Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  He took with him to England a string of preconceptions, some useful, some misleading. 12 French, and perhaps American newspapers, reporting the struggle over the Great Reform Bill and its attendant riots, public meetings, strikes and rick-burnings, had convinced him that England was on the brink of another 1789, as the letter to Mme de Pisieux shows. In this he was only slightly out of date: the year before, as the battle over the Reform Bill rose to its height, many intelligent English people feared that a revolution was imminent, but things had quietened down once the Bill became law. He was also convinced that England was as yet a purely aristocratic polity: he concentrated on this idea so emphatically in his note-taking that one might think that his next book was going to be De l’aristocratie en Angleterre. He did not forget America – indeed, the English journey seems to have reanimated his enthusiasm for writing on the subject: he was sure that investigating the old country would throw necessary light on the new. But these interests by no means comprised the whole of his approach to England. He felt some of the excitement that a young man of the twentieth century felt on making his first visit to the United States. Although the Anglophilia which had characterized the era of the Restoration was past its peak, and was soon to turn into Anglophobia, Britain’s prestige in France was still immense. Not only was this the country which had inspired and sustained the alliance that finally defeated Napoleon, it was also the monarchy whose history and institutions seemed to have most to teach France: Louis-Philippe had been brought to the throne in large part because it was hoped that he would prove to be another William III. It was the country whose mechanical inventions and new economic organizations were transforming the fundamental conditions of human life and generating new riches on a staggering scale: before long the French would coin the phrase the Industrial Revolution. It had also been one of the chief sources of the Romanticism which was flooding over Europe, and to which Tocqueville, in spite of his upbringing, was extremely susceptible. Sicily had been for him the land of Greek mythology; America was that of Fenimore Cooper and Chateaubriand; Britain was that of Walter Scott. It was also Marie Mottley’s homeland. All in all, it is no wonder that Tocqueville was an eager visitor.

  He reached London on 10 August, and stayed until the 26th. From first to last the city disconcerted him. It was so enormous, he told Beaumont, that he felt as insignificant as a gnat at harvest-time. The air was perpetually smoky, ‘but it isn’t raining, which, they say, is unusual’, so he was able to walk everywhere, which was just as well: ‘I’ve never been in a town so terribly expensive.’ And for his purposes he had arrived at the wrong moment of the year: ‘the world’ was leaving for the country, and those great persons who still remained did not receive him as he wished, in spite of his letters of introduction. Perhaps Mme de Pisieux had done her work too thoroughly; at any rate Tocqueville complained that the aristocrats could not get it out of their heads that he was a mere Parisian élégant, and they only talked to him of balls and evening parties which anyway would not be given before the winter. Much to his surprise, it was the Système pénitentiaire which opened doors for him. Tocqueville was vastly pleased to find that it was the best passport that he could have asked for – politicians and savants had read and admired it and were delighted to meet one of its authors and to help him in any way he wanted.13

  On 13 August he was taken to witness a debate in the House of Lords. It served to confirm all his first impressions. The peers met in a large room hung with scarlet cloth, and either sat round a table or lounged casually on cushioned benches. About fifty of them were present, dressed informally (except for the bishops), many of them in riding clothes and boots (in Paris, we must remember, the peers wore uniform). Many kept their hats on. There was no ceremony, but a general air of good fellowship, ‘a certain perfume of aristocracy’. Tocqueville was enchanted, but his French good sense was astonished by the appearance of the Lord Chancellor, Brougham, in an enormous powdered wig. The clerks were also bewigged. Then the Duke of Wellington rose to open the debate. Tocqueville shuddered with excitement. There below him was the amazing man who had conquered France and Napoleon. No doubt he would say something extraordinary.

  Alas, the Duke was no great speaker (as his followers knew all too well). He could hardly get through his remarks. He seemed as nervous as a child reciting its lesson before a harsh schoolmaster.

  The hero of Waterloo didn’t know exactly where to put his arms and legs or how to balance his long body. He kept picking up and putting down his hat, fidgeting to left and right, buttoning and unbuttoning his breeches pocket, as if he might find there the words which were certainly not coming easily from his brain ...

  Then the Lord Chancellor spoke, and immediately showed himself a first-rate orator, though he did not speak at any length.14 Tocqueville much enjoyed his evening, but it is striking that in his account of it he scarcely mentions the topic of debate, although it was one of the greatest measures ever passed by Parliament: the bill to abolish slavery in the British Empire, which would become law on 29 August. At this stage of his development (and, we may add, of the development of parliamentary government in France) Tocqueville did not understand, and was certainly not interested in, the real work of a legislature. He hungered only for the dramatic and picturesque. He did not bother to visit the House of Commons, although the Reform Act had so enormously increased its power and significance. He had shown as little interest in the House of Representatives when he visited Washington.

  Two days later he went to study the electoral process, as he had signally failed to do in the United States. There was a by-election in the City of London, and Tocqueville was present for the last of the polling in Guildhall. He arrived in the afternoon, and had to make his way through a crowd in the streets waving placards scrawled with slogans: ‘Kemble for Ever’ (Kemble was the Tory candidate), ‘Crawford and Reform’. Some of the Crawford placards called for ‘Poor Laws in Ireland!’, ‘Better Wages in England!’ Tocqueville rather sniffily dismissed these demands as gross bribes offered to popular passions. He counted fifty placards waving in front of Guildhall itself, and saw that all the walls round were plastered with similar posters. Inside the hall he found a crowd which ‘contrasted grotesquely with the feudal majesty of the place that held it’. Most of those present evidently belonged to the lowest classes: ‘they even had impressed on their faces that degraded character which one only comes across in the people of great cities ... It was, in short, both a very tumultuous spectacle and a somewhat disgusting one.’ Cheers, hisses and catcalls as the voting went forward until four o’clock, when Crawford was declared the winner. Thunderous cheers, for the crowd was Whig. Crawford spoke, in what Tocqueville thought was a manner as vulgar as the crowd of his listeners, who constantly interrupted him: ‘it was a kind of colloquy between them and him.’ Kemble spoke, bravely restating his principles in defiance of the crowd. ‘I couldn’t help thinking of the savages of North America who delight in insulting their enemies while being burnt by them.’ Then Crawford and the Whigs went off to celebrate in a tavern while the rest dispersed. There was not a soldier in sight, though many policemen.15

  Tocqueville was unimpressed by what he called ‘this electoral farce’. He commended the ‘manly habits’ which sustained Kemble in his defiance, but on the whole ‘this Saturnalia of English liberty’ filled him with disgust rather than fear; in fact he speculated that this sort of thing contributed to maintaining aristocracy by filling the middle classes with a horror of democracy, as the ancient Spartans used to get slaves drunk to give citizens a horror of wine. A few days later he was taken by Mr Bulwer,* a Radical MP, to a public meeting in support of the rebel Poles exiled to Switzerland (two years previously he and Beaumont had attended a similar meeting in Boston). On this occasion Tocqueville was much impressed by a man called Duffy, a much better speaker than the Duke of Wellington: ‘we had laid eyes on an orator.’ He denounced mere charity to the Poles and demanded a resort to arms, amid frantic cheering. ‘Rarely, in
all my life, have I been as much carried away by a speech as I was this evening listening to this man of the people,’ wrote Tocqueville. ‘... In him, I saw the precursor of those revolutionaries who are destined, at no distant date, to change the face of England.’ What did it matter that the lord presiding over the meeting was addressed by Duffy in respectful terms? Duffy had proclaimed himself ‘a workingman belonging to the lowest ranks of industry’, and been cheered for it. ‘When men appear so content in and proud of their lowliness, let those placed above them tremble.’16

  These two incidents show how firmly Tocqueville could cling to his preconceptions, and how little his tour of America had widened his social sympathies. He could not enjoy a crowd, and as to Duffy, he was indeed a portent, but not of revolution. Tocqueville should have reflected on how extraordinary it was, in French terms, that a public meeting could unite the upper, middle and working classes of England in a good cause – or at any rate a bellicose one.

  The fact was that although he boasted to his father that he preferred to travel alone and would never again go on a long journey with a companion, he missed Beaumont. In England there was so much to discover and think about, he found it difficult to decide what to concentrate on, he needed Beaumont’s advice: ‘Try to get my intelligence moving: you know that that is what matters. Left to myself I slumber and can’t get going until I clearly see where I want to arrive ... so I need your practical sense to give me a shove.’ Beaumont was very willing to help. He would have liked to be with Tocqueville (it is not apparent why he was not) but, failing that, he made good use of the post:

  try to direct your attention to roads, canals, railways. When a canal or a railway is built, what part does the government play? What part private enterprise? Is government authorization necessary for such undertakings? is it ever in fact refused? Or is the application for such authorization a mere form?

  And so on for a full page.

  It is doubtful if his advice was of the slightest use to his friend. Beaumont’s head was full of a project for launching a new magazine to deal with political and economic subjects in partnership with a country neighbour, André-Michel Guerry, who happened to be France’s leading statistician. Naturally Tocqueville was to be involved: Beaumont’s idea was that they should invest the Monthyon prize-money in the scheme, and he hoped that Tocqueville could find some contributors in London. Tocqueville was quite willing to try, though he could not promise to contribute himself until his book on America was finished (this remark is the only indication we have that it may have been begun).17

  He continued his English investigations. On Sunday, 18 August, he was the guest of honour at what he called ‘a penitentiary dinner’, where one of the diners was Richard Whately, the archbishop of Dublin, who was also a political economist, a prison reformer and, Tocqueville was told, the only Whig on the bench of bishops. ‘He was very civil to me, but I could not get used either to the bizarrerie of his attire [powdered wig and lawn sleeves, no doubt] or to seeing him accompanied by his wife and several tall pretty daughters, whom I couldn’t match with my idea of a bishop.’ Yet it was probably this encounter which emboldened Tocqueville to introduce himself to Whately’s close friend, Nassau Senior, a distinguished economist,* who was hard at work with Edwin Chadwick preparing their famous report on the reform of the Poor Law. Perhaps Tocqueville had hopes of securing a contributor to Beaumont’s review. At any rate he bounced into Senior’s chambers in Lincoln’s Inn one day with the announcement, ‘Je suis Alexis de Tocqueville, et je viens faire votre connaissance.’ The two men took to each other at first sight, and a lifelong friendship began. Unfortunately it did not start to leave a paper trail until the following year. 18

  Tocqueville had long and stimulating conversations with Mr Bulwer and John Bowring, a leading Benthamite, and in his usual fashion began to make notes, on such topics as religion (by which he meant the Church of England, which he thought was endangered as the French Church had been in 1789), aristocracy and decentralization. As to the last subject, Bowring told him that ‘England is the country of decentralization’, and Tocqueville, most unusually, felt that the principle had been carried too far, especially when it came to law enforcement. However, he pointed out to himself that a federal government could adjust to social diversity better than a unitary one: ‘note for my book on America’. But for the time being his observations on aristocracy went further and left more of a mark, not only on his own thought but on that of later writers. The English aristocracy, nobles and gentry, was distinguished from all others by the ease with which inferiors, if rich enough, could enter its ranks. Everybody could hope to rise to the enjoyment of noble privileges, so the privileges themselves were not hated but valued, and served to make the aristocracy cherished. Aristocracy in England was not founded on birth but on wealth, ‘and this single distinction has enabled it to survive when all others have succumbed, either to the commons or to kings.’ Tocqueville did not expect this state of affairs to last much longer: economic distress was too great. Nevertheless, aristocratic ideas and instincts ran deep. ‘I have not yet met a single Englishman who realized that a law of inheritance, dividing up property, might be passed, so natural does inequality of fortune appear and so customary has it become.’19

  After a fortnight in London it was time to see the country. One of Tocqueville’s letters of introduction had brought him an invitation to visit the Earl of Radnor at his country-house, Longford Castle near Salisbury. This was attractive: Radnor was a staunch Whig and as a boy had witnessed the early stages of the revolution of 1789; and Tocqueville very much wanted to see how a great English lord lived on his estate. He left London on 26 August, planning to fill in the time before he was expected at Longford with a ramble in search of the picturesque, or at least the Gothic.20

  First stop, Oxford. He travelled by stagecoach, sitting on the roof with an iron bar for back support and his feet dangling in mid-air: it was an exception to the otherwise universal rule of English comfort (which always evoked Tocqueville’s warm enthusiasm). It was a relief to get out of London and see the sun again: he thought that it must have been Milton’s long residence in the city which gave him the idea of ‘darkness visible’. As to Oxford, he fell in love with the place on sight: its Gothic lay-out and architecture made it the most interesting city in Europe. He roved through its alleys by moonlight, and was reminded of Pompeii, for the city seemed as if it had been disinterred to show him what medieval towns had been like – towns such as Victor Hugo had described in Notre-Dame de Paris. He was less impressed by the university as an educational or scholarly establishment. He dined with the fellows of Queen’s College, and was appalled at the amount which he was expected to eat and drink: ‘you know that overdoing it doesn’t agree with me.’ He thought he got off lightly by having a restless night as a result. The fellows lived on the revenues of the monks whom they had replaced, and gorged as if they were monks themselves: ‘It is only the name of the abuse which has changed.’21 Nor was that all. The curriculum centred on Greek and Latin, which Tocqueville would have approved if to these fourteenth-century studies they had added some nineteenth-century ones, but science was almost unknown and modern languages were not taught at all. The colleges seemed to exist solely for the benefit of the fellows, most of whom took their share of the revenue without doing any teaching. ‘It’s exactly like the abbeys of the ancien régime, of which the heads were often not even priests.’ There were only 1,500 undergraduates in the twenty-two colleges, who lived in luxury and had six months of vacation annually! The chief beneficiaries of the system were the younger sons of the aristocracy. The only justification offered for this state of affairs was the will of the founders; but in that case, asked Tocqueville unkindly, should not the fellows have stuck to Catholicism? ‘It is true that by a mezzo termine which is typically English, the monks having been expelled, the fellows were forbidden to marry.’22 Oxford, in short, illustrated all too completely Tocqueville’s reasons for thinking that England
was an aristocratic society on the brink of collapse.

  He was both an acute and, by now, a thoroughly trained observer; fortunately Warwick, his next port of call, was not in the least a place to excite his scorn. After dinner at his inn he walked out to see the castle and was overcome by Romantic admiration: ‘We have nothing in France which so recalls the feudal age, those centuries of liberty and oppression, of great crimes and sublime virtues, of enthusiasm and energy, which will live in men’s imagination as long as there is any poetry in the world.’ He plunged into a detailed description of the castle which no doubt interested Marie, but need not be quoted. When he left he was still excited, and although night was falling decided to hire a horse and visit the ruins of Kenilworth castle, a few miles down the road.

  Imagine an Italian night: not a breath of wind; the sky cloudless, the Moon full; add to this an eager, speedy horse between my legs, all the centuries of chivalry whirling in my head and the remains of youthful fire still pulsing in my blood; and you will realize that I rode, as it were, without touching the ground.

  Everyone was in bed when he got to Kenilworth, but his shouts finally brought a young woman to her window (‘very pretty, so far as the Moon and my eyes allowed me to judge’) and she told him the way to the castle. He wandered about the ruins in a state of high chateaubri-anesque rapture (‘was I not, as a matter of fact, in Death’s domain?’), sat on a stone and evoked the wraith of Amy Robsart, ‘that delicious creation of Walter Scott’s genius’. He seemed to hear the echo of her last cry as she fell from the precipice prepared for her, and might have stayed at Kenilworth all night if his horse had not begun to kick the fence to which it was tied. He jogged back to Warwick reflecting on the strange power of fiction.* It started to rain.23