Alexis de Tocqueville Read online

  ‘One of the delights of this remarkable biography is to let its readers see the past as if it were the present, through the eyes of civilised Frenchmen like Tocqueville ... A biography as humane, learned, humorous and perceptive as this extends our knowledge of ourselves and where we came from, as well as painting an incomparable portrait of one of the sharpest and most sympathetic writers of all time’ Hilary Spurling, Observer

  ‘One of the greatest virtues of this book is the fact that the author pulls no punches ... This is a book that the reader wants never to end.’ Alan Ryan, The New York Review of Books

  ‘Warm, witty, intimate, exhaustive, digressive, autumnal, and not in the least idolatrous.’ John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine

  ‘A capacious and emphatic study of a profound thinker and the worlds he embodied – as deputy for the Cotentin no less than interpreter of American democracy.’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Hugh Brogan at a stroke has established himself as Tocqueville’s finest biographer to date ... This is a splendid book, the fruits of a lifetime’s engagement with Tocqueville’ Jonathan Wright, Independent on Sunday

  ‘Superb ... wonderfully learned and intelligent ... The strength of the book comes from Mr. Brogan’s narrative talent and remarkable knowledge of Tocqueville’s life and times. The biography reads like a novel, combining humour and urbanity with erudition and insight ... It should be translated into French.’ Thomas Pavel, Wall Street Journal

  ‘This is a magnificent biography. Hugh Brogan’s knowledge of the details of Tocqueville’s life is extraordinary, as is his erudite account of his family life and of French politics and society in the first half of the nineteenth century. And how splendidly the book is written! Tocqueville’s life was marked by a triumph of character; Hugh Brogan’s biography is a triumph of history and letters’ John Lukacs

  ‘Brogan’s book will have to be reckoned with by all Anglophone students of Tocqueville. It is lively, comprehensive, well-researched, and exceedingly well-written.’ Daniel J. Mahoney, Claremont Review of Books

  ‘The fruit of a lifetime’s scholarship by a distinguished British historian of America, the first proper life of Tocqueville in English has all the insight and human richness of great 19th-century fiction’ The Economist

  ‘Hugh Brogan is a British scholar richly specialized in French as well as American history. No one is better qualified to write this first exhaustive biography in English, and Brogan does not disappoint.’ Michael Kammen, Boston Sunday Globe

  ‘An erudite and combative new biography ... Brisk and admirably accessible.’ Cristopher Caldwell, New York Times Book Review

  ‘On switching off the light after reading War and Peace, Edmund Wilson ... would find his bedroom “full of people.” Something like that happens with this biography of Alexis de Tocqueville ... Hugh Brogan has a historian’s grasp of the period and a novelist’s gift for character.’ The Economist

  ‘A magisterial account ... It is surely the authoritative life for our time.’ Joseph J. Ellis, Washington Post Book World

  ‘Brogan’s comprehensive study is as timely as it is formidable. His biography ranks with Nicholas Boyle’s Goethe and David Cairns’s Berlioz as an outstanding example of the genre’ Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph

  ‘I have also been moved, excited and impressed by Hugh Brogan’s magnificent biography of the greatest analyst of democracy there has ever been.’ New Statesman

  ‘Brogan has written the definitive English language biography of the best known and most perceptive foreign interpreter of the American experience. The work’s major achievement, however, is its lucid presentation of Tocqueville in the French contexts of monarchy and revolution that shaped his perceptions of the emerging democracy across the Atlantic.’ Dennis Showalter, Colorado College

  ‘For almost two centuries, there has been no comprehensive English-language biography of Tocqueville. That gap is now filled by Hugh Brogan ... Brogan’s biography is a marvellous tribute to [Tocqueville’s] life.’ Vikram Johri, Christian Science Monitor

  ALEXIS DE

  TOCQUEVILE

  ALSO BY HUGH BROGAN

  Tocqueville (1973)

  The Life of Arthur Ransome (1984)

  The Longman History of the United States of America (1985)

  Mowgli’s Sons (1987)

  American Presidential Families (with Charles Mosley, 1993)

  Kennedy (1996)

  Edited Works

  The Times Reports the American Civil War (1975)

  Correspondance et Conversations d’Alexis de

  Tocqueville et Nassau William Senior (with Anne P. Kerr, 1991)

  Signalling from Mars: the Letters of Arthur Ransome (1997)

  HUGH BROGAN worked for The Economist and was then a Harkness fellow in the United States. He has held a chair in American history at the University of Essex and now has a research professorship there. His books include the magnificent Penguin History of the United States and biographies of J. F. Kennedy and Arthur Ransome.

  ALEXIS DE

  TOCQUEVILE

  A BIOGRAPHY

  HUGH BROGAN

  Dedicated to the Memory of

  SIR DENIS BROGAN

  (1900–1974)

  My Father – Teacher – and Inspiration

  This paperback edition published in 2009

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  Exmouth Market

  London EC1R 0JH

  www.profilebooks.com

  Copyright © Hugh Brogan, 2006

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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  Typeset in Fournier by MacGuru Ltd

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  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN 978-1-84765-265-2

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  BOOK ONE: YOUNG TOCQUEVILLE

  1. Noblesse

  2. Royalists

  3. A Sentimental Education

  4. First Flight

  5. Pupillage

  6. July

  7. Upheaval

  8. A Voyage Out

  9. A Republic Observed

  10. Writing Prisons

  11. Between Books

  12. Writing America

  13. Fame

  14. Into Politics

  15. Writing Democracy

  BOOK TWO: MONSIEUR DE TOCQUEVILLE

  16. Deputy

  17. February

  18. June

  19. Retrospection

  20. December

  21. Writing History

  22. Writing Revolution

  23. Retreating

  24. Cannes

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  I Abbreviations

  II Primary sources

  III Other printed works

  IV List of illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  BOOK ONE

  Young Tocqueville

  CHAPTER ONE

  NOBLESSE

  1773–1794

  Titles count
for little with the French, and mere wealth is not respected. Blood they understand.

  HILAIRE BELLOC

  IT IS NO PARADOX to say that the greatest event of Tocqueville’s life occurred before he was born: the French Revolution, which decisively influenced almost everything that ever happened to him.

  But behind and beyond that transforming convulsion there lay another France – the France for which we still use the revolutionary term, l’ancien régime, or old order. This played an equally important part in shaping him. Tocqueville’s families, paternal and maternal, nobles of the sword and the robe, were distinguished in that lost world, and he took a proper pride in their achievements, however remote. Thus, late in life, he was enchanted to learn for certain that one of his ancestors had sailed with Normandy’s greatest hero, ‘William Bastard de graunt vigour’, to the conquest of England in 1066.1 He had been almost equally delighted some years earlier when his wife discovered a mass of ancient parchment in a worm-eaten cupboard which seemed to show that the Clérels (the original family name) had been noble since at least 1425.2 Yet nothing could more precisely illustrate one of the main changes brought about in France by the Revolution than the fate of those documents; for what Marie de Tocqueville had almost certainly found was the once-cherished dossier of proofs of the family’s ancient nobility, to be used if their status was ever challenged. In the new France such muniments were of little more than antiquarian interest.

  Nevertheless, the Clérels were indeed an ancient noble family, Norman of the Normans, even before they acquired the manor-house of Tocqueville in the mid seventeenth century. It lies in the Cotentin,* a few miles east of Cherbourg, near the sea. In the middle of the eighteenth century it was occupied by the second Comte de Tocqueville, Bernard (1730–76), and his wife Catherine, the grandparents of Alexis. His story begins with them, for some of their traits, both social and individual, were to mark their descendants for the next hundred years.

  Bernard was a soldier, and took his profession seriously – he had a portable military library of fifty-one volumes, ranging from the 1741 edition of the Code militaire to a work on La Nouvelle Artillerie, published four years before his death.3 He had an exemplary career and was made a Chevalier of the military order of Saint-Louis. He was a younger son, but inherited the house and estates of Tocqueville when his brother, also a soldier, was killed in the Seven Years War and his nephew died at school in a playground accident. Bernard had never expected to be rich enough to marry, but that now became his duty if the family were not to die out. A comrade told him of Comte Étienne de Damas-Crux, who had several unmarried sisters. This was promising: the Damas were a numerous family which combined great landed wealth with Court favour and a firm commitment, like that of the Tocquevilles, to the duty and privilege of bearing arms for the King. Bernard was found acceptable, and was paired off with Catherine-Antoinette de Damas-Crux. His family had a record of making ‘good’ marriages, but this was better than usual: it marked the beginning of a great rise in the world. It is to be presumed that Catherine’s dowry helped to finance Bernard’s decision to rebuild his manor-house, enlarging it and giving it an elegant modern façade: the pediment of the garden-front was emblazoned with both the Tocqueville and the Damas-Crux coats-of-arms. The manoir, from now on, was unequivocally a château.4

  The alliance with the Damas was to be of great importance to the next two generations of Tocquevilles, for good and ill, but not exactly as was expected.5 Great change was at hand, although its coming was probably not very visible from the Cotentin. There, life for the provincial noblesse went on in the manner that had long since become traditional. The Tocquevilles were not among the families which in the previous century had heeded the Sun King’s invitation and gone to Versailles, there (after showing the necessary proofs) to become noblesse de Cour and join the perpetual competition for perquisites by which Louis XIV kept his grands docile and politically impotent. Like their neighbours they continued to be what they had always been – rustic Norman gentry, who spent their time farming or squeezing money out of the peasantry when they were not fighting in the King’s wars. The Tocquevilles had long been in the middle rank of Norman noblesse – nobles de race, patrons of churches (gentilshommes seigneurs de paroisse) as well as fiefholders. They enjoyed the usual privileges of their order, among which were exemption from the taille (general tax) and the gabelle (salt tax), and the right to bypass the lower courts in any cases which involved them, going instead, in the first instance, to the higher royal courts. Only nobles were allowed to wear swords in public and to put battlements on their houses. They took precedence of lesser beings in public gatherings, and had a specially lofty pew in each parish church to which they had the presentation – Alexis eventually inherited the pew at Tocqueville, one of the few privileges to survive the Revolution. Although the soldierly tradition of the Tocquevilles forbade it, they could, as nobles, have claimed exemption (except in great emergencies) from all forms, physical or financial, of military service. Above all, they had various ‘feudal dues’ enabling them to tax, as it were, the land and business of their neighbours: dues which, in the days of serfdom, may possibly have had some functional justification, but which by the eighteenth century had become merely sources of income, as Alexis de Tocqueville, taking the peasants’ side, indignantly demonstrated in his Ancien Régime. Some of their other privileges were surely more trouble than they were worth. They had the sole right to hunt and to trample down the peasants’ crops in pursuit of their quarry. And in one of the three round towers of Tocqueville Comte Bernard kept 3,000 pigeons, another standing cause of peasant resentment, since the birds despoiled the harvest (in an epoch when famines were all too frequent). It is hard to see the point of this abuse, even if Bernard was fond of pigeon pie, unless it was intended as a ruthless display of his power and standing. Otherwise he, like his forebears, seems to have been a responsible landlord to the peasantry – ‘We have lived among them as protectors and friends for centuries,’ said his grandson,6 not quite credibly. But the Tocquevilles did not mingle with their inferiors. There was no need. Social and intellectual life in the French provinces was remarkably vigorous and varied in the eighteenth century. Every local capital seems to have aspired to be a little Paris: Valognes, the capital of the Cotentin, was proud to be known as a little Versailles. The Tocquevilles had a town-house there to which they went every winter, to escape the mud of their estate and the chill of their damp chateau and to enjoy the company of their equals.

  Forty years later, when Alexis de Tocqueville was born, this noble way of life had largely been destroyed. But it still had enough vitality to leave a permanent mark on his attitudes, particularly towards his countrymen. ‘When I talk to a gentilhomme, though we have not two ideas in common, though all his opinions, wishes, and thoughts are opposed to mine, yet I feel at once that we belong to the same family, that we speak the same language, that we understand one another. I may like a bourgeois better, but he is a stranger.’7 First and foremost he was a noble, to the end of his days, and cannot be understood unless this is recognized.

  Tocqueville was never able entirely to shake off nostalgia for this lost world. In his first publication on the ancien régime he wrote:

  Anyone who wished to paint an accurate picture of the order of the noblesse would have to resort to many and various classifications, distinguishing nobles of the sword from nobles of the robe, nobles of the Court from nobles of the country, the most ancient families from the most recent; he would discover in this small society as many nuances and classes as in the greater society of which it was only a part. However, he would also have found that a certain homogeneous spirit guided the whole body; as a whole it obeyed certain fixed rules, governed itself according to certain invariable customs, and all its members had certain ideas in common.8

  But by the mid eighteenth century the bonds of caste were stretched to breaking-point. By immemorial tradition the people of the kingdom of France were divided into three esta
tes, but the division no longer made sense. The position of the Church (the First Estate) was coming under ferocious attack from the philosophers of the Enlightenment. In a nation rapidly growing from 20 million towards 30 million the privileges of a few hundred thousand nobles (the Second Estate) were more and more anomalous. And as Tocqueville hints, the noblesse was far from united. The greatest nobles – the richest, best educated, best connected – took advantage of France’s material progress to further their own interests; they plunged into high finance and industrial investment, and eagerly married into rich roturier (commoner, Third Estate) families, which in their turn were easily ennobled; they were charmed and excited by the limitless possibilities opening to European civilization, and began to regard the prospect of social and political reform with eagerness, not apprehension: they were even prepared, in principle, to sacrifice their privileges if it meant that they could merge with the far more numerous leaders of the Third Estate in a new governing class of notables,* an ambition which was largely to be achieved, thanks to the Revolution. But at the other end of their order were the rural squireens, the hobereaux, families with nothing to live on but their feudal dues and the produce of their ill-managed lands, often no larger than peasant smallholdings: ill-educated, provincial, struggling, often unsuccessfully, to cling to their noble status. They had less and less in common with the polished ladies and gentlemen of the Parisian salons.

  If there was ever any doubt as to which end of the scale the Tocquevilles would move towards, the Damas marriage settled it.

  Not that Bernard and Catherine were particularly worldly, in the English sense of the word. Besides the military library the chateau contained eighty-four volumes of religious devotion. The Tocqueville family’s way of life was permeated, and in their eyes justified, by Catholicism. They were devout in the Jesuit, rather than the Jansenist tradition† (although, in the next century, Alexis de Tocqueville deeply admired the greatest Jansenist writer, Blaise Pascal). The quality of their religion emerges in Catherine’s account of the birth of her son, which took place at her mother’s family home in 1772.