ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
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kinsmen, Jacob Burckhardt and Henry Adams, Tocqueville devoted a
great deal of effort to predicting what he could not but detest.
His political career during the Revolution exemplifies that tragic
irony which keynotes the
Recollections.
Fear of socialism with its
"tyranny of equality" drove him who was perhaps the most "enlightened"
conservative of the century into the Party of Order. There were few, if
any, in that camp who shared either his selfless passion for liberty and
justice or his clearsighted awareness of the dangers that lay ahead.
None knew better than he that the successful quelling of the workers'
risings was all too likely to prove a Pyrrhic
victory.
None was less con–
vinced than he that 1848 constituted the end of the revolutionary
process that had begun in 1789. And not even Marx was more con–
temptuous than Tocqueville of the claptrap employed by Republicans of
all shades to recreate the atmosphere of that first great revolution. His
wit is never more mordant than when he is describing the procession of
secretly armed Deputies to the "Feast of Concord," there to be bom–
barded with bouquets by three hundred young girls dressed in white
"who wore their virginal costume in so virile a fashion that they might
have been taken for boys dressed up as girls"; or when he notices the
single Deputy who obeyed the decree of the Provisional Government
which suggested that the representatives wear the costume of the mem–
bers of the National Convention of 1792-1795, "especially the white
waistcoat with turn-down collar in which Robespierre was always
represented on the stage."
Tocqueville's contempt for these antics is part of a theme sounded
more than once in the Recollections: that history does not repeat it–
self, and that those who act as if it did do so at their peril. But the
problem of Tocqueville's views on this matter is not so easily solved. One
may discover three Tocquevilles in the
Recollections,
and three
Weltanschauungen
corresponding to them. Their constant interweaving
produces a tension which permeates the book and lends it its classic
stature.
There is first Tocqueville the sociologist, the author of
Democracy
in America,
who has long foreseen that the inevitable transition to the
age of the masses would be attended by such disturbances as the
Revolution of 1848. For him there are no surprises and no mysteries.
To each event he wearily reacts with an "I told you so," for the
processes of history proceed according to plan. The second Tocqueville
is the politician: as a Deputy in both the old and the new legislative as–
semblies and in the Constituent Assembly that intervenes, later as
Foreign Minister, he refuses to be overwhelmed by any ineluctable
