The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism

This book is the last completed work of one of the most distinguished political theorists and intellectual historians of our time. Focusing on the political ideas and activities of leading French liberals from approximately 1805 into the Second Empire, Professor Kelly presents a distinctive blending of ideological and intellectual history, biography, analysis of French regimes and their changes, and his own reflections concerning the wide and still highly pertinent range of issues and themes considered. Beginning with a subtle analysis of the complex patterns of agreement and disagreement between the liberalisms of Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville, the work offers a sophisticated examination of the attempts of a sequence of liberal thinkers to harmonize their commitments to political and civil liberty with one another, and with their profound desire for a legitimate and stable political order. Giving close but never reductive attention to the intellectual, political, and more closely personal biographies of the figures he considers, Professor Kelly provides nuanced accounts and appreciations of de Stael and Guizot, Royer-Collard and Remusat, Cousin and Lamartine, Laboulaye, Ollivier, and Baudelaire. A major theme, of great relevance to the current debates about liberalism, is the contrast between the vigor and brilliance of these thinkers as political critics, their inefrlcacy as political actors, and their ultimate retreat from political life.

THE HUMANE COMEDY: CONSTANT, TOCQUEVILLE AND FRENCH LIBERALISM

THE HUMANE COMEDY CONSTANT, TOCQUEVILLE AND FRENCH LIBERALISM GEORGE ARMSTRONG KELLY Late Visiting Professor of Humanities and Political Science, Johns Hopkins University WITH A FOREWORD BY STEPHEN R. GRAUBARD

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521412278 © Cambridge University Press 1992 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1992 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Kelly, George Armstrong The humane comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French liberalism / George Armstrong Kelly; with a foreword by Stephen R. Graubard. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0 521 41227 7 1. Liberalism-France-History-19th century. 2. France-Politics and government-19th century. 3. Constant, Benjamin, 1767-1830Contributions in political science. 4. Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859-Contributions in political science. I. Title. JA84.F8K45 1992 91-10120 320.5'12'0944-DC20 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-41227-8 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-41227-7 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-03072-4 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-03072-2 paperback

Contents

Foreword: Stephen R. Graubard Acknowledgements 1

i II in iv 2

page ix xiv

PORTS IN THE STORM

Liberty: last port of call Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon Royer-Collard: steering by the Charter Tocqueville: sailing the open sea CONSTANT VERSUS TOCQJJEVILLE

1 Social settings of the political self 11 Ages of the spirit in Ancestral voices 3

i 6 17 27

39 55 69

IN PARTIBUS FIDELIUM

1 Faith in freedom 85 11 Protestant protocols: Necker, Madame de Stael, Vinet, Guizot 93 in Catholic submissions: Lacordaire, Montalembert 115 4

PHILOSOPHY AS CIVIL RELIGION

1 How dogmas begin: Jouffroy, Cousin, Damiron 11 How dogmas develop: Cousin in How dogmas dissolve: the "affaire Pascal"

Vll

134 155 168

viii 5

Contents LAMARTINE, LIBERALISM'S FALLEN ANGEL

i II in D

Ut poesis politica ? Another kind of liberty Liberalism against liberals

181 196 209

PARNASSIAN LIBERALISM

1 11 in iv Index

Steps to Parnassus The sadness of Tocqueville The airs of Renan The disgust of Flaubert

221 227 236 245 256

Foreword by Stephen R. Graubard

The premature and untimely death of an active and engaged scholar is always tragic. In the case of the late Professor George Armstrong Kelly, the tragedy is compounded by his not having witnessed what so few imagined even possible at the time of his death in December 1987 - the sudden and complete collapse of many of the principal Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, and the growth of a new interest in liberal institutions and values. How one wishes that the author of this work had lived to see these events, to comment on them, to place them in a historical frame, to explain why Tocqueville and any number of other nineteenth-century French liberals are again in fashion, not so much with the politicians of our day as with those who are scholars, committed to seeing how the past lives on in the present. George Kelly had many distinctions - not the least being his capacity to "trespass" intellectually on many fields, ignoring many of the conventional disciplinary boundaries, making each of the ones he entered his own, without ever appearing to be aggressive or aggrandizing. His interests were legion, his capacities for empathy and understanding so wide-ranging that it seemed as natural for him to be concerned with Hegel as with the French twentieth-century colonial imbroglio in Algeria, with the problems of the American university as with the more cosmic issues raised by the French Revolution, with religious and political consciousness in the United States as with what he chose to call "mortal politics" in eighteenthcentury France. The titles of his books are invariably arresting; they suggest a feeling for language, a concern with those qualities that another age called "belletristic," rarely encountered in many who today see themselves as political theorists when they are not aspiring to the even more grandiose claim of being recognized as political scientists.

x

Foreword

George Kelly, who occupied academic posts with various highly descriptive titles, held at least one that came close to defining at least some of his major interests. He was, for a time, Professor at Brandeis University of Politics, Philosophy, and the History of Ideas. When, at a later date, at Johns Hopkins University, he became for the last years of his life Visiting Professor of Humanities and Political Science, his attributes and interests were even more precisely stated. Had he also borne the title of Professor of History - perhaps even of Intellectual History - and had that title suggested his capacity to place the subjects covered by that amorphous (and very American) discipline in a political and social frame, which was always his prime intention, his scholarship might have been seen for what it was, a continuing exploration of subjects that belonged to no single academic discipline, that took their unity mostly from the fact that they all engaged him. The last of his books, incomplete at the time of his death, was sufficiently advanced to be more than a collection of discrete chapters or essays. Though they may lack the final polish that he would have insisted on, they are in no sense a fragment of a larger work whose major contours are undiscernable by the tragedy of the book being unfinished. The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville and

French Liberalism emerges at a time when the interest in liberalism has never been higher. 1989, the year that George Kelly did not live to see, was an annus mirabilis as important in its own way as any of the others that he reflected on and wrote about. It is, in every respect, a year as unpredictable in its long-range consequences, in its mysterious and obscure beginnings, as any of those others that generated the liberal nineteenth-century intellectual systems which, in George Kelly's memorable phrase, chose to "put liberty first." The fact that liberalism is today a subject of world-wide interest, that it comes almost as a political gift - with all of its obvious ambiguities and hazards - to a number of European societies politically and intellectually submerged for decades, makes for the new and very substantial scholarly interest in the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury origins of a movement that at many times in our century seemed relegated to that "ash heap of history," that Marxists were so fond of describing. For many of our contemporaries, preoccupied, by choice or necessity, with political and social doctrines that boasted very different intellectual origins, whose mythic structures embraced

Foreword

xi

quite distinctive and unique concepts of freedom, though in forms massively uncongenial and unwelcome to those who continued to believe in other kinds of liberty, 1989 can never simply be 1848 redux. On the contrary, despite all the talk of "free markets" and the like, with the suggestion that there is a new European capitalism in the making, there are many, and not only among the more prominent of the Central, Eastern European, and Soviet intelligentsia, who are focusing today on quite other questions, those insistently and imaginatively posed over many decades in the wake of Napoleon's own failed imperial ambitions. To ask those questions, in whatever form, is to have affinity with those who lived in the long shadow cast by Napoleon and the French Revolution. George Kelly would have found preposterious the idea that we are witnessing today circumstances fundamentally like those that followed on Waterloo. Yet, the conditions in early nineteenthcentury France, that led whole generations, with or without personal experiences and memories of revolution, to reflect anew on the meaning of liberty has contemporary meaning and significance in ways that would not have been nearly so obvious even a few years ago. On one level, The Humane Comedy may be read as a work of history, even of French history; on another, it needs to be seen as a more analytic work, which deals with politics and religion - with belief more generally - which seeks to restore not only intellectual reputations that had all but disintegrated, but to revive memories of political debates and conflicts that were ignored precisely because they were so recently thought to be inconsequential, irrelevant. In a time when intellectual fashions change rapidly, it may be useful to be reminded that the restoration of interest in someone even as important as Alexis de Tocqueville is largely a matter of the new European and American scholarship of recent decades. The same, in a much less conspicuous way, may be said of Benjamin Constant. Not the least of the many accomplishments of George Kelly is to be able to give the minds, ambitions, and accomplishments of these men a wholly new dimension. With that, he does something which may be no less important, to give new life to intellectual figures like Royer-Collard, Lamartine, Lamennais, Laboulaye, and even Renan, nineteenth-century giants who had been thrown from their oncelofty French pedestals. Few, in recent decades, have seen them as European pilgrims on an unmarked and largely untravelled road, which bore the name Liberty, compelling them to engage in

xii

Foreword

constant combat with forces ranged under banners as different as those of Authority, History, and Anarchy. Kelly's capacity to make these and many others seem very contemporary - it is best to avoid the somewhat shopworn phrase "relevant" - i s achieved not by taking them out of their historical periods but precisely by insisting that they must be seen in the context of the politics and intellectual life of their day. They are not "disembodied theorists," part of a twentieth-century "canon"; rather, even as we understand their relevance today, they are individuals engaged in deliberate and desperate attempts to understand the age they are living in, the society that is at that very moment being formed. Almost none of them, in recent years, during the period when Marx and Marxism were regnant in so many intellectual quarters, had been able to gain very much of a hearing. One need not be accused of engaging in what is today a new and rather vulgar intellectual sport - conducting yet another requiem for Marx and Marxism - when one suggests that liberalism has revived today in a way that few expected it to do even as recently as the time of George Kelly's death. The revival of Tocqueville had of course started much earlier; it owed a great deal to French scholars, including, most obviously, Raymond Aron, and, more recently, Francois Furet, but also a number of other distinguished French, American, and British researchers. Not the least of George Kelly's achievements, however, is that he makes Tocqueville's conceptual principles come alive in ways that makes his nineteenth-century concern with the "stabilization of modern liberty" meaningful, recognizing how integral his religious views were to a system that called for a "new political science," suited to a new age. He does much the same with Benjamin Constant, giving his views on war and commerce, on the destructiveness of the "spirit of conquest," a meaning that few others had thought to consider. Indeed, in the very comparison of the two men, Kelly achieves an understanding of the multiple spiritual sources of the liberal experiment. Again, this was a subject that few scholars were inclined to reflect on in a more secular age, so superficially self-confident and assertive. Kelly writes about both in ways that would have been almost unthinkable in the nineteenth century, inconceivable in the 1960s and 1970s. The measure of Kelly's achievement with all of those whom he treats so imaginatively is precisely that what he says about them is

Foreword

xiii

novel, intended to be provocative. More than any number of others who have surveyed many of the same liberal traditions, Kelly has established links and affiliations, unperceived by others, that help to explain why intellectual families are as complex and convoluted as they seem to be. To have written a new kind of late-twentiethcentury history of nineteenth-century liberalism without simply extolling those whom he correctly and selectively admires for lucidity and insight is to show the passion appropriate to the committed scholar. His purpose was neither to write "puffs" for deceased great minds nor to prepare a new defense of liberalism. Knowing the intellectual strengths and weaknesses of his characters, recognizing them not least in what he in one instance calls their " complacency and social blindness," his is a tale of failure even more than of success. 1848, though only briefly treated, is given a new meaning as Kelly considers how it went off its tracks, why it generated the "mediocrity" that soon became the hallmark of the age. This work, brilliantly descriptive of the politics and intellectual life of the age of Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis Philippe, and Napoleon III, is in fact an extended essay on the Enlightenment, but even more, on the ways in which the twentieth century has chosen to interpret the period. But beyond all this, Kelly raises questions about whether all his subjects were not essentially "men of letters," and whether the arts of statesmanship are within the compass of individuals formed by such training, having those ambitions. That issue may be even more alive in the 1990s than it was when he was preparing his manuscript in the 1980s. Indeed, George Kelly's The Humane Comedy raises the question of whether the preparation for politics, for a political career in the largest sense, does not have to be reconsidered again. This time, however, even a fundamental revision of twentiethcentury history may be at hand.

Acknowledgements

George Armstrong Kelly's too-early death left me his literary executor. My first task has been to see that his final masterwork, The Humane Comedy. Constant, Tocqueville and French Liberalism, be pub-

lished. To this end, Richard Fisher of Cambridge University Press has been unfailingly generous with his time and effort. There are three people who deserve especial thanks for their help and understanding. Stephen R. Graubard, the editor of Daedalus, was central to the editing suggestions that shaped the final manuscript. His introduction is invaluable in providing the context in which this book should be placed. Richard Flathman, the George Armstrong Kelly Memorial Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University, gave a careful reading and editing of the galleys. He has been a stalwart friend. There is no way I can properly express the full measure of my gratitude to Joanne Lyman, Professor Kelly's widow, whose loving encouragement and understanding has brought my task to a joyful conclusion. James Chace

CHAPTER I

Ports in the storm

i.

LIBERTY: LAST PORT OF GALL

To be liberal, Aristotle wrote, is "to give the right people the right amount, at the right time." 1 While that pre-modern definition could be stretched tofitearly-nineteenth-century French liberalism — and the Aristotelian mean invoked in support of its juste milieu — the immortal soul of this doctrine is elsewhere. It is best described as "putting liberty first." The liberals were not entirely agreed on the sources or forms of liberty, or on its errand; but they were persuaded that it was sacred air - especially for connoisseurs with fine lungs. For some, this liberty was "natural," for others it was "useful"; for still others, "it is a privilege of noble minds which God has fitted to receive it, and it inspires them with a generous fervor."2 Above all, it was defined, to a large degree, by what menaced it, by alternative priorities of value, notably Throne and Altar and the populist Republic (hyperbolically labelled "tyranny" and "anarchy" on occasion by liberal publicists). Most can agree that liberalism - sometimes audacious under Bonaparte (at least from the distance of Coppet), pert and challenging under Charles X - failed in the July Monarchy, with lasting effects on the French body politic. Whether this was the great failure of an inspired political theory or the unlamentable and petty failure of social closure and social greed remains arguable. The propaganda of the last century has done much to make the second thesis carry weight. Yet much of this liberal spirit of long ago is neither insufferably "bourgeois" nor untimely today. Perhaps it is true that French liberalism was too narrow; perhaps also it was too 1 2

Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, 1120a. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (trans. S. Gilbert, New York, 1955). P- l 6 9 -

2

Ports in the storm

smugly comfortable. What seems obvious is that its brilliance in opposition was matched by a mediocrity in power. For, in opposition, "putting liberty first" could not fail to mean using to best advantage those tools of voice and pen by which liberals excelled. When one thinks of Madame de Stael, Constant, Royer-Collard, Guizot, Remusat, Montalembert, and Tocqueville, it is not too much to say that opposition exalts the critical talents of the liberal and nourishes his glory. Power seems to rob him of his element. There were several strains of liberty that nineteenth-century liberalism inherited from the past: liberty of conscience and free examination; the utilitarian liberty of Helvetius and sensationalist philosophy; the regulated civil liberty of Montesquieu; the heroic liberty of the "rights of man " that dominated the earlier phase of the Revolution. Each of these, disproportionately and at different times, played a role in emerging doctrine. But most characteristic of the new liberalism was a respiritualization of its philosophical base — a movement away from the "Ideologie" of Destutt de Tracy toward a more idealized and voluntaristic version of human freedom.3 The greatest oracles of that version were Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville. Regarding his commitment to liberty, Constant wrote in 1829: "For forty years I have defended the same principle, liberty in everything, in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in industry, in politics: and by liberty I mean the triumph of individuality, over both the authority wishing to rule despotically and the masses demanding the right to subject the minority to the majority."4 As for Tocqueville, describing his sentiments after the July Revolution from the vantage of 1848: " I had spent the best days of my youth amid a society which seemed to increase in greatness and prosperity as it increased in liberty; I had conceived the idea of a balanced, regulated liberty, held in check by religion, custom, and law; the attractions of this liberty had touched me; it had become the passion of my life; I felt that I could never be consoled for its loss."5 Already we perceive some impending friction 3

4

5

For " Ideologie," its sources and progeny, see Cheryl B. Welch, The French Ideologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York, 1984). Benjamin Constant, preface to Melanges de litte'rature et de politique (1829), m Marcel Gauchet, ed., Constant, De la liberte chez les modernes (Paris, 1980), p. 519. Tocqueville, Recollections (trans. A. Teixeira de Mattos, Cleveland, 1959), p. 68. Tocqueville signifies here the period 1815-1824; for elsewhere he says of Louis XVIII: "He was the only sovereign of France who had the good sense, or the patience, to rule constitutionally." M . C. M . Simpson, ed., Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau

William Senior (2 vols., London, 1872), 1, 243.

Liberty: last port of call

3

between the two thinkers: what has the "triumph of individuality " to do exactly with "balanced, regulated liberty"? But for now we need only notice the intellectual and spiritual properties of liberty in both accounts. Any serious anatomy of French liberalism requires particular attention to the Constant-Tocqueville relationship. Such an inquiry could be pursued as a dialogue of existential voices, as a comparison of structures of belief and argument, a crossreferencing of allied visions. That should be our goal and result. But the result also needs a contextual milieu. It needs it all the more because, aside from their shared determination to "put liberty first," the connection between the two thinkers is complex, even impalpable. When Edouard de Laboulaye republished (with significant additions) Benjamin Constant's Cours depolitique constitutionnelle in the midst of the Second Empire, just after Tocqueville's death, he expressed astonishment that the author of Democracy in America had never mentioned the elder liberal in his writings and had conceivably not even read him.6 All subsequent work in Tocqueville's letters and archives (so far as I know) has confirmed and compounded this puzzle. And, recently, Jean-Claude Lamberti has carefully reviewed the question, both as a detective and as an historian of ideas.7 Why is it important whether or not Tocqueville read Constant and was influenced by him? Perhaps the more pregnant question is: why, as seems likely, did Tocqueville not read Constant, or read him seriously? An answer to both (for the first must be answered with the second) will involve archaeology in the social and cultural texture of French liberalism, contributing to its definition. Writing his Memoires at about the same time that Laboulaye published the Cours, Charles de Remusat commented, with regret, that the theoretical works of Constant were "peu lus." 8 According to the same author (who knew Tocqueville well and became his warm friend after the coup (FEtat of 1851), Tocqueville was an original and profound thinker, who "lisait peu": he drew almost everything from within himself, he got little from others, and went to the trouble of finding out for himself what others had found before him... The political literature of the Restoration, rich and fruitful, 6

7

8

E d o u a r d de Laboulaye, ed., Cours de politique constitutionnelle de Benjamin Constant (2 vols.,

Paris, 1861), 1, vii. Jean-Claude Lamberti, "De Benjamin Constant a Alexis de Tocqueville," France-Forum, May-June 1984, 19-26. Charles de Remusat, Memoires de ma vie (5 vols., Paris, 1958-1967), 1, 303.

4

Ports in the storm

might as well not have been (est comme non avenue pour lux), so that he came upon well-known things as brand new; and this gave his least original ideas a proprietary stamp and a tone of conviction they would not otherwise have had.9 Curious as it seems to us, it is possible that Tocqueville (as a manner of ascesis) paid no attention to Constant's writings, especially those that bore on his own project. About that project, as Remusat comments, Tocqueville was singularly clear-headed: "Instead of studying society in books, he wanted to observe it in its most recent form on distant shores. His travels in the United States were not just a visit to New York, a chance to talk to someone overseas, but a direct and active exploration of the whole field of reality."10 Like many persons of strong design but mediocre physical constitution, Tocqueville was a relentless explorer, fortunately endowed with both a meditative gift and a superior capacity for organizing his impressions. But Tocqueville, pace Remusat, was also a consummately literate man, deeply read in the ancient and French classics and in the works appropriate to his legal training. He possessed a great store of information about the previous century, down to its petits faits of manners and morals. Had he not been such a sharp observer of his own culture, his book on America would have lacked much of its penetrating originality and cautionary force. It must also be said, however, that Tocqueville was little inclined to make attributions in his published works; in themselves, they are no clue to what he failed to read. That he was scarcely immune to the political ideas of the Restoration is shown by his interest in Guizot's lectures and his dislike of the papalism of Lamennais. 11 It is not unlikely that he read the Globe and was affected by writers like Jouffroy, as well as Guizot.12 His voluminous note-taking from the parliamentary speeches of Royer-Collard (coming in the 1830s and betraying, if anything, a previous lack of acquaintance) proves nothing about his earlier habits; but it does show that he was not inclined to shut out the politics of the past.13 9

10 11 12 13

Remusat, " De l'esprit de reaction: Royer-Collard et Tocqueville," Revue des deux mondes, 35 (15 October 1861), 804; cf. Me'moires, iv, 44-45. Remusat, "De l'esprit," pp. 801-802. Andre Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1839 (Paris, 1984), p. 63-64, 81. See below, p. 34. For Tocqueville on Royer-Collard, see Oeuvres completes (15 vols. to date, Paris, 1951— ), xi, 97-104. Henceforth OC.

Liberty: last port of call

5

Thus, "il lisait peu" will not exactly solve the Constant problem. Tocqueville's reading was surely guided by pre-established taste and purpose. It is hardly conceivable that Constant was nothing but a distant name. It is possible that he read Constant and dismissed him; but it is far more probable that, in dismissing Constant, he failed to read him seriously. Lamberti finds it credible on internal evidence that Tocqueville read the Melanges of 1829. If he did, he would have been struck by some of its formulas (such as the inevitable growth of equality), but, at that moment especially, he could well have been unsympathetic to the author. Tocqueville wanted the dynasty not to blunder; blunder it did, to his heart's regret. In the circumstances, Constant must have seemed an arch-Orleanist of unsavory reputation. Perhaps - although this must remain pure conjecture - the conspicuous public funeral given Constant on 12 December 1830 quickened Tocqueville's dynastic feelings and his resolve to ignore the works of the author ofAdolphe. If, upon returning from his travels in America, Tocqueville still left Constant unexamined, there should be little surprise in that. What is more astonishing is that many Orleanists practiced a similar abstinence, perhaps in part because they did not wish to be too much reminded of their own annals of opposition. Remusat is an evident exception. But his observations were confided to memoirs and not written down until much later: [Constant's] reflections on guarantees [i.e. in De FEsprit de conquete et de Vusurpation], published in 1814, and the Principes depolitique, printed during the Cent-Jours, were my texts of constitutional science. These writings and all those included in his Cours de politique are, I fear, nowadays little read. But they are still of great value [i.e. under the Second Empire]. Elsewhere one can find more power and depth. He does not begin with the most elevated principles. But rarely will one find sounder ideas, more ingenious reasoning, or more of that precision of mind that counsels moderation and illuminates practice... I learned from him to place effective liberty above the particular forms of government, to prefer having more of it with the monarchy than less with the Republic, and especially to hold legal rights above absolute principles. I was delivered forever from those despotic or revolutionary doctrines that sacrifice what one owns to the State... Benjamin Constant had much to do with shaping my ideas.14 14

Remusat, Memoires, i, 303-304. Cf. also Victor de Broglie, Souvenirs (4 vols., Paris, 1886), 1, 281: " I t is Benjamin Constant who taught the nation the principles of representative government... The nation's debt to him will never be sufficiently recognized." Broglie also wrote this under the Second Empire.

6

Ports in the storm

This generous estimation was provided by a man (like Benjamin) tugged in 1815 between Bonaparte (his father had served the Emperor as chamberlain), the legitimate dynasty, and the principles of 1789. Tocqueville, of course, came to liberalism from a quite different direction. I have suggested here a kind of fissure in the culture of liberalism that seems worthwhile to explore. As social actors Constant and Tocqueville illustrate a sort of disquiet that stalks in the liberal pantheon, while all the same remaining partners in "putting liberty first." Only, it seems, in the travails of liberalism under the Second Empire will Constant be revived and linked in respect and energy with a now deceased Tocqueville, as a champion against personal power and centralized corruption. II.

BENJAMIN CONSTANT AFLOAT! HOSPITAL OR PANTHEON?

"C'est une catin qui a ete jolie et qui finit ses jours a l'hopital" was the cruel barb launched against Benjamin Constant by Prosper de Barante, his erstwhile intellectual playfellow and amorous rival at Coppet, later peer of France and author of the Histoire des dues de Bourgogne.15 But in December 1830, a portion of the massive crowd that followed Constant's casket to the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise cried: "Au Pantheon!" 16 Both judgments were excessive: Constant had died with far more dignity than ajille publique; but, on the other hand, he was not "voue a Pimmortalite," even by the monarchy of July, a regime which at first appeared to embody his constitutional principles. In 1834, Michelet, while taking a stroll through PereLachaise, paused before Constant's simple grave, bare of any token of remembrance. "Quoi!" he demanded. "N'a-t-il laisse ni ami, ni famille?" 17 Constant was a vulnerable man who scattered his extraordinary gifts like bread on the water. Contrary to the proverb, that bread did not, on the whole, return to him, but sank. Only years later would his intellectual and political genius be given its due; and it would still lie under a cloud. For long after that, recurrent exposures of Benjamin's moral eccentricity would trouble otherwise true be15 16 17

Remusat, Memoires, i, 422. Paul Bastid, Benjamin Constant et sa doctrine (2 vols., Paris, 1966), 1, 481. Jules Michelet, Journal (4 vols., ed. P. Viallaneix, Paris, 1959-1976), 1, 120.

Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon lievers, liberals who could not find a hero to their heart's content in the mechanical + that Constant committed to his all too decipherable journals. 18 To such critics Constant's vagrant sensuality and excursions on the fringe of private nihilism seemed to indict his serieux. In particular, his dalliance with Napoleon in 1815 (often imputed to his pursuit of Juliette Recamier) seemed to clinch the matter: evidently he sought political power in the same unprincipled way that he indulged his physical appetites. From the "liberated" perspective of our "new morality," we should not simply tax Constant's earlier critics with hypocrisy, although it is beyond question that good faith was not a property of some of those attacks. Even today, Constant requires a certain structure of apologetics, despite the historical distancing that naturally privileges his achievements while mutating the sense of scandal felt by persons closer to his living reputation. 19 Earlier, during his lifetime and while he was directly remembered, there was a tacit consensus that Constant had imprudently transgressed the flexible, often casuistic, rules of his own society. Despite her pliant morality, Madame de Stael was not similarly impugned: we shall see why. It was not so much that Constant's contemporaries and their progeny thought him a moral shambles, as that they considered him to be an irresponsible moral strategist. For reasons bearing profoundly on that society, so unlike our own, Constant, even though his writ could run to high places, was never considered a part of "our crowd." In fact, the damning judgment was that he had never grown up (down to this day, academics, captive to a convention that began long ago, write of "Jean-Jacques" and of "Benjamin," when they would never dream of saying "FrancoisMarie" or "Alphonse," and only say " R e n e " because it was the title of a work). In the "Groupe de Coppet," this is what appears to separate Constant most strikingly from Prosper (de Barante) and Mathieu (de Montmorency). In the eyes of their society, they "grew up." If Constant's ideas are now, more than ever, quarantined from his life, that is because they have been reclaimed by a history not excessively burdened by petits faits. But it was not always so. The Constants were Protestant nobles who had emigrated from Artois to the Helvetic cantons in the sixteenth century, long before 18 19

± signified sexual intercourse in Constant's journals. E.g. O. Pozzo di Borgo, ed., B. Constant, Memoires sur Us Cent-Jours (Paris, 1961), p. xxxvi.

7

8

Ports in the storm

the infamous Revocation. By the time of Benjamin Constant's birth (in Lausanne, in 1767) it could hardly be said that they were impatient exiles. Rather, they were gentrified and comfortable cosmopolitans. But Benjamin Constant, because of the vagaries of his own childhood and education and the world he swiftly became exposed to, was destined for a wider horizon. He would find that nexus of ancestral connection stifling, a barrier rather than a support for his temperament and ambition. The Lausanne of his birth had seemed tolerable to Voltaire and pleasant to Gibbon; but it was always constraining to Benjamin. Well before he met Madame de Stael, already infected by his travels and adventures and by the French Revolution, he yearned to play a role. He had been passed from place to place by his widowed father, a colonel in the Dutch army with eccentricities that easily matched his own. In the family-extensive society of his day, he had many connections but had never been able to sink roots. His precosity was enormous. It is often said that Benjamin Constant brought intellectual traits of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth; but the one probably most in view is the propensity of the Siecle des Lumieres for bizarre plans of education. Constant's Bildung may be thus summarized: "He had never had a family life; he had no home, no country. He had been brought up and had learned to think in three languages. He had known every vice and corruption [first thanks to his tutors, and then in spite of them], had learned to respect no one, to distrust everyone."20 That is not a promising beginning, even for a young man with the steadiest of purposes. Today it would, more than likely (because of factors that Tocqueville saw more clearly than Constant), crush an adolescent into gibberish or doom him to recurrent psychotherapy. That Benjamin achieved his greatness, at the cost of what he suffered, might be considered a redemptive miracle, even a vote for "the good old days." His resiliency and fortitude are far more impressive than his malignancy. Deprived of the normal sources of courage, he managed to show great courage amid a life pointed toward tribulation and decomposition. Even by the loose cosmopolitan standards of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Constant was not French. His social privileges 20

J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Stael (Indianapolis, 1958), p. 141.

Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon

9

belonged to the porous territory now called Switzerland (the canton of Bern, the "pays de Vaud"). As such, if a genius, he might repeat Rousseau. He might aspire to a place in French political life if fortified by conditions like the large fortune of Jacques Necker or even the more modest endowments of the Genevan Etienne Claviere. But, more likely, he would find one through a certain train de vie and partisan journalism, opportunities provided by Necker's daughter; and the cards would have to fall just right. Constant believed himself to be integrally French, by descent and by intellectual destination. It is clear that he had none of that Heimatsehnen for Switzerland which caused Necker, in his forced retirement at Coppet, to declare: " Unhappy cantons... stay faithful to your moeurs and your ways; do not change your just and simple ideas for the political novelties forced upon you by men of vanity in their improvising spirit. May your character, with its moral greatness, continue to distinguish you from the other nations of Europe, just as nature has separated you by your location and your mountains." 21 The best that Constant could say was: "The name of Switzerland recalls five centuries of happiness and public loyalty." 22 At most, for Constant - as for the other Francophones of the Romande that frequented Coppet - the "caractere suisse" was simply another ingredient to be added to the melting pot of Europe, arid Switzerland was a convenient crossroads of Europe's national spirits.23 But his subjective Frenchness did not guarantee Constant a French acceptance. Although it seemed that the Constitution of 1791 had restored his citizenship (as a victim of religious persecution), he did not rush to claim it - as his father Juste had nor was it clear that the dispensation included his case, since Artois had not been French territory when his family emigrated. Following Madame de Stael to Paris in 1795, he benefitted from the influence of her connections, made a deserved reputation as a publicist, invested profitably in national property, and reached public office in 21

22

23

Jacques Necker, Cours de morale religieuse (3 vols., Paris, 1800), 11, 188-189. Necker's pure patriotism is, however, cast in doubt: he was worried lest the invading French divest him of his seigneurial title to Coppet. B e n j a m i n C o n s t a n t , Principes de politique (1815), in G a u c h e t , e d . , Liberte chez les modernes, p. 163. Cf. Simone Balaye, "Le groupe de Coppet: conscience d'une mission commune," in S. Balaye and J.-D. Candaux, eds., Actes et documents du deuxieme colloque de Coppet, 10-13 juillet 19J4 (Geneva and Paris, 1977), p. 32.

io

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the Tribunat of the Directoire. There could be little doubt then that he was, de facto, French. Yet he chose to represent the department of Leman (Geneva), now incorporated to the French Republic, without, for that matter, having any solid claim to Genevan citizenship.24 As a consequence, Benjamin's status of nationality remained under a cloud. These were no longer the times when the Republic was profligate with its naturalizing favors, when Schiller, Klopstock, and George Washington could be declared citizens and a Cloots or a Tom Paine could sit in French assemblies. A faint shadow of bdtardise followed him, as an alien and a subversive, as late as the ministry of Villele.25 And even Madame de Stael (in 1815, admittedly when they were involved in serious quarrels) had occasion to charge: "You aren't French, Benjamin, you haven't any memories of your childhood here. That's the difference between you and me." 26 Sometimes Constant claimed advantage from his detachment: " In order to be judged, the Revolution demands minds that are not so burdened by embarrassing memories, those who, not being enemies of the good that has been done or accomplices in the evil mingled with that good, are not blinded by rancor or forced to apologize."27 But he himself was often judged by French minds which were thus burdened, like Tocqueville's own. Neither was Constant's noble ancestry of much benefit to him. After a cloying period of service at the court of Brunswick in 1792-1793, he had come to regard noble privilege as a sham and never again defended aristocracy of birth except as a matter of cold political utility.28 He played the transcendent commoner in France. 29 He wished, above all, to be a notable, a security that seemed within his reach before 18 Brumaire. Beneath the formulas of genteel behavior that came as a birthright and the incomparable wit and penetration that ennobled him in literary company (Chateaubriand 24

25

See Madame de Stael to Henri Meister, 28 July 1800: "[Benjamin] has carefully avoided all contacts with that region [i.e. Vaud], for he wishes to have his rights as a Genevan and a Frenchman recognized." Beatrice Jasinski, ed., Correspondance generate de Madame de Stael (5 vols. to date, Paris, i960- ), I V / I , 295. See E p h r a i m H a r p a z , ed., Benjamin Constant: recueil d3articles, 1820-1824 ( G e n e v a , 1981), p p .

,„338f27 28

29

Georges Solovieff, ed., Madame de Stael: choix de lettres, 1J7&-1817 (Paris, 1970), p . 4 7 5 . Harpaz, ed., Recueil, p. 136. See G. A. Kelly, "Liberalism and Aristocracy in the French Restoration," Journal oj the History oj Ideas, October-December 1965, 522-528, for discussion. Here, I think, Pierre Deguise goes astray in comparing Benjamin Constant to Lamartine: Benjamin Constant me'connu: le livre de la religion (Geneva, 1966), p. 29.

Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon

11

described him as "Phomme qui a eu le plus d'esprit apres Voltaire"), 30 there were the clues of his disorderly low-life, the gambling and the prostitutes. He created discomfort in the polite liberal salons of the Restoration, and his new political associations did little to reassure these "guardians of the Charter." Where other liberals saw a difficult problem in the recreation of a noblesse cTEtat, given France's social attitudes in the wake of Revolution and Empire, Constant perceived in nobility a "vanite ombrageuse et inquiete." 31 Certain passages in the Principes de politique to the contrary,32 he did not quite endorse the beauty of that "English" solution for which the left-center was grasping; as Barante put it: "understanding and accepting a community of interest with frankly aristocratic citizens (une aristocratie avoue'e des citoyens)... a system [on

which] the prosperity of England is based." 33 He was not as enraptured as Madame de Stael by the prospect that the institutions of the new France would ripen in a mellow mixing of talent and distinguished birth. 34 For him, the "spirit of conquest" had ceded to the rising force of the "spirit of commerce": its agents were making out of "the diverse European stocks a great family hardly distinguishable in its manners and completely alike in its interests."35 Both Constant's views and his reputation, in mutual reinforcement, clashed with the tastes of the new "service aristocracy," whose coolness in turn pushed him toward the society of capitalists like Laffitte and Goyet de la Sarthe. As Barante wrote of him: "He has chosen another society... with men of his own party." 36 The Due de Broglie commented in his Souvenirs that Benjamin paid court to "an opposition society of the second rank." 37 And even in the salon of Albertine de Broglie (Madame de StaeTs daughter, presumably sired by Constant), where the liberals of Europe gathered, Benjamin Constant was received with a singular mixture of familiarity and withdrawal. Everyone in the family felt it necessary to complain about 30 31 32 33

34

36

F r a n c o i s - R e n e d e C h a t e a u b r i a n d , Memoires cTOutre-tombe (2 vols., Paris, 1951), 11, 159. C o n s t a n t , Cent-Jours, p . 188. F o r e x a m p l e , in G a u c h e t , ed., Liberte chez les modernes, p p . 4 4 6 - 4 5 1 . A m a b l e G u i l l a u m e Prosper Brugiere d e B a r a n t e , Des communes et de raristocratie (Paris, 1821), p. 72. Germaine de Stael-Holstein, Considerations sur les principaux evenements de la Revolution frangaise 35 (3 vols., Paris, 1862), 11, 265. Constant, Cent-Jours, p. 65. Quoted by Pierre Deguise, " Constant et Barante," in Benjamin Constant, Madame de Stael et 37 le groupe de Coppet (Oxford and Lausanne, 1982), p. 57. Ibid., p. 61, n67.

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him... Madame de Broglie must never have forgiven the man who had forced her to blush for her mother; yet, trying to believe that he was the only one blameworthy in her sight, she made efforts to be kind to him; afraid of seeming to disapprove her mother's choice if she treated him too badly, she showed him a benevolence mixed with a little disdain.38 That was a remarkably defensive reaction by the Duchesse de Broglie, everywhere praised as affectionate, piously Protestant, and good, toward the man people thought to be her father. It was conditioned by the young woman's new - brilliant and nervous situation, and by the situation of Constant. No more playful carriage rides across Europe with Benjamin! There were two other things: the Cent-Jours and the cult of Madame de Stael. In the Cent-Jours, Constant had carried the notion of "principes applicables a tous les gouvernements" to what liberal society considered offensive, not merely paradoxical, conclusions. After the return of Napoleon from Elba, he had written of the Emperor (on the day before Louis XVIII fled Paris): "He is Attila, he is Genghis Khan... I have wished for liberty under various forms; I saw that it was possible under the [restored] monarchy... I shall not, like a wretched turncoat, drag myself from one power to the other, covering infamy with sophism and mumbling profaned words to redeem a life of shame." 39 Within the month, Napoleon had set him to writing a liberal constitution, the Acte additionnel to the Charter of 1814, and had made him a Conseiller d'Etat. Constant had some plausibly principled reasons for his volte-face (and has not lacked defenders in recent times), but ambition and power were surely among his motives. The anger of most liberals toward him was almost as great as their shock - he had gone slumming with the Fouches and the peasants on an adventure that could not even have tempted Talleyrand. Some of those liberals had themselves served the Emperor with quiet distinction, "citoyens zeles et integres qui ont rempli dans son regne des fonctions eminentes et utiles," in Constant's words.40 Nonetheless, with Bonaparte gone for good, they soon could accuse Benjamin of "covering infamy with sophism." His conduct could perhaps only be explained by his lack of true Frenchness. Back from exile and pardoned by Louis XVIII, Constant vigorously defended his action as best he could in the Memoires sur les Cent-Jours.*1 However, this tract was not published 38 40

Remusat, Memoires, 1, 451. Constant, Cent-Jours, p. 68.

39

Journal des debats, 19 March 1815. 41 Ibid., pp. 227-228.

Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon

13

until three years later, and, by its nature, it did little to heal the rifts that had occurred. Chateaubriand's verdict aptly summarizes what la bonne societe thought of Benjamin's greatest fugue: "De la une reputation de mobilite politique funeste aux hommes d'Etate." 42 Hereafter, Constant might become, as some thought, the finest orator of the Chamber; but he would never be an homme (FEtat. While Constant's ox was being gored by moderate opinion, Madame de Stael had died a figure of legend. Posed beside her as he frequently was, Constant seemed the lesser creature, even the protege}* Although Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker had been born a bourgeoise and Constant a noble, these presumptions were inverted in the "aristocracy of merit." We have noted Constant's vagrant, disorienting childhood. Madame de StaePs early years, on the other hand, had been passed in the bosom of a family intensely engaged in the upbringing of an only child, who was, besides, a prodigy. This is not to ignore the peculiarities of the Neckers nor to discount perversities of camouflage and ambivalence that helped to inflame and depress their daughter's life: from this her inexhaustible energy and ambition, her unrivalled talent for organization and manipulation, and her morbid fear of death and loss. That much acknowledged, Madame de Stael was "well brought up." She was trained to be a great mover, an intellectual, and an incomparable political salonniere. Her body was content to be a woman's; but her mind was thoroughly masculine, regretful of its sex, avid for the power that male coding bestowed on reputation and glory. She believed her father to be the greatest man in the world; what was a little Corsican compared to Monsieur Necker? What, for that matter, was Benjamin compared to her? He was her indispensable intellectual, even spiritual, consort; but, despite the fame of their liaison, simply one among a number of highly reputable, though ultimately disposable love-partners. She could dominate him with rage and tears; but this was only because she had first riveted his mind with the power of her own mind and his habits with a society that she had created and dominated. As a male, Benjamin had the direct privilege of politics and assemblies. But the 42 43

C h a t e a u b r i a n d , Memoires tfOutre-tombe, n , 210. Sainte-Beuve, however, belabors this point to distraction, for he got his information from the Recamier salon and other hostile sources. His treatment of Constant is well exposed by Deguise, Constant meconnu, pp. 3-37. Nevertheless, this was the prevailing impression of the

14

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best of women, through the institutions of the salon and the bedchamber, knew how to get around that restraint. As Tocqueville commented, years later: "The influence of women was then omnipotent: they gave reputation, they gave fashion, they even gave political power."44 Besides, for a dozen years the male privilege of politics was foreclosed to Constant, while the pen of the woman continued to thunder. Before 1815, Constant had published only a few political works of note, none of which, given their occasional circumstances, seemed enduring. As yet there was no Adolphe, no Wallstein, no great treatise on politics quite matching the original inspiration we find in the Lausanne and Paris manuscripts,45 no compendious study of the history of religions. But Madame de Stael had already given the world Delphine, Corinne, De r influence des passions, De la litterature, De

rAllemagne...She had carried forward Montesquieu's ideas on the "spirit of nations"; together with Chateaubriand she had launched Romanticism; she had "discovered" Germany. The prodigious novelty of these works no doubt owed much to Benjamin, A. W. Schlegel, and other Coppetians. But they were received as the triumph of Necker's daughter. Madame de Stael directly challenged the Emperor both with her train of life and with her literary and social influences. Foreigners called her "the greatest power in the Coalition." These heroic properties were set in even bolder relief when, in 1812, events caused her to flee across Austria and across Russia into Sweden, a vivid and hazardous journey in the midst of war that she did not fail to record in some of her best writing.46 Then, for a short while, the best society of England was at her feet. She did not make the error of wishing calamity on France; she only preached the overthrow of the despot - and, for making this distinction so clearly, most of Madame de Stael's adopted nation took her to its heart. By comparison, Constant's feats were pale and reflected light. Only his De Vesprit de conquete et de Vusurpation of 1814 won him comparable glory. But he nullified that work by his behavior in the Cent-Jours. Thus Madame de Stael re-entered Paris in triumph in 1815 - not just as a famous writer reprieved from exile, but a political force in 44

45

46

Tocqueville, q u o t e d in Conversations with Senior, i, 138. Cf. E d m o n d a n d J u l e s G o n c o u r t , La femme au dix-huitieme siecle (Paris, 1982), pp. 8 7 - 8 8 . Magistrally edited by Etienne Hofmann, Les 'principes de politique' de Benjamin Constant, 2 vols.: 1. La genese d'une oeuvre et revolution de la pense'e de leur auteur (1789-1806); 11. Texte e'tabli... (Geneva, 1980). See G e r m a i n e d e Stael-Holstein, Dix annees ctexil (ed. S i m o n e Balaye, Paris, 1966).

Benjamin Constant afloat: hospital or pantheon

15

her own right. Although her costume and headdress were bizarre, her failing health all too visible in her mottled complexion and sunken features (she had, in petto, borne a child to her second husband Rocca at the age of forty-five), and her liberalism offensive to many of the other returning French, she was a great lady and hero. The last, brief portion of her life was devoted to arranging a worthy marriage for Albertine and to having a final fling at politics. To both these ends she resumed the brilliant life of salonniere, and she also attempted to reclaim from Constant a considerable sum of borrowed money, intending it for Albertine's dowry, since the Due de Broglie, though eminently well-born, was not rich.47 Constant, now married to Charlotte von Hardenberg, mired in his gambling expenses and bad management, had little to spare and no disposition to repay what he had understood to be a debt for life. Madame de Stael had earlier made scenes with Benjamin in front of her children. But now they quarrelled ever more furiously. These events probably hardened Madame de Broglie's heart toward Constant. It would also seem that this rift between the two great liberals placed most of "good society" on the side of Madame de Stael. She crowned her life by writing the Considerations sur la Revolution frangaise, intended as a vindication of Necker's politics. Though Necker had ceased to be important to most of Madame de StaePs admirers, the book had further significance as a rallying point for liberal opinion, and it inspired the more erudite revolutionary history of Mignet and Thierry. Much later, Sainte-Beuve praised its "influence conciliante, expansive, irresistible" and wished that its author had been better hearkened to by her acolytes.48 On 14 July 1817, before her book on the Revolution was published, Madame de Stael died, her spirit alert but her body in gangrenous collapse. Constant had tried to see her in her last hours, only to be rebuffed by Albertine. However, decency mandated that he be allowed to spend the first night in the presence of her corpse, together with the Due de Broglie.49 One wonders what they thought, and if they shared their thoughts. Constant was shaken: later he acclaimed her Considerations to the public in the Minerve. The extraordinary power Madame de Stael possessed was, it seems, concentrated in her profound and flashing eyes and in the mouth, indelicate and labial, from which a miracle of conversation 47 48 49

Bastid, Benjamin Constant, i, 267. C.-A. d e Sainte-Beuve, " M a d a m e d e S t a e l , " in Portraits desfemmes Bastid, Constant, 1, 312.

(Paris, 1876), p . 162.

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gushed forth. Remusat, who spoke with her only once, found the experience unforgettable.50 In his long and admiring study, SainteBeuve wrote of her "conversation...which she poured out, as if divine, from the perpetual spring of her soul: that is what life was for her." "All her contemporaries," he said, "are unanimous about this." 51 The cult of Madame de Stael, assiduously tended by her daughter, eclipsed the fragile and contested reputation of Benjamin Constant. The year after Constant died, Chateaubriand, legitimist but co-founder of Romanticism, made a much-remarked pilgrimage to Coppet to abide by her tomb.52 Constant had other difficulties near the end of his life. Already twice rebuffed, but now armed with new writings and, once more, the post of Conseiller d'Etat, he sought election to the Academie Franchise. Despite favorable prognostications, old antagonisms surfaced and he once again failed. Among certain liberals, it seems that Royer-Collard voted against him. The victor was Jean-PonsGuillaume Viennet, peer of France, a military figure and writer of little consequence. Viennet's diary entries on this subject do not make pleasant reading: Tuesday, 18 November. Today, which is my birthday, the dearest and strongest of my wishes has been granted... The Academie Franchise has named me to the chair of M. de Segur... I wrote to the perpetual secretary to announce my candidacy, then rushed to speak of this to M. Etienne. "Step down," he replied. "We are going to elect Benjamin Constant. He is about to die. He won't even have time to deliver his [reception] speech, and you will follow him to give the eulogy both for him and for M. de Segur." "The eulogy of Benjamin Constant!" I exclaimed. " I wouldn't have either the will or the courage; shame would strike me dumb "... Several days later, I happened to meet M. Benjamin Constant in one of the corridors of the Chamber. I told him that his candidacy displeased me greatly, and I reminded him of the wish of M. de Segur [that I should replace him]... "The Academy," he replied, "does not recognize bequests..." I grew red with anger; I looked him right in the face; and I saw that it was practically a cadaver that had just addressed me with the impertinence. I smiled with pity and, after having delivered a glare of contempt, I turned my back on him without a word... Monday, IJ December. Yesterday we celebrated the funeral of Benjamin Constant. The procession was enormous; but I would not record all this if it were not necessary to repeat a stupidity of Alexandre Dumas. "Benjamin 50 52

Remusat, Memoires, i, 358. Ibid., p. 125.

51

Sainte-Beuve, Portraits desfemmes, p. 85.

Royer-Collard \ steering by the Charter

17

Constant," he said, "took noble revenge on Viennet; he died"... That idiotic saying of Dumas will be repeated all over town. But let there be fools in this most spiritual of all nations, and fools who fool around at writing {ecrivaillent) ! 53

The crowds did turn out to mourn Benjamin Constant, and among them were not the least of the literary estate: not just Dumas, but also Victor Hugo, who felt moved to write to Constant's widow: "Your private grief is also a public calamity. The loss that strikes you strikes us all. Allow me to tell you that tomorrow, in the midst of that tearful public that will join the procession for this distinguished man, there will be a sorely afflicted heart. It will be mine, Madam...He has left two widows, you and France." 54 But the majority verdict of the mandarins was not in favor of Constant. He quickly ceased to be a matter of controversy, and was little mentioned in the years to follow. In the mid-1840s, when interest in him was revived by new biographical revelations, SainteBeuve was there to tax him with his moral failings, to dub him "un pauvre pigeon blesse et trainant l'aile" and "une ruine intime et profonde."55 The preceding autopsy may help to suggest why it is possible, and indeed likely, that Alexis de Tocqueville distanced himself from the writings of Benjamin Constant.

in.

R O Y E R - C O L L A R D : STEERING BY THE C H A R T E R

Tocqueville may not have received any direct theoretical impulse from the liberalism of Benjamin Constant. But he drew on another proximate inspiration: Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, the central oracle of the Doctrinaires. Tocqueville's first exposure to Royer-Collard did not come until after he had written the first volume of Democracy in America. Nonetheless, they were kindred spirits who saw the problems of modern politics in much the same fashion. As Nassau Senior informs us: "Royer Collard was a man of superior mind: he had a great deal to relate. De Tocqueville used to pump him whenever an opportunity occurred." 56 Who were the Doctrinaires? In general, it can be said that they 53

D u e d e la Force, ed., Journal de Viennet, pair de France: te'moin de trois regnes (Paris, 1955), p p .

54

Victor H u g o , Oeuvres completes, vol. ix. Lettres a la fiancee: correspondance, I (Paris, 1947), p p . 55 483-484. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits litteraires (Paris, 1864), 111, 188, 281.

56

Simpson, ed., Tocqueville's Conversations with Senior, 11, 56.

116-119.

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were the left-center political theorists of the Restoration, men willing on occasion to support moderate ministries, such as those of Decazes, Serre, and Martignac; resolute defenders of the Charter against royalist infringement; progeny of Madame de StaeTs Anglophilic constitutionalism and her desire to mix talent and breeding. It is not true, as is often said, that the Doctrinaires had no doctrine: they favored a balanced constitutional, but not parliamentary, system; they fought for freedom of expression and equality under the law; and they promoted " the organized sovereignty of free governments," distinguished, as Royer-Collard pointed out, from "the sovereignty of the people" by its attachment to "rights and interests," rather than to "persons and wills," by its more faithful representation of real society.57 As such, the Doctrinaires claimed to be one of the two true "parties" (the other being the "royalist" or right-center) as against the "factions" ("ancien regime" and "revolutionary"). Like the royalists, they were devoted to the principles of Bourbon legitimacy and to the presence of hereditary aristocracy (the Chamber of Peers) in the mixed constitution; but they were devoted to them conditionally, within the specifications of the Charter and so long as there was no backsliding toward "ancien regime." Unlike the Independants, the loosely defined group to their left that included Constant, they did not see themselves as perennial opposition. However, when the Charter and the public liberties it defined seemed threatened (as under Villele and, most radically, Polignac), they rallied to the left.58 On Royer-Collard's own admission, it was perhaps absurd to call the Doctrinaires a "party": more precisely, they were the animating spirits of a political tendency. The true-blue "doctrinaires" were Serre, Camille Jordan and himself.59 But to that triumvirate it would be appropriate to add others, especially Guizot, whose academic and theoretical writings help us to specify this conservative liberalism and whose journalism and political strategy trace its most unambiguous path to the July Monarchy. However, Royer-Collard himself was cool toward Guizot, who, he thought, arrogated too 57

58

59

Prosper d e B a r a n t e , La viepolitique de M. Royer-Collard: ses discours et ses ecrits (2 vols., Paris, 1861), 11, 18. See Georges Weill, La France sous la monarchie constitutionnelle, 1814-1848 (Paris, 1912), p p . 1 6 - 1 8 ; P a u l T h u r e a u - D a n g i n , Le parti liberal sous la Restauration (Paris, 1888), p p . 226—231, 399-4O7, 483-487T h u r e a u - D a n g i n , Parti liberal, p . 79. Also, Sainte-Beuve, Portraits litteraires, 111, 329.

Royer-Collard \ steering by the Charter

19

much of the privilege of speaking for others.60 Guizot, like Madame de Broglie a Protestant, and the most vociferously middle-class theorist of the Doctrinaires, invented the fruitful dichotomy of "pays legal" and "pays reel" to justify the universalism of bourgeois sovereignty, a "sovereignty of reason" as he called it.61 Despite the prominence of Guizot in the articulation of doctrinaire liberalism, he cannot be taken as perfectly representing this " mixed " party of activist professors and liberal nobles, the latter firmly attached to the Broglie salon, the former to Le Globe. Earlier, we described Benjamin Constant's alienation from the bonne societe o{ the Restoration. In counterpart, it is important to understand the dense texture of connubial relations among the liberal aristocrats. Madame de Stael, as we have seen, had married her daughter to Victor de Broglie, whose step-father was a d'Argenson. By the time he wrote his memoirs, Remusat was connected to the Lafayettes, the Tracys, the d'Houdetots, the Barantes, General Lamoriciere, the Corcelles, the Beaumonts. Francisque de Corcelle and Gustave de Beaumont were, of course, bosom friends of Alexis de Tocqueville, who was himself the grandson of Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the cousin of Chateaubriand, and the more distant relative of Comte Mathieu Mole and other progeny of the former robe nobility. Remusat's fascinating portrait of his age alerts us to the natural importance of this extended family network. Then there were the professors and writers: Guizot, Victor Cousin, Theodore Jouffroy, Villemain, Damiron — and RoyerCollard himself. Together with these, the nobility — in the persons of Barante, Remusat, Montalembert, and Tocqueville - provided notable men of letters. This distinguished mixture of minds and pens stocked the academies of the Institut de France, the Parnassus that had rejected Benjamin Constant. Royer-Collard was far more than just a bourgeois intellectual. At a distance it is hard to grasp his impact on his contemporaries, for he left virtually no published writing despite being a philosophy professor, a brilliant parliamentary orator, and a man with ample 60 61

R e m u s a t , Memories, 1, 386. I have neglected Guizot here, in part, because there is little to add to Pierre Rosanvallon's splendid treatment: Le moment Guizot (Paris, 1985). Guizot's theory is most fully expressed in his article "De la souverainete," in Le Globe, 25 November 1826; see, on this, Rosanvallon, Moment Guizot, pp. 87-94. While scarcely eliciting the approval of RoyerCollard, Guizot's conservative group of the July parliaments was commonly referred to as the Doctrinaires.

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opportunity to reflect on his long and full life. Even Charles X admired Royer-Collard.62 In 1828, when Royer was elected president of the Chamber of Deputies, Hegel expressed his joy to Victor Cousin that France had so honored a philosopher.63 Indeed, among his other accomplishments, Royer-Collard had given philosophy a new orientation in post-Revolutionary France. Notwithstanding his humble but solid Jansenist origins in the Champenois village of Sompuis, this future philosopher and friend of liberty was every inch an aristocrat. A noble marriage had brought him a modest fortune and an agreeable country property in the Loiret-Cher, where he held court. "Royer-Collard kept up the Old Regime ways. Grands seigneurs pleased him without overwhelming him; he liked high style (grandes manures), but he liked still better a superiority of mind." 64 Though he had no wish to be ennobled himself, except in the minds of others, no one considered him a social inferior.65 Royer was an eloquent realist, ardent but without illusions, disciplined but caustic, imposing and opinionated but basically unambitious, a charming Cassandra; above all, independent: "he liked neither to command, nor to obey."66 He had undoubtedly gotten this steady perspective from a combination of experiences: his severe Jansenist education, his brief initiation to the liberal tidal wave that produced 1789, his exposure to the hazards of the Terror, his turn to Reid's Scottish "common-sense" philosophy, his collaboration with the exiled Louis XVIII, not, however, as an emigre, but as a secret advisor within France. Active as an intellectual and political force from the beginning of the Restoration (although he had had no part in negotiating the return of the dynasty), he had kept a sense of that world now lost, the pre-Revolutionary age, "which had appealed to him without winning him over, whose memories he was always fond of, while judging it without pity, and on whose tomb he spent his life writing brilliant epitaphs once he was certain that it was really dead." 67 That outlook found expression in his disabused idea of human nature and his unwavering demand for political rectitude. Of 62 63

64 66 67

B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, n , 368. Hegel to Cousin, 3 March 1828, in C.Butler and C. Seiler, eds., Hegel: The Letters (Bloomington, 1984), p. 665. Regarding the political affinity of Hegel and Royer-Collard, see G. A. Kelly, Hegel's Retreat from Eleusis (Princeton, 1978), pp. 145-148. 65 R e m u s a t , Memoires, 1, 88. Ibid., p . 2 5 . B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, 1, 2. Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 786.

Rqyer-Collard: steering by the Charter

21

Royer's childhood upbringing, Barante later wrote: "One would have called it a community of the primitive Church... This was Jansenism in all its rigor and conscientious morality." 68 Though he practiced Catholicism fitfully until his years grew short, his (Gallican) defense of the Church dated from 1797, when he had declared in the Conseil des Cinq-Cents: " T h e Catholic religion is today a need for the great majority of the people you represent. One may think it expedient to deny this truth, but there will be no escaping its inevitable, unyielding consequences."69 Thus, Jansenism was a potent, though not inflexible guide: " [Royer-Collard] felt rather than thought like Port-Royal." 70 Much in the vein of his PortRoyal ancestors, he wrote to Tocqueville: " Politics without morality is only a game of knaves and fools, or the oppression of the weak by the strong." 71 Royer-Collard was one of the first French philosophers to inhabit the "Napoleonic" Sorbonne (from 1811 till 1814, when he took on other state offices).72 He weaned the academic spirit away from the sensationalist theories of La Romiguiere and the Ideologues toward the doctrines of Reid, which admirably suited his own creed as a moralist and a statesman. As Remusat explains: "the Scottish philosophy is a solid and sensible rationalism... that strengthens belief without sacrifice to prejudice." 73 Paradoxically, this also had the effect of opening the French mind to Kant, although Royer himself did not take that step. However, he trained Cousin as his successor, thus smoothing the path for "eclecticism" as well as for the more distinctive doctrines of Maine de Biron.74 He sat in French assemblies from 1815 until his retirement in 1842. Despite his affection for the legitimate dynasty, he had sworn allegiance to Louis-Philippe in 1830. The great blunders of Charles X in overstepping the Charter to curtail political liberty had, 68 69 70 71 72

73 74

B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, i, 5 . "Discours sur la libertedes cultes," in ibid., 1, 31. R e m u s a t , Passe et present (2 vols., Paris, 1970), 11, 3 2 5 ; cf. Me'moires, 11, 2 7 . T o c q u e v i l l e , OC, x i , 2 7 . At the Restoration, Royer-Collard entered the Conseil d'Etat and undertook the direction of the Librairie (censorship). See Remusat, Memoires, 11, 25. Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 793. One of Royer's pupils was the powerful Victor Cousin, who, during his tenure at the Sorbonne and later, during the July Monarchy, as generalissimo of French higher education, gave the nation's lyce'es and universities their ideological stamp. His "eclecticism" reserved an ample, albeit distorted, place for modern German thought. On Cousin and his acolytes see Joseph Ferrari, Les philosophes salaries (Paris, 1849); Jules Simon,

Victor Cousin (Paris, 1891); and Paul-Frangois Dubois, Cousin, Jouffroy, Damiron: Souvenirs (Paris, 1902).

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"despite consequences that he feared and hated," prompted him, together with most of the intellectuals, to prefer revolution to counter-revolution.75 Later, Chateaubriand would explain to the Dauphine: "We were the three men in France who should never have taken the oath to Philippe: myself, M. Laine, and RoyerCollard. Outside of government, in different positions, we would have formed a potent triumvirate. M. Laine took his oath out of weakness, M. Royer-Collard took it out of pride: the former will die of it; the second will live, for he lives by everything he does, and there is nothing he does that isn't admirable." 76 The July Monarchy ended Royer-Collard's political ascendancy and turned him toward a kind of inner migration. His fond constituents returned him as an independent to the new Chamber. He watched its political evolution with a growing distaste that influenced the mood of his new friend Alexis de Tocqueville. Finally, when he had had enough, he told his electors: Politics is now stripped of its greatness; material interests dominate it. I do not look down on those interests: they have their worth and deserve the favorable notice of governments. But in my esteem they only come after other, far higher, interests where nations ought to seek their true prosperity and their solid glory.77 A few months later, Royer-Collard wrote to Tocqueville: " I did not come into the world to change its face; the small part I have played in the affairs of my time satisfied the scope of my activity or, if you will, my ambition. My calling was not to do more than that." 78 Here one senses not just Jansenism, but a touch of immodest frustration. The Charter of 1814 had been his great trial and test; its aftermath of 1830 had underscored his failure. The aging Royer-Collard had no appetite for a new role of opposition, which he directly bequeathed to Tocqueville in this same letter. He had become isolated by his delicacy and his scruples. Unlike Constant, he would be remembered with warmth by the politicians of better breeding. Remusat was called to fill his chair in 75

76 77 78

See R e m u s a t , Memoires, i, 3 9 3 ; B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, 11, 115. J u s t before t h e J u l y revolution, Royer-Collard had told his electors that "my whole life belongs... to the cause of the legitimate monarchy and to the defense of the public rights and liberties of our country" - neatly balancing his obligations. Vie de Royer-Collard, 11, 302. Chateaubriand, Memoires cTOutre-tombe, 11, 722-723. "Discours a ses electeurs," quoted in Tocqueville, OC, xi, 53. Royer-Collard to Tocqueville, 21 July 1838, ibid., p. 65.

Royer-Collard: steering by the Charter

23

the Academie Franchise; Barante wrote his life in two volumes as commentary woven around his public acts and speeches. Royer-Collard had been the Socrates of his generation: a philosopher much heard and recorded, but mute with his own pen. Admirers had found his conversation enrapturing. He also resembles Gladstone: while never the leader of a great party or a great nation, he, too, was a Grand Old Man who had spoken eloquently for freedom, for democracy as he understood it, and for propriety and loyalty in politics. As Thureau-Dangin has written: M. Royer-Collard had an imposing mind. His speech was as serious as his thought, a little lofty and dogmatic, but cast in bronze. At the tribune, and especially in conversation, he sometimes mixed with the dignity of his language a sententious and effective irony which, in a single turn of phrase, could win the contest. With absolutely upright motives and a disinterest from all common ambitions, but without the kind of elevated egoism that would make him privilege his political image (le soin de sa personnalite politique) and his unity of doctrine, he went at his own speed, not caring if he followed the others or if they followed him.79 Remusat confirms: His parliamentary speeches deserve to be studied by statesmen; even in practical politics they are very valuable. What I admire the most is a dominating love of justice; yet experience of revolutions and knowledge of the human heart are everywhere evident. The special quality of M. RoyerCollard is to have been both speculative and philosophical in politics, without ever losing his feel for reality. He deeply understood la miserable perfection des choses humaines.80

Above all, said Remusat, " I have never known a man so mobile and so unshakeable at the same time." 81 We see to what extent this was still a culture of the spoken word, in public or in private, where the character of the soul was read out of the vivacity of speech, with its appropriate accompaniments of gesture and significant reference. (It was also a culture that believed in physiognomy.) Madame de Stael might bend her morals; but her divine sense of la parole won her an acclaim that severe moralists could envy. And when Constant - according to the critics - went about saying "the same old things," that was certain disaster, even if some things might need to have been said again and again. By this kind ofjudgment Royer-Collard was especially privileged, being one 79 81

Thureau-Dangin, Parti liberal, p. 81. Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 785.

80

Remusat, Me'moires, n, 29.

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who, without offending, could go on talking, it seems, endlessly: "Every thought he gathered possessed him, and then he had to express it, the feeling that inspired him had to come out (il fallait...qu>il se produisit au dehors) ...And since human thought has never been expressed with equal verve, piquancy, and vigor, or in a more compelling variety of original phrases and unexpected images, since improvised speech has never combined more energy and finesse, more elevation and warmth, more exactness of reason and colors of the imagination, one would have been very foolhardy to interrupt [Royer's] incomparable monologue."82 That setting was important to the brilliance of the liberal stone. Tocqueville himself admired, and was noted for, a becoming mixture of gravity and charm in conversation. It probably could not be said of him, however, that he "appears entirely in what he says or writes."83 In Tocqueville's composition, as splendid as it is, there is some subterfuge of the personality. Perhaps this is why Tocqueville could write to Royer-Collard: "Monsieur, you represent a time different from our own, loftier feelings, ideas, and a society more vast."84 Royer-Collard was not only beloved as a man of intellectual skill and independence, but as a friend of liberty and a politician of principle. He believed - like Constant - that " a legitimate monarchy, better than a government born out of the disorders of the Revolution,could guarantee the rule of law and respect for the rights of the nation." 85 He also, here more aggressively than Constant, believed that the king could play a role as "neutral power": " a moderator raised above all passions... who would hasten to summon all the interests of the grande famille to a solemn and lasting reconciliation."86 Monarchy, he felt, was "not only [i.e. for France] a truth of politics, but also a truth of feeling... and experience."87 He did not think, as did the far left, that France required governments beholden to the confidence of the Chamber or that legislation should be initiated by the Chamber: "ce jour-la nous sommes en republique." 88 For Royer-Collard, the Charter was a bargain between times past and time present, an alliance between phases of French social history, not an eternal expression of abstract right.89 It was, he thought, an offense to the dignity of the monarchy and the 82 84 85 88

83 Remusat, Memoires, n, 18. B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, i, 2. Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 8 September 1842, OC, xi, i n . 86 87 B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, 1, 4 5 . Ibid., p. 193. Ibid., p. 221. 89 I b i d . , p . 2 1 7 ; cf. p . 2 9 6 . I b i d . , 11, 16.

Royer-Collard: steering by the Charter

25

nation to allow the regicides of Louis XVI to return from exile indemnified (this was a direct reply to Constant). 90 But he also upheld a wide range of civil liberties and national rights. Regarding the press, it was better "that arbitraire should be everywhere than in the hands of the government... better everywhere... and hence nowhere... rarefied to infinity ...imperceptible." 91 Regarding the armed forces, the king should command them (though never in battle), but only a force appropriately drawn from the nation. 92 Regarding the Church, its rights ("le commerce de la terre avec le ciel") should neither weigh on politics nor be determined by politics. Royer-Collard's liberties were in the plural, rarely abstract. Kings, peers, and commons all had liberties - but the greatest liberty of all was for government to conform to the evolving needs of society. In this respect, especially, he anticipated Tocqueville while, from a different perspective, relaying Constant. The major difference with Constant is that Royer believed the French to be devoted to monarchy and neutral toward the "service aristocracy." The major difference with Tocqueville is that he believed democracy to be consummated with its part in mixed government and its protection under the law, while Tocqueville saw an inevitable expansion attached to its "passion for equality." Still, on a famous occasion when Royer-Collard broke with his friend Serre in the Chamber, he taxed him thus: taking as I should democracy in its purely political meaning, as opposed to or compared with aristocracy, I agree with you that it flows mightily (a pleins bords) in France just as the centuries and [recent] events have made it do... The middle classes are so close to the upper classes that, if they wish to see those above them, they would have to step down quite a bit... Yes, [democracy] flows mightily in la belle France^ more than ever favored by the heavens.93 Let others wail or gnash their teeth; I give thanks to Providence for summoning to the benefits of civilization a greater number of its creatures. What Royer-Collard meant by democracy was a supremacy of the educated middle class in public affairs and a society in which all citizens enjoyed the equal protection of the laws. When he told Serre — on a fundamental point — that government must follow and 90 93 94

91 92 Ibid., 1, 495. Ibid., p . 349. Ibid., p . 387. Ibid., 11, 99; cf. pp. 247-248. Cited in Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 787. Democracy was to be qualified by Guizot, much later, as a "fleuve fecond et impur." De la democratic en France (Paris, 1849), p. 124.

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replicate the interests of society, he had in mind a social order that was already being bypassed by events and would be buffeted in his lifetime. Tocqueville sensed this, as well as the "gentle despotism" to which the new society was susceptible. Constant had felt that people, released from the shackles of government, as it constrained both their moral and economic life, would find their own way and not be tempted to either effervescence or servility. Royer-Collard believed that the "rights" of democracy could be founded on a semiaristocratic compromise. Serre thought that even a constitutional government needed to discipline and limit the desires of society. But Tocqueville believed that only a well-regulated society could do this for itself, using the traditional armatures of family, village, and religion: the power of moeurs. Royer-Collard's regressive ideal came out of the caution of putting France back together in 1814. His major political axiom was to use the king to limit counter-revolution, and to limit revolution by the Charter. 95 But, as opposed to Constant, he raised the issue of democracy by its name, inspiring Tocqueville to treat it in precision. What Royer-Collard, here following Sieves, recognized was: The social order is not the political order, because the society is not the government; but the social order acts on the political order: if society is not power, it is influence. And what the French Revolution sought to achieve... was to change the social order... [From what emerged] we can say that democracy [is inscribed] in the social order. That is the most clear and striking result of the revolution. There is the irresistible fact, independent of the will of men and governments. We can still affect the constitution of the state. But the constitution of society is beyond our grasp: it is determined by blind forces, or, if one prefers, it is the work of Providence.96 As we shall see, this was one of the two main points of departure for Tocqueville. The other was the creeping action of centralization (more a political than a social phenomenon, though "influenced" by social trends toward uniformity). Tocqueville shared RoyerCollard's problematic of democracy, while transcending it both in theory and by sociological investigation. His sociology enabled him to raise sober doubts about Constant's vision of progress and the benign effects of commercial civilization. When he entered the Chamber in 1838, Tocqueville struck the pose of an independent liberal in the style of his mentor, Royer95

Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 794.

96

Ibid., p. 795.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

27

Collard. He sat where Royer had sat, on the left-center. He copied him in other ways; as he wrote to him in 1839: " I am not joined in any binding way to anyone. That is what I wanted, and I think I have it.5397 When Royer-Collard died in 1845, Tocqueville wrote to his widow: " H e had almost accustomed me to look on him as a father." 98 Tocqueville's own father, Herve de Clerel, Restoration peer of France, was still alive and revered by his son. But it seems that Royer-Collard's political fatherhood may have been more important to the public man. iv.

T O C Q U E V I L L E : S A I L I N G T H E O P E N SEA

"Vain is the hope of escaping from the calamities of one's century..." wrote Chateaubriand in 1797: We navigate along an unknown coast, amid shadows and tempest. Thus, it is in everyone's interest to reflect on these questions with me [he was writing the first treatise ever on comparative revolutions], because his interest is at stake. Here is a map for each to study in his peril, so that, like a wise pilot, he may recognize his point of departure, his present location, and his destination, and in case of shipwreck rescue himself on some isle where the tempest cannot reach. That island is an irreproachable conscience."

This image of voyage, peril, and possible shipwreck - a perhaps interminable adventure - is commonplace among sensitive aristocrats in the wake of the Revolution. They have descended from Lucretius' lofty and safe crag100 to the desperate affairs of sailors buffeted by the storm. Alexis de Tocqueville shares his cousin's alarm at the wave-tossed cruise along uncharted coasts by voyagers who, it seems, are "blind instruments in the hands of God... [we who] obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins that may still be described upon the shore we have left, while the current hurries us away and drags us backward towards the abyss." 101 These men have read the Odyssey and Aeneid.

But, in travelling across an ocean and across a new commonwealth (a country peopled by men with " a decided taste for the sea... [who weigh] anchor before the tempest is over... [and] are often 97

Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 7 March 1839, OC, xi, 76.

99

C h a t e a u b r i a n d , Essai kistorique, politique et moral sur les revolutions anciennes et modernes

101

98

Ibid., p. 121.

10 (London, 1820), pp. 4-5. ° Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, bk. 11, lines 1-4. Tocqueville, Democracy in America (trans. Henry Reeve, 2 vols., New York, 1945), 1, 7. Henceforth DA.

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shipwrecked"),102 Tocqueville is determined to construct a map more serviceable than Chateaubriand's unavailing catalog of ancient and modern insurrection. If Providence carries us fatally through the storms to unknown coasts, wise men need not doubt their destination; for "it is not necessary that God himself should speak in order that we may discover the unquestionable signs of his will." Providence steers us toward democracy; and we have, upon arrival, the duty "to educate [it], to reawaken, if possible, its religious beliefs; to purify its morals; to mold its actions." That will be the task of a "new science of politics."103 Tocqueville's mission to "educate democracy" had, even then, somewhat the air of a Pascalian wager. But in years to follow, when he reflected on the unrelieved hazards of revolution at more and more cost to liberty, he feared that all might end in "intermittent anarchy": " I do not know when this long voyage will be ended; I am weary of seeing the shore in each successive mirage, and I often ask myself whether the terra Jirma we are seeking does really exist, and whether we are not doomed to rove upon the seas forever:"104 Unlike Chateaubriand (who died at just this time), Tocqueville faced the full consternation of what seemed like permanent revolution, a tempest in which rescue on the island of "irreproachable conscience" would be of little value. And unlike Benjamin Constant, Tocqueville could no longer be sanguine about peace and progress. Constant, in a somewhat Panglossian mood, had written in the Mercure de France in 1817: "our present governments have today many fewer dangers to fear than ever before. No longer are there in our political societies classes interested in upheavals, as before, there are only vicious individuals, and police authority [la force publique) has always been able to handle individuals."105 Thirty years later, Tocqueville was witness to "the most extensive and the most singular [insurrection] that has ever occurred in our history, and perhaps in any other," one that sought to change the "constitution of society," believed impossible by the Doctrinaires. And unlike Royer-Collard, Tocqueville could no longer steer by the Charter. He found himself on the open sea, where the only navigational instrument was his "new political science."106 102 104 105 106

103 Ibid., p p . 440, 442. Ibid., p . 7. Tocqueville, Recollections, p . 69. Constant, "Pieces d e t a c h e e s , " Melanges, in G a u c h e t , ed., Liberte chez les modernes, p . 510. Tocqueville, Recollections, p . 150.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

29

Tocqueville had gained Royer-Collard's friendship (perhaps through Chateaubriand) shortly after his return from America. Royer had been helpful in pushing his and Beaumont's Systeme penitentiaire for the Monthyon Prize of the Academie Franchise, an honor that Tocqueville himself would shortly receive for the first volume of his Democracy in America.107 Besides, a common appreciation of the French political climate after the July revolution bonded the young historian to the older philosopher. Tocqueville had himself had a Jansenist (and Gallican) education that easily put him in touch with Royer's temperament and public ideals.108 Royer, on his part, while defending the prerogatives of the middle classes, had preferred the manners of the aristocracy. Neither man had (like Chateaubriand) refused the oath to Louis-Philippe, but both (like Lamartine) had sworn it grudgingly, without attempting to disguise a lack of enthusiasm. Both could agree - in different accents — that the great problem of the future was "democracy." Both sensed the uncharted peril of that experiment; neither was content to leave the work entirely to Providence, if one could assist by reading its oracles for the sake of a principled liberty. When Royer-Collard obtained the first book of Democracy in America, he read it five times and hailed it as a masterpiece. Not only did it come from a scion of the Old Regime who had chosen liberty as his new faith, but it brilliantly analyzed and confirmed the worst fears the elder statesman had of the politics to come. Royer is supposed to have copied down more than fifty pages of notes, now lost; and he defended the work before the Academie Franchise.109 It was "an inexhaustible source of instruction and pleasure." In an unpublished letter to Mole, he expressed his fear of " a new kind of tyranny without soldiers, tribunals, or laws of September [i.e. the September 1793 "law of suspects"], in a word, the democratic tyranny, as M. de Tocqueville has so well described it." 110 Tocqueville was flattered by these attentions. When, in 1841, Royer-Collard made him the gift of a collection of his parliamentary speeches, Tocqueville seems to have contemplated writing a long article about his friend, anticipating the encomiums of Remusat and Barante. However, this work remained in sketches in the Tocqueville archives; the notes fill eight pages in the contemporary critical 107 109 110

108 J a r d i n , Tocqueville, p p . 218-219. Ibid., p p . 4 4 - 4 5 . Ibid., p. 218; and see Royer-Collard's letter to Becquey, cited in Tocqueville, OC, xi, v. Tocqueville, OC, xi, vi.

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edition. While admiring, these notes are also judiciously critical. Of Royer-Collard, the philosopher, Tocqueville records tersely: "Destruction of materialist philosophy."111 Other excerpts include: "The union of liberty and legitimacy raised to the rank ofprovidential necessity, absolute condition of government"; "excellent against the excessive champions of the division of powers"; "it is time to teach the century that, the more the clergy is weak in the state, the more it should be strong in religion [an eminently Montesquieuvian sentiment] ;112 and to teach the clergy that, if it demands the religious liberty to which it is entitled [the goal of liberal Catholics like Montalembert], it retires from the outer world, it ceases to have influence over civil life and the manners of society."113 Of RoyerCollard himself, Tocqueville states: "A great soul. No more of them left"; "by his taste leaning toward aristocracy, by his traditions and his reason toward equality"; "His speeches will last and always be read as long as there exists a French language and as long as our great social problems bother us"; " a powerful personality, unconquerable, and yet a personality to be forgotten... Say this without denigration; explain it..." "Deep but exaggerated contempt of M. Royer for these times. The main thing that escapes him is that we live in an age of transition"; "Metaphysical mind, but not imaginary (chimerique); no one is more rooted in the facts."114 Tocqueville's notes on Royer-Collard would merit a much longer analysis. However, enough has been given to suggest not only agenda for comparison, but insights into the creation of Tocqueville's own agenda. Before Royer-Collard retired from the Chamber, he literally placed his cloak on Tocqueville's shoulders: "You, Monsieur, are called on to fulfil your time on earth and plow your furrow in another way than I have. You have already begun; and you will follow [your destiny] without ever achieving it: for no man has ever finished anything." 115 With a divergence of horizons that cannot be denied, Tocqueville accepted this charge and its human limitations faithfully, lamenting, as had Royer, the loss of "the feeling of greatness" and the death of "the imagination of greatness."116 If the readings that Royer-Collard and Tocqueville gave to 111 114 115

112 113 Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., pp. 98-99, 101. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 102. Royer-Collard to Tocqueville, 21 July 1838, in ibid., p. 65; cf. Barante, Vie de Royer116 Collard^ 11, 535. Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 6 April 1838, in OC, xi, 61.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

31

democracy disclosed fundamental differences of appreciation, it must be remembered that forty years of age separated them. The problem of Royer's maturity had been to find a middle way between the arbitraire of paternalistic royalism and the rule by self-appointed demagogues speaking for the people with the language of volonte generate', Tocqueville would see the organization and morale of society, not the constitutional distribution of powers or even the primacy of individual rights, as the key to a regulated liberty. Experience had made Royer-Collard a confirmed pessimist. As Remusat justly writes: "he hailed the principle of the equality of rights with respect, he was too fond of justice to fail to greet with joy the victory of that principle in the laws and in social conduct (moeurs); but, by the same token, he was almost frightened by its political dangers and consequences for government. And so, having little confidence in the compromises he himself endorsed for joining order to liberty, the old and the new factors of stability, he constantly prophesied the collapse of what he was building... [He] condemned any return to the past as a chimera, and any faith in the future as a Utopia."117 Tocqueville would trace a similar trajectory; but in the 1830s he had a firmer faith than Royer in the remedial possibilities of political understanding. Tocqueville hoped that, under democracy, "the majority of the citizens will enjoy a greater degree of prosperity, and the people will remain peaceable, not because they despair of a change for the better, but because they are conscious that they are well off already." 118 At almost this same time, RoyerCollard was writing to Barante: " I do not know the future unless it is that the face of our earth will be remade, that he who has commanded will obey, that he who has ruled will more or less serve." He went on to declare that even if he were much younger, he would not have enlisted on such a mission.119 Tocqueville, less upset by role reversals of master and servant, but deeply concerned by the "mediocrity" of coming times, passed judgment on the "noble et imposante figure" in the last year of his life. He wrote that, amid apparent contradictions in Royer's public positions, two major ideas had always stood out. The first was that a clear distinction had to be drawn between the "esprit liberal" and the "esprit revolutionnaire," that rights, liberty, and dignity had to be separated from the "esprit d'aventure, de violence, de tyrannie, 117 119

Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 803. Remusat, "De l'esprit de reaction," p. 803.

118

Tocqueville, DA, 1, 10.

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de demagogic" Secondly, Royer-Collard believed that France needed the institution of royalty: "The dream of his whole life was to make the new spirit and the old family live together and support each other." 120 According to Tocqueville, the liberal idea (where he was at one with Royer-Collard) was foremost and the monarchical idea did not necessarily flow from it. By that time, Tocqueville, while not completely a political agnostic - for he had recognized the benefits of monarchy and legitimacy - was inclined to favor any regime that left a comfortable space for liberty. Tocqueville was not intrinsically afraid of democracy, which he regarded as inevitable; but he grew progressively more fearful of democratic passions, whether bovine ("doux") or exalted ("revolutionnaires"). As the balanced optimism of the first part of Democracy in America receded, he seemed more and more a Royer-Collard of the next revolution, albeit a Royer-Collard recontextualized. Part of this is in his later movement away from sociology and back to politics. For, in exploring the history of his own country, he tilted his emphasis from the social "passion for equality" to the political problem of centralized power. This was not, to be sure, RoyerCollard's obsession of monarchy and liberty; but it was a painful acknowledgement of the fact that France did not seem able to operate by "the slow and quiet action of society upon itself."121 France was mired in a traditional slough, sometimes now vaguely referred to as "Jacobinism." Not only was the problematic of political centralism obviously political, both as a condition and as a milieu of research; it was also parochial. Tocqueville had, after all, had a thrilling, if potentially tragic, world-wide vision of conquests of democracy that was comparative and sociological; it became muted in his later concern for a France caught in the toils of a particular destiny. In the specific sense that I am using the word, Tocqueville was never so parochial as the Francocentric Royer-Collard. RoyerCollard could recognize the achievement of Democracy in America; but he had no wish to call in the new world to redress the balance of the old. Still, he never descended to the esprit de clocher of Chateaubriand: It has been said [by Tocqueville, preface to the second volume of Democracy in America] that a city where goods and education are equally distributed will present a finer spectacle to the eyes of the Divinity than the city of our 120 121

Tocqueville to Freslon, re Royer-Collard, 8 July 1858, in OC, xi, x-xi. Tocqueville, DA, 1, 433.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

33

forefathers... Farewell the pleasures of the hearth; farewell the charms of the family: in the midst of all these white, yellow, and black people who are claimed to be your compatriots, you will never be able to throw your arms around a brother. Was there, then, nothing of value in that earlier way of life, nothing in that narrow space seen from that window framed by ivy?122 Tocqueville, deeply devoted to the small world of his Normandy estate, nonetheless created a global, albeit Europocentric, vision of the march of equality - to be compared in later times with the worldly theodicies of Comte and Marx 123 — and he deepened it with a supple dialectic of "aristocratic" and "democratic" ages. But, as Tocqueville's courage in the face of Providence began to waver and as he began to find the seeds of despotism in regimes where "each man is haunted by a fear of sinking to a lower social level and by a restless urge to better his condition,"124 he became more historical — that is to say, more past-oriented — and more political (or parochial). The thrust of his inquiry had shifted from "whether the principle of equality is to lead [men] to servitude or freedom"125 to the anatomy of the causes of the French Revolution: "What was its true significance, its real nature, and what were the permanent effects of this strange and terrifying revolution?" 126 The questions are compatible, but not co-equal. Carried back to more local perspectives, Tocqueville lamented with Royer-Collard: "La politique est maintenant depouillee de sa grandeur..." 127 The idiom of this great thinker is not, of course, totally clarified by his connection with the Doctrinaire chief. His thoughts really departed from Montesquieu.128 And as has been frequently pointed out, Tocqueville learned his zest for historical globalism (for "la civilisation") from Guizot, whose lectures he attended between April 1829 a n d May 1830 — that grave year of political decision. It was in July 1829 t n a t n e wrote: "The history of civilization... wants and should want to embrace everything at the same time. Man must be examined in all aspects of his social existence." Tocqueville engorged history in those last days of Charles X - Barante, Guizot, Thiers.129 122 123

125 127 128

C h a t e a u b r i a n d , Memoires d'Outre-tombe, 1, 923. Notably Raymond Aron's volume of lectures, translated by R. Howard and H. Weaver as Main Currents in Sociological Thought, I. Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville (New York, 124 1968). Tocqueville, Old Regime, p . xiii. 126 Tocqueville, DA, n , 352. Tocqueville, Old Regime, p . 4. B a r a n t e , Vie de Royer-Collard, 11, 522. Tocqueville to L. de Kergorlay, 15 December 1850, re Montesquieu's fundamental impact 129 on Old Regime, OC, xm/2, 233. Jardin, Tocqueville, pp. 80 — 81.

34

Ports in the storm

Another influence may have come from the philosopher Theodore Jouffroy, the university colleague of Cousin and a contributor to the liberal Globe. Whether or not Tocqueville was familiar with Jouffroy before his trip to America or came upon his writings through the Melanges philosophiques of 1833 is unclear. There is a reference to Jouffroy in a letter Tocqueville wrote to Corcelle in April 1835, where, in apparent allusion to Jouffroy's lesson "Du scepticisme actuel" from his Cours du droit naturel, he takes issue with that philosopher's pessimistic interpretation of the inevitability of democracy.130 Tocqueville could also have been influenced by Jouffroy's "Du scepticisme" (1830) or by his once-famous essay "Comment les dogmes finissent," first published in the Globe on 24 May 1825. He would have found there an analysis of present times couched in terms of high moral elevation, ardent in castigation of "the terrible spectacle of a community without faith, abandoned entirely to selfishness."131 Certainly most of the essays later collected in the Melanges would have engaged Tocqueville's curiosity. This is especially true of "Reflexions sur la philosophic de l'histoire" (1825), where Jouffroy draws a distinction between ancient and modern historians along much the same lines that Tocqueville will later pursue in the second volume of Democracy in America: "The ancient historians explained everything by the passions and interests, the genius or capacity of individuals; the modern historians attempt to reduce everything to the law of ideas, not excepting those events which are most clearly dependent on the chance of individuals and the caprice of circumstances. Between these two extremes, which render ancient history so dramatic and modern history so logical, we meet with the truth." 132 The connection seems palpable. While lacking Cousin's flamboyance, Jouffroy was an important figure in the Paris where Tocqueville matriculated. He taught a moralistic form of eclecticism bordering on personalism; and he animated the Globe circle from his modest apartment in the rue du Four. One senses a singular contact between his mind and that of the young aristocrat, not least because of Jouffroy's anguished apostasy from the ardent Catholic faith of his childhood. Jouffroy did not simply have a gradual change of rational disposition like Renan 130 131

132

Tocqueville to Corcelle, 12 April 1835, OC, x v , 54. T h e o d o r e Jouffroy, " H o w D o g m a s C o m e to a n E n d , " in George Ripley, ed., Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature (Boston, 1838), 11, 140. Ibid., p. 177. Cf. Tocqueville, DA, n, 90-93.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

35

thirty years later. He suffered acutely from incredulity, as if it were a disease, and made a kind of career of his bereavement. His very moving account of his crisis, though only appearing in Nouveaux melanges after his death (1842), surprised no one. It has been called "Tun des sanglots les plus vrais et les plus eloquents de la litterature contemporaine. Tocqueville, too, was disguising a falling away of faith, a wrenching episode that had happened to him when he was sixteen and with whose consequences he wrestled throughout his life, divulging this only to the confidante of his last years, Madame Swetchine.134 His revelation survives only because Madame de Beaumont saw fit to make a copy of this letter, which her husband had excluded from the canonical correspondence on grounds of delicacy. Madame de Tocqueville knew nothing of this: indeed, her sufficiently worldly husband had, with the manners of a seigneur, regularly attended mass and vespers in his family chapel, perhaps uneasy with doubt, hoping perhaps, like Jouffroy, for the grace of conversion.135 Tocqueville's religious background was, as noted, not so different from Royer's: although with far less discipline, conducted less in a cenacle and more as a part of normal aristocratic Bildung. Catholicism is grasped both as a severe moral discipline and as the national religion of France. This is, of course, quite different from the intermittent Protestant, mystical, and liberating surges of faith experienced by Constant and Madame de Stael. Indeed, I shall argue below, at considerable length, that religion is a major and much-neglected path toward understanding French liberalism and its discriminations. Eventually we shall discover that Tocqueville was affected not only by the Globe, but more substantially by the Avenir of Gerbet and Lamennais, in the wake of the July revolution. Tocqueville was, of course, anything but an ultramontane; and it was not that feature of Lamennais's doctrine that attracted him. As a worldly, Gallican, and national Catholic, Tocqueville was clearly repulsed by that "degradation de la vieille religion."136 But he just as firmly believed the anti-religious temper of the previous century, 133 134

T h u r e a u - D a n g i n , Parti liberal, p . 239. Born A n n a Sophia Solmonova in Moscow in 1782, M a d a m e Swetchine died in Paris in 1857. H e r life is studied in Alfred-Pierre-Frederic, C o m t e d e Falloux, Madame Swetchine, sa vie et ses oeuvres (2 vols., Paris, i 8 6 0 ) ; Ernest Seillere, La grace du romantisme sage: Armand de

135

Melun et Sophie Swetchine, 1782-1857 (Paris, 1929). For the famous letter, see below, note 142. 136 Jardin, Tocqueville, p. 366. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

36

Ports in the storm

carried over into the liberalism of his day, to have been an abusive error. Having lost the hard core of his faith, Tocqueville clung to the outer shell of religious culture and a religious view of the cosmos. He treated religion, as had Montesquieu before him, as an "ecrivain politique." But let us return briefly to the loss of faith. Toward the end of his life, Tocqueville entered into a serious friendship and correspondence with Sophie Swetchine, the widow of a Russian general. Madame Swetchine, herself Russian but as French by adoption as Madame de Stael, captivated the author of Democracy in America. She had been instructed by Joseph de Maistre in Moscow, reading Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel with him, and had gone to live in France, where she became the principal salonniere of liberal Catholicism and the political and moral educator of the Comte de Falloux, Tocqueville's friend and colleague in the second ministry of Odilon Barrot under the Second Republic. Falloux would later write her biography.137 Madame Swetchine had also supported the woes of Lacordaire, who would succeed to Tocqueville's chair in the Academie Francaise. Converted to Roman Catholicism and deeply pious, she was not a foolish or unliberated woman. She had numerous crossings with the Protestant clairvoyant Madame de Krlidener (who had so influenced Tsar Alexander I); although frightened of her, she had always managed to hold her own.138 She was a liberal of sorts: she wept for the fate of the Greeks.139 Eventually she gathered around her the distinguished Catholic staff of Le Correspondant: her power reached to complicated problems of Vatican policy.140 Albert de Broglie (son of Victor, previously mentioned), who had ardently embraced Catholicism, described her style as "tres elegant, tres fin, et parfois meme eloquent, n'evitant pas toujours l'affeterie et la mignardise." 141 This was the older woman to whom Tocqueville bared his soul in a series of letters in his last years (just as he had sought a "father" in an older man, Royer-Collard). And this is what he told her: Looking at the problem of human existence ceaselessly preoccupies me and 137

138 140

Alfred de Falloux, important legitimist politician and Minister of Public Instruction under the Second Republic, is best known for the lot Falloux of 1850, a compromise between lay and clerical education under which France would operate until the fall of the Third Republic. See his Discours et melanges politiques (2 vols., Paris, 1882). 139 Falloux, Madame Swetchine, 1, 12if. Ibid., p. 277. M. Prelot and F. Galloudec Genuys, eds., Le liberalisme catholique (Paris, 1969), pp. 141 197-199. Ibid., p. 198.

Tocqueville: sailing the open sea

37

perturbs me. I can neither penetrate that mystery nor look away from it... In this world I find human life inexplicable and in the world to come full of fear. I firmly believe in a next life, since God, who is a just sovereign, has given us an idea of it; in that other life we will be rewarded for good and evil, because God has let us distinguish them and has given us the freedom of choice; but beyond these clear notions, everything beyond this world seems to me wrapped in fearful shadows. I do not know if I have ever told you a story about my youth which left a deep trace... [Here Tocqueville repeats how, in the midst of a large library - while he was a student at Metz, aged sixteen - he experienced universal doubt: "allors de doute y entra, ou plutot s'y precipita avec une violence inouie, non seulement le doute de ceci ou de cela, mais le doute universel."] I was gripped by the blackest melancholy, seized by an extreme disgust for life even without knowing it, and burdened with trouble and terror as I glimpsed the way I had to make in the world.142

He revealed that he had been restored from his despair by sexual longings ("des passions violentes"), but that he remained distanced from the source of his earliest beliefs and actions, always subject to a "triste et effrayante m a l a d i e " - religious doubt. Such was the attitude and profound regret that lay beneath the morose works of a master whose "gout de la liberte" had complex connections with his ancestral faith. This much he disclosed to an extraordinary woman "without prejudice in either her religious or her political convictions."143 And so, as Andre Jardin puts it, "Tocqueville's anxiety is at the same time a religious disquiet and a social anguish."144 Framed by the great moral guides of the seventeenth century, it breaks new seas, its source of turbulence scarcely appearing beneath polished wistfulness. When Tocqueville died, apparently without religious satisfaction, he was received as a hero in the salons of liberty tolerated by the Second Empire. But Prosper de Barante mistook his man when he wrote: "He needed no fear of death to raise his heart to the thoughts and duties of religion. For him no need of a tardy conversion, brought on by the terrors of eternity. His end was edifying, just as his life had been." 145 Thus, Tocqueville was driven from safe harbor, forced to steer on the rough and enigmatic waters of world history. We should not 142 143 145

Tocqueville to Madame Swetchine, 0C, xv/2, 315. 144 Falloux, Madame Swetchine, 1, 309. J a r d i n , Tocqueville, p . 366. Prosper d e Barante, "Discours d u 3 m a i 1859: notice biographique sur Alexis d e T o c q u e v i l l e " (Paris, 1859), p . 11.

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dramatize his life exceptionally, however, when we compare him to Benjamin Constant: the question before us is one of how their social milieux and intellectual equipment fail to connect. In earlier tempests Constant, too, had been enamored, like Tocqueville, like Chateaubriand, by "the so frequent metaphor... of the port, the peaceful harbor, where one can drop anchor after uncertain and perilous navigation."146 His feelings came out of a far more agitated life than Tocqueville's. However, Constant had framed this image around his private sensibility before the storms of politics closed in. In September 1787 he sent Madame de Charriere the following poem: Au sein meme du port j'avais prevu Forage; Mais entraine loin du rivage A la fureur des vents je n'ai pu resister; J'ai predit Pinstant du naufrage, Je l'ai predit sans pouvoir l'ecarter.147 This theme followed him: he survived in his pitching vessel even if he could not very well hold the wheel. Twenty years later he wrote to Madame de Nassau: "chances for the future... are stormy for everyone and for me more than most. But I have learned to sleep in a wave-beaten bark, and seasickness has become so common that it doesn't keep me from thinking of other things."148 And twelve years after that, to his cousin Rosalie: " I am so used to the rolling of the ship that I sleep just as soundly when the sea is raging." 149 For Tocqueville it is the voyage that seems endless and uncharted; for Constant it is the blessed sleep or mental repose that one can snatch from the storm. That is suggestive of what we shall have to say further about their social and political orientations and ideals. 146 147

148 149

E . H o f m a n n , ed., Constant's 'Principes de politique^ i, 117. Constant's poem (framed as an epitaph for himself) was published by Gustave Rudler in his study Lajeunesse de Benjamin Constant, 1767-1797 (Paris, 1908), p. 250. "Still safe in port I had foreseen the storm; / But, carried far from shore / by the wind's fury, I could not resist; / The moment of my shipwreck I foretold, / Foretold but lacked the power to prevail." J . - H . M e n o s , ed., Lettres de Benjamin Constant a safamille, 1775-1830 (Paris, 1888), p . 238. A. a n d S. Roulin, eds., Benjamin et Rosalie de Constant: Correspondance, 1786-1830 (Paris, 1955), p. 231. Cf. Hofmann, ed., "Principes de politique" 11, 487-488: " Conclura-t-on de ce que les volontes individuelles ont peu d'influence sur les causes des revolutions qu'au milieu de ces convulsions sociales, chacun battu par la tempete peut s'abandonner sans resistance a l'impetuosite des vagues, vivre au jour le jour, suivant les evenements dont la rapide succession l'entraine et prendre conseil du hasard ? Je ne le pense pas. Dans les circonstances les plus orageuses, il y a toujours une route indiquee par la morale. II y a done toujours un devoir a remplir."

CHAPTER 2

Constant versus Tocqueville

I. SOCIAL SETTINGS OF THE POLITICAL SELF

As the conclusion to the last chapter suggests, the relation of the individual and private citizen to the opinions of society and the powers of government is one of the chief modes by which the political theories of Constant and Tocqueville are to be distinguished. An expanded domain of the self combined with a normative supremacy of public opinion had, for the most part, characterized the philosophical project of the eighteenth century. Constant, while greatly sobered by revolution and reaction, is obedient to this idea. For him, these goals are in harmony. Liberal politics is fundamentally a safeguard of the educable inner capacities of the human being and their outward projection as expressive rights. Tocqueville is disabused of that simplicity. He does not deny Constant's priority of "liberty against" (for he, too, has a "garantist" view of political authority), 1 but he fears the unstable context of uniformity that democratic self-disclosure has helped to create, a liberation leading to softer but stronger servitudes. " I n democratic times," he writes, "what is most unstable, in the midst of the instability of everything, is the heart of man." 2 This is an instability predicated both as sameness and as separateness. Tocqueville deplores, and probably exaggerates in his aristocrat's heart, the atomization of modern, and especially post-Revolutionary, French society. Insofar as Constant acknowledges that danger, he tends to interpret it as a consequence of "despotic" 1

2

Jean-Claude Lamberti is correct in saying that Tocqueville makes no special case for constitutional guarantees (Tocqueville et les deux de'mocraties, Paris, 1983, p. 84); but his "garantisme" is implicit in statements such as: "The nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience." Democracy in America (trans. Henry Reeve, 2 vols., New York, 1934), n, 338; cf. ibid., p. 151. Henceforth DA. Tocqueville, DA, 11, 198.

39

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Constant versus Tocqueville

residues, seeing uniformity "as the immediate and inevitable consequence of the spirit of conquest [of Napoleon]." 3 Terms appropriate to our inquiry such as "self" or "individual" or "individualism" have long had contested resonances. "Self" (moi), at times virtually identical with "soul" (dme), had a famous career in the lexicon of French moralism, beginning with Montaigne and proceeding through Rousseau to the Romantics: for Rousseau, "renoncer a son moi" is slavery.4 But it is not a privileged term in the political theory under discussion here. Rejecting social-contract theory, these writers do not conceive of political society as a moi commun. Constant, frequently using a publicist's rhetoric, prefers a language of "nous," "vous," "eux," "chacun," "l'homme," "les hommes" to designate human agency; while Tocqueville, more lofty and detached, is usually satisfied with "l'homme," "les hommes," and their pronouns. When it is a question of something internal to the person, Constant is apt to convey this by the adjective "interieur" (or occasionally "intime"); Tocqueville by the expression "le coeur de l'homme," Constant writes "l'individu" more than Tocqueville: sometimes in the neutral sense of "chacun," but also in the originary sense of "Les droits des individus." 5 On the character of those same rights, Tocqueville takes a more Montesquieuvian (and Doctrinaire) position: "The rights of every people are... confined within the limits of what is [universally] just." 6 Indeed, for him " a majority taken collectively is only [my italics] an individual whose opinions, and frequently whose interests, are opposed to those of another individual, who is styled a minority." 7 As for "individualism" (i.e. a "willingness to leave society at large"), 8 a word which, according to Tocqueville, "we have coined for our own requirements," 9 it was "unknown to our ancestors, [for] in their days every individual necessarily belonged to a group." 10 It was similarly unknown to Constant, for the very good reason that he 3

4 5

6 7 9

10

Benjamin Constant, De /'esprit de conquete et de V usurpation (hereafter, Conquete /Usurpation), in Marcel Gauchet, ed., Constant, De la liberte chez les modernes (Paris, 1980), p. 148. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ou de reducation (ed. Richard, Paris, i960), bk. v, p. 587. E.g. Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique applicables a tous les gouvernements (1806), in Etienne Hofmann, ed., Les "principes de politique" de Benjamin Constant (2 vols., Geneva, 1980), 11, 276. Tocqueville, DA, 1, 369. See the remarks by J.-C. Lamberti, Tocqueville, p. 112. 8 Tocqueville, DA, 1, 369. Ibid., 11, 104. Dictionaries record a first coinage of " individualisme " by Balzac in Le medecin de campagne (1833). The novelist uses it as a synonym for "egoisme," which is precisely the idea disputed by Tocqueville in DA, 11 (1840). Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (trans. S. Gilbert, New York, 1955), p. 96.

Social settings of the political self

41

did not see the "rights of individuals" as producing a semipathological condition of privatization called "individualism." For him, "opinion" and "individuals" were healthy collaborators. Constant's positive word was "individuality": "by liberty I mean the triumph of individuality."11 The "calme" and "repos" of the private satisfactions12 encouraged by "commerce" and "industrie" did not, for Constant, lead to isolation, but were the preconditions of an enlightened sociability, a natural and free mode of association protected from political control, though guaranteed by a sufficient practice of preventive politics. The ideals of eighteenth-century Edinburgh (where Constant had been as a young student) are very close to this conception of "doux commerce" - one of social as well as economic exchange. This did not seem to him to require learned proof: "Man is sociable because he is a man. Just as the wolf is unsociable because it is a wolf."13 Obstacles to this condition were abnormal in the proper course of human development. Not only were they being overcome by commerce and the "softening of manners," but by a widening of lumieres}* Placed beside Tocqueville's later premonitions, this might seem shallowly optimistic. At least it is clear that Constant's unproblematic picture of independent but socialized individuals foresees no systemic defects in the milieu where it is carried out, no radical deceptions in its self-image, Paradoxically, these optimistic conclusions are conditioned by a certain mood of exhaustion, by a recuperative pause ("repos"); while Tocqueville's darker vision is always keyed to the complementary dangers of ennui and unrest. For Constant the revolution is over;15 for Tocqueville it reappears, with no end in sight. Constant's vigilance is directed against the past; Tocqueville posts his sentinels for time to come. Regarding the public and private responsibilities of the individual whom Constant exalts as the repository of rights, there can be room for some variance of interpretation. 16 The position taken here is that 11

12 13 14 15

16

Constant, preface to Melanges de litterature et de politique, in Gauchet, ed., Liberte chez les modernes, p. 519. Where possible, "jouissances" is translated by "satisfactions," otherwise by "enjoyment." Constant, Commentaire sur Vouvrage de Filangieri (2 vols., Paris, 1822-1824), 1, 47. See Constant, Conquete/ Usurpation, pp. 134, 184, 231, 238. See Constant, "Pieces detachees," Melanges, p. 510. The July revolution was, of course, a riposte against "counter-revolution." Stephen Holmes, in his Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, 1984), takes Constant too far as an advocate of political liberty. I have responded to some of Holmes's excessive interpretations (in his generally informed and sensitive study) in my "Constant and His Interpreters: A Second Visit," Annales Benjamin Constant, 6 (1986), 83-86.

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Constant versus Tocqueville

Constant's view of "modern liberty" (proposed less as a virtue than as an inescapable fact) denies that contemporaries reap much pleasure from public activity; what makes them happy is "to be left in a perfect independence in everything relating to their occupations, private activities, and fantasies."17 Those most attached to these satisfactions will be most attached to freedom. And, as Constant comments ironically: "The partisans of ancient liberty [i.e. the Jacobins] grew furious when they saw that the moderns didn't want to be free according to their method." 18 Since "political liberty offers less enjoyment than before and can bring about the most intolerable disorders, only what is absolutely necessary should be preserved of it." 19 That can be defined as the amount needed to secure limited constitutional government, with the end of protecting not only "satisfactions" but also the play of opinion that increases the intellectual goods of society. Political authority should be responsive to specific cases of injustice and also to social needs (as expressed by petition), never irresponsibly thwarting public expectation, never going beyond it with radical audacity, never imposing on it arbitrary or contestable standards of virtue. In this sense, the individual, as a receptor and communicator of opinion, is in his social element and shares the general goals of "repos," "aisance," and "lumieres." But society itself is divided into those who hold political office and the many others who do not. Thus, in a different sense, politics and society are seamless — political power is "autorite sociale" —and the non-governing individual remains critically on the qui-vive, having different and conflicting ends from those in power.20 In the last analysis, his rights are guarded only by constitutional protection: for any power-holder, no matter how honorable, will find reason to transgress the rights of ordinary persons.21 If it seems curious that Constant should wish to define government as "social authority," the reason is that society has no rights other than those which can be legitimately exercised by governments.22 The "people" are actively sovereign only through their officials. It is sometimes too hastily argued that Constant's individual liberty is of a hedonistic or at least narrowly egoistic sort, where the 17 19 20 21

18 Conquete/ Usurpation, p. 184. Ibid., p. 191. H o f m a n n , ed., " Principes de politique" 11, 4 3 5 . Ibid., p . 4 9 0 ; cf. Principes depolitique (1815), in G a u c h e t , ed., Liberte chez les modernes, p . 337. 22 Ouvrage de Filangieri, 1, 66. H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique,''' 11, 59.

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essential thing is that separate persons be privileged to advance their interests and, within the limits of public order, indulge in their chosen satisfactions, be they noble, trivial, or contemptible. But this is not the thrust of Constant's argument, despite the latitude he appears to leave to private discretion. Constant consistently rejects the language and moral implications of utility, not because utility is itself false but because it seems degrading,23 especially when applied to matters of the spirit: "The word utiliser has very properly been kept out of the French language." 24 " I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that in everything connected to the soul's affections and to noble ideas, one ought to reject the thing, just as our speech rejects the word.25 The principle of utility is inferior to that of right, "because it awakens in man's mind the hope of profit and not the feeling of duty." 26 Finally, not being "susceptible to precise demonstration," it becomes a matter of subjective argument. 27 If "modern liberty" were to aim after purely physical pleasures, that would indeed bring the goals of rulers and the governed together, for it is in the interest of rulers that ordinary persons be content with such satisfactions. But if the aim is to provide a higher happiness — the development of intellectual faculties — this right and duty will not be to the taste of most governments.28 Thus, beyond physical satisfactions, Constant always summons as his goal the advancement of the mind: "Man is not simply in need of relaxation, application, domestic happiness, and private virtues. Nature has also given him faculties which, if not nobler, are at least more brilliant. More than all the others, these faculties are threatened by arbitrary government." 29 For Constant, the exercise of intellectual liberty serves as a bridge between the individual and the social, somewhat in the way that voluntary associations do for Tocqueville.30 That is, to be sure, a rather eighteenth-century, even non-sociological, account of how individuals combine and operate as social wholes, giving immense privilege to education and to literary and verbal skills. Yet it, too, is based on a kind of sociology in which 23 24

25 26 27 29 30

Ibid., p. 171. The coinage "utiliser" appears to have first been criticised by Jacques Necker in his Du pouvoir executif dans les grands Etats ( 1 7 9 2 ) . H o f m a n n , e d . , " Principes de politique," 11, 1 7 1 . Constant, "De M. Dunoyer et de quelques-uns de ses ouvrages," Melanges, p. 552. 28 Ouvrage de Filangieri, 1, 6 5 . H o f m a n n , e d . , "Principes de politique," 11, 4 6 7 . Conquete/ Usurpation, p . 2 0 6 . This is not to say that Constant, like John Dewey, has any "social conception of intelligence." See his Liberalism and Social Action (New York, 1963).

44

Constant versus Tocqueville

public opinion, commerce, conversation, and a common morale of enlightenment collaborate to improve the human condition. "Thought," Constant writes, "is the principle of everything." 31 Ideas propel history in a progressive direction, for they guarantee that "the intelligence of man cannot remain stationary." And ideas, although having their source in individuals, are a common and social property under the right of free expression in the form of "opinion," which, no matter how persecuted by despotism, always "returns to the fray, and triumphs." 32 Ideas also raise individuals above their interests and create in them a sense of duty, including duties toward government.33 Yet ideas are radically individual: "everything having its source in thought and opinion is individual. It is never as a government that a government persuades." 34 For the proper role of a government is not opinion, not persuasion; it is specifically "the use of public force against individuals."35 Constant's portrait of liberty is not, then, all things considered, a summons of the individual to political participation, except insofar as he must do this to insure his full exercise of rights in the private sphere. There is no surplus exhilaration to be gained from a public role. But this is an invitation to the social through a participation in the moral and intellectual realms of human improvement. And that is precisely the assumption that Tocqueville finds problematic in "democratic ages." The most casual comparison of Tocqueville's scheme of analysis with that of Constant will suggest both analogies and far-reaching differences. That question will be taken up in detail in the next section. Suffice it for now to say that while, for Tocqueville, "aristocratic ages" promote what in our parlance would be called "striking individuals" with a style of liberty to match, "democratic ages" are, in effect, manufacturers of the routine, of "individualism." According to him, this condition had been prefigured in France "for six generations."36 The type of society he calls democratic is basically the same one that Constant's "modern liberty" is calling into being. "If," Tocqueville writes in the second volume of Democracy in America, 31 32 33 35

Conquete/Usurpation, p . 210. Ibid., p . 2 3 1 ; cf. H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique," 11, 486. 34 H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique," 11, 4 7 5 - 4 7 6 . Ibid., p . 77. 36 Ibid., p . 24. Tocqueville, Old Regime, p . 20.

Social settings of the political self

45

everyone undertook to form his own opinions and to seek for truth by isolated paths struck out by himself alone, it would follow that no considerable number of men would ever unite in any common belief. But obviously without such common belief no society can prosper; say, rather, no society can exist; for without ideas held in common there may still be men, but there is no social body.37 Such is Tocqueville's dystopia, his fallen "state of nature," presented as an unlikely thought-experiment but still as an incisive comment on the destiny of rampant individualism. Constant, as we have seen, believed in the effectiveness of the social transmission of ideas, a morale that united men, rather than an interest that drove them apart. Intelligence revokes arbitraire: "As the lumieres make progress, reason casts the legitimacy of chance in doubt." 38 But for Tocqueville this is not axiomatic. Opinions formed in this manner do not converge on the truth, but on a conventional simulacrum that passes for the truth." In democratic ages," Tocqueville argues, the tandem progress of the ideas of individuality and equality produces a result of sameness in which even individuals are effaced39 and where "opinion," far from fulfilling the liberating role assigned to it by Constant, becomes a "mistress of the world" that mobilizes its minions in a shared ignorance.40 Indeed, in democratic societies, when the passion for equality is vented in revolution, there is the paradoxical outcome of "intellectual anarchy" and "the instability of everything." 41 American democracy has held the paradox in check; the French version has not. France was, according to Tocqueville, a nation whose social practices and political institutions had been confused and dangerously out of phase. The Revolution had been " a violent and rapid process by which the political conditions were adapted to the social ones, facts to ideas, the laws to moeurs."*2 But, indeed, moeurs themselves had come close to being effaced.43 In France, neither government nor society, nor the two together, had reached an equilibrium.44 This was not so in the United States, where a system of laws structured on moeurs had been developing since earliest times and where stability had been favored by a "slow and quiet action of 37 39 42

43 44

38 Tocqueville, DA, n , 9. C o n s t a n t , Conquete/ Usurpation, p p . 124, 176. 40 41 Tocqueville, DA, 11, 32. Ibid., p . n . Ibid., p p . 198, 272. Tocqueville, "L'etat social et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789," in Oeuvres completes (ed. G. de Beaumont, 9 vols., Paris, 1866), vm, 21, 29, 44. Henceforth, OF (B). Reception speech, Academie Franchise (1842), in ibid., ix, 17-18. Old Regime, p . 208.

46

Constant versus Tocqueville 45

society upon itself." The Americans were (in 1831) little exposed to the traumas of centralization, and they had vigorous local liberties inherited from colonial times and prolonged through the vigor of voluntary associations.46 Most importantly, "they [had] arrived at the state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution."47 Though Tocqueville sought evidence in the United States for his bittersweet hope that liberty could be sustained by equality in "democratic ages," he did not whitewash the manners of the new nation. America shared in all the mediocrity of democratic life and was perhaps its cardinal example.48 But its mutability and restlessness were controlled by "the singular stability of certain principles."49 In France, on the other hand, all was in flux, "brought together but not yet mingled." 50 In France, the very principle of popular government was a deceit, for it was generated not by the people, but by "those who know what is good for the people." 51 Constant hardly saw or projected the problems of modern liberty in democratic ages, even though he certainly understood many of the features of democratic despotism.52 America versus France is therefore not a matrix of this essay. But Tocqueville's resources of method bear importantly on our examination of the two styles of liberalism, suggesting that we require a deeper probing of them in respect to the relationship of ethos (moeurs) and opinion. The recognition of an independent power of opinion (sometimes described as a "public tribunal") 53 had been a great revelation for French social thought in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This was an opinion inhering in "civil society," held by a vaguely determined class of educated persons and indebted to enlightenment and philosophy. Such opinion, the philosophes believed, could contest, counterbalance, and eventually prevail over the traditional ideologies of church, state, and hereditary privilege (in England, as J. G. A. Pocock has admirably shown, there was little or no "enlightenment" of this kind). 54 But the property or powers of this 45 48 51 52

53

54

46 47 DA, 1, 433. Ibid., 11, n o , 112. Ibid., pp. 108, 270. 49 50 Ibid., pp. 260-261; 1, 273-274. Ibid., n, 271. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., 1, 433.

On the connection Constant makes between Jacobinism and Bonapartism under this r u b r i c , see Conquete/Usurpation, p . 219. Especially so used by Lamoignon de Malesherbes in his reception speech "Discours prononce dans l'Academie franchise le 16 fevrier 1775" (Paris, 1775), where he flatteringly dates "public opinion" and its "tribunal" from the foundation of the Academie itself. See J. G. A. Pocock, "Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in E n g l a n d , " in Ueta dei lumi: studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi (Naples, IO .85)> PP- 528-529.

Social settings of the political self

47

transmission were arguable — arguable specifically in the sense of how opinion related to moeurs. Was opinion essentially reason giving battle to moeurs, breaking, as it were, their " cake of custom " ? Or was it a kind of refined codification of moeurs, asserting the natural (and the national) against the artificial values of hierarchies, feodalite, and "superstition"? D'Alembert spoke for most of the philosophes: "Sooner or later the men who think and write govern opinion, and opinion governs the world."55 But there was also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who declared from a more democratic perspective: "[There is also a fourth kind of law], the most important of all... engraved neither in marble nor in bronze, but in the hearts of the citizens... I speak of habitual conduct, of customs, and especially of opinion; a part of the laws unknown to our political thinkers, but on which the success of everything else depends." 56 Rousseau's notion of opinion (understood as a self-coercion that had superseded necessities of legal coercion), "engraved in the hearts of the citizens," was a populist riposte to the more widespread idea of enlightenment descending from the literary opinion-makers. To be sure, Rousseau himself conceded that the common people need initially to have their inarticulate opinion shaped by "legislators," demiurgoi of semi-divine intelligence. But what is more important for subsequent social thought is that opinion and moeurs correspond very much in Rousseau's perspective: if one is corrupt, so will the other be. As such, the clash aroused by Rousseau in his Lettre a M. cTAlembert sur les spectacles is one between Genevan opinion and moeurs

and Parisian opinion and moeurs. For d'Alembert it is different: Geneva would soften and improve its moeurs by a judicious injection of "opinion" (admitting a theatre). For opinion is not moeurs: moeurs are congealed opinions to be overturned by new discoveries, truths, and amenities owing to philosophy and the advance of civility. Not only does opinion challenge moeurs at their unexamined roots; it is a part of mankind's practical education, its liberation from servility and esprit de clocher. It was the great and theoretically ambiguous Montesquieu who had held these perspectives in balance. Just as Montesquieu appreciated the prescriptiveness of the law of nature and its authorizations for the exercise of an autonomous self, just as he applauded "doux commerce," he was also deeply impressed by the 55

56

J e a n L e R o n d d ' A l e m b e r t , " D e s c a r t e s et Christine d e S u e d e , " in Dialogues des morts de Fe'nelon, suivis de quelques dialogues de Boileau, de Fontenelle et de d'Alembert (Paris, 1862), p . 336. J . - J . R o u s s e a u , Du contrat social, 11, xii.

48

Constant versus Tocqueville

formative power of society with its own kinds of laws and the multiple elements and relationships out of which were fashioned the "esprit general d'un peuple." His project of investigating those relationships — the "spirit" of the laws — has been appropriately called "sociological." For him, moeurs and manures (the "causes morales") were a well of opinion, not inert matter on which ideas might work. The importance of these theoretical positions to Constant and Tocqueville can scarcely be underestimated. From the Esprit des lois, Constant gained his idea of what a political treatise should look like: it should be relational in perspective and should deal with historical and systemic interactions. But it could also be both normative and comparative in ways that the Esprit des lois had not been: normative because the new doctrine of (negative) liberty made it possible to judge regimes by their fruits and not just within the closed circuit of their "principe," thus making it possible to have " principes... applicables a tous les gouvernements "; comparative not only for this same reason, but also because a teleological notion of progress (influenced by Condorcet and Godwin, and perhaps Kant) ventured to close the historical - though not the conceptual - gap between "ancient" and "modern." This aspect of Constant's achievement is most striking in the manuscript text of his Principes (1806, Lausanne; 1810, Paris), now available in E. Hofmann's indispensable edition.57 Nonetheless, it is intimated in his other writings and in his general view of politics. Although Constant, like others, felt that Montesquieu had been too "feudal" in his functional defense of certain Old Regime institutions, and indeed not libertarian enough,58 he judged his analysis to be incomparably better than those of rationalist competitors.59 The reason for this was that Montesquieu had not wished the moeurs of society to be forced by invasions of liberty. The compulsion of enlightenment was often an unwarranted interference. "Nothing is more absurd," Constant wrote, "than to claim [the right] to do violence to habits on the pretext of guiding men more faithfully toward their interests."60 And again: "When governments offer their peoples legislative improvements, peoples should reply by asking for constitutional institutions."61 57 59 60 61

58 See note 3, above. H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique" 11, 27. Ouvrage de Filangieri, i, 2. Hofmann, ed., "Principes de politique" 11, 388; cf. Conquete/ Usurpation, p. 150. Ouvrage de Filangieri, 1, 34.

Social settings of the political self

49

Despite a certain literary and moral filiation with Rousseau (especially his Profession defoi du vicaire Savoyard), Constant held the political theory of Rousseau to be either self-defeating or dangerous, or both. The opening chapters of his 1806 Principles de politique include a devastating critique of both Hobbes's and Rousseau's doctrines of sovereignty.62 In less extended form, these arguments, made elsewhere in Constant's writings, are well known and do not demand our attention here.63 But we should notice Constant's departure from Rousseau on the matter of moeurs and opinion. Despite his "positive" view of opinion in Contrat social, 11, xii, Rousseau, ever in awe of its power, felt that since most societies were incorrigibly corrupt (that of the philosophes included), one should greatly fear their opinion and their moeurs. Constant rejected this position in the large. He did not think that opinion and moeurs were the same thing, or that opinion could, or should, "ascend." He shared the view of the gens de lettres that opinion was, grosso modo, "enlightenment," cosmopolitan in character, a kind of educated tribunal, a state of knowledge and civility diffused by the best minds: "To opinions alone has the governance of the world been given." 64 But (and this is indicative of a quarrel with the philosophes that he shared with Tocqueville) he did not feel that the unremitting pressure of government reform on society could possibly be favorable to liberty in the long run. "Allow me six years of despotism, and I will give you liberty," Turgot is alleged to have declared.65 But Constant had no truck with this notion; for him, opinion exercised by government ceased to be opinion and became merely public power. It is significant also that moeurs do not really play a decisive conceptual role in Constant's writings: their resistance to official lumieres carried no real sociological imprimatur, and is essentially seen in the optic of individual liberty. Tocqueville's inheritance of the problematics of Montesquieu and Rousseau is rather different from this. Like Montesquieu, Tocqueville has a sociological respect for moeurs, that is, he endows the concept with generative power: "political societies are not what their laws make them, but what feelings, ideas, habits of the heart, 62 63

65

H o f m a n n , ed., " Principes de politique,''' n, 2 0 - 4 6 . Well s u m m a r i z e d in J e a n Roussel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau en France apres la Revolution, 64 1795-1830 (Paris, 1972), pp. 495-506. Melanges, p. 604. One of the numerous sources for this is Marc-Antoine Baudot, Notes historiques sur la Convention nationale, le Directoire, I''Empire et Fexil des votants (reprint, Geneva, 1974), p. 157.

5<3

Constant versus Tocqueville

and the spirit of the men who form them, prepare them to be." 66 It is the moeurs of aristocratic ages that make aristocrats valid, if often vainglorious, individuals.67 And it is the moeurs of democratic ages that, under the illusion of individuality, produce a "Cartesian" uniformity.68 The power of a single individual, Bonaparte, was decisive at a certain moment in time because France was "almost as bereft of laws, customs, and moeurs as if it had just been created.; 69 Moeurs are not just a residue of unreflective customary behavior; they are an alert substrate of social character and, as such, can be independently advantageous to liberty. " I n America," Tocqueville noted shortly after his arrival in 1831, "free moeurs have made free political institutions; in France it is up to free political institutions to create moeurs."70 In the natural order of things, moeurs have priority over government: this is because they follow "ideas" and not "facts." While the principle of aristocracy still prevailed in the politics of the French Old Regime, moeurs had already become democratized. This made the arbitration of the gens de lettres even more potent, creating a volatility of opinion that helped inflame the revolutionary crisis.71 For Constant, "ideas," lumieres, and opinion were all attached to the progressive guidance of the literary class: a "community of individuals." Although the basic continuity of society was governed by "principes" (which might be defined as Constant's analogue to the rational givens of human existence; compare Tocqueville's "laws of society"), "ideas" assured man's "access to perfection."72 While Constant did not doubt that writers could, and during the Revolution and Empire did, peddle ideas mendaciously, his confidence in the liberated intellect was quite boundless;73 as we have seen, it tempered the hedonism of "modern liberty." Tocqueville neither shares this confidence nor is he persuaded that the ideas of individuals (especially intellectuals) can play such a critical role in the formation of a social ethos. If they had once done this (in the last years of the Old Regime), it had been owing to frictions within the ruling parts of society and the unbalanced state 66

69 70 71 72

Tocqueville to Corcelle, 17 September 1853, in Oeuvres completes (18 vols. to date, Paris, 67 68 1951- ), xv/2, 81. Old Regime, pp. 110-111. DA, 11, 5-6. Reception speech, Academie francaise (1842), OC (B), rx, 17-18. "Carnet de voyages, i e r octobre 1831," OC, v / i , 179. "Etat social et politique," p. 21. Constant, "De la perfectibilite de l'espece humaine," Melanges, in Gauchet, ed., Liberte chez 73 les modernes, p . 583. Conquete / Usurpation, ibid., p p . 158, 228.

Social settings of the political self

51

of moeurs and institutions.74 Its result had been baneful, for it permitted educated society to "indulge, almost without restriction, in learned discussions on the origins of society, the nature of government, and the essential rights of man" in an absolutist and abstract way.75 But, one may inquire, was Tocqueville himself not an intellectual man writing on political issues with a certain axe to grind? For him to belittle his own calling might bear certain resemblances to Rousseau's predicament in attacking polite letters while publishing them and profiting by them. Tocqueville would doubtless reply to this that, unlike the literati of the previous century (but like the English), he was a man engaged also in practical politics. And he would counter the imputation of a sociological determinism of moeurs by responding that within a wide circle of agency men are free: "If I had entertained the conviction [that they were not], I should not have written this book [Democracy in America, part 11], but I should have confined myself to deploring in secret the destiny of mankind." 76 More importantly, "as it is with men, so with communities."77 Communities are also free to produce their moeurs and to respond to ideas which, although thought by individual minds, are part of a common treasury of opinion and shaped by it.78 That is why in democratic times the voluntary association - where ideas circulate in view of practical goals - is their freest and best purveyor. The relationship between moeurs and ideas, moeurs and opinion, in Tocqueville is always proximate, never construed adversarily as the meeting between something active and something relatively inert, as it tends to be in Constant. For a similar reason, Tocqueville's comparative method contains no immanent teleological predisposition toward universal felicity, either in the self or the species. This returns us to the problematic of Rousseau, whose work was also of consequence in the development of Tocqueville's thought, not so much for what it added to his method, but for its caution against too ready an endorsement of Enlightenment fantasies. Like Tocqueville (and like Montesquieu), Rousseau had tended to join moeurs and opinion. And, like Tocqueville especially, he saw a closeness between bonnes moeurs and citizenship, with public laxity as 74 77 78

75 76 Old Regime, pp. 74-75. Ibid., p. 141. DA, 11, 348. Ibid., p. 352. F o r d e v e l o p m e n t of this idea, see Charles T a y l o r , Philosophy and the Human Philosophical Papers, II (Cambridge, 1985).

Sciences:

52

Constant versus Tocqueville

the measure of a corrupt ethos.79 Again like Tocqueville, Rousseau firmly believed that "great individuals" were mostly a thing of the past (although Tocqueville sociologized this insight and, as we shall see, pace Rousseau, combined the feudal aristocracy with the ancients). Rousseau, however, believed in sameness and unity; Tocqueville foresaw sameness and separation. Clearly, Tocqueville, like Constant, repugned the abstract and tyrannical formulas of the "general will" and the political notion of lepeuple in general, not to mention all but a spectral version (remarkable when it appears) of the "natural rights" legal argument. Tocqueville was ostensibly more concerned with the public law of nations, as reflected from moeurS) than with natural law per se, though he, like Montesquieu, believed in a natural standard of justice. The logical and disembodied shape of "social contract" or legal-consensualist discourse had, for Tocqueville, placed the Revolution of 1789 (despite its magnanimous appeals to concrete liberty - achieving moeurs with a politics to match) in the rhetorical grip of fanatic and politically naive pedants, and had encouraged the worst features of democratic society to appear. 80 These abstractions had been destructive to moeurs. The ambiance in which moeurs were fortified was, for Tocqueville, first of all, local and, second, voluntary. Rousseau's ambivalence was to see and deny this all at once: the anteriority of ethos to politics, once there has been a political institution or foundation, is clear; yet he reserves a special privilege, a sovereign pomp, to "the people assembled (en corps) " and a special contempt for sub-political groups and interests.81 We must finally see how the powers of government or political authority are to be related to the individual and the social in the theories of Constant and Tocqueville. The contours of our study preclude an extensive treatment of this; even in brief it is not easy to draw comparisons because of distances of time and differing perspectives on specific regimes. Let us start with the simplest area of agreement. For both men, government - understood as political authority and its office - is more than a necessary evil: it is a worthy activity for those who pursue it well — and it is the self-governing expression of the "social." On the other hand, for both theorists it is a kind of instrumental enterprise (and this immediately identifies both as 79

80

A m o n g his m a n y observations, Contrat social, in, x v : " A s soon as a n y m a n says of the affairs of state, 'what does it matter to me?' the State may be given up for lost." 81 Tocqueville, Old Regime, p p . 1 4 0 - 1 4 1 . Rousseau, Contrat social, 11, iii; m , xii.

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liberals undistracted by the teleology of human self-fulfillment in politics): it is not an end in itself, or a specifically heroic occupation - although Tocqueville stresses a "greatness" that is totally absent from Constant. Government guarantees the freedom of the social order, its needs and its morale, and, as such, it acquires functions. If - as Tocqueville so cogently argues about eighteenth-century France - its functions become socially dysfunctional, its forms are in jeopardy. And if, as Constant writes, it harbors tendencies toward despotism or anarchy, then these two specific "generally illegitimate" forms of rule will not endure in the face of resistances by the social order and its capacity for lumieres. In an as yet inspecific sense, then, for both, political rule is the servant of social forces. But we notice at this point some cleavages of vision. If, for Constant, government is essentially to be regarded as a protective agency, committed to preserving the orderly and just conduct of private affairs and to the common defense, prevented from impeding the normal advance of civilization by having its powers limited and checked, for Tocqueville government is somewhat more a projective or expressive affair, translating the moeurs of society into congenial laws and practices, inhibited not so much by the adversarial notion of "rights" as by a positive notion of "liberty" (a feeling of selfcontrol and self-determination that communities retain). For Tocqueville expressly, this idea is conveyed in the form of local and spatial liberties (an inheritance of the nobility's resistance against centralizing power, and, paradoxically, recreated in America by commoners "because there was no nobility)." 82 Constant is not insensitive to the claims of "variety" against "uniformity" ("life" against "death," as he hyperbolically puts it): 83 there are elegant words on the subject in both the Principes manuscript of 1806 and the Esprit de conquete adapted from it in 1814. However, their accents are not the same; for Constant cannot possibly share a legitimist's feeling about villages, provinces, and practices - he writes substantially from the psychology of a notable. In the later manuscript of 1814, however horror-stricken he may feel about the single and indivisible nation of the Jacobins and Napoleon, he raises the tone of what earlier was a "Girondin" decentralizing perspective to the newly expressed needs of local liberty in post-imperial conditions of dynastic restoration. Tocqueville was wistful about historic liberties in France, although 82

Tocqueville, DA. n, 316.

83

Constant, Conquete/Usurpation, p. 151.

54

Constant versus Tocqueville

his was no idyllic tableau of seigneurs in friendly commerce with gardeners and milkmaids, being constructed out of bourgeois materials as well. His point was not about deference, but about liberty. Constant regarded localism as a barrier against uniformity and despotism, but scarcely as a blessing in itself or a natural reservoir of public service (he himself represented districts as disparate as Le Mans, Strasbourg, and Paris, while Tocqueville was ever the deputy of his ancestral Valognes). Factors such as these influence two versions of the relationship of government and society. Both Constant and Tocqueville well knew that power was in Paris, and that local electors had to be served as well. But the state, then having to be re theorized if not totally rebuilt, is more prominent in the political theory of Constant; and the activity of citizens is correspondingly more muted. In Tocqueville, we see citizens, but they are not exactly Aristotelian figures, ruling and ruled: they are gliding without such abruptness between societal and public affairs, and basically self-ruled through moeurs. Tocqueville, with his public doctrine of "interest bien entendu" (seeming here more utilitarian than Constant), appears to be striking a bargain between what Michael Oakeshott characterizes as a "morality of communal ties" and a "morality of individuality." 84 Tocqueville's vision of a modern (i.e. democratic) state proceeds somehow from a fruitful transaction of routine and initiative, creating a civic impulse which, "if it be connected with the thoughts, the passions, and the daily habits of life, may be consolidated into a durable and rational sentiment." 85 And on such a foundation political activity and appropriate political powers and offices can be constructed. The task of Constant's generation was to settle and balance prerogatives in a dampening of ideology - to rebuild society from the redoubt of institutional security and the encouragement of private resources. And Constant far outdistanced others in expressing this. For Tocqueville, there was a different task: that of probing social complexity itself so as to grasp how it might or might not be responsive to free institutions. If Constant was not so intimately aware of the relationships of individuals in larger social wholes, and 84

See, on this, Michael Oakeshott, "The Moral Life in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes," in Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford, 1975), pp. 76-77. Cf. Tocqueville, DA, 11, 112: "Men attend to the interests of the public, first by necessity, afterwards by choice... by dint of working for the good of one's fellow citizens, the habit and taste for serving them are at 85 length acquired." Tocqueville, DA, 1, 97.

Ages of the spirit

55

if he was not as alert to anti-social dangers of the satisfied self, he was incomparably more familiar with the formal properties of a "free government" along European constitutional lines. Yet this was achieved with a certain deficit of historical pathos and foresight. II. AGES OF THE SPIRIT

While Locke and earlier contractualists had constructed liberty from a radically originary "state of nature," nineteenth-century theorists, following Madame de Stael, made the historical claim that liberty was "ancient." But political theory is only a semi-historical enterprise (otherwise it would imply that fact makes right); and, in the wake of the Revolution, it was not so clear how liberty a priori and historical liberty could be made commensurate. Constant and Tocqueville both descend from Montesquieu: that is, their liberal analyses depend, for their strength, on quasi-historical, comparative constructs. In Constant's case, the key operative terms are "ancient and modern liberty" and "the spirits of conquest and commerce." Tocqueville's view of liberty is also dichotomous (though rather different and not so succinctly named), and he introduces further comparative richness through his extensive juxtaposing of "aristocratic and democratic ages (men, nations)." In both writers these conceptual devices are so thoroughly imbricated that they become parts of a single rationale. In both, history (and philosophy of history) play a prominent, but not exclusive, role. In the Esprit des lois Montesquieu had proposed to two legitimate regime-types: the polis-republic depending on public virtue and the tempered modern monarchy supported by varieties of honor. While Montesquieu had planted other clues - "moderate aristocracy;" the "commercial republic disguised as a monarchy" (England); the "Gothic" constitutionalism of France; and the limiting case of "oriental despotism"-Constant and Tocqueville required some historical refinement of Montesquieu's materials if they were to display the etiology and features of the contemporary situation. In Constant's case, a soberer version of Condorcet's "history of the progress of the human mind" supplied the deep background. For Tocqueville, an inevitable ("providential") advance toward "equality of condition" — a democratization of moeurs and politics with no necessary relation to "the progress of the mind "-served an equivalent purpose. In neither instance was history so dominant as

56

Constant versus Tocqueville

to efface presuppositions of freedom or the normative properties of comparative judgment. While the social texture of Tocqueville's presentation is deeper and richer, the two methods are not dissimilar and may thus be compared in structure as well as content. Although the observation is partly illuminating, it is going too far to say that "Constant's [method] still bears the mark of the eighteenth century — deductive and philosophical — whereas Tocqueville, here a nineteenth-century man, is working as a sociologist and an historian."86 Our strategy here will be to interpret the historical-comparative frameworks of Constant and Tocqueville in succession, picking up in the discussion of Tocqueville certain criteria of dissonance in respect to Constant's account. While Constant's famous comparison of ancient and modern liberty is most familiarly drawn from the essay of 1819 bearing that name, the theme had already been dealt with in his "reservoir" manuscript of 1806 and further utilized in other writings, notably the "Esprit de conquete" of 1814. The distinction Constant draws is well known. "Ancient liberty," the preponderate ethos of the small republics of antiquity, consisted of the collective exercise of political sovereignty (deliberation, lawmaking, treaties, making war and peace, supervision of magistrates, criminal justice, etc.). However, it incurred "the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the whole," with "nothing granted to individual independence, neither with respect to opinion, nor occupation, nor religion. " 87 The man was engulfed by the citizen and the citizen by the city. Nevertheless, this exercise of common political rights merited the name of liberty, for it was experienced as the supreme satisfaction by those engaged in it. In contrast, "modern liberty" consists "of the peaceful enjoyment of private independence." 88 Its "positive" features are individual choice, expression, conscience, unhindered locomotion, and inviolable property rights. Its "negative" ones are the rights held against political authority: "to be subject only to the law, and not to be arrested, or detained, or put to death, or mistreated in any way as the result of the arbitrary will of one or several individuals."89 86

87

89

Jean-Claude Lamberti, "De Benjamin Constant a Alexis de Tocqueville," France-Forum, May-June 1984, 19. Constant, "De la liberte des anciens comparee a celle des modernes," in Gauchet, ed., 88 Liberte chez les modernes, p. 495. Ibid., p. 501. Ibid., pp. 495-496.

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Modern liberty further requires a representative legislature whose major task is to procure the individual rights inherent in society by just laws. The root meaning of modern liberty is private liberty; but since power is, always and everywhere, self-corrupting, private satisfactions centred on "liberte civile" need to be defended by a sufficient exercise of "liberte politique." 90 The historical weight of caste prejudice, religious tyranny, ignorance, and the warlike spirit had, of course, been a major obstacle to the realization of modern liberty. But a more tragic though reparable - misfortune had been the misreading of liberty itself. Reformers throughout the eighteenth century felt that desirable goals of civilization could be imposed from above, despairing that they would ever be freely attained: even Jacques Necker was not exempt from this authoritarian conviction.91 Beyond that, thinkers like Rousseau and Mably, mistaking the ancients' practice of collective sovereignty for liberty's eternal form, had wished to stifle individuality in the name of the indivisible commonwealth.92 Their propensity encouraged the Jacobins to invent their "virtuous" institutions - revolutionary government, the revolutionary tribunal, and the law of suspects. Bonaparte's "despotic" practices were no different in kind from those of Robespierre.93 Both owed their justifications to anachronistic or opportunistic perversions of the ancient idea of popular sovereignty. Constant's "two kinds of liberty" are explicitly normative and sociological at once: that is, they disclose a preference scheme derived from an evaluation of social satisfactions. They are historical in the sense that one has succeeded the other in time; but they are typological in the same manner as Montesquieu's "republic" and "monarchy," to which Constant favorably compares his own models.94 They might be seen as more broadly historical when set in the perspective of Constant's theory of human progress (in one text described as "Madame de StaeFs system of perfectibility").95 Here, Constant postulates an advance toward human equality consisting in the progressive destruction of " theocratic slavery, civil slavery, feudalism, and noble privileges.96 However, according to such a scheme (and considering the emphasis on slavery), it would be 90 91 92 94 96

Ibid., p. 510. Conquete/Usurpation, ibid., p. 192; Hofmann, ed., " Principes de politique," 11, 66. 93 "Liberte des anciens," pp. 503-504. Conquete/Usurpation, p p . 2 1 8 - 2 1 9 . 95 "Liberte des anciens," pp. 504-505. Ouvrage de Filangieri, 11, 35. "De la perfectibilite," p. 591.

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difficult to see how Constant could call "ancient liberty" liberty at all. One clue to all this is found in his somewhat embarrassed treatment of Athens, where, as he remarks, "subjection of the individual existence to the collective body is not as complete as what I have just been describing."97 Aside from the instinctive fondness that French liberals felt for the cultural eclat of Athens (and neglecting that it was a slave society par excellence), the feature that most struck Constant's attention was that "of all the Greek republics Athens was the most commercial."98 The conjunction between commerce and modern liberty places a proviso on Athens, even though it stands condemned by another of its institutions, ostracism.99 Constant is not, then, writing history as "the story of liberty" (even in the mode of equality); more specifically, he is comparing two kinds of liberty "felt" at different times — or perhaps misfelt. For his purposes it is unimportant to show other strains of liberty manifested in the intervening centuries. He does not ignore a certain long development of modern liberty (see his remarks at the beginning of "De l'usurpation" and in various places with reference to England: e.g. Ouvrage de Filangieri, 1, 90-104); but he scarcely introduces the word to describe this. The subject of "the spirits of war and commerce" is dealt with even more widely by Constant: in the 1806 Principes, in Esprit de conquete, in Cent-Jours, in "Ancient and Modern Liberty," in Ouvrage de Filangieri, and elsewhere. We need first to recognize that war and commerce have a common goal, "to possess what one desires." However, war is comparatively primitive: "the one is the inexperienced impulse of a desire; the other is the calculation of an enlightened desire."100 The temporal continuity of these two conditions is more explicit than that of the two kinds of liberty, and they are also in a zero-sum situation: the more war recedes, the more commerce flourishes, and vice-versa.101 In Constant's age, the attraction of war can no longer be in the booty it procures, but only in the increased power it allows governments to muster. In simpler ages, war was rational and even uplifting. In antiquity and the Middle Ages it "promoted the development of man's finest and highest faculties... greatness of soul, presence, sang-froid, 97

98 " L i b e r t e des a n c i e n s , " p . 496. Ibid., p . 500. Ibid., p . 507. Constant, of course, felt that h e and M a d a m e d e Stael h a d been "ostracized " from French political life b y t h e E m p e r o r . 100 Ouvrage de Filangieri, i, 2 2 ; cf. Conquete/ Usurpation, p . 118. 101 Ouvrage de Filangieri, 1, 10.

99

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courage... heroic devotion, sublime friendship."102 Even wars of conquest could have compensating moral features. But these advantages could only be "the natural result of the national spirit." Such is not the case in the modern age, where civilization begets societies whose "uniform inclination is for peace."103 Modern nations have but one goal: repose, and the easiness of life, made possible through diligence, that comes with it. The expansion of commerce has accounted for this change. Although there were, to be sure, commercial nations in antiquity, like Carthage, they were conquered by the warlike ones. But today a Carthage (namely England) would rouse support and have the spirit of the age for its ally (Constant neglects to raise the case of commercial Athens here). Beyond this, advances in military technology and tactics have robbed war of its "satisfaction" and its "charm." 104 By commerce, Constant means free mobility of goods, capital, and credit unencumbered by a Colbertian or Napoleonic "manie reglementaire," and reinforced by "free and peaceful international relations" (a vision shared by Bentham, Kant, and other liberals). Commerce is connected with peace in at least three ways: (1) it logically displaces war as a means of gaining wealth; (2) it brings to the fore those in civil society with peaceful dispositions in replacement of the "guerrier" mentality and the power-seeking drives of the illiberal state; and (3) it resists war as an incompatible opposite which disrupts communications, confiscates goods, and blockades traffic.105 As such, its spirit, oppressed by imperialism but now succoured by war-weary and comfort-seeking populations, is invincible: for this is nothing but public opinion itself. The triumph of commerce satisfies human utilities; and it is a signifler of independence and the lumieres as well. It lays the material foundation for the society of modern liberty. The spirit of commerce makes Europeans into cosmopolitans, whereas the spirit of conquest had tribalized them. Thus, it is not without its "spirit of sameness" as well, giving nations moeurs and habits almost alike, but "softer," "more humane." 106 Commerce and industry encouraged civil homogeneity and concord also, for "all parties mutually support and help one another, because all, in the different classes of society, have something to defend; and the 102 105 106

103 104 Conquete/Usurpation, p. 115. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., pp. 118-119. C o n s t a n t , Memoires sur Us Cent-Jours (ed. O . Pozzo di Borgo, Paris, 1961), p p . 6 4 - 6 6 . H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique" 11, 4 2 7 - 4 2 9 .

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fortune of the humblest merchants would be in danger if that of the opulent banker, acquired in the same way, were to be shaken."107 However, sameness is here seen as contributing to a social order that keeps peace and spreads individual "bonheur"; it bears none of the stigma of Tocqueville's obliteration of the individual. For Constant, it is, rather, the spirit of conquest, in its extreme and untimely Napoleonic form, that breeds "uniformity" - " a unified surface... [with] the same code, the same measures, the same regulations, and... gradually the same language." 108 The connection between warlike spirit and ancient liberty is as follows. The ancient cities enjoying collective public liberty were, by nature, bellicose: "flung upon each other by necessity, they fought or threatened each other without pause. Those not wishing to be conquered could not lay their arms aside for fear that they would be." 109 While Constant does not propose an immediate connection between ancient liberty and belligerency, he sees both arising from a particular form of "social organization."110 Modern liberty, on the other hand, invested in its private pursuits and with a great latitude for inventing them, consummates a march of civilization in which the commercial spirit has played a determining role. As Constant writes: "The progress of civilization, the commercial tendency of the age, and the [increased] communication among peoples have multiplied and infinitely diversified the means of [obtaining] private happiness."111 The one evidently prepared the other: for Constant judges that " the effects of conquest had become very mild for several centuries and remained so up to the end of the eighteenth century... The spirit of conquest had ceased... But [it] burst forth again from the storms of the French Revolution more impetuously than ever."112 The conclusion is, then, that a stable condition of modern liberty (peace, repose, lumieres, widened wealth and private satisfactions) follows upon the spirit of commerce; that its disruption was due to a resurgence of warlike spirit (which can be suppressed but never conquered in human nature), here driven by a mistaken nostalgia for ancient liberty that ran amok; and that the disruption, however grave, was anomalous and is unlikely to recur, provided that autorite sociale can be made to serve the liberal goals of life. For while harboring a propensity for war, man loves better his comfort, security, and cherished independence. He can now see that the 107 109 111

Ouvrage de Filangieri, n, 66. "Liberte des anciens," p. 497. Conquete/Usurpation, p. 184.

108

Conquete/ Usurpation, p. 146. uo Ibid., p. 494. 112 Ibid., p. 145.

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peaceful production of wealth and exchange of material and intellectual commodities are the source of his happiness and expectations. Liberty remains his weapon: but it is more a shield than a sword.113 Tocqueville's conceptual categories are sometimes difficult to recuperate from his writings. But we are fortunate to have two important and concentrated texts for our purpose, the one bearing on "kinds of liberty" and the other on "aristocratic and democratic ages." The treatment of liberty is found in Tocqueville's essay of 1836, "L'etat social et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789." His diverse uses of the concept of liberty should be referred, in the first instance, to this analysis. "Liberty," Tocqueville writes, "can in fact be a product of the human mind in two different forms. It can be construed either as the employment of a common right or as the enjoyment of a privilege."114 In the latter sense, the notion of liberty is "aristocratic." It proceeds from a will to act freely, not by a general right that men hold in common from nature, but from the individual possession of a right to independence. Liberty was thus conceived and asserted in the Middle Ages, and indeed in all times when social conditions were stamped by inequality. Aristocratic liberty, Tocqueville explains, is the faculty of an individual or class, and may flourish even where general guarantees of freedom are lacking. Psychologically, it produces in men "an exalted feeling of individual worth and a passionate taste for independence." 115 From it, egoism receives incomparable "energy and power." It can impel men and nations to extraordinary greatness. This is, in fact, the liberty that Madame de Stael called " ancient." But it does not correspond to Constant's definition of ancient liberty - via Rousseau. It is, rather, an amalgam of that liberty (the "greatness" of individual peoples and their citizens - treated by Montesquieu in his Greatness and Decline of the Romans) and the

greatness of individuals, which is a legacy of feudal and Germanic inspiration (as such, little appetizing to either Rousseau or Constant, but not unappealing to Montesquieu). The working out of this contretemps can be deferred for the time being. In contrast to the above, the "modern, democratic, and, I dare say, just notion of liberty" proceeds from modern natural right: 113 115

Hofmann, ed., " Principes de politique," n, 461. Ibid., p. 47.

114

OC (B), vm, 46.

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"Each, whose claim is to have received from nature the intelligence necessary to his conduct, derives from his birth an equal and imprescriptible right to live in independence from his fellows in all that concerns him alone, and to shape his own fate as he pleases."116 As soon as the consciousness of this modern liberty affects the spirit of a nation, Tocqueville says, there is no longer any room for an arbitrary will to command obedience. The sovereign will can emerge only from the wills (Tocqueville writes "wills" where Rousseau would write "will") of all. The "will to equality" and the "will to liberty" are reciprocally defining: the more status is equalized, the more there is democratic or modern liberty; the more liberty rejects social obedience, the more the virile virtues of the civic actor vanish. Although Tocqueville concedes that the second vision of liberty is more "just," he suggests that it is just by the standards of a Christian providence that is in conflict with his own feelings.117 His reason accepts it; his heart rejects it: "My head inclines me to democratic institutions, but I am aristocratic by instinct, that is, I have contempt and fear of the crowd." 118 Tocqueville's work would not be so profoundly interesting to his own age and ours if he had simply bailed out of this dilemma. But the problem, so naturally his own by reason of birth and intelligence, was one he pursued with his scholarship. While best known as the discoverer of how the new world might provide values for the stabilization of modern liberty, Tocqueville remained transfixed by the French case. In the perspective of liberty, it was not just a simple matter of how aristocratic independence had been overwhelmed, France had - for a very long time - "modified its ideas and moeurs in a democratic direction " - even in the fifteenth century: that change had not really taken hold before the siecle des lumieres. For, up to that point, "the feudal and aristocratic notion of liberty was still universally accepted."119 Whereas we had in Constant a pristine methodological separation of two kinds of liberty that could be breached only by willful intellectual confusion, Tocqueville saw them explosively mixed in French history. On the surface, aristocratic liberty succumbed to a servile centralization; in subtler ways, "independence" measured and joined itself to the general notion of natural rights in the abstract arena of public opinion. One did not need to invoke the Greeks and Romans: "the 116 118 119

117 Ibid., p. 48. DA, 11, 351. Cited in Andre Redier, Comme disait M. de Tocqueville (Paris, 1925), p. 46. "Etat social et politique," p. 48.

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taste that the French had always had for independence turned into a systematic, rationalized opinion which... finally drew the royal power...into tacitly recognizing that public sentiment was the greatest of powers."120 Ancient versus modern was not precisely the issue in this annal of continuity: the historian's great-grandfather Malesherbes stood, at the watershed of the transaction in the 1770s, where the passion for equality collided with the passion for independence. Our account will be enriched if we turn, without further discussion, to Tocqueville's description of " aristocratic and democratic ages." This contrast motivates virtually all the commentary in the second volume of Democracy in America; and it is most succinctly expressed in a footnote occurring late in that work: When members of a community are divided into castes and classes, they not only differ from one another, but have no taste and no desire to be alike; on the contrary, everyone endeavors, more and more, to keep his own opinions undisturbed, to retain his own peculiar habits, and to remain himself. The characteristics of individuals are very strongly marked. When the state of society among a people is democratic - that is to say, when there are no longer any castes or classes in the community, and all its members are nearly equal in education and in property - the human mind follows the opposite direction. Men are much alike, and they are annoyed, as it were, by any deviation from that likeness; far from seeking to preserve their own distinguishing singularities, they endeavor to shake them off in order to identify themselves with the general mass of the people, which is the sole representative of right and of might to their eyes. The characteristics of individuals are nearly obliterated. In the ages of aristocracy even those who are naturally alike strive to create imaginary differences between themselves; in the ages of democracy even those who are not alike seek nothing more than to become so and to copy each other, so strongly is the mind of every man always carried away by the general impulse of mankind.121 Already, we have noted a number of specific texts that bear out this general charge, especially with regard to "democratic ages," where the passion for sameness or equality of condition leads not only to an isolation from one's "self" but to an all-consuming mediocrity that stifles the pride of the individual.122 This is a darker view of the "general standard of liberty according to nature" 120 121

Ibid., p. 49. On the difference with Constant, see Lamberti's remarks, Tocqueville, p. 82. 122 DA, 11, 298, 112. Ibid., pp. 260-261.

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presented earlier. Yet Tocqueville is not completely pellucid here. For he seemed to argue in "Etat politique et social" that a fruitful combination of the old sense of liberty and the "new, more powerful impulse" might have produced a climate favorable to free institutions. Here he appears to privilege the notion that democratic ages stifle true "individuality" with their soporific of "individualism." To be sure, this is a presentation of ideal — typical limits, not a counterfactual vision of history. And despite the fact that "these are like two distinct humanities," each is conceded to have its "advantages and disadvantages, its own good and ill." Tocqueville clearly suggests that aristocratic ages belong to the past, while democratic ones are the concern of the present and of "new political science"; for he writes explicitly of "the age of aristocracy which preceded our own." 123 However, as we saw with Constant, Tocqueville's models serve both a historical and a comparative - normative function: one can find democratic impulses in societies beholden to aristocratic liberties and virtues existing amid a "free taste for obedience"; 124 or even, imaginably, the formation of new aristocracies in the bosom of democracy.125 Privately, Tocqueville regretted the passing of the nobler features of aristocratic individuality,126 yet he also criticized it as " a curiously ill-adjusted, intermittent freedom always restricted by class distinctions and tied up with immunities and privileges."127 Its virtue was in being a political freedom par excellence:12* one could not have said of these aristocrats that " they want to be led and they wish to remain free."129 Aristocratic ages, while captured best for Tocqueville by the spirit of the European noblesse cCe'pe'e ("There never was a prouder and more independent nobility in its opinions and its acts than the French nobility of feudal times"), 130 are not exclusively confined to that image: this is of great importance. For the ancient Greeks and Romans are also inspired by the aristocratic ethos: "Athens... with her universal suffrage was, after all, merely an aristocratic republic, in which all the nobles had an equal right to the government." 131 An exception made to this judgement (which establishes it all the more) is that "the armies of antiquity were democratic, although they 123 125 128 129

124 Ibid., p. 346. "Etat social et politique," p. 45. 126 127 DA, 11, 170-171. See note 118, above. Old Regime, p . 119. On political liberty as a "bien en soi," see Lamberti, Tocqueville, pp. 310-311. 130 131 DA, 11, 337. "Etat social et politique," p. 44. DA, 11, 65.

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came out of the bosom of aristocracy."132 Tocqueville, one could say, inherits some of Rousseau's reverence for the sublime Plutarchian figure with his patriotic moeurs: writing to Royer-Collard in 1838 on Plutarch, he said: "What strikes me most about our times is not all our pettiness, but that we cannot better conceive the theory of great deeds." 133 But Tocqueville engrafts his classicism to a feudal model that Jean-Jacques despised. Even segments of the French roture fall within the boundaries of aristocratic ethos, that middle class "which had its own traditions, its code of honor, and its proper pride... the aristocracy of the new and thriving social order." 134 It is greatly owing to their contribution "that [by 1775] the idea of freedom had found its way into the minds of Frenchmen," shocking, among others, the aged Voltaire.135 In summary, Tocqueville's concept of an "aristocratic age" is of one where individuality dictates the quality of liberty - where it is "active" and "virile," unwilling to compromise with the "cowardly love of present enjoyment."136 It is, so to speak, contemptuous of the spirit of Constantine modern liberty. Yet it is important to understand that arisocrats are, for Tocqueville, elites, not nobles in the narrow caste sense. Tocqueville — like Montesquieu — makes much of national character. Can it be then (referring back to the previous long quotation) that aristocratic ages produce a collective character only in the sense that there is "no taste and no desire to be alike"? Had Tocqueville not also written that society would be impossible "if everyone undertook to form his own opinions and to seek for truth by isolated paths struck out by himself alone"? For purposes of contrast and identity Tocqueville seems here to be placing exaggerated stress on aristocratic particularity. The moeurs of the aristocrat are not his own; it is his personality. The true aristocrat "remains himself," while democratic man seeks psychological security by borrowing a uniform standard of conduct that he has not made and that is not his own. It is a version of Rousseau's problem of etre and paraitre, with the tables turned. In literal fact, dwellers in aristocratic ages "derive their beliefs from the opinions of the class to which they belong." 137 The democrats cannot do this: they are social Cartesians, selfreferenced, but as such, driven to "the common standard of intelligence."138 132 134 137

Ibid., p. 296. Old Regime, p. 63. Ibid., p. 4.

133

Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 6 April 1838, OC, xi, 61. 135 136 Ibid., p. 165. DA, 11, 277. 138 Ibid., pp. 5-6.

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Up to 1789, France had been a complex mixture of aristocratic and democratic traits, with the latter gaining the ascendant. They had reacted on each other disastrously, dissynchronously; for the French had ''desired to combine freedom with the [institutions of the] servile state." In his remarkable sketch of the French national character that concludes the ancien regime, Tocqueville attempts to explain how these conflicting tendencies, faithful to a deeply implanted and paradoxical coding, created the most powerful and destructive of all revolutions — yet without real novelty. Still, there could be no denying that revolution generated its own tabula rasa: " Every revolution has more or less the effect of releasing men to their own conduct and of opening before the mind of each one of them an almost limitless perspective."139 Such might be called "radical freedom," were it not that all freedom must be grounded in social arrangement and social possibility. The aftermath of 1789 (despite its generous first motions) was, by 1800, a horror vacui in which France "was almost as bereft of laws, customs, and moeurs as if it had just been created." 140 That was the worst fulfillment of the democratic ethos, because it was fundamentally "ethosless," mired in "little time for thinking," 141 mobility,142 and also " forgetfulness" (see the Revolutionary calendar). 143 The forgetfulness was less benign than that in America with its moeurs libres; yet both nations shared a tendency "to accept tradition only as a means of information."144 Although the reactionaries of the Restoration had often been accused of "learning nothing and forgetting nothing," Tocqueville, the liberal, placed no high premium on forgetfulness: his mission was to remind his countrymen of things too easily forgotten, to bring to the surface of consciousness indwelling social truths too easily expunged by political Cartesianism. One of his indictments of democratic ages was that democrats "do not resemble their fathers... The mind of each is therefore unattached to that of his fellows by tradition or common habits; and they never have the power, the inclination, or the time to act together."145 Tocqueville did not recommend living in the past, but he strongly urged living with it, drawing it within one's identity as pride and warning. Constant (like many others at 139 141 143 145

140 Ibid., p. 7. Reception speech, Academie franchise (1842), p. 17. 142 DA, 11, 274. Ibid., pp. 61, 145, 198, 235. 144 Ibid., pp. 105, 204, 234-235. Ibid., p. 4; cf. 1, 219. Ibid., 11, 61.

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the watershed of 1800) noted and lamented a spasm of generational conflict.146 But he mentioned the subject en passant and not as a central theme. One might then conclude that Tocqueville's models of the two ages and their temperaments tilt toward an aristocratic preference. And this would not be incorrect, if we took the issue merely to be one of animus. But it was not mainly that: it was one of clairvoyance. For Tocqueville, "the question is not how to reconstruct aristocratic society, but how to make liberty proceed out of that democratic state of society in which God has placed us." 147 This pathos is armed by his own decision to enlighten his contemporaries and to bring whatever lucidity he can to the practice of democratic politics. Otherwise, he writes, " I should have confined myself to deploring in secret the destiny of mankind." 148 "If," he writes, in a second critical passage, I inquire what state of society is most favorable to the great revolutions of the mind, I find that it occurs somewhere between the complete equality of the whole community and the absolute separation of ranks... Between these two extremes of the history of nations is an intermediate period, a period of glory as well as of ferment, when the conditions of men are not sufficiently settled for the mind to be lulled to torpor, when they are sufficiently unequal for men to exercise a vast power on the minds of one another, and when some few may modify the convictions of all. It is at such times that great reformers arise and new ideas suddenly change the face of the world.149 What Tocqueville envisions here is not called an " a g e " but a "period" — perhaps one that, at moments, he imagined himself as inhabiting, although he never cultivated the expectations of a Victor Hugo or a Saint-Simon. The "torpor" of the July Monarchy was, for him, as trying as the ferment of revolution. Yet the Weberian cadence of "great reformers" is cut by the sense of "intermediate period" - a phrase calling "middleness" to mind. Tocqueville does not want to equate middleness with "mediocrity"; but neither does he wish to witness a social and egalitarian parousia that breaks the bonds and traditions of society: his message is not, therefore, apostolic, and the "power on the minds of one another" means the rational mental communication of the liberal faith. 146 148

Constant, Ouvrage de Filangieri, n, 82. Ibid., p. 348.

149

147 Tocqueville, DA, 11, 340. Ibid., p. 274n.

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For society, according to Tocqueville, has its own "unalterable" or "ancient" laws.150 Among these is the right of private property, described as "the last remnant of an overthrown aristocratic world." 151 To challenge this law is an affront to social creation. The fanatics of 1848 were thus purveyors of "mad schemes," responding to that same modern "taste for comfort" by overthrowing LouisPhilippe, who had regarded it as a political safety valve. Against his prejudice, Tocqueville proposed to "protect the ancient laws of society against the innovators with the help of the new force which the republican principle might lend to the government."152 But, as he confided in the same work, " I did not believe then, any more than I do now, that the republican form of government is the best suited to the needs of France." 153 Finally, there is Tocqueville's version of the spirits of conquest and commerce. He believed, like Constant, that war would become "more rare and less intense" in democratic times.154 But the "esprit de commerce " was simply one of a number of reasons why this might be so.155 Like Constant, Tocqueville did not think that belligerence had always been an unremitting curse; but he gave another explanation: "war almost always enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character. In some cases it is the only check to the excessive growth of certain propensities that naturally spring out of the equality of conditions, and it must be considered as a necessary corrective to certain inveterate diseases to which democratic communities are liable." 156 This does not resemble Constant's point about advancing civilization; it sounds a great deal like Hegel's argument that the incidence of war rouses the bourgeois spirit from "housekeeping" to the defense of the common good.157 Indeed, war and commerce have a "secret connection." 158 There is no zero-sum situation here; and there is no exaltation of commerce as a source of liberty.159 While it is true that democratic peoples are less warlike, "much less afraid of being conquered and much more afraid of war than an aristocratic people,"160 this makes them more servile. Tocqueville is far from concluding that war and commerce are 150 151 154 156 157

160

T o c q u e v i l l e , Recollections (trans. A . T e i x e i r a d e M a t t o s , C l e v e l a n d , 1959), p . 79. 152 153 Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., p. 233. 155 DA, 11, 279. Ibid. "Equality of conditions" is the principal reason given. Ibid, p. 283. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford, 1967), para. 324A, pp. 158 159 209-210. Tocqueville, DA, n, 293. Ibid, pp. 165-167. Ibid, p. 300.

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opposites. He has no confidence that supplanting the one by the other is a critical step toward freedom. "In democratic times enjoyments (jouissances) are more intense than in ages of aristocracy," Tocqueville writes, here agreeing with Constant. But, in such ages, he adds, "man's hopes and desires are oftener blasted." 161 Constant, bent on exorcising the demons of arbitraire, had portrayed the consequences of "modern liberty" as a happy or fulfilled society, without inkling of its darker inclinations. Tocqueville dared to generalize it as a "democratic age," tofindits anchorages deep in the ancien regime, and to predict the perils of its future. Thus, their structures of argument, while analogous, deviate in significant ways. III.

ANCESTRAL VOICES

Religion is intimately connected with liberty in both Constant and Tocqueville. They unwaveringly reject Bayle's supposition of a "commonwealth of atheists"-made plausible by evidence that " the inclination to do evil does not come from the ignorance of God's existence and that it is not corrected by acquiring the knowledge of a God who punishes and rewards." 162 Bayle of course concedes that since history provides no case of his commonwealth, it is logically impossible to refute the charge "that atheists... are ferocious beasts more to be feared than lions and tigers."163 Montesquieu, in answering Bayle, will not leave this image alone: he insists that "he who has no religion is that terrible animal who senses his freedom only when he is tearing and devouring [his prey]." 164 Constant and Tocqueville are pupils of Montesquieu. But they go beyond Montesquieu in one respect — or at least displace his argument. They are not so struck by any perceived rapport between atheism and animal freedom as by the one between religion and political liberty. Thus, Constant: " Religious peoples can be slaves, but no irreligious people has ever been free."165 And as Tocqueville reported of the Americans: "They profess to think that a people ought to be moral, religious, and temperate in proportion as it is free."166 Religion is indispensable to the private man as well. For 161 162

164 165

Ibid., p. 147. Pierre Bayle, "Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Comet of 1680," in K. C. Sandberg, ed., 163 The Great Contest of Faith and Reason (New York, 1963), p . 15. Ibid. Charles-Louis d e Secondat, Baron d e Montesquieu, De I'esprit des Ms, x x i v , ii. Constant, Du polythe'isme romain, conside're dans ses rapports avec la philosophie grecque et la religion 166 chretienne (2 vols., Paris, 1833), 11, 91-92. Tocqueville, DA, 1, 433.

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Constant, it is our faithful and consoling companion in the face of distress; and it is "the most natural of all our emotions."167 Tocqueville acquiesces: " Religion is... simply another form of hope, and it is no less natural to the human heart than hope itself... Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind." 168 Neither Constant nor Tocqueville accepts the narrow view of certain eighteenth-century thinkers that religion (in its doctrine of rewards and punishments) is fundamentally important as a means of social control: the point that Bayle had specifically addressed and Montesquieu had replied to. "That is not my opinion," Constant declares, I do not consider religion as the supplement to the thumbscrews and the wheel. There is a common morality {morale commune) based on calculation, interests, and security which can, I think, in the strict sense, do without religion... But woe to the nation having only that common morality! It is because it creates a loftier morality that religion seems to be desirable [Constant has in mind here a morality of duty, akin to Kant's].169 For Tocqueville, it is the unbeliever who considers religion to be "useful," and, if he is sincere, he regrets that it can be no more than this for him. But for those who continue to believe, "the mass of mankind," the "instinctive desire of a future life brings the crowd about the altar and opens the hearts of men to the precepts and consolations of religion."170 The fires of hell have lost their potency for men of the nineteenth century, but the felicity of eternal life remains a tower of faith. Constant and Tocqueville are agreed that morality and religion, though not indifferent to each other, are separable. A society need not be unanimous in its embodiment of religious sentiment, so long as its tone and practices are religious: indeed, given the voluntary nature of commitment and belief, such a case would be remarkable. There is more than a hint in both writers that it is more natural and more necessary for the masses to believe than the educated elites. As Constant puts it: " I would not form a bad opinion of an enlightened man [i.e. 'given to profound meditations and preserved from most of the corrupting temptations by the pleasures of study and the habit 167 169 170

H o f m a n n , ed., " Principes de politique" H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes depolitique" Tocqueville, DA, 1, 324-325.

n, 158. 11, 170-171.

168

Tocqueville, DA, 1, 321.

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of thinking'] if he was presented to me as having no religious feeling. But a people without this feeling would seem to me robbed of a precious faculty and disinherited by nature." 171 Tocqueville exposes in considerable - and, one suspects, personal - detail an ideal situation in which "those who do not believe conceal their incredulity, [while] those who believe display their faith... [and] public opinion pronounces itself in favor of religion," bestowing on it "love, support, and honor." 172 Beyond this, each thinker firmly argues for the separation of religion and politics in the whole area of conscience and worship and in denominational detachment from all but the routine forms of associational control by the state: i.e. the "American solution" of total disestablishment. This is not to imply that politics and religion have nothing to do with each other; after all, these matters are being raised in works dealing with political principles and written, in the manner of Montesquieu, by "ecrivains politiques." But it does mean, in the context of Catholic France, the abolition of all special church privileges, all clerical Gallicanism of any sort, all residues of politically forced belief. Both Constant and Tocqueville regard this as good for the state, but they especially stress that it is also for the sake of religion itself, in the expectation that its central human importance will be enhanced if it is free. As Constant writes: "So long as [political] authority leaves religion perfectly independent, no one will have any interest in attacking it. The question won't even arise. But if authority claims its defense, especially through wanting to make it an ally, then the independent mind will waste no time in attacking it." 173 And Tocqueville, in similar words: "when religion clings to the interests of the world, it becomes almost as fragile a thing as the powers of earth. It is the only one of them all which can hope for immortality; but if it be connected with their ephemeral power, it shares their fortunes [and, he says, 'a portion of that animosity which the latter excites'] and may fall with those transient passions which alone supported them." 174 As regards the sectarianism which disestablishment and total freedom of conscience encourage, both Constant and Tocqueville are persuaded (as indeed was Pascal) that no true religious feeling or belief can be forced. Constant (in arguments very much like Jefferson's) sees positive benefit in the multiplication of sects: each 171 173

Hofmann, ed., "Principes de politique" n, 160. Hofmann, ed., "Principes depolitique," 11, 163.

172 174

Tocqueville, DA, i, 324. Tocqueville, DA, 1, 322.

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will compete with the others in goodness and purity, and they will mutually monitor one another without the state's having to interfere.175 Tocqueville, from a somewhat different perspective, observes that in America the existence of sects, far from creating islands of moral distinctiveness, tends toward a single ethos consonant with rules of the other national institutions. This is true even of the Roman Catholics, for here they are not bonded to politics: "The clergy of all the different sects there hold the same language; their opinions are in agreement with the laws, and the human mind flows onwards, so to speak, in one undivided current." 176 Up to this point in our analysis, the doctrines of Constant and Tocqueville appear to be in perfect liberal accord. There are probably other matters of substance where comparisons would support this finding. One might therefore speciously think that further examination was not needed. But there are two important details that as yet have not been brought forward. The first is that we have up to now been speaking of religion or religious feeling, not the specific forms or feelings of Christianity as a cultural substrate. The second is this: Constant is a thinker of Protestant descent and culture, examining, for the most part, politico-religious conditions in Catholic France; whereas Tocqueville is a scion of the Catholic (and Jansenizing) nobility, meditating deeply on the moeurs of a country that was the ultimate illustration of the "Protestant paradigm." 177 We shall now see how the religious world views of Constant and Tocqueville subscribe to and reinforce other distinctions; how, indeed, this is central to their political positions. That in itself might not be of uppermost theoretical concern. But what is also at stake is an identification of the spiritual sources of the French liberal experiment, as well as an attempt to explore that complex spirituality as a way of locating virtues and failures in liberal thought. Since most critical writing on French liberalism treats this issue as a kind of externality, we shall obtain new insights from this approach. I have designated Constant's vision as "Protestant"; and this will require some justification. Virtually nowhere in his religious or confessional analysis will Constant be found aligned with any 175 176 177

H o f m a n n , ed., " Principes de politique" n , 166-167. Tocqueville, DA, 1, 313. I explain a n d employ this term, following Peter Berger, in m y Politics and Religious Consciousness in America (New Brunswick, 1984), p . 32.

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semblance of Reformed orthodoxy, particularly as developed in the Suisse romande. In this sense, he goes even beyond the Savoyard vicar, who recommended community worship and formal compliance with the faith of one's country and ancestors.178 There is no central doctrine of theology, no ecclesiology whatever, that Constant is anxious to defend. If it cannot be doubted that he recognizes monotheism as the highest form of religious apprehension and the Christian ethic as its fullest expression, there is little to identify him with positive Christian faith. He mentions Jesus only as "the divine author of our belief... [who] demanded charity, light [lumiere], and liberty for all." 179 Although eulogized by a Protestant pastor at his funeral, Constant never subscribed to any form of public worship. In Switzerland, he was "Protestant" by tradition and descent; in France, he was "Protestant" by opposition and exclusion. During the Restoration, he was an inactive member of the Societe de la Morale Chretienne, which simply meant that he was a theistic antiCatholic. 180 But here is what Constant himself has to say: " I t is in the bosom of the Protestant church that Christianity, restored at once to its ancient purity and progressive perfectibility, is today shown to be a doctrine contemporary with all ages, because it keeps pace with them; open to all knowledge [lumieres] because it welcomes and adopts all knowledge; enriching itself with all discoveries because it fights against none of them; placing itself in each time at the level of that time, and thus casting out all the notions that have fallen behind the daily progress of the human spirit."181 This is scarcely the Protestantism of Calvin or Reinhold Niebuhr, but it resembles the Protestantism of William Ellery Channing and Harry Emerson Fosdick and, in general, what has often in America been called the "Protestant Left." Indeed, the tradition of American liberal, antitheological, non-denomination, and individualistic religion is a matrix in which Constant's position can be well understood.182 In the mode of William James, Constant describes religion as "that need of the soul, which leads or compels it to seek beyond the visible 178

Rousseau, Emile, bk. iv. A l t h o u g h " l e culte essential est celui d u c o e u r " (p. 381), the vicar advises: " R e t o u r n e z dans votre patrie, reprenez la religion d e vos p e r e s " (p. 384). 179 Constant, " D u developpement progressif des idees religieuses," in Melanges, G a u c h e t , ed., Liberte chez les modernes, p. 542. 180 See Daniel Robert, Les e'glises reformers en France, 1800-1830 (Paris, 1961), p. 438. 181 « j ) u developpement," p. 531. 182 See, o n this, William A. Clebsch, American Religious Thought (Chicago, 1973).

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world for beings with which it can establish communication."183 Again, like James, Constant has a fundamental respect for what he calls "non-sacerdotal polytheism."184 And, in another text, much in the vein of the later writing ofJohn Dewey, Constant declares: "All that is beautiful, deep, and profound is religious."185 He seems to anticipate this affiliation: " Look at America... the power of religious feeling is so strong there that often, when a single family is divided in forms of worship, that difference causes no trouble to the peace or fondness of the hearth because all members of the family are joined in the worship of a just and beneficent providence."186 Religion is not, for Constant, a prescribed set of dogmas or any common form of worship: "Religion considered as a positive institution is a very different thing from religion considered as an individual sentiment."187 It is, rather, a "sentiment intime," universal in character, and the "result of the needs of the soul and the efforts of the intelligence."188 This feeling and this need are so strong that only their subjugation and manipulation by unscrupulous priestly and political authority can suffice to explain the widespread phenomenon of unbelief. If left in peace, the atheists would soon cast a horrified glance at the dedivinized world they had created, and would deplore their hollow victory when they viewed man as "standing alone upon an earth that will soon swallow him." 189 The "intimate feeling," "strongest of all our emotions," is the enduring feature of religion for Benjamin Constant. Its inner and outer expressions are, as we shall see, modes of adaptation to the advance of the human spirit in historical time. Yet, despite this entire privileging of individual emotion, it seems that Constant was willing, in his later years, to concede that religion required organized forms of worship.190 As is well known, Constant was - at intervals - doggedly engaged, for over forty years, in composing a monumental treatise on the comparative history of religions. The five volumes of his De la religion, considered dans sa source, ses formes et ses developpements were finally 183 184

186 187

188 189

E p h r a i m H a r p a z , ed., C o n s t a n t , Recueil ctarticles, 1820-1824 ( G e n e v a , 1981), p . 342. O n J a m e s ' s " m e t h o d o l o g i c a l p o l y t h e i s m , " see Kelly, Politics and Religious Consciousness, p p . 185 H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes de politique" 11, 160. 115—116. "Du developpement," pp. 541-542. Cited from C o n s t a n t ' s Journal intime b y Pierre Deguise, Benjamin Constant meconnu: le livre de la religion (Geneva, 1966), p . 54. Cf. I m m a n u e l K a n t , The Metaphysical Elements of Justice (trans. J. Ladd, Indianapolis, 1964), p. 94. "Du developpement," pp. 527-528. 190 H o f m a n n , ed., "Principes depolitique," n , 162. Harpaz, ed., Recueil, p. 345.

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published between 1824 and 1831, the year of his death. Two further volumes, Du polytheisme romaine, considere dans ses rapports avec la philosophie grecque et la religion chre'tienne, appeared posthumously in

1833. In this long span of time, Constant's perspective altered drastically. Weaned on the materialist philosophy of the eighteenth century (especially Helvetius), he had at first been determined "to make my contribution to the destruction of what I called prejudices... to support the assertion... that the pagan religion was by far preferable to Christianity." 191 But through an interlacing of personal experience with an ever-expansive program of research, a road with many bends, barriers, and detours, he came to quite other conclusions. The following summary puts it well: "he went through some complex intermediate stages including a period of nihilism, a desire for faith which still eluded fulfillment, and a handling of skepticism in such a way that it was finally and paradoxically transformed into an instrument of belief."192 Thanks to painstaking recent research,193 this aspect of Constant's work and thought is now far better understood: his prodigious commitment, his many revisions, his steadiness of purpose. On two fronts, the spiritual and the intellectual, Benjamin Constant pressed forward to the embrace of religion. There were serious exposures to Kant's ethics of duty, Schleiermacher's personal theology of faith, nature mysticism (at first hand in the exaggerated form of the poet Zacharias Werner, an habitue of Coppet), quietism a la Madame Guyon (in 1807), and the redoubtable spell of the clairvoyant Baroness von Krlidener (in 1815). As can be seen, some of these encounters were more existential than erudite. It is not necessary to dwell on them further to make the following points: (1) the appeal of the "sentiment intime" for Constant was, as he puts it, a matter of need and emotion, a rebuff to both rationalism and skepticism; (2) in no precise way can it be argued that Constant had any sudden religious illumination or conversion, although there is a distinct watershed of religiosity around 1806-1807; and (3) we can call his religious rapprochement "Protestant," for such were its 191 192 193

Le cahier rouge, in Oeuvres de Benjamin Constant (ed. A. Roulin, Paris, 1957), p. 129. J o h n Cruikshank, Benjamin Constant (New York, 1984), p . 89. See P. Deguise, Constant me'connu; Helen H. S. Hogue, On Changes in Benjamin Constant's Books on Religion (Geneva, 1964); Patrice Thompson, La religion de Benjamin Constant: lespouvoirs de I'image (Pisa, 1978). For controversy and reception, see Brian Juden, "La pensee de Benjamin Constant sur la religion," in Benjamin Constant^ Madame de Stael et le Groupe de Coppet (ed. E. Hofmann, Oxford and Lausanne, 1982), pp. 151-166.

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major sources and such was its quality of self-exploration, its litre examen.

While Constant regarded religious feeling as foundational and separable from reason, he saw religion's manifestation in history as a question eminently subject to reasoned analysis. His problem, as it eventually came to be framed, was this: how to leave the "sentiment" intact and fundamental (as in the Profession de foi of Rousseau), while at the same time tracing its development (like Condorcet's Esquisse without that author's hostility to religious faith). In 1806, according to Prosper de Barante - and this accords with texts found in Constant's Lausanne manuscript of the Principes of the same year - he declared, after composing a chapter on religious sentiment, that "mon livre est a refaire" (meaning the book on religion).194 Thus, it is likely that revisions in his own thought preceded his engagement with the Lausanne quietists in 1807. Whatever the case, it seems clear that over the next few years, until the decisive imperial battles renewed Constant's concern with politics, he gave deep ponderation to the historical question of religious evolution. In 1811 he wrote to Barante: My work will agree with your position. I was led to it by a multitude of facts which I have especially viewed with impartiality because I gathered them for an opposite purpose... [My earlier] proofs rebounded on me, the human heart was revealed for what it is when drained of religious feeling; and religious feeling by itself could not long satisfy me, since it is vague and powerless in its own right... I saw reason in all its splendor and all its weakness, the result of four centuries of reflection turning first into chaos, then into a fantastic and arbitrary construction, with man successful in destroying everything and incapable of putting anything in its place. Finally yielding to so much irresistible evidence, I saw God granting to man not only religion, but reason itself.195 At about this same time, he wrote to Claude Hochet: " a little knowledge {science) leads to atheism, but more of it to religion. I have recomposed the whole plan and more than three quarters of the chapters." 196 The grand outline was now in place for De la religion as we have it, although, amid the frantic activity of the next two decades, its execution would require a long time. We cannot comment here on 194 195

P r o s p e r d e B a r a n t e , Souvenirs (Paris, 1890), p . 163. " L e t t r e s d e B e n j a m i n C o n s t a n t a P r o s p e r d e B a r a n t e , 1 8 0 5 - 1 8 3 0 , " Revue des deux mondes,

34 (1906), 548. Letter dated 2 December 1811. 196

L e t t e r of 11 O c t o b e r 1 8 1 1 , q u o t e d in Deguise, Constant me'connu, p . 4 1 .

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this immense work; but it will be useful to make some observations on Constant's essay of 1826, "du developpement progressif des idees religieuses" (a brisk exposition of his theory and an answer to some of the critics of the earlier volumes of De la religion). In this essay, Constant is concerned, first of all, to establish "the universality of the religious sentiment, the tendency of that sentiment to perfect the form in which it is cast (perfectionner la forme qu'il revet), and the resistance of the priestly class to the perfecting of that form."197 We have already taken up the matter of universality. As regards the resistance of priesthoods to purifications and changes in religious forms, Constant deals with the question in regard to both polytheism and monotheism: ancient Greek non-sacerdotalism is purer and more genuinely expressive than the priestly polytheisms of Africa and Asia; radical Protestant monotheism far surpasses Catholic sacerdotalism. The highest religion is, properly speaking, intimate, not corporative, not hierarchical, and solafide.The absence or presence of priestcraft, in fact, defines "two kinds of religion" and "two kinds of societies"- independent, progressive ones and ones that are "soumises."198 This distinction can introduce the question of perfectibility itself. After asserting the durability of religious feeling in history, Constant's more difficult task was that of temporalizing it, linking it to and synchronizing it with the secular theory of progress: "Should religion alone be exempt form [this law of progression] ?... Surely not." For the doctrine of religious perfectibility alone "reconciles the ideas religious men entertain about [the goodness and justice of providence] with the nature of the human spirit."199 Divinity is therefore not fixity, nor is it tradition; quite the opposite: it is the creative appearance of the divine in conjunction with the progressive advance of human reason and improved society. This is, as we saw, what Constant takes to be the true gospel of Protestantism. He might seem to be in the dilemma of asserting that religion naturally constitutes what is deepest in man, while at the same time man "makes" forms of religion that adjust to his personal, technical, and social needs. As such, a demonstration of religious progress underwrites the reality of all progress. Since there are "two kinds of religion"-free and "soumise"the problem of total progress requires delicate handling. In this 197

"Du developpement," p. 533.

198

Ibid., p. 535.

199

Ibid., p. 537.

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respect, the kinds of religion are distinguished in two dimensions: time and mode. As to time, sacerdotal religions resist the lumieres with determined countermeasures, but cannot finally hold out against them: their resistance is, however, favorable to unbelief.200 As to mode, priestly religions admit inevitable change in secrecy; but this change is publicly concealed in frozen ritual. When the ritual is alienated from the live consciousness of the worshipers, the cult's destruction is at hand. 201 Carrying the day in the march of history, "progressive religion, as such, "ne peut faire que du bien." 202 Religious freedom is, therefore, for Constant one of the mobiles of his broader concept of modern liberty, while at the same time being a kind of ground or evidence of liberty's conquests. It is both highly personal and sweepingly providential as it moves toward the ultimate unity or truth. It is not, at bottom, a matter ofmoeurs, but an aggregation of diverse beliefs that are tested by their independence and authenticity. These beliefs form opinion and shape lumieres. In moments of trial - both personal and public - religion is a rampart; in conspicuous periods of progress and clear sailing, it runs with the wind. At such moments it is exactly what it needs to be. It calls the human mind to a creator, and to higher duty; if it avenges, this is mainly against its own priestly abusers. Religion is feeling, then opinion, then form. The liaison between religion and politics is not simply a matter of freedom for each in its sphere. For, in the first place, the commonwealth, if it is to partake in progress, appears to require a religion — one which it cannot extort. In the second place, it seems that those who endorse Constant's version of liberal religion will also champion his version of liberal politics: it will be a "civil" but not a "civic" religion. Finally, Constant writes, " I prefer the religious yoke to political despotism. In the first case, the slaves at least have a belief, and only the tyrants are corrupted; but when oppression is separated from any religious idea, the slaves are just as depraved and abject as their masters." 203 This is pure Montesquieu; and it subscribes Constant to a belief that religious feeling is stauncher than the taste for political freedom. Let us now make some preliminary comparisons with Tocqueville. Constant's religious awakening was founded on an incredulous beginning, nourished by scholarly reinterpretation and, as it were, 200

Ibid., pp. 536-537.

203

Conquete/Usurpation, p. 216.

201

Ibid., pp. 537-538.

202

Ibid., p. 538.

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by a steady, though often distraught, recollection of the abyss. Yet, while in 1811 Constant accused the shallowness of his Enlightenment forebears, he found mainly that these esprits forts needed amendment and correction, not reproof. There was no guilt in them, or in him, for their atheism was the logical result of sacerdotal intolerance. On the other hand, Tocqueville, raised as a believer in a sacerdotal creed not only interwoven with his universal sense of the cosmos, but also with family and nation, experienced a profound sorrow, approaching guilt or sin, from his apostasy of emotion. As he produced his works of mature intellect, this separation between feeling and intellect critically challenged God's design, which appealed to the brain and not to the heart. Yet, as we shall now see, he advanced the healing power of faith as a prescription for a society he could not wholesomely re-enter. For the "Protestant" Constant religion was an abiding form of solace, while the "Catholic" Tocqueville experienced it as a medium of contrition. " I am not a believer," Tocqueville wrote to Gobineau in 1843. "But I am far from bragging about this." 204 Indeed, it made him miserable. Tocqueville's problem was doubly compounded: emotionally he could not approve of God's predictable providence (an equalization of conditions and minds, an "individualism" which one might represent as a caricature of that system of " perfectibility " which Constant so much applauded); but his political reason obliged him to accept this outline of the future. On the other hand, while emotionally disengaged from religious faith (as Constant was not), Tocqueville continued intellectually to acknowledge the shape of the Christian cosmos: "belief in a first cause...in fixed laws revealed by the physical world and which must be supposed also in the moral world; in the Providence of God, and consequently in his justice; and in man's responsibility for his actions, since he is permitted to know good and evil; and thus in a future life (une autre vie)."205 This combat of aristocratic animus with democratic inevitability, of Pascalian anxiety with Rousseauian theism lurked behind the "new political science" and threatened it with Manichaeanism. Tocqueville could not see the Cross; but he felt the invisible hand of the Dieu cache on his shoulder.206 204

205 206

Letter of 2 O c t o b e r 1843, m 0C> IX> 57- Tocqueville goes o n to instruct G o b i n e a u t h a t 'Me christianisme est le g r a n d fonds d e la loi m o r a l e . " Tocqueville to Bouchitte, 8 January 1858, in OC (B), vn, 476. See A n d r e J a r d i n , Alexis de Tocqueville, i8oj-i8jg (Paris, 1984), p . 6 3 .

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As we have seen, a number of ide'es-forces underlie Tocqueville's political investigations. But one of the most constant of them is the rapprochement of the old faith with the new politics, so that neither governments nor peoples can arrogate the privilege of the divine order.207 It is striking that, much as Tocqueville belittled political Catholicism in France and the cenacles that inspired it, his own point of departure at the onset of the July Monarchy betrays an indebtedness. This is not so strange, once we ask the question: what position might a wavering legitimist ardent for liberty, but vexed by the consequences of Enlightenment freethinking, be expected to adopt? The neo-Catholic agenda of liberty, certainly not the same as those of the Globe or of the Doctrinaires, but making contact with them as the political crisis deepened, were the following, as promoted by FAvenir: (i) liberty of conscience or religion; (2) liberty of education; (3) liberty of the press; (4) liberty of association; (5) liberty of the vote; (6) local liberty (i.e. decentralization). As for the first, FAvenir demanded an end to the Concordat, a " total separation of Church and State." 208 In the second case, "freedom of instruction is a natural right... the primary freedom of the family... expressly granted by the Charter." 209 On the third issue, "the press is for us only an extension of speech {parole), like it a divine benefit, a powerful universal means of communication among men, and their most active instrument for hastening the progress of general intelligence."210 On the fourth, "liberty of association... is also a natural right, because nothing can be done without it, so weak, poor, and wretched is man when he is alone... Where only individuals exist, they have no defense if the law keeps them isolated and will not permit them to unite for common action." 211 On freedom of suffrage, PAvenir comments pointedly that "universal suffrage is the Church opening its arms to all men." It goes on to distinguish between ancient and modern liberty, between choosing "an animating principle that is responsible for all the power of today's United States of America" or going backwards toward Athens, "where no one thought about the free life of his neighbor, or the independence of his conscience."212 As for local liberty, PAvenir demanded the "abolition of the evil system of centralization, a deplorable and shameful 207 208 209 212

E.g. Old Regime, p . 6 9 ; DA, 1, 5 9 - 6 0 . M a r c e l Prelot a n d F . Gallouec Genuys, eds., Le liberalisme catholique (Paris, 1969), p . 85. 210 211 Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 90.

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remnant of imperial despotism."213 It added: "What is the nation? Its first element is the family... All the families, gathered in the same local territory, make up the cities, boroughs, and villages. [They, like the family,] surely have the right to administer their particular interests, the right to create communes" etc.214 It takes no very subtle intelligence to see that the agenda oiTAvenir correspond, to a very large extent, to the core of Tocqueville's discoveries about democracy in America. Whatever its social faults, America very well fulfilled all of these conditions. Especially where the questions of religion, association, and decentralization were concerned, Tocqueville made them themes of his life's research and basic doctrine. Without going meticulously into the matter (for the texts are well known and unambiguous), Tocqueville found in America vindications of each of these aspects of liberty: religion (see Democracy in America i, 310-325, 436); education (ibid., 1, 54, 327; 11, 323); press (ibid., 1, 188-197); association (ibid., 1, 198-205; 11, 123-128); suffrage (ibid., 1, 204, 206-214); local liberty (ibid., 1, 61-101). It is important to notice that he found evidence of these liberties of Catholic inspiration in a culturally Protestant nation. He did not belabor this fact (he made a point of stressing how Catholicism had adapted to the social climate) ;215 but he made instead a potent argument about the contribution of religion to the public ethos, so long as it could remain free of political partisanship.216 As regards association, Tocqueville carried the insights oiVAvenir and Catholic doctrine further: this right was not only to defend the compagnonnage of the weak but to be the carrier of liberty in democratic ages.217 Finally, Tocqueville was intensely interested in America's decentralization and local liberties, factors planted in the earliest settlement. Like FAvenir, he emphasized the mediating and educating levels of family, parish, and township.218 That question, alive both for certain liberals and legitimists in postNapoleonic France, as well as for socialists like Proudhon in a later generation, would occupy the center of Tocqueville's study of Old Regime and Revolution: "Anyone who reads letters passed between the intendants and their superiors or subordinates cannot fail to be struck by the family likeness between the government officials of the past and those of modern France. They seem to join hands across the abyss made by the Revolution." 219 213 216 218

214 Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., pp. 312-313; cf. 11, 30. Ibid., 1, 69; 11, 206-207; cf. Old Regime, p. 48.

217

215 DA, i, 311-312. Ibid., 11, 115. 219 Old Regime, p . 6 1 .

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But the most telling connection, by far, between neo-Catholic argument and Tocqueville's project lies in the question: why, in Europe, does religion seem the enemy of liberty; and why do the proponents of liberty seem to hate religion? In VAvenir, the Abbe Gerbet had written: "On the one hand, sincerely religious people have either not accepted, or accept grudgingly, the doctrines of liberty. On the other hand, fervent friends of liberty take an attitude of sombre defiance toward the religion professed by twenty-five million French. That condition is indicative of a deep disorder going back to earlier times."220 Tocqueville, in introducing Democracy in America, said in almost identical language: "The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the highminded and the noble advocate bondage, and the meanest and most servile preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, while men without patriotism and without principle put themselves forward as the apostles of civilization and intelligence."221 In Old Regime, Tocqueville repeated: "Even in our own time we find men who seek to compensate for their grovelling servility to the meanest jack-in-office by declaiming against God and who, while going back on all that was freest, noblest, most inspiring in the revolutionary ideal, pride themselves on keeping faith with its true spirit by remaining hostile to religion."222 Tocqueville was scarcely inclined to choose the path of Lacordaire (his successor in the Academie Fran9aise) or Montalembert (whom he once scathingly described as "the greatest enemy of Catholicism since Voltaire"). 223 Neither did he have an inordinate admiration for the doctrine of "perfectibility," whose fashionableness, toward 1780, had dazzled the French with a false sense of felicity.224 Although this idea was "as old as the world," the rise of equality had given it a new character: while aristocratic ages tended to limit it too narrowly, democratic peoples "expand it beyond reason."225 Tocqueville's, then, would be a third way of seeking to anchor faith in the new conditions of society. Tocqueville did not think the democratic version of religion to be particularly exalted,226 but he believed it to be quite seaworthy. He had witnessed this social strength in America (where the connection between religion and liberty was undoubted) and again, briefly, in the February 1848 effervescence in France. He concluded that "the 220 223 225

221 222 Liberalisme catholique, p. 80. DA, 1, 123. Old Regime, p. 5. 224 Cited by Jardin, Tocqueville, p. 366. Old Regime, p. 177. 226 DA, 11, 34-35. Ibid., 1, 323.

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notion that democratic regimes are necessarily hostile to religion is based on a total misconception of the facts; nothing in the Christian faith or even in Roman Catholicism is incompatible with democracy and, on the contrary, it would seem that a democratic climate is highly favorable to Christianity."227 Religion was, and could be, a free stimulant in the life of democratic man and at the same time a powerful barrier against his worst tendencies. This would not be the high faith of old; but neither would it essentially be Constant's "sentiment intime." To be sure, "it may be foreseen that a democratic people will seek to discover the chief arbiter of their belief within, and not beyond, the limits of their kind." 228 But this should be interpreted within moeurs, not within the vertigo of individual exaltation. Needless to say, Tocqueville raises no objection to organized forms of worship; his inclination is to favor them, since they appear to unify society. The democratic religion will appropriately commingle the things of this world with those of the next: it will legitimately employ "the principle of interest rightly understood" to animate the faith of men.229 The head, as much as the heart, will bring these worshipers to the altar. Self-interest implies prudence and predictability, and helps to inspire a confidence in the future. In an age of waning faith (here Tocqueville thinks of France), " I do not doubt that by training the members of a community to think of their future condition in this world, they would be gradually and unconsciously brought nearer to religious convictions." This, he insists, with some alarm and despair, is "the only means we still possess for bringing mankind back, by a long and roundabout path, to a state of faith" 230 - elsewhere described as "the only permanent state of mankind." 231 Yet Tocqueville's aesthetic and his love for a liberty of " greatness " rebel more than once at this strategy. While conceding that "the special taste that the men of democratic times entertain for physical enjoyments... may even be frequently combined with a species of religious morality," he laments immediately that "men lose sight of those more precious possessions which constitute the glory and the greatness of mankind " amid this "virtuous materialism."232 Once again, the value-cluster of "modern liberty" is cast in doubt by a loss of "the imagination of greatness."233 In Democracy in America, vol. 11, Tocqueville inserts a curious brief 227 230 233

228 229 Old Regime, p . 7. DA, n, 10. Ibid., p. 134. 231 232 Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., 1, 321. Ibid., 11, 140-141. Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 6 April 1838, OC, xi, 61.

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chapter called "The Progress of Roman Catholicism in the United States." Here he observes: "The men of