Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Yale: Beinecke Tocqueville–Beaumont MSS collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

  Yale: Stirling Rare Books Room, Stirling Library, Yale University.

  II. Primary Sources in Print and Manuscript

  The most valuable source for the study of Tocqueville’s life and works is undoubtedly the edition of his Oeuvres, papiers et correspondances (OC) which began publication in 1951. It is unfortunately still (in 2006) incomplete: we await three final volumes of Tocqueville’s correspondence générale; and the constituent volumes are somewhat uneven in quality; but as a whole the edition is a noble monument to Tocqueville’s memory. Without it the flowering of Tocqueville studies of the last thirty years or so would have been impossible. Its make-up is as follows:

  OC I De la démocratie en Amérique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1951), edited by J. P. Mayer, with an introduction by Harold Laski. Revised edition 1960.

  OC II L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 2 vols. (Paris, 1951): vol. 1 edited by J. P. Mayer; vol. 2, Fragments et notes inédites sur la Révolution, edited by André Jardin, with an introduction by Georges Lefebvre.

  OC III Écrits et discours politiques, 3 vols. (Paris, 1962, 1985, 1990), edited by André Jardin: vol. 1 introduced by J.-J. Chevallier and André Jardin, vols. 2 and 3 by André Jardin.

  OC IV Écrits sur le système pénitentiaire en France et à l’étranger, 2 vols. (Paris, 1984), edited by Michelle Perrot.

  OC V i Voyages en Sicile et aux Etats-Unis (Paris, 1957), edited by J. P. Mayer.

  OC V ii Voyages en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie (Paris, 1958), edited by J. P. Mayer and André Jardin.

  OC VI Correspondance anglaise, 3 vols: vol. I, Correspondance avec Henry Reeve et John Stuart Mill (Paris, 1954), edited by J. P. Mayer and Gustave Rudier, with an introduction by J.P. Mayer; vol. II, Correspondance et conversations d’Alexis de Tocqueville et Nassau William Senior (Paris, 1991), edited by Hugh Brogan and Anne R. Kerr, translated by B. M. Wicks-Boisson, with a preface by Eric Roll and an introduction by Hugh Brogan; vol. III (Paris, 2003), edited by Anne P. Kerr.

  OC VII Correspondance étrangère: Amérique, Europe continentale (Paris, 1986), edited by Françoise Mélonio, Lise Queffélec and Anthony Pleasance.

  OC VIII Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Gustave de Beaumont, 3 vols. (Paris, 1967), edited by André Jardin.

  OC IXCorrespondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et d’Arthur de Gobineau (Paris, 1959), edited by M. Degros, with an introduction by J.-J. Chevallier.

  OC XCorrespondance et écrits locaux (Paris, 1995), edited by Lise Queffélec-Dumasy, with a preface by André-Jean Tudesq.

  OC XI Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville avec P.-P. Royer-Collard et avec J.-J. Ampère (Paris, 1970), edited by André Jardin.

  OC XII Souvenirs (Paris, 1964), edited by Luc Monnier.

  OC XIII Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Louis de Kergorlay, 2 vols. (Paris, 1977), edited by André Jardin, with an introduction and notes by Jean-Alain Lesourd.

  OC XIV Correspondance familiale (Paris, 1998), edited by Jean-Louis Benoît and André Jardin, with a preface by Jean-Louis Benoît.

  OC XV Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Francisque de Corcelle; Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Madame Swetchine, 2 vols. (Paris, 1983), edited by Pierre Gibert.

  OC XVI Mélanges (Paris, 1989), edited by Françoise Mélonio.

  OC XVII Correspondance générale, 3 vols. (not yet published).

  OC XVIII Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville avec Adolphe de Circourt et avec Madame de Circourt (Paris, 1983), edited by Anne P. Kerr.

  The deficiencies of the OC mean that scholars still have to refer to OC(B) from time to time: Oeuvres complètes d’Alexis de Tocqueville, 9 vols. (Paris, 1861–6), edited by Gustave de Beaumont; of these volumes the most useful – indeed, one might say, at this time of day the only useful ones – are V–VII, especially vol. V, which contains Beaumont’s ‘Notice’, the first biography of Tocqueville. Some of the other gaps in the OC are filled by Lettres choisies (LC) (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), edited by Françoise Mélonio and Laurence Guellec; it also includes an up-to-date edition of the Souvenirs. The best edition of the Démocratie is Eduardo Nolla, 2 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1990). The three-volume selection of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1991–2004), edited by André Jardin, Françoise Mélonio et al., contains the best currently available edition of the Ancien Régime; as a whole, the selection is probably the most convenient presentation of Tocqueville’s writings now on the market, though it contains no letters and none of the prison texts.

  Abundantly though Tocqueville has been printed, scholarship must also still turn to the manuscript sources, which fortunately are mostly available in no more than two archival collections: the Tocqueville–Beaumont collection at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and the Papiers Tocqueville accessible on microfilm at the Archives Départementales de la Manche, Saint-Lô, Manche. The Beinecke collection centres on Tocqueville as the author of the Démocratie (it contains the book’s working manuscript); the Papiers Tocqueville is particularly valuable for his political career. But each archive has its auxiliary treasures. The Beinecke holds a large number of unpublished papers of Gustave de Beaumont, valuable both to the student of Tocqueville and to historians of nineteenth-century France and Ireland; at Saint-Lô may be found the manuscript memoirs of Hervé de Tocqueville. As a guide to all the main locations of Tocqueville documents, the catalogue to the Tocqueville papers prepared by Vanessa Gendrin (Université de Haute-Alsace, 2002) is invaluable.

  Archival investigation never ceases; but I need add only that I have also consulted the manuscript of Nassau Senior’s Journal, at the National Library of Wales; the Hatherton MSS, Staffordshire Public Record Office; and the papers of Monckton Milnes in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. A few other repositories are mentioned here and there in my notes.

  III. Other printed works

  The titles listed below for my readers’ convenience are exclusively those of books and articles cited in this biography: I have not attempted to mention all the books which I have consulted, or which have influenced me; still less, to construct a general Tocquevillean bibliography. I must also remark that although most of these works are secondary, some of them contain documents which are not yet available elsewhere: for example, the memoirs of Virginie Ancelot.

  Adams, Herbert B., Jared Sparks and Alexis de Tocqueville (Baltimore, 1898)

  Agulhon, Maurice, The Republican Experiment 1848–1852, tr. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, 1983)

  Allison, John M. S., Malesherbes: defender and reformer of the French monarchy, 1721–94 (Yale, 1938)

  Amann, Peter, ‘The Changing Outlines of 1848’

  American Historical Review, July 1963, 939

  Ancelot, Virginie, Un Salon de Paris 1824 à 1864 (Paris, 1866)

  Arnaud, René, Le 2 décembre (Paris, 1967)

  Bagehot, Walter, ‘Letters on the French Coup d’État of 1851’, Collected Works (London, 1968), ed. Norman St John Stevas, vol. IV

  Barrot, Odilon, Mémoires posthumes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1875)

  Baunard, Louis, La Foi et ses victoires, 2 vols. (Paris, 1882 and 1884)

  Beaumont, Gustave de, Marie, ou l’esclavage aux États-Unis, 4th edn (Paris, 1840)

  — L’Irlande (Paris, 1839)

  Berthier de Sauvigny, G., La Restauration, new edn (Paris, 1955)

  Blanc, Louis, 1848: historical revelations presented to Lord Normanby (London, 1858)

  Boigne, Comtesse de, Memoirs, 4 vols. (London, 1907–12), tr. Charles Nicoullaud

  Bowen, Marjorie, The Scandal of Sophie Dawes (London, 1937)

  Brodhurst, Audrey C., ‘The French Revolution Collections in the British Library’, British Library Journal, vol. 2., no. 2, autumn 1976

  Brogan, D. W., ‘Tocqueville’, French Personalities and Problems (London, 1946)

  Brogan, Hugh, ‘Tocqueville and
the American Presidency’, Journal of American Studies, XV, 3, December 1981, 357–75

  — ‘Alexis de Tocqueville and the Coming of the American Civil War’, Americana: essays in memory of Marcus Cunliffe, ed. John White and Brian Holden Reid (Hull, 1998), 91–112

  Bugeaud, Marshal Thomas-Robert, Memoirs, ed. H. d’Ideville, tr. and abridged by Charlotte M. Yonge, 2 vols. (London, 1884)

  Bury, J. R. T., and Toombs, R. R., Thiers: a political life (London, 1986)

  Chateaubriand, François-René de, De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, Oeuvres complètes, vol. VII (Paris, n.d.)

  — Voyages en Amérique (Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1969)

  — Mémoires d’outre-tombe, ed. Jean-Paul Clément (Paris, 1997)

  Chaussinand-Nogaret, Guy, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: from feudalism to enlightenment, tr. William Doyle (Cambridge, 1985)

  Chevalier, Louis, Le Choléra: la première épidémie du XIXe Siècle (La Roche-sur-Yon, 1958)

  Chevalier, Michel, Lettres sur l’Amérique du Nord (Paris, 1836) Cobb, Richard, Promenades (Oxford, 1980)

  Collingham, H. A. C., The July Monarchy: a political history of France 1830–1848 (London and New York, 1988)

  Corley, T. A. B., Democratic Despot (London, 1961)

  Crook, David Paul, American Democracy in English Politics 1815–1850 (Oxford, 1965)

  Custine, Astolphe de, Lettres à Varnhagen d’Ense (Brussels, 1870)

  Dansette, Adrien, Louis-Napoléon à la conquête du pouvoir (Paris, 1961)

  De Luna, F. A., The French Republic under Cavaignac (Oxford, 1969)

  Dino, Dorothée, duchesse de, Memoirs, ed. and tr. Princesse Radziwill (New York and London, 1909), 4 vols.

  Doyle, William, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989)

  Drescher, Seymour, Tocqueville and England (Harvard, 1964)

  — Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and modernization (University of Pittsburgh, 1968)

  Drolet, Michael, Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform (London, 2003)

  Duguit, Léon, and Monnier, Henry (eds.), Les Constitutions et les principales lois politiques de la France depuis 1789 (Paris, 1925)

  Duveau, Georges, 1848: the making of a revolution, tr. Anne Carter, with an introduction by George Rudé (London, 1967)

  Everitt, Anthony, Cicero (London, 2001)

  Falloux, Alfred, comte de, Mémoires d’un royaliste (Paris, 1888)

  Ford, Franklin L., Robe and Sword: the regrouping of the French aristocracy (Harvard, 1962)

  Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish (London, 1979)

  Fumaroli, Marc, Chateaubriand: poésie et terreur (Paris, 2003)

  Furet, François, ‘De Tocqueville and the problem of the French Revolution’, Interpreting the French Revolution, tr. Elburg Foster (Cambridge, 1981)

  — ‘Tocqueville’, in F. Furet and Mona Ozouf, A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, tr. Alan S. Kahan, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1998 and 2001)

  Gannett, Robert T., Jr., Tocqueville Unveiled: the historian and his sources for ‘The Old Régime and the Revolution’ (Chicago, 2003)

  Gobineau, Arthur de, Selected Political Writings, ed. Michael D. Biddiss (London, 1970)

  Goldstein, Doris S., Trial of Faith: religion and politics in Tocqueville’s thought (New York/ Oxford/Amsterdam, 1975)

  Grosclaude, Pierre, Malesherbes, temoin et interprète de son temps (Paris, 1962)

  Guillemin, Henri, La Première Résurrection de la République (Paris, 1967)

  Guizot, François, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps, 8 vols. (Paris 1858–64)

  Hall, Basil, Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828 (Edinburgh, 1828: photographic reprint, Graz, 1965)

  Hampson, Norman, The Terror in the French Revolution (London, 1981) Hazareesingh, Sudhir, The Legend of Napoleon (London, 2004)

  — The Saint-Napoléon: celebrations of sovereignty in nineteenth-century France (Harvard, 2004)

  Herr, Richard, Tocqueville and the Old Régime (Princeton, 1962)

  Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The Idea of Poverty (New York, 1984)

  Howarth, T. E. B., Citizen-King: the life of Louis-Philippe, King of the French (London, 1961)

  Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure of Pain: the penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750– 1850 (London, 1978)

  Jardin, André, ‘Tocqueville et l’Algérie’, Revue des travaux de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 4e série, 1962 (1er semestre)

  — Tocqueville: a biography, tr. Lydia Davis and Robert Hemenway (London, 1988)

  Jardin, André, and Tudesq, André-Jean, Restoration and Reaction 1815–1848 (Cambridge, 1983)

  Johnson, Douglas, Guizot: aspects of French history 1787–1874 (London, 1963)

  Jones, Peter, Liberty and Locality in Revolutionary France: six villages compared, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 2003)

  Jordan, David P., The King’s Trial (Berkeley, 1979)

  Kerry, Earl of, The Secret of the Coup d’État (London, 1924)

  Lacordaire, Dominique, and Guizot, François, Discours de réception à l’Académie Française et réponse, OC XVI 312–45 (Paris, 1989)

  Lambetti, Jean-Claude, Tocqueville et les deux démocraties (Paris, 1983)

  Laughton, J. K. (ed.), Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, 2 vols. (London, 1898)

  Leberruyer, Pierre, Alexis de Tocqueville (Saint-Lô, n.d.)

  Lefebvre, Georges, The Coming of the French Revolution, tr. R. R. Palmer (New York, 1957)

  Lehmann, A. G., Sainte-Beuve: a portrait of the critic, 1804–1842 (Oxford, 1962)

  Levy, S. Leon, Nassau Senior: the prophet of modern capitalism (Boston, 1943)

  Lewis, W. David, From Newgate to Dannemora: the rise of the penitentiary in New York, 1796– 1848 (New York, 1965)

  Loménie, Louis de, ‘Publicistes modernes de la France: Alexis de Tocqueville’, Revue des deux mondes, tome 21, seconde période (1 mai 1859), 402–28

  Lukacs, John, ‘The Last Days of Alexis de Tocqueville’, Catholic Historical Review, vol. L, no. 2, July 1964, 157–8

  Mansel, Philip, Paris between Two Empires (London, 2001)

  Manzini, Charlotte, Qui êtes-vous Monsieur de Tocqueville?, (Saint-Lô, 2005)

  Marcel, R. Pierre, Essai Politique sur Alexis de Tocqueville (Paris, 1910)

  Mayer, J. P., Prophet of the Mass Age: a study of Alexis de Tocqueville (London, 1939)

  Mélonio, Françoise, Tocqueville and the French, tr. Beth G. Raps (University of Virginia, 1998)

  Mill, John Stuart, ‘De Tocqueville on Democracy in America’, London Review, October 1835; in Collected Works (University of Toronto, 1977), XVIII, 47–90

  — ‘De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [II]’, Edinburgh Review, October 1840; in Collected Works XVIII, 153–204

  — Earlier Letters 1817–1848, ed. Francis E. Mineka, 4 vols. (Toronto, 1963)

  Morris, R. J., Cholera 1832: the social response to an epidemic (London, 1976)

  Packe, Michael St John, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London, 1954) Painter, George D., Chateaubriand, a Biography: volume one, The Longed-For Tempests (London, 1977)

  Palmer, R. R., The Two Tocquevilles: father and son (Princeton, 1987)

  Pessen, Edward, ‘Tocqueville’, Tocqueville Review, 1982, IV I 5–22

  Pierson, George W., Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York, 1938)

  Pilbeam, Pamela, The 1830 Revolution in France (Basingstoke, 1991)

  Pinkney, David H., The French Revolution of 1830 (Princeton, 1972)

  Pouthas, Charles H., ‘A. de Tocqueville, Représentant de la Manche (1837–1851)’, Alexis de Tocqueville: Livre du Centenaire 1859–1959 (Paris, 1960)

  Quentin-Bauchart, La Deuxième République et le Second Empire: mémoires posthumes (Paris, 1901)

  Ratcliffe, D. J., The Politics of Long Division: the birth of the second party system in Ohio, 1818–1828 (Columbus, Ohio, 2000)

  Rédier, Antoine, Comme Disait M.
de Tocqueville ... (Paris, 1925)

  Reeve, Henry, ‘Introductory Notice’, Democracy in America, 4th edn, 2 vols. (London, 1875)

  — Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, ed. J. K. Laughton, 2 vols. (London, 1898)

  Rémond, René, Les États-Unis devant l’opinion française, 1815–1852, 2 vols. (Paris, 1962)

  — The Right Wing in France: from 1815 to De Gaulle (Philadelphia, 1966)

  Rémusat, Charles de, Mémoires de ma vie, ed. Charles H. Pouthas, 4 vols. (Paris, 1962)

  Richardson, Nicholas, The French Prefectoral Corps 1814–1830 (Cambridge, 1966)

  Richter, Melvin, ‘Tocqueville on Algeria’, Review of Politics, vol. 25, no. 3, July 1963, 362–98

  Ross, Janet, Three Generations of Englishwomen (London, 1888)

  Sainte-Beuve, C.-A., ‘Alexis de Tocqueville: De la démocratie en Amérique’, Le Temps, 7 April 1835, reprinted in Premiers lundis (nouvelle édition, Paris, 1894), II 277–90

  — ‘Alexis de Tocqueville’, Causeries du lundi (4th edn, Paris, n.d.), XV 93–129

  — ‘Notes et pensées’, Causeries du lundi, XI 459

  Sand, George, Souvenirs de 1848 (Paris, 1850)

  Schleifer, James T., The Making of Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ (Chapel Hill, 1980)

  Siedentop, Larry, Tocqueville (Oxford, 1994)

  Simon, G. A., Histoire généalogique des Clerel, seigneurs de Rampan, Tocqueville, etc. (1066– 1954) (Caen, 1954)

  Simpson, F. A., Louis Napoleon and the Recovery of France (London, 1951 edn)

  Southern, R. W., The Making of the Middle Ages (London, Grey Arrow edn, 1959)

  Stone, Lawrence and Jeanne C. F., An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984)

  Taylor, George R., The Transportation Revolution (New York, 1951)

  Thiers, Louis-Adolphe, History of the Consulate and Empire of France, tr. D. F. Campbell and John Stebbing (London, 1893), vol. 1

  Ticknor, George, Life, Letters, and Journals, 2 vols. (London, 1876)

  Tocqueville, Édouard de, ‘Lettre sur les derniers moments d’Alexis de Tocqueville’, La France, 14 juillet 1866