Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  (In slightly differing forms, this point was also made by many French critics, at the time and later, and as we have seen was even uneasily apprehended by Tocqueville himself.) Nevertheless we can see why Tocqueville, in his grateful acknowledgement, said that he was going to bind up the review with a copy of his work. ‘Of all the articles written on my book, yours is the only one whose author has made himself completely master of my thought, and has known how to exhibit it to the public.’ And indeed, Mill’s incomparable lucidity of thought and expression sometimes enabled him to understand Tocqueville better than Tocqueville did himself, to state his positions more persuasively, and even, here and there, to foreshadow the future development of Tocqueville’s ideas.62

  Mill’s essay was and is a work of first-rate importance, even more so in the story of his own thought than in that of Tocqueville’s, and it cannot be fully discussed here. But three last points may be made.

  First, Mill devoted much of his space to applying Tocquevillean thought to British society and politics, and by doing so finally established Tocqueville as a major influence on British liberalism.

  Second, at various points in his review he displayed his own prophetic sensitivity to the onrush of current history in such a way as unconsciously to demonstrate that new issues were arising, new events impending, which already threatened to make the Démocratie, so deeply rooted in the Revolution of July, obsolescent. He was inclined to think that Tocqueville should have used the concept of class more systematically, and have acknowledged that the actual rise of the middle class and the imminent advance of most of the working class were two themes of enormous importance. Evil, he reflected, lay not in the domination of the middle class as such, but in the domination of any class whatever. ‘Whenever any variety of human nature becomes preponderant in a community, it imposes upon all the rest of society its own type; forcing all, either to submit to it or to imitate it.’ He also felt it necessary to assert that ‘Economical and social changes, though among the greatest, are not the only forces which shape the course of our species; ideas are not always the mere signs and effects of social circumstances, they are themselves a power in history.’

  Third, it is striking that both Mill and Ampère read Tocqueville in the way that he desired. It is a reading which it is easy to overlook in the proliferation of modern commentary, but it is essential. ‘Cherish, you tell us, cherish liberty.’ In spite of its sociological* aspirations and its anxious preoccupations, the Démocratie, throughout its four volumes, is a profoundly political work, the main thrust of which is to establish that equality had become inevitable and could be so ordered by liberty as to build justice. No-one who has studied Tocqueville can doubt that he made his case, or can fail, in spite of all reservations, to be influenced by it. Mill understood this more clearly than any other of Tocqueville’s first readers; understood, therefore, that the book of which he had to give an account was a masterpiece and a classic; and so it still seems in the twenty-first century.

  * ‘To me, Tocqueville has every appearance of devoting himself to democracy as Pascal did to the Cross: rabidly. That is all very well for talent, which is nothing but a noble battle, but when it is a question of truth and full conviction, a pinch of salt is necessary.’

  * A Plutarchian allusion. When once Caesar tried to put to sea in a fierce storm the captain panicked, but Caesar reassured him: ‘Fear nothing. You carry Caesar and his good luck.’ (The ship put back to port all the same.)

  † Jean-Jacques Ampère (1800–1864), son of the great physicist; professor of literature at the Collège de France; the devoted friend of Mme Récamier.

  * There has been lengthy discussion as to whether the two parts of De la Démocratie en Amérique are separate works or not. My own view is that the second part is integrally dependent on the first, indeed is unintelligible without it, so that it ought certainly to be read as a continuation, not a sequel, let alone as an independent treatise.

  * See above p. 4.

  † Manières, not moeurs. Cf. AT’s conversation with Sedgwick, above, p. 256.

  *This omission, at least, he made good sixteen years later, in the Ancien Régime.

  † See p. 271, footnote. The best discussion of his usage may be found in Schleifer, 263–74; and see Kergorlay’s letter, above, p. 326.

  ‡ Mehemet Ali (1769–1849), much in the news as AT wrote because of his attempt to seize Syria from the Ottoman Empire.

  * The Republic has been established in France for over 130 years, but it is still possible, on payment of a fee and the production of proofs, to get the state to certify your noble status. The College of Arms in London is much less of an anomaly, Britain still being a monarchy, with, at the time of writing (2006), a parliamentary peerage.

  * See above, p. 322.

  * AT refers briefly to the oppressive weight of majority opinion in democratic societies, reminding his readers that he has dealt thoroughly with the subject elsewhere (i.e., in the 1835 Démocratie). He also takes the opportunity to point out that another revolution in the United States could only be produced by the racial problem, in other words not by equality but by inequality. It is a pity that he did not say this in 1835 (see OC I ii 263).

  * See above, p. 194.

  * See above, p. 268.

  * The caution he gives should always be borne in mind: ‘the history of domestic relations cannot be written in the same way as the history of international relations and any description of them must be tentative and incomplete’ (T. Zeldin, France 1848–1945, Oxford, 1973, I, 285).

  * In 1840 the word ‘sociology’ had only just been coined by Auguste Comte.

  BOOK TWO

  Monsieur de Tocqueville

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DEPUTY

  1839–1847

  Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?

  MOLIÈRE, LES FOURBERIES DE SCAPIN

  TALKING TO NASSAU SENIOR in the spring of 1848, a few weeks after the February Revolution, Gustave de Beaumont had his own explanation for that catastrophe. The constitutional monarchy, he thought, had been too British for the French. ‘In France we are not good balancers of inconveniences. Nous sommes trop logiques. As soon as we see the faults of an institution, nous la brisons. In England you calculate; we act on impulse ... Unless we greatly improve, we never shall have any permanent institutions; for as we destroy every institution as soon as we discover its faults, and no one is free from them, nothing can last.’1 No doubt there was something to be said for this view, but it was hindsight. Tocqueville (and Beaumont too) was quite without such scepticism (or call it cynicism) when he entered parliament. The hopefulness of the years before 1830 had not yet entirely deserted him. ‘I had passed the best years of my youth in the midst of a society which seemed to be renewing its prosperity and greatness as it renewed its liberty; there I had conceived the idea of a moderate, disciplined liberty, constrained by its beliefs, manners and laws; the charms of such liberty had captivated me; it had become the passion of my life.’2 He meant to satisfy his ambition and idealism alike by exercising and strengthening this liberty; by playing a part in the drama of public life. The next eight years severely tested the wisdom of this aspiration.

  He was a complete novice, and his service in the Chamber of Deputies is best regarded as a new apprenticeship, or as Henry Adams might have said, a further stage in his education. Great things were expected of him – according to Rémusat he was the last man of superior talent to be elected to the Chamber under the July regime – but he only slowly learned his trade, though he was an assiduous student. The nature of his difficulties is clear: it was largely personal. In the House of Commons, because of the layout of the chamber, a member can always have his party (or some of it) around him and behind him when he speaks, supporting him in difficulty and applauding him in moments of success. A United States Senator speaks from the solitary dignity of his desk, usually to a tiny audience. Tocqueville in the Palais Bourbon had to mount the tribune and short-sighted
ly face a crowded hemicycle, where friends and enemies blurred into a crowd that he confronted as if on trial for his life. This feeling was demoralizing but not baseless. In a few years’ time the revolutionary crowd would again invade the Chamber; meanwhile, without needing to call to mind Robespierre howled down by the Convention or Bonaparte driven out by the Five Hundred, he could not forget the fate of so many of his near relations, destroyed for their political visibility. More important still, his temperamental extremism meant that he suffered agonies of stage-fright: he collapsed physically for two days after almost every speech, such was the intensity of his anxiety. He felt so exposed that in his first two or three orations he seemed to be courting martyrdom, and talked too much about his honour and principles, like an eighteenth-century gentleman issuing a challenge to a duel. Royer-Collard, who had great hopes for Tocqueville and seems to have been the only person who any longer felt free to tell him off, said that he was too self-centred. Tocqueville took the hint, though he could not help smiling as Royer talked incessantly of himself while driving home the point that one must not be egocentric. He loved the old man (‘He is the last of the Romans’) and followed his advice: by the end of his first term in the Chamber his speeches were becoming much more effective. He had learned how to go straight to the point.3

  But he was barely increasing his influence on the deputies. It was the story of the Versailles parquet all over again. He was not a natural orator in an era when oratory was all-important: he could not dominate a debate by the power of his voice and eye, like Guizot, or dazzle with wit, like Thiers. He prepared his speeches as carefully as he did his books and articles; as a result they read better than they sounded, and his colleagues thought him cold and uninspiring. He agreed, acknowledging that he could not think on his feet: when improvisation was necessary he could only come up with sometimes irrelevant fragments of prepared statements.4 Nor did he revel in the battle, readily taking blows as well as giving them.

  He never spoke more than three or four times in a single session. The chief reason was his bad health. In the first nineteen months after his marriage he had had no stomach attacks at all, but after that they came regularly to hamper him. Everyone who now met him for the first time and left a record commented on his sickly appearance: Rémusat at first thought that the greenish tinge of Tocqueville’s face showed him to be a sinister conspirator.5 He changed his mind, and soon became a firm friend, but that hardly helped Tocqueville: remission from pain became rarer and rarer. The demands of the Chamber did nothing to help him in his quest for physical and psychological stability.

  Yet as the career of many a great man has shown, it is not necessary to be wholly healthy or even wholly sane to be a successful politician. Tocqueville’s failure to establish himself as a leader of the Chamber arose in part from his physique and in part from his temperament: he had all the nervousness of a beginner, he was morbidly sensitive to criticism and was shy with his new colleagues. But it was due, far more, to his social and political conditioning; even to his fundamental convictions.

  According to his friend and ally the liberal deputy Jean-Charles Rivet,* he was intolerant of mediocrity. ‘He will not court or talk over or even listen to the common place men who form the rank and file of every assembly: he scarcely knows their names.’6 Tocqueville himself is even more scathing in what is perhaps the frankest passage of his Souvenirs: ‘I have always supposed that mediocre men, like those of merit, have noses, mouths and eyes, but I have never been able to fix in my memory the particular form which these features assume in them. I am forever asking the name of strangers whom I see every day, and forgetting them again ... I honour the type, for it manages the world, but it bores me to death.’7 Beaumont, who was at last elected to the Chamber (for Mamers in the Sarthe) a few months after Tocqueville, says the same thing: ‘Very early in his parliamentary life he had found that an independent member, a member who, supporting no party, is supported by no party, is useless. He allowed himself therefore to be considered as a member of the Gauche [Left]. But I never could persuade him to be tolerably civil to them. Once, after I had been abusing him for his coldness to them he shook hands with Romorantin,* & then looked towards me for my applause! but I doubt whether he ever shook hands with him again.’ No wonder that before long Tocqueville was obliged to accept that he was not going to repeat his triumph as an author. ‘The trade of writer and that of orator fight each other,’ he concluded gloomily.8

  Beaumont, personally, was a much greater success in the Chamber, making many friends by his geniality. As he found his feet he showed a tendency to foster his career by associating with Thiers. This did not escape Tocqueville’s censorious eye. He had assumed that as politicians he and Beaumont would work together as closely as they had as authors, and complained to Kergorlay of what seemed to be desertion. Kergorlay replied in two letters of splendid forthrightness and penetration. The difficulty, he said, lay in the friends’ different characters and inclinations. Beaumont was well launched on a commonplace political career,† while ‘it is absolutely impossible to say what your future will be.’ This was because of the inflexibility of Tocqueville’s moral principles. Kergorlay tried to make himself plain without offence by comparing Tocqueville in this respect to that implacable legitimist, Kergorlay’s own father: his air of complete political probity made him intolerable to those who lacked it. As with the old comte, Tocqueville made people uneasy. ‘They say to themselves, perhaps one day this man will embarrass me greatly, because I have happened to make an evolution without getting his agreement first.’ This was how Thiers responded to Tocqueville, and Guizot, as inflexible as Tocqueville himself, recognized that he would never be able to bridle him. In these circumstances, said Kergorlay, it was no wonder that Beaumont had to keep a little aloof, but he was still as devoted a friend as ever, and Tocqueville must not be severe.9 It was good advice, though perhaps unnecessary: most of the time Tocqueville needed Beaumont’s friendship too much even to reproach him.

  But he did lose his temper spectacularly, almost disastrously, on one occasion. The episode is worth describing because of the light it throws not only on Tocqueville’s temperament, but on his political difficulties.

  After a few years in the Chamber he found himself to be at the centre of a small group of liberal deputies who, like him, opposed Guizot but did not want to work with Thiers if they could help it. In Tocqueville’s opinion Thiers was fundamentally untrustworthy and illiberal, and at bottom cared for nothing but his own advancement.10 Odilon Barrot, the second most conspicuous leader of the opposition, was much more acceptable, but showed a distressing tendency to work with Thiers (it will be seen that Tocqueville still had no idea of the importance of unity and discipline to an opposition). So Tocqueville and his friends toiled, not entirely without success, to establish themselves as a recognized group, not quite a party (they were too few) and not quite outside the ranks of the ‘dynastic Left’ which Barrot led. It was a difficult position to explain, so when in the spring of 1844 the chance came to own a newspaper they jumped at it. These were great years for the Parisian press. If the July Revolution had done nothing else, it had demonstrated the power of newspapers, and in spite of the September laws that power flourished and grew under Louis-Philippe. Tocqueville knew this, and valued his connection with Le Siècle, which he owed in part to Beaumont. Unfortunately Le Siècle was committed to Thiers, and eventually it was made clear to him that unless he toed the party line its columns would be closed to him.11 The opportunity to have a newspaper of his own – Le Commerce – could not have come at a better moment.

  Like so many of Tocqueville’s ventures during the July Monarchy the enterprise of Le Commerce was not a success. It was not his fault: he threw himself into the business wholeheartedly, writing for the paper frequently (if anonymously) and playing a full part on the board of management, which usually followed his lead. But he and his associates could not raise enough capital to support the paper, nor could they find a sufficientl
y talented journalist to edit it successfully. The paper’s somewhat equivocal line, which accurately reflected Tocqueville’s political ambiguities, failed to please readers. Circulation declined steadily, and in June 1845 Tocqueville gave it all up as a bad job. He lost at least 4,500 francs over the business – about a quarter of his yearly income.12

  It was an unfortunate affair, made worse by the breach it opened with Beaumont. The two friends had planned that Beaumont would join Le Commerce when a six-month stint on the board of Le Siècle came to an end, but before then the two papers had fallen out, very noisily, over a big political issue: the question of whether the monopoly of the Université (the secular state educational system established by Napoleon) over secondary education should be maintained, or whether private schools should be officially recognized, which would chiefly benefit those run by the Catholic Church. Thiers and Le Siècle supported the Université, Tocqueville and Le Commerce took the other side, and Le Siècle asserted that they did so because Tocqueville was still a secret legitimist. This slander induced Beaumont to resign from its board, but as he too supported the Université he felt that he could not after all join Le Commerce, as he explained in a public letter to Chambolle, the editor of Le Siècle.13

  Tocqueville’s reaction was extraordinary. Instead of being grateful to Beaumont for this display of loyalty he wrote him a long, furious private letter in which he came close to breaking off their friendship. His grievance was that Beaumont’s brief expression of agreement with Chambolle over the schools question (‘I have always been, and have not ceased to be, on your side’) might be taken as endorsing the legitimist slur, or at any rate might reinforce it. ‘I have only one vulnerable point. My birth and my family’s opinions make it easy to believe that I am allied to the legitimists and the clergy, and as I have not married a grand-daughter of General La Fayette, unlike you, this point de départ naturally leads my enemies to attack not only my acts but my intentions, not only my conduct but my honour.’ And what had Beaumont done? When all these allegations had been revived, he had simply said that he had to dissociate himself from them because Tocqueville was his oldest friend, not because they were untrue. Yet who knew better than Beaumont what sacrifices Tocqueville had made, what supreme effort of conscience, in order to be accepted as a sincere liberal? (Perhaps Tocqueville remembered the strong language of his own letter of resignation after Beaumont was dismissed from the parquet.) ‘I would have preferred to be abandoned in the virgin forest ... rather than to be treated so by you ...’ And so on.14