. Theoretically, the towns might have saved themselves by federating, but:
federal government, gentlemen, is the most difficult of all forms. The mass of the people have to be very intelligent to understand and submit to it and few except those nations which have attained a high degree of civilization can manage it. No political system requires more real enlightenment, more devotion to the public interest and a smaller amount of that often blind egoism which is the ordinary impulse of societies as of individuals.
Anyway, Guizot, reflecting on the record of Holland, Belgium and Italy, did not think much of communal self-government. Its disappearance was good for France. Centralization had been necessary to create the nation, ‘striving towards the same end, moved by the same ideas, shaken by the same passions, marching, in short, like one man to overcome the same difficulties.’30
Here, indeed, was matter for reflection. Here was a frontal challenge to the political creed in which Tocqueville had been reared. Even Guizot’s incidental or merely illustrative remarks were striking: for example, how over time words stay the same but their meaning changes – there was as much difference between the Roman republic and the republic of the United States as there was between the US and a representative monarchy. And, commenting on the fact that slavery existed in some French medieval towns and not in others, he said that to understand the importance of this fact one should look at the state of affairs in contemporary America. ‘Everyone knows that the spirit and opinions of the northern and southern provinces of the Union [differ] ... the ideas, the habits of the latter are infinitely more aristocratic than those of the former, and yet both live under the same manners, the same way of life.’ Medieval communes, he said, were dominated by l’esprit démocratique – ‘that is, by the will to rise socially, by the taste for equality, by turbulence and envy ... But it is not enough to evoke the existence of these two attitudes [the other being aristocratic] ... it is also necessary to discover their traces in both institutions and facts.’ As if all this were not enough, Tocqueville had also to contemplate the supreme discovery, governing all Guizot’s observations, that for hundreds of years there had been a levelling tendency in history, and that it was still going on. If Guizot was right there could be no hope for the idea of a renewed noblesse governing France under the King; and what was the alternative?31
Tocqueville was never to accept all these Guizotin doctrines, but he agreed with many of them, and saw that anyway they all required logical and well-informed – the French would say, scientific – discussion. With this in mind, as well as the political situation, he and Beaumont went to see Guizot, rather as modern graduate students seek out professors to help them find research topics. Guizot received them most graciously, but ‘with remarkable affectation’ evaded all discussion of their studies, ‘no doubt in order to drive home to us the idea that he was not just a professor.’ So they talked of politics, and Guizot was confident both that the Liberals would carry the forthcoming elections (as indeed they did, with an increased majority) and that the King would invite them to form a government, which they would do, dropping their more radical supporters.32 Tocqueville came away rather disillusioned, and it was at about this time (that is, in June) that he wrote a bitter little essay, ‘Truth, 1830’, the main purpose of which was to relieve his feelings about the parliamentary politicians. Tocqueville still clung sincerely to the Charter of 1814, but he now thought that few others did so. All the Liberals professed the utmost loyalty to the King whom they had chased into exile twice already and were quite prepared to drive out yet again; they also professed loyalty to the Charter; they lied, and everyone knew that they lied. The only way to get ahead in politics, especially during a time of crisis, was to choose your party and stick to it (a lesson, we may add, that Tocqueville could never quite accept). Truthfulness, he concluded cynically, was a private, not a public virtue.33
Yet he was beginning to reach out to the Liberals, as the visit to Guizot suggests. He formed an acquaintance with E.-E. Forestier-Boinvilliers, a barrister and follower of La Fayette. Boinvilliers was a habitual conspirator, yet as indiscreet as Kergorlay himself. Tocqueville was impressed by his ardour and also, we may think, taken in by it: this devoted republican was to accept Louis-Philippe and serve Louis-Napoleon, who made him an imperial Senator. Tocqueville thought him ‘an impassioned soul, capable of everything energetic and generous; I find his intelligence to be inferior to his soul ... He seems in general to be ruled rather by his passions than by his ideas.’ He and Tocqueville did not obviously have much in common, but they were both young and ill-suited to dissimulation and craft; besides, Boinvilliers wanted to convert Tocqueville to republicanism. So he boasted that he had been involved in every republican plot of the previous fifteen years, and was ashamed that his party had taken up the cry of the Charter, when they really wanted to get rid of it as well as the Bourbons; but it was a regrettable necessity – if the majority knew where the republicans were going it would never follow. As it was, there was a nationwide network of ‘correspondents’, controlled centrally by the Aide-toi. ‘He also said to me, I don’t know why the nation dislikes the Bourbons so much. All in all, they are decent people, they have given us more liberty than we ever had before. I think it is because they were imposed on us by foreigners. A great nation can never pardon its princes for that.’ Tocqueville was not converted, but as with Guizot, he saw sense in much of what Boinvilliers had to say.34
The election carried Comte Hervé into Normandy, both as a voter and as president of the electoral college of the department of the Manche (the Cotentin under another name). He took Alexis with him and they electioneered together: it was perhaps now that Alexis discovered that, as a noble, he was unpopular in the department (as he was to recall in 1848).* He described his doings in a lively letter to his mother on 29 June. Letters to the comtesse always had to be cheerful, but there is no reason to be sceptical about Tocqueville’s high spirits as he and his father spent two days riding round the countryside to canvass farmers and then stayed at Hippolyte’s chateau of Nacqueville, where Émilie was energetically planning all sorts of improvements. There was much anxiety about the rural incendiarism which broke out all across northern France that summer: even the old curé at Tocqueville kept a gun in his parlour. But the only cloud on Tocqueville’s personal horizon at the moment was his anxiety about Kergorlay.35 He need not have worried: on 2 July a let
ter arrived at Versailles joyously describing Kergorlay’s first battle, on 19 June, which he had gone through without a scratch:
As soon as our howitzers began to fire they concentrated all their efforts upon us. In a short time six men of our company were wounded, one of them fatally. Bullets whistled about us and I was unsure if that was what is called feu vif or nothing much. That evening I learned by talking to fellow officers that it had been very heavy. Being under fire affected me as everything does of which one makes a monster: it was unimpressive. From time to time I felt somewhat inclined to take cover, but that soon passed off ... I assure you that cuts from a sabre or a battle-axe or a bayonet frighten me much more than cannon balls or bullets because with them you have to take action to parry and I don’t think I am a more skilful swordsman than the usual run of men. This discovery has cured me of any taste for battles featuring l’arme blanche.36