Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  * Poor man that I am, I could have robbed; / But no: better to hold out a beggar’s hand. / At most, I helped myself to an apple / Ripening beside the road. Yet twenty times / I was locked in a cell by order of the King. / He robbed me of my only good / For, tramp that I am, the sun is mine.

  * AT, who was inclined to exaggerate the improvements made in the material conditions of French prisons in the recent past, might with advantage have noted the fact that, nevertheless, the cholera induced the authorities to take hurried action about them. Warmer clothes and better food were given to prisoners, internal walls were whitewashed, dormitories were ventilated, and disinfectant was sprayed liberally through the bath-houses and latrines (Chevalier, Le Choléra, 16).

  * British readers may like to be told that this was indeed the man whose name and history were so scandalously misappropriated by the Baroness Orczy when she needed a villain for her Scarlet Pimpernel stories.

  * The recipients did not include Chateaubriand and Berryer, perhaps because they too had just been arrested and imprisoned on account of the duchesse de Berry’s adventure, though the government was well aware that they had opposed it strongly (they were soon released).

  * See above, p. 192.

  * See above, p. 222.

  † This sentence strikingly anticipates one of the most famous pronouncements of the Ancien Régime: ‘the most dangerous moment for a bad government is that in which it begins to reform’ (OC II i 223).

  * Including St Bernard’s Clairvaux, one of the greatest names in the history of Western monasticism, which today is still France’s highest-security jail.

  * Nowadays they vie to have the worst.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BETWEN BOOKS

  1833

  ‘I want to introduce two very clever people to each other,’ said Mrs. Leo Hunter. ‘Mr. Pickwick, I have great pleasure in introducing you to Count Smorltork.’ She added in a hurried whisper to Mr. Pickwick – ‘The famous foreigner – gathering materials for his great work on England – hem! – Count Smorltork, Mr. Pickwick.’ Mr. Pickwick saluted the Count with all the reverence due to so great a man, and the Count drew forth a set of tablets.

  CHARLES DICKENS, 1836

  HE DID NOT GET DOWN TO WORK at once, or indeed for months to come. No doubt he needed a rest after the effort of bringing out the Système pénitentiaire; and then there was the Kergorlay affair to conclude. In December Louis and his fellow prisoners were transferred to Montbrison, chef-lieu of the Loire, where their trial was to take place in March. Meanwhile the political context was rapidly changing. The Orleanist government had had no difficulty in brutally suppressing the duchesse de Berry’s feeble uprising in the West; everyone hoped that as a result she would leave France. Instead she went into hiding, and at length the government felt that it had no choice but to track her down and arrest her; Thiers, the new and. energetic minister of the interior, caught her in Nantes in November. She was imprisoned at Blaye, in the Gironde, but the government was utterly perplexed as to what should next be done with her. To put her on trial would be to create a legitimist martyr, and anyway she was the Queen’s niece; but to keep her in prison without a trial would be equally provocative, since illegal. To send her back into exile, when she had raised a rebellion, however ineffectively, and when so many of her followers were going to be tried, was clearly anomalous, and would enrage the liberals. The legitimists took full advantage of the Orleanists’ embarrassment. Chateaubriand, invoking the memory of his brother and of Malesherbes, ‘defender of Louis XVI, who died on the same day, at the same hour, for the same cause and on the same scaffold’, publicly volunteered to act as her counsel if she was tried, and published a pamphlet, Mémoire sur la captivité de Madame la duchesse de Berry, which got him put on trial himself (he was acquitted). The Tocquevilles too rushed into the limelight: Comte Hervé sent a petition to the two Chambers demanding the release of the duchesse and Hippolyte published a legitimist pamphlet, Lettres aux Normands. Much more surprisingly, Alexis, in his character as a lawyer, sent a letter to La Quotidienne, the leading legitimist newspaper, arguing the illegality of Mme de Berry’s captivity. Beaumont did the same. The two ex-magistrates had no love for the July regime, and no doubt believed what they said; Tocqueville may have been carried away by family feeling; but the incident is probably best regarded as one more demonstration that although his head had renounced the Bourbon cause, his heart found it very difficult to do the same. Still, it was an indiscretion: the duchesse was for a moment the great legitimist heroine, and to support her publicly could only have one meaning. Kergorlay saw the point: although he thought that Tocqueville’s protest lacked fervour, the great thing was that it associated him with all those who resented the ignominious government of Louis-Philippe.

  But the questions raised by this lapse into legitimism were rendered moot when in February it emerged that the martyr-princess, rightful Regent of France, mother of the true King and chaste widow of his murdered father, had somehow become pregnant: a fact that she herself thought of little importance and did not try to keep secret for very long (she was one of the silliest princesses in all European history). She thus made the legitimists ridiculous.* The exiled Charles X cast her off, and when Mme de Boigne asked Chateaubriand (who had previously written ‘A Hymn to the Maternal Virtues of Marie-Caroline’) who he thought was the father of the child, he replied only, ‘How do you suppose anyone can tell what she does not know herself?’1 The duchesse coyly referred to the baby as ‘the child of the Vendée’, and one angry legitimist lady commented that ‘in a sense, she is right.’ The legitimists washed their hands of her, but that could not undo the fact that she had for the time being almost destroyed them as a serious political force. They were not to have another chance of power for forty years, although they were to make an endless nuisance of themselves. The government was rescued from its difficulty. The duchesse was sent back into exile as soon as the child was born: it turned out to be a girl, whom the duchesse turned over to a foster-mother as soon as she could; before long the baby died.

  All this meant that Kergorlay would almost certainly be freed after his trial, even if he were found guilty: it would be too much to punish the follower, while the leader was let off. But Kergorlay was taking no chances. In October Tocqueville had volunteered to act as his counsel, and Louis was charmed by the idea: it would be as if they were comrades in battle, ‘it would realize something of the dreams of our youth.’ But legal tactics forced him to reject the offer; in the end Tocqueville appeared only as a character witness. Even that entailed minute preparation: Tocqueville was told to be sure to bring his lawyer’s gown and diploma to Montbrison so that he could take his place with the other barristers in the section of the courtroom reserved for them; and two days before the trial Kergorlay anxiously urged his friend to say something forceful about his father, the comte de Kergorlay.2

  The trial was held on 9 March 1833. Tocqueville spoke towards the end of the proceedings. His oration reads oddly. It has no bearing on the facts of the case, and is simply a long eulogy of Kergorlay and his father, lovers of liberty and souls of honour, their home a sanctuary of antique virtue. He stressed Louis’s exemplary service in the army, his love of his country and, touchingly, their devoted friendship. Whatever we may think today of the performance, it was admirably suited to the tastes of the jury – landed gentry, provincial lawyers and physicians – local notables, some or all of them probably legitimists. They would perhaps have acquitted the defendants anyway – the July Monarchy always found it difficult to get ‘guilty’ verdicts in political trials – but Tocqueville’s allocution did no harm. It went pretty far. Today, he said, seeing Kergorlay threatened with shaming punishment, he thought it necessary to assert that his friend had never stood higher in his esteem, never been truer to the oaths of their youth – ‘I have never felt prouder of the sacred friendship which binds us.’ It was no moment for half-measures, but once more Tocqueville was recklessly aligning himself wit
h legitimism, and immoderate legitimism at that. 3

  Otherwise the speech is notable because it opens with a disquisition on the rights and duties of a jury which clearly shows the enthusiasm for that institution which Tocqueville brought back from America, and because, in its remarks about the comte de Kergorlay, it suggests the real nature of Louis’s misfortunes. His father had flung himself into conspicuous opposition to the July Monarchy from the first (in November 1830 he had been tried and sentenced for seditiously publishing in the Quotidienne his speech of resignation from the Chambre des Pairs) and he dragged his son with him. It seems unlikely that Louis would have resigned from the army but for his father’s influence, or that he would have involved himself with the duchesse de Berry; and in all his letters to Tocqueville from jail he seems much more anxious on his father’s behalf than on his own. Filial devotion can be ruinously expensive. It is to be hoped that M. de Kergorlay suffered at least a few sleepless nights over the manner in which he had wrecked his son’s career.

  Tocqueville was luckier in his father, but he had his own family preoccupations. Documents are lacking (none is extant for the period between March and July 1833, no doubt chiefly because he and all his regular correspondents, except Eugène Stoffels, were now living in or near Paris); but even the most cautious scrutiny of the evidence must suggest that there was now a decisive turn in his relations with Marie Mottley, a turn which clarified matters in the most important respect, but still left him with a host of difficulties.

  The journey to America had done nothing to weaken his attachment; rather, it had strengthened it, or strengthened Tocqueville’s awareness of it. He had not been in the United States a month when he wrote to Chabrol: ‘I never loved her so much as now when I see her no longer. Absence, so far, acts on me contrariwise. The fact is, I didn’t think I was so bound to her ... Does she sometimes seem to remember me?’ Every mail brought letters from her; getting them was the greatest pleasure that he had in America; he told her so, but he asked Chabrol to tell her so too. As we have seen, he worried that she might catch cholera. Of his letters from America to Marie herself not one survives, although he probably wrote to her more often than to anyone else, but we can be sure that they were full of serious devotion; how serious may be gauged from the fact that whereas he was careful to hide the tale of his various dangerous adventures from his family until he got safely home, we learn from a letter to Chabrol that he kept Marie informed. Presumably he knew that her nerves were stronger than his mother’s; but perhaps he also felt that she was entitled to be told everything. And as we have seen, he flew to her arms as soon as he returned to Paris. 4

  While Tocqueville was in America a cousin (probably Louis de Chateaubriand) wrote to him proposing an arranged marriage to a noble and well-dowered young lady. The proposal was rejected, not, strikingly, on the grounds of an existing pledge, but because Tocqueville had never met Mlle de L. and did not know if they could love each other; as to her fortune (he said) the longer he lived the more clearly he saw that money was not particularly important to him: he could adjust easily to a modest income if it was matched with domestic happiness. This, as we have seen, was his consistent attitude to arranged marriages, but the fact that he does not even hint at Marie, indeed the fact that Louis de Chateaubriand made the proposal at all, suggests that before Tocqueville went to America her importance to him was not understood by his family (he did not wholly understand it himself ) and is certainly consistent with other evidence that there was as yet no actual betrothal. Yet it seems clear that Tocqueville had resolved on marriage by the time he returned to Paris, and soon overcame the first obstacle, Marie’s own doubts. His letters to her in the summer of 1832 are those of a man writing to his second self, to someone of whose interest in his thoughts and doings he is utterly confident, in short, of someone in a permanent union. But an actual wedding was not yet any closer. There was trouble with Mrs Belam. Whether or not Tocqueville and Marie had become lovers before the journey to America, they certainly were after his return, and this perhaps caused the ‘great storm’ between aunt and niece in the spring of 1832 to which Tocqueville alludes in a much later letter. And there was no movement on the side of the Tocqueville family. The comte and comtesse may well have come to realize that Marie was a permanent part of their son’s life, but she was still Protestant, English and not rich.* At least Tocqueville was able to confide in his friends. Chabrol, of course, had known about the affair from the start; now Kergorlay, from prison, was inspired by Tocqueville’s rhapsodies to compose a page of appalling misogyny, but he allowed that Marie must be an exceptional woman and urged Tocqueville to write letters about her whenever he felt like it. 5

  The indications of what happened next are extremely scanty. It was not until the spring of 1833, if then, that Tocqueville adopted the way of life which was to last until his wedding in 1835: living officially, and by day, with his parents in the rue de Verneuil, while spending his evenings, if not his nights, with Marie. It was hardly satisfactory, but no doubt his parents could not yet agree conscientiously to the marriage, and under the civil code as amended by the Bourbons he could not marry without their consent until he was thirty. He was still entirely dependent on his father for an income. According to that same code, he could not be disinherited: the famous law of inheritance guaranteed his equal share, with his brothers, in the family estate; but that had little bearing on his current difficulties. The only other visible factor which may explain his arrangements is that the death of the Abbé Le Sueur and the marriage of her two elder sons had left Madame de Tocqueville, always ailing, in need of Alexis’s company.6 There was no quarrel, no attempt at coercion or revolt; but there was deadlock.

  One difference was resolved: by the early summer of 1833 Tocqueville was on excellent terms with Mrs Belam, and took pains to remain so. This was doubly important: we know little about Marie’s relations with her family in England, but it is clear that they were still on close terms, and if Mrs Belam had been hostile it might have created difficulties with the Mottley parents. As it was, the only fresh problem was with Kergorlay, who was probably suffering from the after-shock (so to say) of his prison ordeal. At any rate he felt so much adrift that he started to learn German, for occupation, and in the feeble hope that it would lead to something; he allowed himself to be appropriated by his parents for the management of the family estate at Fosseuse; and he told Tocqueville plainly that he did not approve of the proposed marriage – it is not clear on what grounds. His attitude annoyed and distressed Tocqueville, but changed nothing: it cast no more than a transient shadow over their friendship, and certainly did not cause second thoughts about Marie.7

  Nor did it affect Tocqueville’s general outlook. He was in high spirits that summer, perhaps because he had not yet begun work on his next book. Instead he travelled to England, where he stayed for five weeks (he did not turn to the book until the autumn).8

  The decision to travel again has caused various scholars unnecessary perplexity.9 Except in 1830, the revolutionary year, Tocqueville had gone abroad annually since 1826. It assuaged his self-­acknowledged restlessness. He explained his motives for this particular trip when he wrote to his cousin, Mme de Pisieux, asking her for a letter of introduction to Lady Stuart de Rothesay, wife of the man who had been British ambassador to France from 1815 to 1830:

  I am already acquainted with her husband; the work which M. de Beaumont and I have published recently has put us in touch; but you are bound to feel that I cannot decently present myself in a lady’s boudoir with the Système pénitentiaire for a visiting-card ... by going to England I hope to escape for a while from the insipid spectacle that our country presents just now. I want to go and feel slightly less bored among our neighbours. And then, I am told that they are definitely beginning a revolution and that I will have to hurry if I am to see them as they are. So I am making haste to go to England as to the last night of a great play.10

  He left Paris on 15 July, and travelled leisurely
to Cherbourg, stopping a few nights at the chateau of Tocqueville on the way: there he made himself agreeable to the neighbours, thinking ahead to the day when, as a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies, he would need their votes. (At about the same time Marie and Mrs Belam set off for a seaside holiday at Étretat in Upper Normandy.) He hung about Cherbourg for a day or two, trying for a passage to Southampton. On 5 August an Englishman with a yacht carried him as far as Guernsey, from where, next day, he went by steamer to Weymouth, ‘a pretty little place’. On 7 August he travelled by stagecoach to Southampton, through country which impressed him less by its scenery than by its ostentatious wealth: ‘nothing but parks, country-houses, retinues, lackeys, horses: universal luxury which, they say, conceals poverty, but which, at least to a stranger’s eye, conceals it marvellously well.’ Southampton, though only a small town, had shops as good as those in Paris ... his education in yet another country had begun.11