Alexis de Tocqueville, Part 4: Recollections

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Book Report has followed Tocqueville the analyst through two volumes of Democracy in America, a writer who worked at a high altitude, reasoning from equality toward the future. His Recollections bring him down to street level. They cover the French revolution of 1848 and its aftermath, written by a man who sat in the assembly, walked through the fighting and served as foreign minister. And they were never meant for us.

Tocqueville wrote them in 1850 and 1851, after he had left office, partly at his family home in Normandy and partly in Sorrento, on the Bay of Naples, where he had gone to rest. In the opening pages he sets his terms. These memories, he says, are a relaxation of the mind, not a contribution to literature. He writes them for himself alone. They will be a mirror in which he can amuse himself contemplating his contemporaries and himself. His closest friends will not see them, so that he can portray everyone, himself included, without flattery.

He kept that promise. The book stayed in the family for decades and was first published in France in 1893, in a trimmed form that softened some of the harsher portraits. The result is the most personal thing he wrote: sharp, funny, snobbish, unfair, and often very perceptive.

The story begins with a warning nobody took seriously. In January 1848 Tocqueville told the Chamber of Deputies that the country was sleeping on a volcano. The working classes were calm on the surface, he said, but ideas about property and society were spreading among them that would sooner or later bring revolution. The majority answered with ironic cheers. He admits that even he did not fully believe the danger was so close.

He gives a hard verdict on the regime of King Louis-Philippe. Toward the end, he writes, the government behaved like a trading company that conducted all its business for the profit of its shareholders. The political class had turned public life into a closed market in favors.

His last private audience with the king is one of the book's best comic scenes. Louis-Philippe talked for three-quarters of an hour, then rose, thanked Tocqueville for the pleasure of the conversation, and dismissed him. Tocqueville adds, in parentheses, that he had not spoken four words. The king left delighted, he observes, the way people always are with someone in front of whom they think they have spoken well.

On February 24th, 1848, the monarchy collapsed. Tocqueville's summary is the kind of sentence that made his reputation: the Monarchy of July fell without a struggle, before rather than beneath the blows of the victors, who were as astonished at their triumph as the vanquished were at their defeat. He was in the Chamber when the king's daughter-in-law, the Duchess of Orléans, arrived with her young son, the heir, hoping the deputies would proclaim him. He describes her as calm and pale in her mourning dress, and the king's son, the Duke of Nemours, standing beside them, cold, stiff and erect. Within hours a crowd had broken in, and the republic was declared instead.

Tocqueville stood for election to the new assembly and won. The second part of the book covers the spring of 1848, when the new republic tried to govern a frightened, divided country. The portraits are merciless. Of the British politician Richard Monckton Milnes, he says he was a clever fellow who did, and, what is rarer, said many foolish things.

Then there is the lunch with George Sand, the novelist and the most famous woman in France. Tocqueville admits his prejudice in the bluntest terms. He says he loathed women who write. He also notes that when someone once asked Sand about his book on America, she replied that she only read books presented to her by their authors. He expected to dislike her. Instead she pleased him. They talked for an hour about politics, and she described the Paris workers, their numbers, their weapons, their preparations and their terrible resolve, in a way no one from his own side could. He thought her picture overdrawn. A few weeks later events proved it was not. His comment on the meeting is one of the best lines in the book: political parties never know each other; they approach, touch, seize, but never see one another.

In June 1848 the government closed the national workshops that had employed thousands of the Paris unemployed, and the workers rose. The fighting lasted days and was put down with heavy loss of life. Tocqueville saw the insurrection plainly, and from one side. It was not, he writes, a political struggle in the usual sense, but a combat of class against class, a sort of servile war. He supported the repression without hesitation.

The most vivid personal scene comes from those days. The porter of his building, an old soldier with a bad reputation, a drunkard who beat his wife, had been telling the wine-shops that he would kill Tocqueville when he came home. Madame de Tocqueville, before leaving Paris, sent a note begging him to sleep elsewhere. He came home at midnight anyway, too tired to bother, with loaded pistols in his pockets. The porter said everyone else had left the house and asked him to come investigate a strange noise in the stables. Tocqueville followed, watching every movement and resolved to shoot at the first sign of treachery. They heard the noise, never learned what it was, and parted. The scene is tense, absurd and honest about his own fear.

The last part covers his months as foreign minister in 1849, under President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Tocqueville judged the president to be the greatest and most permanent danger to the republic, and yet thought he might be managed. He was wrong about that, as the coup of 1851 showed.

The finest passage may be his self-portrait. He explains that he could not fix in his memory the faces of people who did not strike him by some unusual quality. He knew they had noses, mouths and eyes, but he could never remember their particular shape. He honored ordinary people, he says, for the world is made up of them, but they wearied him profoundly.

That confession explains both the book's strength and its blind spot. Tocqueville sees the leading figures with brilliant clarity. The crowds, the workers and their reasons stay mostly out of focus. The Recollections are a portrait of a revolution from the benches of the assembly, written by a man too honest to hide his own prejudices.

After the coup, with his political career over, he went looking for the roots of France's repeated revolutions in the archives of the monarchy itself. Next on Book Report, the final part: The Old Regime and the Revolution.