Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  The response of his son, a prosecutor by trade, who would not be sent to jail for years yet (and then was not detained long enough for it to do him any good) could not have been more different. The prison had perhaps changed somewhat in three years,* but even if it had that cannot account for the horror with which Tocqueville and Beaumont saw the prisoners making the most of Sunday:

  Some smoked their pipes, others played draughts; we heard laughter and shouting; most were eating; next to one prisoner eating dry bread another was carving a chicken in a bowl of salad; wine flowed in torrents and every face was bright with cynical gaiety. It could have been taken for a feast given by Satan to his friends.31

  Elsewhere those who care to do so may find evidence of Oedipal conflict:

  Everywhere in France we see a strict and scrupulous philanthropy concerning itself with the material lot of prisoners. The report of the minister which we have just cited goes on at length about the quality of the soup served to inmates, about the stove-pipes by which the dormitories are kept warm in winter, and the footwear given to the inmates to keep them from the cold: important details, no doubt, but surely the concern of charitable organizations rather than that of a statesman?

  Such was the spirit in which Tocqueville and Beaumont set out for America. They were not going to let philanthropy mar their prison investigations. They intended to be thoroughly statesmanlike observers.

  For Tocqueville, whether at this date or years later, prison reform was never to be more than a secondary concern, a means to an end. In 1830–31 he knew exactly what he was up to. Charles Stoffels apparently expressed doubts about the wisdom of going to America, so Tocqueville explained himself in letters to both brothers:

  [26 August.] If I am forced to give up my career and if nothing requires me to stay in France, I have decided that I shall flee the idleness of private life and take up again for several years a traveller’s restless existence. I have long wanted to visit North America. I shall go there to see what a great republic is like.

  [4 October.] Suppose that, without ceasing to be a magistrate and losing my rights of seniority, I go to America; fifteen months elapse. In France, meanwhile, parties will be articulating themselves; I will be able to see clearly which one is incompatible with the peace and greatness of the country; I shall come back with clear and settled opinions and free of all commitments to anybody. Only this journey can draw one up out of the common herd.

  [21 February.] Merely as a voyage, nothing could be more agreeable than the one we want to make. Bearing a public character, we will have the right to enquire into everything, and the entrée to all the best society. Furthermore, it’s not just a matter of seeing big towns and beautiful rivers. We are going with the intention of examining in detail and as scientifically as possible the entire scope of that vast American society which everybody talks about and nobody knows. And if our adventures leave us enough time, we rely on putting together the makings of a fine work, or of a new one at least – nothing has been published of this type.32,33

  As the moment of departure drew near he began to wonder nervously if he was really doing the right thing, but as he wrote to Beaumont, who was down in the Sarthe saying goodbye to his family, ‘When I calculate how unlikely are the dangers we fear [shipwreck? Indians?] and factor in our delicate position in France, where it is impossible for us to play any part whatever, it seems to me that we should applaud our decision and regret only that we did not carry it out sooner.’34

  The ambition displayed in these remarks is no more striking than the acute judgement, and both are surpassed by the precision of Tocqueville’s aim. Without having ever spoken to an American* or set foot on American soil he already begins to glimpse and sketch the masterpiece that was to be; and his self-confidence is equally evident – as Pierson has pointed out, it did not occur either to him or to Beaumont that such a work as they planned might be beyond their powers.35 Finally, it is very evident that the prison investigation was indeed not Tocqueville’s main preoccupation.

  February and March 1831 were mostly given over to hectic preparations for the great journey. Tocqueville went shopping. Among other things he bought five pairs of boots and shoes: perhaps, like Mrs Trollope planning her ‘bazaar’ in Cincinnati, he underestimated the progress of American civilization.36 He and Beaumont flew round Paris scrounging letters of introduction: they secured seventy in the end, although the biggest name of all, La Fayette, eluded them: he was never in when they called. We do not know the names of all the letter-writers. It is unlikely that Chateaubriand was one of them: his contacts with the US were too ancient to be useful.37 Charles Lucas, the newly appointed inspector of prisons, sent them an official letter, decidedly cool in tone, making a long list of suggestions as to what they should investigate, most of which they would ignore, but one of which anticipated what became one of Tocqueville’s chief preoccupations: ‘One thing which it is important to study and record is the development of the spirit of association for the improvement of prisons. This spirit does not exist in France, yet it is a necessary auxiliary for the Government; it must be organized and propagated here.’38 Perhaps because they already distrusted Lucas, Tocqueville and Beaumont had their ‘Note’ on penitentiaries printed: it was a useful piece of advertising, would help their friends to defend their interests while they were away, and may have helped to elicit some of the letters of introduction. Abbé Le Sueur, who knew that he had not long to live and would probably never see Alexis again, gave him a little book of prayers and a last letter of good counsel: he had never abandoned the hope of reconciling his pupil to the Church. After warning him against the philosophes for the last time, he wrote: ‘Adieu once more. I commit you and your kind companion to the care of Divine Providence. My wishes, my prayers and my blessing will go with you, everywhere.’39 Tocqueville was painfully moved, although the citadel of his doubt remained unshaken.

  Then it was time to be off. After an affectionate farewell to Kergorlay they left Paris for Le Havre on 29 March, accompanied by Tocqueville’s father and brothers. They boarded ship on 2 April. Their vessel, Le Havre, missed the tide and hit a sandbank: they had to disembark and hang about the waterside all afternoon. Mauvais présage, but false. In the evening they went on board again, and soon after midnight Tocqueville went on deck to find that the ship was hurrying down-Channel, all sails stretched, and a fair wind at her back.40

  * ‘Be the slave of your own opinions and nobody’s servant. Besides, in the time of pitiful confusion in which we live, there is no hurry to adopt a cockade.’

  * Moeurs.

  * Camille, comte de Montalivet (1801–80), son of a Napoleonic official, was one of Louis-Philippe’s most trusted advisers and was semi-permanent minister of the interior during the 1830s; but he refused to join Guizot’s ministry in the 1840s, thinking it altogether too reactionary.

  † It is worth remarking that neither in 1830 nor at any later date did the young reformers inspect Saint-Pélagie, where political prisoners were confined; nor did they ever mention it in their writings.

  * Mme. Perrot thinks not: ‘... it was not the prison which had changed, but the nature of the observation directed at it. The prisoners had ceased to be “unlucky”, they were now “guilty”. The time of rigour in the prison system had arrived’ (OC IV i 10).

  * In his old age, after Tocqueville’s death, Jared Sparks wrote of having met him in Paris in 1828; but there is absolutely no corroboration for this statement anywhere, and it is intrinsically unlikely.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A VOYAGE OUT

  1831

  Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage.

  JOACHIM DU BELLAY

  TOCQUEVILLE WENT TO BED to be sea-sick, as he expected, for two days, while the east wind carried Le Havre out of the Channel, into the ocean. On the third day he felt better, and on the fourth was quite himself again. He was pleased to find that his fellow-passengers could not say the same: none of them emerged until the sixth day. The o
ne exception was Beaumont, who was never sick at all; ‘the natural order of things,’ sighed his friend.1 On the whole it was as good a start as might reasonably have been expected to a sea-journey which they greatly enjoyed. For one thing, it was fairly swift, by the standards of the day: they landed in the United States on 9 May, after thirty-seven days at sea. Other ships had been known to take a full two months, or even more. Le Havre – an American vessel, in spite of her name – was as stout as she was speedy: Tocqueville congratulated himself that there was no danger that she would capsize, as had so nearly happened to the ship on his Sicilian voyage, although at times they met weather that was just as rough: one storm blew for thirty-six hours. Real privacy was impossible on board: when Tocqueville and Beaumont went to bed while the other passengers were at supper, as they usually did, they fell asleep to the music of clashing cutlery and in all but full view of the diners. Meal times were enlivened by plates flying off the table, bottles and glasses smashing, and the constant danger of getting gravy poured down your neck. Our travellers rose cheerfully above all these inconveniences. Their one serious complaint was that though the food was good the cooking was atrocious, and by the last day of the voyage supplies were running dangerously low, the captain having apparently miscalculated his needs.

  They enjoyed their company, partly on principle (‘at sea, if you don’t want to fight, you must be the best of friends’), partly out of natural amiability and high spirits. They were occasionally homesick, and would be from time to time throughout the rest of their journey; but the affliction, though acute (and Tocqueville pined for Marie) was intermittent. The chief note of all their letters home is an unmistakable gusto. So it was easy for them to like their fellow passengers; indeed, at times they seem to have been the life and soul of the passenger-deck. Beaumont, an enthusiastic musician, had brought his flute with him, and on one occasion played it to the young people on board (including Tocqueville) so that they could dance a quadrille. On another day a barrel was noticed floating on the sea and immediately became a target for pistol-practice: Tocqueville, though short-sighted, was the champion marksman who hit it. And one evening he straddled the bowsprit to enjoy the sensation of rushing and plunging through phosphorescent waves, ‘a sight more wonderful, more sublime than I can describe’.2

  A charming young American, Miss Edwards, gave them English lessons, for they had quickly discovered that they knew the language much less well than they had supposed. They made special friends of Charles Palmer, MP (a Whig, owner of the celebrated Bordeaux vineyard), and of the Schermerhorn family, rich New Yorkers: these new acquaintances took the greatest interest in the prison mission and were to be very useful to Tocqueville and Beaumont in New York. Tocqueville made his first notes about America: according to Mr Schermerhorn no-one there cared about anything but getting rich, and he thought that crime was increasing. He also made some surprising remarks about the economics of the American merchant marine.3 One reason for all this friendliness was undoubtedly the extreme tedium of shipboard life: according to Tocqueville, most of the passengers distilled boredom drop by drop, as in an alembic. Tocqueville and Beaumont were immune to this complaint. They had work to do. They got up soon after five every morning and read together until breakfast, as they had at Versailles. They translated an English work on American prisons, read a history of the United States and studied Jean-Baptiste Say’s Cours d’économie politique. As they worked, Beaumont’s opinion of his friend rose higher and higher: ‘Tocqueville is a really outstanding man; he is great in the loftiness of his ideas and in the nobility of his soul. The more I know him the more I love him.’4 Their confidence about being able to produce a valuable book steadily increased.

  Yet the difficulties of their project made themselves felt, if not apparent, as soon as they landed. Because of the contrary winds and the shortage of food Le Havre first docked at Newport, Rhode Island, instead of New York, on the afternoon of 9 May. Next day Tocqueville and Beaumont, weary of the vagaries of sail, trans-shipped to the President, a huge steamboat which took them down Long Island Sound to Manhattan. They did not spend many hours in Newport, though Beaumont, whose accomplishments included sketching, did a nice little drawing of the church tower; but he saw fit to write to his mother that the women were amazingly ugly and that the Americans were a wholly commercial people: ‘in the little town of Newport alone there are four or five banks. It is the same in all the towns of the Union.’5 He had yet to learn not to jump to conclusions.

  Tocqueville was vastly impressed by the size and speed of the President, but not by the Connecticut shore, wholly deforested at that period. In the early morning, however, they entered the East River and he was as delighted, even in that age before skyscrapers, as all must be who approach New York by sea:

  we cried out in admiration on seeing the outskirts of the town. Imagine shapely banks, their slopes covered with lawns, flowers and trees right to the water’s edge; and more than that, countless country-houses, no bigger than chocolate-boxes [bonbonnières] but excellently crafted. Further imagine, if you can, a sea covered with sails, and you have the entry to New York from the Sound.6

  He thought he might get the plan of a chocolate-box for his sister-in-law Émilie: she might like to build one on the Nacqueville estate.

  They reached the Battery, the southern tip of Manhattan, at about noon, and with some difficulty found a suitable boarding-house, at 66 Broadway: it happened that Mr Palmer was staying there too. They went to bed, exhausted, at four in the afternoon, and slept until eight o’clock in the morning; and then the fun began.

  It immensely flattered the New Yorkers to learn from their morning papers that the French government had sent an official mission to study their famous prison system with a view to improving its own. The American character was then an all-too-human mixture of conceit (which Tocqueville immediately detected) and anxiety. Americans were equally sensitive to praise and blame, which latter was and would be heaped upon them by the British, who were always hinting (if that is the word) that the ex-colonists were, alas, mere insignificant provincials: ‘Who reads an American book?’ asked Sydney Smith. The arrival of Tocqueville and Beaumont was therefore amazingly welcome. Mr Schermerhorn and his family vouched for the good character of the visitors and led the way in offering them all possible help, especially in the matter of dinner invitations. Mr Palmer was equally assiduous. They were the sensation of the hour, and Beaumont foresaw that soon they would have to deny their door to eager visitors. Somewhat to their surprise (it was one of the things they had not thought of ) New York had a smart society which took them up enthusiastically; Tocqueville tried to persuade himself that this was a good way of learning about the country. However, he had not come well-equipped for balls, routs and evening parties: he wrote to his brother Édouard asking urgently for silk stockings, cravats, and two dozen pairs of kid gloves – indispensable for evening wear (American ones were far too expensive and ill-made).7

  They tried to keep their heads, but it was a fearful struggle. The danger was not that they would become conceited and believe their own publicity, but that their success would make serious observation and reflection impossible. During the first fortnight they poured out their thoughts in their letters home, and in a few scribbled notes, and it is easy to see, in what has survived,* that they were thoroughly bewildered. One of their problems was that America seemed even less like France than they had expected; another was that the differences often lay in surprising areas. Thus, it was astonishing that neither citizens nor public officials seemed to have any idea of the deference due to rank: on their third day in New York they were presented to the governor of the state, Enos Throop, who was staying in a boarding-house just as they were themselves, and thought it quite natural to receive the foreigners in the parlour; he would shake hands with anyone, they were told.8 (They were not told that Mr Throop was in the city to attend the annual banquet of Tammany Hall, or that he was a member of the Albany Regency: these redolent names as
yet meant nothing to them.) A Bostonian wrote to President Andrew Jackson, offering him a tortoiseshell comb of American manufacture: his letter was printed in a newspaper, and began simply ‘Dear Sir’, to Tocqueville’s astonishment.9 American national vanity was also disconcerting. In a desperate attempt to make some sort of sense of their impressions, they filled their letters with rash generalizations based on little evidence and no experience (a trait which Tocqueville was never entirely to throw off ). American Protestants, they said, well understood the ‘necessity’ of religious dogma. American women were all chaste, partly because American men were too busy for sex. Americans on the whole were disagreeably vulgar, but they were all well-educated and hard-working: there were no idle ‘fashionables’ (Tocqueville used the English word). Political parties were unknown in the United States. Gastronomy was in its infancy; so were the fine arts.10

  They did better when they recorded the incidents of their life in New York. One evening they found a church open, but there was nobody in it except a few people praying. The door to the tower was also open, so up they climbed:

  At last, after much trouble, we arrived at the top and enjoyed a wonderful sight: that of a town of 240,000 inhabitants built on an island bordered on one side by the Ocean, on the other by vast rivers on which could be seen a multitude of ships and barges. The port is of an immense size. The public buildings are few and on the whole unimpressive.11