WHO WAS TOCQUEVILLE
Alexis de Tocqueville was born on July 29, 1805, and died in his fifty-fourth year on April 16, 1859 not a long life, and one often addicted with ill health. He was born a French aristocrat and lived as one; and he was also a liberal who both rejected the Old regime Of aristocracy and doubted the revolution that overturned it. An aristocratic liberal he was, and if we knew everything contained in that difficult combination, we could Stop here. But since we do not, the formula will serve as a beginning. In thought as in life Tocqueville always held to freedom and to nobility, and his question, his concern was how to keep them together.
Tocqueville was born into a very old Norman family named Carrel; one of his ancestors had fought in the company of William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. Through marriage, negotiation and action at law, the Carrels acquired the fief of Tocqueville in Normandy, and in 1661 took that name. Alexis’s grandfather was a chevalier; his father Herve became a count in 1820. In 1793 Herve had married the granddaughter Of Malesherbes, a great figure late in the Old Regime: botanist, correspondent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both minister and critic Of Louis XVI, and courageous defender Of the king at his trial in 1792—1793. Malesherbes and Herve de Tocqueville were imprisoned during the Terror, the former guillotined together with a sister, a daughter, a son-in-law, and a granddaughter and her husband.
Herve was spared and released in 1794, his hair having turned snow white at the age of twenty-two. Herve became the guardian of the two orphans of Malesherbes’s son-in-law, who was the elder brother of the great writer Franpis Renede Chateaubriand. In his Memoirs Chateaubriand speaks Of seeing his nephews growing up with Alexis, future author Of Democracy in America. He remarks in one Of his epigrams: “Alexis de Tocqueville went through civilized America while I visited its forests.”‘ Here is the hauteur of the aristocrat that Tocqueville could have imitated but did not. If he remained in any powerful sense an aristocrat, it was only after having concluded that all partisan sentiment in favor of aristocracy is now vain and nostalgic. He himself had no children and no particular wish to sustain his own noble family. He once said that he would passionately desire to have children as he could imagine them but had “no very keen desire to draw from the great lottery of paternity.
However sharp his sympathetic appreciation for aristocratic society and it was considerable this was not a man of aristocratic feeling, ready to make sacrifices as pere de faille on behalf of aristocratic illusions. The irresistible democratic revolution is the theme of Tocqueville’s three great books. It is set forth in his Introduction to Democracy in America (the first volume of which was published in 1835, the second in 1840). It is applied to his own time in his Souvenirs (written in 1851 but not for publication; first published only in 1893), in which he recounts the (ultimately) socialist revolution that he witnessed in 1848. And he uncovers its remote origins in The Old Regime and the Revolution, published in 1856 with a promise he could not fulfill to write further on the events of the Revolution and to provide a judgment on its result.
Unlike other aristocrats of his time, Tocqueville did not despair of democracy. He neither scorned it nor opposed it. On the whole, he approved of it—or at least accepted it with every appearance of willingness. Readers of Democracy in America have always disagreed over how democratic he was both in mind and in heart, but it is fair to say that he directed much of his energy to warning the reactionaries in his country that democracy was irreversible as well as irresistible, and to showing them that it was wrong to hate the consequences of the French Revolution.
He believed that the beginnings of democracy antedated the Revolution, and that its worst aspects—which were not violence and disruption—were even initiated by the Old Regime of the monarchy. So, far from hiding or sulking, like a displaced refugee of the old order, or from reluctantly accepting duties that were pressed upon him, Tocqueville sought out opportunities for engagement in politics. In 1837, when, perhaps, he should have been working without interruption on the second volume of Democracy in America, he ran for the Chamber of Deputies in the regime of Louis-Philippe, and was defeated.
In 1839 he ran again and was elected; he was reelected in 1842, and again in 1846. He became a leading figure of the liberal newspaper Le commerce in 1844; then, as the Chamber turned to the Right, he helped create a group called the “Young Left.” On January 27, 1848, he gave a famous speech in the Chamber warning, with an accuracy that surprised even him, of the “wind of revolution” that was in the air;’ here, in addition to the more general predictions of Democracy in America, was an instance of his uncanny ability to sense the drifts and trends of politics.
Later in that year, after the fall of Louis-Philippe’s monarchy, he was elected to the constituent assembly of the Second Republic and served on the committee that prepared its constitution. Then, in 1848, he was elected to the new Assembly and served briefly, honorably, and unsuccessfully as Minister of Foreign Affairs in a cabinet that lasted from June 2 to October 31. By the following spring he had been stricken with the illness, probably tuberculosis, that would eventually claim his life.
Tocqueville did his best to govern, as he said, “in a regular, moderate, conservative, and quite constitutional way,” but he was in a situation in which “everyone wanted to depart from the constitution.”6 In such a predicament a consistent line of conduct is almost impossible, and in any case the French had put their new republic on borrowed time by electing Louis Napoleon as its president. His coup d’etat putting an end to the republic came in December, 1851, at which time Tocqueville, as a protesting deputy, was imprisoned for two days, then released. Suffering under an illiberal regime and from ill health, he was now free to write his book on the Old Regime.
Yet for him, the freedom to write and publish was not enough. He also wanted political freedom, and he wanted to taste it for himself by holding office. He seems to have understood the desire to distinguish oneself as essentially political be-cause the goods of this world, even the intellectual joys of understanding, never give satisfaction or repose. Theory itself is a sort of activity fraught with restiveness, and as such not surely superior to action. Writing in 1840 to his older brother Edouard, he explained himself
What moves the soul is different, but the soul is the same this restive and insatiable soul that despises all goods of the world and which, nonetheless, incessantly needs to be stirred in order to seize them, so as to escape the grievous numbness that is experienced as soon as it relies for a moment on itself. This is a sad story. It is a little bit the story of all men, but of some more than others, and of myself more than anyone I know.