Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

It made very slow progress. After more than a year – that is, by autumn 1858 – it would consist of no more than seven roughly drafted chapters and file upon file of notes. The trouble was still not shortage of materials. Tocqueville’s friend Taschereau, now in charge of the Bibliothèque Nationale, made an exception to the rules in his favour, just like Lord Clarendon in London, and sent him all the books and documents he asked for. In the spring, when they were digested, he would travel to Paris for more, planning to stay there for several months. But the old problem remained: he only had a cloudy idea of where he was going. He told Freslon that the chapters which he had sketched were not yet fit to be shown; the sketches survive, and certainly do not compare with the Brumaire chapters of 1852, or with the Ancien Régime itself.* Sources were not enough: he was still no Baconian inductionist. As a Cartesian he needed an idée mère to give shape and point to his researches, and he was still without one. He was still determined to avoid mere narrative, a resolution that would be difficult to stick to once he started to tackle the events of 1789; and he had no clear alternative. He spent every morning at his desk, but the months went by without much to show for his labours. Neither chronologically, nor in terms of historical argument, did he get much beyond the point he had reached at the end of the Ancien Régime.

  Given time, Tocqueville, with all his ability and ambition, would have found his way successfully forward; but he was not to be given time. The obstacles in his path therefore assumed a sinister importance. One of his problems was that by burying himself in the Cotentin for so long he cut himself off from a form of intellectual stimulus that was most necessary to him. As the history of all his previous books demonstrates, he required the stimulus of other men’s ideas, other men’s criticisms, to set his creative impulses free, and they had to be men whom he loved and trusted without reserve, men of whose sympathy he could be certain. But Ampère had failed him, and Beaumont, immersed in his own farm and family responsibilities, put off his next visit to Tocqueville until there was a good railway link, which would not exist until August 1858. It does not seem to have occurred to Tocqueville to solve the problem by visiting Beaumont-la-Chartre, or Kergorlay at Fosseuse. Anyway, he was feeling disillusioned about Kergorlay, as he told Beaumont: ‘since he became no more than the husband of his wife and the passive agent of ideas and feelings which are so different from those which are natural to him, there is no-one but you to whom I can talk open-heartedly, feeling at home [English in the original] both in heart and mind.’ This observation seems grossly unfair to Kergorlay, but was sincerely meant: at this time Tocqueville largely let his correspondence with his oldest friend drop, and it was left to Kergorlay himself to suggest a meeting in Paris in the spring for the purposes of discussion. Meanwhile Tocqueville trod water. He was not exactly apathetic about his project – he enjoyed the labour of research too much for that – but he was not caught up in the business of composition with the intensity of earlier times.41

  The truth, probably, is that Tocqueville, in his writing career, had been seized imaginatively by comparatively few topics, and the French Revolution proper had never been one of them. The causes of the Revolution, and its various sequels (Brumaire, 1830, 1848) – yes; but the great central drama itself did not set his fingers itching for a pen. He was not conscious of this distinction. He toiled on conscientiously, reminding himself of what Chateaubriand had once remarked to him: ‘they say that you have to wait for inspiration in order to write; but if I waited for it I’d never write anything.’ ‘If such a great writer lacked inspiration, a scribbler like myself may be consoled for never experiencing it.’ But whatever was the case with Chateaubriand, Tocqueville needed to be obsessed with his subject, and the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly simply did not have that effect on him.42

  Two or three years earlier he had thought of writing a life of Malesherbes, which his Montboissier cousins, Mesdames de Pisieux and de Grancey, did their best to encourage. He would have been well-placed to begin it, for the muniments room at Tocqueville contained one of the most important collections of Malesherbes papers; but nothing came of the idea.43 It is difficult not to think that he would have been well-advised to return to his original idea, and tackle the great Napoleon. Had he done so he would have fulfilled Chateaubriand’s oblique prophecy, his remark that Tacitus had been born under Nero.* The first Emperor had never lost his allure for Tocqueville, who, as late as 1856, was telling himself that ‘My purpose is to paint the true picture of a man more extraordinary than great who up to now does not seem to me to have been drawn either faithfully or in depth.’ His particular concern was to be with the opportunities that Napoleon found in the doings and opinions of his time, and with the means that he employed; ‘but what I want to paint above all, as to him and because of him, is the great Revolution in which he played so leading a role.’44 The task was certainly not beyond him, but he did not pursue it, most probably because he felt that he had committed himself with the French public to tackling the Revolution directly, before writing anything else. He would have got back to Napoleon eventually; given time.

  It would have been a brilliant performance, exploiting all his talents. We get a hint of what was possible in a letter to his favourite nephew, Hubert de Tocqueville. Hubert was making a promising beginning in diplomacy as a junior attaché at the French embassy in Berlin, and Alexis asked him to tell him as much as he could about Germany. When Hubert did so he got a reply in which his uncle’s musings seem to foreshadow European history for the next sixty years, as well as showing clearly why he thought that Napoleon was extraordinary rather than great. ‘I came back from Germany three and a half years ago convinced that our neighbours across the Rhine were our most irreconcilable enemies’; and for that he blamed the First Empire:

  It was the long, exhausting, and above all contemptuous oppression exercised in Germany by the Empire which united the whole country against us, and lit against us in the hearts of the German people passions which survived and will survive for a long time yet the causes which gave them birth. Fifty years ago we always found in Germany a population very willing to value our policies. Today we will never find a true ally there, whatever we do; and we are forced either to deliver ourselves into the hands of England, which will accept us only on condition that we leave them free to spread over the whole habitable globe, or to Russia, an alliance which always brings with it the risk of a general war. We have made our worst enemies out of our natural allies.45

  Tocqueville’s allusion to the ‘contemptuous’ attitude of the Napoleonic regime to the Germans resembles his nearly simultaneous analysis of British rule in India (a topic which had long fascinated him). The course of the Indian Mutiny deeply concerned both Tocqueville and his wife during the summer and autumn of 1857: Marie said it stopped her sleeping (her husband: ‘I did not know that she had kept so English a heart’).46 Alexis was fairly confident that the British would prevail, and thought that their defeat would be disastrous for the liberal cause in Europe; but as he developed his views in his letters to England he made it clear that though he recognized its importance, and indeed talked of European expansion as the spreading of civilization, he had no great opinion of imperialism’s virtue or of its permanent success. Reeve wanted to establish a European population in India; Tocqueville thought this a bad idea:

  A race which is inferior physically or by education can certainly put up with the government of a superior race ... Foreign government only wounds its feeble feelings of nationality; foreign settlers injure, or seem to injure in a thousand ways the private interests which are precious to all mankind ... I don’t doubt that in Algeria the Arabs and the Cabyles are more irritated by the presence of our settlers than by our soldiers.*

  This was to Hatherton; to Reeve himself Tocqueville went further. India, he said, could only be retained with the consent, even if merely tacit, of the Indians; but the British were unlikely to retain it for long, being the least amiable of the European nations: ‘The most cunning i
n exploiting to their profit the resources of every country, the least affable, the most disposed to keep themselves to themselves and (I can say this because the fault is so intimately connected to great merits) the haughtiest.’ To know them, in short, was to dislike them (not that Tocqueville put it like that). The Sepoy rising had been the revolt of those Indians who knew the British best and had been best treated by them. It was not at all a rising against oppression; ‘it was the revolt of Barbarism against Pride.’47

  It is the same point as the one which he made against the Napoleonic empire; together, the two analyses show that his mind was as lively as ever, so long as it was not labouring over the meeting of the Estates General, and so long as he was healthy. Then in late January 1858, he contracted influenza, which afflicted him seriously for six weeks. He referred to it repeatedly as only a trifling illness, but he would never again be wholly well.

  He went to Paris as planned at the end of March; the idea was that he would research there for three months or so, while Marie kept her aunt company at Chamarande; he would join her at the weekends in the small apartment which they were renting in the chateau there. Unfortunately the new owner of the chateau – Persigny, one of Louis Napoleon’s closest associates – decided to overhaul the building so thoroughly that it became, for a time, uninhabitable; Marie had to stay at Tocqueville, where her husband would rejoin her at the beginning of May. He did not much enjoy his stay in Paris. He disliked living in a hotel, and his attitude to his work fluctuated. At times he worked contentedly in the Bibliothèque Impériale, as the Nationale was then called, and the fascination of his studies was as strong as ever; but on the whole he felt that he was making no real progress. Using a favourite image, he told Marie that he was lost in an ocean of paper with no shore in sight; at times he felt like giving up the whole thing. ‘Happily Nature which made me sensitive and in consequence excessively volatile at the same time gave me a streak of tenacity which drives me to complete my undertakings in spite of every discouragement.’48 And no doubt he was sincere when he told his wife that he found the obligatory social round wearisome (though it was also the sort of thing that she liked to hear). It was not quite without its pleasures. Nassau Senior brought his wife and daughter on their annual spring visit to Paris, and they stayed in Tocqueville’s hotel, the Bedford, rue de l’Arcade. He spent several evenings with them and talked as well as ever (though he assured Marie that he was avoiding serious conversations with Senior, in order to spare his throat).49 He broached a familiar subject, the insipidity of young Frenchwomen:

  When a young lady comes out I know beforehand how her mother & her aunts will describe her. ‘She has simple tastes. She is pious. She likes the country, she likes reading, she doesn’t like dancing, she doesn’t like society, she goes out only to please her mother.’ I try sometimes to escape from these generalities, but there is nothing behind them.

  SENIOR: And how long does this simple, pious, retiring character last?

  TOCQUEVILLE: Till the orange flowers of her wedding chaplet are withered. In three months she goes to the messe d’une heure.

  SENIOR: What is the messe d’une heure?

  TOCQUEVILLE: A priest must celebrate Mass fasting; & in strictness, ought to do so before noon. But to accommodate fashionable ladies, who cannot rise by noon, priests are found who will starve all the morning, & say mass in the afternoon. It is an irregular proceeding tho’ winked at by the Ecclesiastical authorities. Still to attend it is rather discreditable: it is a middle term between the highly meritorious practice of going to early Mass, & the scandalous one of never going at all.50

  People who give pleasure with such talk usually receive it also, and there is no reason to suppose that Tocqueville was an exception.

  But nor can there be any doubt that he was unwell, which sapped his energy and his enjoyment of life. He longed for the Cotentin, and for Marie. He loved getting long letters from her, though he knew that writing them made her ill (rheumatism, presumably): ‘I ought to forbid you to do it. But don’t expect me to find the courage.’ The pain of loneliness never left him, yet he could endure it. But another theme creeps into his correspondence, then gradually, during the rest of the year, becomes dominant. On 14 April he assures Marie that his health is improving. His throat is giving less trouble – this is the first time he mentions that it has been affected – although a ‘je ne sais quoi’ grips him at the base of his neck and makes speaking a little uncomfortable. ‘It was almost nothing, but it was something.’ But a few days later he laments the change in himself; now he has every courtesy and assistance from librarians and archivists, but when he was writing the Démocratie he had something better – youth, ardour, faith in a cause, hope for the future, and Marie’s company. A week or so after that he acknowledges his sheer lack of strength: he is not ill, but neither is he well. He still has the soul of a thirty-year-old, but is physically as frail as a nonagenarian.51

  He was very glad to be back at Tocqueville in early May, but even there he could not settle down to work. He was restless and worried, he told Beaumont: ‘Why? Truthfully, it would be impossible to say. The likeliest reason I can find is that I continue to be me’; but among secondary causes the most important was his ill-health. He was not yet defeated, though he was making no progress with his work: he read Theodore Sedgwick’s new book on judicial practice in the United States and liked it so much that he wrote a report on it for the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques* which was published that autumn, and displays undiminished powers. But in mid-June he coughed up some blood – the same symptom which had heralded the terrible illness of 1850. He made light of it to Beaumont; but he thought he should perhaps consult Dr Bretonneau – only Bretonneau never answered letters.52

  Beaumont was always quick to take alarm about Tocqueville’s illnesses (he had seen so many of them) and to worry about him; a hint was enough. On this occasion he read between the lines and did his best to reassure the invalid, attributing his sickness to the particularly savage influenza of 1858 (which may indeed have triggered the recurrence of Tocqueville’s disease), expressing confidence that country life and summer weather would cure him, and reminding him of how many crises he had survived in the past. He wished he could pass on some of his own robust good health. He tried to infuse his friend with some of his own buoyancy. This was very necessary. In letters to other friends Tocqueville was frank about the gravity of the crisis. It made all work difficult; he could hardly speak. He called his affliction bronchitis, since it chiefly affected his windpipe, and that was the word which his doctors used; but in retrospect it is clear that he was actually suffering from tuberculosis of the pharynx or the larynx. The symptoms came and went: his body had been living with the disease for many years, and had to some extent adjusted to it; but there was not going to be another remission. He made some apparent recovery in July and August, but he knew that it was only partial. He told Beaumont that he had lost his élan: ‘The verve I had at Tours has been put out.’53

  In the circumstances it is perhaps surprising that he pressed so many of his friends, both French and English, to visit the chateau in August, when the Emperor would be officially opening the railway to Cherbourg and celebrating the completion of the great naval base there; there was to be a grand review of the French fleet and a visiting British naval squadron. Queen Victoria was coming. Tocqueville, as unrelenting as ever in his opposition to the regime, boycotted the proceedings,* but he could not resist the allure of the great naval spectacle, which he and his guests – Beaumont and Clémentine among them – watched from the cliffs at Fermanville. The guns fired salutes all day, and the smell of gunpowder reached as far as Tocqueville itself. A few days later Marie fell ill with ‘bronchitis’, lost her voice and took to her bed, but the visitors kept on coming. Monckton Milnes invited himself and a parliamentary colleague (Lord John Russell’s nephew Arthur); Tocqueville did not want them at all, but welcomed them effusively just the same; his only revenge was to take advantage
of Milnes’s gluttony and stuff him (he said) like a turkey, so that after dinner he put his feet up on one armchair and went to sleep in another. The English left on 13 August and were immediately succeeded by Tocqueville’s niece, Denise de Blic, her husband, and three of their children, who stayed for a fortnight. Tocqueville had rather dreaded this, but in the event the children captivated him and he was sorry when they left. The Corcelles came, as did W. R. Greg, an English acquaintance;* so did Pierre Gossin, an agricultural scientist whose work Tocqueville admired. Marie recovered, and Tocqueville was in generally good spirits. He wrote several letters full of vigour that summer, among them one to Pierre Freslon which included a long account of Royer-Collard (Freslon was going to write an article about him). Tocqueville insisted on the essential consistency and integrity displayed by the great doctrinaire during his long career, and part of what he said reads like a summary of his own public life, whether as writer or politician:

  Throughout his life M. Royer-Collard firmly believed that one could and should distinguish between the liberal spirit and the revolutionary one. He passionately desired the destruction of the ancien régime and always had a horror of its revival. He ardently desired the abolition of privilege, the equality of political rights, men’s freedom and dignity. He always detested that spirit of recklessness, violence, tyranny and demagogy which remains typical of the revolutionary spirit throughout the world. He believed firmly that one could overthrow the ancien régime without obeying that spirit. He aspired to bring forth from the revolution something other than the revolutionary spirit! He never thought that it was necessary to destroy the old French society in its entirety; only to break whatever stood in the way of the modern mind, of well-balanced liberty, of the equality of rights, of the opening of all careers and all opportunities to the aspirations of all men. Once the Revolution had occurred, he always wanted to shape our institutions according to this ideal, and to renew, so far as was possible and desirable, the past in the present.