Alexis de Tocqueville

The response of reviewers and public to Part II of Democracy in Amer­ica was much less enthusiastic than it had been to Part I. They seemed to find Tocqueville’s use of “ideal types” and his depictions of the future too specu­lative and confusing. Tocqueville was hurt by the general reaction, and led to moments of self-doubt: If he really had any merit as a thinker, how could he have spent four years of his life writing a book of such little merit? But his friends reassured him, and John Stuart Mill’s enthusiastic review filled him with joy. In 1841, he was elected to the French Academy — “the forty immortals,” as they are called — the peak of the French intellectual world.

     In any case, Tocqueville was aiming now for distinction in a career of politics. This was, in a way, the logical conclusion of his book. Now he would try to do what a statesman could to channel the forces of democracy in the right direction.

     Tocqueville was never able to become a political leader, however, although he served in the Chamber of Deputies and in the assembly that followed the Revolution of 1848. In part, this was because of his scruples and unwilling­ness to compromise. Beaumont, who served as a Deputy with Tocqueville and was a political ally, afterwards put it this way:

Tocqueville was ambitious — he wished for power. So did I. We would gladly have become ministers. But nothing would have tempted us to sit in a cabinet in which we were constantly outvoted, or to defend, as Guizot did in the Chamber, conduct which we had disapproved in the Council.

Nassau Senior stressed other reasons for Tocqueville’s lack of success:

His talents and knowledge, and courage and character seem to point him out for a leader. But, in the first place, he wants physical strength. As a consequence of this want, he has never practiced the constant debating which is required of the head of a party. And, secondly, he is intolerant of mediocrity. He will not court, or talk over, or even listen to, the commonplace men who form the rank and file of every assembly. He scarcely knows their names.

Tocqueville was active in the colonization of Algeria, as we have seen, and, perhaps more in keeping with his liberal principles, in the fight to abolish slavery in the French overseas colonies, a campaign that met with failure.

     As the years passed, Tocqueville grew more disgusted with French society under the July Monarchy. Public-spiritedness, the will to work for the public good and the maintenance of freedom — for anything beyond personal gain by any and all means — seemed to have vanished. The lust for wealth to the exclusion of all else was noted by other observers, including the cynic and famous novelist, Honoré de Balzac:

It is a mistake to believe that it is King Louis-Philippe who reigns, and he himself is not deceived on this point. He knows, just as we do, that above the Constitution stands the holy, venerable, solid, amiable, gracious, beautiful, noble, young, all-powerful five-franc piece.

Tocqueville saw the intimate links between the scuffling for material gain and the political system of the July monarchy. He wrote to Nassau Senior in 1847:

The system of administration that has been practiced for seventeen years has so perverted the middle class, by making a constant appeal to the individual cupidities of its members, that this class is gradually becoming, for the rest of the nation, a little corrupt and vulgar aristocracy. But how to prevent the government from corrupting, when the elective regime naturally gives it so much occasion to do so, and centralization so many means?

For some while, Tocqueville had seen violence coming. In January, 1848, he warned his complacent colleagues in the Chamber that they were sitting on a volcano, that an upheaval was imminent, and now the issue would be, not aristocratic privilege, but property itself. In February, the dissatisfaction with Louis Philippe’s regime that had smouldered for years broke out in revolution. A Republic was proclaimed — the Second Republic — but while socialist influence was strong in Paris, the provinces were heavily conservative. For a while, there was an uneasy truce. When elections brought a conservative assembly to power, socialist intellectuals led the Parisian workers in an uprising — the June Days. Tocqueville, who was in Paris at the time, wrote frantic letters to his friends in other towns, urging the provinces to hurl themselves at Paris. The insurrection was bloodily suppressed, but everywhere class-hatred was palpable. In the aftermath of the June Days, Tocqueville, a well-known member of the Assembly and enemy of the “Reds,” as they were called, had reason to fear for his life. Harriet Grote later reported on an incident related to her by Tocqueville:

He had occasion to stay out somewhat late, returning to his dwelling some time after the inmates of the hotel had retired to rest. ... The concierge [or hotel-keeper) accosted him thus: “Do you know, M. de Tocqueville, that I am very much alarmed at some unaccountable noises, which seem to proceed from a building at the farther end of our court? ... If Monsieur would be so good as to come with me, I should like to know from whence these odd noises proceed.” M. de Tocqueville instantly saw that this was a pretext to entice him to a lonesome spot. ... “Allons,” cried he, “do you march first, because you carry the light.” ... At this particular period he habitually carried in his breast pocket a small loaded pistol, and, as he followed the concierge up this long silent entry, he kept his right hand upon the weapon. Alexis de Tocqueville probably owed his escape from the designs of the “Red” to his insisting on the latter preceding. He never once suffered the concierge to get near to or behind him, and the latter probably guessed M. de Tocqueville to be ready for him by his keeping his hand on his bosom.

Tocqueville was shocked — and frightened as well — by the June Days. Still, he rejected the view of those conservatives who held that the insurrectionists were nothing but “social scum,” avid for plunder. In reality, they suffered a “prodigious ignorance” of economics, and they were easily persuaded that state ­control of production would bring them affluence. Beyond that, they had their own ideals. Tocqueville wrote as friend:

In the June uprising, there was something other than bad propensities: there were false ideas. Many of these men, who were marching toward the overthrow of the most sacred rights, were led by a sort of mistaken notion of right. They sincerely believed that society was founded on injustice, and they wanted to give it another basis. It is this kind of revolutionary religion that our bayonets and our cannons will not destroy.

Ideas, Tocqueville believed, had to be fought with ideas.

     In the elections for President of the Republic, the people, to Tocqueville’s chagrin, turned to a candidate they imagined to be a strong man — Louis Napoleon, nephew of the emperor and Bonapartist pretender to the throne. Tocqueville continued in the Assembly, and served briefly as foreign minister. Louis Napoleon was not content to remain a mere president under the conditions of the constitu­tion that had been established, however. In December, 1851, he took control through a coup d’etat — Tocqueville and scores of other liberal deputies were purged. A year later, Louis Napoleon declared himself emperor. Tocqueville was enraged by the turn of events. As he had predicted in Part II of Democracy in America, the fear of revolutionary disturbances had thrown the people into the arms of a despot. Now, filled with great bitterness, Tocqueville already foresaw the downfall of the new Napoleon and his Second Empire. He wrote to Henry Reeve:

We know this only too well in France: governments never escape the law of their origins. This one, which arrives by means of the army, which finds its popularity in the memories of military glory, this government will be dragged fatally into wanting territorial expansion, spheres of influ­ence, in other words, war. In war it will surely find death, but perhaps then its death will cost us very dearly.

The Second Empire did, indeed, involve France in military conflicts and adventures. Finally, in 1870, 18 years after Tocqueville had written these lines and eleven years after his death, Napoleon III embroiled his country in war with Prussia and the other German states — the Franco-Prussian War. France quickly succumbed, Napoleon III was overthrown, and, in the peace treaty, the new German Reich annexed the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, a major cause of the First World War.

     Tocqueville was growing disillusioned with politics. At times, con­sidering the prospects for social stability, he was close to despair. In his Recollections, written around this time, but not meant for publication, he wrote:

Shall we ever attain a more complete and far-reaching social transformation than our forefathers foresaw and desired, or are we not destined simply to end in a condition of inter­mittant anarchy, the well-known, chronic, and incurable complaint of old nations? As for me, I am unable to say. I do not know when this long voyage will be ended. I am weary of seeing the shore in each successive mirage, and I often ask myself whether the terra firma we are seeking does really exist, or whether we are not doomed to rove upon the seas forever.

With active politics now closed to him, Tocqueville began to entertain the idea of another great literary work. The subject would have to have direct bearing on the contemporary world — nothing else could engage his interest and powers. He comforted himself with the thought that, when all was said and done, political figures rarely advance the good of mankind to any discernible degree anyway. He wrote with a new excitement to Nassau Senior:

Now, on the contrary, what a vast effect a writer can produce, when he possesses the requisite knowledge and endowments! In his study, his thoughts collected, his ideas well arranged, he may hope to imprint indelible traces on the line of human progress. What orator, what brilliant patriot of the tribune, could ever effect the vast agitation of a whole nation’s feelings achieved by Voltaire and Jean-Jacques?

The subject Tocqueville selected was one that was worthy of his talents: the French Revolution itself. Others had written extensively before him. An early historian of the Revolution was Madame de Stael, who wrote from a liberal pers­pective. Later, Jules Michelet took up the topic from a democratic point of view, Louis Blanc from a socialist one; and there were others. Tocqueville’s work was more analytical, some would say, more sociological. He delved into the provincial archives, into the records of the Old Regime, in order to discover what difference the Revolution had actually made. His conclusion: much less than had been supposed. In The Old Regime and the Revolution, published in 1856, Tocqueville showed that the process of concentration of power had been going on for centuries; the Revolution and Napoleon simply continued the work of the French kings. All in all, Tocqueville’s book is filled with such insight and finesse in judgment that it has become a classic; it is constantly referred to by historians of the Revolutionary period.

     Just as with Democracy in America, Tocqueville had an ulterior aim in composing The Old Regime and the Revolution, and it was the same one: “to show men,” as he explained to a friend, “how to escape tyranny.” In his Foreward to the book, Tocqueville expresses many of his familiar misgivings on the future of liberty. The great problem is still “individualism,” which is encouraged — he has in mind Napoleon III, although he does not name him — because it plays so well into his hands. But now Tocqueville doubts that religious faith as a bulwark against tyranny. He had observed with disgust the fervent support the Catholic Church was giving to the Second Empire. In the Foreward, he observes dryly that “the patrimony of the Christian is not of this world” — here, Tocque­ville approaches Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s claim that the devout Christian makes a bad citizen. The only hope lies in public spiritedness and citizen participa­tion in government, but how this is to be brought about Tocqueville does not say. He ends with a strike at Napoleon III and his fellow tyrants through the ages:

Even despots do not deny the merits of freedom, only they wish to keep it for themselves, claiming that no one else is worthy of it. Thus our quarrel is not about the value of freedom per se, but stems from our opinion of our fellow men. It is no exaggeration to say that a man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him. I trust I may be allowed to wait a little longer before being converted to such a view of my fellow countrymen.

Tocqueville was never to finish his work on the French Revolution, although numerous notes and drafts survive. His health was never good, and now it began to falter. More and more, he opened his mind to the assuagements of the religion of his fathers. He also tried to grasp the deepest meaning of his life. He wrote to Madame Swetchine:

I believe that my sentiments and my desires are in access of my capacities. I believe that God has given me a natural taste for great actions and great virtues, and that despair at never being able to lay hold on the grand vision that floats before my eyes, the sadness of living in a world and an epoch that answers so little to that ideal creation in which my spirit loves to dwell — I believe, I say, that these impressions which age does nothing to weaken, are among the chief causes of this interior malaise of which I have never been able to get the better. But to how many less reputable causes must I not attribute them also?

Tocqueville died in 1859; the loss was felt and lamented throughout the western intellectual world. What might he not have discovered of the depths and hidden recesses of modern society in another fifteen or twenty years? His friends mourned also the passing of a unique spirit. Mrs. Simpson ended her book on the long years of correspondence and conversation of her father, Nassau Senior, with Tocqueville, by describing a visit to Normandy:

One day my father and I visited the little green churchyard on a cliff near the sea where Tocqueville is buried. There is a plain gray slab — on it a cross is cut in bas-relief, with these words only:

Here rests Alexis de Tocqueville, born the 24th
of February 1805, died the 16th of April 1859.

My father laid a wreath of immortelles on the tomb.