Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  This sympathy, which if not new was at least now better-informed, was to leave a profound mark on the Ancien Régime.5

  Not that the book was moving again, or would do so for months. By now the nature of Tocqueville’s creativity must be clear. He worked in short, passionate bursts with extraordinary speed and thoroughness, but took a long time to screw himself up to performance point. Tocqueville at Tocqueville in 1855 was just like Tocqueville at Tours in 1853. On 4 August he told Corcelle that he was getting back to work but had not yet entered into it, ‘as Pascal puts it’. He got out his chapter on the political influence of men of letters in the mid eighteenth century (what eventually became Book Three, chapter 1), which had already caused him trouble, and was not encouraged when Marie read it and told him that it was flat and over-subtle – ‘which appears to me correct, unfortunately’. When Ampère and Lanjuinais came to stay he read them some of his draft, ‘and they did not appear dissatisfied,’ but still he could not find the energy to make a push and finish. It was not that he was lacking in mental vigour: that summer he began his rather solemnly high-minded correspondence with Sophie Swetchine, *and his letters to his father show him acting informally as the comte’s agent for his lands in the Cotentin (in November, as a winter of dearth approaches, we find him trying to get the curé and the maire of the commune to work together on poor relief, and suggesting that Comte Hervé increase the size of his regular dole of bread). Simply, authorial inspiration did not come. In September he said that his torpor prevented him from working. In October he blamed the incessant rain, which kept him indoors: ‘no-one can work well in prison.’ In early November it was his usual stomach trouble: ‘for there is a close bond between the stomach and the head.’ Suddenly he stops making excuses, stops even mentioning his book (except to say that he is nervous about publication) until on 27 December he reports to Ampère that he has reached the last chapter (‘How the Revolution broke out spontaneously from the conditions depicted’), but there is still an enormous amount of checking to be done: ‘How ridiculous it would be if, after taking so much time to write this volume, I let errors remain because I was in a hurry!’ He began to look forward to travelling to Paris to see to publication, although he was still tormented by his insides (which seem to have been particularly distressing that winter). Finally, in the first week of February, he set off. He left Marie behind planting hedges and shrubberies. She was in better health than she had been for years, had even got back her old dash and gaiety, and so (like a true Englishwoman, we may think) was wearing herself out in the garden.6

  L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, as the world has had it since the second edition, consists of a Foreword, three Books, and substantial endnotes. This is the only simple statement that can accurately be made about an amazingly rich and complex work.

  The book which Tocqueville carried with him to Paris was incomplete. He had drafted and revised its twenty-five chapters, but had not yet added the endnotes, written the Foreword or supplied the finishing touches. Nevertheless, his great contribution to the endless debate about the French Revolution was in place.

  The complexity begins with the consideration of Tocqueville’s intentions. As is clear from his correspondence with Kergorlay, and still more from the article which Kergorlay published after his death, his literary ambitions were now of the loftiest. He was a mature writer at the height of his powers, and he aspired to an achievement which would put him on the same level as the French writers he most admired, particularly those of the seventeenth century. Kergorlay, who was always spurring Tocqueville on to loftier achievement, praised the Ancien Régime highly, but it was only after his friend’s death that he was ready to say unambiguously (after quoting Tocqueville’s tour de force on the French national character, a sentence of Proustian length), ‘this man was a great writer,’ and to compare him to Montesquieu, Massillon, Pascal, Rousseau, Fénelon, Voltaire and Maistre, not to his disadvantage. Kergorlay would only concede to critics that Tocqueville’s prose, though dazzlingly lucid, was so packed with thought that it resisted superficial readers – a reservation that would surely have pleased Tocqueville, and still seems just. There can be no doubt that his prose had grown more laconic, as he and Kergorlay liked to say, since the second Démocratie; severe yet flexible, simple but ironic, and always going straight to the point. He took endless pains with his style, and erected a monument of French literature. It was his second masterpiece and, with its predecessor, was going to keep his name alive indefinitely by its emotional and intellectual command of its material. Had Tocqueville survived to complete his grand design as he completed that of the Démocratie the two works would have palpably complemented each other, and together have made up a sweeping survey of politics in the modern world; revolution in France was a topic nicely matching democracy in America. Only his death defeated him.7

  Yet style, as Tocqueville perfectly understood, cannot be divorced from structure and subject-matter, and his mastery had not yet purged some old failings. Behind the magnificent façade lurked all too much jerrybuilding; or (if the image is too harsh) lacunae and incoherences as characteristic as his fine prose. This is not a question of the sort of correction with which later scholarship pursues a pioneer. Rather it is a matter of faults in the original design, blemishes which need never have appeared, which a biographer must try to explain. They seem to arise from the book’s duality. As Richard Herr was to put it, Tocqueville proposed to write a history that was also a political tract.8 On the one hand he wanted to bring home to his readers what he believed to be the truth, that the ancien régime, quite as much as the Revolution, had created modern French society; the Revolution was only a furious accelerator, sweeping away obsolete or inconvenient laws, customs and institutions more ruthlessly than any ministers of the old monarchy would have dared to contemplate, though their labours tended in the same direction. He also intended to blend this history with a critique of the new order, especially as it was operating under Louis Napoleon, and with an explicit affirmation of his own political creed: his love of liberty as he understood it, and his fierce patriotism. Advanced historical scholarship was to be combined with political pamphleteering. Tocqueville meant these two aspects of his book to reinforce each other; it is necessary to ask if they did or did not do so.

  As history, the Ancien Régime was undeniably a triumph. Tocqueville did not live to show the revolutionary assemblies at work, or to do more than allude to the crowning achievements of Napoleon; but he said quite enough to transform the historiography of the Revolution for good. He restored a sense of the continuity of French history, which is why the chief initial reaction of his first readers seems to have been surprise. They had for long assumed that the pre-revolutionary past had no relevance whatever to the nineteenth-century present. And it was not only Tocqueville’s conclusions which mattered, as he was well aware. He paraded his research as an example of the right way to tackle modern history, as medieval history had already been triumphantly studied (can he have been thinking of Michelet?). In his attempt to depict France in the eighteenth century he was palpably influenced by the early chapters of Macaulay’s History of England, a book which he read with relish in 1853, though he imitated neither Macaulay’s parliamentary prolixity nor his confidence in progress (he thought, rather, that he was dealing with two immense historical disasters, the ancien régime and the Revolution). He was not the first French historian to plunge into modern archives: Thiers, for instance, boasted of having read ‘and re-read’ 30,000 letters by Napoleon, but he made a very different use of the material, as Tocqueville pointed out when discussing the History of Consulate and Empire: ‘[I] expected more from so good a speaker & so admirable a converser. It is too long & too detailed. What do we care whether the Duke of Dalmatia marched on a given point by one path or another?’ Thiers was not a philosophic historian; he did not investigate the causes, ‘intrinsic & extrinsic’, which formed Napoleon. No-one could make such a criticism of Tocqueville on the Revolution;
and his example has been followed ever since by those seriously investigating the subject.9

  And as a tract the Ancien Régime was as successful, at least in France, as the Démocratie had been. It sold in what were large numbers for such a book; it was widely reviewed and heatedly discussed, as Françoise Mélonio has shown in her study, though she also seems to show that one of the reasons was that people had largely forgotten what the­Démocratie said, so that the old message seemed new. Tocqueville was gratified: he began to hope that the French were stirring again: ‘for a book so full of the desire for liberty as mine to be in such demand, that desire cannot be as dead as many believe and some hope.’ Indeed, events up to 1871 were going to demonstrate the plausibility of Tocqueville’s sketch of the volatile French national character, and the Third Republic was to establish a fairly liberal regime, though without ending friponnerie or generating much of the virtuous, manly spirit that Tocqueville had hoped for. After that he and his books gradually faded from view and from memory; and even today, after the great revival of interest in the late twentieth century, it is hard for anyone but the deeply committed to read the Ancien Régime for its political ideas. It seems to be largely a sermon for another day. But such is the fate of tracts.10

  It is when the historical and the political themes are studied together that difficulties arise. Modern undergraduates reading history are constantly warned against the vice of ‘presentism’ – that is, of assuming that the past was just the same as the present, or supposing that the only interesting thing about ancestors is how they opened the way for their descendants. Tocqueville would have found that error hard to avoid in any circumstances, since his mission was to demonstrate the continuity of French history.

  In 1789 the French made the greatest effort ever undertaken by any nation to cut the thread of their destiny in two, as it were, and by a gulf to separate themselves as they had been from what they wanted to be henceforward ... I have always thought that they were much less successful in this unusual enterprise than has been believed abroad, and than at first they believed themselves.

  In consequence he was always alert for evidence that the French had not greatly changed, and what we look for we tend to find. ‘As I proceeded with these studies, I was astonished to recognize in the France of the period, at every turn, many traits familiar to our own time.’* Beyond that, it was perhaps inevitable that the attempt to combine a tract in favour of liberty with a monograph on the old order should breed historical error. His sketch of France, the revolutionary nation, since 1789, is scarcely history – it is a kind of meta-history. All too characteristically, Tocqueville assumes what he needs to demonstrate. Liberté, égalité, fraternité: did the French ever consciously choose between them, as he asserts? They disliked the horrors of civil war, Parisian dictatorship, foreign invasion, famine and unemployment, and acted accordingly: but these are choices of a different kind. Tocqueville offered prophetic assertion rather than documented analysis; and if we are to take seriously the question of the temporary defeat of liberty in mid-nineteenth-century France we will, among other things, be obliged to make searching enquiry of Tocqueville and his like. Many ruinous political disputes (for instance, in the last years of Louis-Philippe) were touched off by rivalry among the grands notables, who showed so little interest in sharing power with those outside the magic circle, or indeed beyond their own particular coteries; and it was elite stupidity and selfishness, as much as any other cause, which wrecked the Second Republic and let in Louis Napoleon. As we have seen, Tocqueville himself was not quite blameless. It was not overlooked by many readers (certainly not by Bonapartists) that to some extent the Ancien Régime was the embittered utterance of a bad loser.11

  And Tocqueville’s main assertion was that centralization, the antithesis of free government, had been the achievement of the ancien régime; the Bourbons had thereby opened the road for the Committee of Public Safety and the Bonapartes (Louis-Philippe no longer figured very high on Tocqueville’s list of villains). Over the centuries local liberties, and local capacity for liberty, independence and self--government, were steadily undermined and suppressed by Parisian authorities; royal despotism was so powerful a force that not only did it rob the French of any taste for liberty, it destroyed all the institutions and laws which constituted the social and political order, so that when it weakened the state collapsed immediately into revolution; in some respects the activities of the royal government could even themselves be called revolutionary, so destructive were they; and yet, when the dust settled, the ancien régime could be seen to have reconstituted itself in splendour, and not only because of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was the only sort of government which the French were fit for. Such is what Sudhir Hazareesingh has recently called ‘the Tocquevillian Myth’, and he vigorously repudiates its validity for France in the later nineteenth century, whether under the Second Empire or the Third Republic, insisting that recent research has demonstrated ‘the energetic and creative nature of local civic life before 1880, whether in terms of village and communal politics; peasant politicization; municipal theory and practice; political socialization through religion; associational activity; and the reconstruction of local memory and local heritages’. For the eighteenth century Peter Jones has established that the government of the old monarchy ‘was less a centralising than a bureaucraticising force’; that the towns and villages of rural France enjoyed considerable autonomy until deep into the Revolution; that it was the Jacobins and Napoleon who established the rigid centralized administration which Tocqueville deplored. Tocqueville, it may be argued, mistook the fatal flaw of the ancien régime. It was not despotism but inefficiency.12

  If this judgement is correct, it suggests a crushing verdict: perhaps the Ancien Régime is obsolete. Yet that does not seem fair, or even plausible. For some reason readers in the twenty-first century still concern themselves with Tocqueville’s little book. What is that reason?

  Something must be allowed for the abiding allure of his subject. So long as Western civilization values the study of the past (and there are few signs that it is ceasing to do so), the French Revolution will be read and written about, for its drama, its complexity, for the moral and political passions which it embodies. It was one of the greatest events, or series of events, in history, and so long as this is understood it will be strenuously debated. Tocqueville’s voice makes itself heard in that debate, whatever his factual blunders, because his point of view was that of an extremely intelligent, well-informed and passionately concerned observer; indeed, a participant, if we accept his view that the Revolution continued throughout his lifetime. He is himself, as it were, one of the consequences of the Revolution, and should be studied as such. Besides, nineteenth-century France is worth studying in its own right, and to understand it, it is necessary to understand Tocqueville, and to understand Tocqueville it is necessary to understand all his works, including the Ancien Régime. So much seems incontestable.

  But as Tocqueville’s biographer I am forced to believe that the secret of the Ancien Régime’s continuing vitality lies in the fascination of Tocqueville himself, even if the old observation that every book is a concealed autobiography is rejected. If we also set aside academic rules and consider the Ancien Régime solely as a work of literature by a great author then the things which professors object to (I am one myself ) can be seen for what, essentially, they are: simply features of the landscape, characteristics that contribute to a reader’s interest and pleasure, traits that reveal the man himself, in all his weakness and strength. And a man like Tocqueville enlarges our sense of human possibility and of the meaning of human lives in everything he writes. He does this through his intellectual and artistic gifts, and through his passionate sincerity. So the accuracy of his conclusions is of limited importance, so long as he is not wilfully perverse, which Tocqueville never was. Let us attempt a reading of the Ancien Régime in this light.

  Tocqueville’s ambition for the success of his book was intense: he wrot
e to his father in November 1855: ‘I passionately desire to finish my great work; I hope God will allow me to do so.’ To him, the Ancien Régime was primarily a political work, a blow struck for liberty, and in due course he was to express surprise that his English reviewers did not discuss it as such – Albion letting him down again. He wanted, above all, to appeal to the common reader: for this reason he refused to include any documentary footnotes (to the irritation of historians to this day), quoted from his masses of material as sparingly as possible in his main text, and was often quite unspecific in his allusions to ‘an intendant’, ‘a marquis’, and so on. It was almost as if he preferred to fire off blanks rather than bullets. Scholarly considerations must take second place to evangelizing.13

  Not that he disavowed his labours of research: he was proud of them, and indeed, as Robert Gannett has shown, exaggerated them.14 It is usually a safe maxim that nothing is ever done for the first time, but Tocqueville’s research into the archives of the old order and the interpretation which he put on his results really do seem to have been unprecedented.* Driven, as we have seen, by his own enquiring mind and the questions that it raised, and assisted at the crucial moment by Grandmaison, he had discovered the enormous value of administrative records for understanding pre-revolutionary France and the Revolution itself. It was a great achievement, but the cause of liberty was what mattered.