Alexis de Tocqueville's Recollections—his memoir of the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath—is a fascinating book. But the portrait of the author that emerges from its pages is one very different from what one might expect, if we knew him only from Democracy in America. Gone is the intellectual humility and value pluralism that we know from Tocqueville's theoretical and sociological treatises. In its place, we find a certain moral arrogance, a snarky sense of humor (willing to mercilessly skewer his contemporaries on the point of an epigram), and a constant desire to justify himself.
I suspect partly that Tocqueville's wish to portray himself as the hero of his own story—the man who knew all and foresaw all, and behaved at all times with superlative honor—stems from a subconscious awareness that, in reality, he played a fairly compromised role in the events he describes. He defends the temporary military dictatorship of Cavaignac, for instance—and the "state of siege" that suspended civil liberties in the wake of the June uprising of 1848—as necessary measures to save the nation.
He passes rapidly over the scenes of repression and bloodshed that these measures entailed, which Alexander Herzen describes with such fire in From the Other Shore: the mass executions, the firing squads, the deportations carried out in the republic's name under Tocqueville's supposedly "moderate" republican government. He casts himself in the admirable role of trying to talk down the national guard from committing certain excesses of zeal in defense of the "moderate" order (such as shooting unarmed, unresisting prisoners); but at the same time, he supports the general crackdown on press freedoms and other stern measures taken to suppress the rebellion.
"For my part," Tocqueville insists, "I believed [...] that, after such a violent revolution, the only way to save freedom was to restrict it. [...] Accordingly we introduced the following measures: a law to suspend the clubs, another to suppress the vagaries of the press with even more energy than had been used under the Monarchy, and a third to regularize the state of siege."
It's hard to see in that passage any lingering trace of the gentle soul who weighed up conflicting values in Democracy in America and wrote so stirringly about the risk of excessive concentrations of power.
(Though in one passage, Tocqueville does allow himself to confess a certain grim horror at his role in these events of 1848. After he urged soldiers to kill prisoners who show signs of resisting, he describes "feeling astonished at the nature of the arguments I had just been using and the speed with which, within two days, I had become familiar with ideas of relentless destruction and severity, ideas that were far from my natural bent." (Lawrence trans.) I am reminded of a powerful line from Brecht: "I suddenly took fright at this voice of mine/ This behaviour of mine and this/ Whole world." (Constantine/Kuhn trans.))
Later on, to be sure, Tocqueville famously broke with Louis Napoleon's government, after the latter staged a coup d'état. This act on Tocqueville's part took real moral and political courage, and he has been justly celebrated for not being willing to go along with the would-be "Emperor's" overthrow of the second republic.
But the text of the memoir shows that Tocqueville also played a somewhat morally ambiguous role within Bonaparte's government during his presidency (i.e., before the 1851 coup)—one that was not always so consistent with his integrity.
Tocqueville freely admits in his recollections that he privately opposed the 1849 French expedition to Rome, which overthrew the nascent Roman republic and re-installed the Pope. He says this war was illegal and violated an express provision of the new Constitution. Nonetheless, Tocqueville stood up before the national assembly and defended Bonaparte's actions in that chamber (admittedly, he had little choice if he wanted to keep his job—he served as the president's Minister for Foreign Affairs at the time).
Tocqueville defends this decision on his part by saying that, even though he "entirely disapproved of the way in which the Roman expedition had been undertaken and conducted," he spoke in its favor purely in order to oppose the left-wing politicians who wanted to use the illegality of the war as a pretext to bring down the government. Thus, he says, he used his speech to oppose revolution, "without saying anything about the fundamental issue" of the justice or legality of the war itself.
This claim, however, is belied by the text of Tocqueville's speech, which is included in the Routledge edition. Here, we see that Tocqueville did indeed defend the war on the merits—addressing the "fundamental issue" in question—despite his private misgivings. He claims, for instance, that France has agreed to restore the Pope to temporal power solely on the condition that he undertake liberal reforms and not engage in too many cruel reprisals; though at the same time, he insists that the papacy's vague promises on this subject are sufficient, and he says that the Pope need not extend the amnesty to "certain men who were particularly dangerous to public order."
One is tempted to echo at this point the "laughter and ironical comments from the Left" that reportedly greeted Tocqueville's assurances on this subject.
It's hard to see Tocqueville, then, as having preserved his honor as a friend of liberty wholly intact, during the years he served in government. To be sure, as I say, he does still deserve credit for refusing to go along with Louis Napoleon's scheme to subvert the constitutional order. But here again, Tocqueville played a somewhat ambivalent role. He records conversations with the future "Emperor" that show he was far from trying to talk the president out of his extreme ambitions. To the contrary, Tocqueville admits that he helped the president explore various legal options to stay in power beyond his constitutional term limit.
Tocqueville's reason for participating in such strategy sessions, he tells us, is intriguing and rife with relevance for our own political moment. He tells us, for instance, that he realized early on that Bonaparte would never be satisfied with simply retiring from his political career after only a single term (which was all the Constitution of 1848 allowed him), and so, it was necessary to find a permanent role for Louis Napoleon in government—or else he would try to overthrow the republic and subvert the Constitution (as he ultimately did).
"It seemed to me very doubtful that such a man, after ruling France for four years, could be sent back into private life; that he should agree to go, quite fantastic; even to prevent him, while his mandate lasted, from throwing himself into some dangerous undertaking, seemed tremendously difficult, unless one could find some prospect to charm, or at least to content his ambition," Tocqueville writes.
And again, later on: "From the beginning I took the line that one must find some regular future career for him to prevent him from looking for an irregular one; for it was no use dreaming that he would be President for a time and nothing more[.]"
It's impossible to read that passage today and not think of our current president—who served one term in office, lost an election, promptly tried and failed to stage a coup to overturn the results, then came back to office four years later, and now—just like Louis Napoleon—openly talks about pursuing yet another term in office, in violation of constitutional term limits.
Tocqueville's private conversations with Bonaparte about how he might circumvent the Constitution's one-term limit bear an eerie resemblance, then, to the way Trump's advisors and propagandists still openly discuss various schemes to elect Trump to an unconstitutional third term.
And indeed, the government that resulted from Bonaparte's eventual subversion of the constitution and overthrow of the republic is one that sounds a great deal like the sort that Trump is seeking to establish here: "a bastard monarchy," Tocqueville calls it, "despised by all the enlightened classes, hostile to liberty, and controlled by intriguers, adventurers and lackeys[.]"
Tocqueville harps in particular on this theme of the kind of person that the future Napoleon III inevitably drew to his banner: "low-class adventurers, ruined men or men of blemished reputations, and young debauchees," he calls them.
Who can read that passage today and not think of the type of creature that seems to swarm around Trump, as if drawn by a magnetic principle? Has anyone not noticed at this point that he unerringly attracts to his circle every possible variety of crook and sharper—every "adventurer," "ruined man," or "man of blemished reputation"—the Roger Stones, the George Santoses, the Rod Blagojeviches of the world? They all recognize a fellow con when they see one.
"Intiguers and knaves," every last one—as Tocqueville calls them; a "constellation of caitiffs," Victor Hugo would dub them. Napoleon III preferred—as Tocqueville tells us—to call them simply: "people of my own."
Trump, of course, has not yet managed to realize his own imperial ambitions, the way Napoleon III did. And, now that his second term is already almost a year old, and he seems to lose power, popularity, and influence by the day, he may have missed his window of opportunity to pull off a successful "coup de main" of the sort Louis Napoleon accomplished in 1851.
But certainly, Trump's ambition remains just as fundamentally dangerous as that of the future emperor. It is just as hard to imagine him quietly retiring into private life and accepting the inevitability of legal term limits, when his administration ends in 2029, as it was to picture the young Bonaparte doing the same.
And if that day comes, when Trump once again decides to try to mount a conspiracy to unlawfully cling to power (just as he did four years ago), we may have reason to hope that he has a few Tocquevilles left in his cabinet, who might try to talk him down from it.
As much as Tocqueville emerges from the pages of his memoir with a few moral stains and tatters showing, then—one still has to admire him. He was willing to dirty his own fingers in order to do his part to prevent the future emperor's worst delusions of grandeur. He failed in this effort, to be sure—but had there been even a handful more men of his caliber in Bonaparte's administration—the French republic might have been saved.
We may well have reason soon to wish that we had a Tocqueville or two in our own executive branch today...
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