Recollections

French Revolution of 1848

Alexis de Tocqueville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351494465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Tocqueville was not only an active participant in the French Revolution of 1848, he was also a deeply perceptive observer with a detached attitude of mind. He saw the pitfalls of the course his country was taking more clearly than any of his contemporaries, including Karl Marx. Recollections was first written for self-clarification. It is both an exciting, candid, behind-the-scenes account of what actually happened during those tumultuous months and a remarkably shrewd analysis that has become an accurate forecast of future societies wrestling with the dilemma of synthesizing equality and freedom. Thus the book has a relevance that extends beyond France, to our own country and others, a relevance that is explored in J.P. Mayer's new introduction.Out of print in English for several years, Recollections is presented here in a translation based on the definitive French edition of 1964. It captures the wit and subtlety of mind that have made this book one of the most popular of all Tocqueville's works. Tocqueville's own comments, which he wrote into the manuscript, including his variants, are given, and the editors have added explanatory notes.

PART ONE

Written in July 1850, at Tocqueville

CHAPTER ONE

Origin and Character of these Recollections - General aspects of the period preceding the Revolution of 1848 – First symptoms of the Revolution

Now that for the moment I am out of the stream of public life, and the uncertain state of my health does not even allow me to follow any consecutive study, I have in my solitude for a time turned my thoughts to myself, or rather to those events of the recent past in which I played a part or stood as witness. The best use for my leisure seems to be to go back over these events, to describe the men I saw taking part in them, and in this way, if I can, to catch and engrave on my memory those confused features that make up the uncertain physiognomy of my time.

Along with this decision of mine goes another to which I shall be equally faithful: these recollections are to be a mental relaxation for myself and not a work of literature. They are written for myself alone. These pages are to be a mirror,¹ in which I can enjoy seeing my contemporaries and myself, not a painting for the public to view. My best friends are not to know about them, for I wish to keep my freedom to describe myself and them without flattery. I want to uncover the secret motives that made us act, them and myself as well as other men, and, when I have understood these, to state them. In a word, I want to express myself honestly in these memoirs, and it is therefore necessary that they be completely secret.²

I do not intend to start my recollections further back than the Revolution of 1848, nor to carry them beyond the date when I left office, that is, 30 October 1849. It is only within this span that the events I want to describe had something of greatness in them, or that my position enabled me to see them clearly.

Although I was somewhat out of the stream of events, I did live in the parliamentary world of the last years of the July Monarchy,³ but I would find it difficult to give a clear account of that time, which is so close, but which has left so confused an impression on my memory.⁴ I lose the thread of my recollections amid the labyrinth of petty incidents, petty ideas, petty passions, personal viewpoints and contradictory projects in which the life of public men in that period was frittered away. Only the general physiognomy of that time comes readily to my mind. For that was something I often contemplated with mingled curiosity and fear, and I clearly discerned the particular features that gave it its character.

Seen as a whole from a distance, our history from 1789 to 1830 appears to be forty-one years of deadly struggle between the Ancien Régime with its traditions, memories, hopes and men (i.e. the aristocrats), and the new France led by the middle class. 1830 would seem to have ended the first period of our revolutions, or rather, of our revolution, for it was always one and the same, through its various fortunes and passions, whose beginning our fathers saw and whose end we shall in all probability not see. All that remained of the Ancien Régime was destroyed forever. In 1830 the triumph of the middle class was decisive and so complete that the narrow limits of the bourgeoisie encompassed all political powers, franchises, prerogatives, indeed the whole government, to the exclusion, in law, of all beneath it and, in fact, of all that had once been above it. Thus the bourgeoisie became not only the sole director of society, but also, one might say, its cultivator. It settled into every office, prodigiously increased the number of offices, and made a habit of living off the public Treasury almost as much as from its own industry.

No sooner had this occurred than a marked lull ensued in every political passion, a sort of universal shrinkage, and at the same time a rapid growth in public wealth. The spirit peculiar to the middle class became the general spirit of the government; it dominated foreign policy as well as home affairs. This spirit was active and industrious, often dishonest, generally orderly, but sometimes rash because of vanity and selfishness, timid by temperament, moderate in all things except a taste for wellbeing, and mediocre; a spirit that, combined with that of the people or of the aristocracy, could work wonders, but that by itself never produces anything but a government without either virtues or greatness. Mistress of all, as no aristocracy ever has been or perhaps ever will be, the middle class, which must be called the ruling class, entrenched in its power and, shortly afterwards, in its selfishness, treated government like a private business, each member thinking of public affairs only in so far as they could be turned to his private profit, and in his petty prosperity easily forgetting the people.

Posterity, which sees only striking crimes and generally fails to notice smaller vices, will perhaps never know how far the government of that time towards the end took on the features of a trading company whose every operation is directed to the benefit that its members may derive therefrom. These vices were linked to the natural instincts of the dominant class, to its absolute power, and to the enervation and corruption of the age. King Louis-Philippe did much to make them grow. He was the accident that made the illness fatal.⁵

Although this prince sprang from the noblest family in Europe and had, buried in the depths of his soul, a full measure of hereditary pride, certainly not considering himself like any other man, he nevertheless shared most of the good and bad qualities associated primarily with the lower ranks of society. He had regular mores and wanted those around him to have the same. He was orderly in his behaviour, simple in his habits, and moderate in his tastes; he was naturally on the side of law and hostile to any excess; sober in all his acts if not in his desires; kind, although without sensitivity; greedy and soft. He had no raging passions, or ruinous weaknesses, or striking vices, and only one kingly virtue, courage. His politeness was extreme, but without discrimination or dignity—the politeness of a tradesman rather than of a prince. He had no taste for letters or the fine arts, but cared passionately for business. He had a prodigious memory which was capable of relentlessly recalling the smallest details. His conversation was prolix, diffuse, original, anecdotal, full of little facts and wit and meaning, in short of all the pleasures of the mind that are possible in the absence of delicacy and elevation of spirit. His mind was distinguished, but restricted and clogged by the meanness and narrowness of his soul. He was enlightened, subtle and tenacious, but all his thoughts turned to the useful, and he was filled with such a deep contempt for truth and such a profound disbelief in virtue that they clouded his vision, not only making it impossible for him to see the beauty that always goes with truth and honesty, but also preventing him from understanding their frequent usefulness. He had a profound understanding of men, but only in respect to their vices; in matters of religion he had the disbelief of the eighteenth century, and in politics, the scepticism of the nineteenth. Having no belief himself, he had no faith in the belief of others. He was by nature fond of power and of dishonest⁶ courtiers, as if he really had been bom on a throne. His ambition, which was limited only by prudence, never either satisfied or carried him away, but always remained close to the ground.

There have been many princes who resemble this portrait, but what was peculiar to Louis-Philippe was the analogy, or rather the kinship and consanguinity between his defects and those of his age; it was this that made him an attractive prince, but one who was singularly dangerous and corrupting for his contemporaries, and particularly for the class that held the power. Placed at the head of an aristocracy, he might perhaps have had a happy influence on it. At the head of the bourgeoisie, he pushed it down the slope that it was by nature only too inclined to go. It was a marriage of vices, and this union, which first provided the strength of the one and then brought about the demoralization of the other, ended by bringing both to destruction.

Though I was never admitted to that prince’s councils, I had occasion to approach him fairly frequently. The last time I saw him at close quarters was shortly before the February catastrophe.⁷ At that time I was director of the French Academy and I had to bring to the King’s notice some matter or other concerning that body. Having dealt with the question that brought me, I was about to withdraw, but the King detained me, taking a chair and motioning me to another, saying affably, “As you are here, Monsieur de Tocqueville, let us chat; I would like you to tell me a little about America.” I knew him well enough to realize that that meant: I want to talk about America. And so he talked tellingly at great length, without my having a chance or even the desire to put in a word, for he really did interest me. He described places as if he could see them; he recalled the distinguished men he had met forty years before as if he had left them yesterday; he remembered their names and Christian names; mentioned their age at that time; and recounted their life stories, genealogies and descent with wonderful accuracy and infinite detail and without ever becoming boring. Without taking breath he came back from America to Europe and talked about all our affairs, foreign and domestic, with an incredible lack of restraint (for I had no right to his confidence), telling me much ill about the Emperor of Russia, whom he called Monsieur Nicolas, mentioning Lord Palmerston in passing as a scapegrace, and finally talking at length about the Spanish marriages, which had just taken place, and the trouble they had caused him from the point of view of England: “The Queen is at me about it,” he said, “and gets very upset. But after all,” he added, “all their outcry won’t stop me driving my own cab “ Although that turn of phrase dated back to the Ancien Régime, I thought it was doubtful that Louis XIV had ever used it after he accepted the Spanish succession. I think too that Louis-Philippe was mistaken, and, to borrow his language, the Spanish marriages⁸ played an important part in upsetting his cab.

After three quarters of an hour the King got up, thanked me for the pleasure our conversation had given him (I had not said four words) and dismissed me, clearly delighted with me, as one usually is by anyone in whose presence one feels one has talked well. This was the last time he received me.

This prince really did improvise the answers he made, even at the most critical moments, to the great State bodies; he was as fluent on these occasions as in his conversation, but he spoke with less felicity and spice. Generally in such cases his utterances were a deluge of commonplaces weighed down by false and exaggerated gestures, a great effort to seem touched, and great thumps on his chest. At such times he was often obscure, for he would start off boldly, headfirst, so to speak, on long sentences whose duration he had not measured and whose end he had not foreseen, from which he would finally break his way out, smashing the grammar and leaving his meaning unfinished. Usually his style on these solemn occasions reminded one of the sentimental jargon of the late eighteenth century, copied with facile fluency and a singular lack of accuracy; Jean-Jacques refurbished by a vulgar nineteenth-century kitchenmaid. This reminds me of a day when the Chamber of Deputies was visiting the Tuileries; I was well in front and so in full view, and I nearly caused a scandal by bursting out laughing, because Rémusat,⁹ my colleague in the Academy as well as in the Legislature, took it into his head, while the King was speaking, to whisper maliciously in my ear in a serious and melancholy tone of voice: “At this moment the good citizen should be agreeably moved, but the Academician suffers.”

In a political world thus composed and led, what was most lacking, especially at the end, was political life itself. Such life could hardly emerge or survive within the sphere delineated for it by the constitution: the old aristocracy had been defeated, and the people were excluded. As every matter was settled by the members of one class, in accordance with their interests and point of view, no battlefield could be found on which great parties might wage war. This peculiar homogeneity of position, interest, and consequently of point of view which prevailed in what M. Guizot had called the legal country,¹⁰ deprived parliamentary debates of all originality, all reality, and so of all true passion. I have spent ten years of my life in the company of truly great minds who were in a constant state of agitation without ever really becoming heated, and who expended all their perspicacity in the vain search for subjects on which they could seriously disagree.

On the other hand the preponderant influence Louis-Philippe acquired by taking advantage of the mistakes and, especially, the vices of his adversaries prevented anybody from straying very far from that prince’s ideas, lest by doing so they lose all hope of success, and so reduced the differences between the parties to slight nuances, and the contest, to a quarrel over words. I doubt if ever a parliament (and I do not except even the Constituent Assembly of 1789) has ever contained more varied and brilliant talents than ours of the closing years of the July Monarchy. But I can assert that these great orators were very bored with listening to each other, and, what was worse, the whole nation was bored with hearing them. Gradually the nation became accustomed to regarding the debates in Parliament as exercises of wit rather than serious discussions, and to thinking of the differences between the parliamentary parties—majority, left-centre and dynastic opposition—as quarrels between the children of one family over the distribution of their inheritance. Some glaring instances of corruption, accidentally discovered, suggested that other scandals lay hidden everywhere and convinced the nation that the entire governing class was corrupt. So the nation conceived a quiet contempt for that class, which was generally interpreted as a trusting and satisfied submission.

The country was at that time divided into two parts, or rather into two unequal zones: in the upper one, which was meant to contain the entire political life of the nation, languor, impotence, immobility and boredom reigned; but in the lower one an attentive observer could easily see from certain feverish and irregular symptoms that political life was beginning to find expression.

I was one of those observers, and although I was far from supposing that the catastrophe was so close and would prove so terrible, I felt an uneasiness forming and gradually growing in my mind; more and more the idea took root that we were marching towards a new revolution. This marked a great change in my thought. The universal calming down and levelling off that fo...