It would be nice to believe that in this passage Tocqueville is groping (as many modern commentators have suggested) towards a theory of the anomie or cafard which is often said to be characteristic of modern society; but it is plain that he is simply following another deductive will-o’-the-wisp, or indulging that snobbish prejudice against bourgeois society which was to be so constant a theme of advanced thought until the late twentieth century. He gives the game away two chapters later when he explains that the Americans successfully counter individualism by elections and party politics: ‘When citizens are forced to concern themselves with public affairs they are of necessity drawn out of the world of private interests and periodically compelled to think of something besides themselves.’ Taking part in free elections educates them in the reality and importance to them of general concerns, while someone who wants to become or to remain a representative must gain the respect of his fellow-citizens by taking their local concerns seriously – by ‘a long succession of small services rendered, of discreet introductions, a constant practice of benevolence and a well-established reputation for disinterestedness’.35 (It is easy to see what Tocqueville learned in his first years of parliamentary politics.) These observations are offered as a remedy for those evils painted in the chapter on individualism (‘As for me, I hold that, in order to conquer the ills that equality can generate, there is only one effective cure: political liberty),36 but they read more like a refutation. Besides, whatever may have been true of the aristocratic era, the democratic age has been deeply marked by solidarity: by political parties, trade unions, great business firms, proselytizing churches, and so on; and it could be shown that the history of the family has been much more complex than Tocqueville supposed, if it were necessary to discuss a theory which is so patently fanciful.
His other great idea was the threat of centralization and ‘democratic despotism’. Centralization, as we have seen, was a concern that (as so often) he had picked up from others.* He made it one of his most particular concerns because he was the first to see that in a society (call it a democracy) where a popularly chosen government reigned supreme, centralization put such a mighty instrument in the government’s hands that it might further the emergence and continuation of a dictatorship – that ‘rule of one man’ against which Tocqueville had already sounded a warning in the 1835 Démocratie, and to which he was passionately opposed. The history of the twentieth century was to offer all too many proofs that he was right to be concerned, though he did not and could not foresee the precise events and mechanisms which were so horribly to vindicate his warnings. What had given him the idea was the course of the French Revolution, which had culminated in the Napoleonic dictatorship by way of the Jacobins. He also saw that the ascendancy of Paris and the instruments of Napoleonic government had not been affected by either the Restoration or the July Revolution: if anything, France was a more centralized country in 1840 than she had been in 1815. No doubt he was alarmed by the reviving cult of the Emperor, and by Louis Napoleon’s second attempt at a coup, at Boulogne on 6 August 1840. Bonapartism was to lead, in just over ten years, to the establishment of exactly such a regime as Tocqueville feared – a striking though unwelcome demonstration of his prescience. Unfortunately neither the coming of Napoleon III nor that of the twentieth-century dictators validates what he actually said in his book or his mode of treating the topic.
During the past hundred years, he says, the monarchs of Europe have rebuilt their states so that all the powers and functions once shared with independent bodies are concentrated in their own hands. ‘I am very far from condemning this concentration of powers; I merely draw attention to it.’37 This sentence is worth registering because it is the only point in the whole of the 1840 Démocratie at which Tocqueville concedes, to the slightest degree, that there may be some necessity for centralization; elsewhere, and at great length, he assumes that it is simply an evil, and tries to demonstrate its deplorable causes and consequences. Once more he states what seems to him self-evident and makes dramatic inferences, rather than engaging in serious investigation of his topic. He has noticed one of the greatest phenomena of his age, the rise of the modern state, but instead of discussing seriously how it was coming about, to what extent it was necessary, and how it could best be organized and controlled, he bundles the whole subject up under the label ‘centralization’ and sets out to give his readers a fright. This enterprise does not even have the merit of originality: he had said much the same in 1835, and as has already been pointed out, decentralization at this date was a shibboleth of the legitimists. Tocqueville’s fulminations are not essentially different from those of any other member of his order.
Much the same must be said of the 1840 Démocratie as a whole. Tocqueville had told Stoffels that he was a new kind of liberal; on the evidence of his book he might as accurately be described as a new kind of legitimist. He had drifted a long way, perhaps without quite realizing it, from the pro-democratic stance and what he hoped was the scientific impartiality of the 1835 volumes.
That he became uneasily aware of this is shown by the last pages of his book and by the ‘Avertissement’ or preface that he wrote for its beginning, as he had written the ‘Introduction’ for the 1835 work, at the last moment. The ‘Avertissement’ is one of those ‘not guilty’ pleas which read like confessions. Tocqueville does not, he says, consider equality to be the sole cause of everything in the modern world. After listing some other factors, especially those concerning the United States (he could very well have referred his readers to the first Démocratie) he goes on:
I recognize the existence of all these different causes and their power, but my business is not, emphatically, to discuss them. I have not undertaken to show the reason for all our inclinations and ideas; I have only wanted to show how equality has modified them.38
He again asserts that the democratic revolution is an irresistible fact against which it would be futile to struggle; that being so, his readers may think it strange that he is so severely critical of the societies which the revolution has brought into being. He answers in the terms of his letters to Reeve and Mill: ‘I reply simply that it is because I am emphatically not an opponent of democracy that I have wanted to treat it sincerely. Men never take the truth from their enemies, and their friends seldom give it to them; that is why I have told it.’ Few others have done so, or pointed out the looming dangers. Having clearly discerned them, or so he thinks, ‘I have not been so cowardly as to keep silent.’
This is surely Philip sober trying to extenuate Philip drunk. Even the magnificent closing pages of the 1840 Démocratie cannot take away the impression made by the rest of the book, which is that despite frequent brilliant flashes of insight and common sense, this is the work of a man who regards the egalitarian phantom which he has conjured up with deep hostility and dread, and wants to rally his caste to control if not defeat it. There is not much difference between this position and that of the parliamentary legitimists who followed Berryer: the only crucial point is that Tocqueville is a legitimist who does not support the Bourbons (he assumed that they were finished), just as he was a Catholic who did not believe in the Church.
What is so curious, biographically, is Tocqueville’s inconsistency. The disavowals in the ‘Avertissement’ were perfectly sincere, and he never disavowed the 1835 Démocratie (which itself pointed both ways). It is necessary to try to explain the phenomenon.
It would probably be wrong to blame the company he kept while writing the book. The friend whom he most regularly consulted was Kergorlay, a fervent legitimist; but as we have seen, Tocqueville only took his advice when it suited him, and found him most useful as an auditor on whom he could test the logic and clarity of his ideas.39, 40 Much the same was true of Beaumont and of Édouard, in whose house so much of the writing was done (and it seems that what Tocqueville wanted most from his advisers was praise and encouragement). It does seem clear from the book itself that Tocqueville expected his readership to consist chief
ly of people like himself: public-spirited country gentlemen, for the most part. With such an expectation, it was unlikely that he would criticize his or their presuppositions very searchingly, and nor did he; but much the same might be said of the 1835 Démocratie, though that he clearly hoped would be read by liberals of all stripes – even republicans – not to mention Americans.
The truth, I suggest, is simply that the 1840 Démocratie was above all a highly personal book. The idea which it conveys most forcibly is that of the writer alone in his eyrie wrestling with his ideas. ‘I investigated elsewhere in this work the causes to which one must ascribe the strength of American political institutions. ... Today, as I concern myself with individuals ...’ Today! For a moment we catch a glimpse of Tocqueville in the tower-room, settling down to work after breakfast. Much further on, as he tries to ram home the point that nowadays government is getting steadily, dangerously stronger, he writes: ‘I attach so much importance to everything that I have just said that I am tormented by the fear of having weakened my argument in trying to make it clear.’ Not for Tocqueville any attempt at a sham-objective, ‘scientific’ prose. He writes as a man speaking to men.41
Nor is it solely a question of style. There are more ways than one of being persuasive and eloquent; Tocqueville chooses to write personally because his ideas are themselves personal. One of the first topics which he tackles in Book One, ‘The Influence of Democracy on the Life of the Mind in the United States,’ is religion. Misled by his method, he makes several mistakes, declaring, for example, that no new religion can arise in democratic society because the citizens will laugh at new prophetic claims (he had not heard of Joseph Smith); but it is not his method which will strike the reader as determining his views. Rather, he seems to fear that in the democratic age his own religious beliefs will be threatened. This he cannot tolerate. ‘For my part, I doubt that mankind can ever simultaneously endure complete religious independence and entire political liberty.’42 Briefly abandoning Cartesianism (and, arguably, thereby contradicting the argument of his first chapter), he asserts that men cannot resolve all their difficulties by going back to first principles every time, so there must always be doctrines laid down as dogmas, and it is preferable that they refer to God rather than to politics, for religious doubt is bound to enervate the soul and weaken the will, thereby preparing citizens for slavery, whereas a reasonable dogmatic religion, even if it cannot guarantee salvation in the next life, will at least be very useful for human happiness and greatness in this one (has he been overdosing on Pascal?) And what should a reasonable religion teach? Why, monotheism, the immortality of the soul and the duty of loving your neighbour. All other religious doctrines, whether the political and legal maxims of the Koran, or the cult of the saints in medieval Christianity, are firmly rejected as unwise and inessential.43
It will be seen that very few readers at any time, whether believers or unbelievers, could be satisfied with these teachings, especially as Tocqueville does not make the slightest effort to back them up with evidence. But it was psychologically necessary for Tocqueville himself to maintain them, so he shovels them into his book on democracy. These passages are important because they illustrate the firmly theistic basis of his thought. As a historian or social scientist he usually relied on purely secular analysis and explanation, but when it came to values religion was indispensable. It was part of the foundation of his being, laid down in childhood, even though he had had to jettison so many of the Abbé Le Sueur’s teachings. Unfortunately, as we have seen, he was never able to transcend the cultural limitations of his cradle Catholicism. He follows up his chapter on religion and democracy with one on the progress of Catholicism in the United States in which, among other blunders, he fails even to mention Irish migration to America, and another on ‘What Draws the Souls of Democratic Peoples towards Pantheism’ (by which he apparently meant unitarianism) in which Cartesianism runs amok and a subtle explanation is found for a non-existent phenomenon. He concludes the one chapter with the thought that, because of democracy, ‘our descendants will tend more and more to take one of two courses, either by falling away entirely from Christianity, or entering the Roman Church,’ and the other by calling all those who still believe in the true greatness of Man to do battle against pantheism.44 Tocqueville remained unable to sympathize with Protestantism or to sense its continuing vitality. To have done either would have entailed a relativist recognition of the limitations of his own creed which he was far too anxious a soul to dare.
The sense that his book is shaped as much by personal neurosis as by logic and observation becomes overwhelming when we scrutinize his pages on the democratic family.
To assess, fairly, Tocqueville’s disquisitions on this subject, it is necessary to understand the world in which he lived and thought, and that is far from easy. The revolutionary era changed the relations between men, women and children, but it is difficult to say to what extent (here is a particular aspect of that debate about continuity and innovation which was to mark so much of Tocqueville’s thought). Theodore Zeldin’s learned and subtle exploration of the topic leaves the impression that progress, or change of any kind, was glacially slow in coming to family life in France between 1789 and 1945; and the evidence he cites gives the gloomiest idea of French manners in this respect.* Common sense insists that since the French were not conspicuously less successful than other nations in their marriages, liaisons and domestic life generally, his evidence must be flawed. Probably it is, but the weight of his argument cannot be dismissed. It is clear that conventional French opinion on such matters as marriage, sex, children and women was, by modern standards, lamentably unimaginative and probably changed minimally as a result of the Revolution. Tocqueville’s views are best studied in the light of this observation. For the most part they were sadly commonplace; that they went beyond the customary in any respect can be attributed to the way he was brought up and, even more, to his experience of America. It is not surprising that when writing of so vastly important a part of human life he gave himself away completely – more completely than in anything else that he published. So would we all, if we were as honest as he was.
His discussion begins with a last return of his idée fixe about the laws of inheritance. He has by now completely revised his first assertions. ‘So far the Americans have emphatically not dreamed of doing what we have done in France, that is, stripping from fathers one of the principal elements of their power by preventing them from disposing of their goods as they wish after their death. In the United States the testator’s right is limitless.’45 He explains the difference by Napoleon: ‘The author of our civil legislation was a man who thought it in his interest to satisfy the democratic passions of his contemporaries in everything that was not directly and immediately hostile to his power.’ What is surprising about Tocqueville’s attitude to this state of affairs is that now he seems to endorse it. He still thinks that the new laws of inheritance have democratized society, but he approves the result. He paints the prettiest picture of the old order, in which the father had absolute power over his sons, and the eldest son had the right of primogeniture, which he always exercised benevolently in the interests of his family and his younger brothers; but there was always an element of fear in the relations between a father and his sons. Not so in democratic times: the father having lost the power to disinherit his sons
a sort of equality reigns over the domestic hearth ... In my opinion, as manners and laws grow more democratic the relations between father and son grow more gentle and intimate; rule, authority, appear less often; confidence and affection are often greater, and it seems that the natural bond strengthens as the social tie weakens.
The same is true of brothers: as they no longer need quarrel over the family inheritance they can remain as good friends for life as they were in their childhood. This new model family is so attractive that even conservatives adopt it. ‘I have known furious enemies of democracy who allow their children to use the tutoyer to them.
’46
It is surely impossible to read this chapter without thinking of Hervé, Hippolyte, Édouard and Alexis, which provokes two further observations: that Alexis writes as if there were never any women in a family, and that possibly the softening of family relations which he describes was for the Tocquevilles, and perhaps therefore others, less the consequence of revolution than of a particular family tradition: we may remember Chateaubriand’s description of Malesherbes en famille; or perhaps it reflected the influence of Rousseau: we may remember Bernard de Tocqueville’s library.
Alexis de Tocqueville Page 45