The vivid dreams of Alexis de Tocqueville

Hugh Brogan
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
Prophet of democracy in the age of revolution
724pp. Profile. £30.
978 1 86197 509 6
US: Yale University Press. $35. 978 0 300 10803 3
 
 
He was tiny, five foot four according to some though others allowed him an inch or so more, very slightly built with sloping shoulders. But his lovely brown eyes and wavy black hair and his wicked mouth were capable of enchanting, as was his melodious voice which was startling, coming from such a little man. We think of Alexis de Tocqueville as a chilly aristocrat looking on the follies and brutalities of his times with an austere and unsparing eye. An aristocrat he was, the son of a landowner in the Cotentin – the Château Tocqueville is just over the hill as you come in to land at Cherbourg – but he was warm, hot-tempered and sentimental. He burst into tears when he visited his childhood home after five months’ absence. He was amorous, too, nearly fought a duel, wrote love letters in invisible ink made out of lemon juice, married for love Marie Mottley, an English girl with no money, and never stopped loving her despite his numerous strayings. In middle age he lamented “how could I manage to stop that sort of boiling of the blood that meeting a woman, whatever she may be, still causes me as it did twenty years ago?”. Marie was probably the perfect wife for him, almost absurdly English, fond of small dogs and gardening and chewing her food thoroughly. She ate so slowly that one day Tocqueville got up, snatched her plate of pie and threw it to the floor. “Some more pie”, she said calmly to the servant.

He was single-minded, a serious man. He wrote with such elegance that one might suspect a tendency to glide over the surface. But this swan never ceased to paddle furiously. Unlike his contemporaries Scott, Guizot and Chateaubriand, he was not in the least bit interested in Greek temples or Gothic churches. “Basically only things of our time interest the public and interest me”, he wrote to his friend Louis de Kergorlay in 1850. Sainte-Beuve noted that while Tocqueville never read a book without digging out its heart, he had never done enough casual reading. He read no serious poetry except Racine, no novels with unhappy endings. Most art and music left him cold.

Tocqueville was seized with one unquenchable, lifelong curiosity: to find out the causes of France’s political agonies, false starts, ghastly endings, brief brilliances and recurring disappointments, all of which had begun before his birth in 1805 and were to continue far beyond his death in 1859. His own political career seems like a series of footnotes to his writings. He reluctantly took the oath of loyalty to Louis-Philippe in July 1830 – he counted it “among the unluckiest days of my life” – and became deputy for his native patch in 1839, then briefly served Louis-Napoleon as Foreign Minister under the Second Republic, though without any illusions that it would last. As Marie said, “we are birds of passage in this hotel”. His participation in politics gave him a ringside seat and turned him into one of the first great parliamentary sketch-writers. During the hectic days of the collapse of the July Monarchy, the Minister of the Interior, the Comte de Duchâtel, assures him that everything is under control. But “I noticed that Duchâtel’s habitual tic, a sort of wriggling of the neck and shoulders, was much worse than usual: this small observation made me more thoughtful than anything else that day”. On the day the monarchy actually falls, he wanders into the Chamber where nothing is happening and only a few deputies are loafing aimlessly and he bumps into the President of the Assembly, Paul Sauzet: “M Sauzet had handsome but undistinguished features, the dignity of a cathedral verger, and a large fat body with very short arms. When he was restless or upset, as he nearly always was, he would waggle his little arms convulsively in all directions like a drowning man. His manner, while we talked, was strange; he walked about, stopped and then sat down with one foot tucked under his fat buttocks, as he usually did in moments of great agitation, then he got up and sat down again without coming to any conclusion”.

Tocqueville fearlessly seeks out what is happening on the streets as well as in the Chamber. He talks to General Lamoricière, who is bellowing orders with wild gestures from the back of a horse at the watertower through a hail of bullets from unseen snipers in the rue Samson. Lamoricière’s horse is shot from under him, his third mount to be killed that day. “The clarity of his thought and language made it obvious that, despite the apparent confusion, he had not lost his coolness: but orders so given might make others lose theirs. I could have admired his courage more had it been calmer.” It is this clinical distinguishing between appearance and reality, between material fact and psychological influence, that makes Tocqueville such a matchless observer. There is no better chapter of history on the wing than Tocqueville’s Souvenirs, a personal history of the 1848 Revolution. But it is also impossible to read any page of his travelogues, starting with his voyage to Sicily when he was barely twenty-one, without coming upon some sharp insight or some melancholy reflection. His account of the grim poverty in the west of Ireland – he went there ten years before the Famine – is particularly poignant and prophetic.

Hugh Brogan’s account of Tocqueville’s life is written with a stylish brio and command of detail and narrative worthy of his subject. It is almost as great a pleasure to read as Tocqueville himself. Brogan has studied his subject for half a century and wrote a short study of him thirty years ago, as had his father Sir Denis Brogan before him. And yet, for all its incidental delights, there is something profoundly odd about this book. The oddity is glimpsed from what Brogan says in his Acknowledgements: “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”. Why the hesitation? The picture of Tocqueville that Brogan draws seems an enchanting one, of a great writer who was also a loving and lovable man – not a combination you often find. Yet as this book progresses, you become uncomfortably aware that this is an opinion against which Brogan himself is irritably rebelling. His shoulders begin to wriggle like M. Duchâtel’s. We are not reading about Tocqueville and Hugh Brogan is not writing about him because he was a delightful character and a brilliant observer of men and manners. Alexis de Tocqueville was not Saint-Simon or Pepys and would have been horrified to think that this was how posterity had come to think of him. His obsession was always political theory and its applications. And the awful truth is that Hugh Brogan does not think he was much good at it. If he had been one of Brogan’s students at the University of Essex, he would have persistently marked him down for flashy, unsubstantiated assertions, lack of research and incurable class prejudice.

During their travels in the United States, Brogan tells us, Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont failed to pay enough attention to the Congress, or to political parties. They talked to too many lawyers and not enough women. Tocqueville never understood that the US relied on elections to curb the abuse of power. His obsession with the constitutional checks and balances on the abuse of majority power came to be his “most serious mistake”. Perhaps, Hugh Brogan concludes with seeming magnanimity, “if he had been able to stay longer, he would have broken through”. Though even that must be in doubt since Brogan also tells us that “Tocqueville was as yet fundamentally mistaken about the nature of politics”. Yet at the end of this searing critique, Brogan says that “the Démocratie is the greatest book ever written on the United States” – or at any rate that this is the claim Tocqueville’s readers have repeatedly made for him. This reminds me of Philip Ziegler telling us in the course of his wonderful demolition of Lord Mountbatten that he had to place on his desk a notice saying “REMEMBER, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, HE WAS A GREAT MAN”.

Garry Wills, in his essay “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?” (New York Review of Books, April 29, 2004), is equally astonished that anyone could think that a twenty-six-year-old Frenchman with imperfect English could write “the best book on America”, after such a brief visit, much of it spent visiting prisons. Wills complains that Tocqueville gives us no statistics of income, production or distribution, he says nothing about steamboats, railroads or factories: “it is as if he ghosted his way directly into the American spirit, bypassing the body of the nation”. Wills cannot get over “the shallow empirical basis” of Tocqueville’s abstract speculations, and quotes Mill and Bryce in support of his critique. But Mill and Bryce greatly admired the book, because they thought that Tocqueville really did “divine” the spirit of America. Alas for us plodders, a penetrating sensibility often flourishes on first impressions and risks growing blunt and stale on a longer visit. D. H. Lawrence started writing Kangaroo almost the day he landed at Sydney and finished it six weeks later. For that reason, as a novel it may not be much cop, but has anyone more indelibly evoked the Australian landscape and the sprawling Australian suburbs?

Nor is Brogan any less grudging when he comes to Tocqueville’s other masterpiece, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution. True, the work is incomplete. The second leg, which was to cover the Revolution, had not been put together at Tocqueville’s death from consumption. Striking his forehead, the dying man told the nuns who were looking after him, “Oh! If you only knew all that was in there and how much I want to be cured so as to do my work”. But even the completed volume would not, I fear, have redeemed the whole thing in Brogan’s eyes. “The accuracy of Tocqueville’s conclusions is of limited importance”, he sighs. His picture of the ancien régime is a “medley of fiction and wishful thinking”. His “commitment to obsolescent economic theory, his obsessive cult of property and his fear of revolution made him a part of the problem which he analysed”. Just as Wills argues that Tocqueville’s ulterior concern – the fate of his own country – was “a subtly distorting agent” throughout the Démocratie, so Brogan argues that “much of what he wrote can be understood as a personal manifesto”, in which he often parroted the slogans of his own party. His obsession with the dangers of centralization, for example, was “a shibboleth of the legitimists”. All of which makes Tocqueville “no philosopher” and “largely useless as a political guide nowadays”, according to an article Brogan wrote for Prospect to accompany the publication of his book – a soft sell if ever there was one. “Even today”, Brogan tells us, “it is hard for anyone but the deeply committed to read the Ancien Régime for its political ideas. It seems to be largely a sermon for another day.” Such, Brogan concludes, not a little sententiously, is the fate of tracts.

There have been biographies of political leaders in which the author shows a disabling lack of sympathy for his subject: G. M. Young on Stanley Baldwin, for example, or Hugo Young on Margaret Thatcher. But I cannot recall reading a Life of a political thinker by a purported admirer which is quite so hostile to his subject’s arguments and conclusions. What is going on here? Is there some sort of hidden agenda in operation? Certainly Brogan’s most emphatic criticisms do seem to fall into a pattern. He starts by ridiculing the reverent attention that Tocqueville pays to the American Constitution’s defences against the tyranny of the majority. Well, the Founding Fathers didn’t think those defences were merely decorative – see The Federalist Papers passim. The checks and balances appeared superfluous only because they had proved so successful. Then Brogan tells us that modern historians have demonstrated that in France the towns and villages enjoyed plenty of autonomy until deep into the Revolution and that even the Jacobins and the Emperor between them had not smothered local and civic life. So it is “the Tocquevillian myth” that the ancien régime had destroyed all the old local liberties and institutions, leaving a clear space for the state to take over. But this is not exactly what Tocqueville says. Yes, he describes how, over the centuries, the monarchy has constantly sought to interfere and control and centralize, but he also repeatedly emphasizes how feeble and ineffective these incursions often turn out to be in practice. The damage is done not so much to “self-government” (the English word that Tocqueville uses most often in his notes, along with “rubbish”) as to self-belief and social coherence. By the end of its life, the ancien régime had discredited itself as much by its hopelessness as by its financial bankruptcy and inequitable taxation.

Tocqueville, Brogan thinks, was a bit hard on Louis-Napoleon. That coup d’état “must not be judged, after more than a century and a half, as self-evidently inexcusable”. Oh, mustn’t it? Louis-Napoleon had earned a second term, Brogan explains, and the constitutional ban on it seemed ridiculous and undemocratic. One can, I think, excuse Tocqueville for taking a different view. He was, after all, forced to trudge through the mud at bayonet point to be locked up in the barracks at the Quai d’Orsay, while Louis-Napoleon consolidated his hold on power. The destruction of the Assembly, the thousands of arrests and sentences of exile, the stifling censorship – all not only postponed the fragile prospects for the democracy that Tocqueville hoped for so earnestly, they also ensured that the rich and the poor in France continued to loathe each other for years to come.

But it is when Brogan touches on the question of liberty that we come closest to the core of his antipathy to Tocqueville’s thought. Tocqueville, we are told, opts for the wrong sort of liberty, the negative sort. Apparently Isaiah Berlin makes the same mistake, “even more egregiously” in his famous lecture, “Two Concepts of Liberty”. Tocqueville doesn’t see that liberty is “a process” more potent than equality itself. Well, of course he does see this, which is why he concludes that the United States is likely to endure precisely because the consequences of her liberties are so endlessly fruitful. So what is Brogan’s complaint? What is his preferred model of liberty?

In a startling moment of self-revelation, Brogan tells us that “Delacroix’s energetic picture “Liberty Leading the People” is more profoundly wise than anything Tocqueville wrote on the subject”. Ah, that picture. It will be recalled that Liberty, alias Marianne, is a bare-breasted maenad with her red cap cocked over her wild hair; what she is doing, along with a bunch of half-starved sans-culottes, is trampling on the corpses of a lot of other half-starved sans-culottes. The strong impression is given that a lot of sang impur has already flowed and Liberty is not going to stop until nos sillons have been given a good soaking. It is one of the most profoundly off-putting images ever painted. Liberty, Brogan goes on blithely, can be, and often must be, destructive, but she “clears the way for rebuilding, and what is built in Liberty endures”. Does she just, like she did in Russia in 1917, in China in 1949, in Cambodia and all those other places where the way was so thoroughly cleared? What Tocqueville grasped at the age of twenty-six was that the tabula rasa is a desert. Brogan doesn’t seem to have got there yet.

Over and over again Tocqueville reminds us of what he was continually told in the United States, that what matters is the “point de départ”. There was no internal revolution in America, because the colonists arrived already imbued with the spirit of liberty under the law. The constitutions of each of their colonies contained minute variations of that precious essence, as the liberals in Paris, “les Américains”, fully understood. That tradition has been miraculously transmitted from that day to this. Tocqueville would have regarded the Presidential election of 2000 not as the fiasco that Brogan thinks it but as a triumph. The eventual outcome may have been suspect legally (the case should perhaps have been determined by the Supreme Court of Florida) and politically prejudiced (since the Supreme Court judges all voted according to their party sympathies), though correct on the matter of fact (since it seems clear that in the final totting there were more Republican than Democratic votes), but what it demonstrated was the ingrained willingness of the American people to have such questions decided by law and not by force. The only mobs at the courthouse were the mobs of expensive lawyers.

What Brogan refuses above all to admit is how startlingly fresh and relevant Tocqueville still is. The Démocratie takes only a couple of pages to describe exactly the pervasive but modest religiosity that startles the European visitor today. That stripped-down religion which does not challenge but rather reinforces the prevailing commercial and materialist ethos of society is an American speciality – “The Good Lord loves a successful man” – as are the Wal-Mart style of low-cost retailing and techniques of built-in obsolescence. All these enduring social facts about America are captured perfectly by Tocqueville in the second (1840) volume which Brogan cannot see the point of at all. How superbly Tocqueville describes the contrast between the sobriety of America’s domestic manners and the risk-taking spirit that fuelled and fuels her commercial life. He noted what still strikes us today, the remarkable extent to which bankruptcy is no disgrace in the land of the free. He even describes the typical American bookstore in terms which are instantly recognizable: the pile of how-to books, the manuals and memoirs on business success, the political polemics by the Rush Limbaughs and Michael Moores of his day. Brogan ignores all this, pausing only to dismiss as snobbish and preposterous Tocqueville’s famous claim that the pressures of republican equality induce a certain blandness and conformity in American life. Brogan refuses to accept that this admirable earnestness, those courteous and welcoming manners, might have their cost in a resistance to irony and fantasy, as well as to scepticism and dissent.

Yet to this day, such things are, I am afraid, said by Europeans returning from the United States. Tocqueville is the first person who said them quite so sharply, and his remarks went down no better then than they do now. What Tocqueville called the “irritable patriotism” of Americans (but then whose patriotism isn’t irritable?) does not cotton to foreigners taking them apart. But criticism from fellow countrymen is a different matter. All through the twentieth century have not Tocqueville’s criticisms of Main Street been bellowed by H. L. Mencken, whined by Sinclair Lewis and sung by Pete Seeger? To refuse to confront these criticisms is surely itself a sign of conformity or, as we would now say, political correctness. And we can imagine what Tocqueville would have to say about all that.

Nor do Brogan or Wills allow Tocqueville any credit for seizing on the issues that continue to haunt modern politics: the contrast between political equality and the painful and growing inequalities of income and property, the difficulty of devolving power once it has been centralized and of recreating intermediate institutions once they have been destroyed, the problems of establishing the rule of law in places which have no tradition of it. Not everyone may share the taste for Tocqueville’s oracular style, his reluctance to cite chapter and verse, but it is not true, as Wills claims, that you have to pick and choose to find relevant theses for today in Tocqueville. On the contrary, you can find plenty of them fully and directly argued through in the text. The movements of that restless mind, so quick in the uptake but trawling so deep, are just as rewarding to follow today as they were when he sailed up New York Sound in the summer of 1831.

Nor will it do to pigeonhole Tocqueville as an unregenerate conservative underneath, a “bad loser” who soured and moved to the Right as he grew older. Certainly he was concerned about the fate of his own class and he was not ashamed to lament the eclipse of its more graceful aspects, but the thrust of his whole work was that the advance of social equality was inevitable and that it must be accepted and welcomed. To the end of his life he acknowledged how irresistible were the dreams of liberty and equality, and it is in the closing pages of L’Ancien Régime that he reminds us of those first days which

inflamed the whole heart of France at once. This is ’89, a time of inexperience doubtless, but of generosity, of enthusiasm, of virility, and of greatness, a time of immortal memory, to which the eyes of men will turn with admiration and respect when those who saw it, and we ourselves, will long since have disappeared. Then the French were proud enough of their cause and of themselves to believe that they could be equal in freedom.

Not sour, and certainly not chilly. Nor was he one of those who thought that, for all its high hopes, the whole enterprise was inescapably doomed to turn to disaster. L’Ancien Régime has a poignant appendix on Languedoc, where as in Brittany the provincial assemblies had continued to exist right up to 1789. Tocqueville believes that in Languedoc “the modern spirit could peacefully penetrate this old institution and change everything while destroying nothing. It could have been the same everywhere else”. Tocqueville too could dream.
 
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Ferdinand Mount's recent books include Mind the Gap: The new class divide in Britain and a novel, Heads You Win, both 2004.