Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  But for much of the time Louis Napoleon and the Assembly were forgotten and the party chatted of whatever came to mind: the Church of England, the problem of poverty, the brilliant simplicity of Voltaire’s style (‘He had a right to answer, as he did to a lady who talked to him about the beauty of his phrases, Madame, je n’ai jamais fait une phrase de ma vie’*), Talleyrand, Napoleon, and ancient Egypt, on which Ampère was something of an expert. Thanks to Senior’s journal it is still possible to enter into the agreeable time that they were all having.50

  Yet although Tocqueville appeared to hold nothing back from his English friends he said nothing to them of what was becoming his deepest preoccupation. He was coming to the conclusion that, whatever happened, his career in politics was ending and that he would be best advised to return to writing full time. He talked the matter over with Ampère, and no doubt Marie, and (by letter) with Beaumont; but his most remarkable expression of his thoughts came in a letter to Kergorlay, written a week or so after the move to Sorrento.

  As the two friends sadly acknowledged, their once abundant correspondence, in which they had shared every thought and feeling, had dwindled of late years almost to nothing: now, when they wrote, it was usually to each other’s wives. We do not know how often, or how regularly, they had seen each other since Kergorlay’s marriage. But the old bond was still strong, and when Tocqueville wanted to discuss his innermost thoughts he still turned first to Louis.

  He had always planned a working holiday; he had brought boxes of books with him, there was the Souvenirs to attend to, and Sorrento was a perfect place for reading and writing. But he did not at first feel in the vein, and while waiting for inspiration to return he began to think seriously of another project. He started to tell Kergorlay about it:

  For a long time I have been preoccupied, perhaps I ought to say bothered, by the notion of again undertaking a big book. It seems to me that my true value lies above all in works of the mind, that I am worth more in my thoughts than in my deeds, and if I am ever to leave some trace of myself in the world it will be much more by what I write than by a memory of what I have done. The last ten years, which have been so sterile for me in so many ways, have nevertheless given me a truer understanding of human affairs and practical matters without my mind losing its habit of looking at human activities as a totality. So I think I am better suited than I was when I wrote the to tackle successfully some great topic of political literature. But what topic should I choose?51

  The point was crucial: he would have to find something that would interest the reading public and rouse his own enthusiasm, ‘for I plunge at once below mediocrity when I don’t passionately enjoy what I’m doing.’ He had been looking round for such an idée mère, in his few moments of leisure, for some years, but now the matter was becoming urgent: he felt that old age was at hand; he must decide. It would have to be a contemporary subject: in the last analysis, it was only questions of the day which interested the public or, even more important, Tocqueville himself. (This remark throws some light on an incident recorded by Senior. He took Tocqueville to call on Carlo Troja, a former Neapolitan prime minister who by some oversight had not been sent to the dungeons. He was now devoting himself to the Dark Ages, ‘& spent half an hour proving to us the identity of the Daci, the Getae, the Gothi & the Normans – a fact which we had no wish to contest. How happy, said Tocqueville as we left him, a man must be who in these times can interest himself about Dacians & Goths.’52 )

  The broad field in which he hoped to find his idée mère was easy to identify:

  I have for long had the idea, as I think I have told you, of selecting from that great expanse of time which runs from 1789 to our own days and which I continue to call the French Revolution, the ten years of the Empire, the birth, development, decline and fall of that prodigious enterprise. More and more I have thought and think that I would do well in choosing to paint that epoch. Not only was it great, it was unusual, even unique, and yet so far, at least in my opinion, it has only been presented in false or vulgar colours. Besides, it throws a bright light on the epoch which preceded it.

  Tocqueville’s first thought was to outdo Thiers, whom he clearly had in mind as the chief dauber of false colours; for one thing, he found Thiers’s pretensions to military expertise ridiculous.* But on reflection he modestly doubted if narrative history was quite his métier: ‘what I have best succeeded at so far is in interpreting events rather than in recounting them’; besides, he didn’t want to write a long book; he wanted to put together a volume of reflections and verdicts on the Empire, on such topics (here he began to list what read like chapter headings) as ‘How the Empire Came About’; ‘How It was Able to Establish Itself in the Midst of the Society Created by the Revolution’; ‘What were the Means That It Made Use Of’; ‘What was the True Nature of the Man Who Founded It’; ‘What Brought About Its Successes, What Its Failures’; ‘The Transient and Durable Effects It Had on the History of the World, and in Particular on That of France’. ‘It seems to me that there we have the making of a really great book; but the difficulties are immense.’ They might have daunted Montesquieu himself. Tocqueville begged Kergorlay to help him with his advice; but he ended proudly:

  I am vain enough to believe that I am more likely than anyone else to bring to such a subject a free spirit, and to write of men and things without passion or reserve. For, as to men, even though they may have lived into our day, I surely neither love nor hate them, and as to the forms of what we call constitutions, laws, dynasties, classes, they have, I will not say value, but existence in my eyes only in their effects; I have no traditions, no partisanship – emphatically – I have no cause but that of liberty and human dignity. I am sure of that. And for work of this sort a disposition, a natural tendency of this kind is as useful as it has often been damaging when my business was not that of discussing human affairs but of intervening in them.

  Kergorlay replied to this remarkable letter as it deserved – thoughtfully, encouragingly, and at length; but he could not do so before 19 January, and in the meantime Tocqueville had gone back to the Souvenirs. Before he did so he had not been able to refrain from dashing down a sketch of what he might say about Napoleon. The note of dispassionate enquiry is not very audible:

  I would like to show ... with what incomparable art he discerned in the most demagogic aspects of the Revolution all that was useful for despotism, and how he brought it to natural birth; starting with his domestic government, I want to contemplate the exertions of that almost divine intelligence, grossly employed in shackling human liberty; that perfected, scientific organization of power, which only the greatest genius during the most enlightened and civilized times could have conceived; and how under the weight of that wonderful machine society was crushed and smothered, becoming sterile, so that intelligence slowed, the human spirit languished, souls shrank, great men no longer emerged, and against the flat vastness of the horizon, wherever one looked, nothing showed except the colossal figure of the Emperor himself.53

  It is not just hindsight which shows that Tocqueville’s mind was again on the brink of a great leap forward.

  Tocqueville underrated his narrative powers. It was not necessary to write like Michelet or Thiers (or, for that matter, Macaulay, whom he was soon to read and admire). The art of narrative, like every other literary form, requires selectivity and imagination; it must be a form of analysis. Tocqueville was fully equal to the challenge, as the Souvenirs shows. The second part, which was written at Sorrento between December and March,54 takes the story of the 1848 Revolution, as he witnessed it, from February to the deliberations of the constitutional committee. It is incomplete: he meant to chronicle the Cavaignac government, but never did so. The fragment, nevertheless, is full of vitality, and sweeps the reader along from set-piece to set-piece: the 1848 elections, 15 May, the June Days, the making of the constitution. It was quoted so extensively in earlier chapters that its merits need not be demonstrated here. Perhaps it is worth remark
ing that its style still illustrates those virtues which Tocqueville valued in Voltaire and the writers of the seventeenth century: it is brilliantly lucid, direct and unpretentious. Tocqueville was true to his models. Only once did another influence unmistakably assert itself, in the elegiac passage already quoted where Tocqueville saluted the old noblesse:

  At the very height of the June Days the man died who, in our time, perhaps best conserved the character of our ancient families, M. de Chateaubriand, to whom I was linked by so many family ties and childhood recollections. He had fallen long since into a kind of mute stupor that made us think at times that his mind was extinguished. However, in that state he heard the din of the February Revolution, and wanted to know what was happening. He was told that the monarchy of Louis-Philippe had just been overthrown; he said, ‘Well done!’ and fell silent. Four months later the roar of the days of June also reached his ears, and again he asked what the noise was. They told him that there was war in Paris and that he was hearing the cannon. He tried in vain to stand, saying, ‘I want to go there’; then he fell silent, this time for ever: he died the next day.55

  It was a leave-taking: of an ancient France, of a man to whom Tocqueville owed much, and of the chateaubrianesque style that he used occasionally to emulate. By 1851 he only had one voice: his own.

  The first part of the Souvenirs was written, as it were, at a sitting. The second was written by fits and starts, and although it flows out of the first with perfect ease, it leaves a somewhat different impression, if only because it covers a much longer period (months instead of days). And Tocqueville opens it with a long, reflective chapter that further slows the pace, but which may be considered the heart of the book – or at least the clearest indication of how the Souvenirs relates to work past and work yet to come. It consists of a meditation on the nature and causes of the February Revolution, allegedly recollected from the evening of 24 February, after he got home from the rout of the Chamber of Deputies,* but transparently a piece of literary contrivance. He offers his view of historical causation, not without a side-swipe at mere men of letters that looks forward to the Ancien Régime: men who have no political experience and try to reduce everything to grand causes according to their pet theories: ‘for my part, I hate these absolute systems, which make all historical events depend on great First Causes ... and which so to say eliminate human beings from the history of the human race.’ Such theories, he thinks, are invented simply to gratify their authors’ vanity. He names no names (he almost never did), so it is permissible to think that one of the writers he has in mind is the author of De la démocratie en Amérique. But he also disparages mere politicians, who can never see anything larger than the hurly-burly in which they live, and here he certainly had Thiers in mind, for this was exactly the criticism he had made of Thiers’s history of Napoleon the previous summer, when he casually mentioned to Senior that he hoped one day to write on the subject himself.56 He himself insists on the difference between ‘general’ and ‘accidental’ causes, and applies the distinction to the February Revolution. Among the general causes he places the industrial revolution, which had filled Paris with discontented workers: this must be one of the earliest uses of the phrase. He surveys the whole course of French history since 1789, and concludes with the image that is recurrent in his writing at this period:

  Will we ever arrive, as current prophets assure us, perhaps as vainly as their predecessors, at a more complete and profound social transformation than our fathers ever wanted or foresaw, and than we ourselves can yet conceive? Or shall we end merely in intermittent anarchy, the chronic and incurable malady well-known to ancient nations? As for me, I cannot say, I do not know when the long voyage will end; I am weary of repeatedly mistaking treacherous fog-banks for the shore, and I often wonder if the terra firma which we have been seeking for so long actually exists, or if our destiny is not rather to beat about eternally at sea!57

  And in another passage of familiar thoughts he explains his anxiety for the future of French liberty:

  I had passed the best years of my youth amid a society which seemed to be becoming great and prosperous as it again became free, so I conceived the idea of a temperate, regulated liberty, restrained by religion, manners and law; the charms of that liberty moved me, it became the passion of my whole life; I felt that I could never be consoled for its loss, and now I saw clearly that it would have to be forgone.58

  This was the heart of his political faith; it was another theme which, inevitably, would figure largely in the Ancien Régime.

  But he is still the Tocqueville of 1848, as we have met him in his letters and speeches, and in his next chapter, still in reflective vein, he abuses ‘socialism’ as the essential and fallacious doctrine of the February Revolution – only to astonish us by adding the following thought, almost unique in his work:59

  Will socialism remain buried under the contempt which so rightly covers the socialists of 1848? I raise the question without answering it. I do not doubt that the constituent laws of modern society will be much modified in the long run; it has happened already to many of their chief clauses, but will they ever be destroyed and others put in their place? I think it impracticable, but I say no more, because the more I study society in former times, and the more I learn in detail how society operates now, and when I consider the prodigious diversity that one comes across, not only of laws, but of the principles of laws, and the different forms they have assumed and which the right of property assumes, whatever men say, here on Earth, I am tempted to believe that what we call necessary institutions are often only those to which we are accustomed, and that where the organization of society is concerned, the field of possibility is much vaster than men who live in particular societies ever imagine.60

  Even Tocqueville could not keep his restless mind in thrall to his prejudices for ever. It is true that this passage had no sequel in the few years left to him; but it makes one wonder what his views would have become had he reached old age. As it is, this is as near as Tocqueville ever got to seeing what is obvious today: that his own political and economic opinions were as ill-founded as those which he so passionately resisted.

  At this point it is convenient to take leave of the Souvenirs. The later chapters written at Sorrento, describing events from February to June, have been quoted exhaustively in my own earlier chapters and need not be recapitulated. The last describes the deliberations of the constitutional committee, and is notably rougher than the rest. It was an embittering topic, but Tocqueville would probably have revised his treatment were it not for events. He meant to: he made a note to get hold of the committee minutes to refresh his memory.61 But when he returned to France in April his time was claimed by other matters, and when he resumed work on the book in September he skipped the period between summer 1848 and May 1849 in order to recount his experiences as foreign minister while the memory was still fairly fresh. But because of the events of December 1851, this third part was also left unfinished (he turned decisively to other work) and is the least interesting, because the most conventional, of the three sections: there are so many ministerial memoirs! – and Tocqueville does not always escape the chief danger of the genre, that of being too self-justifying. Part Three is notable chiefly for his unfinished portrait of Louis Napoleon.

  The book, then, is radically incomplete and unrevised, which, to Tocqueville’s own meticulous eyes, was a serious weakness. Today’s readers are likely to be more charitable. It is deeply regrettable that he was unable to carry out his complete scheme, but what we have is remarkable: it is Tocqueville’s self-portrait. The wit, the eloquence, the deep feeling, the predominant pessimism, the occasional sparks of hope: the characteristics that are to be found in his letters and the records of his conversation are here deployed by the artist. He tries to shed all pretence and to bring out on paper his faults as well as his intelligence, and does so perhaps more successfully even than he realizes. As a historical source the Souvenirs is invaluable; as a biographical
one unique. It is particularly important in showing Tocqueville at the hinge of his fate: he turns into a historian before our eyes. The Démocratie and the Ancien Régime were events in the history of Europe. The same cannot be said of the Souvenirs but (to speak personally for a moment) of all his works it is the one which I could least spare to oblivion.

  * Armand Marrast (1801–52) was editor of the National and a leading Republican under the July Monarchy. In 1848 he was successively Mayor of Paris and President of the National Assembly. He was one of the most active members of the constitutional committee. AT disliked him, and disapproved of him as a centralizer.

  * This is puzzling. Such was his dislike of military government that he voted against the imposition of the state of siege in June 1848, which in the Souvenirs he describes as a mistake (OC XII 161–2). Here he is probably referring to the September vote to extend the state of siege until the end of October.

  † See above, p. 383.

  * AT observed contemptuously that they wanted power, ‘but responsibility, no’ (OC XII 200).