{H} ow dire is the state of American politics today? How inadequate to the moment is our political class? For some perspective, it is worth revisiting that greatest of all French thinkers, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) — specifically, his writings not on America but on France. His writing still feels fresh and relevant today not only because he dealt with questions still contested, but also because he asked constantly how men govern themselves in reality, not just in theory — and how they preserve or lose their self-government.
Tocqueville is best known as the French traveler who chronicled American democracy in the early 1830s. Most of Democracy in America was written, and its first volume published, before Tocqueville turned 30. It marked him as a shrewd observer of humanity and a profound political philosopher who offered an unsentimental assessment of democracy’s strengths and weaknesses. While the two-volume study reflects a particular moment in Jacksonian America, it is justly an enduring classic.
By 1857, Tocqueville had fallen into “despair” at the prospect that dissension over slavery put at risk “the great experiment in Self Government” that the United States represented: “If it fails, that will be the end of political liberty on earth.”
Self-government and how it could be lost was a more immediate threat in his own country. There, Tocqueville witnessed up close the collapse of tenuous forms of democratic, republican, liberal, and constitutional governance during and after the 1848 revolution. As foreign minister to Louis Napoleon in 1849, he lost control over an ill-considered foreign intervention. He had a front-row seat to the failings of kings and strongmen, the decay of an irresponsible ruling class, the madness of riots, the struggles of coalitions, the menace of communists, and the danger of demagogues. It is in Tocqueville’s observations of France that we can find cautionary tales for our own times.
Between 1850 and 1852, Tocqueville wrote Recollections, a memoir of the events of 1848–51. The book was never completed, and because of its barbed portraits of the people around him, he insisted that it not be made public until everyone involved was dead. A full, unexpurgated edition was published only in 1942. The modern translation by Arthur Goldhammer is edited by Olivier Zunz, who in 2022 published a biography, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville.
Even in its unfinished form, Recollections is just as essential a book on self-government as Democracy in America. On nearly every page, one finds a quotable epigram, an indelible portrait, or both. It takes us on a journey from a failing system to a utopian revolution to a collapse into dictatorship.
The Fall of the July Monarchy
The Ancien Régime in France was not merely the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons; under the king was a comprehensive medieval system of aristocratic and clerical privilege. Louis Philippe, a member of the Orléans family related to the Bourbons, rose to the throne in the 1830 revolution that finally dispatched the old dynasty. The July Monarchy was in principle a constitutional monarchy, ruling with an elected legislature, but the assembly’s few powers were no match for those of the king, who controlled the vast, centralized state. Yet it was also no tyranny.
The July Monarchy’s real departure from Bourbon France was in permanently breaking what remained of the power and privilege of the French nobility. The old order had been in decline since 1792. The Terror destroyed many aristocratic families, the Napoleonic era revised the nation’s laws and created its own military ruling class, and the old manorial farmlands were broken up and redistributed so that many French peasant farmers owned their own plots — giving them a stake in the new system. As Tocqueville wrote in 1850, the 1830 revolution finished the job:
[French] history from 1789 to 1830 struck me as a pitched battle that raged for forty-one years between the Ancien Régime, with its traditions, memories, and hopes, epitomized by the aristocracy, and the new France, led by the middle class. Eighteen thirty . . . ended this first period. . . . All that remained of the Ancien Régime was destroyed forever.
By 1830, the triumph of the middle class was definitive, and so complete that all political power, all franchises, all prerogatives, and the entire government were confined and somehow squeezed within the narrow limits of the bourgeoisie, legally excluding everything below it and in fact all that had once stood above. The bourgeoisie became not only society’s sole ruler but also its financier. It occupied all places, vastly increased the number of places to be occupied, and became accustomed to living almost as much off the public exchequer as off the fruits of its own industry.
Suffrage under the July Monarchy was narrowly limited by property qualifications: The French electorate had 250,000 voters by 1848, compared with 5 million in 1804, on the eve of the first French Empire.
Louis Philippe’s 18 years on the throne oversaw a significant shift toward a modern industrial capitalist economy, reflecting its bourgeois base of power. On a per capita basis, the French economy grew at an annual rate of 1.8 percent in the 1830s compared with 0.5 percent in the 1820s. Industry was concentrated in Paris, which swelled the power of the capital while creating a resentful and disenfranchised laboring class. Two-thirds of the city’s population lived in abject poverty in slums built in medieval times. Flooding and bad potato and grain harvests in 1846–47 combined with a severe industrial contraction to strain public patience to the breaking point.
Tocqueville, who had served in the assembly of the July Monarchy since 1839, began to warn his colleagues of the grave dangers they faced. In October 1847, he drafted a manifesto (never published) raising the alarm that “political struggle will soon pit those who own property against those who do not.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published their own manifesto on the opposite side of that question five months later. There were already signs of local trouble elsewhere in Europe, beginning with a Sicilian revolt against rule by Naples that broke out in Palermo on January 12, 1848.
Tocqueville rose in the assembly on January 29, 1848, to deliver a jeremiad. While a vivid writer, he was by his own admission a diffident public speaker. The speech itself contained a bracing warning:
Do you not see that opinions and ideas are slowly spreading among [the working classes] that will someday overturn not only laws, ministries, and governments but society itself . . . ? My deepest conviction, gentlemen, is this: I believe we are presently sleeping on a volcano.
The problem was not merely unrest from below, but that the nation’s rulers were no longer worthy to rule, and that reforms to the electoral and parliamentary systems, while necessary, were insufficient:
When I study other times, other eras, and other nations in search of the true cause of the governing class’s downfall, . . . the effective cause that deprives men of power, is this: that they have become unworthy of wielding it. . . . Laws alone do not determine the fate of nations. No, great events come not from the mechanism of the law but from the spirit of the government. Keep the laws, if you wish. . . . Even keep the men if it pleases you. . . . But for God’s sake, change the spirit of the government. . . . that spirit is driving you into the abyss.
The emphasis on the virtue (or lack thereof) of the government, rather than its structure, sounds notes more of John Adams than of James Madison. Tocqueville’s reflection on the reaction to the speech illustrated his point. Nobody, not even those who applauded it “for partisan reasons rather than out of conviction,” actually believed that revolution was at hand. Tocqueville blamed “the inveterate habit” of parliamentarians daily painting their opponents with catastrophizing rhetoric, which “made them more or less incapable of recognizing what was real and true.”
Both sides had so often asserted things they did not really believe that in the end they believed nothing, even when the event arrived that would prove them both right. Even my own friends believed that there was an element of rhetoric in my speech. . . . Now that I am alone with my thoughts, I search my memory and wonder if I was indeed as frightened as I appeared to be, and I find that the answer is no.
It is not difficult to see here a reflection of our own political class, its two camps so busy idly accusing each other of dooming the country that both would be unable to recognize a genuine disaster on the eve of its occurrence. These are the people who spent February 2020, in the opening act of a world-changing pandemic, arguing about impeaching a president who was about to face the voters anyway — and thus devaluing the weapon of impeachment when they really needed it less than a year later. This is the governing spirit of a nation in which the aging president accuses the legislature of wanting to do something about a fast-approaching fiscal catastrophe and goads them into loudly denying it.
Institutions matter, but so does character. The government of the July Monarchy took on the character of its chief executive. Tocqueville saw the king as a cynic with “profound contempt for the truth” and a “complete disbelief in virtue,” a man “slower to change his thinking but quicker to change his conduct than anyone I have ever known.” At 74, he lacked courage, energy, or the capacity to see new things brewing on the horizon.
The assembly, with little governing authority, devolved into debates for entertainment. “Assemblies are like children, idleness seldom fails to make them do or say many foolish things.” Tocqueville had no use for bringing “the literary spirit into politics,” by which he meant “the error of valuing what is ingenious and new rather than what is true, what makes an interesting scene rather than what serves a useful purpose. It is responding to the talent and elocution of the actors rather than to the consequences of the play.”
A protest movement arose to challenge the July Monarchy’s ban on public assemblies. In French fashion, the meetings were to be styled as private banquets, essentially moderate bourgeois gatherings demanding reforms. One of the organizers was Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville’s best friend and his traveling companion in America. Tocqueville warned him that attempts to recruit the mass of the population to the cause would go badly:
For the first time in eighteen years, you’re trying to speak to the people and seeking support outside the middle class. If you fail to stir up the people, which seems to be the most likely outcome, . . . you will become even more odious than you already are in the eyes of the government and the middle class . . . and you will thus strengthen the power you seek to overthrow. If, on the other hand, you do stir them up, you have no more idea than I do where such agitation may lead.
No banquet had yet been held in Paris, and it was widely recognized that holding one would be an escalation. After the king insulted the banquet organizers, they could not back down. Lines were drawn among men who took positions more out of fear of losing supporters than out of belief in what they were doing. Radicals who thought it premature to push for a revolution “felt obliged to distinguish themselves from their allies in the dynastic opposition by delivering highly revolutionary speeches at the banquets.” As Tocqueville concluded:
One has to have spent long years in the whirlwind of party politics to understand the extent to which men drive one another off their intended courses, so that the direction in which the world moves is often quite different from what its movers intend, just as the movement of a kite is determined by the opposing tugs of wind and string.
The dynamic of letting negative partisanship supplant thinking is all too apparent in today’s America.
Both sides of the banquet dispute chose a step that appeared, on its face, to be peaceful but symbolized their inability to take responsibility: “Government and opposition in effect challenged each other to a duel, to be fought at the bar of justice. It was tacitly agreed that the opposition would hold one last banquet and that the government would not prevent the meeting but would prosecute the organizers, after which the courts would decide.” We can see again the echo in our own time of the political branches’ preference for letting the courts do their dirty work.
The last banquet would be in Paris. The date chosen — which American newspapers found symbolic — was February 22, George Washington’s birthday. The House of Orléans did the opposite of what the Bourbons had done in 1830 in retrenching behind the absolute rule of the throne “yet achieved the same result.” When the bourgeois demonstrations turned abruptly into mass protests by the urban poor, the aging king lacked the strength of will to face the crisis. In the early-morning hours of February 24, he abdicated, leaving France rudderless. In Tocqueville’s phrase, “the government was not toppled; it was allowed to fall.”
In part two, I will look at why the socialist revolutionaries failed to capitalize on the fall of the monarchy.