A cold fish in deep water

There are many studies of Tocqueville’s books and writings. The publication of the surviving Oeuvres, papiers et correspondence began in 1951 and still drags on. Yet there have been few biographies. Hugh Brogan, who has edited for the Oeuvres the correspondence and conversations with Tocqueville with the English economist Nassau W. Senior, has now written the most complete life to date. He opens with a coy and whimsical declaration:

In recent years, 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 … and although I use a friend’s privilege to be frank about his weaknesses, no one else better do the same in my presence.

This hints at some of the difficulties he has had to face, and some of the reasons why there has been so much exegesis and so few Lives.

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.