JOSEPH A. HARRISS: Tocqueville Between Two Worlds Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life
Brogan, Hugh
BOOKS IN REVIEW America and Russia would come to dominate the world seemed uncannily prescient during the Cold War, when he was seized on as an alternative to Karl Marx as a theorist of...
...Tocqueville did his legwork...
...For Brogan, this was Tocqueville’s watershed moment...
...Painful anxiety and doubt dogged him all his life...
...He was not, in fact, particularly pro-American or pro-democracy...
...Taking a cue from that thoroughly modern doctrine, “To each according to his attention span,” in steps P. J. O’Rourke to explicate the truths of the great Scottish philosopher...
...Finally, O’Rourke is working from home, which means it’s easier to drink on the job when the job requires it (and this one surely must have...
...Accolades showered, from the Legion of Honor to membership in the French Academy...
...He was thinking of France, but Americans can easily see its application to other parts of the world and its implications for nation building...
...Thus Brogan’s convincing assertion that Tocqueville was “caught between two worlds, unable to repose in the one where he was born, unable to go forward confidently into the one he saw rising inexorably before him...
...It’s the Cliffs Notes version or, better, Adam Smith for Dummies (which a quick Amazon search reveals does not yet exist...
...Most disorienting to the young noblemen were their first vignettes of raw democracy: Governor Enos Throop staying in a simple boarding house like theirs and receiving them in the parlor...
...But I suspect that much of the 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2007 Joseph A. Harriss, an American writer in Paris, is a frequent contributor and author of the biography The Tallest Tower: Eiffel and the Belle Epoque (Regnery Gateway...
...They sailed on April 2, 1831, on the American ship Le Havre, making it to Newport, Rhode Island, in a relatively swift 37 days...
...New York was a shock...
...ALTHOUGHHECLEARLY admires Democracy, Brogan doesn’t hesitate to point out its faults...
...Not a bad day at the office...
...He worked hard at it, burnishing his prose until it was supple, simple, often ironic, and always to the point...
...He made no bones about it...
...Especially the man, for the British historian Hugh Brogan’s masterfully researched, deeply probing new biography shows Tocqueville in the round, with all his biases, doubts, flaws—and excep frail health that caused him long periods of illness...
...The loss to their investigation was immense, he finds...
...But sometime during his visit to Ohio intellectual honesty compelled him to admit that “the middle classes can govern a state...
...he was interred in the churchyard of the Tocqueville fief on Normandy’s Cotentin peninsula...
...his resulting book, Voyage en Amérique, had declared that “[t]he establishment of a representative republic in the United States was one of the greatest political events in the history of the world...
...The idea of American exceptionalism, due to sui generis institutions guaranteeing individual freedom and self-government, received an endorsement from, of all people, a French aristocrat...
...Interestingly, Tocqueville was also a nephew of one of France’s finest writers of the age, François René de Chateaubriand, who visited America earlier and would importantly influence him...
...His famous prediction in 1835 that time our take on Democracy, which after all is only one of the many volumes that make up Tocqueville’s collected writings, is slightly skewed...
...I was looking for the image of democracy itself, its penchants, character, prejudices and passions,” he says early in the book...
...While Brogan’s style is sometimes less than limpid, with little concession to those who prefer a strong narrative thread, this is an erudite, absorbing portrait of the perceptive, conflicted French nobleman who has had such enduring influence on our idea of ourselves...
...There was also the example of his favorite uncle, Chateaubriand, who had sailed for America in 1791 to avoid a similar spot of political trouble during the Revolution...
...Smith cannot complain that O’Rourke has missed some essential point buried 19 paragraphs into a wild goose chase that the distiller has just deleted...
...is big and dense enough to double as a doorstop...
...Their marriage in 1835 endured despite temperamental differences—he once threw her plate of pie on the floor because she ate too slowly for him—and his wandering eye...
...Next, O’Rourke is better paid and working on a more luxurious deadline than the typical editor—which means he can be more patient and gracious with his dearly departed author...
...Following in the footsteps of Malesherbes, he studied law, became a junior magistrate at Versailles, and entered politics in 1839...
...First, his author is dead...
...I wanted to understand it, if only to know what we should hope or fear from it...
...And when they later met Jackson in Washington, they were distinctly underwhelmed...
...The real reason was to put some distance between himself and an uncomfortable political and professional situation following the fall in 1830 of the Bourbon king Charles X, to which the Tocqueville family was close...
...THE BEST EXAMPLE of O’Rourke’s concision also happens to be the most important for the book, boiling the entire thing down to a simple elevator pitch: “The Wealth of Nations,” he writes, “argues three basic principles and, by plain thinking and plentiful examples, proves them...
...his father luckily escaped the guillotine after ten harrowing months of prison that turned his hair prematurely white at 21...
...He makes this point repeatedly...
...During the crossing a charming American lady, Miss Edwards, helped them brush up their English, which was sorely in need of it...
...To put it simply, our man, a sexual democrat, had a short fuse with the opposite sex...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Publication of the book’s first volume in 1835 (the second was in 1840) made Tocqueville an instant celebrity in Paris...
...His father, Hervé, came from a long line of Norman noblemen, one of whom sailed with William in 1066 to conquer England...
...When Tocqueville decided to travel there in the spring of 1831, his motives were decidedly mixed...
...This “trinity of individual prerogatives” makes a useful guidepost for meandering through the tangle...
...Alexis grew up to be short and slight, with abundant curly black hair, a fine, expressive face with luminous brown eyes, and, with chronic stomach problems, share of marital crises as a result...
...Along the way he and Beaumont nearly drowned in the icy Ohio River when their steamer hit a rock, and stayed in a log cabin so cold that water froze before they could drink it...
...As a national polestar, it is cited constantly in the public discourse, making Tocqueville the most quoted Frenchman in the English language...
...Tocqueville reportedly is President George W. Bush’s favorite political philosopher...
...Two major works followed, The Old Régime and the Revolution, in which he described a France prisoner of its past and prey to class hostility, and Souvenirs, a sardonic, psychologically astute look at the mediocrity of French political leadership during the revolution of 1848...
...Today Democracy still influences political thinkers, conservative or liberal—the subtlety, density, and complexity of Tocqueville’s thought are such that no party owns him...
...tional intellectual honesty and insight—on full view...
...He was immediately at ease with a fellow noble, feeling that they spoke the same language even if they had nothing but good blood lines in common...
...That underpaid proletariat known as editors would have raised pitchfork and laptop at any text so unnecessarily long...
...Formerly he was known chiefly as a duelist and a brawler,” sniffed Beaumont...
...His mother descended from the prominent magistrate Chrétien Guillaume de Malesherbes, guillotined during the Terror in 1794 after courageously serving as Louis XVI’s defense counsel at the Revolution’s kangaroo court...
...At first, Tocqueville fell back on familiar French clichés to make sense of it...
...Between the meandering sentences and discursive tangents, any reasonable editor would balk...
...The result is a usually pleasant, generally useful, and refreshingly insightful distillation of Smith: from 900 pages down to 242...
...Here, Brogan speculates, might have been “the germ of Tocqueville’s masterpiece...
...Despite roughing it, Tocqueville scrupulously kept recording his thoughts...
...When Smith is going on about the history of currency, for instance, or handily disMAY 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67...
...Republicans cite his doubts about bloated government and egalitarianism, Democrats share his distaste for bourgeois materialism and echo his calls for civic engagement...
...a Tocquevillian think tank may be part of his postWhite House legacy...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW America and Russia would come to dominate the world seemed uncannily prescient during the Cold War, when he was seized on as an alternative to Karl Marx as a theorist of social change in a free society...
...He was 25 when he set out with his lifelong friend and fellow magistrate at Versailles, Gustave de Beaumont, who later married a granddaughter of La Fayette...
...We are heading towards unlimited democracy,” he noted...
...He wrote Democracy, he says in an extraordinary passage, “under the impulse of a sort of religious terror created in my soul by the sight of this irresistible revolution on the march...
...He found the available young noble Frenchwomen insipid and boring, and Marie, as he always called her, provided the mothering and emotional support his health and nerves required...
...By P. J. O’Rourke Not so with Adam Smith, (ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, 242 PAGES, $21.95) whose tome revealed profundities from which anyone Reviewed by Joel Miller would profit—that is, unless you count the cost of actually digesting The Wealth of Nations...
...waiters even sitting down at table with their customers...
...The other day one of our passengers broke an arm, and another a leg...
...Democratic, egalitarian society was not really his cup of tea, and part of Tocqueville’s complexity is his ambivalence toward it...
...Worse, his ingrained aristocratic disdain meant that he disastrously lacked the necessary backslapping touch, especially with his fellow deputies in the National Assembly: “I treat them as commonplace,” he commented dryly...
...The Tocquevilles had more than their share of marital crises as a result...
...Anyone who reads him as a fervent admirer of America or a staunch advocate of democracy had better look again...
...That is no small task...
...here, the younger man may have thought, was just the topic he needed...
...Tocqueville was intensely curious about the world’s first big experiment in self-government...
...In the case of Karl Marx, this is no tragedy...
...Any edition of this classic, published in 1776, Joel Milleris publisher of the books and culture division of Thomas Nelson...
...The Tocquevilles had more than their Count Alexis Charles-Henri Clérel (Tocqueville does not appear on the birth certificate, in deference to revolutionary sensibilities) was born on the afternoon of XI Thermidor An XIII, which translates as July 29, 1805, in the family’s Paris townhouse near the Madeleine church...
...Among Tocqueville’s continuing lessons for today is his contention that while freedom is indeed the natural destiny of man, “I would think it a great misfortune for humanity if liberty had to take the same form in every place...
...Before landing in America, he held the standard French view, still a basic tenet in France today, that only an elite could govern a nation’s affairs...
...That was possibly brought on by the dramatic crise de conscience he suffered at 16, when he lost his Catholic faith, a terrifying experience during which he felt as if the walls and ceiling of his room were shaking...
...America, whose people he found generally uneducated and vulgar, was the laboratory where he could examine with clinical detachment the new and—for him and other French noblemen of the day—subversive idea that all men are born equal...
...Even intellectuals should have no trouble understanding Smith’s ideas [of...
...And he needed a topic because Tocqueville’s true vocation apparently was not politics, but writing...
...Instead of a primitive backwoods people, Tocqueville found the city’s smart set, including the Knickerbockers, showering him with invitations to worldly parties and balls, prompting an urgent letter to his brother Édouard for a supply of silk stockings, cravats, and 24 pairs of kid gloves...
...BROGAN’S CHAPTERS ON THE VISIT to America are alone worth the price of admission...
...But by the time he left New York after seven weeks, he had found his grand theme...
...I speak from experience when I say that had Smith submitted his manuscript to a modern publisher at nine in the morning, it would have been summarily rejected by noon...
...Brogan closely examines Tocqueville’s often difficult sentimental life...
...But his career in politics was limited by his anxiety-induced deficiencies as an orator...
...Thanks to the colorful antics of history (many of them sticky and sanguinary), anyone can see that the On the Wealth of Nations bewhiskered dreamer was (Books That Changed the World) full of crap...
...In handling Smith, O’Rourke has several advantages over the editors...
...His admirably even-handed portrait causes me, as it did twenty years ago...
...All well and good...
...Mary Mottley, six years his elder, had three strikes against her: She was English, Protestant, and middle-class, all things his aristocratic family despised...
...I don’t say this is a good thing… on the contrary it won’t suit France, but we are driven by an irresistible force...
...Only by long, careful preparation and training of the people in its practice can it take root...
...In spite of their petty passions, their incomplete education, their vulgarity, they can demonstrably supply practical intelligence, and that is enough...
...They bore me profoundly...
...He also raps Tocqueville’s knuckles for missing the importance of American elections in controlling abusive majorities...
...In all, nine members of Alexis’s immediate family were imprisoned during the Terror and five executed...
...For one thing, the French visitors talked almost exclusively with members of the upper classes, les gens éclairs, mostly lawyers...
...In letters home full of broad generalizations, he described American women (all chaste because American men were too busy for sex), American manners (unpleasantly vulgar), political parties (non-existent as far as he could tell), and gastronomy and the arts (in their infancy, hélas...
...Brogan considers his 17 volumes of output a monument of French literature...
...As he put it, “If there is any country in the world where one can hope to appreciate the dogma of the sovereignty of the people, study it in its application… that country is surely America...
...Brogan mentions “the blind instinct which from time to time drove him crazy,” citing a letter in which Tocqueville asks a friend, “How could I manage to stop that sort of boiling of the blood that meeting a woman, whatever she may be, still causes MAY 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65 BOOKS IN REVIEW me, as it did twenty years ago...
...Officially he was going to study the American penal system and report back on possible applications in France...
...Most scholars seem to agree that it is, as the Harvard political scientists Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop phrased it, “the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America...
...A longtime student of America who has “How could I manage to stop that sort previously done a biography of John F. Kennedy of boiling of the blood that meeting a and a history of the United States, Brogan now woman, whatever she may be, still holds a research professorship at the University of Essex...
...Over the next seven months he swept up through Buffalo and the Great Lakes to the frontier states of Michigan and Wisconsin, then doubled back to Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore before again heading west to Cincinnati, south to Nashville and New Orleans, visiting Washington just before sailing home from New York...
...I have an intellectual taste for democratic institutions,” he wrote at one point, “but I am an aristocrat by instinct, that is, I fear and scorn the mob...
...Adam Smith for Dummies DESPITE THEIR OBVIOUS DIFFERENCES, Das Kapital and The Wealth of Nations share at least one similarity: Nobody reads them...
...Brogan contends that Tocqueville, proud to belong to the fine fleur of old France, remained “a noble to the end of his days, and cannot be understood unless this is recognized...
...He had several youthful affairs, and may have fought a duel, before falling for an attractive, resourceful English woman living in Versailles...
...Between American Idol and the latest Barack Obama coverage, who’s got the time...
...will doubtless stand as the best to date...
...Americans writing to President Andrew Jackson as “Dear Sir...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW NOW COMES AN EXCELLENT opportunity to renew acquaintance with Tocqueville the man and his writings...
...Once when they complained of the discomfort of an open buckboard in Tennessee, the driver shot back, frontier style, “Go ahead, moan...
...Note the words fear, terror, and pernicious in the above quotations and you begin to understand Tocqueville’s basic stance...
...A Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life by Hugh Brogan (YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 724 PAGES, $35) Reviewed by Joseph A. Harriss Tocqueville Between Two Worlds LEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE’S Democracy in America is the most extensively read, highly revered, and, just possibly, widely misunderstood book ever done about our form of government...
...The American presi 66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2007 dent lived in a house “infinitely less magnificent than those of our ministers,” and, with no lackeys, actually served their glasses of Madeira himself...
...Tocqueville helped write the Second Republic’s constitution, served as vice president of the National Assembly, and was named foreign minister briefly in 1849...
...pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade...
...Unconfirmed rumors spoke of an illegitimate child sired by him on a maid-servant during his adolescence...
...His poor health finally caught up with him at age 53...
...But Tocqueville had a maverick streak (he eschewed the title of count) despite his proper upbringing...
...In a letter to his English friend, the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, he said that “the main task from now on will be to fight the pernicious tendencies of the new order, not to bring them about...
Vol. 40 • May 2007 • No. 4
