Abstract
If the French Revolution of 1789 inaugurated the modern era, as is widely recognized, its second edition secured its place in history. The 1848–1849 revolutions that commenced in Paris in February 1848 put in place, if haltingly, the prerequisites for republican rule in France; not for the last time a revolutionary process would extend over decades. The “European Spring,” as it would come to be known, commenced the definitive end to a centuries-old institution, absolute monarchy. That the mass upheavals that began in 2011 to put an end to decades-long despotic rule in North Africa and the Middle East—and that continue to reverberate—are called the “Arab Spring” is no coincidence. Three participants in those mid-nineteenth-century developments would come to exercise enormous influence afterward—two exactly because of the seismic character of what had taken place and whose lessons they distilled.
And yet [Bonaparte’s coup d’état] is inevitable, unless resisted by an appeal to revolutionary passions, which I do not wish to rouse in the nation.
Tocqueville, 1851
By [resisting Bonaparte] it [the Party of Order] would give the nation its marching orders, and it fears nothing more than that the nation should move.
Marx, 1852
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Notes
- 1.
On how both sets of upheavals resembled one another, see Kurt Weyland, “The Arab Spring: Why the Surprising Similarities with the Revolutionary Wave of 1848?” Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 10, No. 4 (December 2012).
- 2.
For details, see André Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988), chapter 1. His authoritative account informs the broad contours of this overview of Tocqueville’s life. Hugh Brogan’s Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (New Haven: Yale U.P., 2006) provides more details on this and other topics. Another overview of Tocqueville is Arthur Kaledin’s 100-page “thematic biography” in his Tocqueville and His America: A Darker Horizon (New Haven: Yale U.P, 2011).
- 3.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [hereafter DIA], Volume I: The Henry Reeve Text (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), p. 343. This overview of Tocqueville benefits from criticism that Richard Boyd made of some of the claims I made about him in my book Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America (New York: Lexington Books, 2003). See Boyd’s review in Perspectives on Politics, vol. 2, no. 3 (September 2004).
- 4.
Brogan, p. 275, argues persuasively that “equality of status” would be a more accurate translation from the French.
- 5.
Ibid., p. 206.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 6,
- 7.
DIA, volume 2, p. 108.
- 8.
For what actually occurred, see Allan Kulikoff, “Revolutionary Violence and the Origins of American Democracy,” The Journal of the Historical Society, vol. 2, no. 2(2002).
- 9.
DIA, vol. 1, p. 343.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 16. For a discussion on the relationship between Democracy and Marie, see Brogan, pp. 294–96.
- 11.
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 270.
- 12.
Jardin, p. 275.
- 13.
Brogan, p. 312.
- 14.
Jardin, p. 290.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 291.
- 16.
James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford U.P., 2016), p. 595.
- 17.
Quoted in Jack Hayward, After the French Revolution: Six Critics of Democracy and Nationalism (New York: New York U.P., 1991), p. 149. Jardin, p. 305, provides a more abbreviated version. To understand in a broader sense what he meant, see Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U.P.), 1987), and Alan S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville (New York: Oxford U.P., 1992).
- 18.
Jardin, p. 313.
- 19.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres Completes, III, 1 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1962), p. 311.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 324.
- 21.
Ibid., pp. 335, 342.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 322.
- 23.
For another critical take, but from a different perspective, on Tocqueville on Algeria, see Cheryl B. Welch, “Colonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Evasion,” Political Theory, vol. 31, no. 2(April 2003).
- 24.
Jardin, p. 347.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 352.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 390.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 396.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 399.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 400.
- 30.
Marx-Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975–2004), vol, 1, p. 130 (hereafter, MECW, 1, p. 130). For details on Marx’s and Engel’s political trajectories, see my Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), chapter 1.
- 31.
MECW, 3, p. 120.
- 32.
MECW, 1, pp. 137–38.
- 33.
MECW, 1, p. 395.
- 34.
MECW, 5, p. 236.
- 35.
Marie, ou l’Esclavage aux États-Unis (Paris: Gosselin, 1835).
- 36.
The first two of the five articles, the most well known, were written in 1843 (MECW, 3, pp. 146–74). Less referenced, but just as important for understanding Marx’s argument are the three in The Holy Family, written in 1844 (MECW, 4, pp. 87–90, 94–9, 106–18). Because of what might be interpreted as anti-Semitic comments in the articles, a long-standing debate has been in place about Marx’s views regarding Judaism and Jews. A recent example of the “anti-Semitic Marx” is Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot’s The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 82. For the still most authoritative refutation of the anti-Semitic Marx claim, see Hal Draper’s “Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1977/kmtr1/app1.htm.
- 37.
Tocqueville’s insight also found its way into the first collaborative writing of Marx and Engels, The Holy Family: “religion develops in its practical universality only where there is no privileged religion (cf. the North American States).” (MECW, 4, p. 116)
- 38.
MECW, 3, p. 153.
- 39.
Engels suggested as much in one of the infrequent references in the Marx–Engels corpus to the English Civil Wars, MECW, 6, p. 399.
- 40.
Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1833), pp. 226–27.
- 41.
For details of Marx’s reading of Hamilton, Beaumont and Tocqueville, see my Marx, Tocqueville, chapter 1.
- 42.
Losurdo, pp. 318–22, rests his critique of Marx on the basis of what he wrote about political democracy in the United States in his five articles, “The Jewish Question,” that is, before becoming a communist.
- 43.
MECW, 4, p. 37.
- 44.
MECW, 4, pp. 84–6, 119. Marx, as later revealed, authored most of the book.
- 45.
MECW, 5, pp. 3–8.
- 46.
I’m indebted to Sergio Valverde who reminded me (private communication) that Hegel continued to exercise a major influence on Marx, especially in Capital, such as in his analysis of value. For a defense of Hegel’s speculative method, see his dissertation, “A Speculative Theory of Politics: Logic of the Party Form,” University of Minnesota, 2017. Marx’s aforementioned “onanism” jab was probably a polemical excess as often happens in such debates. Yet, Marx failed to complete his magnum opus exactly because of the priority he gave, unlike the world of philosophy that he critiqued, to “revolutionary practice” as detailed in Chap. 2; hence the significance of the eleventh Feuerbach thesis.
- 47.
MECW, 6, p. 173.
- 48.
Jennifer Pitts accuses without documentation “Marx to some degree … [with] enthusiasm for empire” in the case of Algeria. See her “Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question” Journal of Political Philosophy, 2000, vol. 8, no. 3, p. 296. She would be on surer ground regarding Marx if she were referring to India and Mexico. I address in detail the issue in my Marx, Tocqueville, Chap. 2.
- 49.
For an overview of Marx’s and Engels’s party-building activities, see my “Marx and Engels on the revolutionary party,” Socialist Register 2017, eds. Leo Panitch and Greg Albo (London: The Merlin Press, 2016).
- 50.
Weyland, pp. 917–8.
- 51.
There is the correspondence of Tocqueville, unlike for Marx (who to be remembered was deeply engaged at the time in the German theater of the European Spring), about the events in real time; see Alexis de Tocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985). If anyone of the two authors was at an advantage in their later accounts, Tocqueville is the likely candidate. A close reading of the letters reveals, however, that what he wrote in real time was not at significant variance with his Recollections written two years later.
- 52.
Roger Price, The Revolutions of 1848 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1988), p. 64. For other comparisons, see Edward T. Gargan, Alexis de Tocqueville: The Critical Years, 1848–1851 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic U.P., 1955) and Irving M. Zeitlin, Liberty, Equality, and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), particularly chapter 6. Also, Craig Calhoun, “Classical Social Theory and the French Revolution of 1848,” Sociological Theory 7 (Fall, 1989). The emphasis here, however, is on their politics.
- 53.
J. P. Mayer, “Introduction” to Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, ed. J. P. Mayer and a. P. Kerr (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Books, 1987), pp. xxxii–iii. This is the edition of the Recollections employed here.
- 54.
J.P. Mayer, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biographical Study in Political Science (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).
- 55.
George Kelly’s The Human Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1992), p. 235, argues that Tocqueville’s writing of history as a private memoir represented a liberal retreat from politics. Jardin states that “we should not necessarily believe him when he declares they are not destined for the public. … No doubt he did not intend to release them to the public during his lifetime. But his reflections on his age led Tocqueville to a concern for what posterity would think of him.” (p. 453).
- 56.
Tocqueville, Recollections, pp. 12–13.
- 57.
MECW, 6, p. 380.
- 58.
Alan S Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burkhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville (New York: Oxford U.P., 1992), p. 72.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 381.
- 60.
Another writing that Tocqueville may have had in mind was Proudhon’s highly popular Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, published in 1840, which popularized the aphorism that “property is theft.”
- 61.
Though Tocqueville, according to Roger Boesche (in a private communication), once referred to himself as a “liberal of a new kind,” and Engels referred on occasion to Tocqueville’s faction as “Liberal,” I employ, given the present-day debates that surround the usage of this term, Tocqueville’s “moderate republican” label.
- 62.
Marx’s critique at the end of 1847 (6, p. 405) of Alphonse de Lamartine’s praise of private property for not distinguishing between bourgeois and other forms of private property could just as well have applied to Tocqueville. Lamartine became the effective head of the government that issued from the February Revolution.
- 63.
MECW, 10, pp. 54–5.
- 64.
Recollections, p. 73.
- 65.
Ibid., pp. 74–5. Because socialists did accede to positions of authority in some locales like Rouen in the aftermath of February it might explain Tocqueville’s assessment. See Aminzade, Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830–1871 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 182, for particulars.
- 66.
Ibid., p. 62. As to which “absolute systems” he is referring to it is unclear. It’s possible he may have had Marx and Engels in mind but it is doubtful since their Manifesto had yet to appear in French. A more likely candidate for Tocqueville’s criticism was Lorenz von Stein, whose Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen frankreichs—a second edition came out in 1848—was certainly much better known among the circles that he frequented than the Manifesto.
- 67.
Recollections, pp. 75–6.
- 68.
Quoted in Irving Zeitlin, Liberty, Equality and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), pp. 106–7.
- 69.
Ibid., p. 105.
- 70.
DIA, p. 6.
- 71.
See Peter McPhee, “The Crisis of Radical Republicanism in the French Revolution of 1848,” Historical Studies, Vol 16, No. 162 (1974), which suggests that another explanation for the revolutionary republican view of February was its institution for the first time of universal manhood suffrage that for them meant the defense of the provisional government at all costs.
- 72.
Recollections, p. 76.
- 73.
For the anti-Marxist Daniel Mahoney, Tocqueville’s conclusion is “one of the most intriguing and unsettling remarks in his Recollections.” That his hero could envision the possibility of socialism is “unsettling” for Mahoney, who reveals a profound ignorance of what Marx and Engels actually advocated. Nevertheless, he is correct to criticize any interpretation of his remarks to mean that Tocqueville was “somehow open to Marx and his view of the social question.” Another problem that Mahoney has is reconciling Tocqueville’s remarks with his “Speech on the Right to Work” made to the Constituent Assembly on September 12, 1848. The latter in Mahoney’s opinion makes it clear that Tocqueville was unequivocal in his opposition to socialism. Be that as it may, the fact is that two years later in his Recollections he certainly seemed to have equivocated. Mahoney should at least address this apparent discrepancy that could reasonably be interpreted to mean that in his private memoirs Tocqueville was less certain about his opposition to socialism than in his public remarks two years earlier. See his “Tocqueville and Socialism,” Tocqueville’s Defense of Human Liberty: Current Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), p. 179.
- 74.
Recollections, p. 96.
- 75.
Ibid., p. 97.
- 76.
MECW, 10, p. 61.
- 77.
For details, see my Marx and Engels, pp. 64–5, 102–7.
- 78.
According to Ron Aminzade (private communication), Ledru-Rollin later admitted that his government’s policies regarding the peasantry were wrong-headed.
- 79.
MECW, 10, pp. 67–9.
- 80.
Recollections, p. 144.
- 81.
MECW, 7, p. 64.
- 82.
Recollections, p. 136. See Craig Calhoun, “Classical Social Theory and the French Revolution of 1848,” Sociological Theory, 7 (Fall, 1989), p. 221, for a discussion about whether Tocqueville and Marx got it right about the class character of the revolt.
- 83.
Calhoun, in the previous note, for example.
- 84.
MECW, 10, p. 56.
- 85.
Mark Traugott, Armies of the Poor: Determinants of Working-Class Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848 (Princeton, 1985), disputes Marx’s and Tocqueville’s class characterization of the Gardes Mobiles.
- 86.
Recollections, p. 165.
- 87.
MECW, 10, pp. 66–7.
- 88.
Recollections, pp. 147–8.
- 89.
Ibid, p. 148. Tocqueville’s real-time account of his actions is consistent with what he wrote two years later; see Boesche, p. 213.
- 90.
Ibid, p. 214.
- 91.
MECW, 10, p. 68. Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (Cambridge: Harvard U.P. 1986), p. 384, says that 1400 “died in the June Days.” Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (New York: Little, Brown, 2011) writes that “an estimated fifteen hundred people died. … Insurgents were hunted down and executed, three thousand in all. Up to fifteen thousand more people were arrested and forty-five hundred of those deported in packed convoys to Algeria” (p. 148).
- 92.
Tocqueville acknowledged in a marginal note to the chapter in Recollections that covers this period that “[t]here is a great gap” in it. (p. 167).
- 93.
Jardin, p. 416.
- 94.
Brogan, pp. 451–61, provides fascinating details about Tocqueville’s role which are not always flattering.
- 95.
Jardin, p. 419. About a month before the debate on the right to work issue Proudhon, a member of the Assembly, caused quite an uproar—reported by the NRZ—by making a prolonged attack on private property. Along the way he exclaimed that “By recognizing in the Constitution the right to work, you have proclaimed the recognition of the abolition of property” (7, p. 323). Proudhon’s heresy may be what Tocqueville had in mind in lambasting the constitutional proposal.
- 96.
Mahoney, p. 186.
- 97.
Recollections, p. 169.
- 98.
Jardin, p. 419.
- 99.
Recollections, p. 178.
- 100.
Jardin, p. 420.
- 101.
MECW, 10, p. 570.
- 102.
MECW, 10, p. 79.
- 103.
Recollections, p. 166.
- 104.
Jardin, pp. 438–9.
- 105.
Kelly’s argument, in fn. 55, that Recollections was not the private memoir that its author claimed it to be, has merit. By failing to discuss the Roman betrayal Tocqueville was in all likelihood attempting to influence his image for subsequent generations.
- 106.
MECW, 9, p. 477.
- 107.
Recollections, p. 211.
- 108.
Regarding Marx’s and Engels’s rethinking of their views on the imminence of socialist revolution, see chapter 4 in my Marx and Engels.
- 109.
MECW, 10, pp. 92–3.
- 110.
Recollections, p. 220.
- 111.
Ibid, pp. 219–20.
- 112.
Ibid., p. 223.
- 113.
My Marx and Engels, chapters 3 and 4, provide details.
- 114.
Recollections, pp. 225–6.
- 115.
This followed discussions Tocqueville had with Bonaparte on May 15, 1851. It’s not clear from his memoir if this was the same or a different meeting referred to earlier in which Tocqueville raised various options for the president for how to stay in office.
- 116.
MECW, 10, p. 142.
- 117.
Ibid., p. 580. From Marx’s article, “The Constitution of the French Republic Adopted November 8, 1848,” the only thing he wrote on the French situation between his last article in Class Struggles and the Eighteenth Brumaire. It is also noteworthy because of its detailed analysis of the democratic limitations of the constitution, giving lie to the oft-repeated charge that he ignored such matters.
- 118.
Recollections, p. 292.
- 119.
Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior, quoted in Irving Zeitlin, Liberty, Equality, and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), p. 118.
- 120.
Jardin, p. 461. Sixteen years earlier in his Democracy, Tocqueville asked if it was possible to have an alternative to the American path to republican democracy “in which the majority, repressing its natural instinct of equality, should consent, with a view to the order and the stability of the state, to invest a family or an individual with all the attributes of executive power? Might not a democratic society be imagined in which the forces of the nation would be more centralized than they are in the United States; where the people would exercise a less direct and less irresistible influence upon public affairs, and yet every citizen, invested with certain rights, would participate, within his sphere, in the conduct of the government?” Tocqueville answered affirmatively. Thus, his willingness to acquiesce in Bonaparte’s coup may have reflected his earlier vision about an alternative path to democracy via the investiture of “an individual with all the attributes of executive power.”
- 121.
In the “Foreword” to his Old Regime, Tocqueville suggested that his analysis of 1789 would serve to explain subsequent events such as 1830 and 1848. Since he died before doing a planned follow-up volume, it is not certain how specific he intended to be in an analysis of 1848. At best, Old Regime is an implicit critique of the bourgeoisie in 1848 as well as Bonaparte’s Second Empire.
- 122.
MECW, 11, p. 118.
- 123.
Ibid., p. 135.
- 124.
Ibid, p. 155.
- 125.
Ibid, p. 168.
- 126.
Jardin, pp. 458–9.
- 127.
Though Tocqueville enthusiastically voted against the impeachment motion on June 13, he in fact helped lead the charge against it as the Assembly member who headed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; he did not, apparently, vote to abolish universal manhood suffrage. He was clearly opposed to the decision, as he explained to Bonaparte in their meeting on May 15, 1851. “I regard that law … as a great misfortune, almost as a crime. It has deprived us of the only moral force society possesses today, that is to say, the moral power of universal suffrage, without ridding us of the dangers of that voting system. We are left to face a multitude, but an unauthorized multitude” (Recollections, pp. 291–2). As noted earlier, Tocqueville was no partisan of universal suffrage before 1848. His apparent change of heart in 1851 should be seen in that light as well as his well-known fears about the “unauthorized multitude.”
- 128.
MECW, 11, p. 176.
- 129.
Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Indispensability of Political Theory,” The Nature of Political Theory, eds. David Miller and Larry Siedentop (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 27.
- 130.
Whether Marx’s and Engels’s line would have been more effective if given an opportunity for implementation in France is of course pure speculation. What is certain is that they strenuously tried to realize it in the German theater. Though unsuccessful, they had no hesitation in faulting the Tocquevillian counterparts in Germany who too feared the masses, doing all they could to hold their “revolutionary passions” in check. Tocqueville, who visited Germany in May 1849, viewed the situation there in a way that would have certainly placed him and the Marx–Engels team on the opposite sides of the barricades had he been able to carry out his line there.
- 131.
MECW, 21, p. 57.
- 132.
Gargan, p. 255.
- 133.
- 134.
DIA, vol. 1, pp. ix–x.
- 135.
- 136.
MECW, 24, p. 585.
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Nimtz, A.H. (2019). The European Spring, 1848–1851: Marx and Engels versus Tocqueville. In: Marxism versus Liberalism. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24946-5_2
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