Alexis de Tocqueville

Alan S. Kahan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623564384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Ideologías políticas

Alexis de Tocqueville was the author of two masterpieces, Democracry in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution. In this volume, Alan S. Kahan, one of the world's leading authorities on Tocqueville's work, presents an accessible and rigorous account of the French author's ideas set in the context of his life and times. It sets out the essential tensions and ambiguities in Tocqueville's thought and analyzes the idea that made him such a compelling and insightful thinker.

Part I

1

Biography

Alexis de Tocqueville, who understood democracy better than anyone else ever did, was born into one of France’s oldest aristocratic families on July 29, 1805. But he was not born in a castle. He was born in a rented Paris apartment. The world he was born into was not the one in which his family had been bred. It was a new world, a revolutionary world, a world in which an aristocrat was always something of an outsider. It was characteristic of Tocqueville’s life that he was always both an insider and an outsider.

Tocqueville was a member of the old elite, and for that reason an outsider in the new France, the France born in the French Revolution of 1789. Throughout his life he had to struggle for acceptance by those distrustful of his aristocratic origins. He firmly believed in the superiority of the new democratic society, yet he was socially uncomfortable with people who did not come from his own caste. Despite this discomfort, he broke tradition by marrying a woman who was not only not a French aristocrat, but English, middle class and six years his elder. For the rest of his life he engaged in a hopeless struggle to make his family accept her. Breaking politically with his father and brothers, he accepted the revolution of 1830 that expelled the restored Bourbon monarchy, and he swore an oath of allegiance to the new king, Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orleans. Distrusted by both his Legitimist family and friends (Legitimists were those who supported the Bourbon dynasty, the “legitimate” rulers) and his new Orleanist allies, he sailed off to America – where he was once again an outsider. When he was elected to the National Assembly he joined the opposition, which was reluctant to accept him. Throughout his career, as both a writer and a politician, Tocqueville always felt isolated. He thought he was really understood only by a handful, and even then not completely. Perhaps it was his dual perspective as both insider and outsider that allowed him to see democracy so clearly.

Tocqueville’s aristocratic roots went deep. Very few noble families in France could trace their ancestors as far back as he could. One of them helped William the Conqueror invade England in 1066. Since the seventeenth century, at least, the family had been large landowners in western Normandy. They owned several estates not far from the English Channel, one of which was near the village of Tocqueville, from which they took their name. While the Tocquevilles were an old family, they were not an illustrious one (although Marshal Vauban was an ancestor on the paternal side). However, Alexis' parents were something of an exception. His father, Hervé de Tocqueville, served the restored Bourbon monarchy as an administrator after 1815. He was eventually named to the Chamber of Peers, the upper house of the French legislature under the restored Bourbon monarchy, and granted a peerage and the formal title of Comte (count) de Tocqueville. In retirement he wrote a history of the French Revolution.

Hervé was nineteen when the French Revolution broke out in 1789. He married Alexis' mother, Louise de Rosanbo, four years later, in early 1793. Her family was both wealthy and distinguished. She came from a different sort of nobility than the Tocquevilles. The Tocquevilles were members of the noblesse d'épée, the “sword nobility,” families who had attained their status through military service to the king. The Rosanbos were members of the noblesse de robe, the “robe nobility,” who had been ennobled for their service as judges and administrators. Louise de Rosanbo was the granddaughter of the great Malesherbes, a judge, a noted opponent of royal authority in the decades before the Revolution and an intellectual figure of the French Enlightenment.

Louise de Rosanbo’s elder sister had married the brother of the great French Romantic writer Chateaubriand, who was thus a cousin to Alexis. Through this marriage Alexis was connected by blood to leading ­gures in French intellectual life.

Louise was pretty, and came from a wealthy family. She was also mentally unstable, subject to nervous fits and extended bouts of depression; Alexis too was subject to depression to some extent. Her mental condition was not improved by the events that succeeded her marriage. Although an enemy of royal absolutism, Malesherbes was a supporter of the monarchy. When the king was put on trial Malesherbes acted as lawyer for the defense. As a result, in December 1793, Malesherbes and the rest of the family, including Hervé and Louise, were arrested. Malesherbes and several other family members were guillotined the following April. Hervé's hair turned white in prison. It was just a matter of time before he and his wife would die too. They were scheduled for trial and execution on July 30, but on July 27 Robespierre’s radical government was overthrown, and in October they were set free. Had Robespierre’s fall come a few days later, Alexis de Tocqueville would never have been born.

He was the middle child of three brothers. Like them, the young Alexis was at first tutored at home by a Catholic priest of Jansenist tendencies, the abbé Le Sueur (Jansenism was a seventeenth-century Catholic movement with which Pascal, an important influence on Tocqueville, was associated). The abbé recognized his unusual abilities. When it was suggested that Alexis be destined for a military career, he responded that it would be a waste to hide such great talent under a helmet. Later, Alexis was sent to high school in Metz, where his father was serving the restored monarchy as prefect (chief administrative officer of the department). Alexis had a good deal of free time there, some of which he spent in his father’s very considerable library (he was also wounded in a duel, and had his first love affairs). Although his mother was very devout, his father was no more religious than appearances required. His library contained many eighteenth-century Enlightenment authors who rejected Christianity. In reading them, the young Alexis lost his Catholic faith at the age of sixteen, although he remained profoundly concerned with religious questions all his life. It was likely also in this library that Tocqueville made the acquaintance for the first time of those he would describe as the “three authors he carried with him everywhere,” Pascal, Montesquieu and Rousseau (OC, 1977a, 418). Their influence on his thought was profound.

After he finished high school, Tocqueville went to Paris to study law. His father had felt embarrassed by his lack of legal knowledge when he first went into administration. Law was also the traditional career of his mother’s family. It was certainly appropriate training for someone contemplating a career in administration or politics or both, the kind of career for which Alexis seemed destined. The concern for legal questions and legal systems Tocqueville shows throughout his writing owes much to his initial training, often overlooked by commentators.

Tocqueville studied law for two years, graduating in 1826. He was then appointed an assistant public prosecutor at Versailles, serving effectively as an unpaid trainee. But Tocqueville did not merely continue his legal training at Versailles. It was at Versailles that both his personal and his intellectual life took on their mature shape. He became friends with his new, slightly senior colleague Gustave de Beaumont, another young noble from a royalist family. Tocqueville had the good fortune of being able to maintain several lifelong friendships, but of all these, the friendship with Beaumont was probably the most important. Beaumont would be his companion on his voyage to America and the first editor of his collected works. Their collected correspondence fills three volumes. At Versailles, Tocqueville also met the woman he was to marry, Mary Mottley, who lived nearby caring for an elderly aunt.

Tocqueville’s Versailles period was also fertile in intellectual influences. He began to study modern history (in high school he had studied the Greeks and Romans). He seems to have begun his serious reading with the work of an historian and politician he would later despise, the ten-volume History of the French Revolution by Adolphe Thiers. After the royalist piety in which he was raised, it came as a revelation to him. Still more of a revelation were the lectures on French history he attended given by the historian, political theorist and later prime minister of France François Guizot. That Tocqueville was later Guizot’s political opponent must not be allowed to obscure the fact that Guizot was a great influence on him. Guizot was a masterful lecturer, and Tocqueville and Beaumont regularly attended his lectures, taking copious notes, which they shared with one another. What struck them were less the particulars of Guizot’s arguments than the broad historical and sociological sweep he brought to bear on his analysis of French history. Guizot’s methods would later influence much of Tocqueville’s writing.

In 1830, revolution broke out once again in France. Tocqueville sympathized with the revolutionaries' cause, while retaining a deep emotional attachment to the ruling Bourbon dynasty. As so often, he felt both an insider and an outsider. In some torment, he took the oath of loyalty to the new regime of King Louis-Philippe that was demanded of all public officials who wanted to retain their positions. His father and brothers refused. Caught in this difficult position, and with a cloudy future facing him as a lawyer for the new government with family ties to the old regime, Tocqueville decided it would be best to leave France for a while. Together with Beaumont, he petitioned for a leave of absence to study one of the trendy subjects of the day, prison reform, in the country that was widely considered to be the leading pioneer in the field, America. On March 29, 1831, they took ship for New York. Tocqueville would remain in the United States until February 20, 1832. But prison reform was not the chief thing on the travelers' minds. In America, they would see democracy in action. In America, they would see the future of France. From the moment he set foot on the boat, Tocqueville was thinking about democracy.

Tocqueville’s (and Beaumont’s) nearly year-long journey through America has been the subject of many books and not a few repetitions by later writers. He saw much of what was then the United States (and a little of Canada), but not all of it. The bulk of his time was spent in the cities of the northeast; Boston New York and Philadelphia; in Baltimore (which at the time was culturally in the Upper South); in the then wilderness of Michigan; and in the frontier territory along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in the states of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. He took a steamboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and he was intending to spend a few months in the southeast United States when he was recalled home by the government. A quick journey mostly by coach from New Orleans to Washington, where Tocqueville shook President Jackson’s hand and was unimpressed, and a return via Baltimore to New York, put Tocqueville on a ship back to France.

In America, Tocqueville talked to everyone he could, and as a wealthy young French aristocrat who spoke English, he could talk to almost anyone he wanted, from a former president such as John Quincy Adams to Michigan Indian chiefs who remembered French Canada with fondness. He has been criticized for not spending time in the South, and for speaking mostly to supporters of the defeated Federalist Party rather than with Jacksonian democrats, but to a certain extent such criticisms are misguided. Although Tocqueville himself said that he had only acquired a “superficial” knowledge of the South, and regretted not being able to spend another six months there as planned, Tocqueville did talk with many Southerners, if not with many people from South Carolina (OC, 1998b, 165). Maryland was a southern, slave-holding state, and Tocqueville recorded significant conversations and experiences there. On the steamboat down the Mississippi, Tocqueville recorded a long and important conversation with Sam Houston, after whom the Texas city of Houston is named. He spent three days in New Orleans, and elsewhere recorded extended conversations with Southerners he met. If he did not spend as much time in the deep South as he would have wished, he certainly talked about it with men who knew it well, both Southerners and Northerners. It is true he did not talk with many Jacksonians, but it seems unlikely that such conversations would have changed his attitudes.

When Tocqueville and Beaumont returned to France, their first task was to write the report on the American penitentiary system they had officially been sent to prepare. This was almost entirely written by Beaumont, but published under both names in 1832. It was a modest success. Tocqueville soon turned to other projects. He visited England in 1833, and he returned there and visited Ireland in 1835. He became acquainted with the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who would in due course write brilliant reviews of Tocqueville’s work on America. But Tocqueville’s objective was not merely to travel. His immediate goals were twofold: overcoming the objections of his family to marrying Mary Mottley, which came to pass in 1835, and writing the first volume of Democracy in America, which was published the same year.

Tocqueville’s marriage to Mary Mottley, like his oath of allegiance to the new regime, was a public act of nonconformity of the sort he usually went to some lengths to avoid. However much he was an outsider in his thoughts and feelings, he always took pains to conform to social expectations. For example, he could not take communion in good conscience, but he could and did regularly attend church, and otherwise act in the ways considered appropriate for a man of his class. His marriage was the sole ongoing exception to the rule. Mary, or Marie as she became known, was by birth an English Protestant. That she converted to Catholicism before marrying Alexis, or that she became by far the more devout of the two, could not change her outsider status. Much would have been forgiven her had she been wealthy, but while no pauper, her wealth was certainly much less than Alexis' own. The fact that she was six years older than Tocqueville was also unconventional. Stormy as their relationship was at times (Marie was jealous, often with justification), it was also marked by a lasting passion and affection that was unconventional in aristocratic marriages of the period.

Democracy in America was not a conventional book either. Masterpieces rarely are. However, it was a great success in conventional terms. It received enthusiastic reviews, to which a well-thought out publicity campaign by Tocqueville contributed. He took care to send copies to all the right people, several of whom were more or less distant cousins. The book was widely noticed, in England and America as well as in France. Tocqueville soon became one of the stars of the Paris literary scene, welcomed at all the best salons. After 1835, Tocqueville was famous.

But he was not content with his literary and intellectual reputation. He wanted more. Tocqueville’s character was always characterized by a mixture of depression, stoicism and vaulting ambition, as can be seen in this 1835 letter to a friend. “The older I get, the more I see life from the perspective I thought was due to the enthusiasm of my first youth. A thing of mediocre value, which is only worthwhile to the extent that one uses it to do one’s duty, help people, and take one’s rank among them.” Tocqueville was anxious to make his way to the front rank on the political stage, too. In 1837, when he was making his first efforts towards a political career, he wrote again: “Don’t think, my dear friend, that I have an unthinking enthusiasm or even any enthusiasm at all for the intellectual life. I have always put action above everything else” (OC, 1977a, 376, 479). Tocqueville intended to use his new-found reputation as a great writer and political thinker to become a political leader. After some hesitation, he chose to run for election from a district in Normandy, in which the chateau of Tocqueville, which he had recently inherited on his mother’s death, was located. The prime minister at the time was another one of Tocqueville’s cousins, Count Molé. He offered to support Tocqueville’s candidacy, which would surely have guaranteed Tocqueville’s victory. But Alexis refused, insisting that to do otherwise would mean sacrificing his political independence. Refusing the benefits of his insider position, he preferred to remain an outsider. He wished to be independent of any political party, not a public and committed supporter of the conservative government. He lost, narrowly, by a vote of 247 to 210.¹ In 1839 he ran again, and this time he was elected. He would represent the same district in the French parliament for the next thirteen years, until Napoleon III’s coup d'état drove him out of politics.

Tocqueville’s entry into politics did not prevent him from finishing Democracy in America, whose second and final volume was published in 1840. Much to his chagrin, it did not receive quite the same warm welcome as volume one. More abstract and theoretical, many readers found it hard to follow. The reviews were correspondingly less enthusiastic, and sales slower. Nevertheless, it served to cement Tocqueville’s literary reputation.

However much he wanted to be independent, Tocqueville did not wish to remain on the fringes of parliamentary life. As he wrote to Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, an elderly liberal writer and former politician who became something of a father-figure to Tocqueville at this time (his own father being politically far removed from Alexis' views, however much the two remained affectionate towards one another), “my nature is to be active and, I must admit, ambitious. I would like power, if it could be honorably acquired and kept.” The problem was that Tocqueville was not comfortable with any of the existing political parties. He wanted in, but found that character, temperament and political perspective forced him to remain an outsider. He was a liberal, as that word was used in nineteenth-century France, but as he described himself, a “liberal of a new kind,” one whose love of freedom was coupled with respect for existing institutions and for religion. As he wrote in a note to himself, “I have an intellectual preference for democratic institutions, but I am aristocratic by instinct, that is I despise and fear the crowd. I passionately love freedom, legality, the respect for rights, but not democracy. This is the base of my soul.” Views like these made it hard for Tocqueville to commit himself wholeheartedly to any political party, or to attract others' support for his own. Ambivalence is rarely a crowd-pleaser (Reader, 2002, 153,160, 219).

Tocqueville was handicapped in his political career in other ways as well. In nineteenth-century politics the ability to speak well and at length was a necessity for anyone with political ambition. Tocqueville was a capable speaker, but he found it increasingly difficult to speak for long periods of time. From the late 1830s he was intermittently in poor physical health, perhaps already showing signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him. In addition, temperamentally he found it hard to suffer fools, and he was never adept, to say the least, at collegial backslapping and moral flexibility. When he attempted to form his own parliamentary block, he found he could attract only a handful or two of supporters. He remained a political “name,” someone who would be listened to when he spoke from the rostrum, but he wa...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half Title
• Series Introduction
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V