Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  This childish outburst (it reads even worse in French) deeply hurt Beaumont; in reply he sent a long, sorrowful and devastatingly reasonable letter. Tocqueville seems to have realized quickly that his had been one of those letters best not posted. He wrote again, after a meeting in public where they could do no more than shake hands: ‘When I thought of the long, long part of our lives that had gone by in such tender and devoted friendship, when I remembered, my dear Beaumont, all the proofs of affection that I have so often received from you, in place of talking politics I was tempted to fall on your neck and say to you that whatever may happen, I will always love you with all my heart.’15 Things were patched up, but did not fully return to the old footing until the eve of the February Revolution.

  This lamentable business recalls the affair of Tocqueville’s boyhood duel, when, it will be remembered, he was said to be completely in the wrong.* More than that, it illustrates his somewhat Byronic attitude to himself and to his political career. His first letter to Beaumont shows that his friend’s defection to Thiers still rankled, but the real grievance was the fancied slight to his honour. This, perhaps, reflects the pain which the breach with his family and its traditions had caused him; it had left him excessively touchy. He was consistent: in his dealings with his constituents he reacted fiercely and promptly whenever the legitimist slur was raised. Tocqueville invariably contradicted it as vociferously as possible, which seems to have worked: by 1848 the voters trusted him implicitly. But such extreme sensitivity was less serviceable at Paris. Serious politicians were expected to be teamworkers, not Promethean poseurs, disdainful of other men’s interests and difficulties. Some of the deputies began to ironize a trifle about their new colleague’s well-advertised virtue.

  For if Kergorlay had been correct in observing that Tocqueville was more fastidious morally than most politicians, the latter might never have entered the Chamber had he been quite so austere as he and his friend believed, or stayed there long. As it was, ambition and the need for re-election dominated his calculations as they did those of his fellows, with the usual results. Nothing is clearer than this in the record of his relations with his constituency, the arrondissement of Valognes.

  He was at first dismayed by the littleness of provincial politics. Nothing could be less like his ideal democracy, where patriotic and educated citizens gravely deliberated over the general good, than life in the Cotentin. He poured out his sorrows in several letters to Royer-Collard (who replied, in effect, ‘What did you expect?’). Writing from Tocqueville in August 1840, he laments:

  I came here for a rest and I can’t have two quiet days together. There are hundreds of local concerns that I am expected to take up that have to be studied on the spot. The whole business is accompanied by immense dinners, a dangerous pastime for so weak a stomach as mine. I go through with them, however, because in this province it is only at table, just about, that there is a chance of bringing men together and forming an idea of current opinion. I have never known a country where the prime symptom of public life, which is men’s frequent coming together, is so little known. There are never meetings of any kind; no places where men can freely exchange their opinions and thoughts on any subject whatever.16

  A theme repeatedly arising is that his constituents know and care nothing about national politics; all they are concerned with are their own personal interests, and that usually means either jobs or decorations – Tocqueville was always having to write letters soliciting the Legion of Honour for village maires. He also had to be ready to adjust his opinions, however conscientiously formed. He voted against the Railway Act of 1842 (which Rémusat called the only important law passed in the last eight years of the July regime)17 on budgetary grounds, but he soon realized his mistake, and began an unwearying campaign to get a line built to Valognes and Cherbourg. A horrid rumour got about that he was a free-trader, which alarmed the horse-breeders and cattle-raisers whose trade was the backbone of Cotentin agriculture: he issued a strong statement explaining that while he had always been a protectionist in principle (which can hardly have been true of this student of classical economics), on a recent visit to his brother Édouard (who was a member of the national council of agriculture and a notable protectionist pamphleteer) he had learned how particularly, how scientifically essential it was to protect the stock-breeders of France by raising high tariffs against foreign competition.18 He found that even his anti-slavery convictions might be inconvenient while Cherbourg depended largely on trade with the sugar colonies, although he maintained them honourably.

  No-one can be surprised that Tocqueville gradually turned into a thoroughly down-to-earth politician, who was rewarded by increasingly large majorities at election time; but it is important to understand what these adjustments (or should they be called evolutions?) tell us about him. In one view, it is clear that he enjoyed the electoral competition much more than he did life in the Chamber: his letters to Paul Clamorgan are full of the relish of battle. After his first re-election, in July 1842, he wrote to Corcelle that the ministry’s vigorous campaign against him had backfired, producing:

  one of those generous and independent reactions such as one sometimes finds in the country, but never in the Chamber. All those testimonies of esteem, confidence and sympathy that I received last Sunday will be long in fading from my memory. Truth to tell, they are the only real joys that political life has yet given me.19

  But if we modify our sense of him, to take in this development, he did not do so himself. For instance, his enemies kept renewing the charge that he was a legitimist in disguise because they had nothing else to attack him with. They dug up his resignation from the parquet in 1832, his part in the protest against the duchesse de Berry’s imprisonment, and his defence of Kergorlay in 1833. These were paltry and ancient matters which did Tocqueville little harm in the end, but his defence of his conduct, in his election circulars, was less than wholly frank and accurate. He denied that there had been any political significance in his resignation; he pretended that he had put his name to the manifesto about the duchesse merely because he had been professionally consulted; he brushed aside the issue of some of his more indiscreet remarks about Kergorlay as mere courtroom tactics. It will be seen that he was slightly misrepresenting the record – understandably, in the circumstances; and he was entitled to affirm his support for the new monarchy as powerfully as he liked (‘sincerely, firmly, loyally, I want to maintain our institutions and the dynasty’), but these were scarcely the words of a man rigidly wedded to the precise truth. Only a few months earlier he had made a note to himself, while preparing a speech, of how much he hated and despised the King.20

  These little fibs and contradictions illustrate the nature of Tocqueville’s central political dilemma under the July Monarchy. On the campaign trail (if so ungenteel and anachronistic an expression is allowed) he was once more the Tocqueville of the travel notebooks, seldom letting philosophical preoccupations get in the way of understanding and relishing the social spectacle. But he could not theorize this attitude, so to say, for it would have meant publicly acknowledging and accepting the necessary second-rateness of democratic politics, and then what would there be to distinguish him from such opportunists as Thiers? Even worse, it would have meant ceding the high moral ground to Guizot.

  Tocqueville’s attitude to his former professor does not show him at his best; Guizot’s to him was comparatively straightforward. Whether as politician or philosophical historian, Guizot’s view of his time was cut and dried. He believed in progress, and welcomed what he took to be the main achievement of the French Revolution: the sweeping away of the antiquated clutter of the old order and the establishment of a new order, justified and guaranteed by the power of the notables, the richest, most intelligent and most creative element of society; the natural aristocracy. On the other hand he dreaded mob rule, and his single most conspicuous political principle was that order must be preserved. He was democratic in that he would always welcome into the ruling cl
ass men who had acquired the necessary wealth and education: that was what he meant by his famous maxim ‘Enrich yourselves, gentlemen!’ He thought that with the advance of civilization more and more persons would enter the elite. He was not wrong, but his terror of opening the doors to chaos (he never forgot his father’s death in the Reign of Terror) meant that he never did anything to hasten or help the process. He had no interest in economics or perception of economic possibilities. Rémusat noticed that he never spoke on trade, public works or public finance, and left the Chamber when they came up for debate, ‘yet he aspired to become first minister!’21 His most constructive work was done as minister of education during the 1830s.

  Guizot greatly admired De la démocratie en Amérique and would have welcomed political alliance with the author. Tocqueville was elected to the Académie Française in December 1841 (‘for the first time in their lives MM. Thiers, Guizot, Villemain, Molé, Cousin were of the same opinion,’ he boasted)22 and took his fauteuil on 21 April following. Guizot was unable to be present on the occasion, but he read the new academician’s speech and sent his compliments. ‘You deal with the greatest questions and you understand all their greatness. Perhaps nothing is rarer today, for things have grown much more than men, and almost all minds now look at them from below. So I take pleasure in your ideas, even when I do not share them. Why don’t we think the same? I cannot find any good reason.’ He was still perplexed nineteen years later when, at that same Académie, he had to pronounce its memorial tribute to Tocqueville.23

  It is undeniable that Tocqueville, as a thinker and historian, was of Guizot’s school; the differences between them, though important, were only nuances.24 For that very reason Tocqueville may have wanted to keep his distance: he was never generous in acknowledging his intellectual debts, having a neurotic craving to seem original, and he may even have felt a little jealous of Guizot’s literary and political pre-eminence. Temperamentally they were perhaps too much alike: Guizot was notoriously cold and haughty except among his close friends; Tocqueville may have found him unapproachable. But there can be no doubt that the real nature of their alienation was political, and perhaps generational. It was Guizot who asserted that the world belongs to optimists, but he behaved as if he thought that any change was bound to be for the worse, whereas Tocqueville the pessimist was never afraid of action, and always sought to make the best of circumstances, however deplorable they were. He had a much wider range of legislative interests than Guizot, and deplored the complete legislative sterility that settled over the July monarchy in its last years: he must have sympathized with the indignant deputy who asked what the government had achieved, and answered his own question: ‘Rien! Rien! Rien!’ He was in the contradictory position of being a democrat who distrusted the people, but his American experience clung to him sufficiently to make it impossible for him to follow Guizot as he crept towards reaction. In a phrase, he found Guizot’s policy timid and illiberal, both at home and abroad, and the chief lesson he tried to learn as a deputy was how to drive this criticism home.

  At first he was hampered by his inexperience. He arrived in the Chamber shortly before the 1840 crisis over the Eastern question. To eyes that could see, this episode laid bare the contradictions which would have to be resolved if the July Monarchy were to endure. Superficially it was absurd: for a moment it looked as if France and Britain were to go to war over the question of whether Mehemet Ali, the pasha of Egypt, might also rule Syria or not. It was a quarrel of imperialisms: France had taken an interest in Egypt ever since Napoleon’s expedition of 1798, and Britain was determined not to let a French client (Mehemet Ali) control the central section of the land route to India. Since the British government had the more vital interest and the greater power, both naval and diplomatic, it prevailed in the dispute, which France had been unwise ever to embark on. She had done so less for reasons of Levantine intrigue than to reassert her standing as a Great Power – a point understood all too well by the whole political nation, including Alexis de Tocqueville. French opinion tenaciously resented the various defeats which the country had endured at British hands since the outbreak of the Seven Years War. In the eighteenth century the quest for revenge had led to the intervention in the American Revolution, which had been a military success but was also the indirect occasion of the French Revolution through the regime-wrecking deficit which it generated. The revolutionary and Napoleonic era had ended with Waterloo and the subsequent peace treaty, another unforgotten humiliation from which the same erroneous lesson was inferred, for the memory of Valmy and Austerlitz suggested that a rebound was still possible. Every nineteenth-century regime, from the Restoration to the Liberal Empire, tried to achieve some stupendous international triumph, by arms or diplomacy or both, which would give it the legitimacy in popular opinion that otherwise eluded it. The other Powers understood this very well, and regarded France as a perpetual threat to peace. This was why Russia, Austria and Prussia rallied to Britain in 1840: not out of love for the British Empire, but from a determination to maintain the Quadruple Alliance which had defeated Napoleon and guaranteed the post-Waterloo settlement. This regrouping inflamed French opinion still further, and French statesmen paid a high price for meddling in Mehemet Ali’s insurgency against his overlord, the Sultan. They wanted to avoid both war and, equally, another national humiliation. As a Russian diplomat put it, they tried ‘evading’ under Soult (first minister 1839–40), ‘threatening’ (or bluff ) under Thiers (1840), and ‘begging’ under Guizot (foreign minister 1840–48). ‘They all failed.’25

  The crisis was just getting under way when Tocqueville made his first speech in the Chamber. Here, one might have thought, was a splendid chance for a young man to make a name for himself by attacking a policy – aggressive support for the pasha – which was sure to fail. Not a bit of it. Tocqueville took the nationalist line, and warned that failure to stand up for Mehemet Ali might imperil the July Monarchy:

  As for me, I was certainly not summoned to found our new dynasty; I have, emphatically, no particular tie to it, I ask nothing of it, nothing but the greatness and happiness of my country; but I want this monarchy to last; why? because I think this monarchy is ... the only stopping place between us and the great misfortunes into which we would be plunged without it. (Applause) So I want this monarchy to last; but I am convinced that it will not last long should the idea take root in the mind of France that we, this nation formerly so strong, so great, which has done such great things, which has involved itself in all the business of the world, will meddle in nothing any more; will put its hand to nothing; that everything will be done without it.26

  He gave a speech on similar lines sixteen months later when, the Thiers government having fallen (after bringing France to the brink of war with all Europe), the new Soult–Guizot government was trying to liquidate the crisis by accepting the decisions of the other Powers.27 He explained to Mill that it was necessary to attack the British diplomatic victory because not to do so, after the way in which Lord Palmerston had behaved, would have been to damage, even extinguish, a national feeling which might be needed one day. ‘National pride is the greatest passion remaining to us; no doubt it is necessary to regulate and moderate its errors, but it is necessary to take care not to diminish it.’28

  Unsurprisingly these views did not please his English friends. Mill was distressed, and while conceding that French national feeling must be respected, urged that ‘in the name of France & civilization, posterity have a right to expect from such men as you, from the nobler & more enlightened spirits of the time, that you should teach your countrymen better ideas of what it is that constitutes national glory & national importance than the low & grovelling ones which they seem to have at present.’ Reeve thought that the speech had inflicted a most severe blow on Tocqueville’s reputation in London. Senior wrote:

  The speech which you addressed to the French Chamber wd have been utterly ruinous to any English statesman. What, it wd have been said, to think of goin
g to war merely to prevent our being excluded from taking part in the affairs of Syria & Egypt? Or to show that we are not unable to go to war? Or because, we, being one, are in a business taken up by the 5 powers, required to yield to the opinion of the 4? Now you laid down to the French chamber these three cases as fit causes of war – In the English House, either of Lords or Commons, we shd consider such proposals as scarcely deserving a serious answer.29

  Guizot would no doubt have agreed with the English view, and if diplomacy were only the calculation of forces all nowadays would agree that he was right: to resort to war or the threat of war as a means of solving domestic difficulties is a highly dangerous game, and a war between Britain and France over Syria would not have made the slightest sense, as many thought at the time (King Louis-Philippe chief among them). Furthermore, the Napoleonic days were gone for good: France was not strong enough to fight a war without allies. Every foreign minister between 1815 and 1851 had to accept this, including Tocqueville when his turn came. But his political point was equally unanswerable. Guizot became foreign minister in the autumn of 1840, when Louis-Philippe could bear Thiers’s bluffing no longer; so in the public mind he was associated with national humiliation, and his extreme unpopularity on this account during the next seven years did indeed weaken the July Monarchy. It did not help that his diplomacy was never conspicuously successful.