Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Tocqueville, Hervé de, Histoire philosophique du règne de Louis XV (Paris, 1847)

  — Coup d’oeil sur le règne de Louis XVI (Paris, 1850)

  White, Richard, The Middle Ground: Indians, empires and republics in the Great Lakes region 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 1991)

  Whitehouse, H. Remsen, The Life of Lamartine, 2 vols. (London, 1918)

  Woodcock, George, Proudhon (London, 1956)

  — Anarchism (Cleveland and New York, 1962)

  IV. List of illustrations

  I. Unknown artist, Hervé de Tocqueville, 1822; 2. Tocqueville’s mother, 1794; 3. Unknown artist, miniature of Tocqueville as a youth; 4. Unknown artist, Mary (‘Marie’) Mottley, c. 1830; 5. Gustave de Beaumont, ‘Lake Oneida’, 1831; 6. Gustave de Beaumont, ‘Departure of the Indians across the Mississippi’, 1831; 7. Gustave de Beaumont, ‘Alexis de Tocqueville’, 1831; 8. Léon Noel, lithograph of Tocqueville, 1848; 9. Théodore Chassériau, portrait of Tocqueville, 1850; 10. Honoré Daumier, caricature of Tocqueville; 11. Lithograph of Gustave de Beaumont, 1849; 12. Contemporary photograph of the Château de Tocqueville; 13. Gustave de Beaumont, ‘Villa Montfleury, Cannes’, 1859.

  Picture credits: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13; Mary Evans Picture Library, 10; Comte d’Hérouville/photo Archives départementales de la Manche, 1, 2, 3, 12; Mrs George W. Pierson, 4; Versailles, châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Photo RMN/ Daniel Arnaudet: 9.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  IN RECENTL YEARS, seeing me so preoccupied with Tocqueville, some of my friends took to asking me if I liked him. I found the question difficult to answer, but my considered reply must be that Tocqueville is himself one of my oldest and dearest friends (I have known him for nearly fifty years), and although I use a friend’s privilege to be frank about what I take to be his weaknesses, no-one else had better do the same in my presence. At the same time, I don’t expect to have the last word. Debate about his life and work will not cease: both are inexhaustible topics, and definitive biography is impossible.

  To acknowledge my great and small debts to the many individuals and institutions that have helped me over the years is, I find, to sketch my intellectual autobiography. I began to study Tocqueville when I was an undergraduate reading history at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1958 or thereabouts, and in the next sixteen years (and occasionally since) received everything I asked for in the way of encouragement and assistance from that body; above all when I was elected a research Fellow (Title A) in the spring of 1963. To win election I had submitted two or three draft chapters of a biography of Tocqueville (of which two or three sentences survive in the present work); the idea was that I would devote the period of my fellowship to the job of finishing it. This, finally, I have done; I hope the present Master and Fellows will feel that it at last justifies their predecessors’ confidence in me all those years ago.

  When my father, Professor Sir Denis Brogan, discovered that I was seriously interested in Tocqueville he made over to me his collection of early editions and secondary works, which has proved invaluable ever since; but I owe his memory thanks for much more than that, and never considered dedicating my book to anyone else. I wish he were alive to read it. In his time he was Tocqueville’s true successor as the interpreter of America and France.

  In 1962 I was awarded a Harkness Fellowship thanks, in large part, to the recommendation of my then employers, Donald Tyerman, editor of the Economist, and John Midgley, the foreign editor. My chief purpose in going to the United States as a Harkness Fellow was of course to get to know that country, but I also wanted very much to improve my qualifications as a Tocquevillean, and I am still grateful to the Economist and to the Commonwealth Fund for giving me the opportunity. With the Brookings Institution as my first base I studied democracy in America; then I transferred to Yale, with its outstanding holdings of Tocquevilleana, and worked happily in the Sterling and Beinecke Libraries (the Beinecke opened its doors for the first time during my residence at Yale) until March 1964. I met with unfailing kindness there. Silliman College gave me splendid accommodation; Professor George W. Pierson, the greatest Tocqueville scholar of his generation, supervised my research; my friend Marjorie Wynne and all the other librarians at the Beinecke were as helpful as possible.

  Professor Pierson introduced me to André Jardin when he visited the Beinecke: M. Jardin was also all kindness, and I would owe much to him in the years to come. And it was Pierson who, when I returned to England, put me in touch with J. P. Mayer, then the director of the Oeuvres complètes project. This encounter was particularly fortunate for me, as Mayer needed someone to re-edit Nassau Senior’s correspondence and conversations with Tocqueville; he gave me the job and, eventually, Anne P. Kerr as my co-editor: without her meticulous scholarship I doubt if I could have finished my task satisfactorily (neither she, nor Mayer, nor I was satisfied with the form in which the Senior material was eventually published, but that was not our fault).

  In about 1970 I was approached by Fontana/Collins with a proposal that I should write a short volume on Tocqueville for the then-celebrated Modern Masters series. I was happy to agree, as I had already begun to feel the need to present a preliminary report, so to say, of my Tocqueville findings. The book appeared in 1973, but not as a Modern Master: the series editor was not yet willing to include a nineteenth-century thinker in his stable, though in the end he published a volume on Karl Marx. But my little book sold reasonably, by my standards, and as I had hoped made me concentrate. So far as the present volume is concerned, it was a valuable rehearsal.

  In 1974 I moved from Cambridge to Colchester, to the new University of Essex and its even newer History Department, where I have worked ever since, and where I have always received the encouragement and assistance (often in the form of study leave and research funding) that I have needed. But times were hard for a Tocqueville biographer: the family archives were still closed to researchers except those working on the Oeuvres complètes who needed access, and there was little I could achieve except an occasional article (and an occasional return visit to Yale). I turned to other work, but never renounced my Tocqueville project; and eventually I began to feel that Time was no longer on my side. By the year 2000 I had decided that if my book was ever to be written, or rather finished (quite a heap of preliminary drafts had accumulated), I would have to get moving; and then I learned from Françoise Mélonio that the Tocqueville family papers were now available to be studied in the Archives Départmentales of the Manche, at Saint-Lô. Permission had to be obtained, but it was promptly and graciously forthcoming from M. le comte Guy d’Hérouville. I went to Saint-Lô twice, and the British Academy gave me a generous grant to make a final visit, lasting a month, to Yale. I gratefully acknowledge this assistance, and must also record my debt to the late Professor Douglas Johnson, and to Professor Geoffrey Crossick, who were my referees. I was received at Yale as generously as ever, and the visits to Saint-Lô were delightful (especially as the hotel where I stayed boasted a Restaurant Tocqueville). I offer warm thanks to M. Gilles Désiré Dit Gosset and his staff at the Archives.

  That was in 2003, and it has been hard slog ever since. If the result in any way justifies so much investment by so many people, it will also perhaps justify the faith in me shown by many other friends and colleagues. Too many on the list are now dead: to those already mentioned I must add the name of Sir Harry Hinsley, who taught me so much when I was an undergraduate, and later did more than anyone else to get my career as a scholar launched.

  Among the living, Geraldine de Berly and Judge Jim Fahey gained me access to Auburn State Penitentiary, New York, where I made a most profitable visit. Dr Peter Chapman was at all times ready with advice on Tocqueville’s illnesses. William Doyle and Douglas Johnson advised me on certain passages sent to them for comment. Thanks to the researches of Sheila Le Sueur several important details of Marie’s life have been verified. I must also acknowledge assistance and encouragement received over the
decades from Michael Biddiss, Patrick Brogan, Josette Brogan, Nigel Cochrane, Seymour Drescher, Michael Drolet, John B. Fox Jr, Shirley Hazzard, Nick Joll, Nicholas Jolley, Jeremy Krikler, Sheila Le Sueur, Heinz Lubasz, Françoise Mélonio, Roger Mettam, Munroe Price, Lucy Riall, Melvin Richter, Arthur­Schlesinger Jr, James T. Schleifer, Larry Siedentop, Jill Steinberg, Jonathan Steinberg, the late Graham Storey, André Tarniou,­ J. R. Vincent, Matthew Woollard, the Staffordshire Record Office, and Janice L. Wood, archivist, of the Devon Record Office.

  Three other individuals have been invaluable to me: Anne P. Kerr, who has always been available to advise me and to discuss Tocqueville with me, and whose erudition in nineteenth-century French history has taught me much; John Lukacs, who read my MS for Yale University Press and produced a long list of excellent comments and suggestions; and Hugh Tulloch, who also read the MS, and over the years has always been willing to fall in with any scheme of Tocquevillean research where his involvement would help: on visits, for example, to Cherbourg, Metz, Compiègne, Sorrento and Paris, Paris, Paris. I offer all of them my warmest thanks.

  Finally I must thank Peter Carson of Profile Books, my publisher, and Mark Handsley, my copy-editor. I and my book owe a great deal to their eye for detail. They must not be blamed for any blemishes which remain after their hard work. The author put them there in the first place, and his is the fault if they are still there at the last.

  HUGH BROGAN

  Wivenhoe, 29 July 2006.