Tocqueville’s Private Thoughts About The French Revolution Revealed Newly translated and carefully edited, ‘Recollections’ contains Tocqueville’s thoughts ‘in the raw’ as a participant in the upheavals that shook France between 1848 and 1853.
By Samuel Gregg
June 9, 2017 This essay is reprinted, with permission, from the blog of the Library of Law and Liberty.Although intellectuals write endlessly about politics, relatively few enter the fray directly. One exception was the author of “Democracy in America” (1835, 1840) and “The Old Regime and the Revolution” (1856). These texts effectively serve as bookends to Alexis de Tocqueville’s active, albeit unsuccessful career during the turbulent years of France’s July monarchy, the short-lived Second Republic, and finally the Second Empire established by that most enigmatic of political adventurers, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.
Tocqueville served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies for much of King Louis-Philippe’s 18-year reign, a member of the Constituent Assembly charged with drafting a new constitution following the February 1848 Revolution, a deputy of the new republic’s Legislative Assembly and, briefly, as minister of foreign affairs in the Second Republic’s dying days. These commitments didn’t, however, prevent him from putting many observations on paper.
The content and tone of the texts presented in “Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath,” newly translated by the doyen of Tocqueville translators, Arthur Goldhammer, and carefully edited by the historian Olivier Zunz, contrast with the detached analysis that permeates Tocqueville’s best-known books. “Recollections” contains Tocqueville’s thoughts “in the raw” as a participant in the upheavals that shook France between 1848 and 1853.
‘To Preserve the Freedom to Portray Without Flattery’Tocqueville is very explicit about why he is imposing this task upon himself: “I want to preserve the freedom to portray without flattery both myself and my contemporaries, in total independence. I wish to lay bare the secret motives that led me and my colleagues and others to act as we did, and when I have understood those motives, to describe them.”
As he engages in this exercise, Tocqueville’s “Recollections” cover three periods. The first concerns the February 1848 Revolution itself. This is followed by Tocqueville’s observations of the subsequent election campaigns, his time as a member of the Constituent Assembly drafting a new constitution, and the insurrection of Parisian radicals known as the “June Days” (June 23 to June 26, 1848). Lastly, Tocqueville considers his time as a legislator and minister for foreign affairs during Prince Louis-Napoléon’s presidency. All this is supplemented by various pieces of correspondence and notes Tocqueville composed during this same late 1840s-early 1850s period and deemed relevant by the editor.
Tocqueville told his family and friends that these writings should not be published in his lifetime. It does not take long for readers to understand why. They contain uninhibited and at times brutally candid sketches of some of the most important actors in French politics of the period. These portraits have been enhanced by the editor’s inclusion of often hilarious illustrations of some of these individuals by the incomparable caricaturist and painter, Honoré Daumier.
What Tocqueville Thinks of His Contemporary GreatsTocqueville turns out to have held almost all his fellow politicians in low regard. On numerous occasions, he underscores the greed for power and barely hidden corruption of the members of the political establishment. Even one of Tocqueville’s most important intellectual mentors, the historian François Guizot, is censured for declining to implement basic reforms when he had an opportunity to do so as one of Louis-Philippe’s ministers.
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http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/09/tocquevilles-private-thoughts-french-revolution-revealed/
