Tocqueville: A Biography
By Andre Jardin
Translated from the French by Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 550 pages, $35
It sometimes appears as if there were three different authors named Alexis de Tocqueville. The first was the young explorer who turned his American adventures into the classic ”Democracy in America.” The second was the author of the ”Recollections,” who wrote in exile in Sorrento, recounting the stormy years he had spent in the parliamentary politics of the July Monarchy and in the revolutionary Paris of the Second Republic. Finally, there was Tocqueville at the end of his life, forcibly retired from politics, seeking answers for the political instability of French society by beginning a work on the French Revolution.
Perhaps it is because there seem to be three Tocquevilles, each of whom has always evoked different responses and commanded separate audiences, that we have had to wait for more than a century for a fullscale biography. And it is Andre Jardin`s great achievement to have at last given us a single, whole Alexis de Tocqueville.
We have to wait some 50 pages, however, before we even get to Tocqueville`s birth, for Jardin must establish the 18th-Century world out of which Tocqueville emerged and which he never could totally escape. It was an aristocratic world that had suffered much at the hands of the French Revolution-a world filled with executions, emigrations and burnt chateaux. Tocqueville`s great grandfather was Malesherbes, the public defender of Louis XVI and himself later executed under the Terror. Having lost relatives on both sides of his family, Tocqueville grew up in a society of lost causes, where decapitated kings were heroes. His own father, imprisoned, escaped the guillotine by only two days.
Jardin describes the scenes of Tocqueville`s childhood: his cousin, Chateaubriand, dropping by from a masquerade, his mother singing songs of the martyred Louis XVI. She was very royalist and very Catholic; and even when he was in America, she was not above sending her son negative views on Americans. Tocqueville`s father, who had been a prefect during the Restoration was a much greater life-long influence. Dying only three years before Tocqueville, he also wrote histories, which cast a faint shadow on the career of his famous son.
Moving beyond the family, Jardin recreates Tocqueville`s network of friends-Beaumont, Kergoraly, Chabrol, Blosseville-all chosen from that aristocratic world. Jardin cites Remusat`s observation that Tocqueville broke with legitimism but never gave up legitimists.
The great enigma of Tocqueville`s life was his choice of a wife. In 1835, the year of the ”Democracy,” he married Marie Mottley, who was English, considerably older, neither wellborn nor rich nor physically attractive. It was a classic misalliance. And while Jardin gives us the fullest account yet of this unhappy marriage, it remains a mystery-one that Jardin sensibly has left as such, allowing us to share the confusion and concern of Tocqueville`s family and friends.
Jardin treats Tocqueville`s journey to America as an experience distinct from the cool, measured pages of ”Democracy” that were its eventual result. America was the great adventure of Tocqueville`s life. He strapped on pistols, rode horseback, traveled by river steamer, saw Indians and plantation slaves. Above all, he experienced the wonders of the American wilderness (”we were besides ourself with joy at the prospect of finding a place where the torrent of European civilization had not yet invaded”). That same wilderness was to be decisive in Tocqueville`s unwrapping of the mystery of American democracy, his portrait of Americans as economic buccaneers substituting success for revolution and class war.
Best of all, America was for Tocqueville a great personal release, allowing him to briefly lift the aristocratic burden. He was welcomed and liked everywhere. His aristocratic name and bearing seemed to excite not hate but only friendly curiosity. Years later, in England, drawing a contrast with the reception he received there, he said, ”In America we were everything.”
Tocqueville, who lived to age 54, spent only nine months in America. Yet Jardin devotes almost a third of his biography to that journey and the volumes that resulted. A justifiable decision, for Jardin demonstrates how everything that happened in Tocqueville`s life was influenced by his American experiences. On the basis of the extraordinary response to the first volume of the ”Democracy”-Royer-Col lard hailed him as the Montesquieu of the 19th Century-Tocqueville was able to enter political life. Returned to France, Tocqueville would judge his own society by its ability to live up to the American future. In Parliament he pursued those interests he had acquired abroad, the penitentary system and the slavery question. Always the acknowledged expert on all things American, he inevitably would have a place in the Second Republic, helping write its constitution and serving as its Foreign Minister.
Back in France, the aristocratic burden reasserted itself; he is once again Alexis of Tocqueville. (Incidentally, that is why the correct last name, when used alone, is Tocqueville-because de Tocqueville literally means ”of Tocqueville.”) Determined to enter politics, he is defeated in his first campaign, to the electoral cry of ”no more nobles,” but is elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839.
Napoleon once said that men are very complicated and should therefore be judged by their actions. By that standard, Tocqueville`s career in politics was a near total disaster. Jardin shrewdly notes that just as Tocqueville had failed to measure the impact cf political parties in America, he could never fit into the political life of his own society. He had neither the taste nor the talent for debate. Meticulous in preparation, he was a poor speaker, and no match for the seasoned parlimentarians of the July Monarchy. Outside, in the corridor, he was even more ill at ease. ”I am always asking the names of these strangers I see every day and I am always forgetting them.”
Tocqueville`s late fling at political journalism is exposed by Jardin as only another variety of failure. Party life, parliamentary life, political life in the 19th Century were all forms created by the liberal middle class;
and despite all his talk of the coming of democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville was personally ill-equipped to participate in this new political age.
It was the revolution of 1848 that provided Tocqueville with the chance to fulfill his aristocratic ambitions, to play a great role, to be a Tocqueville. France had now become a land of excitement and danger. Paris was like America-a dark brooding forest-and Tocqueville straps on pistols again, seeking to find a place in this new world of revolution. His ”Recollections” are Tocqueville`s sentimental education. The bitter lesson he learned is that if American democracy were to come to Europe, it would have to be over the bodies of so many dead Europeans. Again it is a story of personal and political failure, of the destruction of the Second Republic by the despised Louis Napoleon and of Tocqueville`s own exile.
Years earlier, one of Tocqueville`s teachers, Francois Guizot, congratulating him on ”Democracy in America,” had written that extraordinary single-line summary of author and work: ”You judge democracy like an aristocrat who is vanquished and is convinced that the conqueror is right.”
That deep ambivalence reaches its climax in Tocqueville`s last book, ”The Old Regime and the French Revolution,” a work that seemed to be outside of any tradition. Curiously, like ”Democracy in America,” it has been claimed by both conservatives and liberals, to this day providing ammunition for both sides. And it could have been written only by Alexis de Tocqueville.
