Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Alexis by now was more than halfway through his book, and may suddenly have noticed that he had yet to mention half the human race. At any rate his next four chapters all concerned themselves with women. The first, ‘On the Education of Girls in the United States’, begins with the resounding affirmation that ‘There has never been a free society without morals [moeurs], and as I said in the first part of this book, morality is Woman’s work. Everything which influences women’s status, their habits and their opinions, is therefore of great political interest to me.’47 It hardly needs repeating that Tocqueville had a great interest in the subject of women’s education, and strong views. Like many other European visitors to nineteenth-century America he was fascinated by the energy and independence of the young women he met:

  I was often surprised and almost frightened by the sight of the strange dexterity and happy boldness with which American girls knew how to steer their thoughts and words through warm conversation; one of our philosophers would have stumbled a hundred times on the narrow way which they ran over without mischance or difficulty.

  What he meant by this was that these young Americans had none of the prudery and ignorance of well-brought-up French girls, who were shut up for their schooling in convents (‘as in the aristocratic era’) and were then left to fend for themselves when they entered the world. The Americans had the better system (he put it down to Protestantism). Since danger was inevitable, they thought it best to teach their daughters how to look after themselves. This was not without drawbacks in Tocqueville’s opinion: it made women virtuous but cold, rather than tender wives and amiable companions for men. But it was a price worth paying: ‘a democratic education is necessary to protect women from the dangers with which democratic institutions and manners surround them.’48

  Acute readers may already have found something to frown over, and the impression is confirmed in the next three chapters. It emerges that the only point which concerns Tocqueville in the education of women is the need to keep them virgins until they marry and to stop them from committing adultery afterwards. He explicitly attacks ‘European’ theorists (he meant the Saint-Simonians) who, ‘muddling the distinct attributes of the sexes’, want to give women the same functions, rights and duties as men: ‘It is easy to see that in thus striving to equal the sexes one degrades them both; and that nothing could ever come of such a gross confusion of Nature’s work but weak men and unchaste women.’49 He wastes no time on such notions (and is evidently unaware of the extent to which they were gaining ground both in Britain and America). His business is to use the example of American women to recommend democracy, and the manners of democracy to criticize traditional marriage in France. He had an axe to grind.

  Aristocratic marriage, he says, is often a matter of uniting fortunes rather than individuals, ‘so it sometimes happens that the groom is brought to it as a schoolboy, the bride being still at nurse.’ It is inevitable that in such unions the spouses feel free to look elsewhere for love – ‘that follows naturally from the nature of the contract.’50 A further difficulty is the insistence on marrying only in your own order – misalliances are forbidden. This too leads to adultery – ‘in this way Nature compensates secretly for the restrictions imposed by law.’51 How differently things are done in democratic America! There, young women, educated into solid intelligence and manly habits (sic), voluntarily take on the yoke of a marriage which, as described by Tocqueville, sounds more like a prison (‘inexorable public opinion in the United States takes care to shut women up in the narrow circle of their domestic duties and forbids them to leave it’).52 This puzzles Tocqueville, as well it might, but he explains it by the fact that there are no class obstacles to stop a woman marrying any man who asks her. She can choose freely, and usually does so only when the strength of mind which her education has given her has ripened with experience: ‘there are hardly any early marriages.’ Her reason tells her that she must sacrifice her self-will entirely to marital necessity: ‘for a woman the springs of happiness lie only in the conjugal home.’ This reasoned firmness of character makes her an excellent helpmeet. Tocqueville had been particularly impressed by young wives on the frontier: ‘Fever, loneliness, boredom never broke their courage ... they seemed simultaneously sad and resolute.’53 To drive the point home he printed an excerpt from ‘Quinze jours dans le désert’ as an appendix, and remarked that there was almost no adultery in America – so little that it was not considered an interesting subject for fiction, so there were very few American novels.54

  There is a great deal more of this kind of thing, but it is needless to give further specimens of these effusions of nineteenth-century male ideology. What is important is to understand why Tocqueville put them in his book. He was vindicating his decision to marry Marie. His view of marriage and the family is an advance inasmuch as he explicitly champions marriages of affection against the cold arranged marriages of the aristocratic past. The advance was limited: ‘equality of status will never make men chaste,’ he says, and at times he comes perilously close to Proudhon’s remark that women can only be housewives or prostitutes: democracy, he says, by putting an end to philandering and idle seduction, will increase the number of prostitutes as well as of chaste wives: ‘In the eyes of a lawmaker, prostitution is much less fearsome than galanterie’ – by which he meant Don Giovanni’s hobby; in this, as in other aspects of the matter, he is positively Victorian, as André Jardin remarked.55 What can Marie de Tocqueville have thought of these passages, which give men enormous sexual licence, and women none? (At least she would not be able to say that she hadn’t been warned.) But we must not lose sight of the point that, taken together, the passages praising the new laws of inheritance and marriages of affection, which are not afraid of mésalliance, can bear only one meaning, at least to those who know the story of Alexis and Marie.

  Once this is grasped it becomes obvious that much of the book is written with the same purpose: self-justification. Tocqueville remained a noble to his fingertips, but in the 1830s he had broken with the way of his world to what seemed, to him and to it, a shocking extent. He had taken the oath to Louis-Philippe, he had claimed his patrimoine under the Code Napoléon, he had married as unsuitably as possible and, worst of all, he had emerged as the prophet of a democratic future for France. And he wrote his new book at the very time that he was challenging both the legitimists and the regular Orleanists for one of the Norman parliamentary seats. So it came about that much of what he wrote can best be understood as a personal manifesto.

  It was not easy for him. For much of the time, as we have seen, he let himself be carried away by nostalgia for the old days and by loyalty to his caste into almost hysterical anxiety about the new era. It is tempting to guess that he was partly moved by guilt about his mother: he started writing the new Démocratie almost as soon as she was dead, but it would be straining the evidence to say more than that. Nor does his poor physical health seem to be especially relevant to his performance. All that is clear is that in many respects he passionately disliked the new world into which he was being dragged, and yet he was determined to accept it, not merely because (as he thought) it was God’s will, but because he agreed with God. Justice, he thought, was on the side of democracy, and therefore he would be too; although, as he so often asserted, all too correctly, he would be a candid friend, never hesitating to point out faults and dangers.

  In the end he rose above all difficulties and inconsistencies and composed the last page of his book, one of the noblest things he ever wrote. It is Tocqueville at his best, both as a man and a thinker. It must be quoted in full:

  Now that I have concluded my enterprise ... I am left full of fears and full of hope. I see great dangers, which can be averted; great evils which can be avoided or diminished, and I am more and more confirmed in the faith that to be virtuous and prosperous democratic nations only have to will it.

  I am not ignorant that several of my contemporaries have decided that here below nations are never their
own masters, and that of necessity they obey I know not what invincible and mindless power arising from previous events, or from their ancestry, or the soil, or the climate.

  These are false and cowardly doctrines, which can only produce weak men and pusillanimous nations: Providence has created humanity neither entirely independent, nor wholly enslaved. In very truth, it draws round each man a circle of Fate from which he cannot escape; but within its vast area he is strong and free, and so it is with peoples.

  The nations of our time cannot escape equality of status; but it depends on themselves whether that equality will lead them to slavery or liberty, to enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness.56

  Thus, after years of painful thought, Tocqueville expressed the creed he meant to live by – and that indeed he did live by, until his death.

  The second Démocratie was eagerly awaited by the cultivated public, and Gosselin printed a much larger edition than he had done of the first, though he was not wise enough to risk a cheap edition.57 No doubt to his disappointment, and certainly to Tocqueville’s, the book fell flat, and the edition was still not exhausted by 1848. There were various reasons for this mischance. For an author 1840 was an unlucky year: the real possibility of war with all Europe over the Eastern Question distracted the attention of readers, editors and reviewers. Nor, as Tocqueville was very well aware, was he a new star any longer: the surprise at his emergence had worn off. For that matter, America was no longer so popular with French opinion: there had been too much diplomatic friction since 1835, and first the panic of 1837 and then the depression of 1839 had markedly injured the French economy. But undoubtedly the chief cause lay in the book itself. Its virtues worked against it as much as its weaknesses (perhaps even more). If the public had had any particular expectations, it was of more about America; instead they were confronted by a book which required them to think about democracy. Rossi, reviewing it in the Revue des deux mondes, remarked sardonically that ‘Reading M. de Tocqueville’s book is not something men of today are used to doing; it demands not merely eyes but also thought. It is no amusement, it is work.’58 And the general political climate was no longer so sympathetic. The liberal consensus of 1835, to the degree that it had ever existed, was breaking up: opinion was moving either to the Right and a sort of sterile conservatism, or to the Left, where both republicanism and socialism were gaining ground. No longer did Tocqueville seem to be the man of the moment, or his concerns particularly urgent. It did not even help that his book was warmly welcomed in Britain; that country was no more popular than the United States in 1840s France. Tocqueville began to acquire among his countrymen that reputation of being a virtuous bore which was to be so damaging to him posthumously.

  The reception of the 1840 Démocratie has been so admirably studied by Françoise Mélonio in her Tocqueville et les Français that it need not be explored at any length here; but three of the reviews must be glanced at for their importance to Tocqueville himself and to our understanding of him.

  The first was unfavourable: Sylvestre de Sacy’s article in the Journal des débats, which appeared somewhat belatedly on 9 October. The Débats, without being a government mouthpiece, was a particularly forceful supporter of the Orleanist settlement as it had evolved since 1830, and was hardly likely to welcome a book so full of apprehension and so anxious to see the further expansion of liberty and democratic institutions. Sacy, who knew Tocqueville, disliked having to criticize him, but did so nevertheless, using the Démocratie (which he does not seem to have understood) as a springboard for a vigorous defence of the constitutional monarchy as it was in 1840. Tocqueville was furious, and drafted a blistering letter to Sacy (which it is to be hoped that he sent). Sacy, he said, had missed the central point, ‘la pensée mère de l’ouvrage’.

  I noticed that in our time the new order of society which has produced, and still produces, great benefits, gives birth also to some alarming tendencies. These seedlings, if left to grow freely, seemed to me likely to produce unending enfeeblement of the mind, sordid manners and, at last, universal slavery ... My object in writing my book was to exhibit the fearful possibilities which are opening before my contemporaries ... and thus to inspire those efforts of the heart and the will which alone can fight them, to teach democracy how to know itself and then to govern and direct itself.59

  He was seldom so trenchant when calm. Here, in a couple of sentences, he expresses the central concern which drove his investigations (successfully or not) and explains why posterity has argued over them ever since. Few topics are of greater importance to modern humanity.

  He had responded in very different fashion a week or two earlier, when J.-J. Ampère sent him the article he had just published in the Revue de Paris. It was a review in the form of an open letter to Tocqueville; it was favourable, and in verse. ‘Forgive me,’ said Ampère, ‘I had no time to put it into prose.’ His summer had indeed been wretchedly busy: he had had to wage a sustained campaign to win a valuable prize from the Académie des Inscriptions, he had put his brother-in-law in a madhouse and his sister in a home for the psychologically disturbed, and he had had to escort Mme Récamier into Germany, where she was going to visit a spa. Wherever he went the new Démocratie went with him, and scraps of verse gradually fused into a poem. For his response was the most imaginative of all: he understood that he was confronted with two myths, that of aristocracy and that of democracy. At one moment he found himself taking a steamboat journey up the Rhine:

  I see upon its banks

  Ruinous fortresses, to left and right,

  So many that the hills bristle with towers

  Clinging, it seems, to the black flanks of clouds.

  Your book pursues me, I can’t put it down,

  And where could be a better place to read it?

  Those ruins speak of ancient aristocracy,

  And what, than steam, can better voice democracy?

  Here I compare two ages of the world

  Whose secrets yield to your all-piercing eye!

  Old Europe stands above, upon the hills,

  Colossal – crumbling; lofty – ruinous.

  Another lies below: this very boat:

  Prosaic, yes, but strong, and bold, and new!

  How well he understood, he said, Tocqueville’s melancholy contemplation of the Middle Ages, when lord and peasant were bound together in mutual obligations, and men worked, built or wrote for the long future. The olden days would have pleased him too, he said, if everyone could have been born a gentleman. But now was the day of Equality, the daughter of Time and Necessity, and Europeans were like the seabirds that had followed Tocqueville’s ship across the Atlantic – lost, weary, battered by the winds; the vigilant pilot was Tocqueville himself, warning of storms. Then followed more than fifty lines, summing up Tocqueville’s perceptions and his advice:

  To exorcize the evils of equality

  Cherish, you tell us, cherish liberty!

  Ampère’s eloquent simplifications swept away all the hesitations, contradictions and digressions of Tocqueville’s treatise, and so made his thesis all the more comprehensible and persuasive. No wonder Tocqueville was delighted.60

  He was gratified by all the praise of Ampère and other friends – Beaumont, Royer-Collard – whether given publicly or privately. But the views he most wanted were those of one Englishman. As soon as his book was published in Paris he sent a copy to John Stuart Mill via Guizot, who was now the French ambassador in London, and followed it up with a letter saying what he had done: ‘Consider it as testimony of the great esteem and sincere affection I have for you.’ Mill replied at once, saying that he had already bought and read the English translation, but ‘I shall have the greatest pleasure in owing to your friendship a copy of the second part of your great work.’ He was going to write on it for the October issue of the Edinburgh Review, but he did not keep Tocqueville waiting for the main points of his verdict:

  You have changed the face of political philosophy, you
have carried on the discussions respecting the tendencies of modern society, the causes of those tendencies, & the influences of particular forms of polity & social order, into a region both of height & of depth which no one before you had entered, & all previous argumentation & speculation in such matters appears but child’s play now.61

  That was handsome, to say the least, but when the article appeared Tocqueville found that Mill had gone even further: not only did he repeat his opinion of the book’s importance (‘the beginning of a new era in the scientific study of politics’), but he carefully wove into his assessment of the new volumes a reminder of the interest and value of the old. He also paid Tocqueville the compliment of occasionally disagreeing with him, most significantly when he argued that:

  M. de Tocqueville, then, has at least apparently, confounded the effects of Democracy with the effects of Civilization. He has bound up in one abstract idea the whole of the tendencies of modern commercial society, and given them one name – Democracy; thereby letting it be supposed that he ascribes to equality of conditions, several of the effects naturally arising from the mere progress of national prosperity.