756
PARTISAN REVIEW
public, the establishment of a provisional government, the election and
deliberations of the Constituent Assembly, and the bloody "June days"
when the
bourge{)is
Republicans who had begun the Revolution defeated
the insurgent Paris workers who had wanted to make it social as well
as political; and the five months beginning in June, 1849, during which
Tocqueville served as Foreign Minister in a cabinet dismissed by the
President in October of that year because it refused to make itself
subservient to his wishes. The President was Louis Bonaparte, Victor
Hugo's
Napoli{)n le Petit,
who had been overwhelmingly elected in
December, 1848, by that universal suffrage which seemed to so many
the infallible guarantee of democracy.
Tocqueville who had not actively helped to bring about the
Revolution, but did his best to support the Republic once it was
proclaimed, had no illusions about universal suffrage. He predicted
the
coup d'etat
of Louis-Napoleon and the eventual ruin of the Second
Republic just as he had predicted the outbreak of the Revolution it–
self. Like Marx in his
Eighteenth Brumaire,
he recognized the social ele–
ments in the revolutionary process he described. The middle class had
achieved its triumphs in 1789 and 1830 and had monotonously con–
solidated them during the July Monarchy. In 1848 the turn of the
working classes seemed to have arrived.-"Socialism will always remain
the essential characteristic and the most redoubtable remembrance of
the Revolution of February. The Republic will only appear to the on–
looker to have come upon the scene as a means, not as an end."
Tocqueville wrote this late in 1850. A little more than two years
earlier, in September of 1848, the Constituent Assembly, made up for
the most part of moderate Republicans, had debated the critical issue
of incorporating the "Right to Work" demanded by the Left into the
new Constitution. In his speech opposing this demand Tocqueville had
explicitly denied what he was to assert in the
Recollections,
maintain–
ing-<>n that occasion-that the character of the February Revolution
was neither socialist nor social, but political, and that one must have the
courage to say so. He himself, whose honesty in
self-analy~is
verges on
the painful, would have been the first to admit the discrepancy. As an
active participant in the political events of the Revolution, he saw his
duty in saving the Republic from socialism.
If
this could be done by
denying the social character of the Revolution, he was willing to try.
But when, in the
Recollections,
he came to probe into the deeper mean–
ing of the events through which he had lived he felt free not only to
emphasize the importance of socialist currents in the Revolution, but to
envisage the possibility of their eventual success. Like his spiritual
