Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  This priority will come as no surprise to readers of Tocqueville’s letters. He had wavered, ever since the coup d’état, between hope and fear for the future of France. Understandably he exaggerated the extent of Louis Napoleon’s tyranny; he felt horribly isolated in his views; but surely liberty might yet revive? He launched his blow.

  Is any man born with a soul so base as to prefer to depend on the whims of someone just like himself rather than to obey laws which he has helped to establish, if his nation appears to have the virtue necessary to make a right use of liberty? I believe that there is certainly none. Despots themselves do not deny the excellence of liberty; only they want to keep it all to themselves. They do not think that anyone else is entirely worthy of it.15

  Here, as in his occasional barbed references to the Emperor Augustus, a nephew of an uncle, Tocqueville is commenting severely on Napoleon III in a way to which no censor could object (though it would not have saved him under Napoleon I, who exiled Mme de Staël and silenced Chateaubriand). In the Foreword and in his concluding chapter he put forward his view that in 1789 the French wanted both liberty and equality, but under the pressure of events had had to choose between them, and chose equality, as they did again and again afterwards. Tocqueville exerted himself to persuade the French that they had been wrong: only liberty, he says, can effectively fight the vices of egalitarian societies, where nothing matters but money:

  Democratic societies which are not free ones can be rich, refined, cultivated, even magnificent, powerful from the mere weight of their homogeneous mass; one can find there much private merit – good family men, honest businessmen, most worthy landowners; one will even find good Christians, for the fatherland of such is not in this world and the glory of their religion is to breed them amidst the greatest corruption of manners and under the worst of governments: the Roman Empire in extreme decadence was full of them; but what one will never see in such societies, I dare to assert, are great citizens, nor, above all, a great people, and I am not afraid to affirm that the general level of hearts and minds will never cease to decline while equality and despotism are partners.16

  So much for the Second Empire. Tocqueville does not entirely despair of his countrymen: ‘On several occasions since the beginning of the Revolution, right up to the present, we have seen the passion for liberty die out, then be born again, then again die out, and again be born; so it will be for a long time yet,’ while the passion for equality will never flag. But the French nation is so extraordinary, more extraordinary than the events of its history, so full of contradictions that it is impossible to know what it will do next:

  disobedient by nature, and yet adjusting better to the arbitrary, even violent rule of a prince than to the free and lawful government of its leading citizens; today the declared enemy of all obedience, tomorrow abandoning itself to slavery with an enthusiasm that nations better endowed for the condition can never attain; led by a thread when no-one resists, ungovernable as soon as someone gives the example of resistance; fooling, therefore, all its masters, who fear it either too much or too little; never so free that one need despair of enslaving it, never so enslaved that it cannot break its yoke ...

  This is perhaps the most sustained piece of rhetoric in all Tocqueville’s writings (it is part of the sentence which Kergorlay admired so much) and is perhaps best read and enjoyed as such; but at the time it was written it was meant as a signal of hope; as a rallying-cry.17

  What are we to make of all this? Perhaps we should begin by registering the striking similarity, even identity, of thought and language, in detail and in general, between the Ancien Régime and De la démocratie en Amérique. Sometimes similarity verges on self-plagiarism: ‘I admit that in studying our old society in all its parts I have never entirely lost sight of the new one.’* Tocqueville himself was well aware of the likeness, and drew attention to it in the Foreword, where he found it necessary to recapitulate the vision of the course of French and European history that he had set out in the Introduction to the Démocratie in 1835. He claimed, accurately, to have been consistent over twenty years, which is all the more striking when we learn that he had been neurotically unable to re-read the Démocratie, even to make necessary revisions, since its first appearance.18

  There are some notable changes. Whereas the emphasis in the Démocratie was on equality, in the Ancien Régime, as must already be clear, it is upon liberty. This is unsurprising: by 1856 Tocqueville had behind him a long experience of what it meant to be deprived of it. He does not exactly explain what he means by liberty; as usual, he assumes that his readers know what he is talking about, and as a matter of fact they do, or should do: he means the liberty under law which he had expounded and defended in the Démocratie, the Souvenirs, and a dozen other places. He is still an elitist, believing in the superior wisdom of ‘leading citizens’, and we know from other documents that he has despaired of universal suffrage, which Louis Napoleon, the democratic despot, found so useful; his ideology has changed very little since his youth. As in 1835 and 1840 we can see what he wanted and why he wanted it, and need not deny him our sympathy.

  Yet there is one especially important difference. In 1835 the tone is buoyant; democracy is on the march, young Tocqueville is not afraid of the future or especially enamoured of the past. In the Ancien Régime his mood is quite other:

  Already, among the shadows of our future, we can see three very clear truths. The first is that all the men of our time are caught up by an unknown power which they may hope to regulate or moderate, but not to overcome, which gently but speedily drives them towards the destruction of aristocracy; the second, that of all human societies those which will have the greatest difficulty in escaping absolute government for long will be, precisely, those in which aristocracy is no more and cannot be revived; the third and last is that nowhere can despotism produce more pernicious effects than in such societies.

  This is a preoccupation which we can also find in Tocqueville’s letters and conversations at this period: ‘the loss of our aristocracy is a misfortune from which we have not even begun to recover,’ he told Nassau Senior in 1854. It recurs throughout the Ancien Régime. In the Démocratie he had not regarded the consequences of the nobility’s fall so gloomily, although ‘aristocracy’ was discussed at great length.* But by 1856 M. de Tocqueville took no pleasure in democracy, and surrendered to historical nostalgia.19

  Nostalgia for what, exactly? What did he mean by ‘the loss of our aristocracy’? These are questions which have to be answered at several different levels, and they bring us to the heart of the matter.

  By 1856 the noblesse had long since recovered from the demographic and economic shocks of the renunciation of privilege, the emigration, and the Reign of Terror. As Tocqueville’s own career amply demonstrates, nobles were still conspicuous in politics, business, society and the life of the mind. He can hardly have been regretting feudal privilege (which he condemned mercilessly in the Ancien Régime), or the Assembly of Notables of 1787, or the Chamber of Peers which was destroyed in 1848. It is true that by their own folly (as well as that of Charles X) the legitimists had lost national political power in 1830, but as Tocqueville knew perfectly well they had retained much of their influence in the countryside (he had done so himself ), and anyway not all nobles were legitimists (as, again, he himself proved). Furthermore, if the word ‘aristocracy’ is taken to mean government by the rich, well-educated and well-born, without regard to antique snobberies, France was thoroughly subordinated to such an elite until long after Tocqueville’s time (even, some would say, up to the present). If, as is most likely, he was referring to the ancien régime itself, he must have meant a period before the seventeenth century, for he always insisted that it was Richelieu and Louis XIV who broke the power of the noblesse; but it is hard to see what there is to regret in the noblesse of the Fronde and the Wars of Religion.

  Like so much else in the Ancien Régime, Tocqueville’s mythmakssing went back to the Démocratie. Had he
not said in its Introduction: ‘When royal power, supported by aristocracy, peaceably governed the peoples of Europe, society, in the midst of its distresses, enjoyed several types of happiness which it is difficult to imagine or value nowadays’? He also remembered Montesquieu, who in the Esprit des lois had insisted on the importance of ‘intermediate bodies’ to make a true monarchy: he was thinking chiefly of the French parlements, of which he was by birth an ornament, but also of the noblesse generally and of the clergy. Their function was to protect law and liberty, without which monarchy was mere despotism: ‘no monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch.’ As we may remember, Tocqueville in his youth had hoped that the Restoration’s Chamber of Peers would become such an intermediate body, and had an idealized view of the House of Lords.* His great ancestor, Malesherbes, had used the very language of Montesquieu when remonstrating to Louis XV in 1770: Frenchmen, he said, were not slaves, but all the intermediate bodies were either powerless or abolished, there was only one counsellor left, the nation itself.† Like Malesherbes, le président Rosanbo, Tocqueville’s grandfather, had honoured the parlements as the vanguard of resistance to royal tyranny. Tocqueville wrote full in the tradition of his mother’s family (the tradition of the Tocquevilles, nobles of the sword, was as we have seen somewhat different). Above all, however, Tocqueville in the Ancien Régime was determined to make the case for liberty against the Second Empire, and eighteenth-century polemics, which on the one hand constantly scrutinized the Bourbon monarchy for signs of despotism, and on the other championed the parlements, made it easy for him. He did not test his assumptions so rigorously as a historian should. It was just too convenient to use poor Louis XVI as a stand-in for Napoleon III, even though Tocqueville knew, indeed insisted, that Louis was a reforming king (‘that good and unlucky prince’).20 Besides, his reforms only made things worse.

  Similar considerations explain the onslaught on centralization in Book Two. It was an ancient theme: it had been an issue in 1789, it had then been a favourite grievance of the legitimists, and had figured conspicuously in the Démocratie. But in the Ancien Régime Tocqueville handled it with an eloquent ferocity that made the subject his own for ever. There can be no doubt of his passionate sincerity, but as we have seen already the case he makes is not a scholarly one. It is political. As with the parlements, he was not really concerned to be judicious and fair. He does not condescend to answer such arguments as Thiers made to Nassau Senior in 1853‡ ; he was so hostile to centralization that he refused to grant even rationality, let alone good intentions, to the royal government. He makes absolutely no allowances for the kings. All of them, according to him, from Philippe le Bel to Louis XV, laboured to extend their power over the French, apparently for no reason except egotistical satisfaction. No king or minister is given credit for statesmanship, patriotism, prudence, vision or common sense; no room is found to mention any crises which they might have had to meet, such as foreign invasion, famine, insurrection or civil war. Tocqueville could not avoid mentioning, eventually, the deficit and bankruptcy which brought on the final crisis of the old order (though he did so only in passing), but nowhere did he consider what seems an obvious point, that it was France’s aspirations to international preponderance, at least as much as anything else, that fatally overstrained the regime: Choiseul rebuilt the navy, Vergennes plunged the country into the War of American Independence, Louis XVI sank a fortune (almost literally) into building a naval base at Cherbourg, and all these policies were popular.* Tocqueville gave the forty kings no credit for creating France. Only Louis XVI got a kind word, because of his reforming zeal.21 No admissions were to be made of which Louis Napoleon might take advantage. The ‘Tocquevillian Myth’ was in part a response to the Bonapartist dictatorship. Tocqueville hoped to rally opinion in resistance, and in preparation for whatever regime succeeded (he had no faith in Louis Napoleon’s durability). It cannot be said that his attitude was soundly historical; but it had the strongest possible foundations in the political experience of his entire life.

  He was not the only man of his time to believe the myth, and he did not even make it up; but he believed it religiously, because, as a historian and political writer, he had in the end only one subject, announced in the opening pages of the Démocratie as the advance of equality, but really the fall of the noblesse. That this should preoccupy him is not surprising: it preoccupied many of his politically active fellow nobles, and indeed may be said to have preoccupied their opponents, who wanted to secure their own victory. The slightly obsessive quality of Tocqueville’s concern reflected his character; he brought passion and commitment to whatever he undertook. The ancien régime, then, seems his preordained topic, so much so that it seems likely that his gradual turn from Napoleon to the Revolution, and from the Revolution to the eighteenth century, was driven not only by what François Furet calls ‘the logic of all historical work, which is to proceed backward in time in search of origins’,22 and by the incidents of research, but by a deep impulse of which he was not at first conscious himself. He was one of a defeated class, and could not forget or pardon the defeat. He yearned for his birthright, by which, he felt, he was entitled to be part of the government of France. He had never thought much of equality as a principle; since the 1848 Revolution he could see nothing in it but the instinct of envy, as he told Senior as early as 1850: ‘it is a wish that no one should be better off than oneself.’ The Revolution of 1789 destroyed the regime of privilege,

  But it could not destroy the social distinctions which depend upon manners. It could not enable the bourgeois to feel himself the equal of the gentilhomme. It could not deprive the noble of his superior manners, of his self-confidence, of the respect paid to his birth, or of many other advantages incident to his position. These things excite the envy of the bourgeois ... The great majority of the French consists of course of the low-born & the poor and the égalité which they fight for is the destruction of the advantages of birth & wealth.23

  The French Revolution was many things, but all too clearly it had come to interest Tocqueville mainly, at times even exclusively, because it was a convulsion in which the ancient noblesse was broken, swept aside and replaced by a new ruling elite. Tocqueville’s family had maintained a solid footing in the new world, and he himself had done better than that; his reason and conscience suggested to him that in most ways democracy was an improvement on aristocracy; but he could never get over a sort of heartache for what had been lost.

  When we recollect the Démocratie Tocqueville’s observations to Senior seem to show a sad narrowing and impoverishment of thought. His opinion that envy lay at the bottom of the challenge to the noblesse can be discerned in the Ancien Régime; but his hankering for what had been, or might have been, expressed itself there not only in the very structure and argument of the book, but in some revealing details. For instance, one of his set-pieces is an evocation of the time when all went well in France between the orders. They collaborated, he alleged, in administering the country and in resisting royal encroachments:

  So we see, in Auvergne, the three Orders passing most important laws in common and arranging for their execution under the supervision of commissioners chosen from each of them. The same thing happened at the same period in Champagne. Everyone has heard of the celebrated pact by which the nobles and bourgeois of a large number of towns came together, at the beginning of the same [fourteenth] century, to defend the liberties of the nation and the privileges of the provinces against royal encroachment. At that moment in our history several episodes occurred which might have happened in England. Nothing like them was to occur in the following centuries.24

  The Golden Age is always in the past, but Tocqueville was fortunate in being able to give a date to it: scientific history has never been able to do so. Utopia is similarly elusive, yet Tocqueville discerned it across the Channel. The allusion to England in the passage just quoted was not fortuitous. There, Tocqueville argued earlier in the same chapter, was a country where the feu
dal nobility had evolved, not into a selfish caste, but into a true aristocracy, which still governed the country. ‘Nobles and commoners there co-operated in business, entered the same professions and, which is most significant of all, married into each others’ families. Daughters of the greatest lords could marry new men without shame ...’25 The typology is familiar: it had informed his visits to England twenty years previously, and he saw no reason to change it.

  It might be supposed that this medley of fiction and wishful thinking would inexorably lead to a work of bad history. The extraordinary thing is that in Ancien Régime it did not do so. Perhaps the reason was that Tocqueville had spent his entire intellectual and political career in the struggle to accept and build upon the work of the Revolution; and he was too intelligent and too honest intellectually to surrender to his prejudices. It may even be argued that his hatred of what had happened to France gave him his framework for interpreting it. He could argue for the essential continuity of French history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, over the gulf of the Revolution, because for him the break had come much earlier, when the monarchy disempowered the noblesse and crushed local liberties. This liberated him to analyse the old order for the worm-eaten relic that it was, and show the inexorability of the Revolution’s coming. As I have already remarked, his account was not complete, but it was extensive, powerful, and convincing: the work of a great historian.