The report failed. After some days of fierce debate, in which Tocqueville, no doubt exhausted by his earlier effort, took no part, a large majority of the Assembly voted for revision, but it fell far short of the constitutionally mandated three-quarters; rigid Republicans, out of principle, and Thiers’s Orleanist faction, out of opportunism, voted against it. Marx was to point out ironically that in this way ‘the majority of parliament declared against the Constitution, but this Constitution itself declared for the minority and that its vote was binding.’ When the news reached Louis Napoleon he admitted to Morny that he was now seriously considering a coup d’état: planning for it went on steadily from that moment. The Assembly, having completed its work, prorogued itself for three months, leaving the field to the Prince-President.16
Yet this unlucky report must not be neglected.* It throws great light on Tocqueville’s politics in 1851, and indeed on French politics of the time in general. For instance, Tocqueville sees fit to attack the system of scrutin de liste, by which voters in a department have to chose between batches of candidates (slates, Americans would say). This seems to have been a personal view, though no doubt it was shared – but not by all: not, for instance, by Beaumont. Tocqueville’s argument is that it is impossible, in a departmental election, for most of the voters to know anything about more than one or two of the candidates:
With what result? In disturbed regions or times of public excitement extremist parties will impose their choice on the people without consulting them; in peaceful regions and quiet times the list of representatives will be drawn up in advance by political managers with private interests and to satisfy personal hatreds and friendships
– either way, the people have to vote blindly. ‘The choice, which has the appearance of being that of the body of citizens, has really been that of a very small coterie.’ (Tocqueville had made it clear to Nassau Senior a few weeks previously that what he was really afraid of under the liste system was ‘a compact minority which concentrates all its votes on its own candidates’ – a minority of Reds.) Tocqueville also revived the question of indirect election of the president, and made much of what he thought was American practice: as in the constitutional committee, he praised the electoral college in wildly inaccurate terms (‘the American people only choose the electors, who choose the President’), which suggest that he had made no study of the subject since he read Federalist 68 while sailing down the Mississippi, or at least since the first publication of the 1835 Démocratie.17
What these passages together show is that Tocqueville still did not understand or like modern, democratic political parties. In this he was far from being alone. The idea of party was a most ancient one: there were parties of a kind in republican Rome. Tocqueville was well aware that there were true parties in Britain and in the United States, and in France there was not only the Mountain but the party of order. It was a large, amorphous grouping, loosely co-ordinated by the committee of the rue de Poitiers; it rested firmly on the principle that private property was sacred and should be defended against all competing claims; it could count on the financial, physical and electoral support of a durable majority of Frenchmen (those whose passion for wealth and order, as Tocqueville said to Clamorgan, had kept Louis-Philippe on the throne for eighteen years and might yet put Louis Napoleon there); when it controlled the government it fully justified Marx’s famous observation, already quoted, that ‘The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.’ Its conduct when it controlled only the Assembly justified another of his observations, that the Assembly had transformed itself from being a body of the freely elected representatives of the people into ‘the usurpatory parliament of a class’. It was not much of an advertisement for party politics, but Tocqueville’s reservations rested on other considerations. He could not accept party discipline at any level – not for himself, not for the electorate, not for parliamentarians. The unvarying right and power to make free individual judgements was very close to what he meant by liberty. He was correct in thinking that scrutin de liste implied management by coteries – or, to give them their proper name, disciplined political parties. He was right in saying that direct election of the President of the United States was difficult, if not dangerous, but he did not see that the political parties, not the electoral college, were the intermediate bodies which made the system workable. At bottom, he refused to admit that free, democratic politics is impossible without organized parties, because such parties necessarily rest on the proposition that what matters, first and foremost, is winning power. Power is the object of the game, and each player must be convinced that, whatever else is important or true, his side has a better claim to power than any competitor. ‘My party right or wrong’ is the slogan, and though no honest citizen can truthfully promise to abide by it always, at every juncture, serious politicians know that they have to abide by it as much as possible. From this necessity flows much else: above all what was to be called, in an extreme case, democratic centralism; more normally, caucus politics – the word deriving from the earliest practitioners, the parties of the United States.18
Tocqueville was incapable of accepting such a system. His temperament, his upbringing, his achievement as a writer, his experience as a politician (especially his relationship with his constituents over time), his generation, made it impossible. Of these considerations, it is perhaps his generation that most needs to be stressed here. Caucus politics was making its appearance in France (and was on the brink of maturity in Britain) but its symptoms were scarcely recognized for what they were and were vigorously opposed. The party of order relied for victory on influence from above: ministers, land-owners, industrialists, patrons generally; when the opposition, of necessity, tried to create mass organizations the phenomenon was seen as merely one more piece of Red subversion, was outlawed, confronted, repressed and driven underground (the principle of free association was perhaps that which the governments of the Second Republic, including those of Barrot, took most delight in violating). The French propertied classes were outstanding for their ebullitions of panic-stricken selfishness and stupidity. But their ideological position, which Tocqueville fully shared, must be respected, if they themselves cannot be. The classical republican ideal of a free, independent-minded and virtuous citizenry, guided by the likes of Pericles and Cincinnatus, may have been obsolete but was bound to die very hard. Even in Britain there was much hesitation and suspicion about Joseph Chamberlain’s restructuring of the Liberal party in the 1870s, and Tocqueville’s great successor as a commentator on American politics, James Bryce, wrote his American Commonwealth (1888) to warn Britain against machine politics.* In American terms he was a mugwump; Tocqueville was a mugwump avant la lettre.
In these considerations may be found the central explanation of Tocqueville’s failure as a politician, for it was really the failure of a system; of representative politics as practised in France between 1815 and 1851. To be sure, Tocqueville’s temperament did not help: in fact nothing could be more unhelpful than his inability to take a stand without immediately qualifying it almost to the point of complete negation. He was always setting out to cross the floor and then getting stuck halfway. This tendency is very clearly seen in his attitude to Louis Napoleon. But he was not alone in his havering, and at least his havering was a matter of principle, and not of the vanity and cabinet intrigue which largely governed his parliamentary colleagues. The wonder was not that he occasionally despaired, but that occasional flashes of intuition showed him how different, in the long run, things were going to be: too late for him.
A few other details of the report must be mentioned. First, it contains one of Tocqueville’s new celebrations of the French (apart from the workers of Paris). He commends their response to the unexpected February Revolution, when much against their will they had to fight: they did it ‘with admirable courage and resignation, with a restrained energy and a practical wisdom of which their detractors† never t
hought them capable, and which will be an eternal honour to them among mankind’. Alas, he is still thinking of the June Days. He also sets out to frighten his hearers into assent to his proposals. This was not difficult; according to Walter Bagehot, who happened to be vacationing in Paris, the dread of a renewed socialist or anarchist revolution was so strong that trade was almost at a standstill. Tocqueville himself, writing to Marie from Valognes in August, reported that the bourgeoisie were ready for anything, turning to Louis Napoleon like a drowning man clutching at a branch. The root cause was the financial crisis: incomes were down by at least 25 per cent, ‘the Cotentin is ruined’ and the farmers were jibbing at paying their rent. (Tocqueville himself was straitened enough to have given up the idea of moving his household to his chateau for the summer.) Unfortunately for Tocqueville, his alarmism did not frighten the necessary number of representatives into voting for revision, as we have seen.19
More interesting and revealing is Tocqueville’s advice as to what should be done if the proposal for revision failed. Emphasizing that he spoke for the whole committee, he remarked that with such a vote the constitution would receive a new consecration: a curious tribute to the veto power of the parliamentary minority. ‘From the day that we may hope no longer, nothing is to be done but submit ... for the Constitution, as we have already said, is the only legality, is the sole political law that we know, today, in France; there is nothing beyond it but revolution or adventurism. The National Assembly must highly resolve not only to respect the Constitution itself, but to make sure that everyone else respects it.’ Any attempt to launch unconstitutional candidacies would be not only inconvenient and irregular, but culpable. It was a call to resist any plot by Louis Napoleon. Unfortunately the rapporteur gave no hint as to how this might be done, and he got no help from the floor. As Marx was to say, ‘The party of Order proved by its decision on revision that it knew neither how to rule nor how to serve ... neither how to uphold the Constitution nor how to throw it overboard; neither how to co-operate with the President, nor how to break with him.’20
Tocqueville can fairly be acquitted of such futility. Had revision been carried, at least the immediate crisis would have been defused: the prospect of Louis Napoleon’s legal re-election would presumably have reassured public opinion and the business classes. Nor should Tocqueville’s insistence on the obedience due to the constitution be dismissed as simply unpractical. If Louis Napoleon had announced his resolve to respect the law and stand aside in 1852 while making sure that the new elections passed off peacefully it is to be presumed that this too would have restored confidence; and anyway it is very hard to believe that the Red threat was as serious as the Right asserted (this came to be Tocqueville’s view). It was hardly a moment when a clear-headed liberal need feel obliged to discard his principles; and the principle involved was of the utmost importance to Tocqueville. He was profoundly convinced that law and liberty went together; in a sense, were the same thing. It was one of Europe’s most ancient traditions; 21 Montesquieu had taught it; it was embedded in the history of Le Peletier and Lamoignon. Tocqueville’s lifelong passion for liberty (a word which was becoming more and more prominent in his discourse) roused in him an equally passionate desire to teach his countrymen the importance of respect for the law, of government by laws, not men. The constitution might be a defective law, but law it was, and the only guarantor of all the others. To violate it at all was reprehensible; to overthrow it by force would be the worst of crimes.
Yet the problem of what to do remained, growing steadily more intractable. At times Tocqueville seems to have given up the project of revision as a bad job; but at the meeting of the conseil-général of the Manche in September he successfully wielded his prestige, skill and authority (once again he had been elected president) to get the conseil to declare its support both for revision and for the repeal of the law of 31 May. Probably he was pushing at an open door: almost every other conseil-général did the same, that session. It was as if they had constituted themselves as so many colleges of electors, or so many electoral primaries. However it was, the result could not have been more encouraging for Louis Napoleon. Yet Tocqueville, speaking in favour of the revision, tried to make the vote one of confidence in the Assembly. Whatever his private expectations, he made the excellent point that it would only take a shift of fifty votes for the Assembly to approve revision by the required majority, and that the voices of the conseils might have the effect of changing fifty minds. His tone when speaking to the councillors is noticeably more authoritative than it was when he addressed the Assembly: almost masterful. He repeated his insistence on the importance of legality: ‘What the Assembly wanted to say amounts to this, that from the moment when all regular reform shall have been tried, when legal revision shall have become impossible, everyone, government and citizens alike, must obey, and yield to the law.’ In other words, put up with the impasse and hope for the best. It was high-minded, but scarcely hopeful. It is almost as if Tocqueville, by recommending this behaviour, was preparing himself for the world of retirement and internal exile: a world in which, as an ideologist and a writer, he need make no concessions to the deeply unpalatable calculations and compromises of French politics in the age of Louis Napoleon and Thiers. Soon he would no longer have any influence on events; he would have to be content with keeping the flag of idealism flying, like Ibsen’s Hilmar Tonnesen, in the hope of leaving a legacy for better days. But it was weary work, and he would be glad to get back to Marie on 10 September.22
She had stayed behind at Versailles, as she was still unwell and could not face the upheaval and discomfort of a journey. Tocqueville barely visited his chateau during the conseil-général, staying instead with Hippolyte at Nacqueville and then sharing lodgings with him at Saint-Lô, Hippolyte now being a member of the conseil. Tocqueville missed his wife, and wrote to her almost every day as in the past; she did the same, to his great satisfaction, though the posts were irregular and Marie was sometimes fractious:
I have already told you that your letters are my only comfort here. The news they contain, the feelings they express are a great help, for I know nobody with better sense than you have and your affection is the only thing I believe in absolutely in this world and in which I have unreserved confidence. The only thing, mark it well. So I allow myself to smile sometimes when I hear you speak of losing my affection. You have it till life, till death. Don’t you know that?
Marie was unwell and lonely, which helps to explain her gloom. It was the first occasion since 1847 that they had been separated for any length of time. It was hard on them both.23
Back at Versailles, Tocqueville settled down happily to writing the third section of the Souvenirs. He decided to skip the year between the June Days and his appointment as foreign minister: ‘it has seemed to me more important, while my memories are still quite fresh, to recount the five months that I passed in government.’ He would return to the earlier period if he had time. Perhaps he realized that time was in fact running out. He would not even be able to complete his account of his ministry.
Louis Napoleon and Morny had decided to make no move until the members of the Assembly had returned to Paris: they did not want to have to deal with a multiplicity of centres of resistance in the departments. The Assembly reconvened on 4 November (and the Tocquevilles moved to a flat in the rue de Castellane for the winter). The Prince-President greeted the parliamentarians with a message full of the gloomiest political and economic prognostications for 1852, proposing the repeal of the 31 May law as a remedy. The Assembly, in a last, infatuated, suicidal gesture, rejected the proposal by a majority of six votes. F. A. Simpson’s comment cannot be bettered: ‘Already by a minority vote it had refused to allow the country to have the new constitution which it desired. Now by the barest possible majority it had refused to restore the one feature in the old constitution which was really popular.’ Realizing belatedly that it was utterly defenceless, the Assembly (or rather, the royalist parties there) trie
d to claim military authority to protect itself, but the motion was rejected: the Republicans would not vote with the royalists. The actual commander-in-chief, the president, paid no attention.* Nor did his troops. Many of them were Republican voters, and anyway army discipline trumped politics. 24
Beyond the walls of the Assembly nothing seemed to be happening: the wiseacres began to say that nothing would until the New Year. On 1 December the representatives debated a railway line between Lyon and Avignon, rather as the Chamber of Deputies had discussed the Bordeaux bank on 22 February 1848. But the next day, the 2nd, was the day of Austerlitz, and had been chosen by the president as that on which he would at last cross his Rubicon. During the night the army was deployed in and round Paris; proclamations were secretly printed and, at dawn, plastered on every conspicuous wall in the city; every ministry was seized, and at 6.30 a.m. Morny took over as minister of the interior. The Palais Bourbon was surrounded by cavalry and infantry; seventy-eight representatives, generals and journalists (including Thiers, Cavaignac and Changarnier) were roused from their beds and arrested. When, at about ten o’clock, the Prince-President showed himself, riding through Paris with old King Jérôme, his uncle, and the comte de Flahaut, Morny’s father, at his side, he was master of the situation, and the news was being flashed by telegraph throughout France.
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