Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris, in 1805. He was descended from Norman nobility, one of the oldest aristocratic families in France. One of his ancestors fought with William the Conqueror, at the Battle of Hastings in the year 1066, and the family’s history for centuries was closely intertwined with the history not only of Normandy, where where their lands and their ancestral castle were located, but of France as well. His mother’s grandfather, Chrétien-Guillaume de Malesherbes, for instance, had been a conspicuous figure during the time of the French En­lightenment, in the mid-eighteenth century — a minister of Louis XV, responsible for, among other things, the censorship of books, but at the same time a personal friend of many of the philosophes, and sympathetic to their ideas. Malesherbes even connived to help the philosophes get around the censorship and publish their famous Encyclopedia. Years later, old and ailing, Malesherbes came out of retirement to act as defense attorney for Louis XVI, now on trial for treason before the revolutionary Convention. The king was found guilty and executed, and, for having defended him, so was Malesherbes. Others in Tocqueville’s family were also guillotined during the Reign of Terror. In fact, Alexis de Tocqueville’s father and mother had both been brought to Paris and imprisoned. They were awaiting execution, as counter-revolutionary aristocrats, when Robespierre suddenly fell from power, and the Reign of Terror ended. When Alexis’s father, Hervé  de Tocqueville left prison, his hair had turned completely white. He was 22 years old.

     Alexis’s mother appears to have been emotionally scarred by these experiences; afterwards, a melancholy aura seems to cling to her, which probably affected her son’s personality. Many years later, Tocqueville recalled an incident from his childhood:

I remember as though it were yesterday a certain evening in my father’s chateau. A family festivity had brought us and our nearest relations together. The servants had retired. We were all sitting about the hearth. My mother, who had a sweet and touching voice, began to sing an air ... relating to Louis XVI and his death. When she ceased, we were all weeping, not for the personal sufferings they had undergone, not even for the loss of so many of our blood in the civil war and on the scaffold, but for the fate of a man who had died fifteen years earlier, and whom most of those who shed tears for him had never seen. But that man had been the King.

     Hervé  de Tocqueville, Alexis’s father, was a cultivated man, who wrote a Philosophical History of the Reign of Louis XV, and, when the Bourbon kings were restored to the throne, after Napoleon’s fall, served as a prefect in various cities. Yet he was never  a reactionary — or “Ultra” — avid to wipe out all the liberal gains of the past decades. In the mental  ambience of his early years, Alexis de Tocqueville thus found an ancient aristocratic heritage and a deep-rooted loyalty to the French monarchy, but also an openness to liberal ideas and the recognition that tradition must be tempered with progress.

     As a child, Tocqueville, like his two older brothers, was educated by a kindly old priest, the Abbé Lesueur, whom he dearly loved. But while the Abbé inculcated the Christian virtues in his charges, it seems that Alexis de Tocqueville’s Catholic faith could not survive acquaintance with the skeptical writings of the authors he began to read as a teenager. Around this time, Tocqueville wrote down in his notes:

There is no Absolute Truth. ... If I were asked to classify human miseries I should rank them in the following order: one, Disease; two, Death; three [slight pause], Doubt.

Tocqueville continued his studies, which were preparing him for a career in law. In 1827, he was appointed an official at the law-court in the town of Versailles, in the department where his father was prefect. But the profession of law did not appeal to Tocqueville. Louis de Kergolay was a childhood friend with whom Tocqueville would continue to be close all his life —Tocqueville seemed to have a knack for intimate, lifelong friendships. To Kergolay he wrote:

You ask me how I am finding my new position. This is not something I can answer in a single word. ... I have a need to excel that will torment me cruelly all my life. ... [but] I am beginning to fear that with time I will become a law machine like most of my fellows, specialized people if ever there were any, as incapable of judging a great movement and of guiding a great undertaking as they are well fitted to deducing a series of axioms and to finding analogies and antonyms. I would rather burn my books than reach that point!

A major event during Tocqueville’s time at Versailles was his meeting with another young aristocrat, also attached to the law-court, Gustave de Beaumont. Tocqueville and Beaumont became fast friends, although unaware that their names would be linked together in history by a certain journey to America. Together they pursued an intensive course of reading. They studied economics in the works of Jean-Baptiste Say, who was then proselytizing for free market and free trade ideas in France. They paid particular attention to the modern historians, they hoped who could shed light on the tumultuous events of the past few decades. The historian who influenced Tocqueville most was François Guizot, who made a lasting impression on his mind in a number of respects.

     Like other historians of his time, Guizot wanted to break away from the mere chronicle of kings and battles that he felt had filled too much of the accounts of past writers. History should be presented in the broadest poss­ible way, as the history of civilization. The title of the course that Guizot gave at the Sorbonne from 1828 to 1830, which Tocqueville and Beaumont followed with close attention, was “The History of Civilization in Europe and France.” That history could never be understood if we limit ourselves to political events, Guizot believed:

It is by the study of political institutions that the majority of writers, scholars, historians, and publicists have sought to know the state of society, the degree or the kind of its civilization. It would have been wiser to study first society itself in order to know and understand its political institutions. Before becoming causes, these insti­tutions are effects. To understand political institutions, it is necessary to know the various social conditions and their relations.

Here is a note Tocqueville made for himself after listening to one of Guizot’s lectures in July 1829:

The history of civilization aims and must aim at embracing everything at the same time. One must examine man in all the positions of his social existence. Such a history must follow his intellectual developments in the facts, in the mores, in the opinions, in the laws, and in the monuments of the intellect; it must descend into man himself and appreci­ate the foreign influences in the midst of which he finds himself situated. In a word, it is the whole man that must be painted, during a given period, and the history of civilization is nothing else than the resumé of all the ideas having a relation to him.

In his lectures, Guizot had also announced the grand theme around which he constructed his account of modern history — the struggle between the aristocracy and the rising middle class:

[In France there has occurred] a genuine war, such as the world knows between two peoples foreign to each other. For thirteen centuries, the conquered people struggled to shake off the yoke of the conquering people. Our history is the history of this struggle. In our times, the decisive battle was fought. It is called the Revolution.

This was a lesson Tocqueville would remember.

     Meanwhile, the king of France, Charles X, was attempting to restore something like the Old Regime, with increased influence for the aristocracy and the Catholic Church, and supreme power for himself. “Better,” Charles once said, “to saw wood for a living than to reign in the manner of the King of England.”

     He was sadly out of step with the times. Moderates and liberals of all shades, together with the common people of Paris, united to overthrow Charles. He was to be the last of the Bourbon kings of France, the “legitimate” line. His replacement was Louis Philippe, whose reign is known as the July Monarchy, since the revolution of 1830 occurred in that month.

     Tocqueville was now in a quandary. His family had had close ties to the house of Bourbon and considered it a point of honor to serve the legitimate rulers of France. But Tocqueville saw that Charles — true to the saying about the Bourbons, that they never learned and they never forgot — was scheming to repeal the French Revolution, to Tocqueville’s mind an absurdity. Reluctantly, Tocqueville and Beaumont swore the oath of loyalty to the new regime. Still, their careers in the legal profession appeared blighted. They decided to make a fresh start. In various ways, both young men had associations with the Great Republic of the West, the United States of America — Beaumont, for instance, was to marry a granddaughter of Lafayette, still an important political figure of the time. They applied to the government for a commission to study the penitentiary system in America. It was granted, and on April 2, 1831, the two friends sailed from the port of Le Havre. They already had plans for a work far outstripping any report on how criminals were punished in the United States. Beaumont wrote home:

We contemplate great projects. First, we will accomplish as best we can the mission given us. But, while doing the penitentiary system, we will see America. Wouldn’t a book be a fine one if it gave an exact idea of the American people, showed their history in broad strokes, painted their character in bold outline, analyzed their social state, and corrected so many of the opinions we have that are erroneous on this point? We are laying the foundations of a great work which should make our reputation some day.