Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  No-one in the country is more respected or leads a life more packed with benevolent and useful activity. What a noble, honourable, happy and enviable old age! His household is like himself. He lives in a fine country-house, surrounded by a fine park; everything conveys peaceful grandeur; absolutely no vain luxury, but an attention to the least details that contribute to the peace and comfort of life. The servants look smart but lack that air of gilded flunkeydom which has so often shocked me in the great houses of England ... But what is most remarkable in this house is the master himself; he is in good health in spite of the seventy-eight years which he alludes to with serenity; he takes a lively interest in the affairs of his country though he no longer wants to take part in them; he is always busy with everything that can be useful to the people living round him; in everything he sets a good example; he is surrounded by his children, various friends, and universal admiration.

  Here was what Tocqueville had been looking for all his life: a properly functioning aristocracy. It was an Utopia realized.27

  But if England had not changed, the visitor had. On the day of his arrival, as his train hurried through Kent,* Tocqueville, as before, noticed how well-kept and prosperous the country looked; but it did not seem so far ahead of France as it had in 1835; French agriculture was beginning to catch up. Of all the new acquaintances he made the one he liked best – the one who became a friend – was old Lord Hatherton,† a retired politician and devoted farmer, who carried Tocqueville into Staffordshire to see his lands round Teddesley. The visitor’s raptures surpassed even what he had felt at Coleshill:

  I admit that complicated machines, even the steam-plough, while interesting me, did not give me much to think about. But the way in which they pile up manure, how they treat it, how they make use of it – all bears on our concerns. The way they use the liquid struck me as ingenious. Unhappily, in this as in all things of this kind, my mind was interested, fascinated by the sight; but I find it difficult to remember what I saw clearly enough to profit. I admired the dwelling of my lords the pigs. It is swept clean every day and the manure removed and I am sure that there isn’t a single sty which isn’t cleaner than Madame Bono’s house.

  (Madame Bono was a neighbour at Tocqueville.) This interest in pigs was no passing fancy. He showed it at Coleshill, and Lord Radnor thereupon promised him the present of a pair to improve the breed in the Cotentin; when a few weeks later they arrived at Tocqueville they were the wonder of the village. Tocqueville was also much interested in iron fencing, and Hatherton gave him, as a parting present from Teddesley, a pocketful of Italian rye-grass seed, directions as to its use, and ‘an implement for pulling up thistle roots’. Tocqueville was warmly grateful.28

  He would never be more than a dilettante farmer, however enthusiastic; but his real business in England did not go nearly so well as his agricultural enquiries.

  The Croker collections of French revolutionary material in the British Museum were indeed vast, vaster than he expected: ‘48,479 books, pamphlets, and sets of volumes of periodicals’.29 Unfortunately they were quite uncatalogued (and would so remain, rather shockingly, until the late twentieth century) and were therefore, for Tocqueville, in his short visit,* essentially useless. He did not know what to ask for, and there was no Grandmaison to bring him likely specimens. Eventually he gave up, telling Marie that the Museum was a ‘humbug!’. He wrote a dignified letter to Anthony Panizzi, the chief librarian, explaining his difficulties, while thanking the staff for their great helpfulness. He was unaware that all the points which he made had been anticipated twenty years earlier by Thomas Carlyle, which had led to a fearsome quarrel with Panizzi. But even if the collections had been in a more usable condition it is doubtful how they would have served Tocqueville. He was still searching for ideas rather than information, and for those he had to rely on himself, whichever library he worked in. The point is illustrated by what happened when he transferred his researches to the State Paper Office (first incarnation of the National Archives). There, thanks to Lord Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary, he enjoyed the privilege of reading Foreign Office files which related to the first years of the Revolution, which were otherwise closed to the public. He found them fascinating, and copies were sent after him to France (another privilege). He could easily have made an important article out of them for one of the reviews; but they did not much assist his efforts to plan a second volume of his history.30

  He was spasmodically homesick, and wrote to Marie almost every day to say how much he missed his house and her. But it is possible to be homesick and yet to enjoy yourself, especially if you have a mercurial temperament. Invitations rained on him from the first, and he was the star of so many parties that Senior named him the lion of the season. Thinking of his stomach, Tocqueville took precautions: he treated fashionable London as he used to treat Saint-Lô during meetings of the conseil-général, refusing all dinner invitations (including one from the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston), instead taking solitary evening meals at the Athenaeum, where he again enjoyed temporary membership, as in 1835: what he called ‘this magnificent palace’ suited him admirably, and he spent as much time there as he could. But for the rest it was breakfast-parties and lunch-parties, morning calls and evening calls, and occasional dashes into the country to spend a night with the Grotes at their house (‘History Hut’) near Slough.31

  The breakfasts need explaining. These were essentially midmorning meals, halfway between what the French call petit déjeuner and déjeuner, much valued for the leisurely conversation they made possible. They were particularly popular with the London set where Tocqueville found himself, though Lord Hatherton asked his diary:

  Why are not these breakfasts more common? At the one or two hours given to them one really enjoys Society – which one never gets at a dinner. Yet there are not 12 regular attenders at breakfasts – & but six habitual givers of them – Landsdowne, Senior, M. Milnes & ourselves are the only ones I hear of.

  Such occasions suited Tocqueville perfectly. Although he read and wrote English easily, he found that his spoken English had grown rusty;* but his company made no difficulty about talking French. This did not always work: it was a great moment for Tocqueville when he met Macaulay at a breakfast given by Lord Stanhope, as he much admired the History of England, but he could not suppress a flash of his malicious humour:

  No author ever resembled his books more; he graciously complimented me by wanting to speak French and the toilsome way in which hot and vivid thought emerged through the chill embarrassments of a foreign tongue was very agreeable to see.

  When a few days later Macaulay gave a breakfast himself his guests divided into two groups as they walked about his lawn, one speaking English with Macaulay, the other French with Tocqueville. Among the second group was Lord Stanley, a future Foreign Secretary and heir of the Earl of Derby, the leader of the Conservative party. Tocqueville was induced to talk about the United States, and Stanley carefully recorded his remarks in his diary. They well illustrate the extent to which Tocqueville was keeping up with American affairs:

  He thinks disunion not probable. The impulse of the moment, which at present tends towards disunion, is less strong in America than it would be in a like case in France: and the interest of both North and south is against a rupture. He thought the South stronger than is usually supposed – the slaveowners had all at stake – local nationality, personal interest, even personal safety: while their opponents are fighting for a principle which does not directly concern them. But parties had never before been so violent: slavery used to be excused, palliated, represented as an inevitable evil, inherited from former times & for which the present age was not to blame: this was a few years ago the language of the slaveholders: now they identified themselves with the practice, boasted of it, sought to extend its arena.32

  Tocqueville’s charm, his perfect manners and the distinction of his conversation go a long way to explaining his success in London, and the recent publication of the Ancien Ré
gime takes us further. The liberty praised in the book seemed to be English liberty; the model which the French so disastrously (according to Tocqueville) failed to follow, was Britain. Certainly these last considerations explain why Prince Albert insisted on meeting Tocqueville, who duly visited Buckingham Palace one Sunday morning and talked to the Prince for an hour. Unfortunately there is no record of exactly what was said, but Tocqueville was more impressed by Albert than by any other royalty he ever met: ‘You are lucky to have such a man so near the throne,’ he told Lady Theresa Lewis. It was a civilized occasion, but it is reasonable to suspect a political arrière-pensée on the part of the host.33

  At the time of Tocqueville’s arrival in London the Whigs were enjoying what proved to be their Indian Summer. The Crimean War had ended in victory, and news of the Indian Mutiny was only just beginning to arrive; Tocqueville’s friends and acquaintances were splendidly self-confident. He did not meet everyone who mattered politically – not Disraeli, not Gladstone, who between them were to be the gravediggers of Whiggery ten years later, though he had known both in the past;* not John Mill: perhaps George Grote warned him that since his marriage Mill had become all but unapproachable even to his oldest friends.† Tocqueville’s contacts were all with a particular coterie of Whig peers and intellectuals. They welcomed him as a brother.

  He was not taken in by their amiability. He met the duchess of Argyll, who pressingly invited him to lunch; he got her to invite Senior too, who was eager to go, but when Tocqueville had to cry off because of a previous engagement she ruthlessly told Senior that he was no longer wanted. This sort of thing led to a splendidly Tocquevillean reflection, notable for its unexpected conclusion:

  [To Marie, 2 July] As you know, there is still a sort of free-masonry throughout Europe between members of the former upper classes which means that they understand each other with the merest hint ... I sometimes amuse myself here by chatting to some of the great ladies I meet who treat me as one of their own and I am surprised to find in them precisely the same vanities, the same prejudices which wrecked the French aristocracy. You should hear them go on about people who don’t belong to their natural society and how boring it is to have to receive people like the Reeves or the Seniors or even the Grotes. It always makes me think of the wife of our sous-préfet and her complaints about having to receive Madame de Varennes. The same exclusive spirit, the same natural idiocy. So why do they receive so affably all these people whom they consider their inferiors? Because they are afraid. Because they are living in a country where you have to reckon with everybody, and above all with those who speak, write and act. From which I infer that it is more than ever necessary to cry vive la liberté, which exalts and strengthens great minds and forces small ones to conceal their weaknesses and their grievances.34

  Whatever the views of the ladies, their husbands, several of whom were ministers, saw in Tocqueville not only a sympathetic aristo but a former deputy and minister who might soon return to power: they did not believe in the durability of the Second Empire. Nor did they foresee Tocqueville’s early death, though Lord Hatherton spotted that his health was bad and commented on his ‘very narrow flat chest.’ As an avowed friend of England, he was well worth cultivating; they may have thought it their duty to do so.35

  If their attentions had an official tinge, Tocqueville was quite ready to exploit it, whether by gaining access to secret archives or by furthering the career of Marie’s brother, Joseph Mottley, RN, a commander on half-pay who for years had been hoping for promotion. Marie had urged Tocqueville to do something for Joe, and Tocqueville was quite willing to try (he liked his brother-in-law) though he had little hope of success. But he discovered that Joe was quite right in asserting that ‘interest’ was the key, the only key (‘this must be “Entre nous”’). He visited Joe at Dulwich, where he lived with his mother and sisters: this, so far as we know, was the only time that Tocqueville met his mother-in-law, who immediately concerned herself with his health. Twice he gave Joe dinner – Joe took the precaution of reminding him that he had only the simplest taste in food, a mere joint, or ‘your own Athenaeum dinner, for instance – I think far preferable to Soyer’s* entire machinery in the art of stuffing. You know how you were vexed on a former occasion’. Then he took up Joe’s cause with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Charles Wood.† Sir Charles had never heard of Commander Mottley, but he made enquiries, and less than a fortnight later Joe wrote rapturously to Tocqueville, just returned to France, that he had been promoted to postcaptain on half-pay. The ancien régime still ruled the Queen’s Navy. Joe tried to prove his gratitude by helping in the troublesome business of transporting to France a new carriage (a phaeton) which Tocqueville had bought from a coach-maker in Croydon. This extravagance is one of several signs that thanks to his inheritance from his father, and no doubt in part to the sales of the Ancien Régime, Tocqueville was feeling much more affluent than formerly.36

  Sir Charles performed another service: he offered Tocqueville the use of a naval vessel to carry him home to Cherbourg. The offer was gladly accepted. All Tocqueville had to do was to travel to Portsmouth, dine with the admiral in command there, and board a small steamer; the next day (21 July) he saw before him the hill above Tocqueville and could almost believe that he also saw the smoke from his own chimneys. He disembarked at Cherbourg; soon he arrived at his front door. He was grateful and delighted. The Imperial government showed its sense of the significance of this British kindness by forbidding all mention of it in the newspapers.37

  Tocqueville had enjoyed his English visit, and enjoyed the memory of it (his letters were full of the subject for weeks afterwards) but he was glad to be at home again, even if at first the place seemed oddly shrunken. The heat-wave which had at first afflicted him in London was the presage of a summer and autumn of almost perfect weather, which went on far longer than could be foreseen. Relations and friends filled the chateau during August and September, although Ampère, the visitor most desired, first postponed his arrival and then decided that he could not come at all. He had formed a platonic attachment to an unattainable woman (as once to Mme Récamier), the invalid Mme Louise Guillemin, who lived with her parents in Italy (she was separated from her husband). Tocqueville could not quite conceal a certain vexation in the otherwise magnanimous letter which he wrote to Ampère about this disappointment, a vexation amplified on account of Loménie, who with his wife had been specially invited to Tocqueville to give Ampère pleasure.38 The party made the best of it, however, and it is clear from Loménie’s later account that they all enjoyed themselves. Loménie carried away a touching impression of Tocqueville’s democratic delicacy towards his fellow villagers:

  There was formerly in the choir of the village church at Tocqueville a notably splendid pew, reserved from time immemorial for the lord of the chateau, which had gone through all the most revolutionary periods without being suppressed. This pew, which shocked nobody in the commune, nevertheless took up much space, and it was enough that it could become a grievance for Alexis de Tocqueville to decide to remove it. On the other hand, as he did not want ... the villagers ... to see in this either a confession of weakness or a bid for popularity, he waited patiently until a general repair of the church was undertaken; then one fine day, following this general repair, they saw that the lord’s pew had been suppressed and replaced by a much more modest one, placed at the edge of the choir, aligned with and next to that of the maire and the municipal council.39

  The visitors were agreeable, but when they departed Tocqueville and Marie enjoyed their solitude. Tocqueville amused himself with his farm. He was proud to think that his English pigs might improve the Norman breed: ‘When one can’t render great services to one’s country, one can be a public benefactor in small things.’40 He kept up an intermittent agricultural correspondence with Lord Hatherton and spent all his afternoons in the open air, looking after his land, with greater and greater pleasure. There were only two serious blemishes in this charming life
. One was Marie’s ‘facial rheumatism’, which caused her continual anguish. The other was Tocqueville’s new book.