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Monday 1 December 2008

Alexis de Tocqueville

A cold fish in deep water

Tocqueville’s fame rests on two extraordinary books, Democracy in America and The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution. His life was not so interesting and his character was less attractive. Brogan is excellent on his background in the Norman aristocracy, his kinship with Malesherbes, the admirable defender of Louis XVI, and with Chateaubriand, and on his family’s experiences in the Revolution, in which a fair number were guillotined. Childhood, education, journey to America, publication of Democracy, fame, Restoration intellectual life, the revolution of 1830, political career under Louis Philippe, 1848, his brief stint as Minister of Foreign Affairs under Louis Napoleon, the coup d’état of 1851, withdrawal from public life, the writing and publication of The Ancien Régime — overshadowed by the livelier read offered by Madame Bovary — and death in Cannes, 1859, aged 53: it is all here. However, Brogan’s loyalty does not persuade one that much of it repays his exhaustive treatment. Tocqueville was not a particularly unusual, important or successful politician. His judgments, as recorded by Senior, were often wrong, and lacked the realistic bite of some of Senior’s other acquaintances such as Thiers, who from time to time enlivens those relentlessly high-minded diaries with his enthusiasm for shooting down his compatriots in the streets. This biography makes the case for Tocqueville’s Souvenirs as an account of 1848 and its aftermath in France, but vivid as they are, as analysis they lose in competition with Karl Marx. Tocqueville’s vaunted independence from party and faction, his air of superiority and his complacent inability to suffer fools made him ineffectual: one is reminded of Disraeli’s remark about his friend and admirer John Stuart Mill: ‘Ah yes, the finishing governess …’ Brogan gives his own verdict: ‘He is always setting out to cross the floor and getting stuck halfway.’ Tocqueville also appears in these pages as far too given to proclaiming his own passionate — a word that appears with wearying frequency — adherence to Liberty, as if that alone provided the answer to all problems, a not uncommon posture among liberal intellectuals to this day: against the current, but at the same time somehow in the swim.

There are longueurs too in the account of his life outside politics and writing. There was a tedious amount of invalidism in his family and in his marriage, even by 19th- century standards, and his stomach troubles get rather too much attention. Dying of tuberculosis is unpleasant whoever you are, even in Cannes, and it could be got over in fewer pages than it is given here.

The life can get in the way of the books. There is also the problem of his weaknesses, personal and intellectual. Again, Brogan is commendably frank; one can see why friends have asked him whether he likes his subject. Tocqueville from time to time appears as spoilt, arrogant, snobbish, opportunist and the devious prey of intellectual jealousy — he did not give Guizot or Chateaubriand the credits they deserved. In some of his letters he was enthusiastic about sex — he may at an early age have fathered an illegitimate child, though as is the case with a number of other Tocqueville papers the evidence has been mysteriously lost or mislaid, and will not be appearing in the Oeuvres — and that might make him these days a more attractive figure than John Stuart Mill, were it not for his frequent bouts of moral vanity. He was not always faithful to his middle-class English wife, and was also impatient about her slow eating habits. We are told that once when she was toying with a pie he got so exasperated that he seized her plate and threw it on the floor: the reader applauds as she calmly asks the servant for another slice.

Bad-tempered at times, altogether he comes across as a bit of a cold fish, in public as well as in private. Such he showed himself to be in the youthful report on prisons, the writing of which was the pretext of his American journey: he was unmoved by the heartless systems of solitary confinement then in vogue, which a little later so appalled Charles Dickens. Brogan notes this, and duly fits Tocqueville into the contemporary Foucaultian frame of ‘discipline and punish’, but he lets him off rather lightly. He does, however, provide a telling vignette from the memoirs of Alexander Herzen, arrested by the police in the violent Paris June of 1848:

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