Tocqueville

Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (29 July 180516 April 1859), was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political philosopher, and historian. He is best known for his works ''Democracy in America'' (appearing in two volumes, 1835 and 1840) and ''The Old Regime and the Revolution'' (1856). In both, he analyzed the living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. ''Democracy in America'' was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.

Tocqueville was active in French politics, first under the July Monarchy (1830–1848) and then during the Second Republic (1849–1851) which succeeded the February 1848 Revolution. He retired from political life after Louis Napoléon Bonaparte's 2 December 1851 coup and thereafter began work on ''The Old Regime and the Revolution''. Tocqueville argued the importance of the French Revolution was to continue the process of modernizing and centralizing the French state which had begun under King Louis XIV. He believed the failure of the Revolution came from the inexperience of the deputies who were too wedded to abstract Enlightenment ideals.

Tocqueville was a classical liberal who advocated parliamentary government and was sceptical of the extremes of majoritarianism. During his time in parliament, he was first a member of the centre-left before moving to the centre-right, and the complex and restless nature of his liberalism has led to contrasting interpretations and admirers across the political spectrum. For example, ''Democracy in America'' was interpreted differently across national contexts. In France and the United States, Tocqueville's work was seen as liberal, whereas both progressives and conservatives in the British Isles interpreted his work as supporting their own positions.

Early life

Tocqueville came from an old aristocratic Norman family, the great-grandson of the statesman Malesherbes, who was guillotined in 1793. He was the third son of Hervé Louis François Jean Bonaventure Clérel, Count of Tocqueville, an officer of the Constitutional Guard of King Louis XVI, and Louise Madeleine Le Peletier de Rosanbo who, themselves, might have faced the guillotine but for the fall in 1794 of Maximilien Robespierre. Under the Bourbon Restoration, Tocqueville's father became a noble peer and prefect. Tocqueville attended the Lycée Fabert in Metz.

Political career

Tocqueville, who despised the July Monarchy (1830–1848), began his political career in 1839. From 1839 to 1851, he served as member of the lower house of parliament for the Manche department ( Valognes). He sat on the centre-left, defended abolitionist views and upheld free trade while supporting the colonisation of Algeria carried on by Louis-Philippe's regime. In 1842, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.

In 1847, Tocqueville sought to found a Young Left (''Jeune Gauche'') party which would advocate wage increases, a progressive tax, and other labor concerns in order to undermine the appeal of the socialists.

In the Second Republic

After the fall of the July Monarchy in the Revolution of 1848, Tocqueville was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly of 1848, where he became a member of the commission charged with the drafting of the new Constitution of the Second Republic (1848–1851). He defended bicameralism and the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage. As the countryside was thought to be more conservative than the labouring population of Paris, he conceived of universal suffrage as a means to counteract the revolutionary spirit of Paris.

During the Second Republic, Tocqueville sided with the Party of Order against the socialists. A few days after the February 1848 insurrection, he anticipated that a violent clash between the Parisian workers' population led by socialists agitating in favour of a "Democratic and Social Republic" and the conservatives, which included the aristocracy and the rural population, would be inescapable. Indeed, these social tensions eventually exploded in the June Days Uprising of 1848."Regularization" is a term used by Tocqueville himself, see , Third part, pp. 289–290 French ed. (Paris, Gallimard, 1999).

Led by General Cavaignac, the suppression of the uprising was supported by Tocqueville, who advocated the "regularization" of the state of siege declared by Cavaignac and other measures promoting suspension of the constitutional order. Between May and September, Tocqueville participated in the Constitutional Commission which wrote the new Constitution. His proposals, such as his amendment about the President and his reelection, reflected lessons he drew from his North American experience.
A supporter of Cavaignac and of the Party of Order, Tocqueville accepted an invitation to enter Odilon Barrot's government as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 3 June to 31 October 1849. During the troubled days of June 1849, he pleaded with Interior Minister Jules Armand Dufaure for the reestablishment of the state of siege in the capital and approved the arrest of demonstrators. Tocqueville, who since February 1848 had supported laws restricting political freedoms, approved the two laws voted immediately after the June 1849 days which restricted the liberty of clubs and freedom of the press.

This active support in favour of laws restricting political freedoms stands in contrast of his defence of freedoms in ''Democracy in America''. According to Tocqueville, he favoured order as "the ''sine qua non'' for the conduct of serious politics. He opedto bring the kind of stability to French political life that would permit the steady growth of liberty unimpeded by the regular rumblings of the earthquakes of revolutionary change″.

Opposition to Louis Napoleon

Tocqueville had supported Cavaignac against Louis Napoléon Bonaparte for the presidential election of 1848. Opposed to Louis Napoléon Bonaparte's 2 December 1851 coup which followed his election, Tocqueville was among the deputies who gathered at the 10th arrondissement of Paris in an attempt to resist the coup and have Napoleon III judged for "high treason" as he had violated the constitutional limit on terms of office. Detained at Vincennes and then released, Tocqueville, who supported the Restoration of the Bourbons against Napoleon III's Second Empire (1851–1871), quit political life and retreated to his castle ().Epstein, ''Alexis De Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide'' (2006), p. 160.

Against this image of Tocqueville, biographer Joseph Epstein concluded: "Tocqueville could never bring himself to serve a man he considered a usurper and despot. He fought as best he could for the political liberty in which he so ardently believed—had given it, in all, thirteen years of his life ... . He would spend the days remaining to him fighting the same fight, but conducting it now from libraries, archives, and his own desk." There, he began the draft of , publishing the first tome in 1856 but leaving the second one unfinished.

Travels

North America

In 1831, Tocqueville obtained from the July Monarchy a mission to examine prisons and penitentiaries in the United States and proceeded there with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont. While they did visit some prisons, Tocqueville and Beaumont traveled widely in the United States: from the east-coast cities to what was then the north-west frontier, Michigan; by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans; and by stagecoach across the South back toward the east coast and north to New York. Tocqueville also made a side trip to Montreal and Quebec City. Throughout his trip, he took extensive notes on his observations and reflections. He returned within nine months and published a report, ''The Penitentiary System in the United States'', although the more well-known result of his tour was his major work ''Democracy in America'', which appeared in 1835. Beaumont also wrote an account of their travels in ''Jacksonian America: Marie or Slavery in the United States'' (1835).

England and Ireland

Tocqueville returned to France in February 1832. Before putting the finishing touches to his reflections on American democracy, he departed for England in 1833. Tocqueville had a private reason for crossing the Channel: to meet the family of Mary Mottley, a young woman he had met at Versailles. The couple were married in 1836. He stayed five weeks in England, eager to observe what many imagined as the dawning of the age of democracy, the passage of the Parliamentary Reform Act. Tocqueville concluded that there was "a good chance for the English to succeed in modifying the social and political set-up ... without violent convulsions". The English aristocracy was open to new recruits. He suggested that the difference with the French was "clear from the use of one word" as "''gentleman'' in English applies to any well-educated man, regardless of birth, whereas in France ''gentilhomme'' can only be used of a noble by birth".

In May 1835, Tocqueville returned to England but then in summer with Beaumont travelled on to Ireland, then subordinate to Great Britain under the crown of the United Kingdom. He found a country having "all the evils of an aristocracy and none of its advantages". There was "no moral tie between rich and poor; the difference of political opinion of religious belief and the actual distance they live apart make them strangers one to the other, one could almost say enemies". In this circumstance he remarked on the "unbelievable unity between the Irish clergy and the Catholic population". The people looked to the clergy, and the clergy "rebuffed" by the "upper classes" ("Protestants and enemies"), had "turned all its attention to the lower classes; it has the same instincts, the same interests and the same passions as the people; state of affairs altogether peculiar to Ireland".

Back in England, Tocqueville found confirmation of a close connection between centralisation and democratisation. He observed that in England centralisation took a form less absolute than in France. It was of "legislation and not administration", and co-existed with a "spirit of ivicassociation" that in responding to specific and local issues narrowed the range of government intervention. Tocqueville had intended the joint impressions of their trip to Britain and Ireland would form the basis of a work by Beaumont, just as their common reflections of the United States on had served as him as material for ''Democracy in America''. Beaumont did produce ''L’Irlande sociale, politique et religieuse'' (1839)''.'' Much praised by Daniel O’Connell, the first sentence of its historical introduction read: "The dominion of the English in Ireland, from their invasion of the country in 1169, to the close of the last century, has been nothing but a tyranny."

Algeria

In 1841 and 1846, Tocqueville traveled to Algeria which France had invaded and colonised from 1830. Having himself entertained the possibility of settling in Algeria as a colonist, from his election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839 Tocqueville had come to be seen as the parliament's foremost expert on the colony. In 1837, he had written of his hope for eventual intermarriage between the French and indigenous Arabs and their amalgamation into a distinct whole. Following the first of his two visits to Algeria (again accompanied by Beaumont), his position was reversed. When it came to the French colonists, he "displayed his usual liberalism", as he criticised the "coarseness and violence" of the military rule to which they too were subject. Yet from what he observed of Algerian society, including what he understood as "the absence of all political life", he was persuaded that not only could its violent subjugation be justified but also that its result could not, and should never, be assimilation of the indigenous people into the civil and political life of France.

Death

A longtime sufferer from bouts of tuberculosis, Tocqueville eventually succumbed to the disease on 16 April 1859 and was buried in the Tocqueville cemetery in Normandy. He was survived by his English wife of 23 years, Mary Mottley. Although she was "too liberal ... too Protestant, too middle-class, and too English" for some in his family, de Tocqueville described Mottley as perhaps his only true friend. While they had hoped for a family, they had no children.

In advance of their marriage, Mottley converted to Roman Catholicism, Tocqueville's professed religion, before their marriage. While she appeared to be comparatively devout, Tocqueville's own attitude toward religion has been described as "utilitarian", regarding it as a "social cement, a safety valve for passions that might otherwise feed a revolutionary torrent dangerous to individual liberty". Provided it was separated from state power, Tocqueville did not believe that his church was bound to be anti-democratic.

''Democracy in America''

In ''Democracy in America'', published in 1835, Tocqueville wrote of the New World and its burgeoning democratic order. Observing from the perspective of a detached social scientist, Tocqueville wrote of his travels through the United States in the early 19th century when the Market Revolution, Western expansion and Jacksonian democracy were radically transforming the fabric of American life.

According to political scientist Joshua Kaplan, one purpose of writing ''Democracy in America'' was to help the people of France get a better understanding of their position between a fading aristocratic order and an emerging democratic order and to help them sort out the confusion. Tocqueville saw democracy as an enterprise that balanced liberty and equality, concern for the individual as well as for the community. On a negative note, Tocqueville remarked that "in democracies manners are never so refined as amongst aristocratic nations."

Tocqueville was an ardent supporter of liberty. He wrote: "I have a passionate love for liberty, law, and respect for rights. I am neither of the revolutionary party nor of the conservative. ... Liberty is my foremost passion." He wrote of "Political Consequences of the Social State of the Anglo-Americans" by saying: "But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom."

The above is often misquoted as a slavery quote because of previous translations of the French text. The most recent translation by Arthur Goldhammer in 2004 translates the meaning to be as stated above. Examples of misquoted sources are numerous on the internet such as "Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom", but the text does not contain the words "Americans were so enamored by equality" anywhere.

His view on government reflects his belief in liberty and the need for individuals to be able to act freely while respecting others' rights. Of centralized government, he wrote that it "excels in preventing, not doing". Tocqueville continues to comment on equality by saying: "Furthermore, when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power. As none of them is strong enough to fight alone with advantage, the only guarantee of liberty is for everyone to combine forces. But such a combination is not always in evidence".

Tocqueville explicitly cites inequality as being incentive for the poor to become rich and observes that it is not often that two generations within a family maintain success and that it is inheritance laws that split and eventually break apart someone's estate that cause a constant cycle of churn between the poor and the rich, thereby over generations making the poor rich and the rich poor. He cites protective laws in France at the time that protected an estate from being split apart among heirs, thereby preserving wealth and preventing a churn of wealth such as was perceived by him in 1835 within the United States.

On civil and political society and the individual

Tocqueville's main purpose was to analyze the functioning of political society and various forms of political associations, although he brought some reflections on civil society too (and relations between political and civil society). For Tocqueville, as for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, civil society was a sphere of private entrepreneurship and civilian affairs regulated by civil code. As a critic of individualism, Tocqueville thought that through associating for mutual purpose, both in public and private, Americans are able to overcome selfish desires, thus making both a self-conscious and active political society and a vibrant civil society

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