* In fact, Édouard stayed to the end.
* It was actually three.
* Félix Antoine Philibert Dupanloup (1812–78), Bishop of Orleans 1849, received into the Académie 1854.
* Madame Bovary was published in December 1856 and made even more of a sensation than the Ancien Régime; the imperial government prosecuted it unsuccessfully in 1857.
* ‘Confession’ is the word GB uses, but even if AT did indeed pour out to Marie all his concerns, doubts and regrets, his avowal had no ecclesiastical significance.
EPILOGUE
AMPRE ARRIVED IN CANNES on 17 April (soon followed by Corcelle): too late for Alexis, but in time to do what could be done to comfort and help Marie, and to accompany her on her mournful journey back to the Cotentin. For a moment it seemed that her grief, coming on top of her long debility, would kill her, but in a few days she rallied. A funeral service was held at Cannes: Lord Brougham attended as the representative of the Institut, breaking his rule of never going to funerals; but there was never a question of burying Alexis anywhere but in the spot that he had chosen in the churchyard at Tocqueville.1 The cortège went northwards slowly, which gave Louis de Chateaubriand time to arrange for a lying in state in the crypt of the Madeleine (only a stone’s throw from Tocqueville’s birthplace). At last the body reached home; interment took place on 10 May, attended by a huge crowd.2 After that Marie began the struggle of widowhood. She mourned her husband desperately, and her grief soon led to a certain change in her avowed attitude to him and his memory. She wrote lamenting to Monckton Milnes: ‘So much perfection to be called away! the friend of all, lamented by all, so useful to all, and I so useless, so worn out, to be left!’ If she still had any mixed feelings about Tocqueville, she kept them to herself.3
She was a woman of strong character as well as strong feelings. Soon after the funeral she faced the question of what to do about Tocqueville’s huge archive of unpublished material. She called Beaumont in aid, and in this way Beaumont, whom Tocqueville had so repeatedly urged to take up some new literary task after he left public life, found himself committed, for the rest of his days, to act as his dead friend’s editor. It was congenial work and he carried it out very capably, though by the standards of the nineteenth rather than the twenty-first century. He was an honourable editor; Marie, by contrast, pushed the prerogatives of a widow to their limit. She seems to have destroyed every letter which she ever wrote to Alexis, and apparently set out to destroy all those which he had written to her, after copying out passages in which he assured her of his undying love. Her last illness and death in 1864 put an end to this lamentable, if understandable, undertaking.
The death of Tocqueville was a public event. News of his danger had seeped out of Cannes long beforehand, and indeed several French newspapers (and, in London, The Times) had announced his end before it occurred. When it came it was suitably acknowledged with paragraphs and obituaries in the press, but it appears to have been somewhat overshadowed by the outbreak of war with Austria.4 In the winter of 1860–61 there was a dramatic change. Beaumont brought out two volumes of Tocqueville’s remains, which contained Beaumont’s long biographical ‘Notice’, various unpublished minor works, including ‘Quinze jours dans le désert’ and the two Brumaire chapters, and nearly 300 letters to various correspondents, including Kergorlay, Eugène Stoffels, and Beaumont himself. The volumes had a great success. Sainte-Beuve, then at the height of his critical authority, praised them highly in two articles marked, undeniably, by streaks of his characteristic malice, and by his take-it-or-leave-it style, but stating unequivocally that Tocqueville was one of the great writers of the age: Sainte-Beuve particularly liked ‘Quinze jours dans le désert’ and the modesty displayed in the letters to Kergorlay.5 (All this was the more magnanimous as, in life, the two academicians had been sharply divided by politics: Sainte-Beuve was a firm Bonapartist.) Lévy, the publisher, was so encouraged by the volumes’ reception that he commissioned Beaumont to bring out a ‘complete works’, which turned out to be nothing of the kind, but did include a further volume of letters, one of miscellaneous writings (‘Mélanges’) and new editions of the Démocratie and the Ancien Régime.6 (The Souvenirs was held back, an unexploded bomb.)
But Sainte-Beuve was not so gracious when he commented on Père Lacordaire’s reception at the Académie Française as successor to Tocqueville. Lacordaire’s election created a stir, partly because he was the first friar ever admitted among the Immortals, but chiefly because it was the outcome of an unnatural alliance between liberals and Catholics against Napoleon III’s Italian policy. Fireworks were expected: priestly eloquence in defence of Pius IX and defiance of the Emperor; the hall of the Institut was packed for the occasion (even the Empress and other Bonaparte ladies attended). Lacordaire disappointed them all; he made no reference to imperial policy, and said very little about the Pope. His style was ill-suited to the Académie, and his tribute to Tocqueville, though sincere and intelligent, was flat. Only in his somewhat unctuous reference to Tocqueville’s piety at death did he strike a new note, and unfortunately it involved him in seeming to say that on the brink of eternity Tocqueville’s lifetime achievements were unimportant.7 Guizot, who responded on behalf of the Académie, was much more successful. He had not lost the gift of commanding an audience, and this one (according to Kergorlay, who was present) hung on his lips as he plastered Lacordaire with compliments and in his turn praised Tocqueville’s memory. But he could not resist surveying the long controversy between himself and Tocqueville about the course of modern history, or of taking the opportunity of having the last word. The applause fell away, Kergorlay reported to Marie. Guizot’s argument was the same as Molé’s in 1837, as Sainte-Beuve pointed out: Tocqueville only disagreed with him because of his political inexperience. In veiled language Sainte-Beuve retorted on Tocqueville’s behalf that the truth, rather, was that Guizot himself never learned, but clung obstinately to his first mistakes, and never let experience or criticism or patriotism change his mind.8
Read today, these polemics only drive home the fact that Tocqueville was dead and buried. As Françoise Mélonio has pointed out, neither Lacordaire nor Guizot took account of the fact that, as they spoke, the American Union which Tocqueville had described was breaking up in rebellion and civil war, a mistake which Tocqueville would certainly not have made.9 Essentially, these were the opening exchanges in the debate about Tocqueville, now living only in his writings, that has gone on intermittently to the present day.
Later that year a very different meeting evoked Tocqueville’s personality, if not his work, much more vividly. In August some of his closest friends assembled, as Marie’s guests, at the chateau. Ampère was there, Gustave and Clémentine de Beaumont, Nassau and Minnie Senior. All was as it had been before. They walked about the countryside; Beaumont and his ten-year-old son Paul bathed in the sea; they talked about Italy, France, America; and Senior as usual made notes of what was said. Gradually reminiscences of their lost friend and host came to dominate their conversations. Beaumont defended Tocqueville’s record in the politics of the July Monarchy and on the Constitutional Committee in 1848; Guizot would not have been pleased by his comments. And when, at Senior’s suggestion, they passed an evening listening to Ampère reading Molière’s Misanthrope, a play which Tocqueville had loved, their discussion afterwards evoked Alexis and his world as nothing more direct could have done.10
AMPÈRE: The tradition of the stage is that Célimène was Molière’s wife.
MINNIE: She is made too young. A girl of twenty has not her wit, or her knowledge of the world.
AMPÈRE: The change of a word in two or three places would alter that. The feeblest characters are, as usual, the good ones, Philinte and Eliante. Alceste is a grand mixture, perhaps the only one on the French stage, of the comic and the tragic, for in many of the scenes he rises far above comedy. His love is real impetuous passion. Talma delighted in playing him.
SENIOR: The desert into which he ret
ires was I suppose a distant country-house: just such a place as Tocqueville.
BEAUMONT: As Tocqueville fifty years ago, without roads, ten days’ journey from Paris, and depending for society on Valognes.
MARIE: As Tocqueville when my mother-in-law first married. She spent in it a month, and could never be induced to see it again.
SENIOR: Whom did Célimène marry?
AMPÈRE: Of course, Alcèste. Probably five years afterwards. By that time he must have got tired of his desert, and she of her coquetry.
SENIOR: We know that Molière was always in love with his wife, notwithstanding her légèreté. What makes me think the tradition that Célimène was Mademoiselle Molière true, is that Molière was certainly in love with Célimène. She is made as engaging as possible, and her worst faults do not rise above foibles. Her satire is good-natured. Arsinoë is her foil, introduced to show what real evil-speaking is.
AMPÈRE: All the women are in love with Alcèste, and they care about no-one else. Célimène’s satire of the others is scarcely good-natured. It is clear at least that they did not think so.
MINNIE: If Célimène became Madame Alcèste he probably led her a life with his jealousy.
CLÉMENTINE: Of course he was jealous, for he was violently in love. There can scarcely be violent love without jealousy.
MARIE: At least until people are married. If a lover is cool enough to be without jealousy, he ought to pretend it.
Pour en trouver ainsi, elle avait ses raisons.11 *
FINIS
* ‘She had her reasons for thinking so.’
NOTES
1. Noblesse
1. Rédier, 16–17.
2. AT to Hervé de Tocqueville, 1 July 1841, OC XIV 223. For further particulars of AT’s ancestry see Rédier, 17–20, and Simon.
3. Yale, Beinecke Library: Tocqueville Papers A I e, ‘Catalogue des Livres de la Bibliothèque du château de Tocqueville’, compiled in 1818. A total of 542 volumes are listed, and it is evident that most of them were acquired in Bernard de Tocqueville’s time. The books on ‘art militaire’ are explicitly stated to have been his ‘Bibliothèque militaire portative’.
4. The main source for the history of the Tocqueville family in the eighteenth century is the unpublished memoirs of Hervé de Tocqueville, now deposited in the Archive Départementale de la Manche, in Saint-Lô, sous-série 1J. A small portion of the memoirs was published in the Contemporain, janvier 1867, as ‘Épisodes de la Terreur’ (reprinted 1901). I make such extensive use of this most valuable document that there seems to be little point in giving references for particular statements. (For a further account of the memoirs, see the Bibliography.) For my account of the château de Tocqueville, see Leberruyer.
5. For what follows I am chiefly indebted to Ford and to Chaussinand-Nogaret.
6. Nassau Senior, Journal, Saturday, 17 August 1850. Senior, one of AT’s closest English friends, kept a journal of his conversations with AT and other eminent men from 1848 until shortly before his death in 1864. It is a most valuable source, which was published, with various abridgements and editorial manipulations, in 1872 (ed. M. C. M. Simpson, Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau W. Senior, 2 vols.) and then, more fully and accurately, as vol. VI ii of the Oeuvres complètes (eds. Hugh Brogan and Anne P. Kerr, 1991). Unfortunately it was there published in French translation. All my citations in the current work are made from the manuscript (National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth), unless otherwise indicated, in the interest of absolute scholarly accuracy.
7. ibid., Tuesday, 22 October 1849.
8. ‘État sociale et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789’ (published in the London and Westminster Review, tr. John Stuart Mill, 1836), OC II i 38.
9. Rédier, 21. She entitled her memoir ‘Petit recueil ou abrégé de la vie et de la mort de l’homme le plus vertueux, du meilleur et, je peux dire, du plus chéri des époux. Dédié a la reconnaissance’.
10. Chaussinand-Nogaret, 69.
11. AT to Mme Swetchine, 10 September 1856, OC XV ii 292–3.
12. Grosclaude, 734–5, quotes two letters of the time from Mme de Montboissier, Louise de Rosanbo’s émigrée aunt, which show both that the marriage was arranged in some haste and that Hervé was not a familiar member of his bride’s circle: Mme de Montboissier has forgotten his name.
13. AT to Hubert de Tocqueville, 23 February 1857, OC XIV 329.
14. AT to Hubert de Tocqueville, 4 April 1857, ibid. 330.
15. Allison, 126, is my only authority for this statement; I cannot find any confirmation in Grosclaude.
16. OC II, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, i, 63–4.
17. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, vol. I, 288.
18. Painter, 138.
19. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, I, 354.
20. ibid., 521, 541–3.
21. Grosclaude, 706, 711.
22. ibid., 718.
23. ibid., 721.
24. Allison, 162.
25. Grosclaude, 738.
26. ibid., 747.
27. Hampson, 18.
28. Richard Monckton Milnes, ‘Commonplace Book’, vol. 1844–5, Trinity College Library, Cambridge.
2. Royalists
1. As in chapter 1, so here: unattributed information is taken from HT’s memoirs.
2 For further details of HT’s struggle over the family inheritance, see Jardin, Tocqueville, 14.
3. Jardin, ibid., 16; Rédier, 31–2, gets the date of HT’s appointment badly wrong, but wisely 2. remarks of the comte’s reasons for taking it, ‘it was in the manner of the time.’
4. AT to Édouard de Tocqueville, 2 September 1840, OC XIV 214.
5. Jardin, Tocqueville, 14; Rédier, 31; Louis de Kergorlay to AT, 4 August 1833, OC XIII i 331; for Le Sueur, see below, 46.
6. Louise de Tocqueville to AT, ‘Samedi’, [1815 or earlier], Saint-Lô AT 315; AT to Louise de Tocqueville, 19 June 1831, OC XIV 104; AT to comtesse de Grancy, Paris, 11 January 1836, OC(B) VII 145.
7. AT to Francisque de Corcelle, 18 June 1856, OC XV 162.
8. AT to Lady Theresa Lewis, 6 May 1857. I have used the translation in MLR II 376–9.
9. Quoted in Jordan, vii.
10. Senior, Journal, Saturday, 25 August 1850.
11. HT, Memoirs.
12. Senior, Journal, 25 August 1850.
13. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, I, 74–5, and n.10.
14. ibid., 56.
15. ibid., 958–9.
16. Jardin, Tocqueville, 221: ‘under his grave exterior there was still something left of Abbé Lesueur’s spoiled, capricious pet’.
17. Rédier, 36.
18. AT to Édouard de Tocqueville, 10 September 1831, OC XIV 133.
19. AT to Henry Reeve, Paris, 14 June 1856, OC VI I 183.
20. OC V I 199.
21. For this information, and for my whole account of the Restoration, I am deeply indebted to G. Berthier de Sauvigny.
22. Here I differ from Jardin, Tocqueville, 16, who thinks that HT may well have taken part in clandestine activities, at least as far as keeping in touch with the exiled comte d’Artois. HT makes no mention of any such activities in his memoirs, and his account of a conversation with Chateaubriand (Archives de la Manche, Fonds Hervé de Tocqueville, série J.52 p. 109) implies fairly clearly that although he knew that there was much royalist intrigue, he had no hand in it.
23. Chateaubriand, De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, 18–19; Rédier, 34; Berthier de Sauvigny, 15.
24. Boigne, I, 236.
25. Boigne, ibid., 248; Chateaubriand, Mémoires, I 237.
26. Chateaubriand, ibid., 1341–2, n.1.
27. AT to Abbé Le Sueur, April 1814, OC XIV 39–41.
3. A Sentimental Education
1. OC (8) V 469.
2. HT, Memoirs. As before, I will not usually give any references for matter derived from this manuscript.
3. See Berthier de Sauvigny, 42–74; Jardin, Tocqueville, 16.
4. Richards
on, 54.
5. Jardin, Tocqueville, 19; Rédier, 37.
6. Jardin, ibid., 20, seems to think that HT protests too much: it was the situation, not his colleagues and superiors, which defeated him.
7. Richardson, 208 (and elsewhere); Jardin, Tocqueville, 20–27.
8. HT, Memoirs; AT to Le Sueur, [Metz, 27 July] 1817, OC XIV 42–3. This letter ends with the words ‘Mamma is much better,’ which may be thought to imply that Mme de Tocqueville managed to make at least one visit to Metz (perhaps for AT’s birthday). If she did, the visit was not a success, and she was soon back in Dijon.
9. AT to Le Sueur, [Metz], 6 July [1817], OC XIV 42–42. The editors of the Correspondance familiale, André Jardin and Jean-Louis Benoit, state categorically that AT did not enter the school until 1821, but the letters of 6 and 27 July 1817 seem to contradict this assertion, unless they are given a very strained interpretation.
10. Guizot, vol. i 144.
11. Jardin, Tocqueville, 58 n.2.
12. AT to Louis de Kergorlay, Versailles, 27 March 1828, OC XIII i 133.
13. Le Sueur to Édouard de Tocqueville, [Paris], 2 August 1821, Yale: Beinecke.
14. Le Sueur to AT, Paris, 16 April 1820, Saint-Lô.
15. Le Sueur to AT, Paris, 27 April 1820, Saint-Lô.
16. AT to Eugène Stoffels, 22 October [1823], OC(B) V 411. GB misdates the letter to 1822.
17. Le Sueur to Édouard de Tocqueville, 14 September 1822, Yale: Beinecke.
18. Le Sueur to Édouard de Tocqueville, 16 September 1822, Yale: for Kergorlay’s letters see OC XIII i 41–54; for Mme de Blangy, see Henry Reeve, Edinburgh Review, CXIII, 432–3.
19. AT to Sophie Swetchine, 26 February 1857, OC XV ii 315.
20. AT to Charles Stoffels, Philadelphia, 22 October 1831, OC (B) VII 82.
21. The best complete treatment of AT’s religious views is Goldstein, from which I hope I have learned much.
22. AT, notebooks, October 1831, OC V I 183. AT said the same thing in much the same words in the letter to Charles Stoffels of 22 October 1831 (LC 240), for which this memo is no doubt the preparatory jotting; AT, cahier portatif no. 3, [October] 1831, OC V i 183; AT to Ernest de Chabrol, Philadelphia, 19 November 1831, Yale: Beinecke.
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