{I} n part one of this essay on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recollections, I looked at his account of the fall of the July Monarchy of King Louis Philippe in February 1848. Today’s installment examines Tocqueville’s analysis of the revolutionary chaos that followed.

Tocqueville was a classical liberal, passionate about liberty and constitutional government, which he valued more than democracy itself. As he wrote in 1850, “I belong to no party. I have no cause other than that of freedom and human dignity.” He was also fundamentally conservative, respectful of order and tradition, skeptical of mobs and radical change, and implacably hostile to emerging notions of socialism and communism. Outside of the American Founders, whose contributions may best be considered collectively, only Edmund Burke rivals Tocqueville as an intellectual forefather of the fusion of conservatism with Enlightenment classical liberalism.

Tocqueville had a lifelong hatred of socialism and communism, which he viewed as enemies of individual liberty. At the height of the June Days street revolts in Paris in 1848, he wrote that “what is at stake is not the shape of a political regime but property, family, and civilization — in short, everything that makes life worth living.” In a September 1848 speech, he warned that socialism has “a profound contempt for the individual in himself, for the human state.” Moreover, “what characterizes all socialists is a persistent, varied, relentless effort to mutilate, truncate, and impede human liberty in every way possible.” It makes the state to every man “not his master but his tutor, his teacher.” “Lest the state allow the individual to fail, it must always stand beside him, above him, and all around him to guide, support, sustain, and restrain him.”

Socialism, in Tocqueville’s view was therefore irreconcilable with democracy: “Democracy extends the sphere of individual independence; socialism restricts it. Democracy gives each man his full value; socialism turns each man into an agent, an instrument, a cipher.”

A Frenchman but Not a Parisian

Tocqueville’s outlook, which scorned both disorder and centralized authority, was shaped by his background. He came from an aristocratic family that suffered under the Terror during the French Revolution. His maternal great-grandfather defended Louis XVI as a lawyer at his trial and ended up beheaded himself. Tocqueville’s royalist father was a mayor under Napoleon Bonaparte and a regional administrator during the Bourbon Restoration between 1814 and 1830.

Observing his father educated the young Tocqueville in the practical realities of bureaucratic administration and patronage. He came away with great respect for local government but a loathing for centralized bureaucracy. As he wrote in 1854:

I have always had, no matter the regime (I make no exception), a repugnance for bureaucracy. . . . I noticed that, to get ahead, one needed to be pliable and obsequious to those who give you orders, and duplicitous or violent towards those who take orders from you. In France, the administrative state does not conduct itself with the general welfare in mind, but only in the interests of those who govern. And no one can hope to rise in the ranks without subordinating his interests to those of others.

Crucially, Tocqueville was not from Paris. He spent some of the formative years of his youth in Metz, a city close enough to the Rhine that it would be ceded to the German Empire between 1871 and 1919. He lived his adult life in his family’s ancestral home in Normandy, close to the Atlantic and the English Channel, among farmers, merchants, and sailors. It is hard to read his accounts of campaigning for votes in 1848 in Cherbourg and Saint-Lô without thinking of what those names would mean to the cause of liberty nearly a century later.

Tocqueville traveled to Sicily, Switzerland, and Algeria; in America, he went as far west as Memphis, New Orleans, Detroit, and Green Bay. He married an Englishwoman and spent significant time in England after his tour of America. One of his closest correspondents was John Stuart Mill. He was therefore more in tune than many of his countrymen were with the perspectives of British and American thought and less susceptible to the centralizing temptation to treat Parisian elites as France’s natural rulers — and the Parisian mob as the authentic voice of the whole French people.

The Capital’s Riot

“In a riot as in a novel,” Tocqueville observed, “the most difficult thing to imagine is how it ends.” So, people fell into well-worn grooves once monarchy dissolved into anarchy in the streets. The “people were busy reenacting the French Revolution rather than continuing it” — the gestures without the passions — so the whole February revolution “struck me as a wretched tragedy performed by a troupe of clownish provincials.” (In 1852, Marx would use a similar phrase about tragedy repeating as farce to famous effect in describing Louis Napoleon’s coup.)

In the revolutionary atmosphere, Tocqueville saw how easily the radicals overcame the moderate reformers: “In any political assembly, those who want both the means and the end gain the upper hand in the long run over those who want one without the other.” Tocqueville scorned the “garden-variety French revolutionary of the sort for whom freedom of the people has always meant despotism exercised in the people’s name.” Yet, it was “a waste of time to look for secret conspiracies that might produce an event of this kind,” as the revolution was spontaneous; the only merit in those who came to the fore was “the courage to press on when the wind is favorable.”

When that moment presented itself, “centralization . . . reduced the work of revolution to seizing Paris and the ready-made machinery of government.” That machinery — the French “deep state” in today’s terms — was more eager to preserve itself than it was concerned about who sat at the top, while the opposition was no less eager simply to obtain positions:

The government’s downfall comprised this man’s entire fortune, that man’s daughter’s dowry, and the career of yet another man’s son. . . . They were devoted to it in the same straightforward, unflappable way that a farmer is devoted to his field. . . . The truth — the deplorable truth — is that eagerness to hold public office and to live off tax receipts is not a malady peculiar to one party; it is a serious and permanent infirmity of the nation itself. It is the joint product of a democratically constituted civil society and an excessively centralized government.

As Tocqueville concluded later, “When people claim that nothing is safe from revolution, I say they are wrong: centralization is safe.” It was the one thing that united the monarchists and the radicals in France: Even when they disagreed on its application, they reliably came together around the principle.

This contrasted precisely with the virtues Tocqueville celebrated in the America of his day, when the federal administrative state was very small, power was distributed among the states, and most administrative power at the state and local level was exercised by short-tenured elected officials accountable to the people. Of all the ways in which America has changed since Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, the concentration of permanent administrative authority in the nation’s capital is the one that would likely alarm him the most.

Men changed their views as needed to hold onto authority: “I have often observed that in politics, having too good a memory can often be fatal.” He observed a particular bit of black comedy when a list of members of the provisional government was to be announced: One of the leaders refused to be the one to read it because it would be inappropriate to announce a list with his name on it, while another felt it insulting to announce a list without his name on it.

Among all classes, “People who are unafraid in revolutionary times are like princes in the army.” Legislators were unused to being asked to display physical courage, but Tocqueville understood that the most important thing for them to do was simply keep showing up for work: “It is especially in revolutionary times that even the least important of legal institutions, or, for that matter, any external symbol that reminds people of the idea of law, takes on the greatest importance” in maintaining order and popular respect. “My maxim in moments of crisis has always been that you should not only be present in the assembly of which you are a member but also sit in the place where people are accustomed to seeing you.” The parliaments of Ukraine and Israel have been the latest to remember the power of this lesson.

He found “the men who lose their heads most readily and prove weakest in the face of popular unrest to be the men of war,” accustomed as they were to obedient subordinates and clear objectives. By contrast with the political class, the upper middle class, “for whose benefit [the July Monarchy] has forfeited its popularity would rather denounce it along with everyone else than fight for the privileges it secured for them.” To Tocqueville, this illustrated the folly of a government dependent on a single class for its support.

Failed States, Failed Men

In the crucible of revolution, he found that some people failed, some were exposed, and some were elevated above their capabilities or their virtues. His sister-in-law “had, as usual, lost her composure” at fear for her family and had “little interest in anyone else. . . . One could not hope to meet a more decent woman or a worse citizen.” Molé, a relative whose efforts to aid Tocqueville in the past he had long viewed with suspicion, was “always for sale” and “reminds me of those old libertines who continue to fool around with girls when they can no longer do anything else with them, because vice had become such an insuperable habit.”

Lamennais, one of the radicals, drew another of Tocqueville’s most barbed portraits:

If you want to form an accurate idea of the indestructible and, as it were, infinite power of the clerical spirit and habits exert on anyone who has ever acquired them, you would do well to consider the example of the defrocked priest. Although Lamennais wore white stockings, a yellow waistcoat, a colorful tie, and a green frock coat, he nevertheless retained his priestly character and appearance. He took short, quick steps, never turned his head or looked directly at anyone, and slipped through crowds with an awkward, modest air, as if he had just emerged from a sacristy, yet he was a proud enough man to walk on the heads of kings and argue with God himself.

Ledru-Rollin, widely viewed as the most dangerous of the left-populist demagogues, was to Tocqueville a “great big, highly sensual, highly impulsive boy” who “was incapable of cutting an enemy’s throat except as a historical reminiscence or a gesture to his friends.” By contrast, Tocqueville saw Lamartine, the provisional foreign minister and, politically, a liberal, as the most irresponsible sort of demagogue:

Among the selfish and ambitious men I have known, I do not think I ever met anyone who gave less thought to the public good than he. I have known many men prepared to stir up the country for their own advantage. . . . But he was the only one who seemed to me prepared to turn the world upside down for his own amusement. . . . He never honored truth sufficiently to be concerned about it in any way whatsoever. In speech and on paper he wove in and out of the truth without noticing what he was doing. At every moment his only concern was to create a certain effect.

Tocqueville spoke regularly with one of Lamartine’s allies, Champeaux: “By talking with him I gained a better idea of Lamartine’s ideas and plans than I could have gleaned from listening to Lamartine himself. Lamartine’s intelligence shone through Champeaux’s stupidity like the sun through smoked glass: the brightness was dimmed, but you could see the thing itself more clearly than with the naked eye.”

Tocqueville saved his greatest contempt for the “striking servility” of “erstwhile conservatives” he saw in Saint-Lô towards a left-wing figure they had been denouncing for years:

[They] fawned on him as assiduous courtiers. They praised him with their words, justified him with their votes, and approved his actions with gentle nods. They even spoke well of him among themselves lest some indiscretion betray their true feelings. I have seen more impressive specimens of human baseness but none more perfect.

Within months, when the winds shifted, they resumed their denunciations. Today’s American conservatives have seen all too many of their number change their tune on Donald Trump back and forth based on whether they thought he was rising or falling.

The Failure of the Revolutionaries

The socialist revolutionaries were the first of the factions to fail. Nursed in the streets of Paris, they demanded universal suffrage and were stunned when it returned an assembly loyal to French farmers who were not eager to abolish their own property rights. During revolutions, as Tocqueville observed, rural populations are “the last to stand and the last to sit back down.” Rather than enlist indebted farmers against their creditors (as did the American populists of the 1780s and 1890s), the Parisian socialists railed against property itself. That wouldn’t fly because of wider property ownership among peasant farmers after the French Revolution broke up the aristocratic landed estates.

As Tocqueville concluded:

There have been revolutionaries more vicious than those of 1848, but none stupider. . . . Even as they submitted themselves to the judgment of the nation, they did everything they could to alienate it. . . . They jealously closed ranks and seemed to set themselves an insoluble problem, namely, how to establish majority rule against the wishes of the majority.

Today’s progressives, bent on esoteric cultural causes that alienate working-class voters, march in the same direction.

“Insurrections — those that succeed,” Tocqueville noted, “usually begin without a leader but always end with one.” Popular assemblies of revolutionaries were “busily manufacturing principles that could later be used to justify acts of violence,” but the socialists as yet lacked the organized will to impose a tyranny by bloody force. So, their moment passed, and in spite of a significant faction in the assembly, it would not return until the nation was overrun by an invader 23 years later. The June Days insurrection was leaderless and brutally suppressed by the army, with vast loss of life.

Having carried pistols to raucous public marches in May 1848, Tocqueville kept his distance from the violence in June: “I can’t think of anything more foolish than getting yourself killed because you can’t control your curiosity about war.” Even so, he found that he needed the pistols to intimidate the porter of his own house, who had a knife and had talked of killing him. The porter, “an old soldier . . . was a slightly daft, good-for-nothing drunkard who spent all his time in the tavern when he wasn’t beating his wife.” In short, “one might say that he was a born socialist, or rather a socialist by temperament.”

At the height of the June Days, the common people outside Paris supported the republic; many volunteers streamed in to support the assembly against the Parisians (something similar had happened to stave off any insurrection in London earlier in that year of revolutions on the continent). Tocqueville predicted in a letter that “if we are defeated . . . the reddest of republics will control Paris.” And, “if that happens, the Assembly will leave Paris en masse and call France to arms” against it. This proved an accurate prediction of how the rest of France would react to the Paris Commune in 1871, but, for now, the liberals would have the opportunity to make for the French a republic — if they could keep it.

In part three of this essay, I will look at how the republic and its new constitution missed their window of opportunity.