Abstract
Of all the debates that did not occur in the nineteenth century, one of the more interesting would have been between Alexis de Tocqueville of 1839, newly arrived in the Chamber of Deputies and apparently spoiling for a fight with any convenient foreign adversary, and Foreign Minister Tocqueville of 1849, the professed advocate of international peace and quiet diplomatic resolution of disputes. A dialogue between the two Tocquevilles would have done much to illuminate the political issues that divided France and preoccupied Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century—and continue to be matters of concern a century and a half later. It would have been a stimulating contest, filled with articulate passion on either side.
[F]or Liberalism the peaceful coexistence of a number of nations, each organized as a State and conducting its relations with its neighbours on the same principles that govern the relations of free and self-conscious individuals, is a necessary condition of political stability and progress.1
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Notes
Guido Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, trans. R.G. Collingwood (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), pp. 247–48.
Wherever possible, use has been made of previous translations of Tocqueville’s work, with citation being made to the Gallimard edition of the Oeuvres Complètes (hereinafter cited as OC), with reference being made first to the Tome, then, in the case of those Tomes that contain more than one volume, to the volume number, and then to the page number. Where no prior translation has appeared, translations are by the present author. See OC, III, vol. 2, pp. 259, 265, 280, 292, 300, 304, 339. On Tocqueville generally, see André Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, trans. Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988).
OC, III, vol. 3, pp. 249–54, 261, 286–89, 291; VI, vol. 1, p. 100; Nassau William Senior, Journals Kept in France and Italy from 1848 to 1852, ed. M.C.M. Simpson, 2 vols. (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1871), II: 231;
M.C.M. Simpson, ed., Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior fom 1834 to 1859, 2 vols. (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1872; rept. ed. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), II: 41–42.
OC, XII, pp. 45, 284; Tocqueville, Recollections, trans. George Lawrence (London: Macdonald, 1970), pp. 22, 285;
Edward Gargan, Alexis de Tocqueville: The Critical Years 1848–1851 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1955), p. 144;
Antoine Redier, Comme Disait M. de Tocqueville… (Paris: Perrin, 1925), p. 163. One could also assert that these differences were only apparent, and that Tocqueville’s thought was in reality fundamentally consistent, either because “Tocquevillian patriotism is decidedly pacific” throughout, or because Tocqueville “shared … the extreme nationalism … [of] Bonapartism” and had done so long before Louis Napoleon came to power. (See Bruce Smith, Politics & Remembrance: Republican Themes in Machiavelli, Burke, and Tocqueville (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 160–61;
Hugh Brogan, Tocqueville (London: Collins/Fontana, 1973), p. 23. It will be the argument of this chapter that Tocqueville’s thought is consistent, but not in the sense of either Smith or Brogan.
The quotations in this and the following paragraph are all taken from Tocqueville’s introduction to Democracy in America, OC, I, vol. 1, pp. 1–4. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Tocqueville, “The Social and Political State of France Before and After 1789,” London and Westminster Review (1836), printed as the introduction to L’Ancien Regime et la Revolution, OC, II, vol. 1, p. 63. See Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans. John Waggoner (Lanham Way, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), pp. 20–22. See also the point Tocqueville made in his notebook during his American travels: “If ever the world comes to be completely civilized, the human race will in appearance form only one people.” (OC, V, vol. 1, p. 190)
OC, II, vol. 1, p. 88; The Old Régime and the Revolution, ed. Francois Furet and Francoise Melonio, trans. Alan Kahan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 100, 327. See also Tocqueville’s letters to Arthur de Gobineau of September 5, 1843, and January 24, 1847, in OC, IX, vol. 2, pp. 46, 276–81,
and Marvin Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), p. 151.
OC, I, vol. 2, pp. 238–49, passim; Zetterbaum, Problem of Democracy, pp. 36–39; Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains, trans. and ed. Miss Senior, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Company, 1861), II: 365–66. One example of a norm that Tocqueville believed was valid at all times and places was the prohibition against slavery. At a meeting of l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques on April 20, 1839, in response to statements that he took to mean that, while modern slavery was to be condemned, slavery in the ancient world had been necessary to economic development and therefore, “in a certain epoch, good and legitimate,” he rose to make an impromptu intervention “against this doctrine, which I consider false and immoral,” saying, “These facts are odious in our days; they were no less so three thousand years ago.” OC, XVI, pp. 165–67.
OC, II, vol. 2, p. 347. See also Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy; Edward Gargan, De Tocqueville (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1965), pp. 14–15.
Letter of November 17, 1853, OC, IX, p. 202. See also Tocqueville’s letters of October 11, 1853, December 20, 1853, and July 30, 1856, OC, IX, pp. 199–269, passim; Michael Biddiss, ed., Gobineau: Selected Political Writings (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970).
Tocqueville in conversation with Senior on April 26, 1858, in Paris (Correspondence and Conversations, II: 207–08). See also Jean-Claude Lamberti, La Notion D’Individualisme chez Tocqueville (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970).
Tocqueville’s belief in the need for asylum for political refugees may be seen in his dealings as foreign minister with the revolutionaries from across Europe who had taken refuge in Switzerland in 1849. See his own account in his Souvenirs (OC, XII, pp. 245–46). Cf. Gargan, Tocqueville: The Critical Years. For an argument that Tocqueville paints himself as less sympathetic toward the Swiss in 1849 than in fact he had been, see Luc Monnier, “Tocqueville et la Suisse,” in Alexis de Tocqueville: Livre du Centenaire, 1859–1959 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1960), pp. 101–13. During his tenure, he had also to deal with the issue of participants in the failed Hungarian uprising of 1848, who had fled into the Ottoman Empire, and whose return the Austrian and Russian governments were demanding. (See the private correspondence with Beaumont, whom Tocqueville had dispatched as French ambassador to Vienna, which was almost entirely taken up with this issue (OC, VIII, vol. 2, pp. 173–227).) In the Souvenirs, Tocqueville dryly observed that the Sultan’s officials, who protested that those who had requested the mercy of asylum ought to have it respected, “spoke like civilized men and Christians,” while the Russian and Austrian ambassadors, in threatening war if the refugees were not delivered to them, “replied as true Turks” (OC, XII, p. 257).
OC, VI, vol. 1, pp. 66–70, 332–33, 337–38; VI, vol. 2, p. 91; John Laughton, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L., 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898), I: 142;
Henry Reeve, Royal and Republican France, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1872), II: 164;
Henry Reeve, ed., The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1885), I: 315n.
OC, III, vol. 2, p. 350. See also Mary Lawlor, Alexis de Tocqueville in the Chamber of Deputies: His Views on Foreign and Colonial Policy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1959), p. 82.
Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains, II: 310; OC, VI, vol. 2, pp. 185–86. See also his description of the failure of the coalitions against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France before 1813, in Alexis de Tocqueville, “The European Revolution” and Correspondence with Gobineau, ed. and trans. John Luckacs (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1959; rept. ed., 1974), p. 113.
Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains, I: 78–79; letter to Reeve, February 25, 1859, OC, VI, vol. 1, p. 279. See also letters to Beaumont, August 9, 1840, to Paul Clamorgan, February 13, 1847, and to Reeve, January 8, 1851, in OC, VIII, vol. 1, p. 421; VI, vol. 1, p. 133; X, pp. 409–13; Alexis de Tocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, trans. James Toupin and Roger Boesche, ed. Roger Boesche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 185–86.
Letter to Corcelle, October 11, 1846, OC, XV, vol. 1, p. 219. Tocqueville would ensure that his position was reflected in the report he helped to write the following year for a special parliamentary commission established to study the problems of colonization in Algeria (OC, III, vol. 1, pp. 308–418). See also Lawlor, Tocqueville in the Chamber, pp. 150–70; Stephane Dion, “Durham et Tocqueville sur la colonisation libérale,” Journal of Canadian Studies 25 (Spring 1990): 60–77;
André Martel, “Tocqueville et les Problemes Coloniaux de la Monarchie de Juillet,” Revue D’Histoire Economique et Sociale 32 (1954): 367–88; Henri Baudet, “Alexis de Tocqueville et la Pensée Coloniale du XIXe Siecle,” in Livre du Centenaire, pp. 121–31.
Letter to Corcelle, October 2, 1854, OC, XV, vol. 1, pp. 118–19; letter to Reeve, April 12, 1840, OC, VI, vol. 1, p. 58. See also OC, III, vol. 1, pp. 22–23, 216; Irving Zeitlin, Liberty, Equality, and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), p. 119.
For three generous assessments of Tocqueville’s performance as Foreign Minister, see the eulogy published by his friend Jean-Jacques Ampère as “Alexis de Tocqueville (mémoire),” Correspondant (1859), p. 4; Pierre Marcel, Essai Politique sur Alexis de Tocqueville (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1910), pp. 408–32; Redier, Comme Disait M. de Tocqueville…, pp. 215–18.
Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains, I: 151, 232; II: 148; OC, XV, vol. 1, pp. 281, 285, 293. On Tocqueville’s correspondence with Francisque de Corcelle, his special representative in Rome, in which the Foreign Minister exhorted his emissary to demand steps to liberalize the restored papal government, see OC, XV, vol. 2, pp. 253, 256–57, 277, 282, 305–06, 311, 339, 373–80, 422–24, 429–30, 448–49, 474; Francoise Melonio, “Tocqueville et la restauration du pouvoir temporal du pape (Juin–Octobre 1849),” Revue Historique 271 (January–March 1984): 109–23. On the Roman Question more generally, see Jardin, Tocqueville, pp. 437–44;
Emile Lesueur, “Les Débuts du Prince de La Tour LAuvergne-Lauraguais dans la Carrière Diplomatique: Les Francais à Rome en 1849,” Revue D’Histoire Diplomatique 44 (1930): 155–81;
Guillaume Mollat, “Les Debuts de l’Occupation Francaise a Rome en 1849, d’apres une Correspondance Inedite,” Revue d’Histoire Ecclesiastique 30 (April 1934): 334–60; (June 1934): 587–619;
Alessandro d’Alessandro, “La Repubblica Romana del 1849 e l’Intervento Francese,” Nuova Rivista Storica 41, 2 (1957): 261–89;
Comte de Quinsonas, “L’Expedition de Rome 1849 et le General Oudinot,” Revue Historique de l’Armée 15, 3 (1959): 59–78;
William Echard, “Louis Napoleon and the French Decision to Intervene at Rome in 1849: A New Appraisal,” Canadian Journal of History 9, 3 (December 1974): 263–74.
OC, XV, vol. 2, p. 399; Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains, II: 155. See also Gargan, The Critical Years, pp. 122–79; OC, XV, vol. 2, pp. 277, 306, 343, 395, 439; Charles Pouthas, “Un Observateur de Tocqueville à Rome Pendant les Premiers Mois de l’Occupation Francaise (Juillet–Octobre 1849),” Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento 37 (January–December 1950): 417–30;
A.-B. Duff and M. Degros, Rome et les Etats Pontificaux sous l’Occupation Etrangère: Lettres du Colonel Callier (Juillet 1849-Mars 1850) (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1950). Tocqueville drew up two statements of the liberalizing measures he thought essential in Rome, “Mesures Administratives et Institutions” and “Justice dans les Etats Romains.” See OC, III, vol. 3, pp. 340–41, 342–43.
Fonti per la Storia d’Italia (Roma, 1972), vol. 116, ed. Michele Fatica, Le relazioni diplomatiche fra lo stato pontifco e la Francia, III Serie: 1848–1860, Vol. Secondo (19 Febbraio 1849–15 April 1850), pp. 203, 292–94, 302–07, 384–85, 389–90, 395. See also Don Tommaso Leccisotti, “La Corrispondenza fra Don Luigi Tosti e l’Ambasciatore D’Arcourt nel Periodo della Repubblica Romana (1849),” Pio IX 5, 3 (1976): 312–39;
Giacomo Martina, Pio IX (1846–1850) (Roma: Universitá Gregoriana Editrice, 1974), p. 384.
Letter to Beaumont, October 12, 1849, OC, VIII, vol. 2, p. 201. See also Maurice Degros, “Les ‘Souvenirs,’ Tocqueville et la Question Romaine,” in Livre du Centenaire, pp. 157–70; Charles Lucet, “Lamartine, Tocqueville, Gobineau… Les Ministres des Affaires Etrangères de la Seconde Republique et Leurs Cabinets,” Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique 93, 3–4 (1979): 247–78. AJ.P Taylor criticizes Tocqueville for having “fallen victim to the doctrine of ‘the lesser evil’” when the “social peril threw him off his balance” (“De Tocqueville in 1848,” in Europe: Grandeur and Decline (Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1950), p. 44).
Letter to Reeve, March 26, 1853, OC, VI, vol. 1, p. 143; Democracy in America, I, vol. 1, pp. 174, 238; Memoir, Letters, and Remains, II: 124. See Paul Varg, United States Foreign Relations, 1820–1860 (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1979), pp. 20–42;
Adam Watson, “New States in the Americas,” in Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 127–41. On Tocqueville’s contrast between, on the one hand, the United States, “without neighbors, thus without enemies,” and therefore free from “the constraints of diplomacy and war,” and, on the other, France, “surrounded by neighbors who are always rivals and may at any time become enemies,” which therefore must “place above all else worries over external security,”
see Raymond Aron, “Idées Politiques et Vision Historique de Tocqueville,” Revue Francaise de Science Politique X (September 1960): 518–20.
Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains, I: 120–21; OC, III, vol. 2, pp. 344–45, 375–83, 433. See also Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 138.
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© 2003 W. David Clinton
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Clinton, D. (2003). Why did M. Tocqueville Change His Mind?. In: Tocqueville, Lieber, and Bagehot. The Palgrave Macmillan Series on the History of International Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973757_2
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