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Daniel Gordon
In America, I saw the freest, most enlightened men living in the happiest circumstances to be found anywhere in the world, yet it seemed to me that their features were habitually veiled by a sort of cloud. They struck me as grave and almost sad even in their pleasures.
Tocqueville (, 625)
An Anguished Life
Alexis de Tocqueville (18051859) was born into an aristocratic family with strong political connections. He served as a representative in the French Chamber of Deputies starting in 1839 and was briefly Minister of Foreign of Affairs in 1849. As an author, he attained instant fame after publishing the first part of Democracy in America in 1835 (the second part appeared in 1840). In 1838, he was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and, in 1841, to the even more prestigious French Academy whose 40 members were, in principle, the greatest living writers in the French language, known as the immortals. In spite of these achievements, his was an anguished life. He was tormented by the depressing fluctuations of his country between revolution and Bonapartism, and by his own political ineffectiveness. Yet, it was not a failed life. Although he was unable to modify the course of history, he succeeded in articulating a new set of terms for the comprehension of political regimes and how they change.
The existential problem at the heart of Tocquevilles identity was that he was a democratically inclined aristocrat in an era of revolutionary hatred for aristocracy. He would embrace equality but would never disown aristocracy. He would support democratic causes, but he would also worry about the disappearance of noble persons like himself, persons with a sense of historical pride and a desire to rise above the level of the common culture. In our current ideological climate, we tend to divide the world into the haves and the have-nots based on privileges associated with class and race. It is not easy to comprehend how a white European nobleman, born with wealth and easy access to positions of authority, could suffer from the anxiety of oppression. But Tocquevilles aristocratic family was devastated during the French Revolution. Painful memories of injustice, committed in the name of equality, colored his entire life. The threat of becoming extinct inside the democratic society whose emergence he accepted was forever on his mind.
For Tocqueville, his great-grandfather, Guillaume-Chrtien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, was a symbol of democracys penchant for destroying its liberal elite. Malesherbes was one of the leading political figures during the last decades of the absolute monarchy. In the 1750s, as an official in charge of government censorship of the press, he secretly assisted with the publication of Diderots Encyclopedia, the central work of the French Enlightenment. As president of the Cour des Aides, a judicial body dealing with taxation disputes, he issued, in 1775, a widely circulated protest against what he called royal tyranny. Malesherbes contributed to the formation of a critical political language, a language that swelled into revolutionary declarations in 1789. Yet, in 1792, with Louis XVI in prison and facing trial, this former opponent of the royal bureaucracy chivalrously volunteered to serve as the kings legal counsel. For this, and for his aristocratic birth, he was executed by the Jacobins in April 1794, after being forced to watch his daughter mount the scaffold.
Tocqueville, who venerated his great-grandfather, left a handwritten note in his archives:
As to the question of why I should have felt more obliged than others to speak out and write these things, my answer is clear and precise. I am the grandson [sic] of M. de M[alesherbes]. No one is ignorant of the fact that M. de M[alesherbes], after defending the people before King Louis XVI, defended King Louis XVI before the people. I have not forgotten and will never forget these two exemplary actions. (Cited by Jaume 2013, 298; see also Jardin 1989, 36)
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The memory of revolution was formative, but revolution was more than a memory. The political instability that preceded Tocquevilles birth continued during his lifetime; it exerted an awful pressure on him. He struggled not only to comprehend the past but also to manage the vicissitudes of his era. In 1815, Napoleons rule ended; the Bourbon monarchy was restored. In 1830 came the July Revolution, sometimes known as the Second French Revolution; it implemented a parliamentary system in which only the wealthiest were allowed to hold office. Karl Marx described this regime as the rule of bankers, stock exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron works and forests, [and] a section of the landed proprietors (Marx [.
Tocqueville was a left-of-center deputy who found French domestic politics to be uninspiring and corrupt. He tended to focus on foreign affairs. He authored a report in 1839 recommending the abolition of slavery throughout the French colonies. Tocquevilles opposition to slavery, and his equally powerful apprehension that racism would long outlive the abolition of slavery, were already evident in the last chapter of volume 1 of Democracy in America, entitled Some Considerations concerning the Present State and Probable Future of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States: When I look at the United States today, it is clear that in one part of the country [the North] the legal barrier between the two races is tending to decrease, but not the barrier of mores. Slavery is receding; the prejudice to which it gave rise remains unaltered ([1835] 2004, 395).
Tocquevilles reflections on racial inequality (see .
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Tocqueville was not surprised that the Revolution of 1848 occurred, but he was shocked by the violence of the June uprisings in Paris. Since he was not associated with the conservative forces of the July Monarchy, he was elected, in the new regime of universal male suffrage, to the Constituent Assembly. Yet, he was moving rapidly to the right. His disaffection with the Revolution of 1848 was complete when Napoleons nephew, Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, won a landslide election for the presidency in December 1848. Three years later, this mediocre simulacrum of the first emperor of France overthrew the republic through a coup dtat. A popular referendum confirmed his power and he became the second emperor of France in 1852.
