~XIS'fENtIAL
ANALYSIS
155
intellectual lucidity. This is partly the reason why he does not strictly
belong to any literary period or movement. This is also the reason why
the themes, sentiments, and ideas suggested by his life and work have
evoked such a profound response. Why this should be the case and what
is the significance of these themes for an "existential" situation trans–
cending the limited perspective of Baudelaire's original "choice" is, un–
fortunately, not treated in Sartre's essay. Yet, strangely enough, this is
exactly what one might have expected from a philosophical (rather
than a purely psychoanalytic) portrait in literature.
Hans Meyerhoff
THE EDUCAliON OF ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
THE RECOLLECTIONS OF ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE. Edited by
J.
P.
M~yer. Columbi~
University Press. $5.00.
In the late summer of 1850 the English economist Nassau
Senior visited his friend AleJG ' de Tocqueville at the latter's ancestral
mansion in Normandy. In the journal he kept of this visit he noted the
presence of Tocqueville's father, a "fine old man" of seventy-eight whose
hair had turned grey during the Terror of the first French Revolution,
when he was barely saved from trial and certain execution by the fall of
Robespierre. The old Count recalled that "the disagreeable time in
every day was about half-past three," when those selected for trial
were summoned from prison. For this reason he accustomed himself
to sleep each afternoon between three and four. The anecdote is doubly
significant: it evokes a psychological atmosphere heavily ch:;rged with
noblesse oblige,
and it reminds us that by the middle of the lineteenth
century there wcre still eyewitnesses to lend additional vit lIity to a
powerful revolutionary tradition.
The revolutionary heritage of modern French history and the
aristocratic heritage of Alexis de Tocqueville provide the counterpoint
for his
Recollections,
the complete text of which has now appeared for
the first time in an English translation. At the time of Senior's visit
TocqueviIIe had just finished setting down the first part of what he re–
solved would be " ... a mirror in which I will amuse myself in con–
templating my contemporaries and myself, not a picture painted for
the public." It was a mirror that came to reflect nine months of the
French revolutionary period of 1848-1849: the four months beginning
in February, 1848, which saw the proclamation of the Second Re-
