{I} n parts one, two, and three of this essay on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recollections, I looked at the fall of the July Monarchy of King Louis-Phillippe, the failure of the socialist revolutionaries, and the flawed founding of the Second Republic. Today’s installment examines Tocqueville’s account of how the Second Republic died.
Preserve Me from My Friends
Tocqueville took office as Louis-Napoléon’s foreign minister in June 1849. His tenure would prove a personal disaster and mark the limits of his restraining influence on the new French president.
It was the endless, hubristic schemes of Louis-Napoléon that were the undoing of Tocqueville’s ministry. “The danger of disaster,” Tocqueville observed, “is usually greatest after a major success: as long as there is peril ahead, there are only adversaries to face, and they can be defeated, but once victory is in hand, you have to deal with your own side — with its weakness and pride and the incautious sense of security that victory brings — and this brings you down.” Many of the rebellions of 1848 across the German states and in the Austrian Empire were winding down by the time Louis-Napoléon took office, but the assassination of the prime minister of the Papal States kicked off a new revolution in Rome that sent the pope, Pius IX, fleeing in disguise. The Romans proclaimed a republic.
The new French constitution prohibited using force against the liberties of any foreign people, but Louis-Napoléon saw an opportunity to shore up his internal Catholic support and gain a foothold against Austrian influence on the Italian peninsula, so he dispatched French troops to restore the pope to his throne by force. The expedition was well-calibrated to internal French politics in advance of the next round of elections to the Assembly, but it failed to consider the realities on the ground. After their arrival in April 1849, French forces were repelled and mired in a siege.
Tocqueville, who deplored the Roman adventure, joined the cabinet as foreign minister in June on one condition: that he not be asked to defend in the Assembly anything done in Rome before he took office. A cease-fire there offered the hope of a diplomatic resolution.
Tocqueville was always sensitive to the power of perception. Periodic disorders continued to shake the nerves of the Assembly; while none approached the scale of the June Days, “In politics as in war one must never forget that the effect of an event depends not on what it is in itself but on the impression it makes.” When the pope offered amnesty to the Roman rebels but refused to extend it to members of the Roman assembly, Tocqueville noted the danger of such a move: “What happens to individuals makes more of an impression on people than what happens to institutions.”
Once he fortified his domestic position in the elections, Louis-Napoléon secretly dispatched orders to resume the offensive in Rome, undercutting an agreement reached by his own government’s peace envoy, Ferdinand de Lesseps. Lesseps was then pilloried in the pro-government press as a traitor for following Louis-Napoléon’s instructions and was drummed out of politics (setting up his second act as the man who made the Suez Canal).
For five months, Tocqueville dealt with this sort of behavior, as Louis-Napoléon sent him out again and again to defend positions the French president and the pope never intended to honor. Tocqueville had to read aloud to the French cabinet a letter from Lord Palmerston, his British counterpart, asking how Britain could trust the government of Louis-Napoléon if its word meant so little. When Tocqueville recited to the Assembly claims that the pope would accept reforms and asked, “Can you, messieurs, doubt the word of the Holy Father?,” the assemblage laughed in his face. Ultimately, Tocqueville was hung out to dry and scapegoated, his credibility badly damaged, and the blame for the Roman misadventure effectively shifted in the public mind away from Louis-Napoléon, who then replaced the cabinet with more malleable men.
Operation Rubicon
In the end, the fatal flaw of the Second Republic’s constitution was not that it failed to check the power of the executive, but that it constrained his ambitions too much. By 1849, Tocqueville saw that Louis-Napoléon was “a monomaniac who will not give up the imperial idea until he has drawn his last breath.” So, perhaps nothing would have stopped Louis-Napoléon from planning a coup. But the trigger was that the president was limited to a single four-year term of office, expiring in 1852, and he could not bear to leave the stage so soon and return to private life.
Tocqueville, seeing the danger coming and hoping that the Second Republic could put down firmer roots with more time, tried to get the Assembly to amend the constitution to allow a second term. Some of the opponents of the extension had backed the same proposal from within the government in 1849. The hypocrisy grated: “Most of these same men are indignant at the thought of the people violating the constitution to do for Louis-Napoléon precisely what they themselves proposed to do at that time.” Tocqueville could hardly “imagine a better example of human fickleness or of the vanity of fine words such as patriotism and justice, with which men cloak their petty passions.”
The fact that the Second Republic’s democracy died as a result of a legal effort to constrain a rogue president should resonate today, as the court system wrestles with whether to send our own rogue ex-president to jail or throw him off the ballot.
The final failure of that effort in November 1851 was followed within weeks by “Operation Rubicon,” the coup that installed Louis-Napoléon as dictator. A year later, he crowned himself emperor, a title he held until he was captured by the Germans in 1870.
The coup, planned by Louis-Napoléon’s more disciplined illegitimate half brother, was undertaken swiftly, with the assistance of cash spread around to pliable military men and the use of new technology (the telegraph) to transmit control of Paris into a message of dominance of the country. After a few days in prison, Tocqueville warned darkly that this “purely military revolution” was “capable of being repeated indefinitely using the same means.”
He left government after that, never to return. Tocqueville retired from public life rather than swear an oath of loyalty to the new regime when Louis-Napoléon proclaimed the Second Empire in December 1852. He retreated to his writings until his death from tuberculosis in 1859 at the age of 53. He was a few months younger than Benjamin Disraeli, who served two terms as prime minister of Britain between 1866 and 1880.
A People Adrift
The Second Empire of Napoléon III was in some ways the first truly modern dictatorship in an advanced Western country, relying more on public propaganda than on force. Tocqueville offered an epitaph for the regime: “When one sees despotism from afar, one only detests its violence. When one knows its practices, one is equally revolted by its hypocrisy and eternal lying, vices inherent in the nature of despotism rather than . . . in the individual.” Europe would grow too familiar with these vices.
Writing as the Second Republic was unraveling, Tocqueville questioned whether the cycle of revolutions in France would ever end: “I am tired of mistaking deceptive mists for the shore and often wonder whether the terra firma for which we have so long been searching actually exists, or whether our destiny is not rather to ply the seas forever.” Tocqueville predicted in 1851 that “all parties — socialists, Montagnards, republicans, and liberals — will remain discredited until memories of the revolution of 1848 have faded.” As he sadly observed, “The future is an enlightened and upright arbiter — but, alas, it always arrives too late.”
We have been fortunate, in our own time, to have a sturdy Constitution, a distribution of powers to multiple centers, and the soft restraints of cultural norms around American governance. But the spirit of our current politics and the poor quality of the men and women it attracts have been corroding the latter and placing undue pressure on the former. We see it in the insane determination of both parties to contest the next presidential election behind superannuated, venal fabulists contemptuous of law, solely on the theory that the other guy is worse. We see it in Republicans allowing a few of their number to overthrow the leadership of the House when the unity of purpose of its majority is needed most. Many of the same faults observed by Tocqueville in the France of his day are on display around us. We might repeat his plea of January 1848: “For God’s sake, change the spirit of the government . . . that spirit is driving you into the abyss.”