It cannot be said that Tocqueville made any effective resistance to this development; rather, he made it worse. As the great acknowledged authority on the American republic he might have been expected to do better. But by 1848 his claims in this respect were largely hollow. He had not visited the United States for sixteen years and had not written on it for eight. He was neurotically unable to re-read his books, once they had been published; he was dependent, therefore, on memories, or what he thought were memories, of what he had once known. He proposed unsuccessfully that the president be chosen by an absolute majority of an electoral college, failing which he should be chosen by the Assembly. This was an idea taken straight from the US Constitution, as he acknowledges in the Souvenirs; but it is not one which any American would have recommended, given the difficulties which it can and has caused from time to time (not least in 2000), and his advocacy shows how little he had kept up with American politics. He actually supported the preposterous clause introduced by Auguste Vivien which made constitutional amendment all but impossible (the amending process in the US Constitution is one of its greatest strengths).* Indeed, if his observations on the point to Nassau Senior, three years later, may be trusted, he strongly approved of it, thinking that it would give the new constitution time to become generally accepted. Worst of all, he and Beaumont pushed through a clause limiting the president to a single term of four years. They too were victims of their own experience: they were afraid that a re-eligible president would try to secure his re-election by large-scale corruption.† They were right, but they were soon to learn that the alternative was worse. Tocqueville in early 1851 reflected sadly that ‘This vote, and the great influence which I brought to bear on it, is my most unpleasant memory of that period.’ A year later, and he would have been even more emphatic.36
An alternative system was briefly glimpsed, first when Cormenin introduced the clause proposing that the president should be chosen by popular vote, and then again when, to everyone’s vast astonishment, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the Emperor’s nephew, was elected to the Assembly by four departments in the by-elections of 4 June. This gave a frightening glimpse of what the future might hold if Bonaparte became a candidate for the presidency, so the committee reconsidered the question of popular election. Perhaps after all it might be better to have the president chosen by the Assembly? This would in effect have given France a parliamentary government (as eventually emerged under the Third Republic), but thanks to Napoleon I, Charles X and Louis-Philippe the French had scarcely ever known true parliamentary government and were not, that summer, ready to try it. As the committee well knew, the people expected to choose their head of state themselves. The original proposal was confirmed. Tocqueville later supported it vigorously in the Assembly. As he explains, ‘I was, I admit, much more desirous of quickly installing a powerful leader of the Republic than of organizing a truly republican constitution. We were then under the divided and indecisive rule of the Executive Committee, socialism was at the gate, and it must not be forgotten that the June Days were at hand.’ It was another decision which he regretted later, but meanwhile he and his colleagues adumbrated what looks like a boss-shot at the constitution of the Fifth Republic.37
That was its strength: however faulty its details, the constitution of the Second Republic, especially as it was amended before adoption that autumn by the Constituent Assembly, corresponded powerfully to an abiding French political instinct – or habit. The constitutional committee’s members, as Tocqueville remarked, had never known anything except monarchy and its traditions, and could do no better than experiment uncertainly with republicanism. He believed, and said repeatedly, that the choice before France was between liberty and equality, but it seemed at least as obvious to his colleagues that the choice was between liberty and equality on the one hand, and power on the other. Assertive nationalism was a permanent feature of French life: we have seen Tocqueville expressing it. The Napoleonic tradition was one of glory as well as dictatorship. It would probably have shaped the Republic’s new institutions even if no new Napoleon had been in the field.38
Set beside these considerations it hardly seems to matter that Tocqueville (at one in this with Lammenais) from start to finish deplored the fact that the new constitution was going to be as centralized as the old ones. Centralization was the bugbear of others besides himself: of the legitimists and the rest of his constituents. The spring and summer of 1848 saw a successful revolt against Paris, but just as the Parisians of February had been cheated in the moment of their victory, so were the provincials of April and June. The former leaders of the July Monarchy (with exceptions, such as Guizot and the Orleans princes) were about to stage a remarkable comeback, seizing the leadership of the Assembly, which was to be theirs for three years. Their first great success came when, on the constitutional committee, they reasserted the traditions of 1793 and 1799.
Tocqueville could only respond in the bitter pages of the Souvenirs. Neither there nor anywhere else did he ask himself why the French majority should submit to a devolution of government which would only shift power from the hands of the central administration to those of reactionary country squires, of village lawyers and small town businessmen. He never met the arguments put forward, for instance, by Thiers when he remarked to Nassau Senior in 1853 that France’s centralization was made necessary by her geographical position. ‘We are in the midst of hostile neighbours. Paris is not even now three marches from the frontier. We are always in danger of an attack, and have often to make one, if we wish to keep our relative position.’ Only a strong centralized government (‘a master’) could, for instance, manage the necessary conscription. Besides, Thiers did not think much of local government. Quite in the spirit of the ancien régime he believed that the ministry of the interior had to exercise strict supervision of all local activities, otherwise there would be appalling waste of taxpayers’ money. Tocqueville disdained such considerations, or at any rate never discussed them. Instead he was always ready to tell the few who listened to him that local self-government was the school of virtue and citizenship. The historical record, even in New England, suggests that he was deceiving himself.39
He felt that he was ineffective on the constitutional committee, and explained that the heart had gone out of him when he lost the battle for bicameralism.40 Certainly the minutes do not show him as intervening very often – much less often than, for example, Beaumont. No doubt he was discouraged, but the true reason for his quiescence was that he agreed with his colleagues on most points, and where he did not his disagreements were too speculative to be worth insisting on. As all the committee members knew so well that they did not have to say it, a radical reconstruction of government in France was not on the agenda: 1848 was not 1789. The work of the great Revolution was unassailable. The notables supposed that their job was to reassert their power, and Tocqueville was one of them. What neither he nor anyone else, on or off the committee (except perhaps Lamartine) could conceive was that their essential, urgent, pre-eminent duty was to reconcile the French to each other; to devise a political system which all lawful interests could accept as legitimate and worth supporting, thereby making possible a resurrection of the nation’s energy, intelligence and public spirit so that France could master the problems and the dangers, external and internal, which were to confront her so brutally for the next hundred years. Probably it was already too late. Whatever the faults of the new constitution, and they were many, it could have worked, like all constitutions, if the will had been there. Instead it became just one more issue in the battle between the factions.
The preliminary draft was completed on 17 June and delivered to the Assembly two days later. It was immediately sent for scrutiny to the various bureaux (committees) whose views it was desirable to know before beginning a full-dress debate. But this was business for later. The immediate preoccupation of the representatives was their long-awaited showdown with the workers of Paris, which began on Thursday, 22 June, when it became cl
ear that the Executive Committee would not retreat from its decision to close the national workshops at once. The faubourgs, at the end of their patience, rose in arms, and after four days of bloody battle were defeated by the combined efforts of the National Guard, the regular army and the Garde Mobile,* all under the command of General Cavaignac, the minister of war. During the struggle the Executive Committee was forced to resign and the Assembly made Cavaignac temporary dictator. By the end of the fighting 708 government supporters had been killed, including five generals and the Archbishop of Paris, who had been trying to negotiate a truce; there were at least 3,000 dead insurgents (this figure is probably a gross underestimate); and 15,000 arrests. Cannon-fire had battered much of eastern Paris into ruin.
Such, in stark outline, is the story of the June Days. Tocqueville’s doings during these events and their preliminaries are only intermittently visible, although his account of all that happened to him during the fighting is precise and vivid:
[24 June.] At the corner of the street, right beside the Château d’Eau, there was a large, tall house under construction; some insurgents, who had no doubt got in through the courtyard at the back, established themselves there without being noticed; suddenly they appeared on the roof and loosed a great volley upon the troops who were filling the boulevard and were far from expecting an enemy posted at such a point, and so near. The noise of the muskets, echoed terrifyingly by the houses opposite, made them expect a similar surprise from that side of the street too. Our column fell immediately into incredible confusion: artillery, infantry, cavalry were immediately mixed in disorder, the soldiers fired in all directions without knowing what they were doing, and fell back in tumult some sixty paces. This retreat was so disordered and impetuous a movement that I was thrown against the walls of the houses facing the rue de Faubourg-du-Temple, knocked down by the cavalry and generally jostled in such a way that I lost my hat and almost my life. It was quite the most serious danger that I incurred during the June Days. It made me realize that all is not heroic in the heroic game of war: I don’t doubt that accidents of this type often happen even to the best troops, but nobody boasts of them and they are not mentioned in bulletins.41
The pages of the Souvenirs which describe the rising contain many passages as dramatic as this, and Tocqueville himself is always vividly present. He was himself both brave and sensible under fire, or the risk of fire, and as inquisitive as ever: he was only present in the rue de Faubourg-du-Temple because he wanted to see and understand for himself what was happening.42 By contrast, his account of how the fight came about is somewhat patchy.
He tells us that he went with pistols in his pocket to the absurd Feast of Concord on 21 May, when the Assembly had to sit through a daylong parade on the Champ de Mars of soldiers and militia who would soon be fighting each other; but he says very little about developments in the Assembly during the next month: he was hard at work in the constitutional committee. Yet they were not without interest.
By then the majority of the representatives, whether monarchists or middle-of-the-road republicans, were incapable of tolerating the workers’ movement any longer. This is not to say that the representatives were villains. On the contrary, many, perhaps most, of them agreed with the Parisians’ insistence that the Republic must be socially as well as politically democratic, and much time was spent in the first weeks of June in suggesting ways for reviving the economy (which, everyone agreed, would be far the best way of helping the people). Tocqueville alleged that these discussions were inspired by mere fright, but many of the suggestions made bore a strong resemblance to those which he himself had put forward just before the February revolution,* and his friend the comte de Falloux,† whose intransigent leadership played its part in bringing on the final crisis, was to insist in his memoirs that although he wanted the national workshops closed he also wanted repressive measures to be matched with programmes of assistance: the endowment of friendly societies, the improvement of savings banks, protection of child workers, the demolition of slums, and so on. All was benevolence, but it will be noted that none of these measures would have been of much immediate use to the unemployed.43
And on one point the majority was unanimous: the national workshops must go. It was an obsession: they must be destroyed so that the propertied classes could be sure that they were in control again, demonstrate their mastery, and sleep peacefully at night. Various rationalizations were offered. Victor Hugo, who had recently entered the Assembly as a conservative, solemnly warned his colleagues that whereas the July Monarchy had bred idleness in the rich, the Republic, through the workshops, was doing far worse, it was breeding idle habits in the poor: ‘this indolence, fatal to civilization, is possible in Turkey, but not in France. Never shall Paris copy Naples; never, never shall she copy Constantinople!’ Never, he cried, should the intelligent workers of Paris become lazzaroni in peace and janissaries in war! The business class, the patronat, dismayed that labour was in short supply although there was so much unemployment, was convinced that if the workshops closed trade would revive. Others, appalled by the number of men enrolled (by June there were about 100,000), said that the cost was intolerable; many saw and said (but not too loudly) that here was a potentially dangerous revolutionary army: had not thousands of them joined the crowd on 15 May? And Tocqueville’s belief that the working class was rapidly being corrupted by dangerous socialist fallacies was widely shared. Il faut en finir, said the representatives.44
So the Assembly heard but did not listen to the pleas of Caussidière, one of the few left-wing leaders still at large. They did not know, he said, the real position of unemployed provincials who, having lost everything, had come to Paris seeking work, men from all sorts of factories and ateliers, who had been signed into the national workshops and given nothing to do. As a consequence the boulevards in the evening were clubs of despair; these honest democrats listened bewildered to the chaos of excited oratory, but were clear about one thing: ‘Try and give us bread, or we will take our guns and throw ourselves on the bayonets – we will destroy ourselves.’ Lamartine and a few others tried to solve the problem by proposing that the state take over and fund all railway construction, which at present was going on much too slowly: this would create useful, well-paid work on a large scale. The plan made some headway in the Assembly, but events cut it short. Weeks before, the Executive Committee had decided that the national workshops would have to be closed, but it could not bring itself to say so or to make any effective preparations for the event. The boulevards grew ever more riotous and the Assembly angrier. At last Falloux forced the Committee’s hand: in the name of the labour bureau, of which he was chairman, he proposed the immediate closure of the workshops, and prepared a report for the Assembly to debate. The Executive Committee gave in. It published its own decree on 19 June, saying that the men in the national workshops were to be sent to labour on land reclamation in distant provinces. Falloux’s report, decreeing the immediate dissolution of the workshops and requiring all workers between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to join the army or lose the dole, was published on 21 June; civil war broke out on the 23rd.45
Tocqueville only sketched these events in the Souvenirs. He was not trying to conceal the fact that he stood to the Right even of Falloux on the issue. He was so sure of his ground that he took it for granted. The Parisians, he believed, were bent on destroying the very foundations of society; only force would defeat them; all France beyond Paris agreed with him, and the sooner that battle was joined the better. He devotes a chapter of the Souvenirs to his relations with Lamartine in the weeks after the Assembly met, and is brilliantly unkind about the poet in power who was so reluctant to take command of the forces of reaction and so eager to retain some support on the Left. Tocqueville is as unfair as he is unkind, but just as the reader begins to resent the fact he suddenly checks himself and admits that his own judgement was faulty: Lamartine knew better than he did the real danger of the situation and how necessary it was to pl
ay for time (and indeed, though Tocqueville does not say so, it was Lamartine who made sure that the forces of order were strong enough to conquer when battle was joined). This characteristic spasm of candour is one of the traits which make the Souvenirs so valuable; but it does not get round the fact that on the whole Tocqueville was blindly prejudiced about the situation. He gives himself away when he has to mention Louis Blanc. He concedes that Blanc defended himself ably when he was accused of being behind the 15 May affair, but does not admit that Blanc was innocent, and cannot conceal his regret that he was, for the time being, acquitted; and he sneers vulgarly at what he regards as Blanc’s lack of talent.46
Il faut en finir. By now the workers too were spoiling for the fight, which was clearly imminent. There was immense agitation as news of the decrees spread through the faubourgs. On 22 June a deputation of workers visited Alexandre Marie, a member of the Executive Committee who had been indirectly responsible for the workshops from the first; he received them with threats and insults. The barricades began to go up. Tocqueville and Corcelle walked into the quarter round the Hôtel de Ville to see what was going on. To explore as much ground as possible they separated, and Corcelle found himself constrained to help in building a barricade, but he was so clumsy that the insurgents soon let him go. Returning to the Assembly, Tocqueville found it in a state bordering on panic; it voted itself into continuous session; the Executive Committee delegated all authority over the situation to General Cavaignac. Fighting was already fierce, but Tocqueville did not get home until one in the morning, and as he crossed the Pont-Royal all Paris seemed asleep; all was silent. The tranquillity half persuaded him that there was not going to be another battle, that the Assembly had already triumphed.47
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